#oct 31 2022.

[acquiescest]

irt the lrb what would you say if i said liam & noel spent new years 2023 together in paris

what would you say if i said liam bought the house in france (the one with noel's name carved into the walls) in march 2023 and that month noel talked about wanting to spend several months in paris

which could mean nothing

[anthonycrowley]

up there for most day online. to me.

[liatkolink]

For people still in denial whether Israel has committed war crimes, here is a comprehensive list of war crimes Israel has committed both before and after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the list being taken from the Wikipedia article of war crimes with some notable missing examples being the usage of chemical weapons, famine, disease and apartheid. The 7th of October attack did not occur in a vacuum, but is the product of decades of Israel not being held accountable for its war crimes.

Killing civilians:

Israel/Palestine: Unlawful Israeli Airstrikes Kill Civilians by Human Rights Watch on 15/Jul/2014

‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza – The Guardian on 2/Apr/2024

Israeli attack on Rafah tent camp kills 45, prompts international outcry by Reuters on 27/May/2024

Intentionally killing PoWs:

Israel’s Hush-Up Machine in Action: Denying Story Israel Executed Egyptian Prisoners by Washington Report on Middle East Affairs on 8/Apr/2010

Torture:

Israeli government report admits systematic torture of Palestinians by The Guardian on 10/Feb/2000

Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests by Amnesty International on 8/Nov/2023

Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured by Human Rights Watch on 26/Aug/2024

Taking hostages:

Infographic: How many Palestinians are imprisoned by Israel? by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2022

The thousands of Palestinians Israel arrests, tortures, holds even in death by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2024

UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture and mistreatment by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 31/Jul/2024

Unnecessarily destroying civilian property:

Israel destroys Gaza tower housing AP and Al Jazeera offices by Reuters on 15/May/2021

Israel targets infrastructure in Gaza to ramp up civilian pressure on Hamas, report claims by PBS News on 11/Dec/2023

Widespread destruction by Israeli Defence Forces of civilian infrastructure in Gaza by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 8/Feb/2024

Deception by perfidy:

Israeli soldier gives 74-year-old Palestinian woman water then shoots her in the head by Middle East Monitor on 20/Jan/2015

Israeli special forces disguised as doctors kill three militants at West Bank hospital by The Guardian on 30/Jan/2024

NBC News investigation reveals Israel strikes on Gaza areas it said were safe by NBC News on 26/Apr/2024

Wartime sexual violence:

Stripped, beaten and blindfolded: new research reveals ongoing violence and abuse of Palestinian children detained by Israeli military by Save the Children on 10/Jul/2023

Israel/oPt: UN experts appalled by reported human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 19/Feb/2024

‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape by AlJazeera on 9/Aug/2024

Pillaging:

The Biblical Pseudo-Archeologists Pillaging the West Bank by The Atlantic on 28/Feb/2013

Jewish Soldiers and Civilians Looted Arab Neighbors' Property en Masse in '48. The Authorities Turned a Blind Eye by Haaretz on 3/Oct/2020

Israeli soldiers boast about looting from Gaza by AlJazeera on 14/Feb/2024

Any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings:

Netanyahu incites violence by casting protesters as clear and present danger by Middle East Eye on 30/Jul/2020

Israeli minister's call to 'erase' Palestinian village an incitement to violence, US says by Reuters on 1/Mar/2023

Netanyahu cites 'Amalek' Theory to justify Gaza Killings by Times of India on 29/Oct/2023

Database exposes 500 instances of Israeli incitement to genocide in Gaza by TRT World 4/Jan/2024

Genocide:

The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective by Center for Constitutional Rights on 25/Aug/2016

Genocide Warning: Israel & Palestine by Genocide Watch on 21/May/2021

A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is 'plausible' but does not order cease-fire by npr on 26/Jan/2024

‘Reasonable grounds’ to believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, UN rights expert says by CNN on 27/Mar/2024

Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza? New Report from BU School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic Lays Out Case from Boston University Today on 5/Jun/2024

Ethnic cleansing:

UN Human Rights Council: ‘Israel engaging in ethnic cleansing’ by the European Union Parliament on 23/Mar/2011

Israel's ethnic cleansing in Palestine is not history - it's still happening by Middle East Eye on 22/May/2019

UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 14/Oct/2023

‘Plan for ethnic cleansing’: Israel’s north Gaza siege sets off alarms by AlJazeera on 22/Oct/2024

Granting of no quarter despite surrender:

White Flag Deaths Killings of Palestinian Civilians during Operation Cast Lead by Human Rights Watch on 13/Aug/2009

Investigators: Israel fired on Gaza civilians carrying white flags by The Electronic Intifada on 28/Jan/2015

3 hostages killed by Israeli soldier in Gaza were waving a white flag, Israel says by npr on 16/Dec/2023

A group of Palestinian men waving a white flag is shot at, killing 1 by NBC News on 24/Jan/2024

She was fleeing with her grandson, who was holding a white flag. Then she was shot by CNN on 26/Jan/2024

Two brothers shot by Israeli forces in Khan Younis, white flag ignored by AlJazeera on 29/Jan/2024

Conscription of children in the military: First one where I couldn't find anything. Way to go, Israel!

Flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity:

Israel violates the principles of necessity, proportionality in its attacks on Gaza by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on 13/May/2023

Enough: Self-Defense and Proportionality in the Israel-Hamas Conflict by Just Security on 6/Nov/2023

War Crimes and Accountability: The Case Against Israel’s Military Operations in Gaza by JURIST News on 5/Jul/2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[matan4il]

I wanna share with you a small cut from a 2010 documentary about events that began unfolding in 2008. The film (which was up for an Oscar nomination, but wasn't shortlisted), followed the story of a young kid called Muhammad. He was born with an immunity deficiency that killed two of his sisters. Three other siblings didn't have it, but also weren't a match to donate bone marrow to him. To even consider the donation procedure, Muhammad's family needed 55,000 dollars (over 80,000 dollars today), which they obviously didn't have. An Israeli journalist did a TV piece about Muhammad, asking for the money to be donated. An Israeli man, whose son was a soldier killed by Palestinian terrorists, decided to do exactly that.

While Muhammad was in the Israeli hospital, his mom Raida was by him, and here's an exchange she had with the Israeli journalist who helped the family get the money they needed to save their kid's life:

I'm not sharing this because I want to demonize Raida. I'm not sharing it because every Palestinian thinks this way. I'm sharing it because some Palestinians, certainly the ones related to Islamist terrorist organizations like Hamas, do believe that if their child dies as a shahid (a martyr), during an attempt to kill Jews, then the kid would be with Allah. And that will be as if their child never died, because what's better, an imperfect and short life on this earth, or an eternal life with every good thing imaginable by Allah's side? So yes, there are parents who want their kids to die in a confrontation with Israel. There are kids who were brought up with these beliefs. And kindness and humanitarian gestures might change it, but many times they just can't compare to the promise made by this way of thinking.

That's not every Palestinian, but it's enough people to have an impact on the forming and continuation of the Israeli-Arab conflict (much like how Amin al-Husseini was one Palestinian leader, but his antisemitism had a crucial influence on the conflict, and translated into the deaths of countless people, mainly Jews). There are currently at least 30 terrorist organizations in Gaza alone (at least 5 of them are big enough to be household names in Israel), and Hamas on its own includes at least 30,000 people who think this way.

No one can understand this conflict as long as they ignore that the widespread existence of this mentality plays a factor in it. No one can bring about peace here, without getting that this is a part of what threatens it. No one can solve a problem while turning a blind eye to some of its parts.

