Internet Readalong

[effex]

Happy Friday, everyone! And wishes for a good Passover to those in the middle of it. And Good Friday, that's today too, right?

I'm heading home to spend Easter with my family - like most of our religious holidays it's evolved into a big family dinner followed by presents, pie and a movie. Only we have to hunt for the presents :D There's also an egg hunt, despite all three of us kids being over 20 and Grandma invariably forgetting where she hid the last egg.

Hope you folks have a good weekend however you spend it. Here, have some links:

* sitara and I need a third roommate by June for our apartment in Uptown Dallas. Details are back thataway if you or someone you know is interested!

* Boingboing: iOS devices (iPhone/Pod/Pad secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices. WTF, Apple?

* Slacktivist: The 0.014 percent solution

Planned Parenthood — a major source of health care for working class women in this country — receives a portion of federal Title X grants, somewhere between a tenth and a fourth of that funding.


Title X grants last year totaled about $317 million. That’s about 0.0000917 0.00917 percent of the federal budget.


None of that fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of this funding went to provide abortions. The Hyde Amendment has been law for decades. (Oddly, the same members of Congress who vote to ensure that the Hyde Amendment remains law are the ones who love to pretend it doesn’t exist — railing against “federal funding for abortion” as though they didn’t realize no such funding exists because it would be illegal under the Hyde Amendment.)

Yet Congressional Republicans spent the week pretending two things that were not true: 1) That cutting Title X funding would make a significant difference in the federal budget, and 2) That this had something to do with abortion.

* Colorlines: The Casual Violence That Dehumanizing Language Breeds. Part of Colorline's campaign against labeling people 'illegal'.

* Sociological Images: Visual Overview of Inequality in the U.S.

* Colorlines: On Brooke-Lynn Pinklady and the Importance of Self-Definition

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: Lies Damn Near Everyone Told Me

If you had told me before I began this research that 30,000 blacks fought for the Confederacy, I would not have been surprised. That was me barely four years ago. People fight against what we perceive to be their own interest all the time, right? Even being black, even being skeptical, I really had no sense of how deeply the Confederacy was rooted in the explicit and outright domination of black people. Not some amorphous "people of color." Specifically black people.

* Boingboing: Why the weather is wacky

* Boingboing: Save Google Video before it goes dark!. I need to set up the script on my desktop when I get home, let it run over the weekend.

* Smithsonian Magazine: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

* ProPublica: Unraveling the Spin on the Fight Over Hidden Debit Card Fees. Note to self: research ways to deal with banks as little as possible. There's gotta be a better, if less convenient, option.

We raised pygmy goats when I was little (my parents only have one now, and he's way past his adorable baby days) and every year we'd set up the 'nursery', a special enclosure with toys and climbing things for babies and their moms to live in. Going in there was entertainment for hours. And yeah, they're always this cute.

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

Finally, Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane adventures, died on Tuesday. i09 has a wonderful obituary.

Comments

[zvi]

They are not perfect (their professional org is supporting the debit interchange hysteria) but credit unions, in my experience, are friendlier and more humane than banks, and interested in helping their customer/owners manage their financial lives reasonably, instead of nickel&diming them for profits.

The chief disadvantage of credit unions (limited branches/atms) is less of a factor these days, since many credit unions do online banking, and, for the purposes of withdrawing cash, many belong to some sort of ATM network (and possibly also shared branching, so you can do things like get cashier's checks at some other credit union, if yours is inconvenient for some reason.)

The thing that is currently very frustrating about credit unions is that a lot of them, for reasons which I do not understand, are really opaque about who is eligible for membership. It's usually geography or affiliation (often employer-related) that determines eligibility.

[effex]

Thanks for this! Credit Unions are something I keep meaning to look into - I think I qualify for my university's CU, my father's CU, and the local woman's CU. Need to dig around because a friendlier and more humane institution sounds wonderful.