Linkage

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. 

In the autumn of 1938, an internal memorandum was circulated among Reichsbank officials about the dire economic situation of Nazi Germany as a result of the frenzied rearmament policy through central bank monetary expansion. Warning against its inflationary effects, the memo suggested a “smooth landing” from a war to a peacetime economy. In the following months, seeing that instead of restraint there was a further acceleration of the armament race, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the banks’ directorate decided to issue an official memorandum, which Schacht delivered directly to Hitler’s hands. Emphasizing that the Fuhrer himself had always “rejected inflation as stupid and senseless”, the letter stressed that “Reichsbank gold and foreign exchange reserves were ‘no longer available’”, that the trade deficit was “rising sharply” and that “price and wage controls were no longer working effectively”. With the volume of notes in circulation accelerating, state finances were bluntly described as “close to collapse”.

In their paper “Reducing the Joy Deficit in Sociology: A Study of Transgender Joy,” Shuster and Westbrook look to put a little more joy in the world, by researching not the pains and struggles that come with being trans but the reasons to celebrate who we are. This is much bigger than just trying to put a few glimmers in the way of an oppressed group. As they explain, the “joy deficit” “is particularly troubling, as joy is vital to human well-being. . . . As such, joy is sociologically relevant to fully understanding people’s lived experience.”

Shuster and Westbrook argue that because of this joy deficit, the narrative of the “transgender person in misery” has become unfairly centered as the “normal” narrative of trans existence. According to them, it’s become the dominant way that cisgender people view us, and also the dominant way that we see ourselves. Shuster and Westbrook argue that it’s not only unhelpful, but also just plain false, to paint trans people as fundamentally miserable beings.

In New York City, where the majority of residents don’t own a car, it seems odd to assert that a policy benefitting transit users, pedestrians, and cyclists is bad for attracting customers. Commuters who drive into Manhattan have significantly higher incomes than others who work in the borough, so Hochul’s claim that killing congestion pricing would relieve New York’s cost of living crisis is just as suspect.

Even if Hochul is telling the truth about restaurateurs’ complaints, they’re still a terrible justification for her flip-flop on congestion pricing. The same goes for public leaders elsewhere who scuttle other urban transportation reforms that merchants often loathe, such as replacing street parking with dedicated lanes for bikes and buses. When it comes to shoppers’ travel habits, small business owners simply don’t know what they’re talking about — and not just in New York.

In study after study in city after city around the world, researchers have found that merchants exaggerate the share of patrons who arrive by car and undercount those who walk, bike, or ride transit. Those misperceptions lead them to oppose transportation reforms that would limit the presence of cars and make urban neighborhoods cleaner, more pleasant, and less polluted — and would likely increase spending at their business, too.

Key Takeaway #1
Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.
I could not believe how tired I was after the first day. I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot.
But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.

[…]

Key Takeaway #2
High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes. […]

I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.
I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard.

[…]

Key takeaway #3
You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.
I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. […] They have had enough.

A solid summary of a distressing few months that seemed to go on for years.

A few weeks ago an anonymous person threatened to kill my friend. Her crime: being trans. This sort of thing is depressingly familiar to anyone who dares to be or support trans online. Away from the darker reaches of the internet, however, the so called “gender critical” (what I understand to be “anti-trans”) movement enjoys platforms in national media and access to the highest corridors of power. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has even appeared to make high profile statements in support. This summer, however, the GC movement’s claims to legitimacy crumbled.

Judith Butler, a titan of feminist academia, argues that the movement enforces the patriarchal gender norms favoured by the religious and far-right. “Men” and “women” are confined to tightly defined stereotypes and anyone who deviates is punished. It would explain why GCs receive support from authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, and far right politicians like Giorgia Meloni.

One might be forgiven for thinking the GC movement spent the summer trying to prove Butler right.

It's intentionally the opposite of public safety. It's giving violent bigots carte blanche to assault any woman who doesn't meet their expectations of femininity. It's not designed to "work"; it's designed to sow chaos and fear.

These state bathroom bans provide few, if any details about how they would be enforced because they don’t need to — private citizens are often meant to be the enforcers, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.

“The way that the laws are de facto enforced is often through the emboldening of private individuals to police other people’s bathroom use,” he said. “There’s no written enforcement because the proponents of these bills know that just by talking about this, let alone enacting these laws, that they are emboldening individual people themselves to enforce these bathroom bans.”

A recent example that takes this formula to an extreme can be seen in Odessa, Texas. A new expansion of the West Texas town’s ordinance allows individual citizens to sue transgender people caught using bathrooms that match their gender identity and seek “no less than $10,000 in damages,” per the Texas Tribune.

Deputizing private citizens to enforce this kind of law enables high rates of harassment and violence against transgender people as well as cisgender people, Casey said, particularly women who do not conform to traditional ideas of femininity. 

The "little fish" in sellers' inflation:

The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.

These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.

They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system, because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable, but not even capable of being diagnosed. In this issue, I’ll cover some of the companies you don’t realize are gnawing at the foundation of our society - Verisign, Autodesk, Linde, Assa Abloy, Gracenote, and LinkedIn. And yes, there are legal tools to address them. But first we have to realize that these bottlenecks are everywhere. 

The trans community predicted well in advance that cis women would inevitably wind up being targeted by the growing anti-trans hysteria, and that, because trans women are relatively uncommon, the majority of the harassment would ultimately be targeting cisgender women. That has sadly turned out to be the case as members of the public who’ve been whipped into a transmisogynistic frenzy look to vent their rage on any women who doesn’t adequately perform femininity. The harassment of Harold after her half-marathon is just the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Some of these have been relatively mild, such as fleeting encounters in public restrooms where cis women have been challenged or treated disrespectfully by people who believed that they were trans. A few, however, have been violent, including an incident where a woman was maced, dragged, and kicked after a shop attendant got the mistaken idea she was transgender, and one where a woman was murdered by a man who falsely believed her to be transgender. Both of the victims of violent attacks were Black women, who are believed to be particularly vulnerable to transmisogyny, included misdirected transmisogyny.

Incidents like these, where cis women wind up as targets for hatred and harassment intended for trans women, provide an opportunity to shine a spotlight on just how ugly and pointless the anti-trans panic is, even as harassment and violence towards trans women is often ignored and downplayed. However, it also speaks to the irony of a hate campaign that targets a group of women who are small in number, risk averse, and difficult to distinguish from other women. Cis women don’t just wind up as frequent targets of anti-trans hate by accident, they wind up as targets of anti-trans hate because the loathing and violent anger engendered by the anti-trans movement has to vent itself on somebody, and there aren’t enough visible trans women to slake the bloodlust.

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.