September 2020

JK you’ll be poor even if you attend

Schools often run deficits in normal times; in 2019, nearly 1,000 private colleges were already borderline insolvent. Covid will cause many to shutter for good. It is accounting, not epidemiology, that drives university administrators to push for a rapid return to business as usual, effectively demanding that faculty and staff sacrifice their lives for the financial health of their employer.

Source: The End of the University | The New Republic

You can attend college, the price is death.

Or you could not attend college, in which case the price is poverty.

JK you’ll be poor even if you attend Read More »

Skyway

        <a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/nullrend/">nullrend</a> posted a photo:

Skyway

They’re really working fast on getting the Skyway done at the Library

Skyway Read More »

Someone should do a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where the final boss is a giant Elder Dragon. A…

Someone should do a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where the final boss is a giant Elder Dragon. A dragon so big you actually have to fight its fleas, the size of wolves, on your way to its head.

Then it turns out it’s being a menace because it’s got cavities in its teeth. Off you go to play dentist.

Someone should do a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where the final boss is a giant Elder Dragon. A… Read More »

No change, no peace

As the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in The Dance of Freedom, Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the “fiendish lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people with the same indifference as displayed in the killing of snakes or other venomous reptiles,” and that “terrorism engendered by the brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels,” was preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools.

Source: What Black Lives Matter Has Accomplished – The Atlantic

The Orange Maggaot calls people who support BLM “thugs”, “criminals”, “terrorists”, saying he’ll impose Law and Order however necessary.

White people have always been the one to terrorize their communities, and those of people they don’t deem acceptable.

The cold cultural war heats up.

No change, no peace Read More »

Closing quickly, for that matter.

Social networks are universally more restrictive than web pages but also more fun in significant ways, chief amongst them being that more people can participate. What if the rest of the web have that simplicity and immediacy, but without the centralization? What if we could start over?

Source: A clean start for the web – macwright.com

Mozilla is knowingly walking away from any of these options because they’re bitter they could not come to dominate the Web after Firefox helped bring about the downfall of Internet Explorer. Big Tech will not support a reimagining of what the web could be since it will mean less profits. Can’t have that in a capitalist society, now can we?

There’s hope now that the Servo engine is cut loose, but the time window to avoid having a technological cycle (about 30 years or so) be dominated by corporations is closing.

Closing quickly, for that matter. Read More »