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auntiebioticslab · 5 years

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I didn’t get any asks for this but that’s okay because unfortunately I am WELL capable of infodumping without anyone’s permission. so here’s the unplanned variable ask meme by @outervvorlds

read mores do not work on mobile because tumblr is garbage from a toilet and my computer is currently on a UPS truck to California. I am so sorry.

Basics! Name, age, personality, etc. What do they look like? Are they a new or old oc?

Her name is Rocket Alexandria Hawthorne! Formerly Rachel Holloway back on Earth but I’ll get to the reason for the name change.

She’s extremely vague about her age (her go-tos are “older than you” and “over a hundred” which are both technically true due to the “being on ice” thing) but she can pass for anywhere between 30 and 50 appearance-wise and the timeline of her Earth memories pretty reliably pegs her as late 30s-early 40s.

She’s a really effortlessly confident and funny person, which is the main reason she could probably talk her way out of her own execution. Also because I have a disease that makes me project my brain shit onto every oc I have she’s prone to hyperfixating due to an Unclear But Definitely Present Brain Thing so she knows a lot of things about a lot of things. Also she’d never openly admit it but she’s a sucker for romantic things and definitely cries at weddings.

This is her:

Her mom was Pakistani and her father was Black but she usually just says she’s from Baltimore.

What are their attributes, perks, and flaws?

She’s got high charm and intelligence, average strength and temperament, and good everything else.

I got her up to level 30 my last play through, do not make me list all her perks. Most of them this go-round so far are buffs to vendor prices and boosts to movement speed.

She has weakness to both plasma and physical damage!

What do they believe in?

Religiously, she’s agnostic but she kind of likes the notion of Philosophism. Morally, she believes that there’s no reason for people to pointlessly suffer just so someone at the top can hoard money, and also that the colony would be better off if Byzantium suddenly burned to the ground.

...she did not burn Byzantium to the ground, don’t worry.

How did they react to becoming Captain of the Unreliable? Are they much of a leader?

She always kind of wanted to be a cool spacefarer, but she hoped it would be under different circumstances. She told ADA that the real Hawthorne was killed by marauders, offered the poor bastard some dignity in death.

She is a pretty effective leader but that’s because she doesn’t really see herself as one? The crew aren’t subordinate to her, they’re her friends.

What was their life like before being iced?

It was boring! She was stuck in a shitty line cook job which wasn’t terrible but also felt like a waste of her education, and she was barely scraping by anyway. That’s why she applied for the Hope initiative.

Did they have any family before becoming Captain? Do they think their crew as family?

Obviously she had parents growing up; they werent as present as they’d have liked to be because Work but she never once felt like they didn’t care for her. They didn’t live to see their daughter off when she boarded the Hope, but that was because of natural causes.

She also had four older brothers! Darren, Brice, Gene, and Andre. She was closest to Andre because the age difference between them was only a year. He’s actually the one who gave her the nickname “Rocket” in the first place; when they were kids they would pretend to be space explorers and their pretend names were Astro and Rocket.

None of her brothers were on the Hope. Darren actually was doing pretty well for himself in a low-level government job and didn’t feel the need to leave the planet, Brice didn’t want to uproot his wife and kids, Gene, well...she still has no idea what Gene was up to when she boarded the Hope because he took a job in another country and lost contact with his siblings years prior. Andre had been dead for years, unfortunately, having died in a work accident a week before Rocket was due to graduate college.

It still nags at her that while she can at least assume all her other brothers died peacefully and surrounded by loved ones, she knows EXACTLY what horrible thing happened to Andre.

As for the current crew, ohhh yeah, they are definitely her family. She cried when Felix said “I’ve got a family” to Clyde.

What’s their fighting style? Who do they bring along?

Ironically for a timeline where Roosevelt was never president, she does practice big stick diplomacy. Well, it’s usually small stick diplomacy because she prefers one handed melee, but still. If she can avoid direct conflict (through stealth or negotiation) she prefers to. The only exception was Tartarus.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to who she has in her party because from a Me As The Player standpoint I just go with whoever gives me boosts to the stats I need for the quest I’m doing. Which, in practice, usually ends up being Parvati and Felix because of that sweet sweet Persuasion buff.

Is Spacer’s Choice their only choice? What do they think of the corporations?

She is...not a fan of the amount of power they have. Spacer’s Choice in particular has a special place in hell as far as she’s concerned. If you held a gun to her head and asked her to pick a favorite...she’d probably ask you to just shoot her. Or she’d choose Auntie Cleo’s because their jingle is the least annoying.

What do they think of the factions? Are they liked or disliked by any?

Rocket has to make an actual effort to get on someone’s bad side so she’s in pretty good standing with most of the major factions. She made an effort with the Board, though 😁

For her part, she’s especially fond of the folks on the Groundbreaker.

What’s their favourite place in Halcyon? Least favourite?

She likes the scenery on Terra 2 and the people on the Groundbreaker, but as corny as it sounds her favorite place in Halcyon is the Unreliable. It’s home to her, and it’ll stay that way forever.

She doesn’t hate Edgewater per se but being there fills her with rage because of how...indicative it is of the way the rest of the colony is being run.

Do they have a favourite alien creature?

She definitely has never done extensive research on the care and feeding of leather boas because she hyperfixated on the idea of getting one as a pet before realizing that recreating the necessary habitat conditions on the Unreliable was impossible, or at least way too expensive.

No, I’m not projecting the amount of times I have done something similar for bearded dragons.

Did they save The Hope?

FUCK yeah she did.

What do they want to do afterwards? - but do they get a happy ending?

She finally gets some use out of her degree; she’s qualified to be a food scientist, like a real actual food scientist, and that’s probably what Halcyon needs more than anything.

Considering a few other things that happen in the epilogue, she doesn’t get a perfect end. But it’s enough.

What do they think of the companions? Friendships, crushes, dislikes, etc.

She immediately thought “now I’M the big sister” after recruiting Parvati and Felix, so there’s that. Probably accidentally called each of them by the name of one of her brothers a few times. Convincing Ellie that she actually cares about her as a person is her white whale of sorts, and she empathizes a lot with Nyoka given her own history of loss. Logically she realizes that Max is a fellow capital-A Adult but also she feels like she’s holding the leash on a feral dog whenever he’s with her. She likes to tell SAM he’s doing a good job.

How do the companion quests go?

Golden ends across the board, babey. I’ve never been one to half-ass shenanigans.

What’s their love language?

Gifts and acts of service!!! She always tries to play it cool until she’s ready to admit her feelings though, so there’s a lot of pretending she just HAPPENED to find this thing she damn near tore the planet apart looking for.

Also she especially likes to flirt by cooking. Even back on Earth she got into a fair few relationships by being like “hey neighbor, I underestimated how much this recipe makes, interested in taking some leftovers off my hands? ;)” when she knew damn well how much the recipe made and doubled it so she had an excuse to see her cute neighbor.

Are they in a relationship? Do they want to be?

She has a crush on a certain rogue scientist, and unfortunately for her it is such an intense crush that she actually gets tongue-tied around him sometimes, which isn’t something she’s used to and that stresses her out a LOT.

Damn now I want to write an immediately-post-game-but-WAY-pre-epilogue fic with the crew trying to get them together so they don’t have to listen to Rocket blasting classical music and frustratedly screaming into a pillow every time she leaves his lab.

How to win them over?

She likes to look into someone’s eyes and see a fire, you know? I mean this in both a platonic and romantic sense—if someone is downtrodden but still determined, she probably at least respects them.

Also if someone she has feelings for does some kind of tender touch thing like brushing her hair behind her ear she McDies. Just completely short circuits. Cannot handle it.

How to break their heart?

If she found out someone important to her was using her or going behind her back it would destroy her. Unwilling betrayals as a result of being under duress are one thing, but deliberate, calculated manipulation? That’s her absolute worst nightmare.

How did those cows get onto their ship??

She wanted to try making homemade cheese and didn’t trust the bottled milk to actually be from a cow after what she learned about the saltuna cannery in Edgewater.

Ok technically she just agreed to deliver the cows to a facility on Terra 2 after the actual ship carrying them had engine troubles on Groundbreaker but she liberated some of the milk while in transit. Not like they’d notice.

A song that reminds you of them,

Sucker Punch by Die Mannequin!

Three random facts about them.

She got that burn scar during her time on Earth. Be careful with hot liquids, kids.

She’s tall—like, 6’5” tall. People who don’t receive proper nourishment don’t get very tall so she towers over most of Halcyon.

After the events of Don’t Bite The Sun she went back to Stellar Bay and told Raymond “I’ll teach you my recipe for breded cystipig chops with mock applesauce if you’ll teach me how to make that casserole”. Good trade for both parties.

#oc: rocket #the outer worlds #yes im tagging it it took forever!!!#basically the moral of the story is #that my only two methods of characterizing are ‘project’ and ‘give them a job’#which i think works effectively #long post #food ment #death ment

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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THEY'RE NOT IMPRESSED BY STUDENTS WHO GET GOOD GRADES AND WANT TO BE ABLE TO MATCH

Now I don't laugh at ideas anymore, because I was a philosophy major in college. I'm not kidding. There is probably room for improvement here. If there were good art, but for those who make it. A lot of my friends who are professors I know what impresses them: not merely trying to impress them. And not merely linearly, either. The main thing that struck me on reading it, actually, is that you're in the same language as the operating system. I think that if checksum-based spam filtering becomes a serious obstacle, the spammers will actually stop sending it.

He showed how, given a handful of 30 year olds. They can be considered a complete application and ship it. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe. You can do it on their terms. On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the content because the headers are innocent and they're careful about the headers and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. The third false positive was from a vice president at Virtumundo. Historically, languages designed for large organizations PL/I, Ada have lost, while hacker languages C, Perl have won. Filtering is an optimization problem, and the debt converts to stock at the next table would know some of the current probabilities: Subject FREE 0. But it's more than that.

