Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Northern forests have lost crucial cold, snowy conditions

Winter conditions are changing more rapidly than any other season and researchers have found clear signs of a decline in frost days, snow covered days and other indicators of winter that could have lasting impacts on ecosystems, water supplies, the economy, tourism and human health.

House Democrats Are So Focused on Ukraine That They’re Overlooking Another Impeachable Offense

This is the way things work now: Donald Trump is credibly reported to have given aid and comfort to an enemy that attacked the United States—and this allegation, several days later, is not part of the news cycle or the scandal that is fueling the impeachment drive on Capitol Hill. The story of the most […]

Elizabeth Warren Just Released a Wide-Ranging Plan to Give Power Back to Workers

Just two weeks after she joined the picket line outside a General Motors assembly plant in Detroit, Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday morning released a wide ranging labor plan, which promises to tackle an overarching problem: “American workers don’t have enough power.” The 14-page document, significantly longer than both Vice President Joe Biden’s and Senator Bernie Sanders’ […]

#Ocean cleanup device successfully collects #plastic for first time | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/03/ocean-cleanup-device-successfully-collects-plastic-for-first-time

#Pollution #Waste #Plastics #FossilFuels

Golden ratio observed in human skulls

The Golden Ratio, described by Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli as the Divine Proportion, is an infinite number often found in nature, art and mathematics. It's a pattern in pinecones, seashells, galaxies and hurricanes.

Impeachment Scandal Shows Why Congress Desperately Needs to Reform What’s Kept Secret

The Trump administration is again potentially abusing government secrecy — this time in an effort to distract from impeachment and punish rivals.

The post Impeachment Scandal Shows Why Congress Desperately Needs to Reform What’s Kept Secret appeared first on The Intercept.

Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands

The swirling mix of far-right politics and the actual threats posed by the climate crisis raises questions about what’s happening in the Arizona desert.

The post Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands appeared first on The Intercept.

#Abortion: #NI law 'breaches #HumanRights’ - BBC News

#NorthernIreland may at last be falling in line with the rest of the #UK and civilization.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49900668

The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism

The renowned novelist joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss her country's drift toward authoritarianism.

The post The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism appeared first on The Intercept.

Credit Where it’s Due

Hitler chimes in on Trump’s desire to shoot migrants and build a moat and border wall topped with spikes.

Donald the Boy President Gets Impeached

A parody of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes featuring the much less beloved Donald Trump.

Leading by Example

Representation isn’t everything

Adversarial Interoperability

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them.

But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability. From the flurry of absurd software patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted in the dark years between the first software patents and the Alice decision to the growing use of "digital rights management" to create legal obligations to use the products you purchase in ways that benefit shareholders at your expense, Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them.

That can and should change. As Big Tech grows ever more concentrated, restoring adversarial interoperability must be a piece of the solution to that concentration: making big companies smaller makes their mistakes less consequential, and it deprives them of the monopoly profits they rely on to lobby for rules that make competing with them even harder.

For months, we have written about the history, theory, and practice of adversarial interoperability. This page rounds up our writing on the subject in one convenient resource that you can send your friends, Members of Congress, teachers, investors, and bosses as we all struggle to figure out how to re-decentralize the Internet and spread decision-making power around to millions of individuals and firms, rather than the executives of a handful of tech giants.

Interoperability: Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Companies: a taxonomy of different kinds of interoperability, from “indifferent interoperability” (I don't care if you plug your thing into my product) to “cooperative interoperability” (please plug your thing into my product) to “adversarial interoperability” (dang it, stop plugging your thing into my product!).
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies: The history of adversarial interoperability and how it drove the tech revolutions of the past four decades, and what we can do to restore it.
Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle: Big Tech companies created a privacy dumpster fire on the Internet, but now they say they can’t fix it unless we use the law to ban competitors from plugging new services into their flaming dumpsters. That’s awfully convenient, don't you think?
A Cycle of Renewal, Broken: How Big Tech and Big Media Abuse Copyright Law to Slay Competition: Cable TV exists because of adversarial interoperability, which gave it the power to disrupt the broadcasters. Today, Big Cable is doing everything it can to stop anyone from disrupting it.
‘IBM PC Compatible’: How Adversarial Interoperability Saved PCs From Monopolization: IBM spent more than a decade on the wrong end of an antitrust action over its mainframe monopoly, but when it created its first PCs, scrappy upstarts like Phoenix and Compaq were able to clone its ROM chips and create a vibrant, fast-moving marketplace.
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects: Microsoft came this close to owning the modern office by locking up the intranet in a proprietary network protocol called SMB...That is, until a PhD candidate released SAMBA, a free/open product that adversarially interoperated with SMB and allows Macs, Unix systems, and other rivals to live on the same LANs as Windows machines.
Felony Contempt of Business Model: Lexmark’s Anti-Competitive Legacy: Printer companies are notorious for abusive practices, but Lexmark reached a new low in 2002, when it argued that copyright gave it the right to decide who could put carbon powder into empty toner cartridges. Even though Lexmark failed, it blazed a trail that other companies have enthusiastically followed, successfully distorting copyright to cover everything from tractor parts to browser plugins.
Adblocking: How About Nah?: The early Web was infested with intrusive pop-up ads, and adversarial interoperability rendered them invisible. Today, adblocking is the largest boycott in history, doing more to curb bad ads and the surveillance that goes with them than any regulator.

Aspirin may halve air pollution harms

A new study is the first to report evidence that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin may lessen the adverse effects of air pollution exposure on lung function. The researchers found that the use of any NSAID nearly halved of the effect of PM on lung function, with the association consistent across all four weekly air pollution measurements from same-day to 28 days prior to the lung function test.

After Largest Workplace Raid in a Decade, Immigrant Workers Are Organizing

On August 7 the poultry towns of central Mississippi suffered the largest workplace raid in the U.S. since 2006. Some 680 chicken-processing workers from seven factories were detained and incarcerated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

#coop fact of the day!

Socialists are better at running businesses than capitalists?

These daily facts are part of a marketing campaign for #CoopExchange, consider subscribing to our email list in our website here: https://coop.exchange/.

Black Workers Are the Heartbeat of the GM Strike

The news she had been anticipating finally arrived, and Leatrice Strong, a 33-year-old Black woman and mother of four, felt a wave of nervous energy wash over her. Not because she doubted that striking against General Motors was the right thing to do. “We’re just all standing for what’s right,” she told me. But the […]

33% of Parents Went Into Debt to Pay for Summer Childcare in 2018

Kids don’t necessarily look forward to the end of summer break, but for working parents in America, the start of a new school year can mean relief from the months of uncertainty, stress and financial cost that comes with having few viable childcare options when school’s out. A lack of childcare infrastructure in the United States leaves many working families scrambling to find someone to watch their children, desperately trying to keep their kids safe while they’re at work.

But it’s not just a summer problem. For working families, especially single-parent households, finding quality, affordable and accessible day care can be a year-round struggle—one that more hot-button issues like healthcare and jobs often take priority over when elections come around. Some 2020 Democratic candidates want to change that: Elizabeth Warren has made government-funded universal childcare a tenet of her campaign strategy, a concept several other candidates also support. 

These 11 statistics show why childcare is such a source of anxiety for American families:

$9,600 - Average annual cost of childcare nationwide, per child, in 2017

55% - People who said childcare costs were a significant financial challenge in 2018

33% - Parents who went into debt to pay for summer childcare in 2018

51% - People living in “childcare deserts” (areas with three times more children than licensed childcare slots) in 2017

19 - States whose childcare assistance programs had waitlists or frozen intake in 2018

67% - Children who have all available parents working outside the industry home as of 2017

16% - Private-industry employees who had access to paid family leave in 2018

37% - Average portion of annual income that single parents spend on childcare

7% - Recommended portion of annual income to be spent on childcare, according to the Department of Health and Human Services

18.3% - Mothers with children ages 3 and younger working outside the home for a median wage of $10.50 or less in 2016

$23,240 - Median annual income for childcare workers in 2018

Pompeo Admits to Being on Trump’s Ukraine Call

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed his participation in the July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The admission on Wednesday came on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Pompeo had listened in on the call—an explosive detail he went to extraordinary lengths to avoid […]

Susan Collins Feted as “Hero of Kavanaugh Confirmation” at High-Dollar California Fundraiser

“As you know, her actions during the Kavanaugh hearings have made her a #1 target among the radical left,” the invitation from the Lincoln Women’s Leadership Committee reads.

The post Susan Collins Feted as “Hero of Kavanaugh Confirmation” at High-Dollar California Fundraiser appeared first on The Intercept.