And if you still think Raida is an exception, here are some more vids reflecting the same mentality from over the years... (I'm not gonna get into how heartbreaking it is that entire generations of Palestinian kids never stood a chance, because I think that's obvious for anyone with a heart watching these clips)

Official Palestinian Authority TV interview with the mother of a shahid, Nov 28, 2003:

"Being with Allah is better." Hamas TV on Jul 21, 2014:

Mother of murderer of 3 Israeli teens: "He was honored with Martyrdom because Allah loved him." Oct 6, 2014:

Palestinian mothers explain why they make joyful noises when their kids get killed as shahids. Apr 7, 2015:

"Death is inevitable, so why not die as shahids?" Oct 28, 2019:

Palestinian father explains his choice to expose his son to danger by bringing him to the site of violent riots, by saying his 4.5 years old wants to go to paradise. Jun 20, 2021:

"My son had nothing called a funeral, rather it was a wedding..." Official Palestinian Authority TV, Sep 13, 2021:

Shahid's mother says her son is a role model for Palestinian kids. Dec 31, 2022:

Shahid's mother shares she instructed her son on how to be a proper shaid. Official Palestinian Authority TV, Feb 21, 2023:

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[stretchmarkedmuscle]

2023 Tumblr Top 10

1. 820 notes - Sep 29 2023

Anton Ratushnyi

2. 632 notes - Sep 21 2023

Daimo Lee

3. 489 notes - Apr 18 2023

Piotr Wojtowicz 

4. 462 notes - Oct 2 2023

Martin Fitzwater

5. 354 notes - Apr 16 2023

Jung Sung Yeop

6. 315 notes - Sep 21 2023

Max Taylor

7. 312 notes - May 29 2023

William Martins

8. 293 notes - Sep 10 2023

Dawson Coman

9. 273 notes - Jun 25 2023

Andrey Skoromnyy

10. 248 notes - Jul 31 2023

Anton Ratushnyi

Thanks for another great year everybody! It’s pretty interesting to see how different it is compared to my top posts of 2022. Joan Pradells, the most popular post from last year, didn’t even make the list this year.

Created by TumblrTop10

[sapchat]

IDK if this has been done but I went through the 3 reboots and did a timeline of events so you wouldn't have to!

Side notes: sometimes I use the first initial for who it is! also some of MW3 has timestamps. I also apologize for spelling. Also, lots of this shit happens over like 7-12 days April 6, 2019 Makarov bombs Verdansk Price, Ghost and Soap know each other at this point, have NOT met Gaz

Start of MW1 Oct 24 2019 'Al Qatal' moves gas Oct. 25 2019 Piccadilly Square Oct. 25 2019 Price meets Gaz Oct 26 19 Alex & Farah blow Barkov's bombs Same day destroy one of B's bases Oct. 27 19 Price and Gaz go to Picc Safe house Oct 28 19A&F go to Urzstan hospital for "The Wolf" Oct 28 19 P&G meet up w/ A&F for the Wolf Oct 29 19 Plan ambush for Butcher & Wolf - Hadir uses the gas, learn Hadir stole the gas Oct 29 19 PGAF Go to kill W, & get H Oct 29 19 PGAF kill the wolf, H is 2 Russia Oct 31 19 PGN go 2 Russia, Capture Kill Butcher (and traumatize a family) Nov 1 19 Hadir is handed over to Russia Nov 3 19 Take down Barkov's gas production plant & K Price meets Kate @ Tea shop makes TF 141 w/ Ghost, Soap, & Gaz END of MW1 - May 22, 2022 Soap goes side questing, turns green (idk I didn't watch the trailer (I did but I just know there's like green gas)) Start of MW2 July 15 22 Ghost Blows AlMazrah base (Honestly didn't get the point of us seeing this) Oct 28 22 GS Kill/Cap Mission for Hassan -> Find American Missiles not Hassan Oct 28 22 PG in Amsterdam for Missile info (Think they used it as an excuse to swim) Oct 29 22 Capture a cartel mem 4 info Oct 29 22 Alej. Go for cartel jumping border Oct 30 22 GSAlej go 4 Hassan safehouse They capture Hassan (picnic in the desert omg!) Oct 31 22 PG in Spain for Hassan info Kate gets caught Shepherd tries to abandon her Nov 1 22 PG meet with F to get Kate (they get her and get juicy gos on Shep) Nov 1 22 Soap goes into Casa de Sin Nombre Nov 2 22 Gulf oil rig, blows up by G&S (philip was here too) Nov 3 22 Soap & Ghost are fighting Shadow co Nov 3 22 SG go for Alej w/ Rodolfo. PG meet up Nov 3 22 141 goes for Graves Nov 4 22 Go 2 Chicago 4 Hassan & missile kill both END of MW2 - Kate (& tech. Gaz) learn about Makarov

