Ted's Tidbits
Traveling crews have been exploiting young workers and scamming customers for decades—and neither law enforcement nor Congress has been able to do anything about it. Trapped Into Selling Magazines Door-to-Door
Its colder than I ever remember it being here. I’m taking some pictures of this snowfall so that I can appreciate it’s beauty later, once I figure out how to be warm.
At Dallas’s Hall of State, a Return to Majesty www.metropolismag.com/architect…
5 ways Biden can help rural America thrive and bridge the rural-urban divide theconversation.com/5-ways-bi…
Democrats, Here’s How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It. www.nytimes.com/2021/01/2…
Advent of Code Day 1. Full solution on GitHub.
I’m doing Advent of Code this year, and it just occurred to me that I should be posting my solutions here. I’m using these little challenges as daily brain warmups as well as a chance to better grok Rust. So far it’s been fun.
Sede Vacante
Researcher Bill Bishop … examined the way how our diverse country has become more polarized in the past four decades. He studied the number of … counties that went over 70% for a particular candidate in the presidential elections. Since the 1970s, the number of those counties increased 300%.
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What the researcher was surprised to find was regardless of how much influence top-down gerrymandering or dark money in politics might have made for these landslide regions, the primary force for this change was bottom-up: choice of people like us. We moved to be in neighborhoods with people like us, who had the same Jed Bartlett 2020 bumper stickers we did.
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And now by divesting from the broadly-held authorities for years, investing our money, time, and attention only in our circles, only to those psychological manipulations, we cannot see “the other side” as having any authority whatsoever. We’ve all become sede vacante: every chair is empty except the leaders of our echo chambers who self-select who else will be in the seat tomorrow.