Hey! It’s not often I get to write about our little state being on the front lines of solid legislation, but here’s an example: Two bills were passed by the state over the weekend that limit companies’ ability to collect data on our kids, and the other limits their ability to get kids to spend more time online through dark patterns (autoplay, time-based awards, or spam). Lobbyists for big tech, of course, are unhappy:
“The bill’s goal is laudable…but its chosen means are unconstitutional by imposing prior restraints on online speech, erecting barriers to sharing and receiving constitutionally-protected speech…”
Big tech always trots out the First Amendment to paper over their predatory behavior; it always pegs the bullshit meter.
Bloomberg does a retrospective of ten different metrics that show while Biden’s popularity is low, he’s actually done very well for the U.S. since he’s been in office.
I’ve been reading a couple of stories about large American companies over the last couple of weeks and seeing some broad similarities repeating themselves.
Boeing, a successful company, merged with McDonnell-Douglas, a failing company, in 1997—and somehow the MDD leadership wound up running Boeing. They immediately changed from an engineering-led manufacturer to a company run by financiers chasing stock prices. They started outsourcing everything, quality dropped, and now their decades-old reputation has been torpedoed.
There’s a new article about Google out this week, in which the author pins down the exact day they decided to make their search worse in order to increase their ad revenue. The similarity: a guy formerly from Yahoo, who ran their search division into the ground for seven years, forced out the guy who built Google’s search into the powerhouse we remember, and kicked down the wall between search and ads. Have you enjoyed using Google search for the last five years? It’s a piece of shit.
Meanwhile, roughly half the country is primed to re-elect a grifter who uses inflated stock prices to prop up failing businesses and avoid paying taxes, because he’s “good at business” or something.
Happy to see my boss (and one of our former leads of the WRI Climate program) getting lots of excellent press from COP28 this morning; our media and comms teams are firing on all cylinders. I’m also happy to see they’re holding this year’s COP President to account for trying to use the conference to secure new oil and gas deals.
The Washington Post ran a story about gun violence in the US, using photos and video that mostly haven’t been published before.
The impact is often shielded by laws and court rulings that keep crime scene photos and records secret. Journalists do not typically have access to the sites of shootings to document them. Even when photographs are available, news organizations generally do not publish them, out of concern about potentially dehumanizing victims or retraumatizing their families.
More of this please. Stop trying to be nice or “fair” or whatever and just publish the fucking pictures so we can outlaw assault rifles and adopt some logical, reasonable, actionable gun control laws.
Here’s an interesting thought exercise. 1,600 banned books were analyzed for similarities to see what they all have in common, by author and genre. The results aren’t all that shocking (unfortunately their presentation here is garbage, but this second link has a more direct analysis) but I was surprised to see that Pennsylvania is right behind Texas in the amount of books that have been banned. This data is now 3 months old, so I wonder where we stand now and how much things have changed gotten worse since then.
Along with some donations to some Democratic organizations, I need to make one to ProPublica, who just released a new report on the long-term, systemic corruption in our Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas has been getting handouts and free rides from billionaires for decades, and there’s no real mechanism for stopping this as far as I can see.
No, ABC News, 52% does not equal “Most Americans”. Do your fucking math. Or, better yet, hire a fucking editor.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Guardian, a clear and simple guide (anti-paywall link) to what all the protests are about in Israel. Adding to the list of democracies leaning far to the right, their proposal includes:
Full annexation of the occupied West Bank, a rollback of pro-LGBTQ+ legislation, axing laws protecting women’s rights and minority rights, and a loosening of the rules of engagement for Israeli police and soldiers, are all on the coalition’s agenda.
(via)