With Angel Quicksey
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Trump watch: “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens, and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be. I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” President Trump declared as he explained his decision to abandon the Paris climate accord. The mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, responded by affirming his support for the accord on Twitter.
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In response, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that he was “departing presidential councils” because “climate change is real.” (On Twitter, former Hillary Clinton digital director Jenna Lowenstein drily commented, “Muslim ban wasn’t ‘real’ enough, apparently.”)
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The governors of Washington state, New York and California, who represent one-fifth of the US gross domestic product, have announced the formation of the United States Climate Alliance in response to Trump’s decision.
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If you can bear to read only one thing about Trump’s decision, make it this piece by Michael Grunwald in Politico magazine, which should be titled “How Trump is Trolling the World.”
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“[T]he world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.” So write top presidential advisers H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal.
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That’s one vision of the future. Writing in the Guardian, science-fiction author Cory Doctorow offers a different vision, where the lower cost of surveillance protects the rich in oligarchic societies, but also where loose-knit groups learn to network more effectively to build new kinds of social support for all.
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David Brooks very effectively responds to McMaster and Cohn’s narrow vision of the world in his New York Times column today, arguing that selfishness isn’t the only driver of human affairs.
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According a US intelligence official speaking to NBC Nightly News, Trump “was freelancing” with the terrorism declaration about yesterday’s incident in the Philippines and “a laugh when up in the Situation Room” when he made it.
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The White House is looking for the public’s input on which parts of the federal government it should reform and which it should eliminate.
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Here’s Russian President Vladimir Putin arguing that Russian hackers might have meddled in the 2016 US election because they were hacking in their spare time. Which brings this classic skit to mind.
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Privacy watch: Don’t miss Craig Timberg’s detailed report in the Washington Post on how black movement organizers at the Center for Media Justice and Equality Labs are leading a new push to train organizers in how to improve their digital security practices.
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Sam Levin reports for The Guardian that a new US immigration database called the Victim Information Notification Exchange, set up by the Trump administration to highlight crimes committed by immigrants, is also exposing the personal information of crime victims, “putting them at risk of further violence and violating federal laws designed to conceal the identifies of abuse survivors.”
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Tech and politics: Writing in the Washington Post, Dan Balz points out what was obviously wrong about Hillary Clinton’s blaming the Democratic National Committee’s data problems for her campaign’s loss. It wasn’t bad voter files, it was bad data models built by her campaign that led to bad decisions about where to put its resources, he notes.
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What sharing economy? “[R]ather than musing about a [universal basic income], it would be nice to see well-intentioned technology titans try to lift a finger to defend food stamps, Medicaid, disability insurance and other under-assault welfare programs while backing monetary policy aimed at worker-friendly policies and a robust drive for full employment,” Matthew Yglesias writes in Vox.
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After Lyft released its first diversity report yesterday, Megan Rose Dickey of Techcrunch compared the company to its competitor, Uber. She found that the latter is more racially diverse while Lyft employs more women. Lyft promised to address the gaps revealed in its report.
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Comcast launched a new gigabit internet service in Oregon and Washington nearly a year after Google dropped its fiber plans for the region, Mike Rogoway reports for The Oregonian.
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The Supreme Court decided against Lexmark, the printer company that sued a small business for refilling and selling its printer cartridges. The ruling should benefit consumers, in that it expands frees up people creating new innovations from off-the-shelf products, as Brian Fung explained in the Washington Post.
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This could be civic tech someday! The leaders of the New Jersey state legislature are proposing legislation that would allocate $100 million from the sale of two local public television station licenses to fund a new “Civic Information Consortium,” a partnership with four state universities aimed at strengthening public-interest journalism, advancing research in the media field, developing and deploying civic tech and promoting civic engagement. The proposal is the product of years of organizing by the Free Press Action Fund’s New Voices: New Jersey project.
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Your moment of zen: Pinboard has acquired Delicious. And you have to read Pinboard owner Maciej Ceglowski’s post explaining what happens next.
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