Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social), page 4

@emilygorcenski It’s baffling that Apple Health looks at two workouts for the *same time* and decides to double count them. This is pretty elementary stuff.

A real thing everyone in the U.S. did straight through the nineties was have their social security number printed on their checks. We would just hand out pieces of paper with our name, address, phone number, bank account info, and SSN.

I made a new Mastodon bot, called "I Hope This Email Finds You.” Twice a day it proposes a novel way to conclude that sentence that opens so many emails. (It uses phrases from Google Books that include the phrase “finds you.”) I've been having fun reading these, so I turned it into a bot because you, too, might have fun reading them. https://botsin.space/@thisemailfindsyou/112295528875440987

I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.

If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!

"Can't you just type in the number?”

...Maybe? I have dyscalculia, which means that it's really cognitively demanding for me to read arbitrary strings of numbers like, say, bank routing numbers, and I often get them wrong. So this isn't just annoying, it's an accessibility problem.

Browsers should refuse to respect paste-disabling. This is not something that any user wants.

@brianboyer It’s been too many years since I’ve worked in the magazine world, and I sure hope CMSes have improved in the intervening 13 years, so I try to regard myself as a disconnected former-expert in this arena. But I’m very interested in what there is to be said about this by somebody with current knowledge!

@emilygorcenski OK
but your dreams are edging into my actual life. 😒

@jessamyn You’re the second person to mention this! I should have written “seed-bearing” or something.

Oklahoma’s governor refuses to let kids in his state access the federal government’s new summer EBT program, to ensure that kids can have meals when school is out. In response, five tribal nations have teamed up to provide the benefits to any eligible kids who happen to live on tribal land (which is a lot of Oklahoma). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/us/politics/school-meals-summer-ebt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jE0.NZAi.mehkrnKm8xuN&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=u&sgrp=c-cb

Trumpism is taking over American Christianity, which in turn is driving many Americans away from Christianity. Affiliation with the religion has dropped precipitously in the past decade. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-07/trump-s-brand-of-christian-conservatism-is-driving-people-from-church

Virginia's governor also vetoed SB373, which established a paid family and medical leave program for the state. Why? because it would “remove[] the incentive for the private sector to provide these benefits.”

It's been 248 years, and the private sector hasn't yet provided those benefits. The dude just thinks that women shouldn't be in the workforce.

Virginia's governor also vetoed HB81, a bill that eliminates the common-law crime of suicide.

Yes, that's right—thanks to our governor, it remains against the law to kill yourself in Virginia.

The Virginia legislature passed a bill preventing the extradition of VA doctors to states where abortion is illegal—otherwise, e.g. North Carolina could charge a VA doctor with providing an abortion to a NC resident who traveled to VA. The law explicitly says that it doesn't apply to a doctor who has fled another state.

Virginia's governor just vetoed it, saying the bill “is aimed at medical professionals from other states who may be in Virginia and subject to an extradition." Horseshit.

@emilygorcenski This would not surprise me in the least, if they thought they could profit from that relationship.

For more background on the awful people who operate Nexus Services. Just terrible humans who exploit the legal system and public sympathy at every turn—they’ll say anything to make money and avoid consequences. I’m glad this judge threw the guy in prison, but I hope many more charges and many more years in prison are still to come. https://www.newsleader.com/story/news/local/2024/04/04/former-nexus-services-inc-owner-sentenced-to-jail/73188339007/

I am delighted to see these exploitative serial criminals getting punished. I have followed this couple’s exploits for 8 years, and their Trumpian ability to worm out of all consequences, allowing them to exploit the most vulnerable for this long, is a condemnation of the US justice system. I hope this time it sticks. https://wapo.st/3vFBD3G

With Biden joining Threads, I’d like to remind everybody that there are enormous policy and legal hurdles in the way of the federal government joining and interacting with the fediverse.

“Why doesn’t the White House just X” observations in the past 36 hours actually have detailed answers, none of which are “gosh, they didn’t think of that.” Biden joining threads is actually a great first step on a fediverse-engagement process.

NYC's chatbot tells me that you must wear long pants to the DMV, so that's good to know about.

In 2023, Pennsylvania reopened their fire-destroyed I-95 overpass in under two weeks. MDOT needs to borrow the PennDOT and USDOT folks who got that done. The scale in Maryland is far larger, but many of the underlying procurement and oversight principles are the same.