Month: April 2015

Salesforce: loves doing business in gay-killing Saudi Arabia, hates doing it in Indiana.

Oh, isn’t this nice of the company: “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is helping employees who are uncomfortable with Indiana’s controversial religious freedom law to transfer out of the state.” Salesforce, in case you were wondering, is a company that does ‘customer relationship management’ for companies, as can be seen here…

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…Wait. That can’t be right. Saudi Arabia? They sell services in Saudi Arabia? They execute gay people in Saudi Arabia! Well, that says ‘partner,’ so maybe Salesforce has an out there…

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…erm. Turns out that NSI is Salesforce’s gateway to the Gulf area – including Saudi Arabia, which is by the way a place where they execute gay people. But seriously, is Salesforce actually selling services in Saudi Arabia?

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Guess they are! Which is odd, because SAUDI ARABIA EXECUTES GAY PEOPLE.

Look, if you don’t want to do business in Indiana, Arkansas, or any of the other 20 states that have RFRA laws, fine.  It’s a free country. But if you’re going to brag about how you’re happy to pull people out of flyover country because you don’t like a state’s particular attitude about the morality of forcing people to bake a cake for a wedding, at least mention how you plan to help out those of your employees who are living somewhere where being caught being gay leads you to the whipping post or the scaffold.  …Oh, wait, silly me. That’s why Salesforce has the consulting firms and affiliates and partnerships: plausible deniability.  That way the Saudis can keep executing all the gay people that they like, and Marc Benioff can keep cashing those sweet, sweet petro-dollar backed checks.

And Benioff can keep sneering! Mustn’t forget the sneering. That’s probably the best part for him, really.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Speaking as somebody who supports same-sex marriage: I think that it is frankly not moral to support a group like Salesforce.  And it’s not because they do business in Saudi Arabia: it’s because they have carefully calibrated their moral outrage to the point where it never interferes with their bottom line. Salesforce avoiding Indiana is a gesture: avoiding Saudi Arabia would be an economic hardship.  And we can’t have that, can we?

MP3 player advice bleg.

I have grown disenchanted with my iPod. I merely want to buy CDs, rip them to MP3s, then transfer them to my MP3 player for my own convenience; yet, Apple seems determined to not only make that difficult (mind you, I have receipts for everything).  No, it wants to make that obscurely difficult, so that I cannot figure out what is going wrong.

So I want a viable alternative. It doesn’t need to have any extras: I just want something that will play back my music, with a display that I can read.  Oh, and not insanely expensive, either (no more than $200). Suggestions?

In the Mail: ‘Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook: To Travelling Upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway.’

I have been meaning to pick up Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook: To Travelling Upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway (Discworld) for some time.  Hopefully, I will not find it bittersweet.  Although I expect that the last Discworld novel (The Shepherd’s Crown) will utterly undo me.  Well.  There are worse things to be, than sentimental.

The GoFundMe Emergency Memories Pizza support page passes $213K.

Background: you may have missed this, but Tuesday night a pizza joint (Memories Pizza) in Michiana, Indiana got blindsided by Alyssa Marino of ABC News 57. Ms. Marino went looking for somebody who would be willing to suffer personal attacks and death threats for saying that no, they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding – and the owners of the pizzeria made the mistake of trusting a reporter.  They said that, in the unlikely case they were ever asked*, they would say no: Ms. Marino had got her scoop; and now the pizza joint is closed.

So, hey, score one for Alyssa Marino.  Not that she’s ever going to get out of Indiana.  The media has strict quotas for flyover country, and she probably doesn’t have the right J-school degree. Continue reading The GoFundMe Emergency Memories Pizza support page passes $213K.

Well, they indicted Bob Menendez.

He’s gonna go down swinging, at least:

“I am outraged that prosecutors at the Justice Department were tricked into starting this investigation three years ago with false allegations by those who have a political motive to silence me,” Menendez said. “I will not be silenced. I’m confident at the end of the day I will be vindicated and they will be exposed.”

Personally, I totally believe that he’s corrupt, but I’ll be blessed if Bob Menendez isn’t going to give me some prime copy before it’s all over.  Which is… nice of him, given how often I’ve criticized the Senator.  The funny bit? – The Democrats won’t likely try to force him out.  Why? Because Chris Christie wants to be President, and Chris Christie knows that replacing Menendez with another Democrat would likely scupper the deal right there with the national party.

:shrug: Right thing, for the wrong reasons. I’ll take it.

Moe Lane

Across the board water restrictions come to California. Across the board attempts to evade them to follow.

And it’s going to be brutal:

As state officials announced that lowest-ever snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — the source of nearly a third of California’s fresh water — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday said mandatory conservation measures would go into effect for the first time in history.

Among other actions, the governor’s executive order will require urban areas to reduce water use by 25 percent.

That’s an important point, by the way.  From the executive order:

The State Water Resources Control Board (Water Board) shall impose restrictions to achieve a statewide 25% reduction in potable urban water usage through February 28, 2016. These restrictions will require water suppliers to Californias cities and towns to reduce usage as compared to the amount used in 2013. These restrictions should consider the relative per capita water usage of each water suppliers’ Service area, and require that those areas with high per capita use achieve proportionally greater reductions than those with low use. The California Public Utilities Commission is requested to take similar action with respect to investor-owned utilities providing water services.

Continue reading Across the board water restrictions come to California. Across the board attempts to evade them to follow.