I’m curious about a theory posted in a rhyming-slang encoding guide meant to demystify some fun yet secretive communication:
…no cake can be eaten that has not been given (by a shopkeeper) and taken…
“Give and Take”, which rhymes with cake, is thus said to mean cake.
However, cake can be eaten alone. Cake also can be baked and not given away, only eaten. Does nobody in the rhyming slang context bake a cake and eat it themselves?
And that brings to mind something more like a “cake and eat it too” explanation:
…to have or do two good things at the same time that are impossible to have or do at the same time…
It looks like there are interesting cultural clues in a key to decoding signals, although the current reference may actually be incorrect or misleading.
Coffee and cake as it should be… Coconut raspberry green tea chocolate cake.
News about Amazon seems to read like something straight out of a classic American novel and now makes me wonder if the company name is related, as I wrote here in 2015 about that book.
…when you talk to the platform engineers behind closed doors you will often find a modern version of Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle”; history has some very important lessons to be remembered…
Founder Jeff Bezos was reported to say competing with Bernie Madoff in hedge money made him feel like a loser.
Bezos reportedly confided to former AOL president Ted Leonsis that he quit his job at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw because Bernie Madoff “was kicking my ass.” The Amazon idea came to Bezos as he was researching online business opportunities for the hedge fund.
Madoff was later sentenced to 150 years in jail for crimes, what Bezos credited as “kicking”.
Bezos meanwhile gave up because too jealous of Madoff’s ill-gotten wealth; allegedly he thought a better get-rich strategy for a wealthy hedge gambler was to plunge his millions into gaming a vulnerable market into a forced monopoly (initially books). This was basically creating a tech platform for rent seeking (coerced trade that benefits only one side), which today we call Amazon.
In 2011 at BSidesLV I gave a presentation about the danger of big cloud companies operating like the movie 2001 by Stanley Kubrick — ship automation systems with too much authority detaining and terminating their own crew.
Google AI ethics team discusses next steps in a “private” chat while Google’s AI reads their lips
That presentation was the genesis of the book I have been writing since that time (and in 2012 I spoke about humans enacting a political coup using social media, a step beyond HAL). It has generated enough material so far to probably be a multi-volume set, although I tell myself to edit it down…
I recently had to explain that someone edited the Wikipedia entry on Woodrow Wilson to falsely claim that the very man who called for a return of the KKK, restarted the KKK as President, and led its rise to humanitarian disasters across America… was somehow “personally opposed to the KKK”.
Click image to enlarge:
Source: Wikipedia
That’s crazy talk.
It would be like saying General Grant was personally opposed to destroying the KKK. Wrong. Grant destroyed it. Wilson restarted it. Those are facts.
A totally false sentence about Woodrow Wilson entered into a Wikipedia post makes literally no sense, is obviously counter-factual, yet there it is… without any citation or reference at all.
It’s like someone from the KKK dropped in and thought it would be really funny for people to read “water in the ocean isn’t wet [citation needed]”.
The cost to disrupt and confuse with these attacks on weakly-anti-racist (also known as racist) systems is very low, the cost to defend (without proper anti-racist measures for prevention of racism) is high.
I’m finding this class of attack all over Wikipedia. Here’s another example from the very racist history of voucher schools, fraudulently trying to minimize their impact and use by white insecurity hate groups in America.
Click image to enlarge and see the crazy counter-factual statement that “all modern voucher programs prohibit racial discrimination” with [citation needed] right next to it:
That is just so factually wrong it’s amazing. Anyone apparently can get garbage to stick immediately on Wikipedia with a very tedious and long process to get it removed or corrected.
Actual analysis of failure to prohibit discrimination in modern voucher programs would be more like the following:
2016: “Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers… legislators appear to have neglected to construct policies that safeguard student access and ensure that public funds do not support discriminatory practices…”
2017: The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers
2017: “Studies on charter schools in Indianapolis, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas, among other places, show that charter schools can lead to greater racial stratification.”
2017: “…as private school voucher programs grow to scale – statewide and even nationally in other countries – they can actually increase segregation…”
2020: “Century Foundation also proved that voucher programs across the country benefit the most advantaged students … continue the long-residual effects of racism.”
2020: School Vouchers – An Enduring Racist Practice
Wikipedia clearly has widespread integrity issues, weak editing/deployment pipeline process and quality is very low.
Voucher systems not only perpetuate a history of racism, they were intentionally racist and continue to be a tool of racists. When desegregation was ordered, some racists thought the clever trick to continue racism would be to shut all the public schools down and hand out vouchers instead.
In 1958, courts mandated that white-only schools in nine Virginia areas — including the town of Charlottesville — admit black students. Rather than comply and allow the black students, the public schools in Charlottesville and elsewhere in Virginia closed. Some of these public schools in Virginia remained closed for five years, and when they reopened, they were nearly all black students. The white students had relocated to private schools with “segregation grants” to pay tuition.
It’s that simple. Anyone bringing up vouchers who doesn’t start from the position of explaining how racism will be prevented in a well-documented system of racism… is just being racist and perpetuating racism.
And it’s very much the same line of reasoning behind tipping culture — racism used for perpetuation of slavery.
