Mitch Wagner

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Cleveland Plain Dealer’s new owners massacre staff

The owners of the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid off all but 14 of the newsroom staff, then prohibited the survivors from covering the beats they’ve mastered over decades, giving those roles over to the non-unionized staff at cleveland.com. …

Among those affected: Ginger Christ, the paper’s health reporter, who has been stripped of her beat during a pandemic.

This during the largest public emergency in the last 75 years. Peak parasitic capitalism.

The TSA wanted to inspect a 16-year-old trans girl’s genitals

The scanner operator “she told Jamii she must go to a private room, expose herself, and let her ‘feel up in there.’ That is, a TSA supervisor demanded to molest a child.”

When her mother refused, TSA called in the police and top TSA managers. They were eventually released and drove 600 miles rather than flying.

The TSA previously strip-searched a grandmother on Mother’s Day to get a look at her sanitary napkin, and penetrated another woman’s vulva and “falsely told her that she could not refuse the search and abandon her trip and threatened to physically restrain her if she didn’t submit.”

Also:

• The 400-year-old Bannatyne Manuscript may not be the oldest surviving F-bomb. Roger Fuckebythenavele ftw.
• Excellent public domain Zoom backgrounds. Alas, my MBP is too underpowered to use Zoom backgrounds. I have not been moved to buy a greenscreen but these backgrounds may change my mind!
• Monster-themed COVID PSAs.

I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.

But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕

The computer language COBOL debuted in 1960, and it’s still running the world’s governments and banks

It’s tried and true. And also, according to this article, not hard to learn.

I do recall a remark by a programmer a few years ago – once you’ve learned one or two languages, it’s not hard to pick up another.

I took a couple of computer science classes in late 1979 as a college freshman. EVEN THEN we were taught COBOL was obsolete!

[Dave Gershgorn/OneZero]

Rules Rewritten: Managing Data Centers Through the Pandemic: Data center operators are reducing headcount to minimize coronavirus exposure, and these reductions may become permanent. [Scott Fulton III/IT Pro Today]

This looks like a useful new feature on Inoreader: Convert Almost Any Webpage Into RSS Feed With Inoreader’s Web Feeds

Inoreader will let you subscribe to updates for web pages even when those pages don’t offer RSS feeds.

Whenever you see a web page with a series of updates, be it news articles, blog posts, classifieds, product updates, weather alerts, practically any series of HTML links, Inoreader should be able to present it as an RSS feed. This feed will then be continuously updated, and any new links added to the list will pop up as articles inside Inoreader. Just like any regular feed.

I’m guessing it does a little screen-scraping and looks for patterns in text.

Social distancing is getting hard in our house. And we’re normally people who have a limitless capacity for solitude and not going out.

500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”

Scotland is the home of a 500-year-old medieval manuscript containing the oldest extant written F-bomb.

“The profanity appears in a poem recorded by a bored student in Edinburgh while under lockdown as the plague ravaged Europe…. The poem is getting renewed attention thanks to its inclusion in a forthcoming BBC Scotland documentary exploring the country’s long, proud tradition of swearing, ‘Scotland—Contains Strong Language.'”

That is darn interesting.

[Jennifer Ouellette/Ars Technica]

Life Without Toilet Paper Is Better

Frank Bures at Vice:

If you were walking barefoot through your yard, and felt the unpleasant squish of fresh dog do through your toes, what would be your reaction? Would you think, “Geez, I need to get some dry, easily torn paper to smear this off my foot”?

No. You would quickly get yourself to a hose, or a sink. You would find some soap. And you would scrub your foot off using your hands.”

Don’t thank me for sharing this.

Really. Don’t. I don’t ever want to discuss it.

Shkreli’s plea from prison: Free me and I’ll cure COVID-19 [Beth Mole/Ars Technica]: Disgraced pharma exec, best known for raising the price of a lifesaving medicine from $13.50 a pill to $750, goes full supervillain.

This is what happens when a narcissist runs a crisis

Jennifer Senior at the New York Times:

Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats….

Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity….

Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” During Friday’s news conference, he added the tests “we inherited were “broken, were obsolete,” when this form of coronavirus didn’t even exist under his predecessor.

This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”