On Blankfaces

For years, I’ve had a private term I’ve used with my family. To give a few examples of its use:

No, I never applied for that grant. I spent two hours struggling to log in to a web portal designed by the world’s top blankfaces until I finally gave up in despair.

No, I paid for that whole lecture trip out of pocket; I never got the reimbursement they promised. Their blankface administrator just kept sending me back the form, demanding more and more convoluted bank details, until I finally got the hint and dropped it.

No, my daughter Lily isn’t allowed in the swimming pool there. She easily passed their swim test last year, but this year the blankface lifeguard made up a new rule on the spot that she needs to retake the test, so Lily took it again and passed even more easily, but then the lifeguard said she didn’t like the stroke Lily used, so she failed her and didn’t let her retake it. I complained to their blankface athletic director, who launched an ‘investigation.’ The outcome of the ‘investigation’ was that, regardless of the ground truth about how well Lily can swim, their blankface lifeguard said she’s not allowed in the pool, so being blankfaces themselves, they’re going to stand with the lifeguard.

Yeah, the kids spend the entire day indoors, breathing each other’s stale, unventilated air, then they finally go outside and they aren’t allowed on the playground equipment, because of the covid risk from them touching it. Even though we’ve known for more than a year that covid is an airborne disease. Everyone I’ve talked there agrees that I have a point, but they say their hands are tied. I haven’t yet located the blankface who actually made this decision and stands by it.

What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it’s not reducible to any of those. After enough experience, the first two questions you ask about any organization are:

1. Who are the blankfaces here?
2. Who are the people I can talk with to get around the blankfaces?

As far as I can tell, blankfacedness cuts straight across conventional political ideology, gender, and race. (Age, too, except that I’ve never once encountered a blankfaced child.) Brilliance and creativity do seem to offer some protection against blankfacedness—possibly because the smarter you are, the harder it is to justify idiotic rules to yourself—but even there, the protection is far from complete. (...)

Some people will object that the term “blankface” is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what’s right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason.

With many other human evils and failings, I have a strong inclination toward mercy, because I understand how someone could’ve succumbed to the temptation—indeed, I worry that I myself might’ve succumbed to it “but for the grace of God.” But here’s the thing about blankfaces: in all my thousands of dealings with them, not once was I ever given cause to wonder whether I might have done the same in their shoes. It’s like, of course I wouldn’t have! Even if I were forced (by my own higher-ups, an intransigent computer system, or whatever else) to foist some bureaucratic horribleness on an innocent victim, I’d be sheepish and apologetic about it. I’d acknowledge the farcical absurdity of what I was making the other person do, or declaring that they couldn’t do. Likewise, even if I were useless in a crisis, at least I’d get out of the way of the people trying to solve it. How could I live with myself otherwise?

The fundamental mystery of the blankfaces, then, is how they can be so alien and yet so common.

***

Update (Aug. 3): Surprisingly many people seem to have read this post, and come away with the notion that a “blankface” is simply anyone who’s a stickler for rules and formalized procedures. They’ve then tried to refute me with examples of where it’s good to be a stickler, or where I in particular would believe that it’s good.

But no, that’s not it at all.

Rules can be either good or bad. All things considered, I’d probably rather be on a plane piloted by a robotic stickler for safety rules, than by someone who ignored the rules at his or her discretion. And as I said in the post, in the first months of covid, it was ironically the anti-blankfaces who were screaming for rules, regulations, and lockdowns; the blankfaces wanted to continue as though nothing had changed!

Also, “blankface” (just like “homophobe” or “antisemite”) is a serious accusation. I’d never call anyone a blankface merely for sticking with a defensible rule when it turned out, in hindsight, that the rule could’ve been relaxed.

Here’s how to tell a blankface: suppose you see someone enforcing or interpreting a rule in a way that strikes you as obviously absurd. And suppose you point it out to them.

Do they say “I disagree, here’s why it actually does make sense”? They might be mistaken but they’re not a blankface.

Do they say “tell me about it, it makes zero sense, but it’s above my pay grade to change”? You might wish they were more dogged or courageous but again they’re not a blankface.

Or do they ignore all your arguments and just restate the original rule—seemingly angered by what they understood as a challenge to their authority, and delighted to reassert it? That’s the blankface.

by Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. So, I learned a new term today. We've all experienced (and probably worked) with people like this.]

