Notices by Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)

Dark patterns are part of the shift of capitalism from profits to rents: get people to pay for things because of inertia or because they're not paying enough attention rather than by providing anything of value.

Capitalism provides less value at a higher price (in labor) every year. This used to be partially offset by improvements in technology, but tech has leveled off. AI provides next to zero value at tremendous cost.

@sidereal The dot-com boom was the roaring 20s. That was the period when housing first started really getting financialized. Then the Fed cut rates to deal with the dot-bomb and blew a huge housing bubble.

If you aren't willing to risk legal consequences to save someone's life, you have no business being a doctor. Resign.

If doctors fear consequences for providing care for miscarrying women, there need to be consequences for failing to provide care as well. Drive them out of practice, or to another state.

As long as the consequences are focused on pregnant women, nothing is going to change. Everyone has to feel the pain of not letting doctors do their jobs.

You perform poorly: company fires you
Company's leaders perform poorly: company fires you

It would be very surprising to me if SCOTUS upholds Trump's birthright citizenship order. So far they have not shown a willingness to just blatantly reinterpret the constitution for political reasons, just a willingness to discard well-established precedent.

If they do uphold it, they'd be torpedoing their already flagging legitimacy. To me it would be proof that we have genuinely entered a new phase of history. My estimate of the likelihood of civil war would rise dramatically.

Not to trivialize any of the things Trump has done already or the harm that they are already causing, but you do realize that 99% of it is there purely to tie up our attention and resources while he and his buddies use the government to further enrich themselves and permanently insulate themselves from accountability, right?

Literally none of these fights is going to end up mattering if we don't do anything about the massive and accelerating concentration of wealth and power that is happening right now. The system as we know it is ending. And it didn't start ending on January 20 or even in 2016. It's been accelerating this whole time, and this election has just been a minor inflection point.

Trump doesn't give a shit about abortion, trans rights, or even immigrants. He doesn't care about America or making it great. For him, all of those things are just convenient distractions.

Even if Biden hadn't blazed the blanket pardont rail, you can bet Trump would have anyway, for himself and his buddies. I'm sure he's thrilled that Biden blazed the trail, because nobody will be able to challenge his without also challenging Biden's.

As long as we remain on the defensive, we have no chance of winning. We're fighting like hell to preserve a status quo that was always ephemeral.

It's time to stop playing defense and go on the offensive. And not using Trump's rules.

It's time to become ungovernable.

The TikTok/Musk thing has been pretty eye-opening for me. Trump acts like a military and trade isolationist and talks about "America First" and "Make America Great Again". But he and the billionaires around him aren't complete idiots. Their goal isn't just to coöpt the USG to protect themselves, but to make themselves untouchable by *any* government while insulating themselves from America's unstoppable decline they know damn well is happening.

Trump isn't threatening China so the US can get things from them. He is threatening China so he and his buddies can get things from them.

Everything about Trump and his billionaire buddies' behavior makes so much more sense once I accept that it isn't about the US at all but about *them*.

To that end, the goal isn't to make the US stronger but to make it *weaker*, particularly in its ability to hold corporations and billionaires accountable for anything. The only strength they care about it having is the strength to keep other countries' governments in check.

So expect military spending to keep rising even as the rest of the federal government gets gutted.

The great filter: the intelligence level necessary to wipe out the species is significantly lower than the intelligence level necessary to not wipe out the species.

I just love horizontal videos made into vertical videos with huge black bars. The tech industry is so clever.

US tech is built almost entirely on theft:

- App-based work is only viable because it bypasses employment protections and imposes huge costs on the workers (average wage often below minimum wage) and society (extra traffic, idling and double-parked cars, speeding drivers, accidents & deaths).

- Social media is only viable because it's built entirely on the unpaid work of its users; in the subset of cases where it is paid it's only an ad revenue split, thus the user bears all risk, and even the users' work is often stolen from others

- Amazon steals from retailers through monopolistic practices, all US retailers steal from Chinese workers who get worse protections and a lower quality of life than the westerners buying the products they make

- Apple steals from developers through monopolistic practices

It's straight-up colonialism.

For most of human history, the "single source of truth" for what time it is has been the Earth's rotation. We didn't even have a clock that was more accurate than the Earth until 1921, the Shortt-Synchronome clock.

When UT was first created, it was based entirely on the rotation of the Earth. Which meant the UT second was variable, because the Earth doesn't rotate at a constant rate. This wasn't good enough for astronomers, who needed a uniform time scale. So they came up with Ephemeris Time, based on the average day length in 1900, which in turn was based on the tables in Newcomb's Tables of the Sun from 1895. The way they got from tables of numbers to practical values like the count of Cesium oscillations is really interesting (hint: it involved the moon). If you want to know more, look up "ephmeris time" on Wikipedia.

Even after the invention of atomic clocks, the Earth was still considered the single source of truth for time: time broadcasts were kept in sync with UT (Universal Time, then the same as GMT) by stepping them 20ms at a time, but their rate was still based on the Ephemeris Second. But 20ms steps only really worked if systems could tolerare one second being shorter or longer by a little bit, and people didn't really know in advance. With more and more systems becoming dependent on synchronized time, this became impractical, so UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, with the letters arranged so they're equally wrong in English and French) was born. UTC is based on TAI (International Atomic Time, actually correct in French), but it's offset by an integral number of seconds, currently 37 (it started at 10 seconds off since TAI was defined to be contiguous with the older Ephemeris Time and that's how far TAI was off from UT, rounded to the nearest second).

Until now, UTC has been kept within 0.9 seconds of UT (really UT1 as UT varies depending on the current orientation of the Earth's axis and where you are) by adding or subtracting one second at the end of June 30 or December 31, just before midnight UTC. The last one was added at the end of 2016, so we had 2016-12-31 23:59:60 UTC. Leap seconds have only ever been added, though it's also possible to have a negative leap second. It's just never happened.

As you can see, that last leap second was almost 8 years ago. Earth's day has stayed very close to an average of 86400.0 seconds since then, in part due to climate change melting glaciers and causing the planet's rotation to speed up. If we continue with leap seconds, it seems likely that the next one would be the first negative one. Very few systems have been tested with a negative leap second.

But there aren't really good reasons to keep UTC in sync with UT1 anymore. While it's convenient for astronomers, the relative number of applications where 0.9 seconds is "close enough" has dwindled. It'll definitely require astronomers to make some changes, but astronomy has gone from the most important application of UTC to one of a great many applications, most of which are actually harmed by having to deal with leap seconds.

So it's very likely that the 2016 leap second will have been our last. Not really because of the changing rotation of the Earth, but because they were already thinking about getting rid of them in 2016, and it's just time.

Do you suppose anarchists will finish fighting one another over whether Assad's ouster was a good thing before or after Israel and Turkey have divvied up the country and genocided the Kurds?

Since it's impossible to imagine how much money a billion dollars is, henceforth all journalists shall write dollar amounts in the number of years a person would have to work to earn that much at the median income in the US or whatever country is most relevant.

A billion dollars is 25,000 US median income years.

Dude, he's a computer scientist.

https://github.com/lnmangione

His blog: https://luigimangionestanford.wordpress.com/author/lnmangione/