Interesting Links for 21-11-2015

[andrewducker]

• Gamers trust computers too much - unless you prime them not to.
  • games computers trust
• We earn £190K a year. Should we sell a child so we can buy another flat?
  • money satire funny UK
• Biggest Diamond in More Than a Century Unearthed in Botswana
  • diamonds Africa
• Don't be embarrassed about your advantages, use them to help others.
  • money privilege

Comments

[gonzo21]

I find it extraordinary that the FDA see's no need to label genetically modified food in the States.

[gwendysmile]

Why?

[bart_calendar]

Now that half the staff of Kotaku is going to be laid off when they for some reason merge with IO9 I wonder if the blacklist will end.

[andrewducker]

I hadn't heard about this. What's happening?

[bart_calendar]

Denton is pissed off about the union, the fact that people didn't support him when he nuked that story about the closet gay dude and that the staff accussed him of hating women.

So, he's gone on a weird witch hunt and is consolidating a ton of the sites.

There's no official list (though IO9 is confirmed dead) but if you google around at all you should be able to find posts from writers bitching and screaming that Denton fired them for no good reason.

And, honestly, it really looks like plain old sexism is why the people who got fired got fired.

John Cook, Denton's hatchet man, said anyone who didn't work for Jezebel but who wrote about "gossip" was getting fired. You can see the implication there, I suspect.

[andrewducker]

That's terrible!

I wonder if this is death throes for the whole organisation.

[kalimac]

I didn't think anyone was still using the "atoms as solar systems" metaphor. I'd think it was still OK for certain limited purposes, but generally it seems to be - what's the word they use for HTML tags? - deprecated.

I'm sure glad I didn't see the X-Men movie in which Magneto up and moves the Golden Gate Bridge. My eyes would have rolled back so far I wouldn't have been able to get up and leave.

The moral lesson of the story about Leo Tolstoy and Jane Addams is that Tolstoy was a sanctimonious ass. I read an article a few years back about an opposite-sex couple whose problems at Customs were exacerbated because they weren't married, but who were proud of this because they'd stayed unmarried in solidarity with same-sex couples who (at the time) couldn't get married. And I wondered, how does boycotting marriage help anybody? You're not hurting marriage, which is not a corporation whose policies you want to influence, you're just inconveniencing yourself, and vaguely insulting those same-sex couples who can and do get married.

[andrewducker]

That X-Men movie was _terrible_ for so many reasons. Mostly because Bryan Singer went to make a Superman movie (that wasn't very good) handing over control to Brett Ratner, who did a terrible job of bringing together the threads that the first two movies brought together. A real shame.

[andrewducker]

He was absolutely a sanctimonious ass. But a fair number of activists seem to feel like this, and it's a definite problem.