I got quite a lot of pushback a few years ago when I asserted that prudishness was increasing. The evidence is everywhere, though. Not hard to find at all, and countervailing evidence difficult indeed to discover. Here’s some more of that prudishness.
Did you know that AOC was once in high school or college or something and had fun? So scandalous! And she even danced. Will the moral outrages never end?
The Republicans are giving her a great reputation and harming themselves more than they’re hurting her, by far. It’s hilarious to watch. I think they detest her so much because she’s both attractive and savvy to the modern clime in ways they’ll never be. (That’s why a lot of Dems dislike her too.)
What also makes me angry at the Dems, though, is they’d just as quickly abandon her if it turned out in her past she’d been a sex worker of some type. You know it’s true. So there’s no lack of hypocrites here.
Protein mania: the rich world’s new diet obsession.
You only need more protein if you are doing a lot of weight training. If you’re not, you almost certainly do not. I consume extra protein because I average about an hour a day of hard workout. Unless you’re doing that, it’s just wasting time and money.
Another bullshit trend to add to the list.
It doesn’t surprise me.
12 years ago, when I was in the best shape of my life, people told me I “looked to skinny” because of the muscle definition.
9 years ago when I was 80lbs overweight & in the worst health of my life people told me I looked “big and strong”
NONSENSE.
— Jimmy Lee (@InnerFirePod) December 31, 2018
We are normalizing eating disorders, and I am not referring to anorexia or bulimia. Those are only normalized in a relatively-small part of the fashion world.
No, now we’re choosing to normalize the eating disorders of obesity and overconsumption. And if you are obese, you are sick and getting worse — just slowly. This world of shaming the fit is not an improvement. It’s becoming verboten to even show a person who’s in shape in an ad or on a web page; another area the corporations and corporate propaganda have completely won. I still wish someone would do a thorough investigation of where the Fat Acceptance orgs get their funding. I’d bet my entire life savings that it’s largely food companies.
I've seen people being conflicted about works entering the public domain and I feel this is exactly what many of us feared, that this twenty-year stoppage would start to be considered the norm instead of a weird exception. Copyright is *supposed* to expire.
— Stacey Lantagne (@StaceyLantagne) January 2, 2019
Exactly. The purpose of the copyright law is to benefit the public (at least as the founders intended it), not to enrich corporations and creators. The temporary monopoly of copyright was in the service of the larger goal of benefiting the public and the nation, not the ultimate reason for copyright to exist.
Corporations want you to think about this exactly backwards: that copyright exists to benefit them, not the public. This has been an extremely successful propaganda effort to invert this meaning in the public mind. Copyright was always about striking a balance between the greatest number of works being created and the benefit to the public of those works being available in the public domain as soon as possible.
I think on balance it’d be better if copyright didn’t exist at all (along with other societal reforms), but an acceptable compromise would be 14 years with the possibility of a 14 year extension. (By the way, something like 99% of works earn just about all that they will ever earn in the first five years of their availability. Absurd 100+ year copyrights only benefit corporations, not creators or the public.)
Corporate propaganda is so pervasive that I am in awe of its power to control society.
I forgot a major tech that really changed the world for more people than just about any other recently:
Containerized shipping/containers.
(No, not the stupid Kubernetes stuff.)
It’s surprisingly hard finding videos of Taylor Swift’s prorgrammable LED costume(s) she wore on one of her tours, but here’s one. Damn that is cool.
The tech is from Adafruit, with custom programming. The source code for Swift’s outfit and all the others is available here.
I like Swift’s music a lot, obviously, and I don’t care much about moral purity and artist’s misdeeds but she seems like a genuinely decent person so I like her even better for that. Staying a decent person with all the bullshit and crazy she must experience is no small accomplishment.
Amazing performance. Just wait till a little over two minutes in. No, there are never two people singing.
I don't think younger generations care at all if stocks drop a lot.
At the same time, many would love real estate to drop a lot.
Boomers are in the opposite position. Many cannot handle expenses in retirement if stocks drop a lot.
These are overlooked dynamics.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 3, 2019
Boomers pretty much ruined the world — made a lot of money, and enjoyed benefits they then worked exceptionally hard to take away from their children and grandchildren. Some comeuppance only seems appropriate.
DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH NETWORK PORTS? pic.twitter.com/3mLHRsZzmt
— foone (@Foone) January 3, 2019
This sort of device isn’t generally used for networking as most people would think of it, but is rather intended for testing labs and other venues such as that. For instance, if Google was designing some custom hardware that needed to do some specific network task, they’d plug 200+ of them into this and hammer them with some sort of load tester, reconfigure, then do it again.
The advantage of this device is that it’s possible to change the network configuration without any physical rewiring and it’s completely automatable.
Sure, you could (and some people do) use these for more, but the problem is that it’s expensive and if this one device fails, 288 ports go down at once. So it’s not really for production but makes a great testbed.