Balloon Juice | Major Major Major Major, Author at Balloon Juice

Major Major began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.

Who wants some respite??

by Major Major Major Major| December 3, 20194:59 pm| 76 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

It’s been quite the afternoon here at Balloon-Juice! I’m just going to squeeze a respite thread into the middle of all the other stuff that’s going on; sorry for the bigfoot-ish result. No primary politics, and if you have to hate on a generation, make it the Lost Generation or earlier.

To get us started, here is an awesome crab.

Boxer crabs — also known as pom-pom crabs ?— have a cool symbiotic relationship with sea anemones. The tiny crabs hold them in their claws for self-defense & the anemones benefit from food scraps. The crabs have also been seen halving the anemones, essentially cloning them. pic.twitter.com/mGxdTWqIF8
— Dorsa Amir (@DorsaAmir) December 2, 2019

For more on the pom-pom crab (a name which keeps making me think of the Tom-Tom Club), check out this National Geographic article.

What about you folks, seen any good animals lately? I get to see a good one every day…

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Tuesday mood
A post shared by Tynan Burke (@tynanpants) on Nov 12, 2019 at 11:11am PST

Enjoy your respite! Serenity now!

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Why We Build The Wall

by Major Major Major Major| November 30, 201912:12 pm| 81 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Trumpery

We saw the musical Hadestown last night. It’s a rousing retelling of the tragic Orpheus and Eurydice myth. It is of course a major bummer–no Broadway magic swoops in to rescue the doomed heroes. I felt lightly chided by Hermes at the end, when he said that the reason we watch tragedies is because we hope that maybe, just this once, it’ll turn out differently.

Act I ends with a stunning set piece. Hades, who is depicted as a depression-era robber baron, leads a call-and-response dirge about the importance of building a wall around Tartarus. “Why do we build the wall, my children?” he asks. “We build the wall to keep us free,” they chant back.

While I was watching this, I thought, gosh, it’s is a bit of an anvil-drop, isn’t it? So precisely-tailored to our political moment. This is obviously not a new phenomenon to Broadway, but it still took me out of the story.

Well, apparently I was wrong. The song, with a scenery-chewing authoritarian mogul leading chants about how we need to build a wall… is not about Donald Trump. It was written in 2006, inspired by scenery-chewing authoritarians the world over, and walls throughout history.

Asked about this in 2016, the writer said, “We all know the underworld boss/king archetype when we see it. Let’s not elect him president.” So, first, oops. Second, that’s what we’ve become, a nation led by somebody’s imagining of the chaotic evil king of hell. Great.

Good song, though. Lyrics of the last verse below the fold. Open thread.

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Other Stuff Open Thread

by Major Major Major Major| November 20, 201912:41 pm| 90 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Nature & Respite, Not Politics, Open Threads, Something Good Open Thread

I watched the Dem lawyer’s questioning, which was great. Then I watched about five minutes of the GOP questioning, which was just asinine, and I turned it off. It was too stupid to even rise to the level of bad-faith badgering.

Anywho, I figured I am not alone, and maybe somebody should put up a thread for other stuff! Here are some pictures of cats to get us started. From the wonderful @Bodegacats_ account:

pic.twitter.com/NTKLufkzX4
— Bodega Cats (@Bodegacats_) November 19, 2019

This is, as the kids say, “a mood”.
And here we have cats maybe passing the mirror test?

When cats meet cat filters… pic.twitter.com/BKC1OFzHQO
— People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) November 14, 2019

I just concluded a long argument about metadata. How’s your day going?

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Andrew Yang’s Dangerous Idea

by Major Major Major Major| November 16, 20191:08 pm| 99 Comments

This post is in: Privacy, Tech News and Issues, I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About Fucking Nazis, Into the weeds

Andrew Yang has released a plan for Internet regulation. Some of it is good, some of it is anodyne, and some of it is terrible. You may wonder why I’ve chosen to write about this, since he’s not going to be the nominee. Two reasons: one, we should all be talking about this stuff more. Two, his plan is a great example of how Americans go astray when thinking about regulating tech companies.

