Notices by Waldo Jaquith (waldoj@mastodon.social), page 6

When cities run gun buyback programs, they pay a vendor to run the program and destroy the guns. Despite their marketing to the contrary, those vendors turn out to have been reselling the guns, as a matter of course, minus the receiver. 98% are resold. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/us/guns-disposal-recycling.html?unlocked_article_code=1.E00.JnYH.TqkHjf6uP1oW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

If you were wondering "did the ACLU learn anything from August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville?" the answer is that, no, they did not.

No

In “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” Douglas Adams wrote that the Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy is 5,973,509 pages long. English-language Wikipedia currently contains 6,747,777 entries. That means that the size of Wikipedia has now surpassed the size of the Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy.

When a presidential candidate is accused of sounding like a fascist, and his campaign's response is to say that they will "crush" the “existence" of his opponents, is that *bad*? It seems bad. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/us/politics/trump-rhetoric-fascism.html

The Washington Post has published dozens of photos of the aftermaths of some of the worst mass shootings in modern history—of what the crime scenes look like after the dead and injured have been removed. These pictures are very unpleasant and very difficult to see. I think many people regard a bullet wound as a tidy “off” button for life. As these photos make gruesomely clear, that is not what guns do in any way. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-force-mass-shootings/

USDA just updated their plant hardiness zone data for the country, since global warming is steadily changing what can grow where. This reminded me that I run an API for getting the plant hardiness zone for a given ZIP code. I just checked the traffic stats on CloudFront, and it's gotten over 100 million queries in the past year. It's a modern miracle that hosting that costs basically nothing and requires zero work by me annually. Now to update the source data! https://github.com/waldoj/frostline/

This, from the Washington Post, is the correct headline and the right way to frame this story. I hope this is a sign that they're using a new playbook now. Trump is a fascist, and media outlets do their readers no favors by pretending otherwise.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/

It’s kind of impressive how the wealthy have convinced people that “pro-business” is the same as “don’t tax millionaires,” and that taxing millionaires is in opposition to business. These things are not related! But they’re a rhetorical bundle in politics.

This Lockheed Martin ad on the Washington Post’s site promotes Washington Post articles that can be read without encountering the paywall. The articles are all recent (good) news about Lockheed Martin contracts.

I’d sure like to know what a media ethicist thinks about this arrangement.

What they say: We need to get people back in the office.

What I hear: We've got to get women out of the workforce. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/upshot/mothers-remote-work-pandemic.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6kw.4QAX.JTJmOy6Uw00P&smid=url-share

We win. White nationalists lose. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/civil-war-monument-melting-robert-e-lee-confederate/

If you have a 23andMe profile, it is possible that you have been affected by their latest data breach. Just to be safe, you should take a minute now to change your DNA.

I thought this was a radical shift in how the British Museum acquires artifacts, but it turns out that they don't like it when people steal from *them*. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/arts/design/british-museum-collection.html

Vermont's Green Mountain Power is going to equip every customer with a backup battery, since that's cheaper than making their power grid more resilient. This is the first half of a good idea. The remaining half would be to provide customers with heavily-subsidized solar panels (amortized over a decade's power bills), creating a distributed power-generation system that can serve customers even when disconnected from the grid. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html?unlocked_article_code=LeKDfU8q__Ways4PG2VyNTDvV6LLU5JNc5L7H_qb312SZnm9OaYuY573BIxiljZ3L55mi6HAWbKGEhmVrH-jIKJnEl6G6t-8FQxeMxe_HZwRtuDnLZeKjkJxgwym5CKHNMWQ23ZrHZ8Zvg3DQwG9Te1D2nLCwW7ixhHUoqUMB7Of3RMrFAS5Y80nHGWd1X8KFKIboUuhOHllGyZ7UHSNNtG6yBOAdPphYFkw1YycDthyDatHwumZki5-XcUEf4yxBv55nlOb0FrwJqhCt17gFpPXgqWUqK5dbsUOHY7eVd799Nd113qS21tX0eiIS3YWXBzfpWimAhK6PbfgbSfGVqktp52RLdkdSvnY2BkhhOzhuTHcE19JHaAG&smid=url-share

On the one hand, people are leaving red states because their children’s existence has been criminalized. On the other hand, people are leaving blue states because they are exposed to people they disagree with about some things. Both sides! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/us/politics/politics-states-moving.html?unlocked_article_code=sg12OVdvzHXqFsOXpbBHvUfj2pBU5vvNcsxiXfuFWGd_Sn57bMkYpdnLDMMYX9ZkvaLaWGf6RROTkGzMn6DNPrPOV8s3ThsEdgt725ZMR4ekNn5MNKlWGYWAGu3TWfcTNqigR0aEIVPRz3zDGFTQRnrUN8b_XJB6-4Vz9vZTQd_QFpCStz6IXF9DbGu0K2KZOQCeFAHZEEg7XYqwRUn4lwYHqhQjKgQuElG0FeoIEIkhuH6Ny_cTIYgOrCS1gyzVAAn36c4HMIg67kayEkXhBkeWSKPsqg_G4V3diOwBMO9LEyPsnGBwYWJQZTsnIdADclGew6Mf8EpGwdOGy23NuedENA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Midwestern droughts have reduced the flow of the Mississippi. Groundwater depletion has caused coastal land to sink below sea level. Sea-temperature increases raised the sea level in the Gulf. The result: rising ocean waters are out-competing the Mississippi flow, pushing up the riverbed, and will reach New Orleans’ water treatment plant. The city’s water supply will be undrinkable, while the salt leaches poisons out of lead pipes. They have one month.

We did this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/29/climate/new-orleans-saltwater-map.html?unlocked_article_code=YY1Ts4O8PDO2TJgPZYi6Tldxm_uNeKHVvgkg4EgPZmqT4AIKqK7EMYfP3LFe8RlVhSfU8mpQK75rHcnO2Ox59Lh05bgzthiJxc73KZqvQ9bJmSIMPEWOxFuAtwqukSYV0BfzL9JQrhrd6XcwQTCudtCWFwvxKfcjU1ZqEaNS9S_71QVaQ1zkdCsp7W5wZgXlJs-fyw_ZrF8HZUbLGsUL_bV8eWANJDBKOhZu4adbPjbyrVfrF91XtjEPjBABQPHd4eQGKOm-l5i2jam7pF6XnLOGPKcq3Pr7dA81OEbDs-L4o533ERGdU2XtTXAKVqULiIxb2gm94xFRCud-sCrTwfRtD6OmhBWVyHYvvoRTBWmtUA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

This study of hospital-contracted influenza and RSV (using Brigham and Woman's Hospital as the data source) found that rates were cut in *half* thanks to universal masking during the worst of Covid.

We identified a cheap, easy way to significantly reduce disease and death and then decided..."nah.” https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciad451/7235905?login=false

Clarence Thomas twice spoke at the Koch brothers’ annual fundraising retreat. A sitting Supreme Court justice is actually fundraising for a partisan organization that routinely brings cases before the Supreme Court, which he routinely rules in favor of. Naturally he has not disclosed this. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-secretly-attended-koch-brothers-donor-events-scotus

I thought that online identity verification services were as inequitable as they could possibly be, but I've gotta hand it to them, they've done it—they've somehow found a way to bake in an entirely new cultural bias. Not familiar with Western astrology? You won't be getting the government service that you needed!