NFT royalty fees dropped by OpenSea
Who could have seen this coming?!
One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore. OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips.
(via JK)-
I’d never heard of this before, but it makes a lot of sense: “In 1977, two planes collided above a runway on the island of Tenerife. A handful of passengers climbed out of the ruptured hull. Everyone else burned. It wasn’t because they were injured. They were all wide awake. They just couldn’t get moving. They didn’t want to panic.” “Large groups of people facing death act in surprising ways. Most of us become incredibly docile … Usually, we form groups and move slowly, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare.” In short, we don’t panic. We chill way out. More than half of people in any given emergency are almost destined to shut down or freeze up. Even if they can function, they’ll spend precious time gossiping with each other and trying to get more information before they even try to do anything.” (This latter phenomenon is apparently called “milling”.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias : “Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings.[1] Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects.[2] The normalcy bias causes many people to not adequately prepare for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 80% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.[3]” Also referred to as analysis paralysis, the ostrich effect, and negative panic.
(tags: milling analysis-paralysis ostrich-effect negative-panic normalcy-bias biases psychology crises normalcy panic disasters cognitive-biases)
Scientists Witnessed The Birth Of A New Accent In Antarctica
Over the course of the stay, the researchers noticed significant changes in the [winter-overs’] accents. One of the main shifts was how the study group started pronouncing their words with longer vowels. Furthermore, there was evidence of linguistic innovation in the group. Towards the end of their stay in Antarctica, the residents were pronouncing “ou” sounds – like those found in the words “flow” and “disco” – from the front of their mouth, as opposed to the back of their throats. […] “The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable,” Jonathan Harrington, study author and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, told IFLScience. “It’s mostly an amalgamation of some aspects of the spoken accents of the winterers before they went to Antarctica, together with an innovation,” added Harrington. “It’s far more embryonic [than conventional English accents] given that it had only a short time to develop and also, of course, because it’s only distributed across a small group of speakers.”
(via Sean Michaels)(tags: accents antarctica language science)
The Culture War Funded by Russian Roubles
Between 2009-18, anti-gender actors from within the European Union, Russia and the US have spent at least $707.2 million in Europe, with the Russian Federation making up 26.6% of that spend, according to research published by the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights. As reported in this paper, the two main Russian funders of anti-gender disinformation are Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeyev – oligarchs sanctioned for their alleged involvement in the annexation of Crimea, after Russia’s 2014 invasion. Their roubles have mingled with US dollars at the World Congress of Families; with Euros at the Novae Terra Foundation, and La Manif Pour Les Tous; and British pounds at Agenda Europe – in 2013, the assets manager of banker Sir Michael Hintze attended the network’s London summit, the following year Malofeyev’s man in Europe, Alexey Komov, was on the guest list. The campaigns and individuals funded by this wealth have regularly spread anti-abortion, anti-LGBTIQ disinformation, including that abortion is “Satanic” and that there’s a “homosexual agenda” which wants to make children “sex education propagandists in the EU”. They also spread anti-trans rhetoric.
(tags: russia politics terfs gender lgbtqi abortion europe eu trans-rights)