rendall

My friend saw crows lure a stalking cat into the path of a car, laughed, then ate its road killed carcass.

The GDPR consent form on this blog did not have a “Reject all” button. It required me to manually reject 16 instances of “legitimate interest,” then scroll through 1,746 vendors to make sure they were all set to reject.

Seems worth mentioning in a post about excessive and intrusive collection of user data. The moral outrage rings hollow when opting out of tracking is so deliberately onerous.

It's a roulette which can lead to a ticket, or an entry in the sex-offender registry, or nothing. Where it stops, nobody knows. Best just buy something at a bar, restaurant, café to get bathroom privileges.

> > Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level

> this is such a... wrong conclusion to make from the study. the study has found a correlation and by no means is it a causation.

I'm not seeing any assertion of causation from that quote.

> "If you’ve ever been wandering the streets of Chicago or New York, wondering why there’s no place to pee..."

Oh, there are places to pee, if you're brave. My last venture into a NYC public restroom was the one at Sun Yat-sen Plaza, which is under a beautiful pavilion. There was a man hanging around the urinals without apparent purpose other than staring at me because of course there was. There was only 1 working stall of 3, over the entire surface of which someone had managed to squirt at least a quart of liquid poo.

A government may have entirely benign reasons for creating a comprehensive population database, but you cannot guarantee who will control that database later. You have to trust the people who control it, not only now, but at all times in the future, but history does not support that.

Nazi Germany and occupied forces used census data, municipal population registers, etc., to identify and track down targeted people. The United States, during World War II, used census information to assist in the removal and incarceration of citizens with Japanese, Italian, and German heritage. The Rwanda population database explicitly classified people as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. This became the mechanism to target Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide. In China today, these databases are used to surveil and imprison Uyghurs.

Those are examples of official policy turned to dark purposes. It did not even include malfeasance for malfeasance or criminality by individuals or cartels who somehow gain access.

Each officer would then have malpractice insurance, like doctors or lawyers. Criminal or incompetent officers' insurance premiums would get so high that they would need to find another career.

> Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences.

I'm neither a fan of advertising nor Trump, but this reads like yet another patronizing think piece about how the wrong people get a vote and it's terrible that they use it in ways of which the author does not approve. "If only there were some way to control what these people say and hear, we would not have such problems as Trump."

The problem with controlling the flow of information, besides being morally reprehensible, is that it leads inevitably to ignoring problems that do not directly affect or concern the gatekeepers, like rural economic devastation. As well, these censorious advocates always imagine the mechanisms of control will only be used by people they agree with, never imagining the mechanisms of control will be used by their political opponents.

The author later reveals the agenda:

> “But it's free speech!” Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

A fair and honest reckoning with the question would acknowledge the problems such a ban would introduce with free speech, not simply dismiss them as he does here. If you make a thing, and then you tell people about the thing, then you transgress against the advertising ban. The idea is nonsense.

Flagging for being paywalled

His "cheat detection method" mostly consisted of playing someone online and then reporting them for cheating if he lost.