Web Excursions 2022-08-19
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing
A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops.
I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem
Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash,
even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video
It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline
that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.
And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter.
(Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there.
Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)
Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?
Much of Visa and Mastercard’s profits are ultimately driven by the fees that are charged when a shopper uses a credit or debit card to make a purchase.
The eu has capped such fees for credit cards at 0.3% of the transaction value;
intense competition in China means that WeChat and Alipay collect charges of just 0.1%.
In America, debit cards are regulated by the “Durbin amendment”, which gives the Federal Reserve the authority to enforce a cap.
But credit-card fees are unregulated and meatier, usually sitting at about 2% of the transaction and rising to 3.5% for some premium-reward cards.
These fees are set by Mastercard and Visa, but collected by banks, which take a slice and use them to fund perks, such as insurance and air miles, to entice customers.
For the right to use the card networks’ transaction-processing services, banks hand over enormous fees.
The result is that consumers pay through the nose for their perks while remaining largely oblivious.
According to a paper published last year by Joanna Stavins of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and colleagues, retailers raise prices at the tills by 1.4%, passing interchange costs on to households.
On July 28th Richard Durbin, the same Democratic senator who regulated debit interchange a decade ago, introduced the Credit Card Competition Act (ccc).
It does not propose a cap on interchange, as the debit rule does, since costs for credit cards are more variable than for debit cards, making it harder to find the right level.
Instead, the ccc would attempt to spur competition by breaking the links between card networks and banks.
At present, when a bank issues a credit card every transaction on it is processed by the card network the bank stipulates, meaning the bank is guaranteed the interchange fee the network sets.
If the ccc becomes law it will force banks to offer merchants the choice of at least two different card networks.
Crucially, these choices could not be the two biggest—at least one smaller network would have to be offered.
The credit-card firms defend the existing system, arguing that consumers and merchants derive value from it, because it helps guarantee payments for merchants and protect consumers against fraud.
Thus shoppers have more purchasing power than would otherwise have been the case.
I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism’s Extremes
If a silent, 857-hour movie with no recognizable plot or characters can’t do a little harrowing, what can?
My original goal was to live-tweet the viewing experience, but that didn’t quite pan out.
Attempting to watch Logistics as a movie is nearly impossible, as it’s more of a commitment than a film.
I needed to integrate Logistics into how I lived.
Logistics is meant to be absorbed as an art installation, so why not install myself into it?
From that moment on, Logistics became more of a job than my job.
Each morning, I would roll out of bed, grab my tablet and clock in for my shift watching Logistics.
It was on, in front of my eyes, while I worked, ate and lived.
Logistics merged into my being, my life.
The film, in the words of its creators, strives to convey “in the most direct manner possible” the sheer slowness of physical freight that undergirds our ostensibly lightning fast, digital reality.
It’s the inhuman watch time that makes Logistics truly sing.
This is no trite documentary about oceanic commerce, no scold’s warning about the consumer’s responsibility for ethical shipping.
It’s an attempt to encounter the thing itself.
The scale of human effort needed for such an effort is often reported in easily digestible and abstracted metrics such as person-hours or costs in dollars, but to watch it gnaws at the soul.
Going on the Logistics journey means encountering a staggering depiction of alienation, isolation and just how much capitalist social relations have distorted our ability to understand time and space.
This “annihilation of space by time” containerizes existence, but what if the way out isn’t slowing things down but rather giving them space?
Logistics is the filmic annihilation of capitalist relations to time by a force of ultra-cinematic space.
Logistics isn’t a feat of temporal duration, it’s a feat of spatial presence.
To watch this film is not just to commit time, it’s to commit space in your life — space that becomes defined by the slow, silent pace of a container ship driven by capitalist productivity, but demanding that you reduce your own productivity to engage with it.
Cinema is an artform that is defined by the edit — choices in when we disrupt the normal flow of experiential time.
Logistics has just four visible cuts in the flow of the journey, at the transitions from: a truck in Sweden to a train to the container ship and back to a truck when we reach our destination in the Bao’an District.
Logistics takes a minimalist approach to editing to deliver a maximalist approach to mapping an experience.
This film demands the viewer restructure how they use physical space just as much as it requires 857 individual hours.
The very living space of my existence throughout Logistics became part theatre, part crows nest and partly a mast to which I was willingly chained.
The spatial relation between durational cinema and the physical activity of watching this movie created a momentary rupture in capitalistic spatial-temporal relations.
Through watching Logistics, I was able to partly connect into the unknowably large network of labour that creates the physical goods that seemingly appear on store shelves by magic.
The most beautiful moment in Logistics comes at one of the lowest points.
Hundreds of hours of not seeing so much as a human-shaped silhouette, and then a deck hand stops dead centre in the frame and washes the windowpane that sits in front of the lens.
Soap, bubbles and water wash down the frame.
The world of containers and the open sea drift into a gentle, psychedelic haze.