#legal technology 2019

[radiokathryn-if]

DEMO ☯︎ FAQ ☮︎ DIRECTORY ♪

Nate Nicks has disappeared.

Why should you care? Do you?

You probably should, considering he's the face and host of your extremely popular radio show and you've just landed one of the biggest contracts of your careers.

You are a sound tech engineer and a damn good one at that, while Nate was the face you were the sound, usually your work is strictly behind the scenes, except for the odd occasion when you were needed on air. So when Nate goes missing and you're tasked with filling in his shoes you're practically thrown in at the deep end.

It only gets worse after a missing persons case becomes a murder case and the cast and crew of Radio Kathryn and FloNote Ent become the suspect pool...

RADIO KATHRYN is rated 18+ for explicit language, explicit sexual scenes and references, themes of death and blood, use of alcohol and drugs, physical abuse and violence. please check trigger warnings.

The setting of the 70s is purely for aesthetic and technology. Don't expect era—accurate racism or homophobia as it won't be included in this IF.

FEATURES ☯︎ [ Trigger Warnings ]

fully customise your MC! name, gender&pronouns (M/F/NB), appearance, personality

decide your on air persona──can you hack it in the limelight or will you crack under the pressure?

build your relations──do you get along with your fellow teammates? how about your fanbase? or your company?

+your radio teams backstory──how the four of you (Nate, José, Mica and yourself) got along, created the pirated radio show, how you got signed into legality, how everything went to shit... or not?

romance someone (or not)──featuring eight solo routes and two poly routes OR just enjoy the mystery and figure out a murder!

chose paths that affect the game──your choices matter, and the ending you may or may not get is dependent on them.

decide which kathryn is your mother──and your relationship with her. (Catherine, Kate, Cathy, Katherine or Rynnie)

CHARACTER BREAKDOWN ☮︎ [ RO Intros ]

The Man, The Myth, The Legend. [???]

“Nate Nicks” Nathan Nicholson──he/him. 28. Radio Kathryn's host and front man, adored by thousands. Complete arsehole but somehow it makes him endearing to others. Cocky son of a bitch that let fame get to his head... or is he? Nevertheless, he's missing now and you may have something to do with it.

think a mix between gauge burek and chris veres in druck (2019)

The Benefactor.

“Mr Robinson” Lionel Robinson──he/him. 42. The man who funded your radio show, the one who got you to where you are. Kind, calm and considerate, especially with Nate. But every one has a line to cross at some point and Mr Robinson is not someone to get angry.

think chad michael murray in sullivan's crossing (2023)

The Fiancé. [RO]

“Eva Vidal” Evangeline Vidal──she/her. 25. The woman who's been there from the beginning, your first listener, your first fan. You used to be closer but Nate sunk his teeth in her and pulled her away. You watched her steadily lose her glow and for someone engaged she seems quite jaded at the news of her missing fiancé.

think penélope cruz in vanilla sky (2001) or vicky christina barcelona (2008)

The Best Friend. [RO]

“Mica Hollens” Michael/a Hollens──he/him, she/her. your age (24─28). Your voice of reason in the chaos of life and Radio Kathryn's manager. Your support system and rock, even if they are a bit quick to jump the bullet in your honour. Mica has strong opinions and Nate has never been in their good books, but surely they wouldn't do anything to jeopardise your job.

think tanaya beatty in through black spruce (2018) or alex meraz in mine games (2012)

The Detective. [RO]

“Detective Han” Han Jimin──he/him or she/her. 30. The detective assigned to Nate's missing persons case. They are meticulous and goal oriented and their current goal is figuring you and your work family out. The more you resist the more they're intrigued and the more you help the more you unravel them.

think lee soohyuk in tomorrow (2022) or lee siyoung in sweet home (2020)

The Rival DJ. [RO]

“José Danger” Jose/phine Jeager──she/her or they/them. 26. Nate calls them the traitor─the defector. They used to be part of your team, a co-host with Nate in your beginning days. The two of them worked like magic until Nate was in demand more and José was kicked to the curb. You wonder if the festering grudge they left with is still there... and if it still extends to you.

think zazie beetz in deadpool 2 (2018) or wounds (2019)

The "Hater". [RO]

“Ji Han” Han Ji Young──he/him. 24. The younger brother of Detective Han. Ji Han is not a fan of Nathaniel Nicholson but he is a fan of the songs he plays─or rather the ones you play when he's absent. He's taken the utmost interest in his siblings case, suspiciously enough to become entangled in it more than anticipated.

think a mix of choi san (2022-23) and lee dohyun in 18 again (2020) or the glory (2022)

The "Fan". [RO]

“Fauve” Faye─Mauve Langham──she/her. 25. Fauve is a bit of a groupie, she can admit. She's not totally obsessed with Radio Kathryn, she reasons, she's just invested in the show and even more so in the people behind it. Fauve become more involved in the case of Nate Nicks than she's wanted, leaving you to wonder just what it is that keeps her going─even to the edge of insanity.

think a mix of imogen poots in need for speed (2014) and hayden panettiere in nashville (2012-18)

The Family Man. [RO]

“Mr Lewis” Jackson Lewis──he/him. 33. The night shift receptionist-slash-building coordinator. He usually brings his daughter to sit in on show recordings, seeing as she's got a bit of a crush on Nate─he's a no-bullshit kind of man but his soft spot is his daughter's puppy dog eyes. He just so happens to be the last person to see Nate before he disappeared and you can't help but get the feeling he's not being truthful in his statement about it.

think brian tyree henry in eternals (2021) or atlanta (2016-22)

The Question Mark. [???]

"Who?" ??? ???──unknown.

it'll be revealed later!

©️ bonnie berry 2023────@moretinyideas

──the polymances are between eva and ??? (eva???) as well as fauve and ji han (fauhan)!

──this is totally inspired by episode 2.8 of sister boniface "dead air" but other than the idea of a radio show called Radio Catherine there are no other similarities!

#interactive fiction #interactive story #interactive novel #radio kathryn #radio kathryn if

[hit-song-showdown]

Year-End Poll #64: 2013

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Robin Thicke, Imagine Dragons, Baauer, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Justin Timberlake, Pink, Bruno Mars, Florida Georgia Line, Katy Perry. End description]

More information about this blog here

With Billboard now counting YouTube views into their charts, we're seeing new artists reaching higher chart success from the strength of their music videos or internet virality in general, with songs like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' Thrift Shop and Baauer's Harlem Shake.

Speaking of changing technology, we now have to cover the biggest change that's going to define this decade in music. While first released in the States in 2011, Spotify's impact on the charts will start to become even more evident this year. It will still be a while before Billboard begins implementing data from Spotify and similar streaming services into their charts.

We're also starting to see the electropop and club music dwindle in the charts. Some have attributed this to Lorde's Royals, giving it an almost Smells Like Teen Spirit-esque mythos. But there's also the shift towards more folk and indie sounds in music (and commercials gravitating towards this music as well), streaming encouraging more individual listening, and general shifting tastes.

With the remix of Florida Georgia Line's Cruise, we're also seeing the rise in a subgenre known as bro-country. In terms of country crossover success, this subgenre would come to take over ballads and country pop as the main crossover sound. This is not the last time we'll see an example of country-rap fusion on the charts, and it certainly won't be the last time we see controversy over it.

And speaking of controversy, we need to talk about Blurred Lines. Specifically, we need to talk about Pharrell Williams v. Bridgeport Music. The court case concerned the song's similarities to Marvin Gaye's Got to Give It Up and Sexy Ways. Without going too much into it, the case ruled in favor of Marvin Gaye's estate -- a decision that forever altered the course of music copyright law. Since the ruling, we've seen a rise in lawsuits over perceived musical similarities as well as labels scrambling to give songwriting credits out to avoid potential lawsuits (if you ever wondered why Richard and Fred Fairbrass of Right Said Fred received songwriting credits on Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do, that's why). To quote this entry from Harvard Law's Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law:

Aptly named, the “Blurred Lines” case is now blurring the lines of rather well-settled copyright doctrine and is sending shockwaves through the musical community. While it is unclear what the ultimate impact of Williams will be on the music industry, it has, at the very minimum, put artists and publishers on notice as to how they should approach musical composition to avoid legal issues.

These “copyright trolls” would acquire the copy-rights of older music, and then sue artists for infringement with the hopes of forcing a settlement. Many artists would agree to these settlements, as they often are less expensive than the costs of litigating the issue in court. 65 Further, the threat of litigation may incline new musical artists to obtain unnecessary licenses and other permissions that they feel will protect them from these lawsuits. (Quagliariello, 2019)

The arguments behind the initial court case are still being debated, but what can't be debated is the Pandora's Box of litigation that the case inspired.

Good thing this is the only controversy Blurred Lines had ever faced. At least that's what I'm going to pretend for the sake of this poll.

#billboard poll #billboard music #tumblr poll #2010s #2010s music #2013 #macklemore #ryan lewis #wanz #robin thicke #t.i. #pharrell williams #imagine dragons #baauer #ray dalton #justin timberlake #pink #nate ruess #bruno mars #florida georgia line #nelly #katy perry

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

#20yrsago Bill O’Reilly mistakes Globe and Mail for Socialist Worker https://web.archive.org/web/20040426005411/http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040421/DOYLE21/TPColumnists/

#20yrsago Silmarillion in 1,000 words https://web.archive.org/web/20060427200009/https://camwyn.livejournal.com/328358.html

#20yrsago London: The (Magnificent) Biography https://memex.craphound.com/2004/04/22/london-the-magnificent-biography/

#15yrsago UAE royal caught torturing man on video https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=7402099

#15yrsago Joe Biden promises a blank check to the entertainment cartel https://web.archive.org/web/20110624055700/http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10224689-38.html

#15yrsago Entertainment industry’s greedy lobbying is their undoing https://web.archive.org/web/20090425083430/http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=175415&

#10yrsago Appeals court orders Obama administration to disclose the legal theory for assassination of Americans https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/obama-ordered-to-divulge-legal-basis-for-killing-americans-with-drones/

#10yrsago Shakespeare’s Beehive: analysis of newly discovered dictionary that Shakespeare owned and annotated https://endlessbookshelf.net/beehive.html

#10yrsago Reddit’s /r/technology demoted over scandal of secret censorship that blocked Internet freedom stories https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27100773

#5yrsago Facebook has hired the Patriot Act’s co-author and “day-to-day manager” to be its new general counsel https://thehill.com/policy/technology/440085-facebook-taps-lawyer-who-helped-write-patriot-act/

#5yrsago Google walkout organizers say they’re being retaliated against for demanding ethical standards https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/

#5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s latest proposal: cancel student debt, make college free https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something-truly-transformational-universal-free-public-college-and-cancellation-of-a246cd0f910f

#5yrsago Heiress “Instagram influencer” whose parents are accused of paying a $500K bribe to get her into USC has trademark application rejected for punctuation errors https://www.huffpost.com/entry/olivia-jade-trademark-punctuation_n_5c9c8f16e4b07c8866313c5e?ncid=newsltushpmgnews__TheMorningEmail__032919

#5yrsago Zuck turned American classrooms into nonconsensual laboratories for his pet educational theories, and now they’re rebelling https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html

#5yrsago Platform cooperativism (or, how to turn gig-economy jobs into $22.25/hour jobs) https://www.wired.com/story/when-workers-control-gig-economy/

#pluralistic

[mariacallous]

The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz says, referring to the company’s iconic logo. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.”

While the case has left Swiss fruit growers puzzled, it’s part of a global trend. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has made similar requests to dozens of IP authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success. Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced. Apple’s quest to own the IP rights of something as generic as a fruit speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry, which encourages companies to compete obsessively over trademarks they don’t really need.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

Apple's attempts to secure the trademark in Switzerland go as far back as 2017, when the Cupertino, California–based giant submitted an application to the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) requesting the IP rights for a realistic, black-and-white depiction of an apple variety known as the Granny Smith—the generic green apple. The request covered an extensive list of potential uses—mostly on electronic, digital, and audiovisual consumer goods and hardware. Following a protracted back-and-forth between both parties, the IPI partially granted Apple’s request last fall, saying that Apple could have rights relating to only some of the goods it wanted, citing a legal principle that considers generic images of common goods—like apples—to be in the public domain. In the spring, Apple launched an appeal.

The case now moving through the courts deals only with the goods for which the IPI refused the trademark, which an IPI official said could not be disclosed without consent from Apple, because the proceedings are still pending, but which include common uses such as audiovisual footage “meant for television and other transmission.”

Mariéthoz says that the Fruit Union is concerned because there is no clarity on what uses of the apple shape Apple will try to protect and because the company has been very aggressive in pursuing things that it perceives as infringements on its trademarks. “We’re concerned that any visual representation of an apple—so anything that’s audiovisual or linked to new technologies or to media—could be potentially impacted. That would be a very, very big restriction for us,” he said. “Theoretically, we could be entering slippery territory everytime we advertise with an apple.”

Over the past few years, Apple has pursued a meal-prepping app with a pear logo, a singer-songwriter named Frankie Pineapple, a German cycling route, a pair of stationery makers, and a school district, among others. The company fought a decades-long battle with the Beatles’ music label, Apple Corps, which was finally resolved in 2007.

An investigation in 2022 by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that researches Big Tech, found that between 2019 and 2021, Apple filed more trademark oppositions—attempts to enforce its IP over other companies—than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Google combined. Those companies also have trademarked common terms such as “Windows” or “Prime.”

Apple has precedent in Switzerland. In 2010 the trillion-dollar company got a small Swiss grocers’ cooperative to enter into an out-of-court agreement declaring it would never add a bite mark to its logo—a bright red apple inside a shopping caddy—something which, according to the cooperative’s president at the time, was “never planned.”

Things haven’t always gone Apple’s way, though. In 2012, Swiss Federal Railways won a $21 million settlement after it showed Apple had copied the design of the Swiss railway clock. In 2015, an existing “apple” trademark in Switzerland, obtained by a watchmaker in the 1980s, forced Apple to delay the launch of its popular Apple Watch in the country.

Apple is asking only for rights over a black-and-white image of an apple. However, according to Cyrill Rigamonti, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Bern, that might actually give it the broadest possible protection over the shape, allowing it to go after depictions in a wide range of colors. “Then the question [would be], is there a likelihood of confusion with regard to some other not-exactly-identical apple?” he says.

Irene Calboli, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law and a fellow at the University of Geneva, says that in Switzerland, anyone who can prove prior history of using a disputed sign has protection in a potential trademark dispute. That means it might be hard for Apple to enforce its trademark on organizations that have used the apple symbol for decades.

However, she says, big, rich companies can often scare smaller businesses into compliance. “The system is very much skewed toward those who have more money,” she says. Just the threat of expensive litigation against a huge company like Apple can be enough to intimidate people and stop them from doing “something that might be perfectly lawful.”

Calboli says that the global trademark business is self-sustaining. “Lots of people make a lot of money over these rights by registering them,” she says. IP rights authorities “are as guilty as the lawyers, because offices want revenues, so they issue registrations for stuff companies don’t need. That’s our trademark industry.” Smaller companies, such as Switzerland’s apple growers, might need to learn how to work the system to protect their own assets, she adds. “We are dancing, and it is difficult to stop the dance. Since the system is like that, better that everybody uses it rather than just the big ones.”

A decision by the Swiss court will not be known for months, possibly years. For the Swiss apple growers, “millions” are at stake if they have to rebrand following a decision. “We’re not looking to compete with Apple; we have no intention of going into the same field as them,” Mariéthoz says, adding that one of the biggest gripes the 8,000-odd apple farmers he represents had with the attempted fruit grab was that, “you know, Apple didn’t invent apples … We have been around for 111 years. And I think apples have been around for a few thousand more.”

[cidnangarlond]

the most recent development in the case of the missing Titan submersible is that the U.S. Navy has now officially been brought in to assist on the search. earlier it was reported that they were looked at being brought in but are now involved. while the U.S. Coast Guard was focusing mainly on the surface of the water in the search for the sub, the search is now taking place underwater as well. from CNN:

The US Navy is sending subject matter experts and a “Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System (FADOSS)” to assist in the search and rescue of a tour sub that has been missing since Sunday, a spokesperson said Tuesday.

The FADOSS is a “motion compensated lift system designed to provide reliable deep ocean lifting capacity for the recovery of large, bulky, and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels,” the spokesperson said.

A Navy information page on the FADOSS says it can lift up to 60,000 pounds. 

The equipment and personnel are expected to arrive at St. John’s by Tuesday night and will be in support of the US Coast Guard.

the other piece of news: there is only about 40 hours of breathable air left. also per CNN:

The Coast Guard said Tuesday that the search has not yielded anything so far, but it is continuing to look both on the surface and underwater for the missing submersible. Officials estimated that the crew onboard has "about 40 hours of breathable air left."

for those curious as to how something like this could even be ok'ed, know that others had doubts about what OceanGate was doing, too.

as reported by The New York Times, in 2018 Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, by the Marine Technology Society's Manned Underwater Vehicles committee. the group itself is a 60-year old trade group that, according to their website, "promotes awareness, understanding, and the advancement and application of marine technology."

the letter itself was signed by more than three dozen people, which comprised of "oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers", had stated their "unanimous concern" in regards to the Titan submersible. today, Tuesday, chairman of the committee Wil Kohnen said the letter was written because of fears that presumably he and the others had about what could happen if a company is not held to industry standards. quote from Kohnen in the Times:

“The submersible industry had significant concerns over the strategy of building a deep sea expedition submersible without following existing classification safety guidelines,” Mr. Kohnen said.

according to the letter, they said that OceanGate's marketing of the Titan sub as claiming it would "meet or exceed the safety standards" of the DNV - by their website they are "the world’s leading classification society and a recognized advisor for the maritime industry"; they are to maritime vessels, vehicles, and offshore units what the DMV is to cars, trucks, etc., more or less - as "misleading." indeed, OceanGate had no plans to have the Titan assessed by the DNV.

