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treasure-mimic · 2 years ago

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So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

#Unity #Unity3D #Video Games #Game Development #Game Developers #fuckshit #I don't know what to tag news like this

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months ago

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Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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probablyasocialecologist · 2 months ago

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Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for. The massive trove of lookup data was obtained by researchers who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation and shared with 404 Media. It shows more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal” favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus, according to statements from police departments and sheriff offices collected by 404 Media. It shows that, while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement. The data reviewed by 404 Media was obtained using a public records request from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, and shows the Flock search logs from police departments around the country. As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the section that focuses on deportations; “illegal immigration,” “ICE WARRANT,” and other immigration-related reasons. Although lookups mentioning ICE occurred across both the Biden and Trump administrations, all of the lookups that explicitly list “immigration” as their reason were made after Trump was inaugurated, according to the data.

27 May 2025

#ice #ai #surveillance #flock #immigration

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norwayromanoff · 22 days ago

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You Were Are Hers pt. 2

NR x lover-turned-enemy!r

Word count: 1k

Summary: Four months later.

Author’s note: I fixed it (I’m physically incapable of ending things badly for Natasha… like give that woman a break. She’s been through enough)

You can read part 1 here

FOUR MONTHS AGO

You pull the trigger and the shot rings out, loud, deafening in a way that isn’t just due to the gunpowder’s ignition. Somehow you managed to take the shot even though your eyes were blurry with tears and devastation, with heartbreak you shouldn’t be feeling.

The bullet burns past Natasha, grazing her cheek, minor blood, no mess. She’s quick to turn in the direction it came from, eyes scanning the horizon. She can’t see you, but she feels you.

You missed. You don’t miss.

Natasha knows what that means. It was a warning, a ‘don’t come after me’. It was a plea.

She never was good at not following her heart when it came to you.

ONE DAY AGO

It takes days, months, of more research, more data analyses, more late nights, but finally, there it is. Mistakes—plural—and they’re not subtle. You’re getting sloppy. Something's wrong.

A security camera picked you up in Lisbon, just a fleeting image but enough. Facial recognition scans were able to match your faceprint as you walked along the street. It looks as though you hadn’t even noticed the camera. Mistake. Camera tracing followed you, showed you getting into a vehicle, not unmarked, license plate in full view, trackable. Mistake.

Hope, tentative and perhaps foolish, flutters in her chest. She doesn’t push it down.

PRESENT DAY

Natasha finds you easily, detects you easily even within the crowd. She can already see the change in you. You’re shaky and on edge, not collected or composed anymore. You look human again. Her breath stutters.

She got on a Quinjet only minutes after locking onto your location, stole a Quinjet, actually. She may be in for a lecture later, but you take precedence, you always have. It would be a seven-hour flight to Lisbon by commercial airplane. Too long. She needs you back, now.

She moves forward, steps cautious, still just watching, taking in your unusual behavior as she begins to tail you. You don’t even notice her following. Mistake, mistake, mistake.

At her call of your name, you stop, stiffening, but you don’t turn around. Not yet. Both her voice and the fact that she caught you off guard make you wary. Your name again, closer this time. When you finally glance at her, she can see your fear at your own negligence, and she’s met with a guarded expression on your face. She never wants you to look at her that way, to view her as a threat, to believe she holds anything other than love. She needs you to understand that she’s nurtured it, even with the distance, more so with the distance, allowed it to grow each day, only ever wanting it to expand and swell and spread within her until she found and could give it to you again.

“Natasha, I’m slipping.” Your voice is trembling. You’re acting skittish. You’re unsure if you should be letting her in, and she can see it in your eyes that you’re debating fleeing. She won’t let you.

One hand reaches out, coming to gently grasp at your wrist, not just as a precaution preventing you from bolting but also securing, trying to offer solace when you need it. You don't have to be alone anymore. Her hand trails up your arm and then pulls you into her by your elbow, firm—it’s decided, you’re coming closer. Her other hand then settles on the small of your back, pushing you forward, pressing you against her body. It’s been so long since she’s really held you.

“What happened?” she asks softly.

“You happened. I couldn’t take the shot. I’ve never hesitated before, but pointing the gun at you just-” you break off, “I’m compromised.”

She hears the critical way you’re talking about yourself, almost derogatory, as if mercy isn’t something to embrace.

“You’re strong. Compassion doesn’t make you weak,” she murmurs.

“No, but sentiment does.”

“You’ve always had emotions when it’s come to me.”

“I don’t know how to turn them off.”

EIGHT YEARS AGO

“I love you, you know.”

It’s spoken into the air. Tranquility around you, and your arm around Natasha. Her head is on your chest, listening to the rhythmic and comforting sound of your heart while your free hand traces patternless shapes on her hip. She thinks she could stay like this forever. It’s hard to want anything else when you’re holding her so delicately, as though her skin, scarred over and roughened, able to withstand bullets, knives, and arrows, can’t handle a little weight from your fingertips.

