#tour costing system

[evilminji]

You know... >.>

My Dad always used to tell me, if I get a Genuine Genie(tm)? Get a lawyer first. Before I make my Wishes(tm), so they can help me word them correctly.

Obviously, a human lawyer would not be foolproof... BUT! What about a Ghost Lawyer?

Like? Obviously Desiree would be PISSED. How DARE you twist HER wish twisting! Her THING is "what you believe is your heart's desire always comes at a terrible cost" which is what she DIED to learn.

So obviously she would NEVER, willingly, bend her Obsession for ANYONE. And you'd have to make a DAMN good case to that Lawyer for why he ISNT breaking the law by helping you. Probably some "you can: save the life of an unconscious person against their will/shove an unobservant person OFF the train tracks, even if they get hurt, to save their life" clause.

Like? Using a ghosts Obsession against them? Bad. Illegal.

Using it against their will, to save OTHER ghosts, who are in immediate danger? Not illegal, but they will be PISSED. Still not great though, you will want to apologize and fast.

So like??? Reality Bending Power. Patrick Star Method of "what if we MOVED the city... somewhere else?" Considered at 1am. Team of Ghost Laywers, acquired.

Amity and all Limnals are REMOVED from the DP-verse.

Wish worded juuuuust so. Any ghost that forms there? Yoink! Instantly removed to the Zone. Natural Portals? Cut off. Let the whole Reality fade out at an accelerated rate, as no NEW energy is fed into the system. Entropy will do, what entropy does. Exactly as they wished it.

They hated Death so much, they speed up the heat death of their ENTIRE universe by Eons. Congratulations, you guys "Won". Enjoy the wildly more fragile flora, fauna, and general ecosystems. Now that none of you have that ambient Ectoplasm strengthening your bodies. Yeah, the things you used to shrug off? Those are gonna maim or kill you now.

Doesn't MATTER if you "learn your lesson" though! Cause this is WAY past that point! This is "cutting off the tumor before it kills us" territory, and buddy? Amity ISNT the tumor. Go forth a grow, just like you wanted.

They won't be here to fix your messes anymore.

Because Danny got himself a dictionary thick "I Wish..." contract. Which was worded, as it needs to be, in one loooooooong run on sentence. Shouted "I Wish what's written on THIS, as it is currently, and without any form of editing or negotiation!" As fast as he could. Yote the document in Desiree's direction. And Flew like an INCANDESCENTLY pissed off Genie was trying to set his everything of fire.

Which she was.

Thankfully, Paulina came in clutch with her History of all things Jewelry, world fashions, and Make-Up knowledge. That, coupled with the Power Of Rich Friends(tm)? (Sam. Her mother was THRILLED to take her Jewelry and clothing shopping for something other then blacks and dark purple. They went on a jet setting whurl-wind tour. Sam actually kinda liked a some of what she found.)

They have Apology Bribes.

They shamelessly HIDE behind the mountain of Apology Bribes, while they explain themselves. Is Desiree HAPPY? No. But those bracelets are magnificent and she DOES deserve nice things. Those silks will really bring out her eyes. And she... DOES... admit...

Maybe...

That things are not... SAFE. Any longer. Danny TRIES. Everyone else can see it. And he's made incredible strides! Even convinced his lunatic parents. Though they're still not quite POPULAR. (WAY too pushy and invasive with their questions, for most people.) But the fanatics in white?

They nearly killed Box Lunch. If her father hadn't BEEN there...

And the poor man will have that scar on his back for the rest of his afterlife. Desiree can see why Danny is pushing. Does she LIKE it? No. But...

She supposes she will content herself with the suffering of the Fanatics in White and all who support them. THEIR wishes, twisted. Their ugly heart's desires.

Fine.

"SO YOU WISH IT. SO IT SHALL BE!"

And? The ghost town of what WOULD of one day grown into Amity, had the witch's there not been found by those they had fled from, which sits in long rotted ruins, amongst the trees in nowhere Illinois? Poof! Two "Towns" are switched.

The roads out of town coming to a clean line stop, meeting not even goat paths. Just trees. Old growth.

But it's not ALL of Town, is it? Faces missing. New, confused, faces from every corner of the map, taking their place. No Limnal left behind. No supporter of the GIWs genocide, brought along. Family's kept together where they could be. But by the few, scared and upset, green flashing eyes of children in the crowd?

It seemed for some, it was easier to fear and hate, then love their children.

Already they were being gathered up by school teachers and PTA parents. As everyone tried to figure out what had happened. Concerned, quite muttering a dull roar as everyone tries to coordinate.

Red Huntress joins Danny and Dani in the Sky. She doesn't get a word in. Wanted to know what the HELL was going on. She was with her dad in Chicago! Dani was in Taiwan! Literally! As in, sitting in a SUBWAY station one second, the next? Outside!

But they don't get to demand those answers. Because there is a sonic boom on the horizon. And then? Floating... weird... not ghosts?

Uuuuuuhhhh?

Hi?

That much blue... sure is a Statement. Like the cape and... bloooomers? Shorts. Bikini bottoms? It.. it's a Cool Look, dude! No, really. They are being VERY supportive here! If YOU like it? That's the only thing that matters!

Red Huntress smacks the Danny/i's Repeated upside their heads and demans to know what the Not-Ghosts are doing in their airspace.

Oh YEAH. Good point! What she said! And can it WAIT? They're kinda going through A Thing right now...

Kon? Wants it on record he loves these guys. They're hilarious. The LOOK on Clark's FACE?? He wishes he could frame it. Preserve it for future generations. Thing is? There was NOT a town here a second ago.

Well, bout 30 minutes or so, but you get the idea. One moment? Tree noises. Bam! Thousands of people! Obviously the checked it out. Only to be met with two... three maybe? Heros who have NO IDEA who they are.

Clear Reality warping shenanigans. Might be time travel or multiverse. Question is... are they STAYING? And if SO? What now...

@hdgnj @ailithnight @the-witchhunter @nerdpoe @dcxdpdabbles @mutable-manifestation @hypewinter

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

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/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[seat-safety-switch]

Movies make nitrous oxide seem so much more exciting than it really is. Green exhaust flames, super blurry vision, cars that instantly do wheelies and jump drawbridges. Completely rad. If nitrous oxide was so cool, I ask Hollywood, then why does my dentist have a whole bunch of it? The truth of the matter is that nitrous oxide has one hell of a lot of marketing goodwill, built on the dreams of every broke-ass drag racer on the planet.

First, a primer: cars run on oxygen and fuel. As anyone who's run up a hill can tell you, there's only so much air in the air that you can breathe, and there is basically an infinity of Burger King Whoppers you can practically eat. It's not fair, so we have to make it more fair.

There's ways to compress the air, and cram more of it into the engine. Then we can eat more Whoppers – I mean fuel – and make more power. We've all heard of miraculous mechanical devices for adding air, such as turbos and superchargers, but those cost a lot of money and involve complex fabrication. Nitrous oxide, a gas that we get from whales or some shit, accomplishes the same goal just by being sprayed into the engine.

It's sort of like if you gave an asthma inhaler to a Tour de France bicycle dude. He'd go a lot faster for a few seconds until and unless his heart explodes. Or maybe not. Don't get medical advice from me. Treat your captive Tour de France bicycle dudes like you yourself would want to be treated (and for the love of Pete, get them spayed or neutered if you let them outside.)

Hollywood has largely failed to make the intricacies of nitrous, such as not being able to afford filling an entire bottle with today's prices, into a compelling narrative. The sequel to Two Lane Blacktop was never approved because the middle 40 minutes of the film consists of the two of them digging through a half-abandoned parts store looking for the exact AN fitting they need for the fuel system. That's not how you win even a soundtrack Oscar. So instead, they do this crazy movie shit, which in turn makes a lot of other people buy nitrous setups. They want to be like the famous movie star Mr. Bean.

I'm not asking for perfect realism, here, folks. All I want is the occasional admission that sometimes you forget to turn on your bottle heater before making a pass.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So we have now surpassed the 96 hour "best case scenario" amount of oxygen point (if they had been alive and didnt just implode, they arent alive anymore), and I just keep thinking everything about this story, and really the story ABOUT the story, is fascinating.

Like, the situation itself has that incredible blend of tragedy voyeurism and schadenfreude that adds a level of absurdity. (The Logitech controller, the camping world lights, the fact that they probably didn't have their shoes). The way this story touches on issues of deregulation and tragedy tourism and billionaire hubris and a condemnation of wreckless start up mindsets. How much money has been spent looking for them, how much the tickets cost - the extreme absurdity of all of it.

But also the WAY this story has been covered. I keep seeing this compared to the horrific disaster in the Mediterranean this week which killed over 500 refugees and the disparity in the coverage and interest. And yeah, I think the issue is that the disaster in the Mediterranean is transparently horrific- it is a terrible tragedy, the result of systemic and complex geopolitical issues that are complex. So many people, and the weight of that is just so big. It's not funny. It's just awful.

The Ocean Gate Titan thing? It's a simple narrative that was obviously avoidable. It feels like a movie with REALLY obvious themes. It's been covered like a movie. It's been dragged out and every single possible update, the viral video of the tour of the sub, the possible noises detected by sonar, the whole side story about the billionaire step son going to the Blink 182 concert- the cast is so small and the level of abstraction away from normal people and their lives? Makes it feel completely unreal and so it can be consumed like the newest HBO miniseries.

Even now, we are getting updates on how they could stretch the oxygen out longer- like a fan theory prediction of the next episode. Like a headcanon for the season finale. (Oh God, do you think AO3 has fics yet?) Tiktokers making videos about plot holes (why not attach a tether to it?). Discourse over whether it's problematic to say one thing or another about it.

It reminds me of how it felt when the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, but with the added "oh my god, the OCEAN ate the rich" and Logitech Playstation controller jokes.

I'd put money on implosion. These men have been dead since Sunday. It's likely that we won't actually know for a long time though, if ever. But the way this story was covered is worth contemplating.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

1960 DiDia 150 Custom

The car was originally powered by a 365 cubic inch Cadillac engine, later replaced by a 427 cubic inch high-performance Ford engine, and had a 125-inch wheelbase, with a tubular aluminum frame and a hand-fashioned soft aluminum body. The car has Batmanesque set of rear fins dominating the bodyline and ruby red hubcaps on whitewall tires.

The car was designed by Andrew Di Dia, a clothing designer, who Bobby Darin had met while on tour in Detroit in 1957. Darin telling Di Dia at the time that he would purchase the car if he ever "hit it big".

For seven years, from 1953 to 1960 the DiDia 150 was hand-built by four workers, at a cost of $93,647.29 but sold to Darin in 1961 at a cost of over $150,000 (1.5 million today). At the time the car was listed as most expensive "custom-made" car in the world by the Guinness Book of Records. The body was hand-formed by Ron Clark and constructed by Bob Kaiser from Clark Kaiser Customs.

Di Dia toured the car around the country, when Darin wasn't using it for public appearances. After publicity and film use, Darin donated his "Dream Car" to the National Museum of Transportation in 1970 where it remains. It was restored by Mike Manns of Manns Auto Body in Festus, Missouri before going on display.

The gasoline-fueled V8 engine (originally 365 cid, later upgraded to 427 cid) is located at the front. It is rear-wheel drive. The body and chassis are hand-formed from 064 aluminum with a unitized alloy tube frame.

It has a glass cockpit in back, a squared steering wheel resembling a superellipse and thermostatically controlled air conditioning system. The interior is rust colored in contrast to the ruby paintwork. The design included the first backseat-mounted radio loudspeakers and hidden windshield wipers, which start themselves when it rains. Other features include retractable headlamps, rear turn signals which swivel as the car turns, 'floating' bumpers and a trunk that was hinged from the driver's side. Each of the four bucket seats have their own thermostatically controlled air conditioning, individual cigarette lighters and ashtrays, as well as a radio loudspeaker.

Source: Wikipedia / motorius.com

[lonestarflight]

Space Station Concepts: Space Operations Center

"The SOC is a self-contained orbital facility built up of several Shuttle-launched modules. With resupply, on-orbit refurbish- ment and orbit maintenance, it is capable of continuous operation for an indefinite period. In the nominal operational mode, the SOC is manned continuously, but unmanned operation is possible.

