Dec 052018
 

Well I’ll be damned. Major dark web drug suppliers have started to voluntarily ban the synthetic opioid fentanyl because it is too dangerous.

 

Who did CNN get to be their E. Coli expert? The Food Babe. The lady who claims there’s yoga mats in your bread. Yeah, of course everything she says is going to be made up bullshit, and put CNN viewers at risk. Jesus.

 

“The [baby] boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens.

dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the largest political class in the country — the boomers.”

 

Google Employees: “New York Times article […] stigmatizing depiction of polyamory and BDSM counterintuitively hurts victims and makes them less likely to speak out.
… Our existence as sex-positive and polyamorous people is not inherently abusive or scandalous. The abuses reported in the New York Times arose from corporate power dynamics and misogyny, not from polyamory or BDSM.”

 

Warcraft Classic is coming back. I will disappear for 3 months this summer.

 

From Robert Wiblin, who took it from Cards Against Humanity’s research:

“39.1% of Democrats think that it’s wrong to negatively stereotype people based on their place of birth… AND that Southerners are more racist.

65.2% of Republicans think that people shouldn’t be so easily offended… AND that Black Lives Matter is offensive.

64.6% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body… AND that selling organs should be illegal.

48.5% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body… AND that prostitution should be illegal.

57.9% of Republicans think that people should be free to express their opinions in the workplace… AND that athletes should not be allowed to sit or kneel during the national anthem.

Over half of Democrats think that Men and women ‘are equal in their talents and abilities.’ AND that women are ‘better at multi-tasking’ and ‘better able to feel empathy.’

More than half of the people who support Trump’s border wall believe that they could get past it.

34.5% of Democrats say that they trust the scientific consensus… AND that GMOs are not safe to eat.”

 

Just found out that you’re not supposed to drink hot tap water. Why did no one tell me??
The copper alloy pipes within the house could be up to 8% lead before 2014 (tho industry standard was no more than 5%, and some used even less).
In a pilot study, multi-day stagnant hot water did accumulate some lead. This was particularly prevalent in new pipes (since after some time all the readily-accessible lead has been leached out), so you’re actually better off with a few years on your pipes.
The CDC recommends not using hot tap water for drinking or cooking
I assuage myself that the levels to be found nowadays are probably too low to worry about much, since all pipes are either made under the new standards, or are already several years old. Especially if one takes the precaution of running the hot water for a while to clear out everything that’s been sitting in the pipes. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ll be using hot tap water for cooking or tea.

 

Bohemian Rhapsody Performed in 42 Styles

 

Three things from the midterm elections that [a friend] feels haven’t gotten enough attention:

1.4 million people in Florida just gained the right to vote – that’s over 10% of the currently registered voter population. It’s the largest expansion of voting rights in decades, a long-overdue rebuke of a shitty Jim Crow relic, it empowers marginalized communities, and will make it much harder for anyone running on a platform of bigotry and cruelty to win the state in future elections.

In Texas, a democrat who ran on impeaching Trump and abolishing ICE lost by only 3 points, with coattails that flipped an impressive number of downballot races in the aggressively-gerrymandered state. Texas is purple now.

The withered husk of the GOP was destroyed in the under-45 demographic, especially among women. The existing trend appears to be growing stronger as people who came of age under Bush, Obama, and Trump have developed basically the political attitudes you would expect given that background. There’s a myth that this is a common pattern of past generations: they start off liberal and get more conservative over time. That’s not really true. First: political distributions within a generation don’t change that much as they age. Second: the gap among millennials and gen Z is much bigger than any American political generation gap in the modern era. The effects of the Bush and Trump administrations on developing political attitudes are as real as they are lasting, and barring a dramatic change they have destined the Republican party for irrelevance

 

LeBron’s tattoo artists are suing the video game company making NBA 2K for portraying him with his tattoos without getting a licence from the tattoo artist.

 

The Planet Money halloween episode was pretty great. A spooky tale of haunting economics!

 

The History Behind “Hocus Pocus.” The entire history is worth reading, to get context on how the protestant reformation led to:
“…into this colossal mess walks the Great Hocus Pocus of London! With his billowing stars-and-moons cape and his gift for lifting an object over his head, intoning the solemn, allegedly Latin magic phrase “Hocus Pocus!!” and BOOM, his scarf just becomes a bunny wabbit, or something. He was a great illusionist of the early 1600s. There was no Vatican II yet, so every Catholic liturgy was in Latin and most folk didn’t know Latin. So, it was a common misconception at the time that when the priest lifted the bread and blessed it, he was performing a work of Magic, transforming the bread to the body of Christ, and the wine to the blood. Transubstantiation was something scholars could debate until they were blue in the face; the working class, many of whom still celebrated Yule and Samhain and the rest, knew it was Magic. So the Great Hocus Pocus of London would hold up items, mimicking a Catholic priest, and intone solemnly, “Hoc – us poc – us!” And BOOM! The item changed to something else. Hocus pocus was a seventeenth-century corruption of the Latin phrase “hoc est corpus” (this is the body) from the Eucharist.”

 

European Court of Human Rights comes out *in favor* of blasphemy laws. From comment: “Saying that blasphemy laws don’t breach human rights is tantamount to saying that freedom of speech and freedom of (from) religion aren’t human rights”

 

A bunch from Wiblim this month!

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories,

…I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion”

 

What The Social Network is *really* about

 

Amazon’s Ring Police Portal For Mass Surveillance
A lot of discussion in the Ycombinator comments, but basically Amazon is offering the police access to all video from their Ring doorbell camera devices. The customer has to opt-in (currently), but as long as the video is on Amazon servers rather than your own, I consider that shaky as hell.
“Ring is just giving this to cops for free and offering customers a discount for letting their video surveillance from their home / doorbell be shared with the police in this portal.

over 50+ local police departments are now partners.

…There is no legal protection for privacy of citizens face’s caught in these cameras and added to their facial recognition algorithms.”

 

The “In The No” series from Radio Lab is fantastic. (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3)In-depth discussion about today’s social climate around sexual harassment, from many perspectives. Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on this.

 

Somehow, I missed this in the initial Final Exam sprint. Delightful. And I lol’ed at the best comment:
“I just came in from clicking “random subreddit”, read this whole thing, and now have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on here”

 

We Need to Share the Real, Gory, Painful Details of Postpartum Life
“Yes, these details are disturbing, bloody, brutal, messy, gross and uncomfortable. (Did I mention bloody?)
…Why do we hide? Who are we protecting? Not ourselves. When we stay silent, we don’t get the help we desperately need. Not other women. When we stay silent, we simply perpetuate a system that prioritizes babies at the expense of moms.”

  4 Responses to “Link & Meme Archive 9/29/18 – 12/05/18”

  1. @TapWater: You guys still use lead in pipes for drinking water? Why? In northern germany they stopped using lead in pipes for drinking water in the early 70s.. in southern germany they stopped using that in the 19th century.
    This is the kind of stuff we’re worried about when they negotiate deals like TTIP behind closed doors. That we europeans end up with goods produced to US-american health and safety standards in our supermarkets. I heard someone phone a radio station about how he was glad that the UK was leaving the EU because he can’t make some car parts out of cadmium under EU regulations (it’s apparently carcenogenic). Is the EU the only part in the world where they think public health is more important than profits? o0

    • Tap Water – well, only a very small amount, which I guess they thought was within tolerable limits until recently. I’m glad they don’t anymore, but holy hell. Sure took a while!

      And yes, profit matter a lot here. This is America. :/

  2. Dank links

  3. Very interesting collection of news, thanks.

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