Company makes last-minute move to keep control of district as board appointed by governor in ‘don’t say gay’ feud takes over
— Read on www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/30/disney-ron-desantis-florida-dont-say-gay

The agreements include a clause stating that they hold until 21 years after the reign of King Charles III and his descendants. Apparently, this is a legally recognized way of getting around restrictions on agreements with no termination date.

 What a delightful irony, to have a legally binding agreement between an American governmental body and the Walt Disney Company anchored in the British monarchy.

www.vickychow.com.

And while I’m looking around, I found a nice piece by this performer, This Machine Breaths to the Rhythms of Its Own Heartbeat. Really thoughtful electronics.

An idea, shamelessly stolen from a Cory Doctorow novel: end-user-assembled housing. In the novel, prefabricated components are delivered to a site. Each has sensors and a speech output built in. To start, the components that go first say “pick me up!” When someone picks up a piece, it tells them where it should be put, whether it’s positioned just right, … a group of people can work on this together with the coordination done by the components themselves.

We could do this now. We could prototype it with IKEA-like furniture and fittings, and reap the same benefits: easy shipping, economies of scale. The important element is the feedback from the components themselves, telling you when you’re doing it right.

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping

from a quote in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/19/matthew-desmond-the-poverty-rate-in-america-and-the-uk-should-be-zero-and-i-think-we-can-get-there, which the author attributes to a book by the novelist Tommy Orange.

By which he means victim blaming. There’s a set of systems whereby some people in society make money from others who are poor. The example he quotes is a trailer park: there’s a slew of tenants just hanging on for one reason or another, and there’s a landlord extracting $400k a year from them. We tend to focus on the former and not the relationship between the former and the latter.

Webcurios 17/03/23 – webcurios
— Read on webcurios.co.uk/webcurios-17-03-23/

I’m sure there’s lots of these, but this guy has his finger on something. Endlessly amusing.

The US government wants to break links between Tiktok and the Chinese government, by threatening to ban the application from use in the US. From what I can divine, the concern is the sharing of private user information with the Chinese government, and that government using the service’s recommendation engine to point users at given postings (a sort of automated editorial function).

if Tiktok is a publisher, isn’t this tantamount to a First Amendment violation? otoh: perhaps Tiktok is not a publisher, in the same way that other tech companies that act as outlets for user postings are not under the Section 230 rule that’s attracted some discussion recently.

If the issue is privacy, don’t we get to prosecute the company under existing criminal law for capture and inappropriate use of user information, just like any company that abuses user privacy? If the issue is selectively pushing users to state-sponsored media, isn’t this something that any US-government publisher like Radio Free Europe does?

It sounds like the government is fine with abuse of user privacy or manipulation of the recommendation engine, but not if the Chinese government are doing it.