kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

In the UK this was symbolised by nationwide firefighters (!) strikes over salary rises where they actually were not putting down fires. One of the largest was 1977 fire in St Andrew's Hospital.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/14/newsid_3154000/3154632.stm

This event inspired Anthony Burgess to write "1985" novel. A situation like this - a strike of essential life-saving emergency services - is hard to imagine in any civilised country simply because it results in loss of life.

20th century witnessed rise of trade unions to protect labour rights, but it didn't stop there. What we actually saw truly dialectical transformation of unions from workers oppressed by elites abusing their economic power to the ones who actually were oppressing others using *their* economic position.

Peter Turchin explains the social-economic roots of UK and US crisis by violation of the existing social contract by rise of neoliberalism. This is pretty much what happened... but it's only half of the picture.

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-structural-demographic-roots-of-the-uk-crisis/

"Backsliding:Democratic Regress in theContemporary World", Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman

https://www.cambridge.org/files/4616/1281/1201/backsliding_appendix_corrected_feb2021-1.pdf

The reason why Homo sapiens chooses to believe random influencers and celebrities rather than scientists are wired in our brains but with a bit of training this can be fixed.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180709-our-ability-to-stand-up-to-authority-comes-down-to-the-brain

"In our world, instead of helping, people make videos of everything. I don't understand it"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56045561

EU’s refusal to permit #gmo crops led to millions of tonnes of additional CO2

🤷‍♂️ 🍀

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/02/eus-refusal-to-permit-gmo-crops-led-to-millions-of-tonnes-of-additional-co2-scientists-reveal/

If you're confused too, don't be like #facebook - watch my video from OWASP AppSec 2018 where I went into details how these two are different:

https://scitech.video/videos/watch/38bc6082-c97a-4422-bbb5-5a96d94f8603

What they dump is *binary* representation of UTF-8 *encoded* Unicode character U+105 (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH OGONEK) but with \u prefix that confuses decoder into thinking it's *two* Unicode character with code points U+C4 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS) U+85 (NEXT LINE).

They totally confused the concepts of Unicode *codepoint* (the number of a character in the Unicode catalogue), and character *encoding* (one of possible binary representations of the character).

#facebook 🤦‍♂️ When you dump your data prior to deleting your account, you get a nicely looking ZIP with JSON, JPG, MP4 etc.

I've started importing that into ElasticSearch so that all the valuable 10 years old arguments aren't lost etc etc.

This is a fragment of text in Polish taken from the dump (JSON-encoded Unicode):

nios\u00c4\u0085 za sob\u00c4\u0085

Comes out, Facebook screwed up character encodings in their internal representation 🤦‍♂️