How to be less neurotic about getting back to people

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-to-be-less-neurotic-about-getting

Remember that your primary job is being responsive

When you get an email from someone, you are, on the surface, being asked to accomplish some task, like schedule a meeting, or provide advice. But, fundamentally , you are being recruited to mitigate the nightmarish loneliness that plagues us all. Thankfully, any halfway coherent response accomplishes this job. You have acknowledged their existence: excellent! It can be extremely clarifying to look at this as the primary goal of communication, rather than, say, imposing your wit, or nullifying the possibility of conflict. Moreover, if this is seen as the goal, it might imply that you should put in less effort—a long, studied reply might be seen more as an attempt to impress, rather than a reciprocated connection.

How hard is it to cheat with ChatGPT in technical interviews? We ran an experiment.

https://interviewing.io/blog/how-hard-is-it-to-cheat-with-chatgpt-in-technical-interviews

As it turns out, not a single interviewer mentioned concerns about any of the candidates cheating!

We were stunned to discover that interviewers reported no suspicions of cheating, and interestingly, interviewees were largely confident that they were getting away with it, too. 81% reported no concerns about being caught, 13% thought they might have tipped off the interviewer, and an astonishingly small 6% of participants thought the interviewer suspected them of cheating.

The candidates who worried they were caught did have abnormal comments from the interviewers in the post-survey analysis, but they still were not suspected of cheating. To summarize, most candidates thought they were getting away with cheating — and they were right!

Jobs Americans Would Do

https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/

The celebration is not forthcoming. For all its talk about productivity, the business community’s enthusiasm for price signals and efficient market outcomes turns out to be rather selective. The implication of Bernie’s thinking is a second answer: that some jobs are better than others and should pay more. The programmer could pick lettuce if he wanted, but the farmworker cannot code. Past market outcomes were so readily celebrated because they reinforced this worldview. The phrase “jobs Americans won’t do” is so potent because, in setting out certain classes of work as beneath the dignity of the people issuing the judgment, it makes clear exactly what they really think. The irony is that, to maintain his faith that wages fairly reflect productivity, and advance his preference for a supply of low-wage labor that eases his own life and elevates his own status, the “free market” enthusiast must embrace the role of central planner overriding price signals with his own judgment of what prices should be.

 

A Visual Book Summary of Atomic Habits by James Clear

https://www.thunknotes.com/blog/a-visual-book-summary-of-atomic-habits-by-james-clear

Winners and losers have the same goals

What we really need is something that makes success inevitable.

Imagine two people trying to start a weekly newsletter. 

Person A writes down their goal, but they’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, so they don’t take action towards achieving it. Person B focuses on the steps to achieve their goal. They create a system:

• Write every morning at 8 AM for 30 minutes
• Edit on Thursdays at 6 PM
• Schedule the email to go out on Monday at 10 AM.

Which person is more likely to start a newsletter?

We don't need better goals. We need better systems.

Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Abuse Someone, as Long as Another Christian Does It: Part 1

https://laurarbnsn.substack.com/p/why-christians-have-a-hard-time-believing

There are a few beliefs that make Christians in particular subcultures vulnerable to believing abuse, particularly against women and children, is actually not that serious as long as it is done by another Christian. They are:

1. Hierarchy is Health. Good relationships are about knowing and occupying your assigned spot based on age and gender. Most social problems are caused by people failing to comply with their assigned rank. Relationships where rank and role are honored are healthier. Relationships where they aren’t are worse. In general, it’s more desirable to err on the side of a relationship being more hierarchical, not less, since hierarchy is itself an agent of good and order.
2. There Is No Trauma, Only Sin. Depression, mental illness, and damage are manifestations of sin and the individual’s bad habits. They need to be repented of. They have no more power than people give them. Trauma and mental illness can be set aside like any bad habit.
3. People Like That Are the Only People Here. As a result of the conversion experience and the Holy Spirit, Christians are a class of people whose behavior is rational, consciously motivated, and comprehensible to everyone. Christians make mistakes but are fundamentally trustworthy. Serious wrongdoing is usually caused by some kind of external agent, usually addiction or demonic forces. This state of being affected by the external agent is temporary and easy to resolve. Only outside the church are people likely to be recklessly and chaotically dangerous.

Two former CIA officials spoke to Insider before the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

https://www.businessinsider.com/george-bush-liar-cia-mohammed-atta-prague-911-iraq-invasion-2023-3

Alice: A lot of that pressure on the agency comes down through the briefers. They come back from their meetings with the president and other senior officials, give feedback. On a contentious issue you might go to a meeting upstairs on the seventh floor, with the briefers, where everybody is in the room. Once, I was writing a PDB [item for the President's Daily Brief] on what going into Iraq would likely do to our terrorism cooperation with allies. The message I got back was, the president doesn't want to hear about this. Iraq was a done deal.

Bob: They were all saying that. I mean, the US was moving our forces over to the Middle East big-time. You're not going to waste all that fuel and transport power and then listen to Saddam. British intelligence realized it first. They essentially said, "My god, these people are going to invade. It doesn't matter what we write. It doesn't matter what their own intelligence analysts tell them about the consequences. They're going to invade."

Alice: I remember just totally blocking this whole thing out of my mind. I was like, "No we can't possibly go into Iraq because that would be the worst thing we could possibly do." And then one day, I realized we were going. It was a done deal. It was a horrible thing. Because we had a real opportunity to deal a death blow to al-Qaeda, or at least get it down to a level where it would be manageable. Instead we blew it up. We created the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS.

