• If you never made it a point to read the brilliant Star Slate Codex blog, the one recently closed by threats from the New York Times to intrude upon a private psychiatric practice, you might want to grab the entire 8meg collection from this link. I read it with a PDF reader called Sumatra. Good thing to have for a flight or other waiting-in-line reading material.

• In January 2021, will more girls be named Corona or will more boys be named Floyd?

Covid is bad, and as noted in the San Fran newspaper linked yesterday, the damage is often enduring.

It's possible, though improbable, that Novak Djokovic won't be able to play tennis again, whether for health or political reasons. Apparently he said earlier this year that he would resist a vaccine for Covid were it available.

Well, now he's got the disease, but even if he feels no effects, he may very well have been a link in a chain that kills or wounds someone who isn't in the physical condition of a youthful professional athlete.

Many apparently imagine they have no connection or responsibilities to those around them, or to anyone who came before.

The have been commenters, on this blog and in real life (so to speak), including medical professionals, who said just a few weeks ago that this was not a big deal, and that viruses often killed thousands of people per year.

And without picking fights, I wonder what they'd have said had they been told that this thing would soon be the third largest killer of Americans.

FFS

#nascarnoose solved. These images are all from the garages at Talladega SuperSpeedway.

Image 1 shows rope “nooses” are affixed to every garage bay door as a pull down.

Image 2 shows Bubba’s bay 4 in Nov. 2019.

Image 3 is of bay 4 after the incident. Notice the rope is cut.

https://twitter.com/JamesEBeatty/status/1275389111759667201

Blockbuster's business model was always going to be a stop-gap measure. With cable on-demand services, better download capabilities, and rent-by-mail, the pick-up model on which Blockbuster relied was going to be superseded. It was only a matter of time.

The company's senior management was intentionally oblivious to changes in technology that were rapidly rendering the company's business model obsolete. And intentionally oblivious to the ill-will it was building up among its customer base with late fees, surly customer service, out-of-stocks, and no long-tail inventory.

Once a competitor, any competitor, was available, a large chunk of the video rental customer base flocked to it, abandoning Blockbuster in retaliation for late fees, bad service, high prices, etc.

Blockbuster was never convenient. If you didn't get to your local Blockbuster by 3pm, all the latest releases would be gone and you'd be stuck with scratched copies of Summer Rental or Joe vs. the Volcano.

A hero abolitionist who died fighting slavery in the Civil War, and the female "Forward" symbol of Wisconsin.

Let's face it, the only thing you stupid fucks are accomplishing is providing free B-roll for Trump campaign commercials.

https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1275767686258196481

Related to the Iowahawk post, this is about the Forward statue:

Because nothing screams WOKE like tearing down a statue of a woman, made by a woman, designed to be a symbol of progressivism.

https://twitter.com/TCC_Grouchy/status/1275781059150589952

Seems that they also beat up a state senator in Wisconsin.

I took this pic- it got me assaulted & beat up. Punched/kicked in the head, neck, ribs. Maybe concussion, socked in left eye is little blurry, sore neck & ribs. 8-10 people attacked me. Innocent people are going to get killed. Capitol locked- stuck in office.Stop violence nowPlz!

https://twitter.com/TimCarpenterMKE/status/1275716467007328258

Time to call these "protesters" what they are: barbarians. Another statue they want to pull down.

This statue, the Emancipation Memorial, was paid for entirely by freed slaves and Frederick Douglas spoke at its dedication.

https://twitter.com/Hagstrom_Anders/status/1275591387367575555

Oh.

During an interview with Don Lemon on CNN Tonight, the NASCAR driver responded to the FBI's investigation findings, which concluded that the rope found in his garage stall was there since 2019. Wallace expressed his disagreement and addressed the current backlash he's facing. "Whether tied in 2019, or whatever, it was a noose," he said.

https://twitter.com/i/events/1275765326186074112

D'oh!

Well, no noose is good news.

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1275567155065520129

In the future, it will be your patriotic duty to off yourself.

