• Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture (Current Affairs) Short version:  Because Architects are trained to be jerks, but unlike (for example) pretentious and ugly music, it will hit you in the face every day.
• The Cruelty Was Never the Point (The American Conservative) Touched a nerve, huh?  This characterization of Republicans is true.  It’s also true of “moderate” Democrats.  Means testing, which is more likely to turn away the most needy, is there for the sake of its own cruelty.
• Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over (Project Syndicate) Yanis Varoufakis notes that the agenda of the modern tech companies makes the notorious company towns look like an exercise in freedom.
• The Team Resurrecting Ancient Rome’s Favorite Condiment (Gastro Obscura) Garum, fermented fish sauce, which is the very distant ancestor of Worcester sauce.  I wanna try me some.

 

Steve Hostetter on his (very one sided) Twitter war with Kevin Sorbo:

Hofstetter is known for taking on hecklers, and Sorbo gets completely owned. It’s beautiful.

• I say we take off and nuke it from orbit (Lawyers, Guns & Money) The dysfunction at the Yale Law School that is exemplified by power couple Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua and Jed Rubenfeld.
• Securely Erasing Your iPhone or iPad — With a Power Drill (The Intercept) Speaking of nuking it from orbit ………
• Turn Your Old, Cracked Android Phone Into a Backup Server! (UrBackup/Linux Deploy Tutorial Part I) 
• The Soft Corruption of Big Tech’s Antitrust Defense (Big Technology) Big tech is hiring “Think” tanks to be their advocates in secret. 
• Meet the activists perfecting the craft of anti-surveillance (Financial Times) Dazzle camouflage.
• By Bringing Down Sweden’s Government, the Left Party Saved Rent Controls (Jacobin) The “Center Left” government, after mismanaging Covid, wanted to eliminate rent control, and the Left Party forced a vote of confidence, to fight the Neoliberal “reforms, which failed.  Rent control elimination is now off the table.
• Social Media Success Is Driven by Hate (I N Q U I R E) Hate drives engagement, and engagement is how they make their money.
• Report: Settlement reached in Flintstone House case (SJ Mercury News) Your moment of weird.
• Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem (Boston Review) Neoliberalism only continues because of repeated taxpayer bailouts.

Where’s Waldo, the movie:

• How the ‘Wandering Meatloaf’ Got Its Rock-Hard Teeth (New York Times) Bizarre chemistry on a sea slug type creature’s super hard teeth.
• English dictionary of ancient Greek ‘spares no blushes’ with fresh look at crudity (Guardian) There is a lot of profanity in Greek writing, but a Victorian era dictionary Bowdlerized the hall out of it.
• Friends Don’t Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires (Forbes) Chinese billionaires have a disturbingly high death rate.
• Send in the Bugs. The Michelangelos Need Cleaning (New York Times) Using microbes to clean Michelangelo sculptures in a crypt.
• VOICES: Lessons from the union busting at No Evil Foods (Facing South) No Evil Foods is evil.
• A Veteran Tried to Credit Black Americans on Memorial Day. His Mic Got Muted (New York Times) The speaker wanted to discuss the origins of Memorial Day, it started with freed slaves wanting to honor Union soldiers, and the racists at the American Legion Post cut his mic.  Racism Much?
• Buckingham Palace banned ethnic minorities from office roles, papers reveal (Guardian) Speaking of racism.
• The train goes up, the train goes down: a simple new way to store energy (Vox) A train, concrete blocks, a hill, and you can store energy more efficiently and more cheaply than pumped water storage. 

The Squirrel Obstacle Course, the squeak-ual:

• Redditors Launch A ‘Rescue Mission’ For Embattled Sci-Hub, With The Ultimate Aim Of Building A Decentralized Version (Techdirt) Good move.  If Elsevier gets its claws into the Russian government, it’s game over for open science publications.
• Facial Recognition Technology: How to Opt Out at the Airport (Condé Nast Traveler) News you can use.
• Biden admin wants to bring sexy back with dating app vaccination statuses (Ars Technica) Filed under, “Not The Onion.”
• Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners (The Guardian) “When cities lack the paths pedestrians need, people vote with their feet.”
• It Is Unconscionable That The Gay Community Has Ostracized Me Simply Because I Was Born A Cop (Defector) This is both world class snark, and an accurate description of the snowflakes in the “Blue Lives Matter” movement.
• De-Ratting Rat Island Brought Silent Ecosystem Back to Life (Scientific American) Removing rats from Alaskan islands completely restored the ecosystem over a decade.
• Employers court metro Atlanta workers with higher wages, hiring bonuses. (Atlanta Journal and Constitution) Imagine that.
• In Nod to Dystopian Fiction, Citizen Wants to Send Private Security Teams to Your Neighborhood (Gizmodo) These are the folks who put out a bounty on an innocent homeless man for a fire in California. Not Good

Microwaves Reanimate Hamsters: 

• Long working hours kill 745,000 people a year, WHO/ILO study finds (CNBC) I always thought that my job would kill me.
• AT&T to spin off WarnerMedia, basically admitting giant merger was a mistake But they will still get their bonuses.
• Trump Justice Dept. Tried to Use Grand Jury to Identify Nunes Critic on Twitter (New York Times) They called the Feds on Devin Nunes Cow?  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? 
• New York investigation into Trump Organization now criminal, says attorney general (The Guardian) Here is hoping that they get his scalp on their wall.
• Ex-Prosecutor Who Withheld Evidence in Murder Case Gives Up Law License (New York Times) The depressing thing is that this almost never happens.
• China all but bans cryptocurrencies (The Register) Good.  It’s horrible for the environment and a fraud.
• Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate (Krebs on Security) Russian hackers program code into their malware to ignore machines with Cyrillic keyboards or the Russian language installed.
• Frontier sued by FTC, six states for allegedly over-promising, under-delivering broadband (The Register) What part of, “Frontier Communications” don’t they get?
•  
•  

John Oliver eviscerates stand your ground laws:

• The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere (ProPublica) This is a feature, not a bug.  Allowing Wall Street types to game the system is a the goal of all cap and trade and offset systems.  It’s how they get paid.
• Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach (Safety Detectives)  With a company as sociopathically devoted to knowing everything about its vendors and customers, one can only conclude that this market for fake reviews proceeded with the tacit approval of Amazon.
• How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Bert Hubert) How manufacturing and technology are displaced by sales and financialization in western businesses.
• FTC Report Finds Manufacturers’ Repair Restrictions Unwarranted (iFixit) Right to Repair now.
• Jeff Bezos’s $500 Million Yacht Comes With Its Own Yacht (The Cut) I want to go long on Guillotine futures.
• U.S. Tariffs Drive Drop in Chinese Imports – WSJ Econ 101.  It does not mean that the production moved back to the US, it moved to other import sources, so the costs, largely, though not entirely, fell on the Chinese.
• Autonomous Taxi Goes Rogue, Escapes From Rescue Crew (Futurism) Quite educational, particularly the references to other times they had to rescue the car with humans.

Here is said robot taxi going terminator (at about 26 minutes)

• What cats’ love of boxes and squares can tell us about their visual perception (Ars Technica) Kitteh!
• Why Cats Knock Your Stuff Over—and How to Stop Them (Lifehacker) Moar Kitteh!
• ‘Like Uber, but for cremations’: I created a $2m funeral startup – and became a monster (The Guardian) Silicon Valley startup culture is a petri dish for sociopathy.
• How to Avoid ‘Zoom Dick’ Incidents During Zoom Calls at Work (Gizmodo) We live in strange times.
• Alien plants: The search for photosynthesis on other worlds (New Scientist) Photosynthesis polarizes light, and by detecting polarized light, we might be able to detect photosynthesis.
• Pentagon chief says removal of all contractors from Afghanistan under way (Reuters) If they are removing the contractors, then getting out of Afghanistan is real.
• 96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find (Ars Technica) Why making tracking “opt-in” is so important.
• Biggest ISPs paid for 8.5 million fake FCC comments opposing net neutrality (Ars Technica) And Ajit Pai knew about this. Frog march him out of his offices.
• Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are Mostly Bad Policy  (CleanTechnica) They multiply the security costs, and the waste issues, and provide no meaningful economies of scale.

A nice primer on Stochastic Terrorism (14 min):

• How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good (The New Republic) A 40 year program of austerity has destroyed the capabilities of government.
• Trucks Get Parked Over Air Force Nuclear Missile Silos During Tests… Just In Case (The Drive)  In case a simulated launch results in an actual launch.
• Googler demolishes one of Apple’s monopoly defenses – that web apps are just as good as native iOS software (The Register) Apple got its nose under the door by insisting that it would run web apps, and once it set up the web store, it removed web app capabilities.
• Only 14% Of Americans Think Communities Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Build Their Own Broadband Networks (Techdirt) Banning community broadband is about as popular as having one’s daughter dating Matt Gaetz.
• CVS and Walgreens Have Wasted More Vaccine Doses Than Most States Combined (Kaiser Health News) One of the consequence of the US public health apparatus being hollowed out by austerity.
• Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought (The Guardian) The Thwaites Glacier. Over 3 meters of sea level rise with follow-on effects.  We are screwed.

I did not realize that The Who released a protest song 2 years ago. It’s a wonderful bluesy piece:

• HBO documentary on QAnon suggests Ron Watkins is QAnon prophet (The Washington Post) The hed is kind of weak.  Ron Watkins accidentally outed himself as “Q”.
• Meditations On US Forces Firing A Howitzer Into The Empty Desert “Just To Say We’re Here” (Caitlin’s Newsletter) What we are doing, or more accurately, what we are pretending to do, in Afghanistan.
• Encryption Lava Lamps – San Francisco, California (Atlas Obscura) Cloudflare has a wall of lava lamps in its headquarters, and it uses it to generate random numbers for its encryption.
• University of Minnesota thought it would be cool to try to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it backfired badly (The Register) University of Minnesota contributors are banned from the Linux project until further notice.
• Resources by city (Don’t Call The Police) Very useful resource for avoiding getting people shot for minor problems.
• Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed (The Atlantic) They are not low skill workers, they are just poorly paid ones.
• Abolish the OCC? (Credit Slips) Much like the Office of Thrift Supervision, it has been so thoroughly captured by the banks that it needs to be abolished.
• The Defund Police Movement Takes Aim at Fusion Centers and Mass Surveillance (The Intercept) This is an excellent place to star. 
• The World Needs Many More Coronavirus Vaccines (New York Times) The editorial board calls to, “Suspend patents.”  That is a big deal.

Our dysfunctional unemployment insurance, John Oliver counts the ways:

• Golfer’s ball lands on top of alligator at SC golf course (Fort Worth Star-Telegram) Surprisingly, not Florida, and it turns out that he did not have to take a penalty for moving the ball.
•  Facebook job ads algorithm still discriminates on gender, LinkedIn not so much (The Register) This is deliberate, because Facebook knows its algorithms.  Providing a beard for bigotry is a part of their business model.
• Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Is in Trouble, New Data Shows (Gizmodo) The Thwaites Glacier, the most unstable ice field in Antarctica, is more unstable than previously thought.  Its collapse could raise sea levels by nearly a meter.
• The rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats (The Guardian) A Spanish chef has discovered that the grain from the Zostera marin a sea grass is both edible and tasty.  It grows quickly, and does not require fresh water.
• Prolonged Isolation Can Lead to the Creation of New Accents (Atlas Obscura) The results of a study of language in Antarctica.  Would apply to any isolated community.
• Amazon Can Only Claim Their Jobs Are Decent Because American Work Has Gotten So Miserable (Jacobin)  Clearly true.  There has been a race to the bottom in working conditions for decades.
• How Lil Nas X Flipped Conservatives’ Culture-War Playbook (POLITICO) Short version:  Conservatives live to, “Own the libs,” and Lil Naz X has flipped this in his latest song.  I am amused. 
• Swatch of Wright Brothers Flyer 1 Attached to Mars Helicopter (NASA) I do not know if this is cool or pretentious.

 

I don’t know if John Oliver realizes it, but he just not-so-inadvertently endorsed Modern Monetary Theory.  Also, “Oh, yeah — the clock was put up by that Durst family. The bathroom murder burp Dursts.”

• New Wells Fargo Employee Walked Through All The Crimes He’ll Be Asked To Commit (The Onion) America’s finest news source.
• Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient Is Fermenting Microbes (Scientific American) I did not know that chocolate was a fermented foodstuffs.
• Fortran, a 70-year-old computer language, lands back on the top 20 most popular list (Boing Boing) I remember Fortran.
• As Private Equity Comes to Dominate Autism Services… (The Nation) Kill it with fire. “A handful of articles and papers report that agencies acquired by private equity employ under-trained, unlicensed therapists and engage in serial abuse.”
• AT&T said Trump’s tax cut would create jobs – now it’s laying off thousands of workers (The Guardian) Is anyone actually surprised by this?
• Scott Rudin Accused of Physically Abusing His Staff With Computers and Potatoes (Vulture) Not The Onion.  Also, What the f%$#, Hollywood?
• IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86 (The Register) More tech nostalgia.
• A ‘System of Espionage’ Reigned at Ikea, a French Prosecutor Charges (New York Times) The problem is not just American business, the problem is just business.

An oldie but goody, John Oliver on Ayn Rand:

• Venus Flytraps Have Magnetic Fields Like the Human Brain (Vice) I have to listen to the Little Shop of Horrors original cast album again.
• Amazon, the Crappy Monopolist. (Medium) Notwithstanding their assertion of being laser focused on the customer, they deliver a crappy product.
• Teenage Mistake (Elizabeth Spiers)  The defenestration of, “27 year old political reporter Alexi McCammond,” as Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue was not about some anti-Asian tweets she made as a teen, it was about Anna Wintour taking someone who had no background in fashion, management, or editing, and wanting to put her in charge of an increasingly relevant magazine.
• The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez (Financial Times) An intesresting discussion of the hydrodynamics of big ships in small channels, and how it might have caused the incident.  (There is now a Wikipedia entry for the “bank effect”)
• Connecticut Legislature Offers Up Bill That Would Make Prison Phone Calls Free (Techdirt) About bloody time.
• I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand (Nautilus) An evolutionary biologist explains how natural selection actually favors groups that support each other.
• GOP representative Pat Fallon cites Duffel Blog, satire site, as fact while questioning SPLC head (Washington Post) The stoopid, it burns.  
• Maryland police video shows officers threatening, screaming at crying child (The Guardian) A 5-year-old eloped from school, and police officers threatened to beat him.  Support your local police.
• The Rebecca Riots: When Welsh Farmers Dressed In Drag To Protest (Cracked) Cross dressing tax protesters dismantling toll booths.  I love history.
• More than $1 billion for 56 Black charter graduates!? (Cloaking Inequity) It’s Texas (where else?) and more evidence that much of the support of the charter school movement comes from people wanting to re-segregate education.

A specific example of how Amazon uses its monopoly position as a marketplace to crush competitors:

• N.Y. Sues Ice Cream Shop Owner Using New ‘Central Park Karen’ Law For Filing False Race-Based Police Report Against BLM Protesters (Black Enterprise) The Attorney General used the recently drafted, “Central Park Karen” Law. 
• New Oppo smartphone has a 60x microscope camera (Ars Technica) This is the first legitimately new phone feature that I have found interesting in quite a while.
• Lava Jato Hacker Walter Delgatti speaks (Brasil Wire) Discusses why he hacked into the “Car Wash” investigation, and how he found that it was all thoroughly corrupt, how the FBI was involved, etc.  He is a hero.
• Cory Doctorow: Free Markets (Locus Online) Discusses how monopoly rents, are driving our increasingly dysfunctional economy into the ditch, and how the audiobook market is now built around app based, DRM controlled material that you don’t really own.
• Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to Property Law (K-Sue Park at SSRN) “This article demonstrates that the histories of conquest and slavement are foundational to U.S. property law.”
• New York Man Kept Sharks in Pool in His Basement (New York Times) My first thought was, “Florida Man in New York,” but it’s actually a part of an underground market in exotic fish. 
• Free Meal For A Name Change Hooks Hundreds (Hackwackers)  People in Taiwan were legally changing their name for some free sushi?
• Israeli archeologists discover ancient Dead Sea Scroll fragments (Al Jazeera) Getting your archeology on.
• Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT’s actually reference the media you’re “buying” and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon (Twitter) Short version: if the company generating the NFTs goes belly up, or decides to start charging a subscription fee, you are screwed. So, in addition to it releasing as much carbon as 77 years of electrical consumption by an an EU citizen, it’s a scam.

Leopard Seal tries to show NatGeo photographer how to eat a penguin.  It did not go to said seal’s satisfaction.

•  MnDOT reveals 8 winners of its snowplow naming contest (Bring Me The News) One of the winners is Plowey McPlowFace
• “White Privilege” and “Black Lives Matter”: Examples of How Black Activism Failed (Ghion Journal) I enjoy a well written rant, “We are now firmly entrenched in the era of hustling hyenas like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris who cozy up to the very system of repression they pretend to be fighting against.” Good read, whether you agree or not.
• How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you (MIT Technology Review) These folks are going to get their data on you, your only defense is to insure that it is lost in an avalanche of bullsh%$ data so that their bots learn the wrong lesson.
• AG sues ex-Bumpy’s ice cream shop owner over race-based police report (Albany Times Union) It’s called, “Karen’s Law”
• New Oppo smartphone has a 60x microscope camera (Ars Technica) Way more useful than most of the crap that the phone makers try to foist off on us.

A follow-on to my earlier post regarding my dislike of Daylight Savings Time:

• Suburban Survivalism Demonstrates The Most Obnoxious Brand of Privilege (An Injustice!) Did you know that there are survivalists who do not own any sort of non-electric can opener?  Now you do.
• Why do cats purr? (BBC Science Focus Magazine) “In other words, your moggy is an evil genius. And don’t pretend like you didn’t suspect it before.”
• TK Finance Dictionary: “SPAC” (TK News by Matt Taibbi) A definition of Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).  Video below.  Short version:  Another way for Wall Street to rob you blind.
• Hacker reduces GTA Online load times by roughly 70 percent (Ars Technica) Loading times approaching 10 minutes on some machines, and it appears to be a very poorly written JSON (basically text) parser that has remained in the code for 7 years.
• Stacy Graham-Hunt: Call me Black, not BIPOC (New Haven Register) A Black columnist sees it as an erasure of her blackness by white linguistics.
• First-of-its-kind trial finds psychedelic microdosing is equal to placebo (New Atlas) It doesn’t work, but that is no surprise.  It’s yet more status signaling indulged in by hipsters in an attempt to convince themselves that they are special, not just lucky and born with privilege.

 This describes just how corrupt the SPAC is:

• The Martian Jewish Calendar – Draft Discussion (Torah.Works) Someone with too much free time. H/t Bear who Swims.
• Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself – Peterson – 2020 (Social Science Quarterly)  For the life of me, I cannot tell if this is serious or satire, “The objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer.”  
• Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes (NBER) High finance f%$#s everything up, always, “PE ownership increases the short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%, ……… while taxpayer spending per patient episode increases by 11%.”
• My story of working with Governor Cuomo (Medium) Former Cuomo aide goes public with allegations of sexual harassment. (There is now a second accuser.
• Cherokee Nation Addresses Bias Against Descendants of Enslaved People (New York Times) The Cherokee had African-American slaves, now called, “Freedmen,”and until now, they have been denied full tribal membership, until now.
• Mechanistic transmission modeling of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrates the importance of aerosol transmission (PNAS) Short version:  Aerosols are a huge part of Covid transmission, particularly on cruise ships. 
• What the Neera Tanden affair reveals about the Washington DC swamp (The Guardian) A very good summary of just how awful, and completely unqualified, Tanden is, and how the conflict over her nomination to head OMB addresses none of this.

Bernie Sanders opens up a can of whup ass on Alan Greenspan: (I love the guy in the background, Warren Gunnels,  trying not to chuckle)

• On dating men with “potential” (Medium) Sort version: Men with “Potential” are affable f%$#-ups.
• The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book (Crummy) How the NYPL fixed ebook checkout for basically every library in America by going with established non-commercial standards, and not hiring for profit outside guns.
• Want to know if your relationship will work? Try the ‘IKEA rage’ test (Daily Express) If you can handle assembling an 825 quid flat pack monstrosity, a psychologist says that your relationship will probably last.
• Five-storey Blue Screen Of Death spotted in Thailand (The Register) Heh.
• ‘Human chimera’: Man fails paternity test because genes in his saliva are different to those in sperm (The Independent) Nature in all its glory.
• What Does It Mean When War Hawks Say ‘Never Trump’? (War Is Boring) Makes the obvious point, that the Republicans endorsing Hillary Clinton are some of the worst war criminals in the history of the United States.
• Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds (The Guardian) This is happening because prisons, particularly private ones, are increasingly starving their inmates.

To go along with the Ikea link:

• One group is responsible for America’s culture of violence, and it isn’t cops, black Americans, Muslims or rednecks. It’s men (LA Times) It’s true. Our culture of violence is overwhelmingly a masculine one.
• These Are Your 28 TPP House Democrat Targets (Our Future) The 28 House members who voted for Fast Track for TPP.  Call them and tell them that you want them to vote against a lame duck vote on the TPP, and that if there is one, you want them to vote no.  (Unsurprisingly, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is on this list)
• Make your own Downfall video (J. Fedor) You know the meme, Hitler ranting in the movie Downfall where someone rewrites the subtitles. This automates the process.
• Swedish Pokemon teens terrorised by laser-wielding ‘sex pigs’ (The Register) It’s an old story:  Couple dons pig masks, and chases kids hunting for Pokemon out of the park, and then have public sex.
• NASA Study Nails Fracking as Source of Massive Methane ‘Hot Spot’ (Common Dreams) Filed under, “Well duh!”
•  Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire (The Guardian) Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of killings by the British fighting the Mau Mau uprising. The image of the benign British empire is a myth.
• Aetna, Obamacare and health insurers’ 10 dirty secrets (MarketWatch) Medical insurance is evil, and the problem, not the solution.
• Saudi Arabia Kills Civilians, the U.S. Looks the Other Way (New York Times) This is wrong, and stupid, and evil.

 Do try this at home, but kids should make sure that your parents are there:

• Taocma union local first in nation to represent workers in the recreational cannabis industry (News Tribune) Look for the union label, when you are toking that reefer or bong………
• McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad… (McMansion Hell Tumblr) It’s a nice look at balance and design in architecture.
• Ancient Roman Shipwreck Full of Coins and Bronze Statues Discovered Off Israel (Esquire) Get your history geek on. The ship was full of statues that were to be melted down.
• Twitter Can Fix Twitter With Just a Few Lines of Code (JestersCourt) He proposes twitter allowing users to ban the mention of them by banned users. Interesting concept, but too open to abuse and avoidance.
• Scientists Find Earthlike Planet Orbiting Proxima Centauri (Speigel) Relatively close by, but I am not sure how “earth like” it would be orbiting a red dwarf.
• The Hidden Costs of America’s Addiction to Mercenaries (Defense One) “Since 2009, the ratio of contractors to troops in war zones has increased from 1 to 1 to about 3 to 1.”  Our hollowed out military.

They got the voice wrong, but it is still brilliant:

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

• U.S. judge dismisses challenge to Seattle’s Uber, Lyft union law (Business Insider) The Sociopaths at Uber lose in Court.
• I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next (Medium)
• It’s true. Each installation of Babel includes a picture of Guy Fieri, and there is nothing you can do about it.
• Putin Calls Out Rigged US Democracy (Waking Times) Nice troll, Vladimir.
• A New Wireless Hack Can Unlock 100 Million Volkswagens (Wired) All while spewing out more pollution than is allowed.
• Jeremy Corbyn: I fear my cat is a Tory (The Telegraph) Cats tend to be politically conservative, because they genetically selfish and amoral.  It’s why we love cats.  It’s far less endearing when it comes from human beings.
• I Spent My Summer Tracking Down Government Records About the Red Cross (ProPublica) A very nice description of the effective application of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It is also a very useful primer on the proper application of these requests.

A righteous rant on the absurd restrictions on Olympics Coverage

H/t TPM.