The rallies remain the same. In 2016, writer Scaachi Koul thought she might learn something attending Trump rally. “When Trump and his acolytes descended on Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan this Sunday, there was little left to learn about our once-again maybe-president. Nothing feels new anymore.”
There’s a helicopter flying over the house announcing something about a “suspect,” but I can’t make out anything they’re saying. If we’re to be murdered momentarily by a desperate criminal, this would be a cool self-referential final post.
A year of modest victories and tough losses for California's reparations movement
Robin Buller at The Guardian interviews Kamilah Moore, chair of the Californial taskforce on reparations for Black Americans.
We hired five trained economists to help us crunch the numbers to figure out what compensation could look like. We didn’t want to just come up with any number. We wanted it to be rooted in data and a solid methodology.
The final figure – $800bn – got a lot of attention. There was shellshock even among taskforce members. But we weren’t saying that the state should give $800bn to Black Americans in the state. We were saying that’s how much the state has dispossessed from African Americans in California. That’s how much the state has stolen from African Americans in California through exclusionary public policy – like housing segregation, mass incarceration, over-policing and the devaluation of Black businesses – that has hindered our opportunities to build wealth over time.
Then, the University of California, Berkeley, released a poll that found most Californians opposed direct cash payments, and that became the major headline. Speaking from the outside looking in, I think that played into the calculus of the Legislative Black Caucus. To me, it appears their strategy was to take a low-hanging-fruit approach by introducing recommendations from the taskforce report that were easy wins instead of more substantive ones, like direct cash payments and other forms of material reparations.
Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’. He blames the “corrupt leftwing media” for Jan. 6 attack. Um … sure.
Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement
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.
‘I’m not afraid. Let’s do it’: the Arizona abortion clinic testing the limits of the state’s ban. This is what courage looks like.
Nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states. More than 470,000 in Pennsylvania alone.
Apple put the Magic Mouse’s charging port at the bottom again. “… Apple still thinks that the best way to charge your Magic Mouse is by flipping it over to plug it in, making it so you can’t use it. Why?”
It's now legal to hack McFlurry machines and medical devices to fix them
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.
The American housing crisis is a theft, not a shortage
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.
“Fighting for the right of disabled people to adapt their technology is fighting for _everyone’s _rights.” — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Max Read: Anthropomorphic chatbots are a dangerous user interface for LLMs. AI didn’t kill 14-year-old Sewell Setzer. He killed himself with a gun he had easy access to in his house.
The mates who have met for a pint every Thursday for 56 years. “We once talked about soccer and sex. These days it’s more prostates and pensions.”
BlueSky is not decentralized
#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.