August 07, 2016 at 04:33AM

Today I Learned: 1) There is at least one species of cockroach that lives around here that I had never seen until today! It's a smaller species than the usual ones I've seen (which are themselves quite similar to typical dorm cockroches I've seen on the East coast), and could *almost* be confused for a non-cockroach beetle... but on closer inspection, it's definitely a cockroach. 2) A while back, Lady Jade!!! and I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out how many people a typical teen working at McDonnalds could support with the standard of living of a peasant from the late dark ages/early middle ages in Europe. It's not a simple calculation, but we figured it was somewhere on the order of "a few" (2-5?). It's pretty incredible that we've managed to compress the full time, all-day every day labor of a full grown person down to something like 10-20 hours of relatively light* service work of a relatively unskilled post-adolescent. Today I learned a concrete fact that hammers home just how ridiculously wealthy we are now. In the middle ages, a set of clothing required labor which at present minimum wage would cost about as much as a new car. According to a quick estimate by Eve Fisher, a medieval shirt on its own would cost a *minimum* of $4,200 to produce, and would likely cost more (http://ift.tt/2aw1wn1). Clothes are really, really, really expensive to produce, and modern clothes are essentially free by historical comparison. *relative to a Medieval peasant!!!! 3) ...of a nasty little bit of Amazon's public relations history. In 2009, somebody noticed that Amazon had just put a new adult content filter in place, and that it had systematically removed just about any literature about sexuality, particularly anything written on the topics of homosexulity, bisexuality, or transgenderedness. Plenty of sex toys could still be found on Amazon, as could downright nasty books like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- just nothing literary about nominally deviant human sexulity. To a lot of people at the time, this looked like a systematic expunging of LGBT-friendly literature from the literary marketplce by Amazon, which rightfully got people angry, leading to a brief flurry of "#amazonfail" on Twitter. The story from Amazon, which frankly sounds pretty plausible to me, is that their adult content filtering system was designed to filter blatantly pornographic material from front-page search results. That system relied on user-generated tags to identify pornographic material, and someone or someones had gone around and tagged a bunch of LGBT literature with pornographic-like tags that were picked up by the automatic filtering system. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of people were using the tagging system, so a relatively few taggers were able to cut off huge swaths of literature. Not a pretty day for crowd-sourcing.