The last major American privacy law, the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 by Reagan. The only reason it happened is that politicians realized that their privacy was affected. Robert Bork was going through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and someone got a hold of the tapes he had rented and published them.

Politicians were worried about their own personal privacy, so they passed a new law to protect the privacy of people’s video tape rentals.

Maybe the fact that the targets here were politicians will mean that something will happen with data privacy, for once.

Keep Goodhart’s law in mind:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

No, it’s because the opposition is the establishment, and violence is a tool the establishment uses to… well, stay established.

Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?

The same people who write the history books. History is written by the winners, and when they write those books the protests that led to them winning are written up as being non-violent. It’s like “terrorists” vs. “freedom fighters”. If they succeed, they get to write the history books and they’re freedom fighters. If they lose, the other side writes the history books and they’re terrorists.

e-note be like telegram memorandum memo but not on paper, on computer magic blinky box.

Repository: a collection of related computer code, like related files in a filing cabinet

Fork: a copy of a repository at a certain point in time, like a fork in the road, they diverge from that point

Pull request: a request that a repository owner incorporate your changes into their files.

When you’re on the information superhighway, in cyberspace, sometimes you want to send someone some information (datums). Sometimes an electronic mail is too formal or cumbersome for that, so you instead send them digital text messages, basically cybernetic telegrams, called e-notes.

Hancock had superpowers, so no.

Yeah, I’ve run one for decades. I keep thinking it will get easier but it never does. I get better at the old stuff, then new stuff comes up which makes it difficult again. I always had the intention to offer it to friends and family, but I’ve never felt confident that I could guarantee that it would work. These days I know what I’m doing, but I can never guarantee that emails sent from my domain will arrive. Google or Yahoo or Microsoft will sometimes just automatically mark things from my domain as SPAM even if I’m following all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM, whatever rules.

And that’s all aside from the constant, unending stream of SPAM I’m dealing with, in addition to the constant, unending attempts to hack my server.

It’s actually kind of liberating when you manage to do that.

It’s not true, but if you pretend it is, it allows you to do all kinds of math. Follow the rules as if the spin were real and there were real momentum and it allows you to predict things that you can test. It’s almost like looking at a really good magic trick, where you know that what you seem to be seeing isn’t possible, but the magician is manipulating things so that your brain can anticipate what’s coming next.

Yeah, it’s also one of the few remaining interoperable ways of communicating.

If your friend who used to use gmail is now using hotmail, you don’t have to use a new app to communicate with that friend, you just update their email address and nothing else changes. If you used to be on gmail and you now want to run your own mail server you should check into a mental health clinic, but once you get out, you just tell your friends your new email address and for them nothing else changes. In fact, you can set gmail to forward emails, so any friends who forget will still communicate with you without difficulty.

Yes, that’s what makes it so good. :)

I use a different email alias for every service I subscribe to, and my “for humans” email is very different from my subscribe aliases.

Unfortunately, many humans in my life say “oh, merc would like this, I’ll just enter his email address on this web form”. So, I still get a lot of spam to my “only for humans” email address.

Octopodes.

It’s Greek-based, not Latin. English often tries to keep certain rules about loan words from other languages. So, the plural of “alumnus” isn’t “alumneses” but “alumni”. It also mostly keeps the spelling of loan words, which causes all kinds of problems when that spelling is very different from English spelling. For example, “voila” is so different from how someone would spell it in English that a lot of people write “wala” because they don’t know French.

But, I agree that other than having gendered nouns, Spanish is a much more sensible language than English. It does have its quirks though, like “si” vs “sí”, “te” vs “té” or “él” vs “el”. I get that those are to distinguish homonyms, but are they really necessary? Words like “cara” and “sierra” exist and it’s just like any homonym in English. Spanish also has silent letters like “h” so “errar” and “herrar” are pronounced the same but written differently. Also, “y” and “ll” are often pronounced the same way, and many Spanish speakers can’t differentiate between “b” and “v”.

I could see the value in changing the article if the noun itself didn’t change. For example, if Spanish said “la casa” for singular and “las casa” for plural. Then the article would be all you need to know if something is plural or singular. But, every language I’m aware of (which isn’t all that many) changes both the article and the noun. Using “the” in English removes this unnecessary redundancy. But, English is ugly in that whether you add an “s” for plural or “es” seems somewhat arbitrary.

You can express just about everything in any language. It just sometimes takes more words.

French has multiple options because it has 2 genders for nouns “the chair” = “la chaise” (female), “the bench” = “le banc” (male), and it changes the article when you’re talking about multiple things vs. single things “the benches” = “les bancs”.

So, French really has 3 versions of “the”: “le” (male, singular), “la” (female, singular), “les” (female or male, singular).

But German… ugh. There’s a 4x4 matrix of German words for “the”. German had the wisdom to come up with a neuter gender, but the insanity to not apply it to most common objects. Somehow a knife is sexless, a spoon is male and a fork is female. Making it worse, the version of “the” you use for an object depends on whether the object is the subject of a sentence, the object of a sentence, the indirect object of a sentence or possessive. I don’t know if it’s better or worse (but I’m leaning towards worse) that they re-use a lot of these articles at other spots in the matrix, so “der” is used for male objects in the nominative case, female in the dative case, and plural objects in the genitive case.

Take “Stein” which is stone, not beer glass. If you’re an English speaker and are used to adding an “s” to make something plural, and you see “Der Stein” and “Des Steines”, you might think that the version with the “es” is the plural, right? Nope, the plural of “Der Stein” is “Die Steine”. “Des Steins” is for the possessive case. You’d use “Der Stein” for “The stone is heavy”, but if you want to say “The weight of the stone is high” you have to switch to “Des Steins” – and to add another twist, sometimes it’s “Steines” because of reasons.

“Supposed” is one of those words with a quiet “d” that people seem to often get wrong. Same with “used” especially in “used to” where people write “use to”. English sucks, but I still wish people would put in the effort to follow the rules so that they communicate more effectively.

Just remove the “and health insurance” and this works.

I love it when people play with the “Bruce Wayne is an evil oligarch” trope. Just look at Gotham, it’s massively run down, and yet there are billionaires like Wayne at society events. Sure, he spends nights fighting crime (or at least criminals) as Batman, but does he pay his taxes? Does he employ lobbyists who lobby for tax breaks on billionaires, justifying it by thinking that without those tax breaks he couldn’t afford to have Wayne Enterprises come up with such cool toys for Batman, and he wouldn’t be as effective at fighting crime criminals? Surely, one of the best ways to reduce crime in Gotham wouldn’t be to punch bad guys at night, but to ensure that there’s a robust social safety net, and that there isn’t such a vast wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots. But, we don’t see either Batman or Bruce Wayne arguing for more taxes on the rich, more social programs for the poor, etc. It’s more about having adventures and going to gala events.

As for this comic, the only way health insurance companies benefit if someone requires life-long medical care is if they’re not the ones footing the medical bill, and are just a proxy for government money. So, instead of “It’s a good thing you have health insurance”, “It’s a good thing you’re on Gothamcare Advantage by Wayne Enterprises”. Similar to the scam that is Medicare Advantage.

Edit: Now I want to see someone do a Batman spoof where he’s “fighting crime” in his Batsuit but with one of those green eye shades, sitting at a desk, going line by line through financial data on his fellow oligarchs, trying to find the ways they cheated on their taxes.

What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.

Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.

The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.

What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?