#re:publica

[oeffentlicheversicherung]

Man könnte jetzt sagen, ist doch egal. Ist es aber nicht!

Die @re:publica #rp24 lässt sich von #Google und #Tiktok sponsern.

[bauerntanz]

Habeck/Haeusler auf der re:publica. Das Gespräch zum Nachhören.

Johnny Haeusler spricht mit #Robert_Habeck über Angebot und Nachfrage und mehr. Zum Nachhören via @republica

Angebot und Nachfrage – Das Gespräch zwischen Vizekanzler Robert Habeck (BMWK) und Johnny Haeusler (re:publica) “Robert Habeck hat seinen Twitter-Account schon stillgelegt, als das noch als uncool galt. Und als Minister für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz ist er nicht nur für das Projekt „Klimawende“ zuständig, sondern – gemeinsam mit vielen Kolleg*innen – auch für die Digitalisierung des Landes.” Die…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A business model for bankrupting the oil companies

Today (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

Tomorrow (June 7), I’m keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin.

Thursday (June 8) at 8PM, I’m at Otherland Books in Berlin with my novel Red Team Blues.

When a giant company wrecks your life, what are you gonna do? They can afford more and better lawyers than you can, and they have people whose full time job is fighting off lawsuits — are you really gonna beat those people by pursuing your grievance as a side-hustle? Do you really wanna be a full-time, professional litigant?

For some people, the answer is yes: some people are angry enough, or sufficiently morally offended, to make suing a giant company their life’s mission. Sometimes, they succeed, and force companies to cough up gigantic sums of money. Obviously, this makes the plaintiff better off, but it can also make things better for the rest of us. Money talks and bullshit walks, and once it becomes clear that 300% of the profits from harming people will be sucked out of the company by a lawsuit, shareholders will revolt and force the company to clean up its act.

Shareholders don’t invest in companies that ruin our lives because they are committed to an ideology of cruelty. Ideology only gets you so far: the pursuit of profit incentivizes far worse conduct than mere sadism ever can:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers

Incentives matter. Companies above a certain size become too big to fail and too big to jail. They capture their regulators and ensure that any damages the government extracts are less than their profits — a fine is a price.

Juries, on the other hand, can and do really whack a company for its bad conduct. They understand that incentives matter. They understand that a company that saves $1,000,001 by cutting back on workplace safety can’t be driven to improve its behavior by a fine of $1,000,000 after it kills a bunch of workers. If profit outstrips penalties, penalties aren’t effective.

A dirty $1m profit needs to be met with a $100m judgment. As the Untouchables MBA teaches us, this is just sound business: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZ6eaL3S2E

But suing these giant companies is hard. They can tie you up in court for years — decades, even. They can outspend and outwait you. The more profits a company has racked up through its evil deeds, the more claims it can fend off. Incentives matter, so if you’re gonna commit corporate murder, you’d better do a lot of it to build up the cash needed to scare off your victims and their survivors.

However: the bigger a company is, the more cash it has, the more money there is to extract from it if you can prevail in court. If the company has genuinely injured you, and if you can mobilize the capital and resources to pursue it to final judgment, there’s a huge payoff at the end of the process — and a lesson for all the other companies contemplating their own course of action.

That’s the Voltaire MBA: “you have to execute an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others.”

For hundreds of years, rich, powerful people have observed their colleagues’ abuses and thought, “They only pull that shit on peasants — but if they did it to me, I could sue them for everything!”

This led to an obvious course of action: strike a bargain with the mutilated, ruined peasants to finance their suit against the toff that so abused them, in exchange for a (large) share of the proceeds. Medieval courts called this champerty; today, we call it litigation finance: investing in other peoples’ grievances against deep-pocketed monsters, in the expectation of reaping huge cash payouts.

On paper, litigation finance seems like a neat solution to a messy problem. The bigger a company is, the worse the abuses it commits — and the more it can be made to pay for its sins. The normal economics of litigation are turned upside-down: rather than avoiding the largest companies, you pursue them. This is the Willie Sutton MBA: “That’s where the money is.”

Litigation finance is a large and growing chunk of the finance sector. For about a decade, hedge funds and private equity have been bankrolling law-firms that represent people who’ve been mangled by corporations, keeping the money flowing through whatever delays and entanglements the target throws up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

Litigation finance can be thought of as the no-win/no-fee “ambulance chaser” business on steroids. While a local lawyer can make a tidy living going after slip-and-falls and fender-benders, splitting the proceeds with their clients, a firm backed by a huge investment fund can do the same to companies with billions in the bank and hundreds of millions on the line.

Litigation finance is also closely related to impact litigation, which is when a nonprofit uses charitably raised funds to chase corporations and governments through the courts to establish precedents that overturn bad laws or pave the way for future judgments. Impact litigation can be thought of as the trailblazer for litigation finance: for-profit lawsuits are risk averse and stick to pursuing cases that have a high likelihood of eventually succeeding, while impact litigators are a kind of legal entrepreneur, advancing new, uncertain legal theories in the hopes of making new law. Once that law is created, litigation finance can drum up thousands of similarly situated plaintiffs and sue tons of companies on the same theory, citing the new precedent.

