Mahmoud

Created by Joe Pelling, Brendan O’Hare & Cory Snearowski
Produced by Alex Plapinger

Joe Pelling
https://www.instagram.com/joseph.pelling/

Brendan O'Hare
https://www.instagram.com/brendohare/
https://www.twitter.com/brendohare/
https://www.youtube.com/user/brendohare

Cory Snearowski
https://www.instagram.com/corysnearowsk/

Alex Plapinger
https://www.instagram.com/alexplapinger/

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Whatever you do, don't click on any "related videos", because Youtube hates you.

You know, when I throw on a 66 year old movie about a showgirl who becomes a princess, I don't expect a thoroughly modern anticapitalist screed in the middle.

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Frankly, Harold shouldn't have been talking mad shit.

First up: the government of Saudi Arabia now owns almost 6% of Live Nation / TicketMaster, a half billion dollar investment.

Saudi Arabia Buys $500 Million Stake in Live Nation, Stock Rises:

The Saudi Public Investment Fund is now the company's third-largest shareholder, with John Malone's Liberty Media the largest individual shareholder with a 33 percent stake. [...] Many firms have been reluctant to take investment from the fund following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.

That would be the Saudi Public Investment Fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, darling of Silicon Valley, who is widely believed to have personally ordered that Khashoggi be kidnapped and dismembered alive with a bone saw.

Live Nation, again, is the multinational behemoth that sells 80% of all tickets in the US, and owns 117 venues and exclusively books 33 others, including The Fillmore, The Masonic, Cobb's, Punch Line and August Hall.

In local news:

San Francisco has 75 billionaires. Most of them aren't donating to local COVID-19 relief.

Mayor London Breed set up what she called the Give2SF COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund, and started asking for cash. [...] It hasn't worked. As of late last week, the Give2SF Fund had received a total of $10.5 million in donations, according to Mayor Breed's office, an order of magnitude less than the anticipated need. [...]

Dorsey isn't unique among San Francisco's nine-zeroes club. If there are 75 billionaires in San Francisco, close to 70 have yet to fork over a dime to COVID-19 relief. Dorsey's local parsimony is the standard.

In an unprecedented time of unprecedented need, with unemployment projected to top 20 percent and housing displacement estimated to exceed the nadir of the Great Recession, the crop of billionaires created during the past decade in San Francisco -- many of them, like Dorsey, the beneficiaries of generous tax breaks from the city -- have chosen to hold onto their fortunes.

Dorsey got a bunch of fawning, gullible press recently reporting that he had "donated $1 billion" but that's not at all what he did. What he did was shift $1 billion of his money into a new corporate shell, owned by him, that will be a part of the privatization of services that the government should provide.

What Dorsey did was move approximately 20 million shares of Square stock, worth more than $1.26 billion at current market value, into his charitable LLC. A philanthropic technique popular in Silicon Valley, charitable LLCs escape reporting requirements and also allow money to be spent on lobbying -- or investing for profit, as critics point out. [...]

A few hundred million dollars in donations would represent less than 1 percent of the fortune of 75 billionaires. This would be money that San Francisco would not have to cajole out of its feudal overlords if they were taxed. The ability to dodge such taxes is something Jack Dorsey is more than happy to pay for. [...]

Again, this is not to single Dorsey out for being venal. He has company. Other donors who ponied up to defeat Proposition C in an effort to avoid paying taxes and who haven't seen fit to dish a dime to COVID-19 relief include Levi Strauss, the San Francisco Giants, Charles Schwab, Instacart, and the Chamber of Commerce itself.

Incidentally, DNA Lounge has applied for both the Payroll Protection Program and SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loans, on just about the day that those started taking applications, and so far we've gotten $0, like so many other struggling small businesses.

Ruth's Chris Steak House got $20 million, though. They had a profit of $42 million on revenue of $468 million last year. Cool, cool.

So what I'm saying here is, Smash The State, and Join Our Patreon.

my acc has been hijacked by someone then retrieved by tumblr. but all content is gone. unsure about uploading here anymore. in the meanwhile my visual chinatown is living here: https://www.instagram.com/dvdp/
thanks for everything

dvdp

The Joint Venture Silicon Valley Index has been providing insights on our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for over 20 years. It provides an honest and holistic view of life in Silicon Valley, with the obvious exception that it was published before COVID-19. It's worth reading for a reminder of where we were at the start of 2020. We can use today's events as a chance to reflect on what we can do differently when we hopefully return to normalcy sometime later this year.

