Guide to types of wood to burn in a fireplace

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/2plf85/guide_to_types_of_wood_to_burn_in_a_fireplace/

Laufey, dodie, and Jacob Collier perform 'Wild Mountain Thyme' with NSO

Crowd blending:

What makes CEOs successful

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

She couldn’t wait to work for Ryan Walters’ administration. Now she’s worried public schools won’t survive the rest of his term

https://kfor.com/news/local/she-couldnt-wait-to-work-for-ryan-walters-administration-now-shes-worried-public-schools-wont-survive-the-rest-of-his-term/

For the first time, someone once chosen by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to be a leader in his administration – only to later resign — is speaking out, telling News 4 she’s greatly concerned for the future of public education in Oklahoma under Walters’ watch.

If there’s one thing to know about Pamela Smith-Gordon, it’s that she’s devoted most of her life to public schools.

Jared Kushner Has Won and The New York Times Knows It

https://vickyward.substack.com/p/jared-kushner-has-won-and-the-new

I know from experience that Kushner’s word-choice can give his real meaning away. He once told me what he thought of journalists. He said, “If they were more talented they’d be in real estate making money.”

You could charitably paraphrase that as, “Mr. Kushner said he believes journalists are missing out on more lucrative job opportunities elsewhere.” Which has an entirely different meaning – and does not tell you who Mr. Kushner really is.

Gell-Mann amnesia effect (from a Michael Crichton speech)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-whyspeculate.html

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

 

Conan tells his side of story of meeting his wife Liza on Michelle Obama's podcast

 

President Trump and the Shallow State: Disloyalty at the Highest Levels

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psq.12792

President Donald Trump often complained about the “deep state” of career civil servants who, he asserted, were determined to undermine his presidency. But it was his own presidential appointees who most visibly resisted his directives. Political appointees are expected to be the most loyal advocates of a president's policy agenda, riding herd on the many bureaucracies of the executive branch. This article analyzes resistance to Trump's policy directives by his own appointees in the White House, cabinet, military, and intelligence community. It concludes that this level of resistance is unprecedented in the modern presidency.

Double-Entry Bookkeeping as a Directed Graph

Being such a fundamental part of the human experience, accounting has been around for literally millenia. It fostered mathematical and language development. In some cultures, it even predates written language. For this reason, it’s not surprising that accounting uses a very particular vocabulary and set of concepts that can be intimidating to a newcomer. Credits and debits. Assets and liabilities. Balance sheet. Ledgers and journals.

It took me a while to get used to these things. But once I did, I realized they aren’t that difficult. Maybe it is just a matter of finding the right way to explain them.

This series of articles is my attempt to capture some of my “a-ha” moments while learning accounting. Hopefully, it will help someone out there grasp these ideas in a more intuitive and modern way.

In this first article, we’ll start with the basics: bookkeeping.

Disclaimer: in this article, I’ll simplify some concepts and use slightly different terminology than traditional accounting for didactic purposes. If you’re an accountant, please bear with me.

mistakes at work: a round-up

https://www.askamanager.org/2024/04/mistakes-at-work-a-round-up.html

For example: I accidentally sent my boss to Italy instead of Florida

America needs more "bureaucrats," not fewer

https://www.slowboring.com/p/america-needs-more-bureaucrats-not

The problem is that contracting-out core government functions is really bad.

To be clear, it’s not universally bad. There are many situations in which the government really should just to go buy something. The government uses a lot of computers, for example, but it doesn’t make computers. Because generally speaking, the best time to contract something out is when a robust private market exists for the thing you need — the government buys lots of computers, but so do companies and private individuals all across America. In these cases, it’s easy to verify whether the price is fair, and buying things that private buyers also buy to some extent guarantees the quality of goods.

But over the past generation, there’s been a strong trend toward contracting-out basic government functions.

At worst you end up with, as Alon Levy observes in mass transit construction, “consultants supervising consultants” because even the ability to manage contractors has been lost. The more common problem, as John Gravois wrote way back in his 2011 Washington Monthly article “More Bureaucrats Please” is that the contracting paradigm leads to ripoffs. Indeed, government contractors arguably have an obligation to their shareholders to rip the public off. [...]

Over the longer-run, though, this dynamic leads to selective exit of a lot of the best civil service employees to higher-paid contracting roles, and eventually the loss of the ability to supervise the contracts effectively. And because there’s no private market for what you’re buying, there are no checks on quality or price. I think this all mostly starts from a well-intentioned place of sincere frustration with civil service rules that create real problems. But there is a serious time-consistency issue around state capacity. In the moment, it’s always easier to work around the lack of capacity rather than try to address it. The longer that goes on, though, the more state capacity decays and the greater the reliance on hacks and workarounds, until one day someone tosses out the idea of arbitrarily firing half the civil service with no regard to quality or job role. What we need to do is actually fix the problem.

How the Gas Turbine Conquered the Electric Power Industry

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-gas-turbine-conquered-the

This then points to a fundamental challenge of technology development. Technology improves in incremental steps over many decades (or centuries). There needs to be some way to fund that development over that period of time. In many cases, the market can address this, but if the technology is competing with an existing, superior solution, this is more challenging, even if the long-term prospects of the technology are brighter.

A TAXONOMY OF TECH DEBT

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL. I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible, I want to fix it.

When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology - for example League of Legends patch 8.4 - we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for. Countless blog posts, articles, and definitions have been written about this scourge of software development. This post will focus on types of tech debt I’ve seen during my time working at Riot, and a model for discussing it that we’re starting to use internally. If you only take away one lesson from this article, I hope you remember the “contagion” metric discussed below.

/u/Lapsed__Pacifist: “Do you ever tire of War?”

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/1altle5/do_you_ever_get_tired_of_war/

Over a decade later the world isn’t any safer or peaceful than it was during the summer of 2011. The US and allied militaries are embroiled again in another conflict in the Middle East, poised to spiral into a regional war if not carefully and diplomatically managed. Three US Army Reservists were killed just last week at their base in Jordan. If anything, the worlds gotten worse since then. Wars rage in Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, Syria, and Palestine and more.

I think of that brave Hazara Soldier, who likely spent his entire life in a conflict that he and generations of his ancestors could not escape. I look at the wars that rage today in Ukraine, Palestine, and Yemen, fueled by greed, hate, ideology, fanaticism, and fascism. The men who started these wars will never smell blood, or gunpowder or dust or fire. They will never hear the screams of the wounded and dying. For them it is all a game.

I’ll soon be receiving orders for another overseas deployment, which will be my sixth.

I feel like that sad, pitying young Afghan, asking the same weary question to the leaders of the nations who started and prolong these conflicts.

“Do you ever tire of War?”

Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs Gave America a Rare Gift: Harmony

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/arts/music/tracy-chapman-fast-car-grammys.html

When a beloved artist who has not performed live in some time returns to the stage, we often expect them to appear fragile, unsteady, ill at ease. But during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, when the camera first pulled back from a tight shot of a woman’s fingers picking a familiar riff on an acoustic guitar and revealed the face of the great, elusive folk singer Tracy Chapman, what you noticed was the joy radiating from her face. Her contented smile. The unwavering tone and rich steadiness of her voice.

It was a genuine moment of warmth and unity, the sort seldom offered these days by televised award shows — or televised anything, really. Singing her rousing 1988 hit “Fast Car” live for the first time in years, duetting with the country star Luke Combs — whose faithful cover of the song was one of last year’s defining hits — and taking in the rapturous applause of her musical peers, Chapman gave off the feeling, in the words of her timeless song, that she belonged.

The high cost of Uber’s small profit

https://disconnect.blog/the-high-cost-of-ubers-small-profit/

As Uber has been fighting those battles, it’s also been rolling out a new way to further empower itself. Surge pricing is nothing new — it increased prices during periods of high demand — but in the past few years Uber rolled out dynamic pricing to take it to a whole new level. Dynamic pricing makes rider fares and driver pay much harder to predict by causing prices to shift according to more factors that are hidden from everyone but Uber itself, and it divorces the amount drivers are paid from the amount customers pay for the ride. Further, as part of its upfront pricing policy, Uber also removes any context on the fare — or pay, for a driver — that it offers: whether it’s high or low, what a base fare would be, and why it’s made that calculation.

Drivers compellingly argue that upfront pricing is designed to reduce their pay, as has been painstakingly detailed in a column by Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman for Forbes. Long-time Uber driver Sergio Avedian told him it was “the latest in a long line of earnings reductions” because it ensures “a collapse of my personal Utilization Rate if I refuse to accept lowball offers, or a collapse in my hourly earnings if I do.” Drivers feel the company is testing to see how low of a payment they’ll accept for a trip and it will penalize them if they refuse too many rides.

/u/vacri on "What is something that Americans are (actually) very good at?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1au4h00/what_is_something_that_americans_are_actually/kr328vj/

Talking to strangers. As a tourist in the US, I had so many people in public just randomly start talking to me, just to pass the time. On a bus, crossing a car park, whatever. Just chatting to folks. They'd then hear my accent and the conversation would steer that way, but they still broke the ice first.

