Linked List: July 21, 2021

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

Activision Blizzard Sued by California Department of Fair Employment and Housing Over ‘Frat Boy’ Culture, Harassment 

Maeve Allsup, reporting for Bloomberg Law:

According to the complaint, filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court, female employees make up around 20% of the Activision workforce, and are subjected to a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” including “cube crawls,” in which male employees “drink copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”

The agency alleges male employees play video games during the workday while delegating responsibilities to female employees, engage in sexual banter, and joke openly about rape, among other things.

Female employees allege being held back from promotions because of the possibility they might become pregnant, being criticized for leaving to pick their children up from daycare, and being kicked out of lactation rooms so male colleagues could use the room for meetings, the complaint says.

Some seriously fucked-up allegations, to say the least.

The Talk Show: ‘Holes in the Blast Door’ 

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include: Apple’s new MagSafe Battery Pack, the Amnesty-International-Led exposé of NSO Group’s state-sponsored phone hacking, Safari 15’s controversial new UI and Apple’s response, and a look back at year one of Apple silicon for Macs. Also: pizza.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

  • Hello Fresh: America’s #1 Meal Kit
  • Squarespace: Everything you need to grow online. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
  • Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
Breathable 1.0 

New app from Garrett Murray (who should be familiar to long-time readers):

Air quality has become an increasing concern for many people around the globe. While stressing about it constantly isn’t necessarily helpful, the goal of the Breathable widget is to provide a quick, glanceable answer to a new daily question: Is it safe to go outside?

Breathable can use AQI data from two services: IQAir.com and, optionally, AirNow.gov (in the USA). Both of these services offer free accounts and API access for personal use. Breathable uses the United States Air Quality Index for all values world-wide.

The entire point of Breathable is to offer widgets — the app itself just lets you configure how the widgets look. Brilliantly simple, and in a way, fun, with its clever “emoji scale”. I started using it last week after Murray pinged me about it, but only because I was interested in the idea of a widget-only weather app — Philadelphia generally doesn’t have air quality issues. I should have known better. Turns out, the whole world now has air quality issues.

Breathable costs just $2, and Murray is donating a portion of the proceeds to foundations focused on climate change initiatives.

‘I’m Sorry, but It’s Too Late’ 

Dennis Pillion, reporting for AL.com:

Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover. Some of the others are dying.

“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

Good link to spread. Fox News should put this doctor on the air in prime time. (Via Dave Winer.)

‘Let’s Get More People Vaccinated’ 

Matt Yglesias, writing at Slow Boring:

In other words, they are acting about the Covid vaccines the same way they’d act about a long-approved antibiotic or the measles vaccine, not the way they’d act about a dietary supplement. They are not saying you are allowed to get vaccinated, they are saying you should get vaccinated. Indeed, that’s not just their medical advice to you — it’s their stated belief (and I agree) that getting vaccinated is a pro-social means of safeguarding your entire community.

So I am saying, with a full understanding of the process, that the FDA ought to bring the official regulatory status of mRNA Covid vaccines into line with the scientific community’s actual understanding and attitude toward the vaccines.

The government is not worried that Pfizer and Moderna might be running a scam on us. They are charging $20 a dose, not $56,000. We are begging people to take these shots. So we should act like it.

FDA formal approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines isn’t the entirety of his argument, but it comes first because it’s so obvious. And the next steps — mandating the vaccines in places like schools and the military — require FDA formal approval.