You'll be pleased to hear from the ACLU that prisons have released some 9,000 folks at risk of getting sick from this pandemic because there's no place to practice "social distancing" in prison -- even when you're taking a dump! -- but we could be saving more people from near-certain death, hence the ACLU helps you tell federal and state governments to release infirm and elderly prisoners. If you're worried that they're going to come over to your house and kill you, kindly attend the words "infirm and elderly." Also consider that, if you think that, you're putting your own irrational fears above other folks' lives. Also consider that more than half of folks in jail at this moment haven't even gone to trial yet, and where in our Constitution does it say you should serve a sentence before being convicted of a crime? Also consider that we're putting too damn many people in jail to begin with. And not the right ones, either! Who should go to jail more -- the dude caught (or, perhaps, "caught") with an ounce of pot, or the CEO who empties out his workers' pension funds and escapes with a golden parachute?
Speaking of CEOs, MoveOn helps you tell JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to suspend all overdraft and late fees during this pandemic. Ever heard Jamie Dimon talk? He sounds like he thinks he's the greatest human being who ever lived -- despite being a mere bankster and not, say, Jonas Salk -- and when you challenge him on the merits of his ideas, which ain't that damn hard, he starts getting snippy with you. And all the while it's obvious he thinks he's being sardonic when he's being snippy! But charging a boatload of fees is a stupid way to make money. How many times must I tell these pimps! Imposing banking fees is not work! You know what's work, for a bank? Identifying people and businesses on the rise before anyone else does, and making sure you're the one who gets them the funding they need. That's work! Gaming the system so you bleed people of their hard-earned money while you do nothing? That's not work, just like trading at the speed of light with the help of computer algorithms isn't work. I do insist that work be good for civilization. It's not too much to ask.
Finally, the video conferencing software Zoom is all the rage these days, what with so many good Americans working from home -- but Zoom has also caught a lot of justified flak, not just for letting racists hack into meetings and spew racial epithets across the screens of black users, but also for privacy and security issues in general. Indeed, quite a few folks have already moved on from Zoom for this very reason, and Zoom would have been better off fixing their problems first and then spreading out; it wouldn't have made them as much money at first, but they'd be much better-positioned for the long term. Hardly any big corporation thinks about the long term anymore! It's like they're not really conservative at all! And people who get hurt by a product tend to avoid it in the future, even if the corporation that made the product fixes it. Anyway, Zoom might be feeling the sting of the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we should keep applying it. Toward that end, the Action Network helps you tell Zoom to implement end-to-end-encryption for all its users.
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