Powderhorn

Cedar Park, Texas, is a suburban enclave that most reminds me of Scottsdale, Ariz. Wide, tree-lined boulevards without much crime and with people going about their lives in their neighbourhoods.

For those who think it's not going to happen locally, it likely already has.

There's no fucking way that chart is accurate. It's like a fever dream designed to show how "reasonable" we're being. "It's only half!"

Switzerland does not impose blanket 61% tariffs on U.S. imports, which immediately makes the rest of the "data" suspect.

If you're going to hold up an absurd visual aid, at least use a Sharpie to make the hurricane go elsewhere.

I'm reminded of a statistic I once heard that one's first drunk-driving arrest usually happens after having done so for so many times, that one eventually runs out of luck. I don't remember the exact figure, but 20 other Signal chats to get caught once seems about the same.

Not a great look on the heels of Signalgate.

One has to strain to think of even one or two pro-worker or pro-union moves that Trump has taken. The White House says his tariffs are pro-worker and pro-union, insisting they will bring back manufacturing jobs. But many economists say Trump’s tariffs will hurt myriad industries and workers. His auto tariffs, for instance, will increase car prices and as a result, auto sales, auto production and auto jobs will decline, at least short-term. Not only that, other countries’ retaliation will pummel various US industries and trigger additional layoffs. Moreover, Trump’s tariffs will undermine GDP growth and perhaps push the US into recession. Bottom line: Trump remains obsessed with tariffs, even though they’re likely to result in more pain than gain for US workers.

Deaths aren't really entertaining, so I'm throwing this here. But holy shit, he was 65? does quick math Yep, that checks out, I'm just also getting old.

A UK paper once again stepping in to the print void in the Rogue Valley, though they leave Medford for this one.

AP has called it. They were about a half-hour late to my mind, but that's how they work.

So, Elon, maybe throwing money at things isn't a repeatable act.

Strom Thurmond must be rolling in his grave that his record was beaten by a guy he didn't consider human.

The comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prizes, now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump.

“Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear,” she told Deadline.

The only things really new here are the anecdotal lede and this tidbit, but I thought I'd share for those who perhaps don't follow the news all that closely.

This is very bad.

Tuesday’s drills have differed slightly from more recent efforts, which have not been so explicitly linked to “punishing” Taiwan. They were also launched with little warning. Taiwan’s government and military have been ramping up their response training amid growing concern that Beijing might launch a real attack or blockade under the guise of a drill.

Amanda Hsiao, a director in Eurasia Group’s China practice, said Tuesday’s propaganda “makes it clear that China is breaking from what has been a relatively quiet approach since Trump’s election”.

“This is primarily about Lai’s 13 March speech which Beijing found provocative,” she said. “The publicity around the exercise likely also has the US in mind – they want to persuade the Trump administration that Lai is a troublemaker and to deter the US from maintaining high levels of support to Taiwan.”

The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, has visited several Asian countries in recent days, emphasising that countering China and deterring it from attacking Taiwan was a key priority for the US.

No doubt with several emojis.

Ran into an old Reddit post (December 2022) on an account I no longer use. It's funny how this sort of writing has a binary chance of aging well. There's never like "meh, I don't see any relevance today." Without further ado ...

Today's "Jesus fuck, I wouldn't have run that" in the Post was apparently my lightbulb moment on how the desk — and the recurring rounds of layoffs on what remains — had a far larger impact than anyone seems to be acknowledging widely enough to have hit my radar. If you've got links to stories or studies, I'd like to see them if the hed doesn't start with "Here's"!

As fev has been pointing out for years, the most important function served by the copydesk in its late-20th-century incarnation was the framing. Usually, we see this writ small, sort of easy to identify and purge at the unit level: the individual story, where we call it removing bias.

Something I'm just coming to understand is great copy editors I've worked with knew their fucking framing. And as the word itself implies, everything else is inexorably tied to that skill. Bias, tone, when to turn off proofreading (and yes, there are times to run intentional errors), page composition from a content perspective, when to use uncensored vulgarity.

When to spike. I'd go so far as to consider framing the central pillar of the always-nebulous "editorial judgment."

I think we've all gotten the regurgitated press release from the green reporter we knew was coming from the time we saw the incredibly vague photo assignment. That doesn't need to be spiked, but it sure as fuck ain't running tonight.

What does need to be spiked is naked propaganda like the Post is putting forth in its breathless crusade for a recession at the same time we're finally wising up to the fact that modern recessions are engineered and necessary to transfer wealth from any pesky middle class that are just about to or just bought their first appreciating asset by tanking its value and buying up the fire sale in classic rent-seeking fashion.

I know of no competent copyeditor that would have allowed that shit to print where it did. "Did Editorial accidentally drop this in the A1 queue?"

When you've nailed your framing, you're just using tools to do a job. Everything else can be learned through pattern recognition, which is why most jobs seem so easy after several years.

Here's the thing: If you're doing a job you know you're good at, you're focusing on different aspects of it than a novice. If you navigate InDesign using mostly hotkeys, you have exponentially more time to devote to design and editing than someone looking for the right dropdown menu every few seconds.

When you've gotten 10-inch spot news down to a five-minute science, you have more time to see if the 34th Ld moved before sending A11.

In all cases where you save time on the technical end, not only does the product improve, but you also gain time to ask if you should be proceeding as directed. And if a red flag goes up, no matter how small, the answer is "no."

A competent desk functioned as a bit of a hive mind, with earlier members teaching new members data points as they come up, eventually getting everyone to at least 90% competence and at most 10% questions. If you've ever been floored that a seasoned editor didn't have an answer to something, it wasn't that the desk didn't know, this was just on the long tail ("Well, last time that happened here was '84, and Larry wasn't here yet, so I don't know.").

So while the tone and goal levers were set from on high, the desk was the engineering crew deciding what the levers did within the less-than-technical spex provided.

While no desk is a democracy, and style dictates do arrive without recourse, I found desks to be surprisingly egalitarian when it came to new ideas, even on desks with burned-out reporters. If the data proved that Method Y was unequivocally better than Method X, Method Y became the new SOP. No one sat around defending inferior methods, even if there was grumbling about relearning. When new data debunked standing policy, policy was changed. The elephant was acknowledged and escorted out of the room. Almost everything not AP Style-related was unanimous consent.

In effect, this led to the desk having a much larger role than I certainly realized in the beginning. If a copyeditor was overruling the city ed and spiking a story, that was it unless they wanted the ME involved, because bringing up a spike meant the desk would not run it, and that is a large problem when it comes to publication.

For those of you for whom this sounds foreign (and you're picturing it in black and white), this was still the case less than 10 years ago, but dying rapidly because buyouts targeted those with the longest service (most expensive), and there were several rounds of those before centralization, furloughs and the layoffs even started.

Copyeditors became superfluous as soon as being first became more important than being right (both are, of course, important, but only the latter must be true). Desks were wound down and centralized, copyeditors forbade from reading copy (Gannett/GateHouse policy from at least my joining in 2015) and turned into movers of rectangles on larger glowing rectangles instead of designers.

And that's all shit we have to deal with for choosing this field in college.

But the impact to society at large is unmistakable: reputable outlets publishing stories that a 20-year desk veteran would have spiked was only made possible by killing the institutional guardrails that underpinned local and national media's gravitas. When everyone's in the first five years of their career, you're not running an established newspaper; you're running the college daily 2.0, clickbait, propaganda and all, because that's all they know.