You didn’t hesitate to say it, to admit that the steady beat she’s listening to is hers.

The room goes still, no tension, no discomfort, but no words follow. There are none. Anything, everything, will fall short. Natasha’s whole world goes still.

You said it first.

You know she feels the same.

PRESENT DAY

You collapse against her.

The sound that comes out of you can only be described as a whimper as you finally, truly give yourself to the woman you love but never let yourself have.

And she holds you like she’s determined to shelter you from the world that has been much too unkind. She touches you like you aren’t tainted by every kill you’ve carried out, and she kisses your temple like you’re worthy of softness despite them all. She murmurs that you’re still a person, and you don’t deserve a permanent target on your back, or to be buried six feet under. She doesn’t just forgive you for all of your wrongdoings, she understands them.

“What do you need from me?”

A teary-eyed smile. “You, just you… and I could use some water.”

“Yeah? I’ll be the one getting it for you from now on.”

#natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x you #anna writes

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holycatsandrabbits · 26 days ago

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Writers: looking to do the ethical thing and avoid AI images in illustrating, promoting, and selling your work?

There are many places to find public domain and free to use images. Always double-check the license before you use an image and remember to credit your source with a citation and/or link.

Pexels: photographs uploaded by contributors – does not allow AI. I found the photo for this post on Pexels. My blog post citations are usually a link on the photo itself or at the bottom of the page/post.

Unsplash: photographs and art uploaded by contributors – does not allow AI. Make sure you select the “free” license.

Public Domain Image Archive: out-of-copyright historical images.

Artvee: public domain paintings, posters and illustrations.

Smithsonian Open Access: images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Getty Research Institute: images of Getty-owned artworks in the public domain.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: public-domain artworks in the Met collections. Be sure you select “open access.”

New York Public Library Digital Collections. Be sure you select “search only public domain.”

Wikimedia Commons: lots of free-to-use and public domain images. This is my other go-to for blog posts.

Remember, if you want custom artwork and book covers, there are tons of real, live artists you can commission to create for you! And as a fellow creator, you should not have a problem paying artists for their work. Artists, feel free to reblog this post with info on your commissions.

PS: please don’t use AI to write, either…nurture your own voice! We want to hear it.

This article was first published on my writing blog

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers

Image credit

#Dannye writes #writing #writing tips #writers on tumblr #original fiction #writeblr #writeblr community #writing advice #writing community #no AI #don't use AI #anti generative ai #alternatives to AI #public domain images #free to use images

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staravyz · 3 months ago

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︖﹖ㅤㅤ Counting Stars and Stats: Tears

ㅤㅤㅤㅤ❕️ㅤclick 4rules—4masterlist—4ch2

ㅤㅤ🔭ㅤㅤ—ㅤ(Dr. Stone) Ishigami Senkuu x Reader

ㅤ﹑tags ... x reader/comfort/slice of life/fluff/modern au/corny/slice of life/stupid teens in love/sunshine and rainbows and happiness/both parties are bad at feelings

ㅤ౨ৎㅤ—ㅤa/n﹕cross posted tis on ao3 lmk if i suould write a part 2 😼 part 2 is upppppppppp‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

ㅤOn the day the guy from your AP art class that you'd been eyeing for several weeks finally asked you out to the dance, you sprinted to Senku's house to tell him.

ㅤKnowing each other for years now, it was just natural that he was the first person you'd alert.

ㅤNot even your nice friends that complain about schoolwork and convince you to go out with them once a week instead of studying, or your classmates that you only speak to in class when there's nothing to do who ask you for answers and notes during breaks, but Senku.

ㅤThe guy who's most likely to either solve climate change or become a dictator and involve you in his madness either way.

ㅤYou don't know when exactly it hit you that you wanted to start doing less advanced schoolwork and more socializing, but you did know that Senku wasn't interested in it. He was always trying to drag you away from your friends to pull you back in the lab, putting you through Olympic sports level studying over college courses you weren't even planning to take, and running statistics on socialization to prove to you how useless it is compared to science.

ㅤSure, it was probably sweet in Senku's weird way of showing his care, but this time, you got asked out.

ㅤTo a school dance.

ㅤThis is revolutionary for you.

ㅤ"Hate to break it to you, but you're gonna have to cancel your little dance date thing," Senku interrupted, right when you were describing how the guy smoothly asked you after class.

ㅤ"What?" You blinked. "Why?"

ㅤ"I need your help setting up the telescope so we can compare Saturn's moons' orbits over the course of the night. Visibilty rate is the best on the night of the dance before the weather decides to start coating everything in snow," he said casually. Senku hadn't spared so much so a glance since you started talking.

