Link Roundup January 2019

[wepon]

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.

A Fake Nude of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Debunked By Foot Fetishists

The image and text aren’t new—they’ve been around in this combination since at least last month, posted to Twitter and 4chan’s /pol/ political forums, as well as a handful of other subreddits and forums, including some dedicated to revenge porn and creepshots. The conceit here is that if you zoom in to the faucet reflection, you can see the photographer’s breasts, and if you’re to believe the text on the image, that’s Ocasio-Cortez.

For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business

Complaints about private prisons are not new. They go back almost to the advent of the prisons themselves in the 1980s. Those were the Reagan years, when government sought to shift some of its functions to private hands. At the same time, voters wanted harsher measures taken against criminals. Thus, cellblock populations rapidly grew, and prisons became alarmingly overcrowded. But the appetite for locking people up was not matched by a willingness to spend taxpayer money on new government-run cells and support services. Enter for-profit prisons. They were ready to bear some of the burden — for a fee, of course. At federal and state levels, they now operate in more than two dozen states, often in relatively remote regions where jobs can be scarce. It is not unusual in some states for big city crime to become a rural area’s economic development.

NASA Named Its Next New Horizons Target Ultima Thule, a Mythical Land With a Nazi Connection

In the end, they decided to include it in the popular vote, where it fared quite well, coming in seventh out of the 37 options.

Manafort didn't know how to convert PDFs to Word documents, left incriminating paper trail

Manafort and Gates were attempting to secure some loans but decided to falsify their financial documents to try to get better terms. The original document was a PDF file which is not easily editable in that form. The financial document Manafort planned to submit needed to be in .pdf form but it appears that Manafort was not tech savvy enough to figure out how to convert and edit it. He decided to email it to his business partner, Gates, who converted it and sent it back. The two traded the document back and forth in various forms as they added their fake income and eventually submitted it.

I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone

These statements sound very familiar. When The New York Times and Senator Ron Wyden published details of Securus last year, the firm that was offering geolocation to low level law enforcement without a warrant, the telcos said they were taking extra measures to make sure their customers’ data would not be abused again. Verizon announced it was going to limit data access to companies not using it for legitimate purposes. T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T followed suit shortly after with similar promises. After Wyden’s pressure, T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere tweeted in June last year “I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.” Months after the telcos said they were going to combat this problem, in the face of an arguably even worse case of abuse and data trading, they are saying much the same thing.

Twins get some 'mystifying' results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test

There are a variety of factors that can affect the accuracy of results from an ancestry company, Dr. Gravel says, but of particular importance is the size and quality of its reference panel. The larger and more representative it is, the more accurate the results, he says. "If you have fewer people that you can compare to, then you make more shortcuts," he said. "You also run more of a risk of having missed diversity that you might not know existed in one particular region." Another reason for discrepancies in the results from different companies is the arbitrary way each company defines the world's regions, Gravel says. "They kind of need to take a pencil more or less and say, 'That's a region.' And different companies draw different circles."

States warn food stamp recipients to budget early benefit payments due to shutdown

The Department of Agriculture's backup plan for paying out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits amid the lapse in funding means it could be 40 days — or longer, in some cases — before additional money is added to recipients' benefit cards. There is also no guarantee about when nearly 39 million low-income Americans will next receive another payment to help them buy groceries.

‘The Shutdown Makes Me Nervous’: Young People Caught Up in Impasse

With the Internal Revenue Service closed, Cartonise Lawson-Wilson, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has been unable to submit required paperwork for a grant that will pay her housing and tuition. Desperate for help while she awaits a resolution to the deadlock, she started a GoFundMe campaign, but has received only $15 of her $7,512 goal.

Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker

A knee-length Forever 21 dress made in one of the Los Angeles factories investigated by the government came with a price tag of $24.90. But it would have cost $30.43 to make that dress with workers earning the $7.25 federal minimum wage and even more to pay the $12 Los Angeles minimum, according to previously unpublished investigative results from the Labor Department.

How sex censorship killed the internet we love

Facebook recently banned sexual slang; YouTube bans users for sex ed or LGBTQ content because it might be about sex; Twitter has a mysterious sex-shadowban that no one can get a straight answer on. Tumblr can't tell a potato from a boob. Guides on sexual self-censoring are popular — and necessary. Google Drive scans your files and deletes what it believes to be explicit content. Apple just straight-up hates sex.

Ireland’s darkest, oddest and weirdest secrets uncovered

A worldwide crowdsourcing movement is currently unearthing Ireland’s deepest fairy secrets and darkest myths. A voluntary collective online is working its way through transcribing 700,000 pages of folklore that were collected throughout Ireland between 1937 and 1939. This mass of previously inaccessible material was gathered by more than 100,000 children who were sent to seek out the oldest person in their community just before second World War to root out the darkest, oddest and weirdest traditional beliefs, secrets and customs, which were then logged into 1,128 volumes, titled the Schools’ Manuscripts Collection.

California’s almond harvest has created a golden opportunity for bee thieves

“You get out of almond pollination, then your major goal for the next 11 and a half months is making sure your bees are healthy enough to go into almond pollination again,” said Charley Nye, manager of UC Davis’ Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. The almond harvest, he added, is “a weird driver” of market forces – one “that’s kind of pushing everything in one direction. We’re trying to bend the honeybees around it.”

Exclusive: White House preparing draft national emergency order, has identified $7 billion for wall

The White House is preparing a draft proclamation for President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency along the southern border and has identified more than $7 billion in potential funds for his signature border wall should he go that route, according to internal documents reviewed by CNN.

This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss

The arbitrators had awkward news for Beigelman. His lawyers had written an account of what happened to him at UBS as part of a prehearing brief. The document was meant to help prepare the arbitrators for the case. Unfortunately, they hadn’t received it, and no one was sure why.

Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border

First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying. There are two different policies in play, and both are new

Trump Administration Grants South Carolina Foster Care Agencies Authority to Discriminate Against Jewish and Muslim Families

Eighty Republican legislators in May signed a letter to President Donald Trump on behalf of faith-based Child Placing Agencies they say are being targeted because of their mission. The letter includes a specific recommendation to repeal the federal rule that protects people from discrimination in HHS-funded programs on the basis of religion, race, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other “non-merit” characteristic. The letter condemns the shortage of foster care parents and the growing population of children in the system, citing the opioid epidemic as a major contributor, and then requests a change to federal rules to allow agencies to deny qualified parents in the name of religious freedom.