https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/11/12/20950235/ok-boomer-kids-these-days-psychology

Prediction: Today’s “OK boomer” Gen Z will complain about the youth one day. Blame human memory.

The old and young are feuding — yet again.

It’s safe to assume this is an immortal aspect of human society: Young people always exist, and older people will always complain about them. Young people, in turn, always say, “Ugh, old people just don’t get it.”

Recently, that “Ugh, old people just don’t get it” has metastasized into the viral “OK boomer” meme.

If you’re just tuning in: “OK boomer” is a clapback for the rising Generation Z to call out older adults on their collective lack of inaction on climate change, for their (overall) resistance to progressive policies, and for the condescending tone older people tend to use when describing the “kids these days.” The boomers, well, haven’t taken too kindly to the phrase. One conservative radio host called it “the n-word of ageism.”

Here’s a prediction: These “OK boomer” young people are going to get older and start complaining about the youth of the future. They’ll probably use the same insults, complaining the kids of the 2050s and ’60s are more entitled, more narcissistic, and less self-sufficient than those of generations past. They’ll pay a weird amount of attention to controversies on college campuses and write opinion columns for the New York Times on how those controversies are indicative of a looming societal collapse.

That’s because the “kids these days” is an ancient form of remonstration, going back to antiquity, and probably earlier. It’s a cycle we’re doomed to repeat.

But why? “It seems like there is a memory problem,” says John Protzko, a University of California Santa Barbara psychologist. “A memory tic that just keeps happening, generation after generation.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/business/plastic-roads-in-south-africa-intl/index.html



A South African company is taking plastic bottles out of landfill to make roads.
(CNN Business)Plastic milk bottles are being recycled to make roads in South Africa, with the hope of helping the country tackle its waste problem and improve the quality of its roads.

Potholes cost the country's road users an estimated $3.4 billion per year in vehicle repairs and injuries, according to the South African Road Federation, as well as damaging freight.
In August, Shisalanga Construction became the first company in South Africa to lay a section of road that's partly plastic, in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province on the east coast.

It has now repaved more than 400 meters of the road in Cliffdale, on the outskirts of Durban, using asphalt made with the equivalent of almost 40,000 recycled two-liter plastic milk bottles.


Road to recycling
Shisalanga uses high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a thick plastic typically used for milk bottles. A local recycling plant turns it into pellets, which are heated to 190 degrees Celsius until they dissolve and are mixed with additives. They replace six percent of the asphalt's bitumen binder, so every ton of asphalt contains roughly 118 to 128 bottles.

Shisalanga says fewer toxic emissions are produced than during traditional processes and says its compound is more durable and water resistant than conventional asphalt, withstanding temperatures as high as 70 degrees Celsius (158F) and as low as 22 below zero (-7.6F).
The cost is similar to existing methods, but Shisalanga believes there will be a financial saving as its roads are expected to last longer than the national average of 20 years.
"The results are spectacular," says general manager Deane Koekemoer. "The performance is phenomenal."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/30/new-york-times-is-right-dc-is-terrible-place/



By Alexandra Petri

The one downside of the fact that the Nationals (hurrah for our brave boys!) are in the World Series is that now the New York Times is trying to inform its readers about this curious hamlet with few restaurants and less culture in which the team plays. I have had enough of this, I think! But in case they want to run another story, I have taken the liberty of writing one.

WASHINGTON — There is more to Washington than meets the eye! You may think that all of D.C. is just a dark wood-paneled room with two steakhouses in it, but you would be wrong. Let me tell you what you have missed about this quaint backwater that someone called “Hollywood for Ugly People.”

People in D.C. are always walking and talking. Most of the city is the same three exterior shots over again: of the Capitol, the Capitol but in different lighting where it looks ominous, and a park that turns out upon closer inspection to be Baltimore. People in D.C. are known for their political engagement and cutthroat ambition — as anyone you meet at the Cathedral Heights Metro station can attest.

Most of D.C.’s residents wander around in color-coordinated shirts with the name of a middle school in Indiana on it, oohing and aahing at the cherry blossoms, before a visit to the city’s most cherished cultural institution, Madame Tussauds, on their transit mode of choice, an orange trolley with a green top. I ask these locals what to go see, and they tell me “Shear Madness.” I, frankly, did not think much of it. So much for D.C.’s claims to be a center of culture!

On these locals’ food recommendations, I went to Georgetown Cupcake, but it compared unfavorably to the rich range of cuisines available in real cities. I wandered the Mall for miles, and there was no food there at all. Well, there was a man selling hot dogs, but he pulled away just as I got within range. The locals said nothing to me about injera or half-smokes, and I did not think to inquire.

I did not enjoy my 73-minute wait on the Red Line. A fun-loving city would not allow this, so I concluded D.C. hates fun. Instead, they are always on Twitter. Yes, I’m sure that’s everyone in D.C. Everyone in D.C. is a briefcase, a rumpled button-down or an F-35. Although it may appear that the city’s arenas are filled with D.C. sports fans — this is a contradiction in terms — D.C. has no true fans, and the ballpark is packed merely with politics columnists in seersucker suits attempting to use baseball as a metaphor.

At night, the whole city is abandoned, because how could you possibly make a home on all that marble? No one is born here, dies here or does anything that does not revolve around politics, which doesn’t seem like it could be true, yet is. This city’s entire history is political, and I am confused why some buildings have Duke Ellington’s name on them.

Okay, I didn’t leave a three-block radius in Northwest. Okay, I didn’t actually get off the Metro, I just rode the escalator up and then back down again. Okay, I didn’t actually get off the Acela. Okay, I haven’t actually left New York City, I just watched an old episode of “The West Wing.”

Nobody lives here. Well, they might, but can you call living in a place that isn’t New York, living?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/01/this-video-runaway-dogsled-police-chase-is-most-absurd-hilarious-thing-youll-see-today/?fbclid=IwAR10eGLIEqN-1TnU8ViCDIIF1xCEmXN4SlvHU49DaqyIovkuV0-QnMbr5H0

The sled dogs probably crested at a speed of 10 mph as they crossed Interstate 90 at the South Billings Boulevard overpass. Conditions were suboptimal in the Montana city that night; the wind whipped, the asphalt was cold, and wet snow was falling.

But the huskies seemed determined, and they were making good time — due in no small part to the lack of a musher on the back of their sled.

The gold runners glinted in the flashing lights of the Billings police officers’ patrol cars as they approached the rogue dog sled from the rear.

“Myself and four-thirty [Officer Adams] are going to be at the South Billings Boulevard overpass,” Officer Dave Firebaugh radioed, “trying to stop a … dog sled? With, uh, no rider.”

Firebaugh and Officer Jeremiah Adams made several attempts to wave the dogs down, but they could not be stopped. Firebaugh would pull his cruiser over in front of the dogs’ path, attempt to coax them to him, and the dogs would blow right by him in their dead sprint across Billings.

Finally, in an attempt not captured by the dash cam, Firebaugh must have said the right thing. The anxious dogs, which reportedly were separated from their owner when the sled tipped and she fell off, can be heard off camera, whimpering as they walk over to him. Then the officer — part of a K-9 unit, himself — unloads a heap of praise.

“Hello, puppies,” Firebaugh said. “Oh, my goodness, you are beautiful dogs. Where’s your mama or daddy?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/growing-number-of-gop-senators-consider-acknowledgingtrumps-quid-pro-quo-on-ukraine/2019/11/01/72084a3e-fcc4-11e9-9534-e0dbcc9f5683_story.html



A growing number of Senate Republicans are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo.

In this shift in strategy to defend Trump, these Republicans are insisting that the president’s action was not illegal and does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense as the Democratic-led House moves forward with the open phase of its probe.

But the shift among Senate Republicans could complicate the message coming from Trump as he furiously fights the claim that he had withheld U.S. aid from Ukraine to pressure it to dig up dirt on a political rival, even as an increasing number of Republicans wonder how long they can continue to argue that no quid pro quo was at play in the matter.

The pivot was the main topic during a private Senate GOP lunch on Wednesday, according to multiple people familiar with the session who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the meeting. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) argued that there may have been a quid pro quo but said that the U.S. government often attaches conditions to foreign aid and that nothing was amiss in Trump’s doing so in the case of aid to Ukraine, these individuals said.

Inside the lunch, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who ran against Trump in 2016, said a quid pro quo is not illegal unless there is “corrupt intent” and echoed Kennedy’s argument that such conditions are a tool of foreign policy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/30/police-blew-up-an-innocent-mans-house-search-an-armed-shoplifter-too-bad-court-rules/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1



When they were finished, it looked as though the Greenwood Village, Colo., police had blasted rockets through the house.

Projectiles were still lodged in the walls. Glass and wooden paneling crumbled on the ground below the gaping holes, and inside, the family’s belongings and furniture appeared thrashed in a heap of insulation and drywall. Leo Lech, who rented the home to his son, thought it looked like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid that killed him.

But now it was just a neighborhood crime scene, the suburban home where an armed Walmart shoplifting suspect randomly barricaded himself after fleeing the store on a June afternoon in 2015. For 19 hours, the suspect holed up in a bathroom as a SWAT team fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls.

The suspect was captured alive, but the home was utterly destroyed, eventually condemned by the City of Greenwood Village.

That left Leo Lech’s son, John Lech — who lived there with his girlfriend and her 9-year-old son — without a home. The city refused to compensate the Lech family for their losses but offered $5,000 in temporary rental assistance and for the insurance deductible.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/economy/us-gdp-third-quarter/index.html

New York (CNN Business)The US economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.9% in the third quarter, the Commerce Department announced Wednesday.

This is the preliminary reading of US gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the American economy. The Commerce Department will update its estimate twice more.

Although the economy's growth is slowing, it remains relatively strong. However, the third quarter marks the first time since the final quarter of 2018 in which the US economy has grown at a rate slower than 2%.

The economy was helped by growing consumer and government spending, but the pace of growth decelerated. Americans spent less on cars, continuing a trend that has been ongoing for a year.

But Americans also spent less on clothing and footwear. The Trump administration hit some Chinese imports of clothes and shoes with tariffs during the summer.
Nevertheless, the report beat analyst expectations. Economists polled by Refinitiv expected growth to be as slow as 1.6% ahead of the release.

Both the GDP report and ADP private payrolls report exceeded investors' expectations ahead of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decision at 2 pm ET Wednesday. But neither data point "will be able to move the needle for the Fed," wrote Todd Schoenberger, senior research analyst at Wellington & Co. Schoenberger agrees with the majority of investors, who expects the Fed to cut rates by another quarter percentage point today.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/boston-college-suicide-manslaughter-charges-girlfriend

Prosecutors say former Boston College student Inyoung You was so physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive that she caused her boyfriend to kill himself.



A former Boston College student has been charged with involuntary manslaughter over her boyfriend's suicide in May, Massachusetts officials announced Monday, in a case that has parallels to the Michelle Carter trial.

Inyoung You, a 21-year-old from South Korea, was so "physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive" toward Alexander Urtula during their 18-month relationship that she caused the 22-year-old to kill himself, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins told reporters at a press conference.

"[The investigation] also determined that abuse became more frequent and more powerful and more demeaning in the days and hours leading up to Mr. Urtula's untimely death," Rollins said.

Urtula, himself a student at Boston College, died just 90 minutes before his graduation ceremony on May 20. His family had traveled from New Jersey to attend the event.