Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package.

Tiny Dish of Chef's Sincerity.

"'Tiny Dish of Chef's Sincerity' I can sort of understand, but 'Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package'??" I agree with Ben that the second part is intelligible enough, but how do you get from Tāotiè lóngxiā cān 饕餮龙虾餐 to "Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package"? The answer is that there is no way you can get from there to here. Fair enough, lóngxiā means "lobster," and cān in this case signifies a complete meal, i.e., a "package." But Tāotiè is the name of an ancient mythological monster (often translated as "glutton"). Since Tāotiè is a bisyllabic morpheme (neither tāo nor tiè means anything by itself [there are plenty of such bisyllabic morphemes in Old Sinitic]), it is absolutely impossible to break Tāotiè down into anything that might mean "Exterminate Capitalism." Therefore, my conclusion is that somebody was playing around with whomever was responsible for preparing this menu and mischievously provided an absurd translation, perhaps with the intention of poking fun at the Chinese Communist system which has given rise to such luxurious and fancy dining practices as reflected in pretentious menus of this sort.


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jwz mixtape 195

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 195.

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Current Music: as noted

Twitter is a garbage company and @jack is fawning at the feet of Fascists.

Inside Facebook and Twitter's secret meetings with Trump aides and conservative leaders who say tech is biased:

The Twitter executive convened a rare private dinner with Republican leaders and conservative commentators in Washington last week at Cafe Milano, a familiar Georgetown haunt for city power brokers, according to four people who participated in the dinner but spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was off the record. The gathering came weeks after Dorsey provoked conservatives' ire by tweeting a story suggesting voters should elect Democrats in November -- and after he made his first official visit to Congress.

Among those attending the June 19 dinner were Mercedes Schlapp, a top communications adviser for President Trump; Grover Norquist, the leader of Americans for Tax Reform; television host Greta Van Susteren, and Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, according to the people in the room.

Dorsey hoped to use the dinner as a way to build "trust" among conservatives who have long chastised the company, three of the people said. He defended Twitter against accusations that it targeted right-leaning users unfairly but still admitted that the company has room for improvement, according to the attendees.

In response, the Twitter executive heard an earful from conservatives gathered at the table, who scoffed at the fact that Dorsey runs a platform that's supposed to be neutral even though he's tweeted about issues like immigration, gay rights and national politics. They also told Dorsey that the tech industry's efforts to improve diversity -- after years of criticism for maintaining a largely white, male workforce -- should focus on hiring engineers with more diverse political viewpoints as well, according to those who dined with him in D.C.

A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment on the dinner.

Isn't he cute, though? He's got a hipster beard and a $4.8 billion net worth, and I hear that when he's not taking obsequious meetings with literal fascists he sometimes meditates!

Fuck you, Jack, you complicit piece of shit. Grow a spine. You can probably buy one for less than a billion.


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Ben avli(S)



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Solid advice.

Hate your job? Try astral projection


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DNA Lounge: Wherein this is some kind of strawman argument.

Straws. Apparently they're the new Devil in town.

You may have noticed around town that straws in your drink are harder to come by lately. This is because we've all been hearing rumors for about a year now that some time soon a local ordinance is going to require plastic straws to be "by request only", so we've been giving that a try here at DNA for a little while now. Most people seem not to notice or care, so we're going through fewer straws. So that's fine.

Oakland recently went opt-in but it looks like the proposed SF ordinance is going to try to ban plastic straws entirely. And there's another proposed ordinance (or maybe it's the same one, I'm not sure) that would ban the use of all "single-use food service ware" (plates, cups, forks) on city property (which means every outdoor festival or street fair).

Some other SF bars and restaurants have already switched to paper straws, but mostly people hate those, because they get soggy and fail, you can't fuss with them at all without breaking them, and sometimes they feel like licking a popsicle stick (shudder).

