Asparagirl

It’s not common, but it does happen. Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”, originally gave his work away for free online on his website. He only self-published to Kindle (for the lowest possible price setting, 99 cents) because some of his fans didn’t know how or didn’t want to manually install his home-rolled ePubs on their devices, and begged him for the Amazon/Kindle distribution.

The US federal government is in yet another shutdown right now, so how would some sub-agency even know if there were an unplanned outage, who would report it, and who would try to fix it?

Ancestry has a somewhat smaller copy of the BIRLS database online, covering just the years 1850-2010 [1], and it seems to have been published on their website in 2011: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2441/

Our data set from the VA contains data through mid-2020, and was turned over to us in 2022 after undergoing extensive double-checking by the agency, including through non-public VA sources, to confirm the veterans really were all deceased. There's a paper showing the agency's methodology on our site, which we FOIAed from them.

There are a significant number of deceased veterans whose data is *not* included in the BIRLS database, because they (or their family/heirs) simply did not have any contact with the VA concerning benefits in or after the 1970s, which is when the database was first starting to be built. That is, their files almost always still exist on a warehouse shelf somewhere, but they weren't active any time in the past fifty years so they didn't get pulled and indexed into the database. You can still make a FOIA request to the agency asking for one of those files, but the VA will have a lower chance of successfully finding the file, and it usually will take longer for you to get a response.

[1] 1850 is very likely an approximation. While there are certainly deceased veterans listed in the BIRLS database who had birthdates or deathdates in the mid nineteenth century and/or service in the late nineteenth century, they are relatively few. Many of them are actually veterans with likely birthdates or deathdates in the twentieth century whose data seems to have been initially recorded by the VA with a two digit year of birth or death or enlistment/entry, and then assigned to the wrong two digit prefix, causing an incorrect four digit year of birth or death or year of entry/enlistment into service.

In other words, the VA's historic data is very messy and is a great example of an actual Y2K issue.

Actually, “op and crew” were the Plaintiffs (well, really the Petitioners, to be pedantic) who already sued the VA for this database in federal court (SDNY), and won that multi-year lawsuit, and even won our attorneys fees too. If you had checked our website, you’d see we even posted the court papers online for free, from both sides — and the judge’s order in our favor, of course.

The veterans in the data set are all deceased, and I have not heard any complaints from them so far.

Yes, a terrible fire, although there are efforts ongoing to restore some of those files, even reading the data from charred papers and edges with newer technology.

However, these particular files (benefits claims files, or C-Files) are a different type of file and never burned. Better yet, they often have some parts of the veteran’s OMPF that were copied *into* the C-File, to establish eligibility for those benefits — copies that were made before the fire! In other words, these files could serve as partial backups…

We love MuckRock! And we made the original FOIA request to the VA for this dataset via MuckRock’s platform. You can see the actual screenshot in the “Reclaiming These Records” legal papers section. They also get a shoutout in our colophon for indirectly inspiring the FOIA-by-fax-via-web method, although I believe their site uses e-mail, including interfacing with agency FOIA portals when possible.

Indeed. This is ABSOLUTELY not the first time we’ve dealt with a government agency (at the local, state, or federal levels) providing a copy of a public dataset to Ancestry.com and not to the general public. Our taxpayer-funded data keeps ending up solely behind a $300/year paywall. It’s not fair.

(Also, the stripped-down version of BIRLS that has been on the Ancestry website for a while now is much smaller and older.)

Yes, that’s on purpose. SSNs of *deceased* people are public, not private. They are never reused. They are available under FOIA from other sources as well, such as the SSDMF.

The processes for getting these very particular records (C-Files, as opposed to something like an OMPF or other better known military records) has been horrendously broken for years. They were almost completely inaccessible from this specific agency (the VBA, inside the VA) their entire existence. Only 5% of the files have been turned over to NARA, even for records that are very old.

And even now, the “processes” to get the records, as defined by a 58+-year-old law (FOIA) are not really being followed. An agency refusing to process any FOIA requests except by fax (!) is insane, in this day and age. But more specifically, it’s against the law. A letter AND an e-mail are supposed to work. Hence our use of a fax API on this website…

Furthermore, the “requirement” that a FOIA requester must hand-sign the paperwork is absolutely made up by this agency. Hence our signature widget on this website…

Point being, if they’re going to shamelessly ignore or misinterpret the federal law, we are going to just jump through those hoops and say no, we want the files, please do your jobs.

The VA worked to confirm that everyone in this dataset is deceased, in order to satisfy the judge’s order, and produced an internal document about how they did it — which we then FOIAed and posted online too. (It’s up on the site, next to the legal paperwork.) The veterans and their SSNs are believed to have been deceased prior to mid-2020, checked by the VA’s internal datasets as well as public data sets such as the SSDMF. And SSNs of deceased people are *not private*, since they are never reused. The Social Security Administration also makes copies of all deceased peoples’ original SS-5 applications available to the public under FOIA.

Thanks. The original data set, as provided by the VA, has all sorts of data errors and oddities in it. The major ones involving surnames include the inconsistent use of apostrophes in names like O’BRIEN, often written as O BRIEN, and/or vice versa — or the inconsistent formatting of MC and MAC names like MCMAHON as MC MAHON, and/or vice versa. There are also some names where the VA includes an errant dash, not meant to be a hyphen, and other mistakes, as well.