The present mission management and control process is characterized by a people-intensive ground monitoring and control operation involving large supporting ground information and control facilities and a highly- integrated ground-flight crew operation. In order to reduce dependence on Earth monitoring and control, the SOC would have to provide for increased systems monitoring; fault isolation and failure analysis, and the ability to store and call up extensive sets of data to support the onboard control of the vehicle; and the onboard capability for daily mission and other activity planning."

"Like most other space station studies from the mid/late 1970s its primary mission was the assembly and servicing of large spacecraft in Earth orbit -- not science. NASA/JSC signed a contract with Boeing in 1980 to further develop the design. Like most NASA space station plans, SOC would be assembled in orbit from modules launched on the Space Shuttle. The crew's tour of duty would have been 90 days. NASA originally estimated the total cost to be $2.7 billion, but the estimated cost had increased to $4.7 billion by 1981. SOC would have been operational by 1990.

NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center extended the Boeing contract in February 1982 to study a cheaper, modular, evolutionary approach to assembling the Space Operations Center. An initial power module would consist of solar arrays and radiators. The next launches would have delivered a space tug 'garage', two pressurized crew modules and a logistics module. The completed Space Operations Center also would have contained a satellite servicing and assembly facility and several laboratory modules. Even with this revised approach, however, the cost of the SOC program had grown to $9 billion. Another problem was Space Operations Center's primary mission: spacecraft assembly and servicing. The likely users (commercial satellite operators and telecommunications companies) were not really interested in the kind of large geostationary space platforms proposed by NASA. By 1983, the only enthusiastic users for NASA's space station plans were scientists working in the fields of microgravity research and life sciences. Their needs would dictate future space station design although NASA's 1984 station plans did incorporate a SOC-type spacecraft servicing facility as well."

Article by Marcus Lindroos, from astronautix.com: link

NASA ID: link, S79-10137

Boeing photo no. R-1859, link, link

[mohammedmoner]

Hello👋

I am Mohamed Mounir Al-Anqar I'm From Gaza.. Married to Walaa Al-Anqar..

Father of four children..

Zeina, Salma, Omar and Batoul..

We live in northern Gaza.. Unfortunately, we are exposed to severe violence and a stifling siege from all sides. We have been displaced from our home more than twenty times due to the continuous random shelling on us from land, sea and air..

My wife was recently injured due to shelling near our home, which resulted in burns on her hand and foot, which led to disfigurement of the body and she needs intensive treatment for this, and this matter is extremely difficult because it requires a lot of money .. And because of the war, I cannot afford the costs of her treatment.. Other than that, it is difficult to afford food expenses and children's expenses...

Your help to us could be a lifeline for us, please do not be stingy with it..

@heritageposts @90-ghost @pcktknife @ot3 @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @fairycandles @girlinafairytale @cheaperimint @sinhasfluffyheadfur @amatteurrwave @sissa-arrows @taviamoth @spaghetti-gremlin @reduxskullduggerry @saintverse @littlegermanboy @maggot-baggage @celadonwanderer @lavendersfunhouseofbobbles @2024yr @transvalkilmer @starry-system @cori-randomstuff @sunmooneclipseandstars @sushi-the-kitsune @miluciole @oinkoinkfeedeepiggy @ydic74the @butchmagicalboi @springacres @tacit-semantics @transformers4palestine @3lawzdef1ant @fiapple @pupindaturd @yourlocalamoeba @chingaderita @radicalhighway @leovaldeeeznuts @my-little-resource-guide @moremorehino @utane-uta-town @avvrat @zuzecadyke @zahratalkaraz @gayos-emerald @manisthebastard @elidoesdumb2 @spooperdedooper @the-goofiest-tour-guide @neoneone0 @tiptapricot @gingerweed-man @rhymeswithpurple9 @funkworms

Thank you ❤️💫

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

One thing that annoys me about boruto is that naruto ended with the confirmation that Sasuke was *right* but that his *methods* weren't the best way to achieve what he wants

Naruto agrees that shinobi society needs to be massively overhauled, he just thinks it can be achieved without mass death or at the cost of Sasuke. Youre not supposed to end Naruto believing that Konoha's system was correct.

