Marginal Revolution has a post which refers to EULA (end user legal jargon). Seems to me we consumers need an ombudsman with authority over all EULA's--someone who will read them on our behalf, because you know the corporate lawyers who draft them aren't concerned with the consumer at all.
Ideally the ombudsman would be able to do a version of the nutrition facts label on food--something which would summarize the critical facts for consumer.
Oh my gosh, Richard, I don't even have a job, much less an official one. I have no platform from which to speak.” I'm out here in Colorado at 6 in the morning. I don't even have a fax machine.As it turned out, he did get something out, by learning how to tweet a statement in 18 tweets (he'd just gotten a twitter account a couple weeks before), a statement which the media picked up on.
As the early adapters among the silent and boomer generations go to the grave what happens to their digital archives?
As a failed historian I lean towards preserving every record, just because scholars have been able to wring meaning from the documentary evidence of the past, even when it's scant.
As an active user of a Pc for close to 30 years, I know there's an infinitesimal chance that anything in my digital files would be of value to a future historian. That's true in abstract, even more true given the lack of organization of the files.
A third factor is the ever-declining cost of storage, which leads to the logic of why not preserve it, because we don't know what future historians will be able to do using AI.
I suspect there's a niche for an archive service for personal digital files. That would differ from the services which archive what's on the internet.
After roughly two years my wife and I returned to the movies today--Belfast.
We enjoyed it: some laughs, a moist eye or two, and an education in Van Morrison.
Judging by the audience covid took out a lot more old men than old women.
I can't say whether it deserves "Best Picture", but it deserves the nomination.
Ran across a statement in a discussion of declining social mobility in the US that these days the more equal societies have more social mobility.
I wonder if there's math working here. Consider the US--our top income class has been gaining wealth for some time now. It used to be the CEO earned 20 times (figure pulled out of the air) what the lowest paid employee in the company did. Now it's more like 100 times. Doesn't that make it more unlikely the employee will ever get into the top 20 percent of earnings?
What threatened Britain in the 18th century that Britons would not be slaves, as in the refrain of Rule, Britannia. The poetry was written by James Thomson, a Scot for whom there's not much other information easily available.
The year of the poem is 1740 and it turns out the poem was written after the British took Porto Bello in the War of Jenkin's Ear. Fears of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 might have been a factor, since France and Spain were supporting the Stuart pretender to the throne by 1743. So it's wartime when he's writing, the Brits have a victory, and the poem is both boastful and anxious.
The "slavery" in the poem is rhetorical, not descriptive of anything like chattel slavery.
Here's a description of Army basic training as of 1999.
Some things struck me--the expansion from 8 to 10 weeks first of all. Sounds as if they've used the extra time for more military stuff-I don't remember a full week of field exercises, nor any exposure to machine guns.
No mention of policing the area. . Policing the area was basically forming a line and picking up cigarette butts. I wonder if that still happens, given the decline in smoking since 1960's?
KP--glad to see they still make young troops do it. By the time I got through basic at Fort Dix and went to Ft. Belvoir they had started contracting it out there.
The pay--$380 a week? We got $80, IIRC.
That's a phrase from Zadie Smith's recent book of essays. She's using it in the context of her body, a female black body.
I like the image. On the one hand you have the concept of "privilege", which is sort of like a backpack containing an assortment of tools, which is that your history empowers you. On the other hand you have a cage of circumstances, which is the idea that your history limits you. Both I think are true.
David Brooks on the Newshour has a rosy picture of post-1945 European history. He said last night on the Newshour that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be most serious military action since 1945.
I don't buy it. Both Russia and the US know they will try to avoid war. The two nations have learned over the 76 years since WWII they can compete and conflict without going to armed conflict.
We and the Soviet Union/Russia didn't know that with Berlin in 1948, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. We didn't know we could avoid conflict, and we believed that conflict would lead to nuclear war.
Ukraine is serious because of Murphy's law and the likelihood of unforeseen events. But I think we've seen worse, though that may just reflect my advancing age.
CCC was set up in the 1930's. One of the reasons was to handle the money for entitlement programs: farm programs which established payment rates for doing or not doing things without an appropriation, a cap.
When I worked at ASCS there was still a sharp division between CCC and ASCS. CCC decisions were made by the CCC, composed of the administrators of affected agencies and the secretary's office. There were a couple bureaucrats handling the development of "dockets" for the board, which recorded the rationale for the decision and included the regulations to be published in the Federal Register, Chapter 7, secs. 1400-1499.
There were bureaucratic implications: if Congress passed a program with authority to use CCC facilities, it meant that the Printing and Distribution Branch could tap CCC funds to print forms and handbooks on an emergency basis and, I believe, bypass the Government Printing Office's time-consuming process. And the expenses weren't charged to ASCS administrative appropriation.
On the equipment side, similar logic applied. If equipment could be tied to CCC operations, then it was charged to CCC and not ASCS.
As automation came along, first with programmable calculators and then System/36, etc. the IT types were able to use CCC money.
It was in the early 1990's I think that Congress, specifically House Appropriations, woke up to this loophole. I know SCS people were jealous of ASCS ability to use CCC. Did someone blow the whistle on ASCS? Possibly. More likely the USDA IT office complained about ASCS/FSA bypassing them by using CCC.
Meanwhile the different administrations have found the ability to tap CCC funds for various programs. By now I've lost track of who has done what. The most recent announcement is this, pilot projects for climate change.