Stockton Rush called Kohnen after receiving and reading the letter, and stated that "industry regulations were stifling innovation." they would later reiterate this stance in a 2019 blog post about why the Titan wasn't classed (which can be found here, for now).

OceanGate said in the post that because its Titan craft was so innovative, it could take years to get it certified by leading assessment agencies. “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the company wrote.

the company was aware, however, that the Titan had issues. once again, per the NYT:

More recently, OceanGate referenced some technical issues with the Titan in a court filing.

“On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform,” the company’s legal and operational adviser, David Concannon, wrote in 2022 in a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which oversees matters having to do with the Titanic. The submersible sustained modest damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading OceanGate to cancel the mission so it could make repairs.

Still, Mr. Concannon wrote in the filing, 28 individuals had been able to visit the Titanic wreckage on the craft in 2022.

despite these issues with the Titan being brought up and essentially brushed away by OceanGate, issues having been brought up for years now, in retrospect it seems something like this happening was simply inevitable.

#long post #titan sub update #that's gonna be my tag for this I'm gonna keep making update posts every couple hours

[peterrsthomas]

Covid and The Naked Sun

Isaac Asimov had a particular talent for making the setting part of the story; in his murder mystery portion of the Robots series, the detective work involves not just solving the case, but understanding new and strange worlds with deep cultural differences and political infrastructures. When Elijah Bailey sets foot on Solaria in The Naked Sun, he experiences the titular ball of flame in the sky, so alien from the Caves of Steel (the titular environment in the first novel of the series) he was used to. And he encounters a society where robots outnumber humans by a factor of ten thousand, and with an entire human population of twenty thousand: people are scattered and isolated across the planet.

Stepping into this new world is not so dissimilar to the world that we inhabited just a few years ago. Reading The Naked Sun in the post-Covid era, the similarities are striking (speaking once more to the brilliance of Asimov’s foresight). Bailey, moving from a densely populated, comparatively disease-ridden Earth, finds the shift in social norms confusing and strange. No one wants to come within ten feet of him; they all wear nose plugs and gloves in his presence (if they can bear to be in his presence at all). We found ourselves as Solarians in those months and years from 2020; we wore masks and gloves, came not within six feet of one another; how alien we became to ourselves. Had someone in 2019 jumped forward in time a year, they would have been like Bailey stepping foot on a new planet.

And, like the Solarians, in our isolation we became reliant on our technology. The pandemic was a boon for tech firms like Zoom, whose share prices rose (and later fell) dramatically. Like in Solaria, whose main form of communication was 'tridimensional viewing’, an advanced form of holographic communication where the person viewed was almost convincingly present, we found ourselves using video calling and video conferencing, even to the point of fatigue. Though our technology is not so advanced as that of the Solarians, we still experienced joining with others virtually (and still do), on our phones, laptops, and TVs.

Underpinning both our societies was a fear of contamination. So obsessed were we, like the Solarians, with avoiding disease that we remained distant and isolated. Unlike the Solarians, we have been quick to recognise the harm that this has on our personal relationships. Social interaction via Zoom can only satiate the need for human contact so much. Yet Solarian society, in a warning to us all, became entrenched in such isolation. Gladia, a native of Solaria with whom the protagonist forms a relationship, is only one of few to recognise the damage this is causing her.

Indeed, on Solaria this separation is politicised, legally entrenched; in our world, there were fears, many legitimate, some extreme, that government imposition of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and quarantine would give those in power a taste of authoritarianism. That they would, in turn, create a society like Solaria. Such a thing might not be unthinkable: the reliance of Solarians on robotics and automated labour is a key reason of their isolation; automation of labour in our world could be a similar lever of control. Indeed, new technology and automated production has, since the 1970s, undermined collective bargaining and weakened unions, contributing to stagnant wage growth and worsening inequality. In Solaria, the small population are the landed gentry, the robots their serfs. What happened to the human working class?

And yet we have evaded and escaped from much of the Covid restrictions, which have proved, for the most part, temporary. As humans we were able to adapt to our limited conditions in the short term, and we have been resilient enough in the long term to revert back to our old ways. But when we visit a new world and come home, a part of that world stays with us. When Bailey returns to Earth, he does something he never would have done before: he leaves the City, his Cave of Steel, and starts a movement; he goes outside and stands beneath the Naked Sun.

#reading #writers #book recommendations #book review #bookish #booklover #booklr #books #Isaac Asimov #Robots series #The Naked Sun #science fiction #murder mystery #technology #pandemic #COVID-19 #social distancing #isolation #authoritarianism #automation #labour #inequality #resilience

[remesearch]

Serial Fraudster: Gaurav Srivastava has been accused, and convicted, of fraud and misrepresentation multiple times in the US.

Convicted to pay USD 80,000 in 2019 and nearly USD 1 million in 2014, over the past few years, Gaurav has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a con artist.

Gaurav Srivastava, who has built a reputation of an honest and philanthropic businessman related to the CIA, has been revealed as a fraudster by online US legal data. Between 2019 and 2014, Gaurav and several of his family members have faced accusations and convictions multiple times in the US for fraud and misrepresentation, exposing highly questionable intentions behind their business dealings.

In 2019, Gaurav Srivastava was convicted by a Court order to pay USD 80,000 after failing to fulfil a payment obligation of USD 82,088 to the Keck Hospital in Los Angeles for medical services provided to his father, Jaswant Srivastava. Despite having issued checks from his company Veecon Biotech LLC (Delaware, US), Gaurav had later halted the payments. (Case No. 19STCV03981: https://www.lacourt.org/casesummary/ui/casesummary.aspx?casetype=civil)

Below is an excerpt from the legal documents of the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County.

‘Gaurav Srivastava as the President of the Defendant company provided Plaintiff's Assignor with a check dated 05/24/18 in the amount of $14,850.00 made payable to Keck Medical Center USC and another check dated 05/24/18 in the amount of $67,238.00 made payable to Keck Medical Center USC for a total of $82,088.00 to pay for his father's medical services. Both checks were to be drawn from Defender company. The Defendant's President stopped payment on the checks and the balance remains unpaid’.

Gaurav Srivastava and his brother Pankaj Srivastava were also convicted by a Court order to pay nearly USD 1 million in 2014, when Nixon Peabody LLP (US) initiated legal proceedings against them and their company Veecon Group. They had breached an agreement made in 2013 by failing to honour invoices totalling USD 155,329 for legal services provided by Nixon Peabody LLP. As representatives of Veecon Group, Gaurav and Pankaj Srivastava were held accountable for the outstanding debt to Nixon Peabody LLP and were ordered to pay. (Case No. BC548034: https://www.lacourt.org/casesummary/ui/casesummary.aspx?casetype=civil)

Below is an excerpt from the legal documents of the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County.

‘In early October 2013, in an effort to obtain Nixon Peabody's forbearance and willingness to continue as counsel, Gaurav Srivastava provided Nixon Peabody a personal check dated October 4, 2013 in the amount of $50,000.00. The check was returned for lack of sufficient funds. Later in October 2013, Gaurav Srivastava promised full payment by October 21, 2013. To date, no such payment, or for that matter, any payment has been received by Nixon Peabody’.

In 2017, Gaurav Srivastava was accused of fraud and breach of contract. Between 2015 and 2016, Veecon Biotech, under Gaurav Srivastava's leadership, entered into agreements with the plaintiffs, falsely claiming they held licenses to market saliva diagnostics technologies and appointing them as sales representatives. Gaurav Srivastava went further, making deceptive statements regarding Dr. David Wong's association with Veecon Biotech. If the plaintiffs withdrew their complaints after reaching settlements in October 2020, the Superior Court of California rejected these settlements, leaving the case unresolved. (Case no. BC648883: https://www.lacourt.org/casesummary/ui/casesummary.aspx?casetype=civil)

In 2019, a certain Patricia Riordan Torrey also initiated a legal case against Gaurav Srivastava, his company Veecon Biotech LLC, and his wife Sharon Srivastava as defendants. However, no additional information regarding the details or progression of the case could be located. Whilst Gaurav Srivastava and his wife Sharon Srivastava accused a certain Jill Small of defamation and of having 'intentionally interfered with a business deal that would have netted Plaintiff (Gaurav and Sharon Srivastava) approximately $40,000,000 in profit, and then tried to extort $500,000', the motion to seal the entire court file was denied in December 2022 because of a lack of specificity. (Case no. 21STCV28536: https://trellis.law/ruling/21stcv28536/gaurav-srivastava-vs-jill-small/20221208729619)

#fraud #gaurav srivastava #gaurav #gaurav kumar srivastava #con artist #fraudster #veecon group #sharon srivastava #srivastava #pankaj srivastava #scam

[transformativeworksandcultures]

CFP: AI and Fandom

Unfortunately, this special issue will not be moving forward. All submitted pieces are being considered for our general issue. 

Due in part to well-publicised advancements in generative AI technologies such as GPT-4, there has been a recent explosion of interest in – and hype around – Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Whether this hype cycle continues to grow or fades away, AI is anticipated to have significant repercussions for fandom (Lamerichs 2018), and is already inspiring polarised reactions. Fan artists have been candid about using creative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E to generate fan art, while fanfiction writers have been using ChatGPT to generate stories and share them online (there are 470 works citing the use of these tools on AO3 and 20 on FanFiction.net at the time of writing). It is likely the case that even greater numbers of fans are using such tools discreetly, to the consternation of those for whom this is a disruption of the norms and values of fan production and wider artistic creation (Cain 2023; shealwaysreads 2023). AI technology is being used to dub movies with matching visual mouth movements after filming has been completed (Contreras 2022), to analyse audience responses in real-time (Pringle 2017), to holographically revive deceased performers (Andrews 2022; Contreras 2023), to build chatbots where users can interact with a synthesised version of celebrities and fictional characters (Rosenberg 2023), to synthesise celebrities’ voices (Kang et al. 2022; Nyce 2023), and for translation services for transnational fandoms (Kim 2021).

Despite the multiple ways in which AI is being introduced for practical implementations, the term remains a contested one. Lindley et al (2020) consider “how AI simultaneously refers to the grand vision of creating a machine with human-level general intelligence as well as describing a range of real technologies which are in widespread use today” (2) and suggest that this so called ‘definitional dualism’ can obscure the ubiquity of current implementations while stoking concerns about far-future speculations based on media portrayals. AI is touted as being at least as world-changing as the mass adoption of the internet and, regardless of whether it proves to be such a paradigm shift, the strong emotions it generates make it a productive site of intervention into long-held debates about: relationships between technology and art, what it means to create, what it means to be human, and the legislative and ethical frameworks that seek to determine these relationships.

This special issue seeks to address the rapidly accelerating topic of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (ML) systems (including, but not limited to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and speech, image and audio recognition and generation), and their relationship to and implications for fans and fan studies. We are interested in how fans are using AI tools in novel ways as well as how fans feel about the use of these tools. From media production and marketing perspectives we are interested in how AI tools are being used to study fans, and to create new media artefacts that attract fan attention. The use of AI to generate transformative works challenges ideas around creativity, originality and authorship (Clarke 2022; Miller 2019; Ploin et al. 2022), debates that are prevalent in fan studies and beyond. AI-generated transformative works may present challenges to existing legal frameworks, such as copyright, as well as to ethical frameworks and fan gift economy norms. For example, OpenAI scraped large swathes of the internet to train its models – most likely including fan works (Leishman 2022). This is in addition to larger issues with AI, such as the potential discrimination and bias that can arise from the use of ‘normalised’ (exclusionary) training data (Noble 2018). We are also interested in fan engagement with fictional or speculative AI in literature, media and culture.

We welcome contributions from scholars who are familiar with AI technologies as well as from scholars who seek to understand its repercussions for fans, fan works, fan communities and fan studies. We anticipate submissions from those working in disparate disciplines as well as interdisciplinary research that operates across multiple fields.

The following are some suggested topics that submissions might consider:

The use of generative AI by fans to create new forms of transformative work (for example, replicating actors’ voices to ‘read’ podfic)

Fan responses to the development and use of AI including Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT (for example, concerns that AO3 may be part of the data scraped for training models)

Explorations of copyright, ownership and authorship in the age of AI-generated material and transformative works

Studies that examine fandoms centring on speculative AI and androids, (e.g. Her, Isaac Asimov, WestWorld, Star Trek)

Methods for fan studies research that use AI and ML

The use of AI in audience research and content development by media producers and studios

Lessons that scholars of AI and its development can learn from fan studies and vice versa

Ethics of AI in a fan context, for example deepfakes and the spread of misinformation 

Submission Guidelines

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international peer-reviewed online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and promotes dialogue between academic and fan communities. TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms, such as multimedia, that embrace the technical possibilities of the internet and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Submit final papers directly to Transformative Works and Cultures by January 1, 2024. 

Articles: Peer review. Maximum 8,000 words.

Symposium: Editorial review. Maximum 4,000 words.

Please visit TWC's website (https://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or email the TWC Editor ([email protected]).

Contact—Contact guest editors Suzanne Black and Naomi Jacobs with any questions before or after the due date at [email protected]. 

Due date—Jan 1, 2024, for March 2025 publication.

Works Cited

Andrews, Phoenix CS. 2022. ‘“Are Di Would of Loved It”: Reanimating Princess Diana through Dolls and AI’. Celebrity Studies 13 (4): 573–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135087.

Cain, Sian. 2023. ‘“This Song Sucks”: Nick Cave Responds to ChatGPT Song Written in Style of Nick Cave’. The Guardian, 17 January 2023, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/17/this-song-sucks-nick-cave-responds-to-chatgpt-song-written-in-style-of-nick-cave.

Clarke, Laurie. 2022. ‘When AI Can Make Art – What Does It Mean for Creativity?’ The Observer, 12 November 2022, sec. Technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/12/when-ai-can-make-art-what-does-it-mean-for-creativity-dall-e-midjourney.

Contreras, Brian. 2022. ‘A.I. Is Here, and It’s Making Movies. Is Hollywood Ready?’ Los Angeles Times, 19 December 2022, sec. Company Town. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-12-19/the-next-frontier-in-moviemaking-ai-edits.

———. 2023. ‘Is AI the Future of Hollywood? How the Hype Squares with Reality’. Los Angeles Times, 18 March 2023, sec. Company Town. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-03-18/is-a-i-the-future-of-hollywood-hype-vs-reality-sxsw-tye-sheridan.

Kang, Eun Jeong, Haesoo Kim, Hyunwoo Kim, and Juho Kim. 2022. ‘When AI Meets the K-Pop Culture: A Case Study of Fans’ Perception of AI Private Call’. In . https://ai-cultures.github.io/papers/when_ai_meets_the_k_pop_cultur.pdf.

Kim, Judy Yae Young. 2021. ‘AI Translators and the International K-Pop Fandom on Twitter’. SLC Undergraduate Writing Contest 5. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/slc-uwc/article/view/3823.

Lamerichs, Nicolle. 2018. ‘The next Wave in Participatory Culture: Mixing Human and Nonhuman Entities in Creative Practices and Fandom’. Transformative Works and Cultures 28. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1501.

Leishman, Rachel. 2022. ‘Fanfiction Writers Scramble To Set Profiles to Private as Evidence Grows That AI Writing Is Using Their Stories’. The Mary Sue, 12 December 2022. https://www.themarysue.com/fanfiction-writers-scramble-to-set-profiles-to-private-as-evidence-grows-that-ai-writing-is-using-their-stories/.

Lindley, Joseph, Haider. Akmal, Franziska Pilling, and Paul Coulton. 2020. ‘Researching AI legibility through design’. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376792 

Miller, Arthur I. 2019. The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, USA: New York University Press.

Nyce, Caroline Mimbs. 2023. ‘The Real Taylor Swift Would Never’. The Atlantic, 31 March 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-taylor-swift-fan-generated-deepfakes-misinformation/673596/.

Ploin, Anne, Rebecca Eynon, Isis Hjorth, and Michael Osborne. 2022. ‘AI and the Arts: How Machine Learning Is Changing Artistic Work’. Report from the Creative Algorithmic Intelligence Research Project. University of Oxford, UK: Oxford Internet Institute. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/reports/ai-the-arts/.

Pringle, Ramona. 2017. ‘Watching You, Watching It: Disney Turns to AI to Track Filmgoers’ True Feelings about Its Films’. CBC, 4 August 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/disney-ai-real-time-tracking-fvae-1.4233063.

Rosenberg, Allegra. 2023. ‘Custom AI Chatbots Are Quietly Becoming the next Big Thing in Fandom’. The Verge, 13 March 2023. https://www.theverge.com/23627402/character-ai-fandom-chat-bots-fanfiction-role-playing.

shealwaysreads. 2023. “Fascinating to see…” Tumblr, March 28, 2023, 11:53. https://www.tumblr.com/shealwaysreads/713032516941021184/fascinating-to-see-a-take-on-a-post-about-thehttps://www.tumblr.com/androidsfighting/713056705673592832?source=share

#cfp #twc #otw #fan studies #fandom #academia #academic journals #academic chatter #call for papers #call for submissions #ai #artifical intelligence #machine learning #LLMs #chatgpt #ai fanfic #ai fanart #ai ethics #data ethics

[argyrocratie]

“Currently, the predominant strategy for carbon capture is through “natural” methods, namely reforestation, which comes with its own problems. But other strategies, many of them classified as geoengineering, are increasingly gaining attention, and sometimes, funding. Examples include injecting carbon pulled out of the atmosphere into cement or into bedrock, where it mineralizes; liquefying carbon and storing it in old gas and oil wells; constantly seeding the upper atmosphere with aerosols that will reflect sunlight; dusting agricultural soils with ground up minerals that increase carbon retention; or running huge offshore plantations for genetically modified algae to be used as a fuel source. The main real usage of any of these technologies, at the moment, is by the fossil fuel industry injecting captured carbon into its wells to displace oil or gas and increase output, known as enhanced oil recovery.

