- New York may require Uber to provide an option to leave a tip (Economist) "If tipping serves any purpose, it is to reward exceptional service. But what counts as going beyond the call of duty for a cabbie? Turning up on time? Not getting lost? Managing to avoid ploughing into the back of a bus? These are basic criteria of competence. But any driver who fulfills them (and many that don't) will be affronted unless given an extra 20% on top of the stated fare. That is because tipping, particularly in America, has very little to do with the level of service. Instead, it is an unwarranted de facto surcharge. Despite what the smartphone will claim at the end of a ride, it will not be 'optional'. The system of gratuities works through social pressure. It is likely that tipping the Uber driver would soon become normalised."
- New York City Plans to Force Uber to Add Tipping Option (Blomberg) "The drivers guild has made tipping a priority in recent months and pushed the New York City regulator to take action. The group said the rule could mean $300 million of additional income for Uber drivers in New York each year if passengers tip at the same rate as in yellow cabs."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- America has a retirement problem, not a saving problem (Economist) "The median family of retirement age has $12,000 in savings. That is a terrifying figure for a country where Social Security, the state pension, pays out a maximum of roughly $2500 a month, and pensions for both public and private employees are underfunded. For the median, wage-earning family, the best way to encourage saving is not to lower capital gains taxes or estate taxes, but to give the family access to a retirement plan that delays taxation until retirement."
CLIMATE CHANGE:
- Top Trump advisers at odds over Paris climate deal (WaPo) "If the administration does stick with the Paris agreement, Trump energy policy rollbacks and, most importantly, the presumed demise of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would force a less ambitious emissions goal, according to analysts of the United States’ greenhouse gas trajectory. Whether or not the Trump administration decides to stay in the Paris agreement, many in the international community are assuming that the U.S. government’s leading role on climate action is over for the foreseeable future."
LIVING:
- #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement (New Yorker) "Vanlife is an aesthetic and a mentality and, people kept telling me, a 'movement.' S. Lucas Valdes, the owner of the California-based company GoWesty, a prominent seller of Volkswagen-van parts, compared vanlife today to surfing a couple of decades ago. 'So many people identify with the culture, the attire, the mind-set of surfers, but probably only about ten per cent of them surf,' he said. The generation that’s fuelling the trend has significantly more student debt and lower rates of homeownership than previous cohorts. The rise of contract and temporary labor has further eroded young people’s financial stability. And so, like staycations and minimalism, vanlife is an attempt to aestheticize and romanticize the precariousness of contemporary life."
NEWS:
- Is America Really Ready for a Second Korean War? (National Review) "There may come a time when the terrible aspects of the North Korean regime become so pronounced that we choose to risk that fragile stability. It may even be possible to mitigate those aspects — perhaps by shooting down North Korean missiles or employing other targeted strikes — without actually inviting the cataclysm. But it’s vital that we conduct our public debate with eyes wide open, fully aware of the immense risks present on the peninsula. For more than 60 years, America has been strong, and South Korea exists and thrives today in large part because of that strength. Maintaining the status quo isn’t weak, and it very well may be prudent."
- Bad Reviews For Trump's Korea Policy (Weekly Standard) "And yet, the Trump approach is receiving plaudits precisely where it matters most: in South Korea."
- The Administration Gives the Iran Deal a New Lease on Life (Weekly Standard) "...Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in a letter to House speaker Paul Ryan, said...Iran has been 'compliant through April 18th with its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action'—that is, the Iran nuclear deal. Tillerson noted that Iran's continued sponsorship of terrorism is reason for concern and that an 'interagency review' of the sanctions relief provided by the deal is needed."
- Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove (NYT) "The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments. Using his website, USAFacts.org, a person could look up just about anything: How much revenue do airports take in and spend? What percentage of overall tax revenue is paid by corporations? Mr. Ballmer is hoping that the website is just the beginning. He hopes to open it up so that individuals and companies can build on top of it and pull out customized reports."
READ THIS:
- Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen) "Bruce Springsteen tells the story of his life with the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs."
SCIENCE:
- The Shocking Lack of Science Behind Lethal Injections (Wired) "No matter how you feel about the fact that the criminal justice system sometimes kills people, even innocent people, you have to also feel something about the fact that the criminal justice system isn’t very goodat killing people. An Oklahoma medical examiner named Jay Chapman pitched the three-drug protocol in 1977—without a single study or piece of scientific evidence. The thing is, when you’re being executed with a three-drug protocol, you really want to be knocked out. That second drug, the paralytic, is probably extraordinarily painful the whole time you’re suffocating... The potassium chloride injection burns like fire. And even with a barbiturate on board, people might feel all of that every time."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Sneaky Exploit Allows Phishing Attacks From Sites That Look Secure (Wired) "Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer protect against this attack. A Chrome fix arrives in Version 59 this week, but Firefox developer Mozilla continues weighing whether to release a patch. The organization did not return a request for comment."
- Facebook Messenger’s Plot to Be the Only App You Ever Need "Messenger, like all good messaging apps, has become incredibly sticky—which explains Facebook wants to cram every imaginable feature, idea, and experiment into it. ...the team sees messaging as a platform fit for growth, and believes that the place where you chat with friends can be a gateway to something more like an online version of your entire social life."
TRUMPTELL:
- The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal (New Yorker) "It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided 'no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.' The bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- How shoelaces come undone (Economist) "Walking involves two mechanical processes, both of which might be expected to exert forces on a shoelace bow. One is the forward and back movement of the leg. The other is the impact of the shoe itself hitting the ground. Preliminary experiments carried out by Mr. Daily-Diamond, Ms. Gregg and Dr. O’Reilly showed that neither of these alone is enough to persuade a bow to unravel. Both are needed."
- New York City Plans to Force Uber to Add Tipping Option (Blomberg) "The drivers guild has made tipping a priority in recent months and pushed the New York City regulator to take action. The group said the rule could mean $300 million of additional income for Uber drivers in New York each year if passengers tip at the same rate as in yellow cabs."
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- America has a retirement problem, not a saving problem (Economist) "The median family of retirement age has $12,000 in savings. That is a terrifying figure for a country where Social Security, the state pension, pays out a maximum of roughly $2500 a month, and pensions for both public and private employees are underfunded. For the median, wage-earning family, the best way to encourage saving is not to lower capital gains taxes or estate taxes, but to give the family access to a retirement plan that delays taxation until retirement."
CLIMATE CHANGE:
- Top Trump advisers at odds over Paris climate deal (WaPo) "If the administration does stick with the Paris agreement, Trump energy policy rollbacks and, most importantly, the presumed demise of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would force a less ambitious emissions goal, according to analysts of the United States’ greenhouse gas trajectory. Whether or not the Trump administration decides to stay in the Paris agreement, many in the international community are assuming that the U.S. government’s leading role on climate action is over for the foreseeable future."
LIVING:
- #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement (New Yorker) "Vanlife is an aesthetic and a mentality and, people kept telling me, a 'movement.' S. Lucas Valdes, the owner of the California-based company GoWesty, a prominent seller of Volkswagen-van parts, compared vanlife today to surfing a couple of decades ago. 'So many people identify with the culture, the attire, the mind-set of surfers, but probably only about ten per cent of them surf,' he said. The generation that’s fuelling the trend has significantly more student debt and lower rates of homeownership than previous cohorts. The rise of contract and temporary labor has further eroded young people’s financial stability. And so, like staycations and minimalism, vanlife is an attempt to aestheticize and romanticize the precariousness of contemporary life."
NEWS:
- Is America Really Ready for a Second Korean War? (National Review) "There may come a time when the terrible aspects of the North Korean regime become so pronounced that we choose to risk that fragile stability. It may even be possible to mitigate those aspects — perhaps by shooting down North Korean missiles or employing other targeted strikes — without actually inviting the cataclysm. But it’s vital that we conduct our public debate with eyes wide open, fully aware of the immense risks present on the peninsula. For more than 60 years, America has been strong, and South Korea exists and thrives today in large part because of that strength. Maintaining the status quo isn’t weak, and it very well may be prudent."
- Bad Reviews For Trump's Korea Policy (Weekly Standard) "And yet, the Trump approach is receiving plaudits precisely where it matters most: in South Korea."
- The Administration Gives the Iran Deal a New Lease on Life (Weekly Standard) "...Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in a letter to House speaker Paul Ryan, said...Iran has been 'compliant through April 18th with its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action'—that is, the Iran nuclear deal. Tillerson noted that Iran's continued sponsorship of terrorism is reason for concern and that an 'interagency review' of the sanctions relief provided by the deal is needed."
- Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove (NYT) "The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments. Using his website, USAFacts.org, a person could look up just about anything: How much revenue do airports take in and spend? What percentage of overall tax revenue is paid by corporations? Mr. Ballmer is hoping that the website is just the beginning. He hopes to open it up so that individuals and companies can build on top of it and pull out customized reports."
READ THIS:
- Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen) "Bruce Springsteen tells the story of his life with the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs."
SCIENCE:
- The Shocking Lack of Science Behind Lethal Injections (Wired) "No matter how you feel about the fact that the criminal justice system sometimes kills people, even innocent people, you have to also feel something about the fact that the criminal justice system isn’t very goodat killing people. An Oklahoma medical examiner named Jay Chapman pitched the three-drug protocol in 1977—without a single study or piece of scientific evidence. The thing is, when you’re being executed with a three-drug protocol, you really want to be knocked out. That second drug, the paralytic, is probably extraordinarily painful the whole time you’re suffocating... The potassium chloride injection burns like fire. And even with a barbiturate on board, people might feel all of that every time."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Sneaky Exploit Allows Phishing Attacks From Sites That Look Secure (Wired) "Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer protect against this attack. A Chrome fix arrives in Version 59 this week, but Firefox developer Mozilla continues weighing whether to release a patch. The organization did not return a request for comment."
- Facebook Messenger’s Plot to Be the Only App You Ever Need "Messenger, like all good messaging apps, has become incredibly sticky—which explains Facebook wants to cram every imaginable feature, idea, and experiment into it. ...the team sees messaging as a platform fit for growth, and believes that the place where you chat with friends can be a gateway to something more like an online version of your entire social life."
TRUMPTELL:
- The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal (New Yorker) "It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided 'no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.' The bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- How shoelaces come undone (Economist) "Walking involves two mechanical processes, both of which might be expected to exert forces on a shoelace bow. One is the forward and back movement of the leg. The other is the impact of the shoe itself hitting the ground. Preliminary experiments carried out by Mr. Daily-Diamond, Ms. Gregg and Dr. O’Reilly showed that neither of these alone is enough to persuade a bow to unravel. Both are needed."
TODAY'S SONG:
- Waves (Susto)
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