Sloopy is getting a bit frazzled, so I am stepping in to do the Linkings this Morgen. If you hear reports of a naked, woad painted man running up and down the streets of Houston, crying out “Freedom!” – I can neither confirm nor deny that is sloopy. So, on to the Substitute Linkings…
Sports – I shan’t say a word about it. Nope. Can’t make me. I don’t care how well the NFL turned out yesterday… *shakes fist toward the East*
History and Birthdays – Many events occurred today, many people of note were born on this day. For a moment, stop and reflect on them.
- California pauses, only so slightly, on its march to madness. I am sure this will end up in front of the SCOTUS and Kaliforniuh will be beaten like a drum.
- I wonder if we could get some of our politicians in front of a Bangladeshi court? Seems a bit like piling on…but, when it happens to a politician, I have a hard time clinging to my principles.
- Too little, too late, knucklekopf. Wait…I did that wrong. Let me try again… “You know who else wanted to remain Chancellor of Germany?”
OK, go to it, in the comments.
Oh, one more thing…I know several of you speak jive, but does anyone speak Brit Tabloid? WTF kind of headline is this?
Comments
476 responses to “Monday Morning Links of Substitution”
The 2018 World Champion Boston Red Sox are the best team in franchise history.
While I can think of a better player at just about every position in Red Sox history, never saw a team this good.
Hoping next year we see a regression to the mean for the guys who had career years.
Because fuck the Sox.
Advice 14 year old boys everywhere can get behind
Is this what leads to crusty smelly socks?
Well, the ’46 Bosox had a better regular season (by winning percentage, .675 to .667), although they lost to the Cardinals in the World Series. The 1912 Bosox had the best regular season winning percentage (.691) and beat the Giants in the World Series.
Only three links and two of them are duplicates. I want my money back!
No Refunds.
I have no idea what you are talking about… Oh, and MR. SMITH will see you now.
And by “see you” mean….
STEVE SMITH OFTEN IMITATED BUT NEVER DUPLICATED
Truth!
Bangladesh and German links are the same
Merkel importing more third world foreigners, I bet.
LIES!
No they aren’t. One is made with pork and the other street meat.
Oh, that was the wurst.
*narrows gaze*
I never sausage a pun.
We’ve already gotten a narrowed gaze, so don’t be a brat.
To be frank, the pun threads are a crucial part of the Glibs experience.
But the sausage puns always stretch the case to breaking.
You’ll like these links…very sage.
Well, it’s about thyme someone said that.
You really don’t want to know how these puns are made.
Well my son’s high school was evacuated this morning; all students sent back home. Don’t know the reason yet – assuming bomb threat or whack-a-doodle dad or ?
You send your son to a prominent Democrat for schooling?
No, the Dem is a fellow student.
Im glad your son is ok.
The bus never even dropped him off – just turned right back. And the middle school is on lock down – heard through the parent grapevine.
Some angry teacher go on a destructive bender now that the “blue wave” seems to be just fantasy?
It’s a blue tsunami, quit changing the narrative.
Update – as I predicted a bomb threat. I’ll assume that no bomb is actually on the property; high schooler just wanted a day off.
If they find out he lives in a be-Trumped van, I might give the conspiracy theories some credit.
I was/am so sure that was a Dem operation, and they just had to a white van with Trump stickers to show that they can do whatever they want and the media won’t even question it.
Kind of like Hillary’s suddenly relevant “intent”.
Meanwhile the media did a bang up job whipping up even my normal friends into being more angry at Trump than the Synagogue shooter.
But you can tell your son he’s achieved that coveted victimhood status. Now you just have to find a cause and you can get him in front of cameras Nation wide.
Yes, he is now a “survivor” and therefore morally unassailable.
Plus he now has the eye of the tiger.
Except you said “he”.
Back in the day, bomb threats meant we got to spend an hour outside while the fire department pretended to search the school.
Now it means a trip to juvenile detention for the threat-maker, unless he or she is over 17, where they may be in jail.
There were 4 separate bomb threats at the local high school last year. They had to extend instruction by a week to make up for lost time.
That’s public school for you, 5 days to make-up the lost 4.
I had a flat tire. Thankfully it wasn’t a blow-out at speed.
I did too.
How the synagogue shooting should have ended. Arm yourselves if you live in a free state.
Alabama McDonald’s gunman killed by armed dad.
Footage of the incident
Lmao
And to think it only took 24 years for Mac Donald’s to get the message.
The armed citizen is a myth. They never stop an armed gunman. / Sweeps evidence away.
The FBI statisticians sure have been hard at work to hide those facts according to some recent article I read pointing out how they ignored more than 60% of incidences where an armed citizen made a difference – based on pure bogus bullshit criteria – in order to keep making the claim armed citizens make no difference. Fucke them all with a rusty lawnmower blade.
“The gunman, who was not identified, later died of his injuries. The other two injuries were not considered life-threatening.”
The best happy meal prize ever.
Here’s the AP report. No mention of the customer returning fire. I’m still searching for a CNN or MSNBC link, but I’m using google.
Oops
https://www.apnews.com/d6bc4cd3c7224749ade16f191f7c6e07
Ok that was from a different McDonald’s shooting.
Sorry.
Still searching for non Fox MSM coversge
The national media’s going to be ALL OVER this story for sure!
BURGER PUNK!
I love the fact that the pull quote is all about how one of the employees wished he could “wake up from this nightmare.” Why didn’t they use this as the money quote instead? (Same employee too):
Has anyone worked with Resin Ivory before? Is it sensitive to discoloration, or is it more resilient?
My understanding is that you have to mix it with equal parts Resin Ebony.
1/8th ebony so you get Octaroon Resin
Also known as High Yellow resin.
It’s great stuff. Because it’s 99 44/100% pure, it floats, allowing you to save you knife in the case of a tragic boating accident.
I picked copper fixtures, and I was wondering about treatment to prevent corrosion and what effect that would have on the main scales. When freshly made, it should look very nice. I just want it to stay that way over time.
I’ve never used it. The only synthetics I’ve used for knife handles are Dymandwood and some homebrew filled epoxys.
Those were pretty much inpervious.
Sorry I’m late, Yes it will yellow if exposed to too much UV, i.e. Sunlight.
But what about exposure to chemicals for cleaning copper?
Or, you let the copper age naturally, which is not bad look at all. I actually prefer it for just about anything other than cookware.
Above all, I don’t want it turning green.
Probably your best bet is to put a protective coating on it, then.
Of what type? This is part of what led me to start asking about folor retention from the fake ivory.
You can polish it without chemicals, just some jeweler’s rouge.
Thin application of oil? Linseed or whatever you use on guns, I’d guess.
Whenever a corrupt third world country sends a corrupt leader to jail for corruption by what most likely was a corrupt court, I always have a hard time knowing who to cheer for.
Prison for all!
The perfect Jury instructions.
“You will find the defendants guilty, then scold them”
RE: California. I find it disturbing the amount of effort progressives are putting in to sue the federal government to ensure not one ounce of regulations are ever lost. They have claimed on multiple counts that Obama’s policies are somehow binding on future presidents (Paris accords, Dreamers etc).
“By Any Means Necessary”
Double pinky swear no take-backs!
They were told that this would play out exactly like this unless congress was the one creating the laws, because the presidential pen was not law. They laughed at the people saying this, because they figured they would steal the election for Hillary, and she would double down on more of this evil shit intended to allow leftists asshat politicians to pick winners & losers. Now they are mad that all this corrupt shit is being wiped off the books, not just because it has made Obama’s legacy crap, but because once these things were removed the economy team Obama spent nary 8 years telling us was forever doomed to anemic growth suddenly not only came back alive, but went into overdrive. Nothing pisses the marxist/fascist movement that wants government to pick winners & losers off more than reality showing they are evil. selfish, and stupid fucks.
Yeah, but won’t it be nice when the next president can’t wipe out Trump’s travel ban Executive Order? Because I’m sure the precedent set about Obama’s EO’s being binding will be continued to Trump. RIght?
Fear: The Root of Trump’s power
Any law enforcement of any kind entails a “police state”, so defined.
Falls in line with their loose definition of what constitutes as racist and a Nazi.
Are you femsplaining here muppet?
Was that wrong?
Angry bitchez are gonna want your muppet sack for that commentary man..
They have a point. Closing the border is just a simple step to keeping people from leaving.
Is that why they are trying to close the border? To keep people in?
Not now, but set the precedent for having the military at the border and what might happen when the “Democratic” Socialists take Power. Me today, you tomorrow applies to Republicans to.
The border is the one place the Miltiary is Supposed to be.
Well, yeah, protecting the borders from invasion is literally their purpose in being.
There is a whole range of options between “completely open border that is not secured against thousands of invaders” and “completely closed borders where none are allowed to leave”.
If the “migrants” are armed, does that justify putting military at the border? They’ve stated their intention to violate US territorial sovereignty with the further intention of breaking US immigration laws, at the very least. What would be the appropriate response?
Honestly? Say “come on in, we’re glad to have you by the way, we just abolished the welfare state.”
Force the Democrats to publicly concede they can’t have it both ways, either they favor Americans or non Americans. But using equivocating this caravan with an armed invasion in order to place the military on the border for immigration concern is a bad precedent in my mind. It’s further ratcheting State power to fix a state caused problem.
Force the Democrats to publicly concede they can’t have it both ways,
Seriously? The whole point for the Democrats is to keep getting them in and getting them on the welfare state bennies to grow their constituency of government dependents.
Get rid of the welfare state first, then go ahead and open the borders. But not until then.
Get rid of the welfare state, and finally close the borders.
Kinda like “Obamacare won’t apply to illegals”.
“You lie!”
Scandal for outburst during SOTU.
