LearnLiberty

thenewrepublic: “There is nary a hoodie in a tech founder’s...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:26:22 -0400

“There is nary a hoodie in a tech founder’s wardrobe that hasn’t gotten a mention in the press, which has come to fetishize the casualwear of Silicon Valley. But is the liberal mainstream media really reporting both sides of this story?”

See more from Noreen Malone’s piece, “Fourteen Tech Founders NOT Wearing Hoodies,” here.

(Photos from Getty Images)

vicemag: Get Rich or High Trying: The Coming Age of Corporate...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:08:52 -0400

vicemag:

Get Rich or High Trying: The Coming Age of Corporate Cannabis

“At this moment in history, you’ve got to choose between being in favor of legalization, or being against ‘the system.’”

Mason Tvert is leading a quick tour of what he irreverently describes as the Marijuana Manor—a genteel, three-story, historically-registered, 1880s-era brick and stained-glass building in downtown Denver that was recently converted into permanent office space for a consortium of do-gooders fighting to make legal cannabis work in America. The building houses four separate activist organizations, a trade association, and a law firm. Tvert is clad in a conservative suit jacket and tie worn above a pair of faded blue-jeans—an ensemble compiled in deference to a remote television appearance earlier in the day that shot him from the waist up. His clashing outfit offers an unintended statement on the split-personality of the pot world right now: Business in the front, party in the back.

Last November, Tvert certainly had plenty of reason to celebrate, after heading a historic campaign that saw voters in Colorado approve Amendment 64 by a wide margin, ushering in a new era of state-legal commercial cannabis cultivation and retail sales of up to an ounce for all adults 21 and over. A similar ballot initiative in Washington State also passed easily on the unforgettable night when pot outperformed the president, while making headlines around the world.

To date, lawmakers in both states continue to work out exactly how to implement the herb-friendly will of their citizenry, ever-mindful that a miraculous crop that can’t kill you, won’t hurt you, and just might heal you remains fully illegal under federal law, even if you’ve got terminal cancer and floor seats to see Phish. Despite the fact that smoking a joint remains a lot less dangerous than swilling booze. Not to mention that the same federales imposing cannabis prohibition ultimately answer to a guy best known in his youth for “roof hits,” “interceptions,” and sharing some righteous Maui Wowie with the Choom Gang.

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"The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:51:51 -0400

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

- Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF, chiming in on the pronunciation of the word. (As everyone knows, choosy memes choose “jif.”) Wilhite, a former CompuServe employee, created the format in 1987 and is to receive an award for his creation tonight. (via shortformblog)

Barticles: Survival strategies of Governmentus Omnipotus

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:34:53 -0400

Barticles: Survival strategies of Governmentus Omnipotus:

barticles:

Government, an aggressive and complex multicellular organism, can be found in nearly every region and climate of the planet, including those such as North America where the natural habitat is often inhospitable. In order to thrive in such climates, government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies. These have enabled it to co-exist with, and often out-compete, other species.

A full examination of these strategies falls beyond the scope of this paper, but a brief summary should suffice to acquaint the lay reader with the more salient ones.

Learned Predator Recognition. Government in the United States has several highly sophisticated means, from satellite surveillance to warrantless wiretapping, to scrutinize its environment for potential threats, both external and internal. The Nixon administration maintained an enemies list. The administration of President Barack Obama developed an “attack watch” website, and its Department of Homeland Security identified veterans returning from Iraq as potential terrorists. And, like the FBI under President Bush, the Justice Department under Obama trolled through the phone logs of national reporters, seeking out potential weaknesses.

Hypertrophy. Size alone confers distinct advantages in the competition for resources and the battle for survival. It is not surprising, therefore, that government grows at a remarkable rate. Consider public education: In 2009, the cost of a K-12 education, per student, exceeded $151,000 – almost three times the amount, after adjusting for inflation, spent per student in 1970. The story is the same for social-welfare spending, which has increased 375 percent in constant dollars since 1965. Even the most fearsome apex predators often are daunted by the prospect of confronting such powerful creatures.

Metastasis.Many government operations are able to permeate the bureaucratic lining and spread to other agencies. The federal government alone operates 33 distinct housing-assistance programs across four different agencies, and 49 job-training programs across eight different agencies. This strategy helps ensure that even if one strain of programs dies off, many others will remain.