Edward J.W. Li
via: markk

You Can't Rebrand a Class War

This week, a federal judge blocked the largest proposed grocery merger in history, between Albertson’s and Kroger. The merger, which would have further consolidated the industry, raised prices for consumers, and hurt the power of workers, was strenuously opposed by unions. It was brought down by a lawsuit filed by Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s crusading FTC chair, who fought against the consolidation of corporate power harder than any of her predecessors. Khan said that it was “the first time the FTC has ever sought to block a merger not just because it’s gonna be bad for consumers, but also for workers.”

Also this week, the Trump administration announced the Khan would be fired and replaced with Andrew Ferguson, a Republican FTC commissioner. In Ferguson’s own pitch for the job, he wrote that his goal would be to “Reverse Lina Khan’s Anti-Business Agenda,” “Stop Lina Khan’s war on mergers,” “Protect Freedom of Speech and Fight Wokeness,” and “Fight back against the trans agenda.”

Also this week, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—two real pieces of shit—blocked an effort to reconfirm Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board, which would have ensured that the board had a Democratic majority for the first two years of Trump’s term, which would have served to hold off the Trump administration’s incoming efforts to roll back all of the progress on worker-friendly labor regulation that has been made over the past four years. Now, thanks to these two scumbags, Trump will not only replace NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo—the single most pro-union official in the federal government—with an anti-union crusader; he will also be able to ensure that the entire agency is actively weaponized against union power. Because changing regulations takes time, those extra two years will be critical for the Republican effort to erase the Biden administration’s gains in making the government friendly to the task of union organizing, rather than hostile.

Also this week, the world’s richest man, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to on the president-elect’s campaign, and who has threatened to fund primary challengers to any Republicans who oppose the president-elect’s agenda, saw his net worth hit $447 billion, on the strength of the rising value of his company SpaceX, a government contractor that stands to gain thanks in part to the fact that the president-elect just appointed a SpaceX-loving billionaire as the next head of NASA. Elon Musk is confident enough to publicly taunt the SEC’s ongoing attempts to regulate his activity, which is probably safe, since the president-elect that he got elected has ensured that the SEC chair who is trying to regulate him is on the way out. Though Musk is not formally a member of the president-elect’s cabinet, at least nine other billionaires are. They and their fellow members of the plutocracy will soon be rewarded with a tax cut of more than $4 trillion. The corporations that made a big deal about cutting ties with Trump’s allies after January 6 are about to break their arms patting Trump on the back as he slashes the corporate tax rate to 15%.

The first and most obvious thing to be said about all of this is: If you are one of the many analysts seduced by the idea that the Trump administration would be in some way friendly towards the “working class” or would in some way advance the concept of antitrust enforcement in the public good, you are a god damn idiot. Please stop analyzing politics for the general public. Horseshoe theory has poisoned your brains and blinded you to reality. The total melding of the federal government with the interests of the ultrarich and a strongman leader who conducts federal policy in service of only those who bow to him is not “populism.” It is fascism. I would love to stop entertaining this charade so that I do not have to periodically rewrite this for the next four years. “Hey, Lina Khan’s replacement has vowed to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies!” Yes and his motivations are not “economic equality” or “the public good” but the fact that he and other right wingers are pissed that their accounts got censored and that big tech companies are too “woke” and so the tech companies will take exaggerated steps to cancel their DEI programs and what not in order to placate the right wing and we will ultimately get neither true antimonopoly enforcement or trivial social progress. Oh, he’s against “big tech?” I wonder why big tech’s richest megabillionaire Elon Musk would be copacetic with him, then? Could it be because the government is going to be run not according to philosophical principles but instead in the way that a thin-skinned mob boss runs his empire, so that everyone will be able to buy their way out of everything with flattery and legalized bribery? Great stuff. What a victory for The People.

Yelling at pundits, unfortunately, is not going to fix the downward spiral that we are in. This is not just some minor issue of policy preference. America’s grand situation is this: Fifty years of rising economic inequality has sapped the public trust (for good reason!) and destroyed faith in our institutions and consolidated political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich people. Turning around this long-term trend of inequality will require A) the strengthening of organized labor, in order to pull more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of workers, and balance out the ability of the rich to purchase political influence, and B) aggressive work by the federal government and the courts to restrict corporate power and break up monopolies and create a friendly atmosphere for the large scale labor organizing that will be necessary. As demonstrated by the handful of items above, and by common sense, the Trump administration is going to the opposite of those things.