I agree that we need to consider all of these proposals since it is a matter of stopping mass starvation and saving species from extinction, but only if we can do so fully aware of their true dimensions.

First off, we need to consider the cane toad phenomenon, whereby interventionist technologies introduced to solve problems created by earlier interventions create even bigger problems. As Western colonial civilization fumblingly developed an interventionist, mechanical understanding of ecology, in this case in Australia, they released the giant cane toad as a predator to control runaway populations of rabbits, an earlier colonial introduction, but the cane toads ended up eating everything, decimating many native populations.

The truth is, at the intersection between knowledge and business that constitutes almost all of today’s scientific practice, there is a solid tendency to pollute first, and look into the health problems later, from plastics to PFOA to phthalates. If you dangle a dollar bill over a cliff, today’s science-driven industries will jump and assume they can use their earnings to buy a parachute before they hit the bottom.

A pertinent example of this phenomenon is how carbon capture at scale will require a massive infrastructure including a huge network of pipelines for transporting carbon from its capture site to its storage site. The fossil fuel industry are the only players in the current context with the ability to build—and profit from—this infrastructure.

And the reality is, all pipelines leak. From February 2019 to March 2021, there were around 320 “oil- and gas-related incidents” (“oil spills, fires, blowouts and gas releases”) just in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, mostly on Navajo Nation land. One such “incident” was the leakage of 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry into the local watershed.63 Shall we now build more pipelines for the sake of the environment? This is yet another proposal sopping in climate reductionism, environmental racism, and coloniality. In the case of carbon pipelines, a leak would mean death by suffocation for all animal life forms nearby.

Beyond cane toads, we need to consider the very question of what we consider to be technology. After all, the Amazon rainforest constitutes a massive technology resulting from thousands of years of intelligent and reciprocal influencing by hundreds of native peoples. Next to them, carbon capture experts are amateurs. At this point it becomes necessary to distinguish between two very different paradigms of technology. What we can call interventionist or engineered technology is a Trojan horse for beliefs of human supremacy and practices of extractivism, exploitation, and depersonification of the Other against which the technology is deployed. Today, it is fully wrapped up in the legal regime of intellectual property and the institutional framework of the profit-oriented academy, laboratory, and research institute. It is a technology of enclosure, of the alienated worldview that looks down at our lives from above in order to impose a plan that necessarily divides governors and governed, designers and inert material. On the other hand, we have popular or traditional technology, which belongs to, is developed and passed down by a community; which is territorially specific, nuanced, and reciprocal; which constitutes a form of dialogue and commoning and therefore tends to be ecocentric; and which is necessarily anticolonial.

Half of any technology is deployment, how a specific artifact is integrated and mobilized throughout society in conjunction with other technologies and organizational techniques. Currently, interventionist technologies are deployed by a massive, ecocidal infrastructure and their use is controlled by corporations governed by the need to profit. The institutional paradigm reinforces technocratic, quantitative thinking that is reductionist and blind to complex realities on the ground, putting well-meaning scientists in bed with entrepreneurs and economists, giving rise to figures like the “carbon budget” that normalize the extreme suffering and damage that are already widespread.”

-Peter Gelderloos, “ The Solutions are Already Here”

#peter gelderloos #climate change #technology

[mitigatedchaos]

2 question. 1 what was the idea behind clint manstock. 2 I’m not sure what the joke/idea behind the trans/religion post was.

Clint Manstock is a hypothetical highly prolific writer of pulpy detective fiction and science fiction, presumably from the late 1960s to around 2010, with dates applied to contextualize the non-existent stories as belonging to a particular cultural period.

For making a joke, it's not necessary to write the entire book, but just an excerpt, or even the title.

For instance, the most famous Clint Manstock post:

The year is 2056.  My name is Kal Royan, and I’m a gender hunter.  My job is to bring those who traffic in illegal modifications of the gender synthesis implant to justice.  Or at least, what they call justice. - opening lines of Clint Manstock’s The Manhunters (1972)

This hypothetical book was published in 1972, shortly after Ursula K Le Guin's 1969 genderbending The Left Hand of Darkness.

He is, in a sense, hopping on the bandwagon, but also in this case he's closer to the leading edge than with some of his other books. Clint Manstock books aren't necessarily good, though.

(The 1970s are also a time where there is more scientific uncertainty generally, more belief in things like ESP or experiments that wouldn't survive review today like the Stanford Prison Experiment.)

There's a lot going on here, but the punchline is the title of the book.

It's not just the play on words. What's the (primary) gender being regulated? It's right there in the title. Men. People talk a lot about regulation of women, but they also talk a lot about male violence, male sexuality, male competition, male hierarchy... so from an insurance-minimization standpoint, and from a blind "anti-oppression" standpoint, we could imagine a society that has set things up so that there are few men in the first place.

Such a society would not be lesbian, but sexless.

Regarding the 2019 post you're asking about,

“Certainly,” the man said, “it may seem to be in contradiction, but if I do this…”

The central sci-fi technology at play is a computer which estimates political coalitions and ideology. Political coalitions are based on a feedback between ideologies and interests. The interests and beliefs of different coalition members aren't always in alignment with each other, so every coalition will have some tension. (This may be the source of the "contradiction" mentioned here, but not necessarily.)

The presentation board even paused with a twirling icon for a moment, before the node finally came loose, and Mr. Blanstak dragged it to the other side of the board. …dropping it in a category named “religion.”

Previously, transgenderism was pursued as 'transmedicalism,' defining transgender people as a tiny minority of the population who were experiencing a diagnosable medical disorder. In this frame the rights and privileges granted would be similar to those for someone with a disability. This implies a pretty significant amount of institutional gatekeeping.

However, while the medical establishment is influential, this left the status of transgender people ambiguous (just how far can you go with a doctor's note?). As such, activists pushed for the idea of transgenderism as a 'basic human right,' with unlimited gender self-identification.

This is a bit of an all-or-nothing strategy. If activists win, they get to teach their gender views in public schools as fact. This places them above all the established religions, on the same level as the implicit peace bargain between those religions. If they lose, even the medical framework could collapse.

Positioning transgenderism as a 'religion' is a kind of fallback position. The United States has pretty substantive protections against religious discrimination, so both medical procedures and presentation would receive legal protection. However, this would be a demotion to one valid worldview among multiple competing worldviews, and rules on teaching the view in public schools would be similar to teaching "Christians believe X," not just teaching "X".

(In practice, this approach wouldn't work, as religious beliefs are generally understood as being about the supernatural, and people generally don't believe in transgenderism as supernatural.)

In this case, the reclassification causes a whole bunch of cascading updates to the ideology and coalitional makeup throughout the system.

“So you’re saying,” I said, “that this was the latent equilibrium all along?”

The perspective character asks if this is the future, because this isn't his technology and he's more of a normal guy, so he's thinking that this is the big ideological change.

Blanstak looked at me over his shoulder. “There are many semi-stable equilibria, Mr. Whipple. The matter of entering one is choice.”

However, in this case the technology's creator is using the shift as more of a demonstration not merely of the technology, but of the idea that there are other self-reinforcing states of society that can be reached.

It is likely that the book would follow on the consequences of such a technology, however...

excerpt, unpublished Clint Manstock manuscript, 1991

It wasn't considered good enough to actually publish.

#anons #asks #clint manstock #gendpol #clearing the drafts #nov 2023

[gatheringbones]

[“While many U.S. radicals of color adopted the umbrella term “Third World” as early as the 1960s to signify and enact an “affiliation with an international anticolonial community,” the conference coordinators made a point of elucidating and opening up for discussion their own usage: “The definition of ‘Third World’ proposed for the Conference is those nations of people struggling to break the shackles of colonialism and neocolonialism. Principally, this includes those nations of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, South and Latin America, and Native and Black Americans who suffer under a form of domestic colonialism here in this country. While Third World was originally a phrase coined primarily to describe a state of economic dependency and the lack of technological advances, these same characteristics of underdevelopment tragically describe the condition of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American women worldwide.”

Seen through this anticolonial, internationalist lens, an “alarming consistency” of labor exploitation, reproductive control, and sexual violence pervaded histories of genocidal acts against indigenous peoples, racial slavery and Jim Crow, the making and policing of U.S. national borders, and U.S. imperial wars in Asia, forming a foundation for an interwoven analysis of violence against those facing “the triple oppression of race, class, and sex.” In their overview of the proceedings, Ross, Touré, and Kathy Powell, another African American RCC staff member, contended that rape and abuse in contemporary society must be analyzed in the context of this transnational genealogy of violent subjection.

