Scope Creep, 2024-10-18.

It's Friday morning! Let's get at the Scope Creep.

Scope of Work is supported by our awesome Members, and through support from:

SCOPE CREEP.

• Let's do a very belated back-to-school sale on SOW Memberships (which get you access to the Members' Slack, Reading Group, etc; here's a 25% off link) and Supporterships (which gives you access to all paywalled content we've ever published; here's a 25% off link), and also all the umarelling swag and workshop/jobsite scavenger hunts in the SOW shop (here's a link that gives $5 off orders over $25).
  
  Related, next Thursday the SOW Members' Reading Group is discussing two short pieces: Chinua Achebe's essay The Truth of Fiction, and Ted Chiang's short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. Voting is currently underway on our next book, which we'll begin discussing on 2024-10-31; current nominations include Teju Cole's Open City, Lucille Brockway's Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, Murray Morgan's The Last Wilderness: A History of the Olympic Peninsula, Glenn D. Babcock's History of the U.S. Rubber Company: A Case Study in Corporation Management, and Chaim Gingold's Building SimCity: How the Put the World in a Machine.
  
  Also related: My notes on three books I read recently.
  
  Not really related, but here's a reminder that I've set my calendar up to allow anyone to book 30-minute walk-and-talks with me in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
• Progress: The Biden Administration released new rules which will require water authorities to assess and then replace virtually all of their lead pipes over the next decade. “Digging up and replacing the nation’s lead pipes to address that health risk will be a colossal undertaking. The E.P.A. estimates that water utilities must replace about nine million lead pipes [note: this is a weird unit] at a total cost of $20 billion to $30 billion over a decade. While much of that cost will fall to the utilities, and most likely their customers, $15 billion in federal funding is also available under the 2021 infrastructure law to help pay for the effort. On Tuesday, the E.P.A. announced $2.6 billion in new funding to support lead pipe replacement.”
• It has come to my attention that I may have flubbed a hyperlink in this newsletter two weeks ago; the "review of the effectiveness of collagen peptide supplementation on (among other things) recovery from tendon and ligament injuries" is here.