Oh yeah, and they're way more expensive than the plastic ones. So there's that. Straws are a small part of the cost of each cocktail, but every little increase... sucks. A little while ago there was an article where someone from a local bar claimed that they were saving a bunch of money on their Recology bill because of diversion discounts due to paper straws, which sounded impossible to me. So I followed up on that, and yeah, they were very mistaken. So if you hear stories of how much more economical paper straws are, don't believe them.

And of course there's a paper straw shortage already, due to the sudden up-tick in demand. I just hope that by the time we're required to switch, the economies of scale will have driven the prices down. But more likely it's just going to be another instance of, "Great news, everybody! Your business just got more expensive to run!"

And this is all nonsense, anyway:

Plastic Straws Aren't the Problem: Skipping straws may be hip. But there are much better ways to fight pollution.

Two Australian scientists estimate that there are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines. Yet even if all those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for about .03 percent of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year. [...]

Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest.

The impact of this junk goes well beyond pollution. Ghost gear, as it's sometimes called, goes on fishing long after it's been abandoned, to the great detriment of marine habitats. In 2013, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimated that lost and abandoned crab pots take in 1.25 million blue crabs each year.

But something must be done, and this is something, so we must do it. I guess.

It seems to me that recycling at the individual or small-business level is nothing but a placebo. Only the massive industrial scale matters. The ecological damage done by BP's Deepwater Horizon in a minute totally erased all of the trash-sorting you did in your entire life. Even discounting the fact that almost all of your "recycling" used to be made to magically disappear by shipping it to China -- but they've stopped taking it. So these days much of it goes straight into a domestic landfill anyway.

Using different straws or sorting your trash isn't going to save us from extinction. Our only hope is the immediate dismantling of the fossil fuel industry, plus planetary-scale carbon sequestration projects.

But that's hard, so let's ban straws instead, because that will make us feel like we're making a difference.


STARTTLS Everywhere

Similar to Let's Encrypt, the project providing free SSL certificates for web servers along with tools to auto-renew them, STARTTLS Everywhere is trying to build some tools to make it easier to configure your mail server to encrypt mail in transit, and do so with properly signed certificates.

What I only just realized is that it's pretty easy to use Let's Encrypt certs as SMTP TLS certs, if you have already been using self-signed certs: you just need to add your MX to the list of domains in the cert and install that cert into Postfix:

smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/letsencrypt/live/dnalounge.com/fullchain.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/letsencrypt/live/dnalounge.com/privkey.pem
smtp_tls_cert_file = $smtpd_tls_cert_file
smtp_tls_key_file = $smtpd_tls_key_file

They have a page that tests your server, but it's terrible, don't bother. If it detects a single problem it just says "Nope!" without telling you what the problem is. A better tester is at checktls.com which will actually tell you what it thinks went wrong.

Wow, Everything's So Messed Up. How Is STARTTLS Everywhere Going to Help?

We have three primary goals for STARTTLS Everywhere:

Improve STARTTLS adoption.
We want to make it easy to deploy STARTTLS with valid certificates on mailservers. We're developing Certbot plugins for popular MTA software, starting with Postfix, to make this a reality. [...]

Prevent STARTTLS downgrade attacks.
In order to detect downgrade attacks, we're hosting a policy list of mailservers that we know support STARTTLS. This list acts essentially as a preload list of MTA-STS security policies. [...]

Lower the barriers to entry for running a secure mailserver.

Yeah, see, that last part is the kicker. Only crazy people like me run their own mail server, because Google has managed to almost completely de-federate the world's email infrastructure. "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours".

Why would anyone run their own mail server?

"As an act of defiance against the Google hegemony" is probably not a selling point that resonates with very many people.

Nor is, "I really enjoy reading my logs and seeing Error 421: To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily rate limited."

So, you know, maybe some day everyone who still runs their own email server will have certificates installed, and maybe enough of those certificates will be signed by a CA that validating the cert before exchanging mail might be a practical thing to do. But it's more likely that by then, email will have been killed as a concept. All it would take would be for Google to decide, "Fuck it, we're just not going to federate with anyone any more."

You know, like they did with GChat, single-handedly killing Jabber / XMPP.

They don't quite have the market share on the email side to get away with that right now, but maybe they will someday. But even today, they could probably get away with saying "We're no longer accepting SMTP connections, period": they'd just have to bully Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud into peering in some new way that locks everyone else out. They'd do this under the guise of "solving spam", which it wouldn't.

In summary, everything is terrible.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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"The pigs do not give me any attention at all, and they start to passionately mate next to the sewer."

Filip Jandourek: At Buriangy Beach:

"It came to me as a scene from the apocalyptic film when I was in the suburbs of Dhaka called Ashulia earlier this year, one of the most polluted industrial sites in Bangladesh, and I stepped out of a local bus without bumpers and blinkers made of different pieces of metal the local wizards welded to the chassis of a retired truck, haunted by a long way to shooting at the shore of Buriganga, and in Ashulia it is a black sink with floating plastic bottles, where sewerage flows out of the city as well as hectoliters of solvents and other chemicals from nearby factories. one of the many landfills when a breathtaking view of the screaming of the wild pigs that grazed in the garbage from the city showed up, good pigs, everything was spashed, but there was nothing else in Bangladesh, the hairy, sharp ridges emerging from the thick sticky smog, the stinks scatter the smell they learn a mixture of garbage and prove they are truly omnivores. It is hard to say if they smell more pigs, an endless garbage dump or an upper sewer. Hamsters with the sticks and the necessary cigarette on their lips to indulge in anything other than promised mud, filled with plastic bottles, rotting remnants of tanneries and carpets. Kulisu consists of factory chimneys, earth heaps and straw. Animals and people live close to each other. I lit a cigarette but the smell does not need it. The pigs do not give me any attention at all, and they start to passionately mate next to the sewer. I began to take pictures and realized that it was an image that to a great extent accurately describes this polluted and overcrowded land."


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DNA Lounge: Wherein it's almost Robot Time!

Our fifth annual Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge is coming up on Sunday, July 15, which is about three weeks from now!

As you know, Bob, this is the event where people build robots that pour cocktails, hopefully in the most ridiculous way possible, and then you drink them. Sometimes the cocktails are good, and sometimes you get wet, but it's always fun to watch.

Unlike previous years, we've already got quite a few robot contestants! But we could always use more, so please pass the word along to your mechanically-inclined friends. (Or your drinkingly-inclined friends.)

This year, by request, we're also doing something new: if you want to bring your robot project just to show it off without actually entering the contest, then admission is free. So if your bar-bot isn't quite finished, or isn't really a bar-bot at all, sign up anyway! The more the merrier.

RSVP here, and follow the Cocktail Robotics page for updates.

Also of note: the upcoming Freq.Fest 3.0 event has a massive two-day lineup. If you have any love of chiptunes, check it out.

Hey, here's something glorious: using absurdly moralistic, anachronistic liquor laws as a force of Good! It won't do anything, of course, but as a piece of performance art, I give it an A+.

Trump Lacks Character for His Hotel to Keep Its Liquor License:

The Trump International Hotel in Washington shouldn't be allowed to serve alcohol because the hotel's ultimate owner, President Donald Trump, isn't of "good character," a group of religious leaders and former judges said in a complaint.

The group asked Washington's Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to investigate Trump and ultimately revoke his namesake hotel's license to serve liquor. [...] The complainants say that the allegations and evidence demonstrates that Trump fails to meet the beverage board's requirement that only people of "good character" qualify for the right to sell alcohol in Washington.

Some photos from recent events:

Hubba Hubba: Villains
Bootie: Wild Animals
Diana Arbenina

Hubba Hubba: Burlesque Nation
Back 2 Basic: Nelle & Waaves
Everything Goes Cold
Bootie: Glitter Party

This color is deeply unsettling.

previously, previously, previously,

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