#Service Implicit/Inferred

[encyclopediamorbidica]

about the patty taxxon not watching the fool thing: in what way is it bad for her to not watch the film in order to not get an unintended experience? the way i read it, she knows the film contains something that might arouse her, she knows that's not what the film is going for, and so she chooses not to watch it and thus not risk getting aroused by it. she at no point says she is titillated by the premise of the film, and implicitly doesn't want to find the idea of actual noncon incest arousing. isn't that good? would you rather she watch it and think that it's hot? i'm so confused.

i would rather she shut the fuck up.

in what world is her admission that she knows she would find the film arousing if she did watch it not an indictment that she is aware what she's doing is wrong? there is no implicit desire not to find the subject matter arousing, because she constantly talks about finding noncon incest arousing. constantly. in what world is her adding a "get his ass" tag to that post not a casual admission that she believes she would feel justified when watching The Strange Thing About the Johnsons that the victim, Mr. Johnson, in some way deserves the treatment he recieves in that film for... being a father? not speaking up? being ashamed?

she speculates on the content of the film without ever watching it, because the premise is what arouses her and having to deal with the protrayal would cause her cognitive dissonance. in the post i clipped that screenshot from, she is specifically discussing what arouses her about her fetish and a follower of hers makes a recommendation of The Strange Thing About the Johnsons because it so closely aligns with what she personally finds arousing.

she literally states in the post, before the recommendation is made, that she has sought out material like this before, and you're led to infer that that's how she first became aware of that short.

it is bad that she has not watched the film because she doesn't want to sit through the actual discomfort and traumatization that her fetish causes to other people. she only wants to engage with media that reinforces her paraphilias and is specifically designed to titillate her, and when she is made aware of the actual ramifications that her paraphilia has on people, she completely refuses to even approach that perspective. she wants to insist that her fictional desires have no impact on reality, and that thus realistic depictions of her desires are not worth her time.

i would rather she stop pretending that her own personal experiences with marginalization negate her ability to benefit from and perpetuate white supremacy. i would rather she stop tacking us on when she's trying to make a point, paying lip service to the ideas of Black liberation while being fully aware that, if she were able to, she would gladly indulge in depictions of Black suffering for the purpose of validating her paraphilias. if The Strange Thing About the Johnsons was poorly made, or somehow dubiously consensual, or she was able to read into it that Mr. Johnson was somehow deserving of the abuse, she would have already watched it by now and would never shut the fuck up about it. the fact that she hasn't shows a level of self awareness that should be alarming.

[antongordon]

Anton R Gordon on Securing AI Infrastructure with Zero Trust Architecture in AWS

As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded into enterprise operations, the need for robust, secure infrastructure is paramount. AI systems are no longer isolated R&D experiments — they are core components of customer experiences, decision-making engines, and operational pipelines. Anton R Gordon, a renowned AI Architect and Cloud Security Specialist, advocates for implementing Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) as a foundational principle in securing AI infrastructure, especially within the AWS cloud environment.

Why Zero Trust for AI?

Traditional security models operate under the assumption that anything inside a network is trustworthy. In today’s cloud-native world — where AI workloads span services, accounts, and geographical regions — this assumption can leave systems dangerously exposed.

“AI workloads often involve sensitive data, proprietary models, and critical decision-making processes,” says Anton R Gordon. “Applying Zero Trust principles means that every access request is verified, every identity is authenticated, and no implicit trust is granted — ever.”

Zero Trust is particularly crucial for AI environments because these systems are not static. They evolve, retrain, ingest new data, and interact with third-party APIs, all of which increase the attack surface.

Anton R Gordon’s Zero Trust Blueprint in AWS

Anton R Gordon’s approach to securing AI systems with Zero Trust in AWS involves a layered strategy that blends identity enforcement, network segmentation, encryption, and real-time monitoring.

1. Enforcing Identity at Every Layer

At the core of Gordon’s framework is strict IAM (Identity and Access Management). He ensures all users, services, and applications assume the least privilege by default. Using IAM roles and policies, he tightly controls access to services like Amazon SageMaker, S3, Lambda, and Bedrock.

Gordon also integrates AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) for centralized authentication, coupled with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce credential-based attacks.

2. Micro-Segmentation with VPC and Private Endpoints

To prevent lateral movement within the network, Gordon leverages Amazon VPC, creating isolated environments for each AI component — data ingestion, training, inference, and storage. He routes all traffic through private endpoints, avoiding public internet exposure.

For example, inference APIs built on Lambda or SageMaker are only accessible through VPC endpoints, tightly scoped security groups, and AWS Network Firewall policies.

3. Data Encryption and KMS Integration

Encryption is non-negotiable. Gordon enforces encryption for data at rest and in transit using AWS KMS (Key Management Service). He also sets up customer-managed keys (CMKs) for more granular control over sensitive datasets and AI models stored in Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS.

4. Continuous Monitoring and Incident Response

Gordon configures Amazon GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and AWS Config to monitor all user activity, configuration changes, and potential anomalies. When paired with AWS Security Hub, he creates a centralized view for detecting and responding to threats in real time.

He also sets up automated remediation workflows using AWS Lambda and EventBridge to isolate or terminate suspicious sessions instantly.

Conclusion

By applying Zero Trust Architecture principles, Anton R Gordon ensures AI systems in AWS are not only performant but resilient and secure. His holistic approach — blending IAM enforcement, network isolation, encryption, and continuous monitoring — sets a new standard for AI infrastructure security.

For organizations deploying ML models and AI services in the cloud, following Gordon’s Zero Trust blueprint provides peace of mind, operational integrity, and compliance in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

[crmone]

How to Create an Effective Lead Scoring System to Prioritize Your Sales Efforts

Not every lead is the same in the hectic world of sales. While some leads might need more nurturing before they're ready to buy, others may be ready to buy right now. In order to make sure that your sales staff concentrates their efforts where they will have the greatest impact, it is essential to identify and prioritize these leads using an efficient lead management system. Lead scoring is one of a lead management system's most effective tools. In order to maximize your conversion rates and prioritize your sales efforts, this blog will discuss how to create an efficient lead scoring system.

What is Lead Scoring?

The method of ranking prospects according to a scale which represents the estimated value that each lead has for the company is called lead scoring. This value is often determined by assigning points based on various attributes and behaviors, such as demographic information, engagement level, and buying signals. The possibility that a lead will become a customer increases with score.

Why is Lead Scoring Important?

An effective lead scoring system helps businesses:

Prioritize Leads: Focus on leads that are most likely to convert.

Increase Efficiency: Save time and resources by directing sales efforts towards high-potential leads.

Improve Alignment: Foster better alignment between marketing and sales teams by defining what constitutes a "hot" lead.

Boost Conversion Rates: Increase the likelihood of converting leads into customers by targeting the right prospects at the right time.

Steps to Create an Effective Lead Scoring System

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The first step in creating a lead scoring system is to define your Ideal Customer Profile. Your ICP should include the characteristics of customers who are most likely to benefit from your product or service and are most valuable to your business. Consider factors such as:

Demographics: Age, gender, job title, company size, industry, etc.

Firmographics: Company revenue, number of employees, location, etc.

Behavioral Data: Website visits, email engagement, content downloads, social media interactions, etc.

Having a clear ICP will help you identify which attributes to include in your lead scoring model.

2. Identify Key Scoring Criteria

Once you have your ICP, identify the key criteria that will form the basis of your lead scoring system. These criteria can be broadly categorized into two types:

Explicit Data: Information that the lead provides directly, such as job title, company size, and industry. This data is usually collected through forms or surveys.

Implicit Data: Information inferred from the lead's behavior, such as website visits, email opens, and content downloads. This data is collected through tracking and analytics tools.

Some common scoring criteria include:

Demographic Information: Age, gender, location, job title, etc.

Firmographic Information: Industry, company size, revenue, etc.

Behavioral Data: Website visits, page views, email opens, click-through rates, content downloads, etc.

Engagement Level: Frequency and recency of interactions with your brand.

3. Assign Point Values

Next, assign point values to each criterion based on its importance and relevance to your sales process. For example, if job title is a crucial factor in determining lead quality, assign higher points to leads with job titles that match your ICP. Similarly, if website visits are a strong indicator of interest, assign points for each visit or page view.

Here’s an example of how you might assign points:

Job title (e.g., C-level executive): +10 points

Company size (e.g., 100-500 employees): +5 points

Website visit: +2 points per visit

Content download (e.g., eBook): +7 points

Email open: +3 points

Click-through on email link: +5 points

Make sure to balance the point values to reflect the relative importance of each criterion accurately.

4. Set Thresholds for Lead Qualification

Determine the score thresholds that will categorize leads into different stages of the sales funnel, such as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), and ready-to-buy leads. For example:

MQLs: Leads with a score of 30-50 points

SQLs: Leads with a score of 51-70 points

Ready-to-Buy Leads: Leads with a score of 71+ points

Setting these thresholds will help your marketing team understand when to pass leads to the sales team and when to continue nurturing them.

5. Implement and Test Your Lead Scoring Model

Once you've developed your lead scoring model, implement it within your lead management system or CRM. Most modern CRMs have built-in lead scoring functionalities that allow you to automate the scoring process based on the criteria and point values you've defined.

After implementation, it's crucial to test and refine your lead scoring model. Monitor the performance of your scored leads and gather feedback from your sales team to identify any discrepancies or areas for improvement. Regularly review and adjust your scoring criteria and point values to ensure they remain aligned with your business goals and market conditions.

6. Align Sales and Marketing Teams

An effective lead scoring system requires close collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. Ensure both teams are aligned on the definition of a qualified lead and understand how the lead scoring system works. Regular meetings and feedback sessions can help maintain alignment and address any issues that arise.

Best Practices for Lead Scoring

Use a Data-Driven Approach: Base your scoring criteria on actual data and insights rather than assumptions.

Incorporate Negative Scoring: Assign negative points for behaviors that indicate a lack of interest or fit, such as unsubscribing from emails or visiting the career page.

Keep It Simple: Start with a straightforward scoring model and gradually add complexity as you gather more data and insights.

Regularly Review and Update: Continually monitor the effectiveness of your lead scoring system and make adjustments as needed.

Conclusion

Creating an effective lead scoring system is essential for prioritizing your sales efforts and maximizing your conversion rates. By defining your ideal customer profile, identifying key scoring criteria, assigning point values, setting thresholds, and aligning your sales and marketing teams, you can develop a lead scoring model that helps your business focus on high-potential leads. Implementing and refining this system within your CRM Software will streamline your sales process, improve efficiency, and ultimately drive business growth. Take the time to build a robust lead scoring system, and you'll see significant improvements in your sales performance and overall revenue.

[cyberbenb]

Arming Ukraine today is the best investment into the future of the civilized world, even in the short term

The joint effort that liberal democracies have taken to support Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022 is commendable. Thirty-two countries have supplied military assistance so far, with some dedicating 0.5-1.0% of their 2022 GDP to help Ukraine defeat the aggressor. Nonetheless, some observers started suggesting that partners are wasting excessive funds on Ukraine’s military support while their own economies suffer from high inflation and sluggish growth. We provide evidence that international aid to Ukraine, while offering it a genuine chance for its victory and thus ensuring peace dividends for the world in the future, imposes on Ukraine’s allies much lower costs than may seem at first sight.

Military Assistance to Ukraine: A Marathon of Partnership

In the face of Russia’s aggressive actions, including the annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of Donbas, military aid to Ukraine between 2014 and 2021 remained rather modest. Before the start of the full-scale war in 2022, the United States, for example, provided a meager USD 2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine (Arabia et al., 2023; Mackinnon and Detsch, 2021). The UK parliamentary report on military assistance to Ukraine in 2014-2021 says that, in addition to extensive training, the Government provided Ukraine with non-lethal military equipment worth only GBP 2.2 million over 2015-2017. After Russia started actively amassing its troops on Ukraine’s border in 2021, the UK and Ukraine signed an Intergovernmental Framework Agreement enhancing joint projects to develop Ukraine’s naval capacities with the provision of GBP 1.7 billion of financing (Mills, 2022).

The situation changed dramatically after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, although it still took some time for Ukraine’s partners to accommodate the idea of supporting Ukraine with arms. According to estimates by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the total commitments of military aid to Ukraine over 2022 amounted to about USD 66.5 billion*. This includes promised weapons, training, auxiliary services and financing the procurement of military goods. While this figure appears impressive, particularly relative to Ukraine’s economy and past assistance packages, it constitutes only up to 5% of the combined 2022 defense spending of donor countries, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). At the same time, there is a large disparity in assistance to Ukraine among partners relative to their GDP and defense budgets. Countries that feel the most immediate threat from Russia, especially Latvia and Estonia, have committed a significantly larger portion of their resources towards military support for Ukraine (Figure 1).

* Hereafter authors used data from Kiel Institute for the World Economy that were available at the time of writing. Kiel Institute revises the data as the new information arrives. These revisions do not alter main results of our research.

