When situations change, people tend to react to it based on whether their personal situation changed for the better or worse than what it was before, rather than where they stand with respect to other people. So for example, during the time of the financial downturn that began in 2007, we had the spectacle of people working in investment banks lashing out angrily because their usual hefty bonuses had been reduced, and we heard complaints from them about how hard it was to live on incomes of $250,000 or more (private schools and live-in help and summer homes cost so much) and thus how unfair it was to increase taxes on them. From their point of view, a lowering of income was an intolerable hardship even if they still were in the top 2% of income earners in the country and extremely well off according to any objective measures. [Read more…]

There has been an increased interest in protecting people’s privacy online. But what seems to be driving some of the push is not a fear of the NSA grabbing people’s communications in the wake of the NSA revelations or of hiding wrongdoing but just the desire to not have a permanent record on the internet of one’s messages. [Read more…]

Much attention has been focused on the internal battles that risk tearing the Republican party apart. But Alex Pareene points out that there is a battle within the Democratic party as well in which left-wing activists are trying to steer it away from its traditional Wall-Street friendly approach, represented by groups like the Third Way that are friendly to CEO’s and Wall street and pour money into candidates they like, such as Cory Booker. [Read more…]

NPR had an interesting story yesterday on the move by internet companies to limit government snooping on everyone while retaining a legitimate interest in getting information to thwart terrorist attacks. In particular, they wanted an end to the practice of getting blanket information on everybody and everything and get back to targeted data collection. I wrote about this issue yesterday and NPR says that Apple has joined the other seven companies in writing the open letter to the government, though the website still does not include it. [Read more…]

Universities UK, the umbrella organization of universities in the United Kingdom, has published a report saying that it is acceptable for universities to segregate audiences by gender in order to accommodate the sensibilities of external speakers who have ‘genuinely held’ religious beliefs that prevent them speaking to mixed gender groups. [Read more…]

In an interesting development, seven big internet companies (AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo) have jointly set up a website listing five principles by which government surveillance can be reformed to protect the general privacy of people while satisfying the government’s genuine need for security information. The five principles are: [Read more…]

Members of the transgender community face severe discrimination at almost every level, leading to them having extremely high levels of poverty and homelessness. They are also the targets of extreme violence. Cleveland has been the scene of fatal attacks on members of the transgender community, two of them in the last few days. Another person was killed back in January. The good thing is that the local leadership has been quick to speak out against these attacks. [Read more…]