They now campaign on subsidies for illegals.
50 calibers and a lot of ammo
You truly are a specimen of depravity.
We should be glad he didn’t say napalm.
I agree! .50 is an anti-material round, and far too expensive to use here. Also after you shoot 2 or 3 the rest will run away. The breaking point of migrant caravan’s is not all that high.
WE GOTTA FUCKIN KILL THEM FUCKIN INVADIN FUCKIN MEXICANS CUZ THAT FUCKIN JEW SOROS IS FUCKIN IMPORTIN THEM
I TELL IT LIKE IT IS I AINT POLITICALLY CORRECT OR NUTHIN
This is like saying that being in favor of enforcing traffic laws means you’re an authoritarian. Also, this is why Libertarians never win elections. Being in favor of legal immigration but not wanting a caravan of illegal immigrants to pour through the border en masse is not an unreasonable or, dare I say it, anti-liberty position to take. This is very similar to the argument that land ownership is anti-liberty because you’re infringing on the rights of other people’s movement. That’s a fine theoretical, but you’ll find a lot of people in the real, objective world who take great exception to your extraordinarily broad definition of “liberty”.
+1 gambol
“Being in favor of legal immigration but not wanting a caravan of illegal immigrants to pour through the border en masse is not an unreasonable or, dare I say it, anti-liberty position to take.”
It sure is considered double plus non-good think however, because it gets in the way of the plans that the statists that see an open border+ welfare state leading to permanent control for authoritarian leftists, have for the future of this nation. That’s why we have the massive effort to blur the lines between legal and illegal. legal immigration hurts the proponents of that authoritarian welfare state.
Guess they never read Reason. It’s not like there’s thousands of libertarian websites to search through
I’m perplexed by Reason’s stance on immigration. They seem to conflate both ‘illegal’ and legal immigration.
Why come you scared of caravans?
It’s not a question of fear. It’s a question of law and order.
Disappointing. I originally went there because it provided different perspectives than you’d get from other news/opinion sources. I can read one sided disingenuous shit and hear Trump is a Nazi anywhere, so what’s the point.
Imma gonna guess the person who wrote this is has no problem throwing people in jail for possessing a gun or for hate speech.
Twenty years ago you never heard the word “libertarian”. Now I here it all the time.
Not excited to go to work and here about how guns and Trump are to blame for this latest shooting.
Ask them why they feel totes cool defending the biggest Jew haters and defaming people that pointed this out, but now want to pretend Trump, whom is not, is to blame.
I just keep asking people why they’re more mad at Trump than the shooter. I still haven’t got any other answer than Trump needs to STFU.
Everything is Trumps fault. He managed to win an election they thought they had rigged for Hillary, and for that they will never forgive him or the people that voted for him.
but does anyone speak Brit Tabloid?
Cry ‘Bollocks!” and let slip the dogs of war.
The dogs of war.
https://youtu.be/SXO-a6o484M
I immediately thought of these Dogs of War.
I thought of this one.
Saw Pink Floyd’s Dogs of War concert in Cleveland. Awesome show.
“You know who else wanted to remain Chancellor of Germany?”
Bismarck?
Palpatine?
Nosferatu?
What do a bunch of NoDak politicians have to do with Germany?
True story. Until about a year ago, airfare from Minneapolis to Bismarck, ND was slightly above a thousand dollar round trip. At the same time, airfare from Minneapolis to Bismarck Germany was a little less. Fuck Delta.
Monopolies rock man. The people that want to blame capitalism for this shit love the fact government tells businesses how to pick winners and losers.
I bet it was only $89 to fly into Bismark, ND. It was $1000 to leave. And they’ve got people lined up around the hangar to get the fuck out.
Kurt von Schleicher?
Helmut Kohl?
Private roads, schools, prisons and now RAINFORESTS!
How quaint, I haven’t heard any fear mongering about the rainforest since it was the cause celebre when I was in grade school.
Read the responses? Collective pant shitting is not pretty.
“We have voices, bodies, and minds”
Yeah good luck with that.
That’s because they were destroyed by the year 2000.
The rainforest is a classic Orwellian terms. It used to be called the jungle, but that sounds scary.
You know you’re old when you’ve lived through global cooling, the ozone layer, the rainforests, carbs are good, paper bags are bad/plastic bags are good, global warming, plastic bags are bad/paper bags are good, and carbs are bad.
+1 Bruce Cockburn.
Is he related to Anita Tittyfuck?
I also remember growing up when the rainforest-being-in-danger was absolutely syringed into every kid in the 90s. My favorite thing to explain to people on the subject is to note how insanely dirty the world was in 1900 compared to now. This never seems to land with the eco-tards but I still feel compelled to always mention it.
I remember being dumbfounded by the constant Captain Planet shit. Even as I kid I was confused why everyone else loved it. There was a stand up bit that I can’t recall that was about that.
‘The bad guys’ scheme is literally just to destroy the environment. There’s no product! You can’t base your company on just polluting full-time! There’s no margin there!’ If someone knows what I’m talking about I’d be obliged.
Obligatory.
“Clean your plate, kids in China are starving.”
I’m still trying to deprogram myself and to stop eating when I’m full.
“Then kill Chairman Mao and the rest of the party. Then the Chinese would have food again.”
Your best line ever.
“With just 12yr remaining to remake the global economy and prevent catastrophic climate change, this is planetary suicide.”
The end is nigh.
That’s a lot more time than most of them give us to act, though.
The end is nigh-ish.
Look, it’s going to take more than one Five-Year Plan to pile up enough corpses in order to “remake the global economy”. Have some patience.
Gab.com goes offline after Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
Effectively a half dozen or so companies can virtually eliminate your presence from the worldwide web. I don’t want them regulated as utilities or torn up by anti-trust regulators, nor would I even say it’s a market failure. But it’s a truly shitty state of affairs and only marginally preferable to tyranny by a state.
They’ve found another host and are moving their stuff over from my understanding. This state of affairs is temporary.
If they’re lucky they’ll end up on a shady foreign registrar and host, won’t be indexed, will be flagged by every mainstream browser as a potentially unsafe site. Etc etc. It is what it is.
Isn’t this the outcome we have always argued would happen. If anything this is the best argument for libertarians when people challenge us on repealing the Civil Rights Act? The whole argument is that the market wouldn’t tolerate it.
The registrars and various other gatekeepers pick winners and losers and collude with the larger established firms to eliminate competitors. It’s not a good thing.
I like to think of it more as the market would provide such an abundance of options that those who best served the widest number of customers would thrive, while others would not. In other words, the “No Niggers” lunch counter could still operate, but it might die off for lack of customers because the “Welcome Everyone” lunch counter across the street would appeal to a much larger audience. In the modern formulation, the “No Niggers” lunch counter loses its ability to access banking services, gets it utilities shut off, and an angry mob burns it down while the cops look on because nobody likes the “No Niggers” lunch counter and are happy to see it go.
‘and an angry mob burns it down while the cops look on because nobody likes the “No Niggers” lunch counter and are happy to see it go.’
Where are the people destroying Gabb’s property? They should be prosecuted. Otherwise if Gab is contractualy owed services, they should persue what they see fit. The fast is that they have found other registrar’s. No where did it say that being on the margin was easy in the market. It’s easy to say now “hey being a racist will be a bad market move, but I bet in some places that wasn’t true”
The fact is that we (libertarians) don’t want to accept that we are on the margin, and that elite parts of society will do what they can to keep our thoughts down. We have to recognize our position, without wallowing in it.
I think everyone here realizes that most people don’t think like we do politically. Hell, the only reason libertarian sites don’t get the Gab treatment is that we don’t have enough influence for the censorship happy mobs to worry about.
You all laugh at Reason and the cosmotarians, but look, they cozied up to our progressive betters and our betters promised to kill us last.
Where are the people destroying Gabb’s property?
In this particular case that’s not literally happening, although it’s become routine during our perennial Antifa and race riots. Gab isn’t self-hosted anyway, so they don’t have a lot in the way of physical property that could damaged. I only meant it by way of an analogy.
In any case, I’m willing to admit now that I was very wrong about some of the arguments I’ve made in the past in favor of open markets vis-a-vis competition and a diversity of alternatives to any given market participant. Sufficiently oligopolistic markets leave no tenable alternatives when the dominant players are also sufficiently aligned strategically or ideologically. To be fair, I don’t think there’s ever been a point in American history where that’s really been the case until recently. Even in the Jim Crow south there were people willing to provide goods and services without discrimination, and they were able to access the infrastructure necessary to do so.
“Sufficiently oligopolistic markets leave no tenable alternatives when the dominant players are also sufficiently aligned strategically or ideologically.”
Fair enough, though the only group I could see that apply to is payment processing and maybe hosting though there are quite a few hosting solutions out there. I think for the most part those oligopoly’s are protected by regulation that if repealed would hurt that market power.
Beating back the tide of technological illiberalism is going to require cultural and social divestment: quit Facebook, quit Twitter, return to the rich history of advertising newsletters in the backpages of dodgy circulars.
Is this any different from telling someone that, if they don’t want to give up their rights so they can fly commercial, they can just walk or drive
It would be more analogous to saying that they can just fly a general aviation plane (in a hypothetical world where you don’t need a license and GA planes cost $10k or less)
I also think there’s a big difference between the who’s asking you to “give up your rights”. In the airline example, it’s the TSA, a gov’t agency. In the internet example, it’s a cabal of companies saying “we won’t serve the likes of you”. Distasteful? Yes. Hypocritical? Certainly. Well within their rights as private companies providing a service in the marketplace? I think so.
Oops, Gilmored it
Well within their rights as private companies providing a service in the marketplace? I think so.
I’m not sure I disagree. I’m just wondering what limits there are on those rights, if any.
