Crunchy Bytes

800,000 Haitians are in “dire need” of food after Hurricane Matthew

If you don’t feel like an extrovert or an introvert, this might be why.

1. When you’re out in the world, you’re probably not going to be starting conversations with strangers.

2. Generally, you’re always happy to meet new people, but you’ll probably be uncomfortable if you have to do it without any of your existing friends with you.

3. When a topic of interest comes up in conversation, you’re more than happy to talk in great detail about it.

4. But as soon as that’s done, you’ll happily sit listening to the conversation without saying another word.

Story Tweets by Matthew Luhn.

10 reasons to follow Matthew Luhn on twitter.

I’m tired

I’m gay. I’m tired.

I texted one of my best friends this morning and asked, “Did you hear about Orlando?” because the first time I ever went to a gay club and pretended like I was “out” was with him when we were fresh out of high school. Out of all my friends, he’s probably spent the most time in gay clubs. Which means I’m more worried about him than about my other friends. So I texted him.

I’m tired.

They want people to give blood, but it’s gay people who need the blood and it’s gay people who can’t donate. But we’re in crisis mode! We’ll take your tainted gay blood for today only!

I’m tired.

I held hands with a man last week and thought, “Oh no, we’re in a small town in Utah and this is dangerous because we’re both gay,” before I remembered that he’s a guy and I’m a girl so no, it’s not dangerous. But the next time I hold hands with a girl, will someone see us and get mad enough to shoot 50 gay people? Will I feel responsible when I read the news? Will I feel like a danger to society for being gay?

I’m tired.

I went to Pride in Salt Lake City last weekend and I complained as I stood in line in the hot sun and I complained about the ticket prices and I complained about the festival being smaller than it was last year and I complained. When it was over, I was still alive. I’m still alive. I can’t believe I complained.

I’m tired.

Bury your gays. Currently on television, 4 percent of characters identify as LGBT. In 2016, about 40 percent of that 4 percent have already died. Yesterday, that might’ve been the issue I wanted to discuss. Yesterday, I might’ve been angry about fictional gays dying. Yesterday. Art imitates life, life imitates art, and I am tired.

I’m tired.

A year ago I put a rainbow flag around my shoulders and celebrated the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. A year ago there was no law banning transgender people from using the bathroom of their choosing. A year ago a man hadn’t shot 50 gay people dead because he saw two men kissing and got angry. “Now that gay marriage is legal, what more do you people want?” Well, I want to stay alive, for one thing.

I’m tired.

There aren’t gay coffee shops or gay restaurants – there are gay nightclubs. Gay nightclubs where LGBT people can meet other LGBT people and feel safe. I want to meet other LGBT people and make friends with LGBT people, but I also don’t want to die.

I’m tired.

My existence is controversial. Even though I’m out, I have to be careful about how “gay” I “act.” What happens if I’m at work and offend a customer? What happens if someone I know reads these words and decides to punish me for them? What happens if someone gets so angry about my sexuality that they shoot 50 people?

In the wake of John Deere’s claims that the software in its engines means that its farm equipment is “licensed,” not “sold,” I talked to the Globe and Mail about what digital locks mean for the idea of property in the 21st century.

Laws like Canada’s Bill C-11 and the U.S. DMCA say that if a manufacturer uses computer code to control what you do with the things you buy, you can’t overrule them. These laws say that it’s a crime to remove DRM even if what you’re doing is otherwise allowed. So, it’s a lock on something that belongs to you, that even for legitimate reasons you can’t remove.

As the John Deere petition to the U.S. Copyright Office made clear: The presence of a digital lock in a manufactured good means that you don’t own it and can’t decide how to best use it.

In this world, “property” becomes the exclusive purview of manufacturers. You don’t get to own your computerized devices: You are only and forevermore a tenant of them, and the manufacturers are the landlords and they get to decide how you use the goods they deign to allow you to pay for.

It used to be that if you bought something and figured out how to get extra value out of it – using an old blender to mix paint; fixing your own car; or ripping your CDs and loading the music in an MP3 player instead of buying it again – that extra value was yours to keep.

In the world of C-11 and the DMCA, all that value is retained by the manufacturer. So automotive companies can put software locks on the engine computer, then insist that the mechanics they license source all their parts from the manufacturer at full retail, meaning that you can’t choose a mechanic who’ll use cheaper third-party spares.

If your dishwasher can detect and reject “unauthorized” dishes in it, it can refuse to run its load. It’s the inkjet printer model, metastasized into the Internet of Things where everything we own – cars, houses, hearing aids, phones – is just a computer with a fancy case.

As recently as a couple years ago, using the word “neoliberalism” here on Boing Boing would inevitably provoke an outraged comment from someone who wanted to know why we were “liberal-bashing.” Though the term was a little more widely used in Europe than in the USA, it still pretty obscure there. That obscurity is the ideology’s strength.

Neoliberalism is the ideology of Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet, Mulroney and the other business-lionizing, union-bashing, greed-is-good politicians who effectively took over the world in the early 1980s, when Thatcher famously declared “There is no alternative.”

Though the early adherents of neoliberalism used the term proudly to describe themselves, as neoliberalism gained ascendancy, the actual name of the ideology vanished. The world had no word for neoliberalism for the same reason fish wouldn’t have a word for water. It was (as George Monbiot writes), as though the citizens of the USSR hadn’t had a word for “communism.”

Monbiot goes on to explain how this obscurity has allowed the ideology to become invisible and pervasive, synonymous with “human nature,” and how this has put the planet at risk even as it has immiserated millions upon millions. How it became embodied in the Kochs, and gave rise to Trumpism and the other cryptofascist movements around the world, from Golden Dawn to Ukip, and how the Panama Papers are a kind of perfect encapsulation of the kind of capitalism we talk about when we talk about neoliberal capitalism.

The essay commemorates Monbiot’s new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature

I go along with Monbiot right up to the part where he starts talking about consumer demand being the source of environmental destruction, which shades dangerously into austerity ecology territory: the idea that the left needs to be the movement of material austerity, abandoning technology and the ways that it provides material abundance with fewer energy, material and labor inputs. Where once the left said that the pollution and exploitation of industry were artifacts of capitalism, to be done away with through worker ownership and the ending of profit-above-responsibility “shareholder value” ideas; now the green left says that industry and capitalism are to be done away with together, in favor of a “steady state” that controls our population and our technology at some arbitrary level (some say the 1970s, others the 16th century).

I was always skeptical of this, but Leigh Phillips’s Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff congealed my suspicions into something much more coherent and radical. Materialism is good. Stuff is good. Intensive high-tech farming is how we save forests, by using genomics, high tech pesticides and other techniques to produce more food on fewer acres, leaving behind green spaces for the rest of the world (contrasted with low-tech-pesticide-intensive, land-intensive “organic” farming, which can’t feed the world at the current population, nor projected populations, and is wishful thinking wrapped up in unscientific nonsense).

Any time someone starts talking about the planet’s “carrying capacity” I want to see their numbers. Why do we assume that behaviorally modern hominids, 50,000 years into their run on Earth (a planet whose species have a median duration of 10 million years) will cease our amazing track-record of massively reducing labor, energy and material inputs to our necessities and luxuries? Why assume that pollution-demanding political ideologies like neoliberalism (whose managers have the fiduciary duty to pollute right up to the point where the profits outweigh the penalties) are to be permanently coupled with technology? If Walmart and Amazon, which run as command economies internally, can manage to efficiently produce, allocate and fulfill goods, why not assume that rather than needing to worry about robots taking away our “jobs,” that they’ll instead free us to have these global-scale technologies (Amazon and Walmart are more software than hardware, after all) without the exploitative labor relationships and the pollution?

Stalinism was a polluting, corrupt nightmare. Let’s never do that again. But there are more options for a technological, materiallly abundant industrial civilization than Stalinism and Thatcherism.

Pg. 2: Rift (Ep. 2, Act 1)

Now that the truth about rent is out in the open, Markesha and Toshi take very different strategies to cope with it.

Corrugated cardboard, being composed primarily of wood pulp, is prohibitively expensive and well outside the budget of most people who live in Outer Trinity.  However, the same zig-zag reinforcing technique works wonders with the kind of cheap, flimsy plastics that are prodigiously available pretty much everywhere.  As a result, the disposable box industry is still alive and well in Trinity.

Kamikaze is a dustbowl cyberpunk webcomic and animated series concept.  The comic updates every Wednesday!

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolutely lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.

Netflix just announced they want to start producing anime.