The Future of Labour: Trapped In A Neo-Liberal Veal Pen

File under: we are all serfs/eventual anarchists:

Consulting firm PwC recently published its outlook for work in 2022, based on interviews with 500 human resources experts and 10,000 others in the United States and several other countries. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that big companies could end up so powerful and influential they morph into “ministates” that fill the void when government is unable to provide essential services. Companies will also use sensors and other gizmos to monitor employees around the clock. And workers will mostly acquiesce to this digital leash, in exchange for job security, decent pay and important benefits.

The future’s so bright, I gotta drink whiskey like it’s going outta style.

White Suspects > Black Victims

https://twitter.com/LordSWVP/status/498892967231238144

‘WELP:

WHITE SUSPECT

suspect 1

That’s how the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal chose to present the story of Amy Bishop, a former college professor who eventually pleaded guilty to killing three colleagues and wounding three others at a faculty meeting in 2010.

BLACK VICTIM

victim 7

And that’s the headline AL.com ran about the shooting death of a 25-year-old black man in Alabama earlier this year.

WHITE SUSPECT

suspect 2

This is how the Staten Island Advance covered the case of Eric Bellucci, a mentally ill New York man who allegedly killed his parents.

BLACK VICTIM

trayvon

Meanwhile, NBC News ran this headline during ongoing coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing.

More at HuffPo (h/t).

Hacktivists Out Alleged Michael Brown Shooter — Only It’s The Wrong Guy

Not at all helpful (quite the opposite, actually):

On Thursday, a name released by the hacking collective Anonymous began circulating, but St. Louis County Police said that the name was inaccurate. The same kind of thing happened Wednesday, as another name began floating around and gaining traction. Ferguson police said that that name was also inaccurate, telling The Post that these reports were false.

A spokesman with the St. Louis County Police was critical of the group Anonymous for releasing the information.

“People really need to harshly judge the accuracy of this group, given that they’ve now given false information about several important things,” Sgt. Colby Dolly said on Thursday.

Dolly said that authorities were trying to locate the person identified by Anonymous on Thursday to warn him.

Of course, such recklessness could easily be prevented by, y’know, releasing the name of the shooter (even the NRO, etc).

How An Algorithim Caught The Ebola Outbreak

Science: this is why we keep you around:

Nine days before the World Health Organization announced the African Ebola outbreak now making headlines, an algorithm had already spotted it. HealthMap, a data-driven mapping tool developed out of Boston Children’s Hospital, detected a “mystery hemorrhagic fever” after mining thousands of web-based data sources for clues.

“We’ve been operating HealthMap for over eight years now,” says cofounder Clark Freifeld. “One of the main things that has allowed it to flourish is the availability of large amounts of public event data being accessible on the Internet.”

[…]

As anyone who’s ever looked at the Internet knows, any bulk consumption of web content is bound to scoop up tons of noise, especially when sources like Twitter and blogs are involved. To cope with this, HealthMap applies a machine learning algorithm to filter out irrelevant information like posts about “Bieber fever” or uses of terms like “infection” and “outbreak” that don’t pertain to actual public health events.

“The algorithm actually looks at hundreds of thousands of example articles that have been labeled by our analysts and uses the examples to pick up on key words and phrases that tend to be associated with actual outbreak reports,” explains Freifeld. “The algorithm is continually improving, learning from our analysts through a feedback loop.”

“You can’t win a person’s heart and mind when you are pointing a rifle at his or her chest”

Ferguson, Michael Brown, Mike Brown, #michaelbrown, #mikebrown

Afghanistan War veteran Paul Szoldra:

In Afghanistan, we patrolled in big, armored trucks. We wore uniforms that conveyed the message, “We are a military force, and we are in control right now.” Many Afghans saw us as occupiers.

And now we see some of our police officers in this same way. “The militarization of law enforcement is counter-productive to domestic policing and needs to stop,” tweeted Andrew Exum, a former Army infantry officer.

If there’s one thing I learned in Afghanistan, it’s this: You can’t win a person’s heart and mind when you are pointing a rifle at his or her chest.