Notices by Jason Lefkowitz (jalefkowit@octodon.social)

Good on the folks at the Plain Dealer, both for making this decision and the way they announced it. https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html

The movie in question, btw. You can stream it on the Criterion Channel https://letterboxd.com/film/the-boss-1973/

I just watched an Italian mafia movie from the ‘70s that starts with the protagonist hit man whacking a rival by sneaking into the projection booth of the porno theater the rival is watching a skin flick in and shooting him through the window of the booth with a frigging grenade launcher, and I can only say this: if you are ever making a movie and have an idea that incredible, save it for the ending

@thomasfuchs At the very beginning they had an “about us” page on Google.com that defiantly said they would never lower themselves to publishing low-end content like weather or stock quotes just to attract traffic. It disappeared not long after they decided ads would be their business model

@randybias The Spanish-American War marks the shift from continental insularity to overseas empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War

Something you have to understand to understand the current balloon kerfuffle is that it highlights a psychological blind spot the U.S. military has suffered from since 1898.

Basically, the U.S. military doesn't think of the territory of the U.S. as a place where military events happen. It mentally divides the world into two spheres. There is the rest of the world (I think of it as "Over There"), which is where war happens. And then there is the territory of the U.S. ("Back Home"), which is a safe zone. Off limits. Back Home is a place where war simply does not happen.

American soldiers go to war Over There, and then they come Back Home to rest and recuperate. The idea that war might come to Back Home is so foreign to them as to be incomprehensible.

This blind spot has already bitten us hard twice, first at Pearl Harbor and then again on 9/11. When an enemy has the temerity to bring war Back Home, it knocks the American military mind completely off balance. Nothing is set up to defend against it, nobody is prepared to deal with it. Nobody is taking the kind of protective measures they would take as a matter of course if they were Over There. Because why would they? They're Back Home.

This mindset was already pretty hard to justify in 1941, and when long-range missiles got added into the equation in the '50s it became utterly obsolete. But it persists, because old habits die hard.

This is why something as simple as a balloon crossing into U.S. airspace can send the entire military-industrial complex into a frenzy. Because it doesn't matter that it's just a balloon. What matters is, these things aren't supposed to happen Back Home.

Just took my first-ever test ride on an ebike (the Trek FX+ 2: https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/bikes/hybrid-bikes/electric-hybrid-bikes/fx/fx-2/p/35842/?colorCode=black)

Overall I was impressed. The electric motors and such didn't add as much weight and bulk to the bike as I expected them to. It was light enough to be pedaled without turning the electric assist on at all. The controls were appealingly bike-y -- no digital screen, just a set of LED lights showing the charge level of the battery and current level of assist being applied.

I'm told that this bike is pricey for what you get, but my current bike is a Trek and it's run like a tank for nearly 15 years, so I feel a little more confident about build quality than I would buying from a startup with no track record.

I've been dying to upgrade my bike for a while now. Still not sure this is the upgrade I'm going to finally bite on, but I'm more tempted than I was before the test ride.

Kind of weird that Big HVAC has not realized yet the absolute mountains of money it could make if it just put in a little effort to educate people about how airborne viruses work

ME: Hey, official Mastodon iOS app. Refresh my feed, I want to see the latest posts.

OFFICIAL MASTODON IOS APP: No you don’t.

ME: What? I —

OFFICIAL MASTODON IOS APP [ slapping my hand ]: NO. YOU DON’T

Good to see that even in its death throes Twitter maintains its commitment to generating the worst takes

The looming COVID death toll in China is a massive failure of governance.

China could have had access to Western mRNA vaccines as early as 2021. They didn't get it, because they demanded that the vaccine manufacturers turn over the core production technology to them in order to get access to the Chinese market.

This is a common feature of Chinese industrial policy. If you want to sell your products there, you have to give them access to all the information Chinese companies would need to be able to knock off your products. In exchange for some money right now, you effectively train your own replacement. The polite euphemism for this is "technology transfer."

This demand was a huge problem for Pfizer and Moderna, because currently they're the only ones who know how to make mRNA vaccines, and it's generally accepted now that mRNA delivery is the future of vaccine development. Right now, they own that future.

(China's demand could have been sympathetic if they had been pushing Pfizer and Moderna to release this information into the public domain, which would have let anyone who wanted to use it. That, I could have gotten behind -- but that's not what they asked for. They wanted it to remain a monopoly. Just a monopoly that they could cut themselves in on.)

Both Pfizer and Moderna decided that the deal wasn't worth it, leaving China's citizens with only access to lower-performing, domestically produced vaccines. And so now a lot of people are going to die, unnecessarily.

The Chinese government decided that it was more important to try and get one more industrial advantage for itself than it was to use the time Zero COVID bought to get its people the best protection possible. It's not the only government that put business interests above its peoples' health -- that list is sadly quite long (and includes the United States). But it's disheartening every single time it happens.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-refused-china-request-reveal-vaccine-technology-ft-2022-10-02/

Dude really did pay $44 billion to live the life of a phpBB admin in 2004

Meanwhile tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day breaking down ships, a task that nobody is in a particular hurry to automate because those lives are considered cheap https://www.dw.com/en/shipbreaking-recycling-a-ship-is-always-dangerous/a-18155491

A world where computers write and make art while human beings break their backs cleaning up toxic messes is the exact opposite of the world I thought I was signing up for when I got into programming

It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy