#data reporting

[lexlawuk]

HMRC Cracking Down on Online Marketplace Sellers

Are you an online marketplace seller who has received a letter from HMRC? You’re not alone. HMRC is increasing its scrutiny of income generated through online platforms (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Argos, and ASOS) and has recently launched a campaign targeting individuals they suspect have been operating in the hidden economy by not declaring their earnings. We break down what’s happening and explain…

[jonah-miles-smith]

Unlocking Business Potential Through Data & Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide

In today's data-driven world, leveraging Data Analysis is essential for businesses to remain competitive. With the rise of Big Data, organizations have unprecedented access to vast amounts of information, but effectively harnessing this data requires advanced techniques and tools. This is where Data Science comes into play, utilizing sophisticated methods to extract actionable insights.

One of the core components of Business Intelligence (BI) is the ability to make informed decisions based on data. Machine Learning algorithms, a subset of AI, can predict future trends and behaviours by analysing historical data. Combining Data Visualization with these predictions allows businesses to present complex data in a more understandable and actionable format.

Predictive Analytics is particularly valuable for forecasting future outcomes based on current data trends. It involves analyzing patterns and using statistical techniques to predict future events, which is crucial for strategic planning and decision-making. Data Mining and Data Management also play significant roles here, as they help in uncovering patterns and ensuring data is organized and accessible.

Investing in Analytics Tools can streamline the process of analysing and interpreting data. From Data Warehousing solutions that store and manage large volumes of data-to-Data Analytics Software that provides advanced analytical capabilities, the right tools can make a significant difference in efficiency and accuracy.

Data Engineering supports these efforts by designing and maintaining systems that process and store data efficiently. Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence can enhance these systems by automating complex tasks and providing deeper insights through advanced algorithms.

A solid understanding of Statistical Analysis and Data Modelling is crucial for interpreting data accurately. These techniques help in making sense of the data and ensuring that insights are reliable and actionable. Data Governance ensures that data is used ethically and complies with relevant regulations, while Real-Time Analytics provides immediate insights that can influence quick decision-making.

Data Integration is another important aspect, as it involves combining data from various sources to create a unified view. Effective Data Reporting practices are essential for communicating insights to stakeholders clearly and effectively.

In summary, the synergy between Data Analysis, Business Intelligence, and cutting-edge technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can unlock significant value for businesses. By investing in the right Analytics Tools and adhering to best practices in Data Management and Governance, organizations can harness the full potential of their data and drive strategic growth.

[couplerio]

Pipedrive CRM template for Looker Studio (+ free template)

Analyze the key metrics of your sales department, drill down into particular deals, find the top performers, and stay on top of your Pipedrive sales.

[digital-marketing-insight]

Understanding data reporting: types, benefits, and examples

Working with analytics is often disliked by many due to historically boring data reports that require special skills for interpretation. Unfortunately, in the 2020s, a significant number of businesses still rely on suboptimal data reporting strategies. It’s essential to explore how data reporting can be done effectively to transform this into a benefit for companies.

The success of companies depends on collecting, tracking, and analyzing data, covering a wide range of information such as marketing campaigns, sales figures, team efficiency, key performance indicators, and various metrics. Data reports act as a heartbeat monitor for a business, indicating its overall health.

In this post, we will delve into the fundamentals of data reporting, exploring different types of reports and their business advantages. We will also discuss the significance of data visualization for better comprehension and decision-making.

Understanding Data Reporting

Historically, data handling was manual and time-consuming, needing more freshness of real-time updates. Modern reporting tools and analytics platforms automate and enhance reporting processes, providing well-formatted, real-time information. This allows decision-makers to draw conclusions and take prompt action.

Data reports can take various formats, including traditional reports with raw numbers, visualized data using graphs and charts, and enhanced solutions like intuitive dashboards.

Importance of Reporting

Despite the straightforward need for businesses to handle data analytics, challenges persist. Many employees are not “analytics-literate,” if reports are time-consuming to create or understand, it becomes a red flag for businesses. Outdated reporting methods, such as static PDFs and Excel spreadsheets, contribute to employee dissatisfaction and stress when working with data.

