Andreas Wacker

I was wondering if one could use the seat belt use of different countries to predict how different countries would fare in a pandemic.

In theory the cultural attitude towards safety, behavior alteration for a non direct benefit should equally apply to Volvos invention as well as to mask wearing and social distancing in general.

As usual things are not as simple as I think they are. People in Greece, for instance, rather have Sirtaki liberties behind the wheel while they did not have a Covid issue. Sweden is not surprising using seat belts like no other countries, but its Covid numbers are – well – lets say they are not so great.

One of the delights of using feedbin and collecting rss feeds is that things like Dr. Elenaor Janega’s wonderful Going Medieval appear among the usual news BS that is usually so utterly repetitive.

The good Dr she is not: Her writing is wonderful, and the choice of topics is adding an interesting context towards all sorts of things.

Recently she wrote about 45s favorite doctor.

How people have interpreted their sleep problems in the past and what kind of stories they conjured up around it is immensely interesting. I think that much of what has been projected into the existence of incubi and succubi is caused by good old sleep paralysis. That and then cultural issues around sexuality. Young devoted Christian men wake up with boners, much like other people. But depending on your moral compass that you like to use during day hours you need to construct some kind of explanation. People being people those can be truly bizarre. Our imagination does not have boundaries in the respect on how far it can venture into outlandish possibilities. While in the same time ignoring 99.9% of all aspects of the nearest and most plausible explanation. We’d rather think about Alien DNA.

I like to look at things. Were it not for clients, family or organs inside my body communicating needs I could pretty much sit everywhere and look. For a rather long time I guess. A moon and cloudless night sky is one of these things that never gets old on me. Lately it got new on me though: Lots of satellites. They used to be not a thing, then they were far in between, now they clutter the sky. Seeing a couple of them at the same time on the firmament is not uncommon. The root of this word is ‘firmare’, which has nothing to do with movement.

I must admit it makes me angry. Fucking billionaires wanting to give everybody Internet through their clusters. If ever there will be a ostracism against those super riches then I will happily write MUSK on that piece of broken ceramic, or whatever we will use to decide who will go into the soup to feed the pour, or at least restore some sense of justice.

I am not very violent. But having the night sky sliced with with his Starlink BS (he is probably too young and ignorant to remember Iridium) devices makes me mad. More than it should …

99% of closed rooms are owned by somebody. If they are rented out then the responsibility of what happens inside goes to the renter.

Covid 19 gets transmitted in closed rooms.

So it is simple to make the people that house the locus of infection responsible for it. Have them cover the hospital costs of those infected, and those that got infected by them. Just trace the Virus DNA: It is different enough in some details to support these kind of chains.

There will be much less parties and gatherings. Covid would not have an easy way of spreading in the first world as it has now.

Last year I deleted my account. My real friends were not on there anyway, and if they were we did not communicate with that thing. It is a truly horrible system: People have the illusion to be among their peers. They think ‘everybody’ has seen what they post. Which is not the case. It amplifies stupid human traits. Extensive posters will suck the air out of the room. The most insane conspiracy theories run amok. Arguments do not happen. Trolling is a past time for many that have nothing better to do. And while you have an account you go back to that junk. Again, and again and again. Listening to Mark Z about how it builds community is gut wrenching. FB has enough money to engineer a system that would support the better angels of our nature. It could have made a positive impact in the world. It did clearly not. Which interesting concept emerged on the platform? There is nothing. Billions of people spend aeons on the system, without having any gains from it. Before the Internet it often had been said that “TV makes you stupid”. FB is much much worse. It amplifies the voices of those who would have yelled at the TV in the olden days. It amplification system for messages is plain broken. It stinks. It is the worst. Whoever designed it should be ashamed of himself. Turn facebook off today and you do the world a service. People will find ways to communicate. In better ways. No, twitter ist not it. Talking to people in reality or with a phone is a good way to connect. It makes a huge difference. Of course we can not go back. People didn’t smoke en mass until around 120 years ago. It was a real bad idea, and did more harm than good. FB is like that. It is addictive for its users, but it provides no benefit. Leaving FB was a really good thing. Not having to endure the nonsense that people utter there about Covid is a real relief. I very much doubt that it magically became sensible in the last eight months. People might be under the impression that it is just their friends that are so stupid. That others have enlightened, witty, wonderful conversation on that platform. No, that is not true. It is an outlet for things nobody wants to read. And people return to it for the same reason they rubber neck when they pass an accident on the highway. Human suffering interests us. Out of pity, schadenfreude or actual compassion: our attention steers towards it. And with FB we sit alongside a constant stream of the horrible lives that our ‘peers’ seem to lead. We see their failed attempts in self promotion pass by in a stream of other crap and ads, and it is not the live that we ever wanted to have. But FB communicates that this would be the only way of human existence that is around us. Of course it is not. We are much better than this crap. Just hard to see when you turn for human interaction to Mr Zuckerbergs contraption.

was the year that the last TV was made in the USA. Seems to have been AKAI branded. Akai, the japanese company, had been defunct in 2002, while inMusic would only pick up the brand 7 years later. The picture here is from the history of Magnavox page. Which I found since I wondered about their defense division “Magnavox Electronic Systems”. Min Kao had worked there, when Gary Burrell recruited him to work for King radio. In 1989 then both started Garmin which made them very rich. Garmin employs 13,000 people and seems to have malware problems right now.

There is a story here: People from defense tech, starting a big successful thing based on GPS that decades later gets kneecapped by some Russian hackers with generic ransomware. A bit like stopping a tank with sticky tape. In tech that is possible it seems.

64 years ago dolls were made in Canada to be shipped all over the world. Funny how the skin and hair color of these figurines is not worth any reflection in the idea that dolls go all over the world from that factory in Canada.