Finished my week of teacher training. You can read about all that for a very small fee on THE DOOMTOWN GAZETTE. Starts at only one American dollar a month though you're welcome to pay more and I'm grateful if you do. But one buck? Can you even get a cup of coffee for that price? Doubt it! You can even go back in time, read all the old posts. Aside from the HARD JANK, you can find out about how a job recruiter tried to put me on the stroll. Money well spent if you ask me. You're not paying for content, you're paying for HARD JANK. Cheap, dirty, and fucked up. Personal life on display. What else could you want?
Meanwhile, here's a link dump.
India's hidden COVID deaths: Was the toll in 2020 eight times higher?: New research has shown that deaths during COVID's first wave in India were a lot higher than reported. Of particular note is the health disparities. Muslims and women were much more likely to die from the disease.
Help keep COVID-19 vaccines free in the United States!: The People's CDC has a template for a letter to Congress that you can send to try to convince them to keep COVID vaccines free. Considering the amount of pubic money and regulatory help companies received in developing these vaccines (as well as their, you know, importance), it should be a little shocking that corporations would be allowed to charge for them. Though I doubt much can shock us anymore.
Pluralistic: AI art has no anti-cooption immune system (20 Jul 2024): Cory Doctorow holds forth on a subject close to my own heart - basically how janky aesthetics can resist co-option. Some good points as always. Though, where I differ, is I'm not sure that AI really changes the picture at all. The speed of cooption is already so fast and has been for so long that it doesn't even seem to bother with the present anymore. It's already faster than light, reaching back into the past to coopt and re-coopt long extinct countercultures. AI, to my mind, is mainly a corporate grift to facilitate layoffs and juke shareholder value. As long as it does that, no one actually cares if it works -- or, rather, as long as it does that, it is working.
PSA: new site, subscriptions available; also, calling time on VCTB-by-email: Paul Graham Raven has a new research journal. You can subscribe to it. If can't pay, you can get for free. Though Paul and I have a long-running debate on the value of hope (he likes it, I don't) I always enjoy his work, even find his thoughts on hope almost convincing, and think his work is of great value. I recommend paying. I mean, I didn't. (My banking is a bit of a clusterfuck at the moment, and I'm yet to get my first pay-cheque.) But he does good work. You can see it here.
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