There were (loads) of other ballots taking place alongside the US Presidential election last month, and Oregon approved a good one: The Oregon drug initiative will allow people arrested with small amounts of hard drugs to avoid going to trial, and possible jail time, by paying a $100 fine and attending an addiction recovery program. […]
“Democracy is not something you believe in or a place you hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.” – Abbie Hoffman
So suggests Arnold Kling, and it explains the problem better than all the talk about ‘fake news’ and deleting bad content, and all that: The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in […]
Is exactly not the headline to this article in the Guardian (“UK had highest number of young cocaine users in Europe last year – report“), although, it could have come from the business and finance section with a little rewording. In short, the drugs trade is resilient to downturns, highly adaptable to changing market conditions, tolerant […]
Over on Memex, John Naughton makes a good point worth remembering regarding tech companies (the ‘don’t be evil’ crowd): “Anyone who thinks that tech companies are different from any other ruthless corporation hasn’t been paying attention. My view of tech firms is that they are indistinguishable from tobacco, oil and mining companies, i.e. intrinsically sociopathic […]
That good news didn’t last – ‘It will be back to car city’ reports the Journal. Minister of State for the OPW, Patrick O’Donovan, said the decision over the gates was made after discussing issues like a growth of traffic in the surrounding areas over the past few weeks. “The volume of traffic built up […]
Protests over the murder of an unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer have reached every single US state, in a level of nationwide demonstration not seen since the 1968 assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Curfews are in place across dozens of cities and National Guard troops have been deployed […]
Power granted must be limited, if not, it will destroy that which it draws power from.
Tim Bray, now ex-VP in Amazon, quit his job in protest at the treatment of the warehouse workers: Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of […]
I can usually see a stream of little silver slivers on the horizon, landing and taking off from Dublin Airport. Now, the skies are empty and silent. Global air traffic has collapsed: The tiny yellow aircraft symbols speak volumes. Anyone familiar with the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 knows the scores of miniature aircraft on the interactive […]
