Category: Rants 🤬

Here’s another example of police protecting their own so that unlawful behavior goes unpunished. However, this time the story comes from close to home: San Francisco.

Charges dropped for deputies accused of forcing inmates into ‘fight club’ [The Guardian]

How long is our society going to accept the lunacy of allowing police departments to investigate their own misbehavior? In nearly every facet of human life, misbehavior is investigated and remedied by an external party. But when it comes to the United States, for some reason the police are too holy to be held equally accountable.

17 students at a high school in Florida are killed by a former student with a gun. The Trump Administration reacts by convening a commission on school safety. This commission releases their 117 page report. Their findings:

1. Harden schools into fortresses. (Give NRA members more business)
2. Punish black and minority students more harshly. (Do anything and everything to destroy the work of President Obama)

Trump’s school safety commission goes after black children instead of the NRA [Washington Post]

Do you read the news? How many more reasons do you need to delete your Facebook account???

When number 45 calls journalists “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE”, he is encouraging hate against genuine, honest, and good human beings.

1. Today I did the annual story on holiday decorations at the Governor's residence. I've done it every year, for years. A very light but very fun story. Every year my reporting partner was Wendi Winters. This year, it was Selene. Wendi was murdered in June. https://t.co/hDlixzieht

— Joshua McKerrow (@joshuamckerrow) December 7, 2018

Anti-fascists were stabbed at a neo-Nazi rally. Then police tried to charge them [The Guardian]

Money flows so freely into the American political system that we live in an age where foreign governments are spending money through lobbyists to influence the way American politicians vote on legislation.

Republican Senators Who Tried To Kill Yemen War Resolution Were Paid By Saudi Lobbyists [Newsweek]

This morning I woke to all of my Apple devices displaying this horrible, confusing message. The message is unexpected because I A) haven’t touched my iPad in over a day and B) haven’t touched the Apple ID or iCloud settings in many weeks. But what is even more glaring than the unexpectedness of this message is the fact that it is wildly unhelpful.

Read the subtext of this message:

“If you recently signed into “MagPad Pro” you can ignore this notification.”

Well, Apple. No, I did not recently sign into “MagPad Pro”. I haven’t touched those settings in weeks. What am I supposed do now???

Do I call Apple support? Do I take my iPad down to the local Apple Store for help? Do I need to change the password on my Apple ID account? What is the next step for someone who did not recently log into the device you claim they did???

It frustrates me to no end when companies blindly ship code that includes horrible error or confirmation messages such as this one. No one at Apple read the text of this confirmation message while considering when the message would be displayed to users. Instead, they created a situation where a large group of users are left in a pool of confusion with no hint about how or where to take the next steps to secure their account.

This situation could be excused if the message related to something insignificant such as your printer’s settings or the default download location for files from the web, but in this case we’re talking about the security of your Apple ID, the backbone of all the services Apple provides. The vulnerability of a person’s Apple ID is anything but insignificant.

To summarize, here’s my message for product designers and engineers: Never, ever design an error or confirmation message without including a link to further help documentation. Including the relevant link to documentation will help you notice lacking pieces of information that should be included in the message. Even if you happen to produce an unhelpful message such as the one pictured above, the link to help documentation at the very least points the user in a direction towards getting help. If you instead design a message like Apple has, you leave users hanging and feeling helpless, which is a great way to make people hate your product.

Following the example of number 45, the GOP have firmly adopted the abhorrent standard of declaring voter fraud in elections which do not turn out in their favor. Rather than accept the outcome of our fair, just, and legal elections, the party is willing to make false declarations which erode the foundation of our democratic processes. Their statements are wholly unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality. Instead, the lies disseminated by the GOP are created purely to encourage support from uneducated, misinformed Americans.

Only time and further statements of fraud from GOP politicians hold us back from a country that is unwilling to accept the results of our elections.

“GOP cries foul after California thumping” [Politico]

When a police officer shoots an unarmed black man, nothing happens. The shooting is always justified.

It’s only when a police officer beats another police officer that charges are filed.

‘It’s still a blast beating people’: St. Louis police indicted in assault of undercover officer posing as protester [Washington Post]

Think about this: If the undercover officer in this article had been a civilian protester and not been a police officer, absolutely nothing would have happened. No charges would have been filed. There would have been zero negative consequences for the officers who performed the beating.

That is the present state of our country. Only law enforcement matters.

Ever notice how any time there is a disaster, everyone congregates in a big box store parking lot? The center of the next apocalypse will be a Walmart parking lot. There’s a quality about that which I find especially depressing.