How Marvel Is Expanding the MCU Into 7 Different Branches - "1.) MCU Cosmic
2.) MCU Avengers
3.) MCU Young Avengers
4.) MCU Multiverse
5.) MCU Supernatural
6.) MCU Street
7.) Spider-Man"
Does calling a man a pig perpetuate human supremacy? - " Have you micro-aggressed a sloth lately? Or a snake, or a rat, or a chicken? If so, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) would like to have a word with you. According to their new campaign, “using animals as insults perpetuates speciesism”. No, I’m not making this up — this is what they’re actually tweeting out... our zoological idioms have very little to do with our violations of the natural world. For a start, we use some animal names as compliments (e.g. lion) or terms of endearment (e.g. duck), but does that doesn’t stop us from killing the actual animals. Similarly, the use of animal names as insults is not the reason why we ill-treat them. For instance, we subject pigs to the horrors of factory farming not because of our distaste for swine, but because we like eating pork. As for the poor old sloth, it’s not a metaphor that’s driving it to extinction, but habitat destruction. The PETA campaign is not a special case limited to animal rights activism, but illustrative of a much wider trend. I don’t just mean the use of woke terminology, but something that applies across all shades of political opinion — and that is the idea that we can change the world by changing our words. The language we use is important; but it’s not all-important. As Alfred Korzybski put it, “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing.” And yet politics is increasingly constructed around narratives that are unsupported by reality. Just look at the paper-thin claims of the ‘stop the steal’ campaign in America or the empty words of the EU’s vaccine policy. Growing concerns over government effectiveness or economic productivity should begin with a long, hard look at the cult of comms. The post-modern obsession with language at the expense of reality is a universal solvent, undermining the ability of campaigners, politicians and businesses to actually get things done."
PETA: ‘Take the flower by the thorns’ and stop using anti-animal language - "Instead of “kill two birds with one stone,” PETA suggests saying “feed two bird with one scone.” “Bring home the bacon” becomes “Bring home the bagels.” “Take the bull by the horns,” becomes “Take the flower by the thorns.” “Just as it became unacceptable to use racist, homophobic, or ableist language, phrases that trivialize cruelty to animals will vanish as more people begin to appreciate animals for who they are,” PETA also tweeted. The tweet prompted a strong response from the public, with nearly 10,000 retweets and over 40,000 responses. Many Twitter users made fun of PETA’s suggestions."
PETA mocked after asking people to use 'bring home the bagels' instead of 'bring home the bacon' - "the organization proposed using “feed a fed horse” instead of the popular phrase “beat a dead horse”... and “be the test tube” instead of “be the guinea pig.”"
PETA is blasted for telling regional farmers NOT to kill mice during apocalyptic plague - "'They shouldn't be robbed of that right because of the dangerous notion of human supremacy,' PETA spokeswoman Aleesha Naxakis told NCA NewsWire... Deputy Premier Michael McCormack has lashed out at the comments, calling the group 'idiots who have never been outside the city' and that the only 'good mouse is a dead mouse.' 'The real rats in this whole plague are the people who come out with bloody stupid ideas like this,' he said. Mr McCormack said the ideas were 'reprehensible' as farmers across Australia are struggling - with some losing $300,000 each in ruined crops"
PETA Wants Ham Lake, Minnesota to Change Its Name - "People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has asked the City of Ham Lake, Minnesota to change its name to Yam Lake. PETA says that the new name would be more 'pig-friendly,' (Yes, really.) The city in Anoka County is named after the lake that reminded early settlers of the shape of a ham, but PETA says it also resembles a yam."
Peta says sorry for taking girl's pet chihuahua and putting it down - "A family has settled a lawsuit against People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) after it took a girl’s unattended dog and put it down. The legal outcome ends an attempt to in effect put Peta on trial for euthanising hundreds of animals each year. Wilber Zarate from Virginia had sued the group for taking his daughter’s chihuahua from a mobile home park on the state’s eastern shore and euthanising it before the end of a required five-day grace period. Zarate alleged Peta operated under a broad policy of euthanising animals, including healthy ones, because it “considers pet ownership to be a form of involuntary bondage”."
PETA, Ferguson, jihad, Doctor Who, rape, and kitten pics: the toxoplasma of online rage - " The less useful, and more controversial, a blog post is, the more likely it is to get lots of page views... People make fun of Tumblr social justice a lot, but the problem isn't with Tumblr social justice, it's structural. Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable. The tiny Tumblr rationalist community I participate in somehow attracts, concentrates, and constantly reblogs stuff from the even tinier Tumblr community of people who hate rationalists and want them to be miserable. It's like one of those rainforest ecosystems where every variety of rare endangered nocturnal spider hosts a parasite who has evolved for millions of years solely to parasitise that one spider species, and the parasites host parasites who have evolved for millions of years solely to parasitise them. If Tumblr social justice is worse than anything else, it's mostly because everyone has a race and a gender so it's easier to fire broad cannonades and just hit everybody... People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimised to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust."
Social media is toxic
Revisiting the notion of induced traffic through a matched-pairs study - "In investigating the question of the existence of "induced demand" in connection with highway expansion projects, Hansen et al. (1993) studied eighteen California state highway segments whose capacities had been improved in the early 1970s. For the present study, these segments were paired with control segments that matched the improved segments to unimproved ones with regard to facility type, region, approximate size, and initial volumes and congestion levels. Taking annual data for average daily traffic (ADT) and design-hour-traffic-to-capacity (DTC) ratios during the 21 years 1976–1996, three approaches were used to compare growth rates between the improved and unimproved segments: overall growth comparisons for the matched pairs, repeated measures analysis, and analysis of matched mean profiles. We found the growth rates between the two types of segments to be statistically and practically indistinguishable, suggesting that the capacity expansions, in and of themselves, had a negligible effect on traffic growth over the period studied... aggregate models may overestimate induced traffic due to the attribution of at least a fraction of the observed traffic growth to "induced demand" rather than to some of the confounding factors which were not controlled for in such studies. At the same time, it is noted that the traffic induced by capacity expansion may in certain circumstances be larger than that observed in the present study, with the effect of new highway construction on traffic growth being a prime candidate for scrutiny in this regard. The results of this study nonetheless suggest that, for existing facilities, the size of the induced-traffic effect that can be attributed to capacity enhancements may be sufficiently small that its detection in a case-control study would be difficult, if not impossible, without a substantially larger sample size."
On the anti-car activist myth that building roads to expand capacity is pointless because just as many more cars will go down those roads, leaving you no better off
Addendum: Basically this study found that induced demand was a myth - as always, it was a problem of omitted variable bias
Induced road traffic in Spanish regions: A dynamic panel data model - "Distinguishing between traffic generated exclusively from the expansion of the road network (induced demand) and that resulting from other demand factors is of crucial importance to properly designed transport policies. This paper analyzes and quantifies the induced demand for road transport for Spain’s main regions from 1998 to 2006, years that saw mobility in Spain attain its highest growth rate... The estimated short-term elasticity is 0.12, while the long-run one is almost 0.25."
Induced demand and rebound effects in road transport - "We decompose induced demand into effects from increasing overall accessibility of destinations and those from increasing urban capacity, finding the two elasticities close in magnitude and totaling about 0.16, somewhat smaller than most previous estimates"
Mathematicians outline how cities can avoid traffic jams - "Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. “They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance,” says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University. “If engineers manage to achieve local improvements, after a while the flows rearrange and the same traffic jams appear in other places.” Burn!
All drivers need to be on the same navigation system. Cars can only be efficiently rerouted if instructions come from one center hub. One navigation system rerouting some drivers does not solve traffic jams.
Parking bans. Many urban roads are too narrow and cannot be physically widened. Traffic-flow models can indicate where parking spots should be turned into lanes.
Green lanes. For cities that want to increase electric car use, special lanes should be created for electric cars, providing an incentive for their use.
Digital twins. Traffic demands and available infrastructure can only be balanced with digital modeling that creates an entire “twin” of existing roadways. The software will be “an extremely useful thought tool in the hands of transport engineers.”"
Heinz Will Reward Those in Traffic, Driving at Speed of its Ketchup, 0.045 Km/h - "Being stuck in exhausting and never-ending traffic is always a summer pain point, but this year it doesn't have to be, thanks to Heinz. Through a partnership with Waze and Burger King®, Heinz will be identifying those stuck in traffic, driving at the same speed as its slow-pouring ketchup (0.045km/h) and satisfying their taste buds with Heinz Ketchup and an Impossible Whopper from Burger King."
Here's how an artist fooled Google Maps into creating virtual traffic jams - "artist Simon Weckert says that each of the 99 smartphones in the wagon had their own connected SIM card and each one was actively using Maps for navigation. He discovered that if the wagon stopped moving, Maps would not show a traffic jam, so the wagon had to consistently be in motion for a jam to get registered. Additionally, if a vehicle drove by the wagon at a normal speed, Maps would also register traffic as normal. It was only when the wagon was in motion and the street was empty that a traffic jam would show on Google Maps."
Food banks don’t reduce food insecurity, so why did the federal government give them $200 million in emergency aid? | The Star - "Valerie Tarasuk was outraged. Canada’s foremost expert on food insecurity couldn’t believe the government was giving money to food banks. “It’s craziness,” she said. “People like me spend all this time figuring this stuff out and then you watch these policy decisions and you think, ‘Why are we wasting our time doing this research?’ Nobody’s using it.” Tarasuk, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been studying food insecurity for nearly 30 years. All of her research suggests that giving people food does nothing to make them less food-insecure, which is defined as having inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial constraints. The problem is not simply hunger; it’s poverty, she said. The only way to meaningfully address it is to increase income supports so people have enough money to buy food for themselves... One of the longstanding criticisms of food banks is that they are a Band-Aid solution, but Tarasuk argues that they are actually worse. That’s because most food-insecure people don’t ever use food banks, she said. “It’s a Band-Aid that only covers a quarter of the wound.” Research shows that less than 25 per cent of people who are food-insecure ever go to the food bank. Many people who are food-insecure are more likely to borrow from family or friends, take out payday loans or deplete their savings before using a food bank... receiving food donations may quell someone’s hunger, but it leaves their fundamental problems unresolved, Power said, describing food banks as having become a “smokescreen.”"
German anger rises as pandemic reopens old wounds for the eurozone - "The European Union's fragile solidarity over Covid is at risk of collapse as German anger at high inflation and massive deficits in southern Europe exposes faultlines which almost destroyed the bloc a decade ago"
Bell Peppers: Differences Between Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red - "All bell peppers start out green and change color as they mature. If it's not picked, a green pepper may become yellow, orange, or red, depending on its varietal. The longer the fruit stays on the vine, the sweeter it becomes and the more nutritional value it gains. Since they were less ripe when picked, green peppers have longer shelf lives but are less nutrient-dense than peppers that have matured to another color."
WhatsApp privacy controversy leads company to take out full-page adverts asking users to stay - "WhatsApp’s change only affects businesses, not consumers. “We’re giving businesses the option to use secure hosting services from Facebook to manage WhatsApp chats with their customers, answer questions, and send helpful information like purchase receipts”, the company wrote in an online FAQ. “Whether you communicate with a business by phone, email, or WhatsApp, it can see what you’re saying and may use that information for its own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Facebook.” Nevertheless, many users misinterpreted the company’s statement because of Facebook’s history of privacy violations, leading them to switch to other platforms like Signal or Telegram... WhatsApp in India is used for a greater variety of reasons than it is in other countries. In 2020, a payment service between users was rolled out in the country, after the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), gave its approval to WhatsApp last November. Food shopping can be purchased through the app too, in certain areas of Mumbai. It also launched a new fact-checking service in India to help combat misinformation in the run-up to their general election. However, the app has been used to spread fake news about subjects including child abuse or organ harvesting in the country."
Asians dump WhatsApp for Signal and Telegram on privacy concerns - Nikkei Asia
Signal Won't Replace WhatsApp, People Will Use Both: Brian Acton - "Downloads of the encrypted messaging app Signal have skyrocketed since WhatsApp, a rival service, announced it would make users share some personal data with its parent company, Facebook... He said he expected people to rely on Signal to talk to family and close friends while continuing to talk to other people on WhatsApp... Acton has been an outspoken critic of Facebook; in 2018, he urged Facebook users to delete their accounts. He has said he left WhatsApp in 2017 "due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising.""
Dropping WhatsApp? Nostalgia Drives Users to ICQ - WSJ - "WhatsApp users around the world who are worried about the company’s shifting policy on data privacy are flocking to rival messaging apps such as Signal and Telegram. In Hong Kong, some are choosing an alternative that reminds them of their childhood—before algorithms, Big Tech and viral misinformation... Mr. Pang, an airline ground crew worker, said his contact list of friends had been “frozen in time,” with status updates from 20 years ago. One read: “I’ll find my way,” a cryptic phrase invoking the aesthetic of angst-ridden “emo” rock music popular at the time. He said he has helped four or five friends to look up their ICQ numbers—he still has them on his old friend list—and get online... Joyce Lai, a 30-year-old aerial exercise instructor, tried to take to ICQ again in recent days. She had committed her ICQ user number to memory in fourth grade, but she can’t log in because she forgot her password. “I’ve tried so many combinations of my ex-boyfriends’ birthdays and phone numbers, but none of them worked,” Ms. Lai said."
FTC requests Facebooks to sell WhatsApp and Instagram in major antitrust case - "The US Federal Trade Commission has re-filed its complaint against Facebook, arguing that the company should be broken up and forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. The revised complaint argues that Facebook has a monopoly over social networking in the US and argues that Facebook has looked to make it difficult for other companies to compete... The new case comes amid mounting scrutiny over the size and power of Facebook’s empire, and the way that it has bought up competitors as they have grown. The case makes reference to an email from Mark Zuckerberg, sent in 2008, in which he said “it is better to buy than compete”"
Lateral thinking is classic pseudoscience, derivative and untested - "Among the purveyors of new psychological knowledge, there was, however, one ‘expert’ who stands conspicuously apart: Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician and medical researcher who turned his back on academia to become a student of creativity. Eschewing experiment, ignoring all existing studies and scholarship, de Bono’s reputation as a thinker and proponent of lateral thinking is founded on nifty puzzles, a storehouse of anecdotes, an abundance of imperial generalities, no end of clunking analogies and neologisms, and a toolkit that was by no means as novel as his publishers or readers might have assumed. Beginning with his bestseller The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967), de Bono’s quixotic brand of psychology takes aim at traditional logic, identifying it as the enemy of insight and invention... For readers who were wondering what science lateral thinking was based upon, de Bono’s book The Mechanism of Mind (1969) left the matter unresolved. Nerve networks in the brain, he declared – omitting to mention any neurological research or cognitive studies – permitted information to organise itself into sequences or patterns that were usually asymmetric, like rain channelled into streams and rivers... Lateral thinking left academics from all disciplines nonplussed... Though de Bono’s attack on Western logic and traditional pedagogy chimed with the countercultural zeitgeist, lateral thinking was destined to find its most starry-eyed acolytes in a world that the New Age had quietly passed by: business management, where de Bono soon acquired a reputation as a consultant and lecturer... In every one of his books, de Bono approached the field of creativity and problem-solving as a virtual scientific terra incognita: no philosopher or serious thinker had apparently thought to consider the mental processes, conscious or unconscious, that were the wellspring of left-field thinking and heterodox ideas; no experimental work had been undertaken on cold cognition, bounded rationality and the heuristic shortcuts that decision-making relies on. In the same way that Freud had feigned ignorance of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, fostering the impression that he was the true ‘conquistador’ of the unconscious, de Bono places himself in a class of one. An outsider scientist in search of a ‘more creative way of using the mind’, the only meta thinker to have escaped the 2,000-year stranglehold of Greek philosophy, de Bono could find no shoulders to stand on... when brainstorming was subject to its first empirical study, at Yale University in 1958, groups were found to work far less effectively than individuals on a series of creative puzzles. In the 60 or so independent studies that have since been conducted, the evidence has stacked up firmly against the febrile claims made by Osborn and others. Brainstorming, like lateral thinking, neglects to harness the productive spark of debate, friction and constructive conflict – elements that Koestler also came to believe he had overlooked in The Act of Creation... the acerbic American journalist H L Mencken observed that psychology was becoming lost in a fog of its own making. ‘The one way to make a splash in psychology is to come out with a new and revolutionary theory.’ Given that the lateral thinking movement has had almost 50 years to put its evidential house in order, to test whether its mental tricks are any more effective than, say, a short nap or concentrated effort, it’s surely time to put it back in the box and file it under what Mencken would have baldly called flim-flam."
