From Betanews:
In Philadelphia, Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter said: “Though the retrieval of the electronic data by Google from its multiple data centers abroad has the potential for an invasion of privacy, the actual infringement of privacy occurs at the time of disclosure in the United States”. He ruled that there was “no meaningful interference” with the account holder’s “possessory interest” in seeking to access the data.
This is a very slippery slope.
Andy Ihnatko is a word smith extraordinaire:
“He used to be an impatient, Type-A kind of guy, with a hairtrigger temper. But the knowledge that he was personally responsible for tens of millions of men, women, and children dying or living the rest of their lives struggling against crippling debt gave him a center of peace and joy. His only regret was that he would never know the exact number.
I’m no fan of William F. Buckley’s philosophies. I rarely watched him when he was alive. Recently I’ve been taken by a sense of loss for his style. Whether I agreed with his opinions or not, he had them and he was not one to avoid a debate with an interviewee.
Here are a few of the best Buckley interviews I’ve watched on YouTube:
Noam Chomsky — This takes place in 1969 during the Vietnam War era and in hindsight Buckley’s positions have completely disintegrated.
Derek Lowe writing at Science:
One way to deal with such nonsense is to go after it head-on, pulling up evidence to show that no, these things don’t appear to be true, and here are a bunch of quite plausible reasons why they’re not. If someone is wavering or wondering, that might be enough. But it’s certainly not going to be enough for anyone who’s really invested in such thoughts (see that expertise link above for more thoughts on this as well).
I’ve taken a very specific stand against journalism paywalls in the past. It felt like an artificial barrier that restricted access to potentially vital information. It felt like a failure of foresight in an industry that refused to acknowledge the reality that they documented every day. I was wrong.
My tactic was to avoid pay sites. I avoided following and sharing links to paywalls. I wrongly refused even the steepest of discounted access.
Kurt Vonnegut would be 94 today. His words and thought experiments shaped who I am. He made me a better person. I’m glad he kept his shit together for as long as he did.
From Kurt’s “Cold Turkey” essay in 2004:
“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president”.
Kieran Healy created a really interesting analogy to the wealth gap in the US:
So, what if the space on the plane was allocated in proportion to the share of total income earned by each class? With a bit of help from the Census Bureau, Emmanuel Saez, and the Federal Aviation Authority, Air Gini is proud to bring you the future of air travel
Interesting breakdown of political spending by tech companies.
To understand Apple’s efforts at persuading legislators of various issues, I compiled a measure of political footprint which combines a company’s own federally registered lobbying expenditures from 2015 with the campaign contributions they made during the 2013-14 election cycle from their corporate PAC as well as any employees who made campaign campaign contributions (and listed their employer). This data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.
An interesting study, the data of which, I have not verified.
If the poverty rates for each educational bin remained the same, then the upward redistribution of adults from the lower bins to the higher bins would have led to lower overall poverty. But that’s not what happened.
Later:
The big things that cause poverty for adults over the age of 25 in a low-welfare capitalist society—old-age, disability, unemployment, having children—do not go away just because you have a better degree.
From David Talbot at Salon:
To Morales, Kennedy was “that no good son of a bitch motherfucker” who was responsible for the deaths of the men he had trained for the Bay of Pigs mission. “We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Morales told his attorney, Robert Walton, in 1973, after an evening of drinking loosened the CIA hit man’s tongue. It was one more confession that the media ignored, even after it was reported by one of their own, Gaeton Fonzi, a Philadelphia investigative journalist who, after going to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, unearthed some of the most important information related to the Kennedy case.
