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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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The CFPB is genuinely making America better, and they're going HARD

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Let's take a sec here and notice something genuinely great happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of major, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, with the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, that Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!

A little background. The CFPB was created in 2010. It was Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an institution that was supposed to regulate finance from the perspective of the American public, not the American finance sector. Rather than fighting to "stabilize" the financial sector (the mission that led to Obama taking his advisor Timothy Geithner's advice to permit the foreclosure crisis to continue in order to "foam the runways" for the banks), the Bureau would fight to defend us from bankers.

The CFPB got off to a rocky start, with challenges to the unique system of long-term leadership appointments meant to depoliticize the office, as well as the sudden resignation of its inaugural boss, who broke his promise to see his term through in order to launch an unsuccessful bid for political office.

But after the 2020 election, the Bureau came into its own, when Biden poached Rohit Chopra from the FTC and put him in charge. Chopra went on a tear, taking on landlords who violated the covid eviction moratorium:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Then banning payday lenders' scummiest tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Then striking at one of fintech's most predatory grifts, the "earned wage access" hustle:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Then closing the loophole that let credit reporting bureaus (like Equifax, who doxed every single American in a spectacular 2019 breach) avoid regulation by creating data brokerage divisions and claiming they weren't part of the regulated activity of credit reporting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Chopra went on to promise to ban data-brokers altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Then he banned comparison shopping sites where you go to find the best bank accounts and credit cards from accepting bribes and putting more expensive options at the top of the list. Instead, he's requiring banks to send the CFPB regular, accurate lists of all their charges, and standing up a federal operated comparison shopping site that gives only accurate and honest rankings. Finally, he's made an interoperability rule requiring banks to let you transfer to another institution with one click, just like you change phone carriers. That means you can search an honest site to find the best deal on your banking, and then, with a single click, transfer your accounts, your account history, your payees, and all your other banking data to that new bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

Somewhere in there, big business got scared. They cooked up a legal theory declaring the CFPB's funding mechanism to be unconstitutional and got the case fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, in a bid to put Chopra and the CFPB permanently out of business. Instead, the Supremes – these Supremes! – upheld the CFPB's funding mechanism in a 7-2 ruling:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/supreme-court-lets-cfpb-funding-stand/

That ruling was a starter pistol for Chopra and the Bureau. Maybe it seemed like they were taking big swings before, but it turns out all that was just a warmup. Last week on The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner rounded up all the stuff the Bureau is kicking off:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-07-window-on-corporate-deceptions/

First: regulating Buy Now, Pay Later companies (think: Klarna) as credit-card companies, with all the requirements for disclosure and interest rate caps dictated by the Truth In Lending Act:

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/06/cfpb-applies-credit-card-rules

Next: creating a registry of habitual corporate criminals. This rogues gallery will make it harder for other agencies – like the DOJ – and state Attorneys General to offer bullshit "delayed prosecution agreements" to companies that compulsively rip us off:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-creates-registry-to-detect-corporate-repeat-offenders/

Then there's the rule against "fine print deception" – which is when the fine print in a contract lies to you about your rights, like when a mortgage lender forces you waive a right you can't actually waive, or car lenders that make you waive your bankruptcy rights, which, again, you can't waive:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-warns-against-deception-in-contract-fine-print/

As Kuttner writes, the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to "mandatory arbitration waivers" that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us.

There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, and much of it – including an active genocide – is coming from the Biden White House.

But there are people in the Biden Administration who care about the American people and who are effective and committed fighters who have our back. What's more, they're winning. That doesn't make all the bad news go away, but sometimes it feels good to take a moment and take the W.

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/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

#pluralistic #cfpb #consumer finance protection board #rohit chopra #scotus #bnpl #buy now pay later #repeat corporate offenders #fine print deception #whistleblowing #elizabeth warren

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moosha-mushroom · 5 months ago

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Media I imagine different fiction podcasts in instead of the media of being a podcast.

TMA: A selection of volumes, relating to the fears, each with those removable covers. Those covers has a victim or two, and then underneath the cover is a really detailed cover. The paper is decoratively ripped, with a kind of scraggly font, and each has a foreword and ‘author’s note’ from Jonathan Sims.

Malevolent: A really gritty graphic novel with deadly detail in each panel, and very little color. Maybe a trinket on each important character has a color? Like Arthur’s eyes being yellow or Oscar’s collar having a blue sheen to it. The novels are long, dramatic, and intimate in a visceral way.

Welcome to Night Vale: Local 58 bullshit. A broadcast on television with low quality images and audio, tacky music, and a kind of 80’s aesthetic. Each episode the words WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE zoom onto the screen, the purple eye behind them. And each weather segment is an animated short by a different artist.

The Penumbra(Juno Steel): A webcomic. Hours spent scrolling downward a comic that has so much color and GEOMETRIC design. Juno and his curvy jaw, brown pie slice eyes, a cartoonishly high collar for his investigator jacket. Nureyev and his sharp square jaw, shimmering jewelry, and stick legs. Characters sticking out of the panels, fonts changing constantly, a little blue Juno that does his narration and *guitar theme plays* each time he appears.

Wolf 359: A classic comic. Issues month by month. Different special covers of the characters in extra dramatic poses or scenes. Even MORE panel breaking than Juno Steel. So MUCH onomatopoeia, even for small things like the clink of a panel or the disapproving hiss of Hilbert in the background. Geometric designs like Juno Steel, but less colorful. Like the superhero art style mixed with a more stylized look.

Midnight Burger: You pull up the Midnight Burger website. They have a hidden page that has a sort of script-comic thing going on, where the art is next to the writing. Small coded in notes from Leif sometimes pop up if you hold your arrow over the art. Links are attached to the parts where Effie and Zebulon play music, linking you to the music so you can listen to it while you read.

Desert Skies: An animated show. Indie, something you’d find on YouTube. The animation is bouncy and incorporates 3D animation alongside the 2D. Maybe the Sphere Movers have 3D models and the staff don’t? The credits are short because it was made by one guy. People are complaining about it on Twitter /j. People are making content farms about it. Everyone is pissed at Corson like they’re pissed at Jax.

The Amelia Project: A sort of simulation video game. You play as Arthur. You listen to their stories and draw pieces of the tale to invent their death. Every once in a while the game transitions to a point and click suspense game where you solve puzzles as Cole and Haines. Maybe there should even be an Operation-esque part of it where you work as Kozlowski.

Ghost Wax: A novel with a lot of pictures spliced in it. The stories are all in a single book, though the book is through Luca’s perspective— so he picks up on the ghost’s body language and Voncid’s reactions. The pictures are tarot cards with each victim as a card. Some are repeat cards— Lorem does not have a card at the end of the story. Nor does Our Home or Evening at the Ardent. The pictures are only white with black line art. No color whatsoever.

Kakos Industries: A company newsletter. Not a broadcast. A newspaper that arrives at your door and has big bold letters with the main story and pictures of the events that happen in the story as it goes. And the Sunday Comic page is full of employee shenanigans. Some innocent… some not.

I am losing my mind.

#the magnus archives #malevolent #welcome to night vale #the penumbra podcast #wolf 359 #midnight burger #desert skies #the amelia project #ghost wax #kakos industries

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duckprintspress · 1 year ago

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There’s no time like the present to back the Duck Prints Press Patreon!

Why should you back Duck Prints Press?

support a queer-owned indie press, founded by fandom creators for fandom creators looking to publish their original work!

help a great, transparent, ethical small business that helps usually queer, often disabled, creators publish queer stories and art!

AND you get awesome stuff in exchange!

Wait, I’ll get stuff?

You will get so much stuff!!!

a free short story every month!

exclusive teasers and previews!

behind-the-scenes access via our Patreon blog and Discord!

voting rights to influence future anthology themes!

a discount in our webstore!

and that’s JUST THE MINIMUM LEVEL! You get all that for ONLY $3 PER MONTH. Higher levels get EVEN MORE!

