Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Welcome to Trumpcare™:
What you may have missed on Sunday Kos …
- Why a terrorist attack is more likely with a weak President, by David Akadjian
- Trump crowds evoke for me our ugly legacy of racial terrorism and lynching, by Denise Oliver Velez
- ‘The United States is not safe for refugees,’ by Mark E Andersen
- The resistance is real, even in the red state of Texas, by Egberto Willies
- Healing the great American divide one painful fracture at a time, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Subversive: How the Black Panthers fed kids for free and set a model for the government, by Kelly Macias
- Trump travel expenses hurt more than just our wallets, by Sher Watts Spooner
- For Democrats to win back the House in 2018, the first step is believing they can, by Jacob Smith
- While Kansas tries to dump job-killing, budget-busting GOP tax policy, Democratic California booms, by Ian Reifowitz
- Tom Hayden’s final ‘Hell no,’ by Susan Grigsby
• Seventh Circuit Court offers little hope for foes of Wisconsin voter ID law:
At oral arguments Friday, a Seventh Circuit panel was harshly critical of a federal judge’s finding that Wisconsin’s voter ID law discriminates against black voters.
In August, U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled that Wisconsin must offer a way to let voters cast ballots without a photo ID, and found a restriction on absentee voting was intentionally crafted to suppress the black vote.
• A huge crater in Siberia is getting bigger:
Near the Yana river basin, in a vast area of permafrost, there is a dramatic tadpole-shaped hole in the ground: the Batagaika crater.
The crater is also known as a "megaslump" and it is the largest of its kind: almost 0.6 miles (1km) long and 282ft (86m) deep. But these figures will soon change, because it is growing quickly. [...]
The Batagaika crater opens up a vast area of previously buried permafrost, some of which first formed many thousands of years ago.
• The student-built website that is keeping government climate data safe:
When John Rozsa, a graduate student in technology studies at Eastern Michigan University, heard about these efforts [by scientists to rescue their climate data], he thought the more copies, the better. So, between classes and his full-time job, he began to download the pre-Trump version of the EPA website—28,000 files and counting.
“I used a variety of Windows and Linux-based high-tech tools that look at every corner of the website and grab every single file,” he said. “I repeated the process four times, and then compared the data sets. Once I confirmed my data sets were reliable, I backed them up, and then sorted the files.”
• The cognitive bias Donald Trump understands better than you.
• Farmers make more from wind turbines than oil:
The second story, from the Guardian, tells of ranchers making big money off of royalty payments from Texas wind power. A single turbine can produce between $10,000 and $20,000 a year for landowners.
"I never thought that wind would pay more than oil," one landowner told the paper amid the thrum, thrum, thrum of rotating blades. "That noise they make—it's kind of like a cash register."
• Watch all eight SpaceX rocket landings in 60 seconds.
• Millions have seen that viral tiger video. Few know the real story:
Footage released by the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV shows Siberian tigers at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, a city in northeast China, sprinting after an airborne drone in the February snow. According to CCTV, park officials use the drones to exercise the big cats and help them drop the pounds they pack on over the cold winter. [...]
The video has gone viral, but the story behind the tiger park is not all fun and games. The park has been accused of not being a true tiger sanctuary, but rather a "tiger farm" — a breeding site where dead tigers are eventually harvested for their pelts and bones, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine to make wine.
• Uber designed so that for one worker to get ahead another must fail:
In practice, Uber’s values were codified by its internal ratings and performance reviews, a process employees simply referred to as “perf.” Uber uses stack ranking, a system popularized by GE legend Jack Welch that requires managers across a company to assign their employees numeric ratings along a bell curve. The system, alternatively termed forced ranking and “rank and yank,” is highly controversial as it demands that high performers within an organization be offset by a certain number of low performers, who are often fired or pushed out.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Oscars got to have a do-over, but we’re stuck. Greg Dworkin separates the normal from the abnormal. Congress is back. Tomorrow, Trump tells them how bigly he won. Happy Secret ISIS Plan Day! Yet another Trump pick might have rotten Russia ties.
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