Y’all need to have a greater degree of 1- healthy suspicion in Alexa and corporate surveillance devices personal assistants, and 2- understanding of how dangerous this kind of algorithm is in the hands of a multinational company (and anyone for that matter.)
To begin with, that data is both available for sale and able to be subpoenaed by the government. Alexa’s records and recordings have already been used in criminal trials. In the US, a digital record of your emotional patterns can be used to deny you housing, jobs, and to rule on your ability to exercise your basic rights. Consider that psychiatric stigma and misdiagnosis can already be wielded against you in legal disputes and the notion of a listening device capable of identifying signs of distress for the purpose of marketing to you should be made more clearly concerning.
Moreover we have already seen the use of algorithms like this on Facebook and other “self-reporting” (read: user input) sites capable of identifying the onset of a manic episode [1][2][3], which have been subsequently been linked to identifying vulnerable (high-spending) periods to target ads at these users, perhaps most famously in selling tickets to Vegas (identified in a TedTalk by techno-sociological scholar Zeynep Tufekci where she more generally discusses algorithms and how they shape our online experiences to suggest and reinforce biases).
The notes on this post are super concerning- we are being marketed to under the guise of having our emotional needs attended to by the same people who inflicted that emptiness on us, and everyone is just memeing.
fuck if it’s this easy why do they close the goddamn road for like five months shit
all outta soub 😦
I work for the road crew in the summer. Crack sealing (the process you see above) is fairly quick and simple. (Though holding a hose that pumps literal tons of 350F tar into the road in the middle of the summer is NOT easy)
I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.
For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.
Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.
Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.
So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.
A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of road, not many of us, and soup is expensive.
Glass lizard = glass snake: legless lizards from the genera Dopasia (Asian glass lizards) and Ophisaurus (North American glass lizards) as well as the species
Ophisaurus koellikeri (Moroccan glass lizard) and
Pseudopus apodus (
sheltopusik or Pallas’ glass lizard).You can tell they’re lizards because they have external ear holes and movable eyelids. Some glass lizards have vestigial legs:
But they don’t do anything!
Slowworm = blindworm: genus of lizard closely related to glass lizards, but no one calls them glass lizards. Similar in most ways to glass lizards.
Worm lizards = Amphisbaenia: a clade of legless reptiles consisting of 6 families that are neither lizards nor snakes, though they are more closely related to lizards. They like to SCREAM. They can usually be identified by their ring shaped scales, a trait that has resulted in their common name of ‘worm lizards.’ Some worm lizards have vestigial legs, but all known species with this trait are contained in the genus Bipes:
Like this fine fellow.
Snake-lizards =
flap-footed lizards: legless lizards of the family Pygopodidae. These lizards are natives of Australia, and as such, are upside down. All Pygopodidae have vestigial hind legs. They’re a type of gecko!
NONE OF THESE BOYS ARE SNAKES
There are a lot of other kinds of legless lizards, but these are the most common/well known.
(side note: the name
Pallas’ glass lizard
comes from the same Pallas who is in the name Pallas’s Cat)
speaking, uh, as a formerly-trafficked sex worker, it’s extremely difficult to come forward as a trafficking victim in countries where sex work is criminalized; you just… get criminalized under those same anti-prostitution laws. of course reported trafficking would increase when the sole fact of coming forward as a sex worker at all no longer endangers you.
This line of argument is the same one that you see with conservatives who point to the increase in divorce rates as proof that making divorce safer is endangering marriage, while ignoring the massive drops in domestic abuse, murder, and suicide.
It’s a shot argument with them, and it’s a shot argument here.
In WWI, when they introduced helmets, they saw a sudden spike in head injuries.
What the casual observer may miss was that they were seeing the increase because of a dramatic decrease in deaths from head wounds.
vanhalenofficial 