Flutterby™!

Testing the drive train of the pedal powered paddle wheel boat we're building for Petaluma Rivertown Revival. A bit of slip in the rope drive, but I think it'll work... https://youtu.be/15bq0w4e0Ao

The owner of the Red Hen explains why she asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave.

The Sarah Sanders tweet that launched a thousand replies:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

And, of course, a reminder that food establishments turning down customers based on political views has a history, from 2012: Radford bakery that turned Biden away sells out of 'freedom cookies'.

(Although many people have compared this to wedding cakes and said things like "liar is not a protected class")

RT Chalis Montgomery @ChalisforGA:

To clarify:
You were separated from your MEAL and you are upset?

The director of the United States Office of Government Ethics from January 9, 2013 to July 19, 2017 weighs in: RT Walter Shaub @waltshaub

Sarah, I know you don’t care even a tiny little bit about the ethics rules, but using your official account for this is a clear violation of 5 CFR 2635.702(a). It’s the same as if an ATF agent pulled out his badge when a restaurant tried to throw him/her out.

Bonus, 'cause I don't have a better place to put it: RT Michael Cavadias 🌹 @michaelcavadias

very interesting from the 2002 vote that created ICE..

Barbara Lee - NO
Bernie Sanders - NO
Nancy Pelosi - NO
Russ Feingold - NO
Nydia Velazquez - NO

Hillary Clinton - YES
Carolyn Maloney - YES
Joe Crowley - YES
Chuck Schumer - YES
Diane Feinstein - YES

Just got back from Won't You Be My Neighbor?, the Fred Rogers documentary I don't think it was a great film, but it was definitely time well spent, got me thinking about a bunch of things. One was that, early in the film, there was talk about how he was a Presbyterian minister, and how this was his ministry... And I had this moment of cognitive dissonance going through how his ministry was about the substance rather than the branding, and how rare that felt.

And I'm still pondering if he's that much of an outlier, or I'm that much of a cynic, or what.

From some time in pre-history, my dad dug up this picture out a young me...

Reminder: Friday and Saturday are "Spare The Air" days in the Bay Area, so you should wait 'til Sunday to burn this motherfucker to the ground. http://sparetheair.org/

Efail: A Postmortem. Some notes on PGP, GnuPG/GPG, maintaining old software, different use cases and customer bases, and thoughts on how to improve processes.

Science Advances: Macroeconomic evidence suggests that asylum seekers are not a “burden” for Western European countries:

This paper aims to evaluate the economic and fiscal effects of inflows of asylum seekers into Western Europe from 1985 to 2015. It relies on an empirical methodology that is widely used to estimate the macroeconomic effects of structural shocks and policies. It shows that inflows of asylum seekers do not deteriorate host countries’ economic performance or fiscal balance because the increase in public spending induced by asylum seekers is more than compensated for by an increase in tax revenues net of transfers. As asylum seekers become permanent residents, their macroeconomic impacts become positive.

Via Reason: Migrants Boost Per Capita Incomes and Lower Unemployment Finds Yet Another Study

This is written in the usual breathless Democracy Now style, and seems perhaps a little overblown. Sounds like Brooks County, Texas, is poor, strapped for cash, and has a lot of people dying as they try to make the desert crossing from Mexico. And the producer of The Real Death Valley: Full Length Weather Channel Documentary (Vimeo video) is asserting that various laws on attempts to notify next of kin were broken, and the various Texas authorities have a different view of how far the county needs to go.

But I'm putting this in my archive because I think I'm going to want to find it again as the US discussion about refugees and migrants evolves: Mass Graves of Immigrants Found in Texas, But State Says No Laws Were Broken.

These may be too large, but I've had this idea for cuff links for a while now...

Revisiting the relationship between traffic congestion and the economy: a longitudinal examination of U.S. metropolitan areas:

... . Economic productivity is not significantly negatively impacted by high levels of traffic congestion. In fact, the results suggest a positive association between traffic congestion and per capita GDP as well as between traffic congestion and job growth at the MSA level. There was a statistically insignificant effect on per capita income. There may be valid reasons to continue the fight against congestion, but the idea that congestion will stifle the economy does not appear to be one of them.

Via Streetsblog Denver: Widening Roads Does No Favors for Denver’s Economy.

When you realize that Ansible basically serves the same function as OS/360 JCL, but that the latter was easier to read and made more sense.

Pilot study. Small sample size. Needs follow-up. However: Chemical Research in Toxicology: Association of Type 2 Diabetes with Submicron Titanium Dioxide Crystals in the Pancreas, Adam Heller, Karalee Jarvis, and Sheryl S. Coffman.

When SF traffic is so bad I get off the 14 Express down Mission St and manage to pass 2 route 14 buses on foot before I get to my bus. Even with Moscone Center convention tourists on the sidewalk.

How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story:

The original writer of the Village Voice story that inspired “Boys Don’t Cry” looks back on her reporting — and the huge error she still regrets

Ugh. The annoyance of JavaScript developers who think that everything's gonna happen through NPM, rather than being generated from other applications. (This particular case is OpenLayers 4, but...)

RT Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 @RealSaavedra:

Democratic Minnesota Senate candidate Richard Painter just released this campaign ad.

It has an attached video. I'm... oddly intrigued.

Courtesy of Shadow: RT fake githubber @jessfraz

Can’t stop laughing at this.
“Some providers now have something called Metal-as-a-Service, which I really think ought to mean that an '80s metal band shows up at your office, plays a gig, smashes the furniture, and urinates on the carpet”

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3215876

The link is to Kode Vicious — Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud — Cache is king. And if your cache is cut, you're going to feel it. in which a company moves to "the cloud" and discovers that shared computing resources aren't all they're pitched to be...

Two reasons Mountain View Ave needs speedbumps: yesterday a cop was tailgating someone driving prudently, today a kid dropped his bike at the Fairview curve.

Is anyone getting Mastodon to work? I have an account on a mastodon.cloud instance that only works occasionally, and one on a *.masto.host instance which is responsive, but doesn't seem to be getting any content from other sites...

U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani. On the one hand, it's about time, on the other hand I'm having trouble feeling sorry for the investors, it's like they weren't even trying to do diligence...

"Every curb cut is a monument to Ed Roberts" https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/

Teenager Threatened to Murder Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, U.S. Says:

The defendant said he did not have access to a firearm because his “parents won’t purchase a firearm based on his history and the strict gun laws in Maryland,” and said that he “probably won’t be able to get one,” the memo said.

Yay for those parents.

Confessions of a disk cracker: The secrets of 4AM:

I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. So it never got preserved in any form.

There is currently a fairly contentious issue in Petaluma. Developers of commercial projects over $500k have to put 1% of the cost of the project towards public art. Developers can either choose to manage this art themselves, as those behind the recent Deer Creek project did, or to give it to the city, where the Petaluma Public Art Committee (PPAC) can decide how to use it.

continued in the comments:

Burn it all down: State Department Tells US Diplomats To Stop Evaluating Women On Their Baking Skills

The Little-Known Behavioral Scientist Who Has Transformed Cities All Over the World:

“Why are you architects not interested in people?” Ingrid Gehl asked her new husband, Jan. “What do you think about the fact that your architecture professors take their photos at four o’clock in the morning … without the distraction of people in the photos?”

Announced at the company call today, so I can put it on the social medias: I have resigned from current job to go on to next job, which will be in an office, with cow-orkers, but said office will be in Petaluma.

A Tiny Revolution: I Appreciate Right-Wing Honesty

This is a common phenomenon when countries are doing horrible things. At such moments, nice liberals generally present a wholly false picture of their country's history, either because they're incredibly ignorant or just because they think it makes their argument stronger: "Our Great Nation has never [put minorities in internment camps/tortured people/launched aggressive wars/taken candy from a baby] before! We mustn't start now!" Meanwhile, interestingly enough, conservatives are often more honest. In normal times conservatives go into a frenzy if anyone mentions their Great Nation may not be flawless. But when new horrible things need to be done, they'll tell the truth about the past in response to the nice liberals' lies: "It's preposterous to say we've never [put minorities in internment camps/tortured people/launched aggressive wars/taken candy from a baby]. Of course we have! AND LET'S DO IT AGAIN NOW!"

The whole thing is worth reading.

Jalopnik: This Test Shows Why Tesla Autopilot Crashes Keep Happening

BBC Technology: Car insurers warn on 'autonomous' vehicles

ACLU: One Woman Who Knew Her Rights Forced Border Patrol Off a Greyhound Bus

Well, shit. I think I've lost the bandwidth bet with TC: Mobile internet to reach 28% of media use in 2020

Internet usage will finally surpass TV in 2019.

The most amazing thing about the Petaluma Valedictorian who had her mic cut off isn't that the school administration was trying to hide sexual assault, it's that the event had someone on the sound board paying attention... I've paid for many events where there wasn't.

This valedictorian began to talk about sexual misconduct at her graduation. Then her mic was cut

I suppose it's not original to observe that the economy of the future will revolve primarily around artists using their Patreon proceeds to pay the medical bills of friends through GoFundMe.

FCC shrugs at fake cell towers around the White House.

Of course it could as easily be Secret Service snooping on traffic in DC as foreign state actors, or a combination.

National Bureau of Economic Research: The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

From the department of "duh": Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?, John M. Griffin and Amin Shams, both of the University of Texas at Austin - Department of Finance:

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.

New York Times: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say

Wow. Dell and Lenovo are both shipping laptops that can be configured with 128G of RAM. Don't let anyone tell you that Slack hasn't done good things for the world; it's created a market for machines that can run the client!