Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2014-05-30 10:11 pm
silveradept) wrote2014-05-30 10:11 pm
I wonder if people get tired of these - 11 May - 30 May 02014
We open tonight with a thought about enjoying the now as it is, instead of eternally questing for the deeper meaning.
Poet, author, and activist Maya Angelou joins the Dead Pool Writer Corps at 86 years of age. And, actually, the corpus of sex workers who have gone on to their rest. Since Maya Angelou was proud of that work, it is remiss for us not to mention it.
Now that sectarian prayer is permitted at City functions (or has always been permitted), a Florida gentleman applied to open a city business meeting with a prayer to Satan. Mostly as a point to show how far religious freedom really should be able to go.
Pennsylvania joins the Century of the Fruitbat, a federal decision which neither the governor nor the state attorney general will appeal. Additionally, a different ruling brings Oregon into the Century of the Fruitbat. We almost have both coasts covered, but the middle of the country reamins a tougher sell on marriage equality.
I think this poem about being a monster will resonate with many of you. It's bykaberett.
An Ottawa teen was arrested in connection with the practice of spoofing a telephone number and then calling in a false emergency in an attempt to get the police to respond to the spoofer's target with violence. As if there weren't enough real emergencies to have to deal with at any given time.
eBay got hacked. You didn't hear about it? Thank eBay' complete clusterfrak of a non-response. Even though more than 145 million user credentials may face been compromised. Anyone claiming to have the full list for sale, though, is likely trying to scam a company into buying false data.
The United States Justice Department is seeking a change of rules to allow judges to issue warrants for searching computers outside of the judge's jurisdiction. The DoJ says they need this power because of botnets and anonymizing technologies that obscure the location of the physical computers, so they need permission to hack and search through the tunnel they already have. If I trusted the government not to abuse those powers, we might give the proposal any sort of consideration. Since I don't, based on the evidence provided by the high-profile leaks, I hope the answer is NO. And that legislation intended to curb the very worst excesses of the government spying on us is followed by even more oversight and restriction until the government is forced back into abiding by the restrictions of the Constitution.
Amazon is quietly trying to leverage their position as the sellers of all things to get the Hachette Book Group to give them better contract deals, by removing links, obscuring others, and only selling Hatchette materials at their full price.
A suggestion that those who are making the minimum wage are a much smaller group than those who benefit from minimum wage increases in indirect methods, and that those who will be harmed by minimum wage increases are larger still, with the reasoning that increasing the minimum wage reduces the number of available jobs and increases the price of consumer goods, resulting in little net benefit for the demographic groups that would most directly benefit from a minimum wage increase. Because "job creators" choose not to hire people when each worker costs more to hire, since it cuts into their profitability.
And for the small businesses that conservative pundits claim are always the hardest hit by everything, I can believe that. Of course, if all they had to pay were wages, because the government took care of things like retirement income, health care, education, child care, and other such things, then it wouldn't be nearly so bad. (Such things could probably be funded though charging taxes based on what big companies reported to their shareholders as income and profits, instead of to the government.) And those profit-maximalists could probably be taken to task about their decisions regarding staffing. Or the government could embark on an employment program like the Works Progress Administration. In any case, though, the idea of "wages should be kept low so that greedy profit-maximalists will deign to employ people" comes across as exactly backward - but at this point in the game, the very richest have consolidated sufficient control that the rest of us are basically at their mercy, so their logic, while backward, rules.
What we need is for profit-maximalists to seek profit not to enrich themselves, but to enrich everyone, where the number of employees one has at stable, living-wage jobs is seen as the point of pride. And for those who believe social welfare programs are coddling the indolent to understand that most people who are using social welfare programs are probably working more than their critics are, for less total pay. If you want people to not use the social safety net, then employ them in jobs that pay sufficient wages and give sufficient hours, and understand that less profit now means more people can purchase your product or service in the future.
And no, that's not emotion talking. Most reactions to injustice are based on logical conclusions and calculations, not emotional states.
Movies being made about slavery or white-black relations often whitewash how things actually were, which gives the impression that things were better than they actually were, or that focuses on exceptional individuals with no consciousness of everyone else.
A review of the card game Privilege Check, whereupon the goal is to construct the most oppressed character through traits on cards, ostensibly to win an Internet argument by virtue of being able to tell everyone else to check their privilege, which we all know are the magic words that shut down any discussion so the more privileged person will avoid being called all sorts of -ists for continuing. Except, of course, it doesn't work that way, and there's not nearly enough satire that could cover an idea like that game. Especially when reality gives us a gubernatorial debate supposed to appeal to women framed as a dating game, one that avoids the most pressing issues facing women today.
And speaking of issues and women, a mass shooting at the University of California Santa Barbara is the end result of a Nice Guy (TM) taking his beliefs out to their logical conclusion. Rather than condemn the poisonous belief system that sparked the shooting, members of those communities tried to capitalize on the tragedy by claiming their ideology could have prevented the violence as others believed that the shooter was permanently insufficiently masculine to make a splash with his violence, or to obtain his stated goals. Dissent Of A Woman has an excellent roundup and commentary. So the hashtag #YesAllWomen came about so that women could tell their stories about the commonality of assault on women, and describe, in as much detail as needed, all the things women do to try and protect themselves from those men that feel entitled to them, even when, should things go bad, they know they're going to be blamed for whatever it was that resulted in their injury. The precautions are there so that if there is a chance to get away, it becomes a greater chance. Ideology kills. Especially ideology that thinks of women as lesser, inferior, or subordinate to men, or that men are entitled to women so long as they meet some arbitrary parameters. There are things people can do to stop this from happening.
The use of tools for one's own health and energy levels can provoke an interesting reaction from people trained to see certain tools as the signs of disability.
Outcome-oriented evaluations for tasks that are not really about numbers produce poor pictures of the effectiveness of the methods for accomplishing those tasks.
The human desire to improve and make things better extends even to the designs of guns composed of printed plastic, even as legislatures and law enforcement attempt to catch up to it with new laws and processes.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe does not treat its female characters well at all, having them act out of character for their backstories or shoehorning them into roles that allow them to be easily sidelined.
Last for tonight, dragons and their less usual hordes"> and irregular dragon hoards, part two.
Finally, something that was memetic a bit ago - if I were the avatar of some deity, which deity would I be pledged to? (No, you don't want me as a deity. I'd figure out a way to do something cosmically horrible with it.)
Poet, author, and activist Maya Angelou joins the Dead Pool Writer Corps at 86 years of age. And, actually, the corpus of sex workers who have gone on to their rest. Since Maya Angelou was proud of that work, it is remiss for us not to mention it.
Now that sectarian prayer is permitted at City functions (or has always been permitted), a Florida gentleman applied to open a city business meeting with a prayer to Satan. Mostly as a point to show how far religious freedom really should be able to go.
Pennsylvania joins the Century of the Fruitbat, a federal decision which neither the governor nor the state attorney general will appeal. Additionally, a different ruling brings Oregon into the Century of the Fruitbat. We almost have both coasts covered, but the middle of the country reamins a tougher sell on marriage equality.
I think this poem about being a monster will resonate with many of you. It's by
kaberett.An Ottawa teen was arrested in connection with the practice of spoofing a telephone number and then calling in a false emergency in an attempt to get the police to respond to the spoofer's target with violence. As if there weren't enough real emergencies to have to deal with at any given time.
eBay got hacked. You didn't hear about it? Thank eBay' complete clusterfrak of a non-response. Even though more than 145 million user credentials may face been compromised. Anyone claiming to have the full list for sale, though, is likely trying to scam a company into buying false data.
The United States Justice Department is seeking a change of rules to allow judges to issue warrants for searching computers outside of the judge's jurisdiction. The DoJ says they need this power because of botnets and anonymizing technologies that obscure the location of the physical computers, so they need permission to hack and search through the tunnel they already have. If I trusted the government not to abuse those powers, we might give the proposal any sort of consideration. Since I don't, based on the evidence provided by the high-profile leaks, I hope the answer is NO. And that legislation intended to curb the very worst excesses of the government spying on us is followed by even more oversight and restriction until the government is forced back into abiding by the restrictions of the Constitution.
Amazon is quietly trying to leverage their position as the sellers of all things to get the Hachette Book Group to give them better contract deals, by removing links, obscuring others, and only selling Hatchette materials at their full price.
