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#09/14/2022
alligator-dreaming · 6 months
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09-14-2022
I had a dream that I went to Waffle House with my friends and got the chicken and waffles
I woke up before I could eat them
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Tesla's Dieselgate
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Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband
The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us
Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:
https://elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat
Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles
That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/
That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50
But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html
All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.
This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.
When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.
Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
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This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
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Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]
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Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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5sospenguinqueen · 5 months
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Bedtime Stories | Daniel Ricciardo x Author! Reader
Summary: For the past six years, you've been dreaming of a future with Daniel. Until one silly little interview shatters every illusion.
Warnings: Swearing. Angst. Baby fever. End of a relationship. Daniel bashing.
Female reader with various faceclaims. Takes place in the 2022 season.
Main Masterlist
next.
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User 2 no, it's not an announcement. her best friend is currently pregnant and she was gushing about looking forward to aunty duties
User 3 omg her and daniel would make the cutest babies though
→ User 4 i bet she can't wait until they have their own mini-me
User 5 imagine our rom-com queen going from writing the cutest but filthiest fiction imaginable to writing about why you should eat your carrots
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22•05•22
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User 6 i can't believe this man was talking about being in the height of his career when he's been nothing but a flop since leaving red bull
User 7 the way he's been stringing this poor woman along for 6 years, knowing how badly she wants children, to then decide in a random interview that he's never going to have kids because they would be a 'distraction'
User 8 fans spotted y/n running from the pits once she saw that daniel was safely done with racing
User 9 i fear we may be witnessing the downfall of something we once held sacred
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16•06•22
fallontonight just posted
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liked by YourUserName, kellypiquet and others
fallontonight did you know @ YourUser Name was once chased by a kangaroo? find out how in tonight's episode of The Tonight Show 📚🦘
4,477 comments
YourUserName thanks for having me! ✨
User 11 excuse me, ma’am, reassess what
User 12 daniel has been absent from her last 3 posts
→ User 1 not even in the likes or comments
→ User 2 and he didn't even congratulate her on the recent book launch
→ User 3 ya’ll are reaching. he's busy racing. she's busy doing book promo. they still follow each other
User 4 anyone notice she didn't look as happy as she usually does
→ User 5 yes! and i swear she got teary when talking about her life plans 🥺
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YourUserName just posted
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liked by maxverstappen1, mclaren and others
YourUserName my happy place 🌊🐚🦀 Aug '22
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User 6 does this mean a new book is coming soon
→ User 7 girl, we’ve just had one. let the woman rest
→ YourUserName sorry, my lovelies but i don’t think i'm in the right headspace to being right a romance novel at this time
→ User 6 confirmation??!?!
→ User 7 we’re children of divorce
→ User 8 honestly fuck those two because i couldn’t have cared less about vroom vroom boys until mother started dating one and now i'm crying in class ‘cause they’re over
landonorris get that bread, queen 🍞
→ YourUserName who let you out of daycare
→ User 9 not y/n and lando interacting like she didn’t break his teammates heart
→ User 10 more like his teammate broke y/n’s heart. let's not make daniel out to be the victim here
kellypiquet p said get writing those children’s books so she can brag about aunty y/n to her friends
→ YourUserName my sweet girl. i saw the cutest dress the other day for her so I’ll pop round soon x
→ User 11 i love their friendship
→ User 12 get this woman a child. She’s too sweet to be stuck in cool aunt mode forever
User 13 anyone notice she didn't do her annual birthday post for daniel?
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04•09•22
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User 14 no because the interviewer was so real for that. checo has a few children and he’s currently 2nd best. max is nowhere to be seen on the grid he's that far ahead and he makes sure p is his priority when she’s there so???
