Linkage

Many have argued that the United States’ two major political parties have experienced “asymmetric polarization” in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of consti­tutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Wait. "The Democratic Party has moved to the left"? When did this happen? Do you mean the Civil Rights Act?

This is one of the most enlightening things I've read recently, but sadly it's paywalled.

In the US, mask wearing, while opposed and evaded by people all over the political spectrum (albeit not equally), was disproportionately associated with reactionary political affiliation, especially in its most demagogic and violent forms. Anti-mask demagoguery associated mask wearing and mask mandates with communism, Nazism, satanism, genocide, suicide and a war on America. This article argues that this demagoguery was not unique to masks or COVID-19, but the rhetorical consequence of the pro-GOP strategic repurposing of twentieth-century anti-communist demagoguery. This demagoguery (which arose after World War I) framed all policy disagreements, not as issues with multiple legitimate perspectives that could be argued qua policies, but as battles in an apocalyptic war between good and evil, and therefore beyond normal political disagreement.

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

[…] 

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform

Cybernews researchers analyzed the new Pixel 9 Pro XL smartphone’s web traffic, focusing on what a new smartphone sends to Google.

“Every 15 minutes, Google Pixel 9 Pro XL sends a data packet to Google. The device shares location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry. Even more concerning, the phone periodically attempts to download and run new code, potentially opening up security risks,” said Aras Nazarovas, a security researcher at Cybernews.

[…]

Key takeaways

• Private information was repeatedly sent in the background, including the user’s email address, phone number, location, app list, and other telemetry and statistics.
• The phone constantly requests new “experiments and configurations,” tries accessing the staging environment, and connects to device management and policy enforcement endpoints, suggesting Google’s remote control capabilities.
• The Pixel device connected to services that were not used, nor explicit consent was given, such as Face Grouping endpoints, causing privacy and ownership concerns.
• The calculator app, in some conditions, leaks calculations history to unauthenticated users with physical access.

If this sounds outlandish or like easily dismissed political posturing — surely Republicans don’t want to turn back the clock on marital law more than 50 years — it’s worth looking back at, say, how rhetorical attacks on abortion, birth control, and IVF have become reality.

And that will cause huge problems, especially for anyone experiencing abuse. “Any barrier to divorce is a really big challenge for survivors,” said Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “What it really ends up doing is prolonging their forced entanglement with an abusive partner.”

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, divorce is just one of many areas of family law that conservative policymakers see an opportunity to rewrite. “We’ve now gotten to the point where things that weren’t on the table are on the table,” Zug said. “Fringe ideas are becoming much more mainstream.”

Every major English water company has reported data suggesting they’ve discharged raw sewage when the weather is dry – a practice which is potentially illegal.

BBC News has analysed spills data from nine firms, which suggests sewage may have been discharged nearly 6,000 times when it had not been raining in 2022 - including during the country’s record heatwave.

[…]

Helen Wakeham from the EA says the BBC’s methodology is, in fact, “more generous” to the companies than the EA’s.

Commenting on the results of the BBC’s investigation in general she said: “I'm not surprised, these networks haven't been invested in for decades. That investment needs to take place.”

In May the UK’s top engineers and medical professionals warned in a public report the risk from human faecal matter in our rivers will increase without changes to the network and how we build our cities.

Dr David Butler, professor of water engineering at the University of Exeter, and co-author of the report, said investment from water companies has “not really been up to scratch”.

On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a press release containing a roughly 300-word statement, signed by 181 of its members. “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans,’” its headline read, citing a quote from its chair, Jamie Dimon. The CEOs pledged to “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders,” and “move away from shareholder primacy.” The CEOs added, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

[…]

A new narrative quickly began to solidify: Milton Friedman’s profits-at-all-costs way of thinking was dead. In fact, Fortune wrote in its cover story that “Friedman must be turning in his grave.”

There was just one catch: CEOs weren’t actually promising a new way of doing business, but simply a new way of talking about doing business.

[…]

As Columbia Business School’s Shiva Rajgopal, co-author of one study that investigated whether Business Roundtable CEOs followed through on their pledges, observed, “When these guys signed the BRT statement, the stock prices of these firms [did not] move … There was no heartbeat at all.” This suggests, as Rajgopal and his co-author wrote, “market participants agree with the assessment that the BRT statement represents cheap talk.”

Friedman being Friedman:

What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.  […] In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stock holders, he is spending their money.

[…]

But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other.

[…]

Here the businessman—self‐selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders—is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds—all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on. […]  the doctrine of “social responsibility” involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses.

I think that’s the world my parents envisioned for me as I grew up. I could just ask them for rides. As I got older, I could ask my friends, and then I’d get married and get rides from my spouse.

If you ask anyone who’s had to rely on favors to get where they need to go, it gets old, fast. In Washington State, our Legislature funded a study about the mobility of nondrivers and the researchers were surprised to find that while relying on rides was a major source of mobility for nondrivers, the emotional burden of asking for those rides was a significant deterrent, especially for women, low-income and disabled people.

When we insist on visibility as nondrivers, our presence demands a reckoning of the costs and moral efficacy of car dependency. Rather than being ashamed about our disabilities or the lack of resources that prevents us from driving, we should be proud of our status as nondrivers. Instead of a future of congested drive-thrus, oceans of parking lots and freeway-ramp spaghetti nests, our existence tips the scales in favor of communities designed in ways that work better and are healthier for all of us. 

The controversial virtual manager service invites real estate agents who have signed up for membership to enter the details of tenants they wish to keep tabs on.

In the future, when a tenant applies for another property and the other real estate agent searches for their details in TICA's main database, the original property manager receives a notification that includes the name and contact details of the agent who conducted the search.

[…]

When virtual manager launched in 2010 it was met with backlash from tenants' advocates, who described it as "a gross invasion of privacy". At the same time, a TICA spokesperson said its main purpose was to monitor the movement of tenants while they are still renting the property, so landlords could guard against "the dreaded midnight skip".

In the 14 years since, little information has been published about how the secretive service — which is only available for an additional fee to TICA's "gold members" — operates.

"There's just something incredibly creepy and invasive about the fact that a property manager can put a little alert in the system, and seven years later [in this case] know that you're trying to apply for a property and basically go and put a spanner in the works and make it so you can't get a home," Mr Dignam said.