The cost of Ukraine’s loss in the war would be enormous. Besides millions of lives lost, it would lead to a series of wars in Europe and elsewhere, since Russia’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the USSR borders and probably beyond them. Besides, other authoritarian regimes would be encouraged to attack their neighbors with implicit or explicit support from Russia and/or China. In economic terms, this would imply the loss of peace dividend and a jump in poverty levels for decades to come. 

Thus, helping Ukraine win as soon as possible is clearly beneficial for the long run security and growth. However, even in the short run, as we show below, military support of Ukraine will stimulate economic growth and thus will be much less costly than one may infer from looking at commitment numbers.

Economic Ripple Effects: Exploring the Fiscal Multipliers of Military Assistance to Ukraine

In the realm of economics, the adage “what goes around comes around” holds true quite literally. When a government spends a dollar, a significant portion of it normally settles within the country, setting the stage for the concept of the fiscal multiplier – the ratio of change in output in response to a government intervention. Expenditures on defense are not isolated from the economy, with some researchers arguing that this type of government expenses may invoke a positive and lasting multiplier (see, for instance, Sheremirov and Spirovska, 2022; Auerbach and Gorodnichenko, 2012; or Gerchet and Will, 2012 for a meta-analysis on fiscal multipliers). Thus, each unit of currency spent within the defense sector has the potential to generate additional economic growth through various channels.

In the forthcoming paper by Chebanova et al. (2023), we quantify the effect of a military-spending shock on output for countries that provided military support to Ukraine in 2022 according to the data of Ukraine Support Tracker by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. We follow the methodology of Sheremirov and Spirovska (2022) but extend the analysis to capture a recent period of fiscal expansion related to the full-scale war in Ukraine and also a longer period following the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. We find that a dollar increase in military spending by the donor countries is associated with a 65 cents increase in output within the same year. The largest impact of defense expenses at USD 0.79–0.87 is expected in one to two years ahead, and the cumulative impact is felt even five years into the future.

Some studies have consistently shown that multipliers stemming from investment-related expenses are considerably higher than those associated with consumption-related spending (see, for example, Aschauer (1989) who estimates positive long-run effects of government investment on productivity). While transferring weapons to Ukraine, our allies are renewing their arsenals and expanding military infrastructure. Therefore, we can expect a share of investment in defense expenses to be high. Moreover, numerous studies highlight the existence of larger fiscal multipliers during periods of economic recession, which is seen by many forecasters as the key risk for the global economy in the near future.

Thus, military assistance to Ukraine is not an economic loss to the donor countries. The military expansion in partners’ economies in 2022 is expected to generate growth at least in the nearest five years, which will partially offset their expenses on supporting Ukraine. 

Beyond the Numbers: Exploring the Less Tangible Advantages of Bolstering Ukraine’s Defense

There are additional pragmatic reasons for supporting Ukraine with arms and other defense-related goods/services. These second-level effects may be more difficult to quantify but their significance should not be underestimated. 

Exchange of military experience. Several high-level military officials from NATO countries highlighted (1, 2) that the Ukrainian army is the most experienced military force at least on the European continent. Ukraine’s partners have scaled up existing or opened new training programs for the Ukrainian army since the start of 2022. For example, the EU Military Assistance Mission launched last November is expected to train up to 15,000 personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces over a span of two years. During such programs the knowledge flow is not necessarily one-sided, as allies’ military personnel can also learn from Ukrainian soldiers. This knowledge will certainly add to the security of NATO countries, which in turn will lower their risk premiums. 

Better resource allocation in the defense sector based on battlefield arms testing. Notably, the recent successful interception of six supposedly “invincible” Kinzhal missiles by decades-old Patriot anti-missile systems offers the Western coalition valuable information on the effectiveness and limitations of their arsenal. Such insights enable continuous improvements and inform future defense strategies. In particular, the identification of the best-performing weapons among those sent to Ukraine will allow our partners to focus production on the most effective units, as they modernize their armies. This will enable the unification of arsenals and related economies of scale. 

Impulse for large arms exporters. The battlefield success of weapons produced by NATO countries and their allies can play a pivotal role in securing new contracts for respective arms companies. With the superiority of their weapons becoming increasingly more evident, the share prices of major arms producers have surged since the start of the full-scale invasion. Between February 18, 2022 and June 12, 2023, the share prices of the largest companies in each donor country for top-20 producers in 2021 according to SIPRI, grew between 19% (Lockheed Martin Corp., USA) and 59% (BAE Systems, UK). For comparison, over the same period the S&P 500 declined by 0.2%, while the UK benchmark FTSE 100 increased by a negligible 0.8%. 

The demand for products of these companies will increase not only because Ukraine’s allies are modernizing their arsenals as they transfer not-so-new weapons to Ukraine but also because some countries are likely to switch away from Russian weapons. For example, India in 2018-2021 procured about 44% of its imported arms from Russia (SIPRI data). With some supply commitments Russia made before the full-scale war seriously delayed and potentially even cancelled, India has been actively diversifying its import of arms. In our view, it is more likely to switch to NATO-based companies than to Chinese ones. Indeed, a new Indo-Italian defense cooperation memorandum was signed just a couple of months ago.

Enhanced R&D investment. As The Economist (2023) aptly and somewhat cynically observed, “war ought to be a “battle lab” for new ideas”. The need to upgrade the arsenal is likely to induce additional research and development, which have the potential to contribute to long-term productivity growth – and not only in the defense sector. Thus, Steinwender  et al. (2019) show that for OECD countries, to which the majority of Ukraine’s allies belong, a 10% increase in defense R&D results in a 4% increase in private-sector R&D with spillovers between countries.

Many defense R&D projects involve multiple countries. For instance, Storm Shadow missiles, which have proven very effective in the hands of Ukrainian defenders, were the result of cooperation between Britain and France. Earlier this year Japan, the UK, and Italy announced a joint venture to develop a next-generation fighter. As more such projects emerge, democracies will experience stronger technological spillovers across countries and sectors strengthening economic ties and boosting productivity. 

Concluding Remarks

After testing the resilience of the existing security framework for years, Russia shattered it completely on February 24th, 2022. At this critical juncture, Ukraine’s partners can no longer afford to ignore changes in the global security landscape. The first invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2014 failed to generate the necessary momentum to bolster global defense capabilities. Numerous NATO members, including prominent ones like Germany, France and the Netherlands have consistently fallen short of meeting the alliance’s 2% defense spending to GDP minimum target over the last decade. This shared complacency regarding the risks posed by Russia translated into the limited military assistance provided to Ukraine in 2014-2021.

The cost of establishing the new global security architecture stands high. The Economist’s simulations suggest that given Russian invasion and Taiwan-China tensions, global defense spending may surge by USD 200 billion to USD 700 billion (9-32%) a year. However, liberal democracies can lower their future total bill by providing Ukraine with arms and funds in this fateful moment. As noted by Gorodnichenko (2023), the cost of containing Russian forces in Ukraine is significantly lower than what the West would face if Ukraine were to be defeated. 

In fact, our analysis shows that the cost of supporting Ukraine is much smaller for the Western economies than the announced amounts due to economic ripple effects and a number of positive externalities. For now, the key partners seem to share this view. Echoing President Zelenskyy’s address to the US parliament, recent Speaker of Congress Nancy Pelosi stressed that supporting Ukraine “isn’t about charity; it’s about security”. Indeed, buttressing Ukraine’s capacities at this crucial moment not only ensures long-term peace on the European continent but is also likely to deter other dictators, particularly those armed with nuclear weapons, from waging brutal wars against their neighbors. The question every democratic government now faces is: What is the present value of long-term security for you?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the National Bank of Ukraine.

[mysmsmantraindia]

Bulk SMS is a type of communication that requires little to no data and is quick and easy to send to a specific audience. It can be regarded as an implicit message.  

[p3chris]

The Tribute to Murdoch Swan that No One asked for

*some rather vague references to the latest manga chapters, but otherwise no spoilers*

If anyone needs a reminder as to who Murdoch Swan is, he is the interviewer who somehow manages to look more haggard than the two gentlemen beside him who are, respectively, 12 and 19 years older. In the one chapter or 20 minutes (or 15?) he appears, he repeatedly insults Yor and makes Anya cry. That, and he also enrages Twilight to the point of physical violence, and would have been quite dead if not for the noble sacrifice of a hardwood coffee table and a mosquito. To put simply, he is a nasty scumbag.

However, despite his brief appearance, he gets a relatively well-fleshed out backstory and is an effective plot device that 1) sheds light on the social setting in both Eden and Ostanian society and, 2) advances the plot by setting several important character and relationship developments in motion.

We infer from Twilight's thoughts and Swan's own words that Swan's charmed life (wife, child, prestigious career in Eden that was smoothly paved by nepotism) had recently hit a rough patch when his wife, presumably sick of his behaviour, divorced him and he was denied custody of their child.

Rather than humbly reflect on the interpersonal missteps that led to such a resolution or reminisce about happier family times, Swan instead entitles himself to a self-appointed mission to prod and provoke the uglier sides of people to shatter their happy family image and prove they are as miserable as he is.

Thing is, despite his pettiness, he is actually quite smart with how he goes about it. He knows his father still has great influence over the academy despite no longer being in active service, and that gives him power over both his fellow interviewers and his interviewees. His questions and taunting are chosen with precision. He knows what to ask and say to create tension between people and to attack their weak points. His interviewees can only either defend themselves on the spot and appear rude or disharmonious, or suck it up during the interview and resent one another after that. Of course, he only does this to the families who don't have the political or social clout to threaten him.

That Eden has him in the faculty already raises a red flag about the culture and environment in Eden. The irony of Swan being an assessor of candidates for Eden's hoity-toity standards is that he is himself a poor role model. A later chapter reveals that there are many badly behaved students from his Kline Hall. We also see that it is not just Swan who lacks regard for the children he is tasked to educate; we see that some of Anya's teachers are neither wise nor enlightened. In the latest hostage situation, we also see that Eden’s priorities are incredibly messed up. Eden is, first and foremost, about connections, prestige and networking rather than education.

Twilight hit the nail on the head when he called Eden a school that made light of children's feelings and told Anya she would probably not want to go to this school anyway. Too bad it's his mission.

Swan’s behaviour also overtly reflects the attitude of Ostanian society, namely in the way it treats women. His chauvinism is obvious, but not isolated - it is implicit in the way Walter Evans directs the cooking question to Yor, in the way Henderson credits Loid Forger for the elegance the entire family exhibits, in the way that Swan directs all his attacks at Anya and especially Yor rather than at Loid (and I highly doubt it was entirely because Loid appeared flawless).

In earlier and subsequent chapters, we see more gender inequality in Ostania at work: how positions of higher prestige and leadership are mostly, if not entirely, occupied by men, how women are socially expected to aspire to conventional marriage by a certain age and how older unmarried women are viewed upon with suspicion. To me, I also see a little of it in the way Yor is quick to put herself down and how she chooses to elevate Yuri academically instead of investing in herself in any manner.

The way I see it, despite Twilight initially hoping not to offend Swan, the Forgers were already in trouble with him: the more Swan perceived Loid and Yor as a loving couple and the Forgers a perfect happy family, the more he wanted to tear them apart.

But it was his nastiness that strengthened the Forger family and moved the plot along, because in the course of his appearance, he managed to:

a) Trigger Anya’s protectiveness over her parents and strengthen her resolve to go to school for Operation Strix

b) Trigger Twilight’s protectiveness over Yor and Anya. Feeling awful over how the abuse they suffered is the least he (Twilight) could do because it would have been real scummy of him to remain unmoved at the unfair treatment of the two innocent civilians (or so he thinks) he got involved with his mission. The interview also showcases Twilight's liberal views (yes, it was most certainly Twilight, not Loid, who attended this interview) - that he does not believe in traditional gender roles and is accepting of individual strengths and weaknesses, that children deserve consideration and respect, and that wellbeing is not physical but mental and emotional as well.

c) Indirectly reawaken Henderson’s pride over his calling as an educator, leading to his impulsive punch and quite importantly, resulting in him becoming Anya's homeroom teacher (given the lack of investment from her other teachers, this is likely a very good thing.)

d) Trigger Yor’s protectiveness and motherly instincts towards Anya and made Anya cherish having a mother.

To me, the impact of this is a very big one. After all, Chapter 1 is about the start of Twilight and Anya's relationship. Chapter 2 is about the start of Twilight and Yor's relationship. Chapter 3 is about the Forgers finding a bit of their footing together. Even up to Chapter 5, Yor at times still appears uncertain around Anya.

In Chapter 7, Yor is motivated to try to be a better mother to Anya, and Anya sees her mother’s vulnerable side. From this point onwards, Yor and Anya's mother-daughter relationship takes off and they are subsequently seen spending a lot of time together. We also see that Anya might love Papa more, but she never doubts Mama's love.

e) Indirectly cause the events in Chapter 7, which leads to many significant events and long-lasting developments in SxF:

i) Yor and Anya's combat training.

ii) Anya punching Damian on Orientation Day. Henderson, as homeroom teacher, reduces three Tonitrus bolts to one at his discretion.

iii) Becky becoming Anya's best friend.

iv) Damian subsequently developing a crush on Anya.

v) Yor's cooking endeavours

See how important this scum is to the story?

[mmmmalo]

For anyone still under the impression that June Egbert is just a product of the Toblerone wishes with no particular relevance to Homestuck proper, here's an argument to the contrary: that June (or whatever you like to call her) was already here, woven into John's relationship with the idea of Dad.

Act 1 has a certain preoccupation with the ideal forms of things, John having multiple instances of saying X isn't a REAL X unless it has this or that characteristic. "A fire BELONGS in a fireplace, categorically." One of those outbursts touches upon masculinity, with John saying a gentleman without a monocle is a piss-poor excuse for such. Along such a paradigm, you might gather that something like John saying the beaglepuss sucks as a disguise or trying (and failing) to integrate Dad's pipe into the façade communicates that John is kind of grasping at this ideal of masculinity exemplified by Dad and getting frustrated that he can't seem to measure up to it (or that masculinity feels "fake" on him).

This sort of dynamic is more blatant with Dave, who talks openly about how he isn't a "hero", not really, measuring himself against the impossible standards set by his Bro. But as much was already implicit in Act 1.

Later it gets established that John has some kind of fear of heights: the first ogres appear after John experiences vertigo from almost falling off the stairs, and again after getting launched by the pogo hammer. (Just as Karkat suspected he was given a planet covered in his own blood as a form of harassment, Sburb placed John's house on that needle plateau because of this fear of heights; the game generally manifests adversaries in response to fear). The phobia becomes relevant to Dad stuff after the ogre fight is over, when John is hesitating to jump down into Dad's room: it isn't just that John's nervous about entering the room for the first time, the descent itself makes John anxious. Furthermore, this juxtaposition serves to establish that the fear of heights and anxieties around Dad are related somehow, if not outright synonymous. The two are associated again at the beginning of Act 5 Act 2, when dream!John tries to jump over a canyon to reach Dad, but awakens mid-leap. The formal reason John awakens is Vriska of course, but if we ignore her we're left with John approaching Dad and immediately experiencing vertigo. (The name "June" comes from Vriska contacting John shortly after this dream, incidentally)

This comes up again when John finds Dad's wallet and gets overwhelmed by the prospect of Manhood and the responsibilities it entails -- next thing you know John is flying around in Dad's car, having fun... and after the scene is interrupted by Seek the Highblood, we return to find John crashing the car (another fall from the sky!) and talking with Vriska about dread surrounding societal expectations, and the possibility of rejecting them to pursue something different for yourself. John came into the scene worried (if quietly) about the expectations surrounding manhood, so the Vriska conversation serves to makes those kind of concerns more vivid.

The car crash is itself kind of a metaphor for that conversation's trajectory... in Act 6 we see something analogous play out among the Dersites who have gotten into dapper-wear: one Dersite sits on a hat, panics about ruining it, and then begins to wonder if perhaps a crumpled hat could have a value of its own, aesthetically. (Dirk expresses this sort of counter-assessment more bombastically: "...the next best thing. By which you mean, the vastly superior thing.") Dad Crocker swoops in to condemn the crumpled hat, but the Dersite's tentative revaluation of an apparent failure mode is something the scene shares with Vriska, who initially regards her ambivalence towards murder as a symptom of personal failure, unbefitting her caste. John enters that conversation with a crumpled car, and from context we can guess John's revaluation concerns "failing" to be a man in the way Dad is, and how maybe that doesn't need to be considered a failure.

As laid out so far, I guess none of this quite necessitates trans-Egbert, since people can come at "anxiety and reservations at the prospect of embodying masculine ideals" from a number of angles... but there are other considerations which make me think wrestling with self-deprecating thoughts like "I'm a failed man" are maybe comorbid with a budding sense of being a girl, in Egbert's case.

Foremost, I think it helps to recognize that Dad's car can function as a symbol of John's body. To sketch a case for that:

1a. Death often means transformation: the trolls die in questcocoons to reach the godtiers, suggesting that death stands between the caterpillar and the butterfly, their too solid flesh dissolved into a goo.

1b. A command in Act 1 implores John to "retrieve arms from MAGIC CHEST". John complies twofold: we see some fake arms retrieved from the toy chest, held up by John's real arms which have been "retrieved" from John's ostensibly armless torso.

2. This dual usage of chest is deployed in part 3 of Openbound, in service of building a dysphoria metaphor (among other things). The segment reintroduces us to Fiduspawn, a game in which one creature hatches from another, a host creature, killing the host in the process (fans of the Alien films may recognize this as derivative of the "chestburster", fans of Homestuck may recognize this as analogous to godtiering). Damara (who Rufioh refers to as "doll") becomes the host plush, who is accused of locking away Rufioh's "happy thought" (Tinkerbull) in her "chest". Rufioh's beef with Damara serves to illustrate an adversarial relationship with one's own body, the ways in which the body itself seems to function as a barrier to some happiness. The carnal imprisonment of euphoria (the "happy thought") represents dysphoria. The conversation between Kanaya and Porrim which follows has analogous content and offers a potential resolution to such a conflict, with Kanaya coming to distinguish her body from the reproductive duties assigned to her body by her caste's place in society, and knowing that she is not "bound" to the Matriorb by any will but her own...

3. But the paradigm of Fiduspawn reminds us that the act of actually ripping the happy thought out of your chest has suicidal overtones, when taken literally. And Aradiabot notwithstanding, the inner ghosts the kids give up are often green: Dirkbot tears out his uranium heart and explodes, Rose peels pink bricks off the green core of an island and wonders aloud if her existence is a mistake, and (returning to our main topic!) John tries to retrieve the green package from Dad's car. The retrieval of the box comes to represents the birth of the self from its shell, the now broken body, a gesture which overlaps with the pursuit of death.

So we can infer that Dad is akin to Damara here, having locked the desired object (the box, the "happy thought") within a container that we can identify with John's own body. Thus Vriska's talk of perhaps rejecting her assigned role in society proceeds naturally from the wreckage of Dad's car: insofar as the car functions as an emblem of the masculine expectations imposed upon John, the car's wreckage suggests the possibility of liberation from those expectations, liberation from your own body. John is "sick to death of cake" -- cake is a Life symbol imposed by Dad, in visceral excess, accumulating as every birthday marches John towards Manhood. The possibility of living as a girl does not seem to have occurred to John yet, life and masculinity seem inextricable and absolute. The first time John sees Dad's car totaled (after Rose drops it), the symbol of self-as-corpse is surrounded by yellow bands of caution tape. The Authority Regulator who placed the tape will later declare himself to be THE LAW, and we should take his word for it: the scene's function is to declare that the crumpled car, the "dead" and therefore feminized body, is forbidden to John. No surprise then that as John marches to her death, in defiance of the Law's prohibition, she-whose-name-does-not-yet-suit-her is met with impressions of several maps that actually align with their territories: troll movies whose titles are their contents in full, a rocket encoded by the sound PCHOOOOO. John wants that for herself, I think. And as @lscholar once pointed out, it’s worth noting that John's pursuit of this unity (this pursuit of "death") is interrupted by Dave, who in saving John's life repeatedly emphasizes their status as "bros" -- masculinity being, again, inextricable from life within John’s symbol system.

...and that's the short of it. A more detailed account might get into the association of Vriska and other blue girls with the feminized corpse, or read into Equius self-consciously roleplaying as a cat girl between John’s joyride and crash, or perhaps try to apply this car-body framework to the appearances of Dad's car in the Epilogues. And I haven’t even touched upon clowns...but I'll call it here for now.

[doctorsandy]

INVESTING IN OUR TEACHERS TODAY FOR TOMORROW

BY SANDY NICOLL 2006

This is the conclusion of my Masters by Research study. It pre-dates thesis being stored online. It was awarded a High Distinction and I came first in the cohort. My PhD changed direction for I wanted to find a way to help move teaching forward.

Conclusion:

The Proficiency Pyramid involves three layers. Early practitioners start at the top and progress to the bottom. There is no time frame allocated to the proficiency progression. Further, teachers use the preceding level/s as they advance through the pyramid and their career. Additionally, the theory model does not assume all teachers will progress through to the final layer. Instead only truly competent/ proficient teachers’ use all three layers in their practice. This theory is regarded to have generality implications for the focus is not on specific subject areas but rather the approach to competent practice.

As the chief investigator I proposed a three level Professional Development model be utilised by an effective competent teacher. The pyramid design supports Grounded Theory Methodology as it involves the four key components of functionality, it is implicit for people working within the field, it can apply to more than one situation and it has applications for everyday life (Johnson & Christenson, 2004).

The layers include:

1. Beginning proficiencies focus upon teacher proficiency. This includes how teachers can best manage the classroom in terms of behaviour management, organisational skills, questioning, programming and assessing. The focus is on the teacher themselves.

2. Next, as teachers become more self-managing and efficient the teacher proficiencies focus shifts and the focus becomes the student. Certainly core teacher oriented proficiencies still exist. However, the focus is student oriented rather than themselves.

3. Finally, the truly proficient teacher can be concluded to shift their proficiency focus to how a teacher can use student issues to establish how I can become a more proficient teacher.

The theory can be summarised in the figure below as advocated by Vaughan (1992) and Strauss (1970). Both advocated Grounded Theory Methodology permitted factors such as the development of a model or a particular concept.

This model has been concluded in this study to demonstrate a way forward for teachers to become highly competent in the classroom. Thus, following this model will achieve greater success with student learning. Therefore, this model offers a divergent way of looking at the art of teaching and pedagogical practice. It guides professional directions as it establishes how teachers can use competencies to accomplish superior classroom practice.

6.3 Possible Future Aims/Directions

1. Integrate and respond to one group of key stakeholders, primary teachers in executive positions or by extending the study group beyond three participants

2. Identify what is perceived is being done/poorly well by primary teachers and reasons Why? /Why Not?

3. Identify future targets or course features in teacher pre-training as identified by current practicing teachers and this research study

4. Conduct a study designed to ask why teacher retention rates in terms of ‘30% leaving within the first 5 years’ in an effort to develop state wide plans

5. Another study could explore teachers who have not sort higher education qualifications since graduation of pre-service teaching and the implications for life long learning

6.4 Implications of the Study

This study will have implications and ramifications for teachers, the NSW Department of Education and relevant educational institutions. This study may form the basis of a PhD study commencing in 2007. The chief investigator believes the study can best serve the education community by being written and published through various avenues. The possibilities may include being published in:

• Academic Journals,

• Course readings during teacher retraining courses or Master Programs,

• In the Teacher newspapers such as the NSW Federation News

• Daily papers including a letter to The Australian and The Daily Telegraph.

Consequently, the idea of ‘discourse’ and empowerment will be encouraged and facilitated. Key stake holders will be able to develop and discuss the varying pedagogical implications of critical, authentic and productive pedagogy. Teachers will be able to genuinely discuss the study, which may serve as a valuable discourse strategy on its own.

This study has identified what highly competent teachers in the classroom do to achieve greater success with student learning. Therefore, this model offers a divergent way of looking at productive pedagogical practice. It will have implications for teachers, educational institutes and the NSWDET as it will provide an easily understood model for professional direction. The model is designed to establish how teachers can use competencies to accomplish superior classroom practice.

6.5 Discussion: Personal For’s/ Against for the Chief Investigator of the Project

Personal For’s:

The chief investigator in this study enjoyed this approach and found encouragement in this for it fostered creativity and opportunity. The investigator did feel genuine teacher commentary was achieved which was a key aim of the study. Consequently, it can be concluded Grounded Theory approach supports the idea of genuine commentary data collection.

The key components of applicability, functionality, giving a sense of direction for people working in the field, and the potential to apply the theory generated in everyday life was deemed to be achieved by this study. Thus, the investigator has deemed this project to be worthwhile.

The Grounded Theory Methodology gave an opportunity to utilise inferring and deducing. This facilitated the consideration of personal and primary experience to be regarded such as expressions and discourse.

The chief investigator acknowledges comparative analysis was a key feature of this particular study. This was utilised to generate hypothesises. However, this study did rely upon the individual investigator’s own interpretation of commentaries. Finally, the investigator is very willing to take on a sense of personal ownership for conclusions drawn and the theory proposed.

Personal Againsts:

Goulding (1998) argues taking care to consider possible misconceptions when considering the methodology and potentially misusing principles and procedures (p.155). This is a concern for the chief investigator and peer reviewing will be and has been a core validation technique designed to minimise this effect. Consequently, seeking peer reviewing was an invaluable tool.

