Nerd immunity

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported that the GOP has been getting blowback because of the voter suppression law it passed. As an example, I heard today that Major League Baseball will pull the All Star game from Atlanta. Clawson warns there is a difference between “boycott Georgia” and boycott Georgia corporations and politicians. In the first one the people who would be hurt, the low level workers, are the ones least able to afford it. Instead, one should move dollars from GOP politicians to groups pushing for the passage of the voting rights acts in Congress or to groups that help the poor in Georgia. Because of that blowback, the Georgia GOP is retaliating, or at least trying to. One of the loudest in the blowback (now that the bill has passed) is Delta Airlines. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Kos community reported that in response to the outcry from Delta the GOP controlled state House voted to revoke a major tax break for Delta. Before the Senate could take up the bill the Legislature adjourned for the year. That House bill is dead. Clawson reported that the Texas GOP is pushing its own voter suppression laws. And American Airlines, based in Fort Worth, is learning from what happened to Delta. American is now speaking out against the Texas bill before it is passed. Southwest Airlines and AT&T are also speaking out though their statements are rather vague. Also on corporations funding politicians, Alex Kotch, an investigative reporter, tweeted:

Numerous major companies that claim to support the LGBTQ community have funded the campaigns of Arkansas lawmakers who sponsored successful bills to ban trans health care and trans women & girls in sports. Top Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, CVS Health, and UnitedHealth Group proudly tout their inclusive work environments but have aided the careers of anti-trans legislators who are attacking their trans constituents in Arkansas. It's admirable that some of these companies have made real efforts to support their LGBTQ employees at work and sponsor Pride events. But when you don't take a stand against hateful news laws & don't rescind donations to the extremists who are terrorizing trans people, I dunno...

Michael Harriot tweeted a link to an article in The Root and included:

White people: Before you talk about racism, maybe you should focus on education, hard work, and uplifting your own community. Black person who focuses on education, hard work & community uplift: Done! Now let's talk about racism.

That article by Harriot begins:

According to some people, eradicating the scourge of discrimination, white supremacy and oppression is easy. The Caucasian cure for systemic inequality involves the simple task of ignoring the issue, pretending it doesn’t exist and shutting the f--- up until the problem magically dissipates into thin air. While naysayers may point out that this delusory solution didn’t quite work for slavery, Jim Crow or the Minnesotans whose windpipes may have been obstructed by a policeman’s knee, we are assured that this is a safe and effective treatment for racism. Of course, this hypothetical therapeutic comes from people who have never actually been affected by racism. Still, the people who created, perpetuate and spread the racism virus insist that it will work. Simply put, if you or someone you know have been affected by racism, just shut the f--- up. There are others, however, who think there might be a better way.

Harriot then used the rest of the article to discuss the new book The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person by Frederick Joseph. It was released in December and became an instant best seller. The article also discussed Taylor Richardson and her effort to get people to read the book. Richardson, who is 17 and wants to be an astronaut, is already known for organizing fundraisers to share the work of black artists with children around the world. That included making sure all 21 branches of the Jacksonville Public Library system had copies of this book. Of course, there are Floridians who want the books removed while denying they are racist and accusing the author of being racist. The author said:

So it seems like in every other system, in every other way, white people get to decide who, what, where, why and when, except when it comes to racism. And they don’t like that.

At the time of the big Texas freeze the water system in Jackson, Mississippi also froze, which meant a lot of burst underground pipes in an already crumbling water system. Water didn’t flow for two weeks. It got much less press than the Texas disaster for a simple reason – Jackson is majority black. The water is flowing again. But four weeks since the freeze citizen relief groups are still delivering water and hot food. The standoff for the needed repairs is this: The state leadership is GOP and white. The city leadership is Democratic and over 80% black. White people are saying we’ll fix up the water system (about $2 billion needed for that) only if we get to own it. They’ve said the same about the airport and the schools. Black people said thanks, but no. They understood what would happen under white ownership to something that’s supposed to be a community resource. So the black community is figuring out how to care for themselves and each other. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian. The main part of the quote says that all the anti-vax misinformation on the web can be traced back to just 12 people. The rest of the quote is about Big Tech. They can and should do more to stop the spread of disinformation, but they can’t eliminate it.

Misinformation is never going to go away; it isn’t just a Big Tech problem, it’s an education problem. Instead of just yelling at tech companies, politicians should be focusing on what Taiwan’s digital minister calls “nerd immunity” – the government should be investing in education so people have the skills to identify fake news.

Back when I was in college preparing for a career as a professional computer programmer I, of course, learned all about binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbers. Yup, I lived the life of a computer nerd. I did because that’s what computers use. I could explain them, but I don’t want to take the time (if you want to know ask the internet). However, from a tweet from taizou I’ll say a bit on why hexadecimal is called that. Hexadecimal is numbers based on 16 rather than 10. The name comes from “hexa” the Greek word for “six” and “decimal” based on the Latin word for “ten.” But why mix Greek and Latin? I don’t know enough Greek to know what “ten” is in that language. However, in all Latin it would be “sexadecimal” with the first syllable used for abbreviation. And taizou added:

today i found out that hexadecimal is only called that because people in the 50s didn't want computer nerds to say s*x