ㅤWith him in his chair, scribbling down notes—probably memorizing each of Saturn's moons—you sat on his bed, fidgeting with a rubix cube in your lap.

ㅤ"Who's we? I'm going to the dance, Senku. You can collect your data by yourself because I'm not skipping out on this just for you." You rolled your eyes. "Ask Taiju, maybe."

ㅤ"Taiju's going with Yuzuriha, and I'd rather disturb your night over theirs because they have a more solid relationship than you and your little art buddy do."

ㅤYou huffed. Arguing over whose date should be prioritized more was useless.

ㅤ"Then you're on your own, Senku. I want to go. I got asked," You stated.

ㅤSenku sighed and put down his pencil. "You're gonna regret it, ten billion percent." He turned to face you, but didn't exactly meet your eyes. "Gen told me that guy is an entrepreneur in asking girls out over bets for money."

ㅤYou frowned. "Are you saying I'm more likely to be a bet than a real date?" Your hands fell slack in your lap.

ㅤ"I'm saying that you need to think more logically about the people around you." He gestured towards the space around you with his hand then stood up and flicked your forehead. "Use that supposed brain of yours to make better decisions, idiot."

ㅤYou rubbed your forehead, it didn't hurt at all. "Yeah, yeah, whatever, you're not a licensed therapist and I don't feel comfortable taking life advice from someone who watches petri dishes for entertainment."

ㅤSenku turned back around, a smirk peeking at the corner of lips. He scoffed. "Alright, see through the consequences of your actions. Not my problem."

—

ㅤOh how you loathe how right Senku is every time.

ㅤSitting in one of those cheap, black chairs the dance committee laid out at a table only you were at, your date was over an hour late and it was just now starting to sink in.

ㅤYou got stood up.

ㅤThis is unbelievable.

ㅤWith a sigh, you stopped your relentless tapping on the table and placed your chin in your hand as you watched everyone with sonder.

ㅤYour friends were occupied with their own dates. Taking pictures, dancing, sneaking off to make out in a bathroom stall, things you've never really pictured yourself doing but sometimes wished you could. More or less because you craved the real experience and making memories and not because you wanted a pair of lips trailing bacteria and saliva down your neck.

ㅤYeah, maybe you could cross that one off as unnecessary.

ㅤYou checked the time on your phone. 10:38 PM. Might as well go for a walk and rethink everything about your life, then come back with a new identity.

ㅤOne step outside and you had already made another regret: not bringing a thicker jacket.

ㅤHumiliation was stronger than your need for warmth, so you walked down the steps and strode into the night.

ㅤNo particular destination, just listening to the sound of the cool breeze, clacking of your accessories, and your shoes hitting the pavement with each step. A car or two would drive by and you'd wonder if they thought you were a loner, or maybe a runaway.

ㅤPassing a lampost, you grazed your fingers over the pole and observed the light and shadows sharply reacting to your bone structure. Your gaze softened at such a simple sight. Maybe if things had gone well, that hand would be warmer, held by the art guy who apparently profited over your emotional expense.

ㅤ"I can't help but respect the hustle. I would've done it for the yen, too," you softly whispered to yourself. You took a few more steps then collapsed on the bench next to the post, shivering at the cold.

ㅤYou sighed as you tilted your head up towards the moon, your breath coming out as white wisps. For a moment, you only counted the stars you could see.

ㅤThen warm tears began to trace your cheeks.

ㅤIf you weren't freezing cold, you would have lifted a hand or two to wipe them away. But it's okay. There's nobody around. You walked far enough to guarantee that. It's pretty stupid to be crying over something so trivial. You've shed a few tears over exams, failed experiments, teacher comments, normal things that you deemed worthy crying over because they were failures—important things that slipped past your logical thinking.

ㅤThis wasn't like that. This wasn't a test below 80% or a shattered beaker, this was your emotions. A consequence you couldn't have foreseen like you could with a grammatical error. All you did was say yes. All you wanted was a date.

ㅤYou closed your eyes, taking shaky breaths.

ㅤ"Moon, why does nothing ever go right for me?" You asked quietly, as if a round rock in earth's orbit could offer you comfort.

ㅤYou tilted your head back down and wiped the tears onto your sleeves.

ㅤ"... What the hell are you doing here?"

ㅤ"WHAT the FUCK, Senku—" you flinched and snapped your head towards the voice, recognizing him immediately. "—where did you—?"

ㅤ"Answer my question first," he deadpanned. Senku was wearing a much better coat than you were. Regular pajama pants, too, and bedhead hair.

ㅤYou turned your head away, still attempting to fix your whole crying situation. "I'm on a walk. Th—the school gym was crowded."

ㅤ"Uh huh." Reluctancy to tell the truth detected. Senku settled on analyzing you and piecing together what actually happened instead—not like it'd be hard, he saw this coming a week ago.

ㅤHe gave a dramatic sigh. "Move over."

ㅤHesitantly, you made room for him on the bench. He sat a little too close. No, that's probably you.

ㅤ"Art freak ditched you?"

ㅤSilence.

ㅤ"I'll take that as a yes. All your critical thinking deficient friends too busy to accompany you?"

ㅤSilence.

ㅤ"Damn, rough night."

ㅤ"Don't say it," you muttered, lowering your head a bit more.

ㅤHe smirked. "Say what?" He teased, leaning closer to you for more effect. "I told you—"

ㅤ"Senku," you stopped him, voice coming out with less confidence and stability than you intended. You sniffled.

ㅤSenku leaned back on the bench and stared straight ahead for a moment of silence. Uncomfortable silence, significantly on his part.

ㅤWere you crying? He could've deducted that from the sight of you moping on the bench earlier when he started walking here, but he sincerely hoped you weren't because he wouldn't know how to deal with that—how to make you feel better.

ㅤHe'd seen you cry before... from afar... with someone else handling it. After all these years, he still didn't wouldn't know what to do exactly.

ㅤOne time, you cried over a failed math test because your friends wanted to take you somewhere fun the night before. They said you worked too hard and that it was important for you to relax every now and then. Senku disagreed with their beliefs, always encouraged you to study more. When you started crying, he thought only about how he was right. When your friends started frantically apologizing, comforting you until you started smiling and laughing again, he wondered if he was wrong.

ㅤLogically, no, not at all.

ㅤEmotionally?

ㅤSenku never bothered with your questionable taste in the people you surround yourself with until then. He realized he forgot to factor in your emotional need for connection, experience, and comfort, and that's why you stuck around those gossipy idiots, half of whom are failing in at least two subjects.

ㅤSenku clicked his tongue and spoke up. "Look, you got stood up by some kid who'll probably be a deadbeat when he grows up, who cares? You'll live. You should be more above this, genius."

ㅤYou shifted slightly. "That's not helpful."

ㅤHe shrugged. "Tch, this isn't my sort of thing to do so have some empathy."

ㅤHe glanced at you and heard a soft chuckle. He smiled. Laughter, good. Clear sign of positive improvement in emotional recovery.

ㅤ"Then why are you trying?" You snickered, leaning back on the bench and tilting your head towards him. The thought of Senku Ishigami, comforting you, was impossible in the way that it was hilarious.

ㅤSenku looked away, trying not to catch your contagious laugh. "Because you were crying."

ㅤSilence.

ㅤHe leaned back and crossed his arms. You only watched, absorbing that singular sentence. Such a simple reason, yet it meant way too much than it should have coming from Senku.

ㅤHe stared at the street, you stared at him.

ㅤ"Shouldn't you be watching Saturn's moons right now?" You blurted.

ㅤSenku looked at you. Was that it? It was that easy to make you feel better? Noted.

ㅤ"Didn't feel like graphing things myself all night." He shrugged, stretching his legs out. "Went on a walk instead and saw your lonely ass moping on a bench."

ㅤ"Besides," he continued, looking up at the night sky. "this is nice, too. Y'know I'm not only into astronomy because of the scientific details and data, right? I mean, c'mon, any person would be curious of this too." Senku gestured at the sky.

ㅤYou followed his gaze. A small smile spread on your lips, the moon offered you comfort after all.

ㅤSenku went on to list 88 more facts about space with words that had too many syllables to count. You were half listening, half wondering why scientific terms always ended in '-tion'.

ㅤIn the middle of his rant, you pulled out your phone.

ㅤ"12:00 AM, happy New Year, Senku," you joked, smiling at him. "The dance is wrapping up by now. I'll just tell my friends I went home early or something." You sighed as you slid lower down the bench, shivering.

ㅤ"Alright, might as well wrap this disaster up too," Senku huffed, standing up with his hands in his pockets. You followed and began walking down the path to your place, Senku walked next to you.

ㅤSilence. Comfortable silence. Just listening to the sound of the cool breeze, clacking of your accessories, and you and Senku's shoes hitting the pavement with each step.

ㅤYou passed by a 24/7 convenience store, glancing up momentarily at the bright light. Senku followed your gaze and stopped walking.

ㅤ"Want something?" He nodded towards the store. You shook your head. He sighed. "Alright, one second."

ㅤSenku took your arm and dragged you into the convenience store.

ㅤYou yelped. "Wh—!?"

ㅤSenku let go of you at the cashier desk, disappearing into one of the aisles. You blinked and made awkward eye contact with the worker.

ㅤYou peeked your head into the shelves. "Senku?" You called out. Senku magically reappeared next to you.

ㅤ"Get yourself a snack or whatever. I'm just looking for something."

ㅤYou shivered. "God, you're like a ghost," you murmured.

