1. It's been so goddamn hot here lately, and probably where you are, too.

2. In conversation with one of my brothers last week, I proposed the following standard for minimum wage: that it should be pegged to the cost of the cheapest two bedroom apartment within a one hour commute of the job. (With some availability criterion.) Is this flawed for some obvious reason? I really like the idea of pitting landlords against bosses and making them duke it out.

3. One of our friends also has a large family, and travels in an RV. Apparently all WalMarts allow you to spend the night in their parking lots, which was far and away the cheapest and easiest way for them to get to their destinations. (They are a solidly progressive family on a tight budget.) Park at Walmart, grab a quick breakfast inside, and get on the road again. This is a case of a business having a good understanding of the needs of their clientele.

It probably also reflects how few national businesses see the impoverished half of the country as their main market. This is not surprising at all, but worth noting. We criticize WalMart a lot, (and rightly so!), but their business plan does interact with extremely poor people in a complicated way (while also perpetuating extreme poverty) - maybe only the Dollar General and that kind of store are other national chains that do so? And beyond that, locally owned businesses?

4. We are doing our own roadtrip starting Wednesday, so this week is a good time to send in your guest posts, as I can generally throw something pre-baked up first thing in the morning from the hotel.

ttaM writes:

London or London adjacent people, there are plans to meet up with AWB (who is in London) on Wednesday evening. Probably somewhere in or around Bloomsbury.

(Ed. note: I googled, and Bloomsbury seems to be a real place and not a James Joyce reference.)

Mossy Character writes: Shockingly, the US military isn't so great at managing its coders.

Cyber retention bonuses never amount to more than a few hundred dollars a month.
[...]
The intersection of people who can run a 15-minute two mile and dissect a Windows kernel memory dump is vanishingly small.
[...]
Cyber Command partitions leadership into two chains of command: those with operational control (OPCON) and those with administrative control (ADCON). Every servicemember has both an ADCON commander and an OPCON commander. The ADCON commander makes sure a member is compliant with onerous mandatory training, urinalysis screenings, and physical fitness tests. The OPCON commander employs the servicemember in achieving real-world mission.
[...]
the ADCON chain generates all of a servicemember's evaluation reports. If a hacker wants to avoid the substantial promotion risk, they absolutely must serve in the required, service-specific ADCON job to check the box.
[...]
the military's most talented hackers are caught squarely in an identity crisis: Buck the promotion system and continue being a contributor who is "50 to 100 times better than their peers" fighting adversaries in cyberspace or take a year or two off mission to collate push-up scores in Excel spreadsheets.

Heebie's take: Ooof. (The article offers some solutions).