Tag: Politics

In a bid to avoid climate vote, Oregon Republican Senators cross state lines, go into hiding, threaten to murder cops, as white nationalist paramilitaries pledge armed support

mostlysignssomeportents:

Oregon’s legislature is about to vote on a piece of climate change
cap-and-trade legislation that the Democratic majority are likely to
win, so to avoid the vote, 12 Oregon state senators have gone into
hiding, thus depriving the senate of the necessary quorum.

Under state law, the governor – also a Democrat – is entitled to
dispatch state troopers to drag lawmakers back to Salem for a vote, and
to levy fines on lawmakers who don’t show up for work. Governor Kate
Brown has fined the absent senators $500 each and asked the troopers to
locate and return them.

Meanwhile, the AWOL Republicans are widely believed to be hiding out of
state – the Oregon state cops are coordinating with neighboring states’
law enforcement to locate them – and Republican State Senator Brian
Boquist issued this communique from his undisclosed bunker: “Send
bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political
prisoner.”

The situation has attracted the attention of armed white nationalist paramilitary groups like the 3%ers and Oath Keepers;
Paul Luhrs of the 3%ers announced that the group’s leadership had voted
to support the Republican Senators (Luhrs believes that they are in
Idaho) and has “vowed to provide security, transportation and
refuge…doing whatever it takes to keep these Senators safe.”

Oregon was home to a protracted armed standoff involving a group of white nationalist domestic terrorists who illegally occupied the Malheur wildlife refuge.
The terrorists destroyed public lands, pointed guns at cops and
threatened to shoot them, and were involved in high-speed chases, and were not convicted because they are white.

Oregon’s Republican lawmkers went into hiding in May for four days to avoid a vote on a school funding bill. Oregon Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr bemoaned the fact that the minority Republicans are being “bullied by the majority party.”


https://boingboing.net/2019/06/22/son-of-malheur.html

vastderp:

Uncle Sam: TERRORISM IS EVERYWHERE. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.

America: The police are mowing down unarmed minorities and getting off scot free. Our prisons are a private industry forcing nonviolent drug offenders into slavery for profit and disenfranchising them for life. ICE goons are kidnapping children and deporting their parents to parts unknown. Our working class is being exploited and abused. Oh, and there’s a Russian finger puppet in the Oval Office, you might want to look into that too.

Uncle Sam: NO NOT LIKE THAT

EFF and Open Rights Group Defend the Right to Publish Open Source Software to the UK Government

mostlysignssomeportents:

EFF and Open Rights Group today submitted formal comments to the
British Treasury, urging restraint in applying anti-money-laundering
regulations to the publication of open-source software.

The UK government sought public feedback on proposals to update its
financial regulations pertaining to money laundering and terrorism in
alignment with a larger European directive. The consultation asked for
feedback on applying onerous customer due diligence regulations to the
cryptocurrency space as well as what approach the government should take
in addressing “privacy coins” like Zcash and Monero. Most worrisome,
the government also asked “whether the publication of open-source
software should be subject to [customer due diligence] requirements.”

We’ve seen these kind of attacks on the publication of open source
software before, in fights dating back to the 90s, when the Clinton
administration attempted
to require that anyone merely publishing cryptography source code
obtain a government-issued license as an arms dealer. Attempting to
force today’s open-source software publishers to follow financial
regulations designed to go after those engaged in money laundering is
equally obtuse.

In our comments, we describe the breadth of free, libre, and open
source software (FLOSS) that benefits the world today across industries
and government institutions. We discuss how these regulatory proposals
could have large and unpredictable consequences not only for the
emerging technology of the blockchain ecosystem, but also for the FLOSS
software ecosystem at large. As we stated in our comments:

If the UK government was to determine that open source
software publication should be regulated under money-laundering
regulations, it would be unclear how this would be enforced, or how the
limits of those falling under the regulation would be determined.
Software that could, in theory, provide the ability to enable
cryptocurrency transactions, could be modified before release to remove
these features. Software that lacked this capability could be quickly
adapted to provide it. The core cryptographic algorithms that underlie
various blockchain implementations, smart contract construction and
execution, and secure communications are publicly known and relative
trivial to express and implement. They are published, examined and
improved by academics, enthusiasts, and professionals alike…

The level of uncertainty this would provide to FLOSS use and
provision within the United Kingdom would be considerable. Such
regulations would burden multiple industries to attempt to guarantee
that their software could not be considered part of the infrastructure
of a cryptographic money-laundering scheme.

