About the latest celebrity photo theft, here’s a clue about the security of cloud services: they aren’t secure.

By nature, by immutable facts of the universe, anything stored on a network out of your control is less safe than never putting it there in the first place.

That will always be the case, no matter what security is put into place. It’s just as true of your vital business documents, your banking details, your medical records as it is of your nude selfies.

One of the main reason “cloud” everything is being pushed is specifically because it makes things less secure. Always remember that.

This woman is my hero.

While most students at Columbia University will spend the first day of classes carrying backpacks and books, Emma Sulkowicz will start her semester on Tuesday with a far heavier burden. The senior plans on carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress across the quad and through each New York City building – to every class, every day – until the man she says raped her moves off campus.

Society needs more people who do crazy brave ridiculous things. Go Emma. Too bad she would probably face legal penalties for releasing her rapist’s name. (Also it’s cool that her nail polish matches her shirt. (Yes I do notice things like that.))

Examining the minimum wage and the idea of raising it from a purely economic standpoint is insufficient and abhorrent.

Accommodations like the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek are not economic concerns solely, but instead serve as a signal delineating and clarifying what sort of society we wish to have.

For the most part, I think the social justice habit of lecturing people on their privilege is counterproductive.

It mostly makes enemies and hurts the cause. No, no, it doesn’t matter if you’re right. Even if absolutely every word is 100% true.

It’s better and more useful to appeal to empathy, to justice and to fairness. Your harangue on how privilege allowed someone to get somewhere they otherwise would not have might sound in the swim to you, but all your unlucky listener will ever hear is: “Your life is a sham, you don’t deserve what you have, and you are personally evil.”

Warning, again: even if it is true.

Because this is what happens. Your natural allies say, “Well those people are mental and I am having nothing to do with them.”

It probably seems like I am more conservative than I am from writing these things. But I only attack my own side because I care about it. I am quite radical in most ways,  more so than most people would believe. I’ll spell that out sometime.

Other than in an academic setting – where it is useful and valid – for actually changing the world, all the “privilege” talk should be left in the privy where it belongs.