From his website, we can start with the good:

Regulate the use of data and privacy by establishing data as a property right. The associated rights will enable individuals to retain ownership and share in the economic value generated by their data.

Wonderful! Big fan. I used to work at a startup that sought to enable customers to do this. Alas, it failed because investors thought that our user base would only be the Very Online™, and the sorts of people who want to hide things. Without widespread adoption (or government regulation), this doesn’t work.

Then we have the “sure, alright, I could see that working out”:

Minimize health impacts of modern tech on our people, particularly our children. I will create a Department of the Attention Economy that focuses on smartphones, social media, gaming, and apps, and how to responsibly design and use them, including age restrictions and guidelines.

He proposes things like “removing autoplay video for children under 16,” though personally I’d like to see that apply to children under 116. This one also contains stupider bullet points like “removing the queues that allow infinite scrolling,” which would be laughably easy to work around, if anybody can even figure out what it means.

And then we reach his dangerous ideas, which many politicians across the spectrum like, and which represent a particular failure mode in American regulatory thought.

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Andrew Yang’s Dangerous IdeaPost + Comments (99)

There are essentially two ideas united by the same fallacy:

Social media platforms have catalyzed mass disinformation campaigns over the past decade, threatening not just our wellbeing but our democracy… Algorithms driving recommendations towards conspiracy theory content or other types of disinformation need to be reined in…
We must address once and for all the publisher vs. platform grey area that tech companies have lived in for years. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are using algorithms to make recommendations. These recommendations drive the majority of traffic, up to 70% for Google owned YouTube.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act absolves platforms from all responsibility for any content published on them. However, given the role of recommendation algorithms—which push negative, polarizing, and false content to maximize engagement—there needs to be some accountability.

I will leave aside the fact that Section 230 does no such thing and write instead about this inane focus on recommendation algorithms. (If you’re curious about my opinions on Section 230, there are upcoming EU regulations that touch on this, which I have written about here.)

Yang notes that large social networking sites are used to push massive amounts of misinformation. Further, such sites use recommendation algorithms that often reward bad-faith actors. Since these sites are so large and ubiquitous, this represents a threat to consumers and democracy. So far this is not controversial; even Facebook and Twitter acknowledge this.

However, Yang’s proposed remedy is to require said recommendation algorithms to be either posted in full online or pre-approved by the government. The former would needlessly stifle expression and innovation, and as for the latter, well, imagine Trump with that power.

So where is this faulty reasoning I’m talking about? It’s very simple. If there’s a tech company that’s so big and ubiquitous you feel it’s a danger to democracy, what you have isn’t a justification for an algorithm-policing bureaucracy—what you have is a company that’s too big. And the government already has the authority to address that.

Yang says some dumb shit about how antitrust won’t work in his proposal, which demonstrates a follow-up point: The concept of antitrust enforcement is so foreign to modern Americans that they often reach for bizarre & harmful over-regulation to mitigate the damages caused by huge companies instead of just banning huge companies.

While Yang is a sideshow, and I suspect he does not understand what a recommendation algorithm is, this mode of thinking is very common, so I wanted to start a conversation. I’m happy to get into more detail in the comments.

Afternoon Fat Cat Open Thread

by Major Major Major Major| November 14, 20192:47 pm| 38 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

(No, not the easily-trolled fat cats who just can’t stop giving Sen. Warren free campaign ads…)

This found its way onto my Twitter timeline yesterday, and I just had to share it with y’all.

This story is what I wanted Ocean’s 8 to be https://t.co/cB4dMAgeGt
— Iva Dixit (@ivadixit) November 13, 2019

From the NYT…

When airline employees told Mr. Galin that his 22-pound cat, Viktor, was simply too heavy to fly in the passenger cabin on a flight to Vladivostok, in eastern Russia, he devised a plan to ensure his kitty did not wind up in the cargo hold.
…After asking friends for help, he then sourced a 15-pound feline called Fibi, describing her as an “understudy cat.”
When he presented the slimmer pet at check-in, she came under the airline’s limit of eight kilograms, or about 17 pounds… Mr. Galin and Fibi were approved for takeoff.
But unknown to Aeroflot and its staff, Mr. Galin swapped Fibi for his real pet, Viktor, before boarding the plane.

