You don’t need to be coy, Roy

walk, swim, boat, car, airplane

… I think that Harris has a good chance to win in exactly the way that I describe. But if you forced me to place a bet on what will happen, my current expectations are closer to the scenario offered by my colleague — in which Trump, not Harris, is the next president of the United States.

…

All this looks like the very definition of a coin-flip election. So why do I expect the coin to fall Trump’s way? Three reasons, none of them completely rigorous, and all of them shadowed by the fact that I was wrong in 2016 (when I expected Trump to lose) and wrong in 2020 (when I expected Joe Biden to win more easily than he did), so I could simply be overcompensating for underestimating Trump’s chances in the past.

First, I think if Harris were on track to win, she would be leading more decisively at the moment. She has enjoyed an extended period of extraordinarily positive media coverage while the rival ticket flailed around trying to figure out an effective line of attack. She recently had the benefit of her party’s convention, which wrapped up on Aug. 22 and was — in the press, at least — extremely positively received. And yet after those two boosts she still isn’t clearly ahead of Trump in the Electoral College race — which suggests that she probably now has more room to fall than rise.

Not that she will necessarily fall: It may be possible for her to sustain the media halo and the joyfully policy-light style for another two months, and in my essay on her path to victory that’s the future I assumed. But if the current dead heat is her ceiling, at least absent some dramatic change in the race, that’s enough reason for me to regard Trump as a very narrow favorite.

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…

Conservatives often root our societal ills in a childish impatience, and cast themselves as wise adults who understand that “you can’t get something for nothing.”

Clickbait headlines and no synopsis?

I’m betting they mean centralized.

Signing parties would be way more cool though.

Of course it’s rare: bacteria die when they’re well done.

…researchers at UC Davis Health and other institutions have shown that gun-free zones may, in fact, reduce the risk of mass shootings.

…and dental care, apparently

…for uninsured and underinsured Americans, the vaccine has just gotten significantly more costly. On August 22, the CDC sunsetted its Bridge Access Program, which provided free Covid vaccines to 1.5 million Americans over the past year. A CDC spokesperson told Mother Jones that the sunsetting was a consequence of the new 2024-2025 vaccines being approved—which meant the 2023-2024 vaccines could no longer be administered. But many people did not know that the program would only cover the vaccine approved last year—just that it would end in August, potentially after the new shots became available. The CDC’s page on the program, which was live until some point Friday, did not clarify any of this information.

The Living Computers museum’s tech collection is set for auction. Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a last look and mused on the theme of donor’s remorse.

Plummer, who recently built himself a PDP-11 out of spare parts, noted that, despite the “abundance” of billionaires in the Seattle area who owe a substantial chunk of their fortunes to machines like the ones in the museum, “none of them were sufficiently compelled to become the patron.”

weird

A Register reader got in touch after using the Microsoft 365 Plan Chooser. Answer six questions via the tool, and a result with a recommended plan will be displayed. This might be the Business Basic plan for $6 per user per month for an annual subscription, the $12.50 Business Standard plan, or the mighty $22 Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

Our reader mused: “If I follow the menu choices, it always selects Microsoft 365 Business Premium as the outcome.”

Accepting the challenge, and because we still remember the excitement when a new Steve Jackson tome hit the shelves, we decided to try for ourselves, urged on by our reader: “Have a go and see if you can get it to choose another outcome…”

As with many Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, there appears to be a key question: “Do you have access to an IT professional for advanced support and services?” Say yes, and almost all paths lead to the premium option. Say no, and basic or standard await.

Man, I’d forgotten memory loss was one of the side effects of radiation exposure.

or bird poop

short tl;dw: It’s because of the feeder roads.

With the country experiencing a relatively large summer wave of COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year’s strain-matched COVID-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter.

Last year, the FDA gave the green light for the 2023–2024 COVID shots on September 11, close to the peak of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in that year’s summer wave. This year, the summer wave began earlier and, by some metrics, is peaking at much higher levels than in previous years.

Access to reproductive health care—which both Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), have strongly supported—is sure to be front and center in some of the convention’s biggest speeches. Especially given its importance for voters and the fact that former President Donald Trump is responsible for appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, unleashing an avalanche of restrictions in over a dozen states.

Nice try Amazon Kindle!

… at a Sea Parks?