Linked List: March 31, 2019

Sunday, 31 March 2019

Meh 

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball.

Here’s Meh’s deal: they put up a new deal every day, and it’s not boring stuff. As they say, “It’s actual, real, weird shit you didn’t know existed for half the price you would’ve guessed.” Special sneak peek for Daring Fireball readers — on Monday, April 1, they’re doing a Meh-rathon, like a Best-Of-Meh all in one day.

I guarantee it’s the best thing going on for April Fools’s Day.

The Talk Show: ‘I Have Faith in the Rice’ 

Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this here last week when the episode was hot off the presses (I forgot to do it), but you don’t want to miss it. The special guest is Paul Kafasis, and topics include Apple’s mid-March product releases — new iPads, iMacs, and AirPods — and the de-Steve-ification of Wynn Las Vegas.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

NYT: ‘Russia Ordered a Killing That Made No Sense. Then the Assassin Started Talking.’ 

Riveting reporting from Michael Schwirtz for The New York Times:

Assassinations happen frequently enough in Ukraine that they are often just blips in the local news cycle. In 2006, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law legalizing targeted killings abroad, and Ukrainian officials say teams of Russian hit men operate freely inside the country.

“For the intelligence services, as bad as this sounds, murdering people is just part of the work flow,” said Oleksiy Arestovych, a retired officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence service. “They go to work, it’s their job. You have a work flow, you write articles. They have a workflow, they murder people.”

“It doesn’t really worry them,” he said. “They celebrate it, mark it, without much sentiment.”