Moreover, source code is a form of written creative expression, and
open source code is a form of public discourse. Regulating its
publication under anti-money-laundering provisions fails to honor the
free expression rights of software creators in the United Kingdom, and
their collaborators and users in the rest of the world.

Source code is a form of written creative expression, and open source code is a form of public discourse.

EFF is monitoring the regulatory and legislative reactions to new blockchain technologies, and we’ve recently spoken out about misguided ideas for banning cryptocurrencies and overbroad regulatory responses to decentralized exchanges.
Increasingly, the regulatory backlash against cryptocurrencies is being
tied to overbroad proposals that would censor the publication of
open-source software, and restrict researchers’ ability to investigate,
critique and communicate about the opportunities and risks of
cryptocurrency.

This issue transcends controversies surrounding blockchain tech and
could have significant implications for technological innovation,
academic research, and freedom of expression. We’ll continue to watch
the proceedings with HM Treasury, but fear similar anti-FLOSS proposals
could emerge—particularly as other member states of the European Union
transpose the same Anti-Money Laundering Directive into their own laws.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/eff-and-open-rights-group-defend-right-publish-open-source-software-uk-government

Falsely Accusing Poor Disabled People of Lying About Their Disabilities Gets Them Killed.

smallest-feeblest-boggart:

Society either criminalizes & dehumanizes disabled people, or accuses them of cheating the system. We are either second class citizens, or liars and thieves.

The accusations vary based on what is most likely to allow privileged parties to shirk the social responsibility of allowing disabled people to live and participate in society as equals human beings. The easiest way to turn the public against its minority citizens is to insist they are undeserving.

We are inconvenient. In their eyes this is an inexcusable crime.

bernie sanders voters be like

prismatic-bell:

systlin:

azuuure:

isiwashere:

stappls:

nierfenhimer:

soundlyawake:

phineaslightfoot:

hollowedskin:

phineaslightfoot:

hollowedskin:

queercatmermaid:

hollowedskin:

fullten:

ohmygil:

fullten:

mostlyjudson:

fullten:

mostlyjudson:

What 16 trillion dollar debt? I have no idea how my free stuff is going to appear. I just know I want it.

He’s raising taxes on the rich

He’s planning on stealing more from people… ok that makes sense. Just because *They* are rich doesn’t mean those people deserve to have more of their wealth stolen from them.

Yes because the wealthy billionaires that steal and undervalue labor, and companies that scapegoat paying taxes are really hurting

why even bring up the national debt if you don’t want people to pay taxes

I’m on the phone half asleep, but yeah, Thank you for real

I don’t think OP understands what rich people are.
Like
they literally won’t even notice the taxes. It will make no impact on the wealthy at all. You could take literally 50% of the income of the top 10% and they would have to make zero changes to their lifestyle.

Money to them is just a high score. They whinge when you take them down a bit but it makes literally no difference because they’re still winning the fucking game.

They do actually 100% deserve to have their money taken. People are starving to death because we think disability payments shouldn’t be enough to live on and minimum wage should be half of what you need to survive so yeah, I think millionaires and billionaires deserve to have a tiny fucking fraction of the money they could never spend in a fucking lifetime so I can fucking EAT AT ALL.

I also don’t think people understand actually how much a billion dollars is. Like. it’s such an enormous number.

We think of numbers that big like a set of stairs, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion.

With each jump just being another step on the staircase and not realising HOW FUCKING HUGE each step is, and how vast the gap is between each of them.

Aside from the fact that even a million dollars is far more than you need, a billion is disgusting excess. There is no conceivable way one person could justify needing a billion dollars when you know HOW MUCH that is.

To put it in perspective:
a million seconds is 11 and a half days
a billion seconds is 31 years and 9 months.

Another example would be Warren Buffett:
He made $US12.7 billion in 2013. That was his yearly income, not his total worth. Just his income for 2013.

