All of the Arguments Against Raising the Minimum Wage Have Fallen Apart:

*Conservatives should be on the front line of the battle to raise the minimum wage. Work is supposed to make one independent, but with the inflation-adjusted federal minimum down by a third from its peak, low-wage workers depend on billions of dollars in public assistance just to make ends meet. Just this week, Rachel West and Michael Reich released a study conducted for the Center for American Progress that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps.*

Animal Crossing Club Nintendo posters being replaced ⊟

Nintendo is reprinting its Club Nintendo Animal Crossing New Leaf poster, because of misidentified characters all over it. I was going to list the incorrectly named animals, but apparently it’s a lot of them and it’s hella complicated! Poor Tutu :(

Anyway, if you have one of these, you’ll be getting a new one soon free of charge, and it’s up to you to decide whether you want to send your old pal JC the new one or the old one. What? Who said that?

Thanks for pointing this out, Alex!

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, upcoming games

Here's my upcoming speaking schedule for March and April.

• "Digital Threats and Solutions" in Copenhagen on March 20.

• Tufts University, in Boston, on April 7.

• SOURCE Boston on April 9.

• CS Colloquium at Yale in New Haven, CT, twice on April 10.

• University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on April 14.

• Stanford University on April 15.

• Brown University on April 24.

• MIT's IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM on April 24.

Information about all my speaking engagements can be found here.

Amazon announced this week that it’s increasing the price of Amazon Prime from $80 to $100 per year, its first price change since its introduction in 2005.

This has not been a popular decision, to put it lightly, but most Prime customers — which I’ve been since 2005 — aren’t really going anywhere. There’s nowhere to go. Amazon has either destroyed or bought every competitor that has ever come close to its retail business.

Prime customers should hardly be surprised at the price increase — the service has been getting worse for the last few years at an accelerating pace. Overnight shipping, previously $3.99 on anything from toothpaste to televisions, is now variably priced so it’s no longer worthwhile on even medium-sized items. “Add-On Items” was spun as a huge addition to the Prime catalog, but it also excluded thousands of existing items from small purchases that were previously available with no restrictions. For shipping, Prime is a worse deal now than it has ever been.

Its shipping deals always felt unsustainable, so in the absence of other changes, I’d feel that the extra $20 per year was justified. But I suspect the changes to overnight rates and Add-On Items would have been enough to keep Prime’s shipping costs sustainable, and these haven’t been the only changes. The biggest annoyance recently is that Prime members are now being forced through this sleazy interstitial ad between checkout steps:

Showing this once is bad enough, but I see it regularly. Amazon is now annoying their best customers with desperate, obnoxious, tricky interstitial ads. (Of course, the checkbox is checked by default.)

Maybe the reason Prime economics have become tricky is because Amazon bundled in a video service nobody wants since 2011, leveraging one business’ extreme success to juice the numbers of one that’s faring poorly against its competitors. Netflix charges $95.88 per year for a similar service. How much of Prime’s price hike was really to help pay for the video service that’s just a tax on Prime members who have never used it and don’t want it?¹²

This isn’t just an Amazon problem. In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users.³

Google, the geek world’s undeserved, unquestioned darling for well over a decade, has made all of its core products worse by forcefully shoving Google+ into them. They’re leveraging extreme success from some businesses (search, email, maps) to juice the numbers of one that’s faring poorly against its competitors (Google+). Sound familiar?

Apple’s Maps is still worse and has fewer features than Google Maps, which was previously integrated better into the iPhone and didn’t enable as much Google tracking creepiness. Not anymore. (Although I think the fault of this is shared between Apple and Google.) Many of Apple’s other applications and services have suffered as well as they’ve spread themselves too thinly and competed on more fronts.

The battle between Twitter and Facebook has made both products worse and caused weird restrictions to users on both sides, such as the walls both companies have installed between Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is now ultra-paranoid, defensive, aggressive, and full of annoying ads. Facebook’s core product is a mess as it continually tries (and fails) to capture the usage and style of Twitter, while annoying people more and more to keep its ads effective. (At least Facebook is consistent: they’ve always been getting worse.)

Amazon making its retail business worse to prop up another part of its ecosystem shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Amazon doesn’t want you to be only a retail customer anymore, and they’ll keep making it harder to be.

They want to lock everyone into everything. Just like everyone else. And we’re all worse off for it.

(Sesame Street was brought to you today by… | Cartoon Research)

Even for a fan who donated to the cause, the effort required to watch crowd-funded “Veronica Mars” on its opening day was just maybe above-and-beyond, thanks to Warner Bros.

My decision to renounce was triggered when my bank threatened to close my account because I was American. What would I do without a bank? Americans in Switzerland were having trouble with their investments, getting credit cards, and some weren't even getting loans. // On numerous occasions, I've gone to banks to talk about investment opportunities, and they will blatantly tell me, "We do offer them to our customers, but because you're American, those opportunities are not available." I've even had health insurance companies tell me they'd prefer I sign up as a German citizen. // The accountancy fee is the main reason why we both renounced our U.S. citizenship last year. It wasn't an easy decision -- super stressful, and very emotional. But at the end of the day, I think it was the right thing for us. //

Folks who are in the Bay Area tonight can stop by San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum, where artist J.H. Williams III will be talking about Sandman: Overture and offering a sneak peek at the second issue.

