Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses' disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.

https://t.co/XvYDPpR9yd

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Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

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When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

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The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

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The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

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I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

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They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

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Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

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While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

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Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

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But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

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1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

3. I’ve found Braiding Sweetgrass to be a great entry point for non-Indigenous folks to Indigenous scholarship. But this is where yesterday’s epiphany comes in. Neither Braiding Sweetgrass or Gathering Moss tends to the deep deep lineages of Indigenous scholarship in Canada or US

4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

5. Kimmerer does a commendable job of weaving in her own experiences, her family stories+nods to some very important knowledge keepers who deserve to be celebrated for their work. But Braiding Sweetgrass does not tend to the citational politics Sara Ahmed & others teach us about

I've been wanting to write this thread for a while. It has been inspired by hearing a common thought: why can't people just "listen"? If people just followed the rules, we wouldn't be in this mess. I think this is oversimplification of the problem with COVID: 1/

It is true, there are people who haven't been following guidelines (by definition that happened a LOT at Christmas/NYE in my region), but even before, we know transmission in private gatherings happens. 2/

These private gatherings are pictured to be big raucous parties, but in reality, even before lockdown, this is just people having dinner, watching TV, doing things we did before on a daily basis. These little ripples when added across the country make a big wave.. 3/

...and little can be done about this apart from positive messaging. You can't very well have police patrolling neighbourhoods across the country. 4/

Next thing is we keep hearing over and over and over, stay home. There are diminishing returns with this advice, but also, most people who can stay home ARE. So what's the issue? There are a HUGE # of people who can't stay home because they work in essential jobs 5/

Since a lot of my fellow Texans are going to apply for aid through @FEMA let’s talk about the agency and some of the barriers disaster survivors encounter and persisting program flaws.

First things first, @FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Here’s a blog I wrote about its history and shortcomings in how the agency is funded:

Many people will be applying for Individual Assistance (IA), but past disasters have shown us that help isn’t evenly distributed and frequently struggles to reach those in deepest need. This unpacks some of the class bias in accepted/rejected apps:

Of course, there are racial dimensions to this as well:

Documentation is seen as helping reduce fraud, but after a disaster many docs are destroyed. People who are denied assistance and appeal are often told to make small changes to the documents they provide or provide updated documentation b/c of how long the aid process takes.

My wonderful @jainfamilyinst colleagues @laura_bmw & @Edi_Nilaj have released their new report "Student Debt and Young America," which pretty comprehensively demolishes many of the myths about who does and doesn't have student debt.
https://t.co/y02KFosRQ3
Highlights to follow
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@laura_bmw @Edi_Nilaj First of all, look at this one chart that tells you why the student debt crisis is happening: rising debt; stagnant income, and the gap has opened widest for minority borrowers.
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You look at that chart and you see the total failure of the human capital model to explain labor market outcomes, insofar as it even is a falsifiable social science hypothesis.
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Second, while it's true that total loan balances are increasing in income, student debt has increased most over time among the lowest-income groups. This tells you that student debt is becoming a marker of the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged.
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Third, balances on outstanding loans are rising over time, not declining. As I said in my last report, the student debt crisis is a crisis of non-repayment. This is why it's foolish to think the student debt is ever going to be paid back, whether it's cancelled now or not.
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