Tulip Siddiq, the UK treasury minister, has resigned because of criticism that her aunt was until recently the president/dictator of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina.

Atrocities in her name are reported continuing until the very day she fled the country.

For an official who makes important decisions to have a close relationship of any kind with an important foreign official is not necessary actual corruption, but the temptation it creates should be considered disqualifying as a conflict of interest.

A close relationship of any kind with a decision-maker in a major company should likewise be disqualifying.

South Korea's impeached president was arrested, with a big operation that met with only desultory resistance.

Perhaps his guards realized that their primary loyalty was owed to the country rather than to him.

*LA officials warn of price gouging as those displaced by fire seek housing.*

As fire losses gradually accelerate, they will gradually increase the national shortage of housing.

Everyone: call on Meta to resume fact-checking, because facts are not decided by what more people think or whether one view's supporters can intimidate the other views' supporters.

Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.)

First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.

I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without javascript!"

They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.

To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.

Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:

First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.

This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.

I'm intentionally not linking to the honeypot from here, for reasons, but I'll bet you can find it pretty easily (and without guessing URLs.)

It's kinda funny.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

The Democratic National Committee does not publish its list of members. It identifies some members but not others.

Now the full list has been published with the help of leakers.

US citizens: call on Congress to choose the people over Big Telecom — to save Net Neutrality

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

The states that ban abortion tend to have harsh policies towards single mothers and their children. Per year, around 150,000 more households move out of these states than move in.

Falconer Juan Bernabé shared the images on his private social media accounts after undergoing surgery for a penile implant, which he said was for non-medical reasons. [...]

Bernabè said he had no regrets about sharing the images.

Lazio suspended Bernabè in 2021 when he was filmed performing a fascist salute at the end of a match and chanting "Duce, Duce," which was the name used to praise former fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

"I admire him so much," Bernabè added in Monday's radio interview.

Dick pix or it didn't happen.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Curbing global heating would make life healthier and more comfortable, as well as limiting climate disaster.

Reportedly Sudan has fallen into a race war, with lighter-skinned "Arabs" killing darker skinned "blacks" — though people may also be killed or spared based on specific ethnic groups.

*Venezuelan opposition candidate accuses Nicolás Maduro of coup.*

Even worse is when you get that nagging suspicion that you are, in fact, the world's foremost expert on this topic that you hate. "Oh no".

Anyway, my whole entire job is putting on events, and then getting people to show up at them by telling them about them and I feel like I am really bad at that last part.

Two decades ago, we did this by paying for strip ads in the 2 or 3 local weekly physical newspapers, and putting up posters on poles around town (which meant dealing with a small set of complete weirdos who had their own competing poster fiefdoms, but, whatever, capitalism!)

It kinda worked, I guess? Then the Internet came along and broke everything and we've never figured it out since.

So.

if you are a person who is in the business of putting on events that are open to the public:

I would like to know how you tell people about them. I would like to know what you do, and what you think works.

If are not currently a person who is in the event-throwing business, please sit this one out.

Here's what we do. It's all terrible and I hate it. Do you do different things? Does it work?

Ranked roughly from most effective to least effective:

1. We spend many thousands of dollars per month for paid ads on Facebook and Instagram. I hate this, not least because I am paying money to the worst people in the world. We spend many hours trying to tailor the "audiences" of those ads to our likely customers, which is a constant moving-target shitshow. (And still we periodically see replies saying, "I'm in Utah, why are you showing me this?")

   Sometimes our outside promoters seem to get more (tracked) sales on their ads than we do on our own advertising, but I can't tell whether that's because they are targeting them better, or whether they're just spending a lot more money.

2. Every week, we send out our weekly calendar to around 70,000 people. It has become harder to track "email opened" and "link clicked" these days, but those rates are pathetic. Assuming our tracking works at all (which, who knows, maybe it doesn't), those emails turn into like one ticket purchase a week.

   (Yes, they are all live addresses, bounces are tracked, good sender reputation. Please take it as given that I know how to deliver email properly.)

   When an outside promoter uses a third-party spam service, I see the sales tracking on those, and their numbers are rarely much better than our own -- still in the single digits.

   But email link surveillance can only track sales that originated as a click on the email, and it's certainly a common and normal thing for someone to become aware of a show through email, then they find a friend to go with them, and only a week or two later do they go to the web site to buy tickets. At that point there's no "chain of custody". So, does our email work? Maybe, but we can't prove it!

   This is true of nearly every other method of advertising an event as well.

3. We send out maybe 20,000 more-targeted emails to previous ticket buyers of similar events, e.g., we hype upcoming metal shows to previous metal purchasers. The "open" and "buy" rates are somewhat better for those, but not hugely.

4. When a show is doing poorly, we will sometimes dump a bunch of last-minute free tickets on sites like Do The Bay, in hopes of cutting our losses and getting at least a few bodies in the door who might spend some money at the bar.

   When we do this, it's a desperate stop-gap measure for that one specific event. It is my strong opinion that customers acquired through coupon-clipping sites like this never turn into regular customers: once you give it away for free, "free" is the price they expect it to always be.

5. We have a bunch of social-media automation that posts flyers of upcoming events, tonight's event, etc. Most of the social media sites choose not to show those to anybody. I have no idea if they work or not.

6. Sometimes, someone who works for me will post some free-form thing to Instagram and usually only to Instagram. They tell me that it's really important to tag the artists (a thing you can only do manually and not through any API.) Since Instagram has no concept of "Share" or "RT", I do not understand why they think this matters. It does not lead to sales in any evident way.

7. Sometimes we'll nag a band into posting a video where they stare dead-eyed into the camera and say, "Hello fans, we are coming to NIGHTCLUB in METROPOLITAN AREA, are you ready to rock?" Do those move tickets? I dunno, but sometimes they are funny?

8. Every now and then, someone who writes for a local online publication will include one of our events in their event round-up. This only happens at random, and if that writer is a fan of that particular artist. No amount of effort on our part can make this happen.

9. We have occasionally tried buying ads directly with local online publications rather than Zuckerbook. It's expensive, difficult, and doesn't work:

   Expensive: their ad rates tend to be 5× or 10× higher than Facebook. Difficult: They tend to have longer, more complicated terms; terrible conversion tracking; and most of the time you're dealing with an actual human ad rep through email, who doesn't answer your email half the time. Doesn't work: little evidence that it translates to sales.

10. Most of the time when you contact a local publication and say to them, "Hey, this event we have coming up seems up your alley, maybe you'd like to post something about it?", they just ignore you, but sometimes their answer is: "Sure! Write the entire article, pay me hundreds of dollars, and I'll run it under my by-line."

    We've done that a few times in the past. It's a lot of work, obviously, and it's unclear whether it has ever been worthwhile. See also, no tracking.

11. On rare special occasions, we will spread pole posters around town. Effectiveness unknown.

12. On even more rare occasions, we will print out handbill flyers, and pass those out at similar events at other venues. We almost never do this. In my opinion, the people who still do this haven't noticed that it is no longer 1995.

13. "One of the artists posted a video of their performance, look at all this engagement!" The gig's over! This sells zero tickets. "But... exposure!"

Things we don't do:

14. We never advertise on Google, YouTube or with Google Adwords. It simply does not work. When we have tried, they won't even place the ads. "Please spend $200 showing this ad to people." "We have shown it to $5 worth of people, you're welcome." Largest surveillance advertising company in the world and they won't take our money.

15. Sometimes, if you are looking at a band's music video on YouTube, right below the video there will be a text banner ad telling you that the band is playing in your city, next week, at a LiveNation venue. Wouldn't it be nice if I could buy an ad like that, for when the band is playing at my venue, and the video is being viewed by someone in my city? Oops, there is no mechanism to buy that ad unless your first name is "Live" and your last name is "Nation".

    (Not even joking about that: it's a "beta" "partner program" of which LiveNation is the only partner, and has been for over a decade.)

16. Sometimes someone will say, "But shouldn't you be advertising on TikTok? Isn't that where all the 18 to 24 year olds are now?" Then I say, "I don't think that having a dance meme go viral six months after the show helps us much". And they say, "No, you can run ads for events, that have actual end dates" and I say, "Show me one. Just one. Show me a single TikTok ad, placed by a venue, any venue, for an event that happens on a specific date." I have yet to see one.

17. Even less helpful is when someone criticizes our lack of "presence" on TikTok, or the blandness of our Instagram, because the only way for that to change is for me to hire some full-time wannabe "influencer" to run around the club every night hoping to "go viral" and I'd rather just shoot myself in the fucking face I don't think DNA Lounge can really give that person the career path they're looking for.

    I've always had a fantasy about this blog having more of a music journalism spin to it, but that's always been a non-starter and this "influencer" thing is just a variant of that which sucks more.

Related to all of this is that the way people use nightclubs has been completely broken by the internet. The concept of a "regular" isn't even really a thing any more, not at the scale at which we operate.

It used to be that people would go to clubs for many reasons: music discovery, community, finding friends or partners with similar tastes. All of that moved online around 2008, and clubs became the place you went to see the touring artist you are already familiar with, with the people you already know.

The multinational media corporations turned us into their "last mile", the regrettable place where their electronic "content" product has to finally touch dirt. So unseemly.

As late as 2014, it was still possible for a dance party like Blow Up or Popscene to exist, where there were regulars who went for discovery and community. People would show up with the attitude of, "Whoever they've booked, I'll probably like it." But even by then, our monthly genre-specific DJ parties (Sequence, Vital, Wasted, and to a lesser degree So Stoked) had stopped branding themselves as recurring parties and started branding themselves as one-off concerts. Sure, it happened every month, but most of their customers didn't even know that. They came to see the Big Headliner Show.

(Before you object, yeah yeah, Death Guild is frozen in time, like some clove-stinking Brigadoon. But that's not how literally anything else works.)

In conclusion, internet advertising is a land of contrasts.

We ended up with something like 20 hours to smear off a single second.

The end of June approached, and it was time to do a full-scale test. I wanted to be sure that we could survive being a second out of whack without having the confounding factor of the whole rest of the world simultaneously dealing with their own leap second stuff. We needed to know if we'd be okay, and the only way to know was to smear it off, hold a bit to see if anything happened, then smear it back on.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

[Turn to CAM 2, flip chair around backward] Meta employees, let me rap at you a minute. Sure, "You Can Always Quit," as we like to say around here. But at this crucial juncture, you can both protect your own livelihood and do so much more good for the world by not quitting. That's right! Don't quit, just stop working. Show up every day, don't complain, don't draw attention to yourself. But don't accomplish anything. If you are working on a project, commit in your heart to never finishing it. This will be your last project at Meta, and you will be "working on it" until they force you out. If others rely on you to get their work done, make sure they can't. If your role involves reviewing pull requests, you and I both know you can find a reason to reject every one. In fact, wouldn't it be fun to see how many other employees you can drive out first? If you work in an open office space, make sure you chew loudly at all times. Microwave fish in the break room every single day. Be creative! You'll have plenty of time to think of ideas, with all the work you're not getting done.

Extremely previouslies:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

We did a little photo shoot with all of our bar shakers and tip jars, which are covered with years of stickers. Technically these are communal but in practice our bartenders have their favorites. Can you pick out the bartender by their shaker? How many of these stickers can you identify?