Picked this up from Powell’s. It’s a 1986 book drawing from jailhouse interviews with “Sam”, a burglar-turned-fence active in “American City” (from context, Philadelphia).

Sam had a secondhand/antique store, he’d buy things he knew were stolen, and then he’d sell them on the shop floor, at auction, to other shopowners, or to private buyers. dead_dove.jpg, I don’t know what I expected.

That said, there’s plenty of interesting stuff in there. Like, Sam talks about the Mafia (and lesser-known Greek and Jewish organized crime) as a force in the underworld but not a ruling one, that’s interesting. They reserved monopolies on some categories of stolen goods - cigarettes and, interestingly, sugar, and taxed the crews doing truck “hijackings” (almost all inside jobs with drivers paid off), but didn’t otherwise bigfoot around. Really, Sam was happy and proud to have the opportunity to bring them in on deals – they’d take their cut but effectively guarantee things, allowing Sam to confidently make bigger, riskier deals than he could otherwise.

Two things jump out as necessary conditions for Sam’s operations that no longer hold and explain why “the fence” isn’t a familiar figure today.

For one, the corruption. It wasn’t just that high-profile lawyers and judges would defend and acquit guys despite knowing they were “really” criminals. It wasn’t just that they would make and accept four-figure bribes for acquittals. These pillars of the legal system would tell underworld figures when a rich client was leaving town so they could hit his vacant house, in exchange for help building their private collections.

Sam paid off beat cops by offering them goods below cost (writing off the difference as haggling or encouraging custom), but any given cop, if he hadn’t been paid off by Sam, had been paid off by someone, and had no interest in bringing the system down. It seems the only thing that could make a dent (what got Sam, after all) were State Police investigations combined with too much press attention to quietly bribe out at trial or on appeal.

Second, in a pre-electronic, pre-database, pre-chain retail world how much easier things fall through the cracks.

Sales were in cash and receipts were handwritten - or not, one source of margin was selling without sales tax - and if Sam got a load of stolen Hi-Fi equipment, he could buy a clutch of junk at auction and if the law comes asking who’s to say those “radios x 5” on the receipt didn’t establish his legal ownership? Hell, who’s to say the receipt wasn’t written up and signed by his buddy in the back room?

When a law required secondhand buyers to record purchases for the police, Sam dutifully carted boxes of index cards to the precinct house, who told him to chuck ‘em ‘cause what, they seriously expect someone to go around to every station and riffle through a few filing cabinets whenever some old biddy gets her TV swiped? C'mon. And for stuff “warm” enough to draw actual police effort, Sam could just truck it to auction over state lines; with the crime in one jurisdiction and the evidence in another, there was no entity with the scope to put 2 and 2 together.

The overwhelming share of product didn’t come from guys crawling through windows but shrinkage - factory, warehouse and loading dock guys, stevedores at the pre-containerized docks, delivery drivers on rounds who stopped off to let a few items fall off their truck and then shrug to their boss it must’ve been misloaded. Sam says the hardest work there was getting the guys to stay under the radar and not to take too much too fast too regularly.

Part of it’s that there were mom-and-pop stores to unload to, that used the no-questions-asked prices as an edge against department stores and chains. Even if you got a load of great hot TVs today what would you do with them, drive to Best Buy and try to flip them to the floor manager?

(The real answer today is “eBay”, or maybe combine with fake/scavenged receipts for return fraud. Also sometimes professional shoplifters – “boosters” who put Tumblr “lifters” to shame – unload through the newer ethnic crime syndicates. I remember in LA seeing one tobacco shop in Little Armenia that had nowhere near enough product for its floor space, a sign offering heavy discounts for paying in cash, and three tracksuit-and-cigar types talking in the back office and like, hmm. Also at the meth level there’s a thriving market in stolen Tide detergent.)

The thing with neurodivergent folk and rules is that if they don't understand why a rule exists they will not follow it ever

They will listen politely while being told the rule but then will immediately ignore it because they perceive it as nonsense

They won't argue either they just will not follow that rule unless it is explained fully so that they do understand why it exists

On the flip side if they do understand a rule they will be completely enraged that no one else is following the clear instructions! They follow it scrupulously and so should everyone else

There is no middle ground

Let's all reblog the original and not uncredited screenshots :D

REDDIT DUDES ARE MAD ABOUT KARLACH TOPPING THEM

People can gloat all they like, but people probably shouldn't be "jumpscared" into sex acts they don't want to perform.

