Desperation

Sep. 26th, 2025 10:01 pm
[syndicated profile] house_chase_ao3_feed

Posted by EM3NT3D_MD

by

Chase is still hung up over not properly being punished for what happened with Volger and wants House to deal with it.

 

tagged dubious consent because chase never explicitly states he consents

It's heavily implied that Chase is sensitive but there's no specific tag *sob*

Words: 1371, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Yuletide 2025 Nominations Closed

Sep. 27th, 2025 07:05 am
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Thank you for your nominations! Nominations are now closed. We have 6078 fandom nominations to sort through: that means that at least 1216 people nominated, but probably more. This is lower than our highest ever number of nominations received previously - 6257 - but higher than last year's 5950 nominations.

So, what happens next?
First there's a pause. We review the information we have already and get our ducks in a row. Then, when we begin to approve your nominations, it won't be in any obvious order. The approvals interface shows us fandoms at random, rather than according to who nominated them or when the nomination was submitted.

Help us get through approvals faster - please keep an eye on this community for questions about nominations we find confusing. In turn, if you are confused by how we've approved your nomination, you can ask us about it. If you submitted evidence close to the end of nominations, we may also have follow-up comments for you; however, we won't be accepting any evidence for new canons now that nominations are closed.

While we approve fandoms, you can:


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Nominations Closing Soon

Sep. 26th, 2025 07:48 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
We need your fandom & character nominations by 1pm UTC 27 September. That’s 12 hours away!

See countdown!

If your fandom requires evidence, please also submit it by that time.

Please check previous posts in this community for guidance on what can be nominated.




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Following Up

Sep. 26th, 2025 08:03 pm
[syndicated profile] loweringthebar_feed

Posted by Kevin

LTB logo

Occasionally I’ll return to a previous article to follow up on how things turned out and either (1) trumpet my ability to predict the outcome or (2) send the original prediction, if any, down the memory hole. Recently I noticed further developments in at least four matters previously covered here. I correctly predicted all these outcomes, as far as you know.

  • In January 2024, I used a legal term of art (“stupid”) to describe a then-recent class action in which the plaintiff alleged she was seriously disappointed and economically injured by discovering that certain Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins she bought for Halloween did not have little pumpkin faces carved into them as the label had suggested. See Plaintiff Aghast That Her Peanut Butter Pumpkins HAD NO EYES” (Jan. 11, 2024). That particular case was dismissed voluntarily, but the lawyers managed to recruit different plaintiffs to bring the same claims again later. But the claims had not become less stupid in the meantime, and I am pleased to report that this second case was recently dismissed involuntarily. See Vidal v. The Hershey Co., No. 24-60831, 2025 WL 2686987 (S.D. Fla. Sept. 19, 2025) (holding plaintiffs did not plausibly allege an economic injury resulted from the alleged failure to meet their “subjective, personal expectations of how the [chocolate pumpkin faces] would or should have looked when unpackaged”).
  • Last July, I mentioned briefly (in Assorted Stupidity #163) that somebody had tried to steal Graceland. And now I will also mention briefly that the woman who tried that has pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced this week to almost five years in prison. The article includes phrases like “brazen and blundering,” “[a life] spattered with financial grifts,” and “madcap plot born two years ago in Missouri’s Ozark Mountains,” showing I probably should have devoted more attention to this case.
  • The lengthy tale of Nicholas Rossi continues to unfold, but now the only events worth noting involve his convictions and sentences. The Salt Lake Tribune reported this week that the personal-death faker and long-time-identity denier was convicted on a second rape charge dating back to 2008. “He’s not on trial for denying his identity,” Rossi’s lawyer said during closing argument. No, but the evidence he fled the country and created an “‘incredibly elaborate backstory, seemingly from a Charles Dickens novel,’ about how he was an orphan from Ireland who made a living selling books on the streets of London” does tend to show he was hiding from something, the prosecutor suggested. The jury seems to have agreed.
  • In March of this year, I noted that two men had been accused of plotting to use witchcraft to harm a president, though surprisingly the people who made that accusation don’t work for Donald Trump. See President Threatened With Witchcraft” (Mar. 20, 2025) (discussing the charges pending in Zambia under that country’s Witchcraft Act). On September 15, the BBC reported that both men had been convicted. As discussed previously, like many such laws the “Witchcraft Act” is really about fraud, as the magistrate tried to make clear. “The question is not whether the accused are wizards or actually possess supernatural powers,” he said. “It is whether they represented themselves as such, and the evidence clearly shows they did.” Among the evidence: they were caught with a live chameleon, which they allegedly planned to use in a ritual that would kill President Hakainde Hichilema within five days (and the chameleon much faster). The president has said he does not believe in witchcraft, and sadly I need to clarify again here that I’m talking about the president of Zambia.
        
pegkerr: (Mischief managed!)
[personal profile] pegkerr
This week, as another Year of Adventure event, Pat Wrede and I (at Pat's suggestion) took a road trip to Kellogg, Minnesota to visit Lark Toys. I'd never heard of the place before, but it was an enjoyable jaunt indeed. It was started by a man who was interested in creating a market for his carved wooden toys, and over the years it has grown to be a remarkable place. Besides being a toy store, it is a toy museum. It was great fun to wander down the corridor of "Memory Lane" and identify old toys that I had as a child, that I haven't thought of for years: Spirograph, the game of Life, Chinese Checkers, Operation, spin tops, etc. There was an impressive little bookstore, too, with thoughtfully curated books for adults as well as children.

The centerpiece is a truly extraordinary carved carousel, created by the original owner. There was a cafe, and a fudge emporium, and had we been inclined, a miniature golf course.

It was a lovely drive, and Lark Toys was great fun and well worth the trip. Highly recommended I came home with a wee giftie for M, which I look forward to seeing her enjoy.

Image description: Background: a corridor of Lark Toys, lined with display cases. Top: a sign with the words "Memory Lane." Upper left: the logo for Lark Toys, the silhouette of a bird with a wind-up toy key on its back. Below the silhouette: the words "Long Ago." Below the "Memory Lane" sign, another sign which reads: "As once the wing'd energy of delight carried you over childhood's dark abyss, now beyond your own life buid the great arch of unimagined bridges. -Rainer Marie Rilke." Below this sign: a stylized tree, over a pillowed reading nook. Right: a lamp past with directional signs jutting out of the post. Left: a wooden stand filled with lollipops. Lower half: a rabbit and a swan each wearing a saddle (figures from a carousel). Bottom: a family of toy bunnies and a group of Matryoshka Russian nesting dolls.

