Events

You have to admire Vladimir Putin's sense of humor. For five years, he's manipulated our STBXPOTUS into doing just about everything Russia could have wanted. Now that our STBXPOTUS has become STBX, Putin doesn't need him anymore. So why not come clean? He did just that at his year-end press conference last Thursday: Steve Rosenberg, BBC: Don't you think over the last years you also have borne part of the responsibility for making these relations [with Europe and the West] seem like a cold war...? Putin...

Earlier this year, the Nielsen Norman Group repeated a study they first did in 1996 on the usability of PDF documents. As they've now found three times, making PDFs instead of actual web pages yields a horrible experience for users: Jakob Nielsen first wrote about how PDF files should never be read online in 1996 — only three years after PDFs were invented. Over 20 years later, our research continues to prove that PDFs are just as problematic for users. Despite the evidence, they’re still used far too...

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House. More odd things of note: Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets. Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch. Canada...

If you live in the northern hemisphere, tonight will last longer than any of the 365 others in 2020. Sunsets have gotten later by a few seconds a day since the 8th, but sunrises have also gotten later and will continue to do so until just before perihelion on January 4th. We're also only a month from Joe Biden's inauguration. Almost everyone in the Western world and quite a few outside it have felt more relaxed and less stressed in the last six weeks, and will feel even better once the STBXPOTUS loses...

Only 7 shopping days until Boxing Day! So, what's going on in the world? Fortunately, Illinois seems to have escaped a post-Thanksgiving Covid-19 bump. Not so in the UK, where despite not having a big family holiday in November, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a new stay-at-home order covering London and much of the South. So much for Boxing Day. Late yesterday, the FDA approved a second Covid-19 vaccine, from Moderna. WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station, has collected 52 photos looking back at 2020....

We're in the home stretch. We have 14 days until 2021 starts, and 32 days until the Biden Administration takes office. As Andrew Sullivan said in his column today, 2021 is going to be epic. Meanwhile: After giving away billions in tax revenue to the richest Americans in 2017, the Republican Party suddenly doesn't like budget deficits again, coincidentally with them losing the White House. Fascinating. Atlantic City is raising money for charity by auctioning off the right to blow up one of the...

Welcome to the (abbreviated) lunchtime roundup: Not only have attackers breached hundreds of networks due to a subtle flaw in a complicated piece of software, it turns out that a Dutch software engineer has—for the second time—exposed a rather glaring flaw in an uncomplicated piece of wetware by guessing the STBXPOTUS's Twitter password. (It was "maga2020!". I am not making this up.) Thomas Edsall decries "the rise of 'political sectarianism'." It's time once again for Drew Magary's "Hater's Guide to...

FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, revealed last week that unknown parties had penetrated its network and that its clients, including the US Government, were at risk. Bruce Schneier has technical details about the attack. Former Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert lays out the scope of it: The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a...

Josh Marshall outlines how the STBXPOTUS and his friends in the Senate have structured vaccination funding to give President Joe Biden a black eye within two weeks of taking office: Here are some basic outlines of what’s happening. As we learned last week the Trump White House skimped on actually buying enough doses of vaccine from Pfizer. But the federal government will cover the actual purchase of vaccines. The White House says the military is in charge of and has a plan to actual get the supplies to...

I'm looking out my office window at the light dusting of snow on my neighbors' cars, wondering how (or whether) I'll get my 10,000 steps today. My commute to work got me 3,000 each way, making the job tons easier before lockdown. Easier psychologically, anyway; nothing prevents me from going for a 45-minute walk except that I really don't want to. Instead of a lunchtime hike, I'll probably just read these articles: Palm Beach, Fla., has notified the STBXPOTUS that because he agreed in the 1990s not to...