By Howie Hawkins Democratic principles demand that the president should be elected by the people on the basis of one-person, one-vote. But today the Electoral College will elect the president based on an anachronistic anti-democratic 18th century system where some people’s votes count a lot more than others. For example, Wyoming has a population of 579,759 and three electoral votes. California has a population of 39,512,223 and 55 electoral votes. Do the math and you…
Is this the Triangle’s FernGully?
External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/orange/orange-county-development-buc-ees/
In 2012, photographer Regina Valkenborgh, then a student at the University of Hertfordshire in England, created a series of makeshift pinhole cameras by lining drink cans with photographic paper. She forgot about some of them and one remained in place for 8 years before someone found it. — Read the rest
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/14/longest-photo-exposure-of-all-time.html
Over more than 50 years, Lillian Michelson built one of Hollywood’s most famous libraries for film research. Need to know what an Igloo really looks like? How about a Siberian hut? Or the inside of a 15th Century jail? For 50 years in Hollywood, generations of filmmakers would beat a path to the Michelson Cinema Research Library, where renowned film researcher Lillian Michelson could hunt down the answer to just about any question. She was…
Massive planets at far out distances from their stars are possible after all The Hubble Space Telescope has spied a previously unknown exoplanet with similar properties as our Solar System’s hypothetical object Planet Nine. This newly spotted body is living on the outskirts of another solar system 336 light-years away.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/12/11/planet_nine_hubble/
The Austrian socialist architect Josef Frank resisted modernists who wanted to make homes look like workplaces — an idea with new resonance in an age when so many of us are working from home and feel like we can’t escape from our work. Josef Frank design, 1932. (Photograph by Martin Gerlach / courtesy of Wien Museum) In 2020, millions of people have unexpectedly been forced to turn their homes into their workplaces. Not only have…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/socialist-architect-josef-frank-modernism-freedom/
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning. I am not the only one who thinks Bookshop.org is a false savior. It’s not just book publishing – the pandemic is also accelerating the death of print news media. Amazon may finally sell their ebooks to libraries. The bad sex in fiction award will not be given out this year. Apparently the judges decided that bad sex is better than no sex. Google Play…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://the-digital-reader.com/2020/12/14/morning-coffee-14-december-2020/
The Congressional Budget Office studied the costs of Medicare for All and determined that it could cover everyone and cost $650 billion less annually than the existing US medical system.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 11, 2020 For Further Information: Virginia Rodino, Press Secretary, virginia@howiehawkins.us Robert Smith, Deputy Press Secretary, robert@howiehawkins.us RELEASE: Abolish the Death Penalty Lame duck President Donald Trump is rushing through five federal death-penalty executions before he leaves office. Trump’s killing spree breaks a 130-year-old tradition of not executing prisoners during a presidential transition. In 2019, Trump began resuming executions in federal death penalty cases, which had not been carried out since 2003. With these…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://howiehawkins.us/abolish-the-death-penalty/
A complaint filed by the San Francisco office of the NLRB has charged Google with violating the National Labor Relations Act by interfering with, disciplining and firing employees who were engaged in legally protected organizing activities.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/14/goog-d14.html
San Francisco –YouTube is supposed to be a vibrant space for new creativity, but in practice creators are sharply hampered by the site’s “Content ID” system. A new whitepaper from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) takes a deep dive into the confusing process of getting a video past YouTube’s copyright filters, and what the system means for free speech and creativity on the Internet. “YouTube dominates the online video market, and Content ID dominates video…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-helps-shape-what-we-see-online
Earlier today, we wrote about reports detailing the latest attempt to push through a bill to make streaming copyright-covered works online a possible felony, this time being pushed by Senator Thom Tillis, who wanted to attach it to the federal spending omnibus bill. As we noted, Tillis was pushing back on some of the criticism, saying that the bill is very narrowly tailored and wouldn’t be used to criminalize random people. Of course, the response…
Caption: Based on FairVote research, this is a state-by-state breakdown of all campaign events by the major-party presidential and vice presidential nominees from the end of both party conventions through Election Day. With a campaign season fought tooth and nail into the final day, Election Day has finally passed. More than 158 million Americans cast a ballot in the 2020 election, a record-breaking number that represents the highest turnout percentage of voting-age Americans in our…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/no_matter_the_candidate_who_wins_americans_lose_with_winner_take_all
https://thequietus.com/articles/24529-discogs-more-than-200-million-dollars Discogs has cracked the nut, struck the right balance, and is therefore an absolute Internet treasure– Thank you. If you don’t know them, Discogs is a central resource for the LP/78/CD music communities, and as Wikipedia said “As of 28 August 2019 Discogs contained over 11.6 million releases, by over 6 million artists, across over 1.3 million labels, contributed from over 456,000 contributor user accounts—with these figures constantly growing…” When I met the founder,…
Today’s links Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting: Upton Sinclair was an optimist. The largest strike in human history: The Shock Doctrine’s breaking-point. Soviet computing graveyard: Recovering a Saratov-2 from presumed extinction. This day in history: 2015, 2019 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing projects, current reading Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting (permalink) In my book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” I point out that the claims for Big…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/
When I started writing music in in my teens, I didn’t even think about how to begin. I just did what every other starting writer does – I copied, emulated, plagiarized and otherwise ripped-off everything I’d enjoyed from the music I’d listened to thus far. Badly. Deprived of divine inspiration, it wouldn’t have been possible any other way. Show me a composer who hasn’t committed at least one of the above at some point and…
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown millions of Americans out of work — and over the past nine months, up to 20 million have filed for unemployment. Supplemental federal unemployment benefits of $600 per week — a lifeline for many — expired in July and more are set to go away at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t act. But beyond the economic consequences, not having that financial safety net can lead to serious health…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/losing-jobless-benefits-is-not-only-stressful/
The annual approval of the gargantuan U.S. military budget is one of the most reliable rituals in Congress. It is so ordinary and overwhelmingly bipartisan, it’s barely considered newsworthy, and few outlets follow the details of exactly how much the government is allocating to a nuclear weapons buildup, or deployments to the Asia Pacific, or the steady creep of U.S. military bases across the continent of Africa. Even under President Trump, when the Democratic leadership…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/congress-is-deadlocked-on-covid-19-relief/
Even though it’s only 26 words long, Section 230 doesn’t say what many think it does. So we’ve decided to take up a few kilobytes of the Internet to explain what, exactly, people are getting wrong about the primary law that defends the Internet. Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is one of the most important laws protecting free speech online. While its wording is fairly clear—it states that “No provider or user of an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actually
Today the National Science Foundation released a pair of videos that document the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory with incredible detail. A wide shot, apparently taken from the Visitors Center, shows the 900 ton instrument platform breaking free and swinging on the remaining support cables until it smashes into the edge of the dish. The second clip, recorded by an airborne drone, is focused directly on the cables as they failed. Both can be seen…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/03/nsf-releases-video-of-arecibos-final-moments/