Effective reporting is crucial because it allows businesses to uncover insights, cut costs, and make informed decisions. Organizations can eliminate manual work and reduce errors by implementing automation and custom reporting solutions.

Benefits of Data Reporting

When modern tools and data analytics work together, businesses experience immediate tangible value. Proper data reporting offers several advantages:

Better Understanding of the Big Picture: Simple-to-use dashboards keep teams on track, making crucial information accessible to analytics specialists and regular users.

Not Missing Critical Insights: Real-time updates lower the chances of overlooking essential business discoveries, whether positive opportunities or negative trends.

Faster and Informed Decision-Making: Curated, well-presented data simplifies perception, enabling more precise decision-making based on accurate information.

Enhanced Budget Distribution and Planning: Data reports provide a comprehensive information view, helping allocate resources effectively and make informed budget decisions.

Plenty of Room for Customization: Data reports can be tailored to suit various objectives, enhancing usability and flexibility.

Data Reporting Methods

Data reports can be static or interactive, with auto-updating options for continuous access to fresh data. Common approaches for presenting data include:

Narrative Reporting: Verbal or written format, often used for market research or presenting conclusions.

Tabular Data Reporting: Organizing data in tables, commonly used for calculations, financial reports, or database information.

Statistical Data Reporting: Providing an overview of statistics and data analysis results using tables, graphs, text, and comparisons.

Graphical Reports: Focusing on visual elements with minimal text, using various charts, graphs, and other visualizations.

Dashboards: Interactive visual reports incorporating various data representation types for near-time or real-time data monitoring, facilitated by powerful tools for dashboard reporting.

Infographics: Mixing various data formats emphasizing visuals, usually static but visually appealing.

Types of Data Reports

Data reporting can take various forms, including overview reports, SEO reports, key performance indicator reports, customer reports, sales reports, status reports, financial reports, and research reports.

Tips for Reporting Data Effectively

Define the Report’s Purpose: Clearly identify each report’s aim to avoid complexity and ensure it serves its specific purpose.

Decide on the Metrics: Pin down relevant metrics, considering whether they can coexist in one report or need to be split for better evaluation.

Check the Data Sources: Ensure transparent data sources, merging methods, and data trustworthiness to obtain accurate results.

Organize the Data: Integrate data from multiple sources into a centralized system to avoid blind spots.

Consider the User: Make reports adjustable for different user roles and ensure accessibility from various devices for effective collaboration.

Mind Usability: Simplify reports with clear layouts, colors, and element placement, enhancing data relevance and usability.

Check Data Accuracy: Prioritize the quality and accuracy of displayed information, avoiding duplicates, outdated data, and inconsistencies.

Closing Remarks on Data Reports

In a constantly changing market, businesses must stay up-to-date with the latest and most relevant data. When approached thoughtfully, flexible and modern data analysis reports offer a comprehensive view, allowing companies to make informed decisions and stay competitive in the long run. 

[bluerosefox]

A Fair Warning

It was only a matter of time, and a long awaited and well deserved comeuppance, when Joker tried to hurt the wrong person or people.

Not everyone was going to play his games like 'Batsy' does. Not everyone will hesitate or let him live should he put his hands on someone to hurt them. Not everyone will believe Arkham could 'fix' him, he just needed more time and help.

No.

This time Joker bit off more than he could chew when he kidnapped the newly hired Arkham psychiatrist Jasmine Fenton (and he had plans, so many plans, for her. With her mixture of Harley's mind and her looks matching Gordon's daughter would sure to cause some chaos and pain in memories) and the girl's visiting sister Danielle 'Ellie' (and did he laugh when he noticed the 'Wayne' adoptive looks the girl had, on the fun he'll have, maybe he'll beat her the way he beat the second Robin just for funzie's, it'll no doubt upset Batman) from Jasmine's apartment.

He had plans to keep the Bats guessing where he was and by the time they reach him it'll be far to late for them to save either of the two girls, he had just sent the little video he taped to the Bats and the police to get the ball rolling...

So...

So why did a shiver run down his spine for the first time in years when they both looked unafraid (it was their eyes that made him shiver, a look of already dead yet somehow alive, something he never seen before. He's seen the light fade from people's eyes before yes, he's even laughed as he watch people desperately cling onto life only for it to fade into nothing as they took a final breath but never have he seen someone, something alive yet dead at the same time before. It, their eyes, held a natural yet unnatural sense as they stared at him, stared at everything that made him Joker and it unnerved him), honestly they looked very bored, and one of them (the youngest of the two, and the one with more of the look of death than life in their eyes) said with a chill tune in their tone.

"Last chance to back out of this Freakshows Reject. You wont like what'll be waiting for you."

The tone alone was enough to send another bone deep chill down Joker's spine.

But instead of listening to his natural instincts, the deep inkling of run blaring at him, Joker merely placed a grin on his face, ignoring the strain he felt from doing so, and said as nastily as he could in order to scare the two girls (BOTH OF THEM STILL LOOKED BORED WITH HIM?!?! Not even a twitch of fear!)

"OH? And pray tell what is awaiting little ol' me hum?"

His mocking question got a wide feral grin from the smaller girl, a grin with sharp teeth and iris eyes beginning to bleed slowly from sky blue to neon green with each second he stared at her and he barely stopped himself from jumping in his spot when Jasmine answered his question.

"Your end."

-x-x-

By the time the Bats get to the warehouse Joker had taken Dr. Jasmine 'Jazz' Fenton and Danielle 'Ellie' Fenton they were prepared for anything and everything to go wrong. As much as they held the tiniest bit of hope that the two young women were still okay they knew better than to really do, this was the Joker that had them after all.

They had manged to narrow down his location much quicker than normal when they gotten Joker's first video and his little 'game' he was setting the Bats on, most locations he gave them were going to be red herrings or traps to keep them busy and it would had worked. Batman and the others would had been searching for hours for even a hint of the clue of where the Joker and his hostages were actually being kept.

It was nearly, not really, a shame all of Joker's plans went to waste when Red Hood had stumbled onto something when scooping out Jasmine's apartment with Red Robin.

You see, not only were they looking for clues at first but something about the apartment Jasmine rented seemed off, Red Robin noticed it first and called in back up encase there was more to oldest Fenton than what they could dig up (oldest daughter of Dr's. Jackson and Madeline Fenton, grew up in a small Illinois town, straight A student and a goal to become a psychologist, has two younger siblings, etc etc) and their suspension raised up more when the moment Red Hood entered the apartment and seemed to freeze for a moment.

Red Hood couldn't really explain it but he said it felt like something was... strange. Not evil bad danger strange but it felt familiar? Like he was a kid again on the streets and had walked into someone else's territory but knew the person wouldn't be too much of a hardass about it as long as he didn't stur up trouble or disrespect. A kind of... as long as you don't fuck around you won't find out feeling.

It was because of this feeling that Jason had manged to stumble across something in the room, his instincts telling him there was more to it, and they had discovered a clunky old custom PDA hidden away in a false floorboard in the office room. Thankfully Red Robin, was there in person because the old thing apparently had a rather ingenious firewall to keep others (aka Hackers) OUT but it did nothing against someone who held the main thing.

But still it took Red Robin almost frying the damn thing to get to open up, turns out the ghost and star stickers on the PDA was a rather large hint of the pass code. Once Red Robin was in the PDA he noticed some rather interesting files, one of them labeled "Gremlin Tracking" with a tiny green blob with red eyes and a green outlined star as the icons.

Curiosity taking a hold on the most curious of the Bats he opened it up, hoping it would need another password, and watched as the screen split into two maps, one was... strange, there was no land marks or anything but the star icon seemed to be right in the middle of wherever it was and the only hint of anything was the name "baby brother" and the map labeled as IR.

The other one showed an above map of Gotham, before zooming into the city, heading towards some abandoned warehouses Red Robin knew of and stopped right at one. This was the green blob icon, the short abbreviation for Gotham in the corner of the map, and the name for the icon was 'baby sister'

Red Robin immediately got onto coms to tell the others of what apparently was a tracker for Jasmine's younger siblings. Some questioned why the young woman had trackers on her siblings, though some of the others snarked back that "oh didn't know keeping trackers on each other wasn't normal. Mind if I loose the one you got on me than?"

After a quick sweep into the warehouses camera feeds, the very few up that could be accessed, done by Oracle they quickly discovered that yes the tracking on the younger girl of the two, Danielle Fenton, was correct and that was where they and Joker were at.

Despite this, Batman decided that in order to make sure Joker didn't have suspicion that they already know his actual location he made sure to send a few of the others to the fake locations.

So here they were now, staking out the warehouse where they could see a few of the Jokers goons walking around and looking for a way into the building without alerting any of them. As they talked low into coms, Robin mentioning a possible way in for Red Robin by how small it was, Red Robin hissing back a "just because you got a growth spurt doesn't mean you can poke fun at my height you little-"

"Wait!" Red Hood suddenly hissed shouted, his tone startling the rest of them and they all turned their heads to him. Batman made a quick and harsh grunt as a way to say "report."

Under his helmet Jason's eyes were wide and wild. He could feel something, something huge was on the rise, like something was out of sight but the energy of it was felt.

And if Jason could feel it from his spot, the Jokers goons all felt the same thing from the way they all dropped their weapons, turned toward the warehouse and looked ready to bolt like scared animals.

Jason opened his mouth to explain but fell silent when the feeling suddenly popped. Whatever was causing the feeling was here and like the calm before the storm he could only watch as the first drop of rain fall.

The next thing they know, was the noise and the screaming.

It was inhuman, a mixture of noise and sounds to hard to explain. The closest they could explain was a thousand voices coming in all at once mixing with radio static that kept changing volume so only few words could be even hinted at, and the angry cawing of crows along with the flapping of their wings as they took flight. The noise was so bad that many who heard it nearly ripped their coms out, or covered their ears. Thankfully it only lasted a few seconds.

Then, the air itself shifted. It felt like the coldest of winter nights and bone chilling shivers ran down their bodies for a moment. The air was suddenly that sharp cold that hurt to breathe sometimes.

The goons surrounding the warehouse fled in fear. Many scrambling to get far, far away from whatever was happening. If they felt even a fraction of what Jason could feel, he could understand. He honestly felt like a small animal cornered by a predator and there was no escape.

Then just as suddenly as it happened, everything shifted again. The noise of Gotham returned to normal, cars honking, a stray cat hissing or a dog barking, police sirens in the distance, hissing steam from a nearby factory. The air went from winter cold to a chill mid winter harbor feel now.

Once everyone registered what had just happened and not wanting to waste anymore time they bolted towards the warehouse, cautious and alert in case they needed to fight. Batman went in first, quickly making his way to the area he knew Joker would be with the Fenton sisters and wondered just what the fuck was that? Did Joker do something? Was he messing with things outside of his usual MO?!

He walked into the room and stopped.

There was nothing.

The room was in fact the room Joker had used to record his first message to them, the layout was correct and the evidence of two people who had been tied up were still there as well, ropes that weren't cut sitting on them, a lone lamp light above shining down from above no doubt to emphasize the two girls were meant to be the 'stars' of Jokers latest show. Thing was, the two weren't there despite the fact Oracle swore she could see them a few mins ago from a camera set up in the room, she would later explain that she heard the noise as well and that all her tech had glitched hard.

The only other thing in the room was, sitting innocently on one of the chairs was a green sticky note and on a tiny pillow was a tiny sickly green orb with hints of purple, white, and red swirling in it.

A note they would later read the following message written on it after carefully examining it over.

'Joker learned not to touch what is mine to protect. Sorry not sorry, but hey one less killer clown and he was warned not my fault he didn't take it seriously... The massive amount of souls wanting to rip apart the Joker's soul into nothing was quite a sight to be honest.

They were so ruthless. Best not mess with the vengeful dead am I right?

PS. I left a tiny gift for Jason Todd aka Robin Two. It's the tiniest piece of Joker's soul left over after everyone else got done. He can finish it off since he's a reverent and all, and well they need their revenge filled in order to peacefully move on later or else they'll be stuck forever in a loop of madness and revenge. So yeah. Hope he likes the gift.'

D.P.'

It took Jason less than a second after those words were spoken out to reach for the orb, ignoring the cautious and alarmed cries of the others, and could feel deep, deep, deep in his own soul the absolute pure weeping joy as he threw the orb onto the floor, the bottom shattering thus it didn't roll away and stomped hard with his reinforced boots. Crushing the broken orb into more pieces and if one listened closely they could hear the pure screaming terror that came from it.

And Jason for the first time in years felt his rage finally leave him.

[generallydispleased]

So I've been looking into rosquez, and the only excuse vale has for acting the way he did is a theory?? When his fans defend him they cite the fact that he said he looked at data that proved that Marc was sabotaging him? And we've never seen this data at all. In fact Marc had multiple times overtook Lorenzo during that season. It's just insane to me

[gwydionmisha]

Trump's War on The Environment Continues

[a-dagger-named-fluffy]

Every time I watch 3x08 and Ray pulls out the fbi timesheet I giggle

The amount of detail in Dex’s entry compared to the others he’s so pedantic thorough

[trans-axolotl]

"While 988 represents a significant expansion of crisis care, it also represents an expansion of location tracking capabilities and nonconsensual practices in social support services. 988 policymakers have adopted and defended the practice of nonconsensual intervention, disregarding the voices of hotline users, psychiatric survivors, human rights organizations, and crisis care experts who condemn the practice. In addition to defending non-consensual intervention, 988 administrators have advocated to increase the surveillance of hotline users, asking the federal government to grant the Lifeline unprecedented location tracking capabilities. Simultaneously, the Lifeline has avoided calls for transparency and maintained secrecy around the number of non-consensual interventions their hotlines are initiating and the negative consequences that helpseekers have faced as a result. Undeterred by the contradiction of the life-threatening harms that can be caused by non-consensual interventions, 988 officials continue to make claims that the use of these interventions allows them to better achieve their goal of providing “life-saving services.”

Since its creation, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline has increased its reach to the U.S. public through a national marketing campaign. In this campaign, 988 regularly advertises itself as a “private” and “confidential” resource for people in crisis, offering a safe space to discuss one's struggles. Not included in this advertising is any disclosure about the possibility of emergency interventions, which can include law enforcement, and in particular that such interventions can occur without a helpseeker’s knowledge or consent. In spite of efforts by advocates and survivors of non-consensual intervention, 988 officials have continued to obscure the policies and practices that render their advertising misleading and dishonest. This lack of transparency has meant that the public is largely unaware of the potential negative consequences of calling 988. Despite good intentions in its design, in reality, 988 has created another pipeline for people experiencing crisis to come into contact with potentially unwanted and unhelpful interventions. These interventions can ultimately harm, traumatize, and discourage people from reaching out for help."

-The Problem With 988: How America's Largest Hotline Violates Consent, Compromises Safety, and Fails the People. Safe Hotlines Report, 2024.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[couplerio]

Facebook Ads dashboard (free template below)

Derive valuable insights on the performance of your advertising campaigns with the help of our ready-to-go #FacebookAdsDashboard template built in #LookerStudio. Get instant access to essential ad performance metrics and evaluate campaign effectiveness in real-time to be able to make decisions driven by data. Think of the Facebook Ads reporting dashboard as an effective assistant to declutter your ad analytics, which you can effortlessly integrate into your reporting workflow.

[sketchbot9000]

Footage from the Gravitational Anomy Incident is unrecoverable, and all hard copies must be destroyed to avoid investigation interference.

[m0ose-idiot]

Curious whether there really was more of our favourite headless Tudor in season 5? Wonder no more, the data scientists are here! 👻🤍

[sugarphoric]

cant sleep so i’m listening to zaynes secret times: sleep science (affinity 105) and i genuinely got whiplash from realizing that i actually love this man so much he’s actually so fucking hilarious (spoilers under cut but really it’s just me babbling on and on)

he goes let’s go back to counting sheep but instead, change it up with something sleep inducing.. and i’m like oh what. he goes REPORTS I ACRUALLY FUCKING SNORTED i genuinely couldn’t stop fucking laughing i was like wide awake at that point- THEN to top it off he sets the scene for us explaining what the reports look like and how extremely boring they are then literally counts all the way to 100 reports 😭😭😭 this man is genuinely the funniest person ever i’m still laughing but not to mention so love ridden he literally counted each number putting “report” at the end just so his girl can fall asleep 😞🙏

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

does your First have any baggage about being referred to as the first user of one for all/the legacy that left with regards to like. The friend of his that his brother took the quirk from before murdering her in front of him. He seems like he would have so much baggage but also given the amount of repression and secrecy he’s got going on, i’m guessing none of the other users bar his husband and maybe third have any idea about the quirk’s origins

(btw love your aus so much!!! i am frothing at the bit for any info for every single one; your mind and the storylines you create fascinate me beyond measure.)

First has more baggage than the turnstile at the airport.

He thinks about his friend a lot. He doesn’t talk about her.

Second knows about her. Second knows about most things. He’s the only one who knows how exactly First ended up in the Vault.

Third knows a little. This is because when the resistance was trying to find out what First knew about his brother’s operation, they showed him his own goddamn wanted poster from his My Life As A Teenage Unabomber phase. Oh yeah throw back to when he was a “wanted terrorist.”

Apparently, from everyone else’s perspective, there was some guy and some girl ten years back who made a bit of a name for themselves. Everyone thought they must have had some kind of intel no one else did about all for one, because they hit places that no one even knew all for one was involved in yet. Not exactly the same style as the resistance—they exclusively did quick and dirty pipe bomb attacks—but they were weirdly precise in targets. Like, they got a manhunt after them a while ago after they pulled off a hit in one of the wards that still liked to pretend at society. A bit authoritarian, but given the chaos of the rest of the Japan, it was almost welcomed. They had introduced mandatory medical examinations for everyone. Swore up and down it was just to prevent accidents when meta abilities manifested. People had been disappearing in this ward, meta and non meta alike, but that was true everywhere now. And then a bomb went off in the office of a respected clinic, and some of the first responders saw their missing neighbors dead in the files when they rushed in, and also there was suddenly records flittering from the fucking sky—

It turned into a riot and a lynch mob. Not exactly a nice place to life after. Less orderly. Hanging political leaders in the city square gets so tetchy. But the experiments stopped, at least in that lab. It wasn’t until years after that that the resistance to realize all for one had set up the lab. Apparently he had anti-meta figureheads in the game and pro-meta figureheads. Like a third of the factions claiming to be Japan’s government and fighting each other for control was just. All for One fighting himself. He was just increasing the chaos and strain so people would eventually fight him less when he returned order at the cost of their freedom. And these guys seemed to know it before anyone. They disappeared a while ago, and the resistance always assumed all for one caught and killed them, but if first could confirm—

Why is he laughing.

It was just so goddamn funny. His secret intel was being physically locked in his brother’s central command center before the vault. He thought his brother missed that, sometimes. It was more convenient for him. If he wanted access to First, he could just go right down the hall. But in the end, that convenience was trumped by the assurance of the vault. It took longer to get to First, but All for One always was sure he’d still be there.

First’s relationship with the resistance was a little rocky originally. He made a lot of people nervous. His brother was threatening brutal death to all of them for this, and a lot of them suspected that First was really just… bait. A spy they had voluntarily brought into their organization. Here’s something to rescue—don’t suspect him of being on all for one’s side now. He was just. A big risk. His chronic need to fuck off didn’t help. But he passed the initial polygraph and their literal leader thought he was legit for some reason, so he was given leeway, but a lot of people were on edge with him at first. So he gets a lecture about laughing at people who his brother had more likely than not murdered

Second, squinting at the picture: this is a picture of you isn’t it

Yeah uh. Still curious as to what happened to that guy? Or did they piece it together themselves.

They’ve got it. What about her?

Oh.

Her, all for one killed.

Third just knew he had a partner in crime for a bit that his brother killed. First confessed to him, once, on one of the few times that he got drunk with Third, that the Quirk his brother had forced on him was really hers, and he hated it so goddamn much. He tried to dig it out from beneath his skin when his brother made him take it, but he just ended up strapped to that dumb fucking medical cot for for his trouble. He thought pain was supposed to get easier with time. It’s been ten years now and all he’s done is forgotten what she looked like. He’s just got these shitty fucking wanted posters that were missing most of her face and enough regret to drown in. The only reason why he knows grief can’t kill you is because he would have managed it by now.

He never talked about what she was like in life, really, or ever again. First didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t like to talk about a lot of things.

He went looking for her when he found himself in One for All. He could never find her, or her memories, and he eventually accepted she wasn’t in there. He’s not sure why. Maybe it wasn’t strong enough when she had it to make a copy of her. Maybe when it combined with his quirk it reset it, somehow. His and her quirk had just blended in a way the others hadn’t. Every user could access stockpile and transference, after all. But their own quirks didn’t pass down to each user. So maybe when his fused with hers they made something new and wiped out the old. Maybe he killed her a second time.

He didn’t talk about her with the Past Users. It’s not exactly that he didn’t like or trust them. Trusting them (at least more than the average person) was actually a kind of easy decision—it’s really hard to sell him out to his brother when they’re already fucking dead.

Her memory is so tangled up in so many of the worst moments of his life that he struggles to talk about it. Like, completely independent of trust issues, he just doesn’t like to tell people things. He doesn’t like how they look at him after. He doesn’t like how it dredges up all the old mess and feelings in his head. He’s not sure if it’s a side effect of one for all’s stockpiling or if he’s just never gotten over a goddamn thing in his life, but the emotions all feel just as fresh as they did two hundred years ago. He’d rather just. Not think about it.

Especially with how he doesn’t even feel like the same person as he was with her.

It was the last time in his life that he was really young. He never had a real childhood, but they were sort of babies when they were off trying amateur terrorism. He was seventeen when he ran from his brother the first time. He thinks he was maybe just barely eighteen when he met her. She was older, but not by a lot, and she’d gotten an actual childhood.

He wasn’t. He was fucked up when he was with her but he wasn’t fucked up the way he is now. He told her things. Telling people things didn’t feel like handing them a knife the way it does now.

They were a couple of kids just… pretending they could handle anything they were up to. She especially had a very young belief in the idea that they’d somehow make it through. She took First to his brother thinking he’d save First, and then she’d find a way to steal First back from him, and then this wouldn’t just end with her all alone and him gone. She never even considered it’d turn out the other way around.

First already sort of figured he’d gotten stuck with the casting call for a tragedy when he was born. He wishes he’d told her that. Maybe she’d have let this end the right way around then.

It sort of fucking hurts to look at Class 1-A sometimes. They carry on the way First used to with her. She was basically still a high school student when he knew her. She never even finished her last year. And they just acted so goddamn young together. And how Nine’s entire class have banded together to save him with this stupid, innocent, young assurance that the hero always won and their story would have a happy ending—

He thinks about her a lot when he’s at the school.

The Past Users find out a little bit about her. When they start using Shinsou’s quirk to work on getting Izuku back, the users also try to get dream connection working. It’s easier now, almost as if Shinsou showed them all a path hidden in the underbrush, but First ends up slipping a lot when he’s dreaming. No one had really expected that. He was always the best at not, is the thing. But he doesn’t remember that, and also he’s never tried to navigate one for all from the outside. So he slips and they have to scramble to find him.

Sixth ends up finding him in a memory of her, and his attempts at pulling First out accidentally slip him into a memory of her death. Sixth follows and sees it. It isn’t pleasant.

[barksbog]

Salamandra s. salamandra - Dunkelsteinerwald NÖ Austria

we saw three!! different fire salamanders on our morning walk