Glaser (1978) illustrates another limitation and titled it the “drugless trip”. This may result if the chief investigator develops a continual and ceaseless fixation with analysing and collecting data. At times, the chief investigator did feel the trip or journey would not end. However, relying upon supervisors, limiting to participants to be three people only, end of semester dates and reasonable word limits did help avoid clouding progression. Although, progression at times did become very cloudy and the chief investigator sought ‘time out’ to allow for this progression to reignite.

Thus:

“Education is not simply a technical business of well-managed information processing, not even simply a matter of applying ‘learning theories’ to the classroom or using the results of subject-centered ‘achievement testing’. It is a complex pursuit of fitting a culture to needs of its members, and its members and their ways of knowing to the needs of the culture.” (Bruner, 1996, p. 41)

“[The] quality of what teachers know and can do has the greatest impact upon student learning… A clear message for policy makers is to invest first and most in policies that enhance teacher quality”

(Ingvarson, 2003, p. 2).

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The President is having a rough time. That much we can easily infer by reading both the medical and the political tea leaves that have dropped all around him in recent days. As of October 7, 2020–27 days from the Presidential Election — here’s where we stand.

It is a story in three parts:

1. Trump has, or at least had, severe Covid. We can infer that from the drugs he’s been prescribed.

For the past five days he has been on a course of Remdesivir, an antiviral medication that can interrupt viral reproduction. According to the Financial Times, the FDA “authorised the emergency use of Remdesivir for Covid-19 in May for patients with severe coronavirus who need extra oxygen or mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. In August, the FDA extended the emergency use authorisation to anyone in hospital with Covid-19, however severe their disease.”

He has also been given Regeneron’s multiple-monoclonal antibody therapy, a drug that directly kills the virus. He was given an 8-gram dose, which is very high, indicating that his viral load was significant when they got him to the hospital on Friday. This drug has not yet even been authorized for emergency use, but his doctors leaned on the regulatory agencies and the company to be able to prescribe it for compassionate use. This is the drug that, in my opinion, likely saved his life. At least for now. Note, this drug does NOT stop the virus from resurging, but it can be administered again without harm, so long as his body does not develop a resistance to the antibodies, themselves.

Notably, neither of these drugs will help to reverse damage already done to the organs.

The third big-hitter drug he received was a steroid called Dexamethasone. It is used to help prevent the body’s immune system from doing more damage than the virus. When the immune system goes into overdrive, there is significant swelling that can, itself, severely damage the organs. With Covid, that swelling can be so bad that it kills the organs, then the patient. The World Health Organization advises doctors to only use the drug in severe or critical cases, because it can have powerful side-effects — both physiological and psychological.

Physiologically, it SHREDS the immune system. That is, literally, what it is intended to do, which — in this case — is good for him, because he’s getting the Remdesivir and the Regeneron cocktail to fight the Covid, but BAD for him because for the next week or so, he’s got no meaningful immune system and that bathtub mold left behind by William Howard Taft in the White House jakes might take him out quicker than he can kill anyone else with his coronavirus.

Psychologically, it can lead to mania or more severe depressive states — which has got to at least rate a bit of a worry among Trump’s advisors, right?

Well, maybe not — and that brings us to the next point.

Donnie is all alone.

2. The second thing we know, or can infer from the past few days’ events, is that President Trump is finally — and fully — leading his own parade. There really is no sane doctor in the land who, short of wanting to fluff the Commander-in-Chief, would have authorized either his Sunday night joyride, or even his discharge from the hospital as if he’d just come down with a touch of 24-Hour Covid.

But, well, Trump. Even casual observers quickly learn that he does not tolerate independence in his advisors. They either show a willingness to bend to his will, or they are drummed out of service. As such, when he needs someone to finally stand up to him, even for his own good, they are long, long gone. Some folks are lamenting Dr. Sean Conley for tarnishing his reputation this past week, but in truth, you could have inferred that from the simple fact that he’s Trump’s personal physician. It’s the same for everyone. Persistent exposure to his toxicity either leads to outright rejection, or total corruption and collapse. At this point in his life and his Presidency, there simply are no grown-ups left in the room.

That goes for his political team, too. But with them, it’s even worse: Not only have the ones with actual backbone long since been ejected from the West Wing, the toadies that are left are now all down for the count because of this virus. Here’s a list of his people who are currently either ill or in quarantine:

Hope Hicks, chief adviser to the president.

Bill Stepien, campaign manager.

Kayleigh McEnany, White House press secretary.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

Chris Christie, top political advisor.

Melania Trump, his wife.

Nicholas Luna, assistant and “body man” to the president.

Kellyanne Conway, former White House senior adviser.

Stephen Miller, his pet Nazi.

Lord knows what sort of protocols are in place in the East Wing of the White House, right now, but given the pacing and the lunacy of the Tweets, there’s just no one there to stop him. He is amped up on steroids, likely a bit delirious, and clearly surprised — and offended — that his “triumphant return” was mocked by everyone outside of his Proud Boy Fan Club as a weird, pathetic Evita routine wherein he was clearly gasping for air. He’s pissed off, alone, and facing the greatest humiliation of his life in 28 days. CNN today has Biden up by 16 points — 57% to 41%. That is getting into Ronald Reagan / Walter Mondale ’84 territory, when the Gipper beat the Man from Minnesota by an Electoral College margin of 525 to 13.

Clearly, Donald is losing his mind — likely due to the drugs, but also because he is all alone, scared out of his wits, and can’t seem to do a damn thing about it. There is no one left to bully.

So, what does he do?

He lashes out like a haunted madman at the nation he purportedly leads.

3. In his almost four years at the helm, he has typed nearly every single type of public obscenity into his iPhone that a Manson Family member could imagine — but he save the most purely foolish of them for today. A few hours after the Fed Chair — you know, the guy in charge of global capitalism — came right out and said, in essence, “Hey, Washington, we need massive government spending NOW to save the economy!” Trump tweeted, literally and explicitly, “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill.”

Holy shit!

The Fed Chair screamed: “STEP ON THE GAS!” and Trump, instead, slammed on the brakes. The market reacted by cratering nearly 600 points. They will pause for a moment, before again jumping off the cliff tomorrow, when no course correction is offered. This is very, very bad.

Backed into a corner, and with the economy teetering over the abyss, he has decided to take the entire country hostage — with an implicit promise that we either elect HIM, or he will let the entire country burn.

You know, I like to think that if McDaniel, or Stepien, or McEnany, or Hicks, or even Conway were there, they might have at least tried to talk him down from such an utterly insane position — one from which he has ZERO room to retreat without looking like a fool — but maybe not. Maybe after the Covid and the Roids and the Evita jokes, he would have gone ahead and set the world on fire regardless of what any advisor suggested.

Now we’ll never know. That die has been cast. And with it, I believe, his Presidency is all but over — short of straight-up election theft, or an auto coup d’etat.

Both, sadly, are still possibilities.

But shy of that, this President has demonstrated to everyone in the past few days that he has come undone. He is unbalanced, unhinged, disconnected from reality, physically ill, and getting his ass kicked by a dude he calls Sleepy Joe.

To put it lightly: It’s not a good look.

On top of that, his idiot son Eric — a used piece of moral toilet paper, who got busted two years ago for stealing money from a children’s cancer charity — just got deposed in a court case that will almost certainly spit out a basket of Trump Family indictments before Christmas this year, and Vladimir Putin — his patron (and banker) in Moscow is either prepping the piss tape for TMZ once his gimp is no longer useful, or burning the evidence trail so none of this can ever be tied, definitively, back to him.

All in all, Trump should count himself lucky if that Taft fungus rises up from the drain pipe and puts him out of his misery. Nothing good happens for him from here. He can still drag us all down with him, but he won’t get back up off this mat.

Or so, at least, it seems.

Love to you all.

[nataliefecon-blog]

Rational Students: The Economics of WebReg

Natalie Foong

ID: 14653073

Discussion: Friday 12 PM

As students, we’re all familiar with the class registration system at the University of California – Irvine. Class registration is a bloodbath: competitive, risky, and systematically flawed. Sounds a lot like the American economy. (*Rimshot.* This is not to harp on free markets, however.)

There are several aspects of the class registration system that mirror key concepts in microeconomic theory. Having a grasp of these concepts, and understanding how they can be seen in the all-too-familiar race for classes, may help students understand what inevitable concepts of economics they’re up against.

Classes: A Private Good

Private goods, as we’ve learned in economics, is a good or service that is excludable, and rival in use, meaning that the use of said good can be selectively distributed (not available to all), and one person’s use of the good affects the next person’s, and so on.

In the case of class registration, it’s clear that classes are a private good. Some classes bear major restrictions, making it excludable to a smaller set of students than most, but all classes face rival in usage, since one student’s enrollment in a class lessens the number of seats for the remainder of students.

In this set of classes, you can see that the number of students enrolled in the class is subtracted from the maximum number of spots available, leaving a limited number of spots for the rest of the students that require the class.

The competition itself is not the greatest issue in class registration, however. The problem with the registration process lies in the university’s poor gauging of the number of classes required, resulting in what is known as a shortage, and ultimately forcing students to make decisions for classes at a greater cost to their education.

A Shortage in the Market

The university faces both a need to restrict the number of students to a class, as well as a need to restrict the number of classes offered. The former is necessary because of the scope of certain subject matters; some classes are more efficiently taught in small groups. The latter is necessary because the university faces a limited budget to compensate professors and staff, and having extra classes will undoubtedly cost more money. However, this causes a problem where students face a shortage of classes that they need. We can think of this situation as a price ceiling of sorts, or in this case, a student ceiling.

According to demand laws, a greater number of students should yield a greater number of classes. However, the university cannot supply an infinite number of classes, nor can infinitely many students take a class, and as a result, a ceiling is put in place. This ceiling prevents over a maximum number of students from enrolling, but the result is a quantity supplied that is less than a quantity demanded. 

To fix this issue, let’s assume the school removes the ceiling. As we can see, the school has this many number of classes, but the supply does not meet the demand. To ensure a market equilibrium, the school could do the economically-correct thing, which is operate as a movement along the curve, and increase the number of students slightly, as well as the number of classes. However, if the school wanted to keep the number of classes exactly the same, the school could also in theory shift the supply curve left by increasing the number of students per class.

Negative Externalities of the System

Because of the way that the system prevents a large number of students from registering for the classes they require, students now face a greater dilemma as consumers of this class market when they make their rational decisions to enroll in classes. This issue is a cost of the registration system that wasn’t a part of the plan, making it a negative externality.

Let’s say that Student A is an Economics major. As an Economics major, Student A needs to take Math 4 and Econ 15A before taking most upper-division courses, but it seems that these two classes were co-requisites for each other (this rule is no longer in place as of 2019). This means both classes need to be taken at the same time, or not at all. Both of these classes are incredibly impacted, and Math 4 has less than 100 spots in the class, with one class offered per quarter. This makes enrolling in the class very difficult, considering the number of Economics majors that also need to take the class.

Without enough classes offered, Math 4 fills up within the first week of class enrollment, and Student A is out of luck. Student A must enroll in another class, but what was the opportunity cost?

Given that these classes are prerequisites for a number of upper-division classes, Student A not has to wait another quarter to enroll in the class, but falls behind in completing their major-required classes as well. The lost class credit of Math 4, as well as the lost content that could have been learned, are explicit costs of the shortage of classes. Being unable to complete other classes while waiting to take Math 4 costs Student A time, an implicit cost of the situation.

Conclusion

As you can probably infer, students with later enrollment windows are faced with a disadvantage when enrolling for classes, but the competition isn’t always friendly. Though the free market can be an efficient and industrious way to run an economy, it isn’t always the best way to run class registration.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

This is a ultimately personal choice, but I was advised by many different sources to not disclose a disability in your application. Instead, in my personal statement I wrote about "overcoming some health difficulties" that played a formative part in my academic development. I chose to keep it to myself that while I am much better, those health difficulties have not entirely gone away.

Even if people legally/ethically aren't supposed to discriminate, implicit bias is unfortunately a thing. If you disclose beforehand, you run the risk of that unintentional bias clouding your application. Think very carefully about letting that cat (or dog) out of the bag.

I did not disclose my disability and service dog in any of my grad school apps. Instead, I waited until after I had been accepted, when I was legally protected against discrimination (at least in the US, per the ADA). I waited until I was on a zoom meeting with my future advisor, and I phrased it as "so here's a little bit more context about me."

I think that you can talk about designing accessibility programs without inferring your own diagnosis, and that's also a good way of taking the temperature of the programs you're applying to. If they're enthusiastic about your work, that's great! If they don't care, that might be a potential red flag.

If you'd like, dm me and I'd be happy to talk about this more at length. I'd also be willing to share my own personal statement to show how I included reference to my disability without disclosing outright.

seeking advice

Hello my dear academics - and other various nerds.

I am looking for advice for my current PhD application; I am finalizing my Statement of Purpose and I have space in it to talk about my autism diagnosis and Ianto being a service dog.