→ User 15 and the way he stormed out. i bet PR are sooo happy with him
User 16 nah because mclaren recently announced that they’re not extending his contract so he currently doesn't have his seat and doesn't have his y/n, all because he thought he was better than that
YourUserName posted a new story
danielricciardo posted a new story
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danielricciardo just posted
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liked by landonorris, estebanocon and others
danielricciardo yesterday was something. p17 wasn't the result we were expecting, and the media were a challenge but it's always a delight to be in Suzuka. Moving on to the Americas
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User 1 maybe if y/n was there, you wouldn't have done so badly
User 2 maybe if he had a baby waiting in the paddock he would’ve had more incentive to do better
mclaren we’ll get them next time 💪
User 3 letting mclaren and lando down
→ User 4 the real reason he and y/n broke up is because he has no wins. she should move onto lando or something
→ User 5 he’s way too young for her
→ User 4 they'd make a good looking couple tho
(comments have been disabled for this post)
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19•10•22
YourUserName just posted
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liked by charles_leclerc, bloomsburypublishing and others
YourUserName thirty, flirty and thriving. please enjoy a small snippet of my 30th birthday, organised by my favourite girl. these are the nice moments before she plies me full of cocktails and i become the sloppiest person in monaco tagged: kellypiquet
kellypiquet any chance to celebrate you 🤍🤍
→ kellypiquet and an even better chance to drink the entire bar and force max to carry us home
→ maxverstappen1 i'm just glad i was able to pull you both out of the sea before you drowned
landonorris can't believe you tried (and failed) to stop us from gatecrashing
→ YourUserName it was an exclusive event, we don't let randos in
→ landonorris i know you're joking but it still hurts my feelings
maxverstappen1 happy birthday, sloppy. you don't look a day over 40
→ YourUserName i'm gonna let that slide but only because i love the bag that kelly told you to buy
User 7 happy birthday to the best author
User 8 happy birthday queen
carlossainz55 happy birthday, y/n 💐
liked by YourUserName
danielricciardo happy birthday x
User 5 kelly and y/n look like the funnest people to hang out with
→ User 6 literally need to know how to become part of their duo
lewishamilton happy birthday, y/n. have a lovely night 💕
liked by YourUserName
mclaren happy birthday to papaya's favourite author (we're still waiting for a racing rom-com that is quite clearly about your favourite f1 team and their super sexy admin) 🥳🥳
liked by YourUserName
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This is going to be part of a Baby Fever Angst series with the other drivers. So, multiple drivers are going to have an smau like this.
Max’s Version | Lando’s Version | Lance’s Version
Charles’ Version | Oscar’s Version
I do have Part 2s planned if people want them but also happy to leave it like this :)
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skrubu · 2 years
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Test/play #experiment #analoguephotography #darkroom #karis #karjaa #västranylandsfolkhögskola #vnf #finland https://instagr.am/p/CmI6o4vtUSK/
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fernand0 · 2 years
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Cuando hay poca luz. 
(2022-11-14) (2022-09-13) (2022-11-14) (2022-11-14) (2022-11-14)
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View On WordPress
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verstarppen · 1 year
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IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY MASTERLIST
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: ̗̀°•*⁀☆ SUMMARY: there is little time between fast cars and spaceships but you make it work; lando norris never paid attention to the stupid sci-fi shows daniel used to watch, until he met you.
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•*⁀☆ PAIRING: lando norris x fem! star wars actress! reader
╰≫ NOTE: the reader has no face claim. pictures haven't been used to represent the reader's appearance, but within the context of the story she is famous and therefore a well known public figure.
๋࣭ ⭑⁀☆ STATUS: ongoing
⋆。‧⁀☆ UPDATES: 22:00 GMT (UTC+0 UK), 09:00 AEDT (UTC+11 AUSTRALIA), 23:00 CET (UTC+1 GERMANY, FRANCE, ITALY), 00:00 EET (UTC +2 GREECE), 07:00 JST (UTC +9 JAPAN), 17:00 EST (UTC -5 AMERICA), 14:00 PST (UTC +8 CANADA), 03:30 IST (UTC +5:30)
・゚:⁀☆ TAGS: fluff, celebrity nerds in love, f1 2022 and 2023, light angst, way too much star wars lore, surprise pregnancy, no beta reader we die like oscar and danny's sanity, kotor movie bc i said so, ahsoka pr team needs to pay for this smau btw
‧₊˚⁀☆ A/N: stuck between a rock (f1 brainrot) and a hard place (star wars brainrot)
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[ episode i ] - 11/09/2023
[ episode ii ] - 12/09/2023
[ episode iii ] - 14/09/2023
[ episode iv ] - 15/09/2023
[ episode v ] - 18/09/2023
[ episode vi ] - 26/09/2023
[ episode vii ] - 7/10/2023
[ episode viii ] - 8/11/2023
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[ episode ix ] - 24/11/2023
[ episode x ] - 4/12/2023
[ episode xi ] - 7/3/2024
[ episode xii ] - 16/3/2024
[ episode xiii ] -
[ episode xiv ] -
[ episode xv ] -
[ episode xvi ] -
loading...