That’s $37 million per day;
$1.54 million per hour;  
$25,694 per minute 

How much do you get per hour? Is it enough to live on?
the minimum wage in america is $15,080 per year
That man makes more money per minute just for being alive, even in his sleep than most of you do in an entire year.  

also, just using seconds for reference again

15,080 seconds is just over 4 hours.
12.7 billion seconds is 402 years and 4 months.

Can someone please make a staircase graph with dollar amounts?

I have discalcula and have a hard time conceptualizing numbers.
I feel like that’s a great analogy and would help me.

Ok so I tried and the number differences broke the weird little graphing thing I was using.

so here we have one thousand (1,000) not showing
one million (1,000,000) at one pixel

and one billlion (100,000,000) is the big pilon there.

I added fifty million in to show because that graph goes in increments of 50 million.

So how much is 50 million compared to a million though, it’s only one pixel? 

so smol.
But still we’re trying to get down to a thousand, (which is ten hundred-dollar-bills.)

So what does a million look like compared to a thousand?

oh. We broke it again. It will only go in 50 thousands. 
So we got to look at how big 50k is compared to our wad of hunjies.

ok.

This is why i like using the seconds instead of graphs… 
But I won’t give up here. 

the reason it’s so so hard to process is because a BILLION is an enormous number. there comes a point with numbers where we can’t actually process them and its just like…a lot. And more than “a lot” is still “a lot”.

So we need visual representation. Lets use pennies (thanks megapenny)

Imagine a penny. Just one.

Ok, you get a thousand pennies a week, and you end up with 52 thousand in a year. If they were dollars that’s a nice paying wage.

with me?

now this is a thousand pennies. 

this is 50 thousand pennies (1 square foot solid of pennies! COOOOL)
It’s roughly how many pennies you would have in a year if you got a thousand pennies a week.

This is a million pennies

And this is a billion pennies

(Which is 5 schoolbuss sized blocks of solid pennies.)

that is so many.

.

The problem with numbers is that we see them written like this

1
100
1000
1000000
1000000000

And we kind of subconciously go “well… it’s only increasing a little at a time, like a staircase. When the progression is more like 

1.

10……….

100……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

……….

1000………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. 

And so on. which is not a staircase I want to climb because it starts off reasonable and then jumps to building size, then mountain size.

We ‘add a zero’ which is confusing because it’s timesing (x) not adding (+).

to make ten thousand dots, I would copy all the dots in my thousand pile, and paste them ten times. to make a hundred thousand, I would copy all the dots in my ten-thousand-dot pile and paste them ten times. thats what “times by ten” means. 

That’s what adding a zero is, it’s multiplying (x) the last number we had by ten. (i also say timesing: as in copy and pasting it ten times)
try it with a word document and see how many pages it takes to get you a billion dots, and how many it takes for 15 thousand (minimum wage anual)

hopefully this was at least somewhat useful.

Anyway, the point is that if we imagine them as dollar coins, and one square block is established as good enough to live by a year, there’s no reason one individual deserves 5 bus-worths.

Omg this is excellent!
Thank you so much, that does really help!
The pennies in particular

Check out this awesome visual representation of how messed up our society is, everyone!

I literally was about to google a visual representation of this and then THERE IT WAS IN THE POST

Seriously. It’s time for people to wake the fuck up. I’m sick of the godsdamned wilful blindness.

We had this conversation in my sociology class.

If you dont understand the wealth distribution in america, here you go

This is what OP and America thinks it is

What it actually is. Evaluate your life. Evaluate your income. This is why we need to take from the 1%

The 1% makes so much money its off the grid. 

If you stack the 1% money next to eachother it would be like this

That 0% is your college students and people working fast food. Its below the poverty line. So taxing the 1% wont do shit to him.

This post got so incredibly awesome I’m almost glad OP posted it in the first place-almost

Idgaf how much a billion is. You not about to take MY money and spend it on who knows what to pay a debt when you shouldn’t have been borrowing the money in the first place.

People be making policies with the mindset that they going to be poor forever.

Socialism and more government intervention is NOT the answer

They’re not taking YOUR money. You are not at the top of that graph. 

And you’re not gonna get there either. That’s the myth they sell you, but it’s just that; a myth. 

My problem isn’t loans, asshole, it’s that food costs money. I’d like to NOT die of malnutrition because in my world broccoli is a LUXURY ITEM, you feel me, asshole?