Fortress Mind

It's Make A Terrible Comic Day, tho i messed up and called it Draw A Bad Comic day.

@atlaculture wanna see a fish skin dress I snapped a photo of at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver Canada?

If you zoom in you'll see is from a people in what's Siberia, Russia today. It's salmon skin; light, durable, water repellent and the otherwise waste product of eating fish. But not warm enough for outdoor use so it's women's clothing. Apparently the vibrant primary color decorative trimming was added later or maybe it's the swirly bits, the blurb is not quite clear.

I own a fish skin coin pouch, one of the softest most supple things I've ever touched, so I can imagine what this outfit might have felt like brand new.

Needless to say it screamed Water Tribe at me.

The amount of patience and skill it must take to make one of these robes is astounding. If you gave me a bunch of salmon skins to process, I would probably just fry the skins and eat them.

Includes detail on the creation:

(Reads left to right)

Whistleblower on Reddit rage-blogs about how the food delivery company he worked for as a developer is ripping customers AND drivers off.

Main post screenshotted here in case it gets yanked; the whole thread is worth a read.

The post in its entirety reads as follows:

I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine.

You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent.

First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better.

But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.

If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust.

Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker.

In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless.

And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.

If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to.

I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.

"Please!" said the Lorax, eyes full of tears, "I haven't seen Chestnut in many long years! "I haven't seen Sycamore, the Sequoias are wee, "And as for old Pando, that marvellous tree "You've built a great fence right across his fine face! "You've split him in pieces--as though it's your place!

"If the trees were there first, then--yes--leave them be! "But those no-good invasives planted well after me! "They were planted by settlers, who razed the land first!" And he jumped up and down, "They're truly the worst! "So chop down that Bradford, and chop it down good! "And plant there a native that you always should

"Have left alone in the first place!" And so saying, he Picked up my axe and he chopped down that tree! And he gave me a seed, and said, "Treat him with care! "Feed him clean water, give him fresh air! "Grow a forest. Protect them from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back."

[ID: black and white image of a white guy with glasses and short dark hair smiling in front of a microphone]

(source)

I love Tom Lehrer's music and style of satire and from what I can tell was an all around great guy, who famously hated Henry Kissinger. He was an energetic person who inspired comedy musicians such as Weird Al.

He lived a rich life until the age of 97.

He made his entire catalog of music public domain before his death and it was mirrored by the Internet Archive.

I remember my dad and sister bewildering me thoroughly the first time they played me Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:

Not to mention other gems like The Masochism Tango:

And We'll All Go Together When We Go:

I’m writing a book of history. When I did all that research on brutalism, I realized not for the first time but more fully and completely than ever before the extent to which historical fact is often really disruptive to the stories we tell about it. Most “history” doesn’t even survive the barest investigation of the facts because most “history” is political storytelling.

“brutalism is communist” is one of the biggest stories about Brutalism, and it’s why people both love and hate it, but it’s really not true. Communists invented the word Brutalism to mock American tenement housing which by the mid 50s was collapsing and lacked anything resembling modern amenities. They contrasted it to “the new humanism,” the soviet school of architecture’s high ceilinged, centrally heated, public transit accessible public urban housing. Those apartments built under Stalin are still in high demand in Moscow and st. Petersburg because the architects and the builders did a good job. They’re old, but still decent places to live. Brutalism was a slur for designs that centered cost-cutting over safety or liveability. Meanwhile, architects like Miese or Le Corbusier were designing buildings that centered neither the occupant nor the financier, and were pushing this radical view that material science could make architecture the new great center of artistic expression. “Béton Brut” or raw concrete became the medium of the post war reconstruction because it was cheap but you could mold it into anything. architecture could experiment structurally with techniques that had previously been limited to sculpture and you could get buildings that truly seemed to defy gravity.

