"EFF and ACLU triumph as federal judge rules that warrantless, suspicionless device searches at the border are illegal" →

This is great news. Privacy laws around the internet and smartphones basically don’t exist. It’s been “legal” for law enforcement to demand we open everything on our phones, and let them download the entire contents, without warrant or suspicion, until now.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

Now, a federal court in Boston has found in favor of the travelers, affirming that CBP cannot conduct searches of border-crossers' devices without particularized suspicion of illegal contraband.

The judgment has the potential to stem the rising floodtide of warrantless border searches of devices -- up 400% in just three years.

On the famous prediction of 15 hour work weeks... →

An economy is meant to serve the people, not the people an economy. As Jeff Spross, in his article “The many benefits of a 4 day work week” lays out, most of us are working harder than ever, but not reaping the benefits that should follow—more pay, or more time off. Our pay’s stagnating; our bills keep going up; those of us not at the top suffer cycles of chronic stress and burnout; and some companies are beginning to realize they need to share the profits, one way or another (and it’s cheaper just to give people more time off).

Jeff Spross, in The Week:

Back in the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that work weeks would eventually fall to 15 hours — or roughly two-day weeks — as technology advanced and economies became more productive. The logic for this is pretty simple: If a society increases the amount of wealth an hour of labor can produce, people can take the benefits of that in one of two ways: They can work more and take home more income, or they can take the same income home and work less.

…

In fact, Cooper calculated that if we had reduced our hours worked as much as other countries that produce similar amounts of GDP per hour of labor, Americans would already have the equivalent of three Fridays off every month.

…That story about how people can take more income for the same hours, or the same income for fewer hours? It only works if the gains from productivity are shared equally. Rising inequality means they’re not. Thus, many working Americans aren't getting fewer hours or more income — they're working as hard as ever and their wages are stagnating.

A lot of people are working full 40-hour weeks — or much more, in a lot of instances — not because their company needs that labor time, but simply because they need to do so to bring home enough income to get by. Which implies their hours could be cut, but their pay maintained, without any loss to the bottom line — not to mention a decrease in stress and burnout.

And that's often what companies discover. Microsoft in Japan is not an isolated incident. A trust management firm in New Zealand recently made permanent a policy of 30-hour weeks — with pay equivalent to 37.5 hours — after it found significant increases in both worker productivity and reports of improved work-life balance. The Belgian nonprofit Femma is experimenting with a four-day work week this year, and the results will be followed by researchers at the University of Brussels. A Swedish city tried out six-hour work days recently, and found its officials nonetheless completed the same amount of work as before, if not more. Meanwhile, multiple research studies attest that working fewer hours can actually improve productivity and performance.

"Being a pastor in 2019..." →

Only a small fraction need to be racist, sexist, etc., to poison society →

This is an important follow-up study to what’s been commonly-reproduced research: race and sex make a statically significant difference in who’s called back for job interviews. And now we have decent evidence that it’s a fraction of hiring managers who’re responsible for the racial disparity. But just like how most men may not be serious sexual harassers, or the overwhelming majority of people in a “bad” neighborhood may not commit crimes, it only takes a few percent of a given group behaving awfully to another in order to cause widespread mistrust and harm.

Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones:

A popular way of testing for racist attitudes in employment is to send multiple applications to a single job posting. The applications are generally identical except for one thing: the names of the applicants. One has a sterotypically white name (Madison Nash) and the other has a stereotypically black name (LaShonda Greene). Then you check to see how many of the white names get callbacks for interviews compared to the black names. Generally speaking, the white names get called back at a rate 2-4 percentage points higher than the black names.

…Only a small group, about one-sixth of the total, discriminates against blacks, but that sixth is massively racist: they all but flatly refuse to even interview someone who seems like they might be black.

…All by themselves, their racism is so overwhelming that it’s enough to make a noticeable difference in the overall rate.

"The Medicare for All Cost Debate Is Extremely Dishonest" →

What should we call a cost that’s automatically taken out of our paychecks? If the payment goes into public coffers, we call it a “tax”, but for some reason, if it goes to a private company in the health insurance industry, it’s a “premium.”

David Dayen, writing in The American Prospect:

…Biden and Buttigieg take advantage of the fact that we use a bizarre and often faulty system to “score” legislation in the Congressional Budget Office, which only looks at a ten-year window for budgetary impact. If the public option is good, and it eventually becomes a kind of Medicare for All, the cost spike would all happen outside the ten-year window. So Biden and Buttigieg are either lying about how effective their public options will be, or they’re lying about how much they will ultimately cost. They can’t have it both ways.

Notice that I’m using the deficit-scold framing here. In reality, Medicare for All saves money, and maybe even more than we expect. The infamous libertarian Mercatus Center study estimated that Medicare for All would save $2 trillion over ten years, due to lower provider reimbursements, administrative costs, and drug outlays. But the CBO recently looked at a relatively modest prescription drug bargaining proposal from House Democrats, which would directly negotiate prices on just 25 pharmaceuticals per year, and found it would save $345 billion in federal spending for Medicare. If that’s the payoff on just 25 drugs, increasing bargaining power across the health care space would presumably go well beyond $2 trillion.

The problem with cost debates on health care is that much of the current system is largely submerged, set up to hide the true cost to the individual. Quick—how much does your employer-provided health care actually cost in total, beyond just the number that shows up on your paycheck and in co-pays? Most of us have no idea unless we work in a corporate HR department. When you surface these submerged payments, they feel like brand-new tax burdens. But you’ve been paying them all along…

Impeachment is a marathon, not a sprint

It took methodical, televised proceedings for Nixon to be impeached and eventually step down. Trump’s crimes have been much larger, public, and more frequent. But the rule of law has eroded so much since Nixon, that it can be difficult to imagine Trump being held accountable. Still, history is a guide. If we’re to keep what rule of law we have left, we should expect this to be a drawn-out fight for truth and justice.

Calling impeachment a coup has historical precedent

Unfit for Office →

This is the best essay I’ve read on the case for impeaching Trump. George Conway discusses Founding intent of the impeachment clause, as well as Trump’s clear and routine “breach of trust” (which also raises the possibility of a Constitutional takeover by his cabinet):

Trump’s erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it’s part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it’s relevant to whether he’s fit for the office he holds. Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.