Want to read: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland 📚
Currently reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚
San Diego attorneys fought to prosecute an unhoused woman for blocking a sidewalk. Now they’re backing off. The solution to homelessness is not criminalizing homelessness.
Cory Doctorow: Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act protects the people who need it least. How the debt collection industry sets the poor to prey on the poor.
A short collection of delightful and/or appalling confessions, rendered in an excruciatingly painful format. Some of these are extremely raunchy, so don’t read them to the kiddos.
Jamelle Bouie: Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires
Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.
Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”
Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.
I could watch a 2-1/2 hour movie of Peter Quill and his grandpa eating breakfast and gossiping about the neighbors.
We just watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I hope they make about ten more of those movies. So good.
Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.
In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”
My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.
Reddit seems to have successfully put down its moderator revolt, but is destroying the site in the process
Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.
If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.
Currently reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚
Cory Doctorow: Verizon’s “repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.”
“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.
Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:
These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.
EFF: Congress Amended KOSA, But It’s Still A Censorship Bill. Despite small changes, the Kids Online Safety Act “is a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor users. We oppose it, and urge you to contact your congressperson about it today.”
To demonstrate representational bias, the London Interdiscipinary School asked the AI tool Midjourney to generate images of a typical prisoner, lawyer, nurse, drug dealer, etc. The results showed striking racial and ethnic stereotyping.
My latest: Snowflake wants to help telcos ditch silos with a blizzard of data. With its telco ambitions, is Snowflake getting over its skis? The company launched its Telco Data Cloud this year to help providers make better decisions for network planning, customer service, and growing revenue.