From New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan.  I shy away from political articles here, especially ones about the President, but I think this one is worth a read.

INTERESTING TIMESJuly 20, 20189:17 am

Why Trump Has Such a Soft Spot for Russia

By Andrew Sullivan

Looks like the people who guided the US economy through the last crisis are getting together for a very public meeting.  I wish they would have invited Alan Greenspan, just to see if he learned any lessons.  I wonder if they are getting worried.  From WaPo:

What veterans of the last financial crisis have to say about the next one

“Former U.S. Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner and former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke met with reporters last week to discuss a September summit they are hosting to review lessons learned — both good and bad — from the crisis.”

A good description of what went wrong:

“The financial crisis reached its peak 10 years ago, a global banking panic that shook stock markets, wiped out thousands of companies, erased trillions of dollars in savings and drove unemployment from 4.7 percent to 10 percent in 24 months.

“To arrest the panic, the Bush and Obama administrations used controversial and — at times — barely legal methods to flood financial markets with taxpayer money. Most of this money flowed directly to banks, not homeowners, causing a populist revolt.

What they missed was the part about the housing bubble caused by Alan Greenspan and low interest rates.

Been enjoying the music of Bob Schneider for a while.  His latest, Blood and Bones, is as good as anything he has ever done.  If you like this, check out the King Kong trilogy from a few years back.

There was a good documentary on Netflix about Trump’s Scottish golf course development from several years back.  Bloomberg revisits the controversy.

Trump’s Golf Misadventure in the Scottish Dunes

Broken promises and angry neighbors dog the president’s resort near Aberdeen.

By Timothy L. O’Brien

July 15, 2018, 8:00 AM CDT

Was at an air BandB for vacation a couple of weeks back.   The place had a fully outfitted kitchen with plates, spices, a juicer, coffee maker, and just about everything a kitchen would need.  Except one thing. Not a pot or pan in the place.  Very odd.  We had bought some food and I was making breakfast when I noticed the  missing pots and pans.  I wondered if I could microwave some eggs. I remember my brother trying this when we were kids, with terrible results.  The yolk exploded and covered the inside of our massive new Amana microwave with half cooked egg.  So I was skeptical.  But alas there were some recipes on line, including a few making scrambled eggs in a microwave in a coffee cup.  Perfect!  I gave it a try and in a bit more than a minute I had some very nice scrambled eggs.  Put a dab of butter in, some salt and pepper (before or after cooking) and some of the best eggs ever.  Easy cleanup, too.  Why didn’t I know about this?

I was in Denver on vacation and noticed the quiet (almost dangerously so) busses on the 16th street mall.  They seemed to be electric, but there weren’t any obvious signs or anything advertising this, just the lack of noise and smoke.  When I got home a quick Google turned up an article on the electric busses in Denver (Denver RTD to purchase 36 new BYD electric buses for mall service).  It also urned up the article on the all electric busses on Shenzhen.  By coincidence I was talking to a co-worker who happened to be from Shenzhen.  He confirmed the electric bus story and also mentioned that it is far, far easier to get a license for a new car in China if it is electric.

From Ars Technica:

China producing x86 chips nearly identical to AMD server processors

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co. (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD’s EPYC processors—so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called “Dhyana.” The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only—part of an effort to break China’s dependence on foreign technology companies.

A recent local story that has gotten lots of national attention.  Kids shooting off fireworks on July 4th shot by neighbor.  Lots of ugly stuff here, much of it not in the mainstream press.  First it was technically July 4th, but it was really just after midnight in the 3rd.  Non-traditional, but I remember having fireworks as a kid and shooting them days before New Years.  The short story:  41 year old white guy tells brown / black kids to be quiet.  They ignore him, so instead of calling the cops, he dresses up in military gear and gets a bunch of guns and shoots one of them.

Here is the really outrageous part: the shooter left a rifle on the ground, but the police “didn’t know who it belonged to”.  There were reports of guns on both sides but videos don’t bear this out.  The teenager was shot running away.  Here is the best part:  shooter wasn’t arrested until Friday, almost 3 days later.  What????  You can shoot someone and kill them and not get arrested immediately?  I will say it.  If you are white and the victim is black, no matter how bad it looks or what the witnesses say, you get to walk away, at least until the people getting shot scream loud enough.  I am getting more and more disappointed in Austin PD.

Hundreds fill Travis High field to remember teen killed in shooting

An article from New York magazine a few months back with some of the bigger names involved in the modern internet.

The Internet Apologizes …

Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it.

 

I have come to really like Jaron Lanier.  He sums lots of it up:

We wanted everything to be free, because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs, because we loved Steve Jobs. So you want to be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, which is absurd. … We disrupted absolutely everything: politics, finance, education, media, family relationships, romantic relationships. We won — we just totally won. But having won, we have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness. We’re still acting as if we’re in trouble and we have to defend ourselves. So we kind of turned into assholes, you know?

A rainy 4th of July after a long string of 100F (or near)  days here in Austin.