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Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow
In William Gibson's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes her company's core audience: "Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections." It's an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune. It's also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV's role in a societal "dumbing down," that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK's ideas, but to Nixon's terrible TV manner.
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I must have missed the part where racist Karen who filed a false police report became a protected class.

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$100 says this attempt at a new ghetto for people with disabilities is merely an aggregator for sites loading their script.

Another $100 says that, if they actually approached any people with disabilities to inquire about any problems we might have with using search engines, the Chief Vision Officer is the only person with a disability they asked.

I suppose it’s easy to say you’ll make the web accessible by 2025 when you can just build yourself a safe space and then pretend it’s the web. But AccessiBe’s self-constructed safe space isn’t the web any more than Facebook is.

I’ll stick with the open web, thanks.

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The total collapse of Jewish and Israeli PR by SHMULEY BOTEACH
From the beginning of my rabbinic career, I focused mightily on public relations and disseminating the Jewish message to the world. I was accused of being publicity-hungry and of shallowness. But I knew that the one area where we Jews have so significantly failed was in public relations. And this has been true throughout the centuries.

I don’t know Rabbi, did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason so many have accused you of being publicity-hungry and shallow is because you’ve spent the last 40 years or so co-opting the worst excesses of the self-help genre to do your bit to strip Judaism down to its cheapest parts so you could make it a pop culture sensation?

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Security Alert – May 15, 2021 by U.S. Embassy in Kabul
The Embassy reminds U.S. citizens that on April 27, 2021, the Department of State ordered the departure from U.S. Embassy Kabul of U.S. government employees whose functions can be performed elsewhere due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul. The Travel Advisory for Afghanistan remains Level 4-Do Not Travel due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and COVID-19. Commercial flight options from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) remain available and the U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited.
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Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool, not as a platform for ‘posting’

My only response to this is: “Well of course he did.” He was handed an incredibly powerful set of tools coupled with an incredibly easy way to use them. What did people expect would happen?

State College

45 °F Partly cloudy

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Biden Should Stick With Trump’s Agreement To Withdraw From Afghanistan, Veteran And Foreign Policy Expert Says by Kaylee Greenlee
President Joe Biden should adhere to the agreement former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban to completely withdraw American forces from Afghanistan.

Update 15 August 2021 23:03: Daily Caller has updated the machine-readable headline of this article to read: “Biden Should Stick With Agreement To Withdraw From Afghanistan, Veteran And Foreign Policy Expert Says”. I’ve kept the original headline in the appropriate place with the edit noted below.

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I agree with this entire thread, especially the action part.

Don’t get me wrong. Awareness is great. But we’ve been doing awareness now for I don’t know how many years or even decades, and it just seems to me that for every step forward we take, there are six more going backwards.

If awareness doesn’t become actuion, it’s just feel-good talk. And I’m starting to wonder if all the talk being generated around accessibility isn’t getting to a point where we’re seeing diminishing returns.

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I’d like to raise a glass upon the new redesign of @LFLegal’s website by @nataliemac of @hiredigitally.

Lainey’s website has been, ever since I encountered it more than a few years ago, an absolute joy to browse and use.

And it just keeps getting better and better.

It’s also a joy to link to in other contexts, (Episode 19 of the Making Better podcast, for example), because I know for a fact that if podcast listeners click the link to Lainey’s site in that episode they will find everything they could possibly want to know about either Lainey Feingold or structured negotiation.

The ease of finding things became important when I was editing the intro text for the Making Better episode because I found myself in the position of having to edit text for length while also not leaving out important stuff.

Looking forward to the reign of our dolphin overlords,

A very happy user

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Secretary Pompeo’s Meeting with the Taliban by U.S. Embassy in Kabul
Office of the Spokesperson The below is attributable to Principal Deputy Spokesperson Cale Brown: Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo met today with Taliban Political Deputy and Head of the Political Office Mullah Beradar and members of the Taliban negotiating team in Doha, Qatar, on the historic occasion of the start of peace negotiations. Secretary Pompeo urged the Taliban to seize this opportunity to forge a political settlement and reach a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire. He welcomed Afghan leadership and ownership of the effort to end 40 years of war and ensure that Afghanistan is not a threat to the United States or its allies.