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There was a micro-scandal a few months ago, in which some photos of women on toilets got leaked from a new Rumba vacuum prototype. Apparently they were developing one with a camera that would have superior navigation of the home. In order to do this, it required a bunch of image processing.

However, rather than using sophisticated algorithms, the company (iRobot) was sending the images to a contractor in Venezuela. Some of the Venezuelan contractors took some of the pics of women peeing and leaked them to a Facebook chat and they got out from there.

Somewhere in this, I’m convinced there is a perfect metaphor for modernity but I can’t articulate it. I hope, someday, DT will give it to us.

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My dad told an opposite story. Berlin, Invalidenstrasse, the street of the mental patients., 1943. “We took the little female and put him with the biggest buck rabbit we could find!” His fat red face, sputtering spittle, quaked with the hilarity as he remembered it.

My father was half Prussian half Pole. Kinda like being half black I guess. His Pole mom, born in Chicago to a woman who died untreated for a failed abortion due her Catholicism, made it through the nazi era without racial purity papers. My grandfather was a low level nazi official, doing compliance visits to factories and such. My dad said, “my father taught me to respect my father, and love my mother.”

Maybe I respect my father by following in his ways, his proclivities.

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