“But to an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system, the shirt is a collection of license plates, and they will get added to the license plate reader’s database just like any others it sees. The intention is to make deploying that sort of surveillance less effective, more expensive, and harder to use without human oversight, in order to slow down the transition to what Rose calls ‘visual personally identifying data collection’.
‘It’s a highly invasive mass surveillance system that invades every part of our lives, collecting thousands of plates a minute. But if it’s able to be fooled by fabric, then maybe we shouldn’t have a system that hangs
things of great importance on it,’ she said.”—Alex Hern, “The fashion line designed to trick surveillance cameras.” The Guardian. August 14, 2019.
Category: quotes
Domestic War on Terror Is Not the Answer to White Supremacy
“At a time when the American system of government is already being sorely tested by a demagogue and would-be autocrat in the White House, it would be disastrous to grant more power to the Justice Department and the nation’s security services.”
—James Risen, ” To Fight White Supremacist Violence, Let’s Not Repeat the Mistakes of the War on Terror.” The Intercept. August 17, 2019.
Anytime you think the solution to a problem takes the form of “War on X” or “X War”, you probably need to think a little harder about it.
The War on Terror treats a symptom while acting as a catalyst for the underlying disease. Same goes for the “War on Drugs”. The moment marijuana was getting legalized, the criminal elements supplying it went to opiates. Further, one has to wonder how much longer “The Cold War” enabled communism to last by providing a facade the underlying structural problems could hide behind.
Also, this idea of, “At a time when…” is bogus. This kind of testing could happen at any time. If there is some capability you think the next Hitler shouldn’t have as head of government, then you have a good sense of what powers your government shouldn’t have, and you should use that line to have a principled discussion of the powers of state. Should one person be able to start a nuclear war? Should one person be able to start any war, via the War Powers Act? These are conversations that are overdue.
Bad Exercise Advice, Exhibit B
“Despite the apparent complexity of modern exercise programs, you really have only two options if you want to get fitter: you can train harder than you’re currently training, or you can train more. Those two variables, intensity and volume, are the basic levers that all training plans fiddle with in various ways. But let’s be honest: two variables is still too many. We all secretly want to know which one is really the master switch that controls our fitness.”
-Alex Hutchinson, “Is It More Important to Run Faster or Run Longer?” Outside. August 14, 2019.
As covered in the discussion on adaptation response, there is no “master switch that controls our fitness.” If you want to be good at doing push-ups, do push-ups. If you want to swim the English Channel, then practice swimming miles at a time in cold water currents. If you want to be able to hold your breath for an extended time, then practice holding your breath. If you want to have six-pack abs, then you need to reduce your eating and increase your activity to the point that you can get your body fat below 10%. Everybody has six pack abs, it’s just that, for most of us, they are hidden behind a thick layer of fat.
Of course, goals tend to be more complex. If you want to run your first marathon, then you need to run more. You should work up to running 50 miles a week and be able to run for 20 miles straight a month before your race.
If you want to run faster than your last marathon, then you can increase your mileage up to 120 miles a week of elite runners and you can work in as much speed work as your body can handle at that volume, which will not be much unless you have been running that kind of volume for years and your body has adapted to it.
It is possible to run shorter distances fast and move up to the marathon. So, after years of adapting to a high volume of speed and middle distance running, you can start training for longer distances and increase mileage.
However, if your new to running, your goal is to run a marathon and you don’t have a decade time horizon to do it, then it’s probably easier to start with running more rather than a running program focused on running faster. Conversely, if your goal is to run a sub-20 minute 5k race, then running more than 50 miles a week will likely make you slower, not faster. Better to do intervals of 5k, a mile, a half-mile and a quarter mile with lower total mileage.
Your training has to reflect the activity you are training for. Sprinting is not the same as long distance running. Cycling isn’t the same leg exercise as doing squats and deadlifts. Our body (and mind) adapts to the training (or lack thereof) we give it.
The Population Bust: Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It
“The mismatch between expectations of a rapidly growing global population (and all the attendant effects on climate, capitalism, and geopolitics) and the reality of both slowing growth rates and absolute contraction is so great that it will pose a considerable threat in the decades
—Zachary Karabell, “The Population Bust Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It.” Foreign Affairs. September/October 2019.
ahead. Governments worldwide have evolved to meet the challenge of managing more people, not fewer and not older. Capitalism as a system is particularly vulnerable to a world of less population expansion; a significant portion of the economic growth that has driven capitalism over the past several centuries may have been simply a derivative of more people and younger people consuming
more stuff. If the world ahead has fewer people, will there be any real economic growth? We are not only unprepared to answer that question; we are not even starting to ask it.”
Take that, Karl! Workers end up destroying capitalism by not reproducing themselves. There’s no extracting surplus value from people that don’t exist!
The Green Gang — The California Sunday Magazine
“‘You need to call the Green Gang.’ The Green Gang. It was a strange, frightening phrase. Rajput had never heard of the group before. When she began asking about it in local villages, the details seemed too fantastical to be true. It was a gang of hundreds — no, thousands — of women, almost all of them poor and low-caste. It was said that they took on anyone who dared to hurt a woman, including violent in-laws, philandering husbands, domestic abusers, land-grabbers, bootleggers, molesters, and rapists. Sometimes, they beat sense into aggressors, and other times, they scared them into submission.”
—Elizabeth Flock, “The Green Gang.” California Sunday. August 1, 2019.
Solein Because Soylent Was Already Taken | World Economic Forum
“…a new protein powder, Solein, made out of CO₂, water and electricity. It’s a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs. It reportedly looks and tastes like wheat flour, and could become an ingredient in a wide variety of food products after its initial launch in 2021.”
—Robbie Berman, “NASA worked out how to make food out of thin air – and it could feed billions.” World Economic Forum. August 5, 2019.
Finally, a viable solution to climate change: we’ll sequester CO2 in our bodies, eat our way out of disaster and solve world hunger all in one shot.
Exceptional Access to Encrypted Communications
Bob Barr has recently added his voice to the ongoing call of law enforcement to provide exceptional access to encrypted communications. Here’s why that’s not going to work.
“Exceptional access — as governments propose — is the problem of making a system selectively secure. I can tell you, it’s hard enough to make a secure system. It’s vastly harder to make a system secure except for governments, and only available to governments that consist of ‘democratically elected representatives and [a] judiciary’ as the GCHQ authors imagine.”
—Jon Callas, “The ‘Ghost User’ Ploy to Break Encryption Won’t Work.” DavisVanguard.org. July 24,2019.
Is being able to access the encrypted communications of everyone enough? Between the drone’s Gorgon Stare above, the Ring camera on every other front door for police to access, televisions tracking every show being watched, phones and digital assistants listening in on conversations, fitness trackers as evidence in court cases, Stringray and other technology for phone tracking, license plate readers to track vehicle movement over time, surveillance balloons and so on, it feels to me like the police and military are a little under-powered these days.
I was promised a camera in my television watching my every move, a Room 101 for not sufficiently toeing the line and a boot stomping on a face of humanity forever. Was Uncle Orwell lying to me?
Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology
“…’withered’ technology usually means mature technology. It is
much easier for companies to create best-selling products by using mature technology as this kind of technologies are abundant, well-understood and cheap. Mature technologies are often studied extensively by people, and it is easy to experiment with or make further innovations. Even if the technology might be obsolete, it is applicable as long as used appropriately.”—Weisi Han, “Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.” Medium.com. December 6, 2017.
Instantly recognized this as my philosophy as well. I mostly buy used items, from clothing to computers. It means I never pay retail, which lowers the cost of failure if you are trying to do something new.
It’s much easier to install a custom operating system on a phone or computer when you paid <$100 than when you paid >$1,000.
It also gets you in a frame of mind where you can think differently about technologies you want to learn. For example, I’m more interested in learning Common Lisp because it’s a mature technology in a way that Julia is not. Mature languages have libraries, standards and other elements that newer languages don’t.
In short, accepting limitations and using different tools than others can be a source of creativity and can change your focus.
David Byrne on Love – Believer Magazine
“Love, it seems to me, is a joyous self-deception, practiced by two
—David Byrne, “David Byrne in Conversation with David Byrne.” The Believer. August 1, 2019.
people at the same time. No one is as wonderful as the object of one’s love appears to be, and yet who among us would trade that illusion for the truth? Being an illusion, it is not real, but despite not being something we can see or touch, feelings are as real as any physical object. So in that sense, love is absolutely real. Real and not real at the same time. Like some kind of quantum physics puzzle, it binds the universe.”
The Mutable Web
…After a little research, I found two solutions to this problem [of changing a website’s code locally and having those changes persist across browser sessions.]
The first is to use a browser extension. You could make one yourself, but that’s a little too involved for what I’m trying to do, so I turned to an extension called Stylus3. One way to use Stylus is to search https://userstyles.org for the website in question and find a theme you like. Alternatively, you can create new stylesheets right in the browser. You can apply them to specific pages, entire domains, or every site you visit.
The second method is to use web browsers’ native ability to apply custom stylesheets to web pages. In Chrome the feature is called Local Overrides, while in Firefox it’s the Style Editor. In Chrome, you can specify a directory on your filesystem to save the changes you make in dev tools and it will load that stylesheet the next time you visit the site, which is more or less how I think things should work, but for various reasons I don’t use Chrome. Firefox’s system seems to be geared toward developing your own website rather than overriding existing websites, which is cool but doesn’t really work for my use case.”
-Dylan, “The Mutable Web.” simulacrum.party. July 23, 2019
Like RSS, this is about taking more control of your experience of content online. Of course, there are styles that can be used to change The New York Times.
