Unemployment insurance fraud at record levels
The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier:From March through the end of November, there have been...
View ArticleMr Vice President, kick your boss to the curb now
The House of Representatives have started debate on a resolution to ask Vice President Mike Pence to start the process of removing the STBXPOTUS under the 25th Amendment. As you might imagine, this was...
View ArticleMore on Republican posturing about "unity"
Granted, I get most of my news and information from only one part of the media: the part based on evidence and reason. So I may not intuit correctly how Republicans calling for "unity" right now makes...
View ArticleSure Happy It's Thursday, March 319th...
Lunchtime roundup:Author John Scalzi gives the STBXPOTUS a colossal take-down on his blog today: "We don’t have to wait on history, but as it happens, this is how history will remember Donald Trump:...
View ArticleNot a typical January
We've only had six days where the temperature stayed below freezing since November 1st, and the third year in a row where we've not had a temperature below -18°C by this point. This shouldn't surprise...
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Reality check
Top 20 single-day death counts by disaster in the US for the past 100 years:Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
View ArticleBonnie Wilson Coleman (D-NJ) is pissed off
After sheltering-in-place on January 6th with fact-denying, mask-refusing Republican colleagues, Rep. Coleman contracted Covid-19:Over the past day, a lot of people have asked me how I feel. They are...
View ArticleStuff that seems cool but...
The Consumer Electronics Show went virtual this year, but it still had some interesting toys, like these:Air Safety Virus MonitorsIt's well-known that things like ventilation and humidity affect how...
View ArticleMan caught living at O'Hare for three months
Aditya Singh never left O'Hare after arriving on October 19th:Singh, 36, lived in the secure area with access to terminals, shops and food at O’Hare International Airport until his arrest Saturday...
View ArticleEvening roundup
With only 18 hours to go in the worst presidency in American history—no, really this time—I have a few articles to read, only two of which (directly) concern the STBXPOTUS.Author John Scalzi looks...
View ArticleCatching up
Even though things have quieted down in the last few days (gosh, why?), the news are still newing:President Biden has signed a pack of executive orders, including a national mask mandate and others...
View ArticleIt's Groundhog Day...again...
The City of Chicago has moved into Covid-19 response Tier 1, meaning bars and restaurants can sort-of open:In a Saturday morning announcement, as expected, the Illinois Department of Public Health said...
View ArticleThe breakfast of aliens
Via Julia Ioffe, the Guardian highlights a kitchen gadget that literally no one needs:The Egg Master (£29.99, DecentGadget, Amazon) is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured...
View ArticleThree-pointer
Today is the last day of Sprint 28 at my day job, and I've just closed my third one-point story of the day. When we estimate the difficulty of a story (i.e., a single unit of code that can be deployed...
View ArticleNew art forms in the pandemic
Dear future reader, observe how the combination of physical isolation; near-universal access to the entire world through the Internet; apps that make collaboration simple (like TikTok); and really...
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Waiting for one CI build, then another
It's every other Tuesday today, so I'm just waiting for the last continuous-integration (CI) build to finish before deploying the latest software to our production environment. So far, so boring, just...
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Two local stories
As the State of Illinois starts abandoning the Helmut Jahn-designed Thompson Center in Chicago's Loop, the Governor's Office announced the state has purchased PepsiCo's old building at 555 W Monroe...
View ArticleThis wobbly earth (and other stories)
I'm having a series of productive days lately, which has taken me away from wasting a bunch of time. So for example, I haven't yet today read these items:A group of Redditors has put a short squeeze on...
View ArticleAll the pretty press secretaries
Fox News has a habit of hiring the XPOTUS's press secretaries (even when no one else will), for a very simple reason:The appeal of all four to a network like Fox News is that, more than any cluster of...
View ArticleDeferred infrastructure maintenance + climate change = ...?
A 25-meter section of the Pacific Coast Highway slid into the Pacific about 30 km south of Big Sur this week:Caltrans spokesperson Jim Shivers said the damage to the highway is called a slip out. "It's...
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