Jakarta
![A hazy skyline with high rise buildings](https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/663/2024/ccc2e4007c.jpg)
Jakarta
“While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of Japanese lighters from the 1960s, the devices are curvy rectangles that can flip open to reveal a screen. But hardly anyone on the show uses them that way. Instead, they pop an AirPods-style headphone in one ear (the phone doubles as an earbud case) and do almost everything via voice.”
I’ve watched the first three episodes and the different vision for communication is striking.
Apple’s Sunny imagines a cozy future where screens fade into the background - The Verge
A new step has been added to the mind-boggling scam that is academic publishing:
The process for open access is pretty much the same. The public pays or academics self-fund usurious open access article processing fees at Step 3.5.
Taylor and Francis Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training
“We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia. This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor and to protect. This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage.”
A subsea cable went missing. Was Russia to blame? - Bloomberg
Another one for the WTF Europe file
Bombo
Fucking TikTok.
“In a similar vein, some posts featured a sycophantic, yet comedic, admiration for fascist leaders, presenting them as cute and loveable. In general, such memes seek to trivialise extremist content, not least by drawing from the comparative mainstream of meme culture. In the process, this content contributes to the broader memetic struggle waged by factions on the extreme right.”
Beyond Hitler and Mussolini: TikTok and the Adoration of Minor Fascist Ideologues
I’ve had two printers that outlived operating system support for them. I didn’t expect it would happen to sneakers.
The Heads
It’s almost like biodiversity offsets are a proposterous activity, designed to distract more than help. Oh wait…
Sharp observations from Ian Dunt:
“The trouble was that the government had no basic competence. It did not have the organisational proficiency to deliver on its stated aims. So Afghans were encouraged to send emails documenting their case which were simply never read. The tiny haphazard team of civil servants who did read some of them were not equipped with the specialist skills required to assess them. They did not even have a rudimentary understanding of Afghanistan’s ethnolinguistic groups. The men in charge - Dominic Rabb and Boris Johnson - did not have the kinds of minds which could handle the matter. So people were betrayed. They were left to the barbarism of the Taliban. They died. And all that is most admirable about this country and what it represents died with them, in the dust of Afghanistan.
This was by far the most shameful episode of the last 14 years of Tory government, but it is replicated in one form or another across the policy landscape: health, criminal justice, transport, you name it. The same process with the same outcome: incompetence followed by failure followed by national shame.”
14 years of Tory rule: Some shattered conclusions from a broken brain
Sounds like an episode of The Gilded Age
Same No-Face, same
Hello fronds
Tarps and prayers
“So many of Chomsky’s arguments, indeed the very phrases that he used, are becoming commonplace. Even while he is not directly quoted, his shadow looms large and his presence is ubiquitous." - Vivek Chibber at Jacobin