Test Fire 0
Rekha Basu recently took the Iowa “concealed carry” test and qualified for a permit, even though she has never touched a firearm. She wrote of her experience in the Des Moines Register. Here’s a bit:
An Economic Perrytale 0
Rick Perry rewrites the law of supply and demand.
We are doomed.
Both Sides Not 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., points out the “political polarization” in the United States has but one author. A snippet:
No, we are divided because one party did. And it wasn’t the Democrats.
Our political thinking being as fixedly bipolar as it is, many people will read the foregoing as an endorsement of the Democratic Party. It emphatically is not. Democrats are very often disorderly, disputatious, and downright dumb, not to mention stunningly bad at deciding and conveying what they stand for.
In other words, they are pretty much what they were 30 years ago. The same cannot be said of the GOP.
Follow the link for his reasoning.
Dude-Bros, Reprise 0
One of the most powerful weapons of rape culture for centuries has been indoctrinating victims, particularly women, to believe that, if they are abused, it’s somehow their fault, rather than the fault of the abusers. As our society has gotten more open about sex and sexual behavior (and, some would say, cruder), that may be changing. According the San Jose Mercury-News, women in tech have become more willing to expose the misconduct of tech dude-bros. Here’s a bit from a much longer article:
Sixty percent of those women report experiencing sexual harassment, according to “Elephant in the Valley,” a 2015 survey by venture capitalist Trae Vassallo and others of more than 200 female tech executives, founders and investors.
“It’s reached epidemic proportions in Silicon Valley, and there’s so much more that needs to be done,” said San Francisco-based angel investor Karen Bairley Kruger, who founded Wingpact to support female entrepreneurs and investors.
Geeking Out 0
Testing SolusOS in a VirtualBox virtual machine on Slackware –Current.
Solus is a nice, clean bit of work designed with the home user in mind.
Trumpling the EPA, Reprise 0
Shorter version: Science, schmience. We want money.
The Snaring Economy, Dude-Bro Dept. 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Charles Johnson considers the culture of Uber (and many other Silicon Valley outfits). A snippet:
Bro culture fosters an environment where companies are run much like a fraternity house. It’s perfectly laid out in its infamous 14 core cultural values, which includes super-pumpedness, meritocracy/toe-stepping, and always be hustlin’.
A web search tells me that there is a lack of clarity as to what Uber’s “14 core values” may actually be. The clearest list(s) I was able to find are–er–somewhat less than coherent, as could be expected from a bunch of dude-bros with a morning-after hangover.
Afterthought:
On a radio show I heard recently, the host asked a caller, “What do you do for a living?” The caller responded, “I”m a Lyft driver.”
For Pete’s shake, if you do it for a living, it’s not sharing, it’s employment, and should be regulated accordingly.
The whole “sharing economy” thing is a con and a scam to avoid both obeying labor laws and treating employees like employees.