Cute, but there’s an even sillier moment buried in that piece:

The story of the cat swap became so widespread in Russia that it was even mentioned on Wednesday in a daily call between President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian journalists.
Mr. Putin said that the Kremlin did not comment about cats.

Such a terrible policy. One of his many, granted, but…

Open thread!

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Pence Administration Declares War on Orphans

by Major Major Major Major| November 2, 20195:09 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Healthcare, Immigration, LGBTQ Rights, LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights

…and refugees, the sick, the elderly, the homeless… but only if they’re LGBT or the wrong kind of Christian, of course. These people aren’t complete monsters.

Daniel Reynolds at The Advocate writes:

The Department of Health and Human Services announced a new rule Friday that would allow adoption agencies and other programs that receive HHS grants to reject same-sex couples and rainbow families on the basis of religious freedom, reports the Washington Blade. Other programs that stand to be affected include elder services, Head Start, refugee resettlement, HIV services, and programs for runaway and homeless youth.
The proposed regulation would nullify an Obama-era policy that prohibited federally funded agencies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity…
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — deemed an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — praised the new regulation.
“Thanks to President Trump, charities will be free to care for needy children and operate according to their religious beliefs and [lies about LGBT parents redacted],” Perkins said.
[…] “The Trump-Pence White House has proposed a horrific federal regulation that would permit discrimination across the entire spectrum of HHS programs receiving federal funding,” added Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David.

We knew this was coming. These dipshits are convinced that this country, in which a supermajority of the population and elected officials shares their religion, is coming for their faith. And they hated that Obama policy. What liberals are really coming for, of course, is their ‘right’ to take government money while discriminating against people for the circumstances of their birth. They’re more than welcome to hang up a “no fags allowed” sign on their church. Nobody’s trying to take that away.

Now, even for a fairly privileged fellow like me, this is going to affect my behavior. I try not to travel to deeply conservative areas as a matter of conscience and personal safety, and this policy makes such places even more dangerous for me. What if I get hit by a bus and the only hospital won’t treat me? Or more likely, what if they won’t let my husband visit or make decisions? But for the more marginalized members of the community, this is going to be much more significant. Catholic hospitals are already denying procedures to trans folks that they’ll happily perform on cis folks. This policy makes it official.

Anyway, this will probably become another “Mexico City policy” that Republican and Democratic administrations keep reversing each other on, until the culture warriors die out, so forever. That’ll be fun.

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Contempt For Democracy All The Way Down

by Major Major Major Major| October 30, 20193:40 pm| 335 Comments

This post is in: local races 2019/2020, Open Threads, Republican Venality

I’ll be casting my first New York ballot this weekend! It’ll be a hell of a lot shorter than my last California ballot, which I swear to god weighed as much as Samwise (pictured).

Ballot length aside, it’s harder to vote here; they only started early voting this year, I believe, and voting by mail requires you to claim to have a reason.

But as much as the state-level Democrats are behind the curve on voting accessibility… at least they aren’t Republicans, who are at war with free and fair elections, up and down the ballot, and have been for a while, and show no signs of relenting. At, like, every level, down to ridiculous penny-ante bullshit. Consider this, from the local voter’s guide. It’s the Republican’s entire candidate statement for the position of NYC Public Advocate, a post that exists to make sure voters have a day-to-day voice in city government:

Imagine how much money was wasted in sending this booklet to every registered voter in a city of 8.5 million people…
It’s but one example of how little those in City Hall actually value the taxpayers like you who are left footing the bill.
Who speaks for your family?

Nothing says “Republican public advocacy” quite like “I think sending voting information to the public is a waste of money.” They just hate you and want you to live in the dark and be grateful for it. (Much like Pacific Gas & Electric, but I digress.)

Another open thread!