Lark Toys

38 Lark Toys

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Is Chase a cat..?

Sep. 25th, 2025 05:22 am
[syndicated profile] house_chase_ao3_feed

Posted by hibiscusjunkie

by

Chase is terrified of what will happen to him after his betrayal of House, the nerves killing him as he tries to focus on DDXing like always, but his nerves are killing him. He gets so nervous he... meows..?

House is now convinced Chase is secretly an orange cat - and yet he can't prove it. After Vogler left, House inherited the perfect time frame to try and prove his thesis. All he needs is Chase, an empty room, and a couple "innovative" medical tools.

What neither of them know, however, is how quickly the punishment becomes play.

Words: 2124, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

[syndicated profile] acoup_feed

Posted by Bret Devereaux

This is the fourth thread of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who make up a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. We’re thus probing here was has been, in effect, the modal human experience. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at this question through the lens of agricultural productivity and labor. What we’ve found is that under ideal conditions, peasant households might subsist themselves while using only a relatively small part of their labor, but that conditions were never ideal: land scarcity in an absolute sense (too many hands for too few acres) made it possible for elites who owned the land there was to extract – through rents, taxes, corvée labor and more – nearly all of the surplus labor and production our farmers had, with the result that they worked quite a lot more than modern workers did, while still having almost no chance at achieving their ‘respectability’ needs fully.

In short, the peasant farmer often had to work as much as he could. When he wasn’t working, because there was no more land to work, he was hardly thrilled by that because it meant a shortfall in the material needs of his household.

But of course man cannot live on bread alone: the household has a lot more needs than agriculture. So far, we haven’t really discussed women’s labor. One of the mistaken assumptions about the past is that women “didn’t work,” which was simply never true or that their labor was a nice-to-have optional rather than essential to survival. As we’re going to see, peasant women worked a lot, in many cases more than their menfolk did and was every bit as crucial to the survival of the household as the labor of the men. That said labor in these households was typically gendered, meaning that some tasks were done predominately by men and some by women. There were exceptions: women come out into the fields are periods of highest labor demand (planting, harvest) in every agricultural society I’ve studied, for instance, even when ‘farming’ is a ‘male-coded’ activity. Soldiers on campaign were often made to mend their own clothes, even when ‘clothes mending’ was certainly a ‘female-coded’ activity.

But by and large, men and women in these households did different tasks, but no less necessary tasks.

But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

Women’s Work

Compared to agriculture we almost immediately run into significant source difficulties when discussing the labor of women in peasant households or really any households. Our sources for the pre-modern period are mostly written by men; our sources for antiquity are nearly all written by men and that is reflected by their concerns. Columella’s De Re Rustica is in 12 books, of which only the last concerns itself with the activities of the vilica, the enslaved wife of the enslaved manager (the vilicus) of a large estate. Cato the Elder’s De Agricultura likewise runs 162 sections; one of which (143) concerns itself with the vilica. Our sources, being elite men, are really interested in people (and their activities) who are rich and male. Peasant women, being neither rich, nor male, are almost entirely ignored.

So while there are guidebooks in some considerable detail, as we’ve seen, on ancient and medieval agriculture, we lack matching works on wool-working, childrearing, food preparation and the many other tasks women did in these households. At best, we’ll have works like Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (Οἰκονομικός), covering what we might term ‘household management’ from the perspective of the male head of household, which might outline in brief the activities that Xenophon thinks a good farmer’s wife ought to be doing. We might also get, as with Pliny the Elder, details on specific varieties of wool or methods of linen production, but again from the perspective of an owner-operator or merchant trading the stuff, with almost no care to the women working the stuff.

As a result, whereas we can model farming from historical data contained in ancient or medieval texts, the evidence to do this for the tasks generally done by women in peasant households simply doesn’t exist. Instead, we will have to estimate from modern practitioners, often with quite a bit of required inference.

This problem is compounded by the flexibility of ‘women’s work’ in these households, flexibility that was, I’d argue, itself necessary for these households to function. As E.W. Barber notes in the introduction to her foundational Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (1994) a lot of the tasks that women did in the household were tasks which were flexible: they could be moved, or fit into small pockets of time, or performed ‘in the background’ while having at least some spare attention for other tasks. Spinning with a distaff, for instance, can be done almost anywhere: the materials can be easily carried into another room or into the village square. Food preparation – that is, cooking, though it entails more than just that – can be done with one eye open for other tasks. Cleaning tasks often take a lot of time in total, but can be accomplished in small pockets of time in between other tasks.

This doesn’t mean these tasks are less essential or easier or less labor intensive, but it is a pattern in how household tasks get gendered that is worth noting.

And Barber identifies readily what I think is the structuring reason behind that division of tasks: children. As we noted in part III, sustaining a peasant population under pre-modern mortality conditions required having a lot of children. The precise numbers will vary with small adjustments to things like mortality rates, but there’s clearly a lot of infant and childcare that needs to happen in these societies. In particular, for many of these societies – I won’t say ‘all,’ but certainly ‘most’ – there really is no ‘spinster’ class: functionally all women (and usually functionally all men) get married and at least attempt to have children and the typical couple needed to have quite a lot of children – we estimated around nine pregnancies – to maintain the slow population growth we see from these societies.

And while a great deal of the gendered expectations in these societies are a product of (patriarchal) social values, it is also the case that it was not possible for some of these tasks to have been shifted onto men in any case: only women can bear children and only women can nurse them. These societies lack innovations like baby formula or breast-pumps or refrigerated storage of milk or formula, things which enable fathers to share the load of childrearing more equitably; speaking as a father, I am quite grateful that technologies like formula exist so that I could take a more active role in my little one’s earliest months and also so that my better half could catch a break.

But the upshot of all of that is that while a peasant mother is nursing, she can never be very far from her children and “while she is nursing” – as we noted before – probably represents upwards of 40% of the reproductive period of her life (the c. 25-30 years from her mid-to-late teens to her late-30s/early-40s), which of course also coincides with the period where she would be most physically able to do heavier labor (like agriculture) in any case. Of course children do not become ‘labor-free’ just because they’re eating solids – ask the parent of any toddler – but the realities of nursing have effectively already determined who is going to be in a position to be primary caregiver, since the wife of the house (who is still having more children) must already be in situations where she can watch, feed and care for young children while the husband, almost by process of elimination, has to be in the field (keeping in mind that ‘the field’ may be quite distant from ‘the house’ because, remember, these peasants tend to own lots of little strips of land spread all over).

