Regardless of what you think of Joe Biden touting this latest infrastructure deal as a “win”, it sure is nice to see that our government isn’t completely and utterly broken in the 21st century. It took months of bickering and infighting, and more than a few moments of political pettiness, but it appears as though we may just have an infrastructure deal after all. President Biden announced on Thursday that the White House and a group of bipartisan senators had reached a deal on a $579 billion infrastructure plan. “It’s been a very long time since the last time our country was able to strike a major bipartisan deal on American infrastructure,” Biden said at the White House. Biden said he and congressional Democrats had to concede some on what’s known as “human infrastructure,” such as investments for childcare and spending on climate change. Democrats will instead look to pass additional spending in a separate bill through a Senate budgetary process called reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority to pass legislation. And, despite no one having seen the bill yet, Biden is confident that Congress will send it to his desk to sign in the coming days. The radical left will likely be the most disappointed in the bill, after having previously suggested a goal of a $10 trillion investment in climate change initiatives.

Just north of Miami, in the nearby town of Surfside, there is a massive rescue effort underway as nearly 100 people remain unaccounted for in the wake of a residential high-rise’s collapse. That number was nearly double the early estimate, having risen dramatically on Thursday afternoon as more information became available to those leading the effort. The late-night collapse, which was captured on video by a nearby surveillance camera, appeared to be a sudden, freak accident, but new information seems to indicate that there might be more to this story. A Florida high rise that collapsed early Thursday was determined to be unstable a year ago, according to a researcher at Florida International University. The building, which was constructed in 1981, has been sinking at an alarming rate since the 1990s, according to a 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment. When Wdowinski saw the news that the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside had collapsed, he instantly remembered it from the study, he said. “I looked at it this morning and said, ‘Oh my god.’ We did detect that,” he said. But not everyone agreed with the assessment. Wdowinski said his research is not meant to suggest certainty about what caused the collapse. The building was sinking at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year in the 1990s, and could have slowed or accelerated in the time since, he said. In his experience, even the level of sinking observed in the 1990s typically results in impacts to buildings and their structures, Wdowinski said. He believes that very well could have been the case for the Champlain building in the 1990s, based on his findings. “It was a byproduct of analyzing the data. We saw this building had some kind of unusual…