Interesting thesis here:

Just as the story of one Goldman Sachs daughter’s over-the-top bar mitzvah became a Wall Street morality tale, Parker’s wedding has been covered that way, too, across sites that seem to be, lately, more sharply attuned to covering tech culture critically. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Tech-world denizen Jesper Andersen tweeted a similar sentiment: “Change ‘startup’ to ‘hedge fund,’ ‘ecstasy’ to ‘cocaine’, and ‘douche-bag’ to ‘douche bag’ and you too can see SF is just another Wall St.” Or this, from Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”

There’s a lot to agree with in this article over at . . . The New Republic.

It’s like a blog created just for me. From the about section:

This is a safe place. We can all be honest here. We’ll start.

Your children are trying to murder you. We know because ours are almost succeeding against us. They suck the life from us and leave us without the ability to be human to each other, let alone them.

And they think it’s funny.

Obviously, we can’t help with that; as it is, we’re writing this from our bolt-hole next to the pantry. But we’re here to help you out with something else.

Over the course of the pain your children have inflicted on you, you’ve missed out on some popular culture, and by “some” we mean “all.” We have, too. We have decided to do something about it, and in the process, we’re going to help you and us, too.

Here you will find reviews of movies, books, and video games you will have missed while trying to survive the fact of your children. We will focus primarily on adult entertainment (by which we mean things rated PG-13 up to R, not things rated with various repetitions of X), but will also hit some kids’ material that may or may not be bearable, but to which you’ll be exposed anyway.

From their review of Transformers:

In 1986, a generation of children screamed a scream of denial, rage, and mourning as the clueless idiots at Marvel’s animation arm pointlessly and Troy Denning-like killed Optimus Prime so that Hasbro could market a new round of Transformers toys.

In Transformers: The Movie, Optimus Prime returns to the Autobots’ base on Earth to find it overrun with Decepticons, and his own forces dead or hopelessly outnumbered and soon to fall.

Because he’s Optimus Prime, he sets out to singlehandedly turn the tide of battle and to kick ass. Because he’s Optimus Prime, he succeeds. Because Marvel’s animation arm was run by people hopped up on cocaine and stupid, he is inexplicably and gratuitously killed as the incongruous protagonist of the film for no appreciable reason gets in the way of Prime’s moment of triumph.

Genius.

I do not actually know who Robin Thicke is and I’ve never heard the song “Blurred Lines.” Then again, I didn’t hear that crazy Korean song everyone loves until October of 2012, so Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is probably winding its way into my aural sight-lines as we speak. I look forward to grooving on it sometime in mid-2015.

That said, Ace’s giant FAQ about Thicke and “Blurred Lines” strikes me as utterly brilliant. I can’t even excerpt it, because every line is gold. Go and enjoy.

I take a fairly non-academic view of price discrimination–which is to say that if sellers want to practice it by imposing hurdles (like coupons or happy hours) that’s fine, because the hurdles apply to everyone and buyers can choose whether or not to impose them. In other words, the seller presents the array of prices and it’s the buyer who makes the discriminating decisions. I’m fairly nervous about seller-imposed price discrimination.

For instance, should Amazon be allowed to charge different prices for streamable content based on your browser? Or your OS? Maybe. How about your IP address? Or your sex? Or your race?

The reason these sorts of price discriminations make me uncomfortable is because once you allow the seller to start walking down that road, what’s to stop a company from instituting punitive pricing on groups they find distasteful, like, say, people who live in Utah. Or people whom they suspect to be opponents of gay marriage. (And if you think tech companies–even publicly-traded ones–would worry about alienating customers by pursuing political agendas, you probably haven’t been paying close attention.)

All of this is just wind-up to this academic-ish piece on the future of price discrimination in Forbes. I’d be very interested in Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman’s thoughts on it.

Santino has gone on a mini-tear about how the character Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad is a “bad person.”

Well let me just ask Santino this?

Does Jesse Pinkman have kids in private school?

Case. Closed.

Cops wearing cameras turn out to be more polite:

In her ruling in a recent civil suit challenging the New York City police department’s notorious stop-and-frisk rousting of residents, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan imposed an experiment in which the police in the city’s precincts with the highest reported rates of stop-and-frisk activity would be required to wear video cameras for one year. . . .

Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percentand the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.

This is not surprising. Also not surprising would be if the citizens interacting with these cops turn out to be more polite, too.

To the extent I’ve thought about it, I’m nominally against the idea of a CCTV surveillance state, because it extends the eye of the state everywhere, at all times, essentially making the state a disembodied, virtual presence.

But having actual law-enforcement officers–who are in persona civitas–wear cameras is quite different. Because the purpose isn’t to extend the reach of the state, but rather to limit it, by curtailing the ability of officers to make things up. For bad cops, this is a good thing. For good cops, I can imagine how it might seem to be micromanagement. But the upside is that it also protects them from bad actors and, I would guess, improves their day-to-day interactions with the average citizen.

It should be win-win-win for everyone.

I assume this is legit, but it’s such an amazing performance that it’s almost hard to believe it’s not CGI.

Sad Update: Of course it’s fake. Sigh.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but the Free Beacon has become my absolute favorite blog. Santino has been, as our elders once said, en fuego for months. And Bobby Charette is Brendan’s brother from another mother. It’s just awesome.

Anyway, Santino lights it up again with this piece about why people who use private transportation are monsters. Enjoy.