we found now

A Florida Mom Claimed Trans Organ Harvesters Abducted Her Son. He Had Simply Moved Out https://www.them.us/story/florida-mom-trans-organ-harvesters

Suarez told the Herald that his mother, Odalys Heredia, had controlled every aspect of his life, such as determining which sports he played in high school to telling him gay men would hit on him if he crossed his legs. (Heredia denied saying this but explained to the Herald that she believes that “only women cross their legs.”)

And then after he left:

In the ensuing months, Heredia and Saleh raised thousands of dollars on GoFundMe and began the process of establishing a guardianship order over Suarez that, if finalized, would have disenfranchised him from almost every type of decision-making in his life. To police and sympathetic followers online, the two described Suarez as mentally incompetent and possessing the intellect of a middle schooler, characterizations that were plainly false and deeply offensive to Suarez himself.

“He wasn’t ready to leave the house,” Heredia told the Herald of her son, who was enrolled in college. “Maybe he is an adult because of his age, but you cannot call a boy with autism an adult.”

Garganta los Cuartos, Cáceres

Fuentes de Algar, Alicante

Las Chorreras, Cuenca

Cantonigrós, Barcelona

Los Pilones, Cáceres

Salto del Usero, Murcia

Garganta la Olla, Cáceres

El Trabuquete, Cáceres

Lagunas de Ruidera, Albacete

internet shaquille's basics but especially:

making rice

making scrambled eggs

making oatmeal

levels of cooking meat

using & storing vegetables with recipes in the description (this one has a bit of Sassiness directed at people who dont like vegetables but the content is solid)

food safety + a recipe to demonstrate

how to learn to cook (just a list of subtopics, no actual tips)

cooking techniques playlist

how to cut x

basics with babish s1 & 2, but particularly:

freezer meals,

weeknight meals,

kitchen tools (although the specific suggestions are pretty expensive even with the lower end scale items the basic categories are solid, and you can evaluate what items you will realistcially need - eg. if you dont need to read temp for steaks etc the temp reader will not be relevant) &

kitchen care (mid-high advanced home cooking)

basic knife skills

picking the right pan for each recipe

j. kenji lopez-alt's tips and tricks playlist

egg recipes

a little more complicated, involved, and longer than any of the rest of these but good breakdown of flavor & how and why to use the basic seasoning/flavor profiles

and then recipe channels representing various cuisines:

j. kenji lopez-alt (various)

marion's kitchen (southeast & east asian, western/asian fusion)

maangchi (korean)

future neighbor (mostly korean)

the western supermarket playlist of chinese cooking demystified (more recipes available but these are accessible if you dont have "specialty" ingredients)

family recipes playlist by made with lau (chinese)

not another cooking show (various)

cooking with boris (bear with me here i know he does it exaggeratedly humorously but a lot of them are actually solid and beginner cook friendly. mostly slavic/russian)

you suck at cooking (also falls into the intentionally humorous category but most of the recipes are pretty solid anyway)

how to cook that (baking, also does debunking videos of viral cooking hacks - breaks down the reasons the hacks dont work, pretty important to understand those basics imo)

internet shaquille (various)

babish culinary universe (various)

i REFUSE to recommended joshua weissman because he is fucking insufferable but if you want you can try if you can deal with it, the techniques/recipes seem fine for the most part

June 23, 2021

I've been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.

I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don't know how to make friends online. Because this isn't a problem that I experience, I've had a tendency to think along the lines of "kids these days" etc. But that's the easy out. Most of the people I'd consider "online friends" of mine are people I met online several years ago or they're people I met IRL and we just don't live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can't honestly say I'd feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.

If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it's harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for "engagement." The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn't to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.

How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.

Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn't chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.

Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It's hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you're saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I'm probably not the only person on this site that feels like I'm either an observer or a performer, but I'm rarely a participant.

The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.

From Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom)

1. We have a new paper out in PNAS today, in which we address the harm wrought by dramatically restructuring human communication of the span of a decade, with no aim other than selling ads.

It might be the most important paper of my career.

2. This thread describes the paper and the backstory leading to it. I'll be posting over the course of the day as I can find the time.

Three years ago, @uwcip postdoc @jbakcoleman organized a summer meeting at Princeton. I attended, and it changed the direction of my research.

3. Think about how you receive information today, compared to fifteen years or twenty years ago.

Social media, internet search, click-based advertising: innovations in information technology and new mechanisms for monetizing information have rewired human communication.

4. The problem is that this enormous transformation has taken place not as a stewarded effort to improve information quality or to further human well-being, but more or less simply for the purpose of keeping people engaged online in order to sell ads.

5. We don't have a theory for how human decision-making operates in an algorithm-driven online network of comprising billions of souls—and we argue there is no reason to expect some sort of invisible hand is going to bail us out and ensure that good information floats to the top.

6. It is difficult to overestimate the stakes. If these technologies so effectively sow mis- and disinformation worldwide, how we can hope to solve problems such as global warming, extinction, war, food security, pandemics? How can we prevent democracies from crumbling?

