Always good advice
Badges? We don’t need ..
My healthcare provider has this useless new rule about showing photo ID before check-in — I guess because unlike credit card based copays, those totally can’t be forged.
I figured it was a matter of time, and, yup, I just flashed my GameStop rewards card because I wasn’t paying attention.
You stay classy, Alabama.
In other happy news, the US is now even more on track for a GINI coefficient approaching Brazil’s own happy mess.
Now that we’re nearing the completion of the Iraq war, it’s worth reflecting upon some of our many numerous accomplishments.
I work for the internet?
Having been thus far too lazy to properly unfollow the defaults, this was on my dashboard today. Allow me to respond, then, and say: Good for you. I, however, my dear tumblr, do not.
I mean, if you want to be cute, I technically do, and have done so for more than a decade. But being just another neckbeard in the tech sector, the reality is that I work for a paycheck. The internet is a medium. The internet doesn’t care if I eat today, if my heating oil has been delivered or how my day has gone. The internet is an extension of business, and as with the computers that run it, a good portion was largely developed as a function of military application and not a cross-collegiate computer sanctum. Truth. Words on the internet are ultimately illusory, and censorship is just as likely from the media providers as it is from the government. (The irony of a wikpedia link for this reference is not lost on me.) Truly free speech is a constant battle; archives are as likely to disappear as the original source. Never-mind the vagaries of ebooks and the like; Amazon updates pushed out via whispersync can just as easily update a textbook to false facts as new facts.
Ah, but the promise of the internet. Technology will conquer all! Just ask the OLPC project, who plans to drop laptops from helicopters. It makes me positively long for the time when there were actual, professional cynics to the cheerleaders of technology. When everyone’s living hand-to-mouth, it’s much less easier to scorn the bubble, any bubble. Gone is fuckedcompany. Valleywag was since absorbed into the gawker ur-amoeba wholesale, and for reasons too numerous to list here, I mostly swore off the Gawker brand some time ago. That said, this is as good a response as any, in a world devoid of the “why?” needed for the boosters of cyber-triumphalism. It’s positively wallowing in justified snark. The opening in particular should sell it: Lo, white male computer nerds have discovered political injustice!
These companies need to use their lobbyists. True grassroots is the poor man’s methodology, and I suspect most people in the real world have bigger concerns these days.
If you think America’s addiction to slavery was cured by a few strokes of a presidential pen, then a new PBS documentary called “Slavery by Another Name” is going to be a real eye-opener. The film, narrated by…Laurence Fishburne, will focus on the struggles of the post-Emancipation era, as well as the labor practices and laws that effectively created new forms of slavery in the South…
it’s based on the above book. more.
Woot!
Slavery was NEVER outlawed, only qualified!
Amendment 13 Section 1. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
I bought this book awhile ago. I think I need to move it to the top of my queue.
(Source: thesmithian, via fyeahblackhistory)
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
Possibly the dumbest OWS-themed shit I've seen yet.
I silently cringed when coworkers made happy noises over Occupy Flash. But where that simple geek diversion divorced actual productive populist movement from its iconoclastic iconography, this one is less of a divorce and more of a show trial and summary execution.
An interesting, if depressing, data visualization on road casualities
Drive safe this holiday!