The Dutch doctor who euthanized a 74-year old dementia patient against her will and was exonerated of all charges gave a televised interview recently, in which she defended her actions as “for the best.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/23/dutch-doctor-exonerated-after-euthanizing-an-unwilling-patient/

• Yoo Guyyyyythhhh, I totally had the Nascar thing yesterday. And the day before.

• Look, here comes the 4th of July, so do what you want to do… Cookout, whatever. Drink beer if you like… But don't leave the empties sitting around the house to tempt the kids.

This might be a good time for Trump devotees to rethink their adoration. History has given him dozens of the best possible opportunities to to show leadership, yet he might well be defeated by a clearly doddering political hack with serious #MeToo liabilities.

The worst and vast majority of Washington's policies and bureaucracy have been completely unaffected by Trump— He didn't accomplish anything.

The next trend in manufactured hoax: He said the N-word but did it before I had the chance to record it on my cell phone!

https://twitter.com/RealSaleemJuma/status/1275604451806437377

• First Djokovic on the tennis court, now professsional golf.

We knew cinemas might never recover— Professional sports might be gravely wounded as well.

• See yesterday's link about the ARM supercomputer from Fujitsu that was rushed to completion to assist Covid research… We've got another one.

In the seventh decade of life, this many years old and not good at booklarnin', I am told of something called Providence Plantations. Who knew?

If only this were true:

https://twitter.com/FluffyTet/status/1275674140146651140

"See yesterday's link about the ARM supercomputer from Fujitsu that was rushed to completion to assist Covid research…"

Not necessary. Look at the Folding@home website to join the distributed supercomputing brigade, to work on COVID or a number of other projects as you desire.

> Not necessary

When researchers want to run a job, they want to run it right now, all at once, securely and reliably. Torrent for Burt Reynolds movies is fine, but the truth about distributed computing is that the costs and latency for spreading tasks & date around a bunch of sluggish networks to unremarkable, far-flung processors are just too onerous. Academic sharing is always about Big Iron.

I remember (precisely) one article circa 1990 from a big business executive: 'Golly, all these newfangled, interconnected desktops are dormant all night after employees go home... Why can't we RUN stuff on them? Important stuff? Useful stuff?

Because reasons.

Consider this: It ain't about desktop micros, except maybe for writing the grant proposal emails and remotely starting jobs.

That UwU heat map in Germany:

BTW, the guy in that picture got one of his bf killed due to complications from silicone injections.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/a-reddit-user-created-a-worldwide-heat-map-of-furries

WTAF is wrong with those people? I guess a month in Montana wouldn't be so bad.

A new GOP bill would give each taxpayer $4,000 to take a vacation anywhere in the US through the end of 2021

https://www.businessinsider.com/taxpayer-vacation-credit-gop-bill-mcsally-tax-domestic-stimulus-travel-2020-6

WTAF is wrong with those people? I guess a month in Montana wouldn't be so bad.

A new GOP bill would give each taxpayer $4,000 to take a vacation anywhere in the US through the end of 2021
https://www.businessinsider.com/taxpayer-vacation-credit-gop-bill-mcsally-tax-domestic-stimulus-travel-2020-6

I R A Darth Aggie at June 24, 2020 11:01 AM

Husband and I were just discussing this. We figure RV trip up to Alaska, and two weeks or more of fishing.

We had a couple of questions though. First, would we be able to get reimbursement for gas we have to buy in Canada, and.... is this going to be handled through a tax credit? Sure seems like it would need to be.

For the folks of Montana who think that these people with their $4k in free money coming to the state will help the economy should watch this:

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1275473801665536000

You know, these tee shirts would sell well in places like China, Japan, S. Korea

https://twitter.com/chadJohnWallis/status/1275238877054320641

> The company's senior management
> was intentionally oblivious to
> changes

Maybe not: Give this 3½ minutes starting at 4:15.

Wisdom from David French—

When you hear increasing right-wing (I refuse to say "conservative") calls for government oversight of social media speech policies, it's vitally important to understand some of the career/economic context. Many of the people most alarmed made a gamble. /1

They invested enormous time, energy, and effort into a platform they didn't create, don't control, and use for free. They've built impressive followings here, sometimes through edge-lord behavior, skating at the outer margins of Twitter's policies. /2

As progressive speech values shift (after all, this is a site created by progressives and run by progressives) some of that on-the-line tweeting is going to cross newly-created lines, thus jeopardizing all that effort and risking extinguishing their primary public presence. /3

That's why the debate often takes on a slightly-crazed tone. It's not merely an abstract debate over constitutional principles and corporate values. Lots of folks went all-in on creating an edgy presence on arguably the most progressive social media site. /4

They don't want to start over on Facebook. They don't want to flee to Gab. Nor do they want to start from scratch on TikTok ("Chuck Todd won't know I destroyed him!") or Snapchat or YouTube or Reddit. And they're certainly not content to "only" write on the platforms they own. /5

So here we are, in the grips of an incredibly self-interested effort to pull more and more of the government into social media regulation, even to the point of potentially overriding long-cherished First Amendment freedoms. It's important to understand one reason why. /end

Maybe not: Give this 3½ minutes starting at 4:15. ~ Crid at June 24, 2020 12:58 PM

Very interesting.

Forbes posits a theory that Blockbuster's weakness was that its business model relied too heavily on penalizing its patrons. Netflix and RedBox offered the a better selection - with no late fees.

"The irony is that Blockbuster failed because its leadership had built a well-oiled operational machine. It was a very tight network that could execute with extreme efficiency, but poorly suited to let in new information."

The article goes on to describe social networks and their impact on Blockbuster, Netflix, and social media.

Forbes link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/09/05/a-look-back-at-why-blockbuster-really-failed-and-why-it-didnt-have-to/#7f9e850c1d64

Following your link now, but obviously Netflix was exceptionally adept, perhaps because they (literally) weren't old enough to be intimidated.

We never save the articles that mean so much...

But years ago one of them described an urgent meeting for the bright & spry senior management who'd clawed their way to the top of young Netflix, itself just a few years old.

A boss introduced a few punks sitting casually in the rear of the room, and told the admirals and generals seated around the conference table that they weren't going to be getting much attention from executives anymore, though they'd be expected to maintain their high performance and customer satisfaction in the mailed-product side of the business… Netflix was an internet company beginning yesterday.

(These people didn't theretofore know that the enterprise had 'sides.')

And they did it. Some people say they're the power in Hollywood nowadays.

Forbes says:

The irony is that Blockbuster failed because its leadership had built a well-oiled operational machine. It was a very tight network that could execute with extreme efficiency, but poorly suited to let in new information. Antioco’s fatal flaw wasn’t one of intelligence or capability, but a failure to understand the networks that would determine his fate.

Blockbuster was in Dallas.

Hell, I posted the same passage. It looked different after reading the pieces.

And speaking of reads, I've found a podcast with Reed Hastings and Reid Hoffman and will report later.

The Hoffman Hastings podcast is unlistenable.

Imagine walking through a museum, and when the docent discusses a statue standing before you, she rubs her palms across every surface: That's Hoffman hosting a podcast.

Hastings might have contributed: I can't recall his voice.

Crid,
I didn’t see the link for the SSC that you mentioned in your first comment. Can you repost it? Thanks.

I am supremely sorry for bungling that link!

The 8 megabyte epub file is here.

The tweet by which it came to me is here.

I like using Sumatra Portable to read epub files. If you're a big reader or maybe a Kindle person, you probably have your own solution.

If not, or if you need any further assistance, leave another comment here or write to cridcomment at gmail, and we'll work something out. I could send it as a word doc or something.

Again, to be clear, an archive of Scott Alexander's Star Slate Codex blog is here, downloadable as an epub file.

Thanks Crid! I got it. I do most of my reading on the iPad , so I can read it right out of Dropbox, but thank you for offering to help. 😊