So we try our best to help a user find the veteran even with the dirty data we have. For example, there is code here (using a common NPM package) to convert a user’s potential typed accent marks to a non-accented version of the same letter. In compound surnames we will also break up the surname on a space or a hyphen and search both parts, but not if a surname part is three letters or fewer. It’s imperfect but we have to work with the data we’ve got and can’t and shouldn’t normalize or clean the underlying file.

“The second issue is return-to-office policies. Though Times management has told the bargaining unit that it has no plans to change the current hybrid-work model, Goran Svorcan-Merola, a software engineer who is on the Tech Guild’s bargaining committee, said that management wants to reserve the right to eventually have tech employees in the office five days a week. “It’s not the standard around the tech industry,” he said.”

More of this RTO bullshit from upper management? For a tech team?! Ugh. Solidarity with the Tech Guild.

Or their daughter. Or when it's them.

There's a reason this twenty-four-year-old article is a classic: https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...

Have they turned those squishy-sounding different views into horrifically inhumane absolute laws that affect every female person in the state, passing through the state, or considering taking a job (or keeping an existing job) in the state?

And yet the elected leaders of Arkansas purposely rejected a bill that would have allowed these children -- excuse me, these edge cases -- to be allowed abortions if they were raped. They voted the bill down eighteen months ago.

This is who they are. https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2023-03-...

Words mean things, and the four-week fetus of a raped eleven-year-old is not a “baby”. Medical care to terminate that pregnancy and that fetus is literally medical care — and is illegal in Arkansas.

Arkansas currently has a 100% total abortion ban. They do not even allow abortion at any week if you’re raped, if you’re a child who has been raped, or if you’re a victim of incest. No woman in her right mind would ever move there, and this CTO is female.

There's an established organization called Open Collective that can let you support various open source software projects, with the organization acting as a legal and fiscal sponsor. It's not a 501c3 but it is a 501c6.

I use the platform to support tools I like or use, like Nuxt or Tabula: https://opencollective.com/nuxtjs

You can also support some groups that use open data philosophies or methods but aren't necessarily or primarily building software, like ArchiveTeam: https://opencollective.com/archiveteam

See also the noted 2014 economics paper that studied the phenomenon of co-authorship of economics papers…

“A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors”

by Allen C. Goodman (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman (Harvard), Lucas Goodman (UMD), and Sarena Goodman (the Federal Reserve Board)

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...

It’s still no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Not sure about the first part, but generally the way it works is that first you pay taxes to the country where you are a resident, and then you still must also pay taxes to the US by virtue of being a US citizen but you usually get a credit on those US taxes in the amount you already paid to your country of residence. Sometimes the country where you’re living has much higher taxes, so you end up not owing anything to the US — but you still have to file.

Cool! But how did you get the initial dataset of 643,000+ Shopify stores (data as per your “About” page) in the first place, to then scrape the products from their /products.json feeds? Or did you just try a huge list of domain names at random?

Arguably, Starbucks is a mid-sized bank that also sells coffee.

“Here's the shocking part -- Starbucks has about $1.6 billion in outstanding gift card balances. That info comes courtesy of its annual 10-K filing with the SEC. This essentially means Starbucks is getting a $1.6 billion loan from its customers at a 0% interest rate. And it's paying that loan back in coffee, not cash. It's already a great deal for Starbucks, but it gets even better. Some customers don't end up redeeming their gift card balances, which means the coffee chain doesn't even need to pay back the full "loan" amount. For the 2022 fiscal year, Starbucks reported $196 million in breakage, meaning unused gift card balances…”

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/banks/articles/this-is-the-w...

A US Congressman (from Texas, naturally) introduced a bill to grant letters of marque to be used against Russian oligarchs’ property early last year, just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alas, it did not pass. But letters of marque are still explicitly enumerated as a power granted in the US Constitution, and notably the United States was not one of the signatories to the 1856 treaty that mostly banned them.

And that treaty was the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, which came about at the end of a war for…Crimea.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6869

Newton was a member of the British elite, he had income from Cambridge University, and he was first the Warden and later the Master of the Royal Mint. He was also experienced in investments.

Nevertheless, he also got sucked into the infamous South Sea mania of 1720, which was basically the monkey JPG of its day, and consequently he lost a great deal of his wealth.

“Newton's financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble”: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.001...

Important point — many of these employees were “paid” at least half of their salary in the company’s own scrip, a shitcoin, and with extra social pressure to not convert it to real money.

Some of the previous recordholders were at least 38 Ukrainian Jews, including three families (Stermer, Dodyk, and Wexler) and some very young children, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ozerna caves ("Priest's Grotto") in Ternopil oblast, western Ukraine, for 344 days.

Most of the survivors moved to the US after the war. The story was only fairly recently recorded and turned into a documentary film, "No Place on Earth".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Place_on_Earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest%27s_Grotto

This is important: FDIC insurance protects you if the bank goes bust, but it doesn’t protect you if the company/fintech/exchange you’re using goes bust, even if they use an FDIC-insured bank.

This exact issue came up repeatedly in the past few years with crypto companies whose FAQs and even executives falsely told people their deposited money was FDIC-insured simply because the company itself banked with an FDIC bank. That’s not how it works.

One of many recent sad examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1543279013...

Another one: https://mobile.twitter.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1640909892...

(Frances Coppola is a great person to follow on Twitter.)

Not anymore! California became a CCW “shall issue” state (instead of “may issue”) last June, under NYSRPA v Bruen. There’s a backlog of people applying, but it’s finally possible. https://calmatters.org/guns/2023/03/california-concealed-car...