Flutterby™!

In a long Twitter thread, food writer Jack Monroe talks about how standard inflation metrics don't capture impacts on the lowest income peoople, and announces the "Vimes Boots Index".

Twitter thread from the official Terry Pratchett account with the relevant passage (if you haven't read it already).

Guardian: Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index</>

Tor.com: Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes Is the Namesake for a New Price Index

It's almost like all of the hullaballoo over "Critical Race Theory" wasn't actually about CRT, or something: The Mcminn County School board just voted to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “MAUS” by Art Spiegelman from all of its schools

A little feel-good reading: An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled, in which an Air Force vet finds an old farm house a few miles from where he grew up and decides to move from California to Virginia, and then uncovers the past.

A friend recommended this documentary when I mentioned the solution to today's Queerdle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WASW9dRBU

Today I learned that Santa Rosa has a park named after a dirty cop. This is not the way to engender trust between the populace and the government...

Santa Rosa City: Chief Melvin F. "Dutch" Flohr 1940 - 1974

Biometric Tech Company ID.Me Continues To Swallow Gov't Agencies, Cause Problems For People Trying To Access Their Gov't Benefits

As if making US government benefits contingent upon a company with a Macedonian TLD wasn't bad enough to begin with.

Whoah: Next time I'm down in Southern California, I'm gonna have to see this: Planetarium Projector Museum, a virtual exhibit for a real place in Big Bear Lake, down in the San Bernardino Mountains.

There's a trend in California, driven by an enterprising SoCal lawyer who's making hay offf of the California Voting Rights Act, to drive cities to district elections. Petaluma is making such a switch. This suggests that our housing situation won't get any better...

W. E. Upjohn Institute: Warding Of Development Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs

My results suggest that towns reduce the number of housing units permitted by 21 percent afer switching to ward voting. The effect is larger (38 percent) for multifamily units and in towns with higher owner-occupancy rates. It appears that more localized control has a large negative effect on housing production. This suggests that reforms restricting the influence of local levels of government or small groups of people on land-use regulation and housing approval could indeed increase housing supply. However, note that while switches to ward voting provide a natural experiment for this question, I do not consider all the effects of ward representation or claim that it is worse overall than at-large systems

The Bad Cops: How Minneapolis protects its worst police officers until it’s too late

Via https://twitter.com/webster/status/1486050400117694470

Journal of Public Economics, Volume 206, February 2022, 104578: Broadband Internet and social capital

Merging information on the topology of the network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital from 1997 to 2017, we show that access to fast Internet caused a significant decline in civic and political engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration crowded out several dimensions of social capital.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104578

Guardian: Faster internet speeds linked to lower civic engagement in UK — Study finds involvement in political parties, trade unions and volunteering falls as web speeds rise

Republic World: Faster Internet Speed Linked To Lower Civic Participation, Claims Study — Researchers from Cardiff University & Sapienza claimed that people’s political activism seems to be inversely proportional to their internet connection speed.

Evergreen: RT Aaron Patterson @tenderlove

I like to add � and ’ any time I submit online forms because I know that some developer is going to see it and wonder if they have a bug

Maybe giving viruses a secure place to be persistent on motherboards was a bad idea after all? New MoonBounce UEFI bootkit can’t be removed by replacing the hard drive

In their desire to impose big pedestrian killers on us, Ford complely underestimated the small truck market. Now do an electric Maverick, you utter tools. https://jalopnik.com/ford-stop...due-to-overwhelming-d-1848410887

Our World In Data looks at Covid death rate by vaccination status, particularly interesting is that in a study from Switzerland, yeah, vaccinated death rate is better than an order of magnitude lower than unvaccinated, but the boostered death rate is an order of magnitude better than that.

We increased this size of this window to have an emergency egress from the window, and build some steps for the space.

trying again: roll-up sunshade for the swim spa. the stand-in wheel will be replaced with something sexier.

Among this weekends project: roll-up sunshade for the swim spa. The wheel is a stand-in, to replace with something sexier.

Hmmmm... Why did @SignalApp just take almost exactly 24 hours to deliver two messages? I'm glad that was an "I'm on time" and not an "I'm delayed" or "I have to reschedule".

Anyone have ideas on how to guess relative markets for podcasts vs videos? I host a Zoom forum that we're posting as video, and we're talking about format changes that would let it podcast better, but don't know if that's productive.

Political Geography: The effects of housing supply restrictions on partisan geography

Abstract Economists have scrutinized the effects of residential building restrictions on the cost of housing, growth, and migration in recent years. More strictly zoned states and metro areas have lost population to less strictly zoned areas in the United States, but have seen per capita incomes rise, because lower-income households are disproportionately likely to seek out locations with affordable housing. By changing the geographic distribution of population, housing supply restrictions should also affect political geography. This paper estimates those effects with a variety of methods and data. There are consistently sized, statistically significant effects at the state, county, and subcounty levels. Jurisdictions with greater housing supply restriction gradually and subsequently become more Democratic; there is no evidence that Democratic-moving areas subsequently become more regulated or costly. U.S. housing supply restrictions select for education. Areas with more costly housing see their college-educated share of the population rise, and the college-educated have become more Democratic than the non-college population.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.07.007

Just walking by the river in the moonlight

Man, the Spade Cooley episode of Cocaine & Rhinestones was rough, but the episode about Tammy Wynette's relationship with George Richey was a close second. Still recommend the podcast.

"Trade crypto with a broker you can trust" is kinda like saying "buy meth from a dealer you can trust". When they're busted, they *will* turn.

WaPo: A Canadian restaurant was closed after it accepted dog photos instead of vaccination proof

The Granary Kitchen’s Facebook page explained the closure, calling it “an unfortunate circumstance” involving an “underage hostess” and said it would reopen after retraining staff. “We would like to remind everyone of the tremendous pressure being placed on front staff, and please remember to be kind,” the post read. An email to the owner of the restaurant requesting comment was not immediate.

So, yeah, blame it on the teenager...

CTV News Edmonton: Alta. restaurant that accepted dog photos instead of QR code has history of 'flagrant disregard' for measures: former employee

Really good read: He thought tending bar sounded like fun. Then the entire kitchen staff quit on Christmas Eve.

Bill McCamley was NM's labor secretary, but working at a local movie theater taught him the truth about what's ailing the workforce.

Via MeFi, which also had this observation from mhoye which references that WaPo Wharton article that I linked earlier:

Forklift-related accidents kill about 100 people per year; as a result of that, every reputable company requires operators to complete training from a certified instructional program before they can operate them. Wharton MBAs kill a lot more people than that, if less directly, and they're allowed to graduate believing a whole bunch of things that not only aren't true, but aren't even close to true, and get put in charge of much bigger, much more dangerous economic machines.

Seems wrong to me. Maybe MBAs should have a practical element to them that looks more like survivalist courses than classroom learning. You can pack one suitcase, no laptop, no phone, one already-almost-maxed-out credit card and a twelve-year-old car. You're given a job at an Amazon warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of a small town, and you're there for a year, in the economic wilderness. If you have to call your friends or family for help, if you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, that's an F.

Emily Nagoski: Aging and Sex — I read the comments. And for once, it wasn't a mistake.

The problem with giving your software a personality is that you might give your software a personality that sucks.

"I can feel Clippy DNA here."

‘If I Die, I Die’: Meat Loaf Spurned COVID Rules Before Death

The singer said in a recent interview that he was getting tired of pandemic restrictions, complaining about “power-mad” flight attendants who make people wear masks.

Washington Post: A Wharton School of Business professor said her students think Americans make six figures on average. That’s a long way off.

“I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures,” she tweeted Wednesday. “One of them thought it was $800k.”

More evidence that the hydrogen economy is bullshit (sorry, Toyota): Vice: Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

Global Witness: Hydrogen's Hidden Emissions — Shell’s fossil hydrogen plant in Canada found to be emitting more climate-wrecking gases than it is capturing

Via /.

If Wordle has you addicted, and Evil Wordle doesn't sate your need, may I suggest the 7 letter Queerdle? https://queerdle.com/

Thanks to the coworker who caught me on the video call. As his kid asked, "which is which?"

IEEE Spectrum: What You Need to Know About the FAA 5G Kerfuffle — Why is 5G only a problem for planes in the U.S.?

Apparently Sonoma County has given up trying to reach a particular demographic, so they're not even gonna mention churches...

Whoops, nuking this, will try again.

It's Twenty freakin' Twenty Two: How come the local paper (Petaluma Argus-Courier aka Petaluma360) is still sending me an email that sends me to articles in some sort of analogue of physical paper? It's not more usable to page through thumbnails of the physical pages and then click to get a sidebar of the text than to get a list of headlines and subs which link to digital-native versions of the articles. It's like "Hey, we're still trying to hold on to newsprint and ink for as long as we freakin' can, rather than adapting to the new reality, but why are we having trouble surviving?"

In other news, the regional daily (Press Democrat) has just closed its printing plant and gone to printing down in Fremont.

I still think back to that meeting in 1994 that Mike Harrison and I had with the muckety muck at the Chattanooga paper (I think it was the Times, and not the News-Free Press, though at that point they might have already consolidated management) pointing out that this digital future was coming, and they could either be ready for it or not.

And he told us he'd worry about it when we figured out a business model for him.

I really should up my donation to the regional weekly (North Bay Bohemian), because I definitely don't need daily filler from my newspaper, and they're the ones doing actual investigative journalism in the region.

Ugh: Does this mean Gmail for your own domain, too? If so, sounds like it's time to switch to something else.

Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying for Workspace this year

In honor of Dolly Parton's birthday, may I once again strongly recommend this podcast: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

Yet another town with an out-of-control scary gang problem: Police in this tiny Alabama town (Brookside) suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’

"Home & family"? I mean, I'm with ya, but I'm not exactly mainstream on this opinion.

Fast Company: Berlin is planning a car-free area larger than Manhattan

The Guardian: Berlin’s car ban campaign: ‘It’s about how we want to live, breathe and play’

The web page of the organizers is at Berlin Autofrei.

Via Kottke

Just a comment I left on the Facebook link to Ben Werdmüller's blog post on "Settling":

I grew up moving around a lot, and into my adult years thought of places as things to be occupied as long as they served me. I think it was helped that, as a young misfit, I found "my peeps" online, so where I lived in meatspace was less important than the relationships I built with people all over the world. It was only when I hit 40 that I started to yearn for a more solid and stable community, for the idea that I wanted a real relationship with where I lived.

I wonder now if part of that was the destruction of those online communities, the intrusion of "the real world" into them that made them so much less than they'd once been, and I had to start finding other ways to filter in order to build structures of friendship.

I went trying to chase down the source of an image shared on Facebook, and it turns out that Barbie sex toys is an entire Etsy category.

Pew Research Center: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal for recreational or medical use

My inner peas are split.

Listening to the Petaluma Special Meeting of the City Council and Fair Board Subcommittees, and... if you can't hear my eyes rolling you're not in the Bay Area...

RT Tom @NowWeAreAllTom

2000s iTunes:
"hey buy this content! It has DRM!"

2010s Bandcamp:
"hey buy this DRM-free content!"

2020s N F T marketplaces:
"hey buy this content-free DRM!"

Hell is a platform where the documentation seems to only exist in WWDC videos or the source code for the open source bits. MacOS, I'm talking about MacOS.

This is fantastic. I saw it scroll across yesterday, and was like "yeah, of course that's what MLK Jr. wrote", but then I saw all of the praises of Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday, quotes with mysterious ellipses in the middle, the NHL praising him without dialing back their shunning of Colin Kaepernick, and went back and read it today, and it's worth a read.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of The 1619 Project: tweeted the thread that starts here:

I was invited to give an MLK speech today and a small number of members of the group hosting me wrote and then leaked emails opposing my giving this speech, as it dishonored Dr. King for me to do so. They called me a "discredited activist" "unworthy of such association with King"

which describes the speech she gave using excerpts from King's speeches. As mentioned in the MeFi thread:

Rarely has the word “outsmarted” been so literally demonstrated.

Amazing device to cut metal with high precision (YouTube video). An angle grinder and some rails and a worm drive and a neat little cut-off device, but the cool bit is the methods of work as the builder assembles this thing. Lots of good little reminders for me about punching my drill marks, and I'm not sure what material he's using for the drive belt, but that assembly method was super cool.

Don't mind me, I'm just making popcorn...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m...-immunity-sex-trafficking-probe/

Just another sunset.

Saved for future reference: Planetizen: Do Seniors Need Cars? One common argument against road diets and other pro-walkability policies is that seniors need cars more than anyone else. Is this claim borne out by data?