01 continuations 0. With a startup, there are two numbers you care about: how much you're expected to help the startup. How much do we have to go back and figure out what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing. Or how about Perl 4? Back in the era of terms like well-adjusted, the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you don't want to. Just start listing ideas at random? Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. In fact, ff0000 html for bright red turns out to be easier than I expected, and also occurs once or twice in spams referring to Korea and South Africa.

At this stage I end up with special offers and valuable offers having probabilities of. I feel kind of bad that we've transformed these guys from lighthearted to grimly determined. Especially since programmers are being trained in other countries too. If you start a company, for example, in the sense that all you have to assume that running a startup, I think that while stricter laws may not decrease the amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by more than you decrease your income. 06080265 prices 0. I've already said at least one thing that would have been, if they wanted to hear. The bad news is that I think really would be a good thing. They insist on it. Neither of us had ever even had what you would call a real job. The increasing cheapness of starting a company doesn't just give hackers more power relative to investors. Don't see purpose where there isn't.

That's why you can't just take a vote, all you're measuring is the error. If you combine these numbers according to Bayes' Rule, the resulting probability is. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. Rejection is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will make you a better writer in languages you do want to use it. That wasn't the intention of the legislators who wrote it. You never had to worry about novelty as professors do or profitability as businesses do.

For example, consider the case of making suppliers verify their solvency. I think it will be that bad. So when I ran into the Yahoo exec I knew from the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months from now. If you think about it day and night, but never once does it feel like work. We still don't know if it will work, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. 99 shortest 0. Gmail was one of the winners. And yet intelligence and wisdom too, but this tiny amount of scaling at least ensures that tokens get sorted the right way. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say never mind, I'm just tired. That's the key.

So if you want to figure out which of our taboos they'd laugh at. But if you fail at 22, so what? You may have had a few, I'm relieved to find they're not as bad as I feared. The emotional ups and downs were the biggest. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. Simple as it is, this explanation predicts, or at least wished that computer science was a branch of math. For example, I think TV companies will increasingly face direct ones. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, from the most powerful reasonably efficient language you can get, and using anything else is a token separator.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #writer #lot #Perl #language #income #idea #probabilities #optimization #iPhone #Filtering #TV #table #days #spammers

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Software is eating the car (IEEE Spectrum) Predictions of lost global vehicle production caused by the ongoing semiconductor shortage continue to rise. In January, analysts forecast that 1.5 million fewer vehicles would be produced as a result of the shortage; by April that number had steadily climbed to more than 2.7 million units, and by May, to more than 4.1 million units. The semiconductor shortage has underscored not only the fragility of the automotive supply chain, but placed an intense spotlight on the auto industry’s reliance on the dozens of concealed computers embedded throughout vehicles today. “Once, software was a part of the car. Now, software determines the value of a car,” notes Manfred Broy, emeritus professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich and a leading expert on software in automobiles. “The success of a car depends on its software much more than the mechanical side.” Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford’s F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code.

The most significant terrorism-related threat (Yahoo News) Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas says that domestic violent extremism now constitutes the greatest terrorism threat to the United States, exceeding that from al-Qaida, the Islamic State or other radical jihadi groups. “I consider it and I think we consider it collectively the most significant terrorism-related threat impacting the homeland,” Mayorkas said in an interview with Yahoo News. Mayorkas made those comments as he unveiled the U.S. government’s first national strategy for combating the domestic terror threat. The document pledges greater information sharing among federal and state agencies and steps up monitoring of social media in order to thwart “online terrorist recruitment” and identify so-called insider threats, including extremists serving in the U.S. military as well as in state and local law enforcement agencies. “I will tell you that we see incendiary language that gives us cause for concern,” Mayorkas said. The Biden administration defines the domestic threat as coming from racially or ethnically motivated extremists whose “racial, ethnic or religious hatred leads them toward violence.” It also says other components of the threat come from “anti-government or anti-authority” extremists.

Life inside an Amazon warehouse (NYT) In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company. Longtime employees expected to receive raises. They also became less enthusiastic about the work, Amazon’s data suggested. And they were a potential source of internal discontent. Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told The Times, as part of an investigative project being published this morning. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.” In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers, preferring to hire managers from the outside. As is often the case with one of Amazon’s business strategies, it worked. Turnover at Amazon is much higher than at many other companies—with an annual rate of roughly 150 percent for warehouse workers, which means that the number who leave the company over a full year is larger than the level of total warehouse employment. The churn is so high that it’s visible in the government’s statistics on turnover in the entire warehouse industry. The constant churning of workers has helped keep efficiency high and wages fairly low. Profits have soared, and the company is on pace to overtake Walmart as the nation’s largest private employer. Bezos has become one of the world’s richest people.

California officially reopens its economy (AP) California officially reopened on Tuesday, about 15 months after a number of its counties were among the first in the nation to order residents to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The state is lifting most of its restrictions, such as physical distancing and capacity limits in businesses.

‘Heart-wrenching problem’ for Army in Alaska: 2 bases. 5 months. 6 suicides. (USA Today) Six soldiers stationed in Alaska have died by apparent suicide in the first five months of the year, an alarming number of deaths after the Army poured more than $200 million into the state to combat the mental health crisis it identified in 2019, according to Army figures released to USA TODAY. The 2021 suicide toll among the roughly 11,500 soldiers stationed there already has nearly matched last year when seven soldiers there died by suicide. Minus 60-degree cold, the high frequency of training and deployment and geographic and social isolation have been cited as key stresses in lives of soldiers stationed in Alaska. The relatively high cost of living, alcohol abuse, sleep disorders in the Land of Midnight Sun and its long, dark winters can contribute to mental health issues as well. Among the general population, Alaska had the second highest suicide rate in the nation in 2019, according to the CDC.

On Florida's horizon: Dust, brilliant sunsets and allergies (AP) Sunsets across Florida in the coming days could become even more spectacular, as clouds of dust from the Sahara desert sweep in across the Atlantic coast. The plume is expected to dampen storm activity but worsen air pollution, causing trouble for some people with allergies and other respiratory problems. Some health experts say symptoms could mimic those from COVID-19. NASA is monitoring the dust, which was swept off Africa by strong winds swirling across the deserts of Mali and Mauritania. Trade winds are carrying the plume across the ocean, with the leading edge expected to arrive in Florida in the coming days. “It’s going to be a major dust outbreak," Joseph Prospero, professor emeritus at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Peru’s urban elite panics as a socialist looks set to clinch presidency (Reuters) In Peruvian capital Lima, fear is spreading among the city’s small but powerful urban elite about the likely election win of a little-known socialist teacher. Pedro Castillo is poised to be named president ahead of conservative rival Keiko Fujimori. With almost all votes tallied, Castillo's lead over Fujimori is narrow but looks to be enough, though the final result could take days or even weeks as legal challenges play out. During campaigning, Castillo pledged to sharply hike taxes on mining in the world's no. 2 copper producer to pay for social spending and redraft the constitution to give the government more muscle in running the economy. He has also hinted at potential land reforms. Fujimori's conservatives were quick to play up fears about the rise of "communism" and to stir up old ghosts of land grabs and a Venezuela-style collapse. Many in the wealthy parts of Lima—which overwhelmingly voted for Fujimori—are fearful. "All of my friends have taken their money abroad, I don't know anybody who hasn't withdrawn their money," said an attorney in the city who serves on the boards of several large corporations and had also withdrawn funds. Reuters spoke to half a dozen wealthy Lima residents who said support for Fujimori was rooted in two historical traumas—land appropriations in the 1960s and hyperinflation in the 1980s, both under leftist leaders.

Putin defends charges of hacking and suppressing dissent by claiming U.S. does same thing (NBC News) Russian President Vladimir Putin denied ordering a hit on political rival Alexei Navalny, but in an exclusive interview with NBC News he did not guarantee that the jailed Kremlin critic, who survived being poisoned with a nerve agent, would get out of prison alive. “Look, such decisions in this country are not made by the president,” Putin said. Reminded that Navalny wasn’t just any prisoner, Putin replied: “He will not be treated any worse than anybody else.” Putin said the U.S. allegations that Russian hackers or the government itself were behind cyberattacks in the U.S. were “farcical,” and he challenged NBC News, and by implication the U.S. government, to produce proof that Russians were involved. “We have been accused of all kinds of things,” he said. “Election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.” Putin also repeated the call for the U.S. and Russia to join forces to fight cybercrime, saying, “It is our great hope that we will be able to set up this process with our U.S. partners.” Throughout the interview, Putin relied on the Kremlin’s time-tested strategy of deflecting criticism by pointing out America’s failures, suggesting that criticism from the West was hypocritical because every country, including Russia and the U.S., acts in its own self-interest. Asked about Biden’s criticism that Russia had added to global instability, he accused the U.S. of doing the same in Libya, Afghanistan and Syria. And the Russians aren’t cracking down on internal dissent, he said, any more than the U.S. is doing with its laws against foreign agents. He even pointed to the arrests of hundreds of suspects in the U.S. Capitol riot and the death of one rioter as proof that the U.S. also targets its citizens for their political opinions, just as Russia is accused of stifling dissent. “We have a saying: ‘Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly,’” he said. “It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is, why don’t you look at yourselves? You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us.”

China denounces NATO statement, defends defense policy (AP) The Chinese mission to the European Union on Tuesday denounced a NATO statement that declared Beijing a “security challenge,” saying China is actually a force for peace but will defend itself if threatened. NATO allies joined the United States on Monday in formally scolding Beijing as a “constant security challenge.” Washington has singled out China as a particular threat, especially in the South China Sea, where it has built and militarized artificial islands, as well as over its attempts to intimidate self-governing Taiwan, which it claims as its own territory to be annexed by military force if necessary. NATO leaders said China is working to undermine global order, a message in sync with U.S. President Joe Biden’s calls to confront Beijing on China’s trade, military and human rights practices. The Chinese mission said Beijing’s spending on its military is considerably less than that of NATO members and it accused the organization of conjuring up a military threat from China in order to justify its own agenda.

