Look at that red line — China has almost doubled their life expectancy since 1960, which is a significant accomplishment.

Then look at the blue line. The US started from a more advantaged position, but we’ve still been steadily increasing survival over the years.

Except recently. See the abrupt downturn since 2020? It’s due to increased mortality from COVID. Chinese life expectancy continued its steady rise throughout this period, despite the pandemic, while we done fucked up and saw a terrible drop of life expectancy of 1.8 years. I’m closing in on the high end of the graph, and I want those 1.8 years back. With interest.

China can be proud, but we should be ashamed. Our COVID response has evaporated to nearly nothing, and I want at least twelve more good years.

On the one hand, kids shouldn’t have to be snitches, and I don’t like the idea of junior secret agents monitoring adults around them.

On the other hand, some adults need to be monitored, since grown-up institutions seem to look the other way when their members are continuously awful.

That was the case in a Rhode Island school, where students took it upon themselves to document the unpleasant behavior of one of their teachers.

As sixth graders, the students thought their teacher at Davisville Middle School was a creep.

They saw him leering at some girls, singling them out with pet nicknames, encouraging them to dance for him. They saw him treating boys with contempt, and sometimes cruelty.

The teacher, who was also a coach and involved with extra-curricular activities, told the students that he’d weathered parents’ complaints for nearly 30 years, and there was nothing anyone could do to him.

By seventh grade, some of the boys had started taking notes, documenting what the teacher was saying and doing, particularly to the girls, at the school.

In an exclusive interview with The Boston Globe, one of the boys described how in January 2021, he and his friends decided to start their “Pedo Database,” to track the teacher’s words and actions.

They had tried talking to adults about what they heard and saw. None of the adults listened or took them seriously, the student told the Globe. It made the boys uncomfortable to see the girls in their class struggling to deal with their teacher flirting with them.

Again, on the one hand…I had a math teacher in junior high who was exuberant, loud, overweight, and sweaty, who loved show tunes and would sometimes start belting out Ethel Merman songs in class. He was regarded with suspicion by some in the administration, and some of the students — not the ones who were any good at math, or even took his class — started an ugly whisper campaign. He treated students with respect and had high expectations for them. I thought he was just a terrific teacher, memorably enthusiastic. He got me doing geometry for fun.

Again, on the other hand…there were two coaches in high school who were abominable creeps, urging the boys to tell stories about the girls who would ‘put out’, leering at girls outside of the gym, making revolting jokes about them. They were pure misogynistic bullies. No one complained about them, most of the guys were terrified by them (or worshipped them).

I worry about a culture that targets misfits — it could go very wrong very fast. But the RI situation is different. The teacher was a creep, and the kids were later found to have been right about him.

And then, in late April 2022, the teacher was escorted out of the middle school.

Interim Superintendent Michael Waterman announced that he had placed a teacher on leave and was launching an investigation into allegations that the teacher had stalked a pre-teen girl at the middle school while he was her coach, and had been inappropriate with other girls.

The accusations were made by lawyer Timothy J. Conlon, who is representing the girl’s family and is also representing former athletes at North Kingstown High School who have accused former coach Aaron Thomas of conducting naked “fat tests” on teenage athletes.

Of course he was a coach. There are no staff more privileged at a typical American school than the coaches. It sounds like they got good evidence of directly harmful behavior by the coach, which is how this ought to work — a Discord list maintained by a bunch of students shouldn’t be definitive, except as supporting evidence that he was an obnoxious jerk.

Man, I wish my high school coaches had gotten what they deserved. But instead, my excellent math teacher was the one who lost his job — no, he didn’t do anything wrong, other than to annoy small town bigots.

Random thought…Henry Kissinger is older than the Queen was. I am not looking forward to the media suck-uppery when that villainous old toad croaks.

I trust no one will be trying to defend this unfortunate victim: Kiwi Farms is dead. It would have been nice if it had been executed sooner.

If you never heard of Kiwi Farms, lucky you. RationalWiki explains:

Kiwi Farms is an immensely creepy stalking forum run by manchild Joshua Conner Moon out of his mom’s house. The people who are stalked are what are known as “lolcows” to the site’s userbase or “exceptional individuals”. Think some of the Internet’s worst assholes and coalition of criminals projecting their frustration onto minorities – and now that you’re picturing GamerGate, think creepier.

Due to difficulties enforcing harmful speech on the internet, there hasn’t been much legal action taken on Kiwi Farms, despite them being responsible for harming many people (directly and indirectly), costing them jobs and partners, exaggerating and spinning rumors, or even mentally abusing their victims to the point of suicide. In fact, the owners maintain that there is nothing illegal about the site, citing technicalities (we don’t harass people; our users do!) and phonebooks also distributing personal information (because sharing the address of this person we find weird is totally the same as a printed 411Wikipedia!); or just simply denying, downplaying, or justifying the activities being taken place. No services are buying their lies, however, as KiwiFarms is struggling to find any web service company willing to do business with them ranging from Paypal to CloudFlare to even Russia-based DDOS-Guard. Not even 8chan wants anything to do with the site owner.

Too loathsome for 8chan! That’s how bad it is…was. It was one of those sites one avoided tangling with because a) its users were violent and abusive, and b) there was no content there worth engagement, consisting entirely of angry losers vomiting up cliches. Even RationalWiki’s short confrontation got them mad.

Kiwi Farms has a thread “discussing” RationalWiki, which it describes as a “whiny hugbox for spergs and a clusterfuck of never ending drama on a rapidly declining website”. Cynical later helpfully labeled the statement as “sarcasm”, though it’s not clear what part of the statement is supposed to be “sarcastic”, especially since he continued to insult us.

“Sarcasm,” “jokes,” and mindless buzzwords are never adequate explanations for the kind of stupid behavior these kinds of people indulge in.

But you know what does?

Moon is a Florida man.

(Sorry, that was sarcasm and a joke.)

It’s all “the Queen is dead”, over and over again. I don’t care. Time to move on.

The news comes in two categories:

1. Tradition is broken! One aspect of the world is changed. I will now wax sentimental over what the Queen represented (omitting the awkward bits, of course), and moan about how the world was better during her reign and we must return to the values of the 1940s and ’50s.
2. A wealthy white woman represented the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and now she’s dead, can we return the loot her system stole back to their home countries? What? She’s going to be replaced by a wealthy white man? Oh nawww no. Look at all those wealthy conservatives crying.

#2 is not getting printed in the pages of the big name newspapers, but oh boy are the powers that be having a wonderful time with #1, mourning a tiny and inevitable change that doesn’t really affect their status. They’ve got an excuse to wallow in sanctimony! Go ahead, guys, take your moment, but can we get it over with soon? We’ve got things that matter to get done. Swapping figureheads for an immoral system isn’t one of them.

I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this morning, and a couple of appointments with students, and a lecture to give, and some lab prep to do, so I’m a bit relieved that there’s so little of interest to distract me today.

The Queen is dead. My regrets to those who cared about her. Call me when the monarchy is dead, OK?

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All the essential stuff was already written long before her death. Take it away, Patrick Freyne in the Irish Times:

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

Beyond this, it’s the stuff of children’s stories. Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok as head of state. What’s the logic? Bees have queens, but the queen bee lays all of the eggs in the hive. The queen of the Britons has laid just four British eggs, and one of those is the sweatless creep Prince Andrew, so it’s hardly deserving of applause.

That’s from March 2021. It’s all that needs to be said.

The Queen of England is not doing well right now. I don’t wish her ill, but I can’t get too worked up about her potential imminent demise. What does worry me is this:

Prince Charles, her heir, and his wife Camilla and Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge are traveling to Balmoral to be with the queen, according to their offices.

Hasn’t the United Kingdom suffered enough with boobs occupying high office? It seems so unfair.

The greatest thing Queen Elizabeth could do would be to disinherit all her heirs and dissolve the office, break up the kingdoms and let them all be independent. Or maybe do a Buffy and bestow her royal powers on every girl in the land.

---

The Queen is dead. May the monarchy follow suit.

Wow. It’s amazing how oblivious the defenders of a colonial system can be, but this article about an NFT/crypto gaming system is revealing, in a horrifying way. Some Western crypto nuts created a modified version of Minecraft in which players, after paying a hefty entry fee, could earn crypto money that could be exchanged for the real thing just by playing. It was called Critterz. At first, people actually did make money playing!

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. One U.S. player, who goes by “Big Chief,” described how his team, composed largely of young people in the Philippines, gathered building materials for him. He then paid professional Minecraft builders around $10,000 in crypto to turn those materials into a lavish casino.

“At first.” Then, like most of these crypto schemes, the grifters took their profits and left the participants hanging. In addition, Minecraft announced that you can’t use their game in these NFT cons. The value is plummeting, and is heading towards zero.

But, as with Axie Infinity, once the game became more popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around 3 cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual, and many players continued playing and building.

Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs. The company laid out its position and stated in bold text that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

During its heyday, though, the mechanisms of the game were ripe for exploitation. If you had the capital, you could help poor people buy-in, and then rake in a percentage of their subsequent earnings. Sweet! Then you could sit back and do nothing in your wealthy home country, like the US, while the peons on your Minecraft plantation send you money.

It was clear from the languages used in the Critterz chat log that almost all guild members, also known as “scholars,” came from low-income countries, and, overwhelmingly, the Philippines. Many were also former players of Axie Infinity, and worked for guild owners that ran Axie guilds too.

Charles Franzis, a 19-year-old student at Bulacan State University, just north of Manila, got into Axie Infinity last October. He joined a guild called Big Chief Academy and enrolled as a scholar, hoping to earn some extra money that would support him through his studies.

Big Chief was the owner of the plantation, with a swarm of desperate poor peasants playing for him.

Big Chief, who is based in the U.S., owns around 60 Critterz NFTs, which, at their peak, were worth more than $300,000 (at the time of publication, they had reduced in value to around $5,000). At one point, he managed around 200 guild scholars in Critterz.

But hey, they liked playing the game, and he paid them a cut, so it was OK. It was OK, right? They got more than half of what they earned, the rest going into Big Chief’s pockets, instead of 100%, but that was the cost of his beneficent patronage.

Big Chief said that he split earnings 60/40 in favor of his scholars, and that, unlike other games like Axie Infinity, most of them actually enjoyed playing Minecraft. “These kids are playing Minecraft, a game that they already liked and played, and earning as much as a CPA (certified public accountant) in the Philippines,” he said.

It was a force for good! I’m sure every colonized country has heard these arguments, that being under the thumb of a paymaster has been a civilizing influence. Meanwhile, 40% of the wealth produced in their country is being siphoned off to a rich country, which is making no investment in their homeland.

Big Chief framed guilds in play-to-earn gaming as a force for good, arguing that they provide people in poorer parts of the world with an opportunity to make money. “That’s why it’s really annoying when people talk about exploitation,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what the hourly rate comes to, but I could tell you that people make very little money and the cost of living is very low in the Philippines.”

Don’t forget the patronizing attitude!

Big Chief said he felt bad for his guild members who were no longer able to make money from Critterz. “I treated a lot of these kids like they’re my kids, so it’s kind of sad now that I can’t really offer them much. Before, I was really helping a lot of these kids, giving them an opportunity to make some extra cash for their families and it just kind of sucks that I can’t really do that right now,” he said.

Aww, he was so helpful to these people he saw remotely as percentages on a spreadsheet.

Critterz is doomed, it’s already collapsing in value, and once Mojang shuts them down, it’ll be a worthless game. Poor Big Chief. He won’t be able to milk this grift for profit. But don’t you worry, the designers are dreaming big of future horizons in game development. Look at this nightmare fantasy:

But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

The big triple-A gaming companies are probably already drooling at the prospect. They could sell games at a premium to American and European customers, and then use monthly fees to buy the labor of some hungry bunch of Filipinos for a pittance, and have them do all the menial stuff of serving the valued players. Until the day the NPCs rise up in a Westworld scenario and start slaughtering the privileged players.

Nah, won’t happen. You’ve gotta keep the NPCs weak and relatively unarmed so they are helpless.

Man, this is just going to replay all the sins of the colonial powers, isn’t it?

There’s not much analysis here, but lots of numbers about people who regret their choice of a college major. An awful lot of people are regretting getting a humanities degree.

It would have been nice if they dug a little deeper and asked why they regret it, instead of making a lot of speculation. I suspect many don’t regret the actual education — four years of investment in a subject generally implies a healthy interest and respect for the ideas — but it’s more that they don’t much care for the employment opportunities and the lack of respect modern American culture has for breadth of knowledge. College is where you get your ticket for a job, don’t you know, and there must be something wrong with you if you get a degree in a subject like history or literature because you love it. Nope, the focus is all on whether you can get paid lots of money in return for your degree.

Schmidt said it’s possible that the nation’s pro-STEM campaign led many humanities graduates to regret their choice of degree in retrospect, even if a different major may not actually have improved their employment opportunities at the height of a global downtown. They were struggling, and their degree was an obvious scapegoat.

In an analysis published in the Atlantic a few years back, Schmidt noted that while culture wars and student debt didn’t explain the humanities data well — even Christian colleges and colleges with generous financial aid have seen declines — it does line up with a wave of younger millennials who, scarred by the financial crisis, are increasingly fixated on majors with better job prospects.

That’s all true. Writing poetry pays diddly-squat. If your context is, “are you happy starving in a garret somewhere”, then yes, there is cause for regret. But the problem is not with the humanities, which have been a human constant for far longer than Nintendo has been hiring, but in a society that has lost the plot. We need the humanities, not necessarily because they help factories build widgets, but because they make us better people. Which doesn’t generate a number we can put on a spreadsheet.

Show me data like this, and I have other questions.

Have we become a healthier, stronger society since the numbers of humanities majors have been in decline? Correlation is not causation, of course, and I’m not blaming computer science degrees for Trump, but I don’t think it’s a good thing for us that fewer people are appreciating the joys of a deeper, wider education.