The problem with this is not just an “aw shucks I would prefer if we went the other way” type of thing. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America. It means the nation is not, in a very straightforward sense, working. If democracy is a machine meant to ensure that the government serves the will and the interests of the people, ours is broken, and instead of fixing it, it is being further stripped for parts. The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of an evil health insurance CEO is a big tell. If there is great inequality, and great unfairness, and power is too concentrated, and instead of opening the system up to regular people so that they can reverse those things, you come in and make the system operate more towards the interests of the rich and well-connected, the people will, inevitably, get more angry. Crazy things happen when many people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. If we, collectively, do not want more crazy things to happen, we must reform the system. The Trump administration is not going to do that. So consider what is left.

The Democratic Party is such a dispiriting collection of careerists that it can be frustrating to continually speak about what they should be doing, while watching them always choose to instead continue the things that serve the careerists. But let us speak rationally here, regardless. We have a two-party system and the Democratic Party is the opposition. We know what needs to be done and we know that the Republicans are going to do the opposite. The only move for the Democratic Party—the rational move, the reasonable move—is to get more radical. Pundits will call this “going further left” but really what we are talking about is pulling harder in the direction of where the nation needs to go, in response to a Republican Party that is pulling harder towards plutocracy. If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs. (...)

When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Roaring 2020s

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Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media (Welcome to Garbagetown) [ed. and Corporate America in general.]

Image: via

[ed. In theme with a couple of recent posts below, (Sitting Ducks; and Buying a New TV), here's a good rant. Mostly about social networks, but applicable to every corporate and political entity that's principally engaged in fleecing, punking, manipulating and ultimately forcing every individual into using products that eventually degrade over time and are contrary to their best interests.]

***

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed. (...)

***

And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems.

But ultimately, what happens to our places and what happens to liberal democratic culture is only somewhat about money. If you think that’s not true, that it’s only capitalism that curdles the milk, ask yourself whether you think, even with all the money in the world, you ever could pay Amy Coney Barrett or Marjorie Taylor Green or Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley or Andrew Tate or Brett Kavanaugh or Jim Jordan enough to become a progressive feminist eco-warrior activist.

There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option."

On Buying a New TV: Be Prepared For Ad Hell

On Buying a New 'Smart' TV set: "This is an advertising/e-commerce-driven market, not a consumer-driven market. TV content is just the bait in the trap."

If you're looking to buy a TV in 2025, you may be disappointed by the types of advancements TV brands will be prioritizing in the new year. While there's an audience of enthusiasts interested in developments in tech like OLED, QDEL, and Micro LED, plus other features like transparency and improved audio, that doesn't appear to be what the industry is focused on.

Today's TV selection has a serious dependency on advertisements and user tracking. In 2025, we expect competition in the TV industry to center around TV operating systems (OSes) and TVs' ability to deliver more relevant advertisements to viewers.

That yields a complicated question for shoppers: Are you willing to share your data with retail conglomerates and ad giants to save money on a TV?

Vizio is a Walmart brand now

One of the most impactful changes to the TV market next year will be Walmart owning Vizio. For Walmart, the deal, which closed on December 3 for approximately $2.3 billion, is about owning the data collection capabilities of Vizio’s SmartCast OS. For years, Vizio has been shifting its business from hardware sales to Platform+, “which consists largely of its advertising business" and "now accounts for all the company’s gross profit,” as Walmart noted when announcing the acquisition.

Walmart will use data collected from Vizio TVs to fuel its ad business, which sells ads on the OSes of its TVs (including Vizio and Onn brand TVs) and point-of-sale machines in Walmart stores. In a December 3 statement, Walmart confirmed its intentions with Vizio: [ed. Gotta love corporate speak]

The acquisition… allows Walmart to serve its customers in new ways to enhance their shopping journeys. It will also bring to market new and differentiated ways for advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery, helping brands achieve greater impact from their advertising investments with Walmart Connect—the company’s retail media business in the US.

In 2025, buying a Vizio TV won’t just mean buying a TV from a company that’s essentially an ad business. It will mean fueling Walmart’s ad business. With Walmart also owning Onn and Amazon owning Fire TVs, that means there’s one less TV brand that isn’t a cog in a retail giant’s ever-expanding ad machine. (...)

“Roku is at grave risk”

Further, Walmart has expressed a goal of becoming one of the 10 biggest ad companies, with the ad business notably having higher margins than groceries. It could use Vizio, via more plentiful and/or intrusive ads, to fuel those goals. (...)

There are also potential implications related to how Walmart decides to distribute TVs post-acquisition. As Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at Omdia, told Ars:

One of the possibilities is that Walmart could make use of the Vizio operating system a condition for placement in stores. This could change not only the Onn/Vizio TVs but may also include the Chinese brands. The [Korean] and Japanese brands may resist, as they have premium brand positioning, but the Chinese brands would be vulnerable. Roku is at grave risk.

Roku acquisition?

With Walmart set to challenge Roku, some analysts anticipate that Roku will be acquired in 2025. In December, Guggenheim analysts predicted that ad tech firm The Trade Desk, which is launching its own TV OS, will look to buy Roku to scale its OS business.

Needham & Company’s Laura Martin also thinks an acquisition—by The Trade Desk or possibly one of Walmart's retail competitors—could be on the horizon.

‘’Walmart has told you by buying Vizio that these large retailers need a connected television advertising platform to tie purchases to,” Martin told Bloomberg. "That means Target and other large retailers have that reason to buy Roku to tie Roku’s connected television ad units to their sales in their retail stores. And by the way, Roku has much higher margins than any retailer.’”

She also pointed to Amazon as a potential buyer, noting that it might be able to use Roku's user data to feed large language models.

Roku was already emboldened enough in 2024 to introduce home screen video ads to its TVs and streaming devices and has even explored technology for showing ads over anything plugged into a Roku set. Imagine how using Roku devices might further evolve if owned by a company like The Trade Desk or Amazon with deep interests in ads and tracking.

TV owners accustomed to being tracked

TV brands have become so dependent on ads that some are selling TVs at a loss to push ads. How did we get to the point where TV brands view their hardware as a way to track and sell to viewers? Part of the reason TV OSes are pushing the limits on ads is that many viewers seem willing to accept them, especially in the name of saving money.

Per the North American Q2 2024 TiVo Video Trends Report, 64.3 percent of subscription video-on-demand users subscribe to an ad-supported tier (compared to 48 percent in Q2 2023). And users are showing more tolerance to ads, with 77.8 percent saying they are "tolerant" or "in favor of" ads, up from 74 percent in Q2 2023. This is compared to 22.2 percent of respondents saying they're "averse" to ads. TiVo surveyed 4,490 people in the US and Canada ages 18 and up for the report.

“Based on streaming services, many consumers see advertising as a small price to pay for lower cash costs," Horner said.

The analyst added:

While some consumers will be sensitive to privacy issues or intrusive advertising, at the same time, most people have shown themselves entirely comfortable with being tracked by (for example) social media.

Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at the TVREV TV and streaming analyst group, agreed that platforms like Instagram have proven people's willingness to accept ads and tracking, particularly if it leads to them seeing more relevant advertisements or giving shows or movies better ratings. According to the analyst, customers seem to think, "Google is tracking my finances, my porn habits, my everything. Why do I care if NBC knows that I watch football and The Tonight Show?" (...)

That said, there's a fine line.

"Companies have to be careful of... finding that line between taking in advertising, especially display ads on the home screen or whatnot, and it becoming overwhelming [for viewers]," Wolk said.

One of the fastest-growing ad vehicles for TVs currently and into 2025 is free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels that come preloaded and make money from targeted ads. TCL is already experimenting with what viewers will accept here. It recently premiered movies made with generative AI that it hopes will fuel its FAST business while saving money. TCL believes that passive viewers will accept a lot of free content, even AI-generated movies and shows. But some viewers are extremely put off by such media, and there's a risk of souring the reputation of some FAST services.

by Scharon Harding, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. No wonder Enshittification was selected the word of the year in 2024. See also: here and here (or just do a Google search to experience enshittification in real-time).]

F1 Goes Small

Just for Fun

Serious Kids

Serious Competition 

Preteen go-cart drivers are spending millions for a shot at F1 racing (ST/WaPo)
Images: (first image) via; F1 images Claudia Gori for The Washington Post

***

"Julian and Alessandro were walking to the starting line, trying their best not to look at each other. They wore child-size racing uniforms and tiny driving gloves. Behind them, mechanics pushed their 160-pound cars with a list of corporate sponsors on the hood. The team’s name was emblazoned on the side: Baby Race.

