Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Robert Booth (Guardian UK) England's national parks out of reach for poorer people due to public transport cuts.
  
• Natasha Bertrand (The Atlantic), Russia is attacking the US court system from within - links up evidence from a recent Mueller filling against a troll farm.
  
• Spanish company CAF rejects tender for building a light rail in Jerusalem as it cross the '67 border, and the company will not violate international law. (Ma'an News)
  
• Follow up to the 'colonisation of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age' article: critique from environmental historian Dagomar Degroot on Twitter. (TL;DR, it's by no means clear that the Little Ice Age began post-1492, and the study derived its estimate of pre-columban American populations by averaging all previous estimates, including dodgy ones. Article also doesn't sufficiently explain why reforestation in the Americas should outweigh deforestation in Europe and Asia in the early modern period enough to create a carbon drain.)
  
• If you would like to read a reflective piece about someone making an OBVIOUSLY TERRIBLE CHOICE and just barely realising by the end of it how daft they'd been, Archer Magazine has an article by someone who gave their mother a vibrator. (The mother did give her endorsement to the article at least)
  
• Literary agent DongWon responds to the advice that 'the people' want plot over feelings:
  

  this is... exactly opposite of what people want. people only want feelings. plot is a conveyor belt to deliver feelings. it's one of those sushi places with all the little plates going round and round on a track. https://t.co/GKTGrJmKo3

  — DongWon (@dongwon) February 7, 2019

  
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, other

• Isabel Ronai (The Conversation AU) New study confirms what scientists already know: basic research is under-valued. Innovative/ground-breaking/cancer-curing research is built on basic exploratory science, and the latter is drastically underfunded.
  

  We need a new investment approach from government funding agencies. The best strategy for high-risk ventures, such as basic research, is to provide stable funding to a wide variety of projects to diversify the risk. If we cast a wider net, we ensure we will always catch one of these “big fish”.
  Funders can think of themselves as angel investors who are investing in a portfolio of start-up businesses (another type of venture that is high risk but also high reward).
  The expectation of government funding agencies needs to be that most investments in basic research will not provide a return on investment.

  
  
• Ian Parker (The New Yorker), A suspense novelist's trail of deceptions: exposé on the many weird shenanigans of Dan Mallory/AJ Finn, including faking his own mother's death, and the fact that an author he was commissioning editor for seems to have commissioned a detective to figure him out (but won't admit she did so, and seems to have used him as inspiration for her novels).
  
• Corelli Barnett (BBC history), The Wasting of Britain's Marshall Plan aid. If you're paying attention to UK twitter lately you may have seen some ill-informed conservatives being soundly mocked for the claim that Britain 'mortgaged herself' to free Europe and received no post-war aid in return. This is untrue! What's even more fascinating is the story of how, exactly, it came to be that Britain claimed more Marshall Aid than any other European country, but spent so little of it on infrastructure.
  

  The dream of Britain as a global power also included the 'invisible empire' of the Sterling Area, to which Britain chose to play the banker. This was despite the fact that her reserves of gold and dollars were well known in Whitehall to be far too scanty for this role. By the end of 1947, the American dollar loan had already been largely spent, but the gulf still remained between the cost of Britain's self-inflicted global commitments and her inadequate earnings from exports. Without another huge dollar handout, Britain would have to give up all her global strategic commitments, as well as her role as the banker to the Sterling Area, and accept that she was now only a second-class power.
  
  In that same year, the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, proposed his European Recovery Programme to rebuild a war-shattered Europe. For Britain herself, the offer of the Marshall Aid dollars presented a last chance to modernise herself as an industrial power before her old trade rivals could recover from defeat and occupation. Instead, all the illusions and follies of post-war British policy now reached their climax in the wasting of Britain's Marshall Aid.
  
  The French and German tenders for Marshall Aid resemble today's four-year business plans, being detailed technocratic strategies which give clear priority to investment in reconstructing industry and infrastructure. However, the British tender, originally drafted by a senior Treasury civil servant, resembled an Oxbridge economist's prolix prize-essay - with a tour of the world's economic horizon and Britain's place within it.
  
  In the words of Sir Stafford Cripps, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, it was a 'general statement' rather than a set of 'detailed proposals'. Certainly it amounted to nothing like an action-plan with a clearly stated strategic objective.

  
  A few weeks back I linked to Pankaj Mishra's essay which describes Brexit as Partition come home to roost. There are references in this BBC essay to Britain's imperial policy - the delusion of the 'grand power' - but I would be particularly interested to read something that linked up this domestic economic failure with Partition / various other end-of-empire messes.
  
• Electronic Frontiers Foundation, The mistake so bad even youtube says its copyright bot really blew it:
  

  YouTuber SmellyOctopus has over 21,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, and about 2,000 on Twitch. In early January 2019, SmellyOctopus did a nine-minute, private stream where spoke into his microphone to check how new technology he was using affected it. It was automatically uploaded to YouTube, where the Content ID system flagged 30 seconds of just SmellyOctopus’ voice as belonging to a company called CD Baby. The claim sent to SmellyOctopus states that the claimant is CD Baby and that the “policy” applied is to monetize the video—in other words, CD Baby added ads to this nine-minute mic check and will get the non-existent revenue generated by that.
  
  SmellyOctopus shared the experience on Twitter, where it got a response from Team YouTube, which read, “Thanks for flagging this. It looks like the match system really blew it on this one. We’re going to figure out what went wrong and fix it. CD Baby dropped the claim as soon as they saw the dispute, so at least that part of the process worked.”
  
  When another user suggested—accurately—that one needed fix is real penalties for bogus copyright claims, Team YouTube decided to take all responsibility for what happened, saying that CD Baby didn’t initiate the claim, it was Content ID’s mistake.
  
  Content ID is even more automated than you might think. It doesn’t just check for copyrighted material in its database and send notices when it finds a match, leaving it up to the copyright holder to determine if they should make a claim. No, what happens is that, if a match is found, a default option chosen by the content company when it joined Content ID is automatically applied to a video before it’s uploaded.

  
  
• Na'ama Carlin (Meanjin blog) Ill met by gaslight. I had a skewed reaction to this due to the phrasing of one particular thing, but it's overall a good article.
  
• Joseph Cox (Motherboard), Big Telecom sold customer gps data typically used for 911 calls. I'm unclear how this e-911 data differs from regular gps data (does it?), but: YIKES.

Notable DW content this week:

• liv has a post 'Stomping the Brainweasels' on her fear of making 'boring' posts. melannen has a notable comment in praise of boring journals: 'Just, the reassurance that there are people living incredibly boring lives and still being interesting people and time keeps ticking over was sometimes 100% what I needed to read on the internet.'
  I have seen many other people, both here and on twitter, lamenting the demise of LJ-era daily life blogging. Like all nostalgia it's rose-tinted, but I think it is fair to say that Boring Journals Are Worthwhile.
  
• I haven't read it in the depth it deserves, but silveradept has a long post on Trust, Fandom, and Federation, with useful example from recent ALA controversies.
  

  What sciatrix hits on, though, is that part of the ability to know whether someone is going to be a trustworthy and committed moderator is by watching them make decisions about moderation and administration and seeing whether their ethics and ways of handling the problem are in accord with you. And to take a poke around their space and see if it's the kind of space that's favorable to people that you would find terrible. If the only way you can see whether someone's going to be good or terrible is by rolling the die and signing up with them, they're not going to attract a whole lot of people. Having a Code of Conduct out front is helpful, of course, but sometimes it's in seeing what happens when someone actually is accused of a violation that is most informative to someone about whether a space is going to be a good fit for them.
  Time for an example that has basically nothing to do with fandom, but is absolutely illustrative of how this sort of thing happens.

  
  
• Astolat has another update to the signalboost bookmarklet, that now not only includes a warning if you try to boost a locked post, but also preserves html from the original post (links, usernames, etc). Here.

This got pretty long, so I'm holding over a bunch of stuff for Thursday morning.