7. Aside: The paper has been in the works for over two years. A 2019 draft said something along the lines of "Imagine that pandemic hit and people wouldn't follow public health advice because of misinformation spread online. We'd be *really* screwed then."

8. So what is so radically different now compared to twenty years ago, and why does it matter? In the paper, we explore a few factors.

First, scale. We've gone from small face-to-face communities to a global network of 3.6 billion social media users in the blink of an eye.

9. We write "Expanding the scale of a collectively behaving system by eight orders of magnitude is certain to have functional consequences. Not only are societies at the scale of ours rare in the natural world; they also are often ecologically unstable where they do form."

10. Research in opinion dynamics, animal behavior, network epistemology, and statistical physics reveals that the ability to come to collective decisions depends strongly on the size of the group. Bigger does not mean wiser or better-functioning.

11. Second, network structure. Face-to-face networks limit the scope of influence; we can only talk to so many people in a day. On social media it's different. IRL I couldn't tell 200,000 people about this paper in an afternoon. More than that have clicked on this thread already.

12. Moreover, preferential attachment processes (often abetted by algorithms, more on that later) accelerate the inequality of influence online.

Network structure differs as well, with more "long ties" online that accelerate the spread of information and disinformation alike.

13. Third, the ease and fidelity afforded by digital communication. Online, messages can be forwarded, re-forwarded, and re-re-forwarded time and again without a loss of resolution, without breaking down in gibberish like in a kids' game of telephone.

14. All this takes place at essentially zero cost at staggering speed. Someone pens a piece of disinformation after lunch. It gets amplified a few times, and reaches e.g. the leader of the free world later that afternoon. He retweets it to 90 million people, who amplify further.

15. Suddenly a deception is cascading through every corner of the online world. It's even hard to triangulate to figure out if it's true, because by this point it's coming at you from all sides and seemingly from a plenitude of sources.

The very same day it was crafted.

16. Think about the downside of frictionless communication.

Why isn't your postal mailbox buried in 50 pounds of junk mail every day? Because stamps cost money.

Why didn't you get long-distance phone scammers in the 1990s? 25 cents a minute back then, that's why.

17. I want to correct a misperception I'm seeing. Our message is not "ads are evil."

It's that social media etc. been designed largely to sell ads, which means it is not designed with care to facilitate the spread of reliable information, let alone improve human well-being.

18. The fourth and final development we discuss is the role of algorithms and algorithmic feedback.

The posts you see on social media—including this thread, I fear—are fed to you by algorithms designed to maximize your engagement, not the veracity of the content you consume.

19. Perhaps even worse, who you *know* on social media is in some large part a function of whom algorithms wanted you to know.

You may like your online friends because they're cool or whatever, but you *met* many of them because some algorithm thought that would keep you online.

20. And these algorithms know so much about us. The amount of data is staggering. There are hundreds of simultaneous A-B experiments ongoing at any time to figure out what makes us click, collectively....

21. ...and to build up a detailed enough profile to predict what makes you click, specifically.

Sure, the results are sometimes risible. But sometimes they're not. Machine learning is a powerful beast when competently implemented and fed with an endless supply of data.

22. Algorithms create filter bubbles at times. They recommend that I connect with people who thinking like I do, and even if I seek out divergent viewpoints, other algorithms may learn that I don't engage with them and start to down-rank them in my feed.

23. Other times, algorithms may learn that agreement is boring and conflict is engaging. In the struggle for attention, righteous indignation outcompetes thoughtful discussion. So that's what we get. In this way they regulate the emotional tenor of the online worlds we inhabit.

24. Now add in the fact that these algorithms are opaque, sometimes even to their creators, and mercurial. We don't know what they're doing, or what effects they are having, because the only people who have the data to measure it consider that information too valuable to share.

25. "In sum, we are offloading our evolved information-foraging processes onto algorithms. But these algorithms are typically designed to maximize profitability, with often insufficient incentive to promote an informed, just, healthy, and sustainable society."

To be continued...

26. I'll finish up this thread tomorrow. In the meantime, check out lead author @jbakcoleman's feed and those of my coauthors.

@WolframBarfuss @icouzin @JonathanDonges @andy_gersick @jenniferjacquet @albert_kao @RachelEMoran @kaiatombak @jayvanbavel @elkeweber @PRomanczuk

end 🧵 2021/06/22

This reply by one of the coauthors, Jay Van Bavel, is spot on:

E.O. Wilson said it best:

Two days ago Israel has, oh so generously, decided to share some of the millions of vaccines that they have been hogging with the Palestinian non-Authority, but there’s just one small problem: all the vaccines that Israel has “donated” are either expired or near-expired and they were only given to Palestinians in exchange for them to give Israel a brand new vaccine shipment that’s supposed to be shipped to Palestinians this September directly from Pfizer as a form of charity, even though again, Israel is 100% obligated to vaccinate all the Palestinians without anything in return from them.

