Tag Archives: surveillance

Piercing the Corporate Veil, A Study in Bayhem, Bubbles, Box of Pox, and Suddenly Poor

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This entry is part 59 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case creep and speculation continue.

Now there’s some rumblings among some who are supposedly more law-savvy than I am about this close bond between a corporation’s “religion” and the religion of the people who run it may be an exploitable tear in the corporate veil that protects those who run a corporation from certain financial and legal issues.

If that’s true, then that may be a semi-good thing to come from all of this.

But I’m not sure how that would all play out. It very well may end up being worse all around for everyone.

Of course, it may not matter all that much if the economy as a whole–on a global scale–pops all at once.

There are apparently some rumblings (again, from people who know a lot more about the issue at hand than I do) about how over-valued a lot of things out there in the financial and investment world are. And how little corporations (and actual people with lots of money) are investing in things. Real estate, stocks, bonds, each other… few are seeing a chance for a good return on their investment so they’re just holding on to their money.

And while that’s going on, the various central banks of various nations are, in one way or another, pumping more money into the economy… which is, of course, trickling up into these stockpiles. Because (and the article in today’s stream doesn’t touch on this idea, but it’s a pretty glaring omission) the vast majority of people don’t have investments like what they’re talking about, so all that money can only trickle up to the businesses that own and produce what the people at street level are buying.

With that money “stuck” in the cycle, it seems it’s leaving a bit of a vacuum for those who need it most while, yet again, the rich get richer. But if and when this massive series of bubbles pop, everyone’s going to lose big as everything plummets in value–including those vast storehouses of money.

Kind of terrifying.

About as terrifying as hearing that the CDC misplaced a box of smallpox sometime in the 50s. It’s okay, though… they found it. Sitting in a store room in a lab that’s been used by the FDA for the past 40 or so years.

That just leaves me wondering what the heck else has been misplaced over the decades and never missed.

Then there’s the newest revelations from the Snowden files. Seems the U.S. government did, indeed, have a whole lot of personal communications on hand that they probably shouldn’t have. How do we know? Because Snowden handed a bunch of it over to the Washing Post. So now all the officials who’ve been swearing up and down that their organizations never took and retained anything like these newly revealed documents are saying, effectively, “Okay, yeah, we had those, but they’re different! It was only a minimal violation of those people’s privacy! What Snowden’s doing with them is worse than what we did!”

Yeah, not buying the blame shifting, guys. You’re still the ones who collected it–and have been lying about it. Sure Snowden’s in the wrong, that’s not news. You’re still in more wrong overall.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the feed…

Just a Whole Lot of Stuff

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This entry is part 58 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I meant to update Thursday… and even Friday… but… well… it was a holiday weekend and I figured I’d use it to catch up on things.

And by “things”, it turns out I meant all those games I bought during the Steam sale. Because I really didn’t do much else for most of that long weekend.

The feed from Thursday features a bunch of music (via YouTube) because I was in a classic rock kind of Throwback Thursday mood.

Then there were all sorts of questionable political things that went on (or kept going on, as the case may be), as well as some astounding (both in good ways and bad ways) social stuff.

So, this extra long rundown is a real mixed bag. Kind of like life.

Blasts from the Past, Signal Knowledge, Private Police, Big Brother Buzz, and Just Some Darn Funny Stuff

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This entry is part 54 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Today did not start out well.

The bus I normally catch to make it to work on time just plain didn’t show up.

The second bus on that route–the one that will get me to work just a little late, as long as we don’t hit any long traffic lights–was late.

Since that first bus hadn’t shown up, it was also at about 90% capacity when I got on. Total standing room only and a lot of shared airspace and getting friendly with strangers (and their bags).

The first stop after mine filled the aisles of the bus to sardine level.

Then the bus driver spent three minutes arguing with people at the second stop after mine about why he couldn’t fit them on the bus. That repeated for half the stops after that one (since the bus wasn’t getting any less full).

Why there isn’t a “Bus is full” option on the vehicle signage, I’ll never know. There should be.

Because, man, were there some pissed off people.

Rightfully, so, too. Some of them were going to end up being a minimum of an hour and a half late for wherever they were going. I’m assuming most were going to work. You know, a place where being late can get you fired.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in the past year.

Usually, the bus shows up. But more often than not it’s between five and ten minutes late. In a 20-30 minute rotation (depending on time of day). That’s up to a third late. Sometimes more.

Even five minutes late, if the timing is just wrong enough to catch the later traffic lights, is enough to make me miss my first connecting bus. Catching the second connecting bus still gets me to work on time, but just barely. On days I miss that second connection, I’m stuck waiting at the transfer station for another 20 minutes–in order to do a 10 minute bus ride.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve just considered shelling out for a cab from the transfer station.

So my day started with my normally just shy of an hour commute taking me around an hour and a half (from front door to desk). If I were driving, it would less than half an hour.

While I appreciate having public transportation as an option, I really don’t appreciate its lack of ability to hold to an actual schedule.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Innovation Squashed, Bigotry from the Bench, Hacking Hackers, Science Rap, and Work-life Balance

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This entry is part 53 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

As I mention frequently (perhaps too frequently), my own natural flow doesn’t fit exceptionally well with the standard 40-hour work week setup.

I’ve also said for years that we’ve become victims of our technology instead of masters of it.

Instead of allowing our advancing technology to give us modest gains in both free time and productivity, we’ve instead gone whole-hog for productivity at all costs. Creating a culture of utter consumption and quest for profit above all else.

This is unhealthy. It leads to people being continually unsatisfied–as they are regularly manipulated by advertising and cultural pressure to have more, to consume more, and to be conspicuous as hell about it. It’s devoured our culture and contributes stress beyond belief to our lives.

How I think it should have gone? Technology should have, at least in part, freed up more time for everyone to explore the things that interest them. Yes, progress would have been slower, but it also would have been deeper. And, I think, the modern world wouldn’t seem so shallow, trite, and cold as it often does.

We’d have more patience with each other (since competition and one-ups-manship wouldn’t be quite so big a part of our lives). We’d enjoy ourselves more (because we’d actually have time to).

Anyway, those are shorthand thoughts. The article in today’s stream (which I know I’ve posted before in years past, since it’s from 2010) says it all better (and if you click through to the comments, there’s another article there that goes even deeper).

Enjoy what free time you have and don’t let the machine grind you too much on your way through…

https://www.facebook.com/kierduros/activity/10152121073215981

Tarot History, Takei Respect, DRM Woes, Work Tunes, Illusions in Motion, and Comic Book Stuff

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This entry is part 50 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Hopefully, after today’s utter insanity and stress, things will fall back into a more “schedule-friendly” rhythm at work. We should be past the point where a project that should have ebbed has continued to flow… right over top of a new project that was planned to start in the down-time.

In the feed, there’s what I consider a nice story about the insistence on DRM (Digital Rights Management) has come back to bite the company that insisted upon it in the ass. Seems a publisher that vehemently insisted Amazon only sell it’s ebook editions with DRM in place, is now in the sticky situation where it’s no longer happy with Amazon’s terms and charges, but can’t pull out without more or less using it’s entire customer base–because they’re locked into only being able to read the books on Amazon readers… because of the DRM.

Even more “fun” is the tidbit in the article that mentions Tor Books, which dropped DRM from it’s ebooks a couple years back. Ostensibly, DRM is in place to prevent piracy. Well, it seems that since dropping DRM, not only has Tor not seen an increase in piracy, they’ve actually seen an increase in sales.

Same thing happened when Amazon really jumped into the MP3 game… challenging iTunes by offering DRM free downloads. That may not have been a clear-cut victory, but Amazon’s music sales aren’t too shabby.

DRM has always treated legitimate customers like criminals and done little to nothing to deter, let alone stop, actual criminals. In most cases, it seems that it’s created more who break the law–by stripping out or otherwise circumventing the DRM so they can use their products freely.

People pirate stuff because they can’t get it legally in the form they want to make use of it. This is a lesson you’d think everyone would have learned when Napster was the biggest thing. People went there to effectively steal music because there was no legal way to get it in that format.

Ebooks are popular because people love the format. It’s bad enough that there are so many competing formats (which offer very few differences when it comes to the actual content… outside of which device you can use to read them). Adding serious DRM to them does nothing but open the door for things like a content producer getting screwed over by their DRM provider.

Maybe this time around, companies will learn.

Probably not.