Notices by The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)

@notroot @atomicpoet I had a similar thought when I read mine: I hardly ever post about my main hobbies because there's no community on the fedi that shares them, so it's not worth my time and energy.

But I don't want to update my bio because regardless of what I actually post here, it's accurate. 😆

Bored of the lazy trope about how "Mother Nature" will survive this current mass extinction. Between 1970 and 2014 alone, there was an average 60% decline in mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian populations, and there have been comparable declines in invertebrate populations as well. The possibly permanent end of all sentient life, let alone life capable of contemplating its own existence, would be a tragedy beyond imagining.

If by "Mother Nature" you mean bacteria...perhaps. But so what?

The US Crisis Project, an effort by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University, exists solely to collect and analyze data on protests and political violence in the US.

It looked at data from all 50 states, and found that 93% of racial justice protests after George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight and on camera by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, were peaceful and nondestructive.

#MAGA #Jan6

@feditips Controversial opinion, but I've grown to prefer the austere 500-character limit. Collapsing my ideas down into tiny, bitesize chunks (each shareable on their own) helps me to clarify my own thinking, and also stops me ranting into the wilderness before I've taken the time to consider sparser, more disciplined and impactful sentences.

Because some folks hate epic threads, I always aim for a maximum of four installments. So far, my longest has been five.

@Lana It's worth noting in this context that Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by fiction writer and poet, engineer, stage actress and outspoken activist for the feminist movement, Elizabeth Magie.

Magie was a fierce abolitionist and proponent of social justice for African-Americans, and her game - based on the teachings of progressive era economist Henry George - was meant to illustrate the negative effects of land monopolies.

The original rules were anti-capitalist.

After WWII, fear stalked the corridors of power in Great Britain. Irrespective of partisan allegiance, the ruling classes knew that because so many had sacrificed so much for so few, it wouldn't take much to trigger a popular uprising. Hence the emergence of what historians call the "post-war consensus", a cross-party acceptance that nationalisation, strong trade unions, robust regulation, progressive taxation, and an expanded welfare state would be needed to placate the restive electorate.

1/4

In 1945 the democratic socialist Clement Attlee swept to power. A landslide against war leader Winston Churchill, who contrary to today's far-right mythology was widely hated by the working classes and armed forces, and expected to be a disaster for peacetime domestic policy. Attlee's government embarked on a radical programme of social reforms to safeguard all citizens, "from the cradle to the grave". There began two decades of year-on-year economic growth, the longest in the UK's history.

2/4

Thanks to British socialism, made possible by elite terror at the prospect of revolt, every citizen now enjoys financial protection in the event of unemployment or sickness, a state pension when they retire, standardised minimal living and working conditions, universal free healthcare and education, financial help with funerals...the list goes on and on. Attlee's bold achievements in improving people's lives caused a surge in upward mobility that led to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

3/4

So don't let anyone tell you CEOs in America having to beef up their personal security, while feeling increasingly nervous and unsafe in their luxury hotels, gentrified blocks and gated communities can ever be a bad thing. That should just be the price of extreme wealth and power, and as the British post-war experience shows, and recent events in South Korea further highlight, all that's needed for concrete change is enough people refusing to accept less.

Then no more shots need be fired.

4/4

@AnarchoNinaWrites Funnily enough I'm rereading No Is Not Enough by Klein, and have Monbiot's Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order lined up as my next reread. It was less that four feet away from me when I saw your thread!

The book is a penetrating *diagnosis* of the many, overlapping and interlocking systemic problems now threatening us - US hegemony being a central focus.

It's hard to believe he hasn't privately reached the hard conclusion his own work spotlights and underlines.

@mttaggart @kims @mekkaokereke In terms of its UX the fedi does have a way to go.

But Bsky is "bad" 'cos it's a shady, billionaire-owned, VC-funded, data-hoovering corporate behemoth just waiting for its userbase to grow enough - and be entrenched and captive enough - for the next phase of the enshitification cycle.

Even if by every objective measure Bsky was the best social media platform ever, some would still rather throw all their tech in a compactor and go live in a ditch, than feed it. 🤷♂️

@AnarchoNinaWrites @craignicol

Also, there's the not insignificant fact that a lot of what's being pushed as "green" energy today, is not without its own, potentially huge environmental and human costs.

Of course you already know this, but some of your readers may not.

👇

https://mastodon.world/@ApostateEnglishman/113538244703215500

@cstross Oh, ferrets. Definitely ferrets! Giving us not one, but two opportunities to flex some creative muscle:

(1) By coming up with an actual, plausible scenario in which the escape rooms became inhabited by ferrets.

(2) By taking on the truly Hitchcockian task of making cute fluffy animals somehow scary.

@tuban_muzuru @rysiek @futurebird Depends on prior knowledge of the deck, because all shuffles (other than a tabled casino wash, but even that can be manipulated to some extent) are non-random.

Believe it or not, it takes around 2,500 standard overhand shuffles to fully randomize a prearranged deck! A sloppy riffle shuffle is more efficient, achieving this in only seven shuffles - but a perfect, card-for-card interweaving of the packets will restore the deck to original order in eight shuffles.

@tuban_muzuru @rysiek @futurebird Okay help me out here. You somehow do your experiment 100,000 times: deal cards face-up from a face-down shuffled deck, stopping when you get to an ace. You then calculate the probability of the next card also being an ace.

But the next card is never an ace. All 100,000 iterations of the game, it's an indifferent card. You then learn you could have done it an *infinite* number of times, and still have never seen a second ace. The actual probability is 0.

Why?

@tuban_muzuru @rysiek @futurebird I'm not trying to annoy you! Just pointing out that probability calculations don't work if you're missing crucial info: in this case, that the dealer is crooked. He's only shuffling 49 cards - retaining three of the aces to bottom deal as needed. 🤷♂️

But even math is tricky! Assuming a *fair* riffle shuffle and any number of *fair* cuts, what's the probability of dealing four cards, one of each suit, first attempt?

Always 1, if the Gilbreath Principle was used.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Yeah, listen to Nina folks. We didn't defeat the Nazis after WWII, we enthusiastically recruited all their top scientists, engineers and technicians to prevent their expertise falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. We even enlisted those who had paramilitary training into NATO's extralegal stay-behind networks, which engaged in espionage, subversion, sabotage, assasinations and worse throughout Western Europe during the Cold War.

And that was *before* shit got dark...

@julieofthespirits @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy Anarcho-capitalism is a thing, but the "anarcho" part doesn't align well with what, say, the anarcho-syndicalists uphold. The former believe in the pursuit of unfettered self-interest in the competitive arena of an unregulated market, the latter in organizing around shared wants and needs - collective bargaining, unions, co-ops, mutual aid etc.

In the popular imagination, "anarchism" is synonymous with lawlessness, civil disorder, even terrorism.

I'm seeing a lot of posts urging activists and anyone who may be targeted under a Trump regime, to start using the Signal app to organise. This is indeed great advice for keeping your comms secure!

However, it's also possible to carry your entire computer around with you on an encrypted USB drive, boot it from almost any desktop device, and leave no forensic trace when you close down. @tails comes prepackaged with a whole range of privacy tools.

Time to Linux?

@eff

https://tails.net/

@ekis Ah those "secret" billionaire hideaways!

Like the Doomstay Bunker in Kansas, 1325 Gold Rd #5, Glasco, KS 67445. A Cold War missile silo built in the early 1960s at a cost of $15 million. One of 72 "hardened" silo structures meant to withstand a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Bought for $300,000 in 2008 by ex-government contractor Larry Hall. Now a 15-story subterranean bolt-hole where up to 75 individuals can survive a maximum of five years.

It's right here. 👇