Reified and Refined

"When the tires on their Dodge Caravan had worn so thin that the steel belts were showing through,..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:38:21 -0500

“

When the tires on their Dodge Caravan had worn so thin that the steel belts were showing through, Don and Florence Cherry couldn’t afford to buy a new set. So they decided to rent instead. The Rich Square, N.C., couple last September agreed to pay Rent-N-Roll $54.60 a month for 18 months in exchange for four basic Hankook tires. Over the life of the deal, that works out to $982, almost triple what the radials would have cost at Wal-Mart…

Rent-to-own tire shops are among the newest arrivals to a sprawling alternative financial sector focused on the nation’s economic underclass. Like payday lenders, pawn shops and Buy Here Pay Here used-car lots, tire rental businesses provide ready credit to consumers who can’t get a loan anywhere else. But that access doesn’t come cheap.

Customers pay huge premiums for their tires, sometimes four times above retail. Those who miss payments may find their car on cinder blocks, stripped of their tires by dealers who aggressively repossess. Tire rental contracts are so ironclad that even a bankruptcy filing can’t make them go away.

”

- (High prices are driving more motorists to rent tires - Los Angeles Times)

ghostdaddotcx: Self reblogging to add a thing I...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:53:10 -0500

ghostdaddotcx:

Self reblogging to add a thing I found:

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/

The account @Anti_Racism_Dog didn’t last long. Twitter suspended it quickly, a fate reserved only for the most aggressive, abusive and hateful users. What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it.

For the short time it lasted, it was amazing to watch how people reacted to @Anti_Racism_Dog. The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. They demand to be engaged in debate (‘Tell me how what I said was racist!’) or appeal to objective definitions (‘The dictionary says racist means X, therefore nothing I said was racist’), but @Anti_Racism_Dog just barks.

@Anti_Racism_Dog inverted the usual balance of energy in online dialogs about race. Precisely because the dominant global discourse is white-supremacist, it is rhetorically easier to make a racist argument than an anti-racist one. Look at almost any comment thread or discussion board about race and you can see anti-racists working laboriously to be convincing and to play on their opponents’ ‘logical’ turf, and racists repeating the same simple lines they were taught (‘I didn’t own slaves’, ‘I’m just stating the facts’, ‘The Irish were persecuted too’, etc.) ‘Trolling’ as a certain kind of internet harassment is tied to time: the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do. It’s the most micro of micro-politics, an interpersonal tug of war for the only thing that matters. But have you ever played tug of war with a dog?

A true troll doesn’t have a position to protect because to establish one would leave it vulnerable to attack, and playing defence takes time. @Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering.

The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.

This is completely insane. All of those dots are storm chasers,...

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 14:24:38 -0500

This is completely insane. All of those dots are storm chasers, and it’s unclear whether it’s one dot per vehicle or just one dot per multi-vehicle team. Either way, that’s way too many vehicles in a small area for everyone to be able to maneuver quickly and safely if the storm shifts. The purple and blue on the radar is the tornado itself, so lots of them actually ended up inside it. I don’t know how only 3 people were killed in this madness.

Seriously, some storm chasers do valuable scientific and public service work, but you don’t need hundreds of them converging on a single storm to do that work. What you’re looking at there is a media-driven feeding frenzy, with deadly results to the actual professionals.

brucesterling: *Face recognition algorithm

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:01:55 -0500

brucesterling:

*Face recognition algorithm

"So I called Carl, and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show but we wanna use you for it,..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:19:52 -0500

““So I called Carl, and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show but we wanna use you for it, and you’d be working with David Cross.’ And he goes, ‘Great, but let me ask you something. It’s not going to be just a bunch of Rocky jokes is it?’ I laughed, ‘No! No! Give me a little credit, Carl. Of course not! It’s a multidimensional character.’ And he was like, ‘Because I direct and I’m a funny guy and I don’t wanna just do a bunch of Rocky jokes. Nobody wants that. Maybe I could be really cheap or something?’ And I said, ‘Whaaaat?’ ‘Maybe I could be really cheap?’ ‘Really? You’d like to do that?’ ‘Oh, absolutely, that’s what I’m saying. I want to play someone funny, not just be a sight gag.’ It was so much better. I went back to the writers room and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this. Carl Weathers wants to be incredibly cheap.’ All credit to Carl on that.””

- Origin Stories of Six Arrested Development Jokes — Vulture

{Carl Weathers}

5-Year-Old Wants To Be A Tractor When She Grows Up

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:22:01 -0500

5-Year-Old Wants To Be A Tractor When She Grows Up

livingluster: leahstuff: gorgonetta: [Color pic: a cluster of...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:32:56 -0500

livingluster:

leahstuff:

gorgonetta:

[Color pic: a cluster of punks shielding their mohawks under one small umbrella]

Is it a cluster of punks? Is that the appropriate wording? It seems like it would be like a stink of punks or a shove or something.

An Oi! of punks.

A crust of punks!

{Boston}

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:17:05 -0500

{Boston}

thisistheglamorous: The University of Illinois has giant...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:47:00 -0500

thisistheglamorous:

The University of Illinois has giant banners, about 20 or more feet in the air, hanging in Union Station to advertise their MBA program. One of them has a QR code for you to scan. You know, 20 feet up in the air.

*headdesk*

Which is worse, this, or the ridiculous Save the Chief billboards? I mean, I’d think perpetuating an embarrassing racist caricature in a ridiculous and spiteful lost-cause campaign would win hands down, but then I weigh that against 600,000 MBAs + egregious mis/over-use of QR codes, and it’s a pretty close thing.

Related Phenomena

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:27:16 -0500

Bitcoin is yet another lame attempt to claim that Society doesn't exist

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:31:00 -0500

(Felix Salmon - The Bitcoin Bubble)

Such people, including Satoshi Nakamoto, are far from unique in their mistrust of all existing financial institutions. What sets Nakamoto apart is that he turned that mistrust into a philosophy, the most important driving force behind the bitcoin project. When he introduced bitcoin to the world in February 2009, Nakamoto boasted that his new currency was “completely decentralized, with no trusted parties”. And he explained in some detail what he saw as the problem in need of a solution:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

There are all kinds of amusing ways in which you can poke fun at Bitcoin and the subculture that has grown up around it. But, taken seriously, this is yet another big bet by the privileged techno-libertarian class that those of us who believe in society and a commonwealth and democracy and all that rot are the dumb money in the room.

You don’t fix problems of trust by eliminating trust from the equation. You fix them socially, democratically, empathically. The answer to a failure of trust isn’t further atomization (neatly disguised as techno-utopian transcendence). It’s justice.

(Which, easier said than done, yeah. People mistrust our institutions because our institutions are profoundly broken. And there has been precious little justice or reckoning with the events of the past decade and more. But the answer sure as hell isn’t to run away and hide in the Singularity. Social problems have social solutions. Broken institutions have to be mended, and absent justice has to be created. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Start doing what the online community used to do best: inventing new systems of trust and new ways to connect.)

"Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are..."

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:17:20 -0500

“Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.”

- AJ Withers Disability Politics and Theory p109 (via dandyfied)

holajupiter: fourteenacross: holajupiter: Okay, true life...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:24:11 -0500

holajupiter:

fourteenacross:

holajupiter:

Okay, true life story time, the summer that holajupiter and I worked at summer camp together (like, when we were in college. This was only about seven years ago.), we were visiting a friend in St. Louis and saw that this museum was open all night, so we decided to go. I think we specifically wanted to go to the aquarium bit of it because our AAA guide said that it had a touch tank?

GUYS. THIS MUSEUM. Like. I need to go back again. Maybe in daylight. With a camera. Because some of the shit I remember about it CANNOT BE REAL. As summer camp counselors, we were constantly cognizant of children’s safety, but in that summer camp-y kind of way where you’re like, “Well, okay, you can climb on that log, but be careful.” You know, safe, but with a sort of loose knowledge that kids will be kids and you are at a place where they are encouraged to run around and have fun. That being said, THERE IS NO WAY THIS PLACE WAS UP TO CODE. We spent the whole night, despite our summer-camp-y-safety mindset, being horrified that a child was going to die in front of us.

Giant, open aquarium tanks with no attendants and, in one place, ladders and stairs that led right into the water! Exposed pipes and beams and nails! THERE WAS NO SUPERVISION ANYWHERE. It was seriously like a bad trip. I distinctly remember us going to the gift shop to try and look for some sort of post card or souvenir book that had some information on HOW ANY OF THIS WAS OKAY.

I just googled “How many kids have died at City Museum”

However many it is, it’s totally worth it.

A Zero-Sum Attention Economy

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:52:00 -0500

Do you really think money and time as support for art are finite resources? That seems so sad and defeatist to me, but it definitely explains why you didn’t like Amanda Palmer’s TED talk.

Anonymous

(maura)

Are there not limited hours in a day, a month, a year, a life? Do most people not have to budget their money? And their time? Can you consume every piece of art available to you right now? Is a horse the new frisbee???

Seriously though. Of course all these resources are limited. To think otherwise is to live in a dreamland of privilege that will inevitably be punctured by a rude awakening. (Perhaps it will come when you have to attract an audience of your own to something that you put your whole soul into, in which case I’m sorry.)

Seriously, this is like the defining problem of my cultural experience over the past 5 years or so. How can anyone trying to keep up with culture possibly deny resource and attention scarcity? There are just so many options in so many mediums, both to experience/discover and to support with my (extremely limited) time and money. I don’t know how many Kickstarters by friends and/or artists who I respect I have failed to back over the past few years, but it’s a lot. And that’s not even getting to any of the almost infinite amount of worthy stuff out there that I don’t happen to already have a personal connection to.

Which, I’m basically just not making personal connections to much new stuff anymore, because I’m completely overwhelmed by choice and perpetually months to years behind on checking out new records, games, movies, tv shows, books, etc. I effectively can’t participate much in the broader cultural conversation anymore, because I don’t have enough money, time, and mental bandwidth to keep up with the unrelenting stream of the new. Attention is the coin of the realm, and deflation has set in big time.

Is this a generational turnover thing? Are people who grew up with this unprecedented access to cultural superabundance just so used to it that they don’t think about what they might be missing? Or, for us fogies, is it that once you get into your 30’s, you begin to realize that your time is limited and precious and you can’t do everything? I’ve realized that, but I don’t think I’ve exactly accepted it.

doyourwardance: thegoddamazon: bedbugsbiting: blueandbluer: r...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 18:43:11 -0500

doyourwardance:

thegoddamazon:

bedbugsbiting:

blueandbluer:

reanimatrix:

wadebramwilson:

galvanfoxtrot:

ralphabetsoup:

omg

wow. INSTANT recognition.

I didn’t even have to look at the bottom picture to know. AHAHAHAHAHA.

Wow. Yeah, I’ve been on Tumblr too long, as there was NO QUESTION what this was.

I’m a little embarrassed by how quickly I figured out exactly what was going on here.

LMFAOMFOMAOFMAO STOP

OH MY GOD

text-mode: Emoticons/emojis created by overlyaing several text...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 12:04:17 -0500

text-mode:

Emoticons/emojis created by overlyaing several text characters on top of eachother. These instructions are from 1976, and might have been around as early as 1972.

This technique was possible on the amazing 1970s PLATO computer, and probably never again after that? You could also move the text-chars around on a pixel level. Pictures/info from platopeople.com.

How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space — and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more — in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters.

"Google’s shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus..."

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:24:28 -0500

“Google’s shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus and Glass, represent the complete rejection of the “send them away so they will return philosophy” which was the primary reason that nerds (like me) fell in love with Google in the first place. Google is replacing a strategy that was easily understood and straightforward with one that is nearly Orwellian in scope. They’re already quite far down this road, but the shuttering of Google Reader makes it clear for all to see. Google is a different company than it used to be, but the dramatic turn feels like a turn to ‘evil,’ and that’s quite sad for me.”

- hello typepad: Google’s Turn to the Dark Side

I found myself in a sticky situation a while ago where I was being asked to build some custom data visualizations for a client. Google has a very robust chart API; it’s used all over the place. About a year ago, as part of their move toward providing SVG-based charting tools, Google deprecated its existing image-based chart API, without really offering a satisfying explanation. (It certainly wasn’t a matter of the limitations of HTML5!)

This was a problem. I was trying to build a fairly complex visualization employing dynamic scatter charts. It’s not just that Google’s SVG-based solution isn’t identical to its PNG-based predecessor in terms of output visualization - it removes a lot of the functionality from its PNG-based solution, for no apparent reason that I can tell.

How can we take a company seriously when, in the process of modernization, it makes its products meaningfully less functional? It isn’t just that Google builds goodwill and community among developers by providing services like these. It also has an effect on end-users - they risk damaging their reputation as a company that provides a lot of great tools that power the Web as we know it, a reputation that informs their overall corporate identity much more than you might initially think. (Let’s also not discount the fact that it’s easier, when designing software, to sell a client on the Google name vs. a third-party solution - say, the excellent Raphael visualization library - that they may not have heard of. Client stakeholders are, after all, the ones eventually responsible for using maintaining the things that get built.)

The Chart API, Reader, the Finance API. They represent such a tiny fraction of their business that it feels especially petty and arbitrary to see Google kill them off and deprecate them for vague, abstruse reasons. I kinda wonder if Google even listens anymore when people who know what they’re talking about - which David most certainly does - offer criticisms like these.

(via dayan)

mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:34:30 -0600

mini. Quiet Babylon: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations:

quietbabylon:

One of my favourite recurring tropes of AI speculation/singulatarian deep time thinking is mediations on how an evil AI or similar might destroy us.

Here’s a recent example, Ross Anderson on human extinction as quoted/linked by Kottke. It’s a discussion about how a benign AI might be poorly designed and lead to our downfall. What happens is the AI is given a goal that is proximate to helping people but not identical to (because no one even knows what that means).

The scenario imagined is one where there is a button that humans push if the AI gets an answer right and the AI wants to get a lot of button presses, and eventually it realizes that the best way to get button presses is to kill all the humans and institute a rapid fire button-pressing regime. (This, by the way, is the same instrumentalist train of logic that leads to sexbots.)

You would have this thing that behaves really well, until it has enough power to create a technology that gives it a decisive advantage — and then it would take that advantage and start doing what it wants to in the world.’

And all I can think is: we already have one of those. It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that their needs are met.

I don’t think that it’s all that far fetched to suggest that maybe they’re getting better and better at ensuring their needs are met. Pretty much the only thing that the left and right in America can agree on is that moneyed influence has corrupted American politics and yet neither side seems able to do much of anything about it.

What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable?

For a very long time, the AI dedicated to maximizing profit saw the path forwards through innovation, new products, better living for customers. But then at some point it realized that is had the ability to just reshape the planet in its image. So it did that instead.

Imagine these thoughts—hastily thrown together to make a point about the devil we fear, vs the one we face—accompanied by about a million caveats having to do with long histories of systemic racism/sexism/colonialism and many other important isms that make making claims about the relative benefits to humans from the private pursuit of profit very difficult and likely to fall apart under careful scrutiny.

ekstasis: Brasilia-on-Hudson Context is important and...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:36:25 -0600

ekstasis:

Brasilia-on-Hudson

Context is important and organically grown cities are necessarily responsive to context, they’re built over time and their parts are small enough to be destroyed and rebuilt time after time without major disruption. “Disruption,” though,was precisely the point of huge Modernist installations. Just like our modern “disruptive innovation,” Modernism had the feeling of technological inevitability, the better mousetrap. Disruption, then, meant consolidation, smoothing and cleaning. Faced with the appearance of disorder, something like Empire State Plaza sought to simplify and brighten, which it did. Unfortunately, it aerated a dense, mixed-use neighborhood, replacing it with a structure people often have trouble simply entering or leaving.

That right there is what you call a key graf. The whole thing is nearly as trenchant though, and you should check it out. I remember reading someone extolling the virtues of technological disruption in a Facebook thread about MOOCs the other day, and having a strong reflexive disgusted/weary response, before clicking away to avoid another pointless Facebook political shouting-past-eachother-fest. This effectively articulates that disgust and weariness, but, y’know, constructively.

magnificentruin: manifesto

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:25:03 -0600

magnificentruin:

manifesto