You're supposed to leave the manga *knowing that Sasuke's beliefs were correct, it was his methods which weren't the best path forward*

Naruto wants to take the pacifist path of talking and communication, but he doesn't fundamentally disagree with Sasuke.

But then we get to boruto and what do we have? The same system except the villages get along now. Great. So different. Also for some reason Sasuke is willing to die for the sake of Konoha.

You're supposed to end Naruto knowing that sasuke was correct about shinobi society and hoping that Naruto will bring about change even if sasuke doesn't stay (his """redemption""" tour which was unneeded because he was the fucking victim) but boruto shows us a society where nothing has changed

[simply-ivanka]

If Taylor Swift Had Endorsed Donald Trump

Democrats would scorn her business savvy, cap her ticket prices, and fret over her huge carbon footprint.

Wall Street Journal

By Allysia Finley

Forbes estimates Taylor Swift’s net worth at $1.3 billion. Despite her liberal leanings, the singer-songwriter has amassed her wealth the old-fashioned way: through hard work, talent and business savvy. Her endorsement of Kamala Harris last week is rich considering she owes her success to the capitalist system the vice president wants to tear down.

“The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships,” Ms. Swift wrote in a 2014 piece for the Journal. “Some music is just for fun, a passing fling. . . . Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past. However, some artists will be like finding ‘the one.’ ” She has become “the one” for hundreds of millions of fans worldwide with lyrics that chronicle relationship woes women commonly experience.

Ms. Swift took advantage of her ardent fan base in 2014 by removing her catalog from Spotify in a bid for higher royalties. “Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free,” she explained. “My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet, . . . is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.”

She also criticized Apple Music for not paying artists during the streaming service’s free trial, prompting the company to change its policy. As she jeers in a hit song, “Who’s afraid of little old me?” Apparently, Big Tech companies.

Last year she reportedly raked in $200 million from streaming royalties on top of the estimated $15.8 million she grossed per performance during her recent “Eras” tour. Some fans have shelled out thousands of dollars on the resale market to see Ms. Swift perform. Americans have even traveled to Europe when they couldn’t get tickets in the U.S.

Her fan base may be more loyal and enthusiastic than Donald Trump’s. JD Vance scoffed at the idea that the star’s endorsement of Ms. Harris could influence the outcome of the election. The “billionaire celebrity,” he said, is “fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.” Maybe, but she certainly taps into the problems of young women.

Democrats hope to use Ms. Swift’s endorsement to drive them to the polls. But it isn’t difficult to imagine what the left would be saying about her had she endorsed the Republican antihero. It might go something like this:

The billionaire has gotten rich by ripping off fans, avoiding taxes and harming competitors. Time for the government to break her up. Unlike rival artists, Ms. Swift writes, performs and owns her compositions. This vertical integration allows her to charge exorbitant royalties and ticket prices.

Tickets for her “Eras” tour on average cost about $240. That’s merely the price for admission—not including food, drink or Swiftie swag. VIP passes that include memorabilia go for $899. How dare she make young women choose between paying for groceries or rent and going to a concert.

The Federal Trade Commission must cap Ms. Swift’s ticket prices at a reasonable price—say, $20—and ban her junk fees. Concertgoers shouldn’t have to pay $65 for an “I Love You It’s Ruining My Life” sweatshirt.

Her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce also unfairly boosts their star power, letting them charge more for endorsements. As Ms. Swift writes in one song, “two is better than one.” Mr. Kelce reportedly signed a $100 million podcast deal with Amazon’s Wonderly. By breaking up the couple, the government could reduce their royalties and ticket prices.

Ms. Swift, the self-described “mastermind,” also dodges taxes on her “full income,” which includes some $125 million in real estate and a music catalog worth an estimated $600 million. “They said I was a cheat, I guess it must be true,” Ms. Swift acknowledges in her song “Florida!!!”

Under the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed billionaire’s tax, she would have to pay a 25% levy on the $1 billion increase in her fortune since 2017. But that isn’t enough. Ms. Swift should also have to pay taxes on the appreciating value of her “name, image and likeness,” which the Internal Revenue Service considers an asset.

How much is her brand worth? Easily billions. She might say, as she does in a song, that her “reputation has never been worse.” True, Miss Americana’s image took a hit after reports that her private-jet travel in 2022 emitted 576 times as much CO2 as the average American in a year. When Ms. Swift sings, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,” she’s correct. She and her fat-cat friends are what’s wrong with America.

