Adam Tentacles (Pre) @pre@boing.world

Surprisingly, the path-out-of-lockdown plan looks about right. I suspect the schedule will need to slip for some of those later stages but for once Boris isn't obviously stupid and wrong.

Here's my tarot-reading account wondering what some random numbers think of it all:

https://boing.world/@wordcloudtarot/105777046225205626

They're saying the schools will be able to re-open because we've vaccinated all the over-50 year olds.

But under the highly experimental timings invented by non-medics in the government, almost nobody has more than half a vaccine so far.

And the average age of people at schools tends to be well under 50 as far as I can tell.

So not expecting that to go well really.

Sure am glad that Corbyn is gone so #Labour can give us "Effective Opposition" by not asking criminal ministers to resign and not talking about the biggest policy failure in a generation.

Imagine how ineffective it would be if they talked about how shit #Brexit is and asked law-breaking ministers to resign, and maybe sometimes voted against government policy!

The trouble with planning to bake chocolate-chip cookies is that period between when you are able to just eat handfuls of chocolate chips and the time when you actually mix the cookie-dough.

One more then bed.

This year, with kids less institutionalised than usual, might make an interesting natural experiment.

After I could read, I think I'd have done better at home with books than dealing with the school.

Assuming I'd had the books.

All kids should have books.

Not the same for my brother though. He needed more than books.

But then school didn't really suit him either. He often didn't go and basically flunked out.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

"School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole."

I got a new mechanical bathroom scales coz the electric one had battery/rust issues that seem obvious in retrospect.

Why would you have an electric scales in the wet-room? Duh.

Now I'm 5kg heavier according to new metrics.

Stupid mechanical scales.

Which is more #authoritarian?

Quick Reminder: The #uk #government gave twenty billion pounds to their mates instead of running a public test and trace system.

I didn't watch any of it, but it seems fast that it's happened already. I'm sure it'd take months and possibly years for the UK to get some kind of enquiry going.

Unusual efficiency in governance.

Oh, yes. Well done Patch Friday.

I refused to give my robot vaccuum cleaner my wifi password.

LOL

I hadn't noticed the new result from using the timings of pulsars to try and measure the passage of enormous gravity waves. Clever stuff, well explained by PBS here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9L_gNogNes

I'm totally against a link-tax of course, obviously. It'd break the web.

But banning news-sites across Facebook could well have the side-effect of making Facebook better. Perhaps one day they'll do it outside Australia too.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/facebook-news-australia-media-bargaining-law-b1803747.html

"I don’t feel the urge to form walled gardens in which to say those things anyway. I simply accept that, in the age of instantaneous communication, there are no walled gardens: anything you say to a dozen or more people, you might as well broadcast to the planet"

It's worse than that. The walls are a trap, and a lie. And they have ears.

You should broadcast to the planet because those walls are just corporate spying machines anyway.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310

I don't see any way at all to be on the side of the New York Times here.

There's a pattern in press and broadcast media lately to blame social media and the internet for the nazism and the Brexit and the nationalism that Fox and the BBC and the mainstream have created.

This is more of that: Look, someone over there has free speech. Free speech is something evil people like!

Fuck the New York Times. Fuck them in the arse.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article

How can anybody be on the side of the "newspapers" in this kind of thing?

I wonder what the "newspapers" are trying to achieve other than speeding their own obsolescence?

Here's Alex's reply.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article