Linkage

This is England. Heartbreaking.

This week NHS England released their new guidance and every news outlet announced in bold letters, with the BBC putting it on their front page, that transgender women are to be barred from female hospital wards. Trans guys are banned from male wards, too, but they are invisibilised in the narrative, trans women are the ‘danger’, and so we’re the focus.

I have Multiple Sclerosis and so I need to use hospitals from time to time. I haven’t stayed in hospital in the last 10 years, but the time is coming. Now the guidance suggests staff will endeavour to put me in a side room, but who are we kidding the NHS isn’t the Tardis and isn’t replete with rooms they aren’t using for people who need them, and so I will be placed on a men’s ward. Every examination, every time I need to get up to use the toilet, every urgent response to my needs, will all be in a room full of men.

And of course, being placed on that ward reveals our transgender status to everyone. This woman, who most people think of as just another girl in the street, is going to have her gender history revealed to all who see her while in her most vulnerable state.

I can feel it already. The part of me so desperate to be realised in this world tugs at me, scared that we’ll go back, that we’ll put ourselves in the horrifying situation where we’re thought of as a man once more. I felt it when we fell off the Rocinante, our manual wheelchair, splayed out in the road surrounded by good, concerned people who saw this woman in need and stopped to help, asking urgently whether I needed an ambulance. I felt that pull to minimise the symptoms, to tell them I was ok, unsure of how much my appraisal of the seriousness of my injuries was being shaped by my fear of what would happen if I went to hospital.

Bookmarking because I am not a political optimist.

HRT Mom is a website dedicated to science-based, and lab tested methodology for homebrewing HRT. While there is much speculation as to how to best make HRT for injections at home, HRT Mom sticks just to the facts and avoids making assertions based on popular opinion or what feels most convenient.

I have spent over a thousand hours pouring over lab manuals, compounding manuals, USP guidelines, research papers, consulting with professional scientists, working in my home lab, injecting what I create, and writing reports on all the information I learn. All of this work is solely to bring you this guide. I’ve additionally invested thousands of dollars into equipment and experimentation to help work out the kinks in my lab. Up until recently brewing HRT at home has been a task of approximation. People share and publish guides and info on how compound HRT but they never fully understand what it is that they’re writing about. This website changes that. All information that is shared here is based on empirically validated research and its resulting logic. Any claim that cannot be backed up is flagged as an opinion of the author.

"Affordable" housing deja vu:

It was spruiked as a scheme to allow low and middle-income earners to purchase their first home in Canberra, but almost five years after signing on, some participants are yet to move in.

Instead, some buyers say they have been left stranded as they grapple with incomplete works while locked in contractual disputes with the builder.

[…]

Last month, Ms Lawther brought an independent assessor to her practical completion inspection, resulting in them both being told to leave the property due to unauthorised access.

In a subsequent email, the builder advised independent inspectors would not be allowed on site prior to handover because the homes had already been inspected and passed by the certifier.

[…]

Earlier in the process, buyers said they were shocked to discover their homes had not been built from brick, despite it being the only external material on the inclusions list.

Instead, the Suburban Land Agency endorsed the use of foam cladding, but admitted the builder had failed to properly communicate the change with the buyers. 

Well, this is good news for the current account balance:

Independent satellite monitoring has detected massive plumes of methane emerging from one of Australia's largest oil and gas complexes.

The persistent clouds above Chevron's Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Barrow Island off Western Australia's Pilbara coast were picked up by five consecutive passes of the Tanager-1 satellite since November last year.

The most recent, in late August, recorded an average emission rate of about 7.8 tonnes of methane an hour.

That is the equivalent of burning more than 110,000 kilograms of coal within a span of 60 minutes, calculated using an online tool by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The repeated detections, the latest far exceeding a "super emitter" event under US EPA guidelines, prompted a United Nations (UN) warning to Chevron.

According to the UN, methane is responsible for about 25 per cent of global warming and is a greenhouse gas 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide

I have lost count of how many times I’ve left work over the past five years only to realize one push notification later that I had more rights in the morning than I did in the afternoon. The week after Trump’s passport executive order, I kept forgetting to breathe. While social media swirled with speculation about what this was meant to distract the public away from, visions of a grim future unspooled in my head. When it feels like your world is ending and the most people can be bothered to say about it is that something actually important must be happening somewhere else, the clear message is that what is happening to you is a second-tier issue—that you don’t really count.

The distraction discourse also doesn’t account for what happens when politicians supposedly on the “good” side embrace bigotry themselves. Is the response to, say, the recent decision by South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews to release an anti-trans ad to dismiss it as a distraction—or to ignore it entirely? This wasn’t just a rhetorical shift. This was an otherwise progressive politician being dragged into the realm of authoritarian prejudice—the kind of choice that has potentially life-altering consequences for those of us who live here under the bus. Shouldn’t that matter?

Beautifully clear statement of principle by Erin:

Equality organizations exist to promote equality positions, and candidates that receive endorsements gain the prestige (and sometimes the resources) that are going out to these organizations meant to protect LGBTQ+ rights. As a result, supporters of these organizations now have to contend with the fact that some of their support is going towards helping elect candidates that call trans girls “boys” and actively vote for anti-trans policies. That may be a hard pill to swallow for the millions of trans Americans who are concerned about recession of their rights.

An alternate path does exist: putting significant pressure on Democrats who have embraced anti-trans positions not to do so, and withholding or withdrawing endorsements when they do. If equality organizations are not willing to do this, they risk having their goals co-opted and becoming merely another branch of the Democratic Party, rather than independent organizations willing to advocate for the rights of transgender people and to award their endorsements and grades only to those who meet the mark. It is the path many reproductive rights organizations have taken in refusing to endorse anti-abortion Democrats.

