Eating Disorders

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.

Copy That

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.

LED

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.

Droppage

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.