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.