I’ll Bring Rope And A Shovel @francesca-feasts - Tumblr Blog

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

spankerella

@ perfectunion

massachusetts-official

Official Post of Massachusetts

hopefulmisanthrope

From baseball to cheerleading, kids’ sports are becoming an unaffordable luxury good.

Private equity firms — the same financial players driving up costs in healthcare and housing — have quietly captured youth sports across America, turning what was once an affordable neighborhood activity into a profit-extraction machine. Youth sports are now a $40 billion industry,double the revenue of the NFL. The cost of participation has increased by 46% over the last 5 years, double the rate of inflation.

Families going into debt: Spending an average of $5,000 per year on sports, often much more.

Kids burning out: Dropping sports earlier due to anxiety, fatigue, injury, and over-commercialization.

Injuries at epidemic levels: ACL injuries up 26% over 15 years; Tommy John surgeries among young baseball players rising sharply.

Working families pushed out: Only 23% of low-income kids play sports vs. 44% from high-income families.

Deceiving Parents: False promises of scholarships and NIL deals. Only 2% of college applicants receive any athletic scholarship.

Selling Children’s data: PE-owned tech platforms harvest health metrics and family spending patterns from youth athlete profiles.

#ah so this is what’s behind all this

gin-juice-tonic

If you're someone from the US, I like to check out

https://www.fairsandfestivals.net/states

every now and then.

...To see what fairs and festivals may be going on.

uss-edsall

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

the-murmuration-project

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

cheaphalloweencostume

i know i’m just in a bad mood but this push to re-categorize every kind or moral human action as inherently punk and cool is fucking cringe because you’re showing your ass about your priorities. as a visibly alt queer myself, who gives a FUCK if being nice is “punk”? just be nice because it’s nice. i’m not giving you special scene brownie points for it?? and you don’t even listen to punk music or care about the history? so why do you care about being “punk”?? IM GOING CRAZY

cheaphalloweencostume

while im reiterating posts, let’s touch this one!

so, so many well-meaning people going “well, if feeling punk is what makes people be nice and do nice things, let them say they’re punk!” to which, yeah, i can’t stop them

my objection isn't "being nice isn't punk, therefore don't be nice”

my objection is that we've reached a point where every positive human behavior gets reframed as an aesthetic identity instead of just being a positive human behavior

if you think helping people is good, then help people because it's good!

if you think kindness is good, be kind because it's good!

i don't understand the need to run every moral action through a "but is it punk?" filter first, especially when a lot of the people doing this have no actual interest in punk as a culture, music scene, history, or political tradition (for better or for worse)

at a certain point "punk" just becomes shorthand for "thing i personally approve of," and then the word stops meaning anything at all

ANYWAY! here’s some punk bands you could check out if you’re interested in punk music that might reflect the values you hold dear but you’re not sure where to start: Against Me!, Crass, The Dicks, MDC, X-Ray Spex, The Muslims, G.L.O.S.S., Big Joanie, Los Crudos, Pansy Division! give them a try! happy thrashing!

wilwheaton

“After a visitor to the Bunker Hill monument complained that a quote on display related to women’s suffrage represented “woke” feminist ideology, the Park Service removed three other quotes on display: “We find, upon reflection, that our duty to our country has not ended … We as Vietnam Veterans, strongly feel that the United States should cease to build memorials to death and begin to glorify life.”—from a 1971 anti-war editorial by Vietnam War veterans “As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Hill Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared it’s lofty column.”—from a 1846 letter to the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator “Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.”—from a Boston newspaper in 1875 The quote that prompted the complaint was allowed to remain.”

—

‘Woke’ Quotes Removed at Bunker Hill

mammalianmammals

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services

shutyourmoustache

Making exercises more accessible to the disabled? Fuck yeah!

Last night we went to see St. Vincent play with the Boston Pops, which was a really lovely experience.

The opener, however, wasn't my cup of tea. Wonderful woman I'm sure, but her music isn't to my taste. I politely listened and clapped, which is well-deserved when someone is playing by guitar themselves in fucking Symphony Hall. Like, good on ya kid, but maybe pronounce a consonant every once in a while.

But man was I fucking SEEN on the ride home, when out of nowhere TL says, "Sorry, Frankie, about that first opener. I could feel the irritation radiating from your bones..." I busted out laughing, and followed up with, "I was surprised she was wearing shoes."

#I am extremely picky about my singer-songwriter picks #and she was NOT one of them

mathcat345

I still think this is great, but I only know a few people I could say it to who would find it funny.

half-gobbled-piece-of-toast

“I ain’t reading all that” your brain is rotting and shrinking

springsgreenleaves

Yes, but also, I am begging you on bended knee, paragraph breaks.

the-haiku-bot

Yes, but also, I

am begging you on bended

knee, paragraph breaks.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

maudit

profeminist

RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.

Gifset source