In that context, it makes a lot of sense for every form of labor which can be performed alongside watching or nursing small children to end up as ‘women’s work,’ not because they are unnecessary or unimportant – to the contrary, they’re extremely necessary and important – but because this household doesn’t have a ton of spare labor and someone needs to be in the fields all day.

Consequently, while it is the case that these are male-dominated societies with sharply unequal roles for men and women – often unnecessarily unequal roles, we should note – the basic division of labor, where men mostly farmed and women mostly cleaned, cooked, spun and did childcare (both with significant flexibility and crossover in both; women did work in the fields when they had to, which was often) – that division of labor was probably overdetermined even in the absence of a culture of oppressive patriarchy. But also these were cultures of oppressive patriarchy.

All of that said the ‘modular’ nature of these tasks – able to fit in the spaces that peasant women could afford to give them while managing such a heavy workload (and as we’ll see, it is a heavy workload) – makes it even harder to model out the labor demands fully, because we’re not dealing with one big task (agriculture) with a rigid schedule but a host of small tasks with variable schedules, which are no less essential.

Nevertheless, we’re going to try and we’ll start this week with textile production.

Spinning and Weaving But Mostly Spinning

Conveniently, we have already covered pre-modern textile production for wool and linen in some detail, so we can mostly summarize here.

The textile production process has a few basic steps: the fibers (wool or flax) have to be grown, the former on sheep, the latter as plants, and then either sheared (wool) or harvested (flax). There is then a phase of fiber preparation. Flax has to be retted (rotting away everything but the pith, where the useful fibers are), broken (to breath up the pith), then scutched to leave just the useful fibers; this would usually happen at the farm producing the flax, rather than being done by the household textile producer, so it would be done by some peasants but not by most peasants, though . Wool, by contrast, has to be sorted, then washed and scoured (removing oils), and then combed or carded (removing imperfect fibers, dirt and such). Unlike flax production, which often happened before the flax left the growing site, wool often reached peasant households as raw wool, so a peasant woman making clothes is going to be washing, scouring and carding her own wool. Carding, in particular, can take quite a long time, although I am told that the time and labor demands for wool preparation can be pretty heavily dependent on the quality and condition of the wool fibers. Fiber preparation in the household is a significant labor task, but a relatively small portion of total labor time, probably around 2-3% of the total labor investment.

From the British Museum, a French painting by Jean François Millet (c. 1850s) showing a peasant woman carding wool. The two large boards with handles she holds are the hand carders.

Once the fibers are cleaned and prepared, they have to be turned into thread, which means spinning. ‘Spinning’ here is quite literal: the mechanical action that is happening here is that the fibers are being twisted around each other, their microscopic barbs (called ‘scaling’) hooking into each other in order to hold many short fibers together to make a longer length of yarn or thread. That creates a tricky mechanical challenge in that the spinner needs to slowly draw in the fibers and twist them while drawing them, since the goal is to create a long thread of fibers, rather than a single tightly-coiled ball of them. The solution to this mechanical problem, from deep in antiquity onward, was the distaff and spindle.

Via Wikipedia, a distaff and spindle at work. The spindle drawn here looks to be a hand-held spindle for short-stapled wool.

The distaff is can be just a simple rod although they are often shaped to better hold the raw fibers at the top (that mass of fibers is called a ‘roving’). Most distaffs for wool are quite long, so that the rod of the distaff can be couched under the armpit or rested on the ground while sitting in order to free both of the hands. The raw fibers – wool or flax, both use this process – are wrapped around the top of the distaff and often held in place by means of a cord. Some of the fibers are then drawn out of the general mass, twisted by hand and attached to a second object, a spindle. The spindle will be providing the rotary twisting motion so that the spinner has both of her hands free to manipulate the fibers themselves. Spindles will generally have an attachment point for the thread (the ‘hook’), a long section (the ‘shaft’) that functions like a bobbin to collect the thread once spun and finally a spindle whorl: a weight, typically significantly wider than the rest of the spindle. The spindle whorl’s purpose is to preserve rotational momentum: being both heavier and wider help with this, while often the base of the spindle narrows to basically a point so the spinner can with a single flick of the fingers cause a bunch of rotations and get the whole thing spinning quickly with a lot of energy.

From the British Museum, a Greek white-ground oinochoe (c. 490-470) showing a woman spinning with a short-handled distaff and a drop-spindle.

What the spinner then does is set the spindle spinning with a quick twist at the base and then either places it on something or lets it hang supported by the thread itself (this is called a ‘drop spindle’ and was the most common for the kinds of fibers that a peasant is going to be making in the broader Mediterranean world; supported spindles were required sometimes for very slippery or very fine fibers). That leaves both hands, typically, free to control the rate at which the fibers are pulled into the thread and its spinning motion.

We often speak of these societies as ‘farming’ societies, but we might equally call them ‘spinning’ societies. Spinning is by far the most labor intensive part of this process; as noted below, upwards of 80% of the production time of a garment, including the final sewing and assembly, was consumed by spinning. Fortunately for our peasant women, spinning was a very mobile activity. As you can see demonstrated, while a spinner has to stand (or more commonly sit) still once the spinning process is begun, it is very easy to stop, pack up the distaff, roving, thread, and spindle and move to set up somewhere else or continue at a later time. This was thus a task that could be fit into small pockets of time and accomplished while watching other things: a woman could spin some thread while watching children, waiting for food to cook or water to boil, while keeping an eye on animals or – perhaps most importantly – while supervising other, less experienced spinners (like a peasant woman’s daughters, granddaughters, nieces, younger sisters, etc.).

The next major task was weaving, which is how thread becomes fabric. Weaving (and sewing) tend to feature disproportionately in the public imagination because of how much our own perceptions are rooted in textile production in a post-spinning-jenny world of industrial thread production, but weaving was a lot less time intensive than spinning, albeit far more than carding or sewing; it’s about 10-15% of the production time. Unlike spinning, weaving is not a mobile task at all. In order to weave, a loom (the frame that holds the threads) has to be set up, a set that involves quite a bit of set-up and take-down labor. In most forms of weaving, once the loom is set up, it isn’t going anywhere. Certain kinds of looms, like warp-weighted and backstrap looms, might be set up only for a single project, while later horizontal looms are essentially a permanent workspace for many projects, but in all of those cases, the loom isn’t going anywhere.

