The first major app on Blockstack, launched today, is promising to disrupt future models of employment, bringing it more in line with a decentralized ethos.
A public blockchain project has raised over $20 million from institutional investors in a combined token and equity sale.
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Speaking of institutional investors, CoinDesk’s Adam Hart joins host Pete Rizzo to discuss the quarterly State of Blockchain report. Hart’s finding suggest that large institutions may be betting against retail investors on the Bitcoin futures market.
On June 11, 2018, the Supreme Court decided Washington v. United States, a case considering off-reservation fishing rights of multiple Native American Tribes in the State of Washington. The 1854-1855 Stevens Treaties were a series of treaties between several Native American Tribes and the State of Washington. As part of these treaties, the Tribes relinquished land, watersheds, and offshore waters adjacent to a particular area, “Case Area,” in exchange for guaranteed off-reservation fishing rights. In 2001, twenty-one tribes and the United States complained in federal district court that the State had been building and maintaining culverts that impeded the transit of mature and juvenile salmon between the sea and their spawning grounds. In 2007, the district court issued an injunction requiring the State to correct these culverts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to address (1) whether a treaty “right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations ... in common with all citizens” guaranteed “that the number of fish would always be sufficient to provide a ‘moderate living’ to the tribes”; (2) whether the district court erred in dismissing the state's equitable defenses against the federal government where the federal government signed these treaties in the 1850s, for decades told the state to design culverts a particular way, and then filed suit in 2001 claiming that the culvert design it provided violates the treaties it signed; and (3) whether the district court’s injunction violates federalism and comity principles by requiring Washington to replace hundreds of culverts, at a cost of several billion dollars, when many of the replacements will have no impact on salmon, and plaintiffs showed no clear connection between culvert replacement and tribal fisheries. In a per curiam opinion, an equally divided Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Ninth Circuit. To discuss the case, we have Lance Sorenson, Olin-Darling Fellow in Constitutional Law at Stanford Law School.
In recent years, historians have reevaluated the role of unfree labor in the nineteenth century American West. William S. Kiser, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University – San Antonio, is part of this historiographical movement. Kiser’s new book, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses New Mexico as a case study to examine the various forms of coerced labor endemic to multiple successive southwestern societies, including indigenous polities and colonial Spain. Borderlands of Slavery takes an in depth look at how peonage and Indian captivity complicated the seemingly black and white debate over slavery in the antebellum United States, and the important role the question of New Mexico statehood played in enflaming the sectional conflict. The West in general, and New Mexico in particular, became pawns in a national struggle over the future of slavery and freedom, and the institution of peonage thrust the recently conquered southwest into the political spotlight. Kiser’s book is timely and important, and calls for historians to seek out less visible forms of unfreedom that existed well into the twentieth century in sometimes unexpected places.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
The President's threatened removal of security clearances for his public critics is a message to future whistleblowers, according to Patrick Eddington. He also discusses a recently released FISA warrant application.
The President's threatened removal of security clearances for his public critics is a message to future whistleblowers, according to Patrick Eddington. He also discusses a recently released FISA warrant application.
Interview with Alethea Dean; What's the Word: Stridulation; News Items: Lake on Mars, Reanalyzing the Drake Equation, In Search Of Reboot, More Energy Nonsense; Who's That Noisy, Science or Fiction
Special guest Candace Opper tells Mike and Sarah about how the death of a rock star changed the field of suicidology (which is a thing). Digressions include eating disorders, car crashes and the insane grimness of the term “family annihilation.” The cringe-worthiness of Mike’s teenage years reaches new depths.
