Linkage

“The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.

But even among corporations that were sure in their preparations, there was sufficient doubt to hold off on declaring victory prematurely. The former IT director of a grocery chain recalls executives’ reticence to publicize their efforts for fear of embarrassing headlines about nationwide cash register outages. As Saffo notes, “better to be an anonymous success than a public failure.”

After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision — as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. It was called a big hoax; the effort to fix it a waste of time.

Justifiable cynicism is one thing. This is absolute hopelessness. It's not apathy; it's anger and despair.

On Friday, December 29, Ohio governor Mike DeWine announced a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors as well as new restrictions on clinics providing gender-affirming care to adults. But you wouldn’t know it from the headlines, most of which simply describe Gov. DeWine’s veto of HB 68 as a victory for trans youth.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has agreed to settle a $5 billion privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the "incognito" mode in its Chrome browser — along with similar "private" modes in other browsers — to track their internet use.

The class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 said Google misled users into believing that it wouldn't track their internet activities while using incognito mode. It argued that Google's advertising technologies and other techniques continued to catalog details of users' site visits and activities despite their use of supposedly "private" browsing.

The ‘Tragedy of Commons’ thesis, and the ways in which it is accepted as ‘common sense’, has been wildly successful at obscuring what we are actually experiencing: a Tragedy of the Non-Commons. Non-common governance and inequalities are at the heart of the climate and ecological crises.

Has your washing machine broken down, or is your electric kettle, laptop or mobile phone refusing to work?

Well if you live in Austria, the government will pay up to €200 ($219; £173) towards getting it repaired.

The Repair Bonus voucher scheme is aimed at trying to get people to move away from throwing away old electrical appliances - and focusing on getting things mended.

Erik's laptop is broken, so he has come to Helferline, a computer and mobile phone repair workshop in Vienna. Because of Austria's Repair Voucher scheme, he will only have to pay 50% of the repair costs to get it fixed. 

A recent judgement on copyright in the Court of Appeal (20 November) heralds the end of UK museums charging fees to reproduce historic artworks. In fact, it suggests museums have been mis-selling “image licences” for over a decade. For those of us who have been campaigning on the issue for years, it is the news we’ve been waiting for.

The judgement is important because it confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.

The success of the program has other Canadian cities looking to emulate it and generated international attention for its boldness.

But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it's seen (it isn't easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built. For example: What are they going to do there?

[…] 

Paul Fairie, the principal co-ordinator of the Downtown Core Neighbourhood Association, also thinks something needs to be done about the big, empty east-west avenues, particularly on the weekends.

"You wind up walking one or two blocks in a row with literally nothing. You're just walking in this ambiguous, empty space," Fairie said.

But as a downtown resident for 14 years, he says the items at the top of his wish list are what he calls "the boring things."

Things like grocery stores, inexpensive restaurants and coffee shops that stay open after 6 p.m.

"A big misconception is, they think, you live downtown, you're living this sort of glamorous, exotic, party-oriented lifestyle. No. I'm just living in an apartment. It's a relatively normal life and the more we can do to facilitate that, I think, the better," he said.

The French city of Montpellier in southern France became the latest European metropolis to allow all its residents to ride public transport for free.

The entire European country of Luxembourg including its capital of the same name scrapped fares in 2020, after Estonia’s capital Tallinn introduced the policy in 2013.

From Thursday evening, Montpellier residents with a special pass were able to ride trams and buses free of charge in the southern city.

Visitors and tourists will still have to pay 1.60 euro ($1.70) a trip.

Michael Delafosse, the Socialist mayor of the city of 500,000 people, promised free public transport when he was elected in 2020.

The study, released as a preprint in the Social Science Research Network, looked at over 7,500 legal gender changes and dysphoria diagnoses in Sweden and determined that the rates “peaked in 2018, with no evidence of further increases” and have since stabilized. This is also reflected in the Youth Risk Behavior Social Survey showing a modest decrease in trans identification after 2018 in the United States. The rates of transgender identification no longer see to be “exploding exponentially,” despite what anti-trans activists claim.

The leveling off is significant because it closely mirrors another major event where another once-discouraged trait became slowly accepted by society: left-handedness. In the early 1900s, the rates of left-handedness hovered between 3-4%. Left-handedness rates then “skyrocketed” to 12% where it has leveled off ever since. This was, of course, not caused by a “massive social contagion” of left-handedness. Rather, increases in acceptance led to people feeling comfortable using their left hand.