It's my birthday, but I got you some links 27 October 2014
The best part of the day was hearing my wife tell Ryland to “go give this to daddy”, then seeing him wandering around the house carrying a birthday card for me.
GamerGate
Failing to adequately cover this act of spinelessness was the first big fuck-up we at Gawker committed. Intel surrendered to the worst kind of dishonesty, and we allowed it to do so without ever calling it out. So let’s say it now: Intel is run by craven idiots. It employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity. It folded to misogynists and bigots who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games. And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs. http://gawker.com/how-we-got-rolled-by-the-dishonest-fascists-of-gamergat-1649496579
If GamerGate is about ethics among journalists, why is the female developer receiving 14 times as many outraged tweets as the male journalist? http://www.newsweek.com/gamergate-about-media-ethics-or-harassing-women-harassment-data-show-279736
Like they’re all little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny. “First they came for our Halo 2’s, and I said nothing.” https://medium.com/the-cauldron/why-gamergaters-piss-me-the-f-off-a7e4c7f6d8a6
US Government
The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment in Iraq, so that ISIS does not use that American military equipment to bomb Iraqis. http://www.vox.com/2014/10/27/7078635/isis-carbomb-stolen-american-humvee-iraq
It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, D.C., including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
Terrorist 2: Your new plan is that we get Ebola, fly to the United States, and lick a bunch of doorknobs? http://www.vox.com/2014/10/21/7024273/ebola-isis-terrorist-dialogue
Management
Recognize that employees have lives outside of work — cultivate a deep respect for employees’ time. When employees leave because of their boss, it rarely comes from personality mismatches; it stems from a lack of confidence. Counteroffers are (an expensive) band-aid; they won’t fix an employee’s fundamental unhappiness. Building a genuine sense of community is crucial to employee retention. http://firstround.com/article/This-is-Why-People-Leave-Your-Company
Measure performance on achieving goals, not on heroic work. http://recode.net/2014/10/10/fostering-a-better-work-environment-for-women/
Police
The safest place for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for the (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/how-gangs-took-over-prisons/379330/
Many white Americans, indoctrinated by the ridiculous number of buddy-cop films and police-themed TV shows that Hollywood has cranked out over the decades—almost all of them portraying police as heroes—may be surprised by the continuing outbursts of anger, the protests in the street against the police that they see in inner-city environments like Ferguson. But they often don’t understand that these minority communities, in many cases, view the police as the enemy. We want to believe that cops are good guys, but let’s face it, any kid in the ghetto knows different. The poor and the disenfranchised in society don’t believe those movies; they see themselves as the victims, and they often are. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-police-are-still-out-of-control-112160_full.html
The only thing that differentiated me from a random customer standing and watching and taking pictures was my green legal observer hat. And there were four other legal observers there. The police walked right past them and arrested me. The only thing that differentiated me from the other observers was the fact that I was black. http://www.vox.com/2014/10/24/7033567/ferguson-protest-arrested-michael-brown
Everything else
Marin, one of the best places to get in the adrenaline zone was Cascade Canyon Road, which had been a favorite of the hardest of the hardcores since the early 1970s. In fact, even its nickname, Repack, which people like Charlie Kelly and Fred Wolf started using some time after 1974, was hardcore, describing the maintenance required to keep a coaster-brake bike’s rear hub spinning after a couple of descents. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevils-who-were-just-crazy-enough-to-invent-mountain-biking/
Your whine makes me kind of wish that people from the actual poor side of town come this year not with scary costumes but with real pitchforks. Stop being callous and miserly and go to Costco, you cheapskate, and get enough candy to fill the bags of the kids who come one day a year to marvel at how the 1 percent live. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/dear_prudence/2014/10/dear_prudence_on_halloween_poor_kids_come_to_trick_or_treat_in_my_neighborhood.single.html
…they asked behavioral and traditional therapists to watch a video of a person being interviewed, who was labeled either “patient” or “job applicant,” and then evaluate the person. The behavioral therapists regarded the interviewee as well adjusted regardless of whether they were told the person was a patient or an applicant. But the traditional therapists found the interviewee labeled “patient” significantly more disturbed. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/magazine/what-if-age-is-nothing-but-a-mind-set.html
The key difference between a tech hub like San Francisco compared to Seattle, Austin, and Raleigh — the first of which has a greater share of its economy rooted in tech — is housing supply. Other tech hubs around the country build more, which alleviates demand. San Francisco is one of the most regulated cities in America when it comes to urban development, which heavily restricts how much can be built. http://www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom
That Siri. She doesn’t let my communications-impaired son get away with anything. Indeed, many of us wanted an imaginary friend, and now we have one. Only she’s not entirely imaginary. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html