No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Our local buses have accessible seats at the front. They have different upholstery than the other seats. Their pattern features pictograms of a man with a walking stick, a pregrant woman, and a woman with two heads. It’s the last one that always baffles me.
In the modern world, the state is a kind of souped up business. That’s why we’re all "taxpayers" instead of "citizens." "Taxpayer" reframes policy outcomes as a kind of customer-loyalty perk. If your taxes are the locus of your relationship with the state, then people who don’t pay taxes — people too young, old, disabled, or unlucky to be working — are not entitled to policy outcomes that reflect their needs.
Cory Doctorow – Standardized testing and schools as factories: Louis CK versus Common Core [Boing Boing]
Picked it up at the American Book Centre in Amsterdam this afternoon. I don’t think vol 3 matches the first two in emotional depth, but it’s still extraordinarily original and beautiful, funny and poignant.
(They didn’t have Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in stock, but I did snag a copy of Flash Boys by Michael Lewis.)
easyJet, the UK’s largest airline, has announced that from today – 14 April 2014, all passengers onboard will be allowed to use their personal electronic devices such as laptops, DVD players, tablets and mobile phones onboard in ‘Flight Mode’ throughout the whole flight including during take-off and landing.
Yay! No more messing about with one book for the flight, and another for take-off and landing.
The notion that “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” is an impossible standard that impedes actual social progress, which always happens incrementally. A much better way to make a difference is to contribute as little as possible to the problem while contributing as much as you can to the solution.
It’s important to hold yourself and others to a high standard, but when people try to do good and you punish them for not doing enough, it makes it hard for them to try again.
Max Temkin (via Pwnmeal Extreme Gaming Oatmeal, via waxy.org)
You know how A Bug’s Life and Galaxy Quest share the same plot? (Naive representative of downtrodden civilization mistakes a troupe of down-at-luck actors/performers for the heroic characters they play, and hires them to fight off the oppressors. The troupe finds courage and strength within to succeed against hopeless odds.)
Well, it recently struck me that the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg/Nick Frost film The World’s End and Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Burning Paradise both tell the same story, just with differently-coloured goo. In Burning Paradise the simulacra bleed green; in The World’s End they explode in chunks of blue goo. But it’s the same mostly peaceful oppression-for-the-greater-good secret alien invasion scenario.