However, the dilemma, would it be used against my application or not/ should I wait to hear if I get in before telling them I need accommodations like for a job or should I use it in the essay. This application does not have any sort of 'my struggle' essay to write, just a writing sample - my MA thesis - and the SOP.

I already said in it that I wrote and implemented the Egypt Centre's first autistic accessibility program.... which is literally how I found out I'm autistic. So it does fit in, and I have the space.

But it is a disorder that is discriminated against.

going to tag a few folk but I want as many opinions as you have for me so please comment/re-blog whatever. I have also decided that 1 like = 1 vote to disclose so feel free to just like if you don't feel chatty.

@13faeinapenguinsuit @saintartemis @queenanne1532 @chaotic-archaeologist @autie-j @micewithknives @bundibird @rudjedet @sisterofiris

as usual; the above is a non-exhaustive list of the people on here whose opinion I admire and trust. there are always people I have left off because remembering all y'all's handles is impossible.

[edisonashley]

Section 230 Preempts Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) Claims–Henderson v. Source for Public Data

Section 230 and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) have always had an implicit conflict. The FCRA is an old-school regulation of electronic databases run by credit reporting agencies, who gather and republish third-party data. As a result, any FCRA liability for that data seems inconsistent with Section 230’s rule that electronic databases aren’t liable for third-party content.

This opinion addresses that tension head-on, and Section 230 comes out on top. But unfortunately, the opinion reaches this conclusion without clarity about how the FCRA obligations tried to hold the defense liable for third-party content, or whether the defendants even qualified as credit reporting agencies. Worse, the court uses a mangled articulation of the Section 230 defense. It’s possible these defendants should qualify for Section 230, but the court’s legal analysis doesn’t give us a lot of comfort in that answer. Furthermore, because the implications of Section 230 preempting the FCRA are so significant, this opinion will cause extra, and possibly avoidable, friction for Section 230.

* * *

This lawsuit relates to a website called PublicData.com. It aggregates various government records and makes them available for a subscription fee. The plaintiffs allege the website contains inaccurate third-party records and didn’t comply with the FCRA.

The court summarizes the Section 230 issue: because of Zeran, “an interactive computer service shall not be held liable for content they do not create…in this circuit, § 230 provides interactive computer services immunity from suit regarding information originating from third parties.”

As for FCRA claims, “Congress plainly chose five exceptions to § 230 immunity and did not include the FCRA among them. Accordingly, by its plain language, § 230 can apply to FCRA claims.” The court identifies other federal claims preempted by Section 230, including the Fair Housing Act (Chicago Lawyers v. Craigslist), Title III of the ADA (NAD v. Harvard), and Title II of the Civil Rights Act (Noah v. AOL).

Having established the general principle that Section 230 can apply to FCRA claims, the court applies a bastardized version of the standard three-element test for a Section 230(c)(1) defense. The court (incorrectly) says the elements are: “(1) a defendant is an interactive computer service; (2) the content is created by an information content provider; and (3) the defendant is alleged to be the creator of the content.”

1. ICS Provider. In the standard Section 230 defense, this factor considers whether the defendant is a provider or user of an interactive computer service. The court says the defendants “are an access software provider and operate an interactive computer service because they upload the information onto their servers for their clients to access on the internet. Defendants’ status as an interactive computer service is not lost merely because they have purchased the data or edit it like a publisher or distributor in its traditional capacity.” This is the right result but the court’s wording is janky.

2. Content Created by an ICP. All content is created by an “information content provider” by definition, so the court’s articulation of this factor is a tautology. The actual test is whether the ICP was a third party. The court makes a highly unusual move by distinguishing ICPs from “access software providers”:

Plaintiffs clearly state that Defendants do not create the content; they obtain it “from vendors, state agencies, and courthouses.” It is those entities that create the records Defendants upload to their website and collect into a report. Specifically, Plaintiffs aver that Defendants “create summaries of the charges” and “sort, manipulate and infer information.” In fact, Plaintiffs state that Defendants’ “primary and only business function involves purchasing, collecting, and assembling the information contained on [Defendants’] servers.” These allegations fall within the statute’s definition of an access software provider because they “pick, choose, analyze, or digest content.” Plaintiffs do not allege that Defendants materially contribute information or create content. At most, Plaintiffs state that they “strip out or suppress” information. That function falls within § 230(f)(4)(A), which allows access software providers to “filter, screen, allow, or disallow content.” Thus, Defendants are not information content providers as they do not produce the content of the reports at issue in this litigation

(Section 230 protection for stripping out information brought to mind People v. Ferrer, though the Backpage defendants are having a tough time replicating that argument in the federal prosecution).

I believe this interpretation of “access software provider” is novel. I can’t think of another case that essentially treated a typical website as an “access software provider”–and for good reason, because the statutory definition of the term would require websites to provide “software (including client or server software) or enabling tools.” If this court’s treatment of “website = access software provider” sticks, I’m not sure how that interpretation would ripple through the statute.

3. Defendant Allegedly Created the Content. The court’s articulation of this factor, in combination with the prior one, is messed up. The second factor should confirm that the content came from a third party; this factor should examine if the claim treats the defendant as a publisher/speaker. Despite messing up the factor’s characterization, the court reaches the right issue, saying without further analysis that “Plaintiffs treat Defendants as if they are the publisher and distributer of third-party content.” The court rejects the plaintiffs’ allegations that the website improperly remixes the third-party content: “Although Plaintiffs allege that Defendants manipulate and sort the content in a background check report, there no explicit allegation that Defendants materially contribute to or create the content themselves.”

Implications

Section 230 and People Search. In general, Section 230 has applied to people search engines (which I think fairly characterizes the defense). See, e.g., Prickett v. InfoUSA, Nasser v. Whitepages, and Merritt v. Lexis Nexis. However, the more recent ruling in Lukis v. Whitepages suggested that plaintiffs could get around Section 230. See also Sweet v. LinkedIn.

This Result Probably Won’t Stand. The court’s distorted Section 230 test makes this ruling vulnerable on appeal or in further proceedings. If this ruling survives, it will provide additional fuel for Section 230 reform in Congress. Several reform bills have proposed to exclude federal claims from Section 230, so there’s already suspicion on the Hill about the Section 230/federal statute overlap. Congress will not let the Big 3 credit agencies work around the FCRA using Section 230.

Case citation: Henderson v. The Source for Public Data, 2021 WL 2003550 (E.D. Va. May 19, 2021)

  The post Section 230 Preempts Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) Claims–Henderson v. Source for Public Data appeared first on Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Section 230 Preempts Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) Claims–Henderson v. Source for Public Data published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.weebly.com/

[pamphletstoinspire]

Why Are We Called to Stewardship?

As Catholics, we are all called to be Jesus’ disciples.  And, such disciples want and are willing to embrace this exciting existential adventure with and for God.  For it is a life of demanding and determined discipline, a pursuit of virtue and service. It is a walk of humble gratitude, willing surrender, perpetual progress and saintly success.  It is an adventurous life of deep relational intimacy with God and the rational, spiritual and experiential certainty of His love and grace, His goodness and beauty, even His practical provision and intervention. 

While discipleship is the comprehensive calling to which we are all summoned in our individual lives, stewardship is a foundational and integral principle of all such discipleship.  And, Jesus spoke many times about this explicitly and implicitly.  A succinct statement of such stewardship is found in the familiar adage “to whom much is given, much is expected.”  

This is a simple, yet subtle and sophisticated, statement of the operative dynamic within the principle of stewardship, just as it is an exhortation, a challenge and a command to any and every disciple of Christ.  As the adage states, stewardship starts with what we are given.  It begins with our rigorous recognition of what we are given; that everything we are and have is a gift and also a responsibility.    

The very idea of stewardship begins with a penetrating understanding of our complete and comprehensive contingency, the fact that our very existence is the result of God’s direct intentionality and activity.  Stewardship begins with a deep recognition that our ultimate existential reality, that our entire being is completely contingent on God’s action and love.  Stewardship begins with the comprehensive recognition that all that we are, our inherited physical traits and talents, our intellectual abilities and inclinations, even our looks and disposition, are not the result of our efforts or decisions.  

For in life, we get what we get.  And, because we have no hand in our inherited constitution and our idiosyncratic potentialities or even our very existence, we are stewards of our being and our lives.  For we are all contingent beings, divinely contingent on the deliberate intention of God, just as the entire cosmos is.  All we have been given is not our fault or credit.  But, what we do with our giftings is.

And so, we are stewards for we have been given the gift of life and our individuality by the Maker of the universe, the Creator of all truth, goodness and beauty.  And, as contingent beings, our default mindset should be one of profound humility and gratitude for our existence and individuality.  We also should sense a growing excitement and curiosity about this life with God, the discovery of the wonders of existence, the particularities of His plan and purpose for our individual lives and how all that plays out in the world of space and time.  Yet we should also see how we are responsible to be willing and enthusiastic stewards of the life and the time, the talents and treasures we are each given.

For whatever we are, whatever we have is a direct result of God’s initial and abiding beneficence.  They are His gifts.  But, they are also our responsibility to use properly and purposefully, lovingly and morally.  For we are not the owners of our time, our talents, our treasure.  We are stewards of them.  And, we should be good stewards, who use and manage all that is placed in our charge to the glory of God and for the betterment of everyone and everything in His creation.  

For good stewards use their gifts in accordance with God’s generally revealed will and in response to His more particularly and personally revealed plan.  For God has made His general will clear to all of us through our reason and common sense, through our moral sensibilities, through our intuitive compassion and empathy.  

Just think of the parable of the “good Samaritan.”  The good Samaritan helped because he clearly saw the beaten stranger’s need and responded with immediate aid, as well as comprehensive care until the stranger recovered.  The stranger’s need was obvious.  And, the Samaritan acted immediately without any spiritual epiphany or moral deliberation.  He just knew.  Good stewards respond to the obvious needs because they are obvious, even to apostates like the Samaritan.  

But, good stewards also respond to God’s more directly expressed will.   For He wants us to do as He commands, to do as He expects, to do as He exhorts.  Good stewards are good.  They follow the commandments and aspire to be virtuous in thought and in deed.  They love one another just as Jesus would.  They are the working and maturing embodiments of faith, hope and love and they live under the discipline of true virtue and the direction of reason and conscience.

Yet, good stewards also seek God’s more explicit personal guidance.  They do so in prayer and through silence, in meditation and through adoration.  For they know God is near, active and intimate because He loves us and seeks abiding intimacy with us.  And, love, in its fullest sense, is an abiding intimacy.   And, through this fuller loving experience with Him, good stewards know they may accurately discern His more personal will for their lives and its many nuances.  And, they know their trust in Him is reciprocated with an abiding epiphanic spirituality, the hallmark of true loving intimacy with God.    

So, good stewards have an abiding understanding of their complete contingency, their comprehensive dependency on God, for their existence and all that that entails.  They know that their reason and common sense, their conscience and empathy are trustworthy guides about how they should use their time and talents, their vocation and their treasure.  They know following God’s explicit and implicit commands is how true stewards are guided to greater usefulness and maturity in the work of the Kingdom and in the preservation of the world.  And, they know good stewards are deeply intimate with God, guided by God, used by God, provided for by God in many subtle and miraculous ways.  And, they know how abidingly intimate and loving God truly is.    

Yet, given stewardship’s nature and significance to the depth and breadth of the full Catholic life across the life span, it is often not a very common, regular or explicit feature of church culture.  Nor is it a prominent feature of most Catholics’ thinking, reflection or motivation.  Stewardship is more often an implicit or inferred principle within church culture and in the daily lives of many Catholics.  

Yet, its explicit absence and its benign neglect has many implications in our collective and individual lives as the disciples of Christ and as the witnesses of truth and goodness in our lost and fallen world.  For it is a foundational idea in the very essence of true and daily discipleship.  And from it, springs forth all manner of attitudes, ideas and actions, so critical to our personal discipleship and the mission, method and means by which we become the stronger salt and the brighter light of the world.  

For by virtue of our vitality as true stewards, by the rigor of our understanding and our application of its principles, by our relentless embrace and regular use of its imperatives, we will individually and collectively become the true and trusted stewards of God’s kingdom.  And, we will loudly and lovingly live as His real stewards, His real sons and daughters here on Earth, for all to see.

For true and routine stewardship leaves an undeniable impression and witness in its wake, particularly to those who observe us regularly.  For it is as much an attitude as an action, a philosophy of life and living, as much as it is a way of being and behaving.  And, it begins with a hearty humility, an attitude of gratitude and a ready excitement to employ our talents, time and treasure in the work of His kingdom.

And, often this humility, gratitude and excitement can be a most curious and contagious phenomenon to others, who observe such true stewards living their lives in accord with these principles and with such desire, determination and dedication, with such trust and such discerning abandon.  For such a witness of true and good stewardship is hard to deny.  