Start of MW3 Nov 10 23 Makarov is broken out of jail 2am Nov 10 23 Farah is ambushed Konni got missiles around 6am Nov 10 23 141 go for Nuc Power Plant, P get gased 9am Makarov has been out for 6 hours Nov 11 23 They go for Missiles in Urzikistan Nov 11 23 Kate is going 4 intel on Makarov meets Yuri @ 3pm Nov 11 23 Makarov crashes plane, blames Farah and Alex go there 7:30-9:30pm meet with Kate and Nikolai in hanger Nov 12 8am Nov 12 23 they go for Milena 7pm Nov 13 23 they get Makarovs right hand man Nolan 11am Nov 14 23 They find Shepherd swimming at some point 9:30 Nov 16 23 SG stop Verdansk dam bombing Same time PG are at airsti Nov 21 23 141 go after Makarov Hacker Nov 21 23 They stop Makarov bomb, Soap gets killed. Price kills Shepherd after spreading Soap's ashes.

[jonasiegenthaler]

What are the best games for a newbie hockey fan to watch to see that patented 1386 chemistry

ooh this was a fun one anon, thank you! this is more like, foundational (imo) games of the "this is nico's team now" era more than anything. but this did get. Very Long. so sorry about that lol

20 APR 2021 - NJD @ PIT: to me, really truly the start of a new era, couple games removed from moving zajac and palmieri at the deadline, in the middle of a 15-game (kinda, they had one win so like, is it really a win) losing streak. down 6-0 at the end of the second period they score 6 (!!!) goals in the third period and fall juuuust short of a comeback leading to this moment

29 APR 2021 - PHI @ NJD: the first of 3 games against philly because covid season was a fever dream individually great games from jack and nico but more importantly one of my favourite hughes to hischier power play goals of the season

19 OCT 2021 - SEA @ NJD: cursed jack shoulder injury game so like, maybe don’t watch it, BUT one of many captain games from nico, absolutely killing it once jack went down, played incredible defensively and kept the team afloat in jack’s absence

31 DEC 2021 - EDM @ NJD: honestly this game has everything (except defense)! jack goal! nico goal! dawson goal! jack ot goal! surprise hugs!

02 JAN 2022 - NJD @ WSH: the very first jack to nico overtime goal! against the caps! rejoice! (and sheldon keefe take notes)

22 JAN 2022 - CAR @ NJD: pride night game, jacknico(sevo) pp goal, post-win shenanigans, lots of them!

24 FEB 2022 - NJD @ PIT: 3 point games for both jack and nico, and 2 (!!!) power play goals, fun game, we love wins, we love pp goals, we love wins with pp goals

22 MAR 2022 - NYR @ NJD: of the ‘prom pose across the ice blown up into a mural at the prudential center where people now take couple photos’ fame. historic night for devils nation, and therefore the world. but also just. such a good game, made you believe in the team and the core (and then they lost 5 of the next 6 because they wouldn’t be the devils if they didn’t). top 3 hischier to hughes goals. the perfect game. obligatory fuck the rags.

28 OCT 2022 - COL @ NJD: second game of the 13 game win streak, we didn’t know what to expect and they gave us an absolute defensive masterclass from nico and a jack power play goal as a treat

disclaimer: not gonna put every game of the win streak here but like. you should watch all of them. just for the pure joy.

