Housing in Silicon Valley is getting so expensive that the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) petitioned 6,000 faculty and staff members to consider offering students "a room in your home."

The headline is straight up wrong, but I think it's interesting that this sentence in the summary could actually be using SV correctly. Santa Cruz does see the spillover from SV's refusal to build more housing.

Really they should have used Bay Area throughout because it's the (mostly interconnected) Bay Area housing market that is relevant to the discussion.

Previously ridiculous stories about how people are trying to cope with the housing crisis are becoming commonplace, but all of it is a band-aid. The real problem is that the Bay Area has refused, city by city, to build sufficient new housing. Delusional NIMBY homeowners believe that they can block all new development and prevent their city from ever changing. Meanwhile, their children moved out of state, service workers commute hours each way coming in from Stockton, car traffic gets worse because so few can live near transit, and nobody new can move in save a few tech workers.

The quote has been misused. It's about unjustly stealing the most precious and irreplaceable asset any one person has, time. It is not about punishing criminals.

A quote about time as "the most precious and irreplaceable asset any one person has" isn't relevant to discussing a lifetime prison sentence?

Fifth Amendment: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

If you want to punish him for hiring a hitman, you need to convict him first. This is the exact bullshit the fifth amendment is meant to protect against.

He was given a life sentence for convictions on drug trafficking and money laundering. This should be unconstitutional except our cruelty has become usual.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."

Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

This is sensationalist bullshit. Apple is not hiring software engineers in the valley for anywhere close to $52k. Infosys, Tata, et al. import bargain basement engineers. Apple is bringing in the top talent, and those people have no problem finding another employer to sponsor their H-1B if they want to job hop.

As a software engineer, I want H-1B engineers to come work at Apple in the valley. They start or strengthen companies here which then leads to more demand for engineers, and that's a huge plus to my mobility and pay. If they didn't, they would be starting companies back home which does me fuck all good.

The women who choose software engineering as a career path are consistently saying that it's a problem. That's that evidence.

You quote lots of numbers, but you're not talking about software. Women (and people of color) are greatly underrepresented as software engineers.

Sexism is a real issue. It will continue to be while we refuse to acknowledge that.

It depends on his motivations. He could be doing this to embarrass MS, but it may be that he's pressuring them to ensure that the patch gets released on Tuesday. He's been sitting on a 0-day for three months, so he could embarrass them at any time of his choosing. Why do it a few days before a patch Tuesday, i.e. when it will have the smallest impact?

Top bay area tech companies go out of their way to hire every qualified engineer they can get their hands on. American, Indian, Chinese, whatever. You're naive if you think the money matters. H-1B processing fees and minimum salaries are a joke to these companies; most already pay $5K referral bonuses just for submitting the resume of someone who later gets hired.

Yes, Indians are overrepresented compared to the bay area population, but that's what happens when you compare a metro area population to a bunch of globally recruited engineers. Indians, however, are pretty accurately represented when you look at the population mix of engineering applications, and that's obvious to anyone who isn't ignorant about the situation.

BTW, complaining about disproportionate representation is hilarious. Well, unless you're the rare xenophobe who also advocates for more representation for women, blacks, and latinos.

I can't find anyone else reporting this story. I even checked DDG on the paranoid possibility that google was mucking with their own search results.

The story smells wrong to me, and the lack of supporting evidence is very suspicious.

You mean like who I'm allowed to have sex with?

Where are you getting this from? Or are you so restrictive and controlling that you think that people should only be allowed to have sex if they are married?

14 states had anti-sodomy laws on the books until SCOTUS put an end to that shit in Lawrence v Texas 13 years ago. 13 years ago, that's it. That's not too long ago, and you can be sure that most of those states wouldn't have changed the law unless forced to do so by the courts.

And while it may now be legal to have sex with whoever you want, in many states you can be fired or evicted because your bigoted boss or landlord is upset that you're having said sex. What good is that freedom if you can lose your job and your home for exercising it?

[SPOILERS FOR BSG]

I haven't seen Caprica, but BSG is not a good example of how to portray queer characters.

• Cain and her Six: A sadly perfect example of the "bury your gays" trope. They even took it one step further because both of them were *already dead* when you found out they were queer. That ruins any credit they would have earned for showing the Pegasus crew being accepting of their relationship. Also, you find out in Razor, and that wasn't even technically part of the series.
• Cain's Six And Baltar: After Razor, you have to retroactively consider that Cain's Six was bi. Or just PTSD'd to all hell from repeated gang rapes, enough to sleep for Baltar for... solace? And, of course, she dies immediately afterwards.
• Baltar, Caprica Six, and D'Anna: This is overwhelmingly portrayed as the heterosexual male fantasy of doing two chicks at the same time. There's a token line from D'Anna about loving them both, but it's mostly portrayed as a love triangle of two women fighting over Baltar.
• Gaeta and Hoshi: If you're thinking, "Huh, Gaeta and Hoshi are gay?", that's exactly the point. The only indication of either of them being queer is a webisode that takes place during season 4. It isn't touched on either before or after the webisode in the main series. Admittedly, they do a good job of showing their relationship (and Gaeta's bisexuality) as no big deal.

To recap, that's two dead lesbians, a few poorly portrayed examples of bisexual women, and the only queer men confined to a webisode that barely anyone has seen. Contrast this with how BSG subverts tropes and portrays strong women. From the moment Chief casually addresses Boomer as "Sir" in the miniseries, you know something is different. Women can be the President of the Colonies, Admiral of the fleet, or the most badass Viper jock around. That's what makes it so disappointing that BSG couldn't find the time to display a single healthy queer character or relationship in the televised series.

60 million die every year, which comes out to 160k every day. I found a few sources, but the WHO roughly agrees with that number.

Crap, hit submit instead of preview. What I meant to say was:

You left out the initial part of that statement in a way that makes it very misleading. Yes, Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of documents, but it had nothing to do with classified information. He may have committed a civil tort by downloading all those documents (which, btw, JSTOR agreed not to pursue), but it's ludicrous that his actions were threatened with decades in jail for criminal charges while Clinton's felonious actions don't even warrant an indictment.