Lessons learned from my time at the CFPB

http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/01/lessons-learned-from-my-time-at-the-cfpb.html#more-58926

There is a cost to keeping an agency digitally illiterate. But there is also a cost to reshaping a bureaucracy to do something new. Every time something new becomes a priority, a pre-existing operation, tool, team, or process — one that the organization doesn’t know how to live without — must end. That has consequences. It creates inefficiency. It confuses staff. It increases the risk that money will go missing or that data will be compromised. Why would a federal leader embrace these risks so that their successor can reap the benefits years later?

Pope Francis Defends Restrictions on Tridentine Mass

https://spectator.org/pope-francis-defends-restrictions-on-tridentine-mass/
Francis explained that this so-called disease of indietrismo is why he has restricted the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.

“After all the necessary consultations, I decided this because I saw that the good pastoral measures put in place by [Popes] John Paul II and Benedict XVI were being used in an ideological way, to go backward,” he said.

It is sadly true that there are some whose devotion to the Tridentine Mass is an ideological one: they reject the Second Vatican Council, they reject Pope Francis, and some even reject all popes since Pius XII, who died in 1958. Such devotees effectively choose a particular form of the liturgy — admittedly, a breathtakingly beautiful form of the liturgy, one long held in the highest of esteem — over unity with the Catholic Church, making them schismatic. 

A Technologist Walks Into the US Government

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/a_technologist_walks_into_the_us_government 

Help technologists stay in public interest technology. Many PIT recruiting initiatives often fail to create an environment that encourages technologists to stay long term (many go back to the private sector). In my own experience, technologists have left due to a lack of good management (which can be hard to come by in government), a lack of upward mobility due to career paths being unclear, a lack of opportunities to further sharpen their tech skills, and a lack of community. We should invest in educational opportunities for PITs to easily grow into their management and technical skills, and consider funding rotational programs for PITs to learn different ways their technology skills can be useful in government. We must also create community-building opportunities that encourage mid-career peers to network, share new opportunities in the public interest space, and offer access to late-career mentors.

Boards Are Broken, So Let’s Break and Remake Them

https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/01/05/boards-are-broken-so-lets-break-and-remake-them/

A small, not entirely complete list of the problems with boards:

• Boards are filled with people who have little or no expertise in the mission or the product of the organization.
• Boards gather only a handful of hours a quarter and usually don’t have enough time to do the things they say they will do.
• Boards give themselves ultimate decision-making power to determine the organization’s finances, policies, and future.
• Boards demand that we engage them, creating essentially another “program” for the staff to manage.
• Most boards do not reflect the communities we are trying to serve.
• Boards have no one to be accountable to.
• Boards decide who gets to be in their clubs.

The Institutionalist's Dilemma

https://theap.substack.com/p/the-institutionalists-dilemma?s=r

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, electeds, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. But when the party does manage to win majorities, it depends on support from a substantial number of anti-system people. Barack Obama defeated the Clintons with this sacred knowledge, before he started reading David Brooks.

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.

In the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency a lot of very intelligent people tried to come up with ideas for how to change the Supreme Court, which is poised to spend years eroding the regulatory state and chipping away at civil rights. Expand it, perhaps. Or marginalize it. President Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, formed a commission of legal scholars—from across the ideological spectrum, of course—to investigate what ought to be done about it. They failed to come up with any answers. “Lawmakers,” the commission wrote, “should be cautious about any reform that seems aimed at the substance of Court decisions or grounded in interpretations of the Constitution over which there is great disagreement in our political life.” You might be mad at the Court because of the decisions it produces, but it’s essential that everyone still trusts the processes that led to them.

This was a white flag.

The Empty Chamber (2010)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/the-empty-chamber

The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to coöperate across the aisle. The Senate, no longer a fount of ideas, became a backwater of the U.S. government. During the Clinton years, the main action was between the White House and the Gingrich House of Representatives; during the Bush years, the Republican Senate majority abdicated the oversight role that could have placed a vital check on executive power.

Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the Senate has increasingly become populated by “ideologues and charlatans.” He went on, “When we do get good people who come in, they very quickly get ground up by the dynamic and the culture of the parties. And once you get there, look at what it takes to stay there.” He spoke of Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who, nearing the end of his career, spent much of last year working closely with his friend Max Baucus on the health-care bill. Then, in August, Grassley went home and, faced with angry Republican voters and the prospect of a primary challenge from the right, started warning about “pulling the plug on Grandma.” Ornstein added that similar pressures had led John McCain to begin “altering his behavior and abandoning every issue, including campaign-finance reform.”

Elizabeth Banks Thinks This Interview Is Dangerous for Her

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/magazine/elizabeth-banks-interview.html

One of my least favorite things to do in talking to people like you is to represent all women in Hollywood who are doing interesting things. I am in a rarefied category. There are very few female directors in Hollywood. There are even fewer who are actresses who have become directors. I’ve [expletive] worked my tail off to be able to do what I’m doing. I would love for you to interview the studio heads and the corporations and ask them these questions, because I can’t solve it. I’m putting my head down and showing these big corporations that if they give women the opportunity to do this job, they can make a good product that can make them a profit. It’s a male-dominated industry. It’s a male-dominated world. That’s what I’m up against, but I can’t solve it and I don’t really want to analyze it. It’s not interesting to me. It puts me, frankly, in a position where the studio head is going to read it in The New York Times and be like, “Wow, that Liz Banks has got a lot to say.” I don’t need that added pressure. I truly feel that it’s dangerous to talk about these things now...

....I’ve just been put in this position of my statements’ being perceived as being grand when they’re really just about my personal experience, which is all I should be talking about. I was told by a big producer of big action movies that I couldn’t direct action, that male actors were not going to follow me. He was flummoxed at the idea that a woman would be able to lead the Rock on a C.G.I. screen, I guess? That was said by someone with a lot of power in our industry to my face.

You should’ve asked

https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he's viewing her at the manager