Bien le bonjour. Get some radioheadphones, 2+2=5 is 👍 live.

Around the interwebs,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on navigating our differences:
  • Fundamental value differences are not that fundamental.
  • The whole city is center.
• The hotel bathroom puzzle, or a great illustration of the XY problem.
• Kurt Vonnegut: Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088, via kottke.

  The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

  1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
  2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
  3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
  4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
  5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
  6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

• Kottke: How to ask a favor.
• [fr] Grain de philo : Voulons-nous mourir ? et FAQ de la mort !
• David Cain: There is no right decision.
• r/PhotoshopBattle: French president Macron celebrating victory, thx Louis.
• SMBC: The Best.
• Tech:
  • DF: Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg.

    Zuckerberg is so wrong here. It is not hard at all to “impugn the intent” of Holocaust or Sandy Hook deniers. They’re fucking Nazis. The idea that these people are wrong but are making honest mistakes in good faith is nonsense. Facebook’s stance on this is genuinely detrimental to society. They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner.

  • Bloomberg: A global guide to state-sponsored trolling, via jwz.

    In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents. [...]

    In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook, national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and anonymized threats -- what the researchers dubbed a strategy of "information abundance" made possible by the rapid spread of social media. [...]

    Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul's Gezi Park, President Recep Erdogan's government has used a combination of online and offline repression to turn social media "into a near dead zone for genuine social protest in Turkey," Francois said. "Five years later, there is very little organically organized activity."

  • xkcd #2021 - Software Development. NOT TRUE, WE DON'T "load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall", WE LET AMAZON DO IT.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Old Steve Jobs on the constructive-destructive axis:

    In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News”, Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful”. Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer”, he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”