Author: luimbe

TNR’s Race Problem – The Atlantic

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T. Coates on the culture of TNR:

A writer for TNR told me how, in the mid-’90s, Peretz would come down to the office from Cambridge and lobby young writers to write what turned out to be the fictional “Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work.” The writer told me that the young interns and fact-checkers would squirm in their seats. But no one took a stand. And perhaps it is too much to expect writers in their mid 20s, with editors in their late 20s, to say to Peretz, “Please stop shopping this racist bullshit.” But the task was made infinitely easier by a monochrome staff that could view Peretz’s racism as an abstraction, and not something that directly injured their families.

via The New Republic’s Race Problem – The Atlantic

 

CPD tackled & cuffed Tamir Rice’s 14 year old Sister in a squad car feet away from her murdered brother

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These officers responded to everything these kids did with violence:

The mother of a 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by police after he was seen playing with a plastic gun on a Cleveland playground has spoken for the first time since burying her son.

Samaria Rice told ABC News in an exclusive interview that her 14-year-old daughter was tackled by police when she arrived at the scene of the shooting.

“I couldn’t believe they tackled her and put her in handcuffs and in the back of the same police car that was on the grass that the officer got out of and shot her brother so my daughter is sitting there looking at her brother on the ground,” Rice said this morning.

via Mother of Cleveland Boy Shot by Police Says She’s ‘Looking for a Conviction’ – Yahoo

Doesn’t think to much of us

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Image: Pat Lynch search from Google

PBA President Pat Lynch says officer who choked Eric Garner to death is “Blameless” and “Thrown Under the Bus”

When Pat Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association says this:

If you are speaking, you can breathe… [Garner] died for a number of reasons… Garner made a choice that day to resist arrest.”

via New York City Police Force To Be Retrained In Wake Of Eric Garner Case – BuzzFeed News

…you have to believe Lynch doesn’t think we are smart enough to understand the implications of his statement or angry enough to see this through until this police treatment of black citizens changes.

New World Water: Water Theft in California

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glass_of_water

From the National Journal:

Last fall Madden noticed something suspicious. The water filling the tanks outside her veterinary clinic in Los Gatos, Calif., was disappearing at an alarming rate. Madden checked for leaks but found none. Then she realized: Someone was stealing her water.”I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “You never imagine anyone would do something like that but there it was, vanishing right before our eyes.”Madden decided to act. She installed security cameras. Then she put locks on the tanks. She even strung a chain across her driveway to keep out unwanted visitors. The theft stopped after the locks went on. But Madden never caught the thief, and she can’t stop thinking about who did it.”This is a really small community, so you sit here and start going through everyone you know and wondering if it was them,” she said.Madden is not alone. Water theft has become increasingly common in California as the state suffers through its worst drought on record. There’s no reliable tracking of just how much water has gone missing. But reports of theft rose dramatically in the past year. Officials say a black market set up to peddle water is thriving as wells run dry. And law enforcement is scrambling to respond.

via Drought Is Taking California Back to the Wild, Wild West – NationalJournal.com.

Good thing we have a Republican Congress that doesn’t believe in climate change and rather drill for energy rather than natural resource conservation.

Also, this must be black and brown super criminals stealing this water. We need three strikes water theft rules.

Tech Indentured Servancy

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Labor Brokers are conning Indian tech workers into indentured servitude…

One of them is software engineer Gobi Muthuperiasamy, who came to the United States from the southern India city of Madurai in 2007 to work for one labor broker. In 2010, while he was contracted to a project at the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, he decided to switch labor brokers, to Softech International Resources Inc.

The rural Georgia staffing firm boasts online of providing tech workers to IBM, Bank of America, Verizon and other companies. Softech agreed to pay Muthuperiasamy $51,000 a year to continue improving Pennsylvania’s workers’ compensation database. Instead, he changed his mind, taking a better-paying job in Ohio.

When Softech sued him in 2011 for more than $20,000, saying he had agreed to it when he signed his employment contract, Muthuperiasamy was astonished.

“You should treat people like human beings,” the 32-year-old said, “not like animals, creatures that you make money off of.”

He decided to fight back, spending more than three years and $25,000 in legal costs. That makes Muthuperiasamy unusual: In the vast majority of court cases reviewed by CIR, workers naively and ineffectively represented themselves, didn’t show up for their court date or gave up and returned to India.

