In a revealing confession, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declares “I’m afraid” of the implications of rising numbers of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, indicating a fourth surge is underway.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/30/usco-m30.html
Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users that shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as kids or friends got on more stable footing (left home to job hunt, whatever), they’d inevitably get hooked on the service and purchase their own subscription. Execs at HBO (at least before the AT&T acquisition) have stated it doesn’t really hurt these companies’ bottom lines in part because, much like with traditional piracy, there’s no guarantee these users would…
Computerized filtering of job seekers’ résumés means that anyone who
is capable but unusual is never considered.
Photograph Source: AFGE – CC BY 2.0
Do you remember the promises made by the Democratic Party’s presidential and Congressional candidates on universal health insurance? You can forget their pledges and somber convictions now that your votes put the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. The Democrats’ leaders are abandoning their promises and retreating into a cowardly corporatist future.
Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as The New York Times reported. There are…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/16/perfidy-meets-putty-congressional-democrats-betray-voters/
Most new architecture, like Amazon’s proposed new HQ, is hideous. That’s because it is made for corporations. Despite all the mistakes and brutalities of the Soviet experiment, at least their architecture was designed to serve the people instead.
The Amazon building is a monstrosity. (NBBJ / Amazon) I went to architecture school and write about architecture, so whenever a new building goes up somewhere, people ask me what I think about it. They ask not because they want to know my expert opinion and compare it to theirs, but because they understand that they are “supposed” to like whatever new thing has just gone up in their city, but they don’t,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/architecture-amazon-arlington-virginia-brutalism-modernism/
I have been using Signal a lot and, besides the privacy features, I have come to really enjoy custom sticker packs. Naturally, this led me to upload and maintain a lot of them. To keep things under control I wrote packpath, a small command line utility to easily upload and update Signal sticker packs from a simple config file. Consider this mosaic a far more interesting screenshot than a terminal running packpath. Although the Signal stickers API is only kinda public, some developers have written libraries to interact with it. Concretely, signalstickers.com maintainer Romain Ricard, has written signalstickers-client, a Python library to interact with the sticker API. Thanks to signalstickers-client doing all of the heavy…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://diegoe.be/2021/03/15/packpath-upload-signal-stickers-from-config-file/
Texas recently eased all coronavirus restrictions, including mask-wearing. AP Photo/LM OteroPresident Joe Biden commemorated the COVID-19 pandemic’s one-year anniversary by giving Americans an ambitious goal: Return to a semblance of normalcy by the Fourth of July. “But to get there we can’t let our guard down,” he added. Unfortunately, many states already have. Falling numbers of new coronavirus cases and accelerating vaccination rates have prompted Texas and a growing number of other states to ease more restrictions or drop them altogether. Their governors argue the economic costs are just too high and the measures no longer necessary. Federal health officials, meanwhile, are advising states to hold off on reopening too soon and…
There is a new
mailing-list server running under the auspices of kernel.org that is
meant, over time, to address the problems that have been plaguing
vger.kernel.org in recent times.The infrastructure behind
lists.linux.dev supports multiple domains, so all mailing lists hosted on
vger.kernel.org will be carefully migrated to the same platform while
preserving current addresses, subscribers, and list ids. The only thing
that will noticeably change is the procedure to subscribe and unsubscribe
from individual lists.Among other things, the new server
prioritizes delivery to the lore.kernel.org archive, which should minimize
the problems seen recently with lost messages.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/849441/rss
Their argument is, “Bitcoin is ‘green’ because this oil well was just going to vent all that methane into the atmosphere anyway” — or — “It was on fire when I got here.”‘Absurd’ video of bitcoin mine hooked to an oil well sparks outrageIn states like Texas, where energy regulations are laxer, natural gas by-product can be vented, intentionally releasing gases, predominately potent methane, into the atmosphere. The other option is to set gas on fire in flare stacks to convert methane to carbon dioxide, slightly less dangerous when it comes to heating the planet in the short-term. […]”They’re getting zero for this gas anyway so it makes almost no difference whether we’re on that well-site…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/03/bitcoin-mine-cargo-container-literally-incinerating-planet/
Counterpunch has a new article about the harm done to minor parties by HR One, the bill in Congress to change many election laws. This one is also by Howie Hawkins, the Green Party presidential nominee in 2020. The article is balanced and acknowledges the helpful parts of the bill. The article also has a list of reforms that should have been included in the bill. The Green Party is doing a very good job of publicizing the harmful aspect of the bill. No daily newspaper has even mentioned that the bill makes it much harder for presidential candidates to qualify for primary season matching funds. Thanks to Fairvote for the link.
An organization calling itself Safe Cities Northwest is aiming to create public-private surveillance networks in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. The organization claims that it is building off of a “successful model for public safety” that it built in San Francisco. However, it’s hard to call that model successful when it has been at the center of a civil rights lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, been used to spy on a number of public events, including Black-led protests against police violence and a Pride parade, and is now facing resistance from a neighborhood hoping to prevent the spread of the surveillance program.
In San Francisco, the organization SF Safe connects semi-private Business Improvement Districts (BID)…
Enlarge / Empty vials of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are seen at a first-come, first-serve drive-thru vaccination site operated by the Lake County Health Department on January 28, 2021 in Groveland, Florida. Seniors 65 and older waited in line for hours to be vaccinated. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)
Some experts speculate that the pandemic coronavirus will one day cause nothing more than a common cold, mostly in children, where it will be an indistinguishable drip in the steady stream of snotty kid germs. Such is the reality for four other coronaviruses that have long stalked school yards and commonly circulate among us every cold and flu season, to little noticeable effect.
But that sanguine—if not slightly slimier—future is…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1748537
Until this week I did not know about the column command.$ head -5 zillow.csv “Index”, “Living Space (sq ft)”, “Beds”, “Baths”, “Zip”, “Year”, “List Price ($)” 1, 2222, 3, 3.5, 32312, 1981, 250000 2, 1628, 3, 2, 32308, 2009, 185000 3, 3824, 5, 4, 32312, 1954, 399000 4, 1137, 3, 2, 32309, 1993, 150000Turned out this file is much more readable with a good pipe (and a large screen)$ head -5 zillow.csv | column –table –separator ,”Index” “Living Space (sq ft)” “Beds” “Baths” “Zip” “Year” “List Price ($)” 1 2222 3 3.5 32312 1981 250000 2 1628 3 2 32308 2009 185000 3 3824 5 4 32312 1954 399000 4 1137 3 2 32309 1993 150000column is part of util-linux and is thus…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://meta.libera.cc/2021/03/displaying-csv-files-in-readable-way-on.html
Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema was once a Green Party member and a committed antiwar activist. Now she’s best known for a viral thumbs-down on a $15 minimum wage vote. It’s the timeless story of an earnest do-gooder turned Washington monster and what happens when we don’t hold politicians accountable.
Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) gives an enthusiastic thumbs down after voting with Republicans against a $15 minimum wage. One of the most enduring parables in American culture is about “going Washington” — it is a tale of the earnest do-gooder deciding to run for office on a pledge to be a voice for the voiceless, then getting to the Beltway and quickly becoming…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/kyrsten-sinema-thumbs-down-minimum-wage/
Increased social media and tech censorship must be understood in the wider context of the establishment desperately seeking to hold on to what used to be called “the vital centre”, a US-based author and economist tells Sputnik.
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author, and founder of the non-profit Democracy At Work. Recent Facebook posts made by Democracy at Work were blocked from being shared via the social media platform, adding to the growing list of censorship and quasi-censorship that has become commonplace online.
Professor Wolff’s weekly show Economic Update is syndicated on over 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. In a detailed interview with…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/disintegration-of-political-system-helps-explain-rising-censorship/
While the federal CDC has criticized Texas for ending all COVID-19 restrictions, the Biden administration policy of reopening all schools will have the same effect of spreading the pandemic.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/04/pers-m04.html
Newly released documents show the agreement between U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the airline JetBlue on scanning the faces of passengers, in order to “build a biometric gallery of facial images, obtained through various DHS databases” of travelers flying from certain airports. The documents provide more insight into the dynamics between DHS and airlines, which are increasingly deploying biometric boarding at their gates. “The purpose of this MOU for the Parties is to collaborate on JetBlue’s proposed pilot program to utilize facial biometrics to verify the identity of travelers prior to their departure on JetBlue international flights from Boston Logan Airport and John F. Kennedy Airport in the United States, to international destinations serviced…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5bewb/jetblue-cbp-facial-recognition-biometric-boarding
“Crypto art” is literally just “numbered prints, but each time I sign my name I also promise to burn down a local park.”In case you are fortunate enough to have not heard about this latest con:Someone has convinced a bunch of innumerate artists that Dunning-Krugerrands are not a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme. I’ve had to start blocking them on the Twits to avoid hearing about it, even the artists whose work I used to enjoy. They think that making a buck trumps setting the world on fire. “Proof of useless work” is a global suicide pact.bombsfall:If anyone wants to pay me crypto art prices to make them a gif or a png we can skip the middle…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/03/crypto-fart/
Enlarge / A T-Mobile logo at a store in New York on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
T-Mobile has cut at least 5,000 jobs since completing its acquisition of Sprint despite promising that the merged company would start creating new jobs “from day one.”
As noted by Light Reading today, a T-Mobile filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week said, “As of December 31, 2020, we employed approximately 75,000 full-time and part-time employees, including network, retail, administrative, and customer support functions.” That’s 5,000 fewer than the number T-Mobile gave on previous occasions, including a press release on December 8, 2020 that said there are “more than 80,000 employees at the post-merger T-Mobile.”…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1746210
