Selected Posts from Facebook from February 2020

These were deleted from Facebook!

Feb 2

Another way to look at it is: the US capitalist brain trust has successfully drained many countries of talent to prevent demands for universal healthcare from sparking a revolution.

Feb 7

A report on the resaponse to SARS in 2003 https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blaw/cdc/SARS_REPORT.pdf

Feb 7

Scammers Wanted $3,000 – They Watched Me Spend It All
youtube.com
This is hilarious and educational. Thwarting a scammer.

Feb 9

Another symbol that needs to be removed here in LA!! D.W. Griffith Middle School: 4765 E 4th St, Los Angeles, CA 90022. D.W. Griffith directed one of the most racist and infamous films of all time; “Birth of a Nation.”

Feb 9

OK, this is fucked up. I am doing taxes, and reading through the tax rules, and if you have a home office, and sell the home, the capital gains on the office portion of the home are excluded up to 250k.

I heard something about this before, but ignored it. Now I feel stupid.

Why is this even there?

Is it to promote gentrification through live-work spaces? Move in, say 3/4 of it is “work”, Add horizontal fencing. Flip the house, and exempt most of the capital gains from taxation.

Feb 13

Fuckin ahistorical. This asshole doesn’t know history. Redlining was predicated on the existence of racist covenants. If a community had racist covenants, they would not be redlined, unless they were extremely poor. If the community lacked racist covenants, and had residents who weren’t white, then the area was redlined, even if it was relatively safe to invest there.

This isn’t even debatable. It’s right in the policies, and in the HOLC reports on the different areas that were redlined, yellow-lined, blue-lined, and green-lined. They were looking, specifically, for whites-only covenant and restrictions contracts as legal infrastructure that would assure that loans were safe to make.

Bloomberg is old enough know it. He lived through it, though, he might not realize how much he benefitted.

In his own mind, he’s re-writing history, and removing the explicit racism from it, and casting racist redlining as a determination based on poverty.

That is a form of racism, right there.

Feb 14

The jobs being eliminated by AI aren’t just these famed truck driver jobs. I think the main job being automated away, today, is management, supervision, and accounting

Feb 19

Is Meghan McCain really the “bogeywoman of the left”? I didn’t even know who she was.

Feb 20

I’ve started unfriending and unfollowing people who like pages that advertise, and I don’t like.

Feb 21

Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?
longreads.com
Fascinating story about Iron Eyes Cody

Feb 21

Bernie Sanders owns 3 houses, but, I bet if public housing were an option for upper middle class and rich people, he’d be okay with just owning the one house, and living in the DC projects. There’s just no room at this time.

Feb 22

It’s just coincidence, but I was looking for books to resell, and bought a copy of East River by Sholem Asch, whom I’d never heard of. The book is about NYC in the 1910s [Edit – the book was published right after WW2].

I may price it high so I can read it. I had a recent sale of Nathan Glazer and Pat Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, and I suspect that Bernie Sanders’ rise is raising interest in NYC and Jewish life.

Asch wrote from many countries, and in the US wrote for The Forward, the Jewish socialist paper. He also wrote a lot of controversial material, basically upsetting the Jewish community.

There’s several copies for sale online.

Book info: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/947216.East_River

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholem_Asch

Feb 27

To save energy,
sit very still in the dark.

Feb 29

I have my search engine set to Bing, but use Google when I can’t find it on Bing.

Counting the domains in my history, Bing has around 1,200 URLs over an unknown period, whatever Firefox recorded. Google has around 400. (This includes Google Keep and Google Photos.)

Facebook has 800 URLs over the same time period. Total URLs (found by searching for “.”) is around 7,000.