The two boys were Baby Race’s star drivers, among the favorites to win the World Series of Karting championship that was minutes away. In theory, they could work together to secure a team victory. But Alessandro Truchot and Julian Frasnelli had been fierce competitors since they were 9 and 10. Now they were 11 and 12, respectively, and the rivalry had grown violent, culminating in high-speed crashes that caused a roaring crowd to hold its breath.

As its popularity has boomed, Formula One has faced a problem: how to identify future champions who can’t yet drive a car. Karting is the sport’s best approximation, a birthday party diversion that has been bankrolled and professionalized into a series of miniature Grand Prix races. Every current F1 driver started in a go-cart."

Hiroki Kawanabe - Harvest Moon; unidentified artist, non-titled

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Review: A Complete Unknown

Walking out of A Complete Uknown and into the streets of New York City, not far from where Bob Dylan tramped about in his vagabond days of the 1960s, I felt empty and unsatisfied. Far from unlocking the secrets of the widely heralded singer-songwriter's heart, co-writer/director James Mangold's biographical drama keeps the man behind the legend and lyrics a mystery. But as I've gotten distance from that night, I've come to appreciate in reflection that this was precisely Mangold's purpose.

Dylan's lyrics in songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" spoke to his generation and generations to follow. Now 83, he is still a massive influence, not just on folk music but also rock and American music as a whole. Because so many relate to his lyrics, we like to think we could relate to him. As we do with all celebrities whose work we admire or whose personas we envy, we yearn to confirm that they are who we imagine, and in some way are like us. And yet, they don't owe us this interiority. Dylan, even in his decades of fame, even as he chaotically tweets, is still — after 60 years in the spotlight — an unknown in many ways.

The title of this film, pulled from Dylan's lyrics for "Like a Rolling Stone," warns audiences at the outset. A Complete Unknown, despite its immersive and rigorous re-creation of the 1960s folk era and a star-studded cast committed to capturing the specifics of luminaries like Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez, refuses to play by the expectations of a standard Hollywood biopic by demystifying its subject. From the first scene to the finale, Dylan (as portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) is a man who is of the people and yet apart from them. He refuses to be held down by social norms, romantic obligations, genre conventions, or community pressures. Perhaps he is sincere. Perhaps his mystique is a pose. Perhaps we don’t really want to know.

Adapted from Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Mangold's movie begins in 1961 New York City, where a scrawny, scraggly man struts through Manhattan's downtown streets, a newspaper clipping in his hand. Bob Dylan (Chalamet) is seeking out the hospice where his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), idles, partially paralyzed and voiceless but not alone. Tracing him to Jersey, Dylan comes upon another folk star, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who not only walks the walk of singing political songs but also defends them against a government terrified of the voice of its people.

The three become fast friends, the thrumming of their connection as instant and enchanting as the song Dylan plays to impress his heroes. Soon, he'll find not only his place in the folk scene and Greenwich Village but also in the bed of a beautiful artist and activist called Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). (She is based on Dylan's ex Suze Rotolo, who is pictured along the musician on 1963's album cover for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.) But once Dylan hits his groove, the film launches forward several years to 1965, when he's an established megastar whose emerging interest in electric guitar threatens to outrage his fanbase at the Newport Folk Festival, and his early allies.

Timothée Chalamet is perfectly earnest yet irritating as Bob Dylan.

This, too, is the point. Whether flirting with Sylvie or playing for Woody, young Bob is devotedly constructing his own mythology. To his fellow male musicians, this is easily accepted; the construction of his stage persona is as valid as his scribbling lyrics or building his band. However, Dylan's female lovers suffer the friction where fiction meets real life. (...)

Because Mangold's script binds his audience to a protagonist who willfully distances himself from everyone, it's essential that the supporting players erupt with the emotions Bob could never dare express. Norton, Fanning, and Barbaro do so in a symphony of feelings, which carry the film. (...)