10 NOV 2022 - OTT @ NJD: another jacknico ot goal! i.e. things you love to see! truly bonkers overtime, if you don’t want to rewatch the full game just watch the overtime because akira subbed in with like 10 minutes left in the third, ice cold, held it down with ottawa pushing and played SO well in ot

17 NOV 2022 - NJD @ TOR: nico goal, jack ot heroics, and a little hurt/comfort, yknow, the good stuff

15 DEC 2022 - PHI @ NJD: my mind retconned this one as a win and turns out they did lose BUT it is a win solely for nico going after tk in jack’s honour, juicy narratives

07 JAN 2023 - NJD @ NYR: jack going nuclear, jacknico power play assists to jesper (big three goal!) +++ jacknico overtime goal which, okay, sevo scored the goal and neither of them got an assist on it but it’s the essence of it all. also burger king jerseys my beloved.

16–24 JAN 2023: the stretch from the sharks game to the vegas game where they were inexplicably red hot on the power play/6v5 and dougie’s shot was automatic and they put us through an absolute roller coaster. 

23 FEB 2023 - LAK @ NJD: hughes to hischier! with the net empty! with like 40 seconds to go in the third and then dawson gets the ot winner and it’s beautiful and life is wonderful and everything’s perfect.

25 FEB 2023 - PHI @ NJD: 2003 cup anniversary game! jack goal! nico goal! something something passing the torch, something something looking up at the rafters hoping that’ll be your name up there someday

22 APR 2023 - NJD @ NYR - GAME 3: jack power play goal pulling them right back into the series what a game what a time <3

28 NOV 2023 - NYI @ NJD: hughes to hughes to hischier power play goal, that’s family baby! also of course “nico is a horse” game because why be normal about your captain when you can do whatever jack’s doing.

09 MAR 2024 - NJD @ CAR: first jack to nico 5v5 goal! put it in the history books! One of the few bright spots from last season that’s hopefully gonna carry forward this season, jack and nico finally starting to click at 5v5.

22 MAR 2024 - WPG @ NJD: unremarkable in the grand scheme of things but so many power play goals, therefore so many jacknico moments, bon appetit <3

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

Something y'all may need with family get-togethers for the winter hollidays coming up. Several studies have shown 500% increase in risk for cardiovascular episodes after a covid 19 infection, but not for vaccination. Call people out if they spread this bs.

By Chris Mueller

The claim: Studies show COVID-19 vaccine recipients are 500% more likely to die from a heart attack A Nov. 29 Threads post (direct link, archive link) makes a claim about the COVID-19 vaccine and its effect on the heart.

“Your chance of dying from a heart attack from that ‘vaccine,’ according to their own studies, is 500% greater than if you were unvaccinated,” reads the post. “This is state-sanctioned murder.”

It was liked more than 500 times in four days.

Our rating: False There are no studies that show COVID-19 vaccine recipients have a 500% greater chance of having a heart attack. Some studies show the opposite − that the shot is associated with a lower risk of heart attack.

COVID-19 virus linked to heart attack risk, not vaccine There are no credible news reports about a study saying COVID-19 vaccine recipients have a 500% greater chance of having a heart attack. The American Heart Association even recommends the COVID-19 vaccine to people with a history of heart disease and stroke, saying they are "at much greater risk from the virus than they are from the vaccine."

There are several studies that show the vaccine is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attacks and strokes.

A study of nearly 46 million adults in England found that people who received the COVID-19 vaccine had fewer heart attacks and strokes than those who had yet to be vaccinated. The researchers examined medical records from the two years between December 2020 and January 2022.

“This England-wide study offers reassurance regarding the cardiovascular safety of COVID-19 vaccines, with lower incidence of common cardiovascular events outweighing the higher incidence of their known rare cardiovascular complications,” the study says.

Erin Faherty, a pediatric cardiologist at Yale Medicine, previously told USA TODAY that vaccination for COVID-19 is associated with a lower risk of heart attack.

"We have no evidence to suggest that the COVID-19 vaccine shuts down the heart or is associated with widespread heart failure," she said in February. "From the data we have, the risks of COVID-19 infection far outweigh the minor cardiac risk of vaccination."

Some studies have linked the virus – not the vaccine – to a higher risk of cardiovascular events. People who caught the disease early in the pandemic had double the risk, while others with severe cases had nearly four times the risk, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health published in October.

