Bill Buckley once wrote, “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” Just keep that in the back of your mind for the nonce.
It seems many Swiss referenda are based on phony signatures?
We @Arnold_Ventures were frustrated that the US publishes data on the # of hogs slaughtered each day with a one day lag but national crime stats only annually, 9 months later. Since the FBI can't/won't publish more timely data, we funded the creation of realtimecrimeindex.com
The Metsola exception: The European Parliament president and her lobbyist husband Politico
In Germany, a bank blocked the accounts of an AfD politician after his election to the Thuringian state parliament Anti-Spiegel via machine translation:
It is as if they really want to help AfD run the country. As the guys on Radio War Nerd pointed out, nothing helps fascists as much as victimhood. Also, think Hollywood underdog vs. the big bad ones. Every movie scripted as to root for the underdog through the malice of the big bad ones.
Germany’s firewall against the far right isn’t working Washington Post
Bank robbery! Berlin lets its schools and citizens be plundered Nachdenkseiten
Germany faces jobs crisis ‘of a thousand cuts’Financial Times
Ireland fact of the day
Ireland ranks as the loneliest country in Europe, with almost a fifth of people lonely most or all of the time and nearly two-thirds of people suffer from anxiety or depression, according to EU data. One in seven children live in homes below the poverty line, defined as 60 per cent of the median disposable household income.
Here is more from the FT, with much of the piece about how Ireland should spend its budget surplus.
How the Wayback Machine is trying to solve the web’s growing linkrot problem
The Verge: “We’ve been talking a lot about the future of the web on Decoder and across The Verge lately, and one big problem keeps coming up: huge chunks of the web keep going offline. In a lot of meaningful ways, large portions of the web are dying. Servers go offline, software upgrades break links and pages, and companies go out of business — the web isn’t static, and that means sometimes parts of it simply vanish. It’s not just the “really old” internet from the ’90s or early 2000s that’s at risk. A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 38 percent of all links from 2013 are no longer accessible.
That’s more than a third of the collected media, knowledge, and online culture from just a decade ago — gone. Pew calls it “digital decay,” but for decades, many of us have simply called it linkrot. Lately, that means a bunch of really meaningful work is gone as well, as various news outlets have failed to make it through the platform era. The list is virtually endless: sites like MTV News, Gawker (twice in less than a decade), Protocol, The Messenger, and, most recently, Game Informer are all gone. Some of those were short-lived, but some outlets that were live for decades had their entire archives vanish in a snap.
But it’s not all grim. For nearly as long as we’ve had a consumer internet, we’ve had the Internet Archive, a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. It was founded in 1996, and in 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. It’s a huge and incredibly complicated project, and it’s our best defense against linkrot.”
Billion-Dollar Bank Accused of Secretly Sending Customers’ Personal and Financial Information to Facebook, Google and Microsoft
The Daily Hodl: “The eighth-largest bank in the US by total assets is accused of secretly collecting personal and financial information from its customers and sharing the data with tech giants. A new class-action lawsuit allegesCapital One engaged in an “outrageous, illegal, and widespread practice of disclosing – without consent – the Nonpublic Personal Information and Personally Identifiable Financial Information” of its customers, sharing it with third parties including Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
“Capital One did so by knowingly and secretly configuring and implementing code-based tracking devices (“trackers” or “tracking technologies”) into its Website.” The plaintiffs say Capital One has had tracking technologies installed on its website since “at least November 30, 2023, and at least as recently as June 24, 2024.” As an illustration of the actions the bank is being accused of, the class action complaint says one of the lead plaintiffs, in an experience mirroring that of the three other lead plaintiffs, was served with Facebook ads of the product he had just signed up for on the Capital One website just moments after.
- “Plaintiff Shah used Capital One’s Website to apply for a credit card.
- Plaintiff Shah is a Facebook user, who joined Facebook within the last ten years.
- Shortly after Plaintiff Shah used Defendant’s Website to apply for his Capital One Venture X card, advertisements from NerdWallet, advertising random credit cards, began appearing in his Facebook feed.
- At approximately the same time, advertisements from Credit Karma advertising random credit cards began appearing in Plaintiff Shah’s Facebook feed.
- Around the same time, other credit card providers advertising their own cards began appearing in Plaintiff Shah’s Facebook feed.”
The lawsuit says that the personal and financial information Capital One is allegedly collecting includes, “…account information, credit card application information, and credit card pre-approval information, including the fact that a user was on a certain page, that users clicked buttons and what URLs or webpages they led to, information entered on preapproval application pages including their employment information, bank account information, and Customers’ eligibility, preapproval, or approval for a credit card.”
The plaintiffs accuse Capital One of violation of various consumer protection laws, invasion of privacy, unjust enrichment and breach of contract. The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial as well as monetary and non-monetary reliefs. Capital One boasts of $630.89 billion in total assets as of the second quarter of this year.”