Interesting Reads for the Week Ending July 23rd

Here are the reads I found interesting over the past week.

The Rules

Here are the rules for what articles I choose to include in this weekly roundup:

1. It can’t be anything I wrote.
2. It has to be something I actually read. Nothing that simply had an interesting headline.
3. I have to have read it since the previous post. It does not have to be something that was written in the past week.
4. It has to be something I read online. In other words, it has to be a webpage with a URL.

The Reads

First off, The Space Tourism Industry is Stuck in Its Billionaire Phase. If you haven’t been paying attention, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, both billionaires, recently launched themselves into space*. Queue people complaining that the money could have been spent better. And perhaps they’re right - but the benefits (or lack thereof) won’t be known for years or even decades.

It makes me wonder if people complained when the Wright Brothers flew or when Charles Lindberg flew across the Atlantic. I did see in the Space Race episode of History 101 that people didn’t like their tax dollars being spent on the Apollo moon missions.

*Some say not space, but the boundary between space and not-space is not well-defined.

The California Secretary of State Website Has Income Tax Returns 2016-2020 for Gubernatorial Candidates. Like actual, downloadable PDFs of the 1040 forms and schedules that have been submitted to the IRS. If you’re a tax nerd and want to see someone else’s real tax return, check out the California Secretary of State’s Candidate Tax Return Disclosure page.

This interests me - How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request. Honestly, I like the idea of seeing how the law changed over time with a bunch of Git diffs.

Finally, streaming can be free & legal. Check out Clar Howard’s guide on best free streaming services.