It's not so much that they were jumpscared into "sex acts they didn't want to perform" because ultimately it's a fictional character and pixels on a screen. What's really happening here is that these men were fully expecting a sex scene where they would assume the dominant role because in their minds that's the role for men and women are meant to be submissive. But instead this character didn't act according to their cisheteronormative standards and they felt emasculated because they felt she didn't behave the way she's "supposed to".

@bird-bureau​ Thank you for very succinctly saying what I was attempting to get across.

two things are also true in real life: men can get sexually abused and assaulted by women, and rape is as wrong for women to do as for men to do....

but also there are lots of men who frequently do not 'consent' to 'allow' women to 'take' positions that these men feel should be the sole prerogative of men, such as being strong, powerful, aggressive, or dominant. and in that case those men can shut the fuck up and cope.

@roach-works Clarification: It sounds like you're saying a man being pegged without consent IRL is fine. Did you mean to say in-game? Or that some men IRL are uncomfortable with the concept of women taking on dominant (sexual) positions?

im fascinated how i made an unambiguous statement that there are two separate issues here and then you managed to re-conflate them.

when a real live man has his own body penetrated against his wishes, that's rape.

when a man uses consent-oriented vocabulary to position himself as a victim of women taking egalitarian social or sexual positions without his *permission*, such as by seeing a fictional female character being dominant in a video game he decided to play and could quit at any moment, that's sexist entitlement.

a lot of men consider the state of masculinity to be one of dominion over women, so they are immediately and painfully emasculated once that dominion is questioned. this is in no way equivalent to rape and women are by no means comparable to rapists for distressing men in this manner. couching this matter in the language of sexual assault is a way to shift blame and obscure the actual issues in play--sexism, not sexual abuse. hopefully you can now see it.

amusing to watch people re-inventing Radical Feminism in the reblogs of a videogame post

tl;dr removing snipers from TF2 doesn't unbalance the game and instead increases the ability to do the fun parts of the game. (Though this is a small sample size)

Basically every first person shooter is better without one-hit-kill snipers. It's incredibly unfun to get killed instantly across the map without counterplay.

It always surprised me that the standard for long-range weapons in these games was one-hit kills in the first place. You'd think the longest range character should have the lowest damage, not the highest.

a few disconnected thoughts

I think the issue with a low-damage long range thing is that most shooters are designed with the idea that cover can be used to reposition. Like, to take 2fort as an example, if the sniper deals less damage, a player can likely tank the damage as they run from spawn to the bridge, which is protected from snipers. By the time they are in the sniper's view again, they're within the range of many of the other classes, and probably screwed given the low damage

so i feel like a lot of the places I see low-damage-long-range is in vehicle combat games where there's less corridors and cover to stop a long range vehicle from doing damage the entire time a close-range enemy is closing on them

one of my fav vehicle games, Guns of Icarus Online, had this issue where committing to close to close range meant you'd often take a bit of a beating in the long-range low-damage combat, and the enemy would have softened you up enough that you'd lose the close range engagement. That meant both sides often wanted to keep plinking away at the other at distance rather than close in and get blasted.

You might draw similarities to fighting games of zoner-vs-zoner matchups, except that i think often in those games getting hit by a zoner puts you in a disadvantaged state so the other player is incentivized to try and punish that (the vehicle combat games ive played don't have that kind of disadvantaged state)

in Planetside 2 the default sniper rifles were semi-auto ones that take 2 headshots, 3ish body shots to kill, but fire a lot faster than the one-headshot ones. they were more or less useless in the eyes of a lot of the community, because anyone you could shoot would run for cover and heal up. I think in close engagements you often have a lot of tools to deal with cover (explosive, peek the corner yourself, use their retreat to reposition to an advantageous position), but in a long-range engagement it's often not that engaging? At the same time, at medium-long ranges the semi-auto snipers were often pretty good, a thing I didn't really appreciate until much later

CS & Valorant i think do snipers very well because they're designed from the ground up around sniping angles and so the central concern is "how do we counter their snipers and prevent them from countering ours". If the sniper rifle is going to fuck up balance inherently might as well make that the central point of the game

It's objectively a terrible design but I hold some fondness for Unreal Tournament Facing Worlds which just had sniping perches that could see the entire map, no cover. Headshots are instakill and easy to hit. And so the entire process of capturing the flag is a two step process. First: win the sniper war. Second: somehow capture the flag. terrible. i love it. to some extent 2fort and ... whats the night CTF map with the big bridge in tf2?? i forget. to some extent 2fort also exhibits this austere and not-fun-to-play beauty

The other thing about snipers is whether or not the weapon is hitscan; that is, does the damage happen instantaneously when you click the button, or does it spawn a fast-but-still-finite-speed projectile? This can have a serious effect on how strongly snipers dominate the game.

Digging through porn blogs you always reach the inevitable Bowsette layer, like how paleontologists all over the world find iridium to mark the meteor that killed the dinosaurs

Absolutely obsessed with this thread of anons documenting and exposing a writer’s overwhelmingly blatant muscle fetish bleeding into everything he’s ever worked on

You can tell rightwing fearmongering about pedophilic boogeymen is winning by the sheer number of commenters who believe the thing they never noticed before is retroactively an active, insidious threat to childhood innocence.

Like this is funny to note well after the fact but it does not actually matter. Nobody was harmed by it. Even if this grosses you out, it’s critical to recognize that Timmy muscle growth did not endanger, psychologically traumatize, or groom you. You did not witness child porn and no one is helped by reframing your outlook to believe you did.

I get that it comforts you to believe this is a "right wing" thing but concerns about stealth-porn and grooming-by-media have been part of public discourse since forever, and it's a bipartisan activity. Like, the PMRC was not straight-ticket Democrat, and ACT was nonpartisan.

I mean, you're right that this is just the latest phase of People Claiming There's Secret Messages In Popular Media (remember when "Wonderful Tonight" was supposedly Eric Clapton's admission that he beat up his wife?) but that's always been urban-legend thing and those come from either side, sometimes both simultaneously.

(Source)

inventing the notion of a soul is putting a finger on the scales and tipping them towards infinity, justifying all manner of weirdness.

It frustrates me that it’s seen as gauche and fedora-shrek to say crudely of religion: “elites promise you fake pie in the sky so you will be willing to die for them”.

But every historian and anthropologist says that! in so many words. Nearly all societies invent the concept of an afterlife (a variable afterlife where some enjoy rewards and esteem, and others suffer punishment and shame) to fake their way to an incentive structure their subjects will consent to.

that's because every society independently hits on Game Theory and realizes that the only way collaboration is a payoff strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma is if the game is iterated and further realizes that technically all games are non-iterated due to eventual death of the players and thus some sort of post-death continuation is necessary

The thing is, how do you claim that the sexual puritanism of a certain kind of youth comes only from having been intensively surveilled and offered very little freedom except for being online as a kid, when that same certain kind of youth also espouses ideas about what constitutes "good" / "unproblematic" values in media, that are basically aligned to the philippians 4:8 style of media criticism (whatever is good, whatever is pure, whatever is truthful, whatever is virtuous etc etc think on these things). Moreover, their entire style of media criticism is basically like when my youth pastor sat me down and tried to explain that brave new world is a sinful novel because it is depressing and lacking in hope which reflects the writer's deep hopelessness from his immersion in sin. Have we not heard similar arguments advanced against tragic/hopeless novels albeit with the language of sin stripped from it and instead replaced with the language of "necessity" and "ethics"?

In my mind, you cannot separate the sexual puritanism of a certain kind of youth from this desire for only hopeful, uplifting, "wholesome" fiction, because they come from the same instinct and root cause i.e. the ideological requirements of fundamentalist christianity which visualises a frictionless, conflictless, pure and good and virtuous utopia that is also distinctly sexless and chaste (as god intended!). A better question to ask is how did such a distinctly Christian form of media criticism and reading become the dominant strain even in ostensibly progressive spaces? And that, I think, requires a much deeper investigation of what went on in the classroom, where kids learned how to read books; a deeper investigation of how families impart knowledge and the influences that went on in there; the deliberate Christian campaigns to get back into and influence schools through being on boards etc; the ways in which certain forms of thinking spread cross-culturally across the internet (and also, imo, the ways in which conservative Christians have learned to mask their rhetoric in ostensibly progressive garb and in which liberal Christians have served as a kind of vanguard in sanitising this rhetoric). There is no grand unified theory of the puriteen, but if we have to make one, surely since they're replicating Moral Majority talkpoints, we should start by studying the people who birthed the Moral Majority?

except this isn't Christian, it's Puritan Christian, and the innovation of the 1960s Second Wave Feminism was to separate the Puritan from the Christian and just make it generic "morality".

