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Indeed, Sesame Credit is basically a big data gamified version of the Communist Party's surveillance methods; the disquieting dang'an. The regime kept a dossier on every individual that tracked political and personal transgressions. A citizen's dang'anfollowed them for life, from schools to jobs. People started reporting on friends and even family members, raising suspicion and lowering social trust in China. The same thing will happen with digital dossiers. People will have an incentive to say to their friends and family, "Don't post that. I don't want you to hurt your score but I also don't want you to hurt mine."

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

Ne mogu sad da gledam, ali iz mog ugla Simpsonovi su propali posle filma. Sve od 21. sezone na dalje je negledljivo.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moondog

Moondog (born Louis Thomas Hardin; May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999) was an American musician, composer, theoretician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments. He was blind from the age of 17.
Moondog lived in New York from the late 1940s until 1972, and during this time he could often be found on 6th Avenue, between 52nd and 55th Streets, wearing a cloak and a horned helmet sometimes busking or selling music, but often just standing silently on the sidewalk. He was widely recognized as "the Viking of 6th Avenue" by thousands of passersby and residents who weren't aware of his musical career.

Lyrics: https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/moondog/pigmy-pig-52

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In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here.

A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself. But it shouldn’t obscure that there are also many actual children, plugged into iphones and tablets, watching these over and over again — in part accounting for the inflated view numbers — learning to type basic search terms into the browser, or simply mashing the sidebar to bring up another video.

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

Ovaj mi je zasad favorit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCGLEc9vAkw

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There are situations where parents pressure a daughter to marry — if she’s a lesbian, for example. So, they have an entire wedding, and it’s a fake wedding, except for the client’s family. The friends, and everyone else are fake. My side is all fake. Fifty fake people all pretending it’s real. The cost is 2 million yen, for everyone.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/paying-for-fake-friends-and-family/545060/

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Every day for two years, filmmaker Victoria Fiore tried to gain access to a toxic, closed city in Siberia with no ground transportation connections to the rest of the world. Located nearly 250 miles north of the polar circle, Norilsk is home to 177,000 people, many of whom are employed by the world’s largest mining and metallurgy complex, Norilsk Nickel. It spews more than two million tons of gas into the atmosphere per year. As a result, life expectancy in Norilsk is ten years shorter than Russia’s average (and twenty years shorter than that of the U.S.).

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/545228/my-deadly-beautiful-city-norilsk

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Being stuck without access to the internet is often thought of as a problem only for rural America. But even in some of America’s biggest cities, a significant portion of the population can’t get online.

Take Detroit, where 40 percent of the population has no access to the internet—of any kind, not only high speed—at home, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Seventy percent of school-aged children in the city are among those who have no internet access at home. 

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kz3xyz/detroit-mesh-network

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For centuries, Europeans who could read did so aloud. The ancient Greeks read their texts aloud. So did the monks of Europe’s dark ages. 

As late as the 1700s, historian Robert Darnton writes, “For the common people in early modern Europe, reading was a social activity. It took place in workshops, barns, and taverns. It was almost always oral but not necessarily edifying.

https://quartzy.qz.com/1118580/the-beginning-of-silent-reading-was-also-the-beginning-of-an-interior-life/

 

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The most vivid critique of the ICC and other U.S.-supported war crimes tribunals of recent decades is that they are victor’s justice of a sort. The foreigners who face trial tend to be ones who made the mistake of committing their crimes without the backing of the U.S., or against the interests of the United States. The critique goes further than that — if you happen to be from a powerful country that committed war crimes that the U.S. did not support — let’s say, Russian forces in Chechnya — you will not face an international court because your leaders have enough clout to stifle the residual moral reflexes of Washington and Brussels at the United Nations. It is only small countries that have to hand over their thugs.

https://theintercept.com/2017/11/22/bosnia-ratko-mladic-verdict-siege-warfare-yemen/

If you are a white-collar worker, it is simply rational to view yourself first and foremost as a job quitter – someone who takes a job for a certain amount of time when the best outcome is that you quit for another job (and the worst is that you get laid off). So how does work change when everyone is trying to become a quitter? First of all, in the society of perpetual job searches, different criteria make a job good or not. Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters

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The Magyarab are a people living along the Nile River in Egypt and Sudan. They are of Hungarian ancestry, probably dating back to the late 16th century. They were not discovered by Europeans until 1935, when László Almásy, himself Hungarian, and his co-worker, the German engineer and explorer Hans Joachim von der Esch, happened upon the tribe in the Nubian region. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people

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When the genetic engineering technology CRISPR arrived on the scene in 2012, promising to make genetic engineering simpler, faster and cheaper, it galvanized an already simmering hobbyist niche of DIY scientists who sought to try their hands at genetically modifying plants, insects, animals, and even humans.

...

Then earlier this year, he infused his skin cells with green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish in an attempt to make his skin glow. The experiment failed to successfully turn him into a living nightlight, but a skin biopsy revealed that at least briefly the protein was replicating within his body, making him in all likelihood the first human-jellyfish hybrid. The experiment I was there to witness was even more extreme.

https://gizmodo.com/genetically-engineering-yourself-sounds-like-a-horrible-1820189351

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