Next, could someone please sue Microsoft?

 Leftovers & links #34
Click any image to engorge.

Someone is suing Canon for its anti-customer products that require expensive toner even for tasks that don’t require toner, and require color toner even for printing documents in black-and-white.

Why anyone puts up with this is a mystery to me. It’s actually why I don’t own a printer. Thought about buying one a few years ago, and budgeted for it, but decided I didn’t want to be screwed.

Next, could someone please sue Microsoft? For any number of reasons, but certainly for its predatory practices, like endlessly Edging users toward its subpar browser, or Cortana, which is only a clumsy way to drive traffic to Microsoft’s Bing thing.

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In Philadelphia, police will be instructed not to pull over vehicles for minor traffic infractions. Of course, we all know that black drivers get this treatment more often than white, and that it’s often a pretext for faked-up “probable cause” vehicle searches.

Now the only question is the same question as always — will the cops follow the law, or ignore it, or find other ways to continue intruding and arresting and jailing black people?

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After months undecided, here’s the moment when I knew I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription to Wired: Virginia Heffernan recounts the difficulties she endured, trying to start a business selling something she knew nothing about — metal straws.

I’m not the quintessential working man or anti-capitalist, but if Wired’s target audience is people trying to start businesses selling things they know nothing about, well, that’s not me.

There was also a recent article in Wired (though I can’t find it at the moment) that offered reassurance to business owners, that employees who’d quit because of COVID dangers or other work-related bullshit would soon come crawling back to apply for their old jobs.

The "workers will apologize" article, plus the "metal straws" article, add up to adios, but I am sad about letting my subscription lapse. Way, way back in the 1990s, when Wired was more counterculture and less big business, it was the first publication that paid me to write. 

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The news of Walgreens closing several stores in San Francisco because of rampant, perhaps organized shoplifting seems perilously close to being bullshit.

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I love this and wish I'd written it, but sadly, it's by Doris Wrench Eisler, writing in Harper’s:

An eager nursing student suggested I take an attitude test. I was a teenager who didn’t believe in the order of things and who tended to hold negative opinions — conditions that prompted psychological evaluation.

The test was straightforward: draw a stick figure family of three. I drew the stick figure child between the two parents. Each parent held the child by the hand.

The psychologist who analyzed my drawing was astonished. What I produced wasn’t what she had expected. And even then I knew what she expected from me: an image of alienation, perhaps even child abandonment; some evidence of trauma that could have explained my hardened worldview.

From my experience, psychologists and psychiatrists then believed that people like me must have some hidden internal reason for feeling as we did about the world. The world itself could not possibly be at fault.

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From several cities across the nation, I’m seeing reports like this, about cops being required to get the COVID vaccine but refusing, and much public handwringing over their pending firings.

I come bearing bad but obvious news: With only the rarest exceptions, that won’t happen. Cops have tenure like university professors, and are simply never fired unless the stars are very perfectly aligned.

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Similarly, many reports suggest that leading Trump monstrosity Steve Bannon will face criminal charges for refusing a Congressional subpoena.

just some books

That would be nice, too, but it won't happen in this world. All evidence suggests that working for Trump is as good as being Trump, when it comes to being above the law and beyond subpoenas.

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Moose are big.

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I’m disinterested in social media, but I understand the basics of it, I think. This, though, is baffling to me — a “shop” that sells fake followers for social media?

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This guy had a relative's remains rebuilt as a guitar, and “now Uncle Filip can shred for all eternity. That’s how he would want it.”

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Covers of songs that completely miss the point.

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Those dratted Russkies made a movie in space. 

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 Mystery links  — Like life itself, there’s no knowing where you’re going:

—①—
     —②—
          —③—

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Sincere tip 'o the hat to:

• Becky Jo
• Dave S.
• BoingBoing
• Captain Hampockets
• Hyperallergic
• Messy Nessy Chick
• National Zero
• Ran Prieur
• Voenix Rising
• and One of the Butt Sisters but definitely not the other.

10/18/2021

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