Each of these performances masterfully fleshes out these figures so they exist beyond their connection to Dylan. You can see how they tie together, how it hurts when he cuts that tie, but also that each is a tapestry even without him. This, above all else, makes A Complete Unknown remarkable, setting it apart from countless dramas about an abusive (and always male) creative genius whose bad behavior is effectively shrugged off as the cost of art.

by Kristy Puchko, Mashable |  Read more:

Image: Searchlight Pictures; Wikipedia

[ed. Don't know about Chalamet as Dylan (although he did spend five years preparing for the role), but always had an interest in Suze Rotollo, who died in 2011. Very complex woman. See also: Memoirs of a Girl From the East Country (O.K., Queens) (NYT); and, Bob and Suze: Words of meeting, words of parting (Peter White).]

***

"They lived together in a small apartment on West Fourth Street and fed each other’s ravenous hunger for meaning. “We created this private world,” Ms. Rotolo recalled over lunch in an Italian restaurant on Waverly Place. “We were searching for poetry, and we saw that in each other. We were so ultrasensitive, both of us. That’s why it was a good relationship, but also why it was difficult.”

Mr. Dylan has been a gnomic figure for so long that it’s sometimes hard to recollect the Chaplinesque aspect that characterized him in his youth. His boundless enthusiasm proved a delight for the more reserved Ms. Rotolo. For his part Mr. Dylan soaked up her passion for the likes of William Blake, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud; he inscribed a paperback edition of Byron’s poems to her “Lord Byron Dylan.” Equally important, her political activism, particularly in the civil rights movement, spurred his thinking and writing about those issues. (...)

Their romance, then, began on the basis of an equality that became impossible to sustain. She would soon feel overwhelmed by the obsessive attention the world focused on Mr. Dylan. Having made the symbolic journey across the East River to discover herself and what she might become, she felt lost once again, reduced to being Mr. Dylan’s chick and urged even by her most well-intentioned friends to accommodate her life in every way to his genius.

In approaching Ms. Rotolo about doing the book, Gerry Howard, an editor at Broadway Books, mentioned “Minor Characters,” a memoir by Joyce Johnson, who had been Jack Kerouac’s lover at a similar stage in his career. “I’m a great fan of ‘Minor Characters,’ and I thought Suze stood in exact relation to Dylan as Joyce Johnson did to Kerouac,” Mr. Howard said. “They were present at liftoff and then had to live in the backwash of all that.”

Sissel Tolaas: NOEA perfume (2004)
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[ed. Not at Walmart. Currently.]

'Mirror Life'

‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research (The Guardian)
Image: Leigh Prather/Alamy
[ed. Great. Another existential threat. Is there some subset of psychopaths intent on killing off all humanity? Rhetorical question (beyond mad scientists, AI tech bros, Pentagon generals, Jihadists, your average camouflaged neighbor, etc.).]

***

"World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

“The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” said Prof Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.” (...)

Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead."

Isley Brothers

[ed. Bite the Power.]

Sitting Ducks

Image: via:

[ed. Says basically everyone these days. Check out this recent email I got from YouTube. They don't care if you're outraged or not, whether you leave or not, whether you loathe the ads they've polluted their product with or not (enshittification). They know your options are limited (by design). I got the same thing from my insurance company - raising rates without any explanation or justification. They don't care enough to even play-act at being contrite these days.]

***

From YouTube:

YouTube TV has always worked hard to offer you the content you love, delivered the way you want, with features that make it easy to enjoy the best of live TV.

To keep up with the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service, we’re updating our monthly price from $72.99/month to $82.99/month starting January 13, 2025.  [ed. $10 bucks/mo!]

We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize this has an impact on our members. We are committed to bringing you features that are changing the way we watch live TV, like unlimited DVR storage and multiview*, and supporting YouTube TV’s breadth of content and vast on-demand library of movies and shows.

The price of your YouTube TV Base Plan membership will change in your first billing cycle on or after January 13, 2025, and will be charged to your payment method on file going forward. (...)

We hope YouTube TV continues to be your service of choice, but we understand that some of our members may want to cancel their subscriptions. As always, family managers have the ability to pause or cancel anytime. You can find more information in our Help Center.

With lots of exciting shows and live events ahead in the new year, we’ll continue to strive to deliver the best of TV, all in one place. Thank you for being a loyal YouTube TV member.

Sincerely,
The YouTube TV team

[ed. FYI. Basically the same thing from my State Farm Insurance "team".]

Concorde - The Towering Supersonic Airliner. The airliner could maintain a supercruise up to Mach 2.04 (2,170 km/h; 1,350 mph) at an altitude of 60,000 ft (18.3 km)
via:

[ed. Ahh. Wasn't too long ago when cars and jets were cool. And phones were... attached to walls.]

