Dr Oz needs to erase his internet history, it’s just too embarrassing

This could easily evolve into a Daily Dr Oz Gaffe. So much material!

First problem: taking medical advice from a quack.

Second problem: thinking a 15-minute physical could do anything. Physicals are a diagnostic tool, they’re only cheap if they find nothing obviously wrong.

Third problem: who is going to do these physicals? They’re not going to be cheap if they require a highly trained doctor to carry them out. They’re not going to be good if they farm them out to volunteers.

Fourth problem: “festival-like atmosphere”? If I have a health problem, I don’t want to go to a festival. I want it fixed.

Fifth problem: People don’t have a right to health? That promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence was a lie, then. How nice that the Constitution promised us big guns instead.

This is a nothing solution that will only appeal to Republicans who will fixate on the word “cheap”.

New Podish-Sortacast coming up

This weekend, my fellow FtBers have elected to have a podcast in which they discuss their weird, nerdy, geeky hobbies. I suspect they may have chosen this topic to exclude me, since it’s common knowledge that I’m a boring person who never does anything unusual or interesting.

However, maybe I’d have something to say if you, the commenters, told me what you do for fun that others might consider strange or different. Share! Give me some vicarious creativity!

How to tell if the males of your species are assholes

Easy. Their harassing behavior affects the evolution of females. This isn’t sexual selection, it’s just that the juvenile females are disguising themselves with male plumage to escape harassment. These birds, white-necked jacobins, are typically sexually dimorphic, but juvenile females maintain a male-like coloration, because females with adult female coloration face more aggressive assaults from males. Adopting the male coloration allows them to feed uninterrupted, while putting on the sexy female green coat brings on a plague of annoying, obnoxious males.

Ornamentation is typically observed in sexually mature adults, is often dimorphic in expression, and is most apparent during breeding, supporting a role for sexual selection in its evolution. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that nonsexual social selection may also have a role in the evolution of ornamentation, especially in females. Distinguishing between these alternatives remains challenging because sexual and nonsexual factors may both play important and overlapping roles in trait evolution. Here, we show that female ornamentation in a dichromatic hummingbird, the white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora), cannot be explained by sexual selection. Although all males are ornamented, nearly 30% of females have male-like plumage. Remarkably, all juveniles of both sexes express ornamented plumage similar to adult males (androchromatism), but 80% of females acquire non-ornamented plumage (heterochromatism) as they age. This unique ontogeny excludes competition for mates as an explanation for female ornamentation because non-reproductive juveniles are more likely to be ornamented than adults. Instead, avoidance of social harassment appears to underlie this female-limited polymorphism, as heterochrome taxidermy mounts received more aggressive and sexual attention than androchrome mounts from this and other hummingbird species. Monitoring electronically tagged birds at data-logging feeders showed that androchrome females accessed feeders more than heterochrome females, presumably because of reduced harassment. Our findings demonstrate that ornamentation can arise purely through nonsexual social selection, and this hypothesis must be considered in the evolution of not only female-limited polymorphism but also the spectacular ornamentation often assumed to result from sexual selection.

They’re evolving to be able to eat dinner in peace.

Boy birds should be ashamed of their behavior, is all I can say. They can’t even leave a taxidermy dummy alone!

Falk et al., 2021. Male-like ornamentation in female hummingbirds results from social harassment
rather than sexual selection. Current Biology 31, 4381–4387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.07.043

Colonialism in real time

A whole new level of cheap-ass ugly art that you can sell as NFTs!

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?

Look at a map

Did you know that Philadelphia is in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania? That to the southwest is Delaware, and to the south and east is…New Jersey? I guess Dr Oz was hoping that Pennsylvanians were as ignorant of their geography as he is.

I’ve been vastly entertained by the incompetent campaign of Oz, and the masterful way Fetterman has been ripping him up. This is going to be an example brought up in political science classes for decades to come.

The return of Il Duce

You would think the Republicans, with their immense respect and admiration of everything the Founding Fathers did, would be aware that they did not want a monarch, that Cincinnatus was their ideal, and that Washington was admired for gracefully conceding power and setting a model for future transitions. Yet here they are, pretending that an ex-president has privileges that are in ways greater than those of a sitting president, and obstructing justice that attempts to recover confidential materials that are the property of the nation, not some imperial individual.

It’s never been about the Constitution, or tradition, or the good of the country for these Republicans. It’s always been about power and money.

But now we know. That ex-president, who still has a death grip on the more fanatical fraction of the Republican party, was an opportunist who looted everything he could from the office, either as trophies or for sale or as blackmail material. You would also think that a party of arch capitalists who value property rights above all else would recognize that he did not own these things, they were not his, they were the property of the country, and that he was a criminal thief and traitor. We’re getting a better picture of exactly what he stole.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

And now, of course, Trump’s defense is a crooked judge he appointed who is now abusing the courts to hinder any investigation. This is fascism, plain and simple. Not semi-fascism. Fascism.

One of us!

Britney Spears has declared that she is an atheist, for unfortunate reasons. I say unfortunate because her apostasy is a consequence of the horrible treatment by her family, and it’s sad that she had to go through that.

Britney Spears, to put it lightly, has been through a lot. Between her conservatorship and her current family drama with her ex-husband and her children, her faith has been tested, so much so that she now says she doesn’t “believe in God anymore.”

In a now-deleted audio recording (as transcribed by Page Six) shared on Instagram last night (September 5), Spears concludes by saying of the four-month mental health facility stay she regularly mentions, “God would not allow that to happen to me if a God existed. I don’t believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to be believe in anymore. I’m an atheist, y’all.”

K-Fed will do that to you, I guess. I’d rather that major religions recognized that abuse is not an effective recruiting tool and cracked down on their repulsive believers.

Regrets? Everyone has them

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.