Wednesday February 20th, 2019
Musk missteps dredged up with lawyer's exit, misfired tweet.
Dane Butswinkas, the trial lawyer who represented Musk in his legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is leaving due to a poor cultural fit at Tesla and the desire to return full-time to his trial practice at the firm Williams & Connolly in Washington. Jonathan Chang, a vice president in Tesla's legal department, is taking over effective immediately.
The most amazing thing is that despite everything Musk appears to be, they're still building cars that none of the established automakers have been willing to touch...
GRAND RAPIDS, MICH. – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) sent l etters today to the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding an immediate investigation into the wrongful ICE detention of Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, a U.S. citizen and decorated veteran who fought in Afghanistan. On November 21, 2018, GRPD arrested Ramos-Gomez, who experiences PTSD, for a minor offense for which he pleaded guilty and should have been released December 14. GRPD called ICE, and ICE sought to deport Mr. Ramos-Gomez, even though he had the following pieces of identification on him when he was arrested:
- U.S. Passport
- REAL ID compliant Michigan driver’s license (which one cannot get unless lawfully present in the United States and which clearly shows he is a veteran)
- Military ID card
- U.S. Marine Corps tags
- childhood Kent District Library card
Tuesday February 19th, 2019
During the same conversation, Sutton argued that the KKK “didn’t kill but a few people” and “wasn’t violent until they needed to be,” the Advertiser reported on Monday.
Ouch: Punk Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novel Somehow Always Ends in 9-to-5 Office Job:
“But even after I crashed my tour van and cannibalized my band members, I still ended up working at a computer solutions company in Dallas,” they added. “I mean, that can’t be right… right?”
Meritocracy in action: "USAToday bestselling author" wakes up to discover that the ghostwriter she hired on Fiverr plagiarized.
One of the victims elaborates: Courtney Milan: Cristiane Serruya is a copyright infringer, a plagiarist, and an idiot.
And then there’s the fact that it’s me. Look, I’m not special in any other way and I don’t want to toot my own horn to much, but if I were an unethical plagiarist and I was looking to plagiarize a romance author, I would pick literally anyone except the one who clerked for the Supreme Court, taught intellectual property as a law professor, and doesn’t back down from a fight.
Spread Eagle to Dildo (Newfoundland). The best part is the popover.https://www.google.com/maps/di...2!1d-53.5555661!2d47.5706202!3e0
Twitter coincidence that nails it
The tweets:
Inside the horrifying, unspoken world of sexually abusive nuns. Apparently the priests weren't the only ones...A
Monday February 18th, 2019
Vocal map of emotions. Mouse over to hear hundreds of different emotional expressions laid out as how they're related.
Sunday February 17th, 2019
RT Aayla (In English, По-русски) @PunishedAayla
Putting an Adam Smith quote over AOC and dropping it into a libertarian right group is the fastest way to prove that even libertarians have no idea what they stand for.
Contains some hilarious examples.
The Intercept: Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police. I think the article is a little overblown, but there are some issues worth thinking about.
Although Ring owners must opt in to the Neighbors program and appear free to deny law enforcement access to the cameras they own, the mere ability to ask introduces privacy and civil liberties quandaries that haven’t previously existed. In an interview with The Intercept, Matt Cagle, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said “the portal blurs the line between corporate and government surveillance,” making it unclear where the tech initiative ends and constitutional issues begin. ..
Personally as soon as I connected my Ring cameras to my network I assumed all of that data was public, and their field of view is deliberately limited to places I don't mind having publicly visible.
Washington Post: The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras
Police want to register — and even subsidize — private security cameras. That’s just the start of the ethical challenges ahead.
Friday February 15th, 2019
HPD WARRANT: Informant didn't buy drugs from suspects killed in police shootout. Two people inside the house were killed when they shot at intruders who were police officers in a no- knock raid. Police officers who'd lied to obtain the no-knock warrant.