Why is now a great time?

we will no longer be releasing new short stories to our website! So backing on Patreon will be the only way to get them!

as a result, we just changed how many stories our backers get!

$3/month backers now get one short story per month

$5/month backers now get two short stories per month

$7/month backers now a minimum of four short stories per month

$10/month backers now a minimum of five short stories per month

$25/month backers now a minimum of six short stories per month

when you back, you also get instant access to every single backer-reward story we’ve ever released! As of right now, that’s 30 free stories for backers at the $3/month, $5/month, and $7/month level, and 59 free stories for backers at the $10/month and $25/month level! That’s a LOT of stories!!!

Did you just buy Many Drops Make a Stream by Adrian Harley? People who back us on Patreon will get an exclusive epilogue when we fulfill the pre-order campaign! And, if you back us at the $10/month or $25/month level before October 15th, you can still get our Patreon-exclusive bonus reward (it’s a totally awesome engraved wooden coaster)! We’ll add the extra retroactively to your order, even though pre-orders are now closed!

Did you just buy To Drive the Hundred Miles by Alec J. Marsh? Patrons at the $10/month and $25/month level who back the campaign (which runs until October 20th!) will also get a bonus extra: a snowflake ornament!

and I mean, isn’t it always a good time to support a queer indie press?

So come on over to our Patreon, help us grow our Press, and get lots of awesome stuff for yourself!

Who We Are: Duck Prints Press LLC is an independent publisher owned and operated by @unforth. We work with fan creators to publish their original art and stories. We are particularly dedicated to publishing works featuring characters from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Love what we do but aren’t up for backing right now? That’s okay! Sign up for our monthly newsletter and get previews, behind-the-scenes information, coupons, and more!

#support us #duck prints press #patreon #queer patreon #indie press #indie publishing #queer publishing

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posttexasstressdisorder · 4 months ago

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CrowdStruck

By Edward Zitron • 19 Jul 2024 View in browser

Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala)

When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that I was typing words.

As it grew, I wrote the Rot Economy, and the Shareholder Supremacy, and many other pieces that speak to a larger problem in the tech industry — a complete misalignment in the incentives of most of the major tech companies, which have become less about building new technologies and selling them to people and more about capturing monopolies and gearing organizations to extract things through them.

Every problem you see is a result of a tech industry — from the people funding the earliest startups to the trillion-dollar juggernauts that dominate our lives — that is no longer focused on the creation of technology with a purpose, and organizations driven toward a purpose. Everything is about expressing growth, about showing how you will dominate an industry rather than serve it, about providing metrics that speak to the paradoxical notion that you'll grow forever without any consideration of how you'll live forever. Legacies are now subordinate to monopolies, current customers are subordinate to new customers, and "products" are considered a means to introduce a customer to a form of parasite designed to punish the user for even considering moving to competitor.

What's happened today with Crowdstrike is completely unprecedented (and I'll get to why shortly), and on the scale of the much-feared Y2K bug that threatened to ground the entirety of the world's computer-based infrastructure once the Year 2000 began.

You'll note that I didn't write "over-hyped" or anything dismissive of Y2K's scale, because Y2K was a huge, society-threatening calamity waiting to happen, and said calamity was averted through a remarkable, $500 billion industrial effort that took a decade to manifest because the seriousness of such a significant single point of failure would have likely crippled governments, banks and airlines.

People laughed when nothing happened on January 1 2000, assuming that all that money and time had been wasted, rather than being grateful that an infrastructural weakness was taken seriously, that a single point of failure was identified, and that a crisis was averted by investing in stopping bad stuff happening before it does.

As we speak, millions — or even hundreds of millions — of different Windows-based computers are now stuck in a doom-loop, repeatedly showing users the famed "Blue Screen of Death" thanks to a single point of failure in a company called Crowdstrike, the developer of a globally-adopted cyber-security product designed, ironically, to prevent the kinds of disruption that we’ve witnessed today. And for reasons we’ll get to shortly, this nightmare is going to drag on for several days (if not weeks) to come.

The product — called Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor — is an EDR system (which stands for Endpoint Detection and Response). If you aren’t a security professional and your eyes have glazed over, I’ll keep this brief. An EDR system is designed to identify hacking attempts, remediate them, and prevent them. They’re big, sophisticated, and complicated products, and they do a lot of things that’s hard to build with the standard tools available to Windows developers.

And so, to make Falcon Sensor work, Crowdstrike had to build its own kernel driver. Now, kernel drivers operate at the lowest level of the computer. They have the highest possible permissions, but they operate with the fewest amount of guardrails. If you’ve ever built your own computer — or you remember what computers were like in the dark days of Windows 98 — you know that a single faulty kernel driver can wreak havoc on the stability of your system.

The problem here is that Crowdstrike pushed out an evidently broken kernel driver that locked whatever system that installed it in a permanent boot loop. The system would start loading Windows, encounter a fatal error, and reboot. And reboot. Again and again. It, in essence, rendered those machines useless.

It's convenient to blame Crowdstrike here, and perhaps that's fair. This should not have happened. On a basic level, whenever you write (or update) a kernel driver, you need to know it’s actually robust and won’t shit the bed immediately. Regrettably, Crowdstrike seemingly borrowed Boeing’s approach to quality control, except instead of building planes where the doors fly off at the most inopportune times (specifically, when you’re cruising at 35,000ft), it released a piece of software that blew up the transportation and banking sectors, to name just a few.

It created a global IT outage that has grounded flights and broken banking services. It took down the BBC’s flagship kids TV channel, infuriating parents across the British Isles, as well as Sky News, which, when it was able to resume live broadcasts, was forced to do so without graphics. In essence, it was forced back to the 1950s — giving it an aesthetic that matches the politics of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. By no means is this an exhaustive list of those affected, either.

The scale and disruption caused by this incident is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Previous incidents — particularly rival ransomware outbreaks, like Wannacry — simply can’t compare to this, especially when we’re looking at the disruption and the sheer scale of the problem.

Still, if your day was ruined by this outage, at least spare a thought for those who’ll have to actually fix it. Because those machines affected are now locked in a perpetual boot loop, it’s not like Crowdstrike can release a software patch and call it a day. Undoing this update requires some users to have to individually go to each computer, loading up safe mode (a limited version of Windows with most non-essential software and drivers disabled), and manually removing the faulty code. And if you’ve encrypted your computer, that process gets a lot harder. Servers running on cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — you know, the way most of the internet's infrastructure works — require an entirely separate series of actions.

If you’re on a small IT team and you’re supporting hundreds of workstations across several far-flung locations — which isn’t unusual, especially in sectors like retail and social care — you’re especially fucked. Say goodbye to your weekend. Your evenings. Say goodbye to your spouse and kids. You won’t be seeing them for a while. Your life will be driving from site to site, applying the fix and moving on. Forget about sleeping in your own bed, or eating a meal that wasn’t bought from a fast food restaurant. Good luck, godspeed, and God bless. I do not envy you.

The significance of this failure — which isn't a breach, by the way, and in many respects is far worse, at least in the disruption caused — is not in its damage to individual users, but to the amount of technical infrastructure that runs on Windows, and that so much of our global infrastructure relies on automated enterprise software that, when it goes wrong, breaks everything.

It isn't about the number of computers, but the amount of them that underpin things like the security checkpoints or systems that run airlines, or at banks, or hospitals, all running as much automated software as possible so that costs can be kept down.

The problem here is systemic — that there is a company that the majority of people affected by this outage had no idea existed until today that Microsoft trusted to the extent that they were able to push an update that broke the back of a huge chunk of the world's digital infrastructure.

Microsoft, as a company, instead of building the kind of rigorous security protocols that would, say, rigorously test something that connects to what seems to be a huge proportion of Windows computers. Microsoft, in particular, really screwed up here. As pointed out by Wired, the company vets and cryptographically signs all kernel drivers — which is sensible and good, because kernel drivers have an incredible amount of access, and thus can be used to inflict serious harm — with this testing process usually taking several weeks.

How then did this slip through its fingers? For this to have happened, two companies needed to screw up epically. And boy, they did.

What we're seeing today isn't just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.

The problem with the digitization of society — or, more specifically, the automation of once-manual tasks — is that it introduces a single point of failure. Or, rather, multiple single points of failure. Our world, our lifestyle and our economy, is dependent on automation and computerization, with these systems, in turn, dependent on other systems to work. And if one of those systems breaks, the effects ricochet outwards, like ripples when you cast a rock into a lake.

Today’s Crowdstrike cock-up is just the latest example of this, but it isn’t the only one. Remember the SolarWinds hack in 2020, when Russian state-linked hackers gained access to an estimated 18,000 companies and public sector organizations — including NATO, the European Parliament, the US Treasury Department, and the UK’s National Health Service — by compromising just one service — SolarWinds Orion?

Remember when Okta — a company that makes software that handles authentication for a bunch of websites, governments, and businesses — got hacked in 2023, and then lied about the scale of the breach? And then do you remember how those hackers leapfrogged from Okta to a bunch of other companies, most notably Cloudflare, which provides CDN and DDOS protection services for pretty much the entire internet?

That whole John Donne quote — “No man is an island” — is especially true when we’re talking about tech, because when you scratch beneath the surface, every system that looks like it’s independent is actually heavily, heavily dependent on services and software provided by a very small number of companies, many of whom are not particularly good.

This is as much a cultural failing as it is a technological one, the result of management geared toward value extraction — building systems that build monopolies by attaching themselves to other monopolies. Crowdstrike went public in 2019, and immediately popped on its first day of trading thanks to Wall Street's appreciation of Crowdstrike moving away from a focused approach to serving large enterprise clients, building products for small and medium-sized businesses by selling through channel partners — in effect outsourcing both product sales and the relationship with a client that would tailor a business' solution to a particular need.

Crowdstrike's culture also appears to fucking suck. A recent Glassdoor entry referred to Crowdstrike as "great tech [with] terrible culture" with no work life balance, with "leadership that does not care about employee well being." Another from June claimed that Crowdstrike was "changing culture for the street,” with KPIs (as in metrics related to your “success” at the company) “driving behavior more than building relationships” with a serious lack of experience in the public sector in senior management. Others complain of micromanagement, with one claiming that “management is the biggest issue,” with managers “ask[ing] way too much of you…and it doesn’t matter if you do what they ask since they’re not even around to check on you,” and another saying that “management are arrogant” and need to “stop lying to the market on product capability.”

While I can’t say for sure, I’d imagine an organization with such powerful signs of growth-at-all-costs thinking — a place where you “have to get used to the pressure” that’s a “clique that you’re not in” — likely isn’t giving its quality assurance teams the time and space to make sure that there aren’t any Kaiju-level security threats baked into an update. And that assumes it actually has a significant QA team in-house, and hasn’t just (as with many companies) outsourced the work to a “bodyshop” like Wipro or Infosys or Tata.

And don’t think I’m letting Microsoft off the hook, either. Assuming the kernel driver testing roles are still being done in-house, do you think that these testers — who have likely seen their friends laid off at a time when the company was highly profitable, and denied raises when their well-fed CEO took home hundreds of millions of dollars for doing a job he’s eminenly bad at — are motivated to do their best work?

And this is the culture that’s poisoned almost the entirety of Silicon Valley. What we’re seeing is the societal cost of moving fast and breaking things, of Marc Andreessen considering “risk management the enemy,” of hiring and firing tens of thousands of people to please Wall Street, of seeking as many possible ways to make as much money as possible to show shareholders that you’ll grow, even if doing so means growing at a pace that makes it impossible to sustain organizational and cultural stability. When you aren’t intentional in the people you hire, the people you fire, the things you build and the way that they’re deployed, you’re going to lose the people that understand the problems they’re solving, and thus lack the organizational ability to understand the ways that they might be solved in the future.

This is dangerous, and also a dark warning for the future. Do you think that Facebook, or Microsoft, or Google — all of whom have laid off over 10,000 people in the last year — have done so in a conscientious way that means that the people left understand how their systems run and their inherent issues? Do you think that the management-types obsessed with the unsustainable AI boom are investing heavily in making sure their organizations are rigorously protected against, say, one bad line of code? Do they even know who wrote the code of their current systems? Is that person still there? If not, is that person at least contracted to make sure that something nuanced about the system in question isn’t mistakenly removed?

They’re not. They’re not there anymore. Only a few months ago Google laid off 200 employees from the core of its organization, outsourcing their roles to Mexico and India in a cost-cutting measure the quarter after the company made over $23 billion in profit. Silicon Valley — and big tech writ large — is not built to protect against situations like the one we’re seeing today,because their culture is cancerous. It valuesrowth at all costs, with no respect for the human capital that empowers organizations or the value of building rigorous, quality-focused products.

This is just the beginning. Big tech is in the throes of perdition, teetering over the edge of the abyss, finally paying the harsh cost of building systems as fast as possible. This isn’t simply moving fast or breaking things, but doing so without any regard for the speed at which you’re doing so and firing the people that broke them, the people who know what’s broken, and possibly the people that know how to fix them.

And it’s not just tech! Boeing — a company I’ve already shat on in this post, and one I’ll likely return to in future newsletters, largely because it exemplifies the short-sightedness of today’s managerial class — has, over the past 20 years or so, span off huge parts of the company (parts that, at one point, were vitally important) into separate companies, laid off thousands of employees at a time, and outsourced software dev work to $9-an-hour bodyshop engineers. It hollowed itself out until there was nothing left.

And tell me, knowing what you know about Boeing today, would you rather get into a 737 Max or an Airbus A320neo? Enough said.

As these organizations push their engineers harder, said engineers will turn to AI-generated code, poisoning codebases with insecure and buggy code as companies shed staff to keep up with Wall Street’s demands in ways that I’m not sure people are capable of understanding. The companies that run the critical parts of our digital lives do not invest in maintenance or infrastructure with the intentionality that’s required to prevent the kinds of massive systemic failures you see today, and I need you all to be ready for this to happen again.

This is the cost of the Rot Economy — systems used by billions of people held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure maintained with the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over safety and profit over people.

Every single major tech organization should see today as a wakeup call — a time to reevaluate the fundamental infrastructure behind every single tech stack.

What I fear is that they’ll simply see it as someone else’s problem - which is exactly how we got here in the first place.

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fursasaida · 1 year ago

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If you have a bunch of trees, and you chop them down to make paper or lumber or whatever, you can sell the paper or lumber or whatever for money, but on the other hand trees store carbon and cutting them down is bad for climate change. If instead you do not chop down the trees, that is good for the environment, and it is a great innovation of modern finance that, now, you can get paid for not chopping down the trees. This is called “carbon credits.” There are measurement problems.

If you mine Bitcoin, you use a lot of electricity to run computers to perform calculations to get Bitcoins for yourself, which you can sell for money. But this is bad for the environment, because it uses electricity that is probably generated in ways that release carbon.[1] If you were to stop mining Bitcoin, conversely, that would be good for the environment. Can you get paid, though, for not mining Bitcoin? Oh yes, modern finance has solved that one too:

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms Inc. made millions of dollars by selling power rather than producing the tokens in the second quarter as the crypto-mining industry continued to grapple with the impact of low digital asset prices.

