They’re selling counterfeit goods.
This is why the US should maybe more fully sign on to the Berne Convention. This kind of stuff is exactly what the "Moral Rights of the Author" in the Convention is meant to prohibit, but the US mostly opted out of those provisions.
I'm on Think Out Loud to talk about the odd history of donation bins, the fateful decision to put anti-theft doors on them, the fatalities that followed - and how Toronto shows us how to stop them.
Also covered: just how much of a Wild West is the use & regulation of those bins? (Spoiler: very.)
There's a boat in Cathedral Park that appears to have been under construction for almost 20 years www.google.com/maps/place/8...
Excited to attend the ribbon-cutting for the next segment of California’s solar canal initiative later this month in Hickman. Imagine generating solar power over 4,000 miles or so canals across the state. A lot of Sierra and Colorado River water to save via avoided evaporation.
One line that stands out isn't even part of the leak:
"Mr. Obama had been one of just 22 senators to vote against Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation in 2005, saying that the nominee had 'far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.' "
Gift link:
And for anyone who doesn't subscribe to The Atlantic yet, a gift link for you: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
Door with a sign reading “Studio 2D”; under the sign is a picture of Tootie from “The Facts of Life.”
The studio door at Oregon Public Broadcasting is a delight:
I think there's a non-zero chance that one of his frat boy staff wrote it with ChatGPT, which barfed up a "biblical vengeance quote" from Tarantino instead of the Bible.
Join us in our San Francisco offices this summer! Applications for paid, part-time, editorial interns close April 24. For more details:
www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/mcswee...
Workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Troutdale, Oregon, said they were told to keep working as a colleague lay dying on the floor.
“Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work,” Sam recalled the manager saying.
NY Times article for February 14, 1922. It reads: For the first time in its history Essex Market Court, Second Avenue and Second Street, formerly located at Essex and Ludlow Streets and other addresses in the neighborhood, and the oldest Magistrate's Court in the United States, was opened for business and formally adjourned, yesterday, without anything happening. There wasn't one case on the docket: no policemen, no complain- ants, no defendants. After waiting a respectful length of time for something in the way of usual business to be brought in, the Court Clerk, Isaac Rice, twenty-one years on the job, browsed sleepily through court histories and documents of the past century for a similar state of affairs in the court. Just how old the court was the clerk did not know. He had gone back 100 years and a little over, he said. But, anyway, Essex Market Court is usually one of the busiest in the city, averaging from six to seven hundred cases a day, and such stillness, such peace, could never have happened before, the clerk declared Magistrate H. Stanley Renaud officially adjourned court at 10:30.
Much like the famed 1930 broadcast where the BBC ran out of news, it seems there was a day in NYC in 1922 when the downtown courthouse had nothing to do. The clerk, bored, searched over a century of records to see if that'd happened before. It hadn't.
(I imagine it hasn't happened since, either.)
I'm struck by the number of modes of transit these astronauts will experience today.
1. Slicing through the Earth's atmosphere in a spaceship
2. An inflatable raft
3. A rope swing
4. Helicopter
5 Aircraft carrier
6. Airplane.
7. Van.
Ms. Wollack, the English teacher leading this project, has created a GoFundMe for anyone who wants to support these students: www.gofundme.com/f/support-ea...
“His name is John D. Feerick, he turns 90 in July, and when we first tried to contact him… he was *teaching a class*…”
"Not only do both find cases, they find more cases, fatalities I hadn’t heard of and that were not reported by the media. How many more have escaped notice?" — @PaulCollins.bsky.social for @thebeliever.net
Passage reads: “Another method was researched by a Japanese team which concluded that lip prints could be more easily recognized automatically than fingerprints. This would’ve resulted in people having to kiss their terminals to be properly identified. Another method proposed to IBM by a Canadian inventor consisted of using the unique shapes of peoples skulls to identify them. A person would put his head inside a helmet like device and mechanical probes would determine the shape of his skull if he was an imposter, then clamps could be applied to trap the person’s head inside the helmet.”