Litigation finance’s first big scores was going after med-tech and pharma companies. A lax regulatory environment allowed medical companies to market deadly products that maimed or killed people wholesale — think Vioxx, vaginal meshes or metal-on-metal hip replacements (a doc about this, The Bleeding Edge, will give you persistent nightmares):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bleeding_Edge

Suing the companies that killed your family or permanently disabled you is a slow and ugly process, but it’s a lot more certain than asking Congress to patch the loopholes the company that hurt you exploited, or hoping that a future President will appoint an agency head who gives a shit, and that the Senate will confirm them. And since money talks and bullshit walks, corporations that can’t pay dividends or do stock buybacks because they owe all their cash to their victims will suffer in the stock market, and their rivals will clean house and tread carefully.

Which brings me to the latest turn in litigation finance: climate litigation. As more and more money has sloshed into ESG funds that are supposed to make money by investing in ethical, climate-friendly businesses, the idea of suing giant oil companies and other wreckers has grown more attractive. 18 months ago, Businessweek covered the nascent-but-growing phenomenon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/09/grievance-factory/#champerty

That growth has only continued. With more and larger ESG funds chasing returns, there’s a lot more money available to represent, say, poisoned indigenous people in the global south whose ancestral lands have been rendered an uninhabitable hellscape by a mining or petrochemical company. The returns from these cases aren’t correlated with wider economic trends: whether the market is up down, it makes no difference to the size of the judgment or settlement that is extracted in the end.

A new piece in the Financial Times by Camilla Hodgson does an excellent job rounding up the state of play in litigation finance, starting with the oil giant PTTEP paying $102m to 15,000 Indonesian farmers to settle claims stemming from a massive, ocean-killing oil spill in 2019:

https://www.ft.com/content/055ef9f4-5fb7-4746-bebd-7bfa00b20c82

The firm that financed the suit is Harbour Litigation Funding, and they paid for a lot of shoe-leather lawyering, sending reps on off-road motorbikes to each of the farmers’ plots to sign them up. The case cost more than $21m, and Harbour creamed $53.5m off the top of the settlement from PTTEP — about 40% of the total.

Those numbers are pretty compelling investment story: there aren’t a lot of opportunities to make a >100% return on a $21m investment in 15 years — let alone investments that let you claim to be bringing justice to poor farmers who’ve been abused by rapacious corporate murderers.

Other cases are still ongoing: mining giant BHP is facing a £36b class action case over the 2015 collapse of Brazil’s Fundão dam, which released poisoned mine-tailings into waterways serving millions of people. 700,000 plaintiffs are in the class, and the investors, Prisma Capital (Brazil) and North Wall Capital (UK) have already fronted £70m pursuing the case.

There is a vast inventory of cases like these, just lying around, waiting for someone to stake a claim. One barrier is that most of the world’s large law firms are conflicted out of pursuing these cases — they represent these same companies in other actions. But a new sector of specialized, un-conflicted firms is growing up, and tackling more and more of these cases.

These firms are chasing relatively easy claims, but there’s an even bigger fish out there, waiting to be caught: class actions against carbon-intensive companies, especially coal and oil companies, for their knowing contributions to the global climate emergency. These corporations are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars, and they have inflicted trillions in harms. There’s gold in them thar wildfires.

The FT cites experts who predict a massive wave of litigation finance climate suits in the next 2–3 years, and notes an increasing tempo of shareholder motions demanding that big oil and mining companies disclose their litigation risks in their investor reports. This is a very compelling idea, a kaiju boss-fight in which we recruit monsters to fight other monsters. It’s such a fun idea that I actually wrote a novel about it, 2009’s Makers, in which corporate misconduct that has not yet reached the statute of limitations becomes the new oil, prompting a huge investment bubble:

https://craphound.com/category/makers/

But is the answer to a bad guy with a law firm a good guy with a law firm? There are certainly some ways this can go very wrong (many of which end up in Makers). Back in 2015, Cathy O’Neil published an excellent critique of litigation finance in the context of vaginal mesh cases:

https://mathbabe.org/2015/09/01/litigation-finance-a-terrible-idea/

O’Neill’s point is that incentives matter. The incentive for a litigation finance fund is to extract settlements, not win justice. Time and again, we’ve seen how a financial tactic can be severed from a societal strategy — like how GDP can be goosed to spectacular heights without improving national prosperity.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The finance sector is spookily good at decoupling positive societal outcomes from positive investor outcomes. The real answer to medical companies that mutilate women with vaginal meshes, or destroy the planet with CO2, is criminal sanctions and regulation, not private lawsuits.

That said, I think there’s a case for the one leading to the other. Right now, climate wreckers devote very large sums to preventing effective action on climate. Suborning regulators and politicians all over the world isn’t cheap. If we take away the money they’ve saved up for this project through stonking, eye-watering judgments, and if we convince the capital markets not to give them any more money lest it be immediately extracted to pay for more redress of a litany of grievances, then perhaps we can deprive them of the capacity of corrupt our political process.

One way to understand whether something is a genuine threat to a company’s power is to look at how viciously the company attacks it. If you doubt that unions could do good for workers, just take a peep at the all-out violent blitzes that Amazon and Starbucks mount in the face of union drives. I mean, imagine if the Democratic Party took unions half as seriously as the GOP!

The corporate lobby exhibits the same terror over plaintiff-side lawsuits as it does over unions. A massive, decades-long campaign to villify plaintiff-side lawyers has convinced many of us that corporations are the victims of the legal system, rather than its masters. The PR campaign is surprisingly effective, despite its reliance on lies about the “McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit” and other urban legends:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Corporate plunderers are terrified of being dragged into court by their victims, and devote titanic amounts of blood and treasure into making it harder and harder to do so. On the “the more scared the are, the better” metric, litigation finance is a slam dunk.

But winning a case isn’t the same as getting a judgment or disciplining a firm. When Steven Donziger won a landmark judgment against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people whose lands and bodies had been permanently poisoned, the company struck back:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger

Chevron bribed a judge in Ecuador to claim that Donziger had rigged the case, then brought a case in the US against Donziger for racketeering, judge-shopping to get judge Lewis A Kaplan on their case. Kaplan is a former tobacco industry lawyer who never met a corporate criminal he didn’t love, and when the SDNY prosecutor declined to press charges against Donziger because the case was absurd, Kaplan appointed a private lawyer — whose firm also acted for Chevron! — to act as prosecutor. The case against Donziger was obviously trumped up — the Ecuadoran judge who accused him of corruption later recanted and multiple countries’ Supreme Courts upheld the judgment Donziger won against Chevron. Nevertheless, Kaplan got Donziger locked up under house arrest for years, and even got him banged up in Riker’s for a time. Donziger’s lost his law license and his clients are still awaiting judgment.

This is the best law that money can buy, and Chevron has a lot of money. The massive expenditures needed to railroad Donizer were a pittance compared to the $9.5b judgment Chevron owed its victims in Ecuador.

The lesson of Donziger is that these companies won’t go genrly to their graves. They are enormously, unimaginably wealthy and act with the ruthlessness born of greed, which makes mere sadism pale by comparison. Litigation finance is exciting and promising, but it’s only a tactic — and it’s a tactic that’s always in danger of being turned against the goal it nominally serves. The people funding litigation finance don’t want to save the world — they just want to get rich. They can and will change sides if someone can make the business case for doing so.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/06/thats-where-the-money-is/#champerty

[Image ID: A mirrored office tower bearing the Exxon logo. One face of the office tower is a graffiti-covered ATM. Before the tower is a giant pile of bricks of oversized US $100 bills in paper wrappers. The ATM screen depicts a smouldering Deep Water Horizon oil platform.]

Image:

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Joe Shlabotnik (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2299501806/

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

[techniktagebuch]

21. Januar 2023

Es ist doch noch mal alles so wie früher

Ich bin auf einer Anti-AfD-Demo in Berlin, von der es vor Ort heißt, es seien 350.000 Menschen anwesend. Mit einem davon bin ich eigentlich verabredet, es geht um eine Schlüsselübergabe. Daraus wird aber nichts, weil es am Ort der Veranstaltung, vor dem Reichstagsgebäude, während der gesamten Demo-Dauer kein Netz gibt.

Auf dem Screenshot geht es um die "nicht gesendet"-Icons an den letzten beiden Nachrichten. Dazwischen hatte ich einige Zeit versucht, meinen Standort zu teilen, aber wieder aufgegeben. Diese Standort-Nachricht ist auf dem Screenshot bereits gelöscht. Insgesamt war ich etwa eine Stunde lang nicht erreichbar und konnte auch keine Nachrichten verschicken.

Das habe ich schon lange nicht mehr gesehen. Früher war das an Silvester und auf der re:publica normal, aber auf der re:publica gab es 2014 zum ersten Mal funktionierende Mobilfunkversorgung. Wann das Silvesterproblem aufhörte, steht leider nicht so genau im Techniktagebuch und erinnern kann ich mich auch nicht, aber vielleicht war es auch so um diese Zeit herum.

Praktisch für die Dokumentation: Zufällig war ich gestern auch schon demonstrieren. Bei wir-haben-es-satt.de waren 8.000 Leute auf der Straße und ich hatte keine Mobilfunkprobleme, auch nicht ganz am Anfang, als alle noch am selben Ort versammelt waren.

Nicht so praktisch für die Dokumentation: Irgendwo zwischen 8.000 und 350.000 Menschen in einer Funkzelle (oder mehreren benachbarten Funkzellen) verläuft also die Grenze dessen, was die Mobilfunknetze 2024 bewältigen können. Aber zwischen diesen beiden Zahlen ist viel Platz.