You can download the 2020 Silicon Valley Index over here.

Below are a few items that stood out for me:

• We have had nine continuous years of expansion since the last recession, adding 821,000 jobs in the Bay Area.
• Over that same time period, we only permitted 173,000 new homes and have 100,000 megacommuters [Josh: hopefully the option to work remotely continues for many post-COVID].
• Labor productivity reached a record $241,000 per worker, a 53% increase from 2001.
• Unemployment hit 2.1%, a 19-year low.
• More people are leaving the region than coming in.
• Home prices declined 6% in 2019, yet median home sale prices are still the highest in the country (over $1 million).
• Income inequality hit a historic high with 13% of households holding 75% of the region's wealth.
• Internet speeds are slow compared to SF, California, and the country as a whole [Josh: this is shocking for living in the middle of Silicon Valley].
• Individual median income is $117,000 and 82% of the population is above 150% of the poverty level.
• Silicon Valley's ethnic breakdown is 35% Asian, 33% White, 25% Hispanic/Latino, 5% Multiple/Other, and 2% Black/African American.
• 24% of Silicon Valley residents have Graduate or Professional Degrees.
• 51% of families speak a language other than English at home (vs. 41% for SF, 45% for California, and 22% for the US).
• The Bay Area has by far the largest number of tech jobs and greatest % of people employed in tech out of any region in the US.
• 9% of Silicon Valley Residents lack access to adequate food and nutrition
• San Jose generates more patents than any other city in California (11% of all CA patents in fact).
• In 2019, traffic delays cost as much as $3.4 billion in lost productivity for Silicon Valley workers.

Growing awareness of the wider social and political impact of software development has led to efforts to write licenses that prevent software being used to engage in acts that are seen as socially harmful, with the Hippocratic License being perhaps the most discussed example (although the JSON license's requirement that the software be used for good, not evil, is arguably an earlier version of the theme). The problem with these licenses is that they're pretty much universally considered to fall outside the definition of free software or open source licenses due to their restrictions on use, and there's a whole bunch of people who have very strong feelings that this is a very important thing. There's also the more fundamental underlying point that it's hard to write a license like this where everyone agrees on whether a specific thing is bad or not (eg, while many people working on a project may feel that it's reasonable to prohibit the software being used to support drone strikes, others may feel that the project shouldn't have a position on the use of the software to support drone strikes and some may even feel that some people should be the victims of drone strikes). This is, it turns out, all quite complicated.

But there is something that many (but not all) people in the free software community agree on - certain restrictions are legitimate if they ultimately provide more freedom. Traditionally this was limited to restrictions on distribution (eg, the GPL requires that your recipient be able to obtain corresponding source code, and for GPLv3 must also be able to obtain the necessary signing keys to be able to replace it in covered devices), but more recently there's been some restrictions that don't require distribution. The best known is probably the clause in the Affero GPL (or AGPL) that requires that users interacting with covered code over a network be able to download the source code, but the Cryptographic Autonomy License (recently approved as an Open Source license) goes further and requires that users be able to obtain their data in order to self-host an equivalent instance.

We can construct examples of where these prevent certain fields of endeavour, but the tradeoff has been deemed worth it - the benefits to user freedom that these licenses provide is greater than the corresponding cost to what you can do. How far can that tradeoff be pushed? So, here's a thought experiment. What if we write a license that's something like the following:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. All permissions granted by this license must be passed on to all recipients of modified or unmodified versions of this work
2. This work may not be used in any way that impairs any individual's ability to exercise the permissions granted by this license, whether or not they have received a copy of the covered work

This feels like the logical extreme of the argument. Any way you could use the covered work that would restrict someone else's ability to do the same is prohibited. This means that, for example, you couldn't use the software to implement a DRM mechanism that the user couldn't replace (along the lines of GPLv3's anti-Tivoisation clause), but it would also mean that you couldn't use the software to kill someone with a drone (doing so would impair their ability to make use of the software). The net effect is along the lines of the Hippocratic license, but it's framed in a way that is focused on user freedom.

To be clear, I don't think this is a good license - it has a bunch of unfortunate consequences like it being impossible to use covered code in self-defence if doing so would impair your attacker's ability to use the software. I'm not advocating this as a solution to anything. But I am interested in seeing whether the perception of the argument changes when we refocus it on user freedom as opposed to an independent ethical goal.

Thoughts?

Edit:

Rich Felker on Twitter had an interesting thought - if clause 2 above is replaced with:

2. Your rights under this license terminate if you impair any individual's ability to exercise the permissions granted by this license, even if the covered work is not used to do so

how does that change things? My gut feeling is that covering actions that are unrelated to the use of the software might be a reach too far, but it gets away from the idea that it's your use of the software that triggers the clause.

comments

Knowledge Imbalance Dashboard for Wikidata Entities

A video was released a few weeks ago that provides an excellent visualization of how BART Phase 2 will extend from San Jose's Berryessa Station to Little Portugal, Downtown San Jose, Diridon, and finally Santa Clara. I was surprised at how detailed the 3D renders were throughout the entire video.

I was also shocked to see how deep the stations actually were in San Jose. The Downtown and Diridon stations will both have high speed elevators to help get passengers in and out of the stations as quickly as possible.

Source: aphelion2100 from the San Jose Development Forum

A virtual exhibition space.

Hedonometer.org is an instrument that measures the happiness of large populations in real time. The hedonometer is based on people’s online expressions, capitalizing on data-rich social media, and measures how people present themselves to the outside world.

This weekend, Yukoners turned their clocks forward one hour for Daylight Saving Time (DST) for the last time.

raymon14:

This is crazy

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Created by Sarah Shaw
https://www.instagram.com/swagarah/

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The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, “one damned thing after another” -- a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day.

Mason Currey’s blog-turned-book Daily Rituals describes the workaday life of great minds from W.H. Auden to Immanuel Kant, from Flannery O’Connor to Franz Kafka. The one thing that Currey’s project underlines is that there is no magic bullet. The daily routines are as varied as the people who follow them– though long walks, a ridiculously early wake up time and a stiff drink are common to many.

One school of thought for creating is summed up by Gustave Flaubert’s maxim, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Haruki Murakami has a famously rigid routine that involves getting up at 4am and writing for nine hours straight, followed by a daily 10km run. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” He admits that his schedule allows little room for a social life.

Then there’s the fantastically prolific Belgian author George Simenon, who somehow managed to crank out 425 books over the course of his career. He would go for weeks without writing, followed by short bursts of frenzied activity. He would also wear the same outfit everyday while working on his novel, regularly take tranquilizers and somehow find the time to have sex with up to four different women a day.

Most writers fall somewhere in between. Toni Morrison, for instance, has a routine that that seems far more relatable than the superman schedules of Murakami or Simeon. Since she juggled raising two children and a full time job as an editor at Random House, Morrison simply wrote when she could. “I am not able to write regularly,” she once told The Paris Review. “I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”

Above is a way cool infographic of the daily routines of 26 different creators, created by Podio.com. And if you want to see an interactive version of the same graphic but with rollover bits of trivia, just click here. You’ll learn that Voltaire slept only 4 hours a day and worked constantly. Victor Hugo preferred to take a morning ice bath on his roof. And Maya Angelou preferred to work in an anonymous hotel room.

Note: The infographic above is very light on women. For anyone interested in the daily habits of female creators, see this post and Mason Currey's related book: The Daily Rituals of 143 Famous Female Creators.

An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in January 2015.

Related Content:

The Daily Habits of Highly Productive Philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King & More

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here.

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The hottest video game company of the 70s is coming to San Jose in an interesting way. A hotel developer is leasing the Atari brand to create eight video-game themed hotels in the United States and one will be in San Jose.

Each hotel will have an esports studio where pros compete, an Atari gaming playground, event rooms, co-working spaces, movie theaters, a gym, and probably a fun restaurant/bar area. This sounds like a very unique offering compared the the run-of-the-mill business hotels that mostly populate the South Bay. Details are still sparse, but hopefully we'll have more info soon.

Bonus fun fact, the founder of Atari--Nolan Bushnell--also founded the first Chuck E. Cheese in San Jose. Yes, it is the epic two-story one on Tully.  Turns out the first one was actually at 370 South Winchester Blvd in the old Town & Country shopping center, currently Santana Row.

Source: Engadget

source: NYT

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The US Navy says it has classified documents and video related to a 2004 UFO encounter and releasing those materials would threaten national security. From a report: The Pentagon has Top Secret-classified briefings and a Secret-classified video about an infamous UFO incident, the U.S. Navy said in response to a public records request. The files concern the 2004 encounter between the USS Nimitz and a with strange unknown aerial objects. In 2017 and 2018, three videos of bizarre aircraft taken by Navy pilots from their fighter planes made national news. In December 2017, The New York Times ran a story about Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego on November 14th, 2004, and managed to shoot video of the object with their F-18's gun camera. In September of 2019, Motherboard reported that the Navy confirmed the videos contained footage of "unknown aerial phenomena." In response to a Freedom of Information Act request sent by researcher Christian Lambright seeking more information on the incident, the Navy said it had "discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET. A review of these materials indicates that are currently and appropriate Marked and Classified TOP SECRET under Executive Order 13526, and the Original Classification Authority has determined that the release of these materials would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States." "We have also determined that ONI possesses a video classified SECRET that ONI is not the Original Classification Authority for," the letter continued.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

source: Press TV

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source: Press TV

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Krampus—the Christmas “half goat, half demon” of Germanic folklore—has become a figure of some fascination in popular culture recently. We might call the appetite for this “anti-St. Nicholas… who literally beats people into being nice and not naughty,” National Geographic writes, a testament to a widespread sentiment: Hang the forced cheer, Christmas can be dreadful.

How much more so can Valentine’s Day feel like a big con, cooked up by marketers and chocolatiers? Though established 200 years after the saint’s 3rd century A.D. martyrdom, and linked with romantic love by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, its status as a day to overspend has more modern origins. Even some of us who dutifully buy jewelry, flowers, and cards each year may wish for a Valentine’s Day Krampus.

If you count yourself among those humbugs, you’ll be happy to learn about a once-rich anti-Valentine’s Day tradition “during the Victorian era and the early 20th century,” as Becky Little writes at Smithsonian, “February 14 was also a day in which unlucky victims could receive ‘vinegar valentines’ from their secret haters.” Like the choices of Santa or Krampus, tricks or treats, one could make the holiday about love or hate.

One scholar, Annebella Pollen, who has written on the subject “says that people often ask her whether these cards were an early form of ‘trolling.’” Perhaps that’s not an entirely accurate comparison. Trolls like hoaxes, and mostly like to witness the reactions to their provocations. But Valentines cynics proceeded with the same cruel glee. As Atlas Obscura notes, anti-Valentines were meant to wound and shame, Krampus-like. Their appeal proved profitable:

Vinegar valentines were commercially bought postcards that were less beautiful than their love-filled counterparts, and contained an insulting poem and illustration. They were sent anonymously, so the receiver had to guess who hated him or her; as if this weren’t bruising enough, the recipient paid the postage on delivery. In Civil War Humor, Cameron C. Nickels wrote that vinegar valentines were “tasteless, even vulgar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and penny pinchers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-minded valentines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valentine publisher.

Some vinegar valentines publishers had another thing in common with modern-day trolls: they capitalized on a hatred of feminism. “The women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century brought another class of vinegar valentines, targeting women who fought for the right to vote.” These portrayed suffragists as ugly, abusive, and undesirable, a stereotype found in the world of sincere valentines as well. One such card “depicted a pretty woman surrounded by hearts, with a plain appeal: 'In these wild days of suffragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er overlook a girl who can’t be militant, but simply loves to cook.'”

Vinegar valentines (a later name—they were called “comic valentines” at the time) prompted all the sorts of concerns we’re used to seeing. Teachers worried about the effect of such commercialized emotional cruelty on their students. One magazine enjoined teachers to make Valentine’s Day “a day for kind remembrance than a day for wrecking revenge.” But where’s the fun in that? Vinegar valentines, says Pollen, “were designed to expand this holiday into something that could include a whole range of different people and a whole range of different emotions,” including some very un-Valentine's Day-like contempt.

Find a big collection of Vinegar Valentines at Collector's Weekly.

via 41 Strange

Related Content:

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a Charming Stop Motion Animation of an E.E. Cummings’ Love Poem

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

When People Gave Anti-Valentine’s Day Cards: Revisit the “Vinegar Valentines” That Spread Ridicule and Contempt is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies. All perfectly normal

Analysis DNS overlord ICANN has finally released additional details over the proposed sale of the .org internet registry to a private equity firm – details that raise more questions than answers.…

source: RT

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Created by Joe Pelling, Brendan O’Hare, and Cory Snearowski
Joe Pelling - @Joseph.pelling (IG), @japelling (Twitter)
Brendan O’Hare - @brendohare (IG)
Corey Snearowski - @corysnearowsk (IG), @corysnearowski (Twitter)

#AdultSwimSmalls

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