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Evening Respite Thread: Words!

by Major Major Major Major| October 21, 201910:53 pm| 124 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite, Open Threads

I don’t know about you, but I sure would love a nice relaxing respite thread. So! My friend Louis was kind enough to bring this fun page to my attention this weekend:

This website tells you what words were born the same year you were.
Delighted to share the stage with “cringey,” “chat room,” “FYI,” “deets,” and “perestroika.” https://t.co/Z2yHqYQdXj
— BOO-is Frightsman (@LouisPeitzman) October 19, 2019

I’m the same vintage as ‘dead-cat bounce’, ‘IP address’, ‘graphene’, ‘anime’, and ‘breakbeat’, to pick a few that I like. They aren’t all winners; ‘alternative country’ had the audacity to be first used in print* that year, too. What about y’all?

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Evening Respite Thread: Words!Post + Comments (124)

Happy National Coming Out Day…

by Major Major Major Major| October 11, 201911:37 am| 141 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, The Gay Enemy Within

…which is all well and good, but it still rankles just a bit.

I can usually make it through days ending in ‘y’ without having to come out to somebody, but it definitely happens more than once a year. As a cis white man with no behaviors that scream ‘gay!’ to the uninitiated, I’m not as likely to experience anti-LGBT prejudice as most community members, but I do have to tell people I’m gay an awful lot.

I’m not saying that this is an actual burden, relatively speaking. But I’m definitely not alone in being a little annoyed by the official annual reminder that it’s not my world, I just live in it. It can be so stressful that, when I was in college, the observance was delayed by two weeks, so that people could get settled into the semester before having to deal with it.

National Coming Out Day began in 1988, on the premise that visibility is good, which is true. Many did not know that they knew an LGBT person. This is the case for fewer people nowadays, but still too many. So, in the spirit of the holiday, I will get the ball rolling: Hi! I’m a gay man! (More of a Kinsey five, but who’s counting.)

(h/t Sister Golden Bear, who reminded me to write something!)

In other gay news, bonus Elizabeth Warren below the fold.

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Happy National Coming Out Day…Post + Comments (141)

Respite Open Thread: A Crack In Everything

by Major Major Major Major| September 12, 20193:17 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Canada, Music, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Travel

I spent a couple weeks in Montreal last month as a half-working half-vacation. I’d never been, but I’d heard such good things, and we got a very good deal on a sublet. Lovely city; I’d happily settle down there, though I’d have to learn French for real, which isn’t la fin du monde.

Anyway–they seem to be very proud of one of their local boys who made good:

A mural of Leonard Cohen fills the side of a building in Montreal's Plateau neighborhood. — Taken in the Plateau neighborhood

I share their love of Leonard Cohen. There’s actually a much bigger mural downtown, but I couldn’t get a good shot of it. I’ve been meaning to share this with y’all, and this gloomy-slow-day-at-work seemed like the right time.

So, without further ado, here’s a song that I find calming and centering, even (especially?) when the world is on fire.

Below the fold, a deep cut live video featuring Sonny Rollins, and a picture from a visit I made to his grave…

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Panopticon Creep: UK Edition

by Major Major Major Major| September 10, 20193:45 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Privacy, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, United Kingdom

Once upon a time, London was the world’s most-surveilled city. This position has since been usurped by Chongqing, a city in the Sichuan province which boasts one hundred sixty-eight cameras per one thousand people. Perhaps upset over the loss of their title, Boris Johnson has decided it’s high time that the UK began compiling records of its citizens’ web traffic.

tl;dr: Here’s an executive summary based on my reading of the linked article.

Currently, the various parts of the government collect analytics on how people use their websites.
BoJo would like to combine all of this data, creating profiles of how each individual uses the whole government’s online offerings.
This is to be done ASAP and in secret. The rationale for this is mumble mumble Brexit.
This data will be “anonymized”, which is not particularly meaningful at this level of specificity. While an analyst armed with this database would not be able to find a person’s usage by searching for their name, the same analyst could easily derive a person’s name from their usage.

Drilling into some detail now:

Boris Johnson has secretly ordered the Cabinet Office to turn the government’s public internet service into a platform for “targeted and personalised information” to be gathered in the run-up to Brexit, BuzzFeed News has learned.
In a move that has alarmed Whitehall officials, the prime minister has instructed departments to share data they collect about usage of the GOV.UK portal so that it can feed into preparations for leaving the European Union at the end of next month.
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Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems

by Major Major Major Major| August 30, 201910:44 am| 83 Comments

This post is in: Election Year, Open Threads, Democratic Stupidity

I’m sure this is true in many fields, but in software engineering, you’ll often see an engineer or team become very attached to an inferior implementation of some feature. As the problems with this implementation pile up, their attempts to solve them become increasingly bizarre in their desperation to keep their darling. You can only hope that somebody eventually notices during code review.

What made me think of this? Fearing Hackers, D.N.C. Plans to Block Iowa’s ‘Virtual’ Caucuses (NYT):

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee is preparing to block Iowa Democrats’ plans to allow some caucusgoers to vote by phone next year, bowing to security concerns about the process being hacked, according to four people with knowledge of the decision.
[…] The Iowa Democrats’ plan would have allowed voters not attending a traditional caucus to register their preference during one of six “virtual caucuses” over the phone. But D.N.C. security officials told the rules committee at a closed-door session in San Francisco last week that they had “no confidence” such a system could remain safe from hostile hackers.
[…] In August 2018, D.N.C. members adopted new rules for the 2020 presidential primary that encouraged states that held caucuses to switch to primaries and required caucus states to allow for a form of participation that did not require attending a caucus event.

Even when they made my preferred candidate’s victory possible (Obama 2008), caucuses rubbed me the wrong way. They’re unrepresentative nonsense, a throwback to an extremely bygone era. There is a tried-and-true method of making it easy for people to vote that’s fairly difficult to hack–it’s called a primary–but these yahoos are so in love with their inferior implementation of democracy that they’re coming up with increasingly desperate “solutions” to keep it in place.

Sure, you could do it correctly, but it just feels better to do it your special way. This is how systems fail.

Open thread!

Byzantine Solutions to Trivial ProblemsPost + Comments (83)

Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats Content

by Major Major Major Major| August 11, 20192:19 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads

The Mountain Goats (who you may remember from such posts as this one) played a free show in East River Park yesterday. This was great for me, since none of the other tour dates worked out. It was a beautiful day with lovely weather. The concert was very good, as well.

Really just a perfect evening. This was the first time I’d seen them at a venue that had seats, which is important since Millennial fans can no longer stand for three hours straight.

Anybody else been doing outdoor summer activities?

A couple of songs they played below the fold. Studio versions, of course. Open thread!

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Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer

by Major Major Major Major| August 9, 20191:30 pm| 159 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Recommended Reading

Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.” I suspect that this phenomenon is more intense in works of speculative fiction* than, say, spy thrillers. These stories are well-positioned to plumb and amplify the pressing issues and paranoias of their times; more to the point, they often offer high-concept utopian solutions, be they progressive or reactionary.

So I was amused to see the Guardian ask: Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians?

In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president.
[…] But our novel is just one of several recent stories of queer women time-travelling. There is Kate Heartfield’s Nebula-nominated novella Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel Alice Payne Rides, which see two 18th-century women – lovers – become embroiled in a war. There are also Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline.
[…] I wrote to each of these authors in anticipation of this piece and it turns out we were all drafting our books in 2016.

The article is a quick and a good read. I haven’t picked up This Is How You Lose the Time War yet, but it’s near the top of my list. I did read two books last year that featured time-traveling lesbians, though, just chewing through a random pile of space opera.

This article reminded me of a fun piece on Doctor Who**, which found that the Doctor was significantly more likely to overthrow the government during the Thatcher era.

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Verified, but limited!

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Shocking, but not surprising.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Yes we did.

Han shot first.

This Blog Goes to 11…

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

This blog will pay for itself.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Reality always wins in the end.

Wetsuit optional.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

This is how realignments happen…

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

We have all the best words.

The revolution will be supervised.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

The Math Demands It!

Who wants some respite??

Why We Build The Wall

Other Stuff Open Thread

Andrew Yang’s Dangerous Idea

Afternoon Fat Cat Open Thread

Pence Administration Declares War on Orphans

Contempt For Democracy All The Way Down

Evening Respite Thread: Words!

Happy National Coming Out Day…

Recommended Reading #6: Audio Drama Edition

Respite Open Thread: A Crack In Everything

Panopticon Creep: UK Edition

Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems

Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats Content

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer