[cherdano]

No conversation these days is safe of being hijacked by Brexit.
(Condensed in order not to make you suffer through the typical 20-minute questionnaire from a 4-year old.)

My 4-year old son: Why does the king wear a crown?
Me: So that everyone knows he is the king.
4YO: Why does he want everyone to know?
Me: Because the king gets to make the decisions, so everyone should know.
4YO: What if someone doesn't like the decision by the king?
Me: Yes that's a problem, that's why we don't have a king anymore.
4YO: So how do they make decisions now?
Me: &!$~!#$Grrr!

[y66]

Winstonm, on 2019-March-24, 13:29, said:

I think the article reference this, the PAC.

I compared average monthly lobbying expenses to February 2019 political contributions. Apples to oranges. Sorry for the confusion.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-March-25, 05:02, said:

I compared average monthly lobbying expenses to February 2019 political contributions. Apples to oranges. Sorry for the confusion.

I appreciate you cared enough to look for the facts.

[y66]

From In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin:

Quote

The Patagonian desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. Unlike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible. In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these 'arid wastes' had taken such firm possession of his mind.

In the 1860s, W. H. Hudson came to the Río Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin's question, and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

[Winstonm]

This just in. Fox News has just moved three Central American countries to Mexico to avoid U.S. penalties. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are now part of Mexico.

[Cyberyeti]

Winstonm, on 2019-April-01, 07:45, said:

This just in. Fox News has just moved three Central American countries to Mexico to avoid U.S. penalties. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are now Mexican counties.

https://www.facebook...hY9SoNwHcO-uYQL

[jjbrr]

a facebook link, huh? yikes...

[y66]

I just sent a wire transfer from my bank in the U.S. to a bank in Australia. The transaction details include something called a SWIFT code that uniquely identifies financial institutions. The transfer did not go through initially due to a SWIFT code error. The Australian bank confirmed I had the right code and suggested I ask my bank to append XXX. That worked. Such is the state of the art of the international financial system.

[shyams]

y66, on 2019-April-02, 11:33, said:

I just sent a wire transfer from my bank in the U.S. to a bank in Australia. The transaction details include something called a SWIFT code that uniquely identifies financial institutions. The transfer did not go through initially due to a SWIFT code error. The Australian bank confirmed I had the right code and suggested I ask my bank to append XXX. That worked. Such is the state of the art of the international financial system.

Did the U.S. bank charge you extra for the bounced transaction from the SWIFT error? If yes, you should inform them that their Operations Unit is at fault

Although 8 character SWIFT codes are technically allowed, most banks' systems are designed for 11 character SWIFT addresses as standard. And Ops units in all banks know that if a customer includes a 8 character SWIFT code, the must append the XXX (default) to make it into the preferred 11 character format.

[y66]

shyams, on 2019-April-02, 12:35, said:

Did the U.S. bank charge you extra for the bounced transaction from the SWIFT error? If yes, you should inform them that their Operations Unit is at fault

Although 8 character SWIFT codes are technically allowed, most banks' systems are designed for 11 character SWIFT addresses as standard. And Ops units in all banks know that if a customer includes a 8 character SWIFT code, the must append the XXX (default) to make it into the preferred 11 character format.

No extra charge. Just an extra 30 minutes of back and forth to resolve something that is apparently beyond the capability of the people handling international wire transfers at my bank. Kudos to their Australian counterparts who knew about the XXX thing.

[johnu]

Spineless partisan Paul Ryan offered advice to AOC and is surprised that she ignored him

Paul Ryan said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignored his advice to 'just take it easy' as a new member of Congress

Quote

Former [mediocre] Speaker of the House Paul Ryan offered some advice to freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she arrived in Washington, but she wasn't interested in his guidance, Ryan said on Tuesday night.

Why would anybody want to take advice from Paul Ryan who resigned in ignominy after being run over and flattened like a pancake by Dennison's golf cart? Certainly not somebody with integrity and actual potentially good ideas like AOC.

[Winstonm]

Oh, look, God changed his mind again!

Quote

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said on Thursday that it would allow children of same-sex couples to be baptized, a remarkable reversal of church policy from one of the religious groups that had long sought to be a bulwark against gay rights.

So confusing. What's right? What's wrong? Is there no absolute?

[y66]

Fresh lemon juice hack: https://youtu.be/fOoDEZd4a4A?t=82

[y66]

Good stuff: What seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a company

[y66]

From Robert A. Caro on the means and ends of power by David Marchese at NYT:

Quote

I know that when you’re planning your books, you write a couple paragraphs for yourself that explain what the books are about, and then you use those paragraphs as a North Star to guide your writing and outlining. Yes.

