Scooter Libby, adviser to VP Dick Cheney, was indicted, prosecuted, convicted for perjury and making false claims to federal agents, and subsequently sentenced to 30 months in federal prison (which President Bush commuted). Until people are prosecuted and imprisoned in these cases of lying to Congress, I'll know our government isn't serious about preventing perjury.

I have to admire this strategy to wrap AirBnB in the banner of helping disaster victims. Besides being a valuable service for those victims and great PR for the company, it gives them a very effective argument to counter the rent-seeking behavior of the industry they're displacing and to attack enabling bureaucrats and politicians with ("Joe Smith wants to deny aid to disaster victims. Vote Mary Doaks for City Council.") I hope Uber is watching and learning from this.

Jackson isn't interested in waging race war, he wants to shakedown businesses for money for his organization and those of his cronies. Making it about race is just his form of extortion. Notice that whenever he goes after some company, it's suddenly made all better when it makes a donation to his cause and/or hires one or more people of Jackson's designation. I really admire the way the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor refused to knuckle under to Jackson back in 2001 after Jackson labeled Cypress a "white supremacist hate group.’” I hope every Silicon Valley target of his does the same.

What I found more interesting was the story mentioned in the SEO story that Carrasco got scammed by a couple of faux "Native Americans," who made off with 41 thousand pounds of the utility's scrap copper after conning Carrasco into donating it to their non-existent children's crafts program. Even though originally it was supposed to be a "small amount", since Seattle City Lights is publicly owned, I would think donations, unless authorized by the city government, would be considered gifts of public funds. I can see why this guy wants to scrub his record, cuz it ain't good. And amazingly, City Lights keeps paying him a quarter of a mil a year.

The problem does't come from, "If I'm in group A, then I must have beliefs X," it comes from the recognition that an issue will be seized upon by a faction and used to pump their wider agenda. Use climate change, since the OP brought it up: Rather than a rational discussion of whether it's really happening, whether it's human-caused if so, and what to do about it if anything, we've got one side using it to justify all manner of intrusive measures, while the other wants to ignore the issue entirely. The same thing happens with any talk about WMD, terrorism, abortion, etc. The issue itself is the carrier wave for a lot of additional modulation that's usually far off the topic but important to one side or the other. It's the, "Never let a crisis go to waste" mentality. I don't know how you fix that.

Yesterday I got several Google results with "deep dive" in them. Today I turn to a Salon story and there it is in paragraph 1. Now Slashdot. Looks like a new catchphrase has hit critical mass.

On the sublet issue: you're not charging them to park there, you're accepting a bribe to incentivize you to leave. I see this as the same as some guy cruising around and offering you a sawbuck to pull out and let him take your spot.

Change the app so that a "seller" isn't demanding payment, he just makes it known that if, say, $20 shows up in his account from some generous donor, he'll be so anxious to spend his windfall that he'll drive away immediately. The "buyer" would wait until he was right there, transfer the money via cell phone, and pull in the spot. The "seller" doesn't know who his benefactor is, it could have been anyone. Think of it as a variant of the Amazon wishlist. Since there's no direct quid pro quo, no laws were violated.

If you can't use it, what's it for? The phrase, "write-only memory" comes to mind.

Not to mention that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified back in March that the IRS emails "get taken off and stored in servers." One can conclude that this latest story was fabricated between then and now.

This kind of crap is where the Lyft cars, with their visible mustaches, are more vulnerable to enforcement. The airport cops will be able to spot them easily and bust the drivers.

If insurance is a requirement and you can't get it because you're a risk, then you can't legally operate and the public is safer. QED. The big question is whether you'll enforce the requirement. If you don't enforce a law, it may as well not exist.

I wonder what percentage of contemporary scientists thought Galileo and Copernicus were all wet.

When you say "loose government control", some people hear, "anarchy". Just like when you say, "lower taxes", they hear, "elimination of all taxation". No intermediate states are contemplated, or even considered possible.

Given that gender identity is now apparently whatever the individual says it is when it comes to bath- and locker-room assignments, should we all be asked to pick the race we feel most simpatico with and be that for reporting purposes?

The last few mortgages I refinanced, I took note that the paperwork said that if I didn't disclose my race the broker would do it for me and put that on the form in my stead. So now any time I have to put down my race, I pick one at random. Since I have no idea what's back there in my ancestry, all possibilities are in play and one choice is as good as another.