More sneed: https://old.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusWI/comments/xe9t6d/giving_it_to_your_children/

Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?

The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.

People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.

It is important that the population also remembers the guidance on how to prevent the spread of infection, including staying at home in case of illness, frequent aeration or ventilation, social distancing, good coughing etiquette, hand hygiene and cleaning.

Vaccination of children against covid-19

Children and adolescents rarely become severely ill from the Omicron variant of covid-19.

From 1 July 2022, it was no longer possible for children and adolescents aged under 18 to get the first injection and, from 1 September 2022, it was no longer possible for them to get the second injection.

A very limited number of children at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill will still be offered vaccination based on an individual assessment by a doctor.

https://www.sst.dk/en/english/corona-eng/vaccination-against-covid-19

rtechnology

California sued Amazon on Wednesday, accusing the company of pushing sellers and suppliers into anticompetitive deals that lead to higher prices, including at rival online stores.

The lawsuit, filed by state Attorney General Rob Bonta, focuses on the way Amazon — the largest online retailer — deals with third-party merchants, who account for most of the sales on the platform.

California alleges that Amazon penalizes sellers and suppliers that offer cheaper prices elsewhere on the internet, including Walmart and Target, for example by displaying their items lower or less prominently or outright blocking their new postings.

"Amazon makes consumers think they are getting the lowest prices possible," the lawsuit alleges, "when in fact, they cannot get the low prices that would prevail in a freely competitive market because Amazon has coerced and induced its third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to enter into anticompetitive agreements on price."

California's antitrust lawsuit is among the biggest legal challenges to Amazon in recent years, as lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and abroad have investigated the retail giant for potential anticompetitive practices.

Amazon has denied any antitrust violations. Its representatives did not immediately comment on Tuesday's lawsuit.

California also accuses Amazon of creating a "vicious anticompetitive cycle": Sellers view Amazon as a must; Amazon charges them higher fees to be able to sell on its platform; Sellers, in turn, raise their Amazon prices. And, even though it costs them less to sell on other websites, Amazon's policies push sellers to raise prices on those sites, too.

"Through its illegal actions, the, quote, "everything store" has effectively set a price floor, costing Californians more for just about everything," Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Earlier this year, a judge dismissed a similar lawsuit that was filed in Washington, D.C., though the city's attorney general has appealed.

In that case, Amazon argued its deals with merchants were meant to prevent shoppers from being overcharged, and punishing Amazon would hurt consumers.

Amazon has separately proposed a settlement with European antitrust regulators, who charged the company with violating competition laws. Their key allegations accused the company of using data it collected from third-party sellers to its own benefit.

Editor's note: Amazon is among NPR's recent financial supporters.

My God the spam on Twitter is appalling. This account is impersonating Vitalik and had 160 replies in 30 seconds, and Twitter's spam filters can't catch it? pic.twitter.com/GVkQc0wiZ9

— Paul Graham (@paulg) September 14, 2022

Orange Site

Orange Site

I thought people only used folx ironically. Love to see it

Pathetic amount.

rtechnology

The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) on Wednesday slapped a combined fine of 100 billion won ($71.9 million) on Google and Meta Platforms for collecting personal information without users' consent and using it for personalized online advertising and other purposes, officials said.

In a general meeting, the commission approved the fines of 69.2 billion won for Google and 30.8 billion won for Meta Platforms, respectively, in the commission's first penalties handed out over personalized advertisement data collection.

The fines mark the highest amount ever imposed for alleged violations of the personal information protection law.

The PIPC also ordered that Google and Meta inform their users clearly and simply and get their consent if they are to gather or use user behavior data on websites or applications outside of their own platforms.

The watchdog said its probe confirmed that Google and Meta have neither clearly informed nor got prior consent from users when they collected or analyzed such data to estimate their personal interest and use that information to provide personalized advertisement.

Google has had Korean users give their consent without knowledge to such data collection by a default setting since at least 2016 while Meta, the operator of Facebook, has not informed or got consent from users since 2018, according to the watchdog.

As a result, over 82 percent of Google users and over 98 percent of Meta users in Korea have their user behavior data on platforms outside of Google and Meta exposed to their illegal data collection, the PIPC said. (Yonhap)

Orange site thread

Orange Site discusses

https://x.com/linusgsebastian/status/1569876982061740036

Timestamps copied from the bird farms:

5:00 Jay can't figure out how to get to the bit storage and when he finally gets it open he comments it is "very strong" and appears to struggle. Seems like a similar complaint to the one that pissed off Linus in the pop up shop

10:00 Jay uses the motorized screwdriver that he bought years ago from Amazon. It easily gets the PSU screw out and he mentions it was only $10 before quickly saying "I'm not comparing it to that!"

12:40 He's shoving the screwdriver down a confined space and I couldn't help but think "The Wiha would do this better" as the bulbous end seriously limits it in narrow spaces. He notices this issue and explicitly mentions it at ~12:55 but reframes it as being better than his stupid motorized screwdriver because that thing wouldn't fit at all.

14:15 He complains about his shitty motorized screwdriver "cross threading" (how do you do that when you're removing the screw?) and undoing the standoff. Literally setup his motorized screwdriver to fail by rushing and acting like an idiot.

15:00 Doesn't this guy build PCs for a living? Just fumbling around and can't even get the mobo lined up on the standoffs. What the frick

16:10 He finishes and it was 4x faster with the LTT screwdriver. Well no shit when you act like a gorilla with the motorized one and frick up your standoffs. He must've been amping it up for that infomercial black & white scene effect since there's no way this guy builds PCs everyday and it's that much of a struggle unless he's an absolute moron.

16:55 The drop test sheared off one of the plastic bit retention tabs

It is reported by multiple users that YouTube is currently testing an ad format that shows 5 to 10 UNSKIPPABLE ADS before their video starts. pic.twitter.com/A1lBhj0Rfl

— Alvin (@sondesix) September 14, 2022

Fixed the link, accidentally added an 8 somehow

Orange site

The New Delhi High Court has issued a site-blocking injunction in favor of Star India to protect the film "Brahmastra". Local ISPs have been ordered to block 18 pirate sites but the same order also applies to domain registrars, including US-based Namecheap and GoDaddy. These far-reaching measures apply to a movie that hasn't yet been released and hasn't been pirated either.

India has been at the forefront of this movement, with rightsholders requesting blockades of thousands of websites over the years.

Last week, the New Delhi High Court issued another other, targeting 18 pirate sites including http://torrentcue.co, http://uwatchfree.be, http://extramovies.pics and http://movierulzhd.lol. While many of these are relatively small players in the global piracy ecosystem, the injunction stands out for other reasons.

Preemptive Blocking Order

The original complaint was filed by Star India. It aims to protect the release of the film “Brahmastra Part One: Shiva,” which will premiere later this week. Star believes that the pirate sites will make available unauthorized copies of the movie, so it asked the court to take action in advance.

In other words, the Indian media company requested a preemptive blocking order to prevent piracy that may take place sometime in the future.

After reviewing all the evidence and weighing in previous decisions of the courts, the High Court granted the request. According to Judge Jyoti Singh, piracy should be met with a heavy hand.

“There is no gain saying that piracy has to be curbed and needs to be dealt with a heavy hand and injunction against screening of copyrighted content by rogue websites ought to be granted,” Judge Singh writes. “This position is acknowledged and re-affirmed in several decisions..”

Preventing Irreperable Harm

There is jurisprudence in India for these types of preemptive blockades and the Court believes that these are warranted here as well. Without any blocking measures, the film’s profits could be severely harmed.

SHOW MORE

Remember the fake whistle blower and how they praised her? This is how they treat a actual whistle blower, rather than calling for censorship he’s pointing out their questionable ties and ccp infiltration.

Included: rightoids trying to groom you

Meta is introducing a new way for Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users to connect with one another. In the coming weeks, the company plans to expand the availability of Community Chats, a feature that will allow Facebook and Messenger groups to organize discussions around their favorite topics. On top of the usual text conversations, Community Chats will support audio and video channels and allow admins to broadcast messages to their groups.

Since Meta envisions you using Community Chats to communicate with people outside of your immediate social circle, admins will have access to a handful of moderation cowtools to ensure conversations stay civil. An “Admin Assist” feature will allow them to create a list of words and phrases they want the platform to automatically flag and take action against. Admins also have the power to block, mute and suspend individuals who don’t play by their community’s rules. They can also host admin-only chats where they can talk privately with their moderation team.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because Meta is effectively replicating how Groomercord works. On Groomercord, you can join Community Servers that are organized around a single game or interest, and it’s even possible for admins to create multiple sub-channels for people to discuss specific aspects of their interest, much like Meta will allow Community Chats users to do. Even the moderation cowtools are reminiscent of features Groomercord has released in recent months to combat trolls.

The Search for Dirt on the Twitter Whistle-Blower

On August 23rd, a Slack chat for former employees of the payments company Stripe began filling with accounts of strange queries about an ex-colleague. “I’m getting inundated with paid interview requests,” one of the former employees, Dan Foster, wrote. Another, Marty Wasserman, later posted that he’d received a similar message via e-mail. “Hi Marty, Hope you’re having a great week!” the message read. “I’m currently working on a project regarding leadership in tech, and my client is hoping to speak to an experienced professional about a particular individual you may have worked with.” The message requested a “45-60 minute compensated phone consultation.” Wasserman was suspicious of the timing. “Preeeettyy sure this is regarding Mudge,” he wrote, pasting it in the Slack chat with his former colleagues. “Hard pass.”

Hours earlier, CNN and the Washington Post had reported that Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter (Mudge) Zatko, had filed a whistle-blower disclosure to federal agencies, accusing the social-media platform of reckless security practices. Zatko’s sweeping claims, if proven, could aid Elon Musk in his attempt to terminate his forty-four-billion-dollar agreement to acquire Twitter, a legal fight with implications of billions of dollars for investors. The dozens of e-mails and LinkedIn messages received by people in Zatko’s professional orbit appeared to be mostly from research-and-advisory companies, part of a burgeoning industry whose clients include investment firms and individuals jockeying for financial advantage through information. At least six research outfits—Gerson Lehrman Group (G.L.G.), AlphaSights, Mosaic Research Management, Ridgetop Research, Coleman Research Group, and Guidepoint—approached former colleagues of Zatko’s at Stripe, Google, and the Pentagon research agency DARPA. All offered to pay for information, sometimes noting that the compensation would be high or apparently unrestricted. At least two investment firms, Farallon Capital Management L.L.C. and Pentwater Capital Management L.P., also sought information from individuals close to Zatko.

An associate at AlphaSights reached out to Wasserman via e-mail. She did not identify her firm’s client, but she wrote that they wanted to understand Zatko’s “personality, leadership style, validity and history.” She added, “We compensate well because we know this is a difficult and confusing ask at first.” Another Stripe veteran, Jaclyn Schoof, wrote to the Slack group that she had received the same offer from AlphaSights. “They said they didn’t care how much it would cost them… seems really weird,” she said. A fourth member of the group, Niels Provos, who had worked with Zatko at Google and was later persuaded by him to fill his role at Stripe, received offers of payment from AlphaSights, as well as from two other firms, Farallon and Mosaic. “They were happy to pay $1000/hr when I was fishing for more information,” he wrote, of Farallon’s consultant. (A spokesperson for Farallon said that payment was discussed only after Provos broached the subject.)

The consultant told Provos that its analysts were assessing Zatko’s “personality professionally and socially,” his “strengths and weaknesses,” “motives for his whistle-blower complaint and any similar past complaints,” his “need for attention,” and whether he was a “zealot or ideologue,” “conspiratorial,” or “vengeful.” She also said they were interested in Zatko’s “view of Elon Musk and Musk’s bid for Twitter.” G.L.G. included links to detailed sets of questions discussing Zatko and Twitter’s C.E.O., Parag Agrawal. “In regards to Peiter Zatko, can you discuss thoughts on recent news with Peiter, what he did, why he was fired from TWTR?” read one of G.L.G.’s questions.

The firms cast a wide net. Some of the recipients, such as Wasserman, knew Zatko well, but others, including Foster, had never met him. More than a dozen of the people who received the messages told me that they found them unusual, compared with other research inquiries, because of their aggressiveness, persistence, or focus on an individual, as opposed to a product or a technology. One of the messages from G.L.G. suggested that the information was intended for an investment firm, Davidson Kempner Capital Management L.P. (A source close to G.L.G. told me that it represents multiple clients with an interest in Zatko but has no connection to Twitter and added that compensation for experts is standard.) Farallon, an investment firm rather than an expert network, identified itself in its inquiries. The other companies declined to identify their clients, though at least one told recipients that they were working on behalf of an unnamed hedge fund.

As the inquiries proliferated, the group of ex-Stripe employees began to believe, Wasserman told me, “that multiple different sources, multiple different people, multiple different companies, were all basically trying to dig up dirt on Mudge, all seemingly at the same time.” The firms, Provos surmised, were “trying to get information that could further discredit Mudge,” an effort that “seemed incredibly shady.” Jonathan Kaltwasser, Stripe’s former chief information security officer and a member of the Slack group, quickly alerted Zatko.

“My family and I are disturbed by what appears to be a campaign to approach our friends and former colleagues under apparently false pretenses with offers of money in exchange for information about us,” Zatko told me. “These tactics should be beneath whoever is behind them.” On Tuesday, Zatko is expected to testify before Congress and may reveal new details about what he has said are glaring data-security lapses by Twitter. He is also expected to play a key role in a trial set to begin next month in a Delaware courtroom, during which Musk will seek to be released from his agreement to acquire Twitter. Musk’s attorneys have subpoenaed Zatko, and a judge ruled last week that Musk could amend his countersuit to include Zatko’s allegations. A Twitter spokesperson, Rebecca Hahn, told me, “We look forward to presenting our case in Court beginning on October 17th and intend to close the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk.”

Sources close to three of the firms—Farallon, Mosaic, and G.L.G.—suggested that they were simply trying to obtain information about Zatko to guide stock trades involving Twitter and maximize profits. A person familiar with G.L.G.’s business said the outreach was “an attempt to assess the credibility of the allegations” and meant “to better inform investment decisions.” A spokesperson for AlphaSights said that, “as a matter of policy and contractual obligations, we do not disclose the identity of our clients.” Hahn, the Twitter spokesperson, told me, “We have no role in nor did we commission expert networks research regarding Mr. Zatko.” Two members of Musk’s team, who asked not to be named, owing to the sensitivity of the ongoing litigation, said that they also had no connection to the inquiries. “There’s a lot of hedge funds currently betting that the deal flows. And so they’re doing everything they possibly can to undermine that not happening,” one of them told me. “It’s obviously wrong. You can’t discredit a witness, as opposed to listening to what he has to say and taking seriously these security threats. . . . That should be the priority, not making a buck.”

Almost all of the inquiries that The New Yorker was able to document came from “expert networks,” enterprises that recruit specialists from various fields, like Zatko’s former colleagues, to share their knowledge with Wall Street investment firms and other companies. The firms deployed to uncover information about Zatko span the globe. According to its Web site, AlphaSights employs more than a thousand people, in nine cities around the world. Ridgetop, Mosaic, and Guidepoint are all New York-based firms of varying sizes. Coleman Research, a subsidiary of a Japanese company, maintains a network of four hundred and sixty thousand experts, while G.L.G.’s Web site claims a network of a million experts. The investment firm Farallon was founded in 1986 by the businessman and liberal activist Tom Steyer, who sought the Democratic nomination for President in 2020, and now maintains offices worldwide. Pentwater, another investment firm, which contacted one of Zatko’s attorneys seeking information, is one of Twitter’s ten largest shareholders.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-search-for-dirt-on-the-twitter-whistle-blower

The Verge's redesign is shit. Over 436 comments in the article.

rtechnology

Web designers mad

Twitter

We’ve got a whole new Verge for you today. Radically new. Sometimes you just have to blow things up and start over.

Yes, we have a sharp new logo that started with the idea of an unfinished interface between the present and the future. Yes, we have a bright new color palette that highlights our work in confident new ways. Yes, we have new typefaces across the board, including serifs for our body copy. Look at these ink traps in our new headline font, Poly Sans. I love them.

All of those things were designed and developed with great care by Vox Media’s spectacular in-house design team, and they will serve as the foundation for our site and our brand for years to come. The Verge is meant to be beautiful and boundary-pushing, and our new design reflects that.

But new colors and typefaces are not the point of our redesign. Not even a little bit.

Our goal in redesigning The Verge was actually to redesign the relationship we have with you, our beloved audience. Six years ago, we developed a design system that was meant to confidently travel across platforms as the media unbundled itself into article pages individually distributed by social media and search algorithms. There’s a reason we had bright pink pull quotes in articles and laser lines shooting across our videos: we wanted to be distinctly The Verge, no matter where we showed up.

