John Holmes for Human Rights Watch (via The Guardian):

One woman described arriving at Krome — a facility that typically only holds men — late at night on January 28. Officers then confined her for days with dozens of other women without bedding or privacy, in a cell normally used only during incarceration intake procedures. “There was only one toilet, and it was covered in feces,” she said. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came.”

A man recalled the frigid conditions in the intake cell where he was detained: “They turned up the air conditioning... You could not fall asleep because it was so cold. I thought I was going to experience hypothermia.”

This report documents serious violations of medical standards. Detention facility staff routinely denied individuals with diabetes, asthma, kidney conditions, and chronic pain their prescribed medications and access to doctors. In one case at Krome, a woman with gallstones began vomiting and lost consciousness after being denied care for several days. Officers returned her to the same cell after emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder — still without medication. [...]

Staff were dismissive or abusive even when detainees were undergoing a visibly obvious medical crisis. For example, staff ignored a detained immigrant who began coughing blood in a crowded holding cell for hours. In that case, unrest ensued, and a Disturbance Control Team stormed the cell, forcing the men in it to lie face down on the wet, dirty floor while officers zip-tied their hands behind their backs. A detainee said he heard an officer order the cell’s CCTV camera feed to be turned off. Another detainee said a team member slapped him while shouting, “Shut the fuck up.”

During another incident, officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs after forcing the group to wait hours for lunch: “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,” one man said.

The Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their summer launch week. You may recall their previous launch week back in spring, when I emphasized that their launch week announcements were worth checking out just to admire the retro-modern design of the web page. Well, they’ve done it again, with all-new retro pixel-art design. It’s so fun and well done, with a bunch of UI elements that you can play with.

Amidst the fun of the presentation, they once again have a slew of great new features, including:

• Custom CSS for AuthKit.
• Feature Flags — “Assign flags, expose them in JWTs, and roll out features with targeted control.”
• Supabase Native Auth Integration.
• CLI Auth — “Log in from the command line with OAuth 2.0 device grant flow”.

Reuters, with a headline that truly could have come from The Onion, “Trump Threatens Washington Stadium Deal Unless NFL Team Readopts Redskins Name”:

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to interfere with a deal to build a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the local NFL team, now known as the Commanders, changes its name back to Redskins. The American football team dropped the name Redskins in 2020 after decades of criticism that it was a racial slur with links to the U.S. genocide of the Indigenous population.

Trump had called for a return to the name Redskins — and for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to once again adopt the name Indians — on other occasions, but on Sunday he added that he may take official action.

“I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The team moved from Washington to suburban Landover, Maryland, in 1997, but earlier this year reached an agreement with the local District of Columbia government to return to the city with a new stadium expected to open in 2030.

Trump has limited authority to intervene under the current home-rule law governing federal oversight of the District of Columbia, but he has raised the prospect of taking more control, telling reporters in February, “I think we should take over Washington, D.C.”

It should be emphasized — and shame on Reuters for not doing so — that Trump can’t just “take control” of the District of Columbia. Per Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, it’s Congressional authority that oversees the district, not the Executive branch.

Here are the two posts from his blog that got this obvious attempt to distract from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. (“Look at me, I’m a crazy old angry racist, not a creepy old pedophile!”)

Cory Ondrejka joins in on the 40-year-old retro computing reminiscing:

For being otherwise bright folks, it’s remarkable how completely wrong they all are. The Atari was the best computer to have.

This whole friendly debate reminds me of the oft-cited adage that the best camera is the one you have with you: The best computer in the 1980s was whichever one your parents bought you. I honestly don’t remember anyone I knew who had an Atari computer. Atari game consoles, sure — almost everyone I knew had a 2600, and we all coveted the 5200. But they sure were cool-looking.

Oddly enough, Jack Tramiel^* — who founded and named Commodore in 1953 as a typewriter company and was running the company when it launched the PET (1977), VIC-20 (1980), and Commodore 64 (1982) — left the company after a dispute with the board in 1984 (a common industry occurrence in those days, seemingly), founded a new company briefly named Tramel Technology (not “Tramiel”, for ease of spelling), which bought the then-failing consumer business of Atari from Warner Communications and took the Atari name for its own. In 1985 Tramiel launched the Atari ST line at CES. To me the 16-bit Atari ST barely registers in my memory — I don’t think I ever encountered one anywhere, including in a store. When I think of Atari personal computers I think of the 8-bit Atari 800 (pretty cool!) and 400 (horrible — perhaps the worst keyboard ever shipped) from 1979.

(Anyway, neither of those aforecited adages are really true, though. Some cameras are much better than others. And the best computers back then were the Apple II’s.)

* Just me or was Tramiel a dead ringer for character actor Gordon Jump, of WKRP in Cincinnati fame?

Joe Flint and John Jurgensen, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

But digital advertising revenue hasn’t made up for the fall in ad dollars going to traditional broadcast programming. Spending on linear advertising for the late-night segment on ABC, CBS and NBC fell from $439 million in 2018 to $221 million in 2024, according to Guideline, an ad-tracking platform.

That’s a precipitous decline, if accurate. But still, given that Colbert’s The Late Show has consistently been the highest-rated overall and tied with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live for the 18–49 year-old demographic, it feels very safe to presume that it generated at least a full third — say, $75–80 million — of that $221 million total. It’s reported that Colbert’s salary is $20 million per year, and Colbert himself said the other night the show employs 200 staff.

If, as anonymous CBS sources are claiming to multiple outlets, the show lost $40 million last year, that means it costs something on the order of $120 million per year to produce, or $100 million after Colbert’s salary. With a staff of 200 people, that’s an average salary of $500,000. I know it costs money to heat and cool the Ed Sullivan theater, and I’m sure there are other costs. But there is no way the average salary of a staff member on the show is half a million per year.

And, even if somehow The Late Show did lose money last year, it seems implausible that CBS wouldn’t first ask for budget cuts — staff reductions, a salary cut for Colbert, whatever else might possibly be running up a $120 million/year budget — before just shutting the whole thing down. NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers sadly cut the live studio band last year, for example. $75 million per year in ad revenue is way down from its Letterman era heyday, but that’s surely more than enough to produce a talk show. Also, all of this back-of-the-napkin budget analysis neglects to assign any promotional value to the show. CBS gets to promote everything else on the network to over 2 million people per night with house ads during commercial breaks and guests on the show from other CBS programs.