Boing Boing

Bird Scooter really is the Uber of scooters: vastly overcapitalized, vastly overvalued, incapable of turning a profit...ever.According to a report in The Information, Bird lost $100m in the first quarter of 2019 (the company denies this); and is now seeking an additional $300m in investment capital. (Xeni wrote about this on Thursday)Bird's business model (such as it is) involves flooding cities with unlicensed, illegal, dangerous (really dangerous) electric scooters that block sidewalks and impede wheelchairs, strollers and pedestrian traffic. The scooters themselves are so flimsy that they are prone of wearing out before Bird can break even on their purchase price, which is why Bird does not pay to recover its impounded scooters from city property. Unfortunately for Bird, this means that people who want a cheap scooter can buy one for pennies on the dollar at a city auction and then cheaply swap in their own control unit (this fact is so distressing to Bird that they threatened to sue me in a failed attempt to censor my reporting on it).There is no way this can ever be profitable, not even by paying starvation wages to the gig-economy workers who drive around and around, humping scooters back to their charging stations.Bird has already raised $718,000,000 from investors. If The Information's report is true, the company has burned through most of that, which means that the auctioneers might soon be able to give you a stellar deal on a Xiaomi Mi Electric Scooter. Read the rest

Back in 2010, It Books published Mary-Lou Weisman's biography of MAD Magazine icon Al Jaffee: Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography; I missed it then but happened upon Arie Kaplan's 2011 writeup in The Jewish Review of Books this morning and was charmed by the biographical sketch it lays out.Jaffee previously) invented some of MAD's most enduring regular features, including the iconic back-page fold-ins and the "Snappy answers to stupid questions" section. But his story starts in Zarasai, Lithuania, where he grew up with his mother and younger siblings. Jaffee had been born in Savannah, Georgia, but his mother brought him back to the shtetl and left his father behind in the USA. Jaffee's mother was neglectful and indifferent, and when he could, he returned to America without her at the age of 12 -- she is believed to have been murdered by Nazis a few years later.Jaffee's father, meanwhile, used to send him American comic strips rolled into cardboard tubes, inspiring his love of the form. In 1936, Jaffee's teachers at the Bronx's Herman Ridder Junior High School tested Jaffee's class for arts aptitude, and sent him on to art school, along with his classmate, Wolf William Eisenberg -- who would later change his name to Will Elder.The Jewish Review of Books article examines Jaffee's relationship with Judiasm: he was an atheist who still drew illustrations for publication in Orthodox newspapers (he did it out of a fondness for "the kind and gentle souls of the people of Orthodoxy . Read the rest

Acosta calls his role at the Labor Department "the honor of a lifetime."

If you're going to Starbucks to have some coffee and read the newspaper, BYON: Bring your own newspaper.On Friday, the Seattle-based coffee chain said it's going to stop selling The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today at its 8,600+ coffeeshops around the U.S.Why? Starbucks says too many people read the paper without paying for a copy.The New York Post cites a source at Starbucks, saying the company is removing newspapers and other goods from retail shelves in part because of “shrinkage,” what people in the industry sometimes say when they mean goods that tend to be shoplifted.“We will also remove shelving fixtures that display whole- bean coffee and different grab-and-go snacks,” a Starbucks spokeswoman told the New York Post.Excerpt:Starbucks has been selling the papers in its stores for nearly two decades, starting with the Times in 2000 and expanding to add the Journal and USA Today in 2010. But many Starbucks customers take them off the rack, read them while they finish their lattes, and then either leave them on the table or walk off with the daily paper without paying.“Some may have thought it was free, like USA Today in hotels,” said one industry insider.Starbucks confirmed the decision on Thursday.“As part of our continuous efforts to enhance the overall experience in our stores for both partners and customers, we are removing select fixtures from our retail lobby in September,” a Starbucks spokeswoman said.Starbucks will stop selling newspapers in September [Keith J. Read the rest

We've been living, full-time in a 40-foot motorhome for a few years now! It's been great! But we're thinking seriously about downsizing. While we've got all of the room that we could want, our 2004 Newmar Kountry Star is less than ideal for getting into some of the rougher terrain terrain that we like'd like to explore and enjoy. If money was no object (which it is) and I could have any RV I wanted (which I can't), I'd love to get my hands on an Earthroamer. Based in Colorado, Earthroamer specializes in creating made-to-order expedition vehicles designed to allow a few happy campers to live off-grid, in the lap of luxury for long periods of time. Unless I write multiple New York Times bestsellers which get optioned into feature films and sell illicit street drugs in my spare time, it's not going to happen. But a fella can dream.Image via Earthroamer Read the rest

Jimmy Kimmel hosted a game show called "Let's Make a Dope Deal" with customers at a weed store drive-thru in Las Vegas. People who correctly answered questions won not-so-fabulous prizes, like snow globes and Hot Pockets. Read the rest

Oddly, convicted sex offender didn't ask feds to return his child porn stash

A company in Japan has made t-shirts that give the illusion that you can -- kind of -- see through them. The one for women hints at a busty chest in a lacy bra, and the one for guys suggests six-pack abs. The "delusional mapping T-shirt with a faint view of the valley" and the "delusional mapping T-shirt with faint muscles" (loosely translated) each cost approximately $36 (Â¥ 3,888).(Oddity Central) Read the rest

This video from Bohemian Browser Ballett on Germany's public broadcaster Funk is absolutely genius: a comic dialogue between a literal uniformed Nazi officer outraged that someone had the temerity to call him a Nazi: "Just because someone doesn't share mainstream opinion it doesn't mean he's a Nazi. Maybe I'm a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination!" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Billy Green writes, "This is video I shot at the Boing Boing Picnic in 2010. Music by Dr. Popular recorded live at the picnic." Such fantastic footage! Read the rest

In Social Connectedness in Urban Areas (Sci-Hub mirror), a group of business and public policy researchers from Facebook, NYU and Princeton study anonymized, fine-grained location data from Facebook users who did not disable their location history, and find that the likelihood that New Yorkers will remain friends is well correlated with the ease of commuting between their respective homes on public transit.The negative effect of distance on friendships is both intuitive and validated through empirical research, but the paper finds that the effect size for longer commutes is much more pronounced than mere distance: while a 10% increase in distance correlates to a 10% decrease in a reduction in Facebook friendship, a 10% increase in commute times correlates to a 15% reduction in friendships.For now, the researchers haven’t done work to suggest that the relationship between friendship and public transportation travel time holds for places outside of New York City. And it’s true that in the US, New York is sui generis—no other city has such a well-developed and widely used transit system. But researchers think it’s possible that transportation determines “friendships” elsewhere, too. “I think if you did this for a city that’s not New York, public transit wouldn't matter, but road routings would matter,” says Leah Brooks, an economist at George Washington University who has studied cities and transportation systems. It’s very possible, she says, that two neighboring suburban areas might not have a lot of social connections if there’s not an easy way to get between them. Read the rest

Hardly a day goes by that I don't use my Instant Pot to make chili, curry, soup, or yogurt. I paid about $100, but right now this 6-quart model is just minus another $10 when you click the coupon button on Amazon's product page. Read the rest

YouTuber Tom Scott created a 15-part series on how to create a smartphone app - not really the tech details, more like the foundations and basics you need to know. He spends a lot of time telling you why you probably shouldn't make an app and why you will regret it if you do. Tech support, for instance, is a nightmare.In the first episode, he interviews the Adrian Hon, creator of Zombies, Run!, which has been downloaded over 4 million times. Read the rest

"All work and no play makes Jim a dull boy."Another top-shelf deepfake from Ctrl Shift Face. Read the rest

Trump and his fan base became upset when a man at a June 2018 rally held up a photo of a smiling Donald Trump with his old friend, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump ordered the man to be removed, delivering a scorching witticism as the protester was being hauled away by security: "Was that a man or a woman? Because he needs a haircut more than I do"A protester was kicked out of this Trump rally in June of last year for holding a photo of the president and Jeffrey Epstein pic.twitter.com/wXdpSrA816— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 9, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

When asked how his school taught The Holocaust, Spanish River High School principal William Latson said that "I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event" and that “you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”After a year of anger in Boca Raton, Florida, Latson was finally removed from the job, reports CBS News.The school district did not initially punish Latson for his comments. Instead, he received counseling and was encouraged to expand his school's Holocaust curriculum, according to CBS West Palm Beach affiliate WPEC-TV. The district said Latson also visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum to increase his "personal knowledge" of the genocide. But the district announced Monday that Latson would be immediately reassigned because "his leadership has become a major distraction for the school community." ... The district said Latson had "made a grave error in judgment in the verbiage" of his email to the parent. Read the rest

I occasionally need to use an Android device to get things done for my day job. I like the flexibility of the operating system: I can tweak to my hearts content. An Android phone often runs cheaper than a handset from Apple and, in some cases, boast photo snapping capabilities that kick the bejesus out Apple's Designed in Cupertino camera app and optics. But when I read shit like this story from The Verge, I'm reminded, once again, about why I put up with the walled garden and stuffy familiarity of iOS.From The Verge:Even if you say “no” to one app when it asks for permission to see those personally identifying bits of data, it might not be enough: a second app with permissions you have approved can share those bits with the other one or leave them in shared storage where another app — potentially even a malicious one — can read it. The two apps might not seem related, but researchers say that because they’re built using the same software development kits (SDK), they can access that data, and there’s evidence that the SDK owners are receiving it. It’s like a kid asking for dessert who gets told “no” by one parent, so they ask the other parent....That’s in addition to a number of side channel vulnerabilities the team found, some of which can send home the unique MAC addresses of your networking chip and router, wireless access point, its SSID, and more. “It’s pretty well-known now that’s a pretty good surrogate for location data,” said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), when presenting the study at PrivacyCon. Read the rest

Police banned a woman from a Walmart in Wichita Falls, Texas after she allegedly ate half a cake while shopping and then, at check-out, insisted that she should only pay half-price for what was left. This follows on another unusual Wichita Falls Walmart incident a few months back when a different woman spent several hours zipping around the store parking lot while gulping wine from a Pringles can. She, too, was banned.(My9nj) Read the rest

As Bruce Lee once said, "Showing off is the fool's idea of glory." Read the rest

In early June, protesters surged into Hong Kong's streets to protest a change to the country's extradition rules that would allow the Chinese state to demand the extradition of political dissidents to the mainland; as the protests grew, Hong Kong's puppet government had no choice but to withdraw its proposal -- but that wasn't enough, and millions of people poured into the streets, demanding the resignation of administrator Connie Lam and the release of imprisoned demonstrators.The protests are not abating: ever-larger crowds are packing the streets, staging careful and measured acts of vandalism whose delightful details made them darlings of popular sentiment.The state has seized on the vandalism as a pretense for a militarized crackdown, which has not kept the protesters down but it has moved public sentiment -- in favor of the protesters, who continue to demand the executive's resignation.Sum Lai, a 53-year-old housewife and mother of two, said those who condemned the youngsters for vandalising the Legco building did not understand them.“Did the government even raise an eyebrow when a million or 2 million people took to the streets?” she said, referring to two mass rallies in June. “The young people didn’t want to storm Legco but the government was pushing them too hard.”After organisers announced the end of the protest at around 7.30pm, hundreds continued to linger outside West Kowloon station, while hundreds more spilled out onto Canton Road again, saying they were “going shopping”.They taunted and abused police officers trying to reopen the road, targeting and surrounding Chief Superintendent Rupert Dover in particular as one of the commanders on the ground when tear gas was first used against extradition bill protesters on June 12. Read the rest

This easy to set-up canopy is cheap AND actually easy to set up.I am spending most of my summer camping with my dogs. Shade became very important on day 2 when I realized that not having shade on day 1 toasted the back of my neck. Despite liberal smearing of 60 SPF broadspectrum sunscreen, I had to find a solution that'd work for me.I largely travel without human companionship, and when I do it tends to be of the 12-year old variety (less-than-helpful.) I needed a canopy that'd easily go up, and I wanted to be able to quickly tear the thing down if wind unexpectedly kicked up. I am trying to stay to beaches and coastal campsites, where wind can be an enemy.This EzyFast 6x6 shade does the job! It is fairly light, the manufacturer says 17lbs, and very simple to put up by my ownself. The frame is a single unit that practically expanded itself when I took it out of the bag the very first time. Once the frame is out and locked into place with handy built-on locks, you put the cover on and then extend the legs. You can weigh it down by putting stuff in the weight pockets built into the cover.The cover material is a bit thin, but it'll do. The stakes the unit came with are nearly useless, but with additional weigh in the cover it seems to stay in place just fine. If it gets windy out, however, I will lower the legs, remove the cover and go hide in the camper. Read the rest

Back in 2015, the great state of Texas passed The Compassionate Use Act, making the use of cannabis for medical purposes totally cool... in a small number of instances. Only those with epilepsy are allowed to use the plant's properties to ease their symptoms and the cannabis that they're allowed to use must contain minuscule amounts of THC. This left Texans who'd like to turn to cannabis to help ease their way out of opioid use or deal with chronic pain, to saddle up and move to a less restrictive state or risk being arrested. Recently, the state's lawmakers looked to reforming the restrictive act, Once again, too small a group of folks wound up being told that they're cool to roll with a bit of cannabis in their lives. One of the biggest groups excluded: individuals suffering from PTSD.From The Texas Observer:Activists say opposition to cannabis reform is partially based on fearmongering over alleged dangers of marijuana by Republicans and law enforcement officials, a powerful group at the Lege. False claims and junk science often go unchallenged in a vacuum created by the lack of research into cannabis. (Marijuana’s status as a Schedule I drug is a significant barrier to studying the plant’s uses.) For three sessions, the Rural Sheriffs Association of Texas has peddled its report that falsely claims pot lowers IQ scores, is addictive and increases criminality. In March, Plano Police Sergeant Terence Holway told lawmakers in a committee hearing that “all drug addicts … started with marijuana.”Brian Birdwell, a GOP state senator and Desert Storm Army veteran, spoke about his “highly guarded sense of danger” about marijuana for more than 20 minutes during the Senate debate of HB 3703. Read the rest

In Technology Review, author and essayist Chuck Klosterman delivers a short introduction to the stars of space rock, from Pink Floyd (above) to Hawkwind to Spacemen 3:Space is a vacuum: the only song capturing the verbatim resonance of space is John Cage’s perfectly silent “4'33".” Any artist purporting to embody the acoustics of the cosmos is projecting a myth. That myth, however, is collective and widely understood. Space has no sound, but certain sounds are “spacey.” Part of this is due to “Space Oddity”; another part comes from cinema, particularly the soundtrack to 2001 (the epic power of classical music by Richard Strauss and György Ligeti). Still another factor is the consistent application of specific instruments, like the ondes martenot (a keyboard that vaguely simulates a human voice, used most famously in the theme to the TV show Star Trek). The shared assumptions about what makes music extraterrestrial are now so accepted that we tend to ignore how strange it is that we all agree on something impossible.The application of these clichés is most readily seen in the dawn of heavy metal. The 1970 Black Sabbath song “Planet Caravan” processed Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals through a Hammond organ to create a sprawling sense of ethereal distance. Deep Purple’s 1972 “Space Truckin’” used ring modulation to simulate a colossal spacecraft traveling at high speed. The lyrical content of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” is built on Norse mythology, but the dreamlike drone of John Paul Jones’s mellotron and Jimmy Page’s ultra-compressed guitar mirrored the sensation of exploring an alien landscape. Read the rest

Directed by Topper Carew, "Breakin 'n' Enterin'" (1983) documented the Los Angeles B-boy scene emerging at Venice Beach and MacArthur Park's Radio-Tron nightclub. Keep your eyes peeled for a young Ice-T, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, and Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones who all appeared the following year in Breakin'. The dancing in this documentary is much better than in the feature film though -- more complex, raw, and aggressive. Read the rest

Doctor Emmett Lathrop Brown was one hell of a blacksmith, tho he reminds me of Klingon Commander Kruge. Read the rest

In all but a few of the most expensive cities in the USA, median rents on one- and two-bedroom apartments have fallen, sometimes quite sharply (for example, in NYC median asking rents on a one bedroom are down to $2940, a 12.8%/$430 decline from their peak in March 2016; while in Honolulu, rents are down 21.6% from their peak in Mar 2015, down to $1670 from $2130).The glaring exception is San Francisco, which hit an all-time high in June: $3720 asked for the median one-bedroom (but even in San Francisco, two-bedroom rents have declined, down to $4800 from the peak of $5000 in October 2015). The decline in rents in major cities is offset by skyrocketing rents in some of America's smaller cities, like Chandler, AZ; Fresno, CA; Glendale, AZ; Denver, CO; Reno, NV; Spokane, WA; Scottsdale, AZ; and Gilbert, AZ. On the Media's excellent, just-completed series on the eviction epidemic explains that while we think of the eviction crisis as a big-city phenomenon driven by gentrification, the real meat of the crisis is evictions in smaller, poorer cities, some of which have had large swathes of rental stock purchased by Wall Street hedge-funds who have chosen to perfect the art of speedy eviction rather than the art of maintaining liveable homes.Meanwhile, the cities experiencing the steepest decline in rents are something of a mixed bag: Philadelphia (down 12.7%!), Baltimore, Columbus, Akron, Madison, Nashville (which is regressing to the mean after a record-setting surge last year), Seattle, Des Moines and Portland, OR. Read the rest

Following the Supreme Court's determination that there was no good reason to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, the Trump administration has abandoned its pursuit of the project.The census is key to establishing congressional districts and to apportioning federal funding. The Trump administration had hoped that by adding a question about citizenship amid its racist war on migrants, it could intimidate both documented and undocumented migrants into hiding from census officials, resulting in undercounting of non-native-born and racialized US residents.The citizenship question was being proposed by running joke/Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (previously), whose shitty excuses for the move were dismissed by Chief Justice Roberts as "contrived." Then Republican strategist/archvillain Thomas Hofeller (architect of the citizenship question) died, and his computer's hard drive yielded a study of Hofeller's that concluded that "a citizenship question could increase Republican political power by excluding noncitizens and underage American citizens from the census data."It's another great example of the administrative incompetence and emotional incontinence of Trump and Co, who are so convinced that they are the smartest guys in the room (believing as they do that markets reward intelligence, rather than sociopathy) that they routinely put their secret masterplans in writing (or publish them on Twitter), so that whenever they're hauled before a judge to mumble half-assed excuses about why they're doing something that is so evil you can see it glowing from orbit, the judge inevitably is presented with the Trump regime's own explicit admission about its true motives. Read the rest

I have a few different LED headlamps, but this one is by far my favorite. It features a band of LEDs that throw light in a wide area in front of you. It lights up the entire area around you, as opposed to LED headlamps that illuminate just a spot. It uses 3 AAA batteries and has an easy on-off touch sensor switch. Read the rest

When dozens of Jewish activists were preparing to be arrested for blocking the ICE facility in Elizabeth, NJ, they heard singing and shofars — as dozens and dozens more arrived to join the line.@NeverAgainActn #JewsAgainstICE#NeverAgainMeansNeverAgain pic.twitter.com/ShYOumrDIs— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) July 1, 2019 A group of young protestors, many of whom appear to be Jewish, lock arms to block an ICE facility as an army of likeminded folks arrive blowing shofars and singing songs. Read the rest

The John Maddox Prize previously is awarded annually by the UK organisation Sense About Science (previously) for "individuals who promote sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, facing difficulty or hostility in doing so."The open call for nominations seeks recommendations for individuals who made contributions to: * Addressing misleading information about scientific issue (including social science and medicine). * Bringing sound evidence to bear in a public or policy debate.* Helping people to make sense of a complex scientific issue.John Maddox Prize 2019 nominations [Sense About Science](Thanks, Marcos!) Read the rest

Behold the Brain Coat, which is not a tinfoil hat but rather a silver-coated nylon skull cap with ear flaps. It's lightweight, breathable, and claims to be effective at shielding the brain from radio waves while remaining comfortable even if worn with other headgear. Microwave Shielding Effect: 35 dB at 1-10 GHzSurface resistivity: Read the rest

This unrecorded gem has been playing in my head for the last 300 miles of a 500-mile road trip. Read the rest

Rob Smith is an eminent computer scientist and machine learning pioneer whose work on genetic algorithms has been influential in both industry and the academy; now, in his first book for a general audience, Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, Smith expertly draws connections between AI, neoliberalism, human bias, eugenics and far-right populism, and shows how the biases of computer science and the corporate paymasters have distorted our whole society.Smith's book weaves the history of science and mathematics' contribution to our understanding of probability and uncertainty, the philosophical quest for an understanding of the true nature of reality and its relationship to our perceptions and ruminations, the inextricable stories of evolutionary theory and eugenics, and the long project to design a thinking machine to show how the imperatives of neoliberalism and its way of valuing (and discounting) people combined with some of computer science's most ill-advised and habitual simplifications to produce a form of statistical tyranny, one that tries to force humans to simplify their behaviors to suit the models, rather than adapting the models to suit the humans.On the way, Smith shows how the parts of machine learning that do work refute some of the uglier philosophical ideas that have risen in currency as algorithms have taken over our society -- just as the Victorians had their "blind watchmaker," the rise of evolutionary algorithms has given a new lease on life to eugenic theories about survival of the fittest and the need to purify and protect the "best" among us. Read the rest

I lived in the county of Essex for two years as a teenager. It's unique in the English imagination, a place once rural but colonized by Londoners fleeing Germans during the war and Immigrants after it. A sprawling exurban development park, it's held to be trashy yet conservative, its villages surrounded by shabby modern projects and its market downs gutted by them, all inhabited by criminals, sluts and people so stupid their behavior dances on the margins of sanity. That's the nasty charicature, anyway, immortalized in the 1990s by the novelty song embedded above. Tim Burrows narrates the history behind this myth of Essex, "the crudest, stupidest symbol of Englishness."...before Essex was a punchline, it was a dream. A place that offered hope to working-class Londoners in the form of “new towns” such as Basildon and Harlow, which were built by the state to meet dire housing, sanitation and civic needs after the second world war. As the century progressed, however, parts of Essex came to represent the dismantling of this dream, as Thatcherism, the UK arm of the global new right movement that believed in lower taxes and lower public spending alongside deregulation and privatisation, became indelibly linked to the county. In 1990, a new term, “Essex man”, was coined by the Sunday Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, to describe a new type of voter: a “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren” worker in London’s financial centre, whose roots lay in east London, and whose political views were “breathtakingly rightwing”. Read the rest

Methodist University Hospital in Memphis is a nonprofit: it pays virtually no local, state or federal tax; but unlike other Methodist hospitals, Methodist University Hospital is relentless in pursuing medical debts from indigent patients. The hospital owns its own collection agency, and is one of the leading litigants in Tennessee's debt courts.At issue is Methodist University Hospital's policy of requiring patients to cover any expense excluded by their insurers, no matter how high that deductible or excess is and no matter how poor the patient is. And since Obamacare's lowest-cost plans carry incredibly high deductibles and excesses, and exclude many forms of care, the poorest patients at Methodist University Hospital are also expected to pay the highest bills.There are a lot of poor people in Memphis, which is the second-poorest city in America, with more than 40% of the city's workforce earning less than $15/hour. The poor people of Memphis include Methodist University Hospital's own staff, many of whom have been sued by Methodist University Hospital because they couldn't afford their medical bills on the salary the hospital paid them. In addition to suing dozens of its own employees, Methodist University Hospital has garnished the wages it pays to more than 70 of its own workers.Memphis's inequality closely tracks with race, with Black people carrying a much higher risk of poverty.Methodist University Hospital's management -- including CEO Dr. Michael Ugwueke, who was paid $1.6 million in total compensation last year and former CEO Gary Shorb, who draws $1.2m/year to serve as Ugwueke's advisor -- are apparently pursuing this agenda on their own. Read the rest

Political gerrymandering not an issue for the courts, SCOTUS rules 5-4.

Research has shown that two kinds of videos are sure to cheer you up. The first kind is baby animals. The second kind is jackasses ruining their $330,000 cars. This video is of the second kind.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Kickstarter has a lengthy piece on Medium discussing frequent BB contributor Andrea James's Transphobia project (previously). and the broader issues surrounding transgender reporting, the bias within it, and the lack of transgender representation (and outright exclusion) from reporters on the subject. James has three foundational goals for The Transphobia Project: “More trans journalists employed full-time at media outlets; coverage of trans issues to include input from trans editors and fact-checkers; and more non-trans journalists to be aware of how to avoid bias in trans coverage. I hope my project will help editors and publishers identify those with a history of fair and accurate coverage on trans topics, [and] those who don’t have that history. Finally, I hope it will help media consumers see when trans coverage contains bias, both pro- and anti-trans.”At a time when LGBTQ+ tolerance is actually decreasing among youth, holding media to account for both how, and by whom the public receives unbiased reporting on these topics may be even more important than in the past, to stave off what USA Today reports as a "looming social crisis in discrimination." I'm a supporter of her project on Kickstarter, and I hope you will be, too. Read the rest

Germany's auto regulator has ordered Daimler to recall 42,000 Mercedes diesels because the company installed illegal software in their engines that gimmicked the engine's thermostat, which would allow the manufacturer to selectively tune its cars' emissions. Daimler disputes that the software is illegal and has said it will appeal (it says it showed the regulator the software in question last year); but it has formally advised investors to expect a one-time writedown of hundreds of millions of euros over the recall.Today, the Daimler vehicles in question are Mercedes-Benz-brand vehicles that are only sold in the EU. According to a WSJ source, the issue relates to a coolant thermostat in the cars that protects parts of the engine. The related software is found on vehicles made between 2012 and 2015. The WSJ says the type of coolant thermostat used on the diesel vehicles in question is generally found on cars with catalytic converters that don't use selective catalytic reduction, an emissions-reduction technique that uses urea to reduce nitrogen oxides to less-harmful forms. But the GLK 220 CDI 4MATIC Mercedes-Benz models that must be recalled do appear to use selective catalytic reduction.German regulator says it discovered new illegal software on Daimler diesels [Megan Geuss/Ars Technica](via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

"Shhh!" says Gong Master Sven. One does not simply bash the gong. Read the rest

Megan Rapinoe, co-captain of the United States women's national soccer team did not sing the National Anthem before the Women's World Cup game with Thailand on Tuesday. She does not expect to be invited to the White House, and if she ever is, she made it clear she doesn't intend to go:“I’m not going to the fucking White House.” - @mPinoe pic.twitter.com/sz1ADG2WdT— Eight by Eight (@8by8mag) June 25, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

Woody and Buzz's friendship catchphrase -- "The important thing is that we stick together!" -- becomes quite literal in these new mismatched "Toy Story 4" sneakers. You get one shoe fashioned after Sheriff Woody and the other after Buzz Lightyear. Reebok collaborated with Pixar and BAIT on this limited-edition Instapump Fury model in anticipation of the film's release. No word on when they drop or their cost.(HYPEBEAST) Read the rest

Mary Annaise Heglar of the Natural Resources Defense Council is tired of her friends confessing their environmental sins to her, like using disposable containers; as she points out, climate change is a systemic problem, not an individual one, and the Ayn-Rand-ish framing of all problems as having individual causes with individual solutions is sheer victim blaming.If you live in a US city, chances are your biggest contribution to climate change is your car -- and you, personally, cannot dig your own subway (no matter what Elon Musk may think). Collective problems have collective solutions.The most meaningful individual action you can take is to vote for and support politicians who will support the Green New Deal.The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics. When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations — aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful governments, including the US — it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.When people come to me and confess their green sins, as if I were some sort of eco-nun, I want to tell them they are carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes. That the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder. Read the rest

Securing Our Cyber Future, Stanford Cyber Policy Center's new report on election security, depicts a US electoral system whose glaring vulnerabilities are still in place, three years after the chaos of the 2016 elections.It's not all terrible: digital-only voting machines are dwindling away, with the majority of voting machines delivering a voter-verified paper ballot that can be manually recounted by auditors or if there is a question of fraud or malfunction, but there are still plenty of digital-only systems in the field, and across the board, voting machines are aging, error- and fault-prone, and generally insecure, with vendors who would prefer to bluster and threaten critics than fix their products.There's some progress on eliminating the voting-machine business altogether, with a free/open source system emerging from Los Angeles County's election authorities -- LA County is a national leader in election security and inclusiveness, with an 11-day voting window, available paper ballots for all, and a slate of accessibility features in its machines.But LA County is an exception, and between the poor-quality systems in place nationwide, intransigence from Senate Republicans on allocating funds for election security, and the diplomatic chaos that has failed to produce any international norms on election meddling, 2020 is looking like a potential shitshow to put 2016 to shame.Replacing insecure and aging voting machines around the country, introducing post-election audits in the dozens of states that don’t yet have them, shoring up election network defenses, and expanding security personnel all take money. And while independent, locally adjudicated elections are a cornerstone of US democracy, researchers say that federal funding is still badly needed to make sure all election systems around the country have high-caliber security defenses in place. Read the rest

With trustbusting in the air and Big Tech in the crosshairs, Bloomberg's Dina Bass reflects on the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, which the company bungled badly (but still survived, thanks to a judiciary in thrall to a bizarre theory of antitrust that has no problem with monopolies).Bass uses the Microsoft case to come up with some general advice for the Big Tech companies, and there's some revealing truth in the advice that inadvertently points the way to a better future for antitrust and also answers some of the critics of trustbusting.For example, Bass advises companies "Don't even put up a fight about whether you have a monopoly" -- because modern, post-Reagan antitrust is incredibly monopoly-friendly, there's no reason not to enthusiastically admit to having one. Just argue that your monopoly isn't doing anything illegal (like raising prices) and you'll do just fine (some legal scholars beg to differ), but in any event, it's a good reason to revisit the post-Reagan consensus on antitrust).Bass also cites Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamenting "the distraction the case caused, and cited it as a reason the company missed out on the search market," and also unnamed experts who have "pinned Microsoft's abysmal performance in mobile computing partially on constraints and distractions from the case."Another way to look at this is that it validates the theory of modern trustbusters, which holds that even if company breakups are likely to be tied up in courts for years, they still do good, by disciplining monopolists so they don't crush new entrants into the market lest it hurt their antitrust case (or draw the attention of the trustbuster who is currently raking their competitor over the coals). Read the rest

How far the mighty have fallen! I remember the global spectacle of MickeyD's opening in Moscow. Likely the highwater mark for the Golden Arches.CNN:Last year, the burger chain switched to fresh beef quarter-pound burgers from frozen at most of its stores in the contiguous United States. That change has led to a 30% spike in sales of quarter pounders on average over the past 12 months, the company said Monday. It also helped McDonald's (MCD) burgers gain market share in what the industry calls the "informal eating out" category for the first time in five years, the company said.McDonald's made the change to appeal to consumers' growing interest in ingredient transparency. Buyers today want to know where their food comes from, Marion Gross, the company's chief supply chain officer for North America, told CNN Business.I am not sure people REALLY want to know where that McDonald's beef came from. Rumors regarding "the special sauce" plagued my childhood. Read the rest

If you haven't seen them already, do check out Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts. They're delightfully retro and great under-five-minute escapes. The latest one, Our Floating Dreams, has Mickey and Minnie speaking Thai! (Likecool) Read the rest

My guest on the Cool Tools podcast this week is Stephen Wolfram. Stephen is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; he's the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, Stephen has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinkingâand has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Wolfram|AlphaWolfram Alpha is a thing for answering questions using computational knowledge. And I use it every day for all kinds of things. If I'm going to walk outside I go to Wolfram Alpha, usually on my phone, and just type in sunburn. And it will figure out based on where I am predictions for UV index and so on. Plus, skin type data and so on and will tell me what the expected time for me to get sunburned is. It gives you sort of an information presentation. Here's another thing you can do. You can just go to Wolfram Alpha and type in some first name. Like Kevin, for example. And this is a good party trick. Because it knows how many people called Kevin have been born every year since the late 1800's, and it knows mortality tables and so on. It can figure out what the distribution of Kevins in America is. Read the rest