(Kathrin Passig)

[leogfischer]

Was bleibt in Zeiten von DeepFakes, ChatGPT und KI-gesteuerten Aufmerksamkeitsökonomien von unseren guten alten Aprilscherzen? Über dieses Thema diskutiere ich mit Harald Welzer, der Familie Lobo und dem O2-Kunden-Chatroboter auf der re:publica

[unfug-bilder]

Hände hoch, wer überrascht ist

[mistermixmania]

Fil Bo Riva, Milano, Kasi, Aaron – 41 neue Acts für das Liveprogramm | re:publica und TINCON erneut auf dem Reeperbahn Festival https://mister-mixmania.com/de/news/festival-news/fil-bo-riva-milano-kasi-aaron-41-neue-acts-fuer-das-liveprogramm-republica-und-tincon-erneut-auf-dem-reeperbahn-festival/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[gunnarsohn]

Spielerei für weltflüchtige Sprachbastler: Ein Berliner Abend mit Michael Krüger jenseits der re:publica

Im Buchhändlerkeller (kein Keller) in Berlin sammelt sich eine illustre Runde von Literaturbegeisterten. Das Licht ist gedimmt, nur vereinzelt durchbrechen kleine Lampen das Halbdunkel. Michael Krüger sitzt auf der kleinen Bühne, Carola Wedel neben ihm, und die Luft ist erfüllt von einer erwartungsvollen Spannung. Kein Platz bleibt unbesetzt, und die Zuhörer lehnen sich vor, bereit, jedes Wort…

[korrektheiten]

Journalismus als reine Propaganda und ohne jede Debatte?

Ansage: »Die “re:publica” als „Konferenz für die digitale Gesellschaft“ ist das Stelldichein der modernen linken woken Publizistik. Auf der diesjährigen Ausgabe dieses jährlichen Events von Ende Mail waren zwei seither vielbeachtete Wortmeldungen besonders entlarvend: Zum einen die des “Journalisten” Tilo Jung, der den Journalismus propagandanah gestalten will, und der Autorin Carolin Emcke, die mal eben die […] The post Journalismus als reine Propaganda und ohne jede Debatte? first appeared on Ansage. http://dlvr.it/T8MD4c «

[digitalnaiv]

Junge Leute, Medienkritik und weniger Corporates, meint der @larsbas #rp24

Die digitale Gesellschaft hat sich mal wieder in Berlin auf der re:publica getroffen. Und zum ersten Mal war die Konferenz mit 30.000 Besuchern ausverkauft. Lars war vor Ort und berichtet von seinen Eindrücken. Welche Themen wurden diskutiert? #rp24

Im aktuellen Podcast #9vor9 gibt uns Lars seine Eindrücke und Themen der diesjährigen re:publica 2024 wieder. Ich konnte sie leider nur aus der Ferner verfolgen. Die re:publica 2024 kehrte nach einer Pause wieder in die Station Berlin zurück. Zum ersten Mal war man laut Veranstalter komplett ausverkauft und verzeichnete knapp 30.000 Teilnehmer. Die re:publica behauptet sich also, wo andere Messen…

[brookston]

Holidays 5.27

Holidays

Armed Forces Day (Nicaragua)

Bermuda Day (Bermuda)

Bloomer Day

Body Painting Day

Border Guard Day (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia)

Buttercup Day

Carnival of Nose Music

Cellophane Tape Day

Children’s Day (Nigeria)

Clean Sneakers Appreciation Day

Community Police Officer Day (Ukraine)

Cultivating Comedy Day

Derg Downfall Day (Ethiopia)

Dia de la Madre (a.k.a. Mother's Day; Bolivia)

Emergency Medicine Day

Fête des Voisins (France)

Free Feral Cat Spay Day

Golden Gate Bridge Day

Habeas Corpus Day

International Children’s Day (Nigeria)

International Crop Duster’s Day

International Day of Action for Women’s Health

International Day of Marketing

International Heritage Breeds Day

Jag’s McCartney Day (Turks and Caicos Islands)

Janmotsav of Sri Sri Madhabdeva (Assam, India)

Joe Cool Day (Peanuts)

Lazybones Day (Luilak; Netherlands)

Love Your Lanes Day (UK)

Martagon Lily Day (French Republic)

Menstrual Hygiene Day

Meryl Streep Day

Mother’s Day (Bolivia)

National Aaron Day

National Asher Day

National Christian T-Shirt Day

National Climate Day (Switzerland)

National Gray Day

National Hairstylist Mental Health Awareness Day

National Hamburger Day

National Jordan Day

National Melissa Day

National Multiple Births Awareness Day (Canada)

National Reflexology Day (Canada)

National Sunscreen Day (a.k.a. Sunscreen Protection Day)

Navy Day (Japan)

Nothing to Fear Day

Nysa Asteroid Day

Old-Time Player Piano Day

Pop-Up Toaster Day

Procession of the Golden Chariot and the Battle of Lumecon (Belgium)

Pyrex Day

Rachel Carson Day

Richard Wagner Day

Slavery Abolition Day (Guadeloupe, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin)

Stratosphere Ballon Ascent Day

Sunscreen Day

Throw the Bastards Out Day

Tracky Jack Day (Australia)

Whooping Crane Day

World Dhole Day

World Hunger Day

World Product Day

Youm-e-Tkbir (Day of Greatness; Pakistan)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Grape Popsicle Day

Muffin Day (Sweden)

National Brisket Day

National Italian Beef Day

Schmaltz Day

Independence & Related Days

Bartonia (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]

Domanglia (Declared; 2011) [unrecognized]

EDO (a.k.a. Empirical Dyarchy of Ohio; Declared; 2010) [unrecognized]

First Republic Day (Armenia)

Imperial Kermit Empire (Declared; 2021) [unrecognized]

Macéyon (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Republic Day (Azerbaijan)

Republic Day (Nepal)

4th & Last Monday in May

Celebration Day (UK) [Last Monday]

Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling and Wake (Cooper’s Hill, UK)

Late May Bank Holiday (Isle of Man)

Motivation Monday [Every Monday]

Memorial Day (US) [Last Monday] a.k.a. ... 