But a study of more than 8 million adults in Sweden found “full vaccination significantly reduced the risk of several more severe cardiovascular outcomes linked to COVID-19, such as heart attack, stroke, and heart failure,” said Fredrik Nyberg, an epidemiology professor and one of the study’s authors, in a news release.

There is a “causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis,” which is inflammation of the heart muscle, but cases are rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Our fact-check sources Nature, July 31, Cohort study of cardiovascular safety of different COVID-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England University of Cambridge, July 31, Incidence of heart attacks and strokes was lower after COVID-19 vaccination American Heart Association, Oct. 9, COVID-19 Is a Coronary Artery Disease Risk Equivalent and Exhibits a Genetic Interaction With ABO Blood Type American Heart Association, Oct. 6, 2023, What people with heart disease should know about vaccines today National Institutes of Health, Oct. 10, First wave of COVID-19 increased risk of heart attack, stroke up to three years later USA TODAY, Feb. 14, No evidence COVID-19 vaccine 'shuts off' the heart, contrary to anti-Kelce post | Fact check Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed Dec. 4, Clinical Considerations: Myocarditis and Pericarditis after Receipt of COVID-19 Vaccines Among Adolescents and Young Adults

[chicoespecial2022]

Swansea City FC v Cardiff City FC 24 Oct 2022

No.31 Oli Cooper, providing a quick demo of his underwear choice for the game, white briefs, as shown by the brieflines supporting his butt.

[heatherfield]

@giftober 2024 | Day 31: free choice

Our dear Horseman's tale is now at an end.

Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, Ep. 10 “The Haunting of the Hollow” - Oct. 31, 2022 [x]

[boschintegral-photo]

2022 Tumblr Top 10

1. 2.631 notes - May 6 2022

2. 1.536 notes - Jan 29 2022

3. 1.458 notes - May 15 2022

4. 1.240 notes - Oct 25 2022

5. 1.170 notes - Feb 17 2022

6. 1.106 notes - Feb 27 2022

7. 1.104 notes - Feb 8 2022

8. 1.015 notes - Mar 31 2022

9. 1.011 notes - May 25 2022

10. 973 notes - May 26 2022

These are my photos with the highest number of notes in 2022. Find more in my archive.

Thank you all for supporting my blog!

Created by TumblrTop10

[zablife]

Corrupt a Wish

To celebrate spooky season, I thought it would be amusing to play another round of "Corrupt a Wish." (Corrupt a Wish 2022 fics can be read here.) For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, you can find the rules below the cut:

‣Send me an ask for something you wish to do with a character. It can be anything from a mundane, daily task or a simple show of affection to a date night activity.

‣You can use these prompts if needed: cozy.

‣The twist is I turn it into something unexpected and a bit dark. *Please let me know in the ask if there are any triggers to avoid.*

‣Requests are open for all characters you find on my masterlist.

‣One request per person to keep my list manageable.

‣I hope to post them all by Oct. 31. Still working on these so expect to see them posted thru Nov.

‣I will stop taking requests on 25 Oct.

REQUESTS ARE NOW CLOSED: I will add finished fics to this post.

EDIT: I forgot to tag moots who might be interested so I'm adding you now. If you've already sent a request, just ignore this!

@justrainandcoffee, @evita-shelby, @runnning-outof-time, @peakyswritings, @cillmequick

@darklydeliciousdesires, @thomashelbyswife, @pacifymebby, @garrison-girl-08, @huntingingoodwill

@look-at-the-soul, @holacia3, @moral-terpitude, @dreamlandcreations, @noforkingclue

@emotionalcadaver, @mrsalwayswrite, @thegreatdragonfruta, @mara-and-its-the-same, @mayfieldss

@nerdy-novelist017, @xxanaduwrites, @brummiereader, @novashelby, @dandelionprints

@theshelbyclan, @amysteryspot

[scrumptiousstuffs]

Masterpost 1

This will be updated on a periodic basis (and very slowly). I have come to a realisation the FirstKhaotung posts in this blog are getting out of hand. Plus having to scroll through my gazillion FK-related posts are not helpful because most of the tags are all variations of FK names ���

2022

The Eclipse

Random pictures/scenes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Events

Halloween Rockstar Event (Oct 2022)

Photoshoot/Magazine Interview

Rabenda: 1 2 3 4

2023

Moonlight Chicken

Opening Event/Fanmeet 2

Finale Event/Fanmeet 2 3

BTS 1 2

Our Skyy 2 x The Eclipse:

Random pictures/scenes/BTS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Interviews: 1

FK Official Photobook: 1 2 3

Events

Bata Runway, 2 (Jan 2023)

L’Oreal HOH event 2 (Feb 2023)

Event where they looked good in green (Feb 2023)

Event where they looked good in black (Feb 2023)

Design Village event 2 (Mar 2023)

Oscar Party (Mar 2023)

Omatsuri battle, TV Asahi 2(April 2023)

GMMTV Outing 2023: 1 2 3

InnisfreexFK 2 (April 2023)

Marvel GOG: Volume 3 fan meet 2 (May 2023)

Innisfree Retinol event 2 3 4 5 6 7 (May 2023)

Mid Year Sales Event 2 (May 2023)

Link to part 2 of Masterpost

Last edited: 02/02/2025

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931463/ifttt-amazon-alexa-applets-ending-support-integration-automation

Amazon can do this because the Alexa's operating system sits behind a cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that it's literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.

This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them. This is prime directive of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA. The ability to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed an update that killed the feature:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/

That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out it was a starter-pistol. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a "security update" there's a damned good chance that the "update" is designed to block you from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance without any warning or intervention on your part. That's what Adobe did last year, when it literally stole the colors from your Photoshop files, in history's SaaSiest heist caper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

And yet, when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's most often as part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a John Deere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Today, Deere's PR minions are pitching search-and-replace versions of this story about Israeli tractors that Hamas is said to have looted, which were also remotely bricked.

But the main use of this remote killswitch isn't confounding war-looters: it's preventing farmers from fixing their own tractors without paying rent to John Deere. An even bigger omission from this narrative is the fact that John Deere is objectively Very Bad At Security, which means that the world's fleet of critical agricultural equipment is one breach away from being rendered permanently inert:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

There are plenty of good and honorable people working at big companies, from Adobe to Apple to Deere to Tesla to Amazon. But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.

Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer. Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.

Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers. An HP rep once told me that they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so that printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists that its ability to push iOS updates that revoke functionality is about keeping mobile users safe – not monopolizing repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let them add valuable functionality to their products. Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."

These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits without the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that you could bypass, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone. Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates – and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.

Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "Local first" computing is possible, and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" – the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about accessibility and IoT gadgets. Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."

But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."

Like the problem with the "bionic eyes" that Second Sight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see – it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical – it's commercial.

We're meant to believe that no bionic eye company could survive unless they devise their assistive technology such that it fails catastrophically if the business goes under. But it turns out that a bionic eye company can't survive even if they are allowed to do this.

Even if you believe Milton Friedman's Big Lie that a company is legally obligated to "maximize shareholder value," not even Friedman says that you are legally obligated to maximize companies' shareholder value. The fact that a company can make more money by defrauding you by revoking or bricking the things you buy from them doesn't oblige you to stand up for their right to do this.

Indeed, all of this conduct is arguably illegal, under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits "unfair and deceptive business practices":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

"No one should ever use a smart speaker" lacks nuance. "Anyone who uses a smart speaker should be insulated from unilateral revocations by the manufacturer, both through legal restrictions that bind the manufacturer, and legal rights that empower others to modify our devices to help us," is a much better formulation.

It's only in the land of the Darth Vader MBA that the deal is "take it or leave it." In a good world, we should be able to take the parts that work, and throw away the parts that don't.

(Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com, Sam Howzit; CC BY 2.0; modified)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

[madsmadart]

HALLOWEEN HORROR THEMES WARNING!!

(Repost from Oct 31 2022)

Here's a Kirby Krew Halloween special! This is my longest comic so far and I'm glad I finished it on time before Halloween. The script took a bit longer to work on than I thought to wrap up but I think it came out well