A review of Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-apollo

Enthusiasm for the Apollo program tends to be focused on the astronauts who piloted the spacecraft, and on the NASA mission control staff that managed the flights from the ground. Comparatively less focus is placed on the actual construction of the Apollo spacecraft and the rockets that put them into orbit. Everyone knows who Neil Armstrong is, but almost no one knows who built the Eagle lander that carried him to the lunar surface (it was Grumman Aerospace). In fictional treatments like the movie First Man, the rocket is simply there, ready and waiting for the astronauts to take their historic flight.

But the astronauts, and NASA, were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of industrial infrastructure, made up of 400,000 workers and 20,000 individual contractors that designed and built the various rockets and spacecraft of the Apollo program.

Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, by Mike Gray, is a book about one of these contractors, North American Aviation, and the man, Harrison Storms, in charge of the company’s Apollo efforts. It tells the story of what it took to get the rocket from design sketches to the launchpad, the blood and sweat required to build a spacecraft capable of traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through the vacuum of space, landing astronauts on the moon, and returning them safely to earth.

“No inventions; no innovations” A History of US Steel

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history

Arguably, US Steel has been a disappointment since the day it was formed. It was created as a fundamentally conservative reaction to the vicissitudes of the steel industry, and this guided its early years and shaped its culture. The economies of scale it achieved were never passed on to the consumer, and instead it used its size to bully other steelmakers and extract money from consumers. When this stopped working, it used its political influence to prevent consumers from buying low-cost foreign steel. Improving the efficiency of its operations was something it did as a last resort when left with no other options.

The company’s large size made it unwieldy to manage, and it was late to every major advance in steelmaking technology of the last 100 years, from continuous rolling to the basic oxygen furnace to the minimill. When the company did try its hand at technology innovation, it reliably made missteps. 

Speak Softly and Carry a Long Roadmap

https://concrete.ghost.io/speak-softly-and-carry-a-long-roadmap/

Agencies need people who are in it for the long haul, who will take the time to learn the ins and outs of the architecture they're building on and the policy missions they're supporting. But every time an agency IT team attempts to hire great people, they end up reliving the same story: the applicants weren't good, or the application window wasn't open long enough, or the good candidates didn't make it past the first cut because the non-technical reviewer didn't know how to read a developer's résumé. So they cancel the posting and try it again.

The US Government needs a single recruiting team for digital: a single marketing budget, recruiters who know how to talk to the community, a single point of entry, and a delegated examining unit staffed with digital-savvy application evaluators. USDS's SME-QA project recognizes one aspect of the challenge, but it doesn't seem scalable. I'd rather have OPM post one cloud engineer position with hundreds of vacancies and share the cert USG-wide. I know USDS did a project with OPM in the past year or two, and that OPM recently created an office with a digital recruiting mission in mind. I hope this new outfit focuses on recruiting and hiring digital talent at scale, for the purpose of long-term placement within agencies. This is the long pole in the government IT tent, and it is a job that very few agency HR shops are succeeding at on their own. I'm optimistic about the U.S. Digital Corps, the newest USG-wide digital shop. It seems to have a model that resembles what I'm describing here.

Recoding America: A Rallying Cry for the State Capacity Movement

https://modernpower.substack.com/p/recoding-america-a-rallying-cry-for#footnote-anchor-4-102168485

As a result of the distance between policymakers and on-the-ground problems, we have a lot of dysfunctional policies and processes. But in waterfall, the upward flow of information from “lower” levels of the system, which are more proximate to actual end users, isn’t prioritized for cultural and historical reasons we’ll get into later in the piece. 

The upshot is that when a process is not going to properly achieve an outcome, a government staffer can either (a) go along with the process, outcome be damned or (b) pursue the outcome, process be damned.

Jen shares a couple anecdotes where government staff take the former path — Paula, EDD’s leader during the pandemic, and Kevin, a senior IT leader at Veterans Affairs (VA).

In the VA story, Kevin has been handed down a set of requirements by policymakers that don’t make any sense and will definitely exacerbate the problem of getting veterans the mental health services they require. At the time, 16 veterans were committing suicide each day. 

“I’ve spent my entire career training my team not to have an opinion on business requirements,” [Kevin] told me. “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.” Why? I asked. “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.”

The last thing he wanted was to have a seat at the table. Keeping his teams in order-taking mode didn’t make them immune from criticism—there were constant headlines about the VA backlogs and ongoing fury from administration officials who wanted veterans taken care of—but it had been a winning strategy for him personally. Like Paula, he’d been promoted countless times, rewarded by a rule-bound civil service regime that values years of experience and a clean record but has little ability to judge competencies, leadership acumen, or a track record of meaningful results. Like Paula, he saw withstanding the criticism as part of the deal. In the end, he could say he’d just been following the established process. He’d just been doing what he was told.

In defense of "The West Wing"

 https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing

And something “The West Wing” deeply gets about politics is that there are a lot of people like that kicking around. Are there kooks and grifters and opportunists and criminals and morons? Sure.

But you genuinely can’t understand key developments in American political history — good ones like the Affordable Care Act or bad ones like the Dobbs decision — without understanding the large and often critical role played by earnest people who sincerely believe in what they are doing. Even a lot of the really bad characters in politics — Paul Ryan, for example — are extremely sincere. And when you look at someone who is both bad and also non-sincere like Donald Trump, you can’t understand Trump’s successes without understanding the sincerity of many of his collaborators. For better or worse, helping Trump beat Clinton seemed like a good way to try to advance the causes of making abortion illegal and taking health insurance away from poor people, and unless you grasp the sincerity with which lots of Republicans believe in those causes, you won’t be able to make sense of how he related to the party’s professionals.

Jerusalem is Israel’s future

https://unherd.com/2023/12/jerusalem-is-israels-future/

Night after night in the Old City, I came to see it differently. It wasn’t the theme park for which tourists mistook it. This place was a chessboard of control — a battlefield of scuffles and brawls, title-deeds and court cases — where the kippah-wearing boy handing out tea under a camp light on the road to the Damascus Gate all night long was really a look out; where the new mezuzah, affixed to the door post on another Palestinian house these groups had purchased, was another blue dot on the board “reclaimed” for Israel.

This speaks to a growing seam of fundamentalism in Judaism — yearning for the Temple Mount. In 1967, the nation’s Rabbinate reaffirmed an ancient ban on Jews ascending lest they desecrate the ruins of the temple and Jewish prayer was formally discouraged by officials. But this is no longer a liberal Zionist Jerusalem. Today, a growing number of Jews are now visiting and praying at the site.

As Jewish extremists have focused on the mount, so have Palestinians. Over the past few years, a pattern has emerged of Arab rioters, fearful of half-imagined Jewish plans to erect their Third Temple, barricading themself in the Al-Aqsa Mosque only to be stormed by Israeli police. This, for Hamas, is central. Al Aqsa is at the heart of their message, ambitions and ideology. The war launched on October 7 was launched in the name of saving it.

Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/algorithmic_attention_rents-_a_theory_of_digital_platform_market_power_final.pdf

We outline a theory of algorithmic attention rents in digital aggregator platforms. We explore the way that as platforms grow, they become increasingly capable of extracting rents from a variety of actors in their ecosystems – users, suppliers, and advertisers – through their algorithmic control over user attention. We focus our analysis on advertising business models, in which attention harvested from users is monetized by reselling the attention to suppliers or other advertisers, though we believe the theory has relevance to other online business models as well. We argue that regulations should mandate the disclosure of the operating metrics that platforms use to allocate user attention and shape the “free” side of their marketplace, as well as details on how that attention is monetized.

Original Chex Mix Recipe

https://jawns.club/@bendystraw/111621044871558524

What makes a great manager.

https://emilyfreeman.io/blog

You can't hire for leadership and you can't hire for communication. And that's what distinguishes a great manager from a mediocre one. 

Leadership comes in a few shapes and sizes. There's not one prescription. But the result is loyalty and respect. And the gift of leadership is wrapped in the skill of communication — tailoring your words and message to your audience. 

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.

Ukraine's real power broker

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraines-real-power-broker-yermak-zelensky-russia-war-biden-2023-12

But the graft that has long contaminated the country's political system unsettles Ukrainians far from the circles of power. "Huge corruption" is Ukraine's biggest problem, an 18-year-old at a Kyiv café told me bluntly. "I love Ukraine," she said — but she hesitates to give money to the military for fear a dishonest official will steal her donation. Earlier this year, investigative journalists revealed that the prices at which suppliers promised to deliver basics like potatoes and cabbage to Ukrainian troops were inflated two to three times beyond the purchase price reported to government tax officials.

In polls taken last summer by the Kyiv-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation, Ukrainians listed corruption as the No. 1 obstacle to the development of entrepreneurship in the country — ahead of destruction caused by the war. And a majority of Ukrainians surveyed said it would be "appropriate" for foreign partners to provide military aid "only under the condition of an effective fight against corruption in Ukraine." On the most recent "corruption perception" index assembled by the watchdog group Transparency International, Ukraine ranked 116 out of 180 countries — not far in front of Russia, which clocked in at 137.

u/Normal-Flower4437 on context on disasters and Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/18b4wzz/cmv_the_establishment_of_israel_is_one_of_the/kc2gych/?context=3

The very fact that it is repeatedly in the news decade-in and decade-out, all the while with the populations on both sides increasing by a few million, is proof that it is not one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history. Were it actually one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history, you would have maybe heard of it once and then never heard of it again. Because with huge humanitarian disasters, that’s what usually happens. A million people die somewhere in Asia, and no one speaks of it again.

Making a Whole of Shivering Fragments: A Florilegium

https://www.faspe-ethics.org/2022-journal-tara-deonauth/

As a hospital chaplain, my work also brings me into communion with people at the end of their lives, though lives affected by illness, not the US justice system. In many of these encounters, I facilitate a life review: reflecting on significant moments, exploring related emotions, and supporting meaning-making. Some of these life reviews uncover confessions of wrongdoings or hurtful actions, expressions of guilt, shame, or regret, and utter confusion about the meaning of these realities. Only through the practice of a ministry of presence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic attention, do I find that these conversations can deepen into spaces that allow such revisitation of past suffering (“past” insofar as it has happened, but by all other accounts, viscerally present in their emotional and spiritual toll). My patients—in ways not unlike death-row inmates—have difficulty accepting the possibility of compassion, often on account of a system that disallows expiation and forecloses forgiveness. As a result, I wonder what it might mean to encounter and treat them as capable and worthy of full redemption, or even as already fully redeemed—to witness attentively the being of another and experience the oneness that binds us.

Jessy Park, namesake of College’s mailroom, retires after 43 years

https://williamsrecord.com/465397/features/jessy-park-namesake-of-colleges-mailroom-retires-after-43-years/

“Jessy, when she was first diagnosed [with autism], was considered extremely high functioning,” Paul Park said. “But not now. Williams is full of people who have been diagnosed as autistic, but they’re college students, or even college professors. The scale of it has really changed.”

“My mother was very proud of the fact that Jessy had a job, and then she started doing these paintings,” he continued. The mother of four children, including Paul and Jessy Park, Clara Claiborne Park wrote two memoirs (The Siege in 1967 and Exiting Nirvana in 2001) about Jessy Park’s experience with autism, which are now widely recognized “as an important and pioneering source of insight for autism advocates, mental health professionals and educators,” according to the College’s obituary for Clara Claiborne Park.

Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion.html

But as a professor in 2013, she had written a law review article laying out the kind of dilemma she faced in spring 2021. “If the court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the court as an institution might decline,” she noted. “Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.”

That July, with its audience before the court secure, Mississippi made the case more monumental, abruptly changing its strategy. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” the state’s main brief declared on its first page. It urged the justices to be bold. “The question becomes whether this court should overrule those decisions. It should.”

Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/long-covid-reporting-lessons.html

Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism. I understood these dynamics only after interviewing social scientists, disability scholars and patients themselves, whose voices are often absent or minimized in the media. Like the pandemic writ large, long Covid is not just a health problem. It is a social one, and must also be understood as such.

Dismissal and gaslighting — you’re just depressed, it’s in your head — are among the worst aspects of long Covid, and can be as crushing as the physical suffering. They’re hard to fight because the symptoms can be so beyond the realm of everyday experience as to seem unbelievable, and because those same symptoms can sap energy and occlude mental acuity. Journalism, then, can be a conduit for empathy, putting words to the indescribable and clarifying the unfathomable for people too sick to do it themselves.

Many long-haulers have told me that they’ve used my work to finally get through to skeptical loved ones, employers and doctors — a use that, naïvely, I didn’t previously consider. 

double spacing legal filing

66 pages of legal writing on the meaning of "double-spacing"

https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/D561FAQFBAakciPft4g/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/0/1700073478595?e=1701907200&v=beta&t=Ot6xpO_8WMEFo5yJH7BrcjBHaSIAg_BFfgV1OByaDS8