“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude) Continue reading Almanac: Tolstoy on happiness at About Last Night.... Read more
Bump, Filmed at Glebe, is an Australian web television drama series which streams on Stan. It centres around Oly, an ambitious and high-achieving teenage girl who has a surprise baby and the complications that ensue for two families. Wikipedia
Lessons For Us From China’s Cultural Revolution
Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly delighted in chaos under heaven. – The New Yorker
Biden’s team revamped WhiteHouse.gov in 6 weeks
Fast Company: “For a glimpse of how the Biden Administration plans to govern, look no further than the White House website. The new site has lots of negative white space and is designed to be accessible to everyone from Spanish speakers to citizens with vision impairments. “WhiteHouse.gov ends up being the front page of the federal government,” says White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty, whose team would like users to consider WhiteHouse.gov a digital front door. It’s a stark contrast from the previous administration’s site, which used gold accents along with dark blue and white. Under President Donald Trump, a Spanish version of the site was removed(which the Biden administration reinstated). As for navigation: The Trump-era site put zero effort into making content easy to find and visually compelling. On a page about former U.S. presidents, the Trump site opted for a list rather than a visual grid with images. The design matters because the White House website is a place for people to learn about the administration and its agenda. It’s also a place for people to find jobs. Flaherty says some of its most trafficked pages are about the history of the White House and biographical information…The site introduces new features like high-contrast dark mode and large text options, which are both important for legibility and are especially important for users with visual impairments. It brought back a Spanish language version of the site, retired by the Trump administration, and features new details like inclusive pronoun dropdowns for its contact menu. Flaherty’s team also conducted a content audit. “We took down anything that gave the wrong impression of what our administration is about,” he says…
Crowdsourced maps will show exactly where surveillance cameras are watching
Fast Company – “Amnesty International is producing a map of all the places in New York City where surveillance cameras are scanning residents’ faces. The project will enlist volunteers to use their smartphones to identify, photograph, and locate government-owned surveillance cameras capable of shooting video that could be matched against people’s faces in a database through AI-powered facial recognition. The map that will eventually result is meant to give New Yorkers the power of information against an invasive technology the usage of which and purpose is often not fully disclosed to the public. It’s also meant to put pressure on the New York City Council to write and pass a law restricting or banning it. Other U.S. cities, such as Boston, Portland, and San Francisco, have already passed such laws. Facial recognition technology can be developed by scraping millions of images from social media profiles and driver’s licenses without people’s consent, Amnesty says. Software from companies like Clearview AI can then use computer vision algorithms to match those images against facial images captured by closed-circuit television (CCTV) or other video surveillance cameras and stored in a database…”
Never too much talent? Should you be bullish on the Nets?
Toward a more libertarian pandemic?
B.1.1.7 not in decline. And that variant is exploding in Denmark
Vaccines to take Israel back from the Ibex, photo gallery, recommended. And some verticality in a video version. Consider it “the Ibex salt-water paradox.”
Peter Huber tribute, he has passed away
Why Is Big Tech Policing Speech?
The New York Times – “Because the Government Isn’t. Deplatforming President Trump showed that the First Amendment is broken — but not in the way his supporters think…
The giants of social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram — had more stringent rules. And while they still amplified huge amounts of far-right content, they had started using warning labels and deletions to clamp down on misinformation about Covid-19 and false claims of electoral fraud, including in posts by President Trump. Conservative figures, including Senator Ted Cruz, Eric Trump and Sean Hannity, grew increasingly critical of the sites and beckoned followers to join them on Parler, whose investors include the right-wing activist and heiress Rebekah Mercer. The format was like Twitter’s, but with only two clear rules: no criminal activity and no spam or bots. On Parler, you could say what you wanted without being, as conservatives complained, “silenced.”…
Social media sites effectively function as the public square where people debate the issues of the day. But the platforms are actually more like privately owned malls: They make and enforce rules to keep their spaces tolerable, and unlike the government, they’re not obligated to provide all the freedom of speech offered by the First Amendment. Like the bouncers at a bar, they are free to boot anyone or anything they consider disruptive. In the days after Jan. 6, they swiftly cracked down on whole channels and accounts associated with the violence. Reddit removed the r/DonaldTrump subreddit. YouTube tightened its policy on posting videos that called the outcome of the election into doubt. TikTok took down posts with hashtags like #stormthecapitol. Facebook indefinitely suspended Trump’s account, and Twitter — which, like Facebook, had spent years making some exceptions to its rules for the president — took his account away permanently…”
