Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Just winning the next set of elections won’t fix the underlying problems.
Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York City’s mayoral primary, and his probable ascension to the office itself, sent shock waves through the Democratic Party and reopened many longstanding debates. Maybe the word “socialist” isn’t as toxic as many think it is. Maybe the party needs younger, newer faces. Maybe a positive vision is at least as important as standing against Trump. Maybe being Muslim or pro-Palestine does not alienate potential Democratic voters. And so on.
Those are all worthwhile points to discuss, but I worry that they all revolve around a goal — taking power back from Trump and the MAGA congressmen who hold it now — that is necessary but not sufficient to save American democracy. Too easily, we get lost in the search for a new face or a new slogan or even new policies, but lose sight of the deeper problems that allowed Trump to come to power in the first place.
Remember, we beat Trump soundly in 2020. His ego will never let him admit it, but Trump got his butt kicked by Joe Biden, to the tune of more than 7 million votes. Beating Trump is not an unsolvable problem, and we don’t have to convert the MAGA cultists to do it. All we have to do is win back the voters who already voted against Trump in 2020.
But beating Trump did not end the threat then, and it won’t do it now either. We need to understand why.
Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and if all we do is get rid of Trump, they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter.
I do not have solutions for the problems I’m pointing to, but I think we need to keep them in our sights, even as we look for the next face and slogan and message.
The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes. All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?
The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.
Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.
The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak Math and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.
Here’s why this is such a big problem for democracy, and how it turns into a liberal/conservative issue: Ever since the progressive era and the New Deal, the liberal project has been for government to take on issues that are too big and too complex for individuals to handle on their own. When you buy a bag of lettuce at the grocery store, how do you know it isn’t full of E coli? Some corporation has a dump somewhere upstream from you, so how can you tell what dangerous chemicals might be leeching into your water supply? How do you know your workplace is won’t kill you or your money is safe in a bank? What interest rates and tax/spending policies will keep the economy humming without causing inflation? Stuff like that.
The conservative answer to those questions is to trust corporations to police themselves subject to the discipline of the market. (So if the lettuce producers keep selling E-coli-spreading produce, eventually people will catch on and stop buying from them and they’ll go out of business.) Historically, that solution has never worked very well. Corporations are too rich and too clever and too chameleon-like for market discipline to keep them in line. But we’ve had regulations for over a century now, so most of the bad-example history happened a long time ago. (We wouldn’t have OSHA today without the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.) The only people who still remember it are themselves experts of some sort.
The liberal alternative is to have what has come to be called an “administrative state”. The government runs a bunch of three-letter agencies — FDA, EPA, SEC, CDC, FCC, and so on, with an occasional four-letter agency like OSHA or FDIC thrown in. These agencies keep track of things no individual has the resources to keep track of, and they hire experts who spend their lives studying things most of us only think about once in a while, like food safety or how much cash banks should keep on hand to avoid runs or what kind of resources need to be stockpiled to deal with hurricanes.
And the liberal administrative state works like a charm as long as two conditions hold:
The experts are trustworthy.
The public trusts them.
It’s not hard to see that there are problems with both of those propositions. In his 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes.
And then there’s the challenge of globalism: It was supposed to benefit everybody, but in practice, working-class people lost good jobs while professional-class people got cheap products made overseas.
On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.
In a series of books, most recently End Times, Peter Turchin describes two conditions that historically have led to social unrest, revolution, or civil war: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. In other words: Ordinary people see their fortunes declining, and the elite classes expand beyond the number of elite roles for them to fill. (Think about how hard it is for recent college graduates to find jobs.) So there are mobs to lead, and dissatisfied members of the would-be ruling class trained and ready to lead them.
“Remember objective truth?”
Truth Decay. Democracy is supposed to work through what is sometimes called “the marketplace of ideas”. Different interest groups have their own self-interested spin, but when people with a variety of viewpoints look at the facts, truth is supposed to win out.
If you are younger than, say, 40, you may be surprised to realize how recently that actually worked. There have always been fringe groups and conspiracy theorists, but there were also powerful institutions dedicated to sorting out what really happened and how things really happen. The two most important of those institutions were the press and the scientific community.
Those two institutions still exist, and (with some exceptions) still pursue capital-T Truth. But they have lost their reality-defining power. (Part of the problem is that journalists and scientists are part of the expert class that working people no longer trust.) No current news anchor would dare end a broadcast with “And that’s the way it is”, as Walter Cronkite did every day for decades. And no scientific study, no matter how large it is or where it was done, can settle the questions our society endlessly debates.
So: Is global warming really happening, and do we cause it by burning fossil fuels? The scientific community says yes, and the experts whose livelihoods depend on the answer (like the ones in the insurance industry) accept that judgment. But the general public? Not so much, or at least not enough to commit our country to the kind of changes that need to happen.
Was the Covid vaccine safe, and did it save millions of lives worldwide? Do other vaccines (like the ones that all but wiped out measles and smallpox) bring huge benefits to our society? Again, the scientific community says yes. But that answer is considered sufficiently untrustworthy that a crank like RFK Jr. can get control of our government’s health services and put millions of lives at risk.
Did Trump lose in 2020? By the standards of objective journalism, yes he did. He lost soundly, by a wide margin. The diverse institutions of vote-counting, spread through both blue states and red ones like Georgia and (then) Arizona, support that conclusion. Every court case that has hung on the question of voter fraud or computer tampering has come out the same way: There is no evidence to support those claims. Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than argue that it could have reasonably believed Dominion’s vote-counting machines were rigged. (Not that they were rigged, but that there was any reasonable doubt about their accuracy.)
But none of that matters. No institution — not even one Trump cultists establish themselves, like the audit of Arizona’s votes — can declare once and for all that Trump lost.
Loss of Depth. Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.
Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — Marjorie Taylor Greene confusing “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” comes to mind — are now everyday events.
Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Remember George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism“? The idea in a nutshell was that if conservative policies produced a more prosperous society, the rising tide might lift more people out of poverty than liberal attempts to help people through government programs. Things never actually worked out that way, but the intention behind the phrase was clear: Conservatives didn’t want to be seen as selfish or heartless bad guys. They also want a better world, they just have a different vision of how to get there.
Later Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney worked hard to build images as good, decent men, reasonable and courteous to a fault. If the policies they supported might lead to more poverty, more suffering, or even more death, that was lamentable and surely not what they intended.
But in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer made a shocking observation about the first Trump administration: The Cruelty is the Point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears.
After California Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for attempting to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question, Vice President J. D. Vance referred to Padilla as “José”, a reference to José Padilla, who is a convicted terrorist.
After admitting in court that deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador was an “administrative error”, the Trump administration kept him there until they could gin up a criminal case against him. Now they are preventing his release from the criminal charge by threatening to re-deport him somewhere else. And they have assembled testimony against him by making deals with criminals who have done things far worse than Garcia is accused of.
I could go on. It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.
You might think this intentional assholery would get Trump in trouble with his Evangelical Christian base, because — I can’t believe I have to write this — Jesus was not an asshole. Jesus preached compassion and empathy.
Where does a recognition of these issues leave us? Don’t get me wrong. I would like nothing better than for a Democratic wave to sweep the 2026 midterms and then give us a non-MAGA president in 2028. But that is the beginning of the change we need, not the end.
What America needs runs far deeper than a new set of political leaders. We need some sort of spiritual or cultural reformation, one that rededicates Americans to the pursuit of truth and the responsibility to be trustworthy. It would cause us to care about each other rather than rejoice in each other’s pain. It would start us looking for leaders who bring out the best in us rather than the worst.
How do we get that reformation started? I really have no idea. I just see the need.
A scheduling problem has created a Monday-morning conflict for me, so I’m not going to be putting out the Sift on its usual schedule. There is no weekly summary this week, just a featured post: “The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump” about the social and cultural failings that Trump exploited but did not create. That will go out soon — on Sunday night rather than Monday morning.
At work I have acquired two junior devs who heavily use AI when writing code. I don't mind the AI, but I do mind that they're too junior to know what good code looks like and AI accelerates their bad choices to stratospheric levels. One dev told me he that "AI couldn't fix the bugs" in his new unit test so he let AI rewrite it in a completely different test framework at four times the length and still with bugs. The other dev asked me to review 1k LOC he had not read himself that was a nightmare of bad choices and code that had no business being added to the existing service. For both, the initial review wasn't even a review, it was me eyeballing it for two minutes then bailing and telling them to rewrite it entirely.
Title: To Hell & Back Fandom: 双镜 | Couple of Mirrors (2021) Music: To Hell & Back by Maren Morris Summary: 'lucky for me, your kind of heaven's been to hell and back' Notes: Premiered at Escapade 35.5. Warnings: quick cuts and flashing lights, violence
I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one.
When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompi there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.
Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been effectively halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.
The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.
None of this is, or at least ought to be, news. Yet the political implications are still being discussed in the familiar terms of US party politics: swing voters, the centre ground, mobilisation versus moderation, rehashes of the 2024 election and so on. Having given up hope, I have no interest in these debates. Instead, I want to consider the implications for the idea of democracy.
The starting point is the observation that around half of all US voters at the last three elections have supported a corrupt, incompetent, criminal racist and rapist, while another third or more of US citizens have failed to vote at all. And Trump’s support has not been diminished to any significant extent (if at all) by his actions since returning to power.
Any claims that might be made to exonerate Trump’s voters or mitigate the crime they have committed don’t stand up to scrutiny. The US did not face any kind of crisis that might justify such an extreme outcome (as, for example, Germany did in 1933). Unemployment was at historically low levels. The short-lived inflation resulting from the pandemic was well below the rates of the late 20th century, crime was far below those rates. And so on. The only real driving factor was the resentment and hatred felt by Trump’s voters for large groups of their compatriots.
One part of this is fear of immigrants, particularly but not exclusively, asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants. But this fear has long been a winning issue for the political right, in many countries including Australia. It has not produced anything like the turn to dictatorship we have now seen in the US.
In this context what matters is not the marginal groups of swinging voters who have absorbed so much attention: the “left behind”, the “manosphere” and so on. It’s the fact that comfortably off, self-described “conservative”, white suburbanites, historically the core of the Republican base, have overwhelmingly voted for, and welcomed, the end of American democracy.
This is something that, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented in the history of modern democracy, and threatens the basic assumptions on which democracy is built. While the last 200 years of modern (partial or complete) democracy have seen plenty of demagoguery, authoritarian populism and so on, these have invariably been temporary eruptions rejected, relatively quickly, by an enduring democratic majority. The idea that a party that has been part of the constitutional fabric of a major democracy for more than 150 years, would abandon democracy and keep the support of its voters was inconceivable. That’s why so many have refused to admit it, even to themselves.
Nothing lasts forever, but there is no obvious way back from dictatorship for the US. Viewed in retrospect, the the Republican party was a deadly threat to US democracy from the moment of Trump’s nomination in 2016 and certainly after the 2021 insurrection.
With the benefit of hindsight, Biden might have declared a state of emergency immediately after the insurrection, arrested Trump, and expelled all the congressional Republicans who had voted to overturn the election. But this would itself have represented an admission that democratic norms had failed. It was far more comfortable to suppose that Trump had been an aberration and that those norms would prevail as they had done at previous moments of crisis. That is no longer possible.
As I siad, I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one. The best I can put forward is that the US, founded on slavery, has never been able to escape its original sin, and is unique in that respect. Every country has its original sin and a dominant group with its racist core. But only in the US (so far) has that core secured unqualified majority support. The downfall of American democracy should serve as a warning. For conservative parties, flirting with fascism is a deal with the devil that must be avoided. For the left, the nostalgic appeal of the “white working class” (implicitly male and mostly old) should not tempt us into pandering to racist and misogynist reaction.
I don’t know whether that will be enough to save us. At least in Australia, Trumpism is political poison. But until we understand that Trumpism is not an aberration but the course Americans have chosen, we will not be able to free ourselves from our past allegiance to an idea which is now an illusion.
I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!
Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.
More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.
Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.
Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!
Cooking. Bread? Bread.
Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)
Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.
My research group has a new paper, “CRDT Emulation, Simulation, and Representation Independence”, appearing at ICFP this year! This project was headed up by my PhD student Nathan Liittschwager, with help from another PhD student in my group, Jonathan Castello, and our collaborator Stelios Tsampas. You can read our preprint (warts and all, but soon to be improved, thanks to feedback from the ICFP reviewers) on arXiv, but here’s a quick summary.
Conflict-free replicated data types – CRDTs to their friends – are data structures designed for fault tolerance and high availability in distributed systems. They replicate the same data across many physical locations, which helps ensure that some replica will be available and close at hand when clients need it. CRDTs have traditionally been taxonomized into state-based and op-based flavors. State-based CRDTs synchronize with each other by periodically sending their local state to each other, while op-based CRDTS synchronize by sending a stream of locally applied operations. It has long been known that these two flavors of CRDT can “emulate” each other: if you have a state-based CRDT, you can turn it into an op-based one by putting a kind of op-based wrapper around it, and vice versa. Shapiro et al. described these “wrapper” algorithms in their famous 2011 article introducing CRDTs.
But…what does “emulate” actually mean? In what sense does an emulated CRDT object actually behave like the original? We argue that this question actually matters, because researchers love to publish results about one or the other of state-based or op-based CRDTs and then argue that their results are general due to the existence of Shapiro et al.’s wrapper algorithms. For instance, in “Automated Parameterized Verification of CRDTs”, Nagar and Jagannathan write that their technique for op-based CRDTs “naturally extends to state-based CRDTs since they can be emulated by an op-based model”, and in “Katara: synthesizing CRDTs with verified lifting”, Laddad et al. write that their synthesized state-based CRDTs “can always be translated to op-based CRDTs if necessary”. But what results about an original object actually “transfer” over to an emulated object when we do this wrapping? That’s the question we tackled in this paper!
We specify and formalize CRDT emulation in terms of simulation by modeling CRDTs and their interactions with the network as transition systems. It turns out that emulation can be understood as weak simulations between the transition systems of the original and emulating CRDT systems. Getting the details right here was rather involved, because state-based and op-based CRDTs place different requirements on the behavior of the underlying network, both with regard to causal order of messages, and with regard to both the granularity of the messages themselves. With our main result in hand, though, we can then pretty straightforwardly get a good old-fashioned representation independence result about state-based and op-based CRDTs: client programs indeed can’t tell which flavor of CRDT they are interacting with, as long as they are limited to making certain (realistic) observations.
This paper has been in progress for more than two and a half years. Our collaboration got under way when Nathan and Stelios met way back at POPL 2023, when Nathan was presenting a different (but similar in spirit!) project at the POPL Student Research Competition. Nathan and Stelios got to talking, and we all began collaborating on what would eventually become this paper. Nathan presented some early ideas at CALCO in 2023, but the journey from there to this paper was long and challenging, and it’s wonderful to see our efforts finally bearing fruit!
It was Nathan’s idea to use different colors in the paper for the op-based and state-based CRDT semantics respectively, and to me, that suggests a tantalizing analogy to a long line of work on compiler correctness, like in Patterson and Ahmed’s “The Next 700 Compiler Correctness Theorems” (or lots of Amal’s other work). Of course, Amal would probably be doing this with logical relations instead. But it’s cool (and, I guess, not surprising in retrospect!) to see that emulator correctness is kind of like compiler correctness, and I’d like to continue to explore this direction of research beyond CRDTs in the future. Emulation is everywhere, and what it means for an emulator to be “correct” is an interesting question!
I read a lot of MASH fic recently, and while most of it was very good, there were also a ton of inaccuracies about what mid-century America was like. I'm not an expert, but at the same time, I did listen to my parents and grandparents when they talked about what life was like when they were younger. And also, I know what's changed within my lifetime (born in 1982), and quite a lot of things people today take for granted are actually new within my lifetime, and thus not around prior to the 1980s. Now, this is fanfic, and if you don't care about historical accuracy in your fic, that is a fine and valid choice and I salute you. If, however, you do want to at least try to avoid major gaffes, here are things I've noticed that people get wrong a lot:
These are just a few of the things that have changed in the last fifty years. And, of course, I'm only one person and might have got things wrong. Let me know if you see things I missed
Locals want the city to allocate $300,000 in the budget in order to help get a much desired trauma center on a patch of city-owned land in Rockaway. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
By Ryan Schwach
As City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Mayor Eric Adams shook hands on a $115.9 billion city budget, many aspects remain unclear. Among them, if previously committed funds to secure a site for a trauma center in Rockaway will be included.
The city had already reportedly committed to allocating $300,000 in the budget that will help get the site, and while some parts of the budget continued to be negotiated over the weekend, local officials and community members want the administration to keep their promise.
Hours before the handshake deal on the budget, Rockaway locals and elected officials called on the city to get the money in the city’s budget, a step which would check off another big to-do off their list towards getting the center.
The Adams administration said in April they would commit to using a vacant city-owned plot of land on Beach 62nd in the heart of the Rockaway peninsula for the trauma center, which locals have been calling for for more than a decade.
The city also committed to producing the $300,000 needed to pay to transfer the land from its current owner, the New York City Housing Authority, to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.
The hope was that the $300,000 would be included in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, which will be finalized when it comes to a vote on Monday.
Queens Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers – who has made getting a trauma center in the Rockaways a main priority – told the Eagle that as of Friday afternoon the $300,000 is still being negotiated.
In a report last year, a task force dedicated to studying the possibility of bringing a trauma center to the Rockaways identified the land as a possible site.
The report pointed out the area would not require any demolition, is near a subway station and not adjacent to nearby residences.
At a rally held adjacent to the city-owned land they want to use on Friday afternoon, local officials called out the mayor for being noncommittal on the promise that he would include the cash in the budget.
“Shame on Mayor Adams,” said local Community Board 14 District Manager Felicia Johnson. “We had an agreement and a plan that he had to turn this land over so that we can go ahead and fulfill our dreams and what we need.”
The rally was organized and planned by Brooks-Powers, but the councilmember was called to City Hall for budget negotiations and was not present.
“The mayoral administration made a commitment to do such a transfer and to make it happen…and it seems that the mayoral administration is reneging on that commitment,” said State Assemblymember Khaleel Anderson, who ran the event in Brooks-Powers’ absence.
While Brooks-Powers said the administration privately committed to the site after last year’s budget when the city put $25 million into the proposal – City Hall has not mentioned it publicly and their comments have been vague and have not explicitly mentioned the land on Beach 62nd Street or the land transfer.
“Mayor Adams continues to support the need for equitable access to health care access across the city, including on the Rockaway Peninsula,” a City Hall spokesperson said on Friday. “That is why we invested $50 million in capital funds to support the development of a trauma center in Far Rockaway. We continue to work with the community and City Council to increase access to health care in Far Rockaway.”
Rockaway officials including Assemblymember Khaleel Anderson and Councilmember Joann Ariola called on Mayor Eric Adams to keep money in the budget to help the community get a site for a trauma hospital. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
At the rally, locals doubled-down on their calls for the funding, and overall for a trauma center in Rockaway, which has been a major ask from the community since Peninsula Hospital closed in 2015.
Currently, the closest level one trauma center for most Rockaway residents is around 10 miles away at Jamaica Hospital, which takes more than half an hour to get to, often made more difficult by ever-present traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway.
“The nearest emergency trauma facility is approximately 10 miles away, and response times continue to place people's lives at risk,” said Johnson. “This proposed trauma center would be the first step in writing decades of disinvestment and neglect, ensuring that all New Yorkers, regardless of their zip code, can access life saving medical treatment when it matters most.”
Police Officer Jonathan Diller, who was shot and killed in Far Rockaway last year, has become a main example of that sentiment.
Diller was shot on-duty in March of last year, and had to be brought to Jamaica Hospital to receive treatment despite being shot just a few blocks away from Rockaway’s only hospital, St. John’s Episcopal, which does not have trauma treatment capabilities.
“The people of this peninsula have waited long enough, and anyone who has spent any time on this peninsula knows that we've had situations where every second counts and Jamaica Hospital and Brookdale Hospitals are just too far away,” said Ariola. “We saw what happened when seconds counted with Officer Diller…I don't know if a trauma center would have saved his life, but I don't know that it wouldn't have either. We have to have it here.”
While it has long been considered a long shot, a trauma center in the Rockaways has gained significantly more traction in the last two years with endorsements from Mayor Adams as well as Speaker Adams.
However, while there is a site planned and some money allocated toward the project, Rockaway is still far from getting the facility they want.
Rockaway would need the state to approve either a level one or level two trauma center, which categorizes the type and level of service a trauma center is capable of providing.
Officials want one of the top two levels, and anything less would mean that any new hospital would lack the ability to address the two types of trauma incidents officials want treated in Rockaway: shootings and drownings.
There have been questions about whether or not Rockaway has enough trauma cases to reach the requirements for a level one or level two center, but city health care officials and Brooks-Powers said the licensing has already been discussed with state health officials.
The purpose of your life is to discover the purpose of your life. If that sounds recursive, it is. No one has pushed harder on untangling that strange loop than Dan Pink, whose professional career has been trying to illuminate the way for ordinary folks to find their drive and purpose. He recently crafted a 10-minute video – How to Find Your Purpose – with clear, actionable steps you can take if stuck. I agree 100% with his approach and recommendations. They really help. — KK
Kagi Search Engine
I switched from Google to Kagi a couple of months ago and can’t imagine going back. The results remind me of Google’s golden age, before ads took over. The uncluttered ad-free interface delivers high-quality results without the SEO spam that plagues Google. It has tons of customization features I’m still learning about. It’s $10 a month, but having a search engine aligned with user experience rather than advertising revenue is worth it. — MF
Track your natural energy patterns
I took the advice from this LifeProTip and tracked my natural energy and focus patterns for a week to figure out when I’m most productive. For me, it’s after 1 PM. In the mornings, even though I do everything “right”—sitting out in the sun, sipping coffee, and exercising—I still usually feel energetically dispersed and have brain fog for the first half of the day. Instead of getting frustrated or trying to force myself to focus, I decided to shift my approach. Now, I work on tasks that don’t require much brainpower in the morning and save the more demanding ones for the afternoon. This one change has made me feel less shameful or frustrated with my natural patterns and more accomplished each day. — CD
Quiet, powerful hair dryer
My wife started using this CNMSGM hair dryer. Compared to her old dryer, it’s much quieter, more powerful, and lighter (under 1 pound). It features a smart LED ring that changes color to indicate temperature mode (red for hot, orange for warm, green for soft, and blue for cool). The two magnetic attachments snap on easily. Some users on Amazon mention that the power cord is a bit short, but I measured it, and it’s 70 inches long, which is more than enough for our bathroom. — MF
Invisible ring resizer
I love wearing rings, but my fingers are smaller than average and it’s really hard to find rings below a size 5, so I’m often disappointed when shopping for fashion jewelry. I finally found a solution with this Invisible Ring Spacer by Yiruhe. I coat the inside of the ring with a resin liquid that hardens in two minutes under UV light, repeating the process until the ring fits perfectly. It’s straightforward, and if you mess up or want to remove it, you can just run the ring under warm water and peel off the resin easily. My only complaint is the smell of the resin, so I’ve been resizing my rings outside. — CD
Death clock
Part of the thrill of being alive is that we don’t know when we will die. However, I’ve found that knowing my statistical death age to be very clarifying, and it helps me focus on maximizing today. There’s a new AI-enhanced Death Clock that takes into account your lifestyle choices to give you a death date based on statistics. It’s quick and free on the web. Treat it as a hint rather than destiny. — KK
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Twenty-five-year-old Ali Hamed was taken into custody after he walked into the precinct to dispute the allegations against him, having seen his photo circulating in the news. Officers immediately recognized him and placed him under arrest.
Hamed lives just a few blocks from where the incident occurred around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, June 25, near 97th Street and 34th Avenue in Corona. According to police sources, he allegedly followed a 13-year-old girl, confronted her, and offered her $50 to perform a sex act. When she declined, he allegedly increased the offer to $100.
Police released surveillance images of the suspect on Thursday. NYPD
The girl fled, but Hamed allegedly continued to follow her until she reached her home, at which point he left the scene. Her parents immediately contacted the NYPD, and detectives were able to obtain surveillance footage showing Hamed in the area.
On Friday evening, detectives escorted Hamed out of the 115th Precinct in handcuffs as he was transferred to Central Booking. He declined to comment on the allegations.
Hamed has been charged with luring a child to commit a felony, criminal solicitation and endangering the welfare of a child.
25-year-old Ali Hamed was arrested for allegedly confronting a teen and offering her $50 to perform a sex actPhoto by Ramy Mahmoud
Detectives are searching for a suspect who attempted to rape a woman near Hoffman Park in Elmhurst early Friday morning, according to the NYPD.
The attack occurred at approximately 4:30 a.m. on June 27 near the corner of Hoffman Drive and Woodhaven Boulevard, across from Queens Center Mall, police said. The suspect allegedly approached a 26-year-old woman, accosted her and attempted to rape her.
Police said the attack occurred near the corner of Hoffman Drive and Woodhaven Boulevard — which abuts Hoffman Park — in Elmhurst at about 4:30 a.m. on June 27.Via Google Maps
The victim was able to fight off the assailant, prompting him to flee the scene. He was last seen entering the Woodhaven Boulevard subway station. The woman did not sustain serious injuries and reported the incident to officers at the 110th Precinct.
Police released surveillance images of the suspect, described as a man with a dark complexion, believed to be between 20 and 30 years old, approximately 6 feet tall, and weighing around 175 pounds. He was last seen wearing blue headphones, a surgical mask, a black jacket, camouflage pants, and gray sneakers.
Anyone with information regarding his whereabouts can call Crime Stoppers at 800-577-TIPS (for Spanish, dial 888-57-PISTA). You can also submit tips online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org, or on X (formerly Twitter) @NYPDTips. All calls and messages are kept confidential.
Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.
And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.
Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.
Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.
(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Mac as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)
If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.
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