Finally, of course, garments might have to be sewn, although I should note that the amount of sewing might vary a fair bit by time period. Most ancient garments, for instance, that I am familiar with from Greece and Rome required only minimal sewing, they were ‘woven to shape’ which is a fancy way of saying they tended to consist of rectangles of fabric, with most of the shaping and gathering provided by things like belts. By contrast, medieval European fashion increasingly involves dress – for both men and women – with more complex shapes: trousers, hose, sleeves and garments with pockets, gathers, and other shaping. Those more complex patterns would have meant more sewing time, though as far as I know even in those cases for common clothing, sewing time is still a small drop in the bucket compared to spinning and weaving, at most around 5% of total production time.

There’s another vector of change over time here that we noted in the textile series, which is the emergence in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period of significantly better spinning and weaving technology. For spinning, this is the spinning wheel (known in the Near East by the 1000s AD and in Europe by the 1200s), eventually developing (c. 1530) into the treadle-driven spinning wheel. For weaving, the warp-weighted loom, which dominated Mediterranean weaving – though some specialty projects required different loom types – from the late Neolithic onwards, was eventually supplanted by the horizontal framed loom, developed in China and arriving in the Mediterranean in the 10th century; by the 13th century they were common in Europe. In the 1730s, we get the flying shuttle loom, which is essentially a perfected form of the horizontal frame loom and far more productive. The difference in production was substantial, with mature spinning wheels and the horizontal frame looms being about three times more productive than their ancient and early medieval counterparts.

Via Wikipedia, a manuscript illustration (1237) showing a woman working at a spinning wheel. This is, to my knowledge, the earliest visual depiction of the technology.

You might imagine that meant that peasant women had tons of free time once these inventions arrived, but even a casual look at medieval fashion will tell you why this doesn’t happen: households don’t respond to increased production by working less, but rather by adopting fashions which involve more fabric, with more layers and more complex patterns, as well as having more clothes. Indeed, one thing that is very striking is how in the pre-modern world, high status clothing was often signified by its conspicuous waste of material – long, draping sleeves, billowy skirts, puffed sleeves or the heavy, complex folded-cloth garments like the Roman toga – in a way that has mostly fallen out of high status fashion since cloth has gotten so much less expensive.1

Via Wikipedia, a painting by Guillaume Fouace (1888), La dernière Fileuse de mon village (“The Last Spinner In My Village”) showing a French woman working at a spinning wheel. The wheel is driven by a treadle and she keeps the wool for spinning on a distaff.

Lanam Fecit

We’ve already discussed this in more depth in the clothing series, but I do want to note just how central textile production clearly was to the identities of ancient and medieval women, often both elite and non-elite. Clothing was, of course, a major way, arguably the most major way, to demonstrate one’s status in a community. Peasants may have been relatively poor compared to aristocrats, but they were still people of status, landholders, however small, and you can bet that they aimed to demonstrate that status and position – ‘I am a person who matters‘ – in their clothing. Since nearly all of that clothing was produced at home, the burden of doing this fell on the women of the household and it is very clear that peasant women took pride in their textile work and in their skills. I named this section after the very common line in the epitaphs and eulogies of Roman women, lanam fecit, “she made (read: spun) wool,” which speaks to the value placed on doing the task and doing it well.

Likewise, in Livy’s story of the fall of the Roman monarchy, it is Lucretia’s diligent wool-working (along with her enslaved servants) that marks her out as the paragon of Roman female virtue (Livy 1.57.9-10), a motif echoed by the first Roman Empress Livia, who made a public show of supplying her husband Augustus with ‘home spun’ togas for wear in public (Seut. Aug. 73).2 Compare Plutarch’s Ionian woman, boastful about her fine weaving (Plut. Mor. 241D), the pride of Ovid’s Arachne (Ovid. Met. 4.1-145) or the reputation of Bertha of Swabia (907-966; queen of Italy 922-926, 937-948), held up as an exemplar of womanly virtue spinning her own thread and of course quite famously likewise Penelope in the Odyssey, whose womanly virtue is marked out in part by her weaving of a burial shroud – the act of weaving itself is a demonstration of her skill, but also serves as the tapestry of her cleverness, as it were, as it is the mechanism of the ruse to deceive the suitors.

Via Wikipedia, painting by Albert Anker (1888) showing Queen Bertha instructing girls on spinning (in this case the fibers are clearly flax, though wool would probably have been more appropriate for a tenth century spinner in Italy).

We can also be pretty sure textile production would be an opportunity for households to work together, another example of horizontal relationships in these communities mattering. Not every woman would necessarily always be doing every task, but instead, where we can see household textile production that survived into the modern period, we see quite a lot of specialization, trade and exchange between households (see e.g. K.A. Bowie, “Unraveling the Myth of the Subsistence Economy: Textile Production in Nineteenth Century Northern Thailand” Journal of Asian Studies 51.4 (1992)). While we’re modeling here as if every household does every part of the textile production process (just as we’ve modeled every household basically farming all of their calorie needs) we need to remember that these peasants are embedded in networks of trade and exchange – sometimes that’s money-and-markets exchange, sometimes it is gift-and-reciprocity exchange – with their neighbors, family members and even the Big Men who own much of the land.

But most of all I want to stress that this is an essential task; there is a tendency to treat it as somehow a lesser need than the food generated by agriculture but it was necessary. A household that didn’t have sufficient textiles would struggle to maintain its status and standing in the community and of course in most climates, clothing is a non-optional requirement for cold or wet weather.

That said, while the production of clothing was an essential task, it was not a well-remunerated task. Regular weavers – not specialized in rare or fine fabrics – are some of the least well paid individuals in Diocletian’s Price Edict, paid just 12-16 denarii per day (20-40 for those working high quality linen, 25-40 for those working on silk), compared to 25 denarii per day for an unskilled farm laborers, mule drivers, shepherds and 50 or more for skilled artisans working wood, stone or metal (Carpenters: 50; mosaic workers, 60, wall painters (fresco, one assumes): 75, shipwrights, 50-60, blacksmith or baker, 50, etc.). J.S. Lee imputes a rough daily wage for spinners at 2d3 and for a weaver 3.9d; he figures that “a married woman who spent half her time spinning would have earned just under one-third of a labourer’s wage” (Lee, op. cit., 74). Lee presents this as a “good wage” compared to things like servants on annual contract, but it’s hard not to notice that it is still meaningfully lower than the wage commanded by unskilled labor per unit-time.