Appeared in the September 16, 2024, print edition as 'If Taylor Swift Had Endorsed Donald Trump'.

[beautitudes]

where is your coffin?

you're standing in it.

the thing is... dubai penthouse is armand's coffin, too. from what i'm understanding, this is not what his barbie princess dream house looks like, not even close.

it's the 2020s, and one room of the house that he would call his is a gaming cave, and there are pizza boxes stacked on the floor next to the computer desk because he once saw those in a movie and fell for the aesthetics. (daniel mocks him relentlessly.) when daniel goes on his tours, he spends months on end in there playing stray. he totally forgets to eat and sleep. daniel reschedules a meeting to come back home for the weekend to force fresh blood and a good day's sleep onto him.

there is a collection of all kinds of drones on the roof. he uses those to lure humans in from time to time. daniel comes up there quite often to beat armand's ass at drone racing. the rules change every time they're playing. the rules change every time they're playing any game they choose to play together. they only pretend to hate the tendency.

one of the rooms has a horrid yellow wallpaper on the walls that he loves.

he has too many old vynil records, but also the newest sound systems. sometimes he turns on both the vynil recorder and the subwoofer. he's the happiest when the garbage disposer is on, too. and a tv.

there's a legit cinema auditorium in the basement. yes, with popcorn machines. no, he won't tell you why. yes, it's for the aesthetics. (daniel... you guessed this one.)

one of the rooms has a toy railroad that cost him something close to a half million dollars. yes, it was designed for him specifically. yes, it's huge. yes, he makes movies about the teeny tiny passengers and shows them to daniel. (daniel loves him so much.)

there are sex toys. so many sex toys.

and don't even get me started on boston dynamics. armand owns the fucking dog and fucking loves it. it has its own room. (yep, the one with the yellow newspaper.) (daniel... has complicated feelings.)

to be continued...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

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/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

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

[slavghoul]

Hey Slav!! I didn’t really wanna bring it back up but I’m completely confused on when and why this happened so I’m asking you! Why was Tobias yelling at people exactly? I saw someone say it was because his equipment was being destroyed by the storm but I haven’t heard anything else :(. Anyway thank you!!

There's a detailed explanation of the situation on the band's Instagram page. To give you an idea of the gravity of the situation: consider that just the sound system that the band uses is valued at around $250,000. I’m excluding lighting equipment, instruments, screens, etc. that together make up another +$200k. The equipment is leased and typically right after a tour ends, another artist picks it up. Having it damaged to any extent not only jeopardizes the entire tour but also strains your relationship with the equipment lender, who is also put in a compromised position. I’m assuming they have a force majeure clause in their insurance contract that, hopefully, will cover at least part of the costs, but it’s still a fucky situation to find yourself in, and cancellations must have generated en enormous loss for the band (who believe it or not doesn't actually make millions of profit off touring, quite the opposite). From my experience I can say it's remarkable they were able to secure new equipment on such short notice and no more dates were affected. Things must have seemed dire in the heat of the moment, and I'm pretty sure Tobias was the most stressed man on the planet that day, so if he raised his voice, it was certainly warranted.

[sequencefairy]

the bad takes i have seen today! like never mind the like, fully racist garbage, but like, just the idea that for some reason the fandom? is owed? this content? for free?

that watcher should what? just fuckin' go under and leave 30+ people unemployed because your sorry ass who probably only watches Ghost Files and hasn't ever given them one fucking red cent because you've bitched about the cost of tickets to the tours and the cost of merch and the cost of shipping and everything fucking else under the sun is mad that now you will have to cough up six whole american dollars to get access to every single Watcher video at any time?

