On attempts to protect the public
In bed at midnight, an hour later than I wanted to be, but at least I'd finished the ribbing on my pink-and-grey sock and gotten a third of the colorwork band done. Another ten rows and I'm into plain striping -- and I bet I can get that done by the time I go to bed tonight, especially if I get some knitting time at the front desk and at Grandma's. Also, there was a photo I took on the way out of the nursing home Saturday afternoon, that I didn't post at the time because I had no phone reception and forgot about until last night: The Rose Queen of 1934, in her lovely velvet dress with the hand-beaded sleeves and train. (Or maybe those are rhinestones or sequins -- but a serious amount of handwork involved.) I appreciate the way the home is decorated in old black-and-white photos of things the residents might actually remember -- a lot of local landmarks along with the handful of beauty queens.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
The $28m pantomime of airport body scanners -- "While the government may not have conducted a cost-benefit analysis, two academics, Mark Stewart of the University of Newcastle, and John Mueller of Ohio State, have done so for scanners used in the US. Readers will recall Stewart and Mueller wrote an extensive analysis of counter-terrorism spending in the US, showing it was wildly in excess of any conceivable cost-benefit analysis. A year ago they looked in-depth at airport scanners, using similar methods to their analysis of war-on-terror spending. They concluded that the scanners would have to stop 1-3 successful attacks a year that would otherwise not have been thwarted by any other security measure. The assessment was based on assuming a catastrophic disaster resulting from a successful attack-assumptions unlikely to be realistic given the limited capacity of even the most powerful liquid explosives and the poor history of previous efforts. In short, scanners add little to existing security measures and the attacks they are designed to thwart are unlikely to cause major loss of life (such as downing an airliner), thereby significantly reducing their benefit. There’s a term for this: security theatre, measures that have no security benefit, or the benefits of which are so specific as to be easily avoided by terrorists, but that give people the illusion of safety."
Football Shaped by Military -- "Major wars were important turning points in the popularization of the game. During World War I, football turned out to be a great diversion for soldiers, keeping them out of trouble during down times and helping build teamwork. With more men mobilized on military camps and bases, the number of people playing football rose. At the same time, a growing number of civilians gained exposure to football as they visited bases to watch games, and that helped create a national taste for the sport. 'The most striking thing to me was how, in World War I, the military helped democratize football,' said Patricia Shields, a political scientist at Texas State University in San Marcos. 'Back in the 1800s, there was a big division in class between people who went to college and people who didn’t, and people who didn’t go to college didn’t necessarily care about college sports. As common people throughout the country began to understand the game -- and it's not that easy to understand, but you understand it by playing and enjoying it -- that made it more interesting,' she added. 'Who knows, maybe football wouldn’t be what it is today without the military.'"
Hollywood Still Doesn't Realize That The Internet Drives Popular Culture Now -- "There's a lot more in Baker's article about the political implications of all of this, which are worth thinking about as well, but I wanted to focus on this key point. Last week, at the Midem music industry conference, I was amazed at how many people from the legacy music business believe, 100%, that the reason SOPA/PIPA were stopped was because Google stepped up its lobbying efforts. I can't even begin to count how many conversations I had with people trying to explain to them that Google only played a small role in what happened, really jumping on the bandwagon pretty late in the game. It was a widespread group of internet users who spoke up, and that really has changed the equation. And Hollywood still can't seem to wrap its mind around that. That may be because Hollywood was popular culture for so long. It seems to just assume that this is still the case, when there's an awful lot of evidence suggesting otherwise. And really, that explains both Hollywood's confusion in how to deal with all of this, as well as one of the reasons it's lashing out. When Hollywood no longer drives pop culture, it loses its influence, and as it loses its influence, that's going to spell trouble for its business model. The biggest threat to Hollywood's dominance isn't piracy. It's that people no longer view Hollywood as the main source of pop culture any more."
And, going back to read the piece the above post is in reaction to: The SOPA War: Why the GOP Turned on Piracy (Opinion) -- "For Republicans, opposition to intellectual property laws is starting to look like a political winner, and that should terrify Hollywood as it misreads where the pop-culture power base now lies."
Another day with a very productive morning and time up front, followed by a listless afternoon of clicking around online. Still, I just skimmed my LJ friends list back to the last time I looked at it, and I'm caught up with Tumblr for the weekend (though not for the past couple of days).
legionseagle posted Means of Production, Distribution and Exchange, well, actually just the last two, which is much more interesting (and amusing) than you'd generally expect a post about food regulation to be: "Also, since the abolition of trial by combat, the principle way for a tort law judgement to be expressed is in terms of financial reparation; that is, I can't step in and sue a corned beef provider who's caused a typhoid epidemic in Scotland by cooling the cans of corned beef in a Uruguayan river consisting predominantly of raw sewage** for the costs of a new cooling mechanism or even an upstream sewage treatment works, but only for the direct financial loss to me of losing my granny to typhoid. And for as long as the were-gild on dead Scottish grannies is lower than the construction costs of hygienic cooling plants for corned beef works, then the corned beef producer will stick with the old 'dip it in the shit' tried and tested cooling method. And even if a court gets sufficiently pissed off with Fray Bentos the hypothetical corned beef company in question and awards punitive damages against them all this is likely to do is to allow me to buy a large non-sunken yacht, christen it The Typhoid Mary and steam off into the sunset with my granny's ashes built into the bulkhead. Which is why one of the things the bourgeois can do about food security is not vote for dickheads who think the problem is over-regulation and the 'compensation culture'. Using tort law to regulate food chain safety issues is like using a lump hammer to mend a Rolex oyster, but the answer isn't to ban lump hammers but to train watchmakers."