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- A confidential informant didn't buy drugs at the southeast Houston home where an investigation turned into a deadly shootout with police last month, according to a new search warrant.
That contradicts information used to get the no-knock search warrant, which said that a confidential informant bought heroin at the house the day before the drug raid. The raid happened on Jan. 28.
Cue the HPD union in 3... 2...
I want the ability to break when my breakpoint *isn't* hit.
(Right now: Why is my transient popover being closed?)
Results. Compared with average users, Russian trolls (χ2(1) = 102.0; P < .001), sophisticated bots (χ2(1) = 28.6; P < .001), and “content polluters” (χ2(1) = 7.0; P < .001) tweeted about vaccination at higher rates. Whereas content polluters posted more antivaccine content (χ2(1) = 11.18; P < .001), Russian trolls amplified both sides. Unidentifiable accounts were more polarized (χ2(1) = 12.1; P < .001) and antivaccine (χ2(1) = 35.9; P < .001). Analysis of the Russian troll hashtag showed that its messages were more political and divisive.
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567
PMID: 30138075
In a just world, CPB Agent Paul O'Neal would be up on kidnapping charges: Two U.S. citizens claim in lawsuit that feds detained them for speaking Spanish:
“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent says in the video, which the ACLU has released.
The women allege that the agent then detained them for 45 minutes instead of letting them go when they identified themselves as U.S. citizens. Cody Wofsy, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the unlawful detention amounts to a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable searches and seizures.
RT Asperger's Are Us @AspergersAreUs:
When I tell people I used to have a time machine a lot of them ask why I didn't kill Hitler and I explain that my time machine broke shortly after I murdered Smithsen and when they ask who Smithsen was I always say "you're welcome"
Thursday February 14th, 2019
Somehow I missed this back in 2013: 'Our wives and sweethearts' Naval toast rewritten:
Naval officers will no longer raise their glasses to "Our wives and sweethearts" - typically met with the unofficial reply "May they never meet".
Instead, they will say "Our families", following an instruction by the Second Sea Lord Vice- Admiral David Steel.
So on Monday, some of the office conversation revolved around a garage remodel in my boss's neighborhood which seemed excessively robust, involving various upgrades to the support and bracing. I commented that it had been a couple of years, but I remember when we had a wet rainy winter and there were houses in southern Marin sliding off houses, and if I was rebuilding a garage in his neighborhood I'd want it pretty darned beefy.
Anyway, this is a block or so up from his house. We're having a real actual California winter here. Marin storm havoc: Sausalito mudslide, broad flooding, outages.
I'm not sure it's possible to build a structure that beefy, however.
My drive over to Novato on Monday to call may be interesting: Levee breached near Highway 37 in Novato as rains pound North Bay
Everyone's reporting on this Amazon thing as though it's some sort of big decision, and it is, but by New York to not subsidize Amazon. Here's the relevant bit: "There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams."
So, basically, this is all Amazon spinning "New York has decided to not shovel money at us, and we're gonna continue to do business there anyway". Kudos to NYC for standing tall and not falling for the extortion.
Trees aren't supposed to bend like that
Whatever it says about understanding of America's racial politics, "I don't see color" explains a lot about how Starbucks roasts coffee...
Howard Schultz said he’s colorblind. That suggests a deep ignorance about America’s race problems.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a can cat in possession of spare time must be in want of a box.
Wednesday February 13th, 2019
Saved for those evenings when we're thinking "we need a brain-dead movie": 8 queer romantic comedy movies that Gail Carriger loves.
Hard to capture just how much flow there is right now on the normally tidal Petaluma River
He also cancelled an autograph session with Brandon Marshall at his store back in 2016, to protest Marshall’s decision to kneel during the anthem.
“As much as I hate to admit this, perhaps there are more Brandon Marshall and Colin Kaepernick supporters out there than I realized,” said Martin.
In 2017, the feds said Tesla Autopilot cut crashes 40%—that was bogus
But now NHTSA's full data set is available, and, if anything, it appears to contradict Musk's claims. The majority of the vehicles in the Tesla data set suffered from missing data or other problems that made it impossible to say whether the activation of Autosteer increased or decreased the crash rate. But when QCS focused on 5,714 vehicles whose data didn't suffer from these problems, it found that the activation of Autosteer actually increased crash rates by 59 percent.
The policy was written by Lexipol, a California-based company that says it provides policies for approximately 3,400 police, fire, and correctional agencies in 35 states. It has grown rapidly over the last 15 years and saturated California, where its clients include more than 90 percent of law enforcement agencies. It’s impossible to know just how far Lexipol’s reach has spread as the company declines to provide a list of clients, saying that it is proprietary information. But according to an analysis published last year in the Texas Law Review, “although there are other private, nonprofit, and government entities that draft police policies, Lexipol is now a dominant force in police policymaking across the country.”
Fleeing Waterville bank robber slips, spills money, gun in front of special agent, police say
He ran across four lanes of traffic on Main Street and into the Ming Lee restaurant parking lot, slipped on the ice and found himself face-to-face with a special agent for the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Task Force who just happened to be parked in the right place at the right time.
YAGGWAG: New York City Detective Killed by ‘Friendly Fire’ During Queens Robbery:
Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill called the death of the detective an “absolutely tragic case of friendly fire,” and said it was later discovered the suspect was carrying a fake gun. A sergeant was also wounded in the police fusillade.
Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent
A marginal note written in Latin and buried deep within one of the 16 heavy registers used by to record the business of the archbishops of York between 1304 and 1405 first alerted archivists to the adventures of the runaway nun. “To warn Joan of Leeds, lately nun of the house of St Clement by York, that she should return to her house,” runs the note written by archbishop William Melton and dated to 1318.
Of course maybe she was just trying to avoid getting raped by priests: Pope admits clerical abuse of nuns including sexual slavery
Today in prioritizing cars over people, I'm walking to work in the road because the water flowing across the sidewalks is deep enough to soak my shoes.
Tuesday February 12th, 2019
Art space NIMBY’s last days in Oakland: Arts incubator makes way for pot grow . Sooooo... our land use policies make it reasonable for the art space to relocate to rural Lassen county to make way for agriculture in downtown Oakland?
Gavin Newsom calls SF-to-LA high-speed rail unrealistic, pushes for route from Bakersfield to Merced
"Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises... and lawsuits to show for it," Newsom added, explaining he wouldn't want to send the $3.5 billion in federal money the project has been granted back to the Trump administration.
Today in "well, duh" news: Current Affairs: If Property Rights Were Real, Climate-Destroying Companies Would Be Sued Out Of Existence
Huh, I thought all the patents from this project had come through, but apparently 10,197,888 is yet another patent with my name on it. Go me!
Monday February 11th, 2019
Oh geez, that screen on the two Mastodon instances that I use that looked like an unconfigured server that made me think both had abandoned service? That was actually some sort of welcome new user intro screen. More Mastodon UI fail.
Right Said Fred singer finally able to wear his shirt after sexiness reduction procedure:
“It was a difficult time for me,” said the considerably less sexy singer.
“I couldn’t travel to either Milan, New York or Japan, which was a problem, because I was a model, you know what I mean?”
It's a multi-function printer, and it does reproductions, so I guess that makes Greta a copy cat?
Sunday February 10th, 2019
Me and my vulva: 100 women reveal all:
First it was breasts, then penises – now photographer Laura Dodsworth has taken portraits of 100 vulvas. She tells Liv Little why. Below: eight women’s stories
A full size box of tissues doesn't fit here, and the store we were at didn't have the half-size boxes, so....
Regulatory capture in practice: Fentanyl Maker Donates Big to Campaign Opposing Pot Legalization: