Society Archives

  1. Sustainable Software and Customer Support

    I’ve been having trouble with Dropbox on my laptop. No matter what I do (reboot, pause and resume, etc.), it keeps syncing away saying “20 files remaining”. The process continually eats CPU which destroys my battery life and constantly makes my machine hot. I finally dropped a note to Dropbox support to see if they…

  2. America Is Not For Black People →

    The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he’ll reasonably think that his job isn’t simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

    If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

    Of everything I’ve read about Ferguson, this piece (inflammatory title aside) probably does the best job of taking a holistic view of the situation.

  3. The GitHub Rug

    I somehow missed this kerfuffle when it was all going down, but I read about it recently and it’s stuck with me. I think if I were in the decision making position when this happened my first instinct would would have been to dig in my heels. When I first saw the “United Meritocracy of…

  4. Obama May Be Best Economic President Ever →

    Here’s an interesting calculation: Suppose that in 1929, you put $100,000 in a 401(k) fully invested in stocks. Under the 40 years of Republican presidents, you would have ended up with only $126,000. Under the Democrats, you would have amassed a retirement nest egg of $3.9 million! (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.)

    There are some interesting numbers in here, worth fact-checking. I’ve always been in the “things are better when everyone is doing well” camp, regardless of where I’ve fallen on the scale.

    Also, from the :bang: department…

    Deitrick says he’s perpetually shocked that Democrats don’t trumpet their economic triumphs.

  5. Argument Clinic

    So I’m watching this and laughing, and then it hits this part: M: An argument isn’t just contradiction. O: Well! it CAN be! M: No it can’t! M: An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. O: No it isn’t! M: Yes it is! ’tisn’t just contradiction. O: Look, if…

  6. Guns

    To demand gun control is not to "politicize" this tragedy. It is to respond to it with decency and common sense. — Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 15, 2012 I get that crazy people always find a way to kill. I don't get why we bend over backwards to make it as efficient as possible for…

  7. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public…

    Carl Sagan