Gongol.com Archives: 2018 Weekly Archives
April 19, 2018
Contemporaneous notes taken by James Comey during his interactions with the President paint a picture that ought to be exceptionally consistent with what any competent observer ought to have picked up by now: President Trump tends not to have coherent, well-thought-out concepts in mind and generally wings it, succumbing more often than not to his instincts and impulses.
Senator Chuck Grassley plays the long game on the rule of law
He makes a well-advised point: Processes should be protected when one's own party is in the majority specifically because that party will someday be in the minority
An interesting turn of phrase to describe how Vancouver has grown -- with residential skyscrapers clustered around stops on the city's light-rail system. An intriguing approach to land use that doesn't seem to be deliberately duplicated anywhere else in North America.
"[E]xcessive automation at Tesla was a mistake"
Tesla has run into production bottlenecks, and Elon Musk says that over-automation was a factor. What's interesting is that Honda reached the conclusion a long time ago that human workers were easier to redeploy to fix bottlenecks than were robots (see the book "Driving Honda" by Jeffrey Rothfeder).
Unexpected consequences of the Oklahoma City bombing
The terrorist attack had measurable social effects -- a higher birth rate and a lower divorce rate for people in the immediate area
If George Washington had left TripAdvisor reviews
Travel was a little different in the Revolutionary War era
April 18, 2018
Barbara Bush passes away at age 92
A dignified person has passed from this world. Her public mission to promote literacy speaks to an aspiration for a better world through the empowerment of individuals.
"Russian cyberattack capability is a global problem"
American and British cybersecurity agencies warn in a joint statement: "Russian state-sponsored actors are using compromised routers to conduct spoofing 'man-in-the-middle' attacks to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations".
Younkers stores will be gone by August
The parent company of the Midwestern retailer has sold to a liquidator, so by August 31st, the stores will be no more. Another retailer dismantled by the new realities of consumer expectations.
Huawei and ZTE would be the primary targets of the new action
China will lift restrictions on foreign ownership of car companies
By 2022, supposedly, foreign carmakers will no longer be capped at 50% ownership of Chinese ventures to build cars