(also i am going to continue to repeat this ad nauseum, but like, i dunno man, make a fucking friend and share an account. if six bucks is too much, then three is probably more manageable, or even less, if you share it with more people. this is not hard.)

so you wanna watch Ghost Files? you subscribe during the month(s) that GF is coming out, watch what you want, catch up on stuff you missed, and then you fuckin' dip. no one at watcher is forcing you to sign up for an annual subscription.

so you think buying merch supports them more? firstly, merch costs money to make. then it costs money to fulfill. then it costs money to host a site from which your fans can purchase it. this is not even considering paying the artist who designed the merch in the first place. all of those costs? money not going into watcher's pocket, keeping them from being able to afford to make more fuckin' videos.

so you think the patreon would solve this? the patreon doesn't keep the lights on. it never did. it was a stopgap and a way to create a bit of community that would help drive the adoption of the new channel. patreon skims a percentage off the top of what they on every month, as well. same as youtube. same as anything else.

you lot talk a big game about how mad you are about watcher selling out and being previously anti-capitalist but like, seizing the means of video production for themselves is actually like, vigorously saying fuck you to the system they have been forced to work within. they are going to make the content they want to make, and they will no longer have to whittle it down to being fucking palatable for whatever youtube advertiser or fucking nonsense product agrees to sponsor the video.

[weirdthinkingdragon]

In Disguise

yandere shapeshifter x gn reader/you

it's a shapeshifter. They have whatever gender you want. Might think more on this too

this likely is maybe illegal or not possible in any zoo but it's fiction

In speaking of the zoo idea again, I have another idea involving the zoo but with a shapeshifter that came to mind.

A shapeshifter who sees in zoos how animals are, and wants to willingly be in one. Never have to hunt or pay for anything, can nap wherever and whenever they want. Have to eat the same food permanently? Fine by them. They've lived so long that nothing is new. Everything is bland. Raw food to food so seasoned it can be smelled a long ways away. Since they're not human either spicy things don't affect them at all.

Sure, they could do that as a human, but they know they'd have to keep working for a house and stuff they don't want to do anymore. It wouldn't matter anyways. They don't have pets, they aren't connected to any of their belongings or anything.

They've done some research in zoos and have even been the cause of some being shut down with how badly they run. They wouldn't want to live there, so why should other animals have to?

They eventually toured the one as their human form where you were working.

The first few times they shifted into a fly, they watched the zoo for a while, and they were drawn to you instantly. More importantly, how the big cats seemed to be so calm around you.

You were in charge of the big cats enclosure. The zoo has done some runs to keep some more sociable by having tigers and lions in the same enclosure. Sure, it's risky but the end reward was well worth it with several never fighting and peacefully sharing the same enclosure for years.

One thing about this zoo that's different is the interactive system. As in people can ask a question through a speaker that is in the enclosure for you to answer and will go through a speaker in that room for all the people to hear. The only problem is it costs a little bit of money to pay for the speaker to work for the question.

Though it's absolutely insane how much money that accumulates in just a week from it.

They wait for others to ask questions before asking one themself.

"what would the chances be of them accepting another big cat in this enclosure?" Though they know the answer. The cats would be fine with them. Something about them being a shifter draws animals to them like the druid thing they've heard about. Except they can't hear what animals try to say to them.

That question was rather weird to you. "Well, I can't really say for certain. Maybe at some point we'd try a trial run, but that's not very encouraged especially since they're all full adults now."

They have to try really hard not to smirk or smile as they pay to say something instead of a question. They know it's going to rile them up, and all they'll have to do is wait for animal control to get to their house where they'll be waiting as a big cat. Tranquilizers Don't work either, but they can pretend. They've already edited things to make it look like they did buy a big cat illegally as a pet.

"My tiger/lion would love you. I hope you can meet them some day."

It takes a second for you to process what they said. "What?? That's highly illegal!"

They then turn around and walk out of the room, making sure no cameras are around. They then shift into a fly again and head out. See you soon, new muse~

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1953 Dodge ‘Zeder’ Storm Z-250

1953 Dodge ‘Zeder’ Storm Z-250 Concept with body by Bertone

One-off

The Storm Z-250 was developed by Chrysler engineer Fred Zeder to evaluate the feasibility of producing a vehicle that would capture a portion of the growing American sports car market.

Built on a rigid tube frame chassis (built mostly by Chrysler engineer, John Butterfield, in his basement), it was intended to be a dual-purpose sports/racing car because Zeder Jr. envisioned a car with swappable bodies.

In 1952, while on Christmas vacation in Europe, Zeder visited Fiat's Chief Engineer in Turin.

