Bonum Certa Men Certa

Paywalls, Copyrights, and Google WEI in the 'New Normal'



Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer. Also available in Gemini.

My Cat Is Sick… Hyperthyroidism And A Tumor.



Our black and white “tuxedo” cat is sick with hyperthyroidism and a tumor. The vet figures the tumor is probably benign, but we’re not going to wait and find out. We’re going to have it surgically removed.



She also did the labs and found hyperthyroidism starting to develop.



She informed me that my cat was probably older than I guessed (~9 or ~10) and that most cats don’t develop this until they’re around 12.



She said that for the hyperthyroidism we can do pills, which are cheap, or surgery to remove a different growth (which is almost exclusively benign), which is expensive. Like $3,000, which is a LOT of pills. More than the cat will ever need.



Fortunately, I bought a handy dandy secret weapon. A pill giver you load and then push into the cat’s mouth and pop the pill in with a plunger so you’re not getting bitten twice a day trying to keep the cat alive.



Twice a day, come pill time, it’s like the opening of Ghostbusters. “GRAB HER!”



Things are going in a bad direction economically due to the “Economic Miracle of Biden”, as told by “KrugmanBot3000” (with a Volvo) in the NY Times.



I too am sick, of being told of this “Miracle” that is unfolding, as people lose jobs, get their hours cut, and have to wonder how long they can even afford to take care of their pet cat or fill up the tank of their car.



It makes me depressed to read it even though I know it’s propaganda that would make Goebbels or Stalin blush.



The other day, they went so far as to blame people with low interest fixed-rate mortgages for still being able to spend a lot of money while the Fed bangs the poor into bankruptcy due to the wealthy panicking about inflation. This situation with the American media has never been worse.



What level of Freedom and Capitalism are we in where the media gleefully shouts “HAHAHAHAHA!!! It’s all working as planned. The Central Bank is killing American families with rigged interest rates. They can’t afford to buy a can of beans and they are losing their jobs! This will bring inflation to a very manageable 3% eventually!”



A troll in IRC told me he believed copyright should be abolished.



(If it was to be, then Microsoft can commit more code theft using Plagiarism as a Service, AKA CoPilot.)



Then another sockpuppet in IRC shamed me for reading the Times via Links or the Newswaffle.



I mentioned that their paywall is pretty much just there so that people on a Mac with Safari, or on an iPhone, can’t do anything about it. It was never going to stop smart people who can just drop to the terminal and type “links nytimes.com”.



The WEI “attestation” of Chrome is there to stop people from doing this. There will be two or three Web browsers that are “trusted”, and they will be “trusted” to prevent the user from doing anything at all to alter the display of “content”, on the client-side.



So in layman’s terms, no more “KrugmanBot3000” and “Miracles” because the browser has to attest that you have not done anything clever.



The only benefit is that these sites tend to be so bogus that nobody should pay for them anyway which is why they’re really dying.



Let me be frank, that considering that these places only ever post propaganda that benefits the wealthy elite and the American government’s gaslighting, you’d think taxpayers would be on the hook to directly subsidize all of them and not just NPR.



They could have packed it into the “Inflation Production Act” or something.

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