The Appendix of the Mind
June 2011
Play
How Corporations Buy Access to Power →
alternet.org
I think you can imagine how a major bank/investment firm like Goldman Sachs can gain access to power. They obviously can make or withhold campaign contributions. They can throw money into political action committees that go after politicians who want to mess with them. They also can offer politicians lucrative six or seven figure jobs should they ever fail to win reelection or want to retire from public service. They can use their pull to get their employees hired by the government. They can hire their regulators. There are many ways that rich Wall Street bankers can assure that Washington DC will let them do pretty much anything they want to do, even if it’s harmful to the country. But, sometimes, they don’t need to do anything.
Read the rest (it’s only about 300 words more) but we warned: it’s going to infuriate you.
It did…when I first realized it, years ago; glad you’re wising up, though.
Hope you get through your ‘rage’ phase quickly, and then move on to trying to change things. It’s an ultimately futile goal, in the absolute, but one can take satisfaction in the tiny chips against the monolith and hope that someday, someone will make a cumulative chip that causes a major crack…
Play
I wish I could just put my hand in the screen and grab whatever I want.
Reblog if you feel or have ever felt:
- Fat
- Awkward
- Alone
- Scared
- Depressed
- Suicidal
- The urge to cut or self-harm in any way
- Abused
- Used
I have something to say to all of you. A personalized message, no copy+paste shit. No matter how many notes this gets, i will send everyone a message.
I’ve been most of those…no, ALL of those on that list at one time or another. At the moment I’m a little of #5 (due to money troubles) but otherwise mentally healthy.
PLEASE don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’ve NEVER felt ANY of those listed items, you have lead a really fucking lucky life. Not saying that it’s RIGHT or FAIR that everyone has hardship and bad things in their lives, but that’s what Life does to us; we’re ALL victims to one extent or another.
…the big thing is to try to keep how Life victimises us from defining us as people - WE ARE BIGGER THAN THIS, OUR LIVES ARE NOT ALL HARDSHIP, WE STILL HAVE HOPE FOR BETTER THINGS.
And there’s always someone out there who’s willing to give a shoulder to lean on when those aspirations seem so far away.
*hugz*
“
I am SO sick of this argument. Local is important. People want local. But Local is not national or global, and when it’s constantly compared to those of course is falls short. Is that because it’s a failure? No, it’s because the whole world doesn’t live on your block.
When we started Metblogs in 2003 no one gave a shit about local and over the next few years people started paying more attention, but always because they expected it to be the next national thing, which it will never be, since it’s local. I’ve written about this numerous times where we’d but heads with advertisers and affiliates who wanted numbers that just didn’t exist, and would then walk away when suddenly there weren’t 10x the population of a city reading about it.
There are just over half a million people in the city of Nashville, 1.5 million in the metro area. You want to run a campaign in Nashville but are going to be disappointed if you don’t get 4-5 million views to it? You are on crack. If a campaign in nashville gets 250K views - a full HALF THE POPULATION of the city, that’s fantastic. Local numbers are only low because they are *constantly* compared to national and global sites which is just stupid.
Oh really, this site about a city with half a million people gets less traffic than Facebook, obviously it’s a failure.
Stupidest logic ever.
Local is important TO THE LOCALS. It’s useless to non-locals which is exactly how it should be. On a side note, it’s hilarious to watch company after company dump cash into the wrong efforts for local and then panic and give up. AOL has done it twice now, I’m actually shocked that they didn’t seem to learn *anything* from their failed attempts at local with Weblogs Inc. Patch sucks because *actual* local sites, and *actual* locals know it’s just the front of some outsider trying to capitalized on them and isn’t actually invested in anything local. Meanwhile billions of local sites around the world continue to run perfectly fine because it’s a group of people writing about the neighborhoods and communities they live in and aren’t gauging their success against traffic to sites like twitter.
” —Sean Bonner, in response to Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media
(via soupsoup)
Sean Bonner is a genius, and I am lucky to call him my friend.
(via wilwheaton)
…and I’m glad Wil Wheaton keeps sharing Mr. B’s genius with us.
Sean’s right; there IS a local market, and it’s for LOCAL material; outsiders could even come in and GET the local info the market wants, but the locals won’t patronise them and instead get their local info from locals. The only ‘liquid media’ anyone really wants is the DEVELOPERS wanting something they can sell - liquid as in assets - and they can try and try and try and they won’t reap anything out of local market outside of THEIR local area…but they don’t care about that since there’s not enough people to make it worth their effort unless they can ‘franchise it’ nation- or world-wide.
Free Lovecraft eBook Being Sold on Amazon – About The Theft – Cthulhu Chick →
cthulhuchick.com
On March 1, 2011, I released a free eBook of the complete works of Lovecraft in EPUB and MOBI formats. On March 21, 2011, someone uploaded a copy of the MOBI file (with a different cover and missing the intro) started selling it on Amazon. I didn’t discover this until June 18th, 2011, by which time it had achieved a 5-star rating and a good sales rank. I am very disappointed and wish to a) outline proofs to back up my assertion that this is the eBook I created and b) clarify a few points regarding the eBook’s distribution (and c) talk about my feelings on the subject).
That’s the setup. After you’ve read this and seen my supporting evidence, I hope you’ll go over to Amazon and up-vote the negative reviews which people have already left for the book. There are plenty, so we probably don’t need more. I’m taking formal steps to have it taken down, but in the meantime those reviews may help others find the original eBook and keep them from being defrauded. The more up-votes, the better.
My goal in all of this is not to make money off of the eBook and despite my disappointment I will not be taking it down as a free download on my site (because it turns out we can have nice things). My only goal is to stop someone else from making money off of the countless hours I put into creating it. It’s an odd kind of reverse-piracy, like taking a free MP3 album an artist has uploaded to their website and selling it as one’s own.
I have this eBook, which I downloaded from Ruth’s site. It’s amazing, and brilliantly put together. I love that she made it.
Whoever took it and put it on Amazon for sale is a piece of shit. Sharing is one thing, but profiting from the hard work of others — especially when that hard work was done out of love and explicitly not for profit — makes me ten kinds of stabby.
The bastard did this theft on my birthday. This shall NOT stand - I’ll sign up with Amazon just so I can upvote the neg reviews!
Google To Digitize 40 Million Pages Of History, From French Revolution To End Of Slavery →
idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com
Cool!
Google has added The British Library’s collection of out-of-copyright books to its trove of works to be digitized and placed online.
The British Library, the UK’s national library, and Google announced Monday that they had agreed to digitize 170 year’s worth of history in 250,000 out-of-copyright books.
Google will cover the costs of the project.
Glad to see Google’s still going strong with it’s ‘digital Gutenberg’ project that really got me to like it (part of me STILL holds a grudge against it for buying and dissolving Deja News all those years ago…)