Dante Giacosa recommended a visit to Bertone.

Though they were busy designing and building the Alfa Romeo BAT series, they agreed to build the body for Zeder's new car and promised three months to finish the car.

It took nine months to finish.

Unique to the Storm Z-250 was that the comfortable ‘touring’ body could be removed by unscrewing four bolts and replaced with an ultralight 150-pound fiberglass body for ‘racing’.

The mechanical components of the car included a Dodge hemi V8 truck engine with 260hp and 330ft-lbs of torque.

Other parts came from Plymouth and Dodge vehicles, including brakes, radiator, clutch, fuel tank, rear axle, and the steering system.

The transmission was a new unit developed by the Spicer Division of Dana Corporation.

The Storm did not reach the assembly line because high production costs would have made it too expensive to sell in profitable quantities.

The Z-250 would have competed with the Ford Thunderbird, Chevrolet Corvette, and the Kaiser-Darrin.

Zeder drove the Z-250 for 16 years.

He loaned it to the Northwood University where it remained until 1992.

Unfortunately, water leaked into the cylinders so the engine was removed and replaced with a 1965 Dodge V8 with two four-barrel carburetors.

After the work was completed, Zeder continued to drive the car in his home in California.

[katzkinder]

Today, the official servamp account made a tweet in celebration of Otogiri’s birthday on the 28th of September! Her favorite food is soba and she does karate for a hobby!

Under the cut I have some headcanons of my own for her, so please enjoy!

This one is my favorite and it’s that whenever Sakuya needs to have a teacher meet with his guardian she goes along with Tsubaki and they act super annoying to embarrass him lol. Like she dotes on him and calls him goofy pet names and pinches his cheek. On the occasions where he’s in trouble for something Team M view as justified, though, she puts on a face of “our perfect little angle? No, never, you must be mistaken”

This is still somewhat humiliating to Sakuya. She loves teasing him in her own way. Makes her miss Johannes.

Speaking of Johannes as kids he used to cut the hair off her dolls or tear their heads off. It’s fine she’d tie him to a tree with her jump rope and leave him there.

Karate was actually a hobby she picked up as a child for self defense purposes. She continues with it because it’s good to help her destress, especially when doing her forms. Something about the rhythm of them helps her clear her mind

She writes fan fiction and will die if anyone finds her ao3 account

I headcanon her, personally, as wlw (not sure what flavor though. Just in general) A major part of this is because she’s the only female member of the cast you can gift chocolate to during the valentine’s event at TanakaBox! I’ll put a link to the event translation in a reblog later

Because she’s so busty, she has a fair bit of problems buying bras she likes that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Living with Tsubaki and working for him means money is no object, of course, but it’s the principle of it. Belkia surprises her once with a custom replica of Madonna’s cone bra corset in bedazzled hot pink. She needed to take several moments.

She did in fact try the whole thing on for him. She felt ridiculous. She also loved how silly the whole affair was. Far too often people get weird about the size of her chest and it makes her so uncomfortable, but with team M… It’s just another body part. She can relax around them

Speaking of people being weird about her body, this is a headcanon Yarra told me that I loved so much I adopted it immediately. She used to go out late at night into seedier parts of Tokyo trying to find men who would start trying to feel her up or force the issue after she rejected their advances, so that she could kill them without feeling guilty, using them as proxies for the doctor who assaulted her. This was not actually a healthy way to cope.

She wants to do a soba tour. Just go around the country trying all different types of soba. One day she wishes to be able to boast she’s had every soba from every restaurant in japan. For now she’s working her way through Tokyo. She’s a subclass so she has all the time in the world to do it.

The entire hotel is (was) outfitted with her strings. They kind of acted as an early warning system. It’s a strange kind of magic that doesn’t seem to have much limits in the way of distance so long as the space she’s in is enclosed.

During holiday seasons, especially Halloween, Christmas, or New Years, these become places for decorations to be hung.

She truly cherishes everything Tsubaki has done for her. The one regret she has about being a subclass is that she had to kill herself for the chance to meet so many wonderful people. She thinks if she’d had anything remotely close to this while human, she would have found the strength to keep living.

They’re her family. Someday, she hopes Hansel can also be part of it again.