What if you have great material that you can’t make fit into an idea expressible in those two paragraphs? Does having them box you in at all? It’s the opposite. Let’s take “Master of the Senate.” I had two paragraphs that explained that I was writing about power, and that the form of power I wanted to write about was legislative power. More specifically the book is about how a guy, Lyndon Johnson, rises to power in the Senate and then for six years makes the Senate work. And the other half of it is what he does with that power. Well, he passes the first civil rights bill in 82 years. I’m telling you my train of thought here.

Yep, I’m with you. So there’s this character, Senator Richard Russell. He’s fascinating because he’s so smart, he’s so learned. In foreign affairs he’s like a consul of Rome. He sees the whole world, you know? But he’s this son of a bitch.

And a racist. Yes. Here’s how I boiled that book down: I said that two things come together. It’s the South that raises Johnson to power in the Senate, and it’s the South that says, “You’re never going to pass a civil rights bill.” So to tell that story you have to show the power of the South and the horribleness of the South, and also how Johnson defeated the South. I said, “I can do all that through Richard Russell,” because he’s the Senate leader of the South, and he embodies this absolute, disgusting hatred of black people. I thought that if I could do Russell right, I wouldn’t have to stop the momentum of the book to give a whole lecture on the South and civil rights. What I’m trying to say is that if you can figure out what your book is about and boil it down into a couple of paragraphs, then all of a sudden a mass of other stuff is much simpler to fit into your longer outline.

One of the criticisms your books have gotten is that, in the case of Johnson, the depiction of him is too Manichean, too black-and-white. I’m wondering if the boiling down you’re describing might result in your portraying Johnson in a way that lends itself to being boiled down. I don’t think it’s Manichean at all. To oversimplify ridiculously, Lyndon Johnson wanted to create social justice, and because of his incredible capacity for turning compassion into governmental action, he had an unrivaled capacity to do that. But on the other hand, there was the Vietnam War. There were 58,000 Americans killed in that war. Over two million total killed — I can’t even get the total number. I will get the number. But to what extent does Johnson’s personality play into the incredible escalation of Vietnam? You said, “Oh, that’s a guy that’s Manichean.” But it isn’t black or white. It’s all the same personality. It’s the same character.

Have you ever felt there was anything to some of the criticisms? Or did they all feel invalid? Well, the book that got the most criticism was “The Power Broker.” In those days New York had six or seven newspapers, and several of them printed whatever Robert Moses said as fact. He was attacking me after the book came out3 — and he’s a great writer! You’d read a quote about yourself and say: “That poor guy Caro. Oh, wait, that’s me!” I don’t even think the reviews of that book were unanimously good. But you asked did I think any of them were right?

Or even valid. Yeah, no. “The Power Broker,” there was a lot of criticism from academics.

About your subscribing too much to a great-man theory of history? Yes. Last night I was at a dinner, and this professor comes up to me. He teaches in urban affairs at Harvard and he said he’s teaching “The Power Broker.” It made me think: All those professors were attacking the book when it came out! But I don’t believe that I’m writing a “great-man theory of history.” I believe that what I’m writing about are the rare individuals who can harness political forces and bring something out of them, either for good or for ill.

Insofar as you can tell, is the way political power is used today different than in the days of Moses and Johnson? Well, if by today you mean during the Trump presidency, I don’t want to get into that.

That was not a veiled Trump question. I just mean in the contemporary political era. Oh, good. Well, Johnson and Moses are unique: We live in a democracy, where power is supposed to come from being elected, but here is Robert Moses, who had more power than anyone who was elected and held it for almost half a century and shaped our whole landscape. And with Lyndon Johnson, no one since the days of Webster, Clay and Calhoun had made the Senate work, but Johnson did. And no one has done it since.

[johnu]

Poetic justice???

Suspected rhino poacher killed by elephant then eaten by lions in South Africa, authorities say

[y66]

From The Best Year of Our Lives by Ross Douthat at NYT:

Quote

There’s a theory of human psychology that holds that the time you enter maturity becomes fixed in your mind as a civilizational peak — with everything since a falling-off that conveniently matches your own stagger toward the grave. Thus it doesn’t matter if you came of age in the Great Depression or some other nadir; because you were 18 then, it must have been a golden age.

Some of us are lucky, though: Our solipsism actually matches the wave function of history, and the moment we entered adulthood really was a peak. That’s the case for my cohort, for Americans born around 1980. Whether you choose to call us “Xennials” or “Generation Catalano” (after the heartthrob on “My So-Called Life,” our first teen show), the important thing is that we became legal adults at the end of the 1990s, and bliss it was in that time to be alive.

