If "personnel is policy," as Elizabeth Warren penned in a recent New York Times editorial, then character matters. Income inequality and the influence of big money in politics have becoming defining issues of the 2016 presidential election; help the PCCC take a stand for greater transparency and accountability in the electoral process, and beyond!
Check out the brand-new music video for "Yourself" by San Jose favorites Sweet HayaH, off their forthcoming album "Gentle Lies"! Four minutes of hot, sizzling funk that you won't soon forget!
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently teamed up with Seattle graphic design firm Invisible Creature to create a remarkable set of 'space tourism' posters, and the results are nothing short of spectacular. The best part of all? Every single one of them is available for FREE download at the NASA/JPL website. Check out of few of our favorites behind the link, and let us know which planet YOU want to go to!
Google recently teamed up with European mapping solutions provider Ubilabs to give technophiles a down-and-dirty Street View of Hamburg, Germany's Miniatur Wonderland, the world's largest model train set! Check it out!
Live In The San Francisco Bay Area? Are you a musician? Want your music played on our new LIVE show, LOCAL LOVE? Send your tunage to echoplexpod@gmail.com! LOCAL LOVE starts on January 26th from nine to midnight PST, so get a move on and listen for your shit!
The Malheur Militia needs Frito-Lay's help! They've put out a call for food and supplies to the general public in order to maintain their occupation, and as the premier purveyor of many of America's most popular snack foods, who better than to lend a helping hand than Frito-Lay with a couple of cases of gay-ass Doritos?
Holy crap...San Jose Bike Party #100 was INCREDIBLE! It started raining part way through the ride, but the crowd toughed out the bad weather, and showed us so much awesome love and massive boogie. You cannot find a better party in San Jose, no way no how. Dave and Mr. Brandon managed to grab a bunch of great video footage of the event, and we're proud to share it with you here.
Holy crap...San Jose Bike Party #100 was INCREDIBLE! It started raining part way through the ride, but the crowd toughed out the bad weather, and showed us so much awesome love and massive boogie. You cannot find a better party in San Jose, no way no how. Just check out these photos!
Are you a lady? Are you a fan of some seriously nerdy shit? More importantly, are you a lady fan of some seriously nerdy shit that loves to talk about that shit ad nauseum, much to the dismay of your friends and loved ones? Then Randle and Harrison need YOU as our new cohost for FACE FOR RADIO, the official nerdcast of Echoplex Media! Click the link for details!
Dave's birthday was last Sunday, January 3rd, and what better way to celebrate it than with a taping of The Plex? Friend of the show and occasional panelist Mike EDM was in the house that night, and he managed to snap a bunch of great photos of the panel for us to share. We'll have the audio up on the podcast feed soon, but in the meantime, check out our ugly mugs in high def for the first time!
Last week, we finally published our interview with one of the higher-profile targets of the online culture war. His story ends with a lawsuit that he and a number of other people were named as defendants in. Failing to see the irony in his actions, one of the other defendants threatened to sue us if we didn't pull the interview down. The results of that conversation were nothing short of hilarious, and we're pleased to share the entire exchange with you here. Enjoy!
Nobody's managed to break down what actually happened during the DNC data breach because everyone has been throwing feces at each other since the whole thing started. Dave's got the real play-by-play, along with what can be do to prevent it from happening again.
Have a look behind the scenes at our audio setup for The Plex! The podcast is powered by Linux, and in the spirit of the community, we will be posting videos of how our setup works. These tutorials are specific to our setup, but the concepts can be easily applied to your own setup! Watch and learn, y'all!
On December 16, 2015, friend of SOAPBOX and Echoplex Media Peter Allen formally announced his candidacy for San Jose City Council District Six during a fantastic kickoff party at the SLG Art Boutiki, one of his favorite local music venues. Peter gave an impassioned speech about his vision for San Jose's future, who and what got him to where he is today, and what it will take to bring about a better tomorrow for everyone in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Thanks for watching!
How to do a mix minus using KXStudio Jack routing tools. My first tutorial, so it's a little rough, but I think you'll get the idea. This is assuming that you are using a separate machine for Skype or Mumble or whatever and that you have basic knowledge of how your hardware works. - Dave (@plex_dave)
This is going to be a quick one. Just some thoughts on today's DNC security breach.
When this happened, you know what I started combing? Not the usual political blogs. All we saw there was people flinging shit at whichever candidate they don't like. So that didn't really help anyone understand anything did it? I went immediately to the tech press. That's right, a huge political story happened and there I was, reading the tech blogs. This was a data breach first and a political story second if you ask me.
What I am saying here is that in a case like this, in a case where tech is at the heart of the story, it's probably a good idea to check out what the tech press has to say.
Here's a great article on the history of data security in political campaigns, and let's just say it's not exactly pretty.
Clinton And Sanders Are Fighting About Data Because Campaigns Are Bad At Protecting It
On Saturday, December 12th, five brave podcasters at Echoplex Media and their stalwart companions did what no other podcasters or their stalwart companions ever could: they achieved a titanic victory for the agnostic front in the War On Christmas. Audio from their grand victory will be available soon; meanwhile, check out these photographs direct from the front lines!
In the United States we've entered a cycle with mass shootings. I don't know when we entered this cycle but I know what it looks like and it seems to feed itself. Here it is, to the best of my understanding.
1. A mass shooting occurs.
2. Immediately, on Facebook and Twitter, you have Right Wingers and Truthers (conspiracy theorists) saying that the shooting will be used to push gun confiscation, not just control, but confiscation.
3. The Conspiracy theories come. Alex Jones and the rest of the tinfoil hat brigade start saying that it's a government plot to, you guessed it, take the guns and of course they blame psych meds, just like Scientology would. But that's a whole other matter.
4. The shooter(s), if white, they are called everything but terrorists. Disturbed individuals, violent criminals... anything... but not terrorists.
5. Gun lobbies ramp up their fund raising based upon the fear caused by 2 and 3. Maybe they even have an event in the city where the recent mass shooting happened.
6. Someone on Fox News suggests that this could all be Obama's fault for "being divisive".
7. Many white shit kickers are further radicalized leading to a return to step 1.
This is entirely predictable. This happens literally every time. And recently, with the guy who shot up the Planned Parenthood, the political right attacked Planned Parenthood and in many cases cheered the shooter for "saving babies". The story today in San Bernadino is still unfolding but it is just a part of this cycle. It's the next logical thing for the cycle to do after it goes through steps 1 through 7. The problem is, this cycle is essentially at every step of the cycle simultaneously, constantly.
This is not a call for gun control. There are already 300 million guns in this country. Even if gun control happened and was effective, it would take a generation for anything to change. I don't have the answer, but I think I have found the problem. The panic attack is real. And that's the problem. And there's no way to stop it.
Watching Greece it occurs to me that the EU has a fatal flaw. A single flaw that the United States does not have, a flaw that would have caused the American experiment to have gone down in flames. It is a flaw of bureaucracy, not ideology.
The EU countries have to, for the most part, field their own armies, provide their own social services, take care of their own infrastructure, etc. The only system which has benefited from "economy of scale" in the EU is the financial system. It's as if Alabama had to build its own highways, field its own army, and provide social services. Of course Alabama would be in debt up to its eyeballs. And this is, in part, why Greece is in such dire straits. In this scenario, if it happened in the USA, Alabama would have rich states like New York and California on their back the way Greece has Germany on their back.
The EU is a group of nations with a common currency and that's about it. That means no nation within the EU can use temporary currency manipulation in tough times. The USA does that any time the economy isn't so hot, as does just about any other nation with a sovereign currency. Greece cannot do that, can they? Whether or not you agree with this method ideologically, if one nation can do it but another cannot, the nation that can has a huge advantage when things get weird economically. "Printing money", as it is often called, can inject cash into the economy and, assuming it causes inflation, it can lower the real value of a nation's debt. Again, Greece cannot do this. Alabama doesn't have to do this kind of thing because they receive a greater amount of funds from the federal government than they pay in. No such luck for Greece.
I don't know if this was an unintended consequence or if there were factions which knew this was going to happen as the EU was created. I am not really old enough to know off the top of my head what was going on in Greece, or in other nations, as the EU formed. I imagine there was push back, but I can't find anything about the main point I have here. Nobody mentioned that only the monetary system was going to be unified, nobody talked about what happens to the less prosperous nations as the economy goes south, which it inevitably will do under any system. It's Greece today, but any other country that goes through extreme economic hardship is bound to suffer the same fate under the current EU regime which centralizes economic power but keeps the political power of the individual disparate by pitting nation against nation in the new economic order.
This was the official eBay response to questions I have about their users buying items and returning a bag of sand. They basically said "we do not try to stop buyers from stealing".
This means that eBay Inc is complicit in mail fraud. When you receive the bag of sand back instead of your item, eBay steals money from your PayPal account to refund the person who committed the fraudulent act, thus becoming an accomplice.
And the conversation continues. The official ebay customer support team clarifies that they are not willing or able to do anything about people using eBay to steal from sellers.
This is pretty terrible when you think about it. The sellers are paying fees to use eBay's service, and then eBay just allows people to steal from those sellers. What's more is if the seller gets a bag of sand and refuses to issue the refund, eBay will steal money from the PayPal account of the eBay seller to issue the refund. And if that's not interesting enough for you, if a seller pushes back against theft a few times in a month, eBay will limit their account and put a hold on the funds in their PayPal account.
It's not ethical, but eBay just told the entire world that eBay Inc doesn't do shit if you use their service for mail fraud.
But don't worry, this lady is "working behind the scenes to make eBay a great place to sell"