The Brut of art brut and Béton Brut was confused with the Brutal conditions of cheap american tenements and then reclaimed homophonically by a bunch of edgy British architects to make a style that is permanently misunderstood even by the people who like it because it was born from this condensation of two separate meanings of the word “Brut(e).” Brutalism only gets its socialist associations in the 70s and 80s when tory politicians started mongering conspiracies about the inherent socialism of public housing (cheap, made of concrete) because poor people lived there. the “commie block” of eastern europe was far more common in yugoslavia than russia until the late 60s and 70s when brezhnev built more of them for, again, cost reasons.

All art is political. All of it. And politics has been moving at the speed of sound even since the first proto-human said “you can’t sit with us” at the lunch table. Renaissance faires are a kind of public art that exists because of a political movement that killed or destroyed the careers of thousands of queer people and communists. Those people, working in hollywood, were trying to live lives, be free, and change minds about what society could accept and when they were blacklisted by HUAC and Joe Mccarthy and Ronald Reagan, they went out into the woods and made their own party so they could stay working and living and making art.

“Historical accuracy” was not the goal. Surviving a political purge was the goal. Now, not everyone who studies history cares about the same things. My roommate in grad school was working on lightbulbs. Just lightbulbs. nothing else. It would have killed me, to be honest. He loved it. But if you are going to complain about historical inaccuracies in the folk tradition that was created to survive a political purge you better damn well be right about what you’re fucking talking about.

This is a super easy litmus test.

If you are ever talking about someone in the context of human health and nutrition and they make a recommendation for fluoride-free toothpaste, you can dismiss their perspective on all other subjects relating to human health and nutrition.

If someone wants to improve human health but they're willing to profit off of fluoride-free toothpaste, they're either totally unaware of what they're talking about and are therefore not worth listening to, or they're a scammer and are therefore not worth listening to.

Lead Safe Mama sells a bunch of bullshit through Amazon affiliate links, but the easiest one to see right away as the sign of someone who cares more about their money than your health is fluoride-free toothpaste.

"Lead Safe Mama Says" is not a good reason to do anything except ignore whatever instructions follow.

There is definitely reason to be concerned about the lead concentrations in cassava flour, there are a few products that, if consumed daily, would put you at risk of having higher lead levels than recommended by the FDA.

But Lead Safe Mama doesn't bother with the FDA, the difference between the presence of lead and exposure risk, or the way that lead is actually tracked by people who are looking to prevent heavy metal poisoning.

Lead Safe Mama says "there is no safe level of lead according to the WHO." What the WHO means when they say that is is that there is no known safe level of lead in your bloodstream. What LFM means when she says that is "all lead is scary and coming to turn your children into autism zombies."

Lead Safe Mama was also the one who raised a huge stink about lead in Stanley cups and other thermoses a couple of years ago. There is lead in some of those products - it's present in the solder used to seal things and isn't bioavailable. Lead Safe Mama was also the one who was scaremongering about vintage plates. She tests for lead in paint using dubious techniques then over-states the risk of exposure and possible outcomes from exposure. There was a whole tumblr shitpost that went viral about it.

So this post (descriptions in alt):

Is entirely based on reporting by a lady who believes that childhood lead exposure is being misdiagnosed as autism, and claims that explains the current high rate of autism diagnosis. A lady WHO RECOMMENDS NATURAL CHELATION for autistic children when they are too frail for CHEMICAL FUCKING CHELATION.

There's a similar post by the same blogger circulating about this Consumer Report's survey of lead in cassava flour that says that Bob's Red Mill is showing lead levels that is 2343% higher than the Consumer Reports recommended .5 micrograms per adult per day (that .5 microgram number is itself modeled on California Prop 65 standards).

So that's got to be a ton, right, like a crazy amount of lead, right?

Nope. It's 11.715 micrograms.

That is below the 12.5 microgram per day reference value set by the FDA for people who are pregnant or could become pregnant, but definitely higher than the 3microgram per day value set for children. Probably your child should not consume a cup of cassava flour from Bob's Red Mill per day.

One point I'm making here is that actually Bob's Red Mill and Pamela's are actually probably fine with their CA65 warning labels - there's not an absurd risk of high blood lead levels from eating their cassava products.