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Low pay, soaring rents, and cities littered with e-scooters. Welcome to the future. --- But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley—rising housing costs, choked infrastructure—to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America’s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars—all while barely able to make ends meet. […] When Uber and Lyft announced they would guarantee California drivers a $15.60 minimum wage as an alternative to a new law aimed at curtailing gig companies’ misclassification of workers, Chair Ken Jacobs of U.C. Berkeley’s Labor Center found that the pledge was largely an empty one. Once you take into account drivers’ expenses and unpaid time between rides, their true gross wage would be $5.64 per hour. California’s state minimum wage is $12.00 an hour—far more than what rideshare companies were paying after expenses. […] There’s also evidence that Lyft and Uber, the two most popular ridesharing companies, contribute to a decline in public transit ridership. City governments thus have less incentive to invest in more infrastructure, creating still more negative repercussions for poorer communities and communities of color. In November, voters in San Francisco elected to levy a 1.5 percent tax on rideshares, in a bid to incentivize riders to consider public transit. […] The companies say that e-scooters are a “greener” form of transit than cars, but the evidence is underwhelming. One study published in August in an environmental journal, Environmental Research Letters, posited that whatever emissions electric scooters saved were offset by the greenhouse gas that gig workers expended chasing after scooters to perform maintenance and charging duties. The companies also say that e-scooters encourage a more diverse ridership, but San Francisco authorities reportedly found that e-scooter ridership tended to skew male, wealthy, and Caucasian.

Jia Tolentino on how the mantra of “less is more,” which obeys a logic of accumulation, hints at genuinely different ways of thinking. --- It is rarely acknowledged, by either the life-hack-minded authors or the proponents of minimalist design, that many people have minimalism forced upon them by circumstances that render impossible a serene, jewel-box life style. Nor do they mention that poverty and trauma can make frivolous possessions seem like a lifeline rather than a burden. Many of today’s gurus maintain that minimalism can be useful no matter one’s income, but the audience they target is implicitly affluent—the pitch is never about making do with less because you have no choice. […] Today’s most popular minimalists do not mention Marx. Sometimes they address the importance of freeing oneself from the dictates of the market. In “Goodbye, Things,” Sasaki writes about the importance of figuring out your minimum required monthly income, and encourages readers to consider the environmental consequences of their life styles. Millburn and Nicodemus write about the joy that comes from choosing to earn less money, even if they avoid discussing the more common situation of having your wages kept low against your will. But they also assure their audience that “capitalism is not broken”—we are. They insist that there’s “nothing wrong with earning a shedload of money—it’s just that the money doesn’t matter if you’re not happy with who you’ve become in the process.” Even these sincere prophets of anti-consumerism are hesitant to conclude that the excessive purchasing of stuff may be a symptom of larger structural problems, or that a life built around maximum accumulation may be not only insufficiently conducive to happiness but actually, morally bad. The worst versions of life-style minimalism frame simplicity not as a worthy end in itself but as an instrument—a tool of self-improvement, or of high-end consumption, or of self-improvement through high-end consumption. It is a vision shaped by the logic of the market: the self is perpetually being improved; its environment is ready for public display and admiration; it methodically sheds all inefficiencies and flaws. This vision also forgoes any recognition that the kind of salvation so many people are seeking can happen only at the level of the system rather than at that of the individual. […] This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly. We might address the frantic, frightening, intensifying conditions that have prompted us to think of minimalism as an attractive escape.

I used to think that maybe I’d let my anger serve as an engine. But I’ve since discovered that my anger over each new racist incident is now rivaled and augmented by the anger I feel when asked to explain, once more, why black people shouldn’t be brutalized, insulted, and killed. If you’re a person of color, the racism beat is also a professional commitment to defending your right and the right of people like you to be treated with consideration to an audience filled with readers champing at the bit to call you nothing but a nigger playing the race card. The hostility directed at writers who cover minority beats in America is solid proof that those people are doing important work. But that work can be exhausting. It’s exhausting to always be writing and thinking about a new person being racist or sexist or otherwise awful. It’s exhausting to feel compelled on a consistent basis to defend your claim to dignity. It’s exhausting to then watch those defenses drift beyond the reaches of the internet’s short memory, or to coffee tables in dentists’ offices, to be forgotten about until you link to them the next time you need to say essentially the same thing. After a while you may want to respond to every request for a take on the day’s newest racist incident with nothing but a list of corresponding, pre-drafted truths, like a call-center script for talking to bigots. Having written thousands of words about white people who have slurred the president over the past six years, you begin to feel as if the only appropriate way to respond to new cases—the only way you can do it without losing your mind—is with a single line of text reading, “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.” […] I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality. If this doesn’t eventually happen, I wonder how many more writers of color will come to the conclusion, as my colleague did, that this life we’ve made for ourselves is unsustainable. How many essays can go up before fatigue becomes anger becomes insanity? How many op-ed columns before you can feel the gruesomeness of trying to defend another dead black kid slowly hollowing you out? How many different ways can you find to say that you’re a human being?

