L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

I worry that when people hear "defund the police," they understand that to mean sending police out to do the same work, only with fewer resources. If defunding means shifting some of the work to other, unarmed professions, then maybe we should be saying "distribute and defund."

("Abolish the police" is, of course, a different order of demand.)

To help protestors arrested in Atlanta, you can donate to http://atlsolidarity.org/

Haymarket Books has made the Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? ebook free to download through June 15th. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/952-who-do-you-serve-who-do-you-protect?discount_code=WHODOYOUSERVE

One very subtle dark pattern Google uses is when you end a Hangouts call, there's no option to log out. You have to navigate back to the Hangouts start page to sign out.

Time Dilation Status Report 27052020:
The days are absurdly long. The months, however, are ridiculously short.

Didn't realize "power ambient" was a thing, but if this is what it sounds like, I'm into it: https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/power-ambient-list

Some notes on that chart:

• The figure to focus on is the 7-day moving average, marked in orange.

• That last section is the 14-day window — the period during which data is most in flux — so points in the last two weeks are subject to go up. Unless there are major errors, they rarely go back down.

• Don't be fooled by the plunge in the last 7-8 days. Those points are built on relatively little data and will almost certainly increase as they get closer to the 14 day mark.

Just fair warning to anyone who might be affected by it: Things are about to take a turn for the worse in Georgia — and likely the South as a whole. Gov. Kemp is talking about rolling back more restrictions: https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/georgia-governor-aims-roll-back-more-coronavirus-restrictions/9jhXLWGJIbeu2I5en3yD7L/

This comes just as Georgia's own Dept. of Public Health shows that the rate of infections has been rising the past few weeks, after a period of decline.

Stay safe out there.

Crunch-time decision-making gets easier when you push as many decisions as possible up the timeline. If you shop for vegetables by just buying whatever is in season and looks freshest, then the night-to-night decision of what to make for dinner becomes much more straightforward — a matter of how to combine what you have, and what spices or sauce will do the melding.

Intriguing suggestion about one possible inspiration for the name Chthulhu from Proto-Semitic language primers: https://lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-etymology-of-cthulhu.html

For ages, my approach to reading nonfiction has been very detail-oriented, sifting large texts for valuable minutiae germane to any one of a few dozen interests I'm tracking. Now I'm trying to incorporate a more holistic approach, mapping the broad strokes of each book to form a more durable understanding of the author's argument — on the assumption that a broad understanding will allow me to return to the text and track down the details as needed.

This is wild stuff. #theStudio https://eivindopsvik.bandcamp.com/album/overseas-live-2002-2012

If a system like this were really going to promote better engagement, though, I think replies to (and quote posts of) your own posts would have to be excluded from your reserve. Otherwise, people would just build up their reserve by boosting people who've agreed with or said nice things about them. Those would need to be reserve-neutral.

Quote posts would be allowed, but count against your reserve of posts without increasing it. You want to spend a post snarking on some troll, that's fine, but you're going to have to balance it by boosting a post sans commentary.