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The Apache web server has been removed from the OpenBSD base operating system over being too bloated and server administrators are now being asked to switch to lighter-weight alternatives...

Officers' body cameras raise privacy concerns Grand Island Independent LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thousands of law enforcement agencies are equipping their officers with tiny cameras to record interactions with the public. But the devices are often being rolled out faster than departments can create policies on how they're used. and more »

lolzpicx:

Get well soon.

"Strange things are afoot at the Circle K."

The Guardian

Pakistan cuts term for doctor who helped CIA find Osama bin Laden Los Angeles Times PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A Pakistani tribal court on Saturday reduced the prison sentence for the doctor identified as helping the CIA track down Osama bin Laden from 33 years to 23 years. Shakil Afridi, convicted in 2012 of links to a banned militant group, ... Pakistani doctor who helped US find Osama bin Laden has prison term cutThe Guardian Pakistan court reduces Dr. Afridi ' s sentence by 10 yearsThe Hindu Pakistan reduces sentence for doctor who helped track bin LadenUSA TODAY Jerusalem Post -Al-Arabiya all 121 news articles »

Afghanistan to US: Please leave Boston.com Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke during the inaugration of Parliament's spring session in Kabul, Afghanistan EPA Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke during the inaugration of Parliament's spring session in Kabul, Afghanistan. By KATHY GANNON ... and more »

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	baller masterclass, F- grade

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I regret defending GitHub's culture to feminists for the last two years. I'm sorry to everyone I've hurt in doing so. I've been harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years. And I am the first developer to quit. My only regret is not leaving or being fired sooner. What I endured as an employee of GitHub was unacceptable and went unnoticed by most.

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This video has been around for a while, but the level of customer service displayed goes undiminished.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s Science Sweetheart and host of the relaunched Cosmos, made the news last year when he criticized the scientific accuracy of Gravity. In a series of tweets, the astrophysicist picked apart the Oscar winner’s depiction of a zero-gravity environment, among other things. 

While Dr. Tyson insisted he enjoyed the film, he took some time during an appearance at SXSW Film Festival to critique some other sci-fi films. The good doctor enjoyed The Matrix, but pointed out that the film’s evil robots building a giant contraption—a matrix, if you will—to use humans as batteries is less efficient than just using the energy it took to build and run the contraption. Even film’s best-regarded depiction of space, 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t escape Tyson’s red pen, as he points out a moment where an astronaut drinks from a pouch in zero-G ...

The next X-Men movie, X-Men Apocalypse, will be an 80s period-piece movie. And you thought the 70s superheroes looked insane . But wait, there's more.

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Thad Starner has been wearing computers on his face for 21 years. Today he works with Google on Glass, the web giant’s wearable computing project which, because of its high-profile backer and the accompanying publicity blitz, also happens to be the go-to example of all that is good and evil about wearable devices. With that status comes plenty of angst (such this campaign to “stop the cyborgs“) as well lots of hand-wringing about what it means for privacy and surveillance.

But Starner, who is the director of the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as a leading force in the Glass team, says that Glass is actually more privacy-friendly than your smartphone, as Glass Almanac points out. Why? Because of that short battery life that everyone’s complaining about. In an in-depth profile in Atlanta Magazine, Jesse Lichtenstein writes about a conference at which Starner answered questions about privacy:

“Glass is much more honest than what you’re wearing now,” he [Starner] said to one onlooker. “I’m referring to your cell phone. You do not know if you’re recording me. Let me say that again: You do not know if you’re recording me. Your phone can be turned on remotely by your service provider. China has admitted to doing this. The FBI has admitted [link added] to doing this. It’s a service that’s been built into cell phones since the 1980s.”

Although Glass might look like the ultimate X-ray specs for spying, Starner argues that Google has intentionally designed it to prevent snooping by limiting its battery life. Whereas your phone can surreptitiously record audio and video for extended periods of time, Glass will conk out after about 45 minutes (and get hot in the process). Starner insisted to conference-goers that this was a design feature meant to protect privacy, not a flaw.

But skeptics might not be wholly convinced, especially in light of the news today that Google monitored the email of school students without consent. They may also wonder how effective such a limitation would be to prevent privacy intrusions, even as critics urge Google to improve the battery, and other companies come up with add-ons that promise to extend Glass’s battery life.

children may enjoy such thing Karuta like you step on a foot

The South Pacific Island of Palau is famous for its Jellyfish Lake, but this year's crop is unlike anything we've ever seen.

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Hank is the best dog in baseball, now we'll see a whole lot more of him.

The Milwaukee Brewers made the best acquisition of the season. We're confident enough to say that even though it's only March. Hank "The Ball Park Pup" has been added to the team's permanent roster.

Hank walked off the streets of Arizona and into the team's heart, quickly becoming it's unofficial mascot for Spring. Now the good times for Hank will continue in Milwaukee and beyond. He'll live with the family of a Brewers executive and if this is what we'll see at home games, then we're already DEEP into this Hank thing.

HE'S IN A HOT DOG COSTUME!!!

Check out an exclusive first look at The Scotsman's unconventional return in Jim Zub & Brittney Williams' "Samurai Jack" #6.

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Scribe:

A rich text editor framework for the web platform, with patches for browser inconsistencies and sensible defaults.

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