https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-14/one-way-to-make-reparations-work

Glad to see some more-detailed discussions of reparations.

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1106299648795381769?s=17

This.

Oliver Willis (@owillis) Tweeted:

none of this happens without millions of people voting in november, for your local rep, for speaker pelosi, for aoc, for chairman cummings. republicans sat on their asses for 2 years and aided and abetted this perversion of our government. https://t.co/gypSEFg0Zc

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article227742754.html

Tillis flips; votes to support Trump after his big Washington Post piece saying he’d oppose Trump. Burr is just a consistent Bad Guy. Yay, North Carolina, still the land of Jesse Helms.

Also, the highly-principled conservative Ben Sasse voted to support Trump’s emergency declaration.

«Like Tillis, Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr also voted against the disapproval resolution. But the resolution passed 59-41, with 12 GOP senators voting to disapprove.»

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/11/baby-frozen-ditch-haunted-south-dakota-town-years-now-his-mother-has-been-found/

Oof.

«Experts at private labs take advantage of public genealogy websites such as GEDMatch, where people submit their DNA to build their own family tree or identify long-lost family members. The idea is to identify an unidentified suspect or victim by matching their DNA with family members who agreed to make it available on the public websites.

In this case, Baby Andrew’s apparent family members were all from Sioux Falls, Webb said.

“We were able to continue to build that family tree through old birth announcements, old marriage announcements,” Webb said. “We started putting the pieces together. We always felt like our suspect must have been a fairly young individual.”

And so they zeroed in on a woman on the family tree who would have been 19 in 1981 — Bentaas.

According to the affidavit, police went digging in her trash to find beer cans and cigarette butts to test her DNA. Sure enough, it was linked to Baby Andrew’s.»

https://www.keionline.org/30093

Yikes. Software patents rears its ugly head again. Seems like this could be a Big Deal.

«For example, the DOJ could require IBM to show how it will ensure the continued policy of ensuring that Red Hat’s patents are only used for defensive purposes. Conditions on this issue should be durable, and avoid predictable loopholes.»

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/fentanyl-epidemic-obama-administration/

«Between 2013 and 2017, more than 67,000 people died of synthetic-opioid-related overdoses — exceeding the number of U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. The number of deaths, the vast majority from fentanyl, has risen sharply each year.

….

Drug treatment experts compared the government’s slow response to an earlier failure to face the AIDS epidemic.

“There was a stigma about being gay,” said Luke J. Nasta, executive director of the largest drug treatment facility on Staten Island, N.Y. “There is also a stigma about being addicted to drugs. The entire society is suffering and the government can’t seem to get their arms around this epidemic.

“If it’s an epidemic, then treat it like an epidemic.”

….

The drug czar’s office depended on overdose data from the CDC. But data from the field was sometimes a year behind, and local coroners and medical examiners were not always testing for fentanyl.

“It’s incredibly frustrating when you feel like, given the resources of the United States, that we can’t harness those resources in ways that help us see around the corner,” Botticelli said.

….

“A great deal would have been done by the White House simply saying we have this horrible danger out there,” said Walters, the earlier drug czar. “We saw more action by the White House over an outbreak of tainted food, giving out news releases telling people what to look for, telling people to protect their friends and family, than you did for fentanyl. It’s a little ridiculous that we don’t use the bully pulpit to at least provide a national warning.”

In the summer of 2016, a few months after the fentanyl letter, the Obama administration declared the Zika virus to be a public health emergency and had already requested $1.9 billion from Congress to address it. Two people in the United States died of Zika-related illnesses.»

Because food poisoning and mosquito bites are a threat to us, but drug overdoses are only a threat to them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dicks-sporting-goods-to-remove-guns-from-125-stores-11552400663

«The space will be used to sell higher-margin, faster-selling categories such as licensed sports gear and outdoor recreation equipment, Mr. Stack said.»

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613106/a-second-737-max-crash-raises-questions-about-airplane-automation/

«The remarkable safety record of commercial airliners is an achievement of bureaucracy rather than technology. Airplanes are not safe because they are made of strong materials, nor because the computers that help fly them are so sophisticated. They are safe because of an elaborate international system of regulation that, with scores of checklists and reams of systematized procedures, makes “Safety first” not a slogan but a reality.

That system is now showing signs of strain.»