Most New York coronavirus deaths were among men and 86% were people with underlying illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes. [Joseph Spector/Rockland/Westchester Journal News/USAToday]
Irony: Calling someone stupid, naive or malicious for failing to anticipate a leak in a speech that you failed to anticipate leaking.
Like a good kleptocrat, Modly echoes the boss’s party line: It’s all the media and China’s fault. Like the way the media and China laid off the pandemic response team, took numerous golf breaks and campaign rallies while the pandemic spread, ignored warnings from the Obama White House, Department of Defense and other sources that a pandemic was imminent and said the seriousness of the pandemic is a Democratic Party hoax.
“Nuclear-powered locomotive” 1979Via
Why not the best? Red Hat vet Paul Cormier takes over as CEO
Red Hat’s new CEO and president has driven the company’s enterprise leadership for 20 years.
[Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols/ZDnet]
Jo Walton:
Cosy catastrophes are science fiction novels in which some bizarre calamity occurs that wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and even thrive in the new world that follows. They are related to but distinct from the disaster novel where some relatively realistic disaster wipes out a large percentage of the population and the protagonists also have a horrible time. The name was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, and used by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by analogy to the cosy mystery, in which people die violently but there’s always tea and crumpets.
Cosy catastrophes were hugely popular after World War II in Britain, among people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading science fiction. They were a reaction (says Walton) to social programs that made life vastly better for working people, but somewhat less comfortable for the middle class, who could no longer afford servants, vacations to France, etc.
The social contract had been rewritten, and the richer really did suffer a little. I want to say “poor dears,” but I really do feel for them. Britain used to be a country with sharp class differences—how you spoke and your parents’ jobs affected your healthcare, your education, your employment opportunities. It had an empire it exploited to support its own standard of living. The situation of the thirties was horribly unfair and couldn’t have been allowed to go on, and democracy defeated it, but it wasn’t the fault of individuals. Britain was becoming a fairer society, with equal opportunities for everyone, and some people did suffer for it. They couldn’t have their foreign holidays and servants and way of life, because their way of life exploited other people. They had never given the working classes the respect due to human beings, and now they had to, and it really was hard for them. You can’t really blame them for wishing all those inconvenient people would…all be swallowed up by a volcano, or stung to death by triffids.
[Tor.com]
Bug bounty platforms buy researcher silence, violate labor laws, critics say
Bug bounty platforms were designed to provide support for researchers ethically disclosing security flaws, but instead they serve as slush funds for hush money to help businesses keep their security problems quiet
And the platforms may also violate labor law by exploiting researchers.
[J.M. Porup/CSO]
I have long thought that the two greatest threats the United States face are hyperpartisanship and the Republican Party.
It’s not lost on me that these two beliefs are contradictory.
A Recipe for Caesar [Common Sense With Dan Carlin] Either we find our way out of the current political tit for tat cycle, or we follow it to his logical conclusion: a Caesar
Frontier says insufficient fiber investment led to bankruptcy [Mike Robuck/FierceTelecom]
New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is shaking up the leadership team his first day on the job. [Maria Deutscher/SiliconAngle]