Peeling The Onion

The decision to overturn The Onion’s purchase of Infowars is a massive mistake that not only ignores the law but also profoundly misses the point of the nature of parody and satire, something we especially need in the serious and severe of times.

The ruling by Houston US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez takes aim at a move that was bold, creative, and quintessentially satirical, framing it as frivolous when it’s actually rooted in some of the deepest traditions of free speech. By doing this, Judge Lopez not only misunderstands the purpose of satire but also sets a dangerous precedent that could have a chilling effect on how we critique and challenge power in today’s media landscape.

At its heart, satire is a tool for social commentary. It takes the absurdities, hypocrisies, or excesses of public life and magnifies them, showing us the truth in ways that are sharp, funny, and often painfully accurate. Think of it as holding up a funhouse mirror to reality—except what you see is a more honest reflection than what’s presented to us by those in power.

The Onion has built its entire reputation on this principle, skewering everything from politics to pop culture in ways that are both biting and hilarious. So when The Onion decided to buy Infowars, it wasn’t just a business transaction, it was a profound societal statement. It was saying, “Look how absurd this platform is, that we, as a satire outlet, can buy it and make it into what it always was – a complete and total joke.

But the judge didn’t seem to get this. Instead, the ruling dismissed the purchase as a stunt, implying that satire and business don’t mix.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how satire works in a modern context. Satire doesn’t stay confined to newspaper columns or stand-up routines. It can happen through art, performance, social media, and yes, even through corporate acquisitions.

So when The Onion bought Infowars, it wasn’t just poking fun but was rather leveraging the mechanics of capitalism to make a larger point about how misinformation spreads and how ridiculous it is that a platform like Infowars has managed to thrive in the first place.

This decision also fails to appreciate the First Amendment’s role in protecting satire, which has long been recognized as essential to free speech.

In landmark cases such as Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the Supreme Court made it clear that satire—even or particularly when offensive or outrageous—is protected because it contributes to the robust exchange of ideas that democracy depends on.

By stepping into the middle of what should be a creative expression of that right, the court has undermined one of the most important tools we have for holding powerful entities accountable. And let’s face it—Infowars was and probably still is a powerful entity. Its influence on public discourse, despite being rooted in conspiracy theories and misinformation, is undeniable. The Onion’s ownership could have served as a brilliant counter-narrative, showing that satire has the power to dismantle even the loudest megaphones of disinformation.

What’s even more baffling is how the court ignored the legal basics of the case. The Onion followed all the necessary rules for acquiring a business. It wasn’t some rogue operation—they played their acquisition by the book. The judge, however, seemed to suggest that because the purchase had a satirical motive, it somehow wasn’t legitimate.

That’s a dangerous precedent. Businesses make acquisitions for all kinds of reasons—strategic, symbolic, even philanthropic. Why should satire be singled out as less valid? The judge is essentially saying that if you’re not in it purely for profit, your motives don’t count. That’s not how corporate law works, and it’s certainly not how it should.

by Aron Solomon, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Hmm. Lots of interesting arguments here. Would it have made a difference if a hedge fund had bought Infowars instead of The Onion (even if the intent was the same)? What about big boys buying out potential threats/competitors eg. Facebook/Snapchat, etc.?]

Frankenstein: Looking For Love

The Bride of Frankenstein still with Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff.

via:
[ed. I just finished reading Frankenstein, the actual book by Mary Shelly. Quite different than the movies (of course). Did you know the monster was really quite an erudite (self-taught), benevolent and sympathetic character who turned on society only after society turned on him? Maybe. But also how the story is mostly about him stalking and haunting his creator Dr. Frankenstein (who was only in his early 20s at the time) with just one request? To create a partner he could love and who could understand and share in his misery (living in purgatory, between life and death). The doctor (vascillating between admiration and disgust for his creation) initially agreed, but then, feeling the burden of bringing another monster into the world, went back on his word... to his everlasting misfortune. Which is to say, the Bride in this version was a Hollywood creation, not Shelly's.]

"My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events to which I am now excluded."

"I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?" 

Times Change
via: here/here

[ed. Not necessarily for the worse.]

Self-Defense For Women

Self-Defense for Women (anyone, actually)

via: here/here

[ed. I could watch these over and over and probably never think clearly in the moment. But you never know. More here.]

‘Accountable’ Capitalism

Elizabeth Warren introduces Senate bill to hold capitalism ‘accountable’ (The Guardian)

The bill would mandate corporations with over $1bn in annual revenue obtain a federal charter as a “United States Corporation” under the obligation to consider the interests of all stakeholders and corporations engaging in repeated and egregious illegal conduct can have their charters revoked.

The legislation would also mandate that at least 40% of a corporation’s board of directors be chosen directly by employees and would enact restrictions on corporate directors and officers from selling stocks within five years of receiving the shares or three years within a company stock buyback.

All political expenditures by corporations would also have to be approved by at least 75% of shareholders and directors.

What concerns me about the framing in the Guardian, and it’s even more apparent in the Common Dream account below, is that it IMHO does not make it clear that the maximizing shareholder value is a made up economists’ creed, first promulgated by Milton Friedman in a New York Times op-ed. It is not a legal duty, as management touts regularly and falsely assert. Legally, equity is a residual claim. All other obligations, like payments to employees, suppliers, creditors, landlords, tax authorities, successful litigants, regulatory fines, come first.

Since this bad idea seems as resistant to extermination as cockroaches, let us hoist from a 2017 post, Why the “Maximize Shareholder Value” Theory Is Bogus:

From the early days of this website, we’ve written from time to time about why the “shareholder value” theory of corporate governance was made up by economists and has no legal foundation. It has also proven to be destructive in practice, save for CEO and compensation consultants who have gotten rich from it.

Further confirmation comes from a must-read article in American Prospect by Steven Pearlstein, When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town. It recounts how until the early 1990s, corporations had a much broader set of concerns, most importantly, taking care of customers, as well as having a sense of responsibility for their employees and the communities in which they operated. Equity is a residual economic claim. As we wrote in 2013:

Directors and officers, broadly speaking, have a duty of care and duty of loyalty to the corporation. From that flow more specific obligations under Federal and state law. But notice: those responsibilities are to the corporation, not to shareholders in particular…..Equity holders are at the bottom of the obligation chain. Directors do not have a legal foundation for given them preference over other parties that legitimately have stronger economic interests in the company than shareholders do….

One of their big props to this campaign was the claim that companies existed to promote shareholder value. This had been a minority view in the academic literature in the 1940s and 1950s. Milton Friedman took it up an intellectually incoherent New York Times op-ed in 1970….

Why The Shareholder Value Theory Has No Legal Foundation

Why do so many corporate boards treat the shareholder value theory as gospel? Aside from the power of ideology and constant repetition in the business press, Pearlstein, drawing on the research of Cornell law professor Lynn Stout, describes how a key decision has been widely misapplied:

Let’s start with the history. The earliest corporations, in fact, were generally chartered not for private but for public purposes, such as building canals or transit systems. Well into the 1960s, corporations were broadly viewed as owing something in return to the community that provided them with special legal protections and the economic ecosystem in which they could grow and thrive.

Legally, no statutes require that companies be run to maximize profits or share prices. In most states, corporations can be formed for any lawful purpose. Lynn Stout, a Cornell law professor, has been looking for years for a corporate charter that even mentions maximizing profits or share price. So far, she hasn’t found one. Companies that put shareholders at the top of their hierarchy do so by choice, Stout writes, not by law…

For many years, much of the jurisprudence coming out of the Delaware courts—where most big corporations have their legal home—was based around the “business judgment” rule, which held that corporate directors have wide discretion in determining a firm’s goals and strategies, even if their decisions reduce profits or share prices. But in 1986, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that directors of the cosmetics company Revlon had to put the interests of shareholders first and accept the highest price offered for the company. As Lynn Stout has written, and the Delaware courts subsequently confirmed, the decision was a narrowly drawn exception to the business–judgment rule that only applies once a company has decided to put itself up for sale. But it has been widely—and mistakenly—used ever since as a legal rationale for the primacy of shareholder interests and the legitimacy of share-price maximization.

Now to the current post: Warren Bill Would Stop Companies From Placing Shareholder Paydays Over Worker Rights  (Julia Conley, Common Dreams) via: (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism)

Image: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Reuters

[ed. If we were truly a properly functioning democracy/meritocracy Elizabeth Warren would have been elected President years ago. Glad she's still a US Senator though.]