FuckedGoogle: Google to employees: don’t get old if you want to keep your job:

Unfortunately for Google, California’s Sixth District Court of Appeal ruled on Friday that Reid has presented enough evidence to prove that Google has a corporate culture of age discrimination and that the lawsuit shall continue, overturning the previous Santa Clara trial judge that Google almost certainly paid off, just like they paid off Stephen Malouf with that bogus class action clickfraud settlement last year.

Sounds kinda evil.

Ron Jones The Wave:

Although Jones says he would never repeat the Third Wave, he insists it could easily happen today, anywhere in the United States, for a variety of reasons.

“Fascism is always a possibility because it’s so simple and people are frustrated. They lose their jobs, their dignity, their sense of worth, and someone comes along and says, “I’ve got the answer.”

School systems prepare the ground, Jones says by using only standardized tests for success and failing to recognize alternative paths of learning, as well as a wider variety of individual achievements.

Educational institutions weed out troublemakers and those who are difficult to teach, he contends, rewarding placid students who want to succeed at any cost and will accept authority.

Read the article if you’ve never heard of the Third Wave experiment. It’s something every American should know about. Now think about that, and think about the direction American education has taken since the institution of “No Child Left Behind.”

Via Fair Game.

And of course just today my employers got their own gmail domain, so I couldn’t easily be logged in to my own gmail and that at the same time anyway. :)

Man, my timing rocks!

I think it says something about the state of the world when the least depressing, most hopeful and upbeat thing I’ve read about current events in a long time is an interview with Noam Chomsky.

Perhaps unusually I’d always written off Chomsky because I find his linguistics implausible, but more and more, as I’m paying attention, I’m seeing the accuracy his political analysis confirmed.

One of the things I futz about is that occasionally I’ve gotten really interested in the awesome “conversations” interface in Gmail and I take a bunch of steps to put myself into a gmail universe, setting up clever filters to allow this to be redundant with my other email accounts, all that kind of thing.

I think I’ve finally put all that behind me, and having put it behind me, I thought it might be a good time to take all of my private email back from Google, to the degree they’ll let me. So over the past week I’ve been downloading it all. I’ve got Gmail set up to work as a pop mailbox, with it set to “delete mail after I download it.” So it’s been sluuuuurping down all the mail I’ve shoofed into it over the years, directly and indirectly, and dropping it in the “Trash” on the server (I just emptied the trash… there’s no going back!)

This turns out to be timely. Two exploits against gmail have been reported in the past week (here and here), and there’s an interesting account of what you can do if someone compromises your gmail account here (answer: nothing).

(If you’ve got my gmail address and are worried about email getting to me, don’t worry — I’ve got a forward set up.)

Not that Gmail is any worse than any other huge free service provider. I’m sure yahoo mail or hotmail or whatever have their own vulnerabilities, and similarly don’t give a crap about you if something bad happens to your account. (Yahoo especially is notoriously impossible to contact if you have a problem or complaint.) It just seems like it’s Google’s week in the spotlight, the week I happen to have bailed out of them.

I’m going to depend on fastmail.fm as my primary email provider. I pay them, so they’ve got a motivation to take care of me if anything goes wrong, and they just seem overall to be Good People.