About the failure of Facebook’s anti-net-neutrality projects Internet.org/“Free Basics” in India. Instructive to note what made the Indian software lobby support exceptions to net neutrality.
The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback | Rahul Bhatia | Technology | The Guardian
matt blaze on Twitter: (whispers to flight attendant): “I don’t want to upset anyone, but I think the man in 15C is modeling credit default swaps”.
DerivativeTerrorism – An Order Of Magnitude More Destructive Than The Original
Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight – The Washington Post
… Muslim heads of major European cities have been a commonplace for nearly 1300 years, and even at the beginning of the 20th century a few Balkan cities still had Muslim governors. Sadiq Khan’s victory is a great one and we should be happy that an Islamophobic and scurrilous campaign against him by the Tories was thwarted by the good sense of Londoners. But let us not exacerbate the weird amnesia of Europe about how central Islam and Muslims have been to its history since the eighth century (when Byzantium, founded by Heraclius in 610, was only a century old itself). Sadiq Khan has many illustrious predecessors among European Muslim urban leaders.
London’s Muslim Mayor is nothing New: 1300 yrs of Muslims who Ran Major European Cities
Thanks to a number of settlements, we now know that some companies got many of those new signatures via intentional strategies targeting black and Hispanic customers. The most infamous example was Wells Fargo, which paid a $175 million settlement for systematically overcharging black and Hispanic borrowers.
It came out that a Maryland office of the bank referred to subprime loans as “ghetto loans,” and pushed its loan officers to unload as many as possible on the “mud people” of Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs. A crucial element involved pushing expensive and dangerous subprime loans on people who qualified for the safer, lower-interest prime loans.
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In conjunction with better-known offenses in 1960s & 70s] like blockbusting (i.e., clearing neighborhoods of white residents through scare tactics), the misdeeds of companies like Eastern Services helped destroy black neighborhoods practically overnight. They did so in much the same way the modern foreclosure crisis has now left deserts of blighted homes in cities all over the country, from Trenton to Fort Wayne to Fayetteville to Rochester to Port St. Lucie and beyond.
Likewise, the “interest-only” or “negative amortization” loan of the subprime era, which allowed people to jump into new houses with little or no money down, was little more than an homage to the “contract mortgage.” The latter was an infamous type of zero-equity real estate loan-sharking that targeted black homeowners throughout the pre-Civil Rights era.
As a trained defense attorney who once represented clients for violent crimes, Clinton has been long aware of how the criminal justice system works in theory versus reality. That she continues to defend the death penalty given everything we know about it now does not so much betray ignorance as indifference — or else just plain unwillingness to expend political capital on this issue, at least until the moment is right.
This, of course, is at odds with her grand promise to end the era of mass incarceration. In a CNN op-ed the day after he stood to ask his question in Columbus, [Ohio death row exoneree] Ricky Jackson pointed out this contradiction. “The fact that Clinton continues to hang on to this antiquated relic confuses me,” he wrote. “She touts ‘criminal justice reform’ — and much reform is needed — but she misses one of the lowest hanging pieces of fruit.”
Perhaps it is true that Clinton will “breathe a sigh of relief” if and when the death penalty finally ends. But that statement alone speaks volumes about her leadership — and the kinds of reforms she will be willing to deliver in the end. A vow to feel relieved when others finally win the fight against capital punishment is not exactly a profile in courage. Clinton knows full well that the death penalty — as it actually exists — is wrong. She’s just not going to waste any power doing anything about it.
“I love the poorly educated”—Read Donald Trump’s full Nevada victory speech – Quartz
Link to program and registration.
This kind of policing toward Muslim Americans exists because the public has countenanced it. Our tax dollars fund it. In many ways, Americans have acquiesced to the idea that “our safety” requires vigilance, which means more monitoring, more investigations, more preemptive prosecution. While many people have decried the indiscriminate surveillance of Muslim communities, there remains a widespread willingness to see certain kinds of ideas as dangerous. Armed with our fears, we allow this aggressive law enforcement, rarely having to look the consequences or these young people in the eye when we do.
“I Feel Like a Despised Insect”: Coming of Age Under Surveillance in New York