American popular culture hasn’t caught up to a world where brains and gumption are no match for larger material forces. At least, it hasn’t caught up consciously: “Parasite’s” feting at the Academy Awards — where nominees received gift bags worth more than $225,000 that included gold-plated vape pens — could itself be seen as a decadent satire about inequality. Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elicited spasms of outraged mockery from the right-wing media when she called the idea of lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps “a joke.” But maybe “Parasite” has struck such a chord because for too many people inequality is turning modern capitalism into not just a joke but a nightmare.

Her eccentric sound exercises—what she once called “recipes” for listening—briefly went viral. One score reads, in its entirety, “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Like much of her work, Oliveros’s “Meditations” posited listening as a fully embodied pursuit—a posture of attending to sounds and to the world. But her “Meditations” are more than quotable texts. They began as sound and body experiments within a women’s group. Recounting their early history offers a look at the roots of Oliveros’s body-centered politics; in the midst of America’s current political chaos, her “Meditations” make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.

We’re careening toward climate collapse. Wage stagnation means, in 2018, that the average American had the same purchasing power as they did in 1978. And Donald Trump is president. Yet we continue to respond to civilizational challenges with personal solutions that simply aren’t up to the task. Desperate to do right and get ahead, we opt for vegan meals, stay late for no overtime pay, and post only milquetoast tweets. We end up looking smart, strategic, optimized — and feeling very, very small.

We probably shouldn’t be telling children that who they are determines what they do. --- This admittedly fine point is not just a matter of language; it also carries an ethical implication. The coward can’t really be blamed for doing cowardly stuff, because that’s his nature — the same way you can’t blame the kitchen table for being hard and heavy when you stub your toe. But the difference between human beings and objects is that we do not have fixed natures that determine our behavior. When I say I didn’t do the dishes because I’m lazy, I’m talking around the fact that I could have done them but chose not to. The illusion of a fixed nature gives us an excuse to repeat bad behavior. To insist that what we do determines who we are — and not the other way around — is to make freedom and therefore responsibility a part of our worldview at the most basic level. Freedom is scary, though, because it is the freedom to become something other than what you are now — something you cannot predict. It’s easier to think of yourself as a type of person, riding along with yourself and playing out the behaviors your type does. It’s comforting to think that you did what you did because of who you are, even if who you are is bad, because nothing is more frightening than the feeling that you are about to change into someone else. Ask any 12 year-old.

Anti-fascists keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesn’t make it go away. --- When the police form a line to separate one side from the other at these events, they always stand with their backs to the alt-right and their weapons facing the anti-fascist counterprotesters. Dispersal orders and crowd-control weapons like tear gas and stun grenades (“flashbangs”) go only one way, often deployed against the anti-fascists to allow Patriot Prayer to leave the area. Nonviolent protesters have been struck and seriously injured by flashbangs fired directly into the crowd by the police. So why do we keep showing up to protest Patriot Prayer and their white supremacist friends? Why did we come together last Saturday to protest the KKK? Critics often tell us, “Stop giving them the attention they’re looking for!” We keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesn’t make it go away; it only allows it to spread further. If we permit white supremacists to march through our city, they’ll grow bolder. If we don’t show up each time and prove that we outnumber them, their numbers will swell. Imagine the recruiting power of an artfully edited video of white supremacists marching unchallenged through the streets of a major US city like Washington. On August 17, 2019, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other extremists came back to Portland. Anti-fascist protesters recognized that videos of clashes have been used as right-wing propaganda, and so the anti-fascist group PopMob organized the Spectacle, an event designed to shut that down. PopMob encouraged Portlanders to wear whimsical costumes to an anti-fascist outdoor dance party adjacent to the far-right rally. That resulted in the confrontation of about 300 far-right demonstrators with roughly 1,500 unicorns, cats, witches, and bananas (the Banana Bloc, of course), joined by a contingent of protesters in a black bloc forming a front line to protect us. It was a very Portland protest, and it was also very effective. The far right called it quits after 30 minutes, retreated to their rental buses, and went home. This past Saturday, the KKK wanted to test Portland, and once again we organized and claimed victory. Portland leftist organizations including PopMob, Rose City Antifa, Portland DSA, Jobs with Justice, Banana Bloc, the Direct Action Alliance, and others have formed a community to face down right-wing extremists. When we counterprotest white supremacists in Portland, we’re working to cut off white nationalists’ recruitment and radicalization tools as early as possible. If you are opposed to fascism, you are an anti-fascist, and our fight is your fight. As a favorite chant at these anti-fascist rallies goes, “We are many! They are few!” We need to prove that nationwide.

The movie is the latest South Korean film to pit the haves against the have-nots: see this year’s No. 1 movie there, “Extreme Job,” as well as recent titles like “Burning” and 2013’s “Snowpiercer.” It’s no coincidence that income inequality is a recurring theme in the nation’s cinema. Experts say the films, for the most part big hits at home, capture the essence of Korean sentiments at a time when the country’s income gap continues to widen. South Korea’s income distribution is remarkably lopsided. In 2015, the top 10 percent of South Koreans held 66 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the poorer half of the population held only 2 percent.

Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.

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A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says. --- “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.” Mr. Ton-That said his company used only publicly available images. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook so that search engines can’t link to your profile, your Facebook photos won’t be included in the database, he said. But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin. Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States. “We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,” Mr. Hartzog said. “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

This is one of the most interesting-to-me things I’ve ever heard. All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.

By Robin Carnahan, Randy Hart, and Waldo Jaquith. Only 13% of large government software projects are successful.1 State IT projects, in particular, are often challenged because states lack basic knowledge about modern software development, relying on outdated procurement processes. Every year, the federal government matches billions of dollars in funding to state and local governments to maintain and modernize IT systems used to implement federal programs such as Medicaid, child welfare benefits, housing, and unemployment insurance. Efforts to modernize those legacy systems fail at an alarmingly high rate and at great cost to the federal budget. […] This handbook is designed for executives, budget specialists, legislators, and other "non-technical" decision-makers who fund or oversee state government technology projects that receive federal funding and implement the necessary technology to support federal programs. It can help you set these projects up for success by asking the right questions, identifying the right outcomes, and equally important, empowering you with a basic knowledge of the fundamental principles of modern software design.

I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

The Portland woman died in July, a victim of the "cleanup" policy the city is doubling down on. --- Why then, hasn’t the problem been solved? The answer, it seems, is the public has yet to take up universal housing — alongside universal health care — as a policy recommendation and rallying cry that would benefit everyone but the wealthy, corporations, banks and mortgage investment companies. Universal housing would provide a basic threshold that would immeasurably enhance the security, health and wellbeing of not simply people like Scott and Debbie, but the dwindling middle class as well. It would provide a safety net and a threshold that would allow workers to negotiate in the absence of the ever-present threat of becoming homeless, of falling through the floorboards of our domestic economies and landing on the streets and sidewalks. As it is now, the suffering of our homeless neighbors, the endless shuffling of their bodies, moving them along to nowhere, is little more than a public ritual of scapegoating. It’s a rite designed to convince us, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that they are somehow guilty of causing their own condition and that we will not share their fate, as we knuckle under to the boss and scramble for scraps in the gig economy. It is a rite that endangers us all.

The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why. --- The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process. What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. […] Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

Peart’s time was closer to what a drum machine would do than a human. I’m not saying that made for “good” style in and of itself, as real groove is almost never right on the beat. But, it was unusual (not to mention difficult), and in the context of how technologically powered popular music would become in the 80s and beyond, oddly prescient. Of course, progressive drummers like Can’s Jaki Leibezeit or Neu!’s Klaus Dinger had already been compared to machines, emphasizing either metronomic precision, mechanical repetition or both. But Peart’s factory-grade perfectionism was applied to decidedly non-minimalist, highly-structured music; night after night, to arena crowds. Rock critics called Rush “dinosaurs”, but they were on far better terms with the digital age than many cared to admit, if they realized it at all.

