I remember having argument with a (“conservative”) internet stranger around the time of the ’08 financial crisis. His position was that bleeding-heart liberal Congress had mandated subprime loans, and that’s why we were in that mess.

«An analysis conducted for the Wall Street Journal in 2007 showed that the majority of subprime loans were going to people who could have qualified for less expensive prime loans.

….

The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out.»

#theSumOfUs

So… one of my favorite hymns, which has one of those turn-of-the-century sounds, has its melody from an African-American spiritual. Words written in 1913 (with the 3rd stanza inserted in 1987 from Galatians 3:28 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+3%3A28&version=NRSVUE)) , according to the fine print at the bottom of the page.

«the costs of incarceration are coming due in suburban and rural areas, squeezing state budgets and competing with education. It’s not a comeuppance but a bitter cost of the white majority’s willingness to accept the suffering of others, a cost of racism itself.»

#theSumOfUs

Why is college so expensive? Why is everybody in debt? Greedy Big Education?

«In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.

….

State legislatures began to drastically cut what they spent per student on their public colleges, even as the taxable income base in the state grew.

….

The average public college tuition has nearly tripled since 1991, helping bring its counterpart, skyrocketing student debt, to the level of $1.5 trillion in 2020.

….

The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans,

….

In 1978, a [California] ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes. Property tax revenue from corporate landowners and homeowners in the state dropped 60 percent the following year. The impact was felt most acutely in public K–12 schools;

….

Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.

….

A decade later, voters in Colorado… passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes. TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) has forced Coloradans to go without a long list of public services, including for two years children’s vaccines when the state couldn’t afford to purchase them—and the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.»

https://a.co/d3rw2xn

«“an extremely rare set of circumstances” with two identically named but separate waypoint markers outsidethe UK’s airspace»

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/06/uk-air-traffic-failure-blamed-on-extremely-rare-circumstances-as-caa-opens-inquiry

Somewhere there is a software dev who advocated for disambiguating waypoint names seven or eight years ago, and a manager (or managerS) who said, no, that will add a month to the time this project takes. We’ll go back and fix it later.

«Some forgiveness can be given for a borrowed name that’s unlikely to cause a semantic collision in normal use, such as Python or Lisp. But there can be none for such abominations as Processing or Go. These are words so often used in computing contexts that not even a regex match pattern written by God could disambiguate all the indexing and search collisions.»

https://spectrum.ieee.org/python

https://theginisin.com/gin-reviews/hendricks-flora-adora-gin/

This stuff is only good for one thing: a Salty Dog.

Well, here we go again:

«It was all the sign I needed that fall, with its chunky cable knits and deluge of pumpkin-spiced products, is nearly here.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/dining/late-summer-corn-recipes.html

(paywalled; ping me if you’re truly interested.)