Good morning, RVA! It's 69 °F, and today looks a bit cooler and bit less downpour-y than yesterday. You should still stay on the lookout for some rain later this afternoon, though—keep that umbrella handy.
Water cooler
Megan Pauly at VPM reports on this past Monday's RPS School Board meeting and the 5-4 vote to "keep police in schools for the foreseeable future but with some changes." You can read through those proposed changed in this single-slide presentation. Out of the list of tweaks, this one seems most substantial to me: "RPD and RPS would develop a diversion program to end arrests on school grounds for any non-violent offenses." RPD didn't respond to Pauly by deadline if fights were considered "non-violent offenses," which seems like a an important clarification because fights account for a big percentage of the arrests in schools. In fact, Pauly says that "in the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 combined school years, there were nearly 400 student arrests in Richmond schools, the majority over fights and possession of marijuana." I know it's complicated, but I'm not sure that either of those things should end in arrests on school property.
Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the early goings of a really interesting program proposed by the Virginia Poverty Law Center that would "provide down-payment assistance to households that can demonstrate that they, or their relatives, suffered financial consequences as a result of past practices that disproportionately impacted Black households." It's not like we've had a dearth of those in the Richmond region over the last couple hundred years—and this is not a Richmond-specific problem, of course. The way The System's set up right now, homeownership is one of the primary ways families in American build wealth, and we know that Black families lag significantly behind white families in homeownership rates, and we also know that Black families have accumulated much less wealth than white families. Programs like this attempt to address these financial disparities. Two local legislators, Del. Jeff Bourne and Del. Ghazala Hashmi will carry the related legislation at the General Assembly this coming session. Keep an eye on it!
The Virginia Mercury's Ned Oliver has bad news about the horrible fencing around Marcus-David Peters circle: "State officials say they haven’t yet decided when or if they will take down the tall, chain-link fence that surrounds the graffiti-covered stone pedestal." When or if! That's not great language. Also, when's the VMFA kicking off Reimagining Monument Avenue process? I keep checking the website but can't find any updates.
Localities sure do love sports tourism and building the facilities to attract that sort of thing. Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports on Chesterfield's plans to build a new ice hockey venue, with visions of youth hockey tournaments dancing in their heads.
Poking around on the New York Times this morning, I came across this article about the debt limit and how Republicans insist on using each and every opportunity to bring this country as close to the brink as possible. Read this absolutely bananas description of what Mitch McConnell's been up to over the last couple of weeks: "Mr. McConnell has said the government must not be allowed to stop paying its debts; he has also said he will not let any Republicans vote to raise the debt limit, while moving to block Democrats from doing so themselves." If we lived in any other timeline but this, the worst timeline, we'd be shocked to read about behavior like that from a man who represents half of our country. After you finish lamenting the current state of affairs, make sure you tap through and scroll to the bottom of that article for a very helpful "Understand the U.S. Debt Ceiling" sidebar—most of the world does not live this way!
Finally, here's this from the Verge: "On Tuesday, the McAulliffe campaign launched a series of Facebook, Instagram, and Google search ads highlighting his opponent Glenn Youngkin’s role in the controversial purchase of Taylor Swift’s master recordings in 2019. The buyout of Swift’s masters has been a point of bitter contention for the singer and her fans and could be an unexpected liability [for Youngkin] in the upcoming race."
This morning's longread
More details about the October 4 outage
I enjoyed this explanation of the massive, global Facebook outage from earlier this week. I thought the most interesting part of that whole thing, other than some funny one liners, was the handful of Facebook Live-based public meetings I saw hastily rescheduled to other platforms.
This was the source of yesterday’s outage. During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally. Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command. This change caused a complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centers and the internet. And that total loss of connection caused a second issue that made things worse.
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