DL Open Thread: Sunday, July 2, 2023

I can’t (or choose not to) read everything (although I’m reading a pretty amazing novel entitled “Chain Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah right now.  The Greg Abbotts of the World might get some ideas.  Which is not the author’s point at all).  But I digress.  My point being that I love it when our readers send us stuff we haven’t read.  To wit:

DuPont Hid Their Knowledge Of PFA’s And The Damage They Cause For Over Twenty Years:

A group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco conducted a detailed analysis of hundreds of pages of previously secret documents from DuPont and 3M that outlined the efforts by the companies to hide the risks associated with the group of man-made chemicals commonly known by the acronym PFAS (pronounced: pee-fass) which stands for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

The files concerning PFAS from DuPont and 3M—the two largest makers of forever chemicals—contain internal memos, external correspondence, the results of concealed scientific studies and more stretching over the course of a half century, first came into public view more than 20 years ago.

Studying the documents from the corporations helps to broaden the understanding of how industry sources manipulate and withhold scientific data for financial gain, the researchers said. It also underscores the importance of greater transparency in crafting regulations.

“The point of this analysis and the work we’re doing is to understand—in the industry’s own words—how they’re manipulating science and the communication of science towards the benefit of profit over the public’s health,” Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and one of the authors of the study, said in an interview. “The ultimate goal is providing sunshine on this—and transparency is an antiseptic to the harms that the industry is promoting.”

“The industry is telling us that they knew about this,” Woodruff said. “It’s not like I’m accusing them of something. I’m just showing that they knew it was harmful and they were lying to their employees and the public about the health harms of this chemical. So what this means from a public policy standpoint is we need to have strong disclosure laws about what types of scientific information the industry knows about the products that they’re making.”

Sounds like something for Delaware legislators to consider during the break.

Fewer Police = Less Crime?  Maybe:

When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing.

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

Anybody Here Still On Twitter?  I’ve never been, but the screw-ups read as even worse than what those of us who still have cable get from the ‘customer service’ teams at Comcast. Or is it Xfinity?:

Twitter is having some kind of melt-down as it is not displaying tweets for thousands of users across several countries. This is the error message many users are getting.

It is possible that this new asinine policy announced by Elon on Friday, to limit the number of posts users can read, is causing the issue, since the servers now have to keep a rolling count of how many tweets have been “read” by each user.

Here is one explanation for the outage today — that the new policies and the hastily written software to implement them, are causing client apps to repeat requests when the response is an error, thus creating an unintended DDOS attack!

Good to know there’s at least one hellscape I don’t have to deal with.

‘Mother Of Mercy–Can This Be The End Of–Streaming’?

A decade later, much of the gleam of that era has faded. House of Cards turned out be a superficially classy but ultimately quite hollow prestige TV series with a scandal-ridden lead. And streaming, too, has failed to live up to its potential. In 2023 it’s a model that is malfunctioning, without an easy way of fixing it.

Streaming is malfunctioning for viewers. A model that once looked to only have upsides – inexpensiveness, variety, instant accessibility – has become bloated, expensive and confusing. Where once streaming was bunched around a handful of platforms (Netflix, Amazon, BBC iPlayer in the UK, Hulu in the US) now that number has ballooned into the double digits, meaning that viewers have to fork out big sums if they want to try to keep up with the continual churn of buzzy, often overhyped, shows.

Streaming is malfunctioning for the creatives making the shows, too: it’s why the members of the Writers Guild of America, the union representing Hollywood’s screenwriters, are now on strike over their pay and working conditions, with the Screen Actors Guild mulling a strike of its own. While streaming has handsomely paid some of TV’s biggest-name creators like Ryan Murphy or Shonda Rhimes, writers at the lower end of the food chain subsist on relative crumbs – the “back-end” payments they once received when a show they worked on was rebroadcast (or syndicated) to another network having no direct equivalent in the streaming age – while being expected to churn out more shows than ever in an age of peak TV.

And remarkably, streaming is malfunctioning for many of the companies doing the streaming. Disney’s streaming arm, Disney+ posted an operating loss of more than $1bn in the first quarter of this year (that figure shrank to a still-pretty-eye-watering loss of $659m in the second quarter). Peacock, the streaming arm of US network NBC, is expecting to post losses of $3bn this year as it expands its library. Netflix has turned a profit this year but remains saddled with historic debts of around $14bn. As Brian Steinberg, senior TV editor at Variety puts it: “The companies that built [streaming] have done so without the guarantee that they can make a business out of it.”

Some Things You Can’t Unsee.  Did anybody else view the grotesque coronation of Our PAL Val as Speaker on Friday?  Complete with an enforced Hug-athon, a bouquet,  and a reception befitting of someone who was named Queen For A Day and won both the washer and dryer.   That, show, like Val’s coronation, was a sickening spectacle:

Each contestant was asked to talk about the recent financial and emotional hard times she had been through. The interview would climax with Bailey asking the contestant what she needed most and why she wanted to win the title of Queen for a Day.^[3] Often the request was for medical care or therapeutic equipment to help a chronically ill child, or might be for a hearing aid, a new washing machine, or a refrigerator. Many women broke down sobbing as they described their plights.

The winning contestant was selected by the audience using an applause meter; the harsher the contestant’s situation, the likelier the studio audience was to ring the applause meter’s highest level. The winner, to the musical accompaniment of “Pomp and Circumstance”, would be draped in a sable-trimmed red velvet robe, given a glittering jeweled crown to wear, placed on a velvet-upholstered throne, and handed a dozen long-stemmed roses to hold while her list of prizes was announced.

I legitimately worry about the fates of those who did not engage in Val’s Hug-athon. In Leg Hall’s Darwinian World, aka the Survival Of The Obsequious,  there may well be some more imminent ‘Ex-Employees Of The Day’.

What do you want to talk about?