#junk-data

[superfamiblog]

Metal Max Returns (Data East, 1995). English translation patch by Aeon Genesis.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An interoperability rule for your money

This is the final weekend to back the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, The Lost Cause. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!

"If you don't like it, why don't you take your business elsewhere?" It's the motto of the corporate apologist, someone so Hayek-pilled that they see every purchase as a ballot cast in the only election that matters – the one where you vote with your wallet.

Voting with your wallet is a pretty undignified way to go through life. For one thing, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and for another, no matter who you vote for in that election, the Monopoly Party always wins, because that's the part of the thick-wallet set.

Contrary to the just-so fantasies of Milton-Friedman-poisoned bootlickers, there are plenty of reasons that one might stick with a business that one dislikes – even one that actively harms you.

The biggest reason for staying with a bad company is if they've figured out a way to punish you for leaving. Businesses are keenly attuned to ways to impose switching costs on disloyal customers. "Switching costs" are all the things you have to give up when you take your business elsewhere.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Think of how Facebook keeps users glued to its platform by making the price of leaving cutting of contact with your friends, family, communities and customers. Facebook tells its customers – advertisers – that people who hate the platform stick around because Facebook is so good at manipulating its users (this is a good sales pitch for a company that sells ads!). But there's a far simpler explanation for peoples' continued willingness to let Mark Zuckerberg spy on them: they hate Zuck, but they love their friends, so they stay:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

One of the most important ways that regulators can help the public is by reducing switching costs. The easier it is for you to leave a company, the more likely it is they'll treat you well, and if they don't, you can walk away from them. That's just what the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau wants to do with its new Personal Financial Data Rights rule:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-jumpstart-competition-and-accelerate-shift-to-open-banking/

The new rule is aimed at banks, some of the rottenest businesses around. Remember when Wells Fargo ripped off millions of its customers by ordering its tellers to open fake accounts in their name, firing and blacklisting tellers who refused to break the law?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

While there are alternatives to banks – local credit unions are great – a lot of us end up with a bank by default and then struggle to switch, even though the banks give us progressively worse service, collectively rip us off for billions in junk fees, and even defraud us. But because the banks keep our data locked up, it can be hard to shop for better alternatives. And if we do go elsewhere, we're stuck with hours of tedious clerical work to replicate all our account data, payees, digital wallets, etc.

That's where the new CFPB order comes in: the Bureau will force banks to "share data at the person’s direction with other companies offering better products." So if you tell your bank to give your data to a competitor – or a comparison shopping site – it will have to do so…or else.

Banks often claim that they block account migration and comparison shopping sites because they want to protect their customers from ripoff artists. There are certainly plenty of ripoff artists (notwithstanding that some of them run banks). But banks have an irreconcilable conflict of interest here: they might want to stop (other) con-artists from robbing you, but they also want to make leaving as painful as possible.

Instead of letting shareholder-accountable bank execs in back rooms decide what the people you share your financial data are allowed to do with it, the CFPB is shouldering that responsibility, shifting those deliberations to the public activities of a democratically accountable agency. Under the new rule, the businesses you connect to your account data will be "prohibited from misusing or wrongfully monetizing the sensitive personal financial data."

This is an approach that my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers and I first laid our in our 2021 paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly," where we describe how and why we should shift determinations about who is and isn't allowed to get your data from giant, monopolistic tech companies to democratic institutions, based on privacy law, not corporate whim:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

The new CFPB rule is aimed squarely at reducing switching costs. As CFPB Director Rohit Chopra says, "Today, we are proposing a rule to give consumers the power to walk away from bad service and choose the financial institutions that offer the best products and prices."

The rule bans banks from charging their customers junk fees to access their data, and bans businesses you give that data to from "collecting, using, or retaining data to advance their own commercial interests through actions like targeted or behavioral advertising." It also guarantees you the unrestricted right to revoke access to your data.

The rule is intended to replace the current state-of-the-art for data sharing, which is giving your banking password to third parties who go and scrape that data on your behalf. This is a tactic that comparison sites and financial dashboards have used since 2006, when Mint pioneered it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we

A lot's happened since 2006. It's past time for American bank customers to have the right to access and share their data, so they can leave rotten banks and go to better ones.

The new rule is made possible by Section 1033 of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which was passed in 2010. Chopra is one of the many Biden administrative appointees who have acquainted themselves with all the powers they already have, and then used those powers to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

It's pretty wild that the first digital interoperability mandate is going to come from the CFPB, but it's also really cool. As Tim Wu demonstrated in 2021 when he wrote Biden's Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, the administrative agencies have sweeping, grossly underutilized powers that can make a huge difference to everyday Americans' lives:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

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/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Steve Morgan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._National_Bank_Building_-_Portland,_Oregon.jpg

Stefan Kühn (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abrissbirne.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

 - 

Rhys A. (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysasplundh/5201859761/in/photostream/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[antisocialxconstruct]

.

