Link Roundup November 2021

Crypto Investors Are Bidding to Touch a 1,784-Pound Tungsten Cube Once a Year

Over the past two weeks, a joke fired off by Coin Center's Neeraj Agrawal about a nonexistent tungsten shortage thanks to crypto traders buying cubes of tungsten due to a meme actually caused one for Midwest Tungsten Service. The Illinois manufacturer actually creates small cubes of tungsten, and the tweet caused a 300 percent increase in sales that depleted the company’s stock on Amazon, Coindesk reported.

Eye-Scanning Silver Orb Cryptocurrency Launches With $1 Billion Valuation

Over the summer, the world learned that tech investor Sam Altman was plotting to co-found a new startup that struck many as dystopian, albeit light on details: a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin that is distributed by scanning people's eyeballs with an inscrutable silver orb. On Thursday, Altman fully revealed Worldcoin and the mysterious orb to the world with a new website and callout for staffing opportunities. The project's website lays out the vision for Worldcoin, and it seems rather immense, including a plan to mass produce tens of thousands of Orbs operated by eye-scanning entrepreneurs and "billions" of users.

Ministry of Violence

Reading these books felt ghastly. The pit in my stomach deepened as I read descriptions of children as tyrants, anarchists, belligerents and hardened revolutionaries. There seemed a sense of palpable disgust, even rage, towards children. In Dobson’s The Strong-Willed Child, he urges parents to conquer the “willful, haughty spirit and determination to disobey” of their kids: “The child has made it clear that he’s looking for a fight, and his parents would be wise not to disappoint him!” Both Dobson and the Pearls aver that children who cry too hard after spankings are being manipulative, and should be spanked again, to silence their tears.

Spanking Is Great for Sex

So I have a question: If it’s “somewhat pedophilic” when my adult husband consensually spanks me in a simulated “punishment,” what should we call it when parents do the same physical thing to actual children in an actual punishment?

New York City taxi drivers end hunger strike after reaching deal on debt relief

The crisis in the city’s famed yellow cab industry began with the tin plate required to operate a yellow cab, otherwise known as a taxi medallion. The reasons for the large debt owed by taxi drivers are a lack of regulation by New York City, which allowed the price of the medallion to be artificially inflated (once to the point of $1m), and predatory lenders that targeted the taxi workforce, which is made up of many people of color in a sector long seen as a path to the middle class for immigrants. The city was complicit in marketing the medallion as “better than a stock” and a pathway to the American dream, leading taxi drivers to believe a medallion was an investment worthy of risking all they hold dear. The substantial debt eventually drove some drivers to suicide.

After a Two-Week-Long Hunger Strike, Scenes of Celebration and Relief Among NYC Taxi Drivers

Horns honked, NYTWA banners waved, and ashen-faced drivers days or weeks into their respective hunger strikes embraced as people from neighboring office buildings came out to watch the spectacle. New York assemblymembers Yuh-Line Niou and Zohran Mamdani addressed the crowd via microphone. “This is just the beginning of solidarity. We are going to fight together until there is nothing left in this world to win,” Mamdani said, betraying little sign that he was on the 15th day of his own hunger strike.

‘We’re Preparing For a Long Battle.’ Librarians Grapple With Conservatives’ Latest Efforts to Ban Books

“What you can see with book bannings is that they are tied to whatever is causing anxiety in society,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America. Since the beginning of 2021, conservative advocacy groups have been spreading misinformation about critical race theory—which has become a catch-all term for the history of racism—and working to help parents run for school boards and challenge their schools districts over lesson plans or reading materials they feel are inappropriate. At least 28 states have proposed or taken actions designed to restrict how teachers discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week.

Workers at Paizo unionize, a first for the tabletop role-playing game industry

Workers at Paizo, publisher of the Pathfinder and Starfinder tabletop role-playing games, have formed a union. United Paizo Workers (UPW) was created with the help of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which has been working these last few years to organize labor in the video game industry. This represents a first for the tabletop role-playing sector, which is currently not served by organized labor in any major way.

Wet'suwet'en clan members say they are enforcing eviction of Coastal GasLink from territories

An eviction notice was originally issued on Jan. 4, 2020 by hereditary chiefs of all five clans of the Wet'suwet'en Nation. RCMP arrested 28 people in the month following the eviction notice for blocking CGL access to the territory.

The bold new plan for an Indigenous-led development in Vancouver

In an internal referendum on Tuesday, 87% of voting Squamish Nation members approved the construction here of what may become the most dramatic statement of urban Indigenous presence in any Canadian city – a new district called Senakw, after the long-displaced village, with 11 towers, 6,000 dwelling units and more than 10,000 residents.

The Cops Who Touched Fentanyl

Dan: A man who I talked to for my article, Douglas Hexel, is a firefighter in New York who runs a company called Rescue Med NY that runs seminars for first responders and teaches them the actual dangers of being around drugs, but basically what it seems like he does is try to stop first responders from having panic attacks on the job because of this misinformation. He is the one who told me that no one he’d ever talked to has said that they’ve had a euphoric high before experiencing it.

Discord fans are worried NFTs might be on the way

The image is from a now-expired survey that was distributed in August of this year. Among questions about the participant’s knowledge of NFTs and whatever the hell Web3 means, the survey asks open-ended questions about their favorite crypto Discord communities and what, if any, crypto-related problems Discord could potentially solve. According to a Discord spokesperson, the survey was only a fact-finding endeavor targeted specifically toward users active in cryptocurrency communities on Discord.