So much for Ron DeSantis' tough-guy act against Disney, in which the petty governor crowed about "punishing" the company that opposed his Don't Say Gay bill. His bigoted retaliation antics — dissolving Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District — turned out to be a bite with no teeth, leaving "most of the district's special powers intact," according to Tampa Bay Times. — Read the rest
$5m worth of new farm vehicles somehow made their way from a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine to Chechnya. Whoever expected to enjoy the plunder sadly found that the vehicles were inoperable, having been remotely disabled by the manufacturer.
Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away.
I'm fascinated by old technology. I once commandeered a disused typewriter from my friend's apartment just to have one. My obsession with retro-tech isn't from some misplaced, ironic hipster veneration of all things old, mind you. I love contextualizing myself in the era where said technology was cutting edge. — Read the rest
Oakland, California's Mills College, a small liberal arts women's college with an all-gender grad program, announced that it will close its doors in the next few years due to financial challenges. This marks the end of this institution of higher learning but also the silencing of an incredibly-influential experimental music scene that really defined the genre over the last 60+ years. — Read the rest
The Washington Post reports on the receipts from a 2018 meeting at the Mar-a-Lago resort club between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and US President Donald Trump, who also owns and runs Mar-a-Lago.
In the next two days, as Trump and Abe talked about trade and North Korea, Trump's Palm Beach, Fla.,
In 1829 a group of convicts commandeered a brig in Tasmania and set off across the Pacific, hoping to elude their pursuers and win their freedom. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the mutineers of the Cyprus and a striking new perspective on their adventure. — Read the rest
TikTok, the social media app from China-based Bytedance, plans to sue the Trump administration in a challenge to the president's executive order that bans the service in the United States.
To be fair, it would not be wholly inaccurate to describe the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone as an autonomous anarcho-syndicalist collective. But sadly, strange women in lakes and handing out swords might in fact be a better system of government than the one we tend to see promoted on Fox News.
Impeached U.S. President Donald Trump spoke today with Russian crimelord Vladimir Putin today, ostensibly to mark the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, but one wonders what other information may have been exchanged, don't one.
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker is technically a Republican, in as much as calling himself a "Republican" helped him to garner votes in the western part of the state, which is less Deep Blue than the Metro Boston Area. But as far as I've ever been able to tell, Baker has never demonstrated any capacity for principles or beliefs beyond "being governor." — Read the rest
KUOW, a public radio station in Washington state announced on Twitter that it will no longer air live Trump briefings because the gentleman in the oval office is a prevaricator:
"KUOW is monitoring White House briefings for the latest news on the coronavirus — and we will continue to share all news relevant to Washington State with our listeners.
Farmers are increasingly sick of high-tech tractors that are expensive to buy and usually impossible to fix yourself due to their integrated digital technology. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, "Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days." — Read the rest
Captain Elle Ekman is a US Marine Corps logistics officer; in a New York Times op-ed, she describes how the onerous conditions imposed by manufacturers on the US armed forces mean that overseas troops are not permitted to fix their own mission-critical gear, leaving them stranded and disadvantaged.
T-Mobile has a trademark on RAL 4010, a shade of magenta. Trademarks on colors (see also: UPS, John Deere) are a dangerous trend, robbing us of the spectrum one shade at a time, but T-Mobile's views on its trademark made this bad situation much worse.
I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of Big Tech, and that is because I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of all our hyper-concentrated, monopolistic industries.
Everyone in the tech world claims to love interoperability—the technical ability to plug one product or service into another product or service—but interoperability covers a lot of territory, and depending on what's meant by interoperability, it can do a lot, a little, or nothing at all to protect users, innovation and fairness. — Read the rest
