Binding arbitration is corporate America’s favorite dirty trick: to use a product, you are forced to give up your right to sue if the company hurts you, cheats you, or even kills you.
But if you buy a Pixel 3, there’s a bizarre, obscure option where you are given the chance to enter your device’s serial number in order to opt out of binding arbitration.
It feels like some kind of uneasy truce between different Google
factions: the mustache-twirling villains who say, “Who cares if it looks
evil? We’re Google, fuck you!” and the more image-conscious ones who
say, “OK, fine, but if we ever do end up in the middle of a shitstorm over this, we can point to this opt-out option and say, ‘See? Everyone chose
binding arbitration! There was a perfectly easy way not to choose it,
in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory
with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
In any event, if you have a Pixel 3, you should opt out of binding arbitration.
There are many different factors behind this crisis, but one
incontrovertible fact looms over every explanation: there isn’t anywhere
for homeless people to live, and housing is the most reliable solution to homelessness.
Accordingly, the city of San Francisco’s Prop C is proposing to tax its
giant, super-profitable, tax-avoiding tech companies (with gross
turnover exceeding $50m) to build housing for 4,000 homeless people.
While some tech companies (like Salesforce) have backed the measure,
Lyft and Stripe have made major contributions to fund the No-on-C
campaign being run by the Chamber of Commerce’s PAC.
Lyft’s CEO calls the company “woke” and it is often positioned as “fair
trade Uber,” an ethical alternative to the Ayn-Rand-inspired
performative cruelty of Uber and its management. But Lyft’s major
investor is the human monster and Trump ally Peter Thiel
who believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and thinks that
“democracy is incompatible with freedom,” and every dime Lyft makes
enriches Thiel and gives him more money to spend on achieving his
apocalyptic extremist agenda.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.
A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.
The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
One overlooked thing that really sets the Lord of the Rings films apart from other franchises is how earnest they are-
Most movies are so afraid of being “cheesy” that whenever they say something like “friendship is the most powerful force in the world” they quickly undercut it with a joke to show We Don’t Really Believe That! 😉 Even Disney films nowadays have the characters mock their own movie’s tropes (”if you start singing, I’m gonna throw up!”) It’s like winking at the camera: “See, audience? We know this is ridiculous! We’re in on the joke!”
But Lord of the Rings is just 12.5 hours of friendship and love being the most powerful forces in the world, played straight. Characters have conversations about how much their home and family and friends mean to them, how hope is eternal, how there is so much in the world that’s worth living for…. and the film doesn’t apologize for that. There’s no winking at the audience about How Cheesy and Silly All This Is; it’s just. Completely in earnest.
And when Lord of the Rings does “lean on the fourth wall” to talk about storytelling within the film, it’s never to make jokes about How Ridiculous These Storytelling Tropes are (the way most films do)…. but instead to talk about how valuable these stories can be. Like Sam’s Speech at the end of the Two Towers: the greatest stories are ones that give you something to believe in, give you hope, that help you see there are things in a bleak violent world that are worth living for
Earnestness is so much cooler than all the hip cynicism in the world. You go LOTR
Ruby Bridges was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
This movie made me cry, I was so heart broken by how Ruby Bridges was treated! She was only 6, but was so strong. She is a very brave girl and she did not care what the white folks called her.
People are simply disgusting to minimize people by skin color!
Ruby you might not think you’re a hero… But to other people you are! You are A HERO and you are A PERSON WHO MADE AMERICA CHANGE!
this is white culture, this is their history, this is their legacy…being enraged at a damn baby just because she’s black.
she’s still alive by the way
Ruby Bridges in 2010
“As Bridges describes it, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.“ Former United States Deputy Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.“
U.S. Marshals escorted Bridges to and from school
As soon as Bridges entered the school, white parents pulled their own children out; all the teachers refused to teach while a black child was enrolled. Only one person agreed to teach Ruby and that was Barbara Henry, from Boston, Massachusetts, and for over a year Henry taught her alone, “as if she were teaching a whole class.”
Every morning, as Bridges walked to school, one woman would threaten to poison her; because of this, the U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower, who were overseeing her safety, allowed Ruby to eat only the food that she brought from home.
Another woman at the school put a black baby doll in a wooden coffin and protested with it outside the school, a sight that Bridges Hall has said “scared me more than the nasty things people screamed at us.” At her mother’s suggestion, Bridges began to pray on the way to school, which she found provided protection from the comments yelled at her on the daily walks.”
THIS SHIT WAS ONLY 58 YEARS AGO. PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THIS RACIST TERRORISM AND ACTS LIKE IT ARE STILL ALIVE, AND THEIR KIDS ARE IN THEIR 40′S AND 50′S.
DON’T LET RACISM APOLOGISTS GET AWAY WITH “WHY ARE YOU LIVING IN THE PAST,” BULLSHIT ARGUMENTS. WE ARE LITERALLY STILL DEALING WITH THE FAMILIES THAT FORMED HATE MOBS OVER BLACK CHILDREN ATTENDING SCHOOL WITH WHITE KIDS.
Fun Vampire Fact; the reason that Vampires traditionally cannot see their reflections in a mirror is because mirrors used to be backed with a reflective layer of silver — which, as the metal of purity, would not ‘interact’ with Vampires, who are the Devil’s work.
However, modern mirrors have used aluminum as their reflective backing for many years now — and aluminum is not a ‘picky’ metal at all. So Vampires are able to see their reflections in modern mirrors.
All I can think about is a vampire used to not seeing their reflection in mirrors for centuries, and one day they are just walking along and unknowingly pass a mirror backed with aluminum and THEY NEARLY SHIT THEMSELVES.
