This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
29 September, 2022
28 September, 2022
‘Putin Is a Fool’: Intercepted Calls Reveal Russian Army in Disarray
KYIV — The Ukrainian capital was supposed to fall in a matter of days.
But plagued by tactical errors and fierce Ukrainian resistance, President Vladimir V. Putin’s destructive advance quickly stalled, and his forces became bogged down for most of March on the city’s outskirts.
From trenches, dugouts and in occupied homes in the area around Bucha, a western suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers disobeyed orders by making unauthorized calls from their cellphones to their wives, girlfriends, friends and parents hundreds of miles from the front line.
Someone else was listening in: the Ukrainian government.
27 September, 2022
RON DESANTIS: THE MAKING AND REMAKING (AND REMAKING) OF A MAGA HEIR
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/ron-desantis-the-making-and-remaking-of-a-maga-heir
Like many elected Republicans, DeSantis was appalled when Trump ran for president. “Ron made more fun of Donald Trump than anyone I know,” one of the former DeSantis staffers told me. “He thought Trump was fucking nuts,” said another. Two staffers remembered DeSantis was particularly shocked by Trump’s appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Washington in December 2015. “This room negotiates…perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to, maybe more,” Trump told the audience. “Ron came back to the office and said, ‘I can’t believe Trump said that!’ Then we pulled up old SNL videos of Trump doing Domino’s pizza commercials and stood around the computer making fun of Trump for 30 minutes.”
DeSantis pivoted after the 2016 election. He hung out at Trump’s Washington hotel, pushed a bill to defund the Mueller investigation, and shilled on Fox News. “I liked him because he was out there defending me very strongly on the Mueller hoax,” Trump told me in an interview last year. In November 2017, DeSantis earned an invitation to fly with Trump on Air Force One to a rally in Pensacola, Florida. DeSantis’s congressional staff lamented his transformation. “Ron is one of the smartest people I’ve come in contact with. He had such potential, but he became nothing but a Trump suck-up. It’s really sad,” a former staffer told me. “Ron is an intellectual. And then there’s this persona he’s a populist-like Trump figure, which is very clearly crafted,” another said.
DeSantis’s MAGA makeover paid off when he ran for governor in 2018. During the GOP primary, Trump gave DeSantis two endorsements and propelled DeSantis to close a 17-point deficit on the front-runner, the state’s moderate agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. “Ron went through the roof as soon as I endorsed him,” Trump said. A month before the primary, DeSantis aired a campaign ad that showed him reading Trump’s Art of the Deal to his infant son, Mason, and encouraging his toddler daughter, Madison, to build a wall with toy blocks. DeSantis beat Putnam by 20 points.
How China Targets the Global Fish Supply
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/china-fishing-south-america.html
With its own coastal waters depleted, China has built a global fishing operation unmatched by any other country.
26 September, 2022
They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/business/nonprofit-hospitals-poor-patients.html
In 2018, senior executives at one of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital chains, Providence, were frustrated. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars providing free health care to patients. It was eating into their bottom line.
The executives, led by Providence’s chief financial officer at the time, devised a solution: a program called Rev-Up.
Rev-Up provided Providence’s employees with a detailed playbook for wringing money out of patients — even those who were supposed to receive free care because of their low incomes, a New York Times investigation found.
In training materials obtained by The Times, members of the hospital staff were instructed how to approach patients and pressure them to pay.
Thoughts on Internet Content Moderation from Spending Thousands of Hours Moderating Volokh Conspiracy Threads
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/09/25/thoughts-on-internet-content-moderation-from-spending-thousands-of-hours-moderating-volokh-conspiracy-threads/
It is a strange rule of human nature that most people who are moderated in an online forum feel, with great certainty, that they are being censored for their beliefs. Few people think they just went too far, or that they broke the rules. Moderation is usually seen as the fruit of bias. So liberal commenters were positive I deleted their comments or even banned them because this is a conservative blog and we were afraid that liberal truths would pierce through the darkness and show the false claims of conservatives. And conservative commenters were completely confident that I deleted their comments or even banned them because we are liberals trying to prevent conservative truths from exposing liberal lies. It just happened all the time. Moderation led to claims of censorship like day following night.
My Family's Slave
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/
She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.
Why I affirm and support same-sex marriage
https://www.fairlyspiritual.org/2022/08/28/why-i-affirm-and-support-same-sex-marriage/
Recently, I’ve realized it is right for me to affirm same-sex relationships and marriages theologically, publicly, and in practice. I no longer believe Scripture speaks against loving, same-sex relationships. I believe in the past I misunderstood the focus of Scripture and misapplied what Scripture teaches concerning same-sex sexual relations. To help you understand my journey, I’d like to share how I now understand certain scriptures dealing with same-sex sexual activity. I am not an expert in queer theology and my thoughts are in not exhaustive or complete. I am still learning and growing. I would encourage each of you to learn and to grow as well. Regardless, our convictions should be open to rigorous examination, with a humble understanding that we are all in process.
16 September, 2022
Civic Chill
https://peknet.com/2022/09/15/civic-chill/
Have you ever met another human, especially an older person, like an activist or social worker or community organizer, who seems to both give a f*** and not give a f***, simultaneously? Like, they are ready to march in the streets, get up in the face of the powerful, agitate and advocate for what needs to be changed, and yet they seem totally chill, relaxed and trusting at the same time? That’s what I mean by civic chill. It’s a passionately detached engagement. It’s the simultaneous embodiment of believing that what you are doing and saying really matter in a crucially important way, and that they are also doomed to fail. It’s a paradoxical tension in the best Kierkegaardian sense.
Some of you know where I’m going with this. And some of you are googling Kierkegaardian.
The kind of work Truss does in and with governments may require a great deal of civic chill. Or not. Whenever you start a project, the odds are not in your favor that you will ever ship something to production. Most often, failure to ship is not a technical problem and most often it is completely out of your control. It’s one of the many tech-in-government problems that are not about technology but are instead about compliance and procurement and budgets and organizational inertia. If you manage to ship, great! Celebrate! If you fail to ship, recognize that there are many forces aligned against you and it’s likely not your fault.
So you have to start each day holding two contradictory beliefs: what you are doing really matters, and likely it will fail and not matter.
14 September, 2022
Here’s Why Car Wheels Are So Flat These Days (And No, It’s Not Just Aerodynamics And Styling)
Have you ever wondered why designers show sketches of concept cars with massive deep dish wheels, but when those cars actually make it to production the wheels end up being fairly flat? Adrian Clarke talked about this recently from a designers point of view, but I’m going to tell you why this is true from an engineering point of view. In other words, I’m going to tell you why we just can’t have nice things!
Years ago, in days of old, cars came with wheels that had very deep dish styling. Life was good, cars looked cool and everyone was happy (okay, maybe that’s a stretch). Over the years, as technology marched on, deep dish wheels got shallower until finally, starting about 20 years ago, they became essentially flat on the outside. Why did this happen? Well, in a word, “steering” is what happened. The change from deep dish wheels to flat wheels can be traced back to improvements in the steering system — in particular, to the popularity and advantages of rack and pinion steering.
10 September, 2022
Mr. Biden, tear down this highway
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban-highways-segregation.html
We shouldn’t double down on the failed urban highway planning that keeps Americans divided from one another. The Biden administration ought to use the Civil Rights Act not to pause but to fully cancel the highway expansion project that would further strangle Houston. For the United States to adapt to a changing, urbanizing world, the federal government must reckon with the automobile-based segregation it has encouraged for the past 70 years, investing instead in public transit and walkability.
And yes, in many cases, cities should follow Rochester’s lead. Recognize that these hulking concrete structures are the mistakes of a previous generation. Tear them down. Let the cities and their people heal.
08 September, 2022
Queen Elizabeth II obituary
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/aac36242-eebb-11e6-b160-fe23d6a9b5dd
When the Queen became this country’s longest-serving monarch, the humility with which she acknowledged the passing of that historic moment reflected the same selfless dedication with which she once promised to serve her people. Some 68 years separated the pledge she made in Cape Town on her 21st birthday and the modest speech that she made on passing Queen Victoria’s record in September 2015, but even if the empire to which she devoted herself no longer exists, the values she spoke of then were the values to which she still held true a lifetime later. “My whole life,” she said, in that resonant passage that captured imaginations worldwide in 1947, “whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”
Let the Descendants of Britain’s Empire Have Their Glee
Imagine that you, like me, have familial origins in any one of the hundreds of countries subjected to the arbitrary cruelty of British rule. Most likely, you didn’t grow up with the view of Buckingham Palace in the skyline, but you felt the presence of the British Crown in other, more insidious ways: the enduring injustices of the slave trade. Views of poverty and underdevelopment resulting from centuries-spanning exploitation. Displays of plundered objects from your own country as trinkets in museums. The very presence of an iconic Indian jewel on the crown Elizabeth donned (and that Camila will now wear). The whitewashed legacies of empire officials who were violent bigots. None of which was ever actually corrected, with apologies or trillion-dollar compensation or even basic acknowledgement. As the Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara stated in June, referring to Elizabeth: “To this day, she has never publicly admitted, let alone apologized, for the oppression, torture, dehumanization and dispossession visited upon people in the colony of Kenya before and after she acceded to the throne.”
06 September, 2022
Socialite, Widow, Jeweller, Spy: How a GRU Agent Charmed Her Way Into NATO Circles in Italy
The next day, 15 September 2018, a woman with a long, Latin-sounding name bought a one-way ticket from Naples, Italy, to Moscow. For around a decade, this individual had travelled the world as a cosmopolitan, Peru-born socialite with her own jewellery line. Later that evening, she landed in Moscow and is not known to have left Russia since. She flew on a passport from one of the number ranges Bellingcat had outed the previous day – in fact, hers only differed by one digit from the passports on which Boshirov and Petrov’s GRU boss had flown to Britain just six months earlier.
The name on her passport was Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and as Bellingcat and its investigative partners have discovered, she was a GRU illegal whom friends from NATO offices in Naples had for years believed was a successful jewellery designer with a colourful backstory and chaotic personal life.
Organizational boundary problems: too many cooks or not enough kitchens?
See if you recognize this pattern:
- A recurring meeting starts out as a useful regular collaboration space. The team already has open access to its communications and artifacts, no secrets here!
- Members invite others who might find it useful or have something to contribute. Sometimes people invite themselves — it’s open after all.
- Invited or not, more people turn up, because that’s the way to be sure they’ll get information they might need or be present if the team needs something they have.
- Then, as the meeting size increases, the tone changes. People aren’t sure why other people are there, and they clam up. The spaces become more of a performance platform and less a place for messy working.
- People outside the team participate, but often lack full context. Their act of participating puts a burden on the team to respond to input.
- Now the meeting needs a pre-meeting and usually contains sanitized content. The work has shifted elsewhere, and the quality of information it contains has decreased.
A space that once promoted trust now diminishes it, but you can see the benign intent. As the original team, why wouldn’t you want to tap into expertise from across the organization? And as someone outside the team, in the absence of well-packaged information, why wouldn’t you turn up and get news you might need?