Politics

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content. These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. — Merlin Mann, Better

Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default.

Let’s face it. Things are bad right now. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hard to be happy about anything at the moment, unless you’re, I don’t know, a bridge troll, I guess?

The New York Times reports that a Seattle-based company has announced that they will be increasing the minimum wage for all of their employees to $70,000 per year. “The market rate for me as a C.

Swatting is the disturbing practice of calling in an anonymous police report in order to trigger a SWAT response to a person’s home. It’s been in the news more and more recently, with a number of prominent feminists in the tech industry being targeted in particular.

Interesting piece from PBS that makes a strong case that while Millennials have been raised to be more inclusive of diversity, the framework in which they’ve been instructed blinds them to the systemic racism present in our society.

Fascinating piece on both the legal and illegal sand trade, and the immense criminal industry that has grown up around the latter. Today criminal gangs in an estimated 70 countries, from Jamaica to Nigeria, dredge up tons of the stuff every year to sell on the black market.

Ars Technica has successfully completed a public records request that allowed them to acquire 4.6 million records from the Oakland Police Department’s automated License Plate Reader (LPR) system. Using their custom built visualization tool, they are able to extrapolate a shocking amount of information about the travel patterns of individual vehicles.

Great article from Cory Doctorow on the conversations he’s had with his six year old daughter about mass surveillance. What’s particularly revealing is which concepts she intuitively grasps from her own experience with technology, and how that aligns with research done on the online habits of children.

Nik Custodio has put together a wonderfully easy to read primer on Bitcoin titled “ Explain Bitcoin Like I’m Five”. I think there are valid concerns out there about Bitcoin (more of that another time), but it doesn’t stop it from being a remarkable technological achievement, and this article does a good job of explaining it in layman’s terms.

My friend Christina, who works in immigration law, has penned this powerful post regarding how immigrants in detention will be spending their holiday season. I’m not the only one linking to this or quoting the same passage, but it’s such a powerful image:

This is absolutely hilarious. Funny enough to make me break my personal rule about embedding video in blog posts. :) I’ll be back to regular blogging soon, I promise.

Via Boing Boing: I’m a little late on this one, especially since I took my unplanned blog vacation. If you haven’t seen the footage of Jon Stewart intellectually pounding conservative pundit Bill Bennett, you are missing out.

Despite my poking fun in the title, this is really serious stuff. As a nation, we have all heard about the NSA tapping our phone lines for the administration’s domestic surveillance program.

If you haven’t heard about Stephen Colbert’s scathing performance at the Annual Correspondent’s Dinner, I’m not surprised. As near as I can tell, the traditional media isn’t really covering it in much detail.

Via /.: Wisconsin may soon become the first state to ban the practice of mandatory microchip implants in human beings. State Representative Marlin Schneider has authored a proposal that will make it illegal for governments and companies to require RFID chips, or implanting them in employees without their knowledge.

The Bush administration has a new version of DMCA to offer you, and it’s so much worse. In this article, Declan McCullagh of CNET news describes the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 that the administration plans to propose via their lackey Representative Lamar Smith.

I was just listening to the most recent episode of TWiT when I learned of the formation of a new non-partisan political organization dedicated to causes near and dear to a geek’s heart.

Via Warren Ellis: This is a sort of exciting development in the South Dakota abortion story. The president of the Oglala Sioux tribe of South Dakota, Cecilia Fire Thunder, is so upset that she has stated she intends to set up a Planned Parenthood clinic upon her personal land within the boudries of the reservation where South Dakota’s government has no jurisdiction.

Via Boing Boing and Digg: Recently, Brad Hunt of the MPAA presented their plans for requiring DRM technology that would effectively close the “analog-hole” to prevent movie piracy. Unexpectedly, the rest of Hollywood showed some reason and reacted very negatively to the proposal.