May 2013
5 posts
Free Airport Parking for Congress: A Reminder that... →
This little perk, saving congress members time and $22-a-day parking fees, is a great example of the way that privilege translates into being “above society.” The more power, connections, and money you have, the more likely you are to be able to break both the legal and social contract with impunity. Sometimes this just means getting away with breaking the law (e.g., the fact that, compared to...
“automation isn’t an inevitable result of capitalism. If the workforce is pliant...”
– The Rise of the Machines | Jacobin
“Automation’s prime function is to destroy the ability of workers to control the...”
– The Rise of the Machines | Jacobin
Why Are People with Health Insurance Going... →
[T]here’s several levels of insurance coverage [available under ObamaCare:] 90/10, where the insurance company pays 90 percent, consumer pays 10 percent; 80/20; 70/30; 60/40. The subsidy provided by Obamacare to people who can’t afford insurance will only cover 70/30 plans. So when you get a serious illness, you’re paying 30 percent of the cost of that health care.
Now, what’s...
April 2013
12 posts
“You don’t have that much time to work with. You are going to get a very few...”
– How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium
“Conservatives have realized that having a choke-hold on the narrative and...”
– Lawyers, Guns & Money (via abbyjean)
“Hip-hop is now the lingua franca and the background music for an entire...”
– Gene Demby on the demographic shift in America via When Our Kids Own America (via nprmusic)
“White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she...”
– Terrorism and Privilege: Understanding the Power of Whiteness » Sociological Images
The Non-Inevitability of Same-Sex Marriage →
But the problem is that people greatly overestimate the effect of public opinion on public policy. This is one of the really key problems with the “Roe was counterproductive” argument. The assumption is that because outright bans on abortion are unpopular in most states, they were doomed whether the Supreme Court intervened or not. The problem is this isn’t how actually how American politics...
“Academia may not be a traditional bureaucracy but we forget that public colleges...”
– Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Blanket ‘Don’t Go To Graduate School!’ Advice Ignores Race And Reality?” tressiemc 4/5/13 (via racialicious)
“We recommend banning the danza and danzón because they are vestiges of Africa...”
– Danzón is the official genre and dance of Cuba.[1] It is also an active musical form in Mexico and is still beloved in Puerto Rico. The danzón evolved from the Cuban Habanera (known inside and outside of Cuba as the habanera).Originally, the contradanza was of English origin and was most likely...
“Twitter elicits a more poisonous information anxiety. It moves so fast that if...”
– Ezra Klein, The Washington Post. The Problem with Twitter.
Klein is reacting to Nick Beaudrot’s piece about Twitter, which is an account of why he’s not returning to Twitter after giving it up for Lent until he can figure a way to sort the useless from the useful. Beaudrot graphs Twitter content...
“Sandberg has penned not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant...”
– Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? | Dissent Magazine
“I worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of roles culminating in a...”
– Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? | Dissent Magazine
March 2013
5 posts
“The fundamentally conservative nature of the marriage contract is why, I think,...”
– Scot Nakagawa, “Why I Support Same Sex Marriage as a Civil Right, But Not as a Strategy to Achieve Structural Change,” ChangeLab 3/25/13 (via racialicious)
“This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that...”
– The Internet is a surveillance state - Bruce Schneier (via llimllib)
Wealth, risk, and stuff
vruba:
Via Anne Galloway on Twitter, I just saw Living With Less. A Lot Less, an opinion piece in the New York Times.
I run into some version of this essay by some moneybags twig-bishop about once a year, and it bugs me every time.
Here’s the thing. Wealth is not a number of dollars. It is not a number of material possessions. It’s having options and the ability to take on risk.
If you see...
I kind of hate TED talks | mathbabe →
Here’s one way to think about it: TED talks aren’t as good as blogs because they’re not interactive – the audience is expected to receive and not talk back. That’s why I prefer to blog in my underwear and bathrobe, imagining my friends on their living room sofas, also wearing pajamas, and objecting to my stupidity. And that’s why I like the feedback and the comments. It makes my ideas better.
...
February 2013
2 posts
The Autism Advantage →
Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and a regular contributor to The Times), published a much-discussed paper last year that addressed the ways that autistic workers are being drawn into the modern economy. The autistic worker, Cowen wrote, has an unusually wide variation in his or her skills, with higher highs and lower lows. Yet today, he argued, it is increasingly a worker’s...
January 2013
13 posts
Sentiment should not be the new horizon in... →
For example, this piece from the Awl convincingly describes the potential for the rapid analysis of thousands or even millions of articles as a basis for more effective media criticism, and as a replacement for punditry by “anecdata.” A more recent post from the Nieman Journalism Lab at least acknowledges some methodological weaknesses even as it makes a very strong case for large-scale...
“Now, Facebook has introduced what it calls Graph Search. One of the main signals...”
– Nicholas Carr, Rough Type. Facebook’s polluted graph. (via futurejournalismproject)
“The details that have emerged since Swartz’s death have only strengthened calls...”
– Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out - Scott Horton (via llimllib)
“I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might...”
– Kathryn Bigelow addresses ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ torture criticism - latimes.com
“During the last administration (six years), much of the Mexican media...”
– Mexican columnist Ricardo Alemán in today’s edition of El Universal [in Spanish].
For instance, take a look at this interactive infographic (aptly dubbed execution-o-meter) by the newspaper El Norte.
Update: I’ve decided to attach a screen caption of said infographic, since most contents of El...
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal...”
– Official Statement From the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz (via llimllib)
The Unbearable Invisibility of White Masculinity:... →
The “its suppose to happen” in inner-city communities reframe is not surprising. Places like Columbine, Aurora, and Newton exist because of the fear-industrial complex. The white middle-class flocked from cities into the suburbs and rural communities partially due to fear of black and Latino youth, integrated schools, and urban crime. The continuously deployed the narrative of...
aliveforalittlewhile:
10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’
oxfordcommas:
Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.
1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system. The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire...
becauseiamawoman:
“But it’s not really as easy as blaming Michelle Obama for not being as radical as we want her to be. Racist constructions of black motherhood play a large role in how she is perceived, and she has to work double time to avoid being cast as an “angry black woman.” Michelle Obama had to win the appeal of the American mainstream with qualities that make her seem like she’d be a...
“While Twitter’s Turks will help bring much-needed context to the platform,...”
– The Breaking News team to Twitter: Your Mechanical Turk team can’t compete with our actual journalists. (via shortformblog)
FJP: Some Background — The Twitter Engineering blog posted yesterday about how it uses real people alongside its search algorithms to determine the “meaning” of trending...
Homicides Increase After States Adopt ‘Stand Your... →
A new study has found a 7 to 9 percent increase in homicides in states that adopt ‘stand your ground’ law. The study by Texas A&M economist Mark Hoekstra also also found the laws have “zero deterrence” effect.
From 2000 to 2010, more than 20 states passed castle doctrine and stand-your-ground laws. These laws expand the legal justification for the use of lethal force in...
December 2012
9 posts
The Mathematical Hacker →
The trouble with the Lisp-hacker tradition is that it is overly focused on the problem of programming — compilers, abstraction, editors, and so forth — rather than the problems outside the programmer’s cubicle. I conjecture that the Lisp-school essayists — Raymond, Graham, and Yegge — have not “needed mathematics” because they spend their time worrying about how to make code more...
Staged authenticity - Hospitality Encyclopedia,... →
A prevalent form of staged authenticity is the ‘work display’, which includes factory tours, historical enactments of the everyday work activities of pilgrims or museum reconstructions of outmoded manufacturing techniques, to name only a few.
Thus, a place of work is made into a place of leisure for tourists. The nature of the actual work that occurs in the village has changed....
“artificially constructed postmodern tourism environments (such as the New York,...”
– Staged authenticity - Hospitality Encyclopedia, Tourism Encyclopedia
Coding Horror: Web Discussions: Flat by Design →
precious few threaded discussion models survive on the web. Putting aside Usenet as a relic and artifact of the past, it is rare to find threaded discussions of any kind on the web today; for web discussion communities that are more than ten years old, the vast majority are flat as a pancake.
I routinely skip threads where the thread is more than 5 deep
“You can’t “protest” against Taskrabbit, against Uber, against drones. The...”
– Impersonating the Machine | booktwo.org (via iamdanw)
Why New York Times Is Firing More Journalists... →
journo-geekery:
The key points are these:
The print newspaper is (or was) an awesome delivery vehicle for advertising, with the average print subscriber still consuming ~$450 worth of advertising per year.
The digital newspaper is a comparatively lousy delivery vehicle for advertising, with the average print subscriber consuming only about $100 of advertising per year. (And that’s if we...
“Being in media is terrifying right now. Whereas in the old days, you wrote...”
– Alexis Madrigal (via theatlantic)
November 2012
25 posts
“competition, which was the predominant form of market relations in...”
– Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 6 