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mft-toyama · 2 years
Link
Started with a landscape in #midjourney. Used a depth map in @sidefx #houdini to create a scene mesh. Imported to #UnrealEngine5 @UnrealEngine to add grass and animate. Added music. Breakdown thread 1/8 #aiartprocess #MachineLearning #deeplearning #aiartcommunity #genart #aiia https://t.co/r9iJWpL9ut
— CoffeeVectors (@CoffeeVectors) Oct 14, 2022
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merokado · 4 months
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CHRONICALLY ONLINE!
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hey, you've reached suna. leave a message at the beep.
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after a week straight of being holed up in the dorm working on your finals, with an annoyingly noisy next-door neighbor at that, you're finally out at a party. with the stress of piling assignments, deadly deadlines, and an infuriating neighbor who you've endlessly tried to confront but somehow have never seen the face of — it was time to get drunk. usually, the more alcohol you drink, the more single you feel; you're blackout drunk. now flirting with the guy you've been eyeing the whole night, everything's going well. but why does his voice sound so familiar?
pairing: suna rintarou x f!reader
status: ongoing (started may 31, 2024)
genre: 18+ romance, smau + written
tags: social media au, college au, strangers to lovers, neighbors to lovers (???), crack, fluff, angst, smut if i feel like it
warnings: swearing, alcohol, drug use (marijuana), suggestive and sexual themes
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taglist is open! comment to be tagged :)
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profiles:
art students (and atsumu) | Freaky Singles Looking For Love (18+)
teasers:
semi's gig | where's bo taking us this time?
the setup.
01. hashtag pregame
02. a breath of fresh...vodka
03. that was me last night?
04. regrets, regrets, and more regrets
05. a user wants to send you a message
06. that was you the other night?
07.
08.
09.
10.
the confrontation.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
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☆ mera's mail ! hey divas this is my first actual smau (but i've always wanted to make one lol!) i've regressed into my 2020-2022 haikyuu phase and i've been trying to look for smaus to no avail ... so i decided to make my own instead because i'm self-indulgent like that. ALSO the cover photo for this took me an egregious amount of time because i had to start over so i hope y'all like it. recommend some series' you think i'd enjoy! you can send me questions, suggestions, etc. in my ask too. i am also very open to moots mwahahah
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elicatkin · 2 years
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enigma2meagain · 2 years
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🚨🚨 URGENT! Congress trying to pass anti-LGBT bill under the guise of “child safety”!
UPDATE 09/05/2023:
Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of her bigotry
So Marsha Blackburn, in her infinite wisdom, decided to admit in an interview with the bigoted Family Policy Alliance that the Kids Online Safety Act is a GIANT anti-transgender bill (or at the least, it’s so poorly written that it makes targeting transgender people easier). Naturally, after this blunder, she and Blumenthal are trying to do damage control. But WE have the videos, and people’s responses to this open confession in the links below:
Alejandro Caraballo’s Tweet with the Video.
Erin Reed’s followup article
Attempts at damage control commented on by Ari Drennen
PinkNews’ article about it.
Beacon Broadside Article
Mashable Article
So with all that in mind, please make way to the Bad Internet Bills website to tell your Senators that you STRONGLY advise them to drop their support/refuse to support this awful bill in light of this, or that their re-election chances will drop considerably.
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UPDATE 02/14/2023: Richard Blumenthal is a lying snake who’s trying to get both KOSA and EARN IT Act back into law.
