Multiorigin Link Sausage Platter

Not all ingredients fully disclosed — what would be the fun in that?

• Owners of intellectual property — supposed to be the creators, but all too often the patrons — really want two things. First, most obviously, they want to be paid. Second, they want to exclude anyone else from getting paid for "their" stuff. That last can get really icky, and seems to especially be so for creators who have turned into patrons — not just Games Workshop (UK), but others ranging from the obvious to some indie authors.

  But lurking behind all of this is a seldom-acknowledged problem of scale, epitomized by some of the obvious social-class problems in the arts (and that's just one of many, many examples). It's a corollary of Rawls's original position lemma in A Theory of Justice: What kind of art do we end up with if the original position of artists does not include sufficient resources to initially — and, maybe, repeatedly — fail, particularly while they are building competence, confidence, perspective, and audience?

• So the current First Lady has a new documentary/biopic/hagiography/boot-licking portrait out right now. (Notice the absence of a link?) It's directed by a cancelled director — frankly, not very good, and that's not just an issue of taste — who was accused of sexual harassment and worse. The film's budget and other costs are raising eyebrows, too… the same kind of eyebrows that were raised during the building of casinos in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the First Lady's husband's ties to another individual tied to "sexual harassment and worse" — ties reinforced in just the last few days by recent document disclosures, even allowing that there's undoubtedly hyperbole and just plain mistakes in there — paints a picture of disdain for women's rights, agency, and integrity.

  Except, perhaps, at the moments they're advocating for inhumane policies criticized by Heffalump-appointed judges. Or acting like schoolyard bullies ("If he'd just given us his lunch money…" — which matches up with the putative basis for the investigation all too well).

  I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

• Of course, that's far from the only outrageous conduct coming from the current Administration. Investigating (female) political opponents for being opponents having husbands who got rich "corruption" alleged with no details while ignoring The Orange One's own corollary conduct. An Attorney General who, on all appearances, couldn't spell "ethics" without help from the studio audience… or, at minimum, doesn't want to. International law? We don't need no steenkin' international law (or, for that matter, know any).
• Maybe Cory Doctorow is right. Maybe unintended consequences will provide a "surprising opportunity" to reclaim personal information control. I'm more pessimistic: As epitomized by "TV to cable," I suspect any available control will just be moved from one unsatisfactory set of "market-oriented" commercial tyrants to another one, or perhaps to "untouchable hacker gods."
• Earlier this month, Samuel Earle penned a thoughtful piece about how people at the new NYC mayor's inauguration block party want more politics — not less. There's a flaw, however, in the implicit definition of "politics." I think what Earle was writing about was the desire of those affected by policy to talk about policy, to suggest alternatives. I really don't think The Public (for whatever meaning one ascribes to that) wants more backstabbing, more egotism/narcissism/sociopathy, more treating those who disagree as enemies, more overt corruption. Unfortunately, we can't talk about "politics" without at least acknowledging all of these.
• Which, in the end, is still better than arguing about Windows 11… because at least in politics, there's a small chance that one can change someone else's mind. But Micro$oft is unable, at its core, to admit error (and in this, it's far from alone — Leeeeeesa… which, once one actually opened up the case, was nowhere near as "technically superior" as the industry press proclaimed).

  Here are a few unsolicited hints for the powers-that-be in Redmond — and elsewhere: Those of us who work with words all day — especially in chunks longer than a marketing memo — usually touch-type… and never appreciate touch screens for our work. I can, in fact, tell the difference between "my phone" and "my computer" well enough that having different interfaces, etc. doesn't confuse or inconvenience me. I expect computers to last longer than a year or two; I outgrew "three-year life cycles" with cars (I still have a working 5.25" floppy drive hanging around here, because some clients still have old-media backups as their only copies of Stuff). I will not give you my data to store for "convenience" in the cloud, while trusting that you won't read it and you're immune from data breaches; I know how to make a backup copy. (That goes about quadruple for anything private, confidential, privileged, incomplete, immoral, illegal, or fattening.) Neither do you actually need (or, on all appearances, pay attention to) "telemetry" of exactly what I'm doing. I don't play games on my computer that rely on proprietary platforming, in software or hardware, so I don't need all of those accessories built in to the operating system. And if you treat people like mindless children, you're ensuring that people who actually are mindless children are the only ones who will listen to you.