Plus ça change,...

...plus c'est la même chose.

Check Cashing Better Than a Bank?

Interesting article - I had always assumed they were a more expensive option.

Professor @LisaServon explains why check cashers and payday lenders can be the smart choice https://t.co/59VlkElXIi pic.twitter.com/C3UR7NAapz

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) February 12, 2017

The first part of this quote gives me pause, but the latter I can see as a real issue:

"If Carlos is like many small contractors operating in New York City, he relies at least in part on undocumented workers, who are unlikely to have bank accounts. If Carlos deposited his check in a bank, it would take a few days to clear — too late to deliver cash on payday. Or maybe the check was a deposit for a job he had just been contracted to do, and he needed supplies to get started. If he couldn't start right away, he risked losing the job to another contractor." 

Going downhill and gaining speed

The end of civilization will be captured in a selfie. https://t.co/XtORAa7VDr

— LNVF (@LoneNutVolFan) October 1, 2015

And he's referring to...

Hey girls, if you hadn't noticed, there's a game going on https://t.co/7pxeSDYafH

— The Sports Quotient (@SportsQuotient) October 1, 2015

Two Wrongs

Black Lives Matter protesters to block finish line at the Twin Cities Marathon.

I don't think this will help bring support to their cause. Attention, yes. Support, no. I'd be most upset if this happened to me.

Technology Makes Us Antisocial

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Via @msuster

Rare and Random

One review of the data suggests that 2012 was a really bad year and not (in statistical terms) a trend.

Mass shootings are rare and random. Does that make it better or worse? I don't know. It does suggest to me that focusing on the prevention of mass shootings might not be the best approach. As a society, we should look at using our resources to reduce overall violence.

Legos vs. AR-15 vs. Weed

Twitter has been hot with a) people tweeting about getting new AR-15 rifles for Christmas and b) those who are less than pleased with the gift of a gun.

In those posts, someone points out how horrible it is that more people got an AR than got Legos. But then again, more people got weed than rifles.

Hipsters

I have never felt the desire to become a hipster. And, almost by definition, would a true hipster allow the hipster label to be applied?

Euron a.k.a. Drunk Cows

The SCOTUS decision on Obamacare has everyone's attention, so we've forgotten for the moment what is going on in Europe.

It reminds me of Enron Cows.

Europe link via Uncle

Priorities

More people have mobile phones than electricity or drinking water. I would assume part of the reason is it is harder to run big pipes than a little wire to some towers.

Good Idea, Bad Idea

Bad Idea Edition...

We've had samurai sword umbrellas and ENDO worries that it won't be long until a swat team is called because someone sends their kid to school with the neato backpack for the Ruger 10/22 Takedown rifle.

In a world where toy guns, embroidered guns on purses, and plastic lightsabers get the TSA all torn up and
where a few hundred rounds of ammunition, is considered a cache or armory, Wired is showing off an ammo can lunch box. Cue the school lockdown now! (Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired)

"So is sanitation!"

StudioXNYC Foursquare rep says, "Privacy is a modern invention," as if that ends the debate on ethics. Someone in audience yells, "So is sanitation!"Tue, Mar 27 19:55:48 from Twitter for iPhone retweeted by asymco

Jamming

Jamming mobile phones is bad enough, but disrupting speech!?!? Scary!

ExtremeTech link via Slashdot.org

The War on Copyright AKA General Purpose Computers AKA Software Defined Radio

Scary stuff.

Cory Doctorow: Lockdown - The coming war on general-purpose computing. 

He makes the argument that SOPA and the like are merely the next wave of assaults on our freedom. Ignorance, greed, and fear will lead to more invasive technology and laws. He connects the dots between copyright and general purpose computing and even things like Software Defined Radios. The "Evil They" would  prevent you from doing things like modifying your UV-3R to expand the usable frequencies. Or manufacture your own AR-15 in your garage.

"Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in “trusted computing" machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that their programs could be strictly regulated by central authorities."

Shame Game

It is a shame that the differences between the police and the army are becoming non-existent. Their roles are supposed to be different, so one would think they would be equipped differently.

Apparently that is not the case. I present the "Cop or Soldier" quiz. It should have been easy. It was not.

Via Says Uncle

A Sign?

So I was doing a preview of the post about the election and what should appear in the ad on the sidebar? Is it a sign? I don't own a wookie suit, but I guess I could find one on the net somewhere.

SOPA

I like being late to the game... it saves me the effort of writing an opinion and I can link to someone who said it better than I could have anyway. Larry Correia:

"As for SOPA, piracy sucks, but I’d much rather have some loser rip me off than give an already out of control government one more Orwellian power."

Amen.

Happy Thought of the Day

My buddy, Slim, always likes to be the ray of sunshine on otherwise gray days...

The Keynesian School of Economics Leads to Violence:

The problem is that eventually the socialist/Keynesian school runs out of other people’s money to spend. They can’t raise taxes high enough, and the market forces them to pay ever higher interest rates to access public markets. When governments increase spending, businesses cut back. The net present value tables always catch up to them.

At this point in the cycle, they generally have created a situation where there are haves and have nots. Forced to cut spending on the people that receive a government check, those people riot.

Watching

Continuing on today's theme of watching, I found this scary infograph about the data a phone company collected about a customer in Germany. (See the interactive version here.)

Or the government could team up with a mobile phone company to track you via Silent SMS texts.

So big companies are tracking you. The government does lots of tracking.

I think we'll see more things like this neat bit of technology (Escort Live) that help level the playing field...

"Escort Live (an accessory for Escort radar detectors) not only detects police speed traps, it also broadcasts their times and locations to other Escort Live owners. They (the traps, not the owners) show up on a map on the phone’s screen, thereby creating a speed-trap social network. The police can’t be thrilled."

Cameras Everywhere - Sousveillance

Clive Thompson talks about sousveillance:

"Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto."

I like the term and the balance of power it suggests.

Examples of videos providing evidence of when people do bad things is all around. Most commonly, we think of catching people in positions of authority misbehaving as in the video below:

Sometimes it even gets people fired -  like the officer that threatened to kill permit holder in what seemed to be a simple incident.

LawDog points out that doing good may have a price. Even knowing the potential consequences, I would hope that I would be like Mr. Green, who recorded the video above, and do the right thing.