Saturday, November 06, 2021
SITUATION IN STOCKHOLM:: City's IT Department Strikes Back...Lesson Learned = Citizen development can be more effective than costly and often botched government IT projec
These parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops
Official app was a disaster, so knowledgeable parents built an open source alternative.
"Christian Landgren’s patience was running out. Every day the separated father of three was wasting precious time trying to get the City of Stockholm’s official school system, Skolplattform, to work properly. Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare. Two years after its launch in August 2018, the Skolplattform had become a constant thorn in the side of thousands of parents across Sweden’s capital city. “All the users and the parents were angry,” Landgren says.
The Skolplattform wasn’t meant to be this way. Commissioned in 2013, the system was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier—acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that’s made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent.
The only problem? It doesn’t work . . . "
2 Friends with Benefits: The Dysfunctions of Democracy (and where are they headed?)
82% of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare. Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill.
’Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Rex/Shutterstock
If Americans can’t have basic things like childcare, our democracy is a sham
Corporate influence and corruption defines American politics. No wonder most think the country is headed in the wrong direction
In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy”.
Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time – and the country seems pretty ticked off about it, in the lead-up to Tuesday’s off-year elections and in advance of the upcoming midterms next year.
Over the last few weeks, Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have been making headlines agreeing to whittle down their social spending reconciliation bill at the demand of corporate donors and their congressional puppets . . .
[. . .]
The results of this latest middle finger to voter preferences? New polling data shows that almost three-quarters of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise – the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government. And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the 6 January insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.
. . .
The hostile takeover is not just the rejection of the most popular policies – it is also the media discourse itself. The Washington press is constantly portraying industry-sponsored opponents of majoritarian policies as “moderates” or “centrists” and depicting supporters of those policies as fringe lunatics who refuse to be reasonable and compromise.
Meanwhile, there is a pervasive omertà that silences most media discussion of the corporate influence and corruption that so obviously defines American politics – and there is scant mention that the “moderate” obstructionists are bankrolled by the industries lobbying to kill the popular policies that Americans want. . ."
Friday, November 05, 2021
Play Dirty...Get Shit Done
Read more if you want to
‘Get shit done’: how Republican dog-whistles beat Democratic inaction
Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by playing dirty over CRT – and the Democrats had no answer
No film director could have choreographed it better. At the very moment Joe Biden emerged from his helicopter into a cold, dark night on the White House south lawn, a new adversary was delivering his victory speech before a hot-blooded crowd in northern Virginia.
The cable news split screen took place just after 1am on Wednesday. The president, a Democrat, was returning from G20 and Cop26 summits in Europe. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, was celebrating a stunning victory in the race for governor of Virginia. The message from voters was emphatic.
The Republican party was back in business, ready to take on a weakened president whose party is racked by infighting. Youngkin showed the way by deploying a formidable new weapon to which Democrats had no answer: a racist culture war fought over children.
The businessman turned politician promised to ban critical race theory (CRT) from Virginia’s schools on his first day in office. It mattered little that CRT, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society, is not taught in Virginia’s schools . . .
From the Arizona Governor's Office
A NEWS BARRAGE
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Flash News: Ukraine Intercepts Russian Kh-59 Cruise Missile Using US VAMPIRE Air Defense System Mounted on Boat. Ukrainian forces have made ...
