Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

What fresh hell is this?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This fight is for everything.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Women: they get shit done

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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Major Major Major Major, aka J. Tynan Burke, has written at Balloon Juice since 2018. He focuses on science, technology, and fiction. Learn more at www.tynanburke.com

California Bans Cash Bail… But Did they Do It Correctly?

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Governor Brown’s signature made it official today: beginning in October 2019, if you are arrested and charged with a crime in California, your pretrial level of freedom will not be determined by your level of wealth. …In theory.

California will become the first state in the nation to completely end cash bail after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a sweeping reform bill Tuesday. It will give judges far more power over who gets released from jail as they await trial.

“Today, California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are treated fairly,” Brown said[…]

It’s certainly removing money as an official part of the equation.

Under Senate Bill 10, Californians arrested and charged with a crime won’t be given the option of putting up money or borrowing it from a bail bond agent. Instead, county courts will use risk assessment tools to help judges determine if a defendant can be safety released before trial.

[…]

It’s a huge shift, and one that gives judges far more power over pretrial release decisions.

While nearly everyone involved in the bail fight in California, save for the bail industry, agreed that the current system is unfair and often punishes poor defendants while releasing wealthy defendants even if they pose a public safety, not everyone who supported bail reform is on board with the bill. Some civil rights groups that had championed the issue of bail reform [including the California ACLU] oppose the bill, saying it now gives too much power to judges who may have their own biases.

And not just power to judges. The use of ‘risk assessment tools’ brings to mind ProPublica’s controversial 2016 report on apparent racial bias in COMPAS recidivism-risk software.* And just like the judges, these tools, whether software or some other standardized rubric, are being given a lot of power.

My own internal scorecard sees: a good cause, Republicans opposed, Democrats in favor, and law enforcement officially neutral. That’s something I would usually support. But then, I also usually like the ACLU’s opinions, and such scorecards aren’t always right. What do you folks think?

*Good article on that reporting and the ensuing dispute, plus the overall topic of algorithm bias, at the MIT Technology Review. tl;dr: Impartial systems are by their nature biased. One must take care to make sure the included biases are the intended ones, and that the intended ones are just.

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Quick but Interesting (Open Thread)

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I saw this earlier on the tweet-machines and wanted to amplify it. Click through for the whole tweet thread/slideshow:

It reminded me of the excellent documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, about the cool rock & roll scene Cambodia had before the Khmer Rouge, ah, murdered everyone involved.

Anywho, looks like we could probably do with an open thread, so, open thread! Hope everybody’s Saturday is going well. So far I’ve done my one big weekend errand and eaten tacos. I’m calling it a success.

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Waiting for the Weekend Like…

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I just finished standardizing a bunch of application settings, which is about as exciting as it sounds. Then I went to get more coffee. This young man was in the kitchen, doing his best impression of Friday-afternoon-me.

And now… it’s…. 5pm! Who has weekend plans? I will be doing the usual: seeing some friends, yes, but mostly reading, writing, playing video games, and watching cartoons. Open thread!

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Guerrilla Craft Alert (Open Thread)

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Saw this on KQED, thought some of the crafty types here would appreciate it. I hadn’t seen these, but now I want to:

The retired nurse has lived in San Francisco for 43 years. On a recent trek from BART, she spotted adorable knitted animals near City Hall: chameleons with leopard spots, brown fuzzy otters and giraffes licking branches with long pink tongues.

Which brings us to Robin’s question: What’s the story behind the knitted creatures on the trees in Civic Center?

J.P. Dobrin/KQED

As I said, I’d never noticed them, but I’ll definitely go a block out of my way next time I’m nearby. SF might not be any good at addressing dystopian income inequality, homelessness, housing shortages, or transit, but we’re rarely hurting for cool public art.

What Robin saw in the Civic Center were yarn bombs: street art made from knitted or crocheted fabric. They can be as simple as a green snake wrapped around a bike rack or as elaborate as covering an entire bridge. It’s been called a feminist answer to graffiti.

[…] “Yarn bombing is the perfect way to make something and then put it somewhere that is not our closet,” Jill says, laughing.

The short read/video is just really heartwarming. It made me feel like maybe things are kind of okay. Pretty weird!

Open thread.

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Recommended Reading #2: Her Majesty’s Extremely Secret Service(s)

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It’s not a huge surprise when multiple works deal with the same basic idea. Some ideas are quite obvious: a robot renegade cop; a murder in a small town struggling with encroaching modernity; World War II time travel. What’s much more interesting is when the works share a very narrow scope.

Sometimes a newer work’s creator is (apparently) unaware of their predecessor. For instance, Suzanne Collins said she didn’t hear about Battle Royale until after she turned in the MS for The Hunger Games. Yet each work is about teenagers, selected by lottery, being forced into an undisclosed location, where they are armed, surveilled, and encouraged to kill each other; all in order to help prop up a deranged society.

Then again… Christopher Nolan claims he was mostly unaware of Paprika while making Inception… so maybe we shouldn’t be so credulous when Westerners say they aren’t ripping off the Japanese.

via https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/five-ways-daniel-omalleys-stiletto-doubles-down-on-skullduggery/

But we’re getting away from what I wanted to talk about: books addressing bureaucratic dysfunction in the secret branch of the British government that protects the homeland from supernatural threats. The two primary series here, that I’m aware of, are Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files and Daniel O’Malley’s Checquy series. Both are very fun combinations of workplace humor and sci-fi/horror action. Stross, who began first, leans more into horror. O’Malley leans more into humor, but they’re definitely walking the same territory. Remarkably, O’Malley says he hadn’t heard of the Laundry series before his first book came out and people started calling it a rip-off. (Source: my friend asked him at a book signing).

Honorary members of this category are:

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What’d I leave out? What are some extremely specific genres you like? Or you can say anything at all about reading recommendations, really.

(Remember to buy any books via the Balloon-Juice Amazon affiliate link!)

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Local Boy Makes Good (Open Thread)

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It’s always exciting to see a hometown hero in the news. I refer of course to Owen, seen here in a file photo from December:

Owen works at local favorite Aardvark Books*. He’s great, and so is his store. So imagine my squees of joy when I saw that he’d been written up as part of a feature on local bookstore cats!

Aardvark Books is a spacious emporium selling new and secondhand books, cards, and newspapers in San Francisco’s Castro District. The store’s mascot Owen has been a fixture there for 12 years.

“Owen’s the real boss around here,” says Aardvark employee David. You can usually find him on his favorite chair in the Myth & Folklore section.

If Owen was an author, he’d be Christopher Isherwood, says Aardvark employee Frieda, because he’s “loving, kind, pragmatic and takes life as it comes. Nothing really seems to upset him.”

There are eight more Bay Area bookstore managers pictured in the article. I was happy to see it included Hudson the sphinx over at Borderlands, the local sci-fi/fantasy/etc. emporium. But Owen is my main squeeze in this category (possibly because he has fur and is therefore more pleasing to squeeze).

Why so many bookstore cats?

Recycle employee Eric says that owners used to dread rats chewing the pages of their books so would bring in cats “as a practical way to keep the rats away, a tradition that never really left.”

Samwise serves a similar role, eating the silverfish that might otherwise gnaw at my book bindings. But I won’t be sharing a picture–Owen’s the real star today. Open thread!

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*Aardvark may be forced to close soon, after almost forty years in operation, since the building is on the market and will be delivered to the buyer empty. This will add another vacant commercial space to a neighborhood already littered with them. (The restaurant space next door allegedly has a new business coming in soon… after more than three years.)

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