solarbird | January 7, 2024: Sunday Shorts

A set of topics with too few parts to make a post. How do we do this?

Big oil ‘fully owned the villain role’ in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded writes The Guardian, citing abandoning climate pledges and going back in big on carbon fuels expansion again. It’s hard to be surprised, and I’m not, and we’ve seen indications of it all over the place, including from this story: Opec rails against fossil fuel phase-out at Cop28 in leaked letters.

Of course they’re not going to shut down. That’s not how they work, and it never has been, and it won’t become how they work. They’ll pull every lever they have to keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere forever, the planet be damned.

Here’s a bit of good news: Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Long Covid Risk. What the headline leaves out – critically – is it really is More Boosters More Better, and in very important ways. Every additional booster is another big round in reduction of your risk of getting Long Covid, and we now have this from many studies, the largest of which is half a million people.

You don’t get better than that. Get your boosters.

I’m sure you know how much I go off on Twitter – how it’s been turned into X, a fascist propaganda and disinformation machine which will be used against the republic in the 2024 election.

What Substack has done is different, but only so different: Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content. (Here’s the original post about it from the co-founder.) Yes, they’ll not just not remove literal Nazis, and yes, they’ll pay them. The small difference is that they’re not actively promoting them, but they do get algorithmic boosts, so the difference is very, very small indeed, but combined with statements that explicitly unlike X Twitter, they’ll remove calls for violence and the like.

(If you missed it, yes, Twitter allows targeting individuals for violence and groups for persecution now.)

I think from a disinformation standpoint that this is marginally less harmful. I can tell you I’m not boosting Substack posts anymore and in fact haven’t visited the site since they made this announcement. But this is the sort of thing that even letting Twitter stagger along this long encourages, and it’s the sort of thing I said you’d see, and, well, here we are.

This is weird and still kind of unresolved, though we do have denials from manufacturers now: Marketing Company Brags About Using Smart Device Microphone Audio to Target Ads on Their Podcast. I linked to their original pages a few weeks ago, they straight up said they were listening in on people and could target ads based on what people were saying in the privacy of their own homes. Ars Technica describes the claims as “exaggerated” but you know they’ll do it if they can.

Mailchimp went to Pineapple Street Studios – with whom they’ve worked before many times on projects – to work on another project, and included a big surprise with the contract:

Absolutely no union workers. No one who is part of a union can be involved in any of the work.

When Pineapple Street said no, Mailchimp pulled all its existing work as well. But while it appears to be legal, you can still now put Mailchimp into the “union-busting motherfuckers” bin.

I sure hope so: CEOs will finally admit next year that return-to-office mandates didn’t move the productivity needle, future of work experts predict.

Relatedly, anyone need a highly qualified but full-time-remote SDET? Anna’s still looking for a job but remote work has been real thin on the ground and she and needs one bad.

And that’s all I’ve got this time! See you tomorrow, with longer topics.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.