onfocus

The Oregon city of Bend has spent $1,500 (£1,188) on removing googly eyes from seven of the eight sculptures impacted.

Keep Bend googly!

Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out.

Frustrating that we only ever talk about increasing police manpower and budgets even on the left.

Tommy Cappel, who co-founded the group Beats Antique, says the Archive is “hugely valued in the music community” for its preservation of everything from rare recordings to live sets. “This is important work that deserves to continue for generations to come, and we don’t want to see everything they’ve already done for musicians and our legacy erased,” he added. “Major labels could see all musicians, past and present, as partners — instead of being the bad guy in this dynamic. They should drop their suit. Archives keep us alive.”

Yes, I listen to all my Frank Sinatra through The Great 78 Project rather than buying CDs. It really is the most convenient way to listen to music despite the pops and scratches of digitization process. « This is sarcasm. And this lawsuit is more out-of-control copyright enforcement. We need the Internet Archive.

Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

True, but bleak. No easy fixes.

Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created. We therefore recommend that research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria not be permitted, and that funders make clear that they will not support such work.

I hate it when some little fact about how things work (chirality) turns out to have world-destroying implications.

“Making surveillance tech interactive is a really good way of bringing attention to it,” Kolman told PCMag. “It's one thing to understand that cameras are everywhere but… I want to show how to live under these systems and how to resist them.”

When life gives you a surveillance state, make surveillancestateade.

“Without a thriving, inclusive higher education system that serves the public good, the majority of Americans will be excluded from meaningful participation in our democracy and this country will move backward,” Wolfson predicted. “We will do everything in our power to protect our institutions, faculty, staff and students and stand up against those seeking to violate academic freedom and the core principle of higher education.”

The correct message. Amazingly, I’ve only seen higher ed unions discussing the new US administration. Unions might be the only resistance.

Meanwhile, the BM’s political reporters decided that inflation was Biden’s fault because of all the government spending on COVID relief, infrastructure and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. This was a lie.

This post-election analysis resonates with me. It does feel like many of my own habits, patterns, and assumptions need to change.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.

It's always good advice to avoid Substack because they’re platforming Nazis and racists. And if for some reason you need another reason to avoid it, why not consider their truly hostile web user experience:

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

Their awful fade out to sign-up popup as you scroll is also a dark pattern. Willingness to treat readers as rubes you need to trick into subscribing should be a red flag about how the company will continue to make decisions. The fact that so many talented writers and podcasters go along with this is disappointing.

Who in the White House is bothering, while the bully pulpit remains theirs, to educate the public about how the Constitution is supposed to operate?

Excellent questions here. Democrats have power for a brief window, they should be maximizing it while they can.

I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator. Just like Mastodon and the Fediverse already are.

This is a good take on how to analyze social media. I also don't want to put any energy into a service that has the full ability to alter the connections at any point. Bluesky is yet another service with high switching costs. That's attractive to investors and advertisers, bad for users.

Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night. He continued insisting this didn’t happen and then looked confused that anyone would disagree with him. 

This account of a meeting at Google for de-listed site owners is surreal.