Mitch's Blog

Edward Helmore at The Guardian:

From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”

Tapper presents a false choice. Subscribers can choose to reedirect their Post subscriptions to publications that are willing to take a stand against tyranny.

I canceled renewal on my subscription. But the Post can win me back.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government.

Also, after a challenge, it remains “legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment.”

Bad copyright law combined with arbitrary software locks installed by manufacturers make it illegal for people to repair the devices they own, resulting in “both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment.” The beneficiaries of this bad law are the manufacturers of these devices, who have an unjustified monopoly on repairs.

This same monopoly, granted by Section 1201 of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is enjoyed by manufacturers of “everything from video game consoles to tractors to ventilators to ice cream machines, kitchen appliances, and trains.”

The US Copyright Office issued exemptions to the law.

But Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit, said the new ruls don’t go far enough. Industrial equipment is excluded and the rules do not legalize sale of tools that would bypass software locks.

“This exemption is helpful, but what we really need is Congress to solve this problem and truly legalize repair,” he said. 

Economics From the Top Down: Since Reagan, the US has been on a massive policy of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.

By returning this stolen money, the US housing crisis would evaporate. No, I’m not kidding. If the United States were to undo its experiment with rampant inequality and return the distribution of income to the levels found in 1970, the housing crisis would disappear.

via

@possibledog@beige.party/:

#BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky’s 13 million captive users for auth and reach.

Also:

Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It’s better than Facebook. It’s easier than Mastodon. It’s sassier than TikTok. It’s not motherfucking Xitter. But it’s not decentralized.

This is my attitude toward most corporate social media. I enjoy Threads, Tumblr and I even recently went back to Facebook. All their corporate overlords are tainted.

I stopped using Twitter around when Musk bought it but I can’t say that was over moral indignation. I had just gotten tired of it; Twitter had stopped being fun or useful for me.

I recall having dinner with a friend in late 2016 — after the election but before the inauguration. He predicted the US was a year away from the Military Coup to Bring Back Democracy, followed in four years by the Military Coup to End Democracy after democracy turns out not to have worked.

I think my friend may have simply been off by a matter of time.

I remain hopeful that the Democrats win decisively, perhaps in a landslide, and whatever resistance follows is quickly put down. But hopeful is not the same thing as optimism.