So many memories… Thanks !

Sunflower plant here.

I feel like a cannibal munching on sunflower seeds while reading the description of my type of plant XD

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don’t know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

So what is it with Anakin’s picture? Javascript is the dark side of the, web development, force? XD

Seriously tho, valid points.

It’s nearly impossible to pick one, I find beauty in each kind.

I would go with Platanus. They exist near rivers and get really big. I like everything about them.

Then all the wild versions of cherry trees, if not every single stone fruit tree. Most wild versions of them, exist across multiple human lifespans (platanus too), so beside their amazing flowering season, I like the idea that some of them have been standing there for centuries, marking memories of many human generations with their beautiful presence.

Hey have you ever been to https://www.neocities.org? It’s reminiscent of geocities and kind of cool.

No, haven’t even realised that Sheldon Brown’s site was hosted there. I used to have a website up on geocities when I was a kid, browsing neocities brings back so many happy memories… Thanks!

Sorry if I sounded disagreeable, I didn’t mean to be. I was just taking a trip down memory lane.

No worries. Felt exactly like that. That’s why my mind went to how I felt when altavista’s babelfish appeared, I did the same thing for a few minutes before responding :-)

Well, I guess not everyone had the same experience. Maybe I should have spoken only for myself. It’s not that I didn’t use search engines before google appeared or that I don’t do it now. Just the fact, at least in my experience, that I would get to know way more and way better web locations, related to what interested me, through discussions with other people with similar interests, than I would through search engines. Even when discussions are not possible (like in magazines) or are too massive to follow, it is often, especially in technology-related subjects, preferable to have them archived (through subscriptions) and search directly those archives when I need something specific. It was true for me back when engines didn’t have as good indexes, it is true for me now that their role as businesses is becoming obvious. I guess it also depends on what someone considers interesting.

I did love how altavista translation service was called though, really liked the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy :-)

There was a time before google’s search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @[email protected] commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn’t constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.

It makes sense doesn’t it? Biodiversity will always facilitate better, richer, healthier equilibriums between species than the ones imposed by man-made, narrow-minded motives. The more intricate details I notice in environments unaffected (at least not directly) by humans, the more urban environments seem like wastelands…

Nice article, thanks!

which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video.

Maybe it’s just me, but, I 've never felt that video calls add the body language element that in person communication has. I mean, I get a very different feeling (and my facial expressions, are different because of that) when looking directly at the camera than the one I get when making eye contact with the other person. Doesn’t this mean that you actually add an altered body language to the interaction?

Or is this something included in what you meant with “further complexity”? Not sure what you were referring to there.

I see most of the comments discussing efficiency, the inability to have your own garden, or other limiting factors. And I believe all of them are missing the point. There are many and good reasons to shorten your food chain, and efficiency is not one of them. I would expect to at least see some people (there was one exception) considering the value of doing so in their lives, but nope.

So… Not very long ago, most of the people were actually living as farmers. Eric Hobsbawm, in this book, has done a great job describing what it took for the shift to happen, during the industrial revolution. For the people to actually be forced to abandon their land and start accumulating in urban environments where having your own garden is practically impossible for most of them. And it was not good. Child labor, people starving to death, extreme poverty, extreme exploitation of human labor. Many things changed, and most of them did not actually benefit the majority of the people who were forced to abandon or sell their land in order for people who could actually afford more efficient farming approaches (through machines) to replace them while accumulating wealth in an unprecedented manner. Maybe it’s worth examining this shift. Both the argument of efficiency and limiting factors, are not exactly new and are not exactly serving most of us either.

Besides the historical aspect, the how did we get here, of the long food chains. There are other aspects that make them harmful. The ones that allow for a term like “banana republic” to exist, when most of the people who use it don’t pause and think what it actually means for so many people that actually get exploited so they can have their bananas, cheap and available all year (as if potassium is not abundant in every single plant food). The ones that allow for people to have access to food without actually moving at all during the day (CVD, obesity, cases where being inefficient, like… spending energy to live your life, actually improves your health, like walking, carrying some weight, cycling). The ones that allow for food to be consumed weeks, months or even years after it is produced, dramatically reducing it’s quality while actually raising the cost (storage facilities, freezers, transportations through various environments).

But still, most comments at the moment and upvotes are not about those things. Except one. Interesting…

Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.

In this scenario, “Bob” is a hypothetical guy who believes that a woman has cut in front of him in line at the supermarket checkout. He and the woman get into a brief shouting match before she informs Bob that she’d just ducked out of her spot in the line to replace a carton of eggs that turned out to be cracked. He apologizes, and that’s the end of it—except someone recorded the incident on their smartphone, then uploaded only the shouting match, reading all kinds of deplorable motives into it. “The video need only include a hint of cultural asymmetry,” Rose-Stockwell writes:

It may be seen as an angry outburst by a man (Bob) toward a woman (the other shopper). Or a Democrat (Bob) toward a Republican (the lady). Or any heightened reflection of their implied group identity. It can be repackaged as an example of a troubling trend in society. People who feel this way who see the clip now have an opportunity to explain exactly why it’s offensive. They can link it to a larger narrative that may have nothing to do with the actual event itself.

That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.”

This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.

To drive down costs, the meat industry relies on practices that can increase the spread of disease, like overcrowding and intensive breeding, which can trigger the need for gruesome practices like feedback to work around the problems it’s created.

Americans eat more animals than practically any other country — around 264 pounds of red and white meat, 280 eggs, 667 pounds of dairy, and around 20.5 pounds of seafood per person each year.

Insane amounts, horrible -mostly unseen- reality to support them.

Besides, if one does not see certain actions, those actions might as well not be happening at all. If only there was a way people who cause the greatest harm to control what gets reported in mainstream media, effectively shifting people’s attention away from the harmful practices of their businesses…

Elon Musk tweeted on his official account on Sunday that Twitter would be changing its logo to an “X”

Am I the only one that thought of house Bolton ?

This article attempts to provide some reasoning.

As for the neighbouring area, since it’s mentioned near the end of this article, a related fact from wikipedia:

Notably, opium production in Myanmar is the world’s second-largest source of opium after Afghanistan, producing some 25% of the world’s opium, forming part of the Golden Triangle. While opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar had declined year-on-year since 2015, cultivation area increased by 33% totalling 40,100 hectares alongside an 88% increase in yield potential to 790 metric tonnes in 2022 according to latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Myanmar Opium Survey 2022[283] With that said, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has also warned that opium production in Myanmar may rise again if the economic crunch brought on by COVID-19 and the country’s February 1 military coup persists, with significant public health and security consequences for much of Asia

More often than not, ethnic disputes are just leverage used by people in power to achieve their goals.

Besides the brutality of mentioned in the OP, there have been tens of deaths in the area during the past few months.

The organic grow book is probably the best book I 've come across. I tend to favor plants (and fungi) that I will somehow consume, so their health is my first concern. Both the information and the way it is presented in this book, especially if it is your first contact with it, is great. Here you can take a peak on the table of contents and intro of the book.

It might not help you picking plants, but it will help you keeping them healthy and identifying issues. And much much more than that.

The mortality rate was highest in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Which are places where the cost of electricity has gone dramatically up the past few years making air-conditioning less and less accessible.

From the article…

The country has recognised same-sex unions since 2015 but stops short of full marriage equality.

&

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Prime Minister of Greece, has promised to legalize same-sex marriage in a huge step forward for LGBTQ+ rights. “Same-sex marriage will happen at some point and it’s part of our strategy,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg Television in Athens on 4 July.

But in reality, as @[email protected] pointed out, in recent elections 12.76% of the voters went with far right (3 parties, one of them directly supported by convicted criminal party with many Nazis in their line-up) whose views on the subjects are clearly against.

And, even though same-sex unions were recognized in 2015, when the relevant legislation was put into a vote, the party that is now in government (40.56% of the voters) voted against the same-sex unions (31 voted no / 18 voted yes / 27 were not present).

So, even though this sounds like good news and I hope it is actually true, it looks more like part of their communication strategy on the media rather than part of an actual agenda for the future.