Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

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).

" Libra: Facebook Wants to Control Your Money
Facebook - backed by some of the largest banks and corporations on Earth - seek to create a global digital currency and reassert Western dominion over the global economy."

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2019/11/libra-facebook-wants-to-control-your.html#more

A long and rich article which Dr Dejahang posted here yesterday. ( https://qoto.org/@drdej555/103239575953234069 )I read thru and he covers a wide variety of implications. A good read, requires focus.

tl:dr: men who are bad at video games are more likely to hate women players, if you can manage to believe it

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613

"With these firings, Google is ramping up its illegal retaliation against workers engaging in protected organizing," the activists said. "This is classic union busting dressed up in tech industry jargon, and we won’t stand for it." https://trib.al/1cmMlT1
#newsbot

Beware Bidenomics

Amid warnings of a coming global recession, it’s worth asking what the 2020 presidential aspirants would do during an economic downturn. When it comes to Joe Biden, we may already know. 

Biden’s formative political years were spent in the shadow of economic crisis. After more than a decade of economic expansion and blissful, carefree consumerism, recession hit in 1973, the same year Biden entered the Senate. Two years later, 2.3 million jobs had disappeared. Americans also had to contend with runaway inflation that reached double digits by 1974. The United States had barely exited that recession when it plunged into another one in the early 1980s, with unemployment climbing past 10% by 1982. 

During this economically turbulent decade, Biden fended off Republican challenges to his seat by embracing right-wing doctrine—specifically, that restraining federal spending is more important during economic downturns than priming the pump.

This fiscal austerity would become a core conviction of Biden’s and help animate a lifelong belief that compromise and reaching across the aisle are the perennial solution to what ails America.

Biden had always been a somewhat ambivalent New Deal liberal—fretting about government spending as early as 1975, even as he garnered positive scores from liberal groups for his voting record—but the recession and his time in the halls of power nudged him in a more conservative direction.

“I must acknowledge that when I first came to the U.S. Senate at age 29, not too long out of college, many economists had been telling me why deficit spending was not all that bad,” he told the Senate in 1981.

“So I was not very convinced of the arguments made by my friends here, who I must acknowledge, were mostly on the Republican side of the aisle.” But, he went on, “as I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets.”

By the close of the 1970s, Biden began calling himself a fiscal conservative and introduced what he called his “spending control legislation”: a bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically expire. He also voted for a large but unsuccessful tax cut introduced by Sen. William Roth, his Republican counterpart.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, pioneering the economic program of generosity to the rich and stinginess to the poor that became known as Reaganomics. Biden was right there with him.

Biden, Reagan and other conservatives pushed the flawed idea that the government is like a household and must take drastic measures to pay off debt to stay solvent. Six months into Reagan’s first term, Biden called the reduction of deficit spending “the single most important” path toward “an economically sound future.”

To curtail government spending, Reagan severely scaled back or eliminated federal programs—even as he slashed tax rates for the rich. Biden voted for both (including an updated version of Roth’s failed tax cut). When the president proposed a budget freeze in 1983—to cut the enormous deficits that, ironically, his tax cut helped produce—Biden one-upped him, working with two Republican senators to propose an even more aggressive budget freeze doing away with scheduled cost-of-living increases for Medicare and Social Security.

This idea is contrary to what economists and experience tell us is the proper course of action in times of economic downturn. Economist Joseph Stiglitz credits Obama’s 2009 big-spending stimulus for ameliorating the recession (criticizing it only for being too small) and criticized austerity politics for undermining it. Meanwhile, countries like the United Kingdom and Greece stand as living monuments to the economic ravages of budget cutting during a recession, something even the International Monetary Fund belatedly acknowledged.

The economy under Reagan did recover—even as he slashed programs for the poor and vulnerable, he ramped up defense spending, in effect creating an economic stimulus much larger than what would come in the wake of the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, Biden voted three years in a row for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. When the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world into recession, Republicans again called for cuts to entitlement programs. As ever, Biden stretched out a bipartisan hand. As Obama’s lead negotiator during the “grand bargain” negotiations, Biden—to his Democratic colleagues’ horror—capitulated to every one of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s demands, including cuts to Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, and warned in 2013 that, left untouched, deficits “may become a national security issue.”

While that effort collapsed due to Tea Party obstinacy, a President Biden could get one last shot. Following the Reagan playbook, the Trump tax cuts have sent the national debt soaring, and Republicans and conservative groups are now pushing for stringent budget cuts. Biden stands alone among the leading Democratic presidential candidates in his insistence that Democrats can work with McConnell’s GOP. Add a recession into the mix and the temptation to resume what he and Reagan began may be too great. Who says the era of bipartisanship is dead?

RT @philosophrob@twitter.com

Tweets about the "military industrial complex"

23 - Bernie Sanders
10 - Marianne Williamson
7 - Tulsi Gabbard
1 - Elizabeth Warren
0 - Joe Biden
0 - Michael Bloomberg
0 - Cory Booker
0 - Pete Buttigieg
0 - Julian Castro
0 - Amy Klobuchar
0 - Tom Steyer
0 - Andrew Yang

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/philosophrob/status/1201860103240065026

Tiny woodlands are more important than previously thought

Small woodlands in farmland have more benefits for humans per area, compared to large forests according to a new study. The small woodlands, sometimes even smaller than a football field, can easily go unnoticed in agricultural landscapes. Yet, these small forest remnants can store more carbon in the topsoil layer, are more suitable for hunting activities and host fewer ticks than large forests.

Drone images show Greenland ice sheet becoming more unstable as it fractures

The world's second-largest ice sheet, and the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise, is potentially becoming unstable because of fractures developing in response to faster ice flow and more meltwater forming on its surface.

In Wisconsin, the Teamsters Faced a Revolt from Below

Every day, Nikki Sampson drives from her home in Portage to Madison, where she works as a dispatcher for the city’s bus service. To get there, she drives along a 40-mile stretch of highway, which crosses the Wisconsin River twice and then slices south through farms and municipalities. That road lies at the heart of the region represented by Sampson’s 4,256-strong union—Teamsters Local 695.

Nostalgia For Nothing

Retro trends are collapsing into each other. What year is it?!