Author Archives: RafaelClopton

Donald Trump just called himself an environmentalist. Wait, what?

by RafaelClopton Posted on September 21, 2018

President Trump was in Las Vegas on Thursday evening headlining Nevada Senator Dean Heller’s reelection event. Heller is currently high on the list of endangered GOP members up for reelection this fall, so Trump flew down there to save him. Speaking of endangered species, the president just unveiled a proposal to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act, but I digress.

At the rally, Trump said something that will shock the pants off of anyone who has been even remotely attuned to the myriad ways in which this administration has undermined environmental regulations. He said, AND I QUOTE, “I’m an environmentalist.” Sir! This actually isn’t the first time Trump has tried to tell people that he’s a champion of the environment. In 2017, he said, “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment.” Watch the Vegas clip:

No offense, my guy, but you’re an environmentalist if today is opposite day on the planet Mars. Trump went on to say that we have the cleanest air and water — as coal ash spills threaten rivers in North Carolina, students can’t use the drinking fountains in Detroit due to lead contamination, and the air quality in parts of the Western U.S. was the worst in the world this summer due to smoke from climate-worsened fires.

Want more proof that the Trump administration has launched targeted attacks on public lands, renewable energy, climate science, and more? Here’s the short list:

Remember when the president appointed Scott Pruitt, grifter-in-chief at the EPA and dedicated chore-boy for the fossil fuel industry? Yeah, Pruitt wasn’t great for the environment.
What about that time Trump decided to shrink two enormous national monuments, opening up sacred indigenous land and acres of important animal and plant habitat for resource extraction?
Or, hey! How about when he announced plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement? Or what about that year when mentions of climate change essentially disappeared from government websites (and they’re still MIA!)?
Wait! One more. How about that time he repealed Obama’s Clean Power Plan with a “coal-at-all-costs” plan?

I guess everyone can just say that they’re whoever they wanna be now. By Trump’s logic, I am now a Midwest ostrich farmer. You can be one, too! There are no rules.

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Donald Trump just called himself an environmentalist. Wait, what?

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

by RafaelClopton Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Twitter today followed in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook by releasing statistics on the race and gender of its workforce. The company certainly deserves credit for voluntarily making its diversity stats public, unlike, say, Apple. “Like our peers, we have a lot of work to do,” Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity and inclusion, admits on the company blog. But perhaps that’s an understatement; Twitter actually lags far behind its peers on some key measures. For instance, only 1 out of every 10 Twitter tech employees is a woman:

Twitter

In case you’re wondering, other large tech companies have significantly better gender diversity (though it’s still abysmal compared to professions such as law or medicine). At Facebook and Yahoo, 15 percent of tech workers are women. At Google and LinkedIn, it’s 17 percent. In 2010, Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News found that women held 24 percent of computer and mathematics jobs in Silicon Valley and 27 percent of those jobs nationally (though those categories may be broader than how they’re defined by leading tech companies, as Tasneem Raja explores in this great piece on America’s growing gap in tech literacy).

More MoJo coverage of diversity in tech.


Silicon Valley Firms Are Even Whiter and More Male Than You Thought


Is Coding the New Literacy?


Charts: Tech’s Pipeline Problem


Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts


Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

Unlike its peers, Twitter can’t entirely blame its dearth of female coders on the talent pipeline: About 18 percent of computer science graduates are women. Instead, Van Huysse points to a slew of efforts to “move the needle” at Twitter, such as supporting the groups Girls Who Code and sf.girls and hosting “Girl Geek Dinners.”

As other reporters have noted, major tech firms started releasing their workforce data shortly after I obtained a batch of Silicon Valley diversity figures from the Labor Department and began asking them for comment. But pressure to release the stats has also come from a campaign by Color of Change and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, which have demanded the stats during a string of private meetings with Valley execs, and last week launched a Twitter-based campaign to urge Twitter to make its diversity numbers public. Strikingly, only 1 percent of Twitter’s tech workforce and 2 percent of its overall workforce is African-American:

Jackson argues that improving Twitter’s diversity isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a good business decision. It turns out that “Black Twitter” isn’t just a meme. According to a recent Pew survey, 22 percent of African-American internet users are on Twitter, while only 16 percent of White internet users tweet. Meanwhile, usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ is roughly the same between Blacks and Whites.

In short, Twitter might make more money by hiring more people who reflect its audience. “There is no talent deficit, there’s an opportunity deficit,” Jackson said in a press release responding to Twitter’s data. “When everyone is ‘in,’ everyone wins.”

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Twitter Releases Its Diversity Stats. And Boy, Are They Embarrassing.

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Did Newsweek Dox the Wrong Satoshi Nakamoto?

by RafaelClopton Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Is Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City, California, the same “Satoshi Nakamoto” who invented Bitcoin? Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman says he is in a cover story here, and Felix Salmon does a good job of running through the evidence here. Matt Yglesias is skeptical:

Here’s the question of Newsweek’s Bitcoin “scoop,” as I understand it—is the fact that a person is named “Satoshi Nakamoto” good evidence that the person in question is the originator of Bitcoin? If it is, then all of the other evidence regarding this particular Satoshi Nakamoto is telling….But absent the name, there is very little here.

I don’t agree. The key evidence is this conversation that Goodman had with Nakamoto in front of his home:

Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions.

“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”

Nakamoto says he was misunderstood. His English isn’t great, and he was just referring to no longer being an engineer. Goodman, however, says this is nonsense. “I stand completely by my exchange with Mr. Nakamoto. There was no confusion whatsoever about the context of our conversation — and his acknowledgment of his involvement in bitcoin.”

In any case, this is the key piece of evidence. If Goodman is right, then Nakamoto is now covering up after making a momentary slip. But if Goodman stretched the quote a bit to make it sound cleaner than it was in real life, then Nakamoto is very likely in the clear.

Last night there was some chatter on Twitter about whether Goodman’s story sounded right. She made a mistake identifying LA County sheriff’s deputies as “police officers from the Temple City, Calif., sheriff’s department,” for example, and some of her quotes seem a little too good to be true. Personally, I wasn’t persuaded. The former is a minor error, and I didn’t find the quotes all that hard to believe. What’s more, Goodman was very transparent about how she tracked down this story and what her sources were. There’s nothing obscure about any of it. It’s a very, very public story and, thanks to Goodman’s transparency, one that’s pretty easy to check. If Goodman made any of it up, she sure chose a very spectacular way to commit career suicide.

All that said, Karl Smith has a piece at FT Alphaville that compares some of Dorian Nakamoto’s writing to that of the Nakamoto who wrote the original Bitcoin proposal. He’s pretty persuasive that they don’t seem to match. This isn’t a smoking gun or anything, but it definitely gives us fresh reason to be skeptical.

In any case, tracking down the real identity of “Satoshi Nakamoto” is hard, but I suspect that verifying whether Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto of Temple City is the same guy isn’t. One way or another, I have a feeling that someone is going to clear this up definitively within a week or two. Maybe sooner.

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Did Newsweek Dox the Wrong Satoshi Nakamoto?

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MAP: Watch Marriage Equality Sweep the Nation

by RafaelClopton Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Molly Redden and Matt Connolly

Almost 10 years after Massachusetts became the first state to recognize same-sex marriages, the most striking feature of the campaign for marriage equality is the speed at which it’s succeeding.

The map above shows the accelerating pace at which new states have begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples or recognizing their relationships as domestic partnerships. As the result of court rulings, legislation, and voter referendums, 21 states and the District of Columbia now recognize some form of same-sex union—and 12 of them joined the pack in the past two years alone.

The year 2012 was a particularly important turning point. That’s when marriage equality activists mounted a massive campaign to reverse the pattern of defeat they’d suffered at the ballot box, and voters in Washington, Maine, and Minnesota recognized the rights of same-sex couples to marry. A US Supreme Court ruling, in June 2013, that the federal government must recognize existing same-sex marriages was another strong catalyst for marriage equality. Since late 2013, four federal judges have interpreted that ruling to mean that bans on same-sex marriages in their states are unconstitutional. In each of these states—Virginia, Texas, Utah, and Oklahoma—at least one state official is appealing the decision, preventing the state from issuing marriage licenses. And just last week, a federal judge ruled that Kentucky must recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere; Gov. Steve Beshear plans to ask for an indefinite stay of the order, and will fight the ruling.

A few things to note about the map: The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization, characterizes Wisconsin’s domestic partnerships as limited in nature—the state law enumerates 43 rights same-sex partners enjoy, whereas married couples of the opposite sex are entitled to more than 200. Under Wisconsin law, it is illegal for same-sex couples to travel out of state in order to marry; couples who do so, and continue living in Wisconsin, risk a $10,000 fine and nine months in prison.

Utah is represented on the map as a state in which a federal judge struck down the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, only to be challenged on appeal. But US District Judge Robert Shelby did not block marriages while Utah prepared its appeal, so for two weeks in late December and early January, the state issued marriage licenses to 1,300 same-sex couples.

The map does not show the District of Columbia, which has issued licenses to same-sex couples since March 2010. California issued marriage licenses beginning in June of 2008 but stopped doing so that November, when voters passed Proposition 8. A Supreme Court decision overturned Prop. 8 in June 2013.

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MAP: Watch Marriage Equality Sweep the Nation

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