Perhaps this passionate, purposeful and personal stewardship was a crucial component in the early church’s witness to the world of its time?  For if dying in the Roman arenas was the likely climax to the life of Jesus’ disciples, recruits would be hard to come by.  And, only the reality of God’s truth, the intimacy of His love and the everyday epiphanic encounters with Him would be sufficient certainties and circumstances to subvert the natural human instincts for survival and the avoidance of pain.  

Such passionate and purposeful stewardship was and is truly the most natural and effective way of enlightening and preserving the world.  And, it is the surest path to evangelizing the lost and igniting the complacent, inspiring the curious and motivating the mature in our time, if we but pursue true stewardship, with the sincerity and regularity of our faith’s founding generations.

For their success as true and trusted stewards is history’s witness and our role models. So. let us awaken from our slumbering mediocrity.  Let us seek a deeper intimacy with God and a stronger sense of true stewardship.  And, let us each strive to be the stewards of our time as our founders were in theirs.  Then will we shock the world and save it for generations to come.  

BY: F.X. CRONIN

[un-enfant-immature]

Cookie consent tools are being used to undermine EU privacy rules, study suggests

Most cookie consent pop-ups served to internet users in the European Union — ostensibly seeking permission to track people’s web activity — are likely to be flouting regional privacy laws, a new study by researchers at MIT, UCL and Aarhus University suggests.

“The results of our empirical survey of CMPs [consent management platforms] today illustrates the extent to which illegal practices prevail, with vendors of CMPs turning a blind eye to — or worse, incentivising — clearly illegal configurations of their systems,” the researchers argue, adding that: “Enforcement in this area is sorely lacking.”

Their findings, published in a paper entitled Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence, chime with another piece of research we covered back in August — which also concluded a majority of the current implementations of cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe’s Internet users — even though EU law requires one.

When consent is being relied upon as the legal basis for processing web users’ personal data, the bar for valid (i.e. legal) consent that’s set by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is clear: It must be informed, specific and freely given.

Recent jurisprudence by the Court of Justice of the European Union also further crystalized the law around cookies, making it clear that consent must be actively signaled — meaning a digital service cannot infer consent to tracking by indirect actions (such as the pop-up being closed by the user without a response or ignored in favor of interacting with the service).

Many websites use a so-called CMP to solicit consent to tracking cookies. But if it’s configured to contain pre-ticked boxes that opt users into sharing data by default — requiring an affirmative user action to opt out — any gathered ‘consent’ also isn’t legal.

Consent to tracking must also be obtained prior to a digital service dropping or accessing a cookie; Only service-essential cookies can be deployed without asking first.

All of which means — per EU law — it should be equally easy for website visitors to choose not to be tracked as to agree to their personal data being processed.

However the Dark Patterns after the GDPR study found that’s very far from the case right now.

“We found that dark patterns and implied consent are ubiquitous,” the researchers write in summary, saying that only slightly more than one in ten (11.8%) of the CMPs they looked at “meet the minimal requirements that we set based on European law” — which they define as being “if it has no optional boxes pre-ticked, if rejection is as easy as acceptance, and if consent is explicit”.

For the study, the researchers scraped the top 10,000 UK websites, as ranked by Alexa, to gather data on the most prevalent CMPs in the market — which are made by five companies: QuantCast, OneTrust, TrustArc, Cookiebot, and Crownpeak — and analyzed how the design and configurations of these tools affected Internet users’ choices. (They obtained a data set of 680 CMP instances via their method — a sample they calculate is representative of at least 57% of the total population of the top 10k sites that run a CMP, given prior research found only around a fifth do so.)

Implicit consent — aka (illegally) inferring consent via non-affirmative user actions (such as the user visiting or scrolling on the website or a failure to respond to a consent pop-up or closing it without a response) — was found to be common (32.5%) among the studied sites.

“Popular CMP implementation wizards still allow their clients to choose implied consent, even when they have already indicated the CMP should check whether the visitor’s IP is within the geographical scope of the EU, which should be mutually exclusive,” they note, arguing that: “This raises significant questions over adherence with the concept of data protection by design in the GDPR.”

They also found that the vast majority of CMPs make rejecting all tracking “substantially more difficult than accepting it” — with a majority (50.1%) of studied sites not having a ‘reject all’ button. While only a tiny minority (12.6%) of sites had a ‘reject all’ button accessible with the same or fewer number of clicks as an ‘accept all’ button.

Or, to put it another way, ‘Ohhai dark pattern design‘…

“An ‘accept all’ button was never buried in a second layer,” the researchers go on to point out, also finding that “74.3% of reject all buttons were one layer deep, requiring two clicks to press; 0.9% of them were two layers away, requiring at minimum three.”

Pre-ticked boxes were found to be widely deployed in the studied CMPs as well — despite such a setting not being legally valid. (On this they found: “56.2% of sites pre-ticked optional vendors or purposes/categories, with 54.1% of sites pre-ticking optional purposes, 32.3% pre-ticking optional categories, and 30.3% pre-ticking both”.)

They also point out that the high number of third-party trackers routinely being used by sites poses a major problem for the EU consent model — given it requires a “prohibitively long time” for users to become clearly informed enough to be able to legally consent.

The exact number of third party trackers they found being packed like sardines into CMPs varied — with between tens and several hundreds in play depending on the site.

Fifty-eight was the lowest number they encountered. While the highest instance was 542 vendors — on an implementation of QuantCast’s CMP. (And, well, just imagine the ‘friction’ involved in manually unticking all those, assuming that was one of the sites that also lacked a ‘reject all’ button… )

Sites relied on a large number of third party trackers, which would take a prohibitively long time for users to inform themselves about clearly. Out of the 85.4% of sites that did list vendors (e.g. third party trackers) within the CMP, there was a median number of 315 vendors (low. quartile 58, upp. quartile 542). Different CMP vendors have different average numbers of vendors, with the highest being QuantCast at 542… 75% of sites had over 58 vendors. 76.47% of sites provide some descriptions of their vendors. The mean total length of these descriptions per site is 7,985 words: roughly 31.9 minutes of reading for the average 250 words-per-minute reader, not counting interaction time to e.g. unfold collapsed boxes or navigating to and reading specific privacy policies of a vendor.

A second part of the research involved a field experiment involving 40 participants to investigate how the eight most common CMP designs affect Internet users’ consent choices.

“We found that notification style (banner or barrier) has no effect [on consent choice]; removing the opt-out button from the first page increases consent by 22–23 percentage points; and providing more granular controls on the first page decreases consent by 8–20 percentage points,” they write in summary on that.

They argue this portion of the study supports the notion that two of the most common consent interface designs – “not showing a ‘reject all’ button on the first page; and showing bulk options before showing granular control” – make it more likely for users to provide consent, thereby “violating the [GDPR] principle of “freely given””.

They also make reference to “qualitative reflections” of the participants in the paper — which were obtained via  survey after individuals’ consent choices had been registered during the field study — suggesting these responses “put into question the entire notice-and-consent model not because of specific design decisions but merely because an action is required before the user can accomplish their main task and because they appear too frequently if they are shown on a website-by-website basis”.

So, in other words, just the fact of interrupting a web user to ask them to make a choice may itself apply substantial enough pressure that it might render any resulting ‘consent’ invalid.

The study’s finding of the prevalence of manipulative designs and configurations intended to nudge or even force consent suggests Internet users in Europe are not actually benefiting from a legal framework that’s supposed to protection their digital data from unwanted exploitation — and are rather being subject to a lot of noisy, distracting and disingenuous ‘consent theatre’.

Cookie notices not only generate friction and frustration for the average Internet user, as they try to go about their daily business online, but the current situation is creating a faux veneer of compliance — atop what is actually a massive trampling of rights via what amounts to digital daylight robbery of people’s data at scale.

The problem here is that EU regulators have for years looked the other way where online tracking is concerned, failing entirely to enforce the on-paper standard.

Enforcement is indeed sorely lacking, as the researchers note. (Industry lobbying/political pressure, limited resources, risk aversion and regulatory capture, and a legacy of inaction around digital rights are all likely to blame.)

And while the GDPR only started being applied in May 2018, Europe has had regulations on data-gathering mechanisms like cookies for approaching two decades — with the paper pointing out that an amendment to the ePrivacy Directive all the way back in 2002 made it a requirement that “storing or accessing information on a user’s device not ‘strictly necessary’ for providing an explicitly requested service requires both clear and comprehensive information and opt-in consent”.

Asked about the research findings, lead author, Midas Nouwens, questioned why CMP vendors are selling so called ‘compliance’ tools that allow for non-compliant configurations in the first place.

“It’s sad, but I don’t think anyone is surprised anymore by how few pop-ups comply with the GDPR,” he told TechCrunch. “What is shocking is how non-compliant interface designs are allowed by the companies that provide consent pop-ups. Why do they let their clients count scrolling as consent or bury the decline button somewhere on the third page?”

“Enforcement is really the next big challenge if we don’t want the GDPR to go down the same path as the ePrivacy directive,” he added. “Since enforcement agencies have limited resources, focusing on the popular consent pop-up providers could be a much more effective strategy than targeting individual websites.

“Unfortunately, while we wait for enforcement, the dark patterns in these pop-ups are still manipulating people into being tracked.”

Another of the researchers behind the paper, Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at UCL, also expressed shock that CMP vendors are allowing their tools to be configured in ways which are clearly intended to manipulate Internet users — thereby flouting the law.

In the paper the researchers urge regulators to take a smarter approach to tackling such widespread violation, such as by making use of automated tools “to expedite discovery and enforcement” of non-compliant cookie notices, and suggest they work “further upstream” — such as by placing requirements on the vendors of CMPs “to only allow compliant designs to be placed on the market”.

“It’s shocking to see how many of the large providers of consent pop-ups allow their systems to be misconfigured, such as through implicit consent, in ways that clearly infringe data protection law,” Veale told us, adding: “I suspect data protection authorities see this widespread illegality and are not sure exactly where to start. Yet if they do not start enforcing these guidelines, it’s unclear when this widespread illegality will start to stop.”

“This study even overestimates compliance, as we don’t focus on what actually happens to the tracking when you click on these buttons, which other recent studies have emphasised in many cases mislead individuals and do nothing at all,” he also pointed out.

We reached out to the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, for a response to the research — and a spokeswoman pointed us to this cookie advice blog post it published last year, saying the advice it contains “still stands”.

In the blog Ali Shah, the ICO’s head of technology policy, suggests there could be some (albeit limited) action from the regulator this year to clean up cookie consent, with Shah writing that: “Cookie compliance will be an increasing regulatory priority for the ICO in the future. However, as is the case with all our powers, any future action would be proportionate and risk-based.”

While European citizens wait for data protection regulators to take meaningful action over systematic breaches of the GDPR — including those attached to consent-less tracking of web users — there is one step European web users can take to shrink the pain of cookie consent pop-ups: The researchers behind the study have built an open source browser extension that can automatically answer pop-ups based on user-customizable preferences.

It’s called Consent-o-Matic — and there are versions available for Firefox and Chrome.

A holiday gift from us* at @AarhusUni: Consent-o-Matic! A browser extension that automatically answers consent pop-ups for you. Firefox: https://t.co/5PhAEN6eOd Chrome: https://t.co/ob8xrLxhFW Github: https://t.co/0Xe9xNwCEb

* @cklokmose; Janus Bager Kristensen; Rolf Bagge

1/8 pic.twitter.com/3ooV8ZFTH0

— Midas Nouwens (@MidasNouwens) December 24, 2019

At release the tool can automatically respond to cookie banners built by the five big CMP suppliers (QuantCast, OneTrust, TrustArc, Cookiebot, and Crownpeak).

But being as it’s open source, the hope is others will build on it to expand the types of pop-ups it’s able to auto-respond to. In the absence of a legally enforced ‘Do Not Track’ browser standard this is about as good as it gets for Internet users desperately seeking easier agency over the online tracking industry.

In a Twitter thread last month announcing the tool, Nouwens described the project as making use of “adversarial interoperability” as a pro-privacy tactic.

“Automating consent and privacy preferences is not new (DNT and P3P), but this project uses adversarial interoperability, rather than rely on industry self-regulation or buy-in from fundamentally opposed stakeholders (browsers, advertisers, publishers),” he observed.

However he added one caveat, reminding users to be on their guard for further non-compliance from the data suckers — pointing to the earlier research paper also flagged by Veale which found a small portion of sites (~7%) entirely ignore responses to cookie pop-ups and track users regardless of response.

So sometimes even a seamlessly automated ‘no’ to tracking might still sum to being tracked…

Adtech told to keep calm and fix its ‘lawfulness’ problem

[deannamendoza-blog]

The One Where Nobody is Free

During our discussion about Contractarianism, all I could ever think about was what I should answer for the last part of my long exam. As the lecture continues, I suddenly realized that the ethical theory that we were discussing that time was best suited for the “first come, first served” policy. In this entry, I will just reiterate my thoughts in my paper.

The “first come, first served” policy has become a non-binding and self-enforcing agreement that has developed among people when it comes to situations that require the use of any service. It can be frequently observed in fast food chains, grocery stores or public restrooms wherein people have already a common understanding that the first person present will enjoy the merit of being served first. An individual’s punctuality and efforts to be ahead of time is valued and, in a way, rewarded by the service provider. Justice, then, is the ethical principle that is practiced in this social policy as it provides fair treatment for everyone. This implicit shared agreement has helped preserve order, prevented complaints and instilled fairness for the other service users. Considering the statements said above, we could infer that among all the ethical frameworks that was discussed, Hobbes’ contractarianism would be the most suitable theory that would support this policy.

Thomas Hobbes view contractarianism as rules of justice that are conventional and represent a compromise (Sayre-McCord, 2013). In this theory, an action is right if it does not violate the free, rational agreements we have made, and the reason on why we agreed to these constructed terms is because of the belief that it will make our lives better. These consensual agreements among the members of the society are what we call social contract. Human beings trade in moral freedom to a legitimate social institution — that is, the government to access security as a result of living cooperatively.

Hobbes believed that the absence of rules that govern the behavior of a society wherein nothing is considered immoral and everyone is free to act with accordance to their self-interest will most likely be chaotic. There would be a constant threat to a person’s security and we may not be able to live in peace. Hobbesian contractarianism argues that as rational human beings, we would not desire a system without order.  Contractarianism also invalidates the concept of inherent good, and claims instead that morality emerges from free, rational and self-interested individuals who agreed upon what should be good and bad. One might argue that there is no fairness in obeying to some rules that one never agreed to follow. However, contractarians would reason that it is only fair as you get to experience the many benefits of surrendering your freedom. In the case of the “first come, first served policy”, people would prefer to wait in long lines in Starbucks rather than to argue with the other customers on why they should be the first one to order. Without this unwritten policy between service users, the system of providing service would be unorganized. There would be no guiding principle as to who is eligible of a particular amenity. People would always disagree with one another because everyone has reasons as to why they should be first. It is only through the social contract, in this situation, the “first come, first served” policy, can we avoid these kinds of dilemmas.

[wewererogue]

Notes on “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard”: Capital Crimes and Paper Claims

[by Benedict Seymour / Mute]

Introduction by Rogue: This film was an art project originally screened at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2009. From the artists’ site: “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Britain’s first financial crisis, the film is a critical costume drama constructed from a patchwork of historical, literary, and popular sources. It traces the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th century and remain resonant today.”

There were no commercial screenings, it has no IMDB entry, and as far as I can tell it can’t be downloaded, legally or otherwise. So I’m reposting here the review of a film/art installation that I haven’t seen and probably never will, and that YOU haven’t seen and probably never will, because it’s a damn interesting story. Also, long post.

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard (2009), directed by Anja Kirschner and David Panos, retells the story of a proletarian hero of the early 18th Century who ending his days at the gallows – ‘the triple tree’ – in Tyburn in 1724, was executed for theft at the dawn of financialisation.

Jack Sheppard wasn’t much of a thief. Serially incarcerated during his short life, he won fame for his ingenuity and implacable dedication to getting out of gaol. This is years before Houdini, with his spectacularised escape artistry and proto-Fordist routinised liberation. It is years before David Blaine, who inverted the trope of getting free into feats of hyper-visible confinement endured. Jack’s very public demise is furthest from but for us also closest to the telematic death and redemption of Jade Goody, a working class woman who, like Jack, also found fame in dissolution.

Unlike Jade, however, Jack stood for a certain resistance to commodification and the intrusion of the State into one’s intimate processes of self-reproduction.1 Like her he rose to fame in the wake of a suddenly deflated financial bubble. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard plays on the interconnections between his acts of criminal reappropriation and the speculative adventures of the wealthy during the South Sea Bubble of 1720. As much as anything, Jack’s notoriety was about the contrast his crimes made with the legally sanctioned scams of his social superiors; his bravery, fortitude, skill and cunning versus his superiors’ petty self-aggrandisement and greed. Jack also remained independent of corrupting tendencies within his own class and refused to join in the rackets of Jonathan Wild, self-appointed ‘thief-taker general’.

For these and other reasons we will come to, Jack was one of the first heroes of popular culture. His ghost-written biographical Narrative appears as an early act of proletarian public speech. A posthumous publication, the Narrative is based on the words of a man condemned to death; a man escaped and recaptured who is given the right of representation only when he has nowhere left to run.

Near the beginning and end of the film the notorious housebreaker and escapologist (four times escaped from prison, four times recaptured) invokes his right to speak. He holds up the manuscript of his memoirs to the crowd as he stands before the gallows, a dialectical image of the decisive forces of his age. The scene brings everything together – capital and capital punishment, money and representation, the mob and their hero. Jack steps up onto the platform to have the last word, to give his own account and put right earlier misrepresentations. However, the film sardonically notes that this last gesture of self-assertion is already, also, a piece of advertising. Jack’s publisher Mr Applebee is at hand to tout the completed Narrative – ‘available for 6 pence only from Applebee’s’. In the background, as we shall see, there is the anonymous ghost-writer of the text, Daniel Defoe.

It may be considered a moment of resistance, a claim to rights that were not supposed to be issued to people of Jack’s class. As such it is also an attempt to use the bourgeois representational apparatus to get something material back – control over his own history and a legacy for his mother. This last raid on the emerging finance/culture nexus is carried out within the terms of the law and of the market. Like the stocks and bonds of the bankrupted stockjobbers glimpsed in the wreckage of the South Sea Scheme at the beginning of the film, Jack’s Narrative is itself a kind of ‘paper claim’ on value. Behind it lies a contract, and a title to sales revenue, but in itself the Narrative is a fiction, a projection of what his life will have meant. Furthermore, Jack is not the real, or at least the sole, author. The film’s diegesis continues and exacerbates the logic of displacement by putting into his mouth words that others would only have read on the printed page, pointing up the artificiality of the mise-en-scene and, by extension, of the public sphere.

Jack’s moment of free and direct expression, of the right to tell one’s story and give one’s own account of one’s self, is also the moment of commodification. Destitution recapitulated. Alienation consolidated by claims of complete transparency (Defoe’s vanishing mediation). The moment of truth is the moment of fiction, of a constitutive falsehood analogous to the wage labour contract in that it is both ‘authentic’, legally recognised and a kind of betrayal of at least one of the consenting parties. Jack becomes a virtual player in a textual construct, enabling us to retell and rework his story, but objectifying and distorting his necessarily open-ended subjectivity. Death launches him on the literary market. Analogies to paper money and credit here are not accidental: representation opens up the possibility of derivatives, variants, meta-fictions.

The act of representing one’s self – as the film explores – depends on just such objectifications, a process of displacements and substitutions which put the speaker’s identity and status (living/dead, rich/poor, etc.) in doubt. Jack breaks through the social repressions of his day to speak up for himself and, by extension, his class, but he is also spoken for. His words are put to work. The future development of working class struggle to escape from capitalism is foreshadowed here. The question is implicit throughout – how does the subject/object of history, neck in the noose and facing extinction (or perhaps the mutual ruin of the contending classes), get out of this one?

As in life, he had to alienate his considerable skills as a carpenter in the service of others’ accumulation of capital, so in death Jack’s voice is ventriloquised and exploited by Messers Applebee and Defoe for their own ends. Equality is the very form of inequality; the contract guarantees the subordination of the economically dependent and the reproduction of their alienation. Jack makes history, or at least his history, but not in conditions of his own making. And what will history make of him? The film is hyper-conscious of the potential and risks of myth making, yet in order to pose the question of Jack’s legacy, of his contemporary significance and indeed the future of his class, it is necessary to put him in the frame; the film has to borrow and trade on his legend.

The early 18th century represented here is an age of ‘projections’, of new financial abstractions, schemes and scams, exerting an increasingly autonomous force in social life. Jack’s story, at once a critique of the self-contained world of the stock exchange, the Mansion House and the coffee house, is itself a highly mediated claim to authenticity, a work constructed by Daniel Defoe giving the illusion of a first person account. However, true to Jack’s own language and history, it is necessarily a work of (real) abstraction. For a growing market, Jack’s life has become a kind of ‘structured investment vehicle’, a spectacular commodity with an existence independent of the unruly mob who flocked to his hanging. In death, his social mobility is potentiated.

Jack’s rebirth (or undeath) as a literary figment and popular hero, like the floating of a new concern, is a hostage to the market and to the stories people will construct as derivatives of his ‘authentic’ paper representation. Once written down, he is no longer free to determine his story. The film itself is one such derivative, taking as its premise a hypothetical struggle between the Narrative’s two authors – the ghost writer and ghost-written, Defoe and Sheppard – over the content of the biography. By positing this ur-narrative or pre-textual struggle the film is able to reopen what the Narrative tried to close. It is a narrative back-projection which underlies and echoes the film’s other projections, its allegorical/art historical décor made up of prints, paintings, drawings and other artefacts from the period.

Long ago, Frederic Jameson identified postmodern culture’s ‘renarrativisation of the fragment’ as a kind of recycling, reinscription and domestication of modernist practices of disjunction. What distinguishes The Last Days use of parody from this form of blank referentiality is its heightened awareness of the economic determination of and struggle over signs. Where Jameson sees in postmodern culture’s abstraction and reflexivity an analogy to finance capital’s attempt to defer and get around the underlying tendency to crisis in capitalist production by proliferating virtual capital, this particular art work turns the logic of cultural looting in on itself. The result is an emphasis on the perpetual presence of economic relations of domination in capitalist culture tout court. The struggle between Jack and his literary representative is not a mere conceit by means of which to squeeze a new work out of an old one, an ‘exotic literary instrument’ that yields a domesticated and carefully captioned blast from the past. Instead it pushes renarrativisation into overdrive, offering a web of analogies and historical allegories.

By enquiring into the effectivity of signs, the performative power of fictions – economic, literary, biographical – the film is also alert to the way ‘paper claims’ function primarily as ways of appropriating the (rest of the) material world. Money is essentially a title to future value, a ‘licence to loot’ insofar as the paper titles to capital which capitalists deal in always project ahead of the world, ahead of existing value, through the process of capitalisation. Signs, however apparently free-floating and autonomous, tend to intersect in the most brutal ways with processes of accumulation, equivalent and non-equivalent exchange. Paper claims exact work and life from the labouring bodies they command. In the case of the film, the key moment being the separation of peasants from the land and the production of the urban proletariat of whom Jack is a part. Money, State and the banking system are results and, it should be stressed, products of the (perpetually renewed) dispossession of the poor from all independent means of subsistence. Paper claims are worthless without the State to back them up, and the projections of the financial elite are likewise predicated on a brutal ‘framing’ of the poor.

This brings us back to the triple tree. Execution is the most profound form of recognition which the ruling class can offer one such as Sheppard. It’s also, however, a way of negating identity completely. Capital punishment makes the criminal at once particular and equivalent. Use of the gallows was calibrated around the price of commodities, and hence the socially necessary labour time reappropriated by the malefactor and unreliably echoed in the (jurors’) estimate of the prices of the stolen commodities.2 But the gallows were indifferent to the arguments and aphorisms that a proto-literary figure like Jack was capable of (‘One file is worth all the bibles in the world’). Jack’s (illicit) claims are answered by his definitive transformation from subject to object – the inversion on which capitalism runs made horribly explicit. The ‘moment of [his] dissolution’ is the moment of his complete reification, and, with the help of Defoe and Applebee, the moment at which he gains access to the official means of representation, becoming the subject of a new kind of separation, a second order of (linguistic) enclosure. His death sentence and its execution opens up the space of representation, the dimension of fiction, fantasy, financial projections and speculative futures. Indeed, as we have said, Jack is ‘floated’ as much as hanged and his Narrative becomes the stuff of, or rather for, Legend. A story is born with the death of its protagonist, the Narrator (in the manner of a film noir such as D.O.A.) is already posthumous. Like Jade who survived to read her own obituary, there is something zombie-like about the public proletarian, not lacking in wit, far from wordless, but at the same time, as Applebee puts it, ‘doomed’. The sympathy of the public sphere for marked men and women is already, at this historical moment, the most suspicious thing about it.

There is something rather ‘aesthetic’ about this final instant, then. To quote one of the newspapers of the day, Sheppard was hung up and ‘dangled in the Sheriff’s picture frame’ for 15 minutes. ‘The sheriff’s picture frame’ makes clear the tacit connections between artistic and literary representation and the State’s repressive apparatus. Beyond any Warholian undertones, the link between execution and celebrity is not just via the struggles over the body of the malefactor, the crowd’s identification with the victim or the ballad sellers’ narration of their life and times. In fact, the gallows are aesthetic insofar as it constitutes a crude means for communicating a message to those that can read Jack’s broken body. The State itself requires notoriety to get its point across. This is spectacular language aimed at the (mostly illiterate) early proletariat. Not for them Jack’s ghost written Narrative.

The message is the imposition of work. Commodification uses death to communicate its imperatives to the living through the mediation of exemplary delinquents. As the film presents it, Jack is an escape artist captured first by the fascinated artists of the aristocracy (Thornhill paints Jack’s portrait while the felon is chained up in Newgate, shades of Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends, here) and then definitively by the art of the State. As Peter Linebaugh frames it in his great book The London Hanged, the triple tree was not so much the final stage for disposal of society’s ne’er do wells, as one of the foundations of the economy. Capital punishment was a part of the production and reproduction of the poor as workers, it was there to teach people a very definite lesson. Founded on the originary violence of primitive accumulation – the separation of people from their collectively held property through the enclosures – early capitalism attempted to instil in those that produced its wealth the necessity of toil. Those who refused to submit to the imperative of making their living by taking what they needed to subsist – or like Jack, flaunting a desire for luxury deemed out of his social reach, luxury beyond reason or measure – would be made an example of. The triple tree was the most important prop in a theatre in which the insubordinate were turned into the unfortunate protagonists of a cautionary tale.

But the State did not have complete control over this stage or the stories told about it; both the criminals and the mob were given an opportunity by the very public nature of the spectacle. Jack’s speech in the film sums up the way in which the stage of instruction was being turned into a site of contestation, a place in which the poor might talk back and challenge the ongoing process of separation by which work was imposed.

Revolts at the points of instruction, punishment and incarceration were in turn providing the raw materials for goods in the literary market place, another node in the production and circulation of commodities. The spiral continues, from enclosure to escape, re-enclosure to re-escape, re-escape to re-enclosure. Remorseless, and contingent, one recalls Marx’s famous formula for the mutation of money into more money: ‘M-C-M’. Capital wants it to continue in a seamless cycle, but in reality there are many obstacles to valorisation – Jack is just one example.

During the course of the film the dialectic of representation gets turned around one way then the other. Defoe may have tried to make an example of Jack, a lesson that crime doesn’t pay, that corrupting influences lead him astray, or, more subtly and presciently, that within even the worst criminal there is a kernel of industrious ingenuity that, carefully harnessed, can and should be put to work for expanded accumulation. The film shows Defoe struggling to impose his sense of Jack’s story, to tell something more than a simple morality tale, or rather to invent a new morality able to move on from the dizzying loss of balance produced by the South Sea Bubble. Defoe is straining forward to something like Adam Smith’s conception of civil society, but remains confused and disoriented by the financially-accelerated rise of his own class – not to mention Jack’s. The film makes this drama perhaps even more central than Jack’s own (circular) narrative of incarceration and escape. If he could redeem the whore Moll Flanders and turn her into a kind of self-made woman, perhaps Defoe can reconfigure Jack as a post-Bubble figure of mis-directed industry.

Half the time Defoe is winning, half the time Jack. The film leaves the struggle open, but history suggests that Defoe’s successors did find a way to put Jack’s drive to exit (not to mention his right to a voice) to work. Defoe anticipates Adam Smith and Smith, both Marx and Keynes. All that’s solid melts into air, says a Frenchman surveying the ruin after the collapse of the bubble at the start of the film. But this ‘dissolution’ produced the new financial instruments, the perfection of the division of labour, the growth of industrial capitalism and the rationalisation of the working class, with the Socialist movement the most ambitious and contradictory form of integration. Today, both the bubble and the bureaucrats are in a state of collapse, yet, as the film’s less than exuberant mood implies, the proletariat has not yet found a way to get back on (and/or, off) the stage of history. Instead, they have a gallows look about them.

In this respect, Sheppard is a salutary reminder of the potential of working class insubordination, its ability to posit itself as a ‘self-subsisting positive’, not the negation of the bourgeois negation reproduced by the socialist movement. On the other hand, once one grants a certain autonomy to the working class, one has to acknowledge that capital, in our era, has been only too keen to leave the poor increasingly to their own devices. (At least when it comes to welfare provision; when it comes to surveillance, it’s another matter).

As Peter Linebaugh tells it in The London Hanged, Jack’s popular appeal was based on a shared experience as much if not more than symbolising some utopian return to a life before, let alone beyond, capitalism. Jack stood not only for the possibility of turning the tables on the owners of capital but for the daily escapology that the poor needed to practise in order to survive. According to economic historians of the period, the poor’s ability to subsist at all remains a mystery. Crime was not so much a deviation from the path of righteousness as an essential part of the daily journey of self-reproduction. Jack’s may be a story of freedom, as Peter Linebaugh says, but it is also about the way in which proletarian escape can and must itself become a part of capitalism’s continuation. One recalls Mike Davis writing in Planet of Slums about the contemporary form of this ‘wage puzzle’:

With even formal-sector urban wages in Africa so low that economists can’t figure out how workers survive (the so-called low-wage puzzle), the informal tertiary sector has become an arena of extreme Darwinian competition among the poor.

To put it another way, the ongoing attempt to break the law of value, to live more than is allowed, is from the beginning, and again today, an increasingly central part of capital’s calculus. Rather than honouring the principle of equivalence on which commodity exchange is founded, from the beginning capital has depended on short changing those that produce and constitute value. Jack may have taken more than was deemed his due, breaking the principle of equivalence by running away with the means of production or stealing a silver spoon destined for the unproductive consumption of his betters, but capital also assumed – one could say it insisted – that people would find ways to exist and to labour on less than they were owed.

The film proposes a rhyme or homology between this early period of capitalism in which the wage was barely operative, before the stable establishment of capital’s rules, and our present moment in which the rules appear irreparably bent and in which a second financial revolution is collapsing into a crisis of unprecedented proportions. The process of financialisation is presented as co-existent with that of primitive accumulation, mutually reinforcing.

Jack’s birth as a fictional character coincides with a generalised fictionalisation of identity and a simultaneous dematerialisation and reification of its physical and linguistic props. As money replaces land and wealth is dissolved into economic representations, gold is displaced by coin and in turn paper, and ready money by public credit, the subject is (forcibly) liberated from the continuities and fixities of feudal society. As the film suggests, this involves the transformation of ‘character’ into ‘mere’ writing; myths of depth and substance are under attack, the self as a performance or improvised script comes to the fore. Finance itself is positioned as one of the key, possibly the key, solvent of feudal social relations. Those that today call for a return to a healthy, productive capitalism purged of speculation overlook not only the constitutive place of finance capital in any capitalism whatsoever, but also the way in which speculation is a necessary condition not only for modern thought but for modern praxis tout court. To be precise, for that material praxis which Marx identifies some 130 years after Jack’s pioneering efforts in excarceration. The apprehension that humans are the source of the value/s they live by, and that the reproduction of the world in its totality is down to our sensuous activity is the dangerous secret behind commodities such as Jack.

Thus, fictitious capital is an agent that not only produces a new fictitiousness and fluidity of identities but also, potentially, contributes to the volatility of social relations that makes possible the creation of new forms of life. The aristocracy grabbed the opportunities (and took the risks) which came from the rise in capital by mortgaging their land and creating a sort of trangenerational stipend, which was a life saver for a class in decline. The poor, however, were brutally separated from their own communal holdings of land and had to take back what they could through a process of imposed improvisation. Jack is a figure for the unmanageable excess generated in the process, an unforeseen by-product of a society governed by the imperative of capital accumulation. As such, his primitive challenge to capital is not so much a residue of the feudal era but a brand new product, yet to be mastered and, today, no longer subject to the dismantled and decaying apparatus of labour representation.

Capital has been dependent on breaking its own law of value in both eras, pushing to impose its terms of exchange and to hold workers to written and unwritten contracts while finding ever new ways to get around the iron equation between value and the socially necessary labour time for its reproduction. Corruption is not only the source of innovation (pace Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Giovanni Arrighi and Antonio Negri) it can also be a sign of a system’s decadence. While corruption was the talk of the whole nation for much of the post-South Sea Bubble era, up to and including the appearance of Jack on the scene, the grotesqueries of non-equivalent exchange were only fully perceptible against the intimations of equality emanating from the very logic of the market. The aristocratic critics of capitalist greed deployed a feudal morality which they themselves found increasingly impossible to inhabit, while satirists such as Swift already noted the unfairness and cruelty of the new society, even as they hankered for a restoration of more stable forms of domination. In Jack’s day the dissolution of a stable hierarchical social order based on landed property is the most obvious and the most encouraging, result of the rise of financial and mercantile capital. Power was becoming visible, status and influence could be bought, privileges were being transmuted into more nakedly economic forms of domination.

Corruption, and the financial crisis released by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, would become part of the movement toward expanded social reproduction which capitalists themselves (think of Thomas Malthus’ gloomy anticipation of death by horseshit) could hardly comprehend at this point. For all its intrinsic brutality, the imposition of the form of abstract labour on work just beginning in Jack’s day. This would see not only the rationalisation and disenchantment of social existence in its totality but the creation of the material conditions for hitherto unknown self-determination and abundance – given that the dispossessed reappropriate and transform the forces and relations of production. In our day, corruption and delegitimation seem to have undermined fixed authority and ensured the reproduction of a decadent system; both capital and its social democratic opposition (‘the left wing of devalorisation’) are discredited but the working class have suffered greatly through the concomitant process of non-reproduction.

Defoe’s scheming to imagine a way of putting Jack’s exuberance to work points toward both a new form of enclosure – from industrial production down to Fordist devalorisation through the supervision of every aspect of the workers’ reproduction — and a more rational form of social existence. By contrast those writing the working class’s scripts today are rarely capable of imagining a better world even in their own meagre terms. As such Jack’s moment rebukes our own; the social imagination fired by his escapes needs to be reawakened through modern day excarcerations. Although these may have to take apparently Blaine-like forms: occupations, refusals to move, the assertion of our rights in parts of the social factory that capital is now trying hastily to dismantle. Again, these rights will not necessarily be enshrined in law, and will involve workers crossing the line. Jack’s opportunism is also salutary. One can use the law, protect oneself where necessary, know the law better than one’s lawyers. But one will also need to keep alive a healthy sense of the law’s fictitiousness, its paper claims to a justice which can only be material.

The paradoxical message of Jack Sheppard’s fugitive art in an age of faltering globalisation and desiccating liquidity is that fixity and self-enclosure can be a tool of liberation; a first, if necessarily transient, step toward a greater excarceration. In the year of the Lyndsey and Visteon workers’ struggles, we are returned to the ambiguous legacy of the integration of the proletariat into structures of representation with a vengeance.3 While some dismiss any concern with the fate of the residual industrial working class as chauvinistic or narrowly sectarian, a fetish for manual labour or racist preference for defending the struggles of those with something rather than nothing to lose, it is worth considering how – like Jack on the gallows, facing death – the almost-posthumous workers of the world can also send out insurrectionary signals when they refuse to go gently into the lousy night. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard traces the implications of a valediction without reconciliation, the power of refusal in extremis as the beginning as well as the end of something.

Footnotes

1 It could be that what was truly representative about Jade’s death was that it was an avoidable tragedy resulting from neoliberalised UK health care’s growing focus on policing behaviour over the treatment of illness. If her cancer had received the same attention as her subsequent demise (not to mention the ongoing saga regarding her moral status, etc.) there would have been no life-affirming, emotional franchise, no fictitious capitalisation on her death. Some would rather see the death-fest as a sign of our emotional evolution and progress (as with the manic mourn-in for Princess Diana) rather than an index of social decadence. However, though Jade’s death put cervical cancer check-ups back on the agenda for younger women, one should ask why they weren’t making regular trips to the doctor in the first place. Responsibility is shifted onto the patient and away from the ‘service’ provider/public-private State. The flip side of this contraction of social reproduction is a corresponding financialisation of death. Max Keyser notes that with the rise of entertainment futures trading there is now a corresponding spate of death rumours and death threats circulating as a result of ‘death speculation’ and ‘death pools’, as traders attempt to sell short Hollywood actors and other A(AA?) list stars. Market manipulation is spreading from the stock exchange to the entertainment industry as the crisis deepens.

2 ‘We observe a relationship between 10d. and a whipping, between 4s. 10d. and a branded hand, and between large sums of money and a hanging … they are only imagined figures of account [… but …] the consequences of these sums upon the bodies of the offenders were very real.’ In Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, Verso, 2003, p. 82.

3 As so often, union representatives have played an at best ambivalent role in the current conjuncture. Though union members and shop stewards made much of the running, particularly in the mobilisations around the Lyndsey refinery wildcat strikes, union convenors and bureaucrats acted largely as a break on the development of struggle at the occupied Ford-Visteon plants. Indeed, in a manner analogous to the British State’s cocktail of negligence and interference when it comes to welfare provision, ‘representation’ here meant supplying unreliable legal advice to union members and fear-mongering about the repercussions of stepping beyond the law whilst failing to provide material support and funds. For an excellent account and analysis of the struggle by workers at the Ford-Visteon plant in Enfield earlier this year see Ret Marut’s, ‘A Post-Fordist Struggle: Report and reflections on the UK Ford-Visteon dispute 2009’, June 9 2009 (8)