Gongol.com Archives: January 2018
January 9, 2018
Deportation looms for more than 320,000 people
The US government has provided "Temporary Protected Status" to people from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Sudan as a form of what is basically refugee relief. It's hard to imagine how returning more than a quarter of a million Salvadorans to a deeply troubled homeland. The State Department tells Americans to "reconsider travel" there -- the last level of advisory before "Do Not Travel". Putting substantial strain on Central American countries that can't handle the pressure certainly isn't a way to introduce stability there, which likely only makes conditions worse for Mexico.
More than a dozen people killed by California mudslides
With vegetation wiped out by wildfires, there's not a lot left to keep heavy rain from turning the ground into mud
Fitbit data tells us a whole lot more than we've ever really known about how people actually sleep
Omaha developer wants to go back to the future
Or something like that, with old-style buildings in new construction. They would include buildings intended for mixed residential and commercial use -- but one big question looms: If developers are really going to push for new-build live/work spaces, what's going to sustain the relationship? Most business sectors are going to face consolidation and change, so merging living and working spaces with the old model of the "apartment over the shop" is really harder to justify than ever.
Alabama will get huge new Toyota/Mazda plant
Not a huge surprise, given Toyota's previous pattern of site selection
Should we have a completely ceremonial head of state?
When times are good, perhaps we'd pick a happy figure -- an Oprah Winfrey or a Johnny Carson or a John Elway. And when people are angry, like many are now, we could handle putting a hothead in the spot to express the popular discontent.
Matt Novak: "It was admittedly an odd choice for The Post to just be 110 minutes of Tom Hanks staring at the camera and whispering 'journalism' while getting more and more drunk but honestly it works". Any reasonable person would totally watch this.