Decoration Day (f.k.a.)

Great Jubilee Day, A (f.k.a., commemorated Revolutionary War)

National Hamburger Day

National Moment of Remembrance [3:00 PM]

Poppy Day [also 11.11]

Prayer for Peace Day

Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna Day (Fiji) [Last Monday]

Spring Bank Holiday (UK) [Last Monday] a.k.a. ... 

Spring Holiday (Jersey)

Tetbury Woolsack Races (UK)

Weekly Holidays beginning May 27 (4th Week)

Week of Solidarity with the People of Non-Self-Governing Territories begins [Last Monday]

Festivals Beginning May 27, 2024

Canadian Screen Awards (Toronto, Canada)

Festival St-Ambroise Fringe de Montréal (Montreal, Canada) thru 6.16]

Prague Fringe Festival (Prague, Czech Republic) [thru 6.1]

re:publica (Berlin, Germany) [thru 5.29]

Vienna Independent Shorts (Vienna, Austria) [thru 6.2]

Feast Days

AL-1995 Plus Tax (Muppetism)

Anna Cervin (Artology)

Augustine of Canterbury (Christian; Saint)

St. Augustine (Positivist; Saint)

Bede the Confessor (Christian; Saint, “Father of the Church”)

Bruno of Würzburg (Christian; Saint)

Buddha Day (Sukka Tanson II; South Korea)

Centennial Games Day (Everyday Wicca)

Dashiell Hammett (Writerism)

Edward Teach Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Eutropius of Orange (Christian; Saint)

Feast of Comus (Greek God of Drunken Revelry)

Findle Fritter’s Stoat-Wheedling Event (Shamanism)

Frigga Blot (Slavic Pagan/Asatru)

Georges Rouault (Artology)

Harlan Ellison (Writerism)

Herman Wouk (Writerism)

Hildebert (Christian; Saint)

Jessie Arms Botke (Artology)

John Cheever (Writerism)

John I, Pope (Christian; Martyr)

Julius the Veteran and His Companions (Christian; Martyrs)

Lojze Grozde (Christian; Saint)

Media Ver III (Pagan)

Melangell (Christian; Saint) [Hares]

Pillage Festival (Church of the SubGenius)

Restituta of Sora (Christian; Martyr & Virgin)

Season of Confusion begins (Discordian)

Stretch Yourself Creatively Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

The Three Martyrdoms: Red, Green & White (Celtic Book of Days)

Weasel Tossing Day (Pastafarian)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Taian (大安 Japan) [Lucky all day.]

Unfortunate Day (Pagan) [27 of 57]

Premieres

Alice Through the Looking Glass (Film; 2016)

American Stars ’n Bars, by Neil Young (Album; 1977)

Blowin’ in the Wind, by Bob Dylan (Song; 1963)

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (Animated Film; 2022)

Bulloney (MGM Cartoon; 1933)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown (History Book; 1970)

Continuum (TV Series; 2012)

Devil of the Deep (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1938)

Duck Soup to Nuts (WB LT Cartoon; 1944)

An Egg Scramble (WB MM Cartoon; 1950)

The Flintstones (Film; 1994)

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, by Bob Dylan (Album; 1963)

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger (Short Stories; 1962)

From Russia with Love (US Film; 1964) [James Bond #2]

Gift of Gag (Fleischer/Famous Popeye Cartoon; 1955)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Film; 1933)

God Save the Queen, by The Sex Pistols (Song; 1977)

Love Life (TV Series; 2020)

Lumberjack and Jill (Fleischer/Famous Popeye Cartoon; 1949)

Madagascar (Animated Film; 2005)

Melody Time (Animated Disney Film; 1948)

Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark (Novel; 1959)

The Music Mice-Tro (WB MM Cartoon; 1967)

A Mutt in a Rut (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1949)

Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV Series; 2022) The Plumed Serpent, by D.H. Lawrence (Novel; 1926)

Prelude to War (Documentary Film; 1942)

QB VII, by Leon Uris (Novel; 1970)

A Short Vision (Animated Short Film; 1956)

Smokey and the Bandit (Film; 1977)

The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth (Novel; 1960)

Space Mountain rollercoaster (Disneyland Ride; 1977)

Springtime Serenade (Cartune Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Day; 1935)

Striples and Stars (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Day; 1929)

Symphony No. 6 in A Minor (a.k.a. The Tragic Symphony), by Gustav Mahler (Symphony; 1906)

That’ll Be the Day, by Buddy Holly (Song; 1957)

Three Little Pigs (Disney Cartoon; 1933)

Top Gun: Maverick (Film; 2022)

Travels In Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco (Essays; 1967)

Ventriloquist Cat (MGM Cartoon; 1933)

The War Wagon (Film; 1967)

Winked, Blinken and Nod (Disney Silly Symphony Cartoon; 1938)

X-Men: Apocalypse (Film; 2016)

Today’s Name Days

August, Bruno, Randolph (Austria)

Augustin, Bruno, Julije (Croatia)

Valdemar (Czech Republic)

Lucian (Denmark)

Kalvi, Klaudia (Estonia)

Ritva (Finland)

Augustin (France)

August, Bruno, Randolph (Germany)

Alypios, Ioannis Rossos (Greece)

Hella (Hungary)

Agostino, Federico, Oliviero (Italy)

Dzidra, Gunita, Henrijs, Ludolfs (Latvia)

Augustinas, Brunonas, Leonora, Virgaudas, Žymantė (Lithuania)

Cato, Katinka (Norway)

Beda, Izydor, Jan, Juliusz, Lucjan, Magdalena, Radowit (Poland)

Ioan (România)

Iveta (Slovakia)

Agustín, Julio (Spain)

Beda, Blenda (Sweden)

Broderick, Brodie, Brody, Isador, Isadora, Isadore, Isidro (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 148 of 2024; 218 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 22 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Huath (Hawthorn) [Day 16 of 28]

Chinese: Month 4 (Ji-Si), Day 20 (Xin-Mao)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 19 Iyar 5784

Islamic: 19 Dhu al-Qada 1445

J Cal: 28 Magenta; Sevenday [28 of 30]

Julian: 14 May 2024

Moon: 71%: Waning Gibbous

Positivist: 7 St. Paul (6th Month) [St. Augustine]

Runic Half Month: Odal (Home, Possession) [Day 3 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 70 of 92)

Week: 4th Week of May

Zodiac: Gemini (Day 7 of 31)

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 5.27

Holidays

Armed Forces Day (Nicaragua)

Bermuda Day (Bermuda)

Bloomer Day

Body Painting Day

Border Guard Day (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia)

Buttercup Day

Carnival of Nose Music

Cellophane Tape Day

Children’s Day (Nigeria)

Clean Sneakers Appreciation Day

Community Police Officer Day (Ukraine)

Cultivating Comedy Day

Derg Downfall Day (Ethiopia)

Dia de la Madre (a.k.a. Mother's Day; Bolivia)

Emergency Medicine Day

Fête des Voisins (France)

Free Feral Cat Spay Day

Golden Gate Bridge Day

Habeas Corpus Day

International Children’s Day (Nigeria)

International Crop Duster’s Day

International Day of Action for Women’s Health

International Day of Marketing

International Heritage Breeds Day

Jag’s McCartney Day (Turks and Caicos Islands)

Janmotsav of Sri Sri Madhabdeva (Assam, India)

Joe Cool Day (Peanuts)

Lazybones Day (Luilak; Netherlands)

Love Your Lanes Day (UK)

Martagon Lily Day (French Republic)

Menstrual Hygiene Day

Meryl Streep Day

Mother’s Day (Bolivia)

National Aaron Day

National Asher Day

National Christian T-Shirt Day

National Climate Day (Switzerland)

National Gray Day

National Hairstylist Mental Health Awareness Day

National Hamburger Day

National Jordan Day

National Melissa Day

National Multiple Births Awareness Day (Canada)

National Reflexology Day (Canada)

National Sunscreen Day (a.k.a. Sunscreen Protection Day)

Navy Day (Japan)

Nothing to Fear Day

Nysa Asteroid Day

Old-Time Player Piano Day

Pop-Up Toaster Day

Procession of the Golden Chariot and the Battle of Lumecon (Belgium)

Pyrex Day

Rachel Carson Day

Richard Wagner Day

Slavery Abolition Day (Guadeloupe, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin)

Stratosphere Ballon Ascent Day

Sunscreen Day

Throw the Bastards Out Day

Tracky Jack Day (Australia)

Whooping Crane Day

World Dhole Day

World Hunger Day

World Product Day

Youm-e-Tkbir (Day of Greatness; Pakistan)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Grape Popsicle Day

Muffin Day (Sweden)

National Brisket Day

National Italian Beef Day

Schmaltz Day

Independence & Related Days

Bartonia (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]

Domanglia (Declared; 2011) [unrecognized]

EDO (a.k.a. Empirical Dyarchy of Ohio; Declared; 2010) [unrecognized]

First Republic Day (Armenia)

Imperial Kermit Empire (Declared; 2021) [unrecognized]

Macéyon (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Republic Day (Azerbaijan)

Republic Day (Nepal)

4th & Last Monday in May

Celebration Day (UK) [Last Monday]

Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling and Wake (Cooper’s Hill, UK)

Late May Bank Holiday (Isle of Man)

Motivation Monday [Every Monday]

Memorial Day (US) [Last Monday] a.k.a. ... 

Decoration Day (f.k.a.)

Great Jubilee Day, A (f.k.a., commemorated Revolutionary War)

National Hamburger Day

National Moment of Remembrance [3:00 PM]

Poppy Day [also 11.11]

Prayer for Peace Day

Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna Day (Fiji) [Last Monday]

Spring Bank Holiday (UK) [Last Monday] a.k.a. ... 

