If it’s the latter, if you’ve decided that making just enough profit to maximize your real goal is the purpose of the organization, what an extraordinary opportunity. Organizations of humans with a clear measured goal and just enough profit to get there can make a huge impact.
[As I’ve said… priorities are the junk draw of decision making. The clearer you are about your goals the more you are going to accomplish.]
Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company to Fight Climate Change:
Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.
The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.
At the same time, Mr. Chouinard’s relinquishment of the family fortune is in keeping with his longstanding disregard for business norms, and his lifelong love for the environment.
[More on this soon… but I’m not surprised, but deeply impressed.]
The MTA’s switch to OMNY machines is a privacy nightmare:
Cards like the ones these new machines will be supplying are likely to follow the model of other Cubic Corp. cards, including San Francisco’s Clipper and London’s Oyster cards. The OMNY card will likely have a persistent identifier that makes tracking people throughout the city an easy task.
Tying those journeys to a real name and personal information becomes significantly easier if you link that card, or a phone or credit card, with an OMNY account. Accounts have users’ names, payment information, and every web tracker and cookie the OMNY account management site might decide to deploy—along with data scraped from social media—associated with their method of entry.
While the MTA’s MetroCard is also run by Cubic, that system was deployed in 1991 and doesn’t have quite the same tracking capabilities. Transit justice organization TransitCenter reported that the MTA has stated OMNY will give the city “near-instantaneous” reporting on rider tap-ins and travel, an improvement from weeklong delays for MetroCard data. Tap-to-pay with a phone leverages near-field communication (NFC) technology, a system with its own issues that exacerbate the OMNY system’s existing privacy concerns.
Who will they share this new trove of data with? The current legal landscape and previous experience with Cubic tells us that warrantless access to this data is both permitted and commonly exercised.
[It’s gettin’ so that you can’t do nothing in peace anymore…]
Just remember that Trump stole our documents after leading a violent attempt to overthrow our election. There were no redactions in that much bigger crime. We all saw it with our own eyes. Speaking of what we already know, the Feds wanted the redactions in part because “if witnesses’ identities are exposed, they could be subjected to harms including retaliation, intimidation, or harassment, and even threats to their physical safety.” We’ve seen this happen already, too.
[I want to know what the plan was for all these documents. Why was Trump hanging on to them?]
“I Call Bullshit!” Jon Stewart on the PACT Act Being Blocked in the Senate – YouTube:
Jon Stewart joined an impassioned press conference on Thursday, calling out Republican Senators who are blocking passage of the PACT Act in the Senate. The bill will expand healthcare and benefits for the more than three million veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service. The Senate originally passed the legislation in June with extraordinary bipartisan support. The House passed it shortly thereafter, and it arrived back to the Senate on Wednesday for final passage. But a group of Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Pat Toomey, decided to block the measure for purely political reasons, costing sick veterans time they do not have.
[“This is an embarrassment – to the Senate, to the country, to the founders, and all that they profess to hold dear. If this is America first, then America is fucked.” It’s heartbreaking that politics and power has diverged so greatly from what it right.]
Teach Woodworking – or Else – Lost Art Press:
Finally, I try to learn from my students. Even a first-day woodworker can teach me something because they are coming at it with fresh eyes. Or without preconceived notions.
[Lots of truths in that list no matter what you are teaching. And while I know everyone categorizes certain types of knowledge I believe this applies to everything. You can always teach what you know, regardless of topic, but I do make one request. Only teach what you know by doing. If you can’t practice the thing you’re teaching (lots of topics leap to mind) then maybe it requires some level of certification. If you’re not a surgeon, maybe trying to teach surgery is a, er, um, less good idea.]
The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice:
Quote Investigator: Theodore Parker was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810 who called for the abolition of slavery. In 1853 a collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion” by Parker was published and the third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe:
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.
The words of Parker’s sermon above foreshadowed the Civil War fought in the 1860s. The passage was reprinted in later collections of Parker’s works. A similar statement using the same metaphor was printed in a book called “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” with a copyright date of 1871 and publication date of 1905. The author was not identified:
We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice. Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory of the world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice will not fail and perish out from the world of men, nor will what is really wrong and contrary to God’s real law of justice continually endure.
[Buoying my spirits…]
Source: Daring Fireball
Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, “Hard-lock my iPhone”.
The second thing is to know your rights. Never ever hand your phone to a cop or anyone vaguely cop-like, like the rent-a-cops working for TSA. If they tell you that you must, refuse. They can and will lie to you about this. If you really need to hand it over, they’ll take it from you. And they won’t get anything from it, because you’ll have already hard-locked it, and you’ll know that you cannot be required to give them your passcode.
[Nothing to add. Well maybe… drill at dinner once a month until it has set in for the whole family? Just a thought. We did last night.]
The Slap Trap Crap | NextDraft:
Because this is an example of the same kind of asinine false equivalence that we’ve seen soil the media for the past several years. There were not two sides to Trump’s habitual lying. There are not two sides to the vaccine debate. There are not two sides to the potential upside of using disinfectant on the inside of your body. There are not two sides to the climate change debate. There are not two sides to the Jan 6 insurrection story. There are not two sides to the 2020 election results. Yesterday, Donald Trump requested that Vladimir Putin dig up and share dirt on Joe Biden’s family. At a time of war, that’s straight up treachery, the kind of anti-American garbage this criminal has been spewing for years. End of story.
Being unbiased does not mean giving lies the same weight as the truth.
[All the yes!]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 