Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

We still have time to mess this up!

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

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

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

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

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

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Archives for 2014

Long Read: “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”

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Since quite a few of us are loyal Netflix subscribers, thought some of you might find this interesting. In the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal lets his Nerd Flag fly:

If you use Netflix, you’ve probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it’s absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized genres” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix’s algorithm has ever created.

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies…

Netflix cooperated with my quest to understand what they internally call “altgenres,” and made VP of product innovation Todd Yellin, the man who conceived of the system, available for an in-depth interview…

If we reverse engineered Yellin’s system, it was Yellin himself who imagined a much more ambitious reverse-engineering process. Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. “Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want…

I’ve been a customer since March 2003, and I can verify that the ‘suggestions’ system has vastly improved over that period. Because the intersection between Studio Ghibli and BBC police mysteries is not ‘Scooby-Doo’, thank you very much!

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Open Thread: “Republicans Quietly Declare War on Themselves”

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Too much fun not to share. Matt Taibbi:

… The news came in the Wall Street Journal, where the Chamber of Commerce disclosed that it will be teaming up with Republican establishment leaders to spend $50 million in an effort to stem the tide of “fools” who have overwhelmed Republican ballots in recent seasons. Check out the language Chamber strategist Scott Reed used in announcing the new campaign:

Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates… That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.

The blunt choice of words is no accident. All year long, as they’ve crept closer and closer to having to face the reality of a Ted Cruz presidential candidacy in 2016 (with Cruz maybe picking recently-redeemed Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson as his more moderate running mate?), the Beltway’s Republican kingmakers have drifted into ever more alarmist language about the need to change course….

There’s almost no end to the comedy of this story. First of all, there’s the sheer size of the endowment. Fifty million dollars is enough money to fund half a dozen or more Senate campaigns. That the big-business donors who traditionally have funded the Republican Party believe they need to make that kind of monster investment just to keep “fools” from getting on the ballot of a party they basically control is an incredible reflection of the state of things on that side of the political aisle.

Then, of course, there’s the irony. Men like Karl Rove and Dick Armey practically invented the politics of stupid. In fact, they practically invented the politics of winning millions of votes every time some oversexed cosmopolitan liberal of the Matt Damon/Sean Penn genus used words like “dumb” or “stupid” to describe the preoccupations of Middle America’s God-and-guns culture.

To see these same Beltway Svengalis trapped now in this crazy role reversal, denounced by the far right for being the same kind of condescending establishment snot-bags they themselves spent decades trying to find and campaign against – well, that’s just seriously funny.

The situation with Rove is particularly delicious. This is someone who foisted upon the world the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, a man who couldn’t speak English, didn’t read books or newspapers, and won his second term via the political version of an Inspector Clouseau routine, rallying middle America behind an enraged invasion of the wrong country in retaliation for 9/11.

Rove’s sole insight as a political thinker was that if you completely dispense with the patriotic aspects of governing – you know, that whole doing-what’s-right-for-the-country thing – then winning elections is no different than selling cheeseburgers or scoring high sitcom ratings. You give people what they want, and it doesn’t matter if it’s bad for them…

The problem with blowing off the whole governing thing in favor of a decade-plus of cynical pandering and generally treating presidential politics like a fraternity pranking competition is that it eventually comes back to bite you.

If you spend years letting your voters think Saddam Hussein was an agent of al-Qaeda, that passing a national health care program will result in the formation of Stalinist “death panels,” or that Barack Obama is secretly a foreigner, you’re going to end up with some loopy candidates prone to saying crazy things that will turn off voting majorities, which in turn will make it hard to the deliver policy objectives you actually care about for your big-money donors…

I still think the winner of the Fool Vote in 2016’s primaries will be Rick Santorum, though. The GOP id voters may like the idea of a Harvard-edumacated smrt guy like Cruz showin’ all those blue-state elitists up, but when it comes to the crunch, my bet is on the pocket Savonarola and established petty grifter whose response to the President’s call for expanding access to college was “What a snob!”

But on one thing we can, gleefully, agree: There will be fools!
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Assuming it’s not too cold for you Midwesterners to leave your homes (and believe me, you have my sympathy, it’s a balmy 20F here right now), what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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The subtle touch of authority

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John and many others have done an excellent job of skewering Bobo’s anti-pot piece. I’d like to focus on the part that bothers me:

I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Throwing people in jail is just a way of subtly tipping the scales? (And, yes, there are plenty of states where you can be incarcerated for possession of any amount of marijuana.) Perhaps, yes, in a world where bombing countries is a way of subtly tipping the scales.

That’s what’s most terrifying about the modern pundit, the fact that their prudent, civil discourse contains so many euphemisms for mass imprisonment and murder.

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Nom-Nom-Nom

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Living in Florida has its downsides, like giant snakes, mammoth cockroaches and mandatory gun ownership for squirrely girlfriend-abusing-senseless-murder acquittees. But there are good things about it too, like a high of 72 F today and the ubiquity of cheap Caribbean takeout joints, like the one that made my lunch (and snack, and dinner) pictured below:

takeout

What’s your favorite ethnic or otherwise exotic food? Is it available where you live, or do you have to make it yourself or beg others to make it for you?

One of my aunties is Cuban-American, and after building trust with her mother for a decade or so (via flattery and hours of voluntary kitchen labor around holiday times), I finally gained access to some of Abuela’s favorite recipes. It was SO worth it!

Please feel free to discuss whatever.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

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Your daily dose of crazy from ClownHaul:

OMFG baybeeeeeez

Can a democracy function when a large portion of the electorate comprises bug-eyed loons whose sole contribution to debate consists of placing their index finger horizontally between their lips, moving it up and down rapidly and emitting a “beeb-beeb-beeb-beeb!” sound? Yes. Yes, it can. It’s like competing in a 110 meters hurdles event in cement shoes, but it’s possible.

What’s up today? Staying warm?

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Expanding the Horizons, Expanding the Parameters

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In part of my attempts to be more zen like and calm, I am exploring new music, and I’ve been listening a lot lately to the following, expanding the rhymes of this sucka MC amateur. First, the new Latryx album is simply phenomenal, and I bit I have listened to it ten times:

I love their voices. I still think Latyrx, Latryx is amazing. Next, another one I’ve been listening to:

It’s all good, but I like Chain Smoker a lot. And then there is always old school:

I like the feel and sound of these guys. Anything you all have to add that strikes you as comparable to these artists, please do so. I also kind of like Mac Miller and some Drake (which I had never heard before a couple weeks ago).

See- it’s not too late to teach an old dog new tricks.

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Late Night Open Thread

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Why do all these bowl games and the World Series and the March Madness games all have to be so late at night? I mean, if you are trying to cultivate the next generation of audience, shouldn’t your games be at a time that kids will still be up to watch? Makes no sense.

*** Update ***

BTW- I need some new earphones. I had the Bose QuietComforts and they were ok, but felt fragile and eventually died on me. I don’t want to spend a lot of money (I have to buy a fucking car one of these days), but would like an over the ear headphone that is comfortable, provides a good sound, and is somewhat durable.

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