Today’s comic by Matt Bors is How trickle-up will create cool jobs:
• Here’s the impact of the Republicans’ tax-scam in 2025:
• Buffalo Bayou is alive. Ignoring it could kill Houston:
America’s fourth largest city is built on an ancient river network that flooded catastrophically after Hurricane Harvey. With 400,000 homes in the watershed, achieving resilience is the Texan boom town’s greatest challenge.
• Texas boys were beaten, abused, raped at a “Christ-centered” facility for at-risk boys: Now the boys are men, some as old as 70, and all they want is an apology from an institution that everyone today agrees is doing a good job in following guidelines for reforming juveniles. But despite being subjected to years of abuse at Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch, the institution’s tepid response adds insult to the permanent injuries it created. One boy recounts how he kept running away. Finally, they made him run the return trip in front of horses. If he floundered or fell, they hit with a coiled rope or let the horse run over him. Another boy was dragged for miles behind two horses. And those weren’t the worse instances of abuse.
• Live Science has a collection of strangest things that were 3D printed in 2017. Here’s one of them:
The first 3D-printed residential house was constructed in less then 24 hours in the suburbs of Moscow in March. The walls of the studio-like 400-square-foot (37 square meters) home were printed using a mobile construction 3D-printer developed by Moscow-headquartered startup Apis Cor.
Instead of printing individual concrete panels that would be later manually assembled, the 3D printer printed the walls and partitions as one fully connected structure, allowing for the house's unusual round shape.
The roof, doors and windows were the only components that had to be installed subsequently by human workers. The prototype house cost about $10,134, or $25 per square foot ($275 per square meter). The most expensive components, according to the developers, were the windows and the doors.
The company believes that 3D printing could make construction not only considerably faster but also more eco-friendly.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Republican tax-scam bill fails tribes along with everybody else: 38 House Democrats signed a letter last week to the leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee calling for changes to the tax bill to benefit Native tribes. They said the current tax code fails to recognize tribal sovereignty by not treating the tribes on the same level as states and local governments. The GOP blew them off.
• U.S. blames North Korea for damaging WannaCry cyberattack. But some say there are others to blame as well:
"As we talk about to whom to attribute the WannaCry attack, it’s also important to remember to whom to attribute the source of the tools used in the attack: the NSA," says Kevin Bankston, the director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. "By stockpiling the vulnerability information and exploit components that made WannaCry possible, and then failing to adequately shield that information from theft, the intelligence community made America and the world’s information systems more vulnerable."
For many cybersecurity researchers, in fact, WannaCry has come to represent the dangers not only of rogue states using dangerous hacking tools, but of the US government building those tools and using them in secret, too.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter (and Joan’s voice) round up the latest headlines & polls. The Gop TaxScam is set to limp across the finish line, along with some small sliver of other delinquent Congressional business. New top Dem on House Judiciary.
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