I am stuck in this morass of democratic disenchantment. To whom should my vote be cast for in a state senate race thus? An hard-line business-person who aligns herself with Chamber of Commerce/Republicans or the weak-sauce Obama-crat that has moved his family to the most expensive part of our local geography while claiming bona fides because his high school was in the economically depressed part of town.

He left them just as he will leave state senate as soon as he gets of whiff of possibility.

Neither of these people are going to do anything to change the privilege that they have received through their political grooming's nor their earthly "good works".

When I was not a house-husband I worked in various joints. One cube-farm I worked in had one dude that was never satisfied with his project's prestige. He was always looking to move up and out instead of working hard here and now to get ahead later. He was wads smarter than me. But I got a promotion ahead of him.

My manager told me it was because, "Joel is always standing on his desk to see if he can get a better job instead of just doing his. We value the work first."

And it seems that with politicians. They are all standing on their desks looking to see if they can view DC from there.

Please open your "The Wire" transcripts to season 5, episode 2, where State Delegate Odell Watkins asks Carcetti's cabinet member, "Doesn't this seem a little thin to you, running for governor two years into a four-year term?"

His cabinet member retorts, "Everything's thin. The whole world shines shit and calls it gold."

Woah. Wow. This is one of the more interesting things I've ever seen from Wired.

The lack of engagement with the democratic process and reliance on technology is a particular problem now because we consider "the clever people" to be those who know about technology. He describes "nerds" as the "new elite" -- the very people who should be helping to fix the political system. But they "are kind of lazy bastards who are too arrogant to go onto the streets. They are too arrogant to see it's important to not think that we can solve problems with better technology".

While this is partially true, the nerd elite is a minority and minorities don't win under democracy, but they can in entrepreneurship and business if they play their cards right.

I assume mentioning that everything he says is rank hypocrisy is unnecessary. I also -- why do I get the impression he didn't believe any of this five years ago?

Sunde thinks Netflix and Spotify are good services, but he stopped using the latter after it deleted some of the music he listened to. He had already deleted some music he couldn't get hold of any more from a hard drive because he "trusted Spotify to have it". He was scared away from the service permanently "because I realised that someone else is controlling the music that I listen to".

Wow. I'm so fucking blown away by this article, from the cofounder of the goddamn Pirate Bay. I mean ... I literally don't know what to say. If the BitTorrent community is dying (which can only be a good thing because I bet dying in this case is synonymous with going furtherunderground), this is why.

Wow, again.

The /r/bitcoin comments about this are pretty interesting. Some of them agree with him, some of them say he's putting out this statement because of an ulterior motive to get himself elected to the European parliament, some of them say that the government was created to manage interactions in physical space, and that the government is going to be obsoleted by these technologies because our interactions are taking place less and less in physical space. One guy suggested that he's being forced to say this as a condition of his bail haha.

It seems like as the laws get more and more oppressive, the technology to overcome those laws gets more and more cutting edge and less and less accessible to the average citizen. If I was a government who wanted to "beat" technology, I'd concentrate less on banning it and more on making it so cumbersome to use that it would be trivial to keep track of the few people who go through the trouble to do so.