onfocus

"The Federal Trade Commission has issued a proposed order banning online counseling service BetterHelp, Inc. from sharing consumers’ health data, including sensitive information about mental health challenges, for advertising. The proposed order also requires the company to pay $7.8 million to consumers to settle charges that it revealed consumers’ sensitive data with third parties such as Facebook and Snapchat for advertising after promising to keep such data private."

Targeted advertising money makes people behave in awful ways. We need more government intervention like this because companies have shown over and over and over that they don’t respect privacy.

"Those founding fathers drafted a Constitution that denied the humanity of Edie and Nancy; it didn’t even consider them to be “persons”, and you want to tell me that the only way to properly interpret the Constitution is to endorse and adopt their value system without question? That might honor Madison, but it dishonors Edie and Nancy."

A story about how the justice system looks different when you value everyone it’s supposed to serve.

"In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case."

Corrupt court.

"From the reporting about the Secret Service and the senior DHS officials, it becomes pretty clear that this is not just a DOD problem, not just an Army problem, but multiagency," said Dara Silvestre, a spokeswoman for American Oversight.

Oh great, the whole system is in on it. Will it be firings across the board or zero accountability?

"The Senate leadership barely even pretended to try to force their hands by scheduling a vote. Instead, senators are reportedly going on their Memorial Day recess. It’s a broken, worthless institution."

Definitely feeling this.

"But the vote failed along party lines, raising fresh doubts about the possibility of robust debate, let alone eventual compromise, on gun safety measures. The final vote was 47-47, short of the 60 needed to take up the bill. All Republicans voted against it."

This is just your regular reminder to never vote for a Republican even if you'd like to have a beer with them personally. And you shouldn't have a beer with them either. Shun the death cult.

"Simple, dependable architectures such as the one covidtests.gov seems to employ are proven at scale. This affords agencies the space to focus on improved user experience and service delivery, rather than consuming large resources keeping sites up and running. This takes operational experience and know-how, though; even with the use of managed services, composing a full, end-to-end digital service experience takes skill."

The free covid tests site is powered by standard AWS components. And it seemed to hold up well under pressure, nice work USPS.

"Since July, the reduction in family poverty has been mostly sustained by monthly payments worth as much as $300 per child. The payments have lifted between 3 and 4 million children above the poverty line each month. “The sheer magnitude of just that number is not what we normally see on a regular basis, especially from a single policy,” Megan Curran, director of policy at Columbia’s Center on Poverty, said in an interview."

[this is good] (But the sub-headline should be the big part and the headline should be the small part.)

The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden signed into law Monday has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more.

[this is good]

"But daylight saving time doesn’t just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences."

There's also evidence that several programmers quit the profession every year because calculating date differences while accounting for hour shifts across time zones drives them out. But yeah we're not really getting energy savings through mass interference with our sleep schedules.

"But none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question Democrats face. They have plenty of ideas that could improve people’s lives and strengthen democracy. But they have, repeatedly, proven themselves more committed to preserving the status quo of the political system than fulfilling their promises to voters. They have preferred the false peace of decorum to the true progress of democracy."

I agree this is the test for Democrats. They need to be able to endure a few bad media cycles to get important work done. Majority rule is how the system is supposed to work.

See also: The Senate Filibuster Is Another Monument to White Supremacy (Aaron Burr really was the worst.)