— Octavia Butler, who died in 2006 ... The year our mamka passed away ...
"Speak the truth, but leave immediately after." — Slovenian Proverb
The NSW Public Accounts Committee - History
Facial-Recognition Company That Works With Law Enforcement Says Entire Client List Was Stolen Daily Beat
Where Everyone Goes When the Internet Breaks
The Atlantic – Downdetector is a simple, ugly utility, which becomes a weird little life raft for displaced communities when their websites crash. “It can happen at any moment, yet we’re never prepared. When Twitter crashes, how do we tweet about it? We try and try. When Instagram is down, no one can see what we see. When the instant-chat apps of American offices sputter and crash, we go to Twitter and say, “We promise we are still working!” We feel lost, bereft, confused, fidgety, as we are forced to make typing noises with our mouths (“talking”). We hover over our keyboards, moving our hands in ways that don’t make sense, like former nicotine addicts who continue to hold pens as if they are cigarettes. There is only one place to take all this pain and nervous energy: Downdetector, a simple, boring website founded in 2001 to report outages of all kinds of internet services. It’s the first search result for questions such as “Is Twitter down?” and “Is Facebook down?” and “Is Gmail down?” and “Is the whole internet out in New York City?” On any given day, if everything is working fine, a graph showing just tiny smatterings of failure reports will be painted a soothing aquamarine. If, as with Facebook’s News Feed this morning, something is starting to go wrong for a greater number of people, the graph will spike and turn red.
Former CDC director: A coronavirus pandemic is inevitable. What now?CNN. The conventional wisdom has gone from “not a story” to “it’s a pandemic, there’s nothing we can do” with breath-taking speed. This after China, no matter its enormous sins of omission and commission at the start of #COVID’s spread, bought the world at least a month with its draconian quarantine provisions, at great cost to themselves. A month which “The Leader Of The Free World,” “The Indispensane Nation,” has squandered
Don’t Talk to Strangers? These Apps Encourage It. - WSJ.
Do apps that help teens talk to strangers provide unique and meaningful
benefits? And can they ensure the safety of the many children who use
them?
In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019
Pope Francis asks followers to give up trolling for Lent
“People insult each other as if they were saying ‘Good Day.’”
During Lent, Catholics are called on to give up something, like sweets.
On Wednesday, Pope Francis added a modern twist to the list of things to quit during the season and beyond: insulting people on social media.
MEdia Dragon and Deep Blogger - Ven. Carlo Acutis is the ideal candidate for the patron saint of the internet. He created a database of Eucharistic miracles on a website so people could find out about them all while he was still a teenager. If you’ve seen a traveling exhibit with displays on different Eucharistic miracles, this is based right off his site.
‘New GST liability penalties put directors in the firing line’
My father was busy eluding the monsters.
Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina), How Should We Think About Wealth Tax Avoidance? (JOTWELL) (reviewing Diana Onu (Exeter), Lynne Oats (Exeter), Erich Kirchler (WU Vienna), & Andre Julian Hartmann (Vienna), Gaming the System: An Investigation of Small Business Owners' Attitudes to Tax Avoidance, Tax Planning, and Tax Evasion, 10 Games 46 (2019)):
A recently published empirical study by Diana Onu, Lynne Oats, Erich Kirchler, and Andre Julian Hartmann compares taxpayer attitudes towards acceptable tax planning, aggressive (yet legal) tax avoidance, and illegal tax evasion. While the study itself examines small business owners subject to income tax in the U.K., its implications should be of great interest to policymakers concerned about legal avoidance strategies with respect to any tax base. For example, aggressive but legal tax avoidance might be an important concern under recent wealth tax proposals in the United States.
My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
A new bibliography on the best books against socialism
A new bibliography on the best books against socialism
No more public-private hospitals for NSW, parliamentary inquiry recommends
No more public-private partnerships should be entered into for public hospitals in NSW, an inquiry into the troubled Northern Beaches Hospital has recommended.
Scientists discover the first-known animal that doesn’t need oxygen to survive USA Today
·
Today’s “The
Daily” podcast from The New York Times is about how bad the coronavirus
might get. Meanwhile, the Times has started a coronavirus
newsletter.
·
Odd that President Trump’s news conference about the coronavirus
on Wednesday was held at the exact same time of the national network news
broadcasts. None of the major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC — carried Trump’s news
conference live and, instead, stayed with their news broadcasts, which included
a major shooting in Milwaukee.
·
WNYC Studios and “The Takeaway” are launching a new podcast
called “How
to Vote in America.” Hosted by veteran political reporter Amy Walter, each
episode explores an aspect of the election process in short five- to
10-minutes formats.
·
Fox News will have a town hall with Democratic presidential
candidate Amy Klobuchar tonight from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Eastern. Bret Baier and
Martha MacCallum will host.
·
Finalists
for the Scripps Howard Awards, recognizing excellence in journalism in
2019, were announced Wednesday. Judging was held here at the Poynter Institute
in St. Petersburg, Florida, last week. Winners will be announced March 3 at 2
p.m. Eastern during a live stream on YouTube and Facebook.
- Have you seen the viral photo of Amy Klobuchar looking amused and bemused at all the yelling around her during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate? Esquire’s Justin Kirkland with a delightful piece about it.
- Poynter’s Mel Grau with the story of the women who helped The Boston Globe get a better family leave policy.
- The Arizona Republic will no longer endorse candidates. Here’s why.
A leader's guide to managing the inner critic
Leadership That Works: It's All About The People
In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019