Afternoon Tea 3.22.2021 - Fish Laundering

Fish fraud is a thing, as are effects our anti-China foreign policy have on anti-Asian violence, Trump’s wax face keeps getting punched. It’s Monday, March 22nd 2021, and this is the Tea.

Tussaud’s Waxworks in San Antonio removes Trump figure because people keep punching it (San Antonio Current) This story dropped last week, but I knew it would be needed today. Enjoy being the most punchable presidential face in American history, you varsity jackass.

Revealed: seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale (The Guardian) 40% of over 9000 fish & fish adjacent items in restaurants, fish markets, and from fish wholesalers directly, flatly mislabeled. The new concept I learned from this is “fish laundering” where illegally caught fish are funneled into traditional markets. 8-14m tonnes of fish are “laundered” annually, which is the equivalent of 15-20 million cows just vanishing and appearing on your plate somehow.

Our Anti-China foreign policy is fueling violence against Asians (Responsible Statecraft) & China’s Neighbors Are Stronger Than We Think (Foreign Policy) It’s not just Trump and your friend from HS who keeps using Kung Flu making it hard out there. We had Pompeo, international relations “Realists,” and even liberal Dems pounding the table for reprecussions and faffing about, bloviating that we need to enhance our war stance or what have you. That ends up with American citizens getting hurt.

The uneasy intimacy of work in a pandemic year (Vox) Depressingly insightful read about how working remotely has stripped away many of the last boundaries between work and life we used to have.

How a Sham Candidate Helped Flip a Florida Election (NY Times) I really have no idea what the new normal is going to look like given shit like this.

Cars Have Your Location. This Spy Firm Wants To Sell It to the US Military (Motherboard) Eventually, they won’t ask human witnesses what they saw. They’ll just query all of the robot-driven cars and get their data streams.

India’s Move to Deter Digital Monopolies May Hit Amazon, Walmart (Bloomberg) & In a First, Uber Agrees to Classify British Drivers as ‘Workers’ (NY Times) & Apple just gave Russia a spot on the iPhone to advertise its favorite apps to its citizens (The verge) & Tech giants in China are developing ways to bypass Apple’s new privacy rules (9to5Mac) & Senator Says Censorship in Turkey Raises “Serious Questions” About Facebook’s Commitment to Free Expression (ProPublica) E-commerce rules in India, Home screen access in Russia, Minimum wage laws in London, bypassing privacy in China, allowing censorship at the behest of autocrats, and this is just what Big Tech has been doing in the last month or two. As nations realize Facebook, Uber, Apple, and others will bend over backwards instead of giving up major growth markets, the experience an average user, buyer, seller, driver, or marketer has on these platforms is going to get very different, very quickly.

Google Chrome’s new Live Caption feature rolls out to transcribe speech in videos (XDA Developers) & Super Resolution (Adobe) & Wrist-based interaction for AR/VR (Tech@Facebook) On the other side of this semi-Balkanization, we have technical advances that was the stuff of dreams, now becoming expected. Adobe’s Super Resolution tool actually “enhances” resolutions using machine learning and big data. The Chrome browser can now add captions (better every year) and auto-translations for video and audio. That’s right, updating the babble fish is someone’s project and day-to-day work responsibility. Facebook is experimenting with using a fitbit style wrist interface to provide functional AR/VR environment assistance.

The New York Times is so done with its 77,000-member Facebook cooking group. What happens now? (Nieman Lab) This is my favorite story of the month. NYTimes has a cooking group that got so big & unwieldy, they threw up their hands and stopped trying to administrate it. I’m serious.

Song of the Tea: Sound Remedy pops his head up every once and a while. This is from so long ago, it might as well be another era of music. Daughter however, remains timeless.

Hug your loved ones. Tell them you love them. Find joy before it’s too late.

Yours,