Europeans are turning against the EU - " The EU’s Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) has admitted that Brussels’ disastrous handling of the pandemic has severely damaged public trust. New polling commissioned by the ECFR reveals that majorities in France, Italy, Spain and Austria believe that the EU project is ‘broken’. The ECFR has described the situation as a ‘crisis of confidence’. Even in the usually Europhile Germany, 55 per cent believe that the EU isn’t working – a rise of 11 percentage points since before the pandemic."
Sex doll rescued after it's mistaken for drowning woman - "The uproarious gaffe was chronicled on Twitter by YouTuber Natsuki Tanaka, who had initially believed she was witnessing a real-life rescue in the city of Hachinohe off Japan’s northeast coast"
Apple to boost ads business just as iPhone changes hurt Facebook - "Apple will expand its advertising business, according to two people familiar with its plans, just as it brings in new privacy rules for iPhones that are likely to cripple the ads offered by its rivals, including Facebook."
Apple to start scanning people’s images and messages to check for child abuse - "the feature is guaranteed to lead to concerns from privacy advocates, especially given Apple’s public commitment that privacy is a human right... the news has proven incredible controversial even before it was announced. On Wednesday, cryptography expert Matthew Green revealed that Apple had been working on the feature – and both he and a number of security and privacy experts warned that the feature could mark a departure from Apple’s previous record. Professor Green, who works at Johns Hopkins, said that while such scanning technologies are better than more traditional tools, they are still “mass surveillance tools”. He noted that anyone who controls the list of possible images could use it to search for any picture – not just those associated with child abuse – and that there would be no way to know if the system was being abused in that way. “The theory is that you will trust Apple to only include really bad images,” he wrote in a tweet thread. “Say, images curated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). “You’d better trust them, because trust is all you have.” Alan Woodward, a computing expert at the University of Surrey, was one of many who echoed Professor Green’s concerns. He said it could be a “double edged sword: the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and called for more public discussion before it was launched."
Apple Will Scan U.S. iPhones For Images Of Child Sexual Abuse - "Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, warned that the system could be used to frame innocent people by sending them seemingly innocuous images designed to trigger matches for child pornography. That could fool Apple's algorithm and alert law enforcement. "Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily," he said of the ability to trick such systems. Other abuses could include government surveillance of dissidents or protesters. "What happens when the Chinese government says, 'Here is a list of files that we want you to scan for,'" Green asked. "Does Apple say no? I hope they say no, but their technology won't say no.""
Apple is not your friend - "More than any company, Apple is exceedingly keen that we notice its piety and moral purity, for both are part of its brand. But it isn’t alone. Facebook also sells itself hard to the public on TV ads as the vital connecting influence in human engagement, a free social service, a wellness arm of the NHS. Both tech giants also compete to be the Wokest of them All – a posture which is getting too much even for the hairshirt left. Now Apple and Facebook are at loggerheads, engaged in a war of words over privacy... What if Apple isn’t quite as saintly as it portrays itself to be? In a competition lawsuit filed by state attorneys in the US (led by Texas), details of a deal between Google and Facebook to carve up the market between them have emerged... Apple’s pious gestures are in reality giving a huge helping hand to one member of the giant ad duopoly – the one it favours."
Traffic Is Way Up and the Internet Seems Fine. Did We Maybe Spend Too Much Time Ferociously Debating Net Neutrality? - "all those hysterical predictions about how repealing net neutrality back in 2018 would ruin the internet haven’t panned out. At least not yet. Of course, some net neutrality proponents seem to have missed the good news. Or refused to accept it. Take this bizarre and cognitively dissonant headline from Wired magazine: “The Covid-19 Pandemic Shows the Virtues of Net Neutrality: Network speeds are holding up despite the crush of internet traffic. Freed from rules, broadband providers have cut investment in their systems.” Eppur si muove... One other lesson that should be learned: Apply deep skepticism to extreme activist claims that this or that policy tweak will save or destroy the American economy or some big chunk of it."
The Suez Canal’s connection to Indian history, Mumbai’s sex trade - "“Before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the foreign prostitute from eastern Europe was practically unknown in Bombay, and such immorality as existed was confined to women of Eurasian or Indian parentage,” grumbled civil servant SM Edwards in his book The Bombay City Police, published in 1929... The existence of European brothels, Tambe noted, was driven by “three distinct imperatives for colonial administrators: providing sexual recreation for British soldiers and sailors, preventing interracial sex, and preserving British national prestige”. She explained, “Although British administrators condoned brothels, they tried to ensure that brothel workers were not British as that could reflect badly on British womanhood.”"
Existential Comics on Twitter - "Rent is theft. Profit is theft. Interest is theft. Look, it isn't complicated. If you are making money that didn't come from your own labor, then it is coming from someone else's labor. You are stealing their money."
There's a reason his comics are almost never shared, only his shit political tweets
The "taxation is theft" people need to go argue with the commies, which will neutralise both crowds
Meme - "WHAT WOMEN WANT IN A MAN
Strong Silent Type: Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th)
Remembers your birthday:Michael Myers (Halloween)
Loves Children: Chucky
Dream Guy: Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street)
In touch with his feminine side:Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs.)
Family Man: Jack Torrance (The Shining)
Loves His Mother: Norman Bates (Psycho)
Romantic Home Cooked Meals: Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs)"
Jessie Roman 🏳️⚧️ on Twitter - "the fetishisation of the concept of the 'spoiler' to the militant level its reached these days is absurd and misses the point of most media. like i dunno, if knowing an event in a movie makes it completely unenjoyable to you, maybe that's on you"
"One time I mentioned that one of the main cast members of a show was in every episode but one, and someone yelled at me for spoiling the show. "Now every time this character is in danger, I'll know they can't die because they only missed one episode!""
"After an episode of GoT (when it was good), I updated facebook with "Ramsay Bolton OMG!!!" which led to MULTIPLE ppl lecturing me, someone unfriending me & one of my best friends almost ditching me for real because "now we know he does something""
"One time I reminded a friend "Oh, yeah, the commercial this week said 'welcome back, [character name]!'" and he got mad at me for SAYING THE THING THE SHOW ITSELF HAD CHOSEN TO PUT IN THEIR ADVERTISING"
"Several major news outlets had announced that Loki was renewed for season 2 so I texted a friend, “Omg can’t wait for season 2!” He was PISSED. “HOW DARE YOU SPOIL IT FOR ME I HAVEN’T WATCHED THE LAST EPISODE!”"
Gregory Mason: A Nobel Prize for methods, not results - "This year’s Nobel laureates in economics received the award for coming up with creative methods for extracting causal insight from observational data. That may sound underwhelming but the three economists who were recognized have helped free us from the tyranny of randomized control trials (RCTs) as being the only route to understanding cause and effect... Natural experiments have their limits, of course... Using serendipitous randomness is now part of the standard toolkit in econometrics."
Alessio 🇮🇹 on Twitter - "Because you watched... Paddington
You'll love... The Revenant"
"yes netflix, you’re absolutely right..."
