Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The FCC's decision to increase the amount of spectrum dedicated towards unlicensed uses will allow everyone to access and innovate with these valuable public airwaves.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/fcc-opening-some-very-important-spectrum-broadband

The Food Stamp Work Requirement Is a Scheme to Punish Hungry Americans

Growing up in Boonville, California in the 1990s, a friend of mine would sometimes jokingly use the phrase "the beatings will continue until morale improves." If people are feeling bad, what better incentive to change their mood than getting repeatedly whacked with a stick?

The campaign of socialist candidate Joshua Collins for WA-10 just got interesting. The incumbent Dem announced his retirement today, and it is past the deadline for new candidates to join, so it appears Josh will be the only one running for the Dem nomination
https://mobile.twitter.com/Joshua4Congress/status/1202316479724544000
@politics @Bernie2020

Ah yes, poetic justice.

"These owners can choose to share some, all, or none of their footage with police; police do not need a warrant in order to request camera footage from residents....when camera owners are "uncooperative or unavailable," officers are instructed to contact Ring and request that the captured video be preserved." #privacy

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjw9e8/inside-rings-quest-to-become-law-enforcements-best-friend

And that's not all we learned this week:
As recently as July, police could access a "heat map" that got very close to showing specific locations of Ring cameras in their town. (Ring has maintained that they do not show exactly where cameras are located.)

https://www.cnet.com/news/ring-gave-police-a-street-level-view-of-where-video-doorbells-were-for-over-a-year/

“Fear sells.”

That's what Ring said in 2016, according to this staggering history of how Amazon's surveillance doorbell company built over 600 police partnerships and put cameras on front doors across America.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjp53/how-ring-went-from-shark-tank-reject-to-americas-scariest-surveillance-company

“Our Biggest Enemy Is PG&E”: Inside the Fight to Put Utilities Under Public Control

SANTA ROSA, Calif.—“We’ve been evacuated twice in the past five years,” J.D. Opperman tells a small crowd of around 30 who had gathered to protest Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) in downtown Santa Rosa on Nov. 16, 2019. Among the protesters were members of the Marin, North Bay and East Bay chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They held handmade signs reading “PG&E: The ultimate homewrecker” and “PG&E: Poster child for the corporate death penalty.”

Opperman explained the first time he was evacuated, during the Tubbs Fire that hit Santa Rosa in 2017, it was “terribly frightening. I had to pack everything I owned, shove it into my car. I was in school, a student, worried about exams and everyday things. I have a child.”

After the fire, Opperman sought cheap rent in Guerneville, a small town in the redwoods on the edge of the Russian River. It’s not surrounded by a tinder box of dry fields like Santa Rosa, but when the Kincade Fire broke out in October 2019, Opperman was again forced to evacuate.

“This time around was even more frightening,” he told the crowd as it stood solemnly in Old Courthouse Square. “The fire forced the evacuation of my two 80-year-old grandparents, one of whom ended up in the hospital for a stomach ulcer from the stress. My family and I called around but every hotel was booked, we had nowhere to go. My girlfriend had a panic attack about money; our businesses [were] closed and we [couldn’t] earn the money we needed to survive. My daughter had a panic attack as well. She was overwhelmed by the situation.”

Opperman was just one of the attendees who personally experienced the stress of last-minute evacuations—from Santa Rosa, Guerneville and Windsor. But the protest wasn’t just for people to share trauma; there was a strong call to disband PG&E, particularly from local democratic socialists.

“We are here today to voice our collective outrage” against PG&E’s corporate interests, says Brandi Chalker of North Bay DSA. “Our biggest enemy is PG&E itself. The losers in this game? That’s us, folks. We stand against PG&E as a corporate, for-profit entity.”

Opperman’s family members were just a few of the nearly 200,000 people forced to flee the Kincade Fire, which burned more than 77,000 acres—making it the largest wildfire ever in Sonoma County. An investigation is ongoing, but it appears to have started from a spark from a broken cable on a high transmission power line. It’s not the first time the utility has been blamed for a blaze, including the Camp Fire in 2018, which killed 85 people in Paradise, Calif.

While climate change and drought have made California particularly vulnerable to fast-moving, powerful fires, the situation has been exacerbated by PG&E’s failure to secure all of its power lines and transformers. Trimming overgrown trees near power lines is a proven preventative measure, but the company has been slow to negotiate with tree-trimming contractors. Of the 2,455 miles of vegetation along power lines identified as high risk, PG&E has only trimmed 760 miles of it. In June 2019, the bankrupt utility announced plans to shell out $11 million in performance bonuses to its executives.

