Frustrated By Legalities, Interior Plans Re-Org To Eliminate More Employees:

Why attempt to pivot away from the regional management model? Management in the national park service is made up of career park service professionals, not political appointees. This makes them somewhat immune to the machinations of any individual administration since they follow larger management directives approved by Congress, and enjoy the career protections typical across the civil service. Changing the structure within which those managers work is one of the only ways to eliminate their jobs, although it remains legally dubious.

Parks PAC, the first ever political action committee created to defend national parks, explains to me that this is a deliberate effort to break the park service, and then use the fact that it’s broken to attempt selling off some national parks.

“The Trump Administration wants to double down on its historically unpopular attacks on our National Park system, called ‘America’s Best Idea,’ by closing regional offices, laying off even more staff and shuttering facilities,” Parks PAC explains. “This is the plunder of our history, our culture, and our landscapes, done quietly because it could not survive being done in the open.”

The unstated goal here is to degrade management in the National Park Service to the point where its disarray can be held up as evidence that the parks no longer financially justify their existence.

And that’s part of the administration’s stated goal of privatizing operations in the big “crown jewel” parks, while selling off smaller, lesser visited units. Nationwide, the park service manages 433 individual sites, ranging from the big parks like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, on down to historic battlefields or National Historic Sites as small as individual homes.

The National Park Conservation Association warned that the $1.2 billion cut to the park service’s budget that the White House proposed last year could have forced the sale of up to 350 of those smaller sites.

Right now, the NPS operates on an appropriated annual budget of only $3.2 billion. Less than the cost of two days of Trump’s illegal war on Iran.

Selling off national parks has been an explicit and stated goal of Burgum’s tenure at DOI. Last June, he testified to Congress that selling national parks was, “on the table.”

Source: Wes Siler

Writing With Unnatural Constraints:

So too, goes my thinking, regarding the “watermarking” of AI-generated text through word choices alone. Fitting words into the watermarking pattern surely results in prose far less stilted than omitting the letter e, and surely also less stilted than rs1n’s hard-wrapped-at-75-characters-per-line Super Metroid FAQ, but it’s necessarily stilted to some degree. It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

Source: Daring Fireball

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses:

Krebs seemingly tracked down the source: IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz (seemingly where they got Krebs’s own drivers license) and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach. Unreal.

Source: Daring Fireball

Trump Is in Open Revolt Against the Constitution:

Jamelle Bouie:

The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

*repeated hair tearing-out noise*

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · usa

Source: kottke.org

Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins:

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

Source: Pixel Envy

Not your friend:

Reminder: Apple is not your friend, even with a new CEO. Apple will continue to do some good things and some very bad things. Any feelings of love you have toward Apple is not reciprocated: Apple has no feelings. It’s a multi-trillion dollar company that, like every other corporation, would like your money but does not care about you, or your values, at all.

Source: Brent Simmons

A huge 800 MW wind farm could boost Maine’s onshore wind capacity by 66%:

Maine regulators have picked Clearway Energy to develop an 800-megawatt (MW) wind farm in northern Maine – a project that would boost the state’s existing onshore wind capacity by about 66%.

more…

Source: Electrek

LiFX Smart Mirror w/ Matter over WiFi or Thread (review):

There aren’t many smart home categories I’ve not tested since jumping into Apple Home nearly 10 years ago, but a smart mirror is certainly one of them. That’s mostly because such a device didn’t really exist when it came to Apple Home compatibility.

With the LIFX Smart Mirror now available, I’ve finally been able to try one out for myself. Whilst the term ‘smart’ when applied to a mirror can be a little confusing, it’s nonetheless an interesting device with quite a bit more to offer than you might initially expect.

This isn’t my first LIFX product, as I previously owned three of the company’s Mini 800lm warm white bulbs, which served me well for quite some time. Hopefully, the same will apply to this new product. Read on to find out.

Source: Homekit News and Reviews

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out:

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

Source: Krebs on Security

Neovim?

Yesterday I thought it might be fun to get more into neovim — I’d downloaded and tried it a bit previously, and it seemed interesting.

Anyway, I went to its home page to see if I could learn something useful there, and I saw a DHH quote.

Nope. The DHH rule says nope.

brew uninstall neovim

Source: Brent Simmons