Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Anand Menon on racism: the UK has made progress, but this year’s riots show there’s a long way to go

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/10/04/anand-menon-on-racism-uk-has-made-progress-but-far-right-riots-show-theres-a-long-way-to-go/

Writing this, I’ve come to realise how appallingly selfish I’ve become. How my relative security made me blind to the insecurity of others. In my anxiety not to appear hypervigilant, I’d not called out as clearly as I should have the careless and provocative rhetoric, the talk of immigrants as vermin, the scaremongering about an “invasion”, the lazy elisions of “British” and “British-born”.

One of the big changes between then and now is the presence of social media and the ease with which fake news can spread (like claims the Southport murderer was an Islamicist who had arrived in a small boat). This has resulted in the paradox pointed out by Sunder Katwala that, in a society with ever-fewer racists, there might be wider experience of racist abuse and threat than was the case 20 years ago.

I’m still sensitive. So, too, I imagine, are all those who were on the receiving end of the casual, cruel, continuous racism of the 1970s. I hope my recollections about my childhood help explain why.

The $1,000 Wheelchair

https://newmobility.com/not-a-wheelchair/

How the YouTubers from JerryRigEverything are Making Affordable Wheelchairs Without the Red Tape

We have cancer

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/we-have-cancer

When procedures proliferate unchecked, they impair our bureaucratic functions. We should treat this as seriously as we treat cancer.

Ellen DeGeneres Is in Her Boss Era on Her New Netflix Special

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-netflix-for-your-approval.html

In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”

I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: A joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.

She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”

RESCUE AT SEA: Fishermen Reunite With the Girl They Saved 35 Years Ago, the Sole Survivor of Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwjR37keKs0

The Canary - Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI1NTk1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2OTc3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjU1OTUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImQyZTIzZDVjLWZiYTgtNGZkMy1iZjdjLWQyNTNlMzdjOGUxOSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tL29waW5pb25zL2ludGVyYWN0aXZlLzIwMjQvbWljaGFlbC1sZXdpcy1jaHJpcy1tYXJrcy10aGUtY2FuYXJ5LXdoby1pcy1nb3Zlcm5tZW50LyJ9.Ej8f5wr9mAhAoZixnV0LqwkbifeupQvSVB10tzpLVsY&itid=gfta

Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it....

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up. Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one. It felt like a rookie mistake — to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being. Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.

A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?

https://another.rodeo/tasks/

The whole thing started on the Midwest Dev Chat Slack, when someone posted a screenshot from their work Slack that read:

The fact that we only have "Herculean task" and "Sisyphean task" feels so limiting. So here's a few more tasks for your repertoire:

Icarian Task: When you have a task you know is going to fail anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down.

Cassandrean Task: When you have to deal with people you know won't listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start.
Odyssean Task: You'll complete but it will take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures.

From those first screenshots it took off, with the wits on Midwest Dev Chat adding more:

‘People need to see it’: How politics hung up a $42B Biden internet buildout

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/04/biden-broadband-program-swing-state-frustrations-00175845

The 2021 infrastructure law contained tens of billions of dollars intended to help rural parts of the country like southwest Virginia — but mounting political snags will mean the administration will have virtually nothing to show for it by Election Day.