But publishing across other people’s platforms can only take you so far. And the more we lived with that decision, the more we felt strongly that our own platform should be an antidote to algorithmic news feeds, an editorial product made by actual people with intent and expertise. The Verge’s homepage is the single most popular page at Vox Media, and it should be a statement about what the internet can be at its best.

So we sat down and thought about what was really important to us and how to make our homepage valuable every time you open it. We also thought about where we came from and how we built The Verge into what it is today. And we landed on: well shit, we just need to blog more.

So we’re back to basics with something we’re calling the Storystream news feed, right on our homepage. Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet. If that means linking out to Wired or Bloomberg or some other news source, that’s great — we’re happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere, and we trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later. If that means we just need to embed the viral TikTok or wacky CEO tweet and move on, so be it — we can do that. We can embed anything, actually: I’m particularly excited that we can directly point people to interesting threads on Reddit and other forums. The internet is about conversations, and The Verge should be a place to find great conversations.

(Speaking of conversations, we are moving all of our comments to the Coral platform, which has tons of fun new community features. Our executive editor TC Sottek is so excited about it, he wrote an entire post here.)

What’s most exciting about all this is that it will actually free up time for our newsroom: we won’t have to stop everything we’re doing and debate writing an entire story about one dude’s confused content moderation tweets. We can just post the tweets if they’re important, add the relevant context, and move on. That means we’ll get back hours upon hours of time to do more original reporting, deeper reviews, and even more incisive analyses — the work that makes The Verge great. It’ll also be easier for us to share our big investigations and features when they’re relevant to the news of the day — allowing us to showcase our incredible archive of award-winning work. Our art and video teams will now have access to our homepage in a way they’ve never had before; I can’t wait to see what they do with it.

Our former colleague Walt Mossberg always reminds me that reinvention is important; this new site represents the biggest reinvention of The Verge since we started the whole thing.

When you embark on a project to totally reboot a giant site that makes a bunch of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and other extremely boring vocabulary words. People will pop out of dark corners trying to start interminable conversations about “side doors,” and you will have to run away from them, screaming.

But there’s only one real goal here: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you open it. If we get that right, everything else will fall into place. We are among the luckiest people in media because we have the audience that we do, and what we want more than anything is for that audience — for you — to feel how much we care. That’s been the secret to our success for nearly 11 years now: we care, very much, and it’s fun to care about something as much as we care about The Verge and our audience.

Many, many people at Vox Media bought into this vision of The Verge and our goals over a very long timeline: this project has been two years in the making. Our design team Marcus Peabody, Nan Copeland, Eleni Agapis, Derek Springsteen, Heather Shoon, Laura Holder, Ryan Gantz, Sam Hankins, Bart Szyszka, Kara Wilson, Kyle Earle, Miranda Dempster, Phil Delbourgo, and Ian Adelman chased me down the silliest possible rabbit holes trying to figure out what blogging should look like in 2022. Our product managers Zahra Ladak, Tara Kalmanson, Marie Connelly, and Phil Hwang kept this very large product on track and brought it over the finish line in spectacular fashion. Andrew Losowsky and the Coral team built the exciting new Verge comment system.

Our stellar engineering team under Kwadwo Boateng and Ken Peltzer created an entirely new front-end platform called Duet that will allow all of Vox Media to do equally ambitious experiments in publishing in the future. We couldn’t have done any of this without that work and the commitment of that team: Omar Abed, Ben Alt, Andrew Breja, Ambika Castle, Stefan Chlanda, Matthew Crider, Michele Cynowicz, Colleen Geohagan, Ruba Hassan, Jose Junior, Sean Kaufman, Konstantin Kopachev, Simon Korzun, Chi Vinh Le, Michael Manzano, Maria Jose Mata, Miriam Nadler, Jessie Rushing, Matt Singerman, Sammy Sirak, Lenny Sirivong, Thomas Stang, Jordan Stewart, Tessa Thornton, Kristin Valentine, Lucio Villa, Paige Vogenthaler, Grace Wingo, Nikolas Wise, Melissa Young, Nicole Zhu, and Joe Higgins. Our support and QA team, Becky Becker, Jon Douglas, Steven Leon, Anh Phan, Mediha Aziz, and Miguel Abreu, spent endless hours making sure everything works and looks good. (Note to Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok: make your vertical embeds behave! C’mon now.)

The Verge’s senior creative director William Joel spent countless hours working through all of these ideas with me. Alex Parkin, Amelia Holowaty Krales, and Kristen Radtke on our tremendous art team painstakingly created dozens of new visuals and design elements to use across The Verge’s platforms.

Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, TC Sottek, Jake Kastrenakes, and Dan Seifert developed the editorial strategy for our Storystream news feed. David Pierce signed up to return to The Verge and spend his days posting to the feed within hours of seeing our new design. Our project manager Kara Verlaney makes the entire Verge go; she got us over the finish line to launch with major contributions from Ruben Salvadori, Esther Cohen, Nori Donovan, Sarah Smithers, Brooke Minters, Mariya Abate, Liz Hickson, Kaitlin Hatton, Eric Berggren, Gemma Paolo, Lauren Iverson, Liam James, Andrew Marino, Andrew Melnizek, and Nick Steinauer.

No editor has ever had a better partner than I have in our publisher Helen Havlak, who is a ferocious advocate for our team, our work, and our vision for the future of the site.

Building any new product is a huge investment — and a leap of faith — and I am particularly grateful for the belief and support of Vox Media’s executive leadership, including Jim Bankoff, Pam Wasserstein, Chris Grant, Melissa Bell, Jen Cullem, and Chris George.

And lastly, my friend, co-founder, and former colleague Dieter Bohn and I made one of the first prototypes of our new news feed in Google Docs almost two years ago. My dude, it shipped.

I like this channel

It's the 3rd post about it, but there's none in SN. Note that just because Twitter shareholders approved the deal doesn't mean Musk owns it yet. We'll see what happens in the trial next month.

Twitter’s shareholders have voted to approve a proposed $44 billion acquisition by Elon Musk.

Reports yesterday suggested that a wide margin of approval was expected for the vote, with the required majority reportedly locked before the Tuesday meeting. On a call, Twitter confirmed that a preliminary count shows it has enough votes to approve the deal.

Musk proposed a buyout of Twitter in April. Twitter has encouraged investors to accept it since then, even as Musk has filed numerous requests to terminate the agreement. Today’s vote lets Twitter continue with a lawsuit intended to make Musk close the acquisition.

The approval means that Musk and Twitter will proceed to an October trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Musk is set to argue that Twitter concealed important facts about its internal operations, including an alleged undercount of spam and bot accounts on the platform as well as details revealed by former Twitter security head Peiter “Mudge” Zatko. Twitter will push to close the deal regardless, alleging that Musk’s complaints are merely a pretext for backing out.

Meanwhile, Zatko’s revelations will likely continue to draw separate interest from regulators and lawmakers — including questions from members of Congress this morning.

We need a sweet train model.@Tesla @elonmusk @SawyerMerritt @DirtyTesLa pic.twitter.com/zAWFFwQQ4v

— J Grupe (@JGrupe) September 12, 2022

+0, 39% upmarseyd, already over 500 comments in 1 hour

I call it 'Acting My Wage'

Lol this whole anti-work culture online is pathetic. I guess it's good for me though what am I bitching about it's honestly less competition. The lazier and more entitled people get the faster my value goes up.

And the money means I don't have to live around you people either so it's not like I have to deal with your poor conditions.

So I don't agree with you people but I guess ultimately it's good for me so I don't know why I am saying anything

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xdab7v/yes_quiet_quitting_is_real/io9sokb/

Nvm 💀 pic.twitter.com/IZlgJaTL04

— Peach (@Piles0fPeaches) September 13, 2022

HN

rtechnology

Read article

How conservative Facebook groups are changing what books children read in school

Conservative Facebook groups that rate and review children’s books are being used as a way to campaign for restricting certain books in school libraries or removing them altogether.

It’s the latest development in a debate tearing up the US in recent weeks as schools open for the new year. In October 2021, Matt Krause, a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, created a spreadsheet of books affected by the state’s House Bill 3979, which bans the teaching of materials that would lead to “an individual [feeling] discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or s*x.”

That spreadsheet has now become a blueprint for conservative groups, which have adopted it as a guide to challenging books in school districts and in some cases successfully removing them from schools.

Anti-book-ban activists say the groups aren't objective and are doing harm. Laney Hawes is a mother in Keller Independent School District in Tarrant County, Texas, where 41 books were recently pulled after lobbying from Facebook parent groups. She says she and other parents are open to compromise and discussion but that conservative parents aren't bending.

“We are never all going to agree on what’s appropriate for our children, but I have to make that decision for my children, and it is not my right to make that decision for every other child,” says Hawes, who leads several Facebook parent groups countering local books bans. “These books share the stories of the most marginalized people, and oppression and marginalization can be gritty and uncomfortable and violent, and unfortunately, it can be sexual. But it’s so important we don’t quiet them.”

Conservative activist Michelle Beavers doesn’t agree. When she went to her child’s junior high school in Florida for a school advisory committee meeting last year, she came across a carousel in the library that contained books she describes as containing “pornography.”

“It was disturbing to me,” Beavers says. She wanted to root out books like these from her child’s school but felt that the effort was too much for her to take on alone. “These books were easy to spot because they’re graphic novels, but other books you have to actually read,” she says. “And that’s a problem. It takes work.”

So Beavers created BookLook, a site that gathers adult volunteers to rate and review children’s books. The ratings are “meant to be a quick guide for busy parents who want to know what objectionable material is found between a book’s covers,” according to the site. Books are graded on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being content for everyone and 5 being “aberrant” content, including sexual assault and battery.

In between are markers indicating the amount of parental guidance suggested, based on drug and alcohol use, “hate,” violence, and profanity: 1 for young children, 2 for younger teens, and 3 for older teens. Books that get ratings of 4 (“definitely adult only”) and 5 are often flagged to be pulled off shelves, Beavers says: “These are explicit books. If you want to see those, go to your local bookstore or public library. Not school.”

On Facebook, different conservative groups have different strategies for assessing the books found in schools. Some, like LaVerna in the Library, post screenshots of “offensive” passages so that volunteers can rate them. In others, like Safe Library Books for Kids — Arkansas, parents trade tips about where to look for content they might object to, such as targeting coming-of-age novels or memoirs and searching for specific words. Beavers works with both groups to help identify titles. (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Conservative activists are becoming increasingly powerful in determining what books are on school shelves. Districts in Texas have begun to require parent approval for books; in Utah, parents not only have the power to control what books their child checks out but have equal standing with educators to challenge and review books for inclusion in the library at all.

That policy in Utah is perhaps one of the conservative parent groups’ first success stories. Beavers says BookLook doesn’t track how parents use the reviews for school policy challenges, but the group Utah Parents United is featured on the site as a “guardian of the library” and was instrumental in getting the state to implement its current system. Beavers herself has testified at her local Brevard County school district, successfully challenging 19 books for review in May.

The fightback

But those challenges aren’t coming without a fight, on Facebook and elsewhere. One organization opposed to the book bans, the Florida Freedom to Read Project, says rating systems like BookLook’s ignore the fact that teachers and librarians are specifically trained to recommend books on the basis of a child’s development, interests, and maturity, even though materials are currently slotted into suggested age ranges by publishers and editors.

“They [conservative rate-and-review groups] want to restrict what is available for everyone else, but these rating systems are done by people who don’t have any expertise,” says Stephana Ferrell, a co-founder of the FFTRP. “We would never do an opposing system. Another rating system is not needed.”

Groups like Ferrell’s are concerned that ratings are erasing the voices of those in marginalized communities. “Those reviewers that focus solely on controversial topics with the goal of limiting access to books with which they disagree reflect a bias that fails to take into account the needs of the diverse families and individuals served by public schools and libraries,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement.

"Pornography" scare stories

Many parents in the conservative groups say pornography is one of their major concerns. Beavers, for example, cites an oral s*x scene in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a coming-of-age graphic novel, as the reason why she was spurred to action. Gender Queer has been banned in many schools across the country.

“We are asking for books to be reviewed and put up against pornography laws and judging what would be appropriate for a school setting,” she says. But her group’s view of what counts as pornographic don’t always tally with the laws. On August 30, a Virginia court dismissed claims that Gender Queer and another book, A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, were obscene. The dismissal means that liberal groups now have grounds to challenge the book’s bans in other states.

Ferrell says FFTRP’s work was founded when conservative activists began lobbying to remove Gender Queer from her local district. She and her co-founder have purchased books to distribute to local librarians and also held public giveaways of books featuring diverse voices.

To her, the fight is about the quality of education for her children. “Most parents want to give their child more, not less, access,” she says. “I really worry about the future of children’s education because of this.”