The summary papers by the conference organizers provide partial insight into the discussions that occurred about the place of the criminal legal system in analyses of, and solutions to, violence against women of color. They report a consensus that antiviolence movements must earnestly contend with the record of police violence against women and men of color and racially disproportionate rates of incarceration. The intertwined forces of racial, gender, and economic oppression conspired to lock up the “most disadvantaged of offenders,” most reliably when their victims were white women and less often when their victims were women of color. Moreover, as recent legal cases had shown, the most marginalized women survivors of violence were also unjustly incarcerated.

Although a few attendees saw the question of what role men might play in the antiviolence movement as “either premature or diversionary,” there was a fairly broad consensus behind a formal resolution that uprooting violence against women of color would require “re-educating,” rather than incarcerating, individual men who perpetrate rape and battering; in addition, greater numbers of progressive men of color (around ten of whom had attended the conference) should be engaged in advocating community-based sanctions against interpersonal violence. The absence of heated controversy about this resolution reflected the fact that the majority of the women in attendance were participating in mixed-gender political organizations alongside organizations focused on sexual and domestic violence. On the other hand, and relatedly, the “Third World Women and Feminism” workshop surfaced a more divergent range of viewpoints. Whereas some participants were concerned that an “analysis of power and its distribution within the feminist ranks” was not yet “dominant within the majority white movement,” others explained that their reluctance to identify with feminism stemmed primarily from their understanding of feminism as a separatist, “anti-male” project that disregarded the “political realities of Third World people.”]

emily l. thuma, from all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence, 2019

#emily l. thuma #currently reading #history stuff #can’t work with men can’t love men can’t bring your twelve year old male children to events #if you do you’re delusional and bad and exposing other women to danger #judging shaming fear and scarcity based nonsense that sounds exactly like my white family

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

#15yrsago Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, a look at the bumbling, murdering, drunken idiots (and others) who’ve served as vice-president of the USA https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/18/veeps-profiles-in-insignificance-a-look-at-the-bumbling-murdering-drunken-idiots-and-others-whove-served-as-vice-president-of-the-usa/

#10yrsago Tim Wu on FCC’s net neutrality disaster https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/01/14/a-fema-level-fail-the-law-professor-who-coined-net-neutrality-lashes-out-at-the-fccs-legal-strategy/

#10yrsago Random NSA program generator, with denials https://divergentdave.github.io/nsa-o-matic/

#10yrsago Parfaitzilla: the dessert that ate Japan https://mochihead.tumblr.com/post/31243751745

#10yrsago Scoring Obama’s NSA reforms (spoiler: it’s not good) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/rating-obamas-nsa-reform-plan-eff-scorecard-explained

#15yrsago Mr Chicken: the genius who paints London’s fried-chicken signs https://web.archive.org/web/20101208073826/https://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/march/meet-mr-chicken

#10yrsago Congress requires publicly funded research to be publicly available https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/newly-passed-appropriations-bill-makes-even-more-publicly-funded-research-available-online

#10yrsago Android malware uses accelerometer readings to figure out if it was running on a real phone or in emulation https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

#5yrsago An archive of Freedom, Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham’s radical Harlem newspaper https://web.archive.org/web/20190123223255/http://dlib.nyu.edu/freedom/

#5yrsago Unsealed court documents reveal that Facebook knew kids were being tricked into spending thousands of dollars on their parents’ credit cards https://revealnews.org/blog/a-judge-unsealed-a-trove-of-internal-facebook-documents-following-our-legal-action/

#5yrsago Why charter schools are the flashpoint for the LA teachers’ strike https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/01/rising-tide-teacher-strikes-finally-exposing-corrupt-charter-school-agenda.html

#5yrsago Now EVERYBODY hates the new EU Copyright Directive https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/now-everybody-hates-new-eu-copyright-directive

#1yrago Care Inflation: The inflation no one wants to talk about https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers

#1yrago Eleanor Janega's "Once and Future Sex": The true, weird, horny history of medieval gender and sex https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

#pluralistic

[maximus-02]

The Digital Frontline: Ukraine's Crowdsourcing Revolution in Warfare

In an era marked by digital transformation, Ukraine's response to Russian aggression showcases an extraordinary use of crowdsourcing in warfare. This blog post explores Ukraine's innovative approach, which leverages digital platforms to mobilize public action, document war crimes, and counter disinformation, thereby redefining the contours of modern warfare and justice.

The Rise of "e-Enemy" and Digital Witnessing

Central to Ukraine's digital arsenal is the "e-Enemy" chatbot, a brainchild of the country's Digital Ministry. This platform empowers citizens to report Russian troop movements and war crimes. Each smartphone becomes a digital witness as users upload time-stamped, geo-tagged footage, ensuring accurate documentation of enemy actions. This system of digital witnessing has turned ordinary citizens into crucial contributors to Ukraine's defense mechanism (Bergengruen 2022) (Lawler 2023).

Background:

President Volodymyr Zelensky's 2019 election was predicated on digitizing the state, culminating in the Diia app (Lawler 2023).

Diia, used by 19 million Ukrainians, facilitates digital ID access and government services, streamlining administrative processes and reducing corruption (Lawler 2023).

Adaptation During War:

Diia's features expanded to meet wartime needs with the onset of war, including evacuation assistance and property damage reporting (Lawler 2023).

The "e-Enemy" feature on Diia enables users to report Russian military movements, enhancing the military's situational awareness (Lawler 2023).

Crowdsourcing in Ukraine: A Community's Digital Armor

Ukraine's crowdsourcing strategy extends beyond the battlefield. By engaging the community in data collection, Ukraine has fostered a sense of unity and purpose among its populace. This collective effort goes beyond data accumulation; it moves towards transparency and participatory defence. Citizens document Russian offences, creating a vast archive of digital evidence. This democratizes information gathering and ensures clarity in the chaos of war (Bergengruen 2022).

The scale and systematic nature of Ukraine's efforts stand out. Over 253,000 reports of Russian military activities have been submitted via "e-Enemy", with more than 66,000 instances of property damage catalogued (Bergengruen 2022).

These reports feed into a centralized database at Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office, categorizing war crimes and human rights violations (Bergengruen 2022).

Beyond Documentation: Tackling Misinformation

Ukraine's crowdsourcing initiatives are crucial in countering disinformation in the information warfare accompanying the physical conflict. These digital tools debunk false narratives by providing a channel for real-time, verified updates. Thus, crowdsourcing becomes not just a tool for evidence gathering but also a means to uphold truth (Bergengruen 2022) (Druziuk 2022).

Ukraine's documentation serves two purposes: providing evidence against Russian war crimes and countering Kremlin disinformation. This digital archive will be vital in preserving the factual narrative of the war (Druziuk 2022).

Legal Frontiers: Crowdsourcing and International Law

Ukraine's digital evidence collection could revolutionize international law. The array of user-submitted content – images, videos, eyewitness accounts – is building a solid case for war crimes tribunals. This innovative approach may set a new precedent in international law, recognizing the significance of open-source intelligence and citizen journalism in legal proceedings. The challenge lies in the digital nature of evidence and its admissibility under international law standards. Thus, Ukraine's efforts are to adapt and influence international legal practices. This digital mobilization raises critical questions about the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants. When civilians use technology like smartphones to aid military efforts, they potentially become active participants in military operations. This involvement could blur the lines between civilian and combatant roles, a distinction fundamental to international humanitarian law, as established by the Geneva Conventions and other legal frameworks (Bergengruen 2022) (Druziuk 2022) (Olejnik 2022).

Conclusion: Crowdsourcing as Ukraine's Beacon of Hope

In these times of adversity, Ukraine's embrace of crowdsourcing stands as a beacon of resilience and innovation, exemplifying the transformative power of technology in the realms of justice, unity, and truth. The nation's pioneering use of digital tools in warfare serves as a learning model for the global community, offering valuable insights into integrating technology in conflict resolution. Moreover, Ukraine's approach underscores the urgent need for clarity in applying international laws in this rapidly evolving digital age. As personal technology continues to reshape the battlefield, the international community must address and adapt to these challenges, ensuring that the principles of justice and sovereignty are upheld in the face of technological advancements. Thus, Ukraine's journey highlights the nation's steadfast spirit in the face of conflict and marks a significant shift in modern warfare and international law (Olejnik 2022).

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xpi78b/this_was_uploaded_online_with_the_caption_we_are/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Reflective Closing

The unfolding story of Ukraine's digital defence prompts a broader reflection on the role of technology in conflicts. Ukraine's example offers lessons for the international community on leveraging technology for justice and conflict resolution. This narrative highlights Ukraine's creative approach to warfare and emphasizes the transformative power of technology in shaping geopolitical realities. It's a testament to the enduring spirit of the Ukrainian people and their steadfast pursuit of justice and sovereignty.

