Notices by William Pietri (williampietri@sfba.social)

@skinnylatte How do you respond to watching your talks? I find it almost intolerable. That makes difficult my usual approach to things, iterative improvement.

Our current road is untenable. For decades awful people have been making it easier and more rewarding to be awful, as the expense of everyone else. That will come to an end at some point. Either they destroy things to the extent that the system can no longer support parasites, or we stop things first. Which will we choose, and when?

Twitter could certainly survive if it shifted to a direct monetization model. They already sell subscriptions. But now they'd have to figure out how to make it really worth being there to the people paying. I'm hopeful that they'd discover that they'd have to turn down the big dial marked "Asshole Fight Club" to a much lower setting.

Facebook could survive too if they focused on making a product that people actually wanted and benefited from, rather than something people tolerated. What if it really started living up to is promise of being a site that connected you with the people you love?

Other social media sites could survive with radical change. At least back in the day, Twitter cost something like $1/user/month to operate. But a large portion of the operating expenses were around the ad infrastructure, including a lot of expensive people creating and building systems to sell you to advertisers.

Notably, this wouldn't harm Mastodon at all. Mastodon is either paid for by its users or its a gift from instance operators (and their funders) to the users.

Would this destroy a lot of existing businesses? Yes. But a lot of them are parasitic, and all of them reward people for becoming cynical manipulators of others. Other businesses would rise in their wake. Healthier ones. Stronger ones.

Morally, we must design our world so that it encourages people to be emotionally healthy and good to others. As is obvious by who's running the country, we have failed in that. The inmates are running the asylum, and warping systems and culture to create people just as broken as they are.

My modest proposal: we ban indirect monetization. If you get something of value, either it's a gift or you pay for it directly. So no more ad-supported services, no more selling people's data, no more things where you are the product.

And one thing to add about their Other: having an Other is necessary to them.

At play here is a holier-than-thou process where the tribal boundaries a) must always be defended and b) will ratchet smaller, so that people can prove their virtue by attacking people further out.

No matter who the secret police target at first, it will expand. Look at how Republicans have changed over the last 50 years. There used to be big-tent Republicans. Pro-abortion Republicans. Feminist Republicans. Now there are only Trumpists. And that precedes Trump, as you can see in the US House graph here: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/

So the US now has an unaccountable secret police force that does not follow the laws. Their job, to target The Other. Nominally just the ethnic Other. But the cities they've picked mean that they're moving toward the political Other. And as Renee Good shows, they're happy to stretch to include gender and sexuality.

Bullies don't stop until they're stopped. This will only get worse. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-citizen-ice-removed-minnesota-home-underwear-after-129372047

So no matter who you are, unless we stop this, the secret police will eventually come for you. Because it's not about you, it's about people who can't be happy in themselves, and so must always have someone to attack.

In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.

Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.

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RE: https://mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/115855749513703798

I'm glad to see that a local congressperson can clearly name what happened. As, happily, can mine, albeit not on Mastodon.

Foolishly, I hoped for a better outcome here given that the paper was in fact graded correctly. Has anybody seen a way for me to support the graduate instructor? E.g., by sending them money? Grad students are already underpaid and overstressed. Getting fired for doing the right thing just before Christmas is awful. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-instructor-gave-student-zero-gender-essay-barred-duties-schoo-rcna250641

This turned up in my email. At $5 for 12 minutes, plus surely more time to get and use the reward, seems like they're selecting for one of two groups: People who are well under the median income (and therefore are not big users of financial services), or people who are bad at financial decisions. Which, I suppose is a group that financial services companies are very excited to serve.

@inthehands Great stuff. For a long time I've thought that business has shifted toward thinking of customers as livestock. Monopolists and oligopolists don't have to treat customers like respected peers, so it's easy to drift to treating them like an exploitable resource.

I think that has laid the groundwork for the slaver mentality, one where disregard turns into a sick glee.

Question for dog fans:

My downstairs neighbor just adopted a dog. Every time I walk down the stairs, he barks a lot.

I thought I'd make friends with him, so we arranged a time for me to walk down the stairs and say hello. I of course brought a bag of treats. He was skeptical at first, but once he had some chicken, he warmed up.

But after some pets, he realized I had more treats and barked vigorously at me, expecting me to cough up. I politely declined, and waited until he stopped barking to give more chicken. And then he went back to barking.

We did maybe 5 minutes of this. I guess he previously learned he could get treats by menace. How do I help get him out of this habit?

@mariyadelano For sure. the most compassionate way I can understand it is as a gambling addiction:

@log Right? It gives me this feeling of disorientation. It has a number of markers of good prose, but the more I read the less sense I get out of it. Like dealing with a car salesman or something.

@peter_sc