I finally got around to Death by Lightning, the Netflix show about the assassination of James Garfield. When I first heard about this, I admit I laughed a little bit–a show about James Garfield????? But you know, after watching it, even if you took out the entire assassination plot, such a show would still be entertaining because Gilded Age politics were so ridiculously corrupt and filled with such outsized personalities fighting over so little that the potential for both machinations and comedy are very high. Death by Lightning provides this in spades plus of course the assassination plot.

The show works in no small part because of the perfect casting. Michael Shannon is good in everything (though casting him as George Jones and then having him sing the parts was disastrous since he really can’t sing, not just in comparison to the Possum, but in comparison to anyone). He was very good at Garfield, quietly ambitious, a decent man for the time, a family man, not someone with a huge personality but someone who could rise to the occasion. Bradley Whitford plays James Blaine as way more noble than Blaine actually was, but it’s fine as a supporting role. Matthew Macfayden effectively plays Charles Guiteau like he did Tom Wambsgans, except obviously insane. And then, my God friends, there’s Nick Offerman as Chester Arthur. Now, you can quibble with the Arthur portrayal because Offerman really plays the whole thing for comedy. But first, who gives a fuck, it’s Chester Arthur. Second, Nick Offerman is very, very good at playing this kind of role. When he drunkenly shouts “I’M CHESTER GODDAMN ARTHUR!!!!” my first thought was, he must have had so much fun here. Even the minor roles are well cast, including Paula Malcomson (Trixie from Deadwood) as Guiteau’s long-suffering sister and even more so, Tuppence Middleton as Kate Chase Sprague, daughter of Salmon Chase, wife of the governor of Rhode Island, and open lover of New York senator Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham, who was Steve Buscemi’s brother in Boardwalk Empire) and who is the bad guy in the story, played as someone with no scruples at all.

Even outside of this, it’s a pretty compelling story. Guiteau really was batshit insane. He really was at the Oneida Colony where he was the only man too creepy for anyone to fuck, even though free love was the name of the game there. Costuming did a good job here–he always looks just slightly dirty in addition to everything else. Now, it’s not a documentary. If you want to nitpick the history, you can, but why? No, Arthur wasn’t that incompetent or that much of a no one when he was named VP. It does play Garfield as cleaner as he was. After all, Garfield was the clean, civil service reformer of that 1880 campaign, but Garfield also took money in Credit Mobilier and this isn’t even mentioned. He was not that clean. But it is a pretty compelling story about people in nominally the same political party who all hate each other, a story about just how draining the constant demands for jobs from crazy people that presidents dealt with every day, and certainly a story about the complete lack of security for presidents. Then Garfield gets shot and it ends up being very very very much a story about the horrors of late 19th century medical care.

The only bit that really plays wrong enough for me to matter is about Roscoe Conkling’s comeuppance in the New York legislature after he resigned to give the Senate to Democrats for awhile when Garfield went after his dominance of the New York customs collections. What really happened is a whole other mess in the legislature that led to him not being sent back in victory, but to different Republicans being sent. But the series plays it as him responding negatively to Kate Chase Sprague leaving her husband for him and her then going to Albany to tell his wife about the affair and they both appear on the legislative balcony to shove the knife into him in front of everyone. It’s not just that this didn’t happen (though KCS was a political knifefighter of the first rate, a true master of the cynical politics of the Gilded Age, even if she had to play it through the many men in her life), it’s that it brought a sense of ridiculous soap opera to something that didn’t need it.

Hell, I’d watch a much longer series on the machinations of Gilded Age politics. And overblown or not, I’d watch Offerman play Arthur as a drunken clown for his whole presidency. It’s a good, entertaining show, made for someone like me. In fact, it kind of was made for me specifically, who else would be more in the demographic for this show?

The post Death by Lightning appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software

The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sandmandaddy69:

 "Proposed ballot measure that would heavily tax thousands of second homes in San Diego clears critical hurdle," San Diego Union Tribune.

A proposed ballot measure that would impose a hefty tax of as much as $15,000 a year on thousands of empty second homes in San Diego cleared a major hurdle Wednesday when elected leaders agreed to advance it to the full City Council next week.

The proposal, which initially calls for an annual $8,000 tax on more than 5,000 largely unoccupied homes — plus a $4,000 surcharge for corporate-owned dwellings — is being pushed by Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who just a month ago failed to win support from his colleagues for a far broader measure that would have also taxed whole-home short-term rentals.

An empty second home is defined as one that is left unoccupied for more than 182 days out of the year and is not an owner’s primary residence. Elo-Rivera argues that by keeping such homes off the rental or for-sale market, owners are depriving San Diegans of much needed housing.

A lengthy analysis prepared by the Office of the Independent Budget Analysis offered a more conservative estimate of anywhere from 1,790 to 2,812 empty homes that would be affected by the proposal. However, that estimate takes into consideration properties that would fall under a number of exemptions proposed by Elo-Rivera, as well as those instances where owners opt to sell their properties or convert them to short- and long-term rentals.

The Independent Budget Analyst’s office also concluded that the measure, if passed by voters, could generate from $12.1 million to $23.8 million in new revenue to the city during the first year of implementation. That could increase to $15.3 million to $30 million in the second year, which is still considerably less than the $51 million calculated by Elo-Rivera’s office.

Ideally, laws like this are less about revenue generation, and more about pushing properties back into the home ownership market.