Just went to Delta airlines to change some details on the tickets I booked for Julie and Terry. I’m told by the automated phone system that the wait time is on the order of “one hour and fifty minutes”, and I should use the website. The website has no mechanism for the changes I wish to make.

update: their “message us” option reports “Sorry, the app is having technical difficulties”. So they can’t handle text messages, either.

update: their messaging came up! and 15m later, I got someone on the other end named An-May who without fuss changed the details. So this bit worked well.

Imagine VR not as passive experience, but as the ability to “play” all those immersive elements – from 3D forms and architectures to spatial sound – live like an instrument. That sums up what has made the Patchathon artist intensives with PatchXR so engaging. Here’s the newest work from late this year, made in just days by invited artists, live in VR.
— Read on cdm.link/2021/12/vr-becomes-a-fluid-medium-a-music-video-you-can-play-a-playground-in-patchxr-patchathon/

Mass representative democracy https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9069.html

Have lots of representatives (one per thousand people or so). Have a hierarchical system for small ad-hoc committees to consider issues as they come up, which percolate up through the hierarchy competing with other proposals so the one with biggest enthusiasm wins. Use the internet.

Interesting mention of “rational ignorance”, the idea that the average citizen has limited information about any given issue but is capable of making rational decision-making.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/vaccine-hesitancy-covid.html

It’s class, the lower groups having been increasingly left over the past few decades to fend for themselves. And specifically the idea that government increasingly shifts health care onto individual choice. So as a result you don’t get vaccinated for the common good, you get it so you don’t get sick. And this doesn’t work.

Episode 16: From Owing to Owning https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/episode-16-from-owing-to-owning-58d7874c803b?source=rss—-355679162549—4

eand.co/why-everything-is-suddenly-getting-more-expensive-and-why-it-wont-stop-cbf5a091f403

People who won’t take vaccine shots to help fix the pandemic are whiners.

People who turn in pregnant women for $10,000 are snitches.

An artist made this in response to Texas banning abortion from Astuff

Still digging. …

https://novaramedia.com/2021/08/30/david-graeber-was-right-a-debt-free-world-is-possible/