[0scill4te]

i like the internet but i like to think i would be okay if it ever suddenly went out 5ever, it probably would make me better even- im too addicted to screens. I wonder if it will ever go out in my lifetime sometimes. Heres a drawing i made when i was 10 about the internet

[jewishraypalmer]

Try to be objective, not just what you personally love or for nostalgia

[bethanythebogwitch]

Original mechanical Digimon

Another one of my original Digimon lines. All members are virus-attribute. Previous originals: fish line, moth line, owl line, Aztec line, hermit crab line.

Rookie/Child level: Scrapmon. Scrapmon are born out of junk data and as a result, are born incomplete and dying. Only a very few manage to use scrap metal and machine parts to cobble together a shell that acts as life support. Scrapmon fear death and must constantly replace parts of it shell as they wear out. Because of their habit of stealing metal and machine parts, most machine Digimon view them as pests. Its moves are Rusty Drill, where it attacks with the drill on one arm, and Smokescreen, where it releases greasy, black smoke to blind its enemies while it flees.

Champion/Adult level: BigScrapmon. It has grown stable enough that it no longer needs to constantly replace parts of its body to survive, but it fears becoming weak again and so constantly steals parts to upgrade its weapons and defenses. It uses the saw on one hand to cut up metal objects and the claw on the other to shove the parts into its mouth. Things it eats have their data reconfigured into weapons and ammo. Its moves are Rust Rocket, where it launches a rocket that explodes and causes metal to rust, and Saw Steal, where it cuts up objects with its buzzsaw and devours their data.

Ultimate/Perfect level: MegaScrapmon. Out of a fear of falling apart and returning to bean weak, it used to metal and machine data it devours to upgrade itself into a living weapon. However, it lost the ability to feed itself so it keeps a group of Scrapmon in its body that come out after battles to collect and feed it scrap metal and ruined machines. It is know to work as a mercenary, serving other Digimon as a warrior in exchange for metal and data to consume. Its moves are Mega Scrap Cutter, where it cuts the enemy to sheds with the massive saw on its right side, and Hyper Rust Rocket, where it shoots rusting rockets from the launcher on its left side.

Mega/Ultimate level: GigaScrapmon. It is the epotome of junk data: a rusting colossus that breaks up everything it finds to use as fuel for its internal furnace. Whole forces of Scrapmon reside within its body, working to refine the things it devours into new materials to reinforce its rusted, patchwork body. The thundering sound if its treads and the vast cloud of toxic smoke that billow from it have heralded the fall of whole civilizations as they were broken up and devoured by GigaScrapmon. Its moves are Refinement Crusher, where it spews molten slag from the cannon in its right arm at the enemy, they rips them into pieces with its massive claw, and Rust Rocket Barrage, where it mows down its foes with rockets that rust the whole area when they explode

[danses-with-dogmeat]

10 Fandoms / 10 Characters / 10 Reblogs

Thanks so much @simping-for-paladin-danse for tagging me! This probably took me waaaaaaay too long, but I loved every moment ❤️

Alright, here goes:

1. Fallout

Paladin Danse (god, it was hard to just pick one. Ugh. But I mean, come on, I'm DANSES with dogmeat, so, I pretty much had to go with him.)

(danaduchy.tumblr.com)

--

2. The Elder Scrolls (Oblivion)

Martin Septim (Also SO HARD to pick one, but... gotta love Martin)

--

3. Arcane

Silco (between him and Vander and Vi and Sevika and Jinx, and ahh, too many good characters. But... Silco makes me feral, so... you know 😅)

--

4. Avatar the Last Airbender

Zuko (WHY do we have to just pick one? Best show ever though, and one of my fave characters of all time <3)

--

5. Game of Thrones

Sandor Clegane / The Hound (I... have no explanation. I do love him though. [anyone else noticing a trend with these last 3???])

(gameofthrones.fandom.com)

--

6. Star Trek

Data (Another android that I can't get enough of. ❤️)

(danglingthpider.tumblr.com)

--

7. Stranger Things

Eleven / Jane Hopper (She's just the coolest. This was also such a hard fandom to pick one character for though. 😅)

--

8. Harry Potter

Remus Lupin (My love ❤️)

--

9. Star Wars

Anakin Skywalker (Messed up babygirl, but HOLY SHIT so much character arc. Just SO MUCH. Gotta love it.)

--

10. Marvel / MCU

James Buchanan Barnes (Bucky) (Baby boy.)

ALRIGHT, now, I'll tag...

@twosides--samecoin @theartofblossoming @baddieladdie @maccreadysbaby @amazinglyegg @imagine-silk @nuka-after-dark @satans-left-asscheeky @vnknowncrovv @gloomytk

And anyone else who sees this and wants to do it!!

[notsodailykeysmash]

Time to feed AI scrapers with keysmashes.

efvgf olik qewrfr242g42 qvbn[' 3grdyhafj AZHHz 462h 31oik'j5[g sfy6jdt ik56sdc 9gu.hjoy7 15YZ# ]-u9ol9 ewgtee wewg eqre

ttwth

t

[superfamiblog]

Metal Max Returns (Data East, 1995)

[risingsunresistance]

i finally have a desktop for the first time since like. 2007.

[hylianengineer]

Current anxiety level: can't think straight no coherent thoughts only panic WHY does my boss trust me with things I've never done any of this before and I'm SCARED!

[ofcowardiceandkings]

i would like to stop obsessing about the dumb thing where i was scolded a little for being distracted but its a tangible single thing my brainworms can latch onto instead of the many many other shit things in the background that are objectively way worse or scarier

[coulsonlives]

You wish you could be this popular

[remesrobotics]

Betelgeuse / “Khepri”

SGN.0?? / Unnumbered "Servant" - ベテルギウス / ケップリ B: “Peace can only be achieved by complete unification.”

Good Point - K: Resourceful Bad Point - K: Slow-witted Like - K: Trash Sculpture Dislike - K: Intruder

Betelgeuse Height Unknown / Khepri Height 6’2” (187.96)

A Sungod-type robot from Antares’ line and often considered to be an elder half-brother of sorts to the Scorpion’s Heart. Betelgeuse took on a much more aggressive stance towards assimilating civilizations in his purview, using Creator technology and technology developed by its vassal cultures to convert any captured planets and their people into an all-encompassing hive-minded machine civilization. While not ill-intended, this created a growing imbalance, as territories captured from other Sungods as the part of the Creators’ mostly-scripted wargames could never be properly extracted from Betelgeuse’s control.

This created a distinct animosity between Betelgeuse and other immediate Sungods, especially his half-sister Antares, who shared the most bordering territories. Antares eventually convinced the Creators that Betelgeuse was an even larger threat that could possibly even overthrow them if his reign continued to grow unchecked, and received the Creators’ blessing to remove him from the equation.

In a climactic one-on-one battle, Antares annihilated Betelgeuse’s constantly-regenerating body by tearing out his star core, separating it from his consciousness. In a show of haughty disdain, she crushed the core in her hand and threw it into the scrapyard of her temple, losing rapport with many of her Sungod peers, but gaining a position amongst the inner circle of the Creators, before they betrayed her during the coup.

Unbeknownst to her for a time, the will of Betelgeuse emanating from his core allowed it to begin pulling scraps from the heap together to form a body, but without access to a computer capable of higher thought, could not get beyond the simplest, instinctive AI. This rudimentary body, which was later discovered by Antares and remodeled into its current beetle form.

Antares is unaware of the weakened (but intact) core inside it, seeing as it lacked the obvious recurring physical traits from her reviled half-brother's many self-resurrections, believing instead that some other piece of unknown technology thrown away unknowingly over the centuries was responsible.

This new “Khepri” is sympathetically connected to the junk in the scrapyard, and despite lacking full sapience, is able to discern functional and useful machinery from complete garbage, which it collects for Antares to be used as spare parts for repairs, upgrades, and manufacturing new minions. Actual garbage is hoarded to be used as fuel for its devastating meteor-like attacks.

[mildkleptomania]

Does Tomes have any maps so far? (Quality doesn't matter, or accuracy if theyre in universe made maps)

I have a very vague and rough layout of where various places are in relation to each other, but nothing is concretely laid out; the main exception is that, like Earth, the primary setting in Tomes is on a planet, and there are two main inhabited sets of continents (an Old World and a New World) separated by two main oceans

That said, I do have a bunch of places that are named and arranged in relation to each other! The Old World is more built out, so I'll focus on that; the ocean to the west of the Old World (geographically equivalent to the Atlantic) once hosted a civilization of giants known in modern times as the Sea Titans, and the ocean is currently named after them, making it the Titanic Ocean (naming it after the big boat was completely accidental, but I like the sound of "Titanic Ocean" enough to keep it; additionally, as a fun fact, in the setting the Sea Titans are what the metal titanium is named after); I have yet to name the ocean geographically equivalent to the Pacific, but I'll think of something eventually probably

On the west coast of the Old World is the Kyrian region, which is where the obligatory Fantasy Setting Ancient Precursor Civilization was centered, until it exploded, and currently the northern part is where Kayendell is, one of the setting's major imperial powers. Further south from there is Great Ainam, a huge city found in an old flooded impact crater, so parts of it are full of canals; Ainam, the country Great Ainam is capital of, has a longstanding feud with a country named Jankarra, which is closer to Kayendell but more inland, and they've warred on and off with each other over the rich farmland and quarries between them basically since they were established. Jankarra is possibly the most technologically advanced country in the setting, and both Jankarra and Ainam are also major imperial powers, but they're too focused on feuding to be as quite as active about it as Kayendell, which is a neutral party in their conflict.

Further further inland, nestled close enough to the Jankarra-Ainam contested territory to constantly know about what's going on there but not actually part of it, is Darkmire, a barony that has pretty much uncontested ownership of a cursed swamp nobody important actually wants, but they sure do tough it out and live there; they might be close to kind of an inland sea, with part of the swamp being like a river delta? Unsure

Somewhere in the center of the Old World is a big mountain range, with at least one huge dormant volcano in it that used to be home to the Firesmith, the setting's resident god of flames and metalwork and stuff; very much a Hephaestus type god, with the exception that the Firesmith is a enormous mechanical vaguely spider-shaped kaiju of a god, while Hephaestus was more of a person-guy shaped god. The Firesmith's gone now, but the limbs of its shed exoskeletons sprawled across the dead volcano would probably be visible from orbit if anybody could reliably get there; its presence there might also have caused the mountain range to be named the "Pyrachnene Mountains" after it? Exact name is getting workshopped, but I'm pronouncing this version of the name "pie-RACK-neen", possibly pie-RACK-neens to refer to the whole mountain range; the mountains are definitely inhabited by Firesmith worshipers, which live in little monastery adjacents and such, making a small fortune off of being Basically The Fantasy Blacksmithing And Craftsmaking Hat Culture and the only people who are exporting large quantities of high quality steel, among other things

In the Pyrachnenes's rain shadow lie the Tefriti drylands; most of their water supply comes from rivers that originate in the Pyrachnenes, so the drylands's terrain ranges from dry savanna to full-on sandy desert, and most of the people that live in the drylands are either nomadic or live on the riverbanks, with the former facilitating trade between the latter and their neighboring regions, and the latter living relatively comfortably off of riverbank farming

On the east coast of the Old World lies the Jinhari peninsula, which is blocked off on most sides by ocean and on the sides that aren't by the Pyrachnenes and the harsher parts of the Tefriti drylands; this has ended up being advantageous in the long run, since the ocean allows a lot of sea-based trade routes and almost nobody wants to attempt a land assault through mountains and deserts, but was a bit of a struggle in some respects until then, since while the peninsula was good for farming and for copper mining, allowing relatively cheap manufacture of some kinds of magic item, the local iron deposits were sparse and low quality, and anything to make bronze and brass and such with had to be imported via Tefriti traders, who also didn't like trekking through the mountains and deserts to get there, especially not with large quantities of metal intended to get melted down

(this said, the main language spoken by the Jinhari people shares an alphabet and a common ancestor with most of the prominent Tefriti languages, distinct from the languages descended from the Kyrian language, so the two cultures clearly did, and still do, mingle fairly regularly)

Also, the peninsula gets monsoons!

Somewhere on the western side of the New World is a big, Amazon-esque rainforest, which I haven't strictly fleshed out a whole lot, but it's definitely inhabited, and due to their relative proximity, their main interaction with Old World powers is with Jinhar, the setting's fourth main imperial power; after failing repeatedly to militarily conquer the rainforest peoples and taking a few centuries off to have more than one civil war, Jinhar has now adopted a new, more hypothetically peaceful and diplomatic approach to interacting with the rainforest peoples, and time will tell how this attempt turns out

There are also a bunch of little citystates and smaller nations dotted around, but most of them are allied with/subjects of one of the imperial powers; Darkmire probably technically falls into this category, but whoever it's allied to gives little enough of a shit about what it does that it can basically do whatever it wants short of actually attack somebody

Most independent citystates and nations with no concrete political ties to one of the imperial powers probably exist mostly in the New World, but even then, several of the imperial powers are actively expansioning their political influence, with one of the main remaining prominent neutrals being the Pyrachnene Firesmith worshipers, who sell crafts and steel to everybody relatively equally

Another prominent neutral are the descendants of the Sea Titans, now colloquially called raftfolk; while mostly living away from their ancestral ruins and diminished from their heyday, they do still live out in the Titanic Ocean, on boats and rafts and big pontoons and such, doing fishing and whaling and hunting sea monsters like sirens and krakens (not quite unlike how you'd hunt whales). Of course, the Kayendellic navy does still police those waters regardless of who technically owns them, but most of what they do is pirate hunting and attempting to suppress non-trade activity from their direct imperial competitors, so the majority of the raftfolk are willing to at least put up with it, if not be happy about it

[blacksails2017]

spilled an entire cup of water onto both my laptop and phone as I was preparing to backup both devices (the phone for the first time in 2 years and laptop first time in 4) literally the timing couldn’t have been funnier