Reports are out that the FDA is going to approve the Pfizer vaccine for 12-15 year olds sometime next week. Which means we’ll be pulling Finn from school as soon as possible to get her first shot. Best news of the week.
I linked to Kevin Kelly’s first list of unsolicited advice, so it’s only fair I link to the new one: 99 additional bits of unsolicited advice. Some gems:
- Train employees well enough they could get another job, but treat them well enough so they never want to.
- Compliment people behind their back. It’ll come back to you.
- Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.
- Ignore what others may be thinking of you, because they aren’t.
- When you are stuck, sleep on it. Let your subconscious work for you.
- When making something, always get a few extras — extra material, extra parts, extra space, extra finishes. The extras serve as backups for mistakes, reduce stress, and fill your inventory for the future. They are the cheapest insurance.
So today Apple announced some ugly colored iMacs and some other stuff, but what caught my eye are AirTags, which are going to cost $29 and will run on a replaceable battery with a year worth of power. One of these will go under the seat of the Scout, hidden away from prying eyes, and provide another measure of security through the Find My network.
Last week there were a flurry of stories of police taking arrests way too far; an Army lieutenant was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed while Virginia cops searched his car with no probable cause. An Ohio man had snow forcibly shoved in his mouth during a February arrest.
Here in Maryland, a police Bill of Rights was enacted in 1974, ensuring police had extra protections unavailable to ordinary citizens, including time limits on alleging brutality complaints, allowing only other law enforcement officers to investigate misconduct, and allowing a delay before questioning an officer. Last week this was struck down by our state legislature over the objections of our Governor, ensuring that police will need to begin to rein in their worst impulses and be held accountable for their actions. I’m proud of our legislature this morning.
Wow, I’d forgotten about this excellent site: The Internet K-Hole, which is basically just posts of old pictures from the 70’s through the early 90’s. I am guilty of several of the fashion disasters here, as are most of my peers; I’m just glad I haven’t found pictures of myself yet.
Thanks to Seth Godin, this is the is the first reasonable explanation of NFTs that I’ve read so far; all of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has been the confused dad/clickbait headline variety, much like coverage of Bitcoin continues to be. Yet another scam, made by people trying to sell scarcity.
Aw, man. Norton Juster, the author of the Phantom Tollbooth, died Tuesday at age 91. The Phantom Tollbooth was a seminal book for me; this was the first young adult book I read that didn’t just tell a story. Instead, Juster made me stop and think about what I was reading and what it meant and go back and marvel at how he’d written it and how clever it was. And the fact that it featured Jules Pfeiffer illustrations was the icing on the cake. I’m going to go pull my hardback copy off the shelf and re-read it tonight. And then maybe leave it on Finn’s desk and chain her to the chair so that she reads it too. (previously)
I just listened to a great podcast: Radiolab interviewed John Scott, a NHL player who skated for 10 seasons as a goon and was, improbably, voted by fans to be the captain of the All-Star team for his division. The story gets better from there:
You don’t have to like hockey, or even give a shit about sports to like this story.
In The Washington Post, three former Baltimore City health commissioners question Governor Hogan’s vaccine rollout and who exactly is getting it:
By our calculation based on the state health department data, White Marylanders are being vaccinated at a rate more than twice than that of Black Marylanders, and only around 4 percent of inoculations have gone to Latinos.
Hogan’s response has been less than helpful:
He asserted that “as of last week, Baltimore City had gotten far more than they really were entitled to.” The governor did not share data to justify this astonishing statement, nor did he address how it might even be possible for Baltimore to receive excess vaccine and yet have a vaccination rate among its residents lower than that of every one of its surrounding counties.
This is the same guy who, almost immediately after being elected, canceled a long-planned, federally backed improvement to Baltimore City’s mass transit system and diverted that money to building roads in rural white areas of the state.
This is also good Wednesday news: the Baltimore Sun, which has been owned by Tribune Publishing for years, could be sold to a nonprofit organization set up and funded by an area Democratic philanthropist. This would be fantastic for the organization, as the rest of the Tribune holdings would be bought by Alden Capital, a hedge fund with a history of buying and gutting local news outlets.