Alleopathy.In the competition for finite resources, government has developed various means of inhibiting other organisms. Public school systems have become adept at fending off school-choice proposals, for instance. The Internal Revenue Service also has been used as a weapon. The earliest known occurrence of this in the wild was recorded during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Nixon highly favored this tactic as well. More recently, the Obama administration has targeted tea-party groups and other organizations that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution,” according to published accounts.

Crypsis.The simplest way to evade attack is to avoid being detected. Government therefore has several means of remaining unnoticed – principal among them taxpayer withholding. Through withholding, the government is able to feed its voracious appetite without, in many cases, the host organism’s knowledge or awareness.

Thanatosis. Many creatures, including the possum and the hog-nosed snake, feign death to avoid predation. This behavior has been observed in government as well. Programs thought to have been killed off only to spring back to life at a later date include the WWII-era mohair subsidy and the even older federal helium program, originally created to ensure a supply of helium for WWI-era dirigibles. In 2013, The Washington Post reported that the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to continue its operations.

Symbiosis. In many cases government programs have developed mutually beneficial relationships with other organisms that help them to ward off attack. Military systems are particularly adept at this survival technique. The F-22 Raptor program involves more than 1,000 contracting companies in 46 states. Military systems have even developed defenses against attacks from other government colonies. In 2010 the U.S. Army conducted a review of MEADS, the Medium Extended Air Defense System, which found it ill-suited to current defense needs. “Current Army position is: Terminate MEADS,” the Army wrote. Yet according to a 2013 issue of Government Executive, MEADS “is continuing to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding.”

Invasiveness. Constantly seeking out new territory and food sources, government is among the most aggressive of all invasive species. Anti-poverty programs, once designed to ease the plight of the poor, now routinely seek out applicants with incomes of two to four times the federal poverty level. The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010, conferred on government the unprecedented power to force Americans to purchase a commercial good independent of any consumer behavior. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proclaims as its goal to “increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” To that end it has adopted a variety of strategies, including a partnership with the Mexican government through which Mexican consulates spread the word that resident aliens can apply for U.S. food stamps without having to answer questions about their immigration status. And in 2013, The Washington Post reported on the experience of federal employee Dillie Nerios in Florida: “It is Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a quota she usually exceeds.”

CONCLUSION: While a certain amount of government is necessary for the health of any ecosystem, too much can prove devastating. It is important, therefore, to actively monitor and limit government lest it threaten Nature’s delicate balance. However, government’s aggressiveness and highly developed survival mechanisms will make this an arduous task for the foreseeable future.

EFF Will Accept Bitcoins to Support Digital Liberty

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:09:54 -0400

EFF Will Accept Bitcoins to Support Digital Liberty:

Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be accepting Bitcoin donations through our website. You can use them to make one-time donations, set up monthly donations or get an EFF membership (which includes awesome membership swag like EFF hats and digital freedom t-shirts).

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:51:58 -0400

"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:34:58 -0400

“When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”

- Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826)
Source: (1821) in a letter to Gideon Granger. (via timlebsack)

vicemag: How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:43:44 -0400

vicemag:

How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?

You should probably be afraid, at least a little, of the federal government. The reason for this doesn’t have anything to do with conspiracy theories about fluoridation or the Obama administration hoarding ammo to keep it out of the hands of True Patriots. It’s simpler than that: you should be worried about the US government because it is huge and well funded and powerful and, most importantly, you don’t know what it’s doing.

The civics class version of government—that there are three branches, each with its own checks and balances and blah blah blah—is hopelessly outdated. For one thing, the legislative branch is paralyzed by partisanship and a set of rules that make it impossible for it to do anything but stop laws from getting enacted. For another, as documented by the Washington Post in 2010, the governmental agencies that are in charge of “national security” have grown like not-all-that-benign tumors, consuming billions of tax dollars, constructing massive top-secret facilities, and employing hundreds of thousands of people whose job descriptions you don’t have the security clearance to know. The national security state is vast and unknowable, practically its own branch of government at this point, with its own secret history. Millions upon millions of documents are classified, many unnecessarily. By some counts, there are more pages of classified documents in the US than there are unclassified—and the government spends $12 billion a year keeping all that information under wraps.

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theonion: Yahoo Buying Tumblr For $1.1 Billion: More American...

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:26:24 -0400

theonion:

Yahoo Buying Tumblr For $1.1 Billion: More American Voices

ShortFormBlog: News!

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:34:45 -0400

ShortFormBlog: News!:

shortformblog:

staff:

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing.

So what’s new? Simply, Tumblr gets better faster. The work ahead of us remains the same – and we still have a long way to go! – but with more resources to draw from.

Yahoo is the original Internet company, and Marissa and her team share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. I couldn’t be more excited to have her help. We also share a vision for Tumblr’s business that doesn’t compromise the community and product we love. Plus both our logos end with punctuation!

As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down.

Fuck yeah,
David

“Fuck yeah.” — David Karp

breakingnews: Yahoo! buys Tumblr The New York Times: The board...

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:17:38 -0400

breakingnews:

Yahoo! buys Tumblr

The New York Times: The board of Yahoo, the faded Web pioneer, agreed on Sunday to buy the popular blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash, the companies announced Monday, a signal of how the company plans to reposition itself as the technology industry makes a headlong rush into social media.

Photo: yahoo.tumblr.com

Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:51:41 -0400

Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!:

shortformblog:

yahoo:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and…

Note to Yahoo: If you post images in text posts, they don’t look as good on the dashboard as straight-up image posts. You guys are new here, so we’ll give you some time to get used to things.

"The Marxist Karl Mannheim was presented with a problem: If everybody is determined by their class..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:34:53 -0400

“The Marxist Karl Mannheim was presented with a problem: If everybody is determined by their class interest, what about intellectuals? What about Marx, who was obviously a bourgeois type, and so forth. Where do they fit in? His answer was that intellectuals free float. They levitate above the class struggle. So everybody else is determined but we’re free. This is the typical determinist argument: All you guys are determined but I’m not. I’ve somehow broken through and have free will.”

- Murray Rothbard (via eltigrechico)

Just finished work for the day... at 2:05 am...

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:17:38 -0400

sugashane:

I haven’t been posting much here or anywhere and that’s because I’ve been working like a mule. I’ve been putting in 50 to 60 hours a week for a few months now but this last week has spiked up to 80 hours…
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reblogging the hustle

Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:26:04 -0400

Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press | Wired Opinion | Wired.com:

We now live in a world where public servants informing the public about government behavior or wrongdoing must practice the tradecraft of drug dealers and spies. Otherwise, these informants could get caught in the web of administrations that view George Orwell’s 1984 as an operations manual.

With the recent revelation that the Department of Justice under the Obama administration secretly obtained phone records for Associated Press journalists — and previous subpoenas by the Bush administration targeting the Washington Post and New York Times — it is clear that whether Democrat or Republican, we now live in a surveillance dystopia beyond Orwell’s Big Brother vision.

So how can one safely leak information to the press?

C4SS.ORG: Portland neighbors pave their own potholes

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:10:19 -0400

C4SS.ORG: Portland neighbors pave their own potholes:

c4ss:

PORTLAND – A group of Southwest Portland residents decided they were tired of neighborhood potholes and hired a contractor to fix the problem. But the city might now charge those residents to bring those unpermitted repairs up to code.

Homeowner Peter Samson said that until about seven months ago he could barely even make it into his own driveway because the road in front of his Multnomah Village home—Southwest 37th Avenue–was unimproved.

He said driving home was like an off-road adventure. Neighbor Paul Hughes said the gullies created by the potholes channeled water into his home.

“It was obvious to all of us the city was never going to do anything on its own,” Hughes said.

They told KGW that when they spoke with city officials about the improvements they were told it would cost each homeowner about $20,000.

Instead the homeowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Last October they hired a paving company to do the job for only about $1,000 per resident. …

"There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal...."

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:17:36 -0400

“There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.”

- Frédéric Bastiat (via thinksquad)

didoofcarthage: Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrant van...

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:09:01 -0400

didoofcarthage:

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrant van Rijn

Netherlands, 1653

oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Joy is not in things; it is in us."

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:51:56 -0400

“Joy is not in things; it is in us.”

- Richard Wagner (via timlebsack)

"Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:34:50 -0400

“Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Where ever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.”

- Calvin Coolidge (via timlebsack)