BREAKING: Microsoft to address its track record of awful political giving by... renaming its PAC to "the Microsoft Corporation Stakeholders Voluntary PAC (MSVPAC)." to "capture the fact that it is funded exclusively by voluntary donations of Microsoft stakeholders".
Microsoft is also pledging not to support the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the Electoral College for the duration of the 2022 cycle. After that, presumably—back to normal! No word on whether this limit extends to leadership PACs and other forms of indirect giving.
The company is also creating "a new Democracy Forward Initiative to support organizations that promote public transparency, campaign finance reform, and voting rights" that will work to undo the harms its political giving arm subsidizes.
FInally, the company will "promote and join a conversation with other businesses and organizations that want to strengthen democracy. Recent events have raised issues of importance to PACs across the business community."
In other words, Microsoft is trying to coat the irritant of employee anger at its support for antidemocratic extremists in pearly layers of bureaucracy. There will be study groups and new initiatives! Hopefully employees will not be bamboozled and will push for PAC abolition.
Remember—Microsoft donated to WV Attorney General Patrick Morrisey a week AFTER he filed suit to throw out the 2020 Presidential election results. These new self-imposed limits would not prevent Microsoft from donating to him again. The PAC (whatever its rebranded name) must die.
Microsoft listened to its employees' concerns about bankrolling sedition and responded by inserting a "V" into MSPAC. I think we all know what it stands for.
* correction— I see in the full MS statement (I was working from extracts) that they've extended their self-imposed hiatus to state officials as well, presumably including Morrisey. Since these limits are easy to skirt by donating to parties and other PACs, I see this as cosmetic
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Google's post-election FEC report is out. On December 16, Google gave Darrell Issa $5,000 to help retire his primary campaign debt. On January 6, Issa voted to overturn the lawful results of the Presidential election.
Google made a similar $5,000 donation to Wyoming senator Cynthia Loomis on December 16. On January 6, Loomis was one of eight senators who voted to reject the Electoral College vote.
And on December 4, 2020, Google gave $5,000 to Jim Risch's leadership PAC, called Save America. What did Save America spend it on? Making sure that Republicans would win the Georgia Senate races. Googlers, this is who you work for.
Hey everyone—an update on API slowness today. The immediate issue is that the site is getting a lot of API traffic and once things bog down, it's difficult to identify the cause of the problem, as all queries get slow. So I'm doing my best to figure out which Jenga piece to pull
The deeper issue is that the API is not equipped to handle an obvious case (has anything changed for user X since time Y) that would reduce the need to fetch all bookmarks, an expensive query. That's the focus of V2 (draft here idlewords.com/pinboard_api2_…) that I've been building
I'm trying to find a balance between keeping the punch-drunk V1 of the API on its legs and getting V2 to a state where it can go into experimental deployment and then take over some of the load. Once it's up and running, the pressure on the original should lessen a lot
There's going to be some brief API downtime today (~20 minutes) because I don't have time for frou-frou failover to the backup server; I have to replace some hard drives and then get the hell over the Sierra Nevada in a rental Mazda full of your data before the blizzard hits.
Oh, and back up your bookmarks. It's a good habit!
Auspicious sighting of Cat5 the data center cat portends six more weeks of uptime, and possibly a safe mountain crossing today
Microsoft held an employee town hall today. I obtained a copy of Microsoft President Brad Smith's remarkably candid explanation of why Microsoft will continue to fund politicians whose conduct is completely at odds with the company's stated values notes.pinboard.in/u:maciej/90342…
Picture of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with an unidentified Windows user from Queens
One reason we're talking about Microsoft here is that their leaders are at least willing to engage with employees about the PAC. Not so at Google, Facebook, or Amazon, whose political giving is even less defensible. Employees have the power to defund all this and should use it
Ranked choice voting is an amazing electoral innovation that lets you mark one of the two major party candidates as your “first choice” instead of voting for them outright.
I was a fan of ranked choice until I tried to explain to a skeptical voter why "some people get to vote multiple times while others just get one vote" and realized that ranked choice adds both cognitive complexity and ballot complexity to an already difficult process
From ranked choice voting to end-to-end encryption and wood apples, I tend to like stuff a lot until I try it and realize it is way overhyped