Month: October 2021

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Headlines From The Times - The push to decriminalize jaywalking

Rules against jaywalking are rarely enforced, but in many places, when someone does get a ticket, it's more likely than not a person of color — and the penalty is steep.

Jaywalking tickets disproportionately affect communities of color in California’s biggest cities. Critics say that’s because of systemic racism, and state lawmakers want to address the disparity. A bill currently awaiting the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, known as the Freedom to Walk act, would get rid of penalties for pedestrians who try to cross the street when it’s safe, even against a red light.

Today we talk to state Assemblymember Phil Ting, who introduced the bill. And walking advocate John Yi discusses getting from Point A to Point B with convenience and dignity.

More reading:

Editorial: Trying to cross the street shouldn’t be a crime

O.C. deputies argued over whether to stop Kurt Reinhold before fatally shooting him

2018 Op-Ed: Cars are running over people left and right. So why is LAPD targeting pedestrians and not drivers?

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CBS News Roundup - World News Roundup: 10/05

Red-faced at Facebook. Business practices under fire a day after a massive outage. What caused the California oil spill? School cafeteria shortages. CBS News Correspondent Deborah Rodriguez has today's World News Roundup.

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Time To Say Goodbye - “Squid Game:” Some of us are not horses.

Hello from Capitalist Playground of Death!

This week, we talk 100% “Squid Game.”

Warning: Don’t listen until you’ve watched it all.

Does the show constitute anti-capitalist critique? Why does the ending suck? Did Park Chan-wook make the West permanently love K-horror? Will Asian art soon displace Asian American art? What’s with the weird ‘noble savage’ thing going on in the show?

Plus: the dialogue genius in “The Wire”’s writers’ room, fantasy basketball, Gary Shteyngart (i.e., three Asian Americans trashing neoliberalism), and solidarity with subtitle translators.

Thanks for supporting the pod. Please stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!



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World Book Club - Wole Soyinka

This month, to kick off a mini-season to celebrate a very special centenary World Book Club talks, for a second time, to the Nobel Prize-winning giant of world literature, Professor Wole Soyinka, about one hundred years of the writers’ organisation English PEN. PEN is the influential pressure group which helps support and campaign for the release of writers held unlawfully in jail around the globe and which helped to secure Soyinka’s release in 1969, after 26 months of detention without trial by the military regime in Nigeria.

Guest presenter Ritula Shah also discusses Wole Soyinka’s first new novel in half a century with the author and his readers around the world: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is a bitingly witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s ruling elite, and a powerful call to arms from one of the country’s most relentless political activists and world-famous writer.

(Picture: Wole Soyinka. Photo credit: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images.)

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The Intelligence from The Economist - When it goes dark: Facebook’s terrible week

Yesterday’s global outage is not even the worst of it: today’s congressional testimony will examine a whistleblower’s allegations that the company knows its products cause widespread harm. The modern food-industrial complex is great for eaters but appalling for the planet; we examine technological fixes, and whether consumers will bite. And how Afghanistan's embassies abroad are—or aren’t—dealing with the Taliban.

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The Best One Yet - 🦑 “#SquidGame” — Netflix’s squid strategy. Crypto’s physical stores. Undersea Cables’ moment.

Squid Game has become a market-moving Netflix show messing with stocks. The latest move in digital cryptocurrencies is physical crypto stores. And a 470-mile undersea electric cable by National Grid is solving the biggest problem of renewable energy: Inconsistency.  $NFLX $BTC $ETH $NGG Got a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYork Want a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9 Got a SnackFact for the pod? We got a form for that too: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64VKtvMNDPGSncHDRF07W34cPMDO3N8Y4DpmNP_kweC58tw/viewform Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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What Next | Daily News and Analysis - Democrats’ Gerrymandering Dilemma

With the results of the 2020 census in hand, all 50 states have begun the process of redistricting. Extremely thin margins in the House of Representatives mean that this hyper-local process has big implications on the balance of power at a national scale.


After aggressive Republican gerrymandering in the 2011 redistricting cycle, many Democrats came out in favor of creating non-partisan commissions to draw new voting maps. But how much of a moderating force are they really? And what happens if either side decides not to play by the commissions’ rules?


Guest: Nick Riccardi, a western political writer for AP.


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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Canary Islands (Encore)

If you think of Spain as the country on the Iberian Peninsula which is sandwiched between France and Portugal, you are not wrong, but you are also not totally right. There is also a significant part of the country which is located in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Morocco: The Canary Islands. Here you will find things that you aren’t going to find in mainland Spain or even the rest of Europe. Learn more about the Canary Islands on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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NBN Book of the Day - Alvin E. Roth, “Who Gets What–and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design” (HMH, 2015)

In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash is even involved at all. Roth’s work has led the way in taking microeconomics outside the halls of academic theory to become a practical “engineering” tool for policymakers and businesses.

In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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What A Day - Facebook’s Status: It’s Complicated

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were offline for six hours yesterday in what’s been called the most sustained and the largest outage for the company in recent memory. It came a day after CBS aired an interview with a Facebook whistleblower, and on the same day the company filed a dismissal in an anti-trust lawsuit by the federal government.

The latest Supreme Court term began, yesterday, and there is a lot to keep our eyes on with the current 6-3 conservative majority. The court is going to hear arguably the most important 2nd Amendment case since at least 2008, possibly the most impactful reproductive health ruling in decades, and more.

And in headlines: union members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees voted to authorize a strike, Senate Republicans vow to not raise the country’s debt ceiling, and Clint Eastwood won a $6.1 million lawsuit against a CBD company.


Show Notes:

Washington Post: “Facebook apps coming back online after widespread outage” – https://wapo.st/3BcQ3Wu

Wall Street Journal: “​​The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It” – https://on.wsj.com/3AcO8zE

Balls and Strikes – https://ballsandstrikes.org/


For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday