How Wordpress still powers over 40% of the web is beyond me. It is poorly-architected and maddening to work with IMHO.

I have pretty much all notifications disabled and I keep my phone in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7. That doesn't prevent me from spending too much time reading news while sitting on the can, but it does at least prevent the phone from breaking my concentration with some sort of alert message every 45 seconds. It's made a big difference.

Coding with AI is like using a spray can to paint a canvas. It covers a large area with amazing speed but isn't great for fine detail work. Sometimes you have to get in there with a small brush and do the detail work yourself. The trick is to know when to use which tool.

Hi all,

I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.

Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.

At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.

The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.

Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?

We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.

My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.

I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.

Yours,

Bari

How about a network of underground tunnels with autonomous, electric train cars self-routing like IP packets to transport freight containers between cities? 24/7/365 operation through all weather, and it'd get most 18 wheelers off of the highways.

Blocked and Reported podcast just did a two-part series on the Kiwi Farms / Keffals incidents that were in the news lately. It's a complicated saga involving some weird characters. There's a lot more detail to it than what was reported in the major news media. Here's part 1:

https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-131-who-is-stalking-the-twitch#details

Wouldn't it be possible to cache the distance/time for combinations of route segments, speeding future calculations that use that same combination of segments?

Yeah, that's a big problem. One story that I read said they would be fined 1 EUR ($1.1 million) for *each sale* of a non-essential product. There are enough products misclassified on Amazon that some could slip through the filters and end up costing them billions per day. So, I can see why they'd choose to close rather than take the risk.

I'm guessing the need for COBOL developers is mostly related to changes in business logic. Lots of states have changed eligibility rules, deadlines, disbursement schedules, etc. and that logic now needs to be implemented in software.

I'm way more afraid of the idea of the government being able to control social media platforms, than I am of whatever boogeyman-du-jour is being used to justify that control.

That sort of thing happens when the people using and driving for the taxi fleet are not the ones who incur the costs. In other words, the environmental costs are externalized. The solution is to build the cost of the environmental impact into the price of the service - i.e. internalize it - so that people will take that impact into account when making a purchase decision or comparing the prices of two options.

Which is why it can take 45 to 90 minutes for a taxi to show up - if they even show up at all.