tedfrank

I spoke to Reuters about our Seventh Circuit appeal on behalf of drivers trapped in gridlock by pro-Hamas protestors who blockaded the entrance to O’Hare Airport for hours. Argument scheduled for April 9.

In the 1990s, subway fare beaters were sentenced to well-publicized public service: "Thousands of riders--including insurance salesmen, artists, messengers, college students and even grandmothers--are being arrested and sentenced to painting Transit Authority buildings, scraping gum from stations floors or scrubbing toilets as punishment for fare beating." See the NYT from February 18, 1991:

May 1918. Blackstone Hotel Taft checks in and the clerk mentions Roosevelt is eating dinner there. The two hadn't spoken in six years. They ran against each other in 1912, splitting the Republican Party and handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson. The friendship was dead. Taft walked into the dining room anyway. Roosevelt's friends saw him coming and went silent. He turned around. Taft was smiling. Roosevelt jumped up and bear-hugged the man he had once called a "Fathead" with "Brains of a guinea pig". The dining room stood up and applauded. Strangers who had read about the feud for years watched it end in real time. Eight months later, Roosevelt died. At the funeral, Taft stood alone and wept. He later told Roosevelt's sister: "Had he died in a hostile state of mind toward me, I would have mourned the fact all my life. I loved him always and cherish his memory." Don't wait.

Eli Lilly has done it. They've gone and made what seems to be a powerful, permanent gene therapy for LDL cholesterol. That means they'll be able to effectively prevent most heart disease with a single infusion!

In Geneva you need a doctor's prescription to be allowed to install an air conditioner.

she has a masters in drama from Yale and “had no idea what the odyssey was”. not just “hadn’t read it” had never heard of it at all apparently. what a damning indictment of Yale.

Anyone who has traveled internationally knows that the most racist place in the world is not in the United States

I’ll keep things real with you guys, this is not a good thing; a lot of these Neo-Brandesian anti-trust sentiments on the left are built on a highly faulty foundation of analyzing market concentration. Almost always they narrowly define what the market is, to later ‘discover’ a monopoly. Former FTC chair Lina Khan’s entire paper against Amazon was a misunderstanding on how two-sided platform business models worked. The irony is that Khan and progressive types accuse the Chicago school of having a reductive view of monopoly. open.substack.com/pub/hampsters/…

This would be a fitting tribute to Robert Cunningham, the DC Metro mechanic who happened to be on the platform during the 2023 shooting and was killed trying to protect bystanders.

I mean, who in the world could have seen this coming?

My wife’s car was stolen from our driveway Friday (along with 2 baby seats) but fortunately I have this article to calm her nerves

These are the top 15 most expensive cities to live in the world, 2026: 1. 🇨🇭 Zurich, Switzerland 2. 🇨🇭 Geneva, Switzerland 3. 🇨🇭 Basel, Switzerland 4. 🇨🇭 Lausanne, Switzerland 5. 🇨🇭 Lugano, Switzerland 6. 🇨🇭 Bern, Switzerland 7. 🇺🇸 New York City, United States 8. 🇮🇸 Reykjavik, Iceland 9. 🇺🇸 Honolulu, United States 10. 🇺🇸 San Francisco, United States 11. 🇮🇱 Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel 12. 🇺🇸 Seattle, United States 13. 🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway 14. 🇸🇬 Singapore, Singapore 15. 🇬🇧 London, UK Source: Numbeo 2026 Cost of Living Index

an easy tell for AI-drafted contracts is they’re annoyingly neutral. mutual caps, reciprocal indemnities, reps for both sides, etc. looks balanced/fair. probably wrong for what you’re actually doing. /1

Currently existing Medicare — which already faces a massive budget shortfall — has premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

@neontaster Nah, he repeatedly spoke about sanctions going in to and while in Cuba, and these are strict-liability claims. At a minimum, he needed to invest in legal advice. Kamala will pardon him.

Unlike Madea Benjamin, I'm fairly convinced that anything Hasan Piker did that ran afoul of US sanctions was unwitting. Dude is far too stupid to be in on the plan.

Ed Yardeni: "The S&P 500 is up 9% this year, but the price-to-earnings multiple has actually contracted 4.6%. The entire rally has been driven by earnings rising 14.4%."

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

A must read:

Ted did the right thing in 2018 when faced with the same issue. Collins even voted against Kavanaugh and Barrett, voted to convict Trump, and voted for a War Powers Resolution. In Maine, it should be an easy choice for Democrats to go with Collins.

I think Greta Thunberg's worldview is a bit silly, in that she believes that climate change will kill Earth but decided to shift her activism to other issues.

Just wow. The Watseka Theatre (1931) in a little county seat. Designed by Louis Skidmore whose firm would later build the Sears Tower.