Vox Datum

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.

Archive.org is also incredibly dangerous. Not only does it have the way back machine, but it also archives books and lets you read them for free, and rare videos and not so rare videos. Definitely don’t donate to @internetarchive because it goes to protecting library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, and websites, and is a seriously important thing to keep in this world that keeps trying to destroy access of educational and entertainment things to everyone, and stop the rewriting the narrative of things. They’re a really important website, crucial I’d say. So don’t trust them because you can access so much that you’d never be able to access on your own.

Also @jstor has so many academic articles you can access for free— millions of high-quality primary sources and images from around the world, including artworks, maps, photographs, and more.

So don’t make free accounts with these sites, don’t support the amazing archival work they do and all the effort they go to to make sure everyone has the right to access information.

Don’t donate toward them as they work so hard to protect those archives and information, and definitely don’t use them because they have so much access to so much information that so many other people are trying to paywall or block you from.

So don’t do that because there’s nothing academics love more than to feel valued and needed and like their years-long work might actually be read and appreciated/responded to.

It took Haiti over a hundred years to pay that ransom and it's difficult to explain just how badly that fucked up their entire development, especially since France also demanded a 50% discount on everything they bought from Haiti just to make it harder. Like! No wonder they're impoverished!

Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

(I also <3 rats, and used to have pet rats, so admittedly I am super biased, but they're such sweet babies! Forget the anti-rat propaganda!)

You can adopt a baby yourself here ;)

Trans women are just strictly superior at everything I guess.

Truly speechless at this. "Cis women are so dainty and fragile that moving chess pieces for too long exhausts them."

Please acquire some self-respect (and maybe learn statistics). I am taking psychic damage over here.

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Quiet Does Not Mean Empty