jwz: The Web3 Fraud:

After all, a programmer doing the most basic test of a web3 prototype is going to need to get the cryptocurrency, spend the cryptocurrency, and any application will require all users to get the cryptocurrency as well. If this gets abandoned quickly due to the inevitable technical failure "web3" still accomplished its goal of getting more suckers in and extracting their money.

So in the end web3 is a con job, a technological edifice that is beyond useless as anyone who attempts to deploy a real application will quickly discover.

A Note of Reassurance from Your School District Regarding Our Updated Omicron Policies - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

I want to joke about this, but there’s nothing funny here… It’s all basically true in most schools and it’s going to kill us all.

More like this please: Mayo Clinic fires 700 workers, 1% of its workforce, who refused covid jab:

The Mayo Clinic says it has fired 700 workers who refused to receive a covid vaccination, 1% of its 70,000-strong payroll. The company says they can get their jobs back if they get vaxxed.

Officials say while it's sad to lose valuable employees, it's essential to keep patients, the workforce, visitors and communities safe.

— Read the rest

The best of Stephen Colbert’s #HeWhoShallBeNamed | Boing Boing:

In the past year, Stephen Colbert decided he no longer wanted to utter the barbarous name of our former president. After using asterisks like a swear word, he decided to crowdsource euphemisms with the hashtag HeWhoShallBeNamed. Here are the best of these, chosen by The Late Show staff.

My personal preference has been Lord Dampnut (anagrams are sexy), but Марионетка is pretty good too.

Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech:

In the distance is a rectangular frame of foliage. In the foreground, a conference table, placed with architectural rigour so that the focal point is dead centre of the screen. The scene is a tiny cross section through Apple Park, the tech giant’s mighty circular HQ in Cupertino, by Foster + Partners. There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Wingdings redrawn in the style of Comic Sans to create the “worst font ever” | Boing Boing:

Tom Goulet's Comic Dings [.otf, Google Drive] is an intentional atrocity of type design: Wingdings, the unweildy dingbat font, redrawn to use the crudely-weighted linework of Comic Sans. Some people just want to watch the world kern.

There is no fire hot enough, no pit of hell deep enough, to cast this into…

… But police have never lied about the circumstances they killed someone if there were no cameras present to dispute them, right?

Official account of fatal police shooting in Austin, Minn., disputed:

Family members and community activists are disputing the official account of a fatal police shooting last week in Austin, Minn.

The man, who has not yet been officially identified, was fatally shot by a police officer in the parking lot of a gas station in Austin on Thursday night, after he left his home following a lengthy standoff.

A statement from Austin police alleges the man was shot because he confronted officers while armed with a knife.

Michelle Gross with Twin Cities-based Communities United Against Police Brutality has been in contact with the man’s family, and is raising money to help them. She said Sunday that the man was having a mental health crisis and was not threatening anyone.

“It’s a wrongful death situation. There’s no question about it. And we are definitely saying that the police are … lying about the situation,” she said. “If they think that they’re so right, they should release the body camera footage immediately.”

Authorities have not said whether the officers involved were wearing body cameras, or whether they were activated. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating the shooting; the BCA did not provide updates on the investigation over the weekend.

Gross also said actions by law enforcement during the standoff that preceded the shooting caused major damage to the family’s home. The money being raised was going to help them with living expenses.

"We feel strongly that this is a wrongful death. We're appalled at the conduct of the Austin Police Department that not only left a man dead but that left the household of the whole family uninhabitable," she said.

Related link

• EarlierMan dies in confrontation with police in Austin, Minn.

I’m With Optimistic:

Any big plans for the new year???

Hyperbole and a Half: The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas:

From my grandparents' flowery explanation and frequent use of the word "miracle," I went in expecting to be blown away by the production. Unfortunately, the church moms and the pathetic excuses for actors that they called their offspring failed to bring the characters to life in the way I had hoped.  And the story just seemed to center around everyone being really impressed with Jesus and there wasn't much suspense and not a single battle scene.

This is now the greatest* story ever told.

*For certain values of great

What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design (Interconnected):

The brain has a limited amount of resources, so it has to choose what’s going to be regarded and what’s going to be ignored. The feeling of this resource allocation is what we call attention.

This seems to match with my experience.. From a technical point of view this was the point of the doorway transitions in Resident Evil, but narratively it really worked well too.

52 things I learned in 2021 by Tom Whitwell from Fluxx | Fluxx Studio Notes:

Productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one’s own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. [Anna Codrea-Rado] The world’s second most popular electric car (after the Tesla Model 3) is the Wuling HongGuang Mini, which costs $5,000 and outsells vehicles from Renault, Hyundai, VW and Nissan. [Brad Anderson & José Pontes]

With omicron, you need a mask that means business | MPR News:

With another coronavirus variant racing across the U.S., once again, health authorities are urging people to mask up indoors. Yes, you've heard it all before. But given how contagious omicron is, experts say, it's seriously time to upgrade to an N95 or similar high-filtration respirator when you're in public indoor spaces.

The speed limit is America’s most broken law. Why can’t we fix it?:

Speeding is a national health problem and a big reason why this country is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety in the developed world. More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the United States involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year, in addition to an unknowable number of injuries. Thousands of car crash victims are on foot, and speed is an even more crucial determinant of whether they live or die: The odds of a pedestrian being killed in a collision rise from 10 percent at 23 mph to 75 percent at 50 mph. And we’re now in a moment of particular urgency. Last year, when the pandemic shutdowns lowered total miles traveled by 13 percent, the per-mile death rate rose by 24 percent—the greatest increase in a century, thanks to drivers hitting high velocities on empty roads. “COVID,” Roberts said, “was midnight on the day shift.”

One Foot Tsunami: Logic Saves Lives:

Back in 2017, rapper Logic released a song called ”1-800-273-8255”. That’s the number for America’s National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the song was written to encourage those in need of help to call. With over a billion plays on Spotify, it’s no stretch to assume this song has saved lives, but a new study confirms it.

Our history is a battle against the microbes: we lost terribly before science, public health, and vaccines allowed us to protect ourselves - Our World in Data:

Humanity’s history is a continuous battle between us and the microbes.1 For most of our history we were on the losing side.

THX Deep Note – Our legendary sound:

Timothy Leary interview from Folsom prison | Boing Boing:

With society moving closer to prioritizing mental health instead of stigmatizing it, it's no coincidence that alternative treatments such as psilocybin are getting a second look. Gee, if only someone with, I don't know, let's say a doctorate in neuroscience could've mentioned the effectiveness of psychedelic drugs decades ago.

Watching Dr. Timothy Leary’s interview from prison is surreal for several reasons. The least of which is that Nena von Schlebügge, the woman at the beginning of the video, would eventually become Uma Thruman’s mother. Leary crackles with humor and verve as he rattles off a slew of prescient visions that reflect modern attitudes on drugs at the clinical level.

Stripped of the era’s hysteria, Leary appears less like a lunatic and more like a man who’s in on a hilarious cosmic joke. Even if you’ve seen the video before, it’s worth another viewing. Who knows what else Leary might be predicting from the past?

I’ve read a bit of Leary’s writings, along with Robert Anton Wilson’s non-fiction that interacts with him… He was so far ahead of his time early on, before the drug war radicalized him.

Orgdown - the Interesting Feedback Phase so Far:

The reddit posting was a different thing altogether. The feedback was bad to very bad with only a few positive bits here or there. There was no discussion on the idea at all, just the topic on the choice of the name. When I got heated and wrote that I'd probably prefer to take the project offline, somebody wrote:

This is why we can’t have nice things. The FOSS community tends towards toxic at times, and that can drown out anyone trying to add new things…

Parents arrested after son charged in Michigan school shooting | MPR News:

School officials became concerned about the younger Crumbley on Monday, a day before the shooting, when a teacher saw him searching for ammunition on his phone, McDonald said.

Jennifer Crumbley was contacted and subsequently told her son in a text message: “Lol. I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,” according to the prosecutor.

Radicalized by his parents and their gunbunny culture.

How This All Happened · Collaborative Fund:

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.

Omicron: Biden to unveil new Covid-19 winter measures - BBC News:

The US has confirmed a second case of the Omicron coronavirus variant as President Joe Biden was due to unveil new measures to deal with the virus. A Minnesota resident was found to have the variant after attending a convention in New York, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said

Not the reason I want MN to be in international news…

Why We Need to Upgrade Our Face Masks–and Where to Get Them - Scientific American:

A wealth of evidence has shown that wearing a face mask helps prevent people from spreading the virus that causes COVID, SARS-CoV-2, to others and from becoming sick themselves. But there has been less guidance from public health officials on what kind of masks provide the best protection.

Band apologizes for singer after she pees on fan’s face during concert | Boing Boing:

After singer Sophia Urista instructed the fellow to lie down on the ground, she peeled down her pants and urinated on the man's face.

Shouldn’t we call that “The Presidential Treatment” now?

VIZIO Holding Corp. - VIZIO HOLDING CORP. Reports Q3 2021 Financial Results:

Most of what Vizio is known for is selling TVs to you. Platform+ is their business of selling you, your eyeballs, your data.

When you see two devices of similar quality, and one costs way less, you should think about how their business accomodates that.

(Riddle me this - Every other headset in the same class of the Oculus Quest family costs near 2x as much. Do you think Facebook has somehow managed to find cost efficiencies that elude HP & HTC, or that they plan to make up for the cost difference elsewhere in their business…)

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- VIZIO Holding Corp. (NYSE: VZIO) today announced the following results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2021, as compared to the corresponding period of last year:

• Net revenue of $588.3 million, compared to $582.2 million
• Platform+ net revenue grew 134% to $85.9 million
• Gross profit of $82.9 million, compared to $88.8 million
• Platform+ gross profit grew 88% to $57.3 million
• SmartCast Active Accounts grew 35% to 14.4 million
• SmartCast Hours increased 16% to 3.6 billion
• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) grew 91% to $19.89

Ford is selling Mach-E crate motors to promote custom EV conversions like this F-100 concept - Electrek:

In a recent press release, Ford has unveiled a unique concept vehicle that consists of a 1978 F-100 pickup electrified using Ford Performance’s Eluminator electric crate motors. That’s the same motor in Ford’s 2021 Mustang Mach-E GT Performance Edition.

The $3,900 electric motor is now available to the public, should any EV enthusiasts with the proper conversion knowledge want to create a custom vehicle of their own. Although, you’ll still need to acquire an inverter, battery pack, and control system.

This is super cool.. It sounds like they’re going to follow with turnkey battery/control systems to match, which makes it even more exciting for conversion projects.