Just what we need before the country effectively shuts down for a few hours: More unhealthy food.
- One reason I'm fully in favor of "mask mandates" (and that I'll have a good excuse to continue wearing mine) is that they work to limit the spread of pernicious diseases like unauthorized intelligence-agency and private-contractor-relied-upon-as-cost-effective (without security, accuracy, and misuse safeguards) facial recognition and related technological surveillance systems. Does the phrase "Edward Snowden for the private sector" have no all-too-plausible meanings — meanings that, due to the lack of required disclosures by private actors, just get more tangled?
It's no longer true that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. You very well might be misidentified as a dangerous dog with a history of biting letter-carriers and no ability to appeal against that misidentification, but that's different, isn't it? Does anybody really know the substantive misidentification rate for the system to be provided to the IRS, or whether there are simple nontechnological ways to fool it? The first time this happens to a Congresscritter — either locked out through a misidentification or allowing a malicious hacker in — there'll finally be at least otherwise-meaningless hearings that won't reverse the impetus toward "doing it all electronically because it's cheaper" that have crippled intelligence-gathering and analysis since the 1970s (how'd that work out for the World Trade Center?) and also implicitly depend upon the subject(s) not knowing about successful surveillance. And for the IRS, one wonders how they're going to allow lawyers, accountants, and other authorized representatives the same access… or if they are, especially for taxpayers who are (not a hypothetical) temporarily disfigured or permanently scarred due to being beaten up at an otherwise-peaceful anti-tax demonstration.
- I'm just not comfortable being around Those People — bigots. I accept that the current social climate discourages making fun of them as ill-educated ignorant rubes, but they're not exactly downtrodden. It's not like their legacy doesn't continue in housing or at work to keep their views preserved, right?
I really don't care that some religious doctrine can be trotted forth to "justify" this crap. We could just go back about four decades and ask the (establishment and Establishment) Dutch Reformed Church in another former English colony about how that works, couldn't we? Look, if you really want theocracy, I can suggest an area on the southeast side of town with really attractive real-estate values and development potential, including well-known/prestigious schools…
- Which, I suppose, beats hiring a lawyer to write an assholish cease-and-desist letter to a publicly accessible repository for drafts of academic work because a particular paper analyzes a court decision, which makes findings that support the conclusion that you are, indeed, at best an oblivious asshole. "You," in this instance, referring to both the client and the lawyer.
- The Copyright Office is finally beginning to impose 1990s technology on the 1970s by making records from 1969 to 1977 available to the public. On one hand, this is a good thing, if at least two decades overdue. On the other hand, it's a serious misprioritization. The fundamental problem with most "questioned" copyrights from before 1978 — when the 1976 Act came into effect — was and is not initial copyright registration, but renewal records (and even Big Media has to engage with this problem). Ensuring that a definitive source of renewal records for works questionably in the public domain is digitally accessible would have been a much better prioritization framework. Of course, that assumes that the Copyright Office's records would answer the question concerning whether a particular "renewal" actually renewed the underlying copyright — but that's a self-inflicted wound of multiple dimensions that has been ripped open through a century of pro-transferee (and at times discriminatory) policies, procedures, and law, so…
- The scope of copyright has indirectly been in the news, too. Over There: A Dutch court (correctly, IMNSHO, on both direct/substantive copyright grounds and a different flavor of antitrust/dead-hand control) rejected one Anne Frank entity's attempts to prevent scholarly making-available-to-the-public by another. Over Here: The continued misuse of arbitration and arrogant conceptions of "competing productions" has bitten another trust where it deserves to be bitten, but so far (from public reports, and this is precisely why arbitration is pernicious — there are almost none, and won't be any that are authorized) there's no sign that the enablers/enabling commercial memes of this nonsense are coming in for even mild criticism, let alone sharing in that minuscule penalty. I can find no reason whatsoever to categorize a community-theater or school production within 75 miles (or 150 miles) as competing in any fashion with another such production… let alone with a big-budget (different!) adaptation of the same source material. But that's what the standard clauses say…