Respect the Geometries

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

the short version of ONE of the alleged crimes is that they've been hijacking referral links and codes. if you have honey installed on your browser at all, and you use any referral code from anyone, there is a high probability honey will swap out the referral link identifier for their own even if they don't provide a coupon at checkout.

they also are just lying to you, and hiding coupons that very much exist. they're completely fraudulent

actually i dont know if these questions are frequently asked because i do not read the notes on posts that blow up as a matter of policy. but if i was coming into this blind, these are the questions that i personally would have about this.

Q: what's the alternative to Honey? i need my treats and deals

A: there are no "alternatives". the Karma extension is the same scam. the Pie extension is the same scam but pretending to be a man-in-the-middle adblocker and also started by the same people who made Honey. just google "[retailer] coupon', you aren't going to do better than the coupons you find that way. do not install coupon extensions or shopping extensions, the ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL IS A SCAM. any app or browser extension claiming to do what honey does is a scam by design

Q: I don't care about "influencers", they are all evil

A: thats valid. in the context of this case the word "influencer" is applying to a lot of people you would not group with Mr. Beast. honey is stealing referral credits from literally everyone, including you if you just give your friend a DoorDash signup code. if your friend has Honey on their browser, Honey will attempt to hijack the sale/signup during checkout, and you will not get the bonus DoorDash promised you for giving out the signup code. it doesn't matter if youre a professional youtuber or not. also, let's be clear here, your favorite 1000-sub microniche artist cannot make a living any other way anymore. youtube does not pay minimum wage, much less a living wage, unless you get into the upper thirds of viewership by sheer luck. the vast majority of the people acting happy to be there on your screen while you eat cereal are not making ends meet without participating in affiliate marketing

Q: is this actually illegal? are they going to get into trouble?

A: answers to both questions are going to depend on whether anyone goes after them successfully. but if i were a betting man no i would not bet on PayPal Corporation facing any blowback about this whatsoever. im guessing all of this behavior is prominently covered in their TOS which no one reads but everyone agrees to. whether TOSes that no one reads are legally binding or not is a complicated legal question that has only just started to be litigated

Q: what else is going on?

A: the link above will take you to MegaLag's youtube video on this issue, which was released as part 1 of 3. the other videos arent out yet but it also appears Honey has also been running a variation of Yelp Extortion on anyone selling anything (basically a protection racket, Yelp waits for small businesses to get bad reviews [or plants them, its unclear] and then starts calling the business dozens of times a day to "offer" the small business a "membership" which will "allow them to control what appears on their Yelp page". ive worked at two places that were targeted by this one), and also monitoring all shopping carts in every browser where it's installed and stealing employee discount codes and internal-only vendor discount codes and then giving them out to random customers. this has been hinted at but will likely not be addressed until video 2 or 3

Q: why should i care about this when i hate everyone who runs a business of any size, is an influencer, sells stuff online, etc

A: watch the actual video for the explanation but honey is also just hiding coupons from you. i mean it just doesnt work. this is why i never used it. i installed it once, it didnt bring up any coupons i found easily by googling or a newsletter or whatever, and i went "oh this is a scam" and ditched it. it probably worked when it was new, the wedge end of the scams always have to work for a while to get in the door.

and i mean there's "small business owners" and then theres small business owners. i'm a subsistence artist, for a while now i've been studying the youtube economy and cultural shift for artists like myself and concluded i'm going to have to start doing this kind of video stuff to survive. don't make me flash my badge about this, you wont read it anyway, the short version is this referral-hijacking is a way for Actual Evil Megacorporation PayPal to steal money BACK from creators of any size and use everyone who uses Honey as a human battery farm to harvest ad money that you tried to hand to someone else. i dont like that the majority of the subsistence you can even make online is anchored to influencing, referrals, affiliate programs and ads. everyone hates it. no one actually likes Raid Shadow Legends. but you either get paid from advertising or you dont get paid. thats why it matters that PayPal is hijacking affiliate links. it is no different than PayPal walking up and taking the dollar bill you put in the guitar case in front of a busker

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

The preponderance of evidence is that most trending calling posts on Tumblr alleging sexual misconduct by trans women are fabricated by the same relatively small group of bad-faith actors, and that these bullshit callout posts outnumber the legit ones by a considerable margin.

If you think you can tell the legit callout posts and the bullshit ones apart just by looking at them, you're almost certainly wrong.

Like most mechanisms of social control which are based on ostracism, callout posts tend to be most effective against people who are already in a position of vulnerability, and concomitantly, tend to have no significant long-term effect when deployed against people in positions of power or authority.

What all this adds up to is that even leaving the moral dimension of the act aside, from a purely pragmatic perspective, reblogging that callout post accusing a random trans woman you've never heard of of being a dogfucker or what-have-you is an action which in a worst-case scenario will contribute to ruining an innocent person's life, and in a best-case scenario is likely to accomplish nothing whatsoever.

It's encouraging. When you feel like our protests are falling on deaf ears, remember that McDonalds started the year with a loss of over a million dollars, Starbucks fell below it's quarterly sales and is considering closing locations, and people are paying attention- they're changing their opinions. And while these numbers may not be groundbreaking, they are the signs of real effects. Real change.

QUARRY

the DIRT PILES

SHIPPING CONTAINER YARD

a PARTIALLY CONSTRUCTED or HALF DEMOLISHED BUILDING

UNDER A BRIDGE

(Please note that my area of research involves dry sanitation methods for Salmonella cross-contamination within raw flour on equipment surfaces, not oats. Since they are both low-moisture foods, I feel confident using some generalizations to provide a bigger picture.)

1. Some Salmonella strains have desiccation resistance.

For those unfamiliar with microbiology, desiccation resistance means that the bacteria can survive in dry environments. Most bacteria need a certain amount of water available to them to survive. Salmonella serovars like S. Typhimurium, S. enteritidis, and S. Mbandaka can thrive in dry environments. These serovars have been linked to food recalls in the US for the past decade. Additionally, the dried bacteria can resist heat and chemical treatments, making it very hard to kill. This ties into the next problem.

2. In dry production environments, you can't use water to clean or sanitize equipment.

It's important to keep dry food products dry during processing. If they get "too wet," yeasts, molds, and bacteria can grow, impacting the quality and safety of the product. This is the main reason why the industry can't use water or water-containing sanitation solutions on their equipment. To clean, the industry uses brushes, scrapers, and dry ice blasting to remove debris. To sanitize (kill bacteria), some techniques include non-aqueous sanitizers, UV radiation, and superheated steam. These methods can take a lot of time and labor to complete, especially on gigantic processing lines like Quaker.

3. Pressure from upper management to "produce as fast as possible" may have cut down on time for sanitation.

This is slight conjecture, but I went to a sanitation workshop last year and chatted with some sanitation professionals who work in dry environments. I asked them about this problem specifically: "How do you get everything done in lets say, six hours?" One of them laughed and said "It's more like four and a half!"

The pressure from upper management to continuously produce is on everyone in the facility, especially the staff working on the line. "Time is money," and any time not used to make products is lost money. Product safety, something lauded by producers, is always at odds with profit and sometimes isn't achieved. An interesting example is Hello Fresh, who earned an esteemed award for food safety in April 2022, but issued a recall for potential E. coli in their meal kits five months later.

So how did the products get shit in them?

We don't know yet, and we might never know. Keep an eye on updates from the FDA and CDC. You may be able to receive additional information from a FOIA request, but that can depend on a ton of factors like confidentiality and who created the document trail. Instead, let's look at the problem from a systems context.

Oats can be contaminated with Salmonella (among others, see this survey for other indicators) from multiple sources, whether it be from soil, wastewater runoff, or contact with actual shit from known Salmonella vectors like birds. If these products were contaminated with desiccation resistant serovars, the Salmonella could have survived the cooking process (if applicable to the product) and contaminated production equipment. With inadequate sanitation, the equipment could have contaminated newly produced products, leading to where we are now. Additionally, Salmonella could have entered the production line from a roof leak (birds like to hang out on roofs) or other structural issues in the facility. There are tons of possible scenarios here.

Government agencies and external validation sources are getting better at detecting Salmonella in foods due to advances in sensing techniques (PCR, ELISA, etc...). The industry, the government, and research institutions are aware of these issues and are trying to find solutions for dry cleaning and sanitizing to keep this from happening. It's a hot topic these days and everyone wants to solve it. We can generate all of these potential solutions, sure, but it's up to the companies to implement them properly since there are no federal guidelines for dry cleaning and sanitation (yet). Most companies do their best to clean and sanitize because nothing loses more money and customers than a recall.

this is similar to the psychology of husbands who kill their wives and children and then themselves.

it's insane how things are gendered down to hurting and killing yourself...hell, I know men who call cutting a feminine form of self harm.

And if you disagree or think they don’t? You can take a long walk off a short pier and gtfo.

"oh you have chronic pain? sorry I harassed you for being lazy, I didn't realize you had a valid reason. it's good to know you're not actually a lazy person, I still get to harass those people"

"oh you're autistic? sorry I harassed you for being weird, I didn't realize you had a valid reason. it's good to know you're not actually a weird person, I still get to harass those people"

"oh you're deaf? sorry I harassed you for ignoring me, I didn't realize you had a valid reason. you're just not actually a rude person, I still get to harass those people"