The Castle Rock, Colorado-based company had $13.5 million in power curtailment credits during the quarter, while generating $49.7 million in mining revenue. Riot booked $27.3 million in power curtailment credits last year and $6.5 million in 2021 from power sales to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is the grid operator for the Lone Star state. …

The company had $18.3 million in power credits in June and July based on its latest monthly operational updates, including $14.8 million in power curtailment credits received from selling power back to the ERCOT grid at market-driven spot prices under its long-term power contracts and $3.5 million in credits received from participation in ERCOT demand response programs.

Here is the 10-Q; this stuff is described in Note 8. Some of what is going on here is that Riot has a long-term power supply agreement in which TXU Energy Retail Co. has to supply it with electricity at fixed prices through 2030, and Riot has the option to sell the power back to TXU, at market rates, for credit against its future electric bills, when the spot price exceeds the contract price. But part of it is demand response, where ERCOT pays Riot cash for using less than its typical electrical load during periods of peak demand.

As with carbon credits, there are measurement problems; I have never mined a single Bitcoin, yet ERCOT has never sent me a penny for my forbearance. Still, how great is modern finance? Twenty years ago, if you had told people that one day they could get paid for not mining Bitcoin, they would have said “what?” But now it is possible. Modern finance created the problem (Bitcoin mining) and the solution (paying people not to mine Bitcoin); the overall result is that nothing happens and yet people get paid. Just a miracle of financial engineering.

Also: Riot is getting paid for not using electricity, but if you are an enterprising Bitcoin miner surely you should look into getting paid for not using carbon when you are not mining Bitcoin. Riot is not there yet, but it is possible to imagine a warming world in which energy prices go up and Bitcoin prices go down and Bitcoin miners can get paid more for not mining Bitcoin than for mining Bitcoin. Giant fortunes will be made by people who got in early to the business of not mining Bitcoin. The future is so good, man.

This is from Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter (which yes is under the Bloomberg masthead), which I highly recommend if you want some kind of awareness of what the finance yahoos are doing but want to feel like you're hearing it from a human person

#crypto #finance

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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Mike Luckovich

* * * *

Keeping control of the Senate

September 24, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

Sep 24, 2024

On a day with a dozen important stories reverberating in the media echo chamber, I want to start with a positive report on a fundraiser for Senators Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown. Both face challenging races in November because they have achieved the improbable—being elected and reelected as Democratic Senators in red states. That fact alone means that every reelection effort is an uphill battle.

Their MAGA opponents are being showered with staggering amounts of dark money from the unholy trinity of the cryptocurrency industry, billionaires whose only goal is to lower taxes, and conservative organizations promoting the autocratic, Christian nationalist agenda of Project 2025.

But as is increasingly the case in the 2024 election, Democrats responded with enthusiasm and generosity. Several hundred readers of this newsletter donated to and showed up at a fundraiser hosted by Senate Circle. I moderated a conversation with Senators Tester and Brown that left everyone on the call feeling more confident about Democratic prospects in the US Senate in 2024.

It is easy to see why Senators Tester and Brown have succeeded as Democrats in red states. There is not an ounce of artifice or political calculation between them. They say what they think in a plainspoken, genuine, and charismatic manner. They hold strong beliefs that run counter to those of some of their constituents, but they are men of their word who devote every day working to make the lives of their constituents better—regardless of their political affiliation.

Neither candidate guaranteed victory. They have too much integrity to issue guarantees during a volatile election season. But when they tell you that their chances are strong and that their policy positions are resonating with the voters in their states, it is clear that Democrats have a reasonable basis for hoping we will retain both seats.

Senator Tester noted that at this point in his 2018 re-election bid, he was down by four to six points in the polls (because he voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation). The current public polling regarding the Montana race is skewed by small, low-quality polls by Republican operatives. But even those polls show that Senator Tester leads with younger voters and women—two cohorts that should be motivated to turn out in an election with an initiative protecting reproductive rights on the ballot. Senator Tester is confident that he is better positioned than in 2018 and has the ground organization to win.

Senator Brown is running against an opponent (Bernie Moreno) recruited by JD Vance and supported by the cryptocurrency industry because, you know, cryptocurrency regulation is at the top of the list of issues for Ohio voters—not! Of course, JD Vance and Bernie Moreno have made anti-Haitian animus in Springfield a top campaign theme. But Bernie Moreno outdid himself on Monday, saying that Ohio women are “a little crazy” for supporting abortion rights.”

Moreno continued,

You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

See Ohio.net, Bernie Moreno calls Ohio women 'a little crazy' for supporting abortion rights.

Bernie Moreno is repeating and extending the slander against women that JD Vance has thrust into the limelight with his “childless cat lady comments.” Moreno shows the same disrespect, ignorance, and intolerance toward women that JD Vance has exhibited throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.

Senators Tester and Brown are both in the fight to win it—and believe they will. They have strong ground operations but need “late money” to keep those operations going strong. At the fundraiser on Monday, readers of this newsletter helped raise $192,170 to be split between Tester and Brown.

It would be terrific if readers of Today’s Edition can help push that total beyond $200,000—to help maximize Democratic prospects for retaining control of the Senate. If you are moved to contribute any amount, the link is here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2024_mt_oh. (For amounts less than $100, just fill in the “additional contribution box”).

Thanks to the hundreds of readers who contributed and joined the call. Your generosity and commitment will help Democrats defend the Senate and preserve democracy! Bless you all.

Post-script to the fundraiser

During conversation with Senator Sherrod Brown, he noted that his wife, Connie Schultz, is a Substack author. Connie writes Hopefully Yours—a title that resonates with the viewpoint of this newsletter—“Viewing the news through the lens of hope.”

While I am a guy with a laptop and a lot of opinions, Connie is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and best-selling author, among many other accomplishments. I just subscribed to her Substack. Check it out. As an incentive, Connie recently interviewed Heather Cox Richardson and will be publishing an article about that interview on Substack. Keep an eye out for it!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #US Senate #election 2024 #Mike Luckovich

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pb-dot · 7 months ago

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Introducing: The Thereafter Release Newsletter

Big news everybody! As of today, I open up for subscriptions to the Thereafter release newsletter, which is the method I have chosen to release my serial novel Thereafter. The first chapter is slated to be released on May 1st at 13:00 GMT, with subsequent chapters coming out on the 1st and 15th every month until I change the schedule or the story is done. Back-of-the-book-brief and a bit of a Q&A below the cut

The year he turned 13, Michael Sørstrand saved the world of the Molefolk from the tyranny of the Lightlord and his armies. It’s been mostly downhill for him after that. Now, 20 years later, Michael finds himself spirited away by magic yet again. The world he finds himself in is stranger and more chaotic by a long shot than the serene caves of the Molefolk. Something defying description has destroyed the world of the Molefolk and countless other magical worlds. The survivors and refugees of these innumerable worlds that have banded together in the ramshackle town of Therafter, built from what parts of their worlds they could salvage. It is here they have called upon Michael to once again take on the mantle of hero to provide hope and inspiration for the disparate masses of survivors. The good news? The wizards and warlocks in charge of Thereafter have managed to summon three other heroes through the void between worlds. The bad news? They’re all messed up in their own, unique ways, and they don’t play particularly well with others, either. Now, Michael and his fellow ex-heroes must rediscover what heroism they once had, find peace with each other and themselves, and ask what it means to be heroes in an imperfect world. They’ll have their work cut out for them. The city of Thereafter is rife with desperate crime and runaway magic, and the calamity that shattered the countless worlds is still out there, somewhere.

Q: Is there any cost associated with subscribing to the story of Thereafter?

A: Subscribing to the Thereafter story release newsletter is free and will remain free for the duration. If I get enough subscribers that staying on the buttondown free plan becomes unfeasible (100+ subscribers), I will open a patreon or similar crowdfunding page to help pay for the costs associated with the upgrade to a paid plan.

Q: Why are you sending this story out there for free?

A: At a point in my work on the first draft of His Impossible Brushstrokes I realized that I love writing too much to put writing entirely on pause while I edit Brushstrokes and The Clockwork Boy. Rather than get started on yet another manuscript to try to sell to an open-minded indie publisher, I decided to just get some of my writing out there.

Q: Why Buttondown?

A: I did some light research on the topic of newsletter services, and found Buttondown's approach to be the most promising for a small operation like mine. The first tier of paid plans is also more reasonable than what substack can offer.

Q: Does Thereafter have an age limit?

A: As I'm not a children's developmental psychologist, I feel ill-equipped to answer this question. I will however say that Thereafter is a story intended for mature audiences, both in that coarse language and references to sexual acts as well as not-insignificant descriptions of violence feature prominently, but also in that the feeling of being an adult and the often painful contrast with the potential of youth is a pivotal part of the narrative. As such, I suggest "adulthood" as the recommended reading age.

Q: Will you tag potentially upsetting material?

To the best of my ability, yes. I can't guarantee I'll catch every single one, but I will do my best, and I'll do my best to amend any glaring omissions in the archived posts.

Q: Speaking of archival, how will that work?

Buttondown archives every mail sent out, and I will post archived chapters to my Cohost under the tag Thereafter Chapters a week after they go out. This way, the Newsletter is the primary source for new chapters, while allowing for multiple ways of back reading depending on individual preferences.

Q: What's your stance on fanworks, remixes, and similar works?

Thereafter is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license, which is to say that you're free to make works based on or remixing anything in it, provided you do attribute the source, make no money off it, and make your work available under the same license. On a less legalese level, I adore fanworks, but I will personally not read fanfiction of my work as I'm worried about picking up ideas, concepts or interpretations from these subconsciously. I should also mention that I am not super strict about these things, just smack a Thereafter tag in there (and maybe @ me if you feel brave and cool) and we're gravy.

Q: How might your readers interact with you and the community?

Buttondown does not feature a comment section to the best of my knowledge, but I encourage anyone who has thoughts or something to say about the chapters to give the #Thereafter tag here or on cohost some love. If you have questions or a message for the author, contact me here on Tumblr, or on the aforementioned Cohost. I respond to tagged posts, Asks, DMs if we're moots, or you seem legit, the whole bag.

Q: Would you fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?

Ok, this is getting silly, time to wrap it up. (The 100 duck-sized horses, easily. Horses are flesh machines made to break in stupid ways, ducks remember being dinosaurs and giving them a chance to relive the glory days seem like a massive mistake.)

#thereafter #thereafter wip #writing #writeblr #self-publishing

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fountainpenguin · 1 year ago

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"Suspense is controlling my mind... I can't find a way out of here..."

---

New 130 Reasons Why I'm Fairy Trash update today!

Fairly OddParents || One-Shot - “Approval”

Read on FFN || Read on AO3

Find more Lavender Train story arc HERE

---

A glimpse into 155,000-year-old Foop's life on the student council as he decorates the gym for a high school dance. Guest appearances by Poof, Denzel, Kevin, the von Strangle twins, the O'Terrae clones, Whistle, and Foop's betrothed: Anti-Coriander.

(First 1000 words under the cut)

40. Approval (~5,000 years after "Temptation" and 5,000 before "All I Ever Wanted")

Wednesday February 8th, Aurora 177

Year of Water, Winter of the Powerful Rapids

---

If Foop had truly had an inkling of how much work it takes to run the school as its student body secretary, he may not have bothered campaigning. Honestly they were three years into the current zodiac cycle and he still hadn't decided if he'll run for the position again.

He probably would. He most definitely would, so he didn't even know why he was complaining. The one and only cycle that he reigned as student body president with Poof as his secretary, half the meetings didn't get their minutes recorded in any real detail, and Poof had typed every single document using the Central Star region's way of spelling Snobbish words.

And other minor annoyances… like, he'd written out directions once and called the first floor "second floor" and Foop spent 30 minutes flitting around in puzzled circles until it clicked that he and Poof were using different terms for their destination. He walked in late and his snacks were cold. Hmph. No one ever seemed to have that problem when it was him sending out newsletters. Atrocious.

And when Poof had double-dipped his hand briefly into the role of student body treasurer, the budget may as well have been sliced in half with the way Poof divvied up their things. Honestly, it felt sometimes like his counterpart flopped in his various roles on purpose just to make him miserable. He'd like to believe Poof was better than that level of petty, but sometimes when you were dripping with exhaustion and low on caffeine, it was impossible to tell.

Poof's on freaking peppermint a solid 70% of his waking hours anyway. A lot of help HE is. He supposed he could thank his counterpart for getting addicted to candy in a way that let Foop operate sober and without temptation of any kind. That was the only silver lining to any of this.

Foop despised his counterpart's peppermint habit, but like Darkness would he ever rat Poofy out to his mummy and daddy. No. They both relied on their parents' approval- if not for physical comfort and safety, then certainly for emotional support. Hard pass. Disgrace. Poof had far too much dirt on him to ever make him risk tipping their mutually assured destruction too far to one side.

My secret affairs with Anti-Marigold come to mind… His father will flay him alive when he finds out about that. An anti-will o' the wisp… Really. The prince of Anti-Fairy World could have done "so much better in a mistress" (and High Count Anti-Cosmo will painfully let him know it). His lecherous father was a textbook nymphomaniac. Foop would rather die than allow the pooferazzi to document Anti-Cosmo dragging his son out to all his old brothel haunts or… or… something like that.

Do we even have brothels in Anti-Fairy World? Who knows. That's not the point. The High Count undoubtedly did something scandalous with his spare time when he wasn't holed up plotting world domination, and whatever that thing may be, Foop would sooner sprint one billion kilometers in the other direction than ever face it head-on.

Anti-Cosmo didn't approve of the fact that Foop ended up on student council in the first place. Foop had cheated some of the vote (as he'd cheated it for years) by relying on bashful simpletons like Whistle to campaign in his favor while simultaneously threatening others into voting for him. He'd stuffed the ballot box and didn't even care. Honestly, part of him suspected the school knew what he was up to, and Foop took cruel pride in the fact that if he managed to do a good enough job keeping the school activities flowing, the faculty might simply look the other way. Oh, there's such a great joy in being wanted as a leader instead of merely feared…

Not that my father understands that. My position is secured someday, especially if I don't have heirs until I'm so old that my wand sparks when I use it. Meanwhile, my father will be twisting his neck, peering anxiously over one shoulder in cold anticipation of my rise to power until the day he dies.

Ah, youth. He reveled in it.

At least Poof knew how to lead a meeting that kept all the officers engaged. Poof had this animated way of speaking where he sort of gushed over his words, the long tails of his blue bandana ribbon snapping behind him in an imaginary wind every time he paced. He could sell a genie on underwater real estate. Maybe that was why the people kept electing him student body president year after year.

They'd been setting up for tonight's dance since before the window for early-morning breakfast wishes closed off. Well… Foop had, anyway. It wasn't really necessary. In a pinch, magic could always be whipped out to speed the process along, but Foop had his own… reasons for wanting to keep eyes on their location for hours at a time.

He traced the pad of one finger along the dark scar that curled around his neck. Left side, just above the collarbone…

Cavatina Sanderson had slit that scar across Poof's innocent skin 20,000 years ago, during the same Autumn Masquerade where Foop first met Anti-Coriander. Foop had even died and regenerated a few times since then - not on purpose! (mostly) - but the scar wasn't his to heal. This same scar branded his counterpart's neck. It had been given to Poof first, and the stupid sync between their cores kept it firmly in place like a teeter-totter. Terribly annoying.

He never knew how to explain it when strangers asked. Wasn't even his battle wound to brag about. Or Poof's, for that matter… That infuriating pixie had simply backed his counterpart against a wall and shoved a blade right up to his neck. Poof just let it happen. And if he'd done it at one dance, Foop had no reason to believe he wouldn't make another appearance tonight.

Therein lay the anxieties.

[Cnt’d - FFN and AO3 links above]

#FOP #Fairly OddParents #FOP Foop #130 Prompts #ridwriting #Nerdy blue bat son #Purple hippie dragonfly #Snazzy sequel son #Panicked sequel son #Cilantro princess #Cavatina #Big Crock #Little Crock #FAIRIES!#Bat cube and associates #I wrote / drew this in May. It's been a long wait #apparently art #fic announcement

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a-sin-to-be-rin · 25 days ago

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Seeing Is (Not) Believing

Dick is free from the Crime Syndicate. Lex Luthor brought him back to life. He's safe.

But he's starting to feel like part of him died and never came back.

---

Dick collapses the moment they step out of the room.

“Nightwing,” Bruce says sternly, tightening his hold on Dick’s waist. There's no point in using the alias, not anymore, but Bruce is a creature of habit. And his kids have always responded best to a direct order anyway. (Even if they don’t always obey those either.) “Nightwing.”

Dick groans, eyelids heavy. “S-Sorry, B…” he apologizes, like being tortured for weeks and then quite literally dying is no excuse to pass out. He coughs weakly, struggling to get his feet back under himself.

“Come on,” Selina says, gentle but firm. “We need to go.”

And she’s right. They may have gotten Dick out of the Murder Machine, but they’re still in the Crime Syndicate’s base of operations. The heroes of the Justice League are still trapped in Firestorm. The fate of the world literally hangs in the balance.

So they follow Cyborg up the stairs, with Bruce carrying the majority of Dick’s weight and Selina trailing behind, clearly waiting for one (or both) of them to go tumbling down the steps.

“Just a little further,” Bruce mumbles. “Just a couple more steps, okay? Stay with me, chum.”

Dick does his best, but unfortunately, it isn't enough. His knees give out four steps from the top, chin dropping to his chest. Selina rushes up, grabbing under Dick’s free arm before he can slip from Bruce’s hold.

They don't have much time, and unfortunately, they especially don't have time for this. So Bruce readjusts his hold, with one arm under Dick’s knees and the other supporting his back. He holds him close, Batman’s cape nearly engulfing the injured hero entirely.

“Stay awake,” he murmurs. “Stay awake, kiddo.”

Dick looks at him blearily, but he doesn’t close his eyes. He just leans into Bruce’s chest, wincing with Bruce’s every step.

They go up another flight of stairs, turning corners until they reach a door. Cyborg destroys it with a single blast, then steps over the wreckage. Batman starts to follow, trying to ignore the whines coming from the bundle in his arms.

But a hand on his shoulder stops him short.

“Catwoman?”

Selina’s brows are knit in concern, and she rubs her arm, looking from Dick to Bruce and back again. “We’ve got this. Get him out of here.”

Bruce shakes his head. “No. We need to end this. Now.”

Selina isn’t convinced. “Yes, Cyborg and I will end it. You need to get him out of here before he dies.” She twists her whip around her fingers, expression pained, before making fierce eye contact with Bruce. “Don’t let another one die, Bruce.” She knows what she’s insinuating, but she doesn’t back down. “The world is in good hands. Go now before you make yourself a liability.”

Fire erupts in Bruce’s chest, but he can’t do anything about it. So instead, he clenches his jaw and holds Dick closer. He sends her his fiercest glare. “I’m the last person here to become a liability.”

Selina crosses her arms, standing firm. “Take care of the boy, or I’ll drag him out of here myself.”

Bruce sweeps past her and heads for the exit. He isn’t going to take this.

“Nightwing,” Bruce calls, but he doesn’t look down. “Still awake?”

“Batman,” Dick says weakly. “What’s… What’s happening?”

“We’re getting out of here. Cyborg and Catwoman have the situation handled.”

Not that Dick knows what “the situation” is. Bruce doubts the Crime Syndicate gave him a weekly newsletter while he was in captivity.

“Oh…” Dick murmurs. And then he jolts in Bruce’s arms, catching Bruce by surprise and knocking himself to the ground.

“Dick, what-?”

“No,” Dick mumbles feverishly. “No, no, no, no, no. Get away. Just get… get away.” He claws at the ground, dragging his uncooperative body across the stone floor, legs tangled in Bruce’s cape.

“Whoa,” Bruce says, taking Dick’s hands and trying to make eye contact. “It’s just me, Nightwing. It’s just Batman.”

“No,” Dick insists, weakly trying to pull his hands back. “No, you’re not! You’re Owlman. You’ve always been… You keep lying… I can’t…” He’s breaking down, face red and eyes bloodshot. He flails rather ineffectively, breathing so fast that Bruce can’t believe Dick hasn’t knocked himself out yet.

“Chum,” Bruce says firmly, pulling the cowl down. “It’s Bruce. Remember?”

Dick is still upset, expression bereft, but his breathing slows a touch. He reaches up, hand shaky, and Bruce carefully sits him up against the wall. Then he rips his gloves off and allows Dick to feel the grooves of his hands. The callouses. The scars. His crooked ring finger.

“See? It's just me.”

Dick shakes his head, but he doesn't let go of Bruce’s hands. “You look like… You look like him.”

Him. Owlman, probably. Bruce supposes his brother from an alternate universe would bear a passing resemblance to him. It only makes Bruce hate the Crime Syndicate even more.

“It's Bruce,” Bruce promises. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Dick blinks and looks at Bruce as if for the first time. Recognition dawns. “You’re not Owlman.”

With forced patience, Bruce nods. “I am not. Now, can we please get out of here?”

“I… Help me up.” Dick seems to regain his awareness, and Bruce capitalizes on the moment, pulling Dick’s arm over his shoulders.

“This place could blow at any point,” Bruce warns. “Can you run?”

Dick doesn’t answer, forcing himself forward in a frantic limp. It’s enough that Bruce doesn’t try carrying Dick again. The last thing he needs is another argument. There’s no time for discussion.

The pair hobble out of the hideout, and Bruce takes the wheel of the Batmobile stationed outside. Dick tries to sit in the passenger seat but slips and ends up on his back. Bruce has to yank the restraints between Dick’s uncooperative arms.

It reminds him vaguely of trying to get Dick to put on a suit for his first gala, a lifetime ago. Neither one of them had enjoyed the process, but it was a necessary evil. Just as the bowtie was required for societal acceptance back then, the seatbelt is required for not getting thrown through the Batmobile’s windshield today.

“The… The bomb…” Dick’s hand clumsily paws at his chest.

“The Murder Machine,” Bruce elaborates. “Yes. It’s deactivated. You’re safe.” He punches the gas, speeding back for Gotham.

Dick watches him with hazy eyes. “Luthor… killed… he killed… I… I couldn’t breathe, and-” He’s hyperventilating, and Bruce can’t do this. Not right now. With one hand on the wheel, Bruce digs around in his utility belt, finding the autoinjector right where he left it. He takes it out, flicks the cap off with his thumb, and stabs Dick in the leg.

Bruce keeps his eyes on the road, but he doesn’t need to look to see the betrayed expression on Dick’s face. The confusion, the fear, the anger. It’s all there, just in Bruce’s periphery, but Bruce is not looking. He’s focused on driving. (Or that’s what he tells himself, anyway.)

“B, wh-?”

Bruce doesn’t let himself feel bad. It’s not his fault. Dick was going to work himself into a frenzy and end up passing out anyway. A gentle sedative is not only the most elegant and efficient choice, but it’s also the most humane.

At least, the most humane as long as Dick doesn’t smash his head against the window when he collapses. Which of course he does.

