Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

“Let's be clear here: Drag isn't obscene, isn't inherently pornographic, and is protected speech under the First Amendment”

https://reason.com/2022/12/21/the-war-on-christmas-comes-for-the-drag-queens/

#obscenity #drag #LGBTQ #FreeSpeech #1A #FirstAmendment #porn

I recently did a massive redesign of a 3d printed magnetic stirrer I designed a few years back. Here's a brief writeup showing what changed (and why) and the evolution of the design process. https://www.cartesiancreations.com.au/design-revising-the-magnetic-stirrer/

All jokes aside, remember what Christmas is really about, people.

Rich people being terrorized by spectres until they agree to pay their employees a living wage.

Share widely. For all of us.

Asimov was brilliant.

https://astronomy.org/moravian/C00-Last%20Question.pdf

#scifi

Elon Musk suspended Linette Lopez from Twitter after years of critical reporting on his companies.

In a new piece, she lays out Elon Musk’s playbook of exploiting workers while building a cult following. These tactics aren’t new. Musk has always been this way, regardless of what former boosters like Kara Swisher want you to believe. They were just happy to ignore it for access while journalists like Lopez did the work.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-business-playbook-boss-visionary-jerk-spacex-tesla-twitter-2022-12

#elonmusk #tech #tesla #twitter #spacex

Epic Games, creator of the popular video game Fortnite fined $520 million by FTC in relief over allegations the company violated COPPA and deployed design tricks, known as dark patterns, to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations

I see that the Section 230 discourse has regressed to 2019 and the nonsense about Twitter losing Section 230 protections if it moderates too much and becomes a publisher rather than a neutral platform. That is not a thing and never was a thing.

I really despise this idea some people have about the need to stay on Twitter "to fight". To fight what? This isn't a war where ground is won or lost. The platform is wholly and unquestionably owned by the person you're trying to fight against. He has shown he doesn't care about loss of advertisers, loss of respect, loss of users. Twitter is now nothing but his personal alt-right cult. The only valid reason to stay is to assist others in leaving. If you're generating any other forms of content, you're simply enabling him to radicalize *your* userbase.

Protip for the new mastodonians: don't obfuscate names or words - only hashtags work for search so you won't get troll bombed if you say Elon Musk.

Filters, however, work on anything, so those who don't want to see Elon Musk won't see this post.

But if you write El*n M*sk they WILL see it, and that might make them mad, so don't do it okay? Let people use their filters.

Before I break for dinner, here’s a conversational icebreaker for everybody? What is your earliest political memory?

Mine is lying on the backseat of my parents’ car, hearing the radio reporting on Watergate and my parents commenting and wondering if Watergate was something that would ever end.