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This snake has a mission. It slithers quickly into an open door police station in northern Thailand and makes it way to a visitor who is at the station to report an incident. Without provocation, the snake leaps at the man. The man panics for a bit, but handles the situation like a champ. After a few moments of trying to fight it off with his legs and feet, he manages to grab the snake at both ends and carry it off. He even seems a bit amused, offering it to an officer before taking it outside. Seems like this isn't the first time this dude has had to deal with a snake.Via YouTube Read the rest

SantaCon, a public gathering of soon-to-be-drunk folks in Santa Claus outfits, generally turns destructive. SF city leaders attempted to regulate it this year. Apparently, that did not help much. Some revelers were real jerks.SFGate:Two female suspects vandalized and struck an employee of a San Francisco restaurant after they were repeatedly asked to leave, according to SFPD.Videos shared to Facebook by a regular of the restaurant show a chaotic scene outside Shalimar, a Indian-Pakistani restaurant at 1490 Polk St. during Saturday's Santa Con, the city's annual pub crawl. In one of them, a female suspect throws napkins at an employee. Another shows a female suspect taking a chair from outside the restaurant and repeatedly smashing the glass door of the restaurant, after being encouraged by rambunctious onlookers. Read the rest

Even as an adult, I am entirely confused by cousin relationships beyond "first." This chart is very helpful though it lacks the category of "kissing cousin."(via r/mildlyinteresting) Read the rest

An investigation by the New York Times into the shadowy world of location-data brokerages found a whole menagerie of companies from IBM, Foursquare and the Weather Channel to obscure players like Groundtruth, Fysical and Safegraph, who pay app vendors to include their tracking code in common apps.These apps sometimes disclose that they will track your location for ad personalization or to "improve service," but they don't generally reveal that they are beaconing your location to ad brokers you've never heard of, sometimes as often as once a minute, and that this data can be easily traced back to individuals (say, by looking for phones that go from your home address to your job five days a week), and that it is sometimes retained indefinitely.The Times found evidence of children, public officials, and people with sensitive addiction, health, and employment situations being tracked in fine detail by these ad brokers.For their part, the brokers say that this is merely service being traded for data, and blame users for not realizing that all this secretive, creepy shit is happening all the time.In an accompanying guide to reducing location tracking, the Times suggests going through app-by-app location permissions but also points out that this kind of data marketplace is essentially unregulated.Companies that use location data say that people agree to share their information in exchange for customized services, rewards and discounts. Ms. Magrin, the teacher, noted that she liked that tracking technology let her record her jogging routes.Brian Wong, chief executive of Kiip, a mobile ad firm that has also sold anonymous data from some of the apps it works with, says users give apps permission to use and share their data. Read the rest

If there was ever collective schadenfreude to be had, it was when we learned that a bunch of young, privileged rich kids got swindled by the promoters of the 2017 Fyre Festival and were left to fend for themselves on a remote island. On January 18, Netflix is releasing a documentary about the dumpster Fyre. Here's its teaser trailer:Get your exclusive first look at FYRE — a revealing new doc about the insanity and rapid unraveling of Fyre Festival: the greatest party that never happened. Premieres January 18. #NetflixNewsWeek pic.twitter.com/B4iaR3UJwM— See What's Next (@seewhatsnext) December 10, 2018Previously: Fyre Festival fraudster sentenced to six years in federal prison(COS) Read the rest

I am a bicycle snob. I'm at a point where beauty and function generally win out over comfort or financial considerations. This is where non-cyclists start to get really confused. Deep down, riding a bike is about sacrifice, and that's not a popular starting point for most people. There's usually a faster way to get where you need, or a drier one, or one that causes a bit less hardship and pain. But the combination of physical challenge and childlike entertainment makes a bicycle a special thing, and this leads to a cascading series of strange decisions. Eventually, you end up riding around on tires that are too skinny, with bars that are too low and a saddle that is too hard.But we revel in this. We love the confusion in our coworkers when we show up for work late, soaked to the bone and exhausted. We love it when they shake their heads, muttering about our grease-stained pants. The more confusion we sow in others, the more certain we are in our feelings. There's a masochistic pride in our ability to do something that others can't (or don't want to). And I think this is why the cycling community has not embraced e-bikes.That's an understatement, really. In the cycling pecking order, e-bikes reside somewhere just above a recumbent, but just below driving around with the AC blasting out the open windows of our diesel belching pick-up. They're a thing that you look sideways at while at a stop light, or roll your eyes at when they blow by you up a hill. Read the rest

OMG, these hand-crocheted Yip Yips stockings by Carissa Browning sure do make me smile. The big mouths of Sesame Street's Muppet martians are perfect for stuffing in holiday gifts (and later for storing toys, Browning suggests). One catch: If you want these, you'll have to crochet or knit them yourself. Fortunately, Browning has provided patterns for them which can be downloaded for free from her Ravelry page.The spaceship has landed, and any fan of late 20th century children’s public television will recognize these lovable aliens.Crochet them or knit them, use them as holiday stockings, toy storage, kids’ laundry, whatever really!You should also be prepared to play with ping pong balls and pipe cleaners, and do a little light sewing.Yip yip uh-huh uh-huh(Cool Mom Picks, Daily Crochet)photo via Carissa Browning, used with permission Read the rest

Today, activists delivered more than 4,000,000 Europeans' signatures opposing the inclusion of an automated censorship system in the new Copyright Directive to the European officials in Strasbourg who are negotiating the final form of the Directive before the next vote.It's hard to recall any EU initiative that was this unpopular, and nothing the negotiators have done since they slipped behind closed doors more than three months ago has improved it. Instead, they've added an incoherent slaw of contradictory subrules to the proposal that can't possibly be honoured, none of which alter the incontrovertible fact that Article 13 (which required algorithmic copyright censorship bots from the very start) will inevitably lead to AI filters making billions of judgments a day about what Europeans may and may not say.At this point, it's safe to say that nearly everybody hates this rule: the largest movie companies and sports leagues in Europe have asked the EU to remove their content from the scope of Article 13; the world's preeminent internet technologists have warned that it could wreck the internet, and millions of Europeans agree.The EU is in a crisis, with Eurosceptic movements on the rise in almost every member-state. To counter this, the EU has promoted the idea that it is an evidence-based, neutral policymaker, devoted to promoting the interests of all 500,000,000 people under its jurisdiction. It has called on Europeans to strengthen their relationship with the EU by engaging more in European policy questions.European experts and the European people have spoken, and overwhelmingly what they have said is that Article 13 is unsalvageable. Read the rest

I don't ask for much from a Godzilla movie other than it be ridiculous. Big explosions, Kaiju and doomed citizens running to and fro before being crushed underfoot or by a building are mandatory. In the latest trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, there's plenty of that. That it also offers up CCH Pounder, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, and Stranger Things' Millie Bobby Brown is icing on the cake.We'll have to wait until the end of May before we can see how goofy this glorious-looking flick gets. Read the rest

When it comes to tech, smaller is better, and these items fit the bill both in terms of size and price. We've rounded up our favorite stocking-ready gadgets, most of which are already on sale - and you can take an additional 15% off any of them with the special code MERRY15.iPM 3-in-1 Fast Wireless Charging PadThanks to the Qi wireless charging capability of this slim pad, you can charge two smartphones and an Apple Watch simultaneously. A great space saver that doesn't sacrifice charging speed for convenience, the iPM 3-in-1 Fast Wireless Charging Pad is currently sitting at a 62% discount of $48.99.2-in-1 Smart Plug with Alexa, Google & IFTTT CompatibilityWith an easy set-up to any Wi-Fi connection, this unobtrusive gadget lets you enable any plugged in devices for remote activation. Manage groups of items with a single button or command, or create an energy-saving schedule to automatically turn your appliances on or off. All that functionality is 9% off with a 2-pack of 2-in-1 Smart Plugs at $37.99.BentoStackWhen you love your gadgets, it's easy to run out of space. The BentoStack is a cute, elegant way to cart around those ancillary iPhone items like chargers, earbuds, and styluses - even internationally-compatible wall plugs - in a Japanese-inspired carrying case. Right now, the BentoStack is 14% off at $42.95.SolarJuice 26,800mAh External BatteryTeam up with the sun and give your phone or tablet some extra life on long trips with this sturdy unit. Read the rest

When it comes to making rope, there's no school like the old school. I love that, despite the advances made in the areas of fabrication and industrial automation, there are still products made using methods that haven't changed in a century. Some things, as this video from How it's Made illustrates, are better off without updates. Read the rest

Warner Bros. has just released Emmet’s Holiday Party, a cute nearly-2-1/2-minute-long short that has The LEGO Movie's Emmett decorating Apocalypseburg for the holidays. It doubles as a promo for The LEGO Movie 2, which hits theatres in February 2019. Read the rest

This spells doom for Trump and the NRA. Paul Erickson, hope the sex was fantastic.Maria Butina, 30, was either a perky gun nut with a fetish for sex-starved GOP losers, or a secret agent in Russia's covert influence operation to influence the 2016 United States elections. We had a pretty good idea. But now we know. And she's flipping. Today Maria Butina's lawyers said she agrees to plead guilty to conspiracy and cooperate with federal, state and local authorities in any ongoing investigations."The agreement, which Butina signed on Saturday, Dec. 8, also notes that the conspiracy charge carries ... up to five years in prison, but the deal could see Butina receive a lesser sentence, depending on the level of her cooperation, before likely being deported back to Russia." Previous reporting links her to the NRA. The already broke NRA is now in extremely deep shit. Butina is reported to have admitted, as part of the deal copy obtained by ABC News that is expected to be filed to the court, that....She and an unnamed “U.S. Person 1,” which sources have identified as longtime Republican operative Paul Erickson, with whom she had a multiyear romantic relationship, “agreed and conspired, with a Russian government official (“Russian Official”) and at least one other person, for Butina to act in the United States under the direction of Russian Official without prior notification to the Attorney General.”Based on the description, the “Russian Official” appears to be Alexander Torshin, deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Read the rest

Rocky Bergen creates gorgeous, downloadable papercraft models of retro PCs, from the Commodore 64 to the Apple ][+ to the Amstrad, with different screens to print celebrating classic 8-bit games, and accessories like tiny floppies in tiny paper sleeves. As Waxy points out, these would make stunning Christmas ornaments. Read the rest

Add this to the ongoing list of "quirky and downright strange" calendars for 2019: Sean Tejaratchi of LiartownUSA's Social Justice Kittens.It’s 2019. All around us, ancient evils lurk in the deepening shadows, growing more powerful by the hour, feeding on hatred and centuries of oppression. The signs and symbols are everywhere for those willing to see.Thanks to LiarTown, you can now take the most courageous step of all: remaining silent while others speak. Once again it’s time to amplify the voices of those fluffy little activists, the Social Justice Kittens! They’ve returned, rested and ready to call out and clap back!But don’t think for a minute these woke, whiskered warriors have come alone! Get an eyeful of the all-new litter of Social Justice Puppies scrambling along behind them! These progressive pups have endured marathon struggle sessions and merciless “self-crit” to achieve dizzying levels of abject submission and self-debasement. They’re determined to be on the right side of history, and positively squirming for a chance to recite their gut-wrenching confessions!It’s up to you. Will you celebrate the voices of the marginalized, or further stain your soul with murderous complicity? Every moment you delay causes further abuse and gentrification. Those far more woke than you roll their eyes at your absurd doubts and questions! Desperate times call for desperate measures! Answer that call NOW…with kittens!Please note: As usual, every bit of kitten and puppy dialogue is sourced from genuine social media posts. Nothing has been taken out of context or misrepresented. Read the rest

Leon Hong writes, "I made this science-y animation for my wife Elaine Hsiao's research — with the hopes that people will learn something new about how all the microbes that live in and on us affect our brains and behavior."Professor Elaine Hsiao heads the Hsiao Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology at UCLA where she teaches the class “Me, Myself, and Microbes”. Her lab researches how microbes affect our brains and behavior. Elaine received her bachelor's in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at UCLA and her PhD in Neurobiology at Caltech.Me, Myself & Microbes — A short story on how microbes affect our brains and behavior [Elaine Hsiao and Leon Hong] Read the rest

It's highly unusual for a squirrel to purposely jump on a human. And it's even more unusual for said human to roll with it, without any shock or flinch, laughing while the squirrel does its thing. As the old lady said in When Harry Met Sally, "I'll have what [s]he's having!"Via Mashable Read the rest

Jim Hightower is a longstanding, respected columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate -- but Creators refused to distribute his latest column, "Free the Free Press from Wall Street Plunderers," which warns about Wall Street vultures like Digital First Media and GateHouse Media buying up newspapers, including the Austin Statesman.The Austin Chronicle reports that Creators wouldn't distribute the column because it feared retribution from the Wall Street firms; Creators managing editor Simone Slykhous told the Chronicle that "We have more than 200 columnists and cartoonists, and our job is to make sure that our actions do not negatively impact them."Thankfully, the Texas Observer has run Hightower's column, the story of which is perhaps more persuasive on the risks that Hightower warns against than his column itself. The buyers are hedge-fund scavengers with names like Digital First and GateHouse. They know nothing about journalism and care less, for they’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast by slashing the journalistic and production staffs of each paper, voiding all employee benefits (from pensions to free coffee in the breakroom), shriveling the paper’s size and news content, selling the presses and other assets, tripling the price of their inferior product – then declaring bankruptcy, shutting down the paper, and auctioning off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.By 2014, America’s two largest media chains were not venerable publishers who believe that a newspaper’s mission includes a commitment to truth and a civic responsibility, but GateHouse and Digital First, whose managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it. Read the rest

John Lewis & Partners is a well-known general department store in Great Britain. It’s the type of old-fashioned department store that, like the late and lamented B. Altman & Co. (which you can see recreated in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), carries everything from clothing to electric appliances. “Special” Christmas TV commercials and Christmas shows are a big big thing in English television, much bigger than here in the United States. It is often the season when extinct TV shows come alive for one new episode on one night.John Lewis’s Christmas commercial stars a big “get”: Elton John. It’s a musical tour through his life that mixes old and new footage, with de-aged Elton mixed with young Elton and old Elton.I liked it, but there’s been a lot of odd hate for it online. You decide. Either you’ll smile or you won’t. Read the rest

NASA's Voyager 2 space probe has officially left our solar system and entered interstellar space. Now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft has crossed the boundary of the bubble-like heliosphere around the planets and is no longer touched by the plasma wind from our sun. Voyager 2's twin Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012 and continues to send back valuable scientific data via the Deep Space Network.From NASA:“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “This is what we've all been waiting for. Now we’re looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.”Voyager 2 launched in 1977, 16 days before Voyager 1, and both have traveled well beyond their original destinations. The spacecraft were built to last five years and conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn. However, as the mission continued, additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible. As the spacecraft flew across the solar system, remote-control reprogramming was used to endow the Voyagers with greater capabilities than they possessed when they left Earth. Their two-planet mission became a four-planet mission. Their five-year lifespans have stretched to 41 years, making Voyager 2 NASA’s longest running mission.The Voyager story has impacted not only generations of current and future scientists and engineers, but also Earth's culture, including film, art and music. Read the rest

The latest installment of the Canadaland media criticism podcast (MP3) (previously) features an outstanding and nuanced discussion between host Jesse Brown and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (previously), regarding the Trudeau government's plan to hand Canada's press a $600 million bailout, with large tranches of that money to be funneled to billionaire media barons who ran their businesses into the ground by loading them up with predatory debt while mass-firing their newsrooms and paying themselves millions in bonuses -- Brown and Rosen don't just discuss the merits and demerits of this proposal, but get into a fascinating debate/discussion about what a better version of this would look like. Read the rest

Say a prayer for Our Patron Saint of Taking Down the Current Administration by lighting one of artist Clare Winter's Robert Mueller devotional candles. You can get these rhinestone-embellished candles through Winter's online shop Devotional Democracy ($12) or in person at Cargo Inc in Portland, Oregon. (Rumor has it she is making Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) longevity candles next.) Read the rest

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee Americans "equal" education (which would require similar per-student funding in both rich and poor neighborhoods), merely "adequate" education.Even that adequacy standard has weakened over the years, as right-wing governments have systematically gutted education budgets, and in 20 states, the state supreme court will not hear challenges to education cuts that argue that these cuts undermine an "adequate" education.Now, a suit in Rhode Island is asking the state court to rule that underfunded education is unconstitutional because it denies pupils the opportunity to be sufficiently well-educated to be citizens in a democracy, something the framers of the Constitution were very explicit about. The case just filed in Rhode Island seeks to avoid that trap by doing something completely new. It focuses on the civics knowledge and skills that our democratic form of government demands of citizens – a topic with deep historical roots. My recent research demonstrated that our founders intended public education to be a core aspect of the “republican form of government” that our federal Constitution demands.Our republican form of government began as an experiment in the idea that everyday citizens could govern themselves. But our founders – people like George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – emphasized that public education was necessary for those governments to work. In legislation that would dictate how the western territory would be divided up and later become states, Congress in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 mandated that each township reserve a central lot for public schools and that the states use their public resources to “forever encourage” those schools. Read the rest

Frustratingly, this video has no data about the identity of the incredible genius featured therein. Who is she? This girl's transformation to... from r/Damnthatsinteresting Read the rest

In 1948, Costa Rica weathered a civil war, and in 1949, they abolished their military. Since then, Costa Rica has emerged as the Central American success story, more politically stable and richer than its neighbors.In a research paper, researchers from the Universidad de Costa Rica Observatorio de Desarrollo deploy "synthetic control estimates" to try to see how much of Costa Rica's growth can be attributed to eliminating military spending: they find that between 1950-2010, annual growth increased from 1.42% to 2.28%, leading to a doubling in per-capita GDP every 30 years instead of every 39, and that this freed up capital for national spending on development goals that have provided long-run advantages to the country and its people.Some confounding factors to note: Costa Rica received a lot of US aid during the "dirty wars" where the CIA was bent on overthrowing democratically elected socialist governments in the region. Much like West Berlin, Costa Rica was meant to serve as a beacon of the benefits of "free market" systems, and to attain this showroom status, the US government spent lavishly to show how great things were under small government. Also: while Costa Rica doesn't have an army, it has had rural police forces that wore paramilitary uniforms, carried automatic weapons, slept in barracks, etc -- think "National Guard on high alert." This isn't an army per se, but it's also not what we think of when we think of "police."This article estimates the causal long-term developmental effects of Costa Rica’s constitutional abolishment of its army in 1949 after the 1948 civil war. Read the rest

George HW Bush was a mass murderer and a war criminal and now he is dead.In some ways, Bush I was fated to be a terrible person. His family fortune sprang from his father's willingness to cozy up to Hitler and sell him the steel he needed to re-arm Nazi Germany. As a young man, Bush I distinguished himself by desecrating indigenous graves.But it was when Bush I's national political career took off in earnest, first as Reagan's VP and then as a presidential hopeful and finally as a one-term, failed president that he began to performatively inflict cruelty upon innocents, lying to the American people, victimizing people both retail and wholesale, all in the service of shaking off his media image as a "wimp."Matt Taibbi (previously) is in characteristically fine form in tracing the path to dishonor pursued by George Herbert Walker Bush, the petty, spiteful campaigns he waged after being stung by mockery in the panels of Doonesbury (reminding us on the way of the enormous political power Garry Trudeau has quietly wielded down through the years, including the infliction of much-deserved psychic trauma on Trumplethinskin himself). Multiple sources, including George W Bush, have stated that Jeb Bush was so enraged by the toll this mockery took on "Poppy" that he vowed to go to New York City and kick Garry Trudeau's ass.But Bush I's pricked ego didn't stop at stewing over Garry Trudeau. He and his team entrapped a young Black man into trying to sell crack in front of the White House, merely so he could go on TV and complain about the crack epidemic getting so bad that someone had been arrested for selling crack outside of the White House. Read the rest

Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia psychologist who wrote "The Reading Mind," says that the most common question he receives these days is the following: “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” In a New York Times essay, Willingham parses the benefits and drawbacks of both formats. Which one is better? Of course personally preference and convenience matter, but Willingham argues that generally right now when it comes to listening or reading a book, there is "equivalence for easy texts and an advantage to print for hard ones." For example, audio books provide prosody, the intonation, tone, and rhythm of the words. Sometimes, hearing those cues helps us understand the material. But not always. From the NYT:For example, one study compared how well students learned about a scientific subject from a 22-minute podcast versus a printed article. Although students spent equivalent time with each format, on a written quiz two days later the readers scored 81 percent and the listeners 59 percent.What happened? Note that the subject matter was difficult, and the goal wasn’t pleasure but learning. Both factors make us read differently. When we focus, we slow down. We reread the hard bits. We stop and think. Each is easier with print than with a podcast.Print also supports readers through difficult content via signals to organization like paragraphs and headings, conventions missing from audio. Experiments show readers actually take longer to read the first sentence of a paragraph because they know it probably contains the foundational idea for what’s to come. Read the rest

"I'm not a narcissist... just trying this mirror thing... testing the camera... seeing how well it works... doooooo... applehead."(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

These people are pretty bad at recognizing different languages. And so am I. Bonus facts I happened to find on Ethnologue, a fascinating directory of languages: Apparently there are more than 7,000 living languages in the world. Half the world's population speaks one of the top 23 most-used languages, with the top five being Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hindi. One-third of the 7,000 languages are endangered, "that is, loss of all individuals who continue to identify the language as being related to their identity." Read the rest

In Taylor, Texas an 11-year-old girl helpfully unwrapped her four-year-old brother's Sonic fast food burger and found what she thought was a piece of candy inside. Fortunately, she asked her parents before popping into her mouth. They took the "candy" to the police who determined it was actually an Ecstasy pill. Insert your own "happy meal" joke here. From KXAN:Officers took the restaurant's manager, Tanisha Dancer, into custody for a felony theft warrant from Guadalupe County. When she got to the Williamson County Jail, police said a female correctional officer searched Dancer and found three ecstasy pills hidden in her clothing...Taylor police said they notified the Texas Department of Health, the restaurant's local owner and corporate Sonic. Police said the Sonic director of operations told them that they have now fired Dancer. Two other employees were also arrested -- one for marijuana possession and the other for outstanding warrants. Read the rest

Last week, students at Atlantic Community High School in Delray Beach, Florida were delighted by a new snack offering in the vending machine. Unfortunately, it wasn't immediately clear how to select this limited time item for purchase.(WPTV) Read the rest

Smart guy. Has 6-year-old triplets. Knows a shitshow when he smells one. Nick Ayers, who is currently Vice President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff, will NOT become the next Next White House Chief of Staff. NEWS — Pence Chief of Staff Nick Ayers Won’t Be Next White House Staff Chief -- Sources https://t.co/MFh95DTwBJ— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) December 9, 2018Nick Ayers, the leading candidate to replace John Kelly as chief of staff, won’t take the job, I’m told. He and Trump could not agree to terms. Trump pushed Ayers to commit to 2 years, but he declined, citing young kids & desire to move back to GA. Unclear who will take the job.— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) December 9, 2018Ayers was Donald Trump's first choice as a candidate to replace outgoing chief of staff John Kelly. He also tweeted the news himself. Thank you @realDonaldTrump, @VP, and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our Nation at The White House. I will be departing at the end of the year but will work with the #MAGA team to advance the cause. 🇺🇸 #Georgia— Nick Ayers (@nick_ayers) December 9, 2018He has triplets, and that is the reason given for why Ayers will not be taking the job, a White House official told the Wall Street Journal, and later CNN and other outlets, on Sunday. WSJ:It was unclear on Sunday who would succeed John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s current chief of staff, who is leaving the job this month. Read the rest

Writing in New York Magazine, Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith draws on Hubert Horan's outstanding series on the underlying economics of Uber to describe why the company's IPO will be a terrible bet for the investors who buy into it.It's only been a year since Softbank offered to buy out shareholders on a valuation of $48B (and had more takers than they were prepared to buy from!); and now Uber is hoping to float on a valuation of $120B, asking suckers to pay more than double what the company's top execs were willing to sell their shares for a year ago.Uber claims it's a tech company and can benefit from the economics of scale that tech companies enjoy. But it's not. It's "a taxi company with an app attached." Uber's spent billions of its investors' cash subsidizing rides in a largely successful bid to kill local taxi companies, but even if every other cab company goes out of business, Uber won't be able to jack up the prices, because starting another Uber to compete with it just isn't that hard.Uber has disadvantages of scale. Beyond a certain critical threshold, adding drivers to Uber's pool of employees (who it claims are not employees) just lowers everyone's wages, and individual drivers spend much more maintaining their cars than yellow cab companies do maintaining their fleets.Uber's data-richness doesn't confer much of an advantage, either: no amount of data will change the fact that commuters mostly go in one direction in the morning and the other direction at night, leaving drivers with empty cars half the time (it's even worse with airport runs). Read the rest

Spoonflower's gorgeous selection of Haunted Mansion patterns can be printed on demand on wallpaper, giftwrap, or fabric: from the green strips of the maids' uniforms to the purple and black stripes of the butler's vests, to motifs picked up from the characters and decor (tightrope walker girl's floral print, hitchhiking ghosts, Leota's seance room), the variety is amazing. (via Disney's Haunted Mansion) Read the rest

Argentine hacker [Roni Bandini] modded a 1998 Furby so that it responds to stimulus by rattling off a random quote from Jorge Luis Borges. He calls it "Borgy."[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the speaker with a more powerful one, and built a base to hold the larger speaker and a switch which can activate Borgy. He also used an Arduino Nano and a Sparkfun MP3 player shield loaded with the samples of Borges.When the Furby speaks, it shares some wisdom from Borges. It’s a simple, but a surprisingly effective hack that could be very useful for someone seeking inspiration. Or, as Borges himself once said: “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”Furby Plus Borges Equals Borgy [Richard Baguley/Hackaday] Read the rest

Every year, DJ Riko drops a longform "mixmas" of Christmas mashups; this year's mix is out (MP3 link), featuring everyone from Run DMC to Harry Belafonte to Eels (here's how to get all 16 installments in the series!). Read the rest

It's the 20th anniversary of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry's seminal horror text adventure; to commemorate the occasion, Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna worked with 84 developers to create Cragne Manor, a tribute, whose puzzles are ingenious, frustrating and amazing.Each of the developers was given one room to create, without any knowledge of the others developers' rooms, making "each location ... a different author's take on a tribute to Anchorhead, or an original work of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, or a deconstruction of cosmic horror, or a gonzo parody of cosmic horror, or a parody of some other thing, or a portrait of life in Vermont, or a pure experiment in writing with Inform 7, or something else entirely. There are tons of puzzles. The puzzles get very weird."Early reviews are very positive: Zarf updates says "It's glorious. It's a mess. It's a glorious mess... It's a grand collection of vignettes by the biggest collective of IF authors ever gathered in one fictional Vermont town. It's a demonstration of varied styles, varied approaches to puzzle design, and varied takes on the idea of 'Lovecraftian/Anchorheadian game'. It's creepy and funny and gross and poetic."Emily Short writes: "I can tell you already that if you like parser IF, you want to play this. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes disgusting, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, and sometimes all of those at once — but I’ll let you find the horse for yourself. And somehow all that surreal adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts."Your name is Naomi Cragne. Read the rest

Binding arbitration agreements were formalized in 1925, allowing two corporate entities of roughly equal size to resolve their disputes outside of a court, saving both parties a lot of money, but since then, the primary use of arbitration is to force employees, customers, patients and other comparatively weak parties to surrender their right to sue (or join class actions) as a condition of going to work, seeking care, or simply shopping.Instead, people who have been crammed into binding arbitration "agreements" are forced to argue their cases one at a time in a privatized courtroom, where the "judge" is often a contractor for the corporation whose conduct gave rise to the complaint.A notorious example of this is the gig economy, where employees are turned into "contractors" through a legal fiction and then deprived of their right to join class action suits over unfair treatment thanks to the arbitration clauses in the farcically long license agreement they click through when they sign up (Uber drivers can technically opt out within 30 days, but they'd have to read thousands of words of impenetrable legalese to discover this). As is so often the case, Uber is the granddaddy of the worst practices of the gig economy. When the company went to the court to argue that its employees weren't employees, it defended its binding arbitration, saying that the company would of course pay for the arbitration fees in the states that required it.12,501 Uber drivers took the company at its word and filed arbitration claims in California. Read the rest

Peter Leigh, known as the Nostalgia Nerd on his YouTube channel, has a cool new hardcover book out called The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech: Computers, Consoles and Games, which is exactly what it says it is - photos and descriptions of gear from the 1970s-1990s. Here are a few spreads from the book to give you an idea of what's in it and how the material is presented: Read the rest

Sometimes I blog about something and it goes nowhere, much like this girl's domino:Sometimes I blog about something and it continues to weave its way to the many corners of the internet, much like this:But, sometimes I blog about something and it starts a chain reaction that looks more like this (I looked for a domino video that featured fireworks and confetti but came up short):viaIn other words, it goes viral. Now, on November 11, I blogged about Tim Klein's "puzzle montages" and I believe it's the most-viral post I've written in my over-seven-year professional blogging career. While I don't have the exact numbers, I have been watching it quickly spread across the planet and I feel certain that it is. Today, I thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain a little to show you what "going viral" looks like from "backstage." [TL;DR version (and, warning, this post IS entirely TOO LONG): The post I wrote about Tim Klein's puzzle montages went nuts! Media outlets from around the globe picked up the story (digital, print, TV), some linked back to Boing Boing, some didn't. Tim got TONS of fan mail, all of his art sold, and now he's being offered gallery shows. Well... he and I talked and we plan to take it to the next level together (note: we didn't know each other before all of this). We first want to build a community of people who love puzzle mashups. Want to learn more? Read the rest

This unlucky guy tried hang gliding in Switzerland. His instructor failed to attach him to the glider. Watch this video and prepare to wet your pants. Read the rest

Vegemite has enough salt to be conductive, and is viscous enough to draw distinct traces with on suitable medium (say, toast that has been cooked such that most of the water has evaporated, making it a good insulator), as Luke Weston has ably demonstrated. Read the rest

The Japanese are extremely proud of their pottery, which is among the finest in the world. And with the special place the Tea Ceremony holds in Japanese culture, tea cups are finely wrought. Many of them look more like not-so-chunky mugs than the European teacups we see. Those known as Karatsu Ware are among the most highly regarded.While they look like teacups, these “karatsu-yaki” are actually edible rice cakes. They are made by master confectioner Osamu Tsurumaru in the city of Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, Japan and are sold at Nakazato Tarouemon Tobo, a 400-year old pottery studio.The price is a shockingly low $2.60 per cup, all of which are painted by Tsurumaru himself in traditional designs. He also makes rice-cake saucers, which perhaps look more realistic than the teacups! A set of one cup and saucer will set you back 12 bucks, but imagine serving it to guests for desert.Via Asahi Shimbum/Photos by Mahito Kaai. Read the rest

Ground House, a hip burger joint in Irvine, CA, has just gamified eating fried foods with their Fry Roulette. There's a spinning wheel, six types of deep-fried potato products, and 12 different dipping centers.Buzzfeed shows how it works: Fry Roulette Exists And We Know You Want To Playscreenshot via Ground House IG Read the rest

When scooter companies like Bird started illegally deploying their gadgets in city streets, there was intense interest in both the street value of the components to be found within each of these VC-backed ewaste-in-waiting devices, and tactics for hotwiring them.Now, with hundreds of these scooters abandoned and rotting in impound lots, likely never to be recovered, maybe now is a good time to invest in a $30 scooter "conversion kit", which ships direct from China, and plugs-and-plays to convert one of these scooters to a "personal scooter," with all recovery and payment components permanently disabled.The subject of this conversion are scooters deployed by Bird, which are in actuality Xiaomi MIJIA M365 scooters with a few added electronics to connect to the Internet. The ‘conversion kit’ for a Bird scooter comes directly from China, costs $30, and is apparently a plug-and-play sort of deal. The hardest part is finding a screwdriver with the right security bits, but that again is a problem eBay is more than willing to solve.Right now, [humanbeing21] is in contact with a towing company that has well over a hundred Bird scooters on their lot, each accruing daily storage fees. Since these scooters only cost about $400 new, we’re probably well past the time when it makes sense for Bird to pay to get them out of storage. This means they’ll probably be heading for an auction where anyone can pick them up — all of them — for a hundred bucks or so. Read the rest

Combine a paperclip, tin foil, a cereal box, and a print out to make the Die Hard John McClane Air Duct Christmas Ornament. PS: Die Hard is a Christmas movie. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Andrew Smith is Trump's chief of the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, in charge of investigating companies that abuse Americans -- but he can't, because he has previously provided services for over 100 of America's largest companies, including Facebook, a whack of payday lenders, Amazon, American Airlines, Amex, BoA, Capital One, Citigroup, John Deere, Equifax, Expedia, Experian, Glaxosmithkline, Goldman Sachs, Jpmorgan, Linkedin, Microsoft, Paypal, Redbubble, Twitter, Sotheby's, Transunion, Uber, Verizon, Visa, Disney and Wells Fargo.Smith is required to recuse himself from any proceeding involving these companies. Luckily, none of these companies are in any position to abuse or rip off Americans. Smith insists that there are many other companies he can go after, and he is thus in no way too compromised to have the job Donald Trump gave him.“Andrew Smith is literally not able to do his job,” Remington A. Gregg, counsel for civil justice and consumer rights at Public Citizen said. “He has ties to a vast universe of financial predators that are likely to break the law — and he won’t be able to enforce the law against them. We need someone who can.”One of these high-profile cases could involve Facebook. At an oversight hearing in November before a Senate Commerce subcommittee, FTC Chairman Joseph Simons said that Facebook is currently under investigation by the agency, but would not provide details. The company entered into a consent decree with the agency in 2011, and is subject to a fine if it is proven to have deceived users as to how their data and privacy is handled on the platform. Read the rest

Emergency rooms at for-profit hospitals are notorious price-gougers, where an ice-pack and a bandage can cost $5,000, and where no one will tell you how much your care is costing until months after the fact.In a funny, serious, link-studded satirical essay on McSweeney's (Welcome to Our Modern Hospital Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself), Alex Baia makes explicit the submerged subtext of these sleazy, crooked tactics: "Well, you can’t do much about that now. Except of course to go fuck yourself. Yes, ma’am, as a matter of fact, we do have a special room where you can go fuck yourself. Yes, it does cost money to use the room, and no I cannot tell you how much. Want a hint? It’s between $1 and $35,000 per minute. Will you be reserving the go fuck yourself room?"Honestly, there’s no telling what you’ll pay today. Maybe $700. Maybe $70,000. It’s a fun surprise! Maybe you’ll go to the ER for five minutes, get no treatment, then we’ll charge you $5,000 for an ice pack and a bandage. Then your insurance company will be like, “This is nuts. We’re not paying this.” Who knows how hard you’ll get screwed? You will, in three months.Fun story: This one time we charged two parents $18,000 for some baby formula. LOL! We pull that shit all the time. Don’t like it? Don’t bring a baby, asshole.Oh, I get it: you’re used to knowing a clear price for products and services. Read the rest

At the rate the world is shrinking, you don't need to be a globetrotter for a second language to be a useful skill. And if you're looking to learn that second language (or a third, or fourth), uTalk Language Education is the learning program that makes progression not only easy but fun.If you can't be among native speakers, there's not much of an immediate reward to rote memorization of words and phrases. That's why uTalk "gamifies" the process by folding the learning process into fun challenges and exercises. You can "level up" your fluency as you go along, getting verification on your pronunciation from native voice artists. Before long, you'll be picking up full sentences you can use in real-world conversations.What's more, uTalk offers this learning structure for more than 130 languages, loads more than most other language apps. You can choose up to six with a lifetime subscription to uTalk Language Education for $24.99 - a drop from the previous sale price of $29.99. Read the rest

In 2019, we'll move out of Ultra Violet and into Living Coral, according to the Pantone Color Institute. Their color experts have determined that their Color of the Year will be the "vibrant, yet mellow" PANTONE 16-1546. Here's what they have to say about this "life-affirming" shade:In reaction to the onslaught of digital technology and social media increasingly embedding into daily life, we are seeking authentic and immersive experiences that enable connection and intimacy. Sociable and spirited, the engaging nature of PANTONE 16-1546 Living Coral welcomes and encourages lighthearted activity. Symbolizing our innate need for optimism and joyful pursuits, PANTONE 16-1546 Living Coral embodies our desire for playful expression.Representing the fusion of modern life, PANTONE Living Coral is a nurturing color that appears in our natural surroundings and at the same time, displays a lively presence within social media.How do they come to pick their Color of Year? Well, they write that "the selection process requires thoughtful consideration and trend analysis" and that their color experts "comb the world looking for new color influences."Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely color, but the cynic in me is screaming, "But climate change is bleaching the coral reefs!"(After I wrote this up, I found this searing Slate article that agrees with me, "Pantone might as well have named it 'The Rare Coral That Has Not Yet Been Bleached, as It Inevitably Someday Will in This Increasingly Toxic Toilet Bowl We Call Earth.'")images via Pantone(It's Nice That) Read the rest