Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This really is a full service blog.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Late Night Horrors

Open Thread: Late Night Horrors

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And if that isn’t scary enough… Alison P. Davis at NYMag says “Ladies, You Can Now Marry Your iPhone“:

… I was initially intrigued by Ringly, a new business in the wearable-tech melee, which offers a ring that inconspicuously notifies you of incoming communication. Co-founder Christina Mercando, a start-up alum with a background in fine art, created the ring because she was sick of missing texts and calls from friends and family, but also felt like a jerk for keeping her phone constantly in view. The ring, available for preorder this week for $145, connects to an iPhone or Android and alerts the wearer to incoming texts, calls, calendar alerts, or emails. It also allows for push notifications from Tinder, eBay, Facebook, and Twitter. If info is coming in, the ring will vibrate and flash a tiny light, so the wearer can be aware of communication without sacrificing social etiquette or style…

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    patrick II

    So, if there is a swine flu outbreak, you will never miss a notification on your iphone ring. Good to know.

  2. 2.

    NotMax

    More, um, robust versions of the ring for males cannot be far off.

    “You receiving a text or just glad to see me?”

  3. 3.

    Amir Khalid

    There’s something wrong with the very concept of the Ringly. The device that tells me I have an incoming communication on my smartphone should be my smartphone. (ETA: ) Not some additional thing that I need to buy and wear.

  4. 4.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The entire idea of be wired to some network on a continual basis bothers me no end. I experienced this in a way when I was in the Army (I was, after all, often a unit signal officer…by definition, I was wired in all the time) and I grew to loathe it. Turn off the damn phone, let it go to voicemail, don’t sweat it. 90% of the time it’s simply not that damn urgent to respond at once. ESPECIALLY when it’s some idiot customer who associates “losing a million dollars an hour” with life and death. Because they’re not “losing a million dollars an hour”, they just think they are because they want to impress someone as to how “serious” they are about fucking money.

  5. 5.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Also, it’s the height of utter stupidity to be creating airborne viruses that could get out and start pandemics. We’ve got enough stupid in the GOP in this country already without mad scientists getting their rocks off on “experiments” straight out of stock 50’s B movies.

  6. 6.

    Mustang Bobby

    If info is coming in, the ring will vibrate and flash a tiny light, so the wearer can be aware of communication without sacrificing social etiquette or style…

    Based on what I’ve seen of social etiquette nowadays — texting while driving, eating, talking — the ship sailed on sacrificing it long ago.

  7. 7.

    Off-White Tower

    Other horrors:

    This was made known to me by a friend who works with the domestic violence group in the mayor’s office. They recently ran a study and found quite a few weaknesses in Nashville’s current system for handling domestic violence, and this crystallizes them.

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mustang Bobby:
    And it’s getting worse, now that people are taking out smartphones — or worse, tablet phones — to do their texting. In movie theatres, during the movie.

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    @Amir Khalid

    Because it is absolutely vital and imperative to immediately inform everyone they know that there were more red Jujubes in the box than there were orange ones.

  17. 17.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Amir Khalid: I have seen people sitting at the table in the office cafeteria texting like mad. It reminds me of the scene in The Big Bang Theory where Raj and Lucy have their first date and are incapable of speaking to each other, so they have a text date. It’s the next dimension of phone sex, I guess.

  18. 18.

    gogol's wife

    @David Koch:

    It’s pretty sick that that story is in the “most important” position on the front page, next to a picture of weeping refugees. A perfect distillation of their moral universe.

  19. 19.

    Sondra

    @Amir Khalid:
    Exactly. I thought all of those things are what the phone was supposed to do. So…what? She’s uncomfortable not having her phone glued to her ear?
    Wouldn’t Crazy Glue be cheaper?

  23. 23.

    Frankensteinbeck

    There is a British lord who, while a scientist on paper, is also a crackpot. Is that Lord May? He’s the big name in opposition in the article, so it’s kinda important.

    While I am incredibly leery of recreating the Spanish Flu, the guy who did it makes an awfully good argument. And Sun Pony knows it wouldn’t be the first horribly deadly virus we’ve kept successfully locked up.

  24. 24.

    different-church-lady

    That ring sounds completely stupid, but this week I actually would have found it helpful — I was in a job situation on a noisy location with a new phone, with lots of texts and calls flying about, and I could neither hear the ringer nor feel the vibrations even with the phone in my pocket. And that was a situation where it was perfectly “socially acceptable” to be using a phone.

    Not that I got a spare $150 bucks lying around…

  25. 25.

    different-church-lady

    @Amir Khalid: Here’s what I don’t get: who has enough money nowadays to pay $12 for a movie ticket and then not pay any attention to the movie?

  26. 26.

    Comrade Dread

    We’re really going to, uh, ‘book of Revelation’ ourselves one day and do something stupid that will kill off 5/6ths of us, aren’t we?

  29. 29.

    someofparts

    You know, there actually is an old episode of Big Bang Theory that aired this week where one of the guys falls into a relationship with the female voice recognition software on his smart phone.

  30. 30.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @jayjaybear:
    Yep! I think you’re right. It looks like Lord May is a pretty respected and knowledgeable guy, so that is significant. I’m not sure if I agree with him here – I’m very ambivalent – but I’ll take his word as an expert seriously.

  31. 31.

    Ruckus

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    Boss once observed me turning off my company cell as I was leaving work. Told me I had to leave it on 24 hrs a day in case someone needed me. Told him that if I was that necessary and I had to be available 24/7 they would have to triple my pay. He did not appreciate this. I still left with my phone turned off.

  32. 32.

    Mnemosyne

    @Off-White Tower:

    The most horrifying part was that the guy was released a second time without a 12-hour hold. WTF? I could see the first one being the judge’s mistake, but who the heck was the second judge who decided, Well, last time he attacked his girlfriend again immediately after being released, but I’m sure that won’t happen this time.

  34. 34.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    The Stand is supposed to be a work of fiction, not a fucking “how-to” manual.

  37. 37.

    Thoughtcrime

    @Anoniminous:

    So many great lines:

    Wynn Quantrill: We’ve both done weekend picketing.

    [quietly]

    Wynn Quantrill: As a matter of fact, we sponsored the Negro doctor and his wife when they moved into the development.

    Dr. Sidney Schaefer: Well, the President will be very pleased to hear that.

    Wynn Quantrill: That’s great. If I do say so, it took a little courage. The Bullocks next door? Real right-wingers. American flag up every day. Real fascists. Ought to be gassed. You know the type.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062153/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu

  38. 38.

    StringOnAStick

    A killer flu pandemic is every microbiologist’s worse nightmare, and based on the typical time span between them, we’re due for a big one, so I can understand why they want to recreate this virus for study purposes. Though it does give me pause, but we’ve managed to keep small pox on ice so far (crosses fingers). Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-History/dp/0143036491/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1402593773&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Spanish+Flu An excellent book, very well researched. One thing that struck me as I read it is that it is almost like this world-wide pandemic has been wiped from popular consciousness; I rarely see it mentioned even when discussing WWI or what an authoritarian prick Pres. Wilson was. I suspect because it was such a terrifying time, those that survived it never wanted to talk about it so the memory wasn’t passed on.

    One of the points at the end of this book is that it was only relatively recently that they found some blood samples from this pandemic and were able to correctly ID the strain of flu virus responsible for killing what was then 3 to 5% of the world’s entire population, 50 to 100 million people. It is from the H1N1 strain, so when one of those shows up, the CDC gets very anxious. It killed mostly those in the prime of life, simply because at age 21 your immune system is about as strong as it will ever be, and their body’s defensive response did so much damage that it killed them. Certain cells from your immune system “tag” infectious cells for destruction by other immune system cells, which do so by various means, but the released nasties from the process also destroy some of your normal healthy tissue, so in a normal situation the body rebuilds what inadvertently got destroyed. With this flu in those young people, the tagging system ran out of control and the destruction from hypervigilant immune system destroyed so much tissue (lining of the lungs, for one) that people died, horribly. Moving around soldiers and the associated crowding is why it raged through the ranks of the armed forces, starting apparently in Kansas and spreading with the recruits as they were mustered and sent overseas. Young kids with immature immune systems got sick, but usually didn’t die; those over age 50 had been exposed to a milder form of H1N1 flu when they were younger and had some immunity, plus their immune systems were weaker too. Flu usually kills young kids and older, medically compromised adults, but the Spanish Flu of 1918 didn’t, and may have played a large role in ending WWI.

  40. 40.

    C.V. Danes

    If info is coming in, the ring will vibrate and flash a tiny light, so the wearer can be aware of communication without sacrificing social etiquette or style…

    Yes, because nothing sacrifices social etiquette or style like a nagging little voice in your head wondering what that message was that just vibrated your finger…

    I seriously wonder what the world might be like if some Apple virus all of a sudden took every iPhone off line for a couple of days. How would people endure the horror?

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