I did mention to someone that it was only men doing this, and they said that American women do it as well, just not to solo males (for obvious reasons). But with other women or a mixed couple, they'll break the ice with strangers as well.

I haven't encountered that in any other English-speaking country I've been to. Not at that frequency, anyway.

The Money Is In All The Wrong Places

https://defector.com/the-money-is-in-all-the-wrong-places

Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn't exist. You could be the most popular novelist in the world and not make $21/word to report. You could argue that no writer today is as good or popular as Hemingway was at his peak, but no writer today is even making half or a quarter of what he made, and writers only ever get so famous. If someone were paid $5/word in 2022—which is something I have never heard of happening and is a full $2 more than than anyone I know has ever been paid per word—that would be a quarter of what Hemingway was paid. That writer would be able to pay their rent and health insurance premiums and tuck some money away in savings off a standard-issue story per month, but again, that lucky writer does not exist.

What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut.

That's not because there isn't money to be made in any of these industries, either—not just Sydney Sweeney's, but mine, too. Some people are making very good money in these fields, and have been for a long time. They just aren't the people making the art—the product, if you want to think about it like that. They aren't the people whose names you know, whose lives can upend overnight because of the attention and lack of privacy that fame brings. They are people who profit off art without actually making it.

What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools

https://huyenchip.com/2024/03/14/ai-oss.html

Four years ago, I did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem. Since then, the landscape has changed, so I revisited the topic. This time, I focused exclusively on the stack around foundation models. [...]

I think of the AI stack as consisting of 4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications.

The Moral Economy of Tech

https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. Politics is the thing we do to keep ourselves from murdering each other. In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.

Second, the surveillance economy is way too dangerous. Even if you trust everyone spying on you right now, the data they're collecting will eventually be stolen or bought by people who scare you. We have no ability to secure large data collections over time.

The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just like we don't let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal information. The risks are too high.

I think a workable compromise will be to allow all kinds of surveillance, but limit what anyone is allowed to store or sell.

More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

There is also prior art in attempts at achieving immortality, limitless wealth, and Galactic domination. We even know what happens if you try to keep dossiers on an entire country.

If we're going to try all these things again, let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.

One Approach To Leadership Reflection

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-approach-leadership-reflection-aliya-bhatia

This fall, I’ve had several requests to share my leadership reflection practice. I felt it couldn’t hurt to write it down, for my own benefit to examine where it stands and for the benefit of others looking to refine their own reflection process.

There are 2 important premises to this exercise that are far more essential than any specific reflection approach.

First, the reason for these journals is that my memory (like that of most humans) is short, selective, and quite revisionist. These journals are designed to let me capture in short-hand various big picture ideas, personal histories, and readings. When starting a new project or a new job, I have my reflections at my fingertips: Checklists about how to launch a new team, strategies to harness the brilliance of a diverse group of people, and a glimpse of how I have handled (or, mishandled) similar situations in the past.

The window for great-grandmothers is closing

https://memoirsandrambles.substack.com/p/the-window-for-great-grandmothers

But even more interesting is that this “age of great-grandmothers” as I like to call it not only is ending, but it hasn’t been here for long either.

Now, I won’t dig too deep into the numbers but this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022. One can extrapolate it was even lower in the 1900s, and before then too.

What that means is that there probably weren’t too many great-grandmothers before the 1900s either. Indeed, people had children even earlier, but it was hard to get old enough to have grandkids even in that case.

So all in all, it seems that the window in history during which there were probably the most great-grandparents is kind of around now, and it’s seemingly about to end.

'Lose the Romney': Inside Ronna McDaniel's Long Fall

https://theankler.com/p/lose-the-romney-inside-ronna-mcdaniels

McDaniel led a secret and willful resistance (as did, with futility and not in secret, her uncle Mitt Romney). Trump wanted her to cancel the debates and she ignored him. Whatever Nikki Haley represented, whether meaningful resistance in the party or just a thorn in Trump’s side, was only possible because McDaniel, in spite of Trump’s ire, let the debates go on. 

Then, as it became obvious that nothing would interrupt the Trump march, McDaniel herself seemed to go on administrative strike. The RNC’s fundraising efforts, one of its key functions, providing another money spigot for the general election, seemed to dry up. McDaniel blamed it on the constant call for money to pay Trump’s legal bills, leaving nothing left over. But, in truth, the RNC, under McDaniel — who had assembled a national committee of Trump foot-draggers — stopped working. Passive resistance. Finally, Trump fired her — though in typical Trump disorganization, this probably came too late with the fundraising hole too deep to make up. 

McDaniel may have actually wounded him.