A suggestion that those who are making the minimum wage are a much smaller group than those who benefit from minimum wage increases in indirect methods, and that those who will be harmed by minimum wage increases are larger still, with the reasoning that increasing the minimum wage reduces the number of available jobs and increases the price of consumer goods, resulting in little net benefit for the demographic groups that would most directly benefit from a minimum wage increase. Because "job creators" choose not to hire people when each worker costs more to hire, since it cuts into their profitability.
And for the small businesses that conservative pundits claim are always the hardest hit by everything, I can believe that. Of course, if all they had to pay were wages, because the government took care of things like retirement income, health care, education, child care, and other such things, then it wouldn't be nearly so bad. (Such things could probably be funded though charging taxes based on what big companies reported to their shareholders as income and profits, instead of to the government.) And those profit-maximalists could probably be taken to task about their decisions regarding staffing. Or the government could embark on an employment program like the Works Progress Administration. In any case, though, the idea of "wages should be kept low so that greedy profit-maximalists will deign to employ people" comes across as exactly backward - but at this point in the game, the very richest have consolidated sufficient control that the rest of us are basically at their mercy, so their logic, while backward, rules.
What we need is for profit-maximalists to seek profit not to enrich themselves, but to enrich everyone, where the number of employees one has at stable, living-wage jobs is seen as the point of pride. And for those who believe social welfare programs are coddling the indolent to understand that most people who are using social welfare programs are probably working more than their critics are, for less total pay. If you want people to not use the social safety net, then employ them in jobs that pay sufficient wages and give sufficient hours, and understand that less profit now means more people can purchase your product or service in the future.
And no, that's not emotion talking. Most reactions to injustice are based on logical conclusions and calculations, not emotional states.
Movies being made about slavery or white-black relations often whitewash how things actually were, which gives the impression that things were better than they actually were, or that focuses on exceptional individuals with no consciousness of everyone else.
A review of the card game Privilege Check, whereupon the goal is to construct the most oppressed character through traits on cards, ostensibly to win an Internet argument by virtue of being able to tell everyone else to check their privilege, which we all know are the magic words that shut down any discussion so the more privileged person will avoid being called all sorts of -ists for continuing. Except, of course, it doesn't work that way, and there's not nearly enough satire that could cover an idea like that game. Especially when reality gives us a gubernatorial debate supposed to appeal to women framed as a dating game, one that avoids the most pressing issues facing women today.
And speaking of issues and women, a mass shooting at the University of California Santa Barbara is the end result of a Nice Guy (TM) taking his beliefs out to their logical conclusion. Rather than condemn the poisonous belief system that sparked the shooting, members of those communities tried to capitalize on the tragedy by claiming their ideology could have prevented the violence as others believed that the shooter was permanently insufficiently masculine to make a splash with his violence, or to obtain his stated goals. Dissent Of A Woman has an excellent roundup and commentary. So the hashtag #YesAllWomen came about so that women could tell their stories about the commonality of assault on women, and describe, in as much detail as needed, all the things women do to try and protect themselves from those men that feel entitled to them, even when, should things go bad, they know they're going to be blamed for whatever it was that resulted in their injury. The precautions are there so that if there is a chance to get away, it becomes a greater chance. Ideology kills. Especially ideology that thinks of women as lesser, inferior, or subordinate to men, or that men are entitled to women so long as they meet some arbitrary parameters. There are things people can do to stop this from happening.
The use of tools for one's own health and energy levels can provoke an interesting reaction from people trained to see certain tools as the signs of disability.
Outcome-oriented evaluations for tasks that are not really about numbers produce poor pictures of the effectiveness of the methods for accomplishing those tasks.
The human desire to improve and make things better extends even to the designs of guns composed of printed plastic, even as legislatures and law enforcement attempt to catch up to it with new laws and processes.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe does not treat its female characters well at all, having them act out of character for their backstories or shoehorning them into roles that allow them to be easily sidelined.
Last for tonight, dragons and their less usual hordes"> and irregular dragon hoards, part two.
Finally, something that was memetic a bit ago - if I were the avatar of some deity, which deity would I be pledged to? (No, you don't want me as a deity. I'd figure out a way to do something cosmically horrible with it.)
no subject
I know :( makes me want to go live on an island in the middle of nowhere.