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South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though.

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.

Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.

Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:

”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)

Also:

”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.

Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.

“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”

Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.

Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.

Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.

Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

…

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.

The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.