References

Bergengruen, V. (2022, April 18). How Ukraine is crowdsourcing digital evidence of war crimes. Time. https://time.com/6166781/ukraine-crowdsourcing-war-crimes/

Druziuk, Y. (2022, April 19). A citizen-like chatbot allows Ukrainians to report to the government when they spot Russian troops - here’s how it works. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-military-e-enemy-telegram-app-2022-4

Lawler, D. (2023, May 26). Ukrainians use the same app to file taxes and track Russian troops - axios. AXIOS. https://www.axios.com/2023/05/26/ukraine-diia-app-fedorov-russian-troops

Olejnik, L. (2022, June 6). Smartphones blur the line between civilian and combatant. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/smartphones-ukraine-civilian-combatant/

#mda20009 #week 8 #digital communities #slava ukraini

[lgbtawarenessproject]

Part 7: Nigeria and Angola

Keep an eye out for a post soon, I have an announcement I want to make about the pride month history project I'd like to make.

(Should I be leaving my name on these things?)

-Soul

Nigeria

Homosexual activity is illegal in Nigeria, but it hasn’t always been like that. In January of 2014 Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan passed a law known as the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, or SSMPA. The law bans every part of LGBT+ life, even just talking positively about it(similar to Russia). Supporters of this bill say it protects their culture, which is baseless if you look at African history(Sources 1-4). Nigeria itself was not accepting of gay-relationships in pre-colonial times, but it was accepting of lesbian ones according to a paper by Chan Tov McNamarah. (It is important to note that when making criminal laws against homosexuality the excuse is often that homosexuality was brought by western cultures)

Prior to SSMPA, Nigeria queer culture was often socializing in clubs, parties, and other similar things. These clubs were often private and hidden to protect themselves and the people in them from discrimination. Some methods to protect these clubs were that in order to enter you had to be vouched for by someone already approved, and that in order to find them you either had to identify the owner or learn by word of mouth. The scene inside was very social, and the drag scene specifically was doing very well. 

After SSMPA, gay weddings(which were already hidden and private) became even more difficult to have, and cohabitation that was used as an alternative to marriage, became dangerous. Partners were no longer able to trust their neighbors to respect their privacy, and now that SSMPA existed would get called in by those neighbors. Violent homophobia began to rise as well, safe havens being raided, and people being pulled from their houses and beaten. Nonetheless, the queer scene in Nigeria continues to exist. Only now, the locations change and modern technology helps to keep it private.

Sources: 1 2 3 4(cw below) 5 6 7 8

Source 4 contains the slang version of the N slur, but it is from a black run website and I used it as a reference so I added it as a source. If any black person wants me to remove it as a source I will. (I specifically use the word black because Africa is a very diverse continent with many different colors of person.)

Angola

In January 2019, after gaining their independence as a country in 1975, Angola made its first new penal code. While making this code the Angola Parliament made a vote remove a law commonly interpreted as an anti-gay law. In addition, they also banned discrimination against people based on their sexuality. 

This amendment was not unexpected, as in 2013 they had granted legal status to an LGBT organization called Iris Angola. This organization had often complained about discrimination against their employees by health care. 

Additionally, in 2016 Angola held its first LGBTIQ festival called FESTÍRIS, which gathered the LGBT+ community, allies, and others, to raise awareness to LGBT+ issues. In 2019, they celebrated the laws and reflected on the history of their chosen day, May 17th(International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia)

Despite all of this, and all of the celebration, the new penal code only went into effect in February of 2021.

Sources: 1 2 3

I gave myself limited time to make this one so there are less sources, and it is shorter.

Part 1

Part 6<-->Part 8

Please support this project by following and taking this survey about queer identities and experiences.

Lmk in replies if you want to be added to the tag list!

#project unknowing #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtqia+ #queer #pride month #history #current history #recent history #politics #world news

[msclaritea]

This article is from 2019 and never more important than now. Maybe people didn't take it seriously then. I hope they will, now.

"Shortly after World War II, when Europe lay in ruin and humanity was newly traumatized by the spectacle of organized violence that an authoritarian regime could achieve in the industrial epoch, the Western World experienced a sudden cultural shift. This new regime of thought is sometimes called postmodernism, but that term is obscure and overused; a better way to think about this is that there was no longer a unifying narrative, a guiding thread that united humans in the West. Whereas some countries might have previously had religious bonds, or ethnic bonds, or monarchial bonds, or even political bonds around, say, an authoritarian leader, suddenly there were none anymore — or at least none that were universally believed. Individualism and identity were more important, and politicians and legal bodies would now have to consider how to govern subjects in an ambiguous, pluralistic, multicultural world.

At the same time, it was becoming clear that the forces that shaped the world — the power to  organize society, or to exterminate it — were in the hands of scientists and technologists. The atom bomb, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the radio, the car, electrification, the refrigerator and the moon landing all happened in a span of about a hundred years. Science and technology spurred World War II, and led to its conclusion. And as the war receded from memory, it was apparent that the areas of greatest economic growth were all in technical fields — computers, engineering, communications, biotech and material science.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher who studied the condition of knowledge in this new era, realized that technology had changed the way that humans even thought about what knowledge was. Knowledge that computers could not process or manage — for instance, the ability to think critically or analyze qualitatively — was increasingly devalued, while the kinds of knowledge that computers could process became more important. As Lyotard wrote:

The miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited....The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned... Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements.

Lyotard wrote this in 1978, before the modern internet even existed. Today, the idea that computational forms of knowledge — and/or the kinds of people who traffic in that knowledge — are more valuable to our society seems to be universal. Thanks to generous grants from the tech industry and well-heeled nonprofits like the Mellon Foundation, humanities academics across the world have been spurred to do more research in what is called the "digital humanities" — a vague term that often means applying statistical and quantitative tools to data sets that involved humanities research, such as literary corpuses. The tech industry investments in digital humanities fulfills Lyotard's prophecy that society would cease to see the humanities' brand of knowledge as useful; that it would attempt remake the humanities into a discipline characterized by discrete information, rather than a means of analyzing, considering, and philosophizing the world.

In the same essay, Lyotard actually distinguishes between two different types of knowledge: the "positivist" kind, that is applicable to technology; and the "hermenutic" kind of knowledge. Hermeneutics, meaning the study of interpretation, is what the humanities (and to some extent social sciences) concerns itself with. One can see how this kind of knowledge might be difficult for computers to catalogue and use. The idea that a computer could produce a literary analysis of a Vonnegut short story sounds absurd because it is: this is not the way that computers process data, this is not what humans generally regard computers as useful for, and it is certainly not what they are designed to do by the tech companies. Unsurprisingly, then, this type of humanities knowledge has become devalued, and not even considered "knowledge" by many.

So this leads us to a predicament in which slowly, since the postwar era, humanities skills and associated knowledge have been devalued, while STEM knowledge — an acronym for "Science, Tech, Engineering and Math," meaning the kind of quantitative knowledge associated with technology — reigns supreme. One of the most interesting places that you can see this trend is in fiction: the kinds of heroes and protagonists that people admire and look up to in fiction are increasingly those with STEM knowledge, as these people are seen as heroes because we uncritically accept that STEM knowledge is what changes the world. There is a reason that Iron Man is a billionaire technologist, and Batman is a billionaire technologist, and The Hulk's namesake Bruce Banner has multiple PhDs in the Marvel canon, and that the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (of "Rick and Morty") is essentially an immortal, infinitely powerful being because of his ability to understand science and wield technology. We admire these people because they possess the kinds of skills that our society deems the most valuable, and we're told that we, like them, can use these skills to master the universe.

(There is a potent irony here, of course, in that it is artists who write these narratives, and artists who are partly responsible for creating and popularizing this kind of STEM-supremacist propaganda. Weirdly, though, you rarely see a superhero or a super-spy who started life as a painter, or a novelist, or a comic book artist.)

Moreover, in real life, people who possess technological knowledge, primarily the scions of Silicon Valley, are widely adulated, viewed as heroes who will inherently change society for the better. This manifests itself in various ways: some technologists, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have set up philanthropic foundations to "solve" our social problems — though curiously, the means by which that happens always seems to enrich themselves and their fellow capitalists along the way. Some of them promise widespread social change for the better via their own businesses, as though running a for-profit tech company was in and of itself a gift to the world and a net positive for social cohesion: you see this in many tech companies that advertise themselves as operating "for good," such as in the PR rhetoric of Facebook.  Then, there are those who believe that their contribution to society will be helping us leave this planet, and who are investing heavily in private spaceflight companies with the ultimate intention of colonizing space; this includes both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

In all these cases, the idea that people with STEM knowledge are predestined to save the world is an idea has become so dominant we don’t even question it. Some call this attitude STEM chauvinism, though I prefer the moniker STEM Supremacy. The noun "supremacy," I believe, is called for, because of how the idea that STEM knowledge (and those who posses it) is superior to other forms of knowledge has become so hegemonic that our culture openly mocks those who possess other forms of knowledge — particularly the hermeneutic, humanities-type knowledge. There is a fount of memes about humanities majors and how useless their fields are; some of these memes depict humanities majors as graduating to working at low-wage jobs like McDonalds; others mock critical humanities majors (particularly gender studies) as being out-of-touch, social failures.

Such discourse is intersectional with other supremacist beliefs, such as patriarchy, and often these kinds of memes that celebrate STEM knowledge and mock humanities knowledge will simultaneously mock women and celebrate masculinity. It was unsurprising to me when, last year, it leaked that a Google engineer, James Damore, had circulated an anti-diversity manifesto in which he used discredited science to argue that there were biological reasons for the gender gap. He went on to argue that there were reasons men were more interested in computers and in leadership, and women less. Though Damore was fired, he maintains that many of his peers agreed with him. Such incidents speak to the ways that different chauvinist tendencies, one of STEM Supremacy and one of patriarchy, can intersect to form novel noxious political ideologies.

The concept of "STEM Supremacy" relies on a popular belief that STEM knowledge is synonymous with progress. Yet if you take this kind of belief a bit too far, you might be keen to abandon democratic ideals and start to believe that we really should live in a society in which the STEM nerds rule over us. This has resulted in a number of half-baked supremacists within the tech industry who advocate either for authoritarian technocracies or, more bizarrely, monarchy.

I’ll give a few brief examples. There’s Google engineer Justine Tunney, a former Occupy Wall Street activist who now calls for “open-source authoritarianism. ” Tunney has argued against democracy and in favor of a monarchy run by technologists, and advocated for the United States to bring back indentured servitude.

But perhaps best-known among the techno-monarchists is Mencius Moldbug, the nom de plume of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer and founder of startup Tlon — a startup that is backed at least in part by billionaire anti-democracy libertarian Peter Thiel, who famously once wrote he did not believe democracy and freedom were compatible, and expressed skepticism over women's suffrage. Moldbug's polemics are circular, semi-comprehensible, and blur political theory and pop culture; Corey Pein of The Baffler described his treatises as "archaic [and] grandiose," while being "heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas."

Both of these so-called thinkers constitute parts of a larger movement that calls itself "Dark Enlightenment," alternatingly known as "neoreactionaries." True to its name,  the political agenda of Dark Enlightenment includes a celebration of patriarchy, monarchy, and racialized theories of intelligence differentials. 

The notion that monarchy is popular again in Silicon Valley might sound absurd. We associate monarchies with stodgy, quaint medieval kingdoms, the opposite of the disruptive, fast-moving tech industry. And yet those in the tech industry who see monarchy as appealing are keen to point out how the hierarchical aspects of monarchial rule are actually familiar to their industry. As Pein mentions in his Baffler essay, Thiel delivered a lecture in 2012 in which he explained the connection:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.

[But] it is certainly not representative governance. People don’t vote on things. Once a startup becomes a mature company, it may gravitate toward being more of a constitutional republic. There is a board that theoretically votes on behalf of all the shareholders. But in practice, even in those cases it ends up somewhere between constitutional republic and monarchy. Early on, it’s straight monarchy. Importantly, it isn’t an absolute dictatorship. No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame them if and when things go wrong.

[T]he truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups. It is more tyrant than mob because it should be. In some sense, startups can’t be democracies because none are. None are because it doesn’t work. If you try to submit everything to voting processes when you’re trying to do something new, you end up with bad, lowest common denominator type results.

The underpinnings of STEM Supremacy are, as I've laid out, complicated to see and stretch back to the end of World War II — but when put together they form a broader picture of where the philosopher-kings of the tech industry are heading, and what they believe. If we continue to live in a society that devalues humanities-type knowledge and glorifies STEM knowledge, this kind of thinking will persist, I fear. And the tech industry is partly responsible for cultivating this noxious worldview, in the sense that their PR apparatuses glorify STEM knowledge and encourage the public to view their leaders as demigods.

This isn't a unique phenomenon. Any situation where a certain ideology is denigrated and another valorized, there will be at some point a corresponding rise in a chauvinism in favor of the valorized ideology. The situation today is made more complicated by the fact that the tech industry benefits from the normalization of STEM Supremacist beliefs. The unearned trust that the public has for tech startups and tech industry ideas, the lack of regulation, and the absurd valuations of companies that continue to lose money — this is all motivated by an underlying belief that these companies are innately good, their owners smart, and their work more vital than other fields. Whether they admit it or not, you can draw a line from the public relations departments of tech companies and Justine Tunney's call for "open-source authoritarianism."

Ironically, the only antidote to all this sophistry is the humanities — the kind of critical thinking that they entail, and the kind of thinking that it is impossible for computers to do. I've often wondered if part of the tech industry's investment in digital humanities is designed to help stave off critical discourse or criticism of their companies. Indeed, by remapping the idea of what knowledge is in the first place, the tech industry is helping to realize a future in which we lack even the language to think critically about their role in society. Or maybe even a future in which they rule over us as monarchial, benevolent dictators — at least in their eyes. Perhaps this was the plan all along. (Oh yeah. It was)

By KEITH A. SPENCER

Keith A. Spencer is a senior editor at Salon who edits Salon's science/health vertical. His book, "A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy," was released in 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @keithspencer, or on Facebook here.

_______________________________________________

THESE FUCKERS IN SILICON VALLEY WANT A MONARCHY !!

"Few Catholics outside the D.C area are likely familiar with Fr. Arne, who never wrote a book or made national headlines. Yet a list of those who appear in Eberstadt’s book to laud his role among “billionaires and Supreme Court Justices” indicates the breadth of his influence: George Weigel, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, Arthur Brooks, Hadley Arkes, Peter Thiel, and Fr. Paul Scalia, to name but a few..."

"From his perch on K Street at the Catholic Information Center (CIC), Father Arne Panula shepherded some of the nation’s power brokers into the Catholic Church..." Mary Eberstadt

“As recently as 2017, Billy [Barr] was on the board of directors of the DC-based Catholic Information Center, led by the ultraright and secretive group Opus Dei…Its board includes the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone..."

*Above thread is chockful of more information!*

#Credit Suisse #Peter Thiel #Mueller Report #Much more #Sorry for the length #Important information

[beardedmrbean]

Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a trio of vetoes late Friday evening that are sure to anger his progressive allies — including an unexpected rejection of a bill requiring judges to consider children’s gender identities in custody disputes.

On the losing end of the Democratic governor’s actions are three mainstays of liberal support: LGBTQ rights groups, labor unions and immigration advocates. Newsom has long touted a progressive record while also acting as a moderating counterweight to an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature. Newsom dealt a stinging defeat to LGBTQ activists by vetoing a bill that would’ve asked courts to consider a child’s gender identity when it comes to custody decisions. The legislation, Assembly Bill 957, was authored by Lori Wilson, who is herself the parent of a transgender child.

In his veto message, Newsom largely sidestepped underlying political implications by warning against allowing the government “to dictate — in prescriptive terms that single out one characteristic — legal standards” for judges to apply. He noted courts could already consider parents’ handling of gender identity.

Trans youth issues this year have sparked protests in school boards across the state, as conservative groups push for mandatory parental notification policies. Members of the LGBTQ caucus had considered introducing a bill to halt those policies, but shelved the idea after the Newsom administration and some members of the caucus expressed concerns about getting the messaging right.

Republicans on Friday praised Newsom for his veto. Assemblymember Bill Essayli, who has pressed the issue in the legislature, said on Twitter “this is fantastic news and the right call.”

Sen. Scott Wiener, a gay San Francisco Democrat and a champion of LGBTQ priority bills, called Newsom’s veto a “tragedy for trans kids who “are living in fear” in a post on X, previously known as Twitter.

Newsom also vetoed a bill requiring human drivers to be onboard in self-driving trucks. The measure was a priority for organized labor groups like the Teamsters, who fear artificial intelligence and automation will lead to widespread economic upheaval, and tumult around self-driving taxis in San Francisco, wherecity officials fought an expansion of malfunctioning vehicles that have snarled traffic and blocked first responders.

Newsom’s rejection was not a surprise after his top business official opposed the bill, arguing it would stifle innovation. The governor wrote in his veto message that regulatory agencies were well-equipped to oversee the emerging technology.

That response is unlikely to mollify lawmakers, who believe regulators are overly friendly to industry, or organized labor. California Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez excoriated Newsom’s “shocking” veto in a statement vowing to “fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers.”

And the governor turned back a bill barring California’s prison system from sharing information about incarcerated immigrants with federal officials, fortifying California’s “sanctuary laws.” In a veto message, Newsom said he believed “current law strikes the right balance on limiting interaction to support community trust and cooperation between law enforcement and local communities.”

This is not the first time Newsom has broken with immigrant advocates. In 2019, he rejected a bill barring private security personnel from arresting immigrants in California prisons.

Several hundred more bills are awaiting Newsom’s signature or veto before the Oct. 14 deadline, including many that will further test his balance between business interests and labor.

#nunyas news #if it makes you mad don't vote for him