Bruce can’t worry over it. He’s got bigger problems. The world is ending. Tim is missing. Dick has plenty of severe wounds, many of which are old and likely infected. He’s hardly concerned with a bump on his head.

“Rest,” Bruce says, though Dick probably can’t hear him anymore. “I’ll take care of everything.”

And Bruce fully intends to make good on that promise.

---

Dick wakes up in a small room filled with fading greens and browns. The wallpaper is a peeling floral print. The blankets are familiar and smell of wood varnish. There’s a puke green recliner in the corner of the room, its stained upholstery worn to the point of ripping across the front of the seat.

The only things not in the dated earth tones are the bed, the monitor, and the IV poles. The bed itself is clearly designed for a hospital, and the remote for it is resting on Dick’s leg. Green, yellow, and red lines draw wavy patterns across the monitor’s jet black screen, meaningless numbers in corresponding colors down the side. One IV pole is hooked up to the crook of Dick’s elbow, a mystery fluid dripping from the bag, through the catheter, and into Dick’s bloodstream. The other is connected to Dick’s hand, though he can’t be certain of what exactly its purpose is.

And once Dick is done assessing his surroundings, he turns inward. And man. Does he hurt. His ribs scream with every shallow breath. His stomach churns, nausea pushing against his throat. The world seems to ebb and flow with his heartbeat, turning fuzzy and then coming into focus in a constant cycle. And just generally, everything about Dick hurts. He aches. He’s tired. He’s hot, he’s cold, he’s thirsty, he’s dizzy. He tries to sit up, but every movement sends fire through his back.

Whip burns, he realizes. The Crime Syndicate.

The day - the weeks - come rushing back to him, but all he does is sigh. He died - he died - but he’s so numb, so ridiculously overwhelmed with the concept, that he can’t even worry about it. He was dead. Past tense. It’s a non-issue for the moment.

“Bruce?” he croaks, voice dry and ravaged.

“Every time you scream, you get two more lashes,” Superwoman hisses. So he’s beaten, whipped, and generally torn to pieces until he loses his voice and can't yell anymore.

And that's only week one.

No one responds. It’s not a huge shock. Back when Dick had just started out as Robin and up until about halfway through Tim’s tenure as Robin, Bruce would rarely do the bedside vigil thing. He’d usually prioritize finding the crook over emotional support. That was what Alfred was for. Or that was his justification, anyway.

But slowly, over time, Bruce got better about it. Instead of dumping an unmasked Dick at the ER doors and then running, he would carry him to triage. Instead of leaving the Cave the moment his partner was on a cot, Bruce started helping with initial first aid. And then he gradually started staying at the bedside. He was almost always working on a case on his laptop, even now, but he didn’t stray far from his injured partner for very long.

So Dick isn’t surprised that Bruce isn’t within earshot. He’s just a bit disappointed.

Cautious of the IV, Dick picks up the remote on his bed. Even that tiny movement makes his back fizzle with pain, but he endures it, pressing the red button. There’s a soft dinging outside his room, and within a minute or two, a man in a white coat and khakis enters, shutting the door behind him with a click.

“Mr. Grayson,” he greets softly. “How are you feeling?”

Dick doesn't waste time playing along. “Where am I? Who are you?”

“Bristol Medical Center,” the man replies evenly. “I’m Dr. Frank Philips. I’m an old friend of Bruce; we went to school together.”

“Oh.” But that doesn’t answer the most burning of his questions. He just has to be careful of how he asks it. “What happened? I don’t… um… I don’t remember.”

If amnesia deviates from whatever story Bruce made up, it doesn’t fluster Dr. Philips in the slightest. “Bruce brought you in after the… ah… the Crime Syndicate.”

Dick blinks. Looks down at his hospital gown. Feels his face, bare save a bandage on his cheek. “He… told you?”

Dr. Philips shoves his hands in his pockets, one eyebrow arched. “That you're Nightwing? I think everyone knows that.”

It takes Dick a long second to process that. And then he remembers.

“Haul him up, Superwoman.” The lasso tightens around Dick’s chest and arms, its barbs digging into his skin. A sudden yank flings him upwards, and he lands hard on his side. The barbs cut deeper, tearing through muscle and clashing against bone.

“On your feet, cutie pie,” Superwoman croons. She grips his hair with steel fingers, threatening to rip it straight out of his head.

Dick struggles weakly. Coughs. Feels something warm and wet run down his chin.

“They've even taken care of Nightwing!” It's Eddie Nygma’s unmistakably arrogant tenor.

“Yes,” Superwoman hisses, so close that Dick can feel her breath on his ear. “Nightwing. But his real name…” A gloved thumb brushes under his eye, and suddenly, the glue from Dick’s mask is ripped from his skin. “... is Richard Grayson.”

This man - this stranger - knows who Dick is because everyone knows who he is.

“Hey, don't stress, okay?” Dr. Philips looks at him with a knowing sympathy. “We’ve got this room locked up. I’m the only one who knows you're here.”

Dick frowns. He expected to wind up in the Cave. Leslie’s clinic, if he was really hurt. But never a hospital. That almost never happens anymore, and even in his state, he doesn't think it's worth the hospital visit.

Though, if his identity is already out there…

“Where's Bruce?” Dick asks, fatigue starting to slow him down. He doesn't have much time before he’ll fall asleep and lose any chance of getting answers.

“Right here,” a slightly-winded voice says. “I’m right here, Dick.” And Bruce walks into eyesight with a coffee in one hand and a gatorade in the other. He sets the drinks down on the bedside table and studies Dick carefully, one hand checking the temperature of his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

But Dick jumps, pushing himself as deeply into the mattress as he can. He needs to get away, get away, get away-

Bruce jumps back too, hands up in surrender. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s Bruce.”

And Dick knows that. But upon seeing Bruce’s face… His features are just so… so…

“You’re not the same Richard Grayson I knew,” Owlman - Thomas Wayne, Jr. - says, pacing back and forth. “That Richard Grayson is dead.”

Dick pops his thumb out of its socket, trying to contain the grimace. He grates the chair’s wooden legs against the cement floor to cover up his sharp intake of breath. Then he slides his hand out of its handcuff.

“That’s why I need your help, Richard.” Owlman turns to him, pulling the cowl back over his eyes. “Help me make a better world.”

Dick wraps the loose chain around his fist and jumps out of the chair, swinging the chained fist at Owlman’s jaw.

But he’s weak. He hasn’t had water in two days. He hasn’t eaten in nearly a week. Sleep is restless and infrequent. Owlman dodges him with a single step and uses Dick’s momentum to slam a fist into Dick’s gut.

Dick doubles over, wheezing.

“Everyone in the world knows your real name,” Owlman reasons, knocking Dick to the ground and holding him there with a forearm to the throat. “The Society has already leveled your apartment building. Your friends have been hunted. And Batman is dead. You have nothing. You need a new start, and I can help.”

“Help you destroy the world?” Dick chokes out. “No, thanks.”

Owlman drags him up and slams him into the wall. “No. I want to make a better world.”

“No. Thanks,” Dick growls. He swipes at Owlman, but Owlman drives a dagger through Dick’s hand and into the wall, effectively pinning him.

“Think about it, chum.”

It’s hard to separate Bruce from Owlman, even when Bruce isn’t wearing the cowl. Dick’s pulse speeds up. Sweat breaks out on his palms. He has to repeat it over and over in his mind. Remind himself that this is Bruce, Bruce, Bruce-

“Say the word, and all this stops.”

“Screw you,” Dick says, though his tone is too weak to sound intimidating.

Owlman doesn’t appreciate this. He wrenches Dick’s head back underwater. And Dick tries to stay calm. Owlman won’t drown him.

But Dick’s nerves are too fried. Survival instinct has long since taken over his body. He struggles and splashes and fights against the merciless hand in his hair. When Dick is finally pulled up, his muscles have gone limp, eyes fluttering. He coughs weakly.

“Everyone you love is gone. We’ve killed them. You have nothing left to fight for.”

“Then-” Dick is cut off by a long, painful, unproductive coughing fit. “-kill me,” he finally manages.

“That was never an option, Richard.”

And Dick is dragged underwater again.

“Dick, breathe.”

But he can’t breathe. He can’t. He’s drowning. He’s-

“Owlman, we- we had an agreement!”

“What’s he talking about, Wayne?” Ultraman’s eyebrows lower dangerously.

The cowl never stops watching. Its pale blue eyes stare into Dick’s soul. They dig deeper than the laser burns in Dick’s thighs.

“He’s delusional,” Owlman says simply.

Ultraman turns back to Dick, eyes flashing an agonizing red.

“It’s Bruce. Batman.” A frustrated, pitying sigh. “What did he do to you?”

Dick can feel a hesitant thumb on the back of his hand. He almost jerks away when he feels it rub a familiar, constant pattern into his skin.

Straight line. Half-circle. Half-circle.

Dick blinks, taking a shaky breath. Bruce continues drawing the letter over and over, his free hand carefully feeling Dick’s forehead again.

“Bruce,” Dick mumbles. He can see him now. He can see the hue of Bruce’s eyes. The slight curve of his nose. Not quite the same as Thomas Jr.’s.

No. Not the same at all.

“It’s me, chum,” Bruce murmurs. “You’re safe. It’s over. You’re safe.”

And Dick believes him.

#whumptober2024 #no.30 #recovery #hospital bed #“What have I done?”#dcu comics #fic #torture #drowning #reference to canon character death #ptsd #hospital #dick grayson #bruce wayne #forever evil #post forever evil #cross posted on ao3

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shirleywhere · 1 year ago

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The Swiss are getting salty at their neighbor Germany over the latter’s inability to operate a punctual train system to their exacting standards. Last year, one out of three long-distance trains operated by Deutsche Bahn were late, the worst performance in a decade. The Swiss are livid; officials there are considering banning DB trains, as German delays are seen at risk of degrading the timeliness of Switzerland’s rail system, which has just a 7.5 percent late arrival rate. Any train that arrives from Germany more than 15 minutes late is stopped at the city of Basel, where passengers transfer to a Swiss train. This mostly will come as a shock to my fellow American readers who have managed to read this entire newsletter while waiting for a single R train to show up at Herald Square.

Humza Jilani, The Wall Street Journal

#deutsche bahn #germany #switzerland #whatthehellweretheythinking

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erqwtyhw · 1 year ago

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kdp payment issues

Issues with Amazon KDP Payments - What You Should Know

Are you struggling to make a decent monthly income with Amazon KDP? Read this...

#Single Operated Newsletter #Paidletter

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

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/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

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

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handeaux · 1 year ago

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Remembering The Long-Forgotten Clermont County Gold Rush Of 1868

Byron Williams, who published the exhaustive 1913 history of Clermont and Brown counties in Ohio, spares not a single word in his two-volume epic for the gold rush of 1868. Perhaps this is understandable.

Compared to the renowned California Gold Rush of 1849, the Clermont County gold rush of 1868 was hardly noticeable outside a handful of incurable optimists. Oh, there was gold in the creeks east of Cincinnati, it is true. There’s still gold there and it is easily found. The problem is, it takes a lot more time, money and effort to get that gold out than it is commercially worth – even at the lofty prices gold has claimed since it was deregulated in 1975. The economic futility of Ohio gold was summarized as early as 1873 in the report of Ohio State Geologist Edward Orton:

“From what has already been said, it will be seen that Clermont County has no monopoly of the gold-bearing formation of Ohio. This formation should be named the ‘Drift gold field,’ rather than the ‘Clermont County gold field.’ All of the counties of southwestern Ohio certainly share in its treasures, and without doubt one locality is as good as another, where gravels are found that have been washed from the bowlder clay. The best results thus far known to have been obtained in gold-mining in Ohio are reported for Warren county, where in one day gold to the value of six dollars was obtained – by an outlay of ten dollars; a half-dozen days’ work being also thrown in.”

Nevertheless, there are some folks for whom the gold fever never subsides, and Clermont County has been subjected to hard-working miners and unscrupulous fraudsters in approximately equal measures ever since. According to the Spring 1985 newsletter of the Ohio Geological Survey:

“Gold was first discovered in Clermont County on the farm of Robert Wood, near Elk Lick, on the banks of the East Fork of the Little Miami River. This site is now located on the north shore of William H. Harsha Lake at East Fork State Park.”

It is almost certain that any discovery of gold will attract equal numbers of hard-working miners and shady flim-flam men. Several stock companies were set up to finance gold-digging operations in Clermont County, but few paid dividends. The newspapers were full of breathless proclamations of easy riches. “Professor” J.W. Glass announced in the Ohio Statesman [21 September 1868]:

“I believe that were we supplied with an abundance of water for hydraulic purposes, our hills would pay equally well as those of California.”

Glass estimated that hand-panning would yield no more than fifty to seventy-five cents worth of gold in a day, while hydraulic mining could generate anywhere from twelve to fifteen dollars a day. A correspondent signing himself M. Jamieson informed the Cincinnati Gazette [31 August 1868]:

“Old California miners have prospected over a good portion of this field, and report gold in almost any ravine where they tried their luck. Those miners seem sanguine, and say they found no better diggings in California.”

Alas, such wishful appraisals never, shall we say, “panned out.” The Cincinnati Post [22 Januray 1897] echoed State Geologist Orton while taking an honest look at the situation:

“Every year or so some newspaper correspondent in Clermont County, Ohio, or some contiguous county sends a report of the discovery of gold and of mining enterprises for its recovery. These reports of gold in these counties are true. It has not been found to be minable, because it costs about $5 – in money and labor – to get out $1 in gold.”

That judgement didn’t prevent the Post from printing, just eight years later, a small feature on Clermont miner John Allen, who had dug a 200-foot tunnel into a hillside along Cabin Run Creek in an area known as Bear Hollow. Allen called his mine Paradise Gulch and worked it without ever striking the mother lode into the 1920s. His mine shaft is now collapsed.

Allen failed to find the source of the gold flakes extracted from nearby creeks because he misunderstood the local geology. Unlike California, where seams of gold up in the hills erode into flakes of placer gold in the streams, Ohio has only placer gold. The mother lode for Ohio’s gold is somewhere up in Canada and all the gold found here was dragged south by the glaciers that once blanketed our state.

Gold fever revived in the 1930s when the regulated value of the precious metal was boosted to $35 an ounce and so many men were out of work due to the Great Depression. A farmer named Robert Titus found a few gold flakes in a creek that ran through his farm and set up a company to exploit the find. Titus built a gasoline powered sluice that could sift a cubic yard of gravel and sand in less than an hour. According to the Ohio Geological Survey:

“Considerable excitement was created by this venture and Titus was reportedly offered financial backing and outright purchase of his 40-acre farm for $1,500 per acre. No commercial quantities of gold were ever produced from this deposit and most of the metal recovered was sold for souvenirs.”

Today, Clermont County prospectors are almost exclusively hobbyists. The Cincinnati Mineral Society has led occasional field trips to a tributary of Stonelick Creek since the 1960s, as has the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science.

Still, the lure of gold fires the imagination. Michael Hansen of the Ohio Geological Survey recalled the heady days of gold speculation in the 1980s:

“In early 1980, when gold prices skyrocketed to more than $800 per ounce, the survey received up to 600 letters each week after newspaper articles across the state identified the Survey as the organization responsible for such matters in Ohio.”

#clermont county gold #ohio gold

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