Is demographics destiny?

This is fascinating, and I have no idea what the consequences will be. The populations of many countries are rapidly shrinking, and it defies simplistic explanations.

Is that good? Bad? I don’t know. Reducing the human population is good for the planet overall, but how these countries will respond is an open question. Also, modern capitalism seems to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme that relies on continuous growth — what happens when the base of the pyramid shrinks?

The decline in growth isn’t entirely universal. Some countries continue to expand that population base, largely through the mechanism of immigration. Look at the difference between China and the US!

My grandchildren are going to grow up in a different world than I did. We need to accept the fact of change and prepare to adapt with it.

Another demise!

Where’s his fedora?

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.)

Not much to see in the news today

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?

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.

Have you considered forming a United Republic, maybe?

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.

Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.

It’s unfortunate they’re so hard to hear, but did you know that spiders can make sounds?

Instead of catching flies in a web, the wolf spider hunts and runs down its prey, including small bugs and even other spiders. They have excellent night vision and because they make a hiss-like sound, they are among the so-called hissing spiders.

“Hissing is kind of a misnomer,” Dill said. “What they do is actually called strigulation, like crickets do when they rub their legs together.”

In the case of a wolf spider, it makes sound by rubbing its front legs together.

“Those front legs have hairs that are best compared with Velcro with little hooks on the end,” Dill said. “Some people say it sounds like a hiss when they hear it.”

The behavior is partly a defense strategy and, for the male spiders, mating behavior. In fact, they will turn up the volume during mating season by rubbing their legs while sitting in a pile of dry leaves, according to Dill.

“The rustling of the leaves helps them make more noise,” Dill said.

I don’t think my quiet little Theridiidae make any noise — they’re homebodies, they’re interested in vibrations but not at any detectable auditory level — but now I’m tempted to get some teeny tiny sensitive microphones to check them out.

Also…here is the required “creature of the night” video.

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.