Spring Holiday (Jersey)

Tetbury Woolsack Races (UK)

Weekly Holidays beginning May 27 (4th Week)

Week of Solidarity with the People of Non-Self-Governing Territories begins [Last Monday]

Festivals Beginning May 27, 2024

Canadian Screen Awards (Toronto, Canada)

Festival St-Ambroise Fringe de Montréal (Montreal, Canada) thru 6.16]

Prague Fringe Festival (Prague, Czech Republic) [thru 6.1]

re:publica (Berlin, Germany) [thru 5.29]

Vienna Independent Shorts (Vienna, Austria) [thru 6.2]

Feast Days

AL-1995 Plus Tax (Muppetism)

Anna Cervin (Artology)

Augustine of Canterbury (Christian; Saint)

St. Augustine (Positivist; Saint)

Bede the Confessor (Christian; Saint, “Father of the Church”)

Bruno of Würzburg (Christian; Saint)

Buddha Day (Sukka Tanson II; South Korea)

Centennial Games Day (Everyday Wicca)

Dashiell Hammett (Writerism)

Edward Teach Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Eutropius of Orange (Christian; Saint)

Feast of Comus (Greek God of Drunken Revelry)

Findle Fritter’s Stoat-Wheedling Event (Shamanism)

Frigga Blot (Slavic Pagan/Asatru)

Georges Rouault (Artology)

Harlan Ellison (Writerism)

Herman Wouk (Writerism)

Hildebert (Christian; Saint)

Jessie Arms Botke (Artology)

John Cheever (Writerism)

John I, Pope (Christian; Martyr)

Julius the Veteran and His Companions (Christian; Martyrs)

Lojze Grozde (Christian; Saint)

Media Ver III (Pagan)

Melangell (Christian; Saint) [Hares]

Pillage Festival (Church of the SubGenius)

Restituta of Sora (Christian; Martyr & Virgin)

Season of Confusion begins (Discordian)

Stretch Yourself Creatively Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

The Three Martyrdoms: Red, Green & White (Celtic Book of Days)

Weasel Tossing Day (Pastafarian)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Taian (大安 Japan) [Lucky all day.]

Unfortunate Day (Pagan) [27 of 57]

Premieres

Alice Through the Looking Glass (Film; 2016)

American Stars ’n Bars, by Neil Young (Album; 1977)

Blowin’ in the Wind, by Bob Dylan (Song; 1963)

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (Animated Film; 2022)

Bulloney (MGM Cartoon; 1933)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown (History Book; 1970)

Continuum (TV Series; 2012)

Devil of the Deep (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1938)

Duck Soup to Nuts (WB LT Cartoon; 1944)

An Egg Scramble (WB MM Cartoon; 1950)

The Flintstones (Film; 1994)

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, by Bob Dylan (Album; 1963)

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger (Short Stories; 1962)

From Russia with Love (US Film; 1964) [James Bond #2]

Gift of Gag (Fleischer/Famous Popeye Cartoon; 1955)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Film; 1933)

God Save the Queen, by The Sex Pistols (Song; 1977)

Love Life (TV Series; 2020)

Lumberjack and Jill (Fleischer/Famous Popeye Cartoon; 1949)

Madagascar (Animated Film; 2005)

Melody Time (Animated Disney Film; 1948)

Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark (Novel; 1959)

The Music Mice-Tro (WB MM Cartoon; 1967)

A Mutt in a Rut (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1949)

Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV Series; 2022) The Plumed Serpent, by D.H. Lawrence (Novel; 1926)

Prelude to War (Documentary Film; 1942)

QB VII, by Leon Uris (Novel; 1970)

A Short Vision (Animated Short Film; 1956)

Smokey and the Bandit (Film; 1977)

The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth (Novel; 1960)

Space Mountain rollercoaster (Disneyland Ride; 1977)

Springtime Serenade (Cartune Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Day; 1935)

Striples and Stars (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Day; 1929)

Symphony No. 6 in A Minor (a.k.a. The Tragic Symphony), by Gustav Mahler (Symphony; 1906)

That’ll Be the Day, by Buddy Holly (Song; 1957)

Three Little Pigs (Disney Cartoon; 1933)

Top Gun: Maverick (Film; 2022)

Travels In Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco (Essays; 1967)

Ventriloquist Cat (MGM Cartoon; 1933)

The War Wagon (Film; 1967)

Winked, Blinken and Nod (Disney Silly Symphony Cartoon; 1938)

X-Men: Apocalypse (Film; 2016)

Today’s Name Days

August, Bruno, Randolph (Austria)

Augustin, Bruno, Julije (Croatia)

Valdemar (Czech Republic)

Lucian (Denmark)

Kalvi, Klaudia (Estonia)

Ritva (Finland)

Augustin (France)

August, Bruno, Randolph (Germany)

Alypios, Ioannis Rossos (Greece)

Hella (Hungary)

Agostino, Federico, Oliviero (Italy)

Dzidra, Gunita, Henrijs, Ludolfs (Latvia)

Augustinas, Brunonas, Leonora, Virgaudas, Žymantė (Lithuania)

Cato, Katinka (Norway)

Beda, Izydor, Jan, Juliusz, Lucjan, Magdalena, Radowit (Poland)

Ioan (România)

Iveta (Slovakia)

Agustín, Julio (Spain)

Beda, Blenda (Sweden)

Broderick, Brodie, Brody, Isador, Isadora, Isadore, Isidro (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 148 of 2024; 218 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 22 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Huath (Hawthorn) [Day 16 of 28]

Chinese: Month 4 (Ji-Si), Day 20 (Xin-Mao)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 19 Iyar 5784

Islamic: 19 Dhu al-Qada 1445

J Cal: 28 Magenta; Sevenday [28 of 30]

Julian: 14 May 2024

Moon: 71%: Waning Gibbous

Positivist: 7 St. Paul (6th Month) [St. Augustine]

Runic Half Month: Odal (Home, Possession) [Day 3 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 70 of 92)

Week: 4th Week of May

Zodiac: Gemini (Day 7 of 31)

[bauerntanz]

Cash

#Cash. Morgen beginnt in Berlin die #re_publica2023. An drei Tagen wird eine Vielzahl netzpolitischer Themen diskutiert. @netzpolitik hat einen kleinen Ausblick auf das Programm zusammengestellt. 

Morgen beginnt in Berlin die diesjährige re:publica-Konferenz. An drei Tagen wird eine Vielzahl netzpolitischer Themen unter dem Motto „CASH“ diskutiert -in der Arena Berlin, dem Festsaal Kreuzberg und vielen anderen Locations in Berlin. Netzpolitik.org hat jetzt einen kleinen Ausblick auf das Programm zusammengestellt. Die re:publica ist weiterhin die größte Konferenz für die digitale…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Today (May 10), I’m in VANCOUVER for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and later a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall; on Thurs (May 11), I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest.

#20yrsago Lying, plagiarising NYT writer outed, ousted https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html

#20yrsago COGECO’s Terms of Service: Assholes or idiots? https://memex.craphound.com/2003/05/11/cogecos-terms-of-service-assholes-or-idiots/

#10yrsago My Re:publica talk: “It’s not a fax machine connected to a waffle iron” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWqx_1tDyqE

#10yrsago What makes a project remixable? https://mako.cc/academic/hill_monroy-remixing_dilemma-DRAFT.pdf

#10yrsago Bike lanes led to 49% increase in retail sales https://web.archive.org/web/20130315222708/https://www.americabikes.org/nyc_study_finds_protected_bicycle_lanes_boost_local_business

#5yrsago FanFlick Editor: an entry in EFF’s Catalog of Missing Devices https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/fanflick-editor-entry-catalog-missing-devices-eff-supporter

#5yrsago Here are the official lyrics to the Mr Softee jingle https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/mister-softee-jingle-has-lyrics-who-knew

#5yrsago Bite-Sized Linux: a zine collecting awesome *nix tutorial webtoons https://wizardzines.gumroad.com/l/ltywT

#5yrsago West Virginia Senator laughed at the idea that hating on teachers would bite him in the ass — then he lost his job https://theintercept.com/2018/05/11/west-virginia-primary-teacher-strikes/

#5yrsago Pentagon sucks up to Trump by censoring mentions of climate change in its global risks assessment https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/10/pentagon-revised-obama-era-report-to-remove-risks-from-climate-change/

#5yrsago Teens are cyberbullying themselves as a form of self-harm https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/04/21/604073315/when-teens-cyberbully-themselves

#5yrsago Indigenous Canadians sue the Canadian government over decades of secret, involuntary, inhumane medical experiments https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/canada-indigenous-people-medical-experiments-lawsuit

#5yrsago Individual FBI agents can be sued for blackmailing potential informants with no-fly list threats https://www.techdirt.com/2018/05/11/court-fbi-agents-can-be-held-accountable-tossing-immigrants-no-fly-list-because-they-refused-to-be-informants/

#1yrago The (billionaires’) case against billionaires https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/11/a-dent-in-the-universe/#eminently-guillotineable

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[techniktagebuch]

Juni 2024

In zwei Welten

Auf der re:publica habe ich durch ein bisschen Herumfragen die Gelegenheit, eine Apple Vision Pro Brille auszuprobieren. Eine Standbetreuerin hilft mir, das recht schwere Gestell auf den Kopf zu ziehen und zu kalibrieren (hierfür muss ich meine Augen und Hände auf verschiedene Art bewegen) und dann darf ich ein paar Demos austesten, unter anderem die Vorzeige-Software "Encounter Dinosaurs". Der schwere Akku der Brille steckt dabei in meiner Hostentasche.

Ich hatte schon öfter VR-Brillen auf (wie im Techniktagebuch dokumentiert), aber diese Art der Mixed Reality ist doch etwas anderes, Ungewöhnliches. Wie ich im Techniktagebuch-Chat direkt im Anschluss schreibe: "Dass man alles noch sieht, aber eine Benutzeroberfläche drüberliegt, das fand ich sehr spannend. Dass es wirklich möglich ist, beides zu haben und in beiden Welten zu sein." Tatsächlich habe ich einen Monat später, als ich diesen Text schreibe, auch fast alles vergessen, was ich tatsächlich getan habe, aber dieses Gefühl, eine Benutzeroberfläche als Overlay über der restlichen Welt zu haben, ist zurückgeblieben. Ich konnte mir wirklich vorstellen, dass das eine mögliche Zukunft sein könnte.

(Alexander Matzkeit)