How millions of people are at risk of being locked out of society - "visitors and residents in Paris would need to show a QR code on their phone to enter certain parts of the city. The temporary requirement is part of security measures being put in place around this summer’s Olympic games, but the move offers a stark glimpse into a future in which those who are unable to keep up with technology – or choose not to – are at risk of digital exclusion. They will, in effect, become locked out of society. To those with a smartphone, flashing a QR code may not seem that big a deal, but as was shown during Covid, when QRs helped the world open up again, not everyone has a compatible phone – or even a phone at all. This left some unable to confirm their Covid-free status, or see a menu while eating out to help out. Two years on, that particular pandemic habit has stuck, with many restaurants still choosing a QR code on the table over a paper menu. Ordering, too, is often now done via an app. Putting to one side the open goal this leaves for scammers to stick their own QRs over the real thing, this not only further reduces facetime with real people that so many in society value, but excludes those who cannot afford or choose not to own a smartphone... Increasingly, car parks are doing away with traditional cash-based machines in favour of QR codes or apps, allowing drivers to pay for their tickets online. Very handy for most, including the growing number of people who never carry cash. But with many car parks unmanned, this renders them completely inaccessible for some... Linda now also manages her dad’s prescription because the service is now entirely digital... Banking is another area in which Linda helps her father, and where many people now struggle... Today marks the 6,000th local bank branch closure in the past nine years, according to Which?, leaving dozens of entire parliamentary constituencies without a single branch. For those unwilling or unable to switch to online banking, this makes accessing services significantly more difficult, often costing them money in the process. And while digital exclusion may often be seen as an age issue, it is not. In the first year of the cost of living crisis, one million people cut back or cancelled their broadband packages to save money, and as of June 2023, 1.7 million households had no internet access... ‘Authorities are trying to shut down 3G to provide more bandwidth for other, faster services,’ she says. ‘But the nice thing about 3G is that it has long-distance penetration, it can go quite far from the mast, and through walls much easier than 4G, and especially 5G, which is a very short-range technology. ‘That means 3G is something a lot of people depend on, particularly in rural areas, so these people are going to be left in dire straits, because suddenly their technology won’t work, and their phone might be a lifeline for them.’... many smart meters also run on 3G, meaning soon millions of the devices will be left redundant and possibly heading for landfill – a blow for the environment they’re intended to help... the advance of artificial intelligence could further isolate those already digitally excluded. This might be difficulty dealing with AI assistants online, or failing to play the new game of ‘beat the AI recruiter’ to get their job application in front of a real person. Even before the point of application, potential candidates need to find the job advert, 90% of which are now online. That leaves those with no internet access at an insurmountable disadvantage. And while there are legitimate concerns over the vast troves of data being collected for machine learning, which must be addressed, it will continue to happen. That means those who are not online will be excluded from those datasets, leaving them further behind as decisions by governments and businesses are increasingly made using this information."
Japanese man tells friend to wear suit to wedding party, so he comes as Mobile Suit Gundam - "Kuroboshi showed up dressed head to toe in cosplay of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the RX-78-2, with a name card hanging around his neck so that people would know who he was. In the above photo which he shared from the event, the only non-costumed bit is his right hand, as he temporarily removed the covering so that he could raise a glass of wine... the newlywed couple was Ryuryu (@00riu) and Ruby (@rubyred_16), who prior to getting married represented Japan at the 2019 World Cosplay Summit. So Kuroboshi was far from the only one who attended the celebration in costume. In his above photo there’s a Yu-Gi-Oh duelist visible in the background, and at some point during the party Gundam and Eva Unit-01 found time to face off against one another."
I married a top – but now he wants to be a bottom - "I am a man in my early 30s married to a man in his mid-50s. We have always been in an open relationship: we met at a sex party. When we met I was always a bottom and he a top. Over time, however, he has become obsessed with bottoming. He never penetrates me, even in a group, and has starting expressing jealousy about the tops that I attract. I feel he is throwing our life away in pursuit of a pipe dream and I long to get back the dominant top that I married – a role he is suited for physically. He has been looking at escort websites, which I find depressingly inevitable. How can I wake him up to reality?"
A warning from the breakdown nations - "Led by Canada, Chile, Germany, South Africa and Thailand, these “breakdown nations” carry a lesson. Growth is hard, sustaining it even harder, so the stars of today are not necessarily the stars of tomorrow. Take Canada first. Widely admired for how it weathered the global financial crisis of 2008, it missed the boat when the world moved on, driven by big tech instead of commodities. Canada’s per capita GDP has been shrinking 0.4 per cent a year since 2020 — the worst rate for any developed economy in the top 50. New investment and job growth is being driven mainly by the government. Private-sector action is confined largely to the property market, which does little for productivity and prosperity. Many young people can’t afford to buy in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets. Pressed to name a digital success, Canadians cite Shopify — but the online store is the only tech name among the country’s 10 largest companies, and its shares are trading at half their 2021 peak. Then there’s Chile. Hailed in the 1990s as a model of deft, East-Asian style government in Latin America, its halo has since vanished. The country now makes headlines for political strife over its constitution. Anaemic tax collection has gutted public services, triggering violent street protests. Red tape has spread — the time required to get new investments approved doubled to nearly 20 months — chasing off investors. As a result, manufacturing industries remain small compared with emerging world peers, including neighbouring Argentina. Mining products such as copper still account for most of its exports and billionaire wealth, making Chile look more like an old-fashioned commodity economy than an East Asian star. No developed economy has seen a more dramatic turn for the worse than Germany. Its per capita income growth fell from 1.6 per cent in the past decade to less than zero in the past few years. During the pandemic Germany looked flush and flexible, poised to excel in the post-Covid world. Now it looks undone by its heavy dependence on exports to China and energy imports from Russia. Investment has contributed nothing to growth in recent years, industrial productivity is declining at a shocking annual pace of 5 per cent. Suddenly, the future of the Mittelstand — the network of manufacturers that has long been the engine of German growth — looks murky. South Africa, meanwhile, was added to an acronym for big, fast-growing emerging markets led by Brazil, Russia, India and China back in 2010, when Bric became Brics. The largest economy in Africa, resource-rich South Africa was powered by a commodity boom that then went bust, exposing the country’s many faultlines. The African National Congress has held power for 30 years yet presides over the same dogged set of failures: youth unemployment above 50 per cent, a shocking share of the population on welfare, weak investment, rolling power outages. While voters could oust the ANC next month, the malaise looks too deep to end soon. The IMF predicts negative per capita GDP growth over the next five years in only one top 50 economy: South Africa. Finally, Thailand. A leader of the “Asian Tigers” before debts tripped them up in the crisis of 1998, it is now the runt of the lot, the only former Tiger to see its per capita GDP decline in this decade. It has one of the world’s highest inequality rates with 79 per cent of the poor living in rural areas. A running political battle between the rural poor and the Bangkok elite focuses public debate on how to distribute — not expand — the economic pie. Despite efforts to turn its location on global trade routes into a factory hub, productivity growth is stagnating and Thailand is losing out to manufacturing rivals like Vietnam. The takeaway here is not that smart countries somehow turned stupid. It is that hidden traps line the path of development and can spring on nations at every income level from the middle to the rich."
Man Booked For Using VPN In J&K's Rajouri, 3rd Such Case In 2 Days - "A man in Rajouri district was booked on Tuesday for using virtual private network (VPN) which was banned last month by the district administration, officials said. This was the third such instance when a case was registered against a man in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district for using VPN in the last two days. In an order issued on April 24, Additional District Magistrate of Rajouri Rajeev Kumar Khajuria ordered immediate suspension of VPN services in the district as a preventive measure to protect all information related to the ongoing Lok Sabha elections and other sensitive data from cyber attacks."
Taking the Medium-Term Past Seriously - "Taking the medium-term seriously means understanding that there are singularity-type events that ensure that the old rules no longer apply. At the same time, they are very rare, maybe one every few centuries or so. The Russian-Ukraine War and 9/11 are certainly going to be part of any comprehensive history of the twenty-first century, but may not make it into a short book on the third millennium. Most events, whether geopolitical shocks or new technologies, don’t fundamentally change things all that much because the world is in a state of rough equilibrium, with most fundamental transformations being dependent on gradual trends, like population shifts or a changing climate. Certain technological capabilities increase exponentially, while we make very little progress at all and in many ways go backwards when it comes to governance, as we can see in how difficult it is to build new infrastructure and the fact that we see more urban crime and disorder than we did in the 1950s. In our current age, I think that the two main phenomena that should be guiding how we think about the future are the Industrial Revolution and World War II. On the first of these, here is neoliberals’ favorite chart of all time... If the Industrial Revolution permanently changed the technological context in which societies operate, World War II created new political realities... Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro in The Internationalists put forth a bold thesis, arguing that it was the much-maligned Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which supposedly “outlawed war,” that created new international norms, as the border changes that occurred through military force after that time tended to get reversed. Yet, as the authors acknowledge, it would be wrong to argue that norms like this would have been just as likely to have been enforced had the other side won the Second World War... I think that some level of economic growth is practically automatic at this point. Even the Soviet Union got wealthier under communism, which means it’s almost impossible to screw this up. In fact, economics textbooks used to predict that it would eventually surpass the West, even though they overestimated Soviet progress, likely due to ideological bias. While rates of growth can vary based on human capital, policy decisions, and institutional quality, you have to get a lot wrong in order to go backwards in the era of global communication and widespread knowledge of technology and what makes for more successful societies. In contrast to the direction of economic growth, the decline of war has been more contingent. I think that civil war within advanced societies is practically impossible today. But October 7, along with Putin’s attack on Ukraine, imply that dictators and fanatical movements will still make war when the opportunity presents itself and they are ideologically driven to do so. American leadership here is therefore very important, as it is the only nation that can be the focal point of a liberal democratic alliance. So I’d predict no civil wars in developed countries, and global order to prevail only if the US stays committed to continuing its leadership role... One thing that neither World War II nor the Industrial Revolution has settled, or even necessarily placed on the right track, is violence in the developing world"
Islam and the Jews: The Pact of Umar, 9th Century CE - "THE Pact of Umar is the body of limitations and privileges entered into by treaty between conquering Muslims and conquered non-Muslims. We have no special treaty of this sort with the Jews, but we must assume that all conquered peoples, including the Jews, had to subscribe to it. Thus the laws cited below and directed against churches apply to synagogues too. The Pact was probably originated about 637 by Umar I after the conquest of Christian Syria and Palestine. By accretions from established practices and precedents, the Pact was extended; yet despite these additions the whole Pact was ascribed to Umar. There are many variants of the text and scholars deny that the text as it now stands could have come from the pen of Umar I; it is generally assumed that its present form dates from about the ninth century. The Pact of Umar has served to govern the relations between the Muslims and "the people of the book," such as Jews, Christians, and the like, down to the present day. In addition to the conditions of the Pact listed below, the Jews, like the Christians, paid a head-tax in return for protection, and for exemption from military service. Jews and Christians were also forbidden to hold government office. This Pact, like much medieval legislation, was honored more in the breach than in the observance"
A Muslim accused me of being "an islamophobic zionist troll" because this was written by a "jewish scholar" and was "clearly very biased against Islam". Apparently all Jews are Islamophobic. But of course it's not anti-Semitic to say that
Adrian Chen on X - "Someone needs to invent Zoomroulette, where you can click a button and drop into a random business meeting, university class, or friend hangout."
Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "People with weird diet preferences higher in mental illness, in particular the low-meat people ('vegetarian-like'). Results of prior studies confirmed in the huge sample sized UKbiobank. One could of course speculate it is causal, but I think it's just self-selection."
✨ Jean Yang ✨ on X - "Two important lessons I learned in my twenties:
- If you think everyone hates you, you probably need to sleep.
- If you think you hate everyone, you probably need to eat."
James Clear on X - "There are 4 types of wealth:
1. Financial wealth (money)
2. Social wealth (status)
3. Time wealth (freedom)
4. Physical wealth (health)
Be wary of jobs that lure you in with 1 and 2, but rob you of 3 and 4."
Scott Alexander on X - "Dear @apple - your OS has a global spellcheck that autocorrects names of medications to names of different medications, eg "duloxetine" to "fluoxetine", without telling the user. Some clinics inexplicably continue to use MacBooks. Please fix this before someone gets hurt."
From 2017
Meme - jonstokes.(eth|com) @jonst0kes: "This US Navy IG post is making the rounds. It's truly something else, man. That man is the captain of this vessel & a graduate of the Citadel. For non-gun ppl, obvious π things happening here are:
1. That optic is backwards!
2. Lens caps are on
3. From his shoulder to his grip to his stance, he's holding the rifle like he has never in his life fired a rifle. You wouldn't even hold your grandpa's hunting rifle this way, much less an AR-pattern gun.
4. Why is someone touching his shoulder while he is firing?!
5. Why is he looking through the optic with his shades on?!
Nobody involved in this spotted any of this. Not the captain, or social media team, or anyone involved in the photo shoot. It's completely, totally wild to me. It would be like if, say, the Microsoft social media team were taking IG photos of an open floorplan office at HQ, and the engineer in the shot had his laptop upside down & was pretending to type on the screen & look at the keyboard. It's that bad. I'm trying not to over-index on this, but we pay the military a lot of tax money & we trust them to defend our civilization, so this extreme level of yikes from these people is mildly terrifying to me. God save us all, because this dude in this picture sure won't."
usnavy: "Highlighting the amazing work of our U.S. Navy Sailors! From engaging in practice gun shoots, conducting maintenance, testing fuel purity, and participating in sea and anchor details, the #USNav
y is always ready to serve and protect #Readiness"
Meme - WylfΔen @wylfcen: "A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean ‘more than once’ or continuously—so originally, to ramble is to ‘roam’ on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks."
"-le
1. A frequentative suffix of verbs, indicating repetition or continuousness:
crack -> crackle
daze -> dazzle
draw ("to drag") -> drawl
game -> gamble
grope -> grapple
hand -> handle
nest -> nestle
nose -> nuzzle
prate ("to talk") -> prattle
scribe ("to write") -> scribble
sniff -> sniffle
wrest ("to twist") -> wrestle"
✨ Jean Yang ✨ on X - "Today I discovered an unfortunate consequence of GDPR: once someone hacks into your account, they can request--and potentially access--all of your data. Whoever hacked into my @spotify account got all of my streaming, song, etc. history simply by requesting it. π±"
Porkchop Express on X - "France is butt of jokes (economically) but I’ve studied and worked in France and let me tell you it’s a much better functioning country than Germany, with more future potential. This is visible immediately on the surface (for example, better maintenance of public infrastructure), but also fundamentally France doesn’t hate itself, and its people are capable of standing up for their own national interests. There is a kind of antifragility built into the French system, for example their notorious protest culture.
My favorite example of how smart the French are is that they kept a huge portion of their paradisical colonial territories while pushing their leftist bs on everyone else. There are French (EU) holiday destinations from the Caribbean to the Pacific serving fresh baked croissants every morning."
Thread by @718Tv on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If zoomers and millennials are any indication, the segment of our population comprised of pre-adolescents up to and including age 14 - generation alpha - has been rapidly losing their predisposition for creativity and imagination A perfect example of this are Legos. A thread:
LEGO, a company teetering precariously on the premise that kids want to be creative, has been struggling with exactly that conundrum for decades. As recently as 1990, the standard box of LEGO bricks contained anywhere from 500 to 1000 pieces. Through sales research, focus groups and peer review, LEGO now believes such a set is way, way too complex. Let's dial it back a bit: not only do children not have the patience to gather together all the required parts for a castle, or boat, or car - there isn't enough space in their tiny, ridiculous brains to previsualize long-term plans, imagine new forms, or create the requisite custom shapes. As a response to this trend, LEGO decreased the number of pieces in each box. Instead of grappling with a full one-hundred pieces to build that Kentucky Fried Chicken or Starbucks Coffee, now you only need ten. And look: these pre-fab green umbrella straws snap directly into the miniature espresso machine - you don't even gotta build 'em. LEGO bricks have gotten bigger, as well: the size of each block in a set has increased steadily over time in direct proportion to your child's inability to manipulate his backwards, clumsy-ass ham hands. Who needs hours of unnecessarily complicated finger work when you're trying to develop your motor skills?
Finally, the majority of "bricks" in today's LEGO kits have evolved exactly as Darwin intended: they're now shaped exactly like the cars, trees, humans, animals, ships, and rockets originally subject to interpretation by a kid's imagination. And which set of LEGO is right for you? Choose from styles like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Exoforce, Knight's Kingdom, Bionicle, Minecraft, Ghostbusters and numerous other brandy-brands too depressing even to think about. It's only a matter of time before LEGO starts packaging their product directly inside the Happy Meal carton. From little plastic bricks and imagination to electronic, battery-operated toys and program squiggly meta-scripts so his optically sensitive robots to kaput in 24 years. Not sure where along the way imagination was lost but it happened. There should be a children's aptitude test where they're in a room with 10,000 single-cell plastic bricks and given however long they want to successfully construct something from their mind"
Quite Interesting on X - "A newly deciphered ancient scroll reveals that during Plato’s last hours, while he was battling fever on his deathbed, he found the energy to criticise a flute player for her lack of rhythm."
Meme - "New Taipei elementary school forbids students from feeding school dog which has come to resemble a cow"
Meme - "Westerners when a Japanese speaks with bad English
On dear, oh dear. Gorgeous.
"Westeners when an Indian speaks with bad English
You fucking, donkey"
lord_chris_iii: "Indians had 200+ years to learn it"
The Magic Word? Face-Work and the Functions of Please in Everyday Requests - "Expressions of politeness such as please are prominent elements of interactional conduct that are explicitly targeted in early socialization and are subject to cultural expectations around socially desirable behavior. Yet their specific interactional functions remain poorly understood. Using conversation analysis supplemented with systematic coding, this study investigates when and where interactants use please in everyday requests. We find that please is rare, occurring in only 7 percent of request attempts. Interactants use please to manage face-threats when a request is ill fitted to its immediate interactional context. Within this, we identify two environments in which please prototypically occurs. First, please is used when the requestee has demonstrated unwillingness to comply. Second, please is used when the request is intrusive due to its incompatibility with the requestee’s engagement in a competing action trajectory. Our findings advance research on politeness and extend Goffman’s theory of face-work, with particular salience for scholarship on request behavior."
Farthest distance walking barefoot on LEGO® bricks | Guinness World Records - "The farthest distance walking barefoot on LEGO® bricks is 8,898.9 m (29,195 ft 10.39 in), and was achieved by Salacnib "Sonny" Molina (USA) in Woodstock, Illinois, USA, on 1 May 2021. Sonny has broken this record twice already and trained to regain his title to honor a promise he made his dad. Sonny says that his dad taught him so much, including not to give up when things get in your way."
Nim Chimpsky - Wikipedia - "Nim retreated back to a depressed state after Terrace left, never to return to see Nim again. Nim developed friendships with several of the workers at the Institute of Primate Studies, and learned a few more signs, including a sign named "stone smoke time now" which indicated that Nim wanted to smoke marijuana"
Meme - "Waiting at the glory hole right now holding one of these *squeaky toy hammer*"
Singaporeans in London, do you face lots of subtle racism? : r/SingaporeRaw - "5 years in London, experienced no racism - even during the covid period. London is incredibly diverse and majority of them are foreigners. From my personal observation, East Asians are often segregated due to them not wanting to mix with the locals and tend to stick to their own group. I could almost say the same about Arabs as well. They love banter so it could be perceived as rude. It’s definitely harder at first to socialise with them due to the differences in culture, but once you settle down you should be fine. I worried about personal safety more tbh. Definitely go for it. You will not regret it."
Singaporeans in London, do you face lots of subtle racism? : r/SingaporeRaw - "Not me but my brother studied there. He used to say the Ang Mos are actually the friendly ones that will invite you out for drinks and activities. The racist or snobbish ones tend to be the Asians like those from China, HK or Korea. Always dressed in their branded wear and think they are better than you because you are from south east Asia"
Meme - The Missing Data Depot @data_depot: "How many men say they are "masculine"? How many women say they are "feminine"? While 90% of Boomer men say they're "completely/mostly" masculine, only 57% of Gen Z men do. Similarly, while 87% of Boomer women say they're "completely/mostly" feminine, only 67% of Gen Z women do."
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "For 40 years, people have been fleeing less economically free states for the more pro-market ones. You should trust the choices people make with their own lives over an index someone made up. https://richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-"
Dr. Magic Panda @magicpanda_703: "There's no good argument for conservative governance."
"US Human Developmet Index, Natural Scale 2021"
Meme - Andy Scott @AndyJScott: "Was wondering if the whole "sugar causes cavities" thing has good data behind it and guess what"
"Proportion of Tooth Surfaces Affected by Dental Caries / Total Added Sugar (grams) *no clear correlation*"
Meme - Slazac πͺπΊπΊπ¦πΉπΌπ @TrueSlazac: "Chernobyl's greatest ecological impact remains the mass hysteria that happened after the accident
Regional Nuclear Power Capacity Over Time *increasing quickly till Chernobyl, when it plateaued"