Right, I need to wind up the account I'm on (a matter of about five minutes' work) and then see about getting out of here before Grandma goes upstairs for the night...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
The $28m pantomime of airport body scanners -- "While the government may not have conducted a cost-benefit analysis, two academics, Mark Stewart of the University of Newcastle, and John Mueller of Ohio State, have done so for scanners used in the US. Readers will recall Stewart and Mueller wrote an extensive analysis of counter-terrorism spending in the US, showing it was wildly in excess of any conceivable cost-benefit analysis. A year ago they looked in-depth at airport scanners, using similar methods to their analysis of war-on-terror spending. They concluded that the scanners would have to stop 1-3 successful attacks a year that would otherwise not have been thwarted by any other security measure. The assessment was based on assuming a catastrophic disaster resulting from a successful attack-assumptions unlikely to be realistic given the limited capacity of even the most powerful liquid explosives and the poor history of previous efforts. In short, scanners add little to existing security measures and the attacks they are designed to thwart are unlikely to cause major loss of life (such as downing an airliner), thereby significantly reducing their benefit. There’s a term for this: security theatre, measures that have no security benefit, or the benefits of which are so specific as to be easily avoided by terrorists, but that give people the illusion of safety."
Football Shaped by Military -- "Major wars were important turning points in the popularization of the game. During World War I, football turned out to be a great diversion for soldiers, keeping them out of trouble during down times and helping build teamwork. With more men mobilized on military camps and bases, the number of people playing football rose. At the same time, a growing number of civilians gained exposure to football as they visited bases to watch games, and that helped create a national taste for the sport. 'The most striking thing to me was how, in World War I, the military helped democratize football,' said Patricia Shields, a political scientist at Texas State University in San Marcos. 'Back in the 1800s, there was a big division in class between people who went to college and people who didn’t, and people who didn’t go to college didn’t necessarily care about college sports. As common people throughout the country began to understand the game -- and it's not that easy to understand, but you understand it by playing and enjoying it -- that made it more interesting,' she added. 'Who knows, maybe football wouldn’t be what it is today without the military.'"
Hollywood Still Doesn't Realize That The Internet Drives Popular Culture Now -- "There's a lot more in Baker's article about the political implications of all of this, which are worth thinking about as well, but I wanted to focus on this key point. Last week, at the Midem music industry conference, I was amazed at how many people from the legacy music business believe, 100%, that the reason SOPA/PIPA were stopped was because Google stepped up its lobbying efforts. I can't even begin to count how many conversations I had with people trying to explain to them that Google only played a small role in what happened, really jumping on the bandwagon pretty late in the game. It was a widespread group of internet users who spoke up, and that really has changed the equation. And Hollywood still can't seem to wrap its mind around that. That may be because Hollywood was popular culture for so long. It seems to just assume that this is still the case, when there's an awful lot of evidence suggesting otherwise. And really, that explains both Hollywood's confusion in how to deal with all of this, as well as one of the reasons it's lashing out. When Hollywood no longer drives pop culture, it loses its influence, and as it loses its influence, that's going to spell trouble for its business model. The biggest threat to Hollywood's dominance isn't piracy. It's that people no longer view Hollywood as the main source of pop culture any more."
And, going back to read the piece the above post is in reaction to: The SOPA War: Why the GOP Turned on Piracy (Opinion) -- "For Republicans, opposition to intellectual property laws is starting to look like a political winner, and that should terrify Hollywood as it misreads where the pop-culture power base now lies."
Another day with a very productive morning and time up front, followed by a listless afternoon of clicking around online. Still, I just skimmed my LJ friends list back to the last time I looked at it, and I'm caught up with Tumblr for the weekend (though not for the past couple of days).
legionseagle posted Means of Production, Distribution and Exchange, well, actually just the last two, which is much more interesting (and amusing) than you'd generally expect a post about food regulation to be: "Also, since the abolition of trial by combat, the principle way for a tort law judgement to be expressed is in terms of financial reparation; that is, I can't step in and sue a corned beef provider who's caused a typhoid epidemic in Scotland by cooling the cans of corned beef in a Uruguayan river consisting predominantly of raw sewage** for the costs of a new cooling mechanism or even an upstream sewage treatment works, but only for the direct financial loss to me of losing my granny to typhoid. And for as long as the were-gild on dead Scottish grannies is lower than the construction costs of hygienic cooling plants for corned beef works, then the corned beef producer will stick with the old 'dip it in the shit' tried and tested cooling method. And even if a court gets sufficiently pissed off with Fray Bentos the hypothetical corned beef company in question and awards punitive damages against them all this is likely to do is to allow me to buy a large non-sunken yacht, christen it The Typhoid Mary and steam off into the sunset with my granny's ashes built into the bulkhead. Which is why one of the things the bourgeois can do about food security is not vote for dickheads who think the problem is over-regulation and the 'compensation culture'. Using tort law to regulate food chain safety issues is like using a lump hammer to mend a Rolex oyster, but the answer isn't to ban lump hammers but to train watchmakers."
Right, I need to wind up the account I'm on (a matter of about five minutes' work) and then see about getting out of here before Grandma goes upstairs for the night...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.