Not that we knew it then, of course, because no punk 18-year-old knows anything. But I’ve been thinking about how good we had it lately because we’re 20 years out from 1999, and the cultural press is thick with reminders that it was a pop-culture annus mirabilis — from the premiere of “The Sopranos” that defined a golden age of television, to the yearlong cascade of brilliant movies (The Ringer recently wrote up a top 100 films list for ’99; in 2019 it was a struggle to write up a top 10) from a Hollywood not yet captive to the superhero era.

Widen the aperture a little, so that the “Xennial” cultural era covers 1995 to 2005, and you get everything from the perfection of the sitcom (late “Seinfeld,” season one of “Friends,” the silver age of “The Simpsons,” “Arrested Development”) to the peak of HBO (when “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” and “Sex and the City” were all airing). Oh, and those were also the days when George R.R. Martin could publish three “Game of Thrones” novels in five years, inventing all the good parts of the TV show’s plot in an end-of-millennium rush.

De gustibus non est disputandum, and if you prefer a zillion algorithmically-generated Netflix shows and endless Marvel sequels to “The Matrix” and “The Sopranos,” then God bless you. But cold hard economic data also suggest that ours was a uniquely blessed coming-of-age: a time of low unemployment, surging productivity, strong working-class wage growth — and all without a huge overhang of public and private debt.

In March, a Time magazine writer, Charlotte Alter, attracted some conservative sneers on Twitter for explaining the youthful vogue for socialism by arguing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s generation had a coming-of-age “defined by financial crisis, debt & climate change … No wonder she and her peers are moving left.”

The sneerers argued that the Ocasio-Cortezans exaggerate the burdens borne by twentysomethings, which is fair — this is still a rich country whose young people are relatively privileged.

But as a statement about generational experiences, Alter was basically right. If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles (Vietnam/Iraq), between epidemics (crack and AIDS/opioids and suicide), and between two different periods of economic stagnation (the ’70s and early Aughts). If you were born later, you experienced slow growth followed by financial crisis followed by a recovery that’s only lately returned us to the median-income and unemployment stats of … 1999.

And even with under-4 percent unemployment, the differences between our economy and 1999’s are notable: Our current expansion features lower work force participation rates and weaker productivity growth, a fertility collapse instead of the modest 1990s baby boom … plus it’s all floated by deficits that seem necessary but aren’t a sign of deep economic health.

But perhaps the best way to understand the lost world of 20 years ago is that it was the just-enough-internet era. There was just enough internet to boost economic productivity (the Facebook-Amazon era has not had a similar effect), just enough to encourage subcultural ferment, just enough to challenge cultural gatekeepers and give lonely teenagers succor. It was the early blogosphere instead of Twitter mobs, serendipity instead of ruthless curation, geek culture as an insurgency rather than a corporate establishment, online as an escape for eccentrics rather than an addictive dystopia for everyone.

Still, we should have seen the bad days coming. The filmmakers of 1999 did, as Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted when The Ringer’s top-100 list came out. “Election,” “The Matrix,” “Fight Club,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Office Space,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” even (God help us) “The Phantom Menace” … it’s all there, everything that followed, class anxiety and workplace alienation, end-of-history discontents and internet-fueled hoaxes, disputed elections and virtual-reality prisons, plus a tottering republic waiting for its Palpatine.

We should have listened. Instead, we took that stupid red pill from “The Matrix,” and now we’ll never find our way back up.

[y66]

Woods, Finau and Molinari tee off at 9 AM EDT today (Sunday) in the final group at the Masters. Tee times were moved up to allow players to finish before heavy rains arrive mid afternoon.

At the Champions Dinner on Tuesday, Gary Player, a three-time Masters winner, casually asked Woods how he was doing. “I’m not finished yet,” Woods said. This from a guy who has had 4 back surgeries and reported two years ago that he didn't think he would play competitive golf again.

[PassedOut]

y66, on 2019-April-13, 22:11, said:

Woods, Finau and Molinari tee off at 9 AM EDT today (Sunday) in the final group at the Masters. Tee times were moved up to allow players to finish before heavy rains arrive mid afternoon.

At the Champions Dinner on Tuesday, Gary Player, a three-time Masters winner, casually asked Woods how he was doing. “I’m not finished yet,” Woods said. This from a guy who has had 4 back surgeries and reported two years ago that he didn't think he would play competitive golf again.

Great finish!

[y66]

Everyone thought Ben Hogan's career was over after a near fatal head-on collision with a bus in 1949 but he came back to win the U.S. Open in 1950 in what is considered the greatest comeback in golf history. Tiger's comeback is up there with Hogan's and definitely the greatest comeback in golf history in the throwing yourself under the bus category which I suspect is even harder to come back from.