Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

ICE Office Must Stop Keeping All Asylum Seekers Locked Up, Federal Judge Orders

In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released 75 percent of eligible asylum seekers in Deep South detention centers on parole. By 2018, that figure had dropped to 1.5 percent. So far this year, it’s zero. And a federal judge says that’s not acceptable. On Thursday, Washington, DC, district court judge James Boasberg ordered the agency to provide asylum seekers […]

Unions Have Supported Democrats for Decades. It’s Time for Dems To Keep Their Promises.

Unions have backed the Democratic Party for decades, supplying a steady stream of voters, money and volunteers. Despite this support, Democrats have little to show for their promises to strengthen unions and expand workers' rights.

And workers are increasingly frustrated. As contributing editor Jeremy Gantz reported in “Labor’s Endorsement Dilemma,” “Donald Trump had the best GOP presidential candidate performance with union households since 1984 ... which raises the question: Are Democrats losing labor as a reliable constituency?”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warns Democrats that they may. “You can’t offer campaign rhetoric or count on workers’ votes simply because you have a ‘D’ next to your name,” he told candidates behind closed doors before the July presidential primary debates.

Losing union support would be devasting for Democrats. In his 2002 article, “Better Luck Next Year,” senior editor David Moberg wrote:

Without union voters, argues AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal, Gore would have lost by a wide margin last year and Republicans would hold 61 Senate seats, instead of 49. Yet with the votes of just 3,000 more union members in five congressional districts, he calculates, [Democrat] Richard Gephardt would have been Speaker of the House.

Even then, some in the labor movement felt unions should be applying more pressure on politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike:

A growing number of labor leaders, like Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE (apparel and textile workers), want unions to be more aggressive and more independent, giving money directly to neither party and endorsing candidates—no matter what their party—only when they will support unions and working people. Increasingly, labor is also seeking clout and independence by running union members for office.

The Democratic Party has remained poor on labor while many unions remain close to the Democratic establishment. In 2016, for example, some rank-and-file workers grumbled when their unions’ leadership endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary over the more labor-friendly Bernie Sanders.

This time around, several unions have made it clear that 2020 hopefuls will have to actually earn their endorsements. Though four presidential candidates have detailed labor plans, most international unions have yet to endorse. Exceptions are the International Association of Fire Fighters, which endorsed Joe Biden in April, and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, which endorsed Sanders in August.

With the labor movement stirring—nearly half a million workers participated in strikes last year, and union support is the highest it’s been in 15 years—the question now is, Will it be enough to finally get an organizer-in-chief?

Librem 5 shipping starting 24 September 2019 https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/ #purism #linux #linuxphone #linuxmobile #gnome

Unwelcome Wagon

Congrats on being born, kid. Now let’s see that wallet.

The PTA: Should You Join?

A handy guide for parents with kids going back to school.

Mathematical model provides new support for environmental taxes
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190904141300.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

“Give Me A Break:” Elizabeth Warren Just Cut Through the Dumbest Climate Argument

Approaching hour six of the CNN climate crisis town hall, Elizabeth Warren broke the rhythm of the 10-candidate marathon on Wednesday.  Warren, the seventh candidate to speak to the small audience of climate activists, woke viewers up when she challenged a question from CNN moderator Chris Cuomo. Cuomo asked about President Trump’s rollback Wednesday of […]

Trump Holds Up a Doctored Chart to Try to Show Hurricane Dorian Hitting Alabama

Who needs memory holes when you can alter the truth with a stroke of black Sharpie? A White House video released Wednesday shows President Donald Trump holding up a chart of the trajectory of Hurricane Dorian. But there’s one problem: Added onto the National Hurricane Center’s “cone of uncertainty” forecast, outlined in white on the map, someone seems […]

Reviving the General Strike | The Nation https://prismo.xyz/posts/b826ab97-e654-4fc9-a077-5a55078a3556

"Mr Ryan found that Google had labelled him with an identifying tracker that it fed to third-party companies that logged on to a hidden web page. The page showed no content but had a unique address that linked it to Mr Ryan’s browsing activity."

Block. Google. Everywhere.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/google-accused-of-secretly-feeding-personal-data-to-advertisers-1.4007629

Climte concerns: It is best not to fly to conferences

A political scientist has developed a climate-friendly concept for international conference tourism.

Ridesharing is Uncaring

Uber and Lyft are facing a fate worse than death in California: Recognizing their employees as employees!

Climate Casual

Who doesn’t care about the Earth dying?

North Carolina Judges Toss Out Gerrymandered Maps as Unconstitutional

On Tuesday, a panel of three judges ruled that legislative districts drawn by Republican lawmakers for state legislative races “do not permit voters to freely choose their representative” and therefore qualify as partisan gerrymanders.  The striking decision in Common Cause v. Lewis found partisan gerrymanders “contrary to the fundamental right of North Carolina citizens to have elections conducted […]

Does anyone have any good literature on forming co-ops or the philosophy behind co-ops?

Announcing the PureBoot Bundle: Tamper-evident Firmware from the Factory – Purism
https://puri.sm/posts/announcing-the-pureboot-bundle-tamper-evident-firmware-from-the-factory/ #purism #librem13 #librem15 #privacy #security

California Has No Broadband Plan for the Future While The World Marches Ahead

The world’s largest economies are aggressively modernizing their Internet infrastructure with universal fiber to-the-home plans or have already achieved that metric—with the exception of the United States.  EFF noted that there is a desperate need for a federal “Fiber for All” plan that tackles this national problem. But the same can be said about the state of California, the country’s largest state economy, which ranks on its own as the fifth largest economy of the world. 

In fact, as of 2012, the California legislature decided to eliminate the authority of its own telecom regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) through the end of 2019—on the promise that such a move would produce an affordable, widely available, high-speed broadband networks.

That never happened.

Despite that fact, AT&T and Comcast lobbyists are close to convincing the state legislature to renew that law with Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez’s A.B. 1366. EFF remains strongly opposed to the legislation. We have detailed to the legislature the extent to which Californians face a monopoly for the future of broadband access per the government’s own data. If this legislature listens to AT&T and Comcast by backing this bill, it will risk dropping California further behind the rest of the world's major economic powers as they build affordable high-speed broadband.

Take Action

Don't Let the Legislature extend Broadband Monopolies

Most Californians Face Expensive Local Monopolies or No Access at All

Major ISPs argue that less regulatory oversight allows market forces to promote universally available, affordable, and competitive high capacity networks. But that hasn’t been proven true anywhere on planet Earth. When ISPs are left completely to their own devices, they tend to focus on the easiest-to-serve customers rather than try to reach everyone. That leaves most people with high-speed broadband as a monopoly—or no choice at all—per the government’s own data. California’s own broadband picture is abysmal.  Data shows a vast majority of Californians are facing a monopoly when it comes to high-speed broadband access ready for the future. This is because only small ISPs and local governments are building fiber to the home while the large statewide telecom companies like AT&T have opted to avoid competing with Comcast. That leaves Californians worse off than in 2012, the year the state deregulated broadband companies, when most people had at least two viable competitive choices.

And it is not like the big ISPs are hard up for capital to invest. They in fact received billions in new capital after federal tax cuts. Rather than systemically replacing their legacy networks with fiber, they ended up buying back stocks. And ISPs have, for years, prioritized mergers and acquisitions over investment in the future—leaving AT&T and Comcast the most indebted companies in the world. If we stick with the current approach to broadband access, there is no reason to expect that the current trajectory of the state’s market into local monopolies will change. 

What Are California’s International Competitors Doing on Broadband?

Other major global economies with the same goal of universal fiber access rely on an expert regulatory agency to study the barriers—and use its power to knock them down. California, has long denied itself the power to follow suit by enacting Public Utilities Code 710 in 2012 at the behest of the major ISPs. That’s left most California residents stuck with cable monopolies or old, degrading telephone infrastructure. When we compare California’s inaction to other major economic powers, the state’s telecom policy looks down right backwards.

Larger economies such as Japan replaced their entire telecom networks with fiber years ago, and sell symmetrical gigabit broadband services for around $50 a month. For comparison, Californians in monopoly markets, on average, pay between 200% to 300% that rate ($159.99 in San Jose, $159.95 in Antioch, or $100 in Los Angeles for example) for slower speeds, which also mirrors the national story. Furthermore, when a country has ubiquitous fiber, it can quickly upgrade to faster speeds on the cheap—and can be leveraged for speedy 5G highspeed wireless deployments. For example, South Korea took just two months to hit 1 million 5G users because the entire country is already wired with fiber optics. The UK, which has a smaller economy than California, recognized last year that their telecom networks were not where they should be and adopted the bold vision of connecting 15 million new homes to fiber by 2025. It aims to have universal coverage by 2033.

France, which was underperforming on fiber deployment when compared to its EU peers, empowered its regulator to leverage its authority to push the ISPs to commit to near universal transition to fiber optics and invested billions in public dollars in infrastructure. Now the major ISPs there have committed to a near-universal transition to fiber networks in just a few years. France’s largest ISP, Orange, is reaching for 92% fiber-to-the-home coverage by next year. Smaller economies such as Lithuania, Portugal, Latvia, and Spain already exceed 70 percent fiber to the home coverage (California is less than 20 percent—with most of the action around San Francisco). The consistent theme here is none of these countries reached these metrics without a plan executed by an expert agency empowered to address competition and universal access.

Stop A.B. 1366 and Demand That California Adopt an Ambitious Fiber Plan

There is no good reason why a vast majority of Californians can’t get access to fiber networks at an affordable price. It will take work and experts to study the market’s shortfalls and to remedy them. But California has a lot of case studies of successful approaches around the world—even from other states. In Utah, people have 11 choices for gigabit fiber services through an open access fiber network built by local governments. North Dakota has already reached 60 percent fiber-to-the-home due to aggressive local investments.

California has historically been a leader in broadband policy; it opened up the telecom market to local competition, eventually prompting the landscape-changing federal Telecommunications Act of 1996.  But it will not regain that position if we allow the California legislature to pass this AT&T- and Comcast-backed bill in the coming weeks. Contact your state Senator and ask them to vote No on A.B. 1366. Tell them Californians deserve not only the same broadband options and standards enjoyed by the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, but also for their state to be a global leader.

Tech Is No Panacea for the Classroom

The Wall Street Journal reports that parents are starting to have a few wee concerns about digital classrooms: When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping […]

“The answer is rather simple: Don’t. Control. People.” https://puri.sm/posts/control-freedom-and-harm/ Librem One doesn’t track, doesn’t retain useless data and uses free software while Big Tech strips freedom and causes harm https://librem.one #purism #libremone

Mouthwash use could inhibit benefits of exercise

Scientists have shown that the blood pressure-lowering effect of exercise is significantly reduced when people rinse their mouths with antibacterial mouthwash, rather than water - showing the importance of oral bacteria in cardiovascular health.