Today's links

1. Tax Justice Network publishes a new global Financial Secrecy Index: US and UK, neck-and-neck
2. What Marc Davis lifted from the Addams Family while designing the Haunted Mansion: Amateurs plagiarize, artists steal
3. ICANN should demand to see the secret financial docs in the .ORG selloff: at least it's an Ethos
4. Wells Fargo will pay $3b for 2 million acts of fraud: they shoulda got the corporate death penalty
5. This day in history: 2019, 2015, 2010
6. Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Continue reading "Pluralist, your daily link-dose: 22 Feb 2020"

Today's links

1. Bloomberg's campaign NDA is a gag order that covers sexual abuse and other crimes: Bloomberg's lowest moment at the debate came when he fumfuhed over whether he'd release women from his corporate NDAs.
2. Private Equity has sabotaged every attempt to end emergency room "surprise billing": AKA, "Why didn't you ask your ambulance driver to shop around?"
3. The Parkland kids have launched a zine: "Unquiet" is a gorgeous, haunting zine from the March For Our Lives, debuted on Teen Vogue.
4. Tumblr's ad policy: you can't block ads because we don't live in a post-scarcity society.
5. Gopher shows us how adversarial interoperability was there from the start: the web's precursor depended on adversarial interop to win its place in history, and the web vanquished gopher with yet more adversarial interop
6. A line of hardcovers designed to double as decor accents: I want to hate this, but they're so pretty!
7. $2b later, Blue Apron is broke: incoming podcast apocalypse in 3, 2, 1….
8. Tour Cards Against Humanity's incredible board-game cafe: when amazing people spend amazing sums.
9. The team behind Frozen are making a musical out of Jen Wang's Prince and the Dressmaker: holy smokes, is this ever great news!
10. This day in history: 2019, 2015, 2010
11. Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Continue reading "Pluralist, a daily link-dose: 21 Feb 2020"

Today's links

1. The 2020 Nebula Award Finalists: a bumper crop of outstanding SF
2. Uber driver/sharecroppers drive like maniacs to make quota: subprime lending + gig economy = stay off the roads
3. Barclay's bankers forced to endure nagging work-computer spyware: the shitty technology adoption curve at work
4. Bernie Sanders leads in 10 out of 10 polls: but unless he can get a majority of pledged delegates, he'll be ratfucked by superdelegates
5. Bloomberg: kids only like Sanders because they're stupid: "Because our kids no longer learn civics in school they longer study Western history, they no longer read Western literature…"
6. "Secure erase" with a bolt-cutter: Jamie Zawinski doesn't mess around when it comes to getting rid of old hard drives.
7. Adding 2 inches of tape to a road-sign induces sudden 50mph acceleration in Teslas: Adversarial examples are unstoppable.
8. Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Continue reading "Pluralist, a daily link-dose: 20 Feb 2020"

Contents

1. The Woman Who Loved Giraffes: a documentary about Anne Innis Dagg, the magnificent feminist biologist and critic of pseudoscience like evolutionary psychology.
2. Machine learning doesn't fix racism: experiments in using machine-learning "risk assessment" for bail hearings collapse in ignominy.
3. Rethinking "de-growth" and material culture: great commentary from Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner.
4. Bernie Sanders is a clear favorite among "regular Democrats." 71% approval and 19% disapproval!
5. Trump's border wall defeated by 99 pesos' worth of rebar.
6. Capitalism without capitalists: companies are not their shareholders' property. Companies own themselves.
7. Rental car immobilizes itself when driven out of cellular range: Unauthorized Bread, but for cars!
8. Nearly half of medical devices haven't been patched against the Bluekeep vuln
9. Glowing Randotti skull-prints: Coop revives the golden age of Haunted Mansion merch.
10. Ios is now a vehicle to deliver unblockable adware
11. Colophon

Continue reading "Pluralist: 19 Feb 2020"