Gaza of course is left out of this deal, even though Israel bombed the ONLY COVID-19 facility in Gaza and their Ministry of Health just last month. Please keep that in mind when the media attempt to save Israel’s image by reporting on how they wanted to help out by donating vaccines, but it was the evil™ Palestinians who “refused” their generous offer.

Source for Israel giving Palestinians expired vaccines in exchange for taking their new vaccines: X, X & X.

Source for Israel giving vaccines to foreigner countries for political blackmail: X & X

The deaths of nearly 200 people are linked to February’s cold snap and blackouts, a Houston Chronicle analysis reveals, making the natural disaster one of the worst in Texas this past century.

The tally, which is nearly double the state’s official count, comes from an investigation of reports from medical examiners, justices of the peace and Department of State Health Services, as well as lawsuits and news stories.

The state count, which is preliminary, has yet to incorporate some deaths already flagged by medical examiners as storm-related.

The 194 deaths identified by the Chronicle so far include at least 100 cases of hypothermia that killed people in their homes or while exposed to the elements, at least 16 carbon monoxide poisonings of residents who used dangerous methods for heat and at least 22 Texans who died when medical devices failed without power or who were unable to seek live-saving care because of the weather.

Sixteen deaths were from other causes, such as fires or vehicle wrecks, while the remaining 40 were attributed by authorities to the storm without listing a specific cause.

“This is almost double the death toll from Hurricane Harvey,” said State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas. “There was no live footage of flooded homes, or roofs being blown off, or tidal surges, but this was more deadly and devastating than anything we’ve experienced in modern state history.”

The toll is almost certain to grow in coming weeks as death investigators in the state’s most populous counties clear a backlog in cases from the cold snap. The Travis County medical examiner alone is investigating more than 80 deaths between Feb. 13 and Feb. 20.

The deaths come from 57 counties in all regions of the state but are disproportionately centered on the Houston area, which at times during the crisis accounted for nearly half of all power outages. Of the known ages, races and ethnicities of the victims, 74 percent were people of color. Half were at least 65. Six were children.

Their ‘Starship’ is not, and never was designed to fly to Mars - that’s a marketing scheme, and it makes no sense if you actually look at the vehicle. SpaceX is able to throw money at this project because they’ve got a military contract to produce it as a military cargo drone. Their ‘Starship’ is designed to deliver a C-130′s load of US military cargo to anywhere in the world within an hour.

SpaceX, from before its first ever launch, has been partnered with the US military - as noted in the incident where the company stranded its workers without food on an island owned by the US Army. SpaceX’s constant failures with their rocket come from a simple calculation - cost versus time. To slowly and methodically design a rocket such that, by your first test flight, you’re confident in it, is just that: slow. Blowing up rocket after rocket and iterating is fast, but expensive - but when you have military contractor money, it’s worth it.

This is far from SpaceX’s only time contracting for the military, having launched military payloads with their Falcon rockets, and even designed satellites for the military. There’s a reason only USAmerican citizens are allowed to work at SpaceX.

The image of SpaceX as an eccentric billionaire’s quest to colonise Mars serves as a marketing ploy which distracts from the company’s real existence as part of the US military industrial complex, beholden not to the Reddit-fueled whims of an egocentric moron, but to the massive economic and structural forces of modern capitalism.

That’s not happening any time this century, and probably not in the next one either. Have you noticed that we’ve been trying to do a Mars walk for 50 years and haven’t succeeded yet? How long do you think it will take to get a small settlement on Mars, let alone a self-sustaining one? Global warming is going to catch up with us waaaaaay before that and the rich know that. The idea that they’re betting their future on moving to Mars is ridiculous.

Companies are spending millions of dollars to keep themselves from having to cover benefits for their employees instead of spending that money on, for instance, employee benefits.

And they’re doing this at a time when the job these workers do has become the most dangerous for drivers and in the highest demand for deliverers.

Their attempt is so transparently heinous that they had to dispute a neutral description of the proposal.

And their add campaigns are exactly the bullshit Amazon tries to pull, where they have people of color talk about how important their job is or how much “freedom” they need in their work life. If you’ve ever lived in a community with an Amazon warehouse/distribution center, you’d know they regularly chew up and spit out workers in poor and often minority communities desperate for work.

VOTE NO ON PROP 22 in CA

It’s the gig economy corporations fighting hard to have the right to exploit workers and deny them the basic benefits of employment. 

Like, you know, the right to be paid for all the time you spend on the job, not the time you spend doing specific tasks. Like the right to overtime payments. The right to have your employer pay for necessary equipment. (In this case, being paid for gas, car maintenance, insurance, and so on.) 

OR - if this really were “independent contractors just using an app to find clients” - the right to negotiate directly with those clients. The right to set their own rates. The right to discuss the terms of the work - like, agreeing to a delay on one side or the other. The right to build  up a regular clientele. The right to refuse clients without penalty. The right to know the details of a job before agreeing to it. (Did you know that Uber and Lyft drivers don’t know the destination before they accept a job?)