#control signal

[spockle]

Phineas and Ferb intern for Doofenshmirtz and Ferb just spaces out for half the time.

I mean look at the boy.

Totally whipped

[thhouseofblack]

Penelope and Diomedes together! (pre-marriage? post-trojan war? either way they're pining)✨

commissioned from the amazing @/BLUET0NES on twitter! thank you for this!! 🩷

[taikeero-lecoredier]

Chat Control to return on the agenda this month

Tweet link For those unaware, Chat Control is a European proposal that aim to prevent people from sending videos,pictures or links through private messages and emails unless they agree to be scanned by artificial intelligence to "fight against csem". While the intention seems good this would open a door to mass surveillance and vulnerabilities that hackers can easily exploit,and given all the recent cyber attacks through the world, they dont need to have their job become even easier. Without even talking about the false positives this would trigger. There are better ways to keep children safe online. Chat Control is not it. Even messages from minors wont be exempt from being scanned. TAKE ACTION HERE !

JOIN OUR DISCORD SERVER ! American followers, please reblog this,because this goes in the same hand as KOSA does, and its very likely Europe will be geo blocked from messaging services if it passes, cutting off communication with your European friends. (and the possibility that the US govt will use Chat Control as "inspiration" if it passes) See more of my posts on chat control

[hello-eeveev]

man people really hate that orym still gets sad about his husband and father being murdered huh

not only is healing not linear and one’s progress shouldn’t be compared to someone else’s, but orym is actively in a situation that is bringing up that trauma and grief again and again, and you just want him to ignore that? to never talk about it??

like, I’ve been really stressed out lately in a way that’s bringing up a lot of old, tough memories and just a *smell* started to trigger a spiral, but you want orym to be perfectly reasonable when he’s dealing with the organization that killed his family, friends, and coworkers???

I also think that some of you just don’t like that Liam’s narration style utilizes a lot of imagery and parallels, because I’ve seen takes that are like ‘liam narrating orym being reminded of laudna’s past as she plays with her puppets shows that he doesn’t view laudna as a full person’ and ‘orym telling laudna that she has more love than delilah and that she deserves to live outside of delilah’s shadow means that he is incapable of viewing her beyond her history with delilah’—and with the latter take specifically: literally no? what? the whole recent arc has been laudna struggling to do that herself? how is orym trying to combat that view reinforcing it?

marisha frequently evokes delilah imagery in her narration of laudna and we all agree that it rules, so why is it suddenly Problematic that orym also thinks about these parallels? hot take I guess but I think it’s cool actually that liam pays attention to how his friend describes her character and has his own character engage with it.

[nomoneybeetieblog]

making the batfamily on the sims is another kind of torture

[not-equippedforthis]

really wish we got a 30 minute special episode montage of john and arthur trying to figure out how to drive. bonus: parallel parking.

[thebookishwallflower]

I want to make a post to inform people about the current situation with the bird flu (/avian flu/H5N1) outbreaks.

I don't want to cause panic but do want to spread information.

This is especially important if you live in an area that has a news system you don't trust to give accurate, timely, or honest news about something like a possible new pandemic, use your own judgement.

If that applies it is going to be very important to make sure you stay informed and follow these H5N1 outbreaks yourself and know how to best protect yourself.

I am no expert, but I do know a good bit about disease and influenza in particular, and have been following the H5N1 outbreaks as they've been happening, so under the cut I'm going to do my best to inform everyone I can.

Please stay safe, stay informed, and spread information, not germs.

What's bird flu and why do I care? (What's bird flu and why do I care?)

Avian flu and bird flu mean the same thing, an influenza virus that (primarily) infects birds. H5N1 denotes a specific strain of avian influenza. H5N1 can spillover (when a pathogen spreads from it's normal host organism to a new host organism) from animals to humans.

How could I get H5N1? (How could I get H5N1?)

Human to human transmission has not been observed yet (12/1/24) during this current outbreak. You can get this from contact with wild birds, especially water fowl, domestic birds, cattle, pigs, horses, dogs, and bats. It is also possible to get from raw (unpasteurized) milk and undercooked meat from infected animals.

What's the big deal then? (What's the big deal then?)

The common flu is not very pathogenic. How pathogenic something is determines how sick something makes the host, something that is highly pathogenic can cause severe disease. H5N1 is considered a HPAI, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza.

H5N1 is also a Type A influenza virus, most known Type A influenza viruses can infect birds. There is one Type A human flu in circulation at the moment, however it isn't very prevalent.

"IAV poses a significant risk of zoonotic infection, host switch, and the generation of pandemic viruses. IAVs can infect humans and a variety of animals, such as pigs, horses, marine mammals, cats, dogs, and birds (S1)."

IAV - Influenza A Viruses | Zoonotic infection - when an infectious disease of a non-human host infects a human host | Host switch - when a cross-species transmission of a pathogen can lead to successful, stable, and continuous infections

Every species the flu infects, the more strains that pop up under a sub-type IAV, the possibility for recombination increases. "Recombination occurs when at least two viral genomes [or strains] co-infect the same host cell and exchange genetic segments (S2)."

