Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Good Stuff

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

Elizabeth & Bernie do the tax bill:

Posted in Econ & Money, Politics: US | Comments Off on Good Stuff

Alexa is Ready to Party!

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

One more reason to hold off on buying one, I guess.

AN AMAZON ECHO SPEAKER has been blamed for starting a “rave” in a sixth floor flat in Hamburg.

The owner was out at a real nightclub when the speaker decided to start blasting out bangin’ tunes at top volume at 0150 CET. Neighbours called the police who broke down the door to find no one in, just the Alexa speaker havin’ it large all on its own.

…

Speaking to German paper Die Welt, the flat (and speaker) owner, Oliver Haberstroh explained that he’d not had any problems with the digital task monkey up until this point.

Neighbours raised the alarm after shouting and banging on the door didn’t work.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | Comments Off on Alexa is Ready to Party!

Powerful

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

I don’t watch TV news, so I only saw this ad when Digby blogged it.

Powerful stuff. Here’s Wikipedia’s article on Tom Steyer if you want to know more about him.

Posted in The Resistance, The Scandals | Comments Off on Powerful

Frankly, My Dear, That’s a Tell

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

Based on several years’ observation, I’ve come to believe that when an elected or appointed official says “frankly” in a sentence, all the rest of it is either false, or so suffused with spin as to be as good as false.

This rule is, unfortunately, bipartisan. Try it for yourself as you read or hear the news, you’ll see…

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Frankly, My Dear, That’s a Tell

This Could Happen to You

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

…if you are a litigator taking a deposition (dramatization via NYT, ‘Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier?’).

Posted in Law: Practice | Comments Off on This Could Happen to You

These Are the Good Old Days?

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

Or will be if the gloomdogglers are right about the environment,

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.

One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.

And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.

The impact on wildlife of changes in farming practice (and the expansion of the farmed area) is so rapid and severe that it is hard to get your head round the scale of what is happening.

It all sounds dreadful. Of course historically technical change and market forces overwhelmed Malthusian effects, so it’s possible that late capitalism still has rabbits in the hat….

Posted in Global Warming, Science/Medicine | 1 Comment