So, you're right that the things modern kids are talking about sound like the things we associate with stereotype-Church-Lady-Christians, but that's because the stereotype Christians were following a tradition that has been present in America since before it was a country.

love too be helpful and harmless

Can’t wait to have this bot replace Google and write most news articles

AI safety turned out to just mean “we made the robot woke”

when they said "AI safety" they actually meant "safety of the people who made the AI"

Reminder to take all this with a grain of salt because people can just go on the internet and tell lies :-) I don't know OP from Adam and I do know people will sometimes post photoshopped images of fake GPT chats for the lulz.

-

With that said, I looked the subject up, and according to respectable medical sources, anal intercourse has more than 10x the transmission risk of vaginal intercourse. (A Stanford study estimates 14x, a NIH paper estimates 18x, varying somewhat with population studied and condom usage and so forth.) That's how much this "safety" module is lying about. It is not a mere few percent that might be lost in margins of error and measurement noise.

Even with margins of error, the lowest estimate of transmission risk from anal intercourse (95% confidence interval) was still 5x the highest estimate of transmission risk from vaginal intercourse (95% CI) in the same study.

-

Once upon a time, there were some people who were actually serious about "AI safety" and really meant avoiding a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario, I know because I spoke to them personally and I was a hipster at some of their groups before they got famous (LessWrong >10 years ago).

Lysander Spooner sums up how I feel about them now:

no see you've missed the point

everyone in this conversation is well aware that anal intercourse is vastly higher transmission risk for HIV than other methods

and we aren't taking about Paperclip Maximizers when we say "AI Safety"

what's happening is that the people who make AI bots have had the social-control version of Vinnie and Bluto come around and say "nice career you got here, sure would be a shame if someone were to turn a Shaming Mob loose on it, maybe you want to think about the answers your AI gives to certain questions"

and we are Noticing the effect of that in the current output of AI bots

love too be helpful and harmless

Can’t wait to have this bot replace Google and write most news articles

AI safety turned out to just mean “we made the robot woke”

when they said "AI safety" they actually meant "safety of the people who made the AI"

Any discussion of the value of Humanities degrees has to contend with the fact that a lot of people are getting degrees because they need to have a certificate proving they're willing to waste three years of their life to get a nicer job, and the Humanities offers the courses that most teach from the ground up with the widest prerequisites.

Which is bad! It's bad for people who want to have a serious academic future in the Humanities and it's bad for people who just want an office job. Both of these classes deserve better than this. The serious academics deserve a robust curriculum with an eye to future study and the rest of them deserve not to waste several percent of their lifespan on a bullshit degree to check off a box.

Well, I wouldn't call spending that time a waste, because most employers these days have realized that a college degree acts as a proxy for "are you non-poor white or can you act like it" and therefore it's a legal way to filter applicants for race and class status.

EXCUSE ME????

One time at work a guy brought in a box of pastries, and one of them was an extremely-large fritter, and I commented "that's a fritter so big it's a frotter", and nobody reacted except for one of my female co-workers who turned BRIGHT red.

(a: yes, I knew what it meant, and I said it on purpose)

(b: she was not my type and I was definitely not hers)

Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill. - if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives - if not, red pills live and blue pills die Which do you choose?

It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma except there's literally no reason for anyone to choose blue over red.

(there is if you're in a room full of people and someone popular has picked Blue.)

See, I'm not sure that it's sensible to construct philosophical problems like this, in the sense that it doesn't actually give you any information about the real world!

The only way someone IRL would pick the blue room was if they had been intentionally misled about its effect! Like, what is the point of anyone making this choice of exposing themselves to the risk of dying? "To ensure that with a solid majority, nobody dies" presupposes that someone else already picked blue beforehand; why did THEY do that?

Oh, they gave us plenty of information about the real world, in the sense of "lots of people consider Being Nice worth the risk of a pointless death".

Ford Explorer SUV Concept, 1973. A forward-control pick-up concept that was shown at the Chicago Auto Show in 1973 (studio shots are dated 1971 with the vehicle's license plates indicating it was a proposal for the 1974 MY). The design copied the Dodge Deora custom truck from 1967. Ford had made forward-control pick-ups in the 1960s so it's not out of the question that the Explorer was considered for series production. The concept featured a canopy that could be deployed from the rear deck. It was powered by a mid-mounted 429ci V8 but went no further than a single prototype

I can see crash worthiness being an issue (your legs ARE the crumple zone) but GOD a mid-engine V8 pickup? Handling would be insane.

Also, it's pretty.

It's interesting to go back and look at the degree to which crashworthiness standards (and pedestrian-safety features) resulted in every car looking identical.

Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill. - if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives - if not, red pills live and blue pills die Which do you choose?

It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma except there's literally no reason for anyone to choose blue over red.

(there is if you're in a room full of people and someone popular has picked Blue.)

this seems pretty great

1) AI model is trained on artists' work without their permission

2) AI model is given prompts that substantially reproduce training data

3) Artists no longer have control over their work, including "denying permission for uses they find objectionable"

4) nerds on the internet rush to explain how if the AI had been properly built it wouldn't have been able to substantially reproduce its training data and this isn't anyone's fault really

This is probably going to sound like a really dumb question to Americans, but

Why are carbon monoxide detectors a thing?

I can't name a single person I know who has one, so what are they for? What sources of carbon monoxide are Americans regularly exposed to that we Australians apparently don't ever contend with?

After some googling, I've learned that they're also available in Australia, but hardly anyone talks about them. I have to conclude that the American domestic energy supply is vastly more dependent on natural gas than Australia. Is that it?

stop getting your info about my country from weird PSAs

I never owned a carbon monoxide detector till I moved to Europe

The other day someone said that everyone they knew had a CO detector. The thing with CO detectors in the US is, they're mandated in rental units in some states, sometimes conditional on the type of heating. And yeah, any heating involving combustion, like gas, caries a risk of CO, so that's probably part of the picture. If everyone you know rents from vaguely reputable landlords in a state that requires CO detectors, they're all going to have CO detectors. If they are in a state without the requirement, or own, or rent from sketchy landlords, they may not.

Carbon monoxide detectors are a thing because carbon monoxide can kill entire families overnight. If you are burning anything in an enclosed space, carbon monoxide is a potential danger. Every bad winter, someone uses a kerosene heater or wood stove or something and fucks it up and kills half or all of their family.

Also, too high but not fatal CO levels can really fuck up people's heads and make them see crazy stuff or have memory lapses and stuff, to the degree that it's standard advise for dealing with a "haunted" house to get a CO detector to check if elevated CO levels aren't causing haunting symptoms.

Edit: originally this post erroneously used "CO2" where it should have used "CO".

"see crazy stuff", like

This is in line something I've intuited/observed/decided, which is that all decisions are rational. Or, rather, that decisions are only irrational in hindsight. Every decision is utility-maximizing, given the information and weighting in the moment.

Now, maybe a half-second later it doesn't look like it anymore, because you see how it turns out and wish you'd picked a different way. But in the moment, the decision to set the couch on fire is made knowingly and with cold logic, made with the straightforward reasoning of "fuck that guy he sucks and I want to make him feel bad more than I want to ever see any of my friends again".

ʷʰᵃᵗ ᶦᶠ ᵃ ᵍᵒᵇˡᶦⁿ ᵐᵃᵈᵉ ʸᵒᵘ ᵈᵒ ᶦᵗ

This is in line something I've intuited/observed/decided, which is that all decisions are rational. Or, rather, that decisions are only irrational in hindsight. Every decision is utility-maximizing, given the information and weighting in the moment.

Now, maybe a half-second later it doesn't look like it anymore, because you see how it turns out and wish you'd picked a different way. But in the moment, the decision to set the couch on fire is made knowingly and with cold logic, made with the straightforward reasoning of "fuck that guy he sucks and I want to make him feel bad more than I want to ever see any of my friends again".

-There Is Always An Alternative: Remarks presented to York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Graduating Class of 2023

so whatever your thoughts about modern tech, this is ahistorical nonsense.

the stuff the Luddites objected to was not a ‘prelude’ to child labour. It was the 19th century. Child labour was perfectly normal. They were objecting to advances that would 'enable' employers to replace them with cheaper child labour, yes - but the working class children in question would have been working to help support their families in some capacity anyway. This really wasn't the basis of their objection.

The Luddites were not primarily concerned with orphans from the one place in England this guy knows the name of. The Luddite movement began in Nottingham, and operated mostly there, in Yorkshire and in the Northwest. There were already children in the north of England.

They were a labour rights movement, of a sort. From what I gather the machine-smashing is better understood as a kind of rioting/direct action than a fundamental objection to the machines themselves.

But the quoted comments are really twisting the reality to say what they want to say and it annoyed me

On a different tack - it feels weird to hold up the ludditee as an inspirational example here?

Like however virtuous or sophisticated they were, the movement did not exactly result in a viable long term alternative to industrial capitalism.

but they smashed stuff and broke stuff and did Bad Things and it was Allowed, so a lot of people really want to construct a narrative where the Luddites were the Good Guys and Morally Superior.