He persistently continues to ignore all of the backlash against these bills, the criticisms and highlighting the serious flaws of the bill by numerous human rights and LGBTQ organizations, and it’s telling that there seems to be no one who opposed the bill at the hearings today.
Fortunately, there are those are speaking up against it, such as Evan Greer from Fight For The Future.
Keep your eyes and ears open. We will be hearing more about these bills as time goes on.
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UPDATE 01/30/2023: Well, Chuck Schumer has chosen to backstab human rights and pro- LGBTQ communities, as well as the internet by trying to fast-track KOSA. The time table is as follows:
REINTRODUCTION OF THE BILL IN FEBRUARY
HOLDING MARKUPS IN MARCH
And holding a floor vote in JUNE
https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1620088145554579456
KEEP IN MIND, this was the man who blocked legitimately good anti-Big Tech bills like AICOA on the pretense they would be “too much”, but was perfectly fine with the travesty of KOSA.
This man is in Big Tech’s pockets, because only they can afford to pay the fines that such a restrictive pro-censorship bill would enforce. The only people this bill helps are the exact people it claims to stop, while LGBTQ people have to pay the price for the greed of the corrupt congressmen and women.
All of the relevant links are still below, but I will be updated this as we go.
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UPDATE 01/17/2023: Nothing has happened yet, but there have been rumblings of our “favorite” Senator Blumenthal talking about trying to push KOSA in again. I’ll mostly be keeping an eye on things for now, and you guys should too on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and news outlets.
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UPDATE 12/20/2022: KOSA BILL HAS NOT BEEN INCLUDED IN THE FINAL OMNIBUS BILL! WE DID IT!
https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1605261800479547392
That being said, this is very much a reprieve, since Blumenthal and Blackburn, and their cohorts have made it clear they intend to get this bill back into Congress next year. But WE DID IT. We managed to get this bill stopped from being added in the omnibus bill.
I want to thank all of you who helped to reblog this post, signed the various petitions and the open letter, and especially if you went and called your Senators. Without your effort, this might have turned out VERY differently!
Thank you all, and I hope the rest of this year is a pleasant one!
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So, this is a particularly long post, but it’s an absolutely IMPORTANT ONE. PLEASE REBLOG! LIKING IS USELESS!
UPDATE 12/14/2022: Two weeks ago, 90+ human rights, LGBT, and tech orgs signed onto an open letter telling Senators NOT to pass this bill. in response, over 230 orgs led by the American Psychological Association signed a letter urging senators to push this bill forward.
An updated version of the bill has been pushed forward by Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn, who claim to have changed the bill in response to feedback, but insight by the likes of Evan Greer and Ari Cohn have made it clear that the changes are superficial at best, and arguably fail to properly address the problems of the original bill.
https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1603139423071309825
We got blindsided by this, and we REALLY need your help!
Further explanation HERE: https://www.tumblr.com/fullhalalalchemist/703545300138262528/urgent
POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. about your opposition to this! The more voices speaking out the better, and we can’t do this alone!
The Hashtags are:
#KOSA
 #STOPKOSA
 #KidsOnlineSafetyAct
“Kids Online Safety Act” (no hashtag and quotes, just the regular words)
And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).
ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE OMNIBUS/MUST PASS SPENDING BILL:
Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441
Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542
Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965
LINKTREE WITH ALL INFO HERE: https://linktr.ee/stopkosa
----
ORIGINAL POST:
In a particularly scummy move, the Kids Online Safety Act is going to be put into the must pass end of year spending bill: www.axios.com/…
The two laws best positioned to get rolled into big year-end legislative packages, according to advocates and lawmakers, are:
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to guard kids from harmful content using new features and safeguards and to make privacy settings "on" by default for children. The law also mandates privacy audits and  more transparency about privacy policies.
At first glance, the bill doesn’t sound bad, since it’s about helping “protect children” online. But like every “protect the children” type law, this would censor the internet of anything “harmful” to children aka any LGBT, NSFW, or whatever the Right doesn’t like, force everyone to upload their govt ID’s to even access anything online, and surveil everyone else. Gutting everyone’s privacy in an era where we see massive state violence and encroaching fascism globally. This is not only pushed by the same people (Senator Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn) who created the awful EARN IT Act, but also has many of the same flaws, such as pro-censorship, anti LGBT resources and content, and pro-mass surveillance.
But the biggest problem, as Mike Stabile has pointed out, is HOW the mechanism to which this works: The State Attorney General.
This addition would allow states like Texas and Florida to sue companies for having LGBTQ+ content, along with sex education resources, incentivizing these platforms to ban that content. To be more specific, the bill allows the state attorney general to sue if they believe that platforms do not protect minors from a list of harms that includes politicized terms like "grooming" which, as we've seen can include any sort of LGBTQ information, entertainment or literature.
RuPaul on TikTok?
A clip on transgender youth on Facebook?
A gay character in a Disney movie?
Suicide hotlines for gay youth?
Cue a suit from Texas or Florida targeting the entire web.
And the problem is that given the current political climate and the cruel behavior of a number of GOP aligned political groups in positions of power, this only ends up making things RIPE for abuse and mass censorship (since companies will probably end up choosing to acquiesce to their demands rather than risk being subject to liability) not to mention the damage this would cause to children who might need resources regarding LGBT or sex education.
Furthermore, the definition of “sexually exploitative material”, “grooming”, and “child porn” has been used in the past year to target transgender people, drag queens, and the wider LGBTQ+ community by likening their very existence as sexually violent. Yet another way this bill’s language will be used to target a community that is already facing violence. Every night, Fox News blasts a story on “sexualization of children '' to fear-monger around the LGBT community. One needs to not look any further than the right-wing ecosystem to see how KOSA would easily be weaponized.
This article by Mike Masnick on Techdirt also goes further into KOSA and its adjacent bills.
To make matters even worse, on top of the usual suspects of NCOSE ( They used to be called Morality in Media, and are a far right group disguised as an anti sex trafficking org infamous for being religious assholes who HATE anything to do with sex or LGBT) supporting this travesty of a bill, it’s been revealed that the Senate leader is claiming there’s no opposition.
This is literally giving the fascists a dangerous tool to abuse, all for the sake of political brownie points against ‘Big Tech’. A tool that far right groups like the Heritage Foundation have OPENLY stated will abuse to silence LGBTQ+ or sex-ed content for youth everywhere if it passes.
The ONLY way this works is by making sure who is and isn’t a minor is to have some form of age-verification scheme. And the only way to do that is through a third party like ID.me which has recently come under scrutiny for, you guessed it, data leaks. So everyone who accesses anything online will be forced to upload their govt IDs. How is this protecting anyone’s privacy?
With all that said, what can we do?
Well, the same thing we did for the EARN IT Act; we make a LOT of noise, and get the word out.
If you have read all of the above and want to fight this, sign this open letter against KOSA.
And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).
ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE }OMNIBUS:
Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441
Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542
Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965
There is a call script with phone numbers here.
Fax them, email them. Tell them they MUST oppose this bill. CONTACT any major human rights, LGBT, and cybersecurity related organizations aligned and let them know about this bill, and the harm it can cause to LGBT rights and children! If you need more information on KOSA, we have a LINKTREE HERE.
EMPHASIZE THE HARM TO CHILDREN WHEN YOU CONTACT PEOPLE, SINCE THEY’RE TRYING TO CLAIM THAT THIS WILL HELP PROTECT CHILDREN’S PRIVACY, WHEN IT DOES THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
There’s also a Petition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation  and from Fight For the Future.
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toskarinarchive · 7 months
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Toskarin Database
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Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!
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Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:
https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/
This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.
I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.
Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.
But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.
As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:
I. Competition
II. Regulation
III. Self-help
IV. Labor
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax
But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes
In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:
https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act
But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").
The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.
Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.
The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.
Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/
With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.
And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.
Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy
Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers
Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms
That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.
One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/
What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.
A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.
The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus
Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.
But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.
At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith
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Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.