The flu is pretty good at recombination, when given the chance. It is also really good at mutating, and fast. If there were to be a recombination event and a new strain evolved (this would be called an antigenic shift) that was highly pathogenic, highly infectious (good at spreading, which H5N1 is), that could then infect humans and cause human-to-human transmission we might have a pandemic on our hands. This has not shown signs of happening during this outbreak*, this is what to look out for.

This (a recombination event) is what caused the 1918 pandemic during WW1. This pandemic killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people in 1918, in a world with a population of around 2 billion. 7.1 million died of COVID 19, as of 11/9/24 (S3), from a population of around 8 billion.

We know more, we are prepared, it's not guaranteed to happen, and it's not guaranteed to be as bad. But the possibilities are endless and it's extremely important to be prepared and stay informed.

So what do I do? (So what do I do?)

Again, stay informed, and that might mean checking independent news sources, the CDC website, and more, to keep yourself updated, especially if you know your local news won't do it for you. You should also familiarize yourself with the symptoms of influenza, if you have it, stay home.

Keep yourself safe, we had a pandemic already, you know the drill. Cover your nose and mouth when sneezing/coughing, wash your hands, sanitize your hands, and get your flu shot. And, in addition, avoid contact with wild birds, poultry, pigs, and cattle if you can.

In the event that this gets worse, social distancing is very important, being outdoors, wearing a mask, and all the stuff above, you can shed the virus for around a week before you start feeling bad. Keep yourself safe and don't infect anyone else.

If that doesn't sound like it'll do much, I promise you it does. Those are all classified NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and even epidemiologists were shocked at their impact and importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. They did work, and they were incredibly effective—as long as they were carried out.

I don't want to cause panic or worry anyone, but that is how information ends of suppressed. I want to make everyone aware of what we might face so that we can fight it and be strong and stay safe.

If anyone has any questions, wants any clarification, any corrections, or wants to know some good places to learn more about this stuff please don't hesitate to contact me (@'s, dm's, or asks), I will answer as best I can.

Here's the CDC's page covering the H5 bird flu current situation.

S1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5578040/

S2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7106159/

S3 - https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths?n=c

*with the exception of this coverage (as a possibility): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/bird-flu-cases-mutation-canada

[maryymaruu]

INCOMING TRANSMISSION

FROM: Gentle Stars [GLOBAL CARETAKER]

TO: Three Signals

PUPPET HOLOGRAM STREAM REQUEST - Approve iterator hologram via overseer stream?

INCOMING: Overseer Camera + Audio Live Feed

[“Hello, little songbird! I hope I caught you at a good time. Do you mind if I send my hologram into your chamber? I know it’s not much, but I think we’d both appreciate some time spent together, outside of the oppressive silence of our own structures, yes? Well, you up for it?”]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[evilhorse]

Pray for your city.

(Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #32)

[garpen]

So is Duke aware of your bad spelling? Does he know the typos are yours not theirs? ❤️😘😛

"Bully, bully, bully," I say three times into the mirror. I wait, and watch as anon materializes behind me. /j

[thetarttfuldickhead]

I think there’s a lot of unmined potential in Jamie being conditioned to prick out when he’s flipped off, ‘cause if the team’s doing the rounds some late night after a win and some random dude decides to give Jamie the finger then—

[celestial-encounters]

Hello? Who's there?

This is an ask blog for Celestial Encounters, an AU made by @sainteclectic that you can find extra information about here. Basically, HMS and all the other albums are deities, while Whole (Harmonia) is just some guy who works at a corner store. HMS (or Pathos, Logos, and Psyche) are the primary gods, and they created or formed the other gods as offshoots of themselves, representing aspects of their power or performing duties for them.

Asks are preferably directed at someone specific, but you can also just shout into the void and see who answers. blog rules and further information about the characters are below the cut, but here's the short list:

Pathos (he/she/they) is the god of the moon, emotions, and justice. Under her are Castor (CiD; he/him), the god and entropy and injustice, and Thalia (Fine I'm Fine; any), god of celebration and euphoria.

Logos (she/her) is the god of the sun, logic, and progress. Under her are Pollux (The Before; she/her), god of apathy and downward spirals, and Theseus (...you know; he/they), god of perseverance and change.

Psyche (it/they/rarely she) is the god of the stars, the soul, and the underworld. Under it are Charon (Handsome Devil; he/they/it), god of judgement and passing on, and Lethe (Forest for the Trees; he/it), god of mania and overgrowth.

Aaand Harmonia (he/she), a normal mortal who doesn't know what he's doing here either.

Rules

I honestly don't really have anything except for being generally respectful of the blog owner and not getting too rowdy. {suggestive stuff is fine, use your best judgement on that kind of thing} go wild go crazy

Longer bios

pathos is the god of the moon, emotion, and justice. she gives humans their feelings, compassion, and drive to do what they feel is just. he has a strong sense of justice himself, though that sense might seem intense and destructive at times. despite his seemingly righteous goals, he's often blinded by them and is reckless as a result. she's driven purely by emotions, being a conduit for the feelings of humanity, and often doesn't think things through. logos despises their perceived immaturity, believing her to be too rash and emotional to know what's best for mortals.

logos is the god of the sun, logic, and progress. she grants humanity reasoning skills and technological advancements. she enjoys seeing them develop, but she's grown to dislike mortals for all their flaws and failures. still, she's devoted to giving humanity a flawless future - but she doesn't take their feelings about that into account, only what's "objectively" best for them. she approaches things from a purely practical perspective, not caring much for the emotions of the mortals who will be affected. this constantly puts her at odds with pathos, who thinks her methods are ruthless and cruel.

psyche is the god of the stars, the soul, and the underworld. they represent the spark of life in all things, the driving force that makes them unique. in return for giving humanity their sentience, it sacrificed its own personal identity, instead becoming a vessel for the wayward and damned souls that stay trapped behind their mask. it's exhausted from its duties of managing living and dead souls, as well as keeping logos and pathos from destroying humanity with their constant bickering. they like to go and watch the humans when it gets stressed out. it makes them happy to see mortals living their lives, using the gift of free will they granted them.

harmonia is a normal human living in a semi modern setting. the setting is sort of mixed with a bit of fantasy, because they still know gods exist and worship them and all that, which basically just means there's temples to them instead of churches. he's a minimum wage worker, painfully average, depressed, and barely presentable. she doesn't interact with many people outside of coworkers and customers, and she's certainly never interacted with literal deities before... until now.

thalia is a god of celebration and euphoria, especially after hard times. she represents the kind of overjoyed catharsis you get when you're finally free from your problems. he's worshipped in dances and song, and though they're more of an underground worship god than mainstream one these days (and she prefers it that way), many celebrations like graduations or weddings still include a toast to thalia as part of their tradition.

theseus is an interesting case. he was a human who strived to attain godhood by replacing his body with animal parts, hoping to be inhuman enough to ascend to godhood. logos respected the grind but hubris is still a crime, so they should probably punish his soul post death. pathos got into a debate over the fact logos is the most hubris person ever, of course she'd say that, and psyche allowed him to be a minor god of persistence and change as a compromise. he's more like a patron saint than a god in his own right, people pray to him for minor things these days, like personal growth or doing good on a test.

castor is the god of entropy and injustice. despite this, he's not generally a misanthropic god. instead, he's the god you turn to when you need strength in the face of an uncaring universe. fighting an oppressive system, getting vengeance for your suffering, seeing the beauty in decay, that kind of thing. he's representative of pathos' domain in justice and the cruel world that requires it! the emotional motivation to do better is nothing without the logical understanding of how to do it, though.

his twin pollux is the misanthropic one, representing apathy and downward spirals. she's the embodiment of the kind of nothingness you feel while trapped in depression. despite this seeming like an emotional thing, it's instead symbolic for the pit you can fall into when you can't feel emotions healthily. so she serves under logos because, while logos represents progress, that doesn't mean anything without the emotional drive to move forward.

charon is a chthonic god, specifically of judgment and passage into the underworld! charon is under psyche, who's The god of the underworld {taking care of souls and all that}, and he's basically a collector of souls that try to escape them - think thanatos trying to take sisyphus, who refused to die naturally. but it often gets into trouble with psyche because it likes to "play with his food" before taking them to it. they appreciate a good game of cat and mouse, and they respect those particularly crafty mortals that successfully elude them. meanwhile psyche just wants him to do his fucking job.

lethe is a nature god, but in the same way early nature deities like pan also represented madness. he's a god of doomed journeys, mania, and overgrowth. he's the voice in your head that tells you to leave the well-trod path and lose yourself in the gnarled branches and twisted pathways. legend says you might enter his domain if you get lost in the woods, and if you do, you might never escape... used as a cautionary tale to keep kids from wandering off, but people also make offerings to it before going traveling or hiking as a way to avoid their journey ending poorly.

[banefort]

im gonna be reallly annoying here for a second grrm shouldve added so much more linguistic diversity to westeros. especially the north and ESPECIALLY north of the wall. also there's no way daenerys's mothertongue would be high valyrian. thank you.

[grimesapologist]

hey, Valerie here, black trans woman, writer, sound, image, and video artist, I'm super broke and need to live. if you want to help me out or support my work،, thank you. this is a last ditch effort, I'm really tired of things going wrong but also really desperate so I'm gonna have to do this again with all the links I can think of, please try all of them if you can, I am really really grateful for all the people who have tried to help me out so far, if you see this and your attempt failed, it would be extremely kind of you to try again <3

monzo revolut paypal

kraken (crypto works here too)

[rabbit-rays]

STABILIZATION PROTOCOL