Via Wikipedia, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguerau (1873), The Spinner, showing a young woman with her distaff and spindle. As with many of his paintings, the subject is idealized, and rather well dressed for what is presumably meant to be a peasant woman, although spinning was an activity which might be done by all classes of women.

That may seem counterintuitive, because we’ve just noted that spinning and weaving were skills that require a fair bit of manual dexterity and practice, where the quality of the spinner and weaver has a huge impact on the quality of the final product. But it is important here to think about how the economics of these societies are structured: remember these societies are ‘long’ on people and short on capital, so it is capital, not labor, which commands most returns. The peasant household mostly survives as an economic unit because however poor peasants may seem, they own or have rights to some small amount of capital: land. But the peasant wife diligently working her wool has only labor: the capital involved is relatively minimal – a distaff, spindle, and simple loom were not huge capital investments the way farmland was. And while in an objective sense, spinning and weaving are both examples of skilled labor, in a society where nearly all women were trained to spin and weave, the skills essentially become ‘unspecialized labor’ for women (the same way these societies assume basically anyone can farm and so ‘farming’ becomes an ‘unspecialized’ labor category, perhaps most vividly, if cruelly, demonstrated by how ancient societies assume that naturally war captives could be put to work as enslaved farm workers (or, for women, for that matter, enslaved textile workers), no training required).

Yet even then, wool-working commands even worse wages than unspecialized male labor and it is hard not to see the structures of gender and power at work here. It certainly isn’t that fabric was cheap in these societies, but that it was easier to press down the wages of women, who had less power and fewer opportunities to acquire capital or engage in more remunerative wage labor. This is sometimes quite vividly portrayed, particular in the context of medieval male commercial weavers, who command higher wages than the female spinners providing all of their thread (on this, see J.S. Lee, op. cit.). Equally, in a society where it was assumed that the ‘primary’ income of the household was from agricultural labor done by men, textile production might command lower ‘wages’ (literal or figurative) due to being viewed as a ‘side hustle,’ as it were, of the household, despite its considerable labor demands.

It is a useful reminder that while economic principles govern prices and wages (in a sense, we could say here that the sharp limits patriarchal societies impose on women’s opportunities artificially increases the ‘supply’ of spinners and weavers, thus pushing down their wages), they do not do so in a vacuum but in the context of societies where deeply socially embedded patterns also play a major role. In this case, in a real sense labor mobility is heavily reduced by the nearly binary gendering of labor patterns, resulting in what at least seems to me to be quite clearly an inefficiency in labor allocation expressing itself through depressed wages for female workers. Of course that has an implication for these households: a household that ends up ‘male-shifted,’ assuming it can get sufficient land, can likely produce enough to buy or trade for the fabric it needs (albeit at significant cost), but a household that ends up ‘female-shifted’ is likely to experience significant hardship due to the lower returns commanded by textile work (and thus the motif of the poor woman spinner, struggling to keep her family afloat in the absence of a male ‘breadwinner’).

Spindle-Time

Again, for readers who want more detail on those processes or their social position, the series on textiles is there for you. But just as with farming, we are focused here on production time and subsistence, rather than the intricacies of methods and tools. Now the key tasks we’re interested in here are the ones that would be happening within most peasants households to some degree: fiber preparation, spinning, weaving and sewing. Unfortunately, our sources give us basically no indication before the early modern period how long such tasks might take, so we’re primarily reliant on the experience of modern-day practitioners of traditional methods of textile production. Even that is complicated, because most living history practitioners making textiles by hand – at least, in the United States, where I am – are interested in doing with with the technology of the late 1700s or early 1800s: treadle-driven spinning wheels (developed c. 1530) and flying shuttle looms (developed c. 1733). It is absolutely still useful to talk to those practitioners, but their production rates are going to be several times faster than what might have pertained during the Middle Ages or antiquity.

Still, I have assembled a few studies and also talked to a number of practitioners (if you spin or weave and tell me that, there is a 100% I will immediately begin asking you about production methods, tools and speeds; both my better half and I love living history exhibits and I arrive like the Inquisition when it comes to production methods) and I think it is possible to have a basic sense of the time demands. So we can pull forward the chart we used back when we discussed textile production, showing the estimated time to produce a yard (square) of fabric (8,361.27cm2).

Fiber PreparationSpinningWeavingSewingTotal% spent spinning
Aldrete et al3.25 hours74.7 hours9.75 hours2+ hours?89.7 hours83.2%
Fischer100 hours14.4 hours1.4 hours115.8 hours86.35%
J.S. Lee36 hours6 hours42 hours85.7%
Figures are from Aldrete et al., Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor (2013), Fischer, “The $3500 Shirt” (2013) and J.S. Lee, The Medieval Clothier (2018). Note that J.S. Lee’s figures are for the later Middle Ages and thus assume a horizontal loom and a spinning wheel, thus the much faster production time.

Aldrete’s numbers here are for linen production, while Fischer and Lee are both focused in wool; Lee’s figures are for spinning using a spinning wheel and a horizontal loom (but not a flying-shuttle loom), while Fischer and Aldrete’s figures assume spinning with a distaff and a vertical (‘warp-weighted’) loom. You can see the technological impact very clearly: Lee’s textile producers are spinning and weaving a yard every 42 hours, compared to 84.45 hours for Aldrete and 114.4 for Fischer – that’s two to three times faster. Another quirk of my data so far is that I’ve never gotten good time estimates for wool fiber preparation by traditional practitioners: the problem when I ask is invariably that wool is getting carded and combed pretty regularly and it’s hard to neatly know that X amount of fabric required Y meters or yards of thread required Z carded wool which required A hours to produce from B pounds of wool, because the process just isn’t that self-contained and made more complex that we shift measurements midway from length of thread (or area of fabric) to weight of wool and we do so in a process (carding) which is removing a bunch of material from the wool by design and so weight in is not equal to weight out.