ㅤPhone in hand, packet of pastillas in the other. You waited for Senku at the front. He returned with what looked like one of those ice packet things the elementary school office used to hand out to those injury prone kids for bruises and stuff. You decided not to question it. Senku snatched the pastillas from your hand and handed it to the cashier. Before you could pull out your wallet, he had already paid.

ㅤYou narrowed your eyes at him and slowly put your wallet back.

ㅤOn your way out, he pressed something on the ice packet then handed it to you. It was warm.

ㅤ"Ohh, it's a heat pad," you said. Senku nodded.

ㅤ"You looked like you were about to get a secret fourth degree level of frostbite back there."

ㅤYou glared at him but laughed anyway and thanked him, feeling significantly rejuvenated by the warmth. Senku opened your snack.

ㅤ"What are these?" he held one piece up as you two walked side by side. You took one for yourself and popped it in your mouth.

ㅤ"Pastillas," you said, chewing. "They're good, try one."

ㅤSenku ate one and made a face.

ㅤYou snickered at his reaction. "What? Don't like it?"

ㅤHe held the packet up and squinted at the ingredients. "Does this thing have, like, 15 pounds of sugar per serving? Holy." You laughed. "You're going to get one cavity per bite. Never letting you pick snacks again."

ㅤ"I'm sorry, I didn't know you wanted to share in the first place. And if you hate it so much, why are you eating more?" You glared, taking the packet back before Senku could toss another piece in his mouth.

ㅤ"I was stating facts, not my true opinion," he countered. "Your taste in convenience store snacks are nutritiously inefficient, but admittedly, not bad." Senku made a hand gesture as he spoke.

ㅤThe rest of the walk to your house was—for one, warmer, and a lot nicer than what you expected with that AP art classmate.

ㅤIn retrospect, you didn't know why you said yes in the first place. It wasn't like you two were super close. It was clearly a one-sided crush. Senku called him a distraction. You knew that. And yet, caught up in the moment of when he asked you after class, you said yes.

ㅤYou made impulsive decisions sometimes. It's a good thing Senku knows how to knock sense into you. Never is it polite nor gentle, but he does it without being prompted, and is always conveniently there for you when it ends in disaster—painfully accurate according to his prediction.

ㅤYou snuck a glance at him while you walked in that same, slow pace, as if you were mutually savouring the moment.

ㅤSenku, the guy who would either solve climate change or become a dictor and involve you in his madness either way, cheered you up, bought you a heat pad and a snack, and then walked you home.

ㅤAre you just now realizing this?

ㅤRealizing him?

ㅤYou faced forward once again, ignoring the heat rising to your cheeks.

ㅤFuck. This is going to be your worst distraction yet.

ㅤ"We're here." Senku's voice snapped you out of the clouds. Your eyes darted from his to your home. You muttered a small "Oh" and started walking towards your door.

ㅤYour hand lingered on the door knob. You could already hear Senku's footsteps fading into the quiet of the night.

ㅤThat's a bit unfair of you, isn't it?

ㅤ"Senku," you called out.

ㅤHe turned around with that unfathomable look, like walking you home was just another task on his to-do list that he was satisfied to check off and not an overly romantic gesture you didn't know he was even capable of.

ㅤ"Thank you." You smiled.

ㅤYou caught a glimpse of his smirk before he turned away.

ㅤ"Don't go accepting any more dates with ridiculous guys without consulting me first," he retorted.

ㅤWith a sigh, you entered your house, kicked your shoes off your aching feet (you walked a farther distance than you thought), and collapsed on your bed, fully content with sleeping in your current attire.

ㅤYou threw the empty packet of pastillas in your trash and left the heat pad on your desk.

ㅤYour phone buzzed in your jacket. You hummed, contemplating whether or not you should fall asleep now or answer that.

ㅤOpening your phone, you squinted at the brightness, scrambling to turn it down. You opened the notification. A text from your friend group.

[name]whre are u??????

did thwy get kidnepaped holy shit guys

vroo i told u their date was sketchy asf like

ㅤYou chuckled at their texts and typed out a reply.

i'm fine lol

i went for a walk and ran into senku.

SO U DID GET KIDNEPAPD😥

no, hs walked me home

wair werent you supposed to be with that guy feom yiur art class?

he stood me up, not a big deal.

senku filled in.

ㅤToo tired to elaborate, you dropped your phone on the bed next to you and began to count stars until you fell asleep.

©️ staravyzㅤ(¬_¬") do not steal, translate, or repost.

#senku x reader #x reader #ishigami senku x reader #dr stone x reader #x y/n #x you

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dawnfelagund · 7 months ago

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The last couple of days have been heavier topics, with data on who speaks by gender and character group, so today seemed a good day for a post that is only semi-serious!

Because it doesn't actually mean much to talk more than Ilúvatar in The Silmarillion. Ilúvatar has a lot of lines and is prone to speech-making so has a high word count as well, but it's not like the four characters who speak more than him are trying to one-up God or anything. But we're Silmarillion fans and anything related to our characters feels political, so it's fun to consider which of them talk more than God.

In fact, the four characters who do are interesting in part because their dialogue is so different. Melian's dialogue is mostly in conversation, with Thingol or Galadriel. Fëanor has a variety of different dialogue but also makes some lengthy speeches; his speech to the Noldor prior to their exile is the third longest in the book (excluding two instances of "group speeches"). Túrin is the exact opposite: He speaks a lot, but his instances of dialogue are unusually short. The median length of an instance of dialogue across the book is thirty-one words, but the median for Túrin's dialogue is twenty-one words.

Thingol, of course, comes out on top as the character who speaks the most instances of dialogue AND the most words, topping Ilúvatar in both of these categories.

Returning to Melian and continuing yesterday's discussion of gender and speech, the woman who speaks the most after Melian is Yavanna, with ten instances of dialogue (most of them in the Christopher Tolkien-authored "Of Aulë and Yavanna). This means that Melian and Yavanna speak more than half of the dialogue uttered by women in The Silmarillion.

Of course, I'm always interested in pseudohistorical readings of The Silmarillion, particularly thinking about who is telling the story at what points and how the story Tolkien gives us is shaped by narrative point of view.

In this case, Thingol as the top talker makes sense given that the Beleriandic materials were collected by Pengolodh, who counted as a major source the refugees from Doriath who migrated, as did he, to Sirion's mouth. Dírhaval, who is credited with Túrin's story, would have likewise heard much of Thingol (and Melian) from his sources. It makes sense that Thingol, Túrin, and Melian are written with more immediacy than other characters are, who likely felt less accessible to the narrators.

What about Fëanor? The Aman materials were authored by Rúmil and passed to Pengolodh. I've always felt like Rúmil's sections portray Fëanor with more humanity than Pengolodh's sections do, though I've not yet drilled down into the data on this. The dialogue data seems to support that, at least, Rúmil perceived Fëanor as a character important enough that his words were worth preserving. That may seem like a "doh" statement, but consider how many important moments throughout The Silmarillion occur without us hearing dialogue from anyone at all. Multiple of Fëanor's speeches, on the other hand, were preserved.

---

This is part of my ongoing project The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? The data is available under a CC license for others who wish to play with it: View the data | Copy the data

Dialogue by Chapter Dialogue by Character Group Dialogue by Gender

The entire project is archive on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild.

#silmarillion #tolkien #silmarillion: who speaks?

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river-taxbird · 1 year ago

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Have YOU got an old Windows PC Microsoft has told you can't run Windows 11? It's time to give it a new life!

How to install Windows 11 on unsupported PC Hardware using Rufus. You can also disable some other Windows 11 bullshit like data harvesting and needing a Microsoft account.

It has been in the news a lot lately that Windows 11 isn't allowed to be installed on PCs without certain requirements, including the TPM 2.0, a chip that was only included in PCs made in 2018 or later. This means that once Windows 10 stops receiving security updates, those PCs will not be able to (officially) run a safe, updated version of Windows anymore. This has led to an estimated 240 million PCs bound for the landfill. Thanks Microsoft! I get you don't want to be seen as the insecure one, but creating this much waste can't be the solution.

(I know nerds, Linux is a thing. I love you but we are not having that conversation. If you want to use Linux on an old PC you are already doing it and you don't need to tell me about it. People need Windows for all sorts of reasons that Linux won't cut.)

So lately I have been helping some under privileged teens get set up with PCs. Their school was giving away their old lab computers, and these kids would usually have no chance to afford even a basic computer. They had their hard drives pulled so I have been setting them up with SSDs, but the question was, what to do about the operating system? So I looked into it and I found out there IS actually a way to bypass Microsoft's system requirement and put Windows 11 on PCs as old as 2010.

You will need: Rufus: An open source ISO burning tool.

A Windows 11 ISO: Available from Microsoft.

A USB Flash Drive, at least 16GB.

A working PC to make the ISO, and a PC from 2018 or older you want to install Windows 11 on.

Here is the guide I used, but I will put it in my own words as well.

Download your Windows 11 ISO, and plug in your USB drive. It will be erased, so don't have anything valuable on it. Run Rufus, select your USB drive in the Device window, and select your Windows 11 ISO with the Select button. (There is supposed to be a feature in Rufus to download your ISO but I couldn't get it to work.?

Choose standard windows installation, and follow the screenshot for your settings. Once you are done that, press Start, and then the magic happens. Another window pops up allowing you to remove the system requirements, the need for a microsoft account, and turn off data collecting. Just click the options you want, and press ok to write your iso to a drive.

From there you just need to use the USB drive to install windows. I won't go into details here, but here are some resources if you don't know how to do it.

Boot your PC from a USB Drive

Install Windows 11 from USB Drive

If you had a licensed copy of Windows 10, Windows 11 will already be licensed. If you don't, then perhaps you can use some kind of... Activation Scripts for Microsoft software, that will allow you to activate them. Of course I cannot link such tools here. So there you go, now you can save a PC made from before 2018 from the landfill, and maybe give it to a deserving teen in the process. The more we can extend the lives of technology and keep it out of the trash, the better.

Additional note: This removes the requirement for having 4GB Minimum of RAM, but I think that requirement should honestly be higher. Windows 11 will be unusable slow on any system with below 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum I think you should have before trying this but it still really not enough for modern use outside of light web and office work. I wouldn't recommend trying this on anything with 4GB or less. I am honestly shocked they are still selling brand new Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of ram. If you're not sure how much RAM you have, you can find out in the performance tab of Task Manager in Windows, if you click the More Details icon on the bottom right. If you don't have enough, RAM for old systems is super cheap and widely available so it would definitely be worth upgrading if you have a ram starved machine you'd like to give a new life.

#Windows #Windows 11 #tech #tech advice #pc #TPM 2.0 #rufus #open source #open source software #technology #tech tips

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lakecountylibrary · 1 year ago

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A behind-the-scenes look...

Music credit:

Lord of the Land by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1400022

Video description and audio transcript continue under the cut:

[Description: A get ready with me video narrated by a library employee, comprised of several short scenes.

Narration: Get ready with me to open a local library. My day typically starts at 8:30 and first I turn on the lights. Simple, but essential in banishing the dark spirits from the stacks.

The narrator walks into the library and turns on the lights. Several shadowy figures disappear behind the shelves as the lights come up.

Narration: Next I head down to book up the computers. Libraries require a lot of data, so we always hack into a few government databases to provide top-tier reference work.

He logs into his computer and begins typing furiously, then turns to the camera with his hand on his chin and an intent look on his face.

Narration: After that, I tend to our Guardian Tree that protects the library from evil spirits like censorship and sentence fragments.

A shot of a tree in a large planter in the middle of the library.

Narration: It's been really into cozy mysteries lately, so we do our best to provide. Thank you, Tree Spirit!

The librarian lays out three cozy mysteries on the planter's rim, then bows to the tree with his hands pressed together.

Narration: Today's a bit special, since it's the monthly taming of the library bookworm. So I grab my Library of Congress blessed sword and my favorite cardigan - plus two to my AC - and head down to the dungeon.

The librarian reaches down to grab a sword and cardigan from under his desk. He shrugs on the cardigan then takes the sword into an elevator and walks through a basement hall lined with book boxes.

Narration: Down in the dungeon we've got lots of damaged items and overstocked James Patterson books to keep the worm sated. But sometimes extra care is needed. A well scourged dragon is the key to any good collection development policy. Thanks for hanging out. Tell us how your bookstore or library gets ready. Bye!

He pulls out the sword and prepares to leap into battle in a darkened room with a flowery, cheerful sign on the door reading Sorting Room. The video ends mid leap. /description]

#get ready with me #grwm #library life #public libraries #librarians #libraries #captioned video #described video #video #tumblarians #tumblrarians #fantasy #LCPL recs

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ashleyrowanthewriter · 1 year ago

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Porcelain Doll HRT Observation Report

Part I - WTO Foreword

The report is based on studies and observations performed by Dr. Pierre Oupée, Dr. Kotomi Abuki and Dr. Pirkko Osliini. The team studied 25 participants who underwent therapy including Dr. Osliini.

The therapy has been approved by the World Transhumanism Association, but every licensed physician administering the treatment has to report the course of therapy of at least 50% of patients for clarity of data. The therapy is to be submitted for reapproval once reports of at least 1000 patients are collected.

Part II - Recommended Psychological Evaluation

Before undergoing the therapy it is recommended to evaluate the patients psychologically. The evaluation should take three sessions, which should be performed in intervals of 14 days. The process of evaluation prioritises informed consent and letting the patient consider their decision.

The first session is focused on discussing the desired effects with the patient. During the second session the patient is to be explained about the effects of the therapy. During the third session the patient signs the informed consent file after which they can undergo an endocrinological evaluation and get prescribed the medications.

Part III - Required Medications

All medications are available in oral and epidermal form. It is important to note that the exact dosage differs from patient to patient.

Antihomogen (0,5-2 mg/week) - Humanity removal agent. Due to the anthropomorphic nature of the therapy it is important to keep the dosage low unless cross administering multiple therapies.

Antisomatotropin (10-17 mg/week) - Somatotropin halting agent.

Contostropin (13-22 mg/week) - Shrinking hormone. Due to the rate of influence the final dose should be taken when the patient reaches the height of 5-7 cm higher than desired. Further research is advised.

Tsichirone (17,5-32 mg/week) - Porcelanising agent.

Part IV - Course of Therapy

Phase 1 (onset on week 4-8) - Somatotropin in the patient’s body stops influencing it and constopropin causes it to start shrinking.

Phase 2 (onset on week 7-14) - Tsichirone starts turning the patient’s skin into soft porcelain. The effects of constotropine become amplified causing rapid decrease in height. The patient’s hair starts falling out. It is not understood what causes this effect, but it is observed that it doesn’t affect scalp hair. Further research is required.

Phase 3 (onset on week 20-30) - Tsichirone might cause the patient’s body to spontaneously freeze for a short time. The effect first affects small parts of the body such as single fingers to later spread to entire limbs and near the onset of phase 4 even the entire body. The patient’s scalp hair stops growing. It is not understood what causes this effect. Further research is required. The patient’s body hair falls out entirely midway through this phase. Tsichirone causes the patient’s skin to become more brittle. The patient’s hearing becomes more sensitive to high sounds. It is not understood what causes this effect. Further research is required.

Phase 4 (onset on week 40-56) - The patient’s body is completely turned into soft porcelain. While the patient retains muscle control for some time, tsichirone starts causing muscle atrophy and conversion of movable soft porcelain into immovable hard porcelain.

Phase 4A (10 weeks after the onset of phase 4) - The patient has to register in a surgery clinic licensed to perform dollification surgeries.

Phase 5 (onset on week 55-70) - Tsichirone causes complete conversion of soft porcelain into hard porcelain and complete muscle atrophy. The patient loses control over their body. Dollification surgeries become possible. The medication process is deemed completed.

Part V - Course of Surgeries

All the surgeries become possible after the patient reaches phase 5 of therapy.

Articuplasty involves cutting the patient’s body and shaping new joints out of kintsugine. The joints become integrated with the patient's body after two to three weeks of auxiliary tsichirone therapy after which the patient is to undergo physical rehabilitation. Articuplasty is to be performed on shoulder joints, elbows, wrists, finger joints, hips, knees and ankles. If the patient expresses such desire, articuplasty can also be performed on toe joints, neck and some regions of the torso. The patients are able to use their joints despite muscle atrophy.

Voice box transplantation is not necessary for transition, but if the patient wishes not to undergo it, it is advised they learn sign language. The surgery involves cutting a hole in the body region chosen by the patient, inserting an artificial voice box and sealing the hole using kintsugine. The seal gets healed after one to two weeks of auxiliary tsichirone therapy. Although the voice box can be transplanted to any part of the body that is big enough to store it, it is highly recommended to transplant it into the neck or the torso.

Some patients express a desire for their post-transition forms to possess winding keys. In such cases it is possible for them to undergo winding key transplantation. The transplantation consists of drilling a hole in the patient’s body, constructing a key rail out of kintsugine, inserting the key and sealing the rail. The key becomes integrated into the patient’s body after two to three weeks of auxiliary tsichirone therapy, during which it is absolutely necessary not to touch the key. Touching the key during the auxiliary therapy may result in damage which may render the key unusable or require repeating the surgery. Winding the key seems to have no effect on the patient's physical state. It is however understood to cause feelings of relaxation. Further research is required.

Some patients express a desire for their post-transition forms to possess movable eyelids. In such cases it is possible for them to undergo palpebraplasty. The surgery involves cutting the eyelid rails into the patient’s eye sockets and shaping the eyelids out of kintsugine. The eyelids become integrated with the patient’s body after four to eight days of auxiliary tsichirone therapy. To ensure proper shape of the eyelids they are to be shaped in the closed position.

Part VI - Reversibility

The effects of the therapy are currently understood to be irreversible once the patient’s body enters phase 4 of the transition process. Further research is required.

Part VII - Contraindications

The therapy is not to be administered to patients with calcium deficiency until the deficiency is treated.

To prevent damage to the organism the therapy is not to be administered to patients with brittle bone disease.

Patients with any health conditions causing muscle atrophy are to be thoroughly observed by their physician.

The physician has the right to alter or completely halt therapy if it poses danger to the patient’s life.

Part VIII - WTO Approval

The World Transhumanism Organisation approved the therapy on August 2nd 20XX.

*************

Sorry, but I like the otherkin HRT genre too much. And while it will feel weird to self-insert myself into such a story as a receiver (because it seems my disability prevents me from gender HRT IRL), I thought I could write some lore bits to contribute to the community. It might not even be the only report I decide to write.

Of course, feel free to base your own story on that report. I'd be excited to read it!

#otherkin hrt #therian hrt #furry hrt #doll hrt #dollposting #animal hrt

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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