Events

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation—read: the government—read: us, as we live in a frickin' REPUBLIC—has taken over the Sears Holdings pension fund because, basically, Eddie Lampert has driven it into the ground: The agency covers individuals’ pensions, up to certain limits, if an insured pension plan shuts down without enough money to pay all benefits. It estimates Sears’ two pension plans are underfunded by about $1.4 billion. As a creditor, the agency could attempt to recover some of that money...

...Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Happy anniversary, Barry.

The Times provides a bit of colour about the Speaker of the House of Commons, who earlier this month broke precedent to force the Government to accept more control from Parliament: The outside world rarely takes much notice of the speaker of the House of Commons, a nonpartisan and typically low-profile figure who presides over parliamentary debates. But Britain’s last-minute paralysis over exiting the European Union, or Brexit, has made Mr. Bercow into a kind of celebrity. With less than 10 weeks left...

...is TV Tropes. Try to get out in less than five minutes. I dare you.

Author Pankaj Mishra thinks Brexit may be comeuppance for the British ruling class. Exhibit 1: Indian Partition: Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy...

I wanted to post this when it came out but life intervened. A couple weeks ago, New Republic reported on the sad tale of exurban town Elwood, Ill., and the "opportunity" they seized on with a giant intermodal freight terminal in 2002: Fifteen years before Amazon’s HQ2 horserace, Elwood had won the retail lottery. “Nobody envisioned what we have out here,” said Jerry Heinrich, who sat on the board of the planning commission that first apportioned the land for development in the mid-1990s. “It was never...

As readers have inferred, I've started a new position (more later), and with that I've got to set up a new work computer. I say "computer," but it's actually a MacBook Pro. All of my everything lives in the Microsoft universe. This has caused a slight problem trying to get access to my new company's source code in GitHub. See, I've used Password Safe for years to manage all my passwords. By "all" I mean that I follow the standard industry practice of never re-using passwords, and generating strong...