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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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
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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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astraofdelos · 3 months
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My Personal Headcanons for the Batfamily
(All ages are calculated for the last day of 2024. If people want me to add onto this for other Batfamily members or associates, lmk)
Bruce Thomas Wayne: 43, 02/19/1981
— 19 when he went off to the LoA (2000)
— 24 when he became Batman (2005)
— 27 when he took in Dick (2008)
Barbara Joan Gordon: 24, 09/23/2000
— 12 when she became Batgirl (2012)
— 17; paralyzed (2017)
— 18 when she became Oracle (2018)
Richard John “Dick” Grayson-Wayne: 24, 11/11/2000
— 10 when he became Robin I (2010)
— 15 when he became Nightwing (2015)
Cassandra Carolyn “Cass” Cain-Wayne: 22, 01/26/2002
— 18 when she became Batgirl II (2020)
— 19 when she became Black Bat (2021)
— 21 when she became Orphan (2023)
Jason Peter Todd-Wayne: 22, 8/16/2002
— 13 when he became Robin II (2015)
— 15; died (2017)
— 18 when he became Red Hood (2020)
Timothy Jackson “Tim” Drake-Wayne: 19, 07/19/2005
— 13 when he became Robin III (2018)
— 16 when he became Red Robin (2021)
Stephanie Brown: 19, 08/11/2005
— 14 when she became Spoiler (2019)
— 16 when she became Robin IV (2021)
— 16 when she became Batgirl III (2021)
— 18 when she became Spoiler again (2023)
Duke Thomas: 17, 08/13/2007
— 14 when he became Robin (2021)
— 15 when he became Signal (2022)
Damian Thomas al Ghul- Wayne: 12, 08/09/2012
— 10 when he became Robin VI (2022)
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skrubu · 2 years
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Friday #umbrella #street #autumn #kids #helsinki #finland https://instagr.am/p/CjrxcGgtgDd/
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fernand0 · 2 years
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No empezó bien. 
(2022-04-09) (2022-10-14) (2022-10-14) (2022-10-30) (2022-10-30)
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lunarfied · 2 years
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WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP ME ?; masterlist
a genshin impact scaramouche x gender neutral reader ; social media au
IMPORTANT ;;
this au is DISCONTINUED. please stop asking me to be added to the taglist and for updates, it’s not going to happen.
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SYNOPSIS ; SCARAMOUCHE and Y/N were once lovers. high school sweethearts if you will, but a week before your birthday, he broke up with you and disappeared from your life. you thought you’d never see the boy who broke your heart again until the new roommate moving in with you and your best friends happens to be none other than your ex boyfriend, KUNI.
WARNING ; this will contain slight heavy material at some parts; nothing is set in stone yet though & timestamps do not matter. all characters in this are young adults (18+) unless stated otherwise. written parts are marked with a ✎
GENRES ; friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, friends to lovers to exes to enemies to friends to lovers (lol) fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, social media au, modern au, college au, we will see where the vibes take us….
TAGS ; mommy issues, kinda toxic exes but it’s more of a miscommunication type thing, alcohol and drug usgae, nsfw jokes, family member death, random side ships, etc.,
STATUS ; discontinued. started [dec. 27th, 2022] and ended on [---].
PLAYLIST ; here - give it a listen pls i swear its good
TAGLIST ; closed.
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PROFILES : skittle squad + emo band
ACT ONE : first love / late spring
✎ 01 : stream start
✎ 02 : venti the dropout
03 : scara is sus
04 : uh oh
05 : i luv my boyf
✎ 06 : dinner gone questionable
✎ 07 : left on read
08 : sims stream
09: party planners
10 : huggy wuggy
✎ 11 : fucked
12 : flowers have a language?
✎ 13 : family bonding
✎ 14 — : the party
✎ 15 — : talk to me
16 — : hungover (bonus)
17 — : omori (bonus)
ACT TWO: francis forever
✎ 18 — : picnic
✎ 19 — : oops
✎ 20 — : raid shadow legends
✎ 21 — : tbd
© lunarfied : do not copy or steal my work. taking inspiration is fine as long as you ask beforehand and credit me. do not translate, repost, republish or edit without my permission.
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