How are you doing, Wilmington? What's going on that people should know about?

How does this keep happening?

Found here.

"The area, which has about 5,000 residents and a growing waiting list, is completely self-sufficient. Residents can build houses however they like, and must collaborate with others to figure out things such as street names, waste management, roads, and even schools. But the local government has included one extremely unusual requirement: about half of each plot must be devoted to urban agriculture."

But also: The price of eggs! Oh my!

At the end of WW2 most of the world's major economies were in shambles, with a lot of international debt outstanding. Political leaders wanted to do something to handle that in order to head off what had happened after WW1, when international debts were defaulted on and countries started manipulating their markets to gain advantages over each other. The economic mess after WW1 had contributed to the making of WW2; being able to avoid any kind of a repeat was a priority.

So in 1944 economists and policymakers from 44 different nations, including every Allied nation, got together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to work out some kind of agreement about how the world economy would work after the war ended.

The agreement they came to was that all the nations would establish fixed exchange rates with each other, and all nations had to agree to maintain convertibility of their currency to U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars, in turn, would always be convertible to gold at a certain rate. The agreem

I'd like to become a tree.

I recently read Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler. It's a book kind of about vampires, but not really about vampires.

The minute I started reading it it engrossed me in a way that hasn't happened in a while. It's very compelling writing. It begins with the main character, a young woman, waking up with amnesia, which is amnesia for us, the reader, as well. We find things out slowly and at the same pace as she does. Something bad has happened and she has to figure out what it is and what to do about it.

This isn't a book about polyamory, but there is a strong polyamory storyline in it. The woman takes on partners and the group of them have to learn to become a family. It's very beautiful and sensitive. The woman is the matriarch of the family, and is responsible for her partners' well-being.

Because she is not human -- and her partners are -- it's natural, I think, for the reader to identify more closely with her partners. I did. And that led to some interesting feelings. I am a cis m

If you're in the U.S. anyway.

"As Pakistan’s ties with China, its neighbour and closest ally, further strengthened, particularly following the launch of the $62bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructure project, China has also emerged as its new technological partner.

"During the last few years, the idea of replicating China’s Great Firewall – its sophisticated internet censorship and surveillance system – also began to take hold within Pakistan’s security establishment."

Whatever's going on in your country, it's probably not as bad as this.

Good news for Americans. "For the second year in a row, the cost of buying Thanksgiving dinner has decreased from the year before, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual report released Wednesday."

It's a long read, but very interesting.

"OIG Investigators found that the DEA paid one airline employee tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years in proceeds from cash seized as a result of their tips. However, the vast majority of those airport seizures aren't accompanied by criminal prosecutions. This has led to years of complaints from civil liberties groups that the DEA is abusing civil asset forfeiture—a practice that allows police to seize cash and other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never arrested or charged with a crime."

"There is an apparently new iOS 18 security feature that reboots iPhones that haven’t been unlocked in a few days, frustrating police by making it harder to break into suspects’ iPhones

...

Apple added “inactivity reboot” code in iOS 18.1 that triggers iPhones to restart after they’ve been locked for four days"

It's just a fad. It'll pass.