As wildfires have become a seasonal norm, pressure has risen for a public takeover of the shareholder-owned PG&E, mirroring calls across the nation for utilities to be placed under public control. Many utility cooperatives do exist: The Delaware Electric Cooperative, for example, was founded in 1936 and serves 101,000 people, and Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative has served 14 Central Texas counties since 1939. In addition to providing customers with added transparency over decisions and finances, co-op utility companies can also provide local economic opportunities.

But 2019 marked a shift in California as homes and businesses continued burning and mass evacuations and power shut-offs hit an unprecedented scale. By early November, PG&E shut off nearly 2.5 million customers, the largest such event in state history, and politicians are paying attention. More than 20 California mayors, led by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (D), signed on to a plan to turn PG&E into a customer-owned cooperative. Pressure is on for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to take a stance on what will certainly become a key voter issue.

The exact logistics of a takeover are still unclear. Despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, PG&E declined to sell in September 2019 after San Francisco officials made a $2.5 billion offer for the city’s electric grid.

Meanwhile, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson says the public should expect rolling blackouts for a decade. Hours after the Santa Rosa protest, news emerged that high winds ensured more power outages on the immediate horizon.

“Public ownership of this utility is a definite necessity,” Opperman told the crowd at the Santa Rosa protest. “There is no reason that something that is so critical to the modern world and the functioning of daily life should be owned by a private industry.”

Going for Medicare for All Proves That Radicalism Is the Only Way

Moderates who love incrementalism constantly say that is the only way to get things done but the current debate over healthcare shows that the exact opposite is true.

THE BIRDIE PARTY?
#BernieOrVest
#NotMeUs
#Sanders/Turner2020

RT @Jscott1145@twitter.com

Careful @HillaryClinton@twitter.com we have no issue going somewhere else. @TheDemocrats@twitter.com party is already a shell of itself. https://twitter.com/dabrandolfski/status/1201991017873821697

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Jscott1145/status/1202110454618873856

Google and Facebook together receive 50% of the total worldwide digital ad spending in 2019. That's $103.73 billion and $67.37 billion respectively. They gained this position due to the incredibly detailed profiles of their users that they collected. Therefore these two companies enable advertisers to target a very specific audience for their ads.

Source for ad spending 2019:
https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-digital-ad-spending-2019

#deletegoogle #deletefacebook

Robbing Peter to Pay Joe

Biden claims Mayor Pete “stole” his healthcare plan.

Cheers to @GIbiz People of the Year Jeffrey Rosen and John Graham! We at EFF are humbled by their ability to bring support and attention to numerous charities, including ours, through the love of games http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-02-people-of-the-year-2019-jeffrey-rosen-and-john-graham

Micro implants could restore standing and walking

Researchers are focused on restoring lower-body function after severe spinal injuries using a tiny spinal implant. In new research, the team showcases a map to identify which parts of the spinal cord trigger the hip, knees, ankles and toes, and the areas that put movements together.

Trump’s Labor Dept. Has Declared War on Tipped Workers

In October, the Trump administration published a proposed rule regarding tips which, if finalized, will cost workers more than $700 million annually. It is yet another example of the Trump administration using the fine print of a proposal to attempt to push through a change that will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. We also find that as employers ask tipped workers to do more nontipped work as a result of this rule, employment in nontipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3% and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.2%, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being nontipped to being tipped. Given that back-of-the-house, nontipped jobs in restaurants are more likely to be held by people of color while tipped occupations are more likely to be held by white workers, this could reduce job opportunities for people of color.

The good news is that users can block cookies themselves with browser extensions. EFF’s very own Privacy Badger will eat those tracking cookies and stop third parties in their tracks. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://t.co/yIkJL2UjYm

The most common tool for this kind of tracking is a cookie: a small piece of text stored in your browser, associated with a particular domain.

Cookies were invented to help site owners determine whether a user had visited their site before, which makes them ideal for tracking.

Studying the effects of computer Operating Systems on happiness.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/32063603

Kamala Harris ends presidential run https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/kamala-harris-ends-presidentia.html

Click, click, cook: Online grocery shopping leaves 'food deserts' behind

An analysis found that most people in 'food deserts' in 8 states would increase their access to healthy, nutritious food if they purchase groceries online and had the food delivered as part of the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).