Taiwan reports largest incursion yet by Chinese air force (Reuters) Twenty-eight Chinese air force aircraft, including fighters and nuclear-capable bombers, entered Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Tuesday, the island’s government said, the largest reported incursion to date. While there was no immediate comment from Beijing, the news comes after the Group of Seven leaders issued a joint statement on Sunday scolding China for a series of issues and underscored the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, comments China condemned as “slander”. The latest Chinese mission involved 14 J-16 and six J-11 fighters, as well as four H-6 bombers, which can carry nuclear weapons, and anti-submarine, electronic warfare and early warning aircraft, Taiwan's Defence Ministry said. Chinese-claimed Taiwan has complained over the last few months of repeated missions by China's air force near the self-ruled island, concentrated in the southwestern part of its air defence zone near the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.

New Israel government vows change, but not for Palestinians (AP) Israel’s fragile new government has shown little interest in addressing the decades-old conflict with the Palestinians, but it may not have a choice. Jewish ultranationalists are already staging provocations aimed at splitting the coalition and bringing about a return to right-wing rule. In doing so, they risk escalating tensions with the Palestinians weeks after an 11-day Gaza war was halted by an informal cease-fire. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s best hope for maintaining his ruling coalition—which consists of eight parties from across the political spectrum—will be to manage the conflict, the same approach favored by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, for most of his 12-year rule. But that method failed to prevent three Gaza wars and countless smaller eruptions. That’s because the status quo for Palestinians involves expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, looming evictions in Jerusalem, home demolitions, deadly shootings and an array of discriminatory measures that two well-known human rights groups say amount to apartheid. In Gaza, which has been under a crippling blockade since the Hamas militant group seized power in 2007, it’s even worse.

Israel is no longer requiring masks indoors (AP) Israel is no longer requiring masks indoors, lifting one of its last coronavirus restrictions following a highly successful vaccination campaign. The restriction was lifted on Tuesday, though people will still be required to wear masks on airplanes and on their way to quarantine. Unvaccinated individuals must wear masks in nursing homes and other long-term health facilities. Authorities have been cautious about welcoming visitors, however, because of concerns over new variants. Israel welcomed its first tour group late last month. All tourists must show proof of vaccination and be tested upon arrival.

#headlines #news

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an-ephemeral-blog · 6 years

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Linkspam #4

Top Links

How to Not Die in America by Molly Osberg at Splinter News:

On that second Tuesday in June 2017, I found myself in what I worry could be a fleeting moment in my life, one in which the institutions around me find it advantageous to protect rather than screw me. I find it baffling that, since my illness, well-meaning people have repeatedly referred to me as a “survivor,” as if the fact that I got to go on with my life had to do with some inherent moral strength, rather than the material forces put in motion long before I got sick.

The Many Lives of Pauli Murray by Kathryn Schultz at the New Yorker:

Murray’s silence about her gender and sexuality is striking, because she otherwise spent a lifetime insisting that her identity, like her nation, must be fully integrated. She hated, she wrote, “to be fragmented into Negro at one time, woman at another, or worker at another.”

Yet every movement to which Murray ever belonged vivisected her in exactly those ways.

Socialism As A Set Of Principles by Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs:

The instinct that “people should be able to shape their own destinies” leads socialists to endorse what I think is the core meaning of “democracy,” namely the idea that people should have decision-making power over those things that affect them. If we think people’s choices should be valued, then they should be included in decision-making that affects them.

Hence all this business about the “means of production.” The workers in an auto plant are strongly affected by the decision as to whether or not it should close and move production elsewhere. Yet because they do not “own” it (i.e. have any decision-making power), the choice will be made without the participation of those it will impact most. This violates the core principle of democracy. The whole reason socialists are critical of the concentration of private property in few hands is that it constitutes a concentration of socially consequential decision-making power.

How The ACORN Scandal Seeded Today’s Nightmare Politics by Zach Carter and Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:

ACORN had survived for more than 40 years. Its sudden collapse was a defining moment in 21st century American politics. The explosive cocktail of racism, dishonesty, incompetence and cowardice that brought down the organization reveals as much about Washington Democrats as it does about the conservative movement. It marked the Republican Party’s full transition from the coded winks and nods of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the bellicose white nativism that defines Donald Trump, and it exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent.

The Spy Who Came Home by Ben Taub in the New Yorker:

[O]ver the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”

The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs by Gwynn Guilford at Quartz:

Thanks to a painstaking analysis by a handful of economists, it’s become clear that the data that underpin the dominant narrative—or more precisely, the way most economists interpreted the data—were way off-base. Foreign competition, not automation, was behind the stunning loss in factory jobs. And that means America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize.

Inside the Massive U.S. 'Border Zone' by Tanvi Misra at Citylab:

Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.

That’s striking because the border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population, and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI. This zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Other Favorites

Science

This Roman ‘gate to hell’ killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide by Colin Barras at Science Magazine

The Framingham Heart Study and the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease: a historical perspective by Syed S Mahmood, Daniel Levy, Ramachandran S Vasan, and Thomas J Wang in the Lancet (full text here) - this article describes how the death of President Franklin Roosevelt from heart disease impacted cardiovascular research in this country

Twitter thread by Ask An Entomologist @BugQuestions - “What we now call 'queen' bees-the main female reproductive honeybees-were erroneously called 'kings' for nearly 2,000 years. Why?“

Diary of a Local Data Reporter by Rachel Alexander at Source - “Telling the story of health care workers dying from opioid overdoses in Spokane, Washington“

Method to identify undetected drug suicides wins top NIDA Addiction Science Award at the NIH website - what the post title fails to mention is that the method was discovered by a pair of high school girls. Hell yeah, teenage science nerds making the world a better place. <3

Tech

Inclusion Riders in Tech by Nicole Sanchez at Medium and, conversely, Sorry, Hollywood. Inclusion Riders Won’t Save You by Rebecca Chapman at the New York Times

Stop Being Sexist, Siri at One Foot Tsunami - an example of algorithmic bias vis-a-vis the devaluation of women’s sports

The Aggregator Paradox by Ben Thompson at Stratechery - Facebook, Google, and their relationship with publishers and advertisers

Double Buffer by Robert Nystrom in Game Programming Patterns - a delightfully clear explanation of the kind of problem double buffering solves (graphics rendering in games) and how to implement it

The Universal Design Pattern by Steve Yegge at their personal blog - a long, detailed, and admittedly decade-old pitch for the properties design pattern

Four cents to deanonymize: Companies reverse hashed email addresses by Gunes Acar at Freedom to Tinker

Georgia bill could stifle the state’s booming cybersecurity community by Seth Rosenblatt at The Parallax - yet another example of why legislators at all levels need more technical experts on their staff

Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention by moxio0 on the Signal blog

Invisible asymptotes by Eugene Wei at Remains of the Day - designing social media and other software products for growth

12 Fractured Apps by Kelsey Hightower at Medium - a practical guide to implementing 12FA philosophy when using Docker

Politics

America’s poor subsidize wealthier consumers in a vicious income inequality cycle by Aaron Klein at The Brookings Institution

Markets aren’t natural: governments have to make them work by Steven K. Vogel at OUPBlog

Black Teens Have Been Fighting for Gun Reform for Years by Lincoln Anthony Blades in Teen Vogue

The Persistence of Tyranny by Ken White at PopeHat - “Tyranny is mouthing platitudes about liberty while cheering its suppression. Tyranny is our capacity to rationalize exceptions to rights for our enemies. Tyranny is our willingness to dismiss violation of rights as unimportant or minimal. Tyranny sold you your morning coffee.”

How the Democrat’s Corrupt Congressional Pay-to-Play Machine Sabotages Progressives and the Popular Will by Yves Smith at naked capitalism

How Conflicts (Don’t) End by Richard English at Lawfare - four elements of conflict resolution as exemplified by the Northern Ireland peace process

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns by Jeremy Adam Smith at Scientific American

We have to build the future out of the past by Quinn Norton at emptywheel - “This is the myth of the truth of the moment — that we are powerful beyond our own understanding, and broken and angry within our dysfunctional family.”

In A World That Polices Black Movement, ‘Black Boys Dance Too’ Is Revolutionary by By Ja’han Jones at Huffington Post

Inside Russian Women’s Fight For Their Lives by Madeline Roache at The Establishment - how legislation decriminalizing domestic abuse has made life even worse for women in Russia

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors by Ed Kilgore at NYMag

History

Becoming Trans: Transgender Identity In The Middle Ages by zac clifton at Medium

Heroes, Identity and the Realm of History by Meg Foster at JHIBlog - on the Australian semi-mythic figure of the ‘bushranger’

Rethinking the “Lessons” of the First World War by Michael Neiberg at Lawfare

Misc

Why dictators find the lure of writing books irresistible by Lucy Hughes-Hallett at New Statesman - a review of a book which is itself a series of reviews of books by Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, etc.

What Fullness Is by Roxane Gay at Medium - Gay writes about getting weight loss surgery

The non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates in Sri Lanka, and their plan to do the same around the world by Robery Wilbin at 80,000 hours - this title is wildly misleading but the content is interesting

Words Matter by Siderea on Dreamwidth - Small changes in language can have big effects.

“Who Do You Think You Are?”: When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity by Tressie McMillan Cottom in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology

Black Issues in Philosophy: A Conversation on Get Out at the APA Blog - an analysis of the film Get Out by political theorist Derefe Kimarley Chevannes and philosopher Lewis Gordon

A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain by Glenn Fleishman at The Atlantic - I’m so excited, you guys! For the first time in my adult life, we’re going to get a mass release of public domain material! If Disney doesn’t get to it first, anyway.

The Rise and Fall of Dr. M. by Bernd Kramer at Elephant in the Lab - a story of academic fraud

Short & Sweet: Change Makers by forestofglory at ladybusiness - a short list of short stories about ordinary people making political change, all available to read for free online

Tendrils of Mess in our Brains by Srah Perry at ribbonfarm - what makes a mess a mess?

When does your company stop paying women in 2018? by Josh Holder, Alexandra Topping, Caelainn Barr and Antonio Voce at The Guardian - an interactive map

nontoxic masculinity by Katie at her personal blog - lifting up examples of non-toxic masculinity

“When Tables Speak”: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy by Talia Mae Bettcher at Daily Nous

A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy by John Nerst at Everything Studies - an extremely thorough and thought-provoking analysis of someone else’s debate (bonus follow-up post)

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye by Ta-Nehisi Coates - as a white person I don’t feel comfortable opining on this except to say it’s really, really worth reading

The Nice Cop by Nick Slater at Current Affairs - “Is this because cruel people become cops, or because becoming a cop makes people cruel? I used to think the answer was obvious, until I watched my friend kill a man on Facebook Live.”

#linkspam

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rollinbrigittenv8 · 7 years

Text

Catalonia’s Bid for Independence Is Complicating Tourism in Spain

Catalan business executives stepped up their push to defuse a separatist movement as thousands gathered in Barcelona on Sunday to demand the region stay in Spain. Bloomberg

Skift Take: A prolonged period of uncertainty over Catalonia's future does nobody any favors. The region and the city of Barcelona have endured a difficult 2017 and it will be interesting to see if this has any impact on tourism in 2018.

— Patrick Whyte

Last week, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont declared independence from Spain. The move, which followed a controversial referendum, was greeted with wild applause on the streets of Barcelona, where large crowds had gathered to watch the speech.

The onlookers’ delight soon turned to disappointment as seconds later Puigdemont effectively suspended the quest for statehood to continue talks with the Spanish government.

This state of confusion continues still, with nobody quite sure what the future holds for Catalonia. The Spanish government is furious with Puigdemont for failing to clarify his position and has given him until Thursday to rectify that. If not, Spain will look to curb Catalonia’s powers by imposing direct rule from Madrid.

One of Spain’s greatest selling points to foreign tourists has always been its stability — and the movement for Catalan independence poses a threat to that. The industry brings in millions of dollars each year, contributing 5.1 percent of GDP in 2016.

Violent scenes of police brutality that marred the referendum vote were beamed across the world and there is a worry they could be repeated if a mutually acceptable solution is not found.

Should Catalonia push ahead with secession plans, the Spanish government will face the choice of either letting go of its industrial heartland or getting even tougher.

Even at this stage a split still seems unthinkable, mainly because there is no precedent for it in recent European history. Despite this, a number of companies have already moved their headquarters out of the region over fear of a possible split.

Tourism in Spain and Catalonia

Tourism is one of Spain’s most economically important industries. It contributed $63.7 billion directly to GDP in 2016, the tenth highest total worldwide according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, and also directly supported 862,000 jobs (4.7% of total employment.)

Last year was also a boom year as the country benefitted from instability in competing destinations to record a 10.3 percent rise in international tourist arrivals. The 75.6 million people it welcomed put it in third place overall behind France and the United States.

Clearly Spain is a magnet for tourists, but it is important to remember that all of Spain does not experience this equally. Mass tourism is concentrated in certain pockets, not only concentrating the financial benefits but also some of the associated problems.

Catalonia is Spain’s most popular region for international arrivals. In the first eight months of this year, it welcomed 13.8 million international tourists, giving it 24% of the national share. Only the Balearic islands offer any real competition. In 2016, Catalonia was the beneficiary of $20.4 billion of international tourist spending, representing 22.3 percent of the overall total.

And at the very top of the tourism pile sits Barcelona. In 2016, it was estimated that the city and surrounding region recorded 34 million overnight stays, putting it more than 10 million ahead of second-place Madrid (another Catalan city, Girona, was in fifth place with 20.1 million).

Overnight Stays

Province 2015 2016 Percentage increase Barcelona 32.1m 34.0m 5.9 Madrid 22.6m 23.2m 2.3 Alicante 20.6m 22.1m 7 Malaga 20.1m 21.7m 7.6 Girona 19.1m 20.1m 5.4

Source: Laboratori de Turisme based on INE data

“The Barcelona tourism image is more powerful than the Catalonia marca [brand] and the Spain marca [brand],” said Josep Ros, chair the Tourism Industry Commission at Catalonia’s Association of Economists.

“20 years ago Barcelona was not a big tourism destination,” he said. “Now it’s more powerful…It’s a perfect destination because it’s all year round, all kinds of segments: leisure, business, congress, and conventions and so on. It’s a very diversified market.”

Why Independence?

Clearly, Barcelona as a city and Catalonia as a region are very important to Spain’s overall tourism picture and removing them would greatly reduce the amount of money the country could bring in from tourism. But even at this stage, that possibility looks some way off.

What is perhaps more worrying (and likely) is a long period of squabbling where uncertainty reigns and nothing much gets done.

The problem at the moment is that no side seems willing to move. In the UK and Canada, Scotland and Quebec, for varying reasons, were allowed to carry out official independence referendums (both coincidentally said no).

“My view is that the Catalan situation is unique. The closest parallel is to Scotland perhaps, but one key difference is that the pro-independence movement in Catalonia has a number of significant forces while the Scottish one is centered much more around a single party,” said Richard Gillespie, professor of politics at Liverpool University. “Both, however, share the context of a unitary state with significant devolution and both are pro-EU.”

There are many reasons for the current situation. Catalonia has a long history that is distinct from other parts of Spain. Inhabitants speak a different language to most other Spaniards. In modern times Catalonia was united against the dictatorship of General Franco who eliminated much of the autonomy that had previously been given to the regions. The current dispute can be traced back to 2006 when a row broke out over the granting of more powers to Catalonia.

David Rodriguez, an economist who works closely with the tourism industry in the Barcelona region, says the inflexibility of the Spanish government is one of the reasons the situation in Catalonia has become so serious.

“Catalans have power to spend but limited ability to raise money,” he said.

Granting more power to the Catalan government might have been able to head of the threat of independence, but Spain cannot afford to do so as giving more money to Catalonia would mean taking it away from another region.

Has the Threat of Independence Actually had an Impact?

The possibility of Catalonia declaring independence is one of several events that have had an impact on the region and its biggest city during 2017.

Spain as a single tourism destination saw an upsurge in bookings on the back of terrorism and other geopolitical issues in other countries that are also popular with European visitors.

This boom has led to a small yet vocal backlash, particularly in Barcelona, against tourism. Skift has chronicled the effects of overtourism in Barcelona and other destinations.

The protestors have been helped by Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, who wants to rebalance the city’s tourism offering and reclaim it for its residents.

For some like Ros this is a big threat, while others like Rodriguez say the reports of anti-tourist violence such as an attack on a bus over the summer was overblown.

“You have to fill the newspaper, you have to fill the TV with news and you end up running things that during the normal season you would not even mention,” Rodriguez said.

Then there was the terrorist attack in Barcelona and Cambrils on August 17, which killed 16 people and injured more than 130. The incident in Barcelona occurred on La Rambla, one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations.

Attacks in European cities have become more common in recent years and the tourist response to each one varies.

The initial response from visitors and potential visitors is often severe, but demand can come back quickly if the destination falls off the news agenda. Even so, research company Euromonitor suggested that the Barcelona attack could lead to a the loss of 200,000 tourists.

All of these incidents are radically different, but all contribute to the perception of the country as a tourist destination.

Travel intelligence provider Mabrian uses both transactional and behavioral data to try to get a sense of how people feel towards a destination at any one time.

Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain all suffered big drops in the index immediately after the August attacks. The recovery had largely been complete by the start of September. Then there was another dip – although nowhere near as big – at the start of October, around the time of the independence referendum.

“We did some research after the attacks in August in Barcelona and what we saw was it was a very quick recovery of the security index, faster than in any other cities in Europe that have that have been under attack,” said Àlex Villeyra, Head of Customer Success at Mabrian.

The same indices saw a slight dip after the referendum violence and although it clearly didn’t have, as Villeyra said, the same “drastic effect,” it did have an impact.

That weekend at the start of October, TV news across the world was filled with images of Spanish police attacking voters at polling stations

“Of course people don’t want to go to a place in which you can walk and be in the middle of a demonstration and end up hurt by a rubber bullet or batons,” said Rodriguez, the economist.

No one is sure yet how the cruise industry might have been affected; the European season has pretty much come to a close, but Rodriguez is worried about the valuable North American market.

Barcelona is the biggest cruise port in all of Europe. As well as bringing in long-haul tourists, the fly-cruise market also connects Barcelona residents with other parts of the world and also boosts the flow of goods through air freight.

How Likely is Independence?

From the events that have taken place so far this year, it would be easy to deduce that independence seems inevitable, but not everyone agrees.

Historian John Elliott believes a split is “not at all likely” while Joan Costa-i-Font, an Associate Professor in political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes it remains in the balance.

“It is hard to say. The EU will pressurize Spain to deliver a better deal,” he said. “If it happens soon, it is likely that breakout will be avoided.”

Both agree that Catalonia’s independence would be a disaster for Spain.

“Spain would lose 30% of its exports, 20% GDP, there will be a recession in Spain and the euro would plummet, as the European Central Bank would have to partially bail out Spain,” Costa-i-Font said. “However, it depends on whether events turn nasty or not. If they turn nasty, they could lead to Spain suspended from EU membership and a wider recession in Europe.”

In this situation, tourism would obviously suffer. Catalonia would likely lose visitors put off by any uncertainty and Spain would lose a sizeable chunk of its income from the industry.

Given what’s at stake, both sides will be hoping for an amicable solution.

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touristguidebuzz · 7 years