Events

After 38 years of publication, Dr. Dobbs is shutting down: Why would a well-known site, dearly loved by its readers and coming off a year of record page views, be sunset by its owner? In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to...

Finally, after 50 years of stupidity: The United States intends to open an official embassy in Cuba in the coming months, the White House announced Wednesday, part of a broader normalizing of diplomatic relations after the countries exchanged prisoners. The White House said that Obama would order Secretary of State John Kerry to begin discussions with Cuban officials on re-establishing diplomatic relations and high-level discussions and visits between the countries are expected to follow. The opening of...

What happens when you're a talking head and your mom calls into your show? The Woodhouse brothers are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Brad is a Democratic operative who helps run the super PAC American Bridge and Dallas, by contrast, is a Republican who helps run the conservative Carolina Rising. The were on C-SPAN to talk about their documentary, Woodhouse Divided, when their mother called in. Hilarity ensued:

Very busy today; less so the rest of the week. So after I'm done with this deliverable today I'll read these: Wow, the Bears suck ass. Wait, yak poop is a problem? Oy, NASA spent $349m on a project after the project was cancelled. Heh, politicians sometimes lie. Cool, the space L2O is leaving next month will reopen quickly with a rotating-chef concept. Yo, come hear The Messiah on Saturday. Back to the mines...

In the legislation passed over the weekend that will keep the U.S. government operating for another few months, the House had its cake and ate it with respect to marijuana. Slate's Josh Voorhees explains: Among the myriad policy riders buried inside the 1,600-plus-page bill is one aimed at blocking the Washington, D.C., City Council from legalizing recreational marijuana, something voters in the district instructed them to do by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 last month. That ban was inserted at the behest...

I was a bit overloaded yesterday, so I didn't have time to absorb these articles thoroughly: The Atlantic's CityLab blog wants an end to horrible license plates. Krugman is weary of financial commentators who can't learn what the zero-lower-bound means. Want some real excitement? The IRS has raised standard mileage rates for 2015. I know: shut the front door! Illinois Climatologist Jim Angel says we have almost no chance of a white Christmas this year. I say, fine. Even though I thought the 10 km walk...

...if we weren't arming drug dealers?"—Aaron Sorkin Alas, Americans increasingly want everyone to have guns: For the first time since Pew began asking the question two decades ago, a majority of Americans now say that gun rights are more important than gun control — a striking shift in public opinion over both the last generation and just the last few years. As recently as December 2012, in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, 51 percent of people surveyed by Pew said it was more...

Since the client on the Paris thing for some reason declined to spend $9,000 per person for us to fly business class, I decided to take American 90 to London and then take Eurostar under the Channel. The strategy worked; I got sleep on a real bed Sunday night, and was coherent and lucid Monday afternoon at the job site. This time, I put a clock on the train. Here's what my phone GPS showed about 30 minutes outside London: The screen shot above (click for full size) shows that about here the train was...

They're interesting if you like, for example, airplanes: The Wright Amendment is finally gone, helping make Southwest Airlines more profitable. Cranky Flier goes over American Airlines' plans for its fleet and says some uncharitable things about the 767-300ERs that I was on this week. James Fallows digs into the fatal aviation accident in Maryland that happened over the weekend. That's it for now.

Because I stayed in the Airport Sheraton, had only carry-on bags, and got my boarding pass last night, I got on my flight home less than half an hour after leaving my hotel room this morning. Then, at O'Hare, because of the aforementioned lack of checked baggage, a New York-style walking speed, and Global Entry, I got from the airplane to my car in exactly half an hour. Parker was in the car half an hour after that. Compare that to the trip out, when I left my house at 7, the plane finally left the gate...