The Death of the Mind

CHICAGO—Excited about his final opportunity to make friends as an adult before surrendering to a life of solitude, local man Josh Kelly reported Friday that the adult kickball he joined would be a great way to meet other people who are entirely out of options. “It feels good to do something different and meet some…

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External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/adult-kickball-league-great-way-to-meet-other-people-wh-1846940382

 
iHeart Media‘s purchase of design podcast 99% Invisible means that the canary in the coalmine just died.
In the past couple of years, two high-profile acquisitions of podcast companies have produced a whirlwind of think pieces from the media press. Forbes (12/4/20) prophesied that Amazon’s 2020 purchase of podcast publisher Wondery put the industry “on a Path to a Crossroads.” And a Poynter headline (2/7/19) proclaimed Spotify’s 2019 purchase of celebrated commercial podcast network Gimlet Media “could change podcasting’s future.”
But that future has already arrived. In a largely ignored story last year, Liberty Media, a conglomerate that already owns SiriusXM radio and the audio streaming and podcast platform Pandora, secured the right to a 50% stake in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/

Around 1,000 security forces stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers with stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets, injuring more than 330 Palestinians.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/11/isra-m11.html

Having written over 600 blog entries, I thought I would have already covered the complexities of the
CLUSTER command, but it seems I have not, so let’s do that now.

CLUSTER is an unusual SQL command because, like non-unique CREATE INDEX, it only affects performance. In fact,
CLUSTER requires the existence of an index. So, what does CLUSTER do? Well, what does CREATE INDEX do? Let’s look at how storage works in Postgres.

User data rows are stored in heap files in the file system, and those rows are stored in an indeterminate order. If the table is initially
loaded in INSERT/COPY order, later inserts, updates, and deletes will cause rows to be added in unpredictable order in the heap…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/54g

If you’ve been following along with us, the past several months haven’t gone great for streaming platform Twitch. It all started with Twitch’s decision to simply nuke a bunch of streamer content as a result of a massive influx of DMCA notices it received. While Twitch streamers and some in the public went ballistic over this, the company decided to try to distract the world with bright shiny objects like emojis, only to continue to let the DMCApocalypse continue even after it apologized for its lack of transparency. Then Amazon, which owns Twitch, put on Twitch’s GlitchCon and spent a pretty penny on it, while streamers on the platform wondered why Amazon didn’t just spend that…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210505/11421146738/twitch-takes-steps-to-make-it-even-easier-to-issue-dmca-strikes-against-streamers.shtml

The Labor Department reported just 266,000 new jobs in April, far below predictions of 1 million or more, evoking loud calls from Republicans for an end to pandemic relief measures.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/08/jobs-m08.html

Cancel culture is at a crossroads, seems to me.  And I might as well be at the center of it.  If I wasn’t before, I appear to be now.
But what is cancel culture?  Isn’t that a rightwing term used to excuse bigoted behavior and avoid accountability for said behavior?  Yes, that’s how the right uses the concept — as a weapon against the rest of society.
And that’s all I’ll say about that.  Now to the left.  Cancel culture on the left also exists.  The people claiming otherwise are part of the left’s version of cancel culture.  (Note to anarchists:  when I use the term “left,” this includes you, too.  We can argue about the semantics of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/06/cancel-culture-conundrums/

On May 5, the proponents of several Ohio initiatives filed this brief in U.S. District Court, in Thompson v DeWine, s.d., 2:20cv-2129. This is the case over petitioning relief for initiatives. Although the Sixth Circuit denied injunctive relief (and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to get involved), that doesn’t necessarily mean Ohio’s policy is constitutional. The proponents of the initiatives will seek a ruling that Ohio violates the First Amendment by its policy. Here is the brief.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2021/05/05/ohio-initiative-proponents-will-seek-a-ruling-in-u-s-district-court-that-constitution-required-petitioning-relief-during-covid/