Putting climate change in perspective. When people say "The climate has changed before," these are the kinds of changes they're talking about.

The internet is built to highlight the dumb stuff famous people say. --- But when no part of our context-collapsing feedback loop is built to accommodate stakes, and considering the speed and vitriol with which Eilish was attacked, I can further understand why artists choose to distance themselves from the press in favor of doing their own. There is almost no upside to being ensnared into a controversy like this, even if it’s manufactured.

I prefer ‘enslaved person’ not just because of that nod to humanization, but because of its closer proximity to the verb enslave. Especially in Pulido’s case—absent the generational and legal context of African American slavery—slavery is not a fixed state. Enslavement is not a single action, either. Rather, like emancipation, enslavement is a process. Enslaved people are made over decades by the process of enslavement, they are broken and bent, their persons warped against their wills. Calling Pulido a slave obscures the work that individuals did to assign that status.

I recognize in Tizon’s descriptions of his mother and “Lola” a pattern I have seen in my reporting: how one exhausted, single immigrant mother turns all her fury and shame into abuse of another, weaker woman in her emotional and physical bondage. They remind me of a Filipina woman I met in a shelter here, who told me how her madam had starved her, threatened to turn her over to the police, and beat her so badly she jumped out of an upstairs window, injuring her hip and spine, to survive. I wrote all of that in an article, but couldn’t fit what she told me about her madam: that she was also a lawyer, single mother, and bulimic. That she used to cry, binge, and throw up at home every day, and that the worst beatings usually came after angry, screaming phone calls with her estranged husband. For months, I’ve been watching and wrestling with how to articulate this specifically cruel way that women can dehumanize and harm other women. I’ve often wished I could include a footnote to these stories: Sometimes the victimizers are victims themselves.

Darius Kazemi believes social networks should be run like small communities rather than massive businesses --- After speaking at a conference recently, Kazemi was approached by a group of Twitter designers who asked him how they could apply his principles to the platform. He said he didn’t think it was possible. “As long as [big social media companies] are operating in the same way—harvesting eyeballs, working on advertising revenue, and needing venture capital investment—I don’t have a lot of advice for them,” he says. What Kazemi’s proposing is something structurally different than how social media giants operate. They can scramble to change their privacy policies and try to combat hate speech, but really, they’re just too big. “I feel like they’re doing what they can at this point, but they’re almost at a dead end,” he says.

The NBC afterlife comedy ended Thursday after four seasons, and it did so in a rich, emotionally satisfying, provocative fashion. --- Fragility and preciousness are not paired out of some regrettable irony; they are reliant on each other. It's because we know our time with people will end that we can find ourselves flooded with gratitude for their presence. The friction of our limitations is what necessitates effort (of all kinds), and effort — rewarded and not — is where we find meaning. Surround yourself with friends who love you and love them deeply, and you will grow. It's worth applying every part of yourself, including your intellect, to the question of how to do the right thing.

Font Pair helps designers pair Google Fonts together. Beautiful Google Font combinations and pairs.

You can also just put this on an old iPad! MagicMirror² is an open source modular smart mirror platform. With a growing list of installable modules, the MagicMirror² allows you to convert your hallway or bathroom mirror into your personal assistant.

Zimoun is a Swiss artist, composer and musician who's most known for his sound sculptures, sound architectures and installation art that combine raw, industrial materials with mechanical elements.

Syrmor interviews DJ Soto, a Christian pastor who is looking to redefine what faith looks like. As Soto tells it, part of his interest in taking up a virtual house of prayer is that it opens up the experience to people who might otherwise be excluded from real-world congregations, such as folks in wheelchairs and recovering drug addicts. Soto describes one instance where he baptized a woman who couldn’t leave her home, and the experience was so intense that she started “bawling,” as she never thought she’d have the opportunity to do it given her condition. His service also allows him to reach people he couldn’t if he preached solely through typical avenues. He has been performing virtual reality baptisms for a year now.

I made this blog. The irreverent “Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog Dot Com” is underwritten by a password-security company and features not-so-subtle digs at Deadspin’s bosses.