Favorites July 3 2021

Doug Saunders @DougSaunders

An extraordinary thing happened in Canada yesterday: most of the country decided not to hold Canada Day, out of a sense of respect and shame. My ‘hood, normally fireworks central, was nearly silent. There was also activist stuff, but I found this mass atonement more moving

There were marches in the capital and everything. This is because of the recent discoveries of the remains of Indigenous children who were in the care of the Canadian government in the 1920s. The ‘residential school’ program this was part of ran from the 1860s till the 1990s.

Lawrence H. Summers @LHSummers

If anything, bipartisan deal is huge underestimate of revenue potential from totally reasonable enforcement reform. Simply returning audit rates to recent levels would raise $200B+ in highly progressive way.

More tax police! Believe it or not, but if you spend more on the IRS, they find more tax cheats, and collect more taxes!

Bloomberg @business

BREAKING: A massive ransomware attack by Russia-based hackers on the global software supply chain has hit more than 1,000 businesses across at least 11 countries.

trib.alBloomberg - Are you a robot?

This seems really bad, apparently a Swedish chain of supermarkets was shut down by this ransomware.

Aaron 🥑🚈🚰🏀 @aceckhouse

@MattBroad15 @TribTowerViews @vigneshr4m and hey, found a study about camera enforcement of bus lanes specifically! turns out it offers significant improvements over paint only designs

mobilitylab.orgAutomated bus lane enforcement is more effective than police, among other findingsBus-only lanes are one of the most effective ways to improve bus service. However, they do no good if constantly impinged on by traffic, as happened with Washington, DC’s recent experiment with a priority bus

I really like this idea of putting a camera on busses that run in their own lane to ticket folks who drive in the bus lane. This was part of a long thread discussing specifics, and they seemed to come to an agreement that it’s ok as long as the first citation is a warning. The idea is to prove to motorists that they’ll be caught if they do it, so that they don’t do it. Ideally the program collects zero dollars because no one is blocking the lane.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Just gotta start doing this for multi family housing https://t.co/6vqfgGcuOH

Timothy Aeppel @TimAeppel

When a town in Connecticut objected to a lumber store's Paul Bunyan statute because it violated local sign ordinances, the owners put a flagpole in its hands. There's no height limits on flagpoles. https://t.co/dFlF5DAsc4

You'd need like, a really big flag, and then say that the flag pole just happens to have apartments in it. Do you think it'd be more convincing if the building is cylindrical?

Ok, I actually did some research, the largest flagpole in the world has a 4.1 meter diameter, meaning that each ‘floor’ could have 142 square feet of space. You could absolutely sell that as an apartment. I think we’re on to something here…

Jack Hurley @loudribs

Liberty Steel Ostrava in the Czech Republic use old T-55 tanks to do steel stuff and make every other steel company on earth feel deeply, deeply inadequate about their non-tank adjacent steeling.

It's not even clear what they're doing with that tank, besides making the other factories jealous of their... tank.

July 2021, Mountain View

Once this year’s fire season starts, will the sunsets get better? worse? I guess we’ll find out.