Via the British Library, detail from the Luttrell Psalter, Add MS 42130 fol. 193r (1325-40), showing one woman spinning with a spinning wheel while another cards wool. Once again, thanks to J.S. Lee for citing his manuscript details completely so I could run this down and get the image.

Still, the task is not hopeless. A single yard of fabric might require something like 1,800m of thread, which is right around a pound of wool (0.45kg, very roughly) and practitioners often report that it takes a few hours 3-4 or so, to comb and card a pound of wool, conveniently on the same rough order of magnitude as Aldrete’s figure for flax preparation. Naturally, production times will vary based on the quality of fibers, the skill of the producer and the technology available. Still, these figures give us something to go on for our model.

In most places in the broader Mediterranean the vast majority of textile production is going to be in wool, not linen (or imports like cotton or silk), so we can focus on wool production. Let’s assume producing a yard of fabric requires very roughly 3.5 hours of carding, 90 hours of spinning, 12 hours of weaving and another 2 hours of sewing to get us to finished garments, taking something like an average of our pre-spinning-wheel estimates. That’s a total of 107.5 hours of labor per yard of fabric used in finished garments or other textiles (sheets, etc.). That’s how fast we might expect the relatively experienced adult women of the household to work; for the sake of it, we can assume that the young girls and the elderly women work more slowly, perhaps at half the rate of women in their prime (things like loom set up, for instance, I can imagine getting a lot slower as one ages).

The last thing we do need to do is convert back over to metric: my figures for textile production are invariably in yards and pounds because in the United States – I am unsure about the rest of the English speaking world – yards is invariably how fabric is sold. But one yard of fabric is 0.836m2, so our 107.5 hours per square yard becomes about 128.5 hours4 per square meter: about 4 hours carding, 107.5 hours spinning, 15 hours weaving and 2 hours sewing, per meter square (later note: as about 10,000 comments have pointed out, I did this metric conversion wrong the first time! Fixed now, I hope). Now we can do our textile production time estimates per household:

The SmallsThe MiddlesThe Biggs
Subsistence Fabric Required13.75m2 fabric (6.35kg fibers)18.75m2 fabric (8.68kg fibers)
32.5m2 fabric (15kg fibers)
Subsistence Labor Time1767 hours
34 hours per week
2409 hours
46 hours per week
4,176 hours
80 hours per week
Respectability Fabric Required27.5m2 fabric (12.7kg fibers)37.5m2 fabric (17.36kg fibers)65m2 fabric (30kg fibers)
Respectability Labor Time3,534 hours
68 hours per week
4819 hours
93 hours per week
8,352.5 hours
160.5 hours per week

That is, as you can see, quite a lot of labor time. By way of comparison, if we assume 12 hour working days, the hours each family required to hit farming subsistence (including rent but not other forms of extraction) were 2,184 for the Smalls, 3,120 for the Middles and 5,616 for the Biggs, so textile production is likely going to occupy nearly as much time as agriculture: around three-quarters of the time demand. In practice, of course, demand for textiles in the household is fairly elastic: if textile production is low, old clothes can be worn a bit longer as they wear out and fabric can be reused a little more aggressively, at the cost of everything looking and feeling a bit shabby. If textile production is high, fabric could be sold or simply allow the family to have somewhat nicer clothes. There’s a bit more flexibility here than with food, but we must stress the flexibility is not infinite: no household can survive with no fabric; if it cannot be made, it must be bought.

Now you may be thinking, “but wait, I thought you led by suggesting that women’s labor time was probably more fully employed than men’s labor time in these households, but here we’ve seen that textile production demands only around three quarters (70-80%, depending on household size and composition) of the labor as farming?”

Indeed, because women have to balance this work in textile production with a bunch of other key tasks. And next week, we’ll bring those tasks in – food preparation, childcare, water-fetching, cleaning and so on – to get a fuller picture in our model of the necessary labor largely being done by women (and girls) in these households. As we’ll see, once we total it all up, these peasant women work a lot.

★ Apple on the Digital Markets Act

Sep. 26th, 2025 03:47 pm
[syndicated profile] daringfireballfeed_feed

Posted by John Gruber

Apple, “The Digital Markets Act’s Impacts on EU Users”:

The DMA requires Apple to make certain features work on non-Apple products and apps before we can share them with our users. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of engineering work, and it’s caused us to delay some new features in the EU:

  • Live Translation with AirPods uses Apple Intelligence to let Apple users communicate across languages. Bringing a sophisticated feature like this to other devices creates challenges that take time to solve. For example, we designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers either.

  • iPhone Mirroring lets our users see and interact with their iPhone from their Mac, so they can seamlessly check their notifications, or drag and drop photos between devices. Our teams still have not found a secure way to bring this feature to non-Apple devices without putting all the data on a user’s iPhone at risk. And as a result, we have not been able to bring the feature to the EU. [...]

We’ve suggested changes to these features that would protect our users’ data, but so far, the European Commission has rejected our proposals. And according to the European Commission, under the DMA, it’s illegal for us to share these features with Apple users until we bring them to other companies’ products. If we shared them any sooner, we’d be fined and potentially forced to stop shipping our products in the EU.

Live Translation with AirPods and iPhone Mirroring are both amazing features. And EU users are missing out on them. I think Apple structured this piece exactly right, by emphasizing first that the most direct effect of the DMA is that EU users are getting great features late — or never. And that list of features is only going to grow over time.

Under the section “Is the DMA Achieving Its Goals?”:

Regulators claimed the DMA would promote competition and give European consumers more choices. But the law is not living up to those promises. In fact, it’s having some of the opposite effects:

  • Fewer choices: When features are delayed or unavailable, EU users don’t get the same options as users in the rest of the world. They lose the choice to use Apple’s latest technologies, and their devices fall further behind.

  • Less differentiation: By forcing Apple to build features and technologies for non-Apple products, the DMA is making the options available to European consumers more similar. For instance, the changes to app marketplaces are making iOS look more like Android — and that reduces choice.

  • Unfair competition: The DMA’s rules only apply to Apple, even though Samsung is the smartphone market leader in Europe, and Chinese companies are growing fast. Apple has led the way in building a unique, innovative ecosystem that others have copied — to the benefit of users everywhere. But instead of rewarding that innovation, the DMA singles Apple out while leaving our competitors free to continue as they always have.

This is all true. But I have a better way to put this. If Apple were to just switch the iPhone’s OS from iOS to Android, these DMA conflicts would all go away. Apple’s not going to do that, of course, but to me it’s a crystallizing way of looking at it. The DMA is supposedly intended to increase “competition”, which in turn should increase consumer choice. But the easiest way for Apple to comply with the DMA would be to switch EU iPhones to Android — which, by a significant margin, already has majority mobile OS market share in the EU. Here’s a link to StatCounter’s mobile OS stats for Europe (which is not the same as the EU, but as good a proxy as I could find). It’s two-thirds Android, one-third iOS — a 2-1 ratio.

If Apple just shipped all EU iPhones with Android instead of iOS, all of their DMA problems would be off the table. EU iPhone users would lose all iOS exclusive features and Apple device Continuity integrations. EU consumers would effectively have no choice at all in mobile OSes. They’d just get to choose which brand of Android phone to buy.

How in the world would that increase competition? iOS’s unique and exclusive features — which, yes, in many cases, are exclusive to the Apple device ecosystem — are competition.

【chouse】Find the exit

Sep. 26th, 2025 03:10 pm
[syndicated profile] house_chase_ao3_feed

Posted by RabbitSleeping

by

House进入了九号房,而他的搭档正是两周前被他解雇的下属Chase

九号房AU

连载中,可能会边写边改

Words: 5841, Chapters: 2/?, Language: 中文-普通话 國語

[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

We've just given the code for collection browsing and filtering a much-needed overhaul! In addition to some long overdue performance improvements, this update introduces collection tags — a new way to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.

How do collection tags work?

Collection owners can now use up to 10 tags of any type (What are the different types of tags?) to describe their collection. The tags are listed on the collection blurb, and the collection filters have a new "Filter by tag" autocomplete field to help users find collections matching their interests.

A collection blurb next to the collection filters. The blurb has tags listed under the collection title and the filters have a 'Filter by tag' field beneath 'Filter by title.'

While it is possible to use brand new tags on collections, we strongly encourage owners to use existing canonical tags or their synonyms. This makes it easier for users to find your collection using the autocomplete options in the collection filters.

We've also added a "Multifandom" option specifically for collections that feature a wide variety of fandoms. Collection owners can select this option to help users find collections where the focus isn't a specific fandom, but rather a theme like fanvids of old films or fic written in first person. We think this will be particularly useful for users whose fandoms don't have their own prompt memes or gift exchanges, but who want to find challenges they might be able to participate in.

Please note that while we encourage collection owners to start using the "Multifandom" option right away, there are a few more changes we need to make before it will be possible to filter collections based on their multifandom status. We'll update this post when multifandom filtering becomes available.

What about existing collections?

Together with the collection tags feature going live, we automatically tagged existing collections with the fandoms from their works and bookmarks, as well as any works or bookmarks in their subcollections.

Additionally, collections with more than one unrelated fandom were automatically marked as multifandom. We used our tag wrangling system to determine whether fandoms are related, just like we do when marking works as crossovers. Collections with more than 10 fandoms (the limit for collection tags) were marked as multifandom but did not have any fandom tags added.

Collection owners are welcome to edit their collection and change any information we automatically added.

Other changes

As part of the browsing and filtering overhaul, there are a few other noticeable changes to collections.

  • Subcollections are now listed on the main Collections page and included in the results when filtering.
  • In order to make room for collection tags, we've combined the list of owners and moderators in blurbs, similar to the way they're combined on the collection profile. Because we know this distinction may be important to some users, we've made it possible to style owners and moderators separately by using the a.owner and a.mod selectors in a site skin. (Your styles will apply in the blurb and on the collection profile.)
  • The Open Challenges page, including the Open Gift Exchanges and Open Prompt Memes pages, now list collections that are closing the soonest at the top of the page.

I've started clicker training Sipuli

Sep. 26th, 2025 05:33 pm
cimorene: A very small cat peeking wide-eyed from behind the edge of a blanket (cat)
[personal profile] cimorene
Sipuli has had three days of short sessions, 5-10 minutes, of clicker training, and it's adorable. She's possibly the cleverest cat we've ever met, and she's very food-motivated.

Our rewards are the little cubes of freeze dried chicken, which are much more expensive than most cat treats but also healthier because, unlike most cat treats, they don't contain anything but meat; and they were the only kind Snookums could have because he was diabetic, and as a result Tristana is used to getting them at bedtime and after Procedures like claw trimming and ear cleaning.

Sipuli has not fully mastered "touch the target", but she's so engaged, and you can see her thinking.

The idea behind this suggestion from the cat behaviorist was, I think, being able to ultimately train them simultaneously in parallel, and maybe get them to act differently at the gate. This seems possible, but we haven't started training Tristana or introduced Wax making the requests yet, so it's early.

On the minus side, yesterday Sipuli got out and chased Tristana across the room for about thirty seconds. You'd have thought they were both dying, but actually it seems like they did not in fact touch each other at all - Tristana was screaming under the chair while Sipuli was yelling back. That's good, that nobody was hurt and they didn't physically fight. But obviously still a setback. Tristana had to go hide in the turtle bed on the heated upstairs bathroom floor for a few hours.

Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?

Sep. 26th, 2025 11:48 am
[syndicated profile] thesphinxblog_feed

Posted by NevilleMorley

If politics is rock music for boring people… I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the frequent use of music analogies to describe the current Labour government. One example from this morning’s Grauniad: “On its worst days, Starmer’s government is akin to a mediocre tribute band playing cover versions to a crowd who will always prefer the original.” The second part of the claim: fair enough, maybe, if you ignore how much the real thing will cost you. But surely even the most mediocre tribute band has a genuine commitment to the songs and the image of the act they’re imitating, and seeks to copy everything they can, even if there is some essence that escapes them?

Starmer’s lot are not in fact playing cover versions, let alone committing wholeheartedly to the bit. Rather, they’re trying to keep on with the lumpen stuff they were churning out before, but adding a few cosmetic touches to try to tap into the Zeitgeist. It’s bandwagon jumping, like early 60s skiffle groups getting Beatles haircuts or early 90s hair metal bands ditching the spandex for ripped sweaters and singing about depression instead of chicks. We’re not getting Björn Again or the Australian Pink Floyd, who could put on a show and imitate the songs pretty well perfectly (or so I am told); we’re not even getting The Monkees. We’re being offered Menswear and Ocean Colour Scene.

The end result is indeed deeply inauthentic and unconvincing – you just had to listen to Lisa Nandy on the radio this morning, trying to present the government’s new digital ID card plan as simultaneously game-changing and not a big deal at all. But it’s a different kind of inauthenticity, and imagining it to be akin to Noasis means that its failure as a tactic is also being misunderstood.

Part of this misunderstanding comes from the unthinking assumption that Farage and Reform are The Real Thing – I don’t mean in the sense of the classic soul group. They are not the Rolling Stones or Oasis, returning to the stage with their classic hits from decades ago, bringing together their old fans and a few naive young people with questionable tastes. Rather, they may be drawing on some very old tunes with very dodgy associations, but the point of their appeal is newness and difference, the absolute cliché of the latest thing rebelling against the staid, boring status quo. Yes, Farage has been doing this for a while, but he’s not 70s Elvis trotting out the old routines, but Bowie, constantly reinventing himself and occasionally hitting paydirt.

Farage manages that trick of completely inhabiting his character at a given moment, despite manifold contradictions and inconsistencies; he comes across as himself, even if he was significantly different in the past. Part of the problem with political journalism is that they don’t grasp how this works – they’re either completely taken in by the performance, or they reject it completely because it doesn’t match their idea of authenticity.

Because ‘authenticity’ is important here, just not in the way that the ‘tribute band’ analogy implies. These commentators remind me of a certain type of earnest rock journalist back in the 90s (echoing similarly earnest music journalists from earlier eras; those who objected to bebop because it wasn’t trad New Orleans jazz, for example), obsessed with craft and tradition and substance and proper song-writing and musicianship. They get deeply annoyed with the sorts of artists who gain ‘undeserved’ success compared with their heroes, and are always ready to cry “sell-out” when one of their heroes tries to hop on the bandwagon and fails. This tends very easily to become frustration with the audience for not appreciating what they’re being offered and falling instead for flash showmanship and hedonism and drum machines.

And I can’t help feeling that a lot of the current Labour Party – and the Tories, for that matter – are caught in a similar cognitve trap. The political equivalent of landfill indie. They don’t have anything very original or individual to offer, just echoes of familiar tunes, but nevertheless feel entitled to fame and money and success, if only they were given a fair hearing; they resent those who are more successful and seize on superficial explanations for this, and try some half-hearted imitation while despising the people who might fall for it.

Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing as the 18th Brumaire de nos jours…

Tua’s Brain Takes A Day Off

Sep. 26th, 2025 07:01 am
[syndicated profile] thedrawplay_feed

Posted by DrawPlayDave

I was surprised to discover this past week that Tuanon remains active. Just like the actual conspiracy movement the Tua fan collective is named for that sort of just faded from public consciousness after a point, I sort of expected Tuanon to have done the same over the past couple of seasons.

I went searching on twitter (my first mistake, yes) to try and find a clip of the latest Tua brain fart against the Bills and was immediately bombarded with posts complaining about how Herbert got bailed out or whatever by Tuanon posters who are still, still, somehow on that train. He’s just a football player at what point do you move the fuck on? Why is Herbert still this object of such obsession? He’s just his own guy, doing his own thing, over on the opposite coast.

Granted, I do believe the Tuanon movement has slowed and shrunk. It had to. When I made the original Tuanon comic, Tua was hot shit and Herbert had stalled. Two years later, Herbert is making strides and continuing his good play while Tua has…broken.

The Dolphins offense went from explosive titan captained by Lord Tagovailoa into a mess that crumbled the instant Tua was out, into a rudderless wreck that barely functions at times even with Tua still healthy and in. I know it’s not all Tua’s fault, but the fall has been drastic.

He’s developed a nickname that a lot of Dolphins fans seethe at: Tua Turndaballova. I want to say it’s a stupid nickname but he’s been earning it. In each game this year, from the thumping by the Colts, the mess against the Patriots, and the valiant failed effort against the Bills, Tua has thrown a terrible ball directly to a defender.

Look at the Colts pass. It’s like he’s completely blind to the defender sitting right in the passing lane. Maybe he thought he had more zip on this arm? While he’s out of the pocket, there’s no pressure, he had time to survey the field. It was the most embarrassing throw on a day full of them.

The Patriots pass isn’t much better. Tua is actually under pressure this time, so you can attribute this one at least partially to panic, but I have no idea what the hell he is trying to accomplish with this pass. The guy you are throwing to isn’t close to open, and that’s ignoring the defender DIRECTLY IN YOUR LINE OF SIGHT. That’s a ball you either run with or throw away. Terrible decision. A veteran QB this deep into his career should not be making this kind of panic toss.

The Bills pass was the cherry on top. A play I literally called in my discord chat about 2 quarters before it happened. It was another terrible decision. It’s a quick read and a quick throw, so it’s isn’t caused by pressure. However, Tua stares down his target the entire time and throws a ball the defender easily steps in front of. It effectively ended the game. 0-3 Dolphins.

I didn’t want to make the usual joke that his brain has holes and is full of CTE because that seemed like the cheap way to do it but it is really hard to not wonder sometimes. Intelligence was supposed to be one of Tua’s strengths. He’s getting worse. The Dolphins are financially tied to him for the time being so they have to try to make it work, but oof. Something has to change, or he’s going to end up another what-if. At least he got his bag already.

The post Tua’s Brain Takes A Day Off appeared first on The Draw Play.

[syndicated profile] daringfireballfeed_feed

Posted by John Gruber

The New York Times:

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.

The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion. [...]

The White House hasn’t said exactly who would own the U.S. version of TikTok, but the list of potential investors includes several powerful allies of Mr. Trump. The software giant Oracle, whose co-founder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, will take a stake in U.S. TikTok. Mr. Trump has also said that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is involved. A person familiar with the talks said the Murdoch investments would come through Fox Corporation.

$14 billion is a ridiculous valuation. The whole thing is ridiculous, of course, but a fair valuation on the open market would surely be at least 10× that value. They’re not even pretending this is on the up-and-up. And it doesn’t answer the core problem at the heart of the PAFACA Act:

Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is focused on U.S.-China relations, said the White House’s executive order would stoke those questions only because it says “the divestiture includes intense monitoring of software updates, algorithms and data flows.”

“If you control it, why would you need intense monitoring to know what’s happening with it?” Mr. Sobolik said. “Monitoring the algorithm is not the same controlling it. That’s the head fake the administration appears to be trying to pull here.”

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