Leaving aside our current laws, if an HOA decided that it didn’t like Jews, should it be permitted to forbid them from using the roads in the HOA?
I’m just wondering what limits there are on those rights, if any.
Honestly, I don’t know. This is where doctrinaire libertarianism gets sticky. Stripping away everything else, I’m having a hard time squaring forcing these companies to sell to customers they find distasteful with my conscience.
Leaving aside our current laws, if an HOA decided that it didn’t like Jews, should it be permitted to forbid them from using the roads in the HOA?
This^^ is a much harder question to answer than this:
Leaving aside our current laws, if a Jewish deli
an HOAdecided that it didn’t like NazisJews, should it be permitted to forbid them from using the shitter in the deliroads in the HOA?However, I’m not convinced they’re actually different questions.
If I peel away as many layers of the onion as I dare, the issue seems to be that a company or cabal of companies can accumulate enough power in a region or an industry to be able to deny access to that industry for certain potential customers. Frankly, as somebody who would applaud a repeal of the CRA, I see this as one of those issues that come up when self-ownership is fully affirmed by law. I haven’t found any convincing reason why a bakery can deny service to a gay couple, but an internet company* can’t deny service to a site that they dislike.
*excepting ISPs
Sufficiently oligopolistic markets leave no tenable alternatives when the dominant players are also sufficiently aligned strategically or ideologically.
I’m not seeing it. What was Gab owed? An audience? Psh. A business relationship with companies who don’t want to do business with them? Fuck off slaver! An equal footing to Twitter and Facebook? Earn it!
Gab isn’t owed a megaphone, and they are subject to the whims of the companies whose technology they use to make their site work. This is the case in every market in every industry. If you don’t want to be subject to your suppliers, insource that work.
Public accommodation sucks, even when it benefits your pony. Freedom of association is paramount, even when it’s your ox being gored.
The nice thing about the internet is that the barrier to entry is extremely low, so if you’re getting pushed out by the established powers, you can DIY most of it.
It’s less that Gab is owed anything, and more in trying to get the companies punishing them to follow their own supposed rules evenly.
trying to get the companies punishing them to follow their own supposed rules evenly
Never. Gonna. Happen.
Have you ever seen the inside of Facebook’s HQ? Have you ever walked the streets of Palo Alto and listened to the conversation?
They’re so far up their own asses that they can lick their progressive, super tolerant gall stones. Even if they tried, they couldn’t be unbiased because the closest thing they encounter to a conservative on a daily basis is a person who has enough understanding of economics to be a bit nervous of Bernie’s policies.
To paraphrase Twain in Connecticut Yankee:
Even if they do their best to be impartial, according to their lights, they are still extremely biased. They are a product of their environment, and they will always favor their fellow travelers on the left because they live in an enclave of varying flavors of progressivism.
The nice thing about the internet is that the barrier to entry is extremely low, so if you’re getting pushed out by the established powers, you can DIY most of it.
You really can’t, and that was my point. You’re talking about multi millions of dollars of capitalization required to bootstrap a social network if you can’t access cloud-based hosting, or even a traditional server farm. Let alone when you are boxed out of basic essentials like domain registration. After you’ve sunk that humongous capital expenditure into the hardware to make your site run, and saying that you can find a service provider to hook you into the internet (that’s coming next, bet on it), you can put up a .onion site and print up some flyers to hang on telephone poles since you won’t be indexed and will be barred from advertising on the ad networks run by Facebook or Google, which accounts for 80% of all ad traffic. And then you can sell it all for 60 cents on the dollar a few months later when your 500 users can’t give you enough money to pay your power bill.
Don’t get me wrong, I still support free markets and oppose anti-trust. But I’ve often argued in the past that oligopolies and even monopolies aren’t sustainable in a free market and that diverse offerings will always thrive because of the decentralized nature of markets and the nature of competition. And I was wrong. Full stop.
And that is the point.
There are no alternatives. It is not like GAB could just go to another provider, nearly all of the providers are governed by the exact same political views and the small handful that are not are actively hindered in other ways by google and similar internet giants.
No one is saying that companies have to offer GAB any given service but the reality is the TOS needs to be treated as a contract but specifically a contract that the company can either enforce universally or not at all so that any client that you try to boot for failing to adhere to your TOS can defend itself by simply pointing out cases where they failed to impose the same sanction on any other company.
Then if the hosting service or paypal wants to get rid of GAB as a client they wait till the contract is up and do not accept a new contract with them. None of this overnight banning BS.
What Pat said.
You really can’t, and that was my point. You’re talking about multi millions of dollars of capitalization required to bootstrap a social network if you can’t access cloud-based hosting, or even a traditional server farm.
And you can’t bootstrap a car manufacturer, a pharma company, or an airline without investing billions.
I don’t understand how this in any way overrides the freedom of association inherent in dissociating from a distasteful client. All I’m hearing are complaints akin to “MARKET FAILURE!!” as commonly paraded by the progs.
The “no other options” complaint may fly when ISPs get involved, but until then, Gab is more than welcome to start from the ground up.
The TOS argument is interesting, but I doubt it will go anywhere. Just because the door says “no shirt, no shoes, no service” doesn’t mean that McDonald’s can’t kick a fully dressed person out for other reasons. It also doesn’t mean that McDonald’s can’t kick somebody out for wearing a translucent shirt.
And you can’t bootstrap a car manufacturer, a pharma company, or an airline without investing billions.
True, but also not analogous. The tech oligopoly has a very unique ability to exclude new market entrants because of control of the infrastructure necessary to operate on the web, and they are joined by adjacent industries like banking and payment processing in their efforts. It would be as if Ford, GE and Fiat were able to exclude Tesla from operating on the same roads. Or if Southwest and Delta owned all of the airports and refused to make leases to regional carriers. Or if Pfizer, Novartis and Merck owned every chemical lab on planet earth and only made basic compounds available to companies in their good graces.
The other part that makes the tech oligopoly unique is the ideological uniformity upon which their collusion against new entrants is based. In most oligopolistic and monopolistic situations the barrier to entry is purely a function of economic scale and market position – new entrants are kept out for financial reasons. In the tech world, companies are actually happy to hemorrhage money and forgo revenue in order to exclude certain market participants who do not conform to their ideology. Most oligopolies and monopolies are amoral. Tech is not.
Here again, I’m not advocating any intervention in the market. But I ‘m no longer willing to defend a position that’s demonstrably false. The tech giants, as is their god-given natural right, own enough of the infrastructure of the internet and worldwide web that they can effectively bar from participation anyone they wish, and do so routinely for political and ideological reasons. They’re entitled to do that. It’s just a shitty situation, and there’s no practical remedy to it.
To state it more simply, a very substantial amount of business and social interaction in this country now operates purely on the benevolence of a couple dozen entrenched interests because they have built up such impressive market positions and share the same ideological orientation. The only way in which this is different from a state is the ability to opt out from commerce with these institutions entirely. However, doing so is extremely difficult while maintaining a modern lifestyle.
I DON’T WANT TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS. It’s not morally wrong. It doesn’t justify any intervention by the state. It’s just frustrating and disappointing. And it will get nothing but worse as the industry further consolidates.
I hear the “free association” arguments, and am even willing to look past the fact that many people making them in this context are full-on “public accommodation” supporters in every other context. I wonder, though, if there isn’t something different about the internet, which makes it more analogous to . . . . wait for it . . . . roads.
This doesn’t apply so much to social media platforms as it does to ISPs and content hosting services, but if they are allowed to block people from even having access to the internet, that sounds to me a lot like barring people from using roads. Its not a sufficient answer, in my mind, to say “well, they can just walk wherever they want to go.” That has been the basis for the government’s restrictions on right to travel by various modes (can’t drive without a license, can’t fly commercial without surrendering your rights, etc.). Just because there may be an alternative, doesn’t excuse restrictions on the primary infrastructure.
Switching analogies to utilities, would we really be OK if an electric company and water company refused to provide services to registered Republicans? And justified it on “free association” grounds and the fact that you can just buy bottled water and set up solar electric at your house?
This doesn’t apply so much to social media platforms as it does to ISPs and content hosting services, but if they are allowed to block people from even having access to the internet, that sounds to me a lot like barring people from using roads.
Let’s set aside ISPs for a moment. They are a government enforced local monopoly and should be held to a different standard.
Content hosting isn’t some sort of magic wand. If Glibs was getting blackballed by their host, TPTB could migrate (at a cost in dollars and effort) to a Clinton style server in the basement.
Sure, it may not be as polished of a solution as cloud hosting, sure it may not be as full featured, sure it may require 10x the maintenance. However, the same could be said for repairing your own car or building your own furniture.
The ISPs are the only things that can actually block you from the internet, and technology is beginning to take root that would give you many more options in that space. The browser is a distant second.
Everything else is a convenience. As the saying goes, you have a right to speak, not a right to be heard.
If Glibs was getting blackballed by their host, TPTB could migrate (at a cost in dollars and effort) to a Clinton style server in the basement.
Is this any different from telling someone that, if they don’t want to give up their rights so they can fly commercial, they can just walk or drive?
The ISPs are the only things that can actually block you from the internet
Which will happen increasingly, I absolutely guarantee you. And no one’s rights would be violated in that case either. The internet is a private meta-network.
The above mentioned limitations are still relevant though. You’re not getting it. No one’s rights are being violated when an oligopoly colludes to exclude participation in their market. That’s not the the argument. Not mine, anyway. But don’t pretend that’s not exactly what’s happening. When you can’t register a domain, can’t host your site on third party hardware, can’t access third party networks, can’t have your site indexed, can’t advertise your site, and can’t host advertising on your site, you don’t have a site. You are excluded from the entire chain of commerce related to the worldwide web. If you’re an activist and you’re content with a handful of dedicated users accessing your site over TOR that’s dandy. If you have a business plan that entails launching a service that will compete with any of the incumbents in the commercial space, you’re fucked. End of story. There isn’t a remedy available short of launching a fully integrated service platform from the host and registrar up, and even then you need ICANN and Verisign accreditation, so there’s still a gatekeeper. It’s a uniquely untenable situation resultant not of a market failure, but of the market functioning exactly as it should.
Gofuckdaddy.
They and Paypal can seriously go fuck themselves.
What did PayPal do?
They stopped processing Gabb’s payments
Yeh. Just read that.
What I find outrageous is based on their reason, they should stop processing Facebook and Twitter.
I have no idea what the people who own Gab’s financial situation looks like but I would love to see them take Paypal to court over exactly that issue. Claim it as an illegal restraint of trade for unequally enforcing their terms of service or some shit. No they probably won’t win but they could cause a shit ton of damage to Pay Pal in the process and maybe encourage someone else to step up and fill in the gap
I’ve been saying that long before this crap.
My only complaint is that their poorly defined codes of civility are not equally enforced.
By the reasoning they gave Gab none, and I mean none, of the social media sites would make the cut.
That’s by design.
So GoDaddy and Paypal are now going to be liable for whatever they DON’T censor?
:bar association rubs hands gleefully:
Not Paypal, since they aren’t a platform.
GoDaddy, maybe, if it starts deplatforming people based on inconsistently applied standards. If you don’t apply standards consistently, you aren’t acting in good faith and don’t qualify for immunity any more. The real challenge under the current language will be when they stop pretending to be content-neutral, and just say “This platform is only for liberals and progressives”, so that their bans are consistent with their standards. Even then, though, I suspect that they won’t quite be able to bring themselves to ban the Farrakhans and misc. nutters.
The case against the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to end net neutrality, filed by California and 31 other states and public interest groups, will be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court’s decision is expected next year with arguments beginning Feb. 1.
If the court decides the FCC acted arbitrarily and capriciously, net neutrality protections could return nationwide. The court also is deciding if states can regulate the issue on their own.
I predict shit-show.
Someone should pass a “road neutrality” law – no fast lanes, no HOV, no tolls, no parking fees anywhere. It’s only fair, right?
Shark is jumped.
“Anti-Semitism without Jews.”
He hates Arabs?
“The far-right faction with which Bowers identifies does oppose Trump as a pro-Jewish sellout, citing such betrayals as his support for Israel and the marriage of his daughter to a Jewish man. Those differences between Trump and murderous anti-Semites are hardly trivial.
Still, Bowers does identify with some of Trump’s goals and rhetoric, because Trump has inspired the racist far right to a degree surpassing any modern American president.”
More than Obama?
Hurr durr, anti-Trump loon inspired by Trump because Trump a meanie.
Seriously, they must beat themselves in the head with hammers every night before bed, because this level of stupid can’t be derived naturally.
far-right faction with which Bowers identifies
Big government collectivism, such as nazism, is patently left-wing.
Florida is too hot:
Kentucky Dad Apologizes For Father-Son Nazi Halloween Costumes
Well, that was stupid.
I wonder what the reaction would be if someone dressed as Castro, Mao, Lenin, or Stalin. If you really want to fly under the radar, dress as Pol Pot. No one would know who the fuck you are.
It would hard to tell him apart from Mao or the one of the Kims.
LACIST!
Some regular guy wears a costume, gets dog piled by the mob and has his scalp waved bravely by Huffpo. How am I not to hate humanity at this point?
Goldbach = (((troll)))?
OTOH I dressed as T. E. Lawrence a couple years ago. I wonder whether even dressing as a white man dressed in Bedouin garb would be acceptable in this climate. Would it help if I said I’m Peter O’Toole? I’m the white guy dressed as the white guy pretending to be another white guy who wore a dress.
I thought dressing up as evil goblins, ghosts and ghouls was kinda the point of Halloween.
This costume outrage is silly. People dress as demons and serial killers, so why not Nazis? Part of the point of Halloween is to have one night a year to be transgressive, and to do so in a “safe space” because none of it is real. Dressing as an evil entity for Halloween is no more a negative reflection of personal character than enjoying a video game where you play as a career criminal (such as GTAV – the 3rd most popular game of all time).
Dressing as a demon or a serial killer means you are pro-demon or pro-serial killer. Duh.
If I was a bolder man I’d dress up as Ernst Rohm – the gay, pro-labor, undeniably socialist Nazi who was Hitler’s BFF (until, of course, he wasn’t and got cut from the team).
Only three links and two of them are duplicates. I want my money back!
Count your change before leaving the window
You obviously haven’t seen my pron viewing history.
The Train That Only Libertarians Can Love
Will Florida’s sleek, for-profit rail project become an advertisement for the limitations of bipartisan compromise?
So they wanted free, silent, high-speed trains?
express trains between every two stops, that leave every seven minutes.
With en suite puppies.
and who object to the generous subsidies handed out to private investors in the form of what are known as private activity bonds
Just wait until they see the price tag for the bailout when ridership is about 1/4 of the projections and revenue fails to match operating costs.
In Texas they are also planning a privately funded high speed rail – from Dallas to Houston. Personally, I think if they build it (likely) it won’t be profitable, as it will be a half-hour slower than the airplanes and yet still leave you stranded at your destination (i.e. you’ll have to use ride-share or some other service, as both cities are too sprawling for effective public transport). But at least the Texas plan is set to have only one stop and use bridges over crossings, so it will actually be high speed.
It all depends on the boarding/disembarking flow. If it’s equivalent to planes, then yeah, it’s a pig. If it’s streamlined otoh…it might take a chunk out depending on price.
IBM to acquire software company Red Hat for $34 billion
About 3 more mergers and/or acquisitions and the linux kernel will effectively be a proprietary collaboration between the top 5 largest technology companies.
Also rms on suicide watch.
Also also RIP Fedora.
It’s a good move for IBM, probably the smartest thing they’ve done in a decade.
There’s a guy locally who was one of the initial investors in Red Hat, he’s having a good day.
Fuck, you just reminded me of one of my acquaintances from my start up days. He got a shit ton of Red Had stock pre-IPO for his work on the networking stack. Great guy, technical networking genius, horrible, horrible business guy.
I’d love to think he’s richer than shit now, but my guess is that he cashed in long, long ago.
If IBM has payed it’s fair share of tax this would not have happened
The license prevents that from happening.
yeah, probably.
The license prevents that from happening.
True as far as it goes, the code will still be in the wild, but it will probably become the case that it becomes more and more tailored to the use requirements of the handful of corporate sponsors left standing with other contributions getting short shrift. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see it forked in a few years for other reasons anyway.
Yes you will have the evil patriarchial Manyx that is developed by a community of mstly male trolls using such colonialist concepts as objectivity and competence and the virtuious Gynix that is developed by a diverse community of all genders and colors freed of such patriarchial colonialist contstraints
That is amazing. Bravo.
Unless I am horribly mistaken, the conception of Linux had nothing to do with the existence of Microsoft products.
Poorly worded sentence. The complete OS offering from Red Hat was intended to compete with proprietary alternatives from MS (and others at the time, including proprietary Unix). The kernel by itself wasn’t written for that purpose explicitly. In fact, you can see from Linus’s announcement on comp.os.minix that it’s beginnings were much more humble:
That’s the exact quote I was thinking of. Even though die-hard Linux people claim contrary, Linux never became anything even remotely formidable against the Windows juggernaut on desktops. It had a much bigger impact in the server space against Unix and more recently on mobile devices with Android.
But what really animated Republicans was Brightline’s solution to funding: it would be a for-profit operation funded through private investment. This train wasn’t socialism; it was American free enterprise at work.
Are they proposing to get the re-animated corpse of James J Hill to run it?
Why are the links an hour early? I call shenanigans
I blame DST.
You may be on to something
Suspect in synagogue massacre known as loner
This message sponsored by the Niskanen Center
“known as loner”
Doing it wrong?
He’s not completely incorrect: The edgy misanthrope trying to find a place in the world to far right pipeline is a real thing and it eventually attracts a lot of people who are superficially attracted to libertarianism.
Tim McVeigh comes to mind, although I’m not sure characterizing him as far right is really all that accurate. He wasn’t overly nationalist or racist from what I understand. If he’d set off the revolution he hoped for we might remember more as a Lysander Spooner type than an Osama bin Laden type, honestly.
McVeigh was a fan of the Turner Diaries, an explicitly Neo-Nazi screed.
Volokh does a good job of characterizing him, and he updates his posts as more information comes available.
Chris Cantwell and Richard Spencer used to call themselves libertarians and if you go over to Takimag or the comments section of Zerohedge you can see plenty of these people.
This is why I don’t use the argument that Nazis called themselves socialist to prove that they were Socialist. There’s enough evidence through there economic policies to show they were inline with socialism.
I don’t think Spencer ever called himself a libertarian. He attended a few Reason events before, but he wrote for The American Conservative at the time.
On reflection and with a little googling, you’re right about Spencer. Articles are out there that characterize him as a wayward libertarian but he doesn’t make that claim himself from what I could find.
The “Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline” is perhaps the most strained argument in popular culture today. It all rests on Christopher Cantwell who was always a marginal libertarian figure to begin with.
Spencer was more of an anti-war conservative and then was fired from The American Conservative when his writing became more fixated on race (also the same reason why The American Conservative got rid of Ron Unz as their publisher)
“The Libertarian-to-Far-Right pipeline is a real thing,” the post said.
Isn’t this mostly parroted by the left to attack libertarianism?
Nearly 20 posts used the n-word.
Naggers?
Libertarian-to-Far-Right pipeline
If the spectrum makes any sense (big government collectivism on the left and small government individualism on the right) then libertarians are the “far-right”, but not associated with collectivist identitarians.
Manic Monday: Halloween Noodle Special
It’s like people have never heard of recycling.
You know who else was a vegetarian and liked dismemberment?
PETA Advertising Execs?
SAW?
PP-loving lefty vegans?
Me?
Go on…
So Soylent Green is making a comeback?
Who could have foreseen this?
Decades of falling interest rates have led to a sharp increase in the number of “zombie” firms, a report for the Bank for International Settlements said, potentially threatening economic growth and preventing interest rates from rising.
Economists generally define a zombie firm as one that is at least 10 years old but is unable to cover its debt servicing costs with its profits — a definition that would currently fit the likes of electric car maker Tesla (TSLA.O) and streaming giant Netflix (NFLX.O).
———–
The zombie firms highlight a “difficult trade-off” for central bank policy, the BIS writers concluded. While lower rates should help boost aggregate demand in the economy and raise employment, more zombie companies means more misallocation of resources.
Chinese investors eye apartments in affordable Athens
Their survival could also crowd out investment in, and employment at, healthy firms.
Time for some creative destruction. Take them out behind the barn and beat them to death with a shovel.
aka The Everything Bubble
You mean the tech boom could just be a bubble? Yesterday I saw an ad for coding boot camp prep. In other words a bootcamp bootcamp. I still think learning to code can be valuable, but I wonder about how viable some of the market is.
I still think learning to code can be valuable, but I wonder about how viable some of the market is.
Without a guild protecting the trade, its market value is sure to decrease. I’d imagine it will be similar with what happened to lawyers a few years back – lawyering was seen as a profitable trade, so a lot of people went to law school, so there was a glut of lawyers and the value of having a law degree went down.
He’s not completely incorrect: The edgy misanthrope trying to find a place in the world to far right pipeline is a real thing and it eventually attracts a lot of people who are superficially attracted to libertarianism.
“Wait- and then we just leave those people alone? Where’s the fun in that? What a gyp.”
“The Libertarian-to-Far-Right pipeline is a real thing,” the post said.
Isn’t this mostly parroted by the left to attack libertarianism?
They cannot fathom a philosophy based on leaving people alone (especially people whose thoughts are problematic), so they just assume libertarianism is a hoax.
Who would oppose a system where the right people make sure the right people win, and bad people lose, huh?
Merriam-Webster: Time Traveler
2014: manspreading
2009: alt-right
2008: dumpster fire
etc
See? Obama caused the alt-right.
GAB.COM GOES DOWN IN WAKE OF PITTSBURGH SHOOTING, AFTER FAR-RIGHT SOCIAL NETWORK IS DROPPED BY TECH COMPANIES
Does anyone know anything about Gab? Do they actually support far right ideology or are they just a free speech platform? Why didn’t tech companies cut off Facebook when they allowed the Russians to help Trump win?
They’re just a free-speech platform and they’re getting a raw deal.
Oh no. They’re absolutely an alt-right platform.
This doesn’t mean they should be shut down, mind you, but the “It’s just a free speech” thing got lost when their twitter account was tweeting Jewish conspiracy theories (all mysteriously deleted on Saturday).
That I was not aware of. Regardless, if they’re not filtering their users then the practice outweighs the owner’s personal opinions.
Is there a screen shot of these posts on Twitter that you could provide?
I don’t pay too much attention to Gab, but I do know that Twitter still has Farrakhan on its site and even carried a blue check mark until a few months ago. So, maybe these companies should consider not doing business with Twitter too, if this is the standard that we’re applying.
Oh no. They’re absolutely an alt-right platform.
Any platform that doesn’t exercise content controls is, by default, going to be an “alt-right” platform because there is no other alternative. Andrew Torba is an unabashed Trump bro, but I don’t think he’s said anything explicitly alt-right, and the platform was open to anybody.
Any platform that doesn’t exercise content controls is, by default, going to be an “alt-right” platform because there is no other alternative.
Tolerance is allyship in their minds. The insane amount of danger inherent in that mindset has not crossed their minds.
Doh missed the discussion up top. That’s what I get for waking up late today.
Y’all are forgetting Free speech is far-right. To be mainstream you have to advocate for limits.
I signed up for GAB to read a few guys like Matt Bracken and the Z-Man. It was Twitter (as best as I could tell having never signed up for it) with absolutely no content rules. There was plenty of good stuff, a constant influx of people who were thrown out of other outlets, and some bad stuff.
I viewed it like eating out in the city. You sometimes have to drive through a bad neighborhood to get the authentic cuisine.
If you ask PopeHat this is fine, because property rights, which somehow forbids you from criticizing the actions of these companies. At the same time, though, PopeHat is also right to criticize the NFL for its ban against kneeling during the anthem and that’s different because.
The game being playing by some free speech advocates in order to conform with elite popular opinion is unbelievably transparent. And maybe the best example of that was when PopeHat and Reason tried to say that California forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to post information about where you can attain an abortion was not really a violation of the First Amendment.
I didn’t realize they had taken that position. The shit you have to do to get a party invite is just sad.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/17/lawsplainer-the-ninth-circuit-and-compelled-speech-about-abortion/
PopeHat argues how California is only regulating “licensed clinics” so compelled speech is fine.
The TOS article was written by ENB and it linked to PopeHat’s post and was very neutral on the argument. And then when the pro-life clinics won TOS completely ignored the ruling.
That was sort of around the time that I realized that there is a brand of libertarianism that is pretty god awful on free speech and other topics. I had by criticisms of PopeHat and TOS with regards to free speech before, but they were more so degrees of emphasis or how much you have to denounce a speaker in order to defend his right to speak, but in this case it was pretty glaringly obvious that PopeHat and TOS were clearly taking the anti-free speech side pretty much because they didn’t like the principal involved.
Walk away!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4hXix76YeI
That is the Dems’ worst nightmare.
Why do you think they are hell bent on killing Kanye West? Nothing is more firefighting to the new plantation owners than African Americans realizing they are being shafted by team blue.
I’m not saying it’s a shithole, but…
Still, most people don’t like to pay taxes, and in this the rich are even more like you and me than you and me. Usually. “There is a kind of hypnosis that goes around, that businesses should not support taxes,” Benioff says. “The reality is, unbridled capitalism is not good for anybody, including all the companies benefitting from it. We want society to be successful. We are connected to it, not apart from it.”
Sounds unobjectionable, right? In fact, no one will go on the record saying “screw homeless people, I don’t want to pay any taxes.” But several of the city’s prominent elected officials—all touting solid liberal credentials—oppose Prop C. They include Mayor London Breed and state Senator Scott Wiener, who has historically supported more resources to attack homelessness and last year sponsored a sweeping bill that would’ve boosted housing construction in the extraordinarily expensive state. “I really struggled with this,” Wiener says. “But this measure was vetted only within the homeless advocacy community and then placed on the ballot. If we’re going to to move forward with a tax increase larger than any we have proposed before, this is not the way to do it.”
But this measure was vetted only within the homeless advocacy community and then placed on the ballot.
Sounds legit.
It’s “well-meaning” imbeciles, all the way down.
Minutes from homeless advocacy meeting: “FREE SHIT!!!!!!11!1Eleven!!!111!!!”
In fact, no one will go on the record saying “screw homeless people, I don’t want to pay any taxes.”
Particularly not in San Francisco, California, USA, which has one of the highest tax burdens in the world.
The Democrats should really work on keeping things fresh. Especially when the tactic didn’t work the first time.
Ex-high school classmate of the guy running against Ellison tells the world that Wardlow bullied him in high school for being gay.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Somebody acted like an asshole in highschool? God forbid.
“He said Wardlow made phallic remarks about him playing the flute in band.”
Totally depends on how he was playing it.
This one time at band camp…
“Is calling someone gay in high school as equally bad as beating your wife?”
The question that many progressives are calculating right now.
Stupid Vikings. At least it wasn’t the playoffs, and at least Green Bay lost too. Aaron Rodgers Twitter was all over that poor kick returner for GB yesterday.
Is it just me, or is it not that exciting when the away team wins the World Series? Though judging by the sound after the final pitch, most of the stadium was Sox fans anyway.
I’m more of the it’s not exciting because it’s the Red Sox group. Near the top of my list of worst fans to deal with.
I hate all but two baseball teams equally. And the two that I don’t hate, I only mildly like and will only pay attention to them when they go to the playoffs.
Mammary Monday is here to start your work week out with a bounce.
http://archive.is/duYMU
14, 17, 29, 33, 37, 41, 42, 47, 61, 65. BUT, winner is 10 by a mile.
Quite the bounty. 5, 8, 26, 27, 40, 71
More from Wired:
The tension is evident elsewhere, in slightly different form. In May, Seattle’s City Council voted unanimously to pass a payroll tax that would have cost the city’s largest employer, Amazon, $22.5 million a year. Amazon pushed back, threatening to stop construction of a new office building. “What we saw happen was a really effective and coordinated campaign to flip the public narrative,” says Katie Wilson, who helped lead Housing for All, a coalition supporting the Seattle tax hike.
Solving homelessness is not a mystery. A proven model called “housing first,” pioneered in Seattle, has shown that challenges like substance abuse or job training are best tackled by giving people have a safe and stable place to live. However, Amazon and other opponents successfully tapped into legitimate frustration with the lack of progress on homelessness to shift political debate away from taxes and funding a solution.
Instead, opponents blamed Seattle city officials for spending their budget poorly, arguing that the government is taxing you and giving it to some shiftless drug addicts who don’t even want to come inside, exploiting economic tensions, much the same way Republicans have exploited the racial divide, Wilson says.
Nice non sequitur; gotta get those talking points in, no matter what.
I guess only a Republican would complain about pounding ever-larger sums of money down a rathole.
P-R-O-J-E-C-T-I-O-N
Progjection
A proven model called “housing first,” pioneered in Seattle, has shown that challenges like substance abuse or job training are best tackled by giving people have a safe and stable place to live.
Proven model? So, I’m guessing Seattle has no significant homeless population to speak of. Seriously, in the next goddamned sentence they refer to “legitimate frustration with the lack of progress on homelessness”. Do these guys even get the notion of what a “proven model” even means? Proven at what? Funneling money at the right activists and Top Men?
It’s proven bro. It’s science. IFLS!
I’m loath to use these kind of oversimplified SoCon “good old days” type arguments, but I think the author has a point here.
http://victorygirlsblog.com/social-collapse-bad-things/
One thing that I would add: things really kicked into overdrive when people’s primary form of human contact started to come from social media. It creates echo chambers with a (real or imagined) cover of anonymity so there’s nothing to check people’s worst impulses. I noted almost 20 years ago that people in chat rooms were much more likely to be assholes and say things they’d never say to someone in person. Our current environment has turned it up to 11.
Related:
https://twitter.com/mikeydickerson/status/1056310757934149633
I present to you, “The Worst Argument Against Brazil’s New President Who Deserves Plenty of Criticism”
https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/1056739486481170432
“This is worth repeating over and over:
The most horrific thing Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has planned is privatization of the Amazon rainforest. With just 12yr remaining to remake the global economy and prevent catastrophic climate change, this is planetary suicide.”
We all have twelve years to live guys. Then the world is over. Ignore the last prediction that we only had ten years to live from twelve years ago, this prediction is super science-y and serious and stuff.
Posted upthread, but worth sharing again.
Aw dang
Hmmmm… “right-wing” president, kind of a doofus, plenty of legitimate criticisms, instead his opponents resort to smears and outrageous apocalyptic predictions… remind you of anyone?
Reagan?
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsliverpool/halloween-liverpool-weather-forecast-as-bookies-slash-odds-on-coldest-ever-november/ar-BBP387d
bookies slash odds on “coldest ever November” – brits have a strange way of announcing the weather
“Olivia Munn vows she will continue to speak up for the Me Too movement ‘even if it costs her career’ as she calls for change in Hollywood”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-6328381/Olivia-Munn-continue-speak-MeToo-movement-costs-career.html
So brave.
What happened to her face?
“Olivia Munn Vows to Speak About the Me Too Movement in its Efforts to Get the Right People Fired While Keeping Good Thought Rapists on the Job, as Munn is Unwilling to Sacrifice Her Career Over Outing Actual Rapists”
When you take to the cover of a widely circulated magazine where you are received with a hero’s welcome, patting yourself on the back for taking a moral stance that might cost you your career seems even more transparently stupid than usual.
She is “brave” in the new definition of the word.
Brave (n.): (1.) taking the popular position on a matter, while insisting that the stand is revolutionary and controversial (2.) without fear (3.) to show valor despite resistance
Eg: Stacy was brave to declare that President Trump was a Nazi at the Netroots Festival
Who? Never heard of her.
GAB – A good article on how tech companies have stacked the deck with “adhesion” or “standard form contracts”.
Their hosting service, Joyent, gave them 48 hours to find a new hosting service while GoDaddy tried to steal the domain name, and PayPal tried to shutdown their cash flow.
Slavery As A Service
I don’t see either party taking up that cause.
I don’t know nearly enough about contract law to have an opinion on if any of this can be beaten in court.
Literally worse than Hitler.
Do these guys even get the notion of what a “proven model” even means? Proven at what? Funneling money at the right activists and Top Men?
By George, I think you’ve got it!
Silicon Valley’s sovereign wealth problem
I mean, if tech companies start taking money from repressive middle eastern regimes they might start exhibiting bias, restricting their users’ speech, and accommodating religious extremism on their platforms!
NOT GOOD ENOUGH
Black unemployment, like overall unemployment, is, in fact, at record lows. The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since January, the unemployment rate has fallen nearly half a percentage point overall.
But the unemployment rate doesn’t necessarily tell the entire story, experts told ABC News. Delving into the numbers, the racial disparities become clear. While the outlook’s improved for everyone, it especially improved for whites. Unemployment among white workers slid to 3.3 percent. For minorities, however, the numbers showed little to no change from the previous month. For black workers, unemployment hovered at 6 percent, while it’s 3.5 percent for Asians and 4.5 percent for Hispanics.
“It’s true [black unemployment] has been declining, but it’s still much higher than other groups,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, told ABC News. “It’s the persistence of the racial gap. To me, that’s the bigger challenge.”
In other words, black unemployment remains the highest — nearly double that of whites.
“There’s nowhere you’d go in the country and see the black and white unemployment rate as the same — it’s race, any way you slice it,” Wilson added.
Donald Trump hates black people.
Unemployment down, women and minorities hardest hit.
By the way, the U3 number is still just as much a crock of shit now as it was during the Obama administration and the labor market is still very, very fucked.
I don’t know man, I have to tell recruiters to not call me unless they can guarantee me $30K more than I make now to stay on the East coast, and to double my salary if they intend to move me to the left coast.
Oh really?
Hug a journalist, guys
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1056865090450939908
“I have to say, I feel less safe as a journalist in America these days than I ever did in Russia. A lot less safe.”
Literally shaking with fear
She is a worthless hack. Lunatic with Microsoft Word.
No. She’s “brave”. In the new definition of the word.
Brave (n.): (1.) taking the popular position on a matter, while insisting that the stand is revolutionary and controversial (2.) without fear (3.) to show valor despite resistance
Eg: Stacy was brave to declare that President Trump was a Nazi at the Netroots Festival
It’s the hipsterization of politics. Take something tried & true & old, and make like you invented it.
I hate hipsters
Pick one:
a. Lying
b. Retarded
c. Both a and b
She probably feels unsafe because she blamed conservative (politically, I mean) Jews for Pittsburgh.
GQ and Esquire have a knack for hiring the most histrionic idiots out there.
I thought I recognized that name, Ioffe is the reporter who got fired from Politico for suggesting that Donald was porking Ivanka.
Uffda. Like I needed more of a reason to dislike Gabby Giffords. Here asshole husband is referred to in the story as “Capt. Mark Kelly”
I would so vote for any crusty nco who insisted on being called “Gunney” just to fuck with pretentious d-bags like Mark Kelly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2pA8XZRb7c
The only captain duo that matters
Giffords was a pro-2A Rep. Not sure if she held that position just to get elected in AZ, or she really believed in it while her brain was fully-functional. Her husband is a despicable statist prick parading around his handicapped wife.
Kristen Gillibrand was also a pro-2nd Amendment representative.
She pretended to be when she needed upstate votes for her congressional seat.
Just like Dick Durbin use to be pro-life when he represented western Illinois
If Gillibrand was lobotomized, would anyone notice the difference?
John Taylor Gatto has passed away. 🙁
Damn.
I wasn’t familiar with him, but he sounds like he was an exemplary human. I will definitely check out his bibliography.
Pine64 is Working on a Linux Smartphone Running KDE Plasma
It’s nice to see another entrant in this area besides the Librem 5. Especially for those of us who don’t need a 600 dollar flagship phone.
Until the load it up with crap ware
Russians or space alien crap ware?
I’m looking foreword to the L5 actually being released. I buying one if they’re worth a damn.
OT: Military to Deploy 5,000 Troops to Southern Border
Deployment numbers are increase from initial estimates of 800 troops, in anticipation of migrant caravan.
I’ll take “What Is the Recipe for a Shit Show” for $400, Alex
They wanted to test Trump’s resolve, and he called their bluff.
I know right. A Bomb-qualifying training flight out of Arizona could have sorted this out.
Normally I would offer up a kinetic orbital strike, but that would be overkill.
Active Denial System – hope they brought one along.
The media will ignore the 80% military-age males and focus exclusively on crying children.
And the only people who’ll buy their spin are the ones that have been shrieking for two years. They burned their credibility.
Nothing left to cut Exhibit ????.
Minnesoda launches site to measure broad band speeds.
So we have an Office of Broadband Development that is part of DEED (Department of Employment and Economic Development). I bet you could fire everyone involved in either office and outside of the fired employees, no one would notice.
sure people would notice. There would be a surge in the Economy.
So, they set up a redirect to speedtest.net?
Bizarre. My cable provider has a speed tester on their site and if I’m not sure about its integrity, I can just use speedtest.
https://twitter.com/Some_BlackGuy/status/1056675162819452928
I suspect HM is behind this.
Erm…
I am not sure I understand this suggestion.. I am gonna quit watermelon too.
“the simpsons without the stereotypes”
https://twitter.com/ChrisRGun/status/1056712155750264832
That’s a very good point, but why does their cable box have an antenna?
but why does their cable box have an antenna?
Local channels. They asked for too much money, so the cable company dropped them from the service.
https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1056722541908234240
“i’m old enough to remember when the devil music of @marilynmanson was responsible for mass shootings, instead of Trump’s devil tweets”
Best exchange in the comments:
It was @slipknot for my peer-group
@sandordaHOUND
Dude slitknot came out like three years after Marilyn Manson and no one blamed them for anything. Stop trying to be special.
No love for Slipknot
Haha
What do you have against knitting?
From a Daily Fail article on the Indonesia plane crash: “There have been more than 40 air accidents resulting in deaths in Indonesia since 2001”
Thassa lotta plane crashes you got there.
“He said Wardlow made phallic remarks about him playing the flute in band.”
“Dude, he plays the skin flute.”
I can’t get enough of this cat.