Absolutely bonkers passage on biometrics in Donn Parker’s 1976 book “Crime by Computer”
The very 1982-looking paperback cover of “What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?” by Dr. Robert Freymann
So, it turns out the real-life Doctor Robert went on to put a book that looks EXACTLY like what you’d expect from a Dr who lost his license for speed prescriptions
“As PSU cuts arts and academic programming due to extreme budget cuts and restrictions, hoping to focus on business and science in a time of tumultuous graduate employment rates, it is simultaneously positioning itself as a major venue developer with real estate interest.”
I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake By A Horse Hello. I am a horse. I work very hard at my job of being a horse. When humans say move the heavy thing, I move the heavy thing. When humans sit on top of me and pull on my head, I carry them where they want to go. The main food the humans give me is hay and oats. But I am thinking it would be nice to have a different food. I am thinking I would like to try cake. Yes, yes. Cake. I know all about it. When humans eat cake, it is in glad times. It is the food for a celebration, such as when a woman becomes 47. I have seen cake on the Fourth of July. When humans have a cake, they stand around it and clap hands and smile and say happy birthday at each other. Sometimes there are beautiful markings on a cake, such as balloons or a pink shape. Sometimes the top of a cake is on fire and a boy must blow on the fire with mouth wind. This is the scariest cake. I do not want this kind. But I will eat any other cake. Any cake that is not the fire cake that tries to kill the boy. Please understand: I do not get money for doing work. I do not get to go inside the house. All I am either doing my horse job or standing in my pen or eating food off the floor. I always do these things. But I have never once gotten cake and I would like it very much. I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children. I am more helpful to the farm. Children do not move the heavy things like me or let anyone ride on them. And yet they get cake. Maybe the humans will realize this. Maybe they will say, "You know who deserves cake? That horse. That horse whose back we are always on." Every day I dream about what it will be like if I get to eat cake. Here is what will happen. First, I will walk to the cake and putt my nose at it like hrrfff to make and stomping my hooves to make sure it is not a snake. Then I will trot in a circle to show that I am a horse and I am large. After that, I will nuzzle the cake to …
The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me.
It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."
I have built load-bearing portions of my personal philosophy and theology on ideas that were in the footnotes of the books I read. You can't assume that the "important stuff" is clearly identifiable, because the meaning of "important" is "important to me, a unique human reader."
Kind of weird to use "Project Mt. Hood" as your secret code when the Mt. Hood Freeway was a giant construction project that famously got tanked
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
How a theft-proof redesign turned clothing donation bins into profoundly hazardous objects:
www.thebeliever.net/the-death-of...
The solution to this is to then accidentally order 203 apes:
Aside from picking the worst possible guy to be right about, CPAC's midterm presidential straw polls have been wrong for decades:
1986: Jack Kemp
90 & 94: not held
98: Steve Forbes
2002: n/h
06: George Allen
10: Ron Paul
14: Rand Paul
18: n/h
22: Trump
"I want to write about donation bins killing homeless people" does not make most editors say “Oh good.” But The Believer was so patient & encouraging. (And the factchecker deserves kudos for poring over my stacks of heartbreaking autopsy reports.)
They're an amazing magazine. (/🧵)
I'll add: though my story’s about the US & Canada, I also found multiple donation bin deaths in the UK and Australia. In one case in Yorkshire, the victim bled to death when a bin's anti-theft door grabbed and punctured their arm & wouldn't let go.
One person was killed by a donation bin on Thanksgiving night. Another died looking for clothes for his kids. Another was a grandpa, killed behind his hometown convenience store. And the actual number of fatalities is probably higher than 31, as deaths among the homeless often don’t draw scrutiny.
Despite the 31 donation bin deaths I tallied, I was astonished to find bins can be cheaply fixed in minutes. The design's banned in major Canadian cities, where bins must be engineer-certified as safe.
In the US, nothing's been done. Each death is treated as a one-off freak accident.
It's not.
