Last minute geek

1. California's Right to Repair Bill, killed by Big Ag and Apple, has been reintroduced
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... to coalitions led by Apple -- which subsequently warned its investors that its profits were threatened by customers' unwillingness to abandon their old devices and buy new ones. In California, the farm ...

2. Meet 'Spread The Vote,' a nonprofit helping voters get IDs, rides, support so they can vote
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

“We believe voting is the sacred right of every American, and every American should be able to exercise it.” — spreadthevote.org. Read all

3. Electronic Health Records: a murderous, publicly subsidized, $13B/year grift by way of shitty software
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

In 2009, the bipartisan HITECH Act pledged $36 billion to subsidize the adoption of Electronic Health Records throughout America's fragmented, profit-driven health system, promising that the system would ...

4. Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... of their servers in California, Egypt and Amsterdam. They're a mission-driven nonprofit supported by philanthropists, foundations, and small-money donations (I'm an annual donor). (via JWZ) (Image: UNTHA)  ...

5. To do in San Francisco: Future Perfect: A Postcapitalist Adventure from Free Machine on March 24
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

[Editor's note: I'm on the advisory board for Free Machine, a nonprofit that describes itself as an "LA-based collective of UX designers, artists, urban planners, and policy wonks. By using the tools ...

6. The latest Right to Repair battle: fake, corporate co-option of Right to Repair measures
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The Right to Repair movement is gaining so much ground that the corporations whose profits it threatens are making tiny, symbolic concessions in the hopes of diffusing the energy behind it. Farm equipment ...

7. This is Birdpunk, the intersection of DIY, environmentalism, and birdwatching
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... punks, who thrive on independence and individualism. Their music bucks the profiteering industry of labels and promoters and travels over a homegrown network of venues and websites. The ethic also spills ...

8. MoviePass' 'day to day' leading exec resigns after a few months
(English/engadget)

In December MoviePass closed out a turbulent year with new subscription plans for moviegoers and a path to profitability, all with a new exec Khalid Itum taking over day to day operations. Now reports ...

9. Save the ARC, the largest popular music library in the United States
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

New York City's ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) is a cultural treasure packed with actual treasures. Inside the walls of this not-for-profit private research library in TriBeCa are 3 million physical ...

10. You cannot opt out of Facebook's surveillance network
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... it does, while respecting no master — not governments, not courts, not users — in turning political chaos and personal misery into profit. As Will Oremus puts it, Facebook is "a massive, global, highly ...

11. Homestead High - A typical teen in a typical American for-profit "concentration camp"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH teens will never forget their time at Homestead High, the punishment they receive for seeking asylum in America. Read all

12. Bowing to public pressure, Coinbase announces it will "transition out" the ex-Hacking Team cybermercenaries whose company it just bought
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... internal documents that revealed the company's enthusiastic and highly profitable complicity in human rights abuses by the world's most torture- and murder-happy autocrats and dictators. The move sparked ...

13. Financialization is wearing out its welcome
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... profits by squeezing suppliers, paying its bills late, and cutting costs at the expense of growth -- only to have Kraft-Heinz's value drop by more than 50% in less than three years. This pattern is repeating ...

14. University of California system libraries break off negotiations with Elsevier, will no longer order their journals
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Elsevier (previously) is one of the titans of academic and scientific publishing, a wildly profitable and politically potent corporation whose market dominance has allowed it to extract ever-larger sums ...

15. London's awful estate agents are cratering, warning of a "prolonged downturn" in the housing market
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

London's estate agents were notorious profiteers of the property bubble, listing on the stock exchanges and rewarding investors with soaring share-prices that reflected the human misery of a city where ...

16. Fox hit with $179m (including $128m in punitive damages) judgment over shady bookkeeping on "Bones"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Fox has been ordered to pay $179m to profit participants on the longrunning TV show Bones; the judgment includes $128m in punitive damages because the aribitrator that heard the case found that Fox had ...

17. New Orleans reduced homelessness by 90% (and saved a fortune) by giving homeless people homes
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... stable housing). Martha Kegel is executive director of Unity New Orleans, the nonprofit that led the housing first coalition. In an interview with WBUR, she explains how the program worked in NOLA, and ...

18. How the payday loan industry laundered policy by paying academics to write papers that supported its positions
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... prevailing under Trump's CFPB boss Mick Mulvaney. The nonprofit Campaign for Accountability used public records requests, suing all the way up to the Georgia Supreme Court, to reveal how the industry ...

19. San Francisco marijuana crimes to be expunged by the thousands, with Code For America's help
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... few attempt it. Gascon’s office initially began the expungement process by hand and found about 1,000 cases to clear, but then teamed up with Code for America, a national nonprofit that uses technology ...

20. France fines UBS €3.7b for helping rich French residents launder more than €10b
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... authorities. The fine is more than ten times larger than the next-largest fine in French history, when HSBC paid €300m over its wrongdoing. The fine represents 92% of the bank's 2018 profits. After ...

21. Deposition of opioid profiteer Richard Sackler reveals his bizarre defense: definitional games and insistence that words mean their opposite
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Richard Sackler is the only known member of the powerful opioid family (previoulsy) to have been deposed; the 2015 deposition was published last week by Propublica and it reveals Sackler's bizarre rationalizations ...

22. How a Young Maker Helped Make Barbie More Inclusive
(English/makezine)

... Unicorn Project inspired Jordan and her mom Jen to start a non-profit, Born Just Right, to help other kids with […] Read more on MAKE The post How a Young Maker Helped Make Barbie More Inclusive ...

23. Florida inmates sue prisons for digitally confiscating the music they were sold
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... at $1.70/track, nearly double the going rate for music when not purchased from prison-system profiteers. The move was part of a switch to notorious prison contractors Jpay (previously), a division of ...

24. AFL-CIO open letter to gave devs: things won't get better until you unionize
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

In the wake of Blizzard/Activision's announcement of mass layoffs following record profits, Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO has published an open letter on Kotaku addressed to workers in the notoriously abusive ...

25. Amazon's 2018 profits: $11.2 billion; Amazon's 2018 IRS bill: negative $129 million
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Amazon doubled its profits in 2018, to $11.2 billion; the company will receive a $129 million tax rebate for the year. Though Trump denounced Amazon's tax return, Amazon actually has Trump's tax deal, ...