“White supremacists are guzzling cow milk in an effort to mock people of color who are lactose intolerant”
https://twitter.com/peta/status/1054408360013922305
I think the title of the linked article is even dumber.
I bet they wear jeans too. JEANS!
Only white people wear Wranglers
So what about it, huh?
“So… wanna go to the Gap?”
After this episode of Friends.
PETA. Nuff said.
I’d like to point out that Simon Lebon turned 60 this weekend. SIXTY. What the frak?
Nikki Sixx will be this year too.
Wasn’t 1985, like, just 3 years ago?
That math doesn’t add up. I’ve been working at this job for ten and a half years but by your rekoning, I’m only six. Isn’t there a law against preborn labor?
Srsly – WTF is happening????
Our inability to perceive time as anything but a linear event in one direction is kicking our ass?
Wasn’t 1985, like, just 3 years ago?
There are people visiting this website RIGHT NOW who weren’t even born yet.
Lies.
I realized my sophomore students this year have no first-hand memories of 9/11.
Buying alcohol, I start thinking about what I was doing on/around the “Before this date”.
I’ve linked the Mindset list before. Specifically started to give teachers a frame of reference for their students. It can make you feel old quick..
I remember when Afghanistan was the quagmire we laughed at the Soviets for getting into.
BTW, the song I Don’t Like Mondays came out in 1979, so #4 is in no way unique to the class of 2018.
Beatles trivia is boring.
He’s on massive amounts of manroids.
Still skipped leg day.
The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855. An incident where firefighters and circus clowns brawled in brothel and triggered a series of events that led to the firing of the entire police department and a reform of its civil service.
Now that’s a circus I’d actually want to attend. I’m sure a lot of people would want to see some clowns get beat up. You’re creepy and nobody likes you, clowns!
In the contest of clown vs. cop, I’m always gonna root for the clowns.
Hey – GAB has a Twitter account today.
Look while you can before the banhammer falls on the evilness of free speech.
The “hate speech is not free speech” crowd is just precious.
Especially since the can decide who they feel is doing hate speech and who isn’t based on totally random criteria… That’s the kind of power the left loves, but those of us pointing out that they will be outright totalitarian evil (see history) are the ones that are bad for stating the obvious.
“Dude has a prosthetic tattoo gun, this is the most Cyberpunk thing I’ve ever seen.”
https://twitter.com/klara_sjo/status/1056684890454921216
“The Death of the First Amendment in Cyberspace
These measures have put pressure on social media companies to establish sophisticated online censorship. In Germany, Facebook operates a “deletion center” staffed by more than 1,200 “content moderators.” In 2017, Facebook removed 288,000 posts a month globally for violating its hate speech standards. And, most recently, independent anti-establishment content “created to stir up political debate” has been purged.
In a 2017 hearing in the British Parliament, Twitter officially renounced its non-negotiable commitment to free speech. A Twitter VP announced that the platform was ditching its “John Stuart Mill-style philosophy,” because “it’s no longer possible to stand up for all speech in the hopes society will become a better place….And we do have to take steps to limit the visibility of hateful symbols, to ban people from the platform who affiliate with violent groups—that’s the journey we’re on.” And so, in September 2018, Twitter adopted new guidelines prohibiting “dehumanizing speech.” “Be Sweet when you tweet” is the new motto. Google too has acknowledged the fundamental shift towards restricting more content in an internal memo entitled “The Good Censor,” leaked earlier this month.
In short, Big Tech has pivoted from the stubbornly principled “viewpoint neutrality” of the First Amendment towards the European approach of “balancing” free speech against competing interests. This includes exempting specific categories such as “hate speech” from protection altogether. Big Tech’s Great Purge does not violate the First Amendment. Americans remain free to post controversial content that would violate European hate speech laws online. They just can’t do so on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. But since 68 percent of Americans use Facebook, 72 percent use YouTube, and 24 percent use Twitter, often to read and comment on news, the shrinking space for online content and consequent muddying of the distinction between public and private space is likely to limit the practical effect of the First Amendment even so. From being the colonizers of cyber space Americans are now being colonized by the standards adopted in Brussels and Berlin.”
https://quillette.com/2018/10/22/the-death-of-the-first-amendment-in-cyberspace/
And most of them are cheering it on.
See Drake’s Gab link above.
Guys, stay cool.
We will still have freer speech than we did in 1995 even with the current regime. And in the meantime a backlash is coming.
There are numerous peer-to-peer alternative communications systems being developed as a result of the behavior of the tech giants. Most of those attempts will fail without us hearing about them. Some will become known, but not do a good enough job to displace the tech giants. But over the next two decades a handful will succeed and change the landscape completely.
In creating obstacles intended to hobble people they dislike, the tech giants have created market opportunities for competitors.
“In creating obstacles intended to hobble people they dislike, the tech giants have created market opportunities for competitors.”
This is true and if I had the startup capital I would be working my ass off to create hosting services and payment processors that don’t discriminate at all (except in cases of actual illegal shit like kiddie porn). Unfortunately, I don’t have the startup capital.
Problem with payment processors is that at some point, government gets involved. Either you’re working through intermediary like Visa or some bank, who can fuck you because you broke some vague FYTW clause, or you have to set up a bank-equivalent entity of your own, in which case government will fuck you directly. You can jerk off with Bitcoin all you like, at some point it has to get converted into currency.
“We will still have freer speech than we did in 1995”
How do you measure this?
I remember in the mid-90’s when people complained that Wal-Mart wouldn’t carry CDs with parental advisory labels. I don’t recall a lot of shouting by ostensibly “free speech advocates” about “muh…property rights therefore you can’t criticize for nonsensical reasons”.
In creating obstacles intended to hobble people they dislike, the tech giants have created market opportunities for competitors.
That would be true. In a free market. Now, look what’s being done to Gab and tell me there’s a free market at play here. That’s why the social media giants need to be put in check. Not with some fundamental interference with their basic rights, but simply the recognition that they’ve unduly been granted an unfair exemption to infringe on others’ rights.
If nothing is done, you’ll see the social media giants having the government shut down the very competitors their content control is creating.
Now, look what’s being done to Gab and tell me there’s a free market at play here.
There is a free market at play here.
Just because it doesnt adjust to our sensibilities the next day doesn’t mean it isn’t at work. It could be a few years before this collusion catches up to the tech giants.
“Operation Choke point” is free market
As long as people that think government should pick winners & losers have or can get power, this remains a problem that won’t be solved by free markets.
Two thoughts about the tech companies deplatforming right wing and libertarian voices:
1. They are assholes for it and while my belief in liberty and property prevents me from calling for litigation or laws to prevent it, it certainly doesn’t prevent me from wishing them ill.
2. The Market will eventually solve the problem. But market solutions, while inevitable unless prevented by force, are NOT quick, and not magical. The market does not give a damn about fairness, political outcomes, or your feelings, all it does it aggregate individual choices into prices. Maybe Facebook and Twitter go belly up, maybe something replaces them, maybe not. The market is not Santa Jesus and does not necessarily produce virtue, it is just all of us buying and selling so what it mostly produces is compromise.
A Twitter VP announced that the platform was ditching its “John Stuart Mill-style philosophy,” because “it’s no longer possible to stand up for all speech in the hopes society will become a better place….And we do have to take steps to limit the visibility of hateful symbols, to ban people from the platform who affiliate with violent groups—that’s the journey we’re on.”
The social media giants have every right to take this policy stance. And given their policy stance, there’s only one rational standard to apply to these guys – revoke their CDS Section 230 protections. They aren’t independent third parties providing an open platform., They’re publishers pushing a specific editorial stance. Given that, they should be subject to all the same legal liability risk as their brick and mortar peers.
The “journey” they’ve gone down is that they want that Chinese and European market and liberal ideas are too inconvenient for the sophisticates of Europe and the tyrants of China (which we’re not suppose to call tyrants)
Foolish, foolish.
GAB was great for SJWs – Twitter for Nazis where they can blame Jews and trade lolicon pictures (and some, I’m sure, are good people). Leave them there and make sure normies don’t get exposed to Bad Think.
Win the culture war first, THEN shoot the PoWs.
Not all bad news today!
Barbra Streisand Brought to Tears By Trump
Wait, the electoral college doesn’t sit well with Barbara Streisand? Maybe it’s time we rethink the foundational structure of this country.
MAD MAX
TL;DR – This guy sucks, but we have to endorse him anyway BECUZ DRUMPF.
https://freebeacon.com/politics/new-jersey-newspaper-endorses-awful-menendez-hes-no-gem-hell-check-trump/
What a monster.
DoJ poised to enter dick-measuring contest with Pennsylvania over synagogue shooting.
Erdogan’s erasure of Ataturk continues apace.
https://twitter.com/airlivenet/status/1056927948643676160
What’s happening in Turkey is tragic.
Excellent article in the WSJ on Saturday (paywalled, so no linky) on the historic rivalry between Turkey and the Saudis for leadership of the Sunni Islamic world.
Short version: for a long time, Turkey (via the Ottomans) was the boss of the Sunnis. When the Ottoman Empire went all wobbly and eventually kaput, Saudis tried to fill the void. Turkey invaded Arabia a couple times, even dragging the Saudi king to Turkey for a public beheading. Ataturk wasn’t interested being a secularist and all, so the Saudis finally got the top spot. Now Erdogan, being and asshole and all, wants it back.
Yeah, this is gonna get interesting globally. Does NATO “side” with one of its earliest member countries that seems to be descending into Islamo-fascism, or an Islamist monarchy with lotsa black gold to sell?
That’s messed up. It should be called Constantinople Airport.
In all seriousness, Ataturk was a great man. If the whole of the Middle East had pursued the path of Ataturk that region would be better off for it.
Eh, it’s a new airport. Not unusual to have a new name for it to differentiate it from the old one.
(Aside from Erdogan’s other efforts to bury Ataturk’s legacy)
In Turkey, it’s pretty unusual not to name gigantic public works projects after Ataturk. It definitely means something that they didn’t.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/413622-howard-dean-gab-should-be-tried-as-accomplice-to-murder-in-synagogue
For the billionth time, Twitter is a private company (that just happens to get political figures to smear their competitors).
This is normal. Nothing to see here. Move along
Howard Dean is still a bag of dicks
YEEEAAAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!
That loser is still around? What a loser.
Say what you will about Dick Cheney, but he did have Adam Serwer pegged. This is one of single most idiotic things I’ve ever read – Nazi boy shot a bunch of Jews in a synagogue because of Trump’s statements about the migrant caravan. That’s literally his argument – this guy shot a bunch of Jewish Americans because he was pissed off about Honduran illegal immigration.
The tie-in that I’ve seen is that the synagogue involved itself in refugee relocation and so he went after them for that. This really doesn’t hold up too well when you consider that Christian non-profits are by far the largest groups involved in refugee relocation (by leaps and bounds more than any other secular or other religious non-profit).
So, the guy was just basically a bigot. But, that doesn’t help the political narrative so we’re all suppose to pretend that he was an anti-semite, but what he was really upset about was refugee resettlement. How many anti-semites do you think totally hate Jews, but are just fine with South Americans? It would seem like hatred of both groups usually goes hand-in-hand.
Remember how Omar Mateen was a closeted gay man driven to murder by the homophobic slurs of Christian conservatives? Oh, wait. He just googled night clubs.
The guy has a long history of hating Jews. The notion that he was driven to it by Hondurans would be laughable if it weren’t such a tragic subject.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, even by their own low standards. This is less policing the bounds of acceptable opinion and more staging sorties out into the wilderness to harass hikers. How’s it going to play with voters in Texas or Arizona who are treated to risible assertions of Nazism because they’re not sure about Swiss cheese border control? You think they’ll be less or more sympathetic to Serwer et al.?
I just watched the execrable Max Boot make a similar argument on CNN where I’m eating lunch. Sounds like they’ve got their talking points.
“Max Boot is like a hero or something. Him and Bill Kristol are the good conservatives.”
– NPC thought
Rage makes you stupid, and they are high on rage right now.
Gee, I wonder if it’s a smart strategy to smear every single Trump supporter as a white supremacist Nazi sympathizer? Just calling them Deplorables worked like magic in 2016, so let’s crank the rhetoric up even more!
By 2020, they’ll probably be calling Republicans cockroaches that need to be exterminated.
2020? There are already calls for that.
The same people who praise Hamas and embrace Louise Farrakhan are lecturing everybody else on anti-semitism.
Precisely.
Brother Keith, deputy chairman of the DNC, has never, ever repudiated Louis Farrakhan. Jessie “Hymietown” Jackson and the architect of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Al Sharpton, are warmly received at any Democrat function, and yet those fuckers have the stones to yell about antisemitism?
Farrakhan had a blue check mark on Twitter until a couple of months ago and he’s never been banned. Including two weeks ago when he said he wasn’t an anti-semite, but instead “anti-termite”.
Maybe Twitter should start getting un-personed
Our country is seriously ill right now.
https://nypost.com/2018/10/29/pittsburgh-mourners-chant-vote-vote-during-memorial-service/
This is what happens when you make the personal political. It infects and adulterates everything in your life.
When politics is your religion, voting is an act of remembrance. Which is a quite vile statement on our corrupt and amoral society
Aside from the specifics of their chanting, far too much push for voting these days. Local school sends out email after email to register and vote. Same with the idiotic moter voter bills. If you can’t be bothered to pick up and fill out a voter registration card or if you need to be prodded over and over to do so, fuck you, you shouldn’t be voting.
*motor voter
The two things that have fucked up my state more than anything else were rammed through by Dems right before they lost control of the State Legislature:
1) Mandatory universal mail-in ballots.
2) Same day registration.
If you’re too lazy to go to a fucking polling station, you shouldn’t vote. If you’re too lazy to register 2 weeks before the election, you shouldn’t vote; not to mention that it essentially guarantees voter fraud. By doing that, they have given themselves a structural advantage in all elections in perpetuity.
ding ding ding winner winner chicken dinner
And any attempt to roll those back will be portrayed as disenfranchising voters.
Michigan has a proposal on the ballot right now to allow both of those. I don’t have a huge problem with mail-in ballots – some of us do have jobs; but I’ll be damned if I’ll vote for same-day registration.
My guess is it will pass anyway.
I don’t have a huge problem with mail-in ballots
Well, other than they may be the biggest security weakness in voting, outside of the room where ballots are actually counted. “Mail-in” ballots usually means ballots that are mailed to you.
Nobody should get a ballot that isn’t delivered to them in person after showing valid ID. People can pick them up in advance and mail them in, but those are what we used to just call “absentee” ballots.
Fair enough, I was in fact thinking of absentee ballots that you have to pick up and then mail in. As far as I know, Michigan doesn’t have any option where your ballot gets mailed to you.
I’m going to amend my will so that if I die under politicized circumstances, every time a politician utters my name, $100 will be donated to the NRA or the ACLU, depending on the utterer’s political party ($100 to the NRA if a lefty says my name, $100 to the ACLU if a righty says it).
Cue the jokes, apparently Cleveland just fired their coach.
But he was turning it around!
Maybe the Bills can snap him up.
Suicide is usually a bad idea.
https://nypost.com/video/i-shot-myself-in-the-head-and-lived/
Only because the best methods are restricted. Take 12 grams of pentobarbital and you’re in for an easy ride into the sunset. When my time comes that’s how I’d like to take my leave.
Oh, dear. It’s almost “use or lose” season here in the Fedgov. That means Fedgov employees completely disappear during the holidays, leaving us contractors to run the show. Leave it to bureaucrats to not space out their vacation time, so they have to take off the whole month of December.
If there’s a scramble to use vacation time, that’s a sure sign the employer gives too much annual leave.
Or, they’re just dipshits who can’t plan ahead?
But yes – Fedgov employees enjoy Euro levels of vacation accruals.
Working in a place where we have too much leave, I can tell you, this is not always the case.
I understand if you find yourself with a day or a few days at the end of the year, but these people have, like, WEEKS of use or lose. They’re literally gone the entire month of December.
You can carry over 40 days of vacation time year over year. I’m at about half that, so I’m not worried there.
I’m currently allowed 26 days (I think I get 5 more starting next year)
My problem with using all my days is now that I have a kid in school, shoulder seasons are off limits for travel. September and October were always my favorite vacation times as crowds are mostly gone and temperatures are generally more tolerable.
We just started a new contract and our company gives us 18 days plus Fed holidays. It’s the most leave I’ve had in about…well, ever. I’ve never had 18 days.
There are ten state holidays (some are also fed holidays), five personal days and twenty vacation days a year. I just noticed recently that I have three personal days left this year. They expire if not used.
I’m currently allowed 26 days
Does that include holidays?
One of the quirks of working for a true 24/7 business like a hospital is that your paid time off allotment gets burned off on holidays as well as vacation days. So 30 days sounds like a lot, until you realize it includes 10 holidays that you are used to thinking of being on top of your PTO.
Nope its 26 days + the 6 big holidays, and MLK of all things.
Oddly we don’t get black friday off, though about 70% of the office seems to take it.
When I started there in 2009, the initial number of days PTO was 21 for professional types. I thought that was rather astonishing considering how jobs were hard to come by then.
They classify our time off as personal holidays (3), flex time (8 days), and vacation (15 days).
The only one that really matters when it comes to taking it is the flex time of which up to $1000 worth can be sold back.
When I saw “use or lose” and Fedgov I first thought of budgeting and remember the wish lists that we would dump on the budget at the end of the fiscal year in the Air Force.
Also my first thought, but the Fed Fiscal year ends in september or something.
Oh yeah – you can tell end of fiscal year by all the new toys. Our admin people ordered a shitton of Varidesks, but they can’t be installed because our study carrels are not deep enough. Fun times.
In a 2017 hearing in the British Parliament, Twitter officially renounced its non-negotiable commitment to free speech. A Twitter VP announced that the platform was ditching its “John Stuart Mill-style philosophy,” because “it’s no longer possible to stand up for all speech in the hopes society will become a better place….And we do have to take steps to limit the visibility of hateful symbols, to ban people from the platform who affiliate with violent groups—that’s the journey we’re on.”
“This mask is uncomfortable and restrictive. Time for it to go.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t he explicitly denounced white supremacy multiple times?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/413558-jewish-leaders-say-trumps-not-welcome-in-pittsburgh-until-he
The guy is objectively the most pro-Jewish president ever. His fucking daughter and grandchildren are Jewish. He moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. He bailed on the Iran deal. These people’s minds have been so twisted by politics that they can’t even tell right from wrong anymore.
https://twitter.com/amber_athey/status/1056912042047823876
How stunned she is by that response is priceless.
“How does ‘go fuck yourself’ sound?”
” He moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.”
To be fair the Republicans in 1990’s did that, he was just the first president to not give himself a 6 month exemption. (Still your point stands, even stronger in light of that)
Orangeman can say it a million times, and these people will simply refuse to hear it.
Orangeman bad.
And me wanna go home.
Of course, the “Jewish leaders” are an activist group funded by Soros and run by his son. Totes representative.
Say what you will about Dick Cheney, but he did have Adam Serwer pegged.
Serwer is a truly special intellect.
Branding question: Do “we” need the .com on the glibertarians.com graphic at the top? Is it superfluous?