• Here are some fun facts about minimum wage. In both Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, there is no state minimum wage at all. Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, an action that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated will lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty.
• An astute analysis by an anonymous author on ValleyWag shows how Facebook’s emphasis on earning revenue from various brands’ pages means that activists’ and nonprofit organizations’ pages are increasingly getting pushed out of the algorithm altogether. Curious about what’s going on with your friend’s activist organization these days? Well, you’re going to have to sift through more and more stupid jeans and engagement ring ads (or whatever Facebook thinks your demographic wants) before you’ll be able to see it.
• Over at Bookforum, Evgeny Morozov reviewed Baffler contributing editor Astra Taylor’s new book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Her book, Morozov writes, “is an extended effort to rethink what the cultural side of our digital debate would be like if we didn’t start from a set of axioms about what the Internet is and does, and instead sought to promote values conducive to cultural democracy . . . . Creating welcoming structural conditions for the production of great art is not the same as making it easier to find an apartment on Craigslist or Airbnb: It’s not just a matter of matching supply and demand. It’s precisely such crude reductionism—the idea that, once translated into information, everything is just like everything else—that allows Internet pundits to establish themselves as prophets of the new age.”
• Judging by this Death and Taxes dispatch, San Francisco’s “Google Glass Bar” sounds like a pretty unfun place to drink.