The Democratic Party and Democratic officials are under heavy pressure from paid consultants to adopt more anti-transgender positions and policies. Should Democrats embrace those policies and win, the wins will be presented as evidence that abandoning transgender people is what it takes to win elections, and the contagion will spread through the party. And right now there is nothing to stop it. A Democrat can take an anti-trans vote or make an anti-trans statement before an endorsement and receive it anyway, or after an endorsement and keep it. The blessing of the organizations built to defend LGBTQ+ people has become something a candidate can simply take for granted. What remains unknown is how far one would have to go to lose it. Meanwhile, transgender people will keep being cut out of the calculus in favor of candidates who throw them under the bus, with the endorsements of their own movement in hand.

When federal energy minister Chris Bowen announced last November that all electricity companies in NSW, South Australia and South-East Queensland would – from July 1 – be forced by law to offer three free hours of electricity between 11am and 2pm through his Solar Sharer scheme, it seemed a top idea.

It would encourage people to use power between these hours, soaking up that solar power and so cutting demand later in the day when prices are higher. This would also enable households without solar, especially tenants and apartment dwellers, to share in the benefits of the energy transition to renewables.

The electricity market is dominated by the big three retailers: AGL, Energy Australia and Origin. They all own big power stations, too, so they are also generators. Because of this they are often referred to as “gentailers”.

I reviewed multiple pricing schedules on the government’s Energy Made Easy website and it’s now clear that Solar Sharer pricing has the highest cost for a household of all pricing schedules on offer.

The electricity retailers have increased the price of electricity outside the free three hours of Solar Sharer, plus they’ve increased the daily supply charge above the supply charge in their other pricing offers. 

Brilliant:

This seems like a reasonable explanation. "Aesthetics and judgement"... coming from "experience and intuition". Okay, interesting.

But where does taste come from? Every now and then there's a famous Rick Rubin or (sigh) Steve Jobs type character, who is a non-practitioner who undoubtedly does move mountains around their sense of taste, and so I think lots of people are hoping they can rely on maybe being such an exceptional figure themselves.

But it's important to realize that in the case of Rick Rubin or Steve Jobs, these are people who had strong taste who were also in positions of power and themselves were curating practitioners who themselves had exceptional taste. Which means that in order to produce something interesting and exceptional, they were curating practitioners who operated away from the averages who did the actual work.

But if your practitioner is an LLM, then you're not a Steve Jobs or a Rick Rubin. Your practitioner is the averages.

So you'd better have exceptional taste yourself, and here's the thing: ultimately, taste in terms of practice has to come from doing the practice yourself, and trying and failing and thinking something will be interesting and then you find you actually don't like it, or you try something and you end up having a wonderful accident or make up for some sort of thing that you're not good at, and that becomes your style, and your style defines the taste and preferences that you shape around it.

So... I'm afraid that to develop taste, you're going to need to spend a lot of time not using generative AI to develop it. Which a lot of people are finding themselves having a hard time motivating themselves to do.

The other bit of background worth understanding here is that Meta has been desperately seeking a path to regulatory capture for quite some time now. It’s been practically begging for Congress to pass child safety legislation that only the largest companies (like itself) could comply with. Indeed, Meta has done this before. It went against the rest of the internet industry in embracing FOSTA, again to try to create a regulatory moat. So this shouldn’t be surprising.

Meta’s failed forays into the “metaverse” and AI have shown that it’s been pretty consistently losing the innovation race, and the government granting it a regulatory moat that smaller competitors can’t cross would be a godsend.

And it’s even better when it can be done in a way that looks like Meta “losing” a lawsuit.

So that’s what Meta gets here. They “settle” the lawsuit so the AGs and Meta haters can all claim that they’ve “protected the children.” Meta pays out over a decade — enough that it’s taking a $10 billion legal charge in Q3, which stings for a bit but will mostly be forgotten by next year. Meta can easily eat the cost. And then Meta agrees to implement a bunch of kid safety features, most of which we have no idea whether they actually protect any kids. Notably, a legislature could not have mandated most of these features without running straight into the First Amendment — but coming out of a settlement, they carry the imprimatur of law anyway (more on that in a moment), and the structure of the agreement makes it so that Meta has to actively encourage Google and TikTok to take identical steps, thereby setting in concrete what steps any platform will have to take to be considered following “best practices” and therefore acceptable to most of the country’s Attorneys General.

[…]

You can argue that these feature changes sound like they should help kids. Limiting access to two hours a day (unless parents grant more, which many will), lights out at midnight, disappearing like counts — these all sound like they’ll help some kids. But if it turns out that locking kids out of these systems actually pushes the most vulnerable ones to darker places with no trust & safety team at all, you won’t hear about that from Meta or the AGs.

We just spent three years teaching the entire industry that if you do research on child safety, you’ll have it held against you. Do we really think that all of this is going to actually enable anyone to figure out what works to help actual kids?

Meta bought itself a moat. The AGs bought themselves headlines that will be useful next election season. And every teenager in the country was just automatically enrolled in an untested experiment. There’s a five year independent auditor requirement to confirm that Meta follows the rules. But not to see if the rules work.

An investigation by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) has found an "alarming lack of transparency" from major government contractors operating inside the privatised employment services system.

It has also raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest arising from for-profit companies in the system making large donations to Australia's major political parties.

[…]

It shows how for-profit "employment services providers" can use aggressive tax minimisation, large dividend payouts, offshore-related party payments, tax havens, and opaque financial reporting to extract profits from the system, without breaking any laws.

And it questions if the system is meeting the public's expectations.

"It's no secret that Australia's system of privatised employment services has failed," the report argues.

"The Howard-era system fills the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work."