I’m a huge fan of this!

Dress like you’re in the Arctic, the high on Friday is -14°F

Definitely sounds like a trap.

(What follows is a slightly unrelated anecdote.) I knew a guy who was a tax preparer back in 2009 when Obama put out the “Making Work Pay” stimulus. You basically got a tax refund of like $400 per person if you met a pretty lenient criteria.

Well, my buddy told me that during the 2009 tax season, he would constantly have people coming into his office trying to file taxes, but they hadn’t filed in a few years. After hours of getting their paperwork together and running through the tax schedules for each year, the tax payer would find out that they owed thousands of dollars in back payments. Rather than file their taxes and paying the delinquent taxes, they would just say “yeah, all I wanted was the $400” and just walk out.

I’m sure the IRS cleaned up that year if anyone who owed was bold enough to actually file.

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in awhile…

One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security. The person deemed it shocking that the U.K. government was demanding Apple’s help to spy on non-British users without their governments’ knowledge. A former White House security adviser confirmed the existence of the British order.

Bloody hell - I’m encouraged by this because it means that Apple’s encryption actually frustrates governments, but anyone using iCloud for storage or backups is pwned.

Holy shit, Americans. What is happening to you?

I’m surprised video game scene shirts aren’t more common

That farthest one has seen some shit

Why are BMW owners all the exact fucking same worldwide?

Damn, I ate this until I saw the community name. This world is wack

SYAC:

“What all this shows is that it is unlikely chess has a significant impact on overall cognitive ability. So while it might sound like a quick win – that a game of chess can improve a broad range of skills – unfortunately this is not the case.“

FUCK

Was part of a qualitative research study put on by a university and related to a local chapter of the Occupy movement.

My thoughts on 2 reasons why the larger movement died:

1. No unified list of attainable objectives.
2. The physical persecution ended.

While no one in the movement disagreed with the main tenants that the group stood for, when Wall Street came calling to know what the Occupy movement wanted, the distributed leadership model made it hard to form a coherent list that went beyond “overturn Citizens United”. It really was a leaderless movement for awhile there, and that has downsides.

Regarding the physical persecution, I first got interested in the movement because of the news coverage I was seeing from independent channels. US citizens were being beaten, gassed, and corralled in a way that infringed on civil rights and usually without incitement (Occupy was vehemently non-violent). Once those acts of injustice started to fade, I think people lost some of their zeal.

It was a wild time, though, and I’d be happy to talk about it further. From limited news coverage by US MSM, to folks coordinating carpools to NYC and DC, not to mention the unique style of communication at rallies to get around the ban of sound amplification by police… a lot happened.