Softech is a case in point. Owned by Krishnan Kumar, Softech has filed 32 lawsuits against employees in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Many of those lawsuits name workers who complain that they quit because they weren’t being paid. Yet most of the workers ended up on the losing end, through settlements or mediations or in court.

via Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US | US news | The Guardian

I’m a software developer. I know the wage ranges. I know the job market. There is a shortage of developers. We can command higher salaries because we are in high demand. Put a resume online for a database developer and recruiters will call you.

51K/yr for a database software developer in this hiring environment before taxes is very, very cheap. On the job search and labor info site “Glassdoor.com” 57k is listed as a minimum for that role. 80k is the national average. That means 51K is intern or recent collage grad in a rural low cost of living who had to settle prices. The labor broker is most definitely charging at least twice that. I’m not surprised Muthuperiasamy looked for a new job. He was being severely under valued.

Also problematic:

Yet software engineer Muthuperiasamy tried in vain to get the US government to help. He complained to the Department of Labor, Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service that Softech was abusing the legal system by pursuing him for quitting.

The official response: a letter from the Labor Department saying it would not investigate Softech because the company technically never had employed Muthuperiasamy – even though Softech’s lawsuit was based on him being an employee who left the labor broker in the lurch.

“They said it was not a DOL problem,” Muthuperiasamy said.

Here is the DOL’s mission statement:

To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.

It sure sounds like it’s the DOL’s problem.

“Not our problem” is something no one wants to hear from any government department. Non-political management and political appointees leading these organizations need to learn that soon.

Surprisingly little hiring in government is political, but a lot of government firing and downsizing is. Outrage is embodied by hash tags and white on red “breaking news” 24 hour news channel tickers. This kind of “not-it” bureaucracy will be targeted by conservatives and abandoned by liberals.

iTunes is Eating my Purchases

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On my iPhone:

On Saturday night I updated to 8.0.1 before going to a friends apartment to visit. Imagine my surprise when songs I purchased, ranked highly and were in playlists on that iPhone were deleted from the iPhone. Songs I was literally listening to hours before and expected to have with me disappeared from my phone.These songs are all songs I purchased through iTunes.

On my Windows 7 laptop:
For a long time iTunes progress bar crawled across a dialog box as it “updated my iTunes Library”. What updating means is that songs that were in my library are no longer there. These songs are all songs I purchased through iTunes.

I didn’t tell my library to do this. I am not using iTunes Match so I have not checked a preference that I want my music stored in iCloud. I use the star rating system to organize my music but when songs have to be re-downloaded, my ratings have to be redone.

This is a problem for a variety of reasons…

  1. iTunes (you must Match) is turning these disappearing purchases into rentals: I’m not enrolled in iTunes match. But it’s treating me like I am. When the songs disappear from my library, then what happens is that if Apple loses rights to a song, I won’t be able to re-download it. What if an album i loved, i paid for was stripped off my device and then pulled from the iTunes store? Then I lose it because they took it out of my library.
  2. I’ve invested hours of time into my iTunes Library: I pay for iTunes. It’s a free download, but I buy content that can only be downloaded through iTunes. I buy iTunes connected devices because I’ve accepted iTunes as my media manager for my home and my personal use.
  3. These are my devices: Apple is using iTunes to modify my devices without my permission. Again, this means they believe that my phone is a rental item as long as I use iTunes. And they also believe that since I installed iTunes on my PC, that my PC and my network drive are also within their rights to unilaterally modify.
  4. Re-downloading files has a material and temporal cost: if i want to listen to a song that is stripped from my iPhone without my knowledge, iTunes would re-download the item. This impacts my data plan limits. In addition, it wastes my time. I already downloaded a song. I already synced devices. I should never have to download it again unless I purposefully delete it from a device or my library.

The solution I want:*

I want to find some sort of alternative app/application ecosystem I can use to decouple my mp3’s from iTunes store/iTunes match/iCloud scheme. From iTunes support threads, I think a lot of iTunes users may benefit from a non Apple music App. The Apple “music” app is designed to support the iTunes Store. I need a music app that is mainly about me being able to play music and doesn’t care where I get the audio files from. A great example is the Overcast App for Podcasting: it has better features than the perfectly fine Apple Podcasts app. I don’t need to sync it with my desktop. I need to find something similar for music. I need to be able to rate music, make playlists and sync it with a library on my phone. It needs to be local file based, not cloud or streaming based. Data charges make cloud based or stream based music services problematic for me. I would pay for this app and pay for this application.

*And no Spotify, Google Music are not viable solutions. Neither is anything from Amazon. They are all fine, but they have stores as well.