Also: Republicans understand that politics is transactional. The NRA has been great for the GOP, and so the GOP is unwaveringly pro-gun.
Democrats are uncomfortable with transactional politics, and that’s why the Republicans, a minority party, are running the country.
A brief history of the floppy disk. Fascinating!
ForecastAdvisor shows you the accuracy of major weather forecasting services in your area. It says that The Weather Channel and AccuWeather are most accurate for us, which matches my unscientific explorations.
There is a joke that San Diego doesn’t need weather forecasts because the weather is always the same. There is some truth to that – but only some. Generally, you can tell what the weather is going to be by looking at the calendar, and any forecasting service will give you the rest of the information you need. It doesn’t rain much, which is bad, because we’re in a drought. It gets chilly, but not cold, in the winter. Sometimes too hot in the summer, in our party of the county. Spring and fall are lovely.
But we’ve been having rain for days, and I like to schedule my walk around the rain. So suddenly I care about the accuracy of weather forecasts. The Weather Channel and AccuWeather seem to do best for hourly forecasts.
Dark Sky, which fans say can do an uncanny job of predicting rain down to the MINUTE, doesn’t work well here at all.
AT&T CEO pay rose to $32 million in 2019 while he cut 20,000 jobs
The Verge guide to Twitter (with a contribution from yrs trly)
Reporters Without Borders uses Minecraft to sneak censored works across borders.
The Zoom virtual background for videoconferences doesn’t seem to work with my Mac. I can buy a portable green screen, that attaches to the back of a chair, for $65.
Or I can just clean my office.
“Social distancing” is actually not that big a change for me. #JokingNotJoking
Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) is a brutal tyrant, who has also implemented reforms, including expanded women’s rights and crippling the oppressive, conservative Saudi clergy.
But even for his reforms: Permission is not the same thing as freedom. Permissions granted by a tyrant can be taken away by the tyrant.
Barbara Krasnoff: How to hide your messy room during a Zoom video conference
Another excuse for me to postpone cleaning up the mountain of empty Amazon boxes in my home office.
Um, thanks, Barbara?
Jason Snell: How to customize the display of the Apple Watch Workouts app.
Useful tips - I did it right away after reading this article.
Twitter 101: how to follow people and discover topics.
Should be headlined: “How To Tell Your @ From a Hole in the Ground.”
By me on The Verge (with a lot of work from my editor, Barbara Krasnoff - thanks!)
The FCC is giving out big bucks for rural broadband, and New York is the one state in the continental US that’s been left out.
IBM says it’s number three in cloud sales, but analysts say nope. Not even close.
Interesting definitional disagreement on what “the cloud is.” Analysts say if it’s not like Amazon, it’s not the cloud.
These face-touching memes have been canceled for public health reasons.
Funny.
Cory Doctorow: “Senate Republicans have killed emergency sick leave legislation, a move that will force millions of low-waged cleaning and food-service workers to choose between homelessness and potentially spreading Covid-19.”
Billions for tax cuts for the rich, but when it comes to helping the poor, the GOP suddenly gets fiscal responsibility religion.
This is peak disaster capitalism. If employers are required to pay sick leave, they lose money. But if people get sick and die, the healthcare and funeral industries make bank.
Cory Doctorow: A former top Cigna exec calls baloney on Biden’s claims that Medicaire-for-all is impractical.
For starters, M4A wouldn’t COST $35T; it would SAVE at least $450B/year.
The head of the TSA says he’s standing by a decision to take away healthcare coverage from part-time agents.
Because of the nature of their work, TSA agents are at high risk of spreading infectious disease, like Covid-19.
Trump’s ban on European travel exempt nations where he owns resorts.
What an extraordinary coincidence! How fortunate for him!
Cory Doctorow: A scam-buster hacks into a scam factory and surveills the heck out of them.
Cory Doctorow: Details of Italy’s “I stay in the house” law.
Cory Doctorow: Twitter upgraded its terms of service to permit academics to use bots for research and auditing purposes
Cory Doctorow: Sensor Tower, which provides VPN and other software it describes as privacy protecting, was in fact distributing spyware.
Cory Doctorow: The satiety index: Which foods make you feel the most full?
Cory Doctorow: Nobody knows why people have gotten fatter since the 1950s. Diet and levels of physical activity don’t explain it, at least not entirely.
Even animals are getting fatter, both domestic animals and feral animals.
Michael McConnell, a prominent San Diego homeless advocate, fought against Proposition C in San Diego, which allocated $2 billion for homelessness. He said the law didn’t do enough and would have been too easily abused.
A California software engineer found paragraphs and themes in the novel “The Manchuriam Candidate,” by Richard Congdon, that were plagiarized from “I, Claudius.”
Yes, the individual sentences and paragraphs and character personalities were copied, but this doesn’t pass the sniff test for plagiarism. The novels are blatantly different from one another.
Astronomers are using computer models for for slime mold growth patterns to trace filaments connecting galaxies.
Reminds me of season 1 of “Star Trek: Discovery!”
Cory Doctorow: Farmers are fighting John Deere for the right to fix their own tractors.
This is literally jeopardizing the US food supply.
Cory Doctorow: A woman sued the TSA over a “pat-down” that penetrated her vagina.
Led Zeppelin wins a ruling that “Stairway to Heaven” was not plagiarized from an earlier record, potentially setting a precedent for future copyright cases.
Holy Crom, is that what Robert Plant looks like now?
X-ray Shoe Fitting “Customers Expect It!” [1940s]
Dick Van Dyke for Colorburst instant cameras (1978)
Belmont Radio (LIFE, March 6, 1944)
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/fgoixp/belmont_radio_life_march_6_1944/
Elvira for Coors Light, 1986
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/fgofxx/elvira_for_coors_light_1986/
IBM’s outgoing boss Rometty awarded $20m+ in 2019 for growing revenue 0.1% Nice work if you can get it.
IBM Food Trust: Who’s using blockchain to track supply chain?
IBM has pushed blockchain hard for tracking customer supply chains, and touted marquee customers such as Walmart and Nestle. But it’s a big, hairy problem and uptake is slow.
I came into my office at about 4 am. Minnie had been closed up in here for six hours.
It’s now after 7 am. Minnie still hasn’t gone out to relieve herself.
I’m kind of in awe.
VMware is looking to rejuvenate again with a Kubernetes injection:
VMware today rolls out an aggressive plan to integrate Kubernetes with traditional applications (running on VMware vSphere, natch). I go in-depth on the news at The Next Platform.
“The power of Frenchmen in your intestines” (1919) via
Back of the famous 1 Hacker Way Facebook sign via
The back side of Hollywood Squares, 1976 via
Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web?
The dark web is swarming with hitman-for-hire sites, with colorful names like Azerbaijani Eagles and Sicilian Hitmen International Network. They charge tens of thousands of dollars in bitcoin – but they are frauds. They don’t actually kill people.
What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media:
much of the U.S. media still covers elections as if they’re sporting events and that the affluent New Yorkers who run and appear on television networks are not inclined to like him.
Corporate media sees Sanders and Trump as the same, which is wrong.
Trump is “a star of the corporate media who hacked its commercial incentives to his advantage, delivering free lively entertainment to cable networks desperate for programming. … Mr. Sanders wants to remake the media in a new model.”
California’s Gig Economy Is Under Attack.
AB5 is limiting freelancers' ability to work, going far beyond the Uber drivers it was intended to protect.
AB5 is a disaster. Terrible legislation.
Grace and Frankie is Golden Girls minus the rattan furniture.
Like Cambridge Analytica, “but more nefariously, arguably:" Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police, used a shadow company to create Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media.
Cory Doctorow: Europe looks like it may be getting the courage to take on Apple, mandating that consumers have a right to repair their phones
That would be a big threat to Apple’s revenue, as the company depends on customers replacing worn out phones when Apple deems the pocket-fondles are beyond repair.
Cheesy even by 1978 standards, according to this fellow on Reddit.
On YouTube: here and here and here
I gave it a quick peek and can confirm its cheesiness. It’s in Russian, no subtitles, so I didn’t watch. I don’t speak Russian.
Old age is very different today, when the average lifespan is 79, than at the turn of the 20th century, when it was 49. It’s a new stage of life, like adolescence emerged 70 or so years ago.
An interview with Louise Aronson, author of the book “Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life." From the book description on Amazon:
For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied.
In the words of Doc Holliday: “I’m in my prime.”
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Coronavirus really is that bad and you should work from home
We watched “Sharpe’s Gold.” I bet the men in the 95th Rifles found Hagman annoying after a couple days. “Enough with the singing,” they said.
How to Tell If You Have the Flu, Coronavirus, or Something Else
I think I had norovirus almost exactly a year ago, after returning from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And I passed the norovirus to Julie. Because you should always bring your spouse a little something when you return from a business trip.
I have been that tourist. It’s why I often patronize Starbucks when I’m out of town.
Minnie found a steak-bone on our walk the other day, and I let her carry it home and work on it in the backyard for a while. “What could go wrong?” I thought. It made her so happy.
She sleeps in my office at night, separated from the rest of the house so she doesn’t terrorize the cats. Putting her to bed is the last thing I do before I go to bed myself, and letting her out is the first thing I do when I wake up.
The next morning, when I went into my office to let Minnie out, I found the answer to the question, “What could go wrong?”
Fortunately, she got it all on the mat in front of my desk – bless her! Easy clean-up. And she was SO happy and friendly and affectionate and excited to be let out of my office. I suspect she was partly trying to distract me to keep me from getting angry – not that I would have – and partly she was just relieved, happy, and excited to be out of my office and away from that awful mess.
I left my office windows open the rest of the morning, to air it out. It was some of Minnie’s best work, there.
Bernie has done fine this far appealing to a radical, burn-it-down revolutionary base. But now he needs to appeal to ALL Democrats or he’ll lose the nomination.
And he’ll have to switch gears again if he gets the nomination, to appeal to that additional fraction of Americans who see him as being just as bad as Trump.
It’s no coincidence that farms and farmers have been leaders in Right to Repair: when you’re isolated and you’re not allowed to fix your stuff, it means that you can neither nip down to the shops for a replacement, nor easily have an authorized repair tech come to your place.
Covid can put everyone – even entire nations – into the position of that isolated farmer.
And if Covid turns out to be a fizzle – and let’s pray that it is on a global scale, although it’s already awful for the people effected – it’ll be something else. Natural and man-made disasters are inevitable, and they will require us to make repairs locally, not wait for authorization from a big corporation.
Cory Doctorow talks about how big business and government have taken away your right to repair property you own, how Facebook and other monopolies can be broken up by requiring them by law to interoperate with other services, and other issues related to monopoly control and trustbusting.
INTERVIEW WITH THE FIREWALLS DON’T STOP DRAGONS PODCAST
Cory and other digital rights advocates can often get branded as socialists. And yet your right to do what you want with your own property is the most fundamental right there is in a capitalist/market economy. The Revolutionary War was literally fought to protect property rights.
But we’ve reached a state where Apple, Amazon and Microsoft can sell you music, then arbitrarily decide to delete it from your computer or phone at some point maybe years in the future. This is a thing that has actually happened, more than once.
And more seriously, farmers are literally denied the legal right to modify or repair their own equipment, jeopardizing our food supply.
Ezra Klein: Sanders can’t lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy www.vox.com/2020/3/4/…
Coronavirus Porn Is Going Viral on Pornhub
8-year-old boy wins $200 worth of cannabis products at hockey tournament
Trump blasts Sessions on Twitter, inadvertently confirming key Mueller finding
Trump publicly admits to obstruction of justice. Again.
AT&T is looking to cut billions of dollars in spending, starting with “headcount rationalization” (apparently the new bureaucratese for “sorry you don’t have a job anymore”) and “benefit restructuring” (hope you don’t have to go to a doctor!)
Their grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, killed himself, as did Margaux and six other members of the family. Mariel Hemingway survived and became a mental health advocate.
The transition to “America” came about the time the US became a bloody, brutal global empire, committing genocide in the Philippines and conquering Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
Cisco WebEx, Google and other companies are offering free videoconferencing to help restrict coronavirus (and encourage people to subscribe and pay when the emergency is over!)
Issa’s primary campaign against Republican Carl DeMaio was dirty. The campaign against Campa-Najjar is going to be dirtier.
“… this ostensible problem-solving software was rigged to provide only one solution: detention,” writes Sam Biddle at The Intercept.
According to a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders:
While waiting for those hearings, those detained suffer under harsh conditions of confinement akin to criminal incarceration. While incarcerated, they are separated from families, friends, and communities, and they risk losing their children, their jobs, and their homes. Because of inadequate medical care and conditions in the jails, unmet medical and mental-health needs often lead to serious and at times irreversible consequences.
Via Cory pluralistic.net
Ryan Cooper:
America’s atrociously inadequate welfare state makes it by far the most vulnerable rich country to a viral pandemic, and the vicious, right-wing ideology of the Republican Party has wrecked the government’s ability to manage crises of any kind….
Indeed, U.S. health care is not only by far the worst system among rich countries, it is much worse than that of many middle-income or poorer countries when it comes to confronting a fast-moving epidemic.
The US has no national healthcare system for testing and treatment. Working people with symptoms like a cold (which is how the virus presents) can’t afford to go to the doctor. And the coup de grace is there’s no national policy mandating paid sick time off, which means infected workers in food service, retail, and personal healthcare have financial incentive to go out there and infect the public.
In healthcare policy, as with gun control and education, American Republicans are convinced of the impossibility of policies that work in every developed country in the world, and many undeveloped ones. The point of Sanders' comments about Cuba is not that Cuba is awesome, but rather that even Cuba, with its broken, awful, government, manages to get healthcare and education right.
Via Cory pluralistic.net
Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web.
Wonderful article.
American taxpayers have paid $152 million for Trump to play golf, making him the 10th highest paid American athlete.
We have watched two episodes of the second season of “Altered Carbon.” We are almost enjoying it. Does it get better?
I just remembered Joe Biden is fine
“Please don’t show me any footage of Joe Biden saying or doing things.”
A Fantastic Night . . . If You Don’t Like Bloomberg, Warren, or Sanders
AP: Bloomberg is thinking about dropping out after a disappointing Super Tuesday showing.
Google and IBM are dueling to commercialize a new generation of computing technology, quantum computing. While Google is working on a breakthrough to achieve “quantum supremacy,” IBM is dismissive of that approach, working on evolutionary development with a steady stream of commercial applications from the outset.
Gideon Lichfield goes in depth at MIT Technology Review, along with explaining the principles of quantum computing and differences between the two approaches. Based on Lichfield’s article, Google is ahead but IBM looks ready for a marathon:
Regardless of whether you agree with Google’s position or IBM’s, the next goal is clear… to build a quantum computer that can do something useful. The hope is that such machines could one day solve problems that require unfeasible amounts of brute-force computing power now, like modeling complex molecules to help discover new drugs and materials, or optimizing city traffic flows in real time to reduce congestion, or making longer-term weather predictions. (Eventually they might be capable of cracking the cryptographic codes used today to secure communications and financial transactions, though by then most of the world will probably have adopted quantum-resistant cryptography.) The trouble is that it’s nearly impossible to predict what the first useful task will be, or how big a computer will be needed to perform it. …
As for quantum supremacy itself, it will be an important moment in history, but that doesn’t mean it will be a decisive one. After all, everyone knows about the Wright brothers’ first flight, but can anybody remember what they did afterwards?
Nestor Ramos at the Boston Globe:
Surely I could give up wiping my mouth, rubbing my eyes, and scratching my nose, too. How hard could it be? I’m not a 4-year-old licking the buttons in the elevator; I’m a grown man in control of my various scratching and rubbing functions.
Wonderful article. While I read it I became aware I was scratching my nose.
China is using Uighur slave labor camps for manufacturing for US brands including Nike, Apple and Dell.
Miss Staten Island banned from St. Pat’s parade after coming out as bi — still shows up
