Graceful

i dont know who needs to hear this but as a general PSA for those who pay people online for goods and services: KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE BUYING. While it might seem funny to write a clever note along with your transaction, any sort of hint that you're buying something nsfw or even mildly suggestive poses a huge risk that the person you're paying is getting their method of payment shut down permanently. transaction services are stricter than ever. "thanks for the boobs" is a pipe bomb that only needs one pair of eyes to be noticed. loose lips sink ships

hey i know you guys are all the funniest and smartest people in the world but you arent actually required to give any reasons for payment right. you can just say nothing. you know that right

The partly-eclipsed sun shining through the gaps in the leaves makes crescent shapes on the ground.

Modern art

Hi real quick does anyone have the cat gif that goes like this

Found and saved one from this very hellsite:

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

"This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

"Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics."

Wouldn't owning shorted stock in a company & then funding journalists to run hit pieces on that same company be a form of insider trading or something, no matter how true the hit pieces are???

Nope.

That sounds like a massive oversight tbh

No, insider trading is trading on information that can only be known by insiders (e.g. a manager who decides to lay off a bunch of workers tomorrow can't sell his stock tonight).

Trading on publicly available facts - even if they're not widely known - is fine. If you notice that a company's products aren't selling at your local grocer and you short it's stock, that's fine, even if the grocers haven't published any sales figures that might help others draw the same conclusion.

It's fine.

basement remodeling is going well

op how did you take the photo

@guiltiest-gear

The dismissive attitude toward a certain stripe of "fandom discourse" is getting more and more irksome to be me because it completely – and, I suspect, wilfully – elides how transparently targeted a lot of this shit is. Sure, anonymously swanning into somebody's inbox like "it's pretty sus that you don't have a pinned post preemptively denouncing the hypothetical wrongdoing I imagine your mutuals might commit in the future" is ridiculous on its face, but pay close attention to who gets hit with the lion's share of this shit. It's a calculated harassment tactic aimed at specific visible minorities – mostly trans women this time around, though it's varied in the past – that explicitly relies on the absurdity of what it's proposing to escape serious criticism.

Like, shit, I have personally seen people play the "you're guilty by association because you follow somebody who follows somebody who had a bad take" game by tracing a path through my blog without breathing a word of censure in my direction in the process. I'd ask how that makes sense, but we already know the answer, right?

"Autistic characters in popular media are always robots or aliens" I mean, that's just not true. Autistic characters in popular media in fact span a wide range of backgrounds, including (but not limited to):

I’ve met most of these people and they are autistic. By the way

You know, when I saw this poll had been made I fully expected "morbid little girl" to win by a landslide, but evidently I'd badly underestimated the number of Tumblr user who have been harmed by the Wizard.

I thought Tech Support was gonna win

In fiction, "talking animal" is usually a completely separate character from "tech support", but in real life these groups have a large overlap.

okay but actually imagining bec as just being constantly blown out and overexposed due to sheer photon radiation is actually really fucking good

"Not faceless, but so blindingly bright you can't perceive any of his features" is a pretty cool aesthetic actually

literally become a satisficer. life is so much better dude.

eh, life's good enough as a maximiser

the sun from pluto is bright enough that it's like twilight (from what i can find. its kind of hard to get a clear answer. 1/900 sunlight, 300 times moonlight). but small enough that its just a point of light which is kind of weird. if you think about it. like. imagine if there was a star that cast a shadow

dynamic range of light is so fucked, that's so fucked up, "the sun is >10000x brighter than the moon" just feels so intuitively wrong

i think the weird thing here is actually like. our eyes. human vision is really good at dealing with a huge range of brightnesses. you notice this with camera stuff, you can have two environments that feel like theyre roughly similar brightnesses that a rudimentary camera can handle. and sometimes even in the same image we can see detail in areas of different brightness, i think because of dynamic+local retina sensitivity (do they make cameras that do this? itd be a huge pain in the us).

the downside to harassing a cat constantly is that you run out of ways to bother them. so sure she's "well socialized" but how am i supposed to get revenge when she is being SO so annoying?

she enjoys this. what is left?

Holy shit, oh my god! 50 of them??

Me when I'm a sexy gay wizard that suddenly realizes they are being followed by 50 rats

OMG LMAO I WOULD NEVER RUN FROM YOU, 50 RATS, I JUST DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE BEHIND ME

You know what you are so right... We have a bond, these 50 rats and I....

OH SHIT OH NO

WAIT

I CAN'T FEED THIS MANY RATS

Oh wait I'm a fuckin wizard lol

Yay :) Enough treats for everyone :)

Happy rat day to my most popular post ever

as a little boy i could only dream.... now as a young woman i can finally start my new job as an anvil

AUGH

AUGH

AUGH

HAMMERS

Yeah they sure are banging her. with hammers. Because she’s an anvil

AUGH

type of guy who invariably buys the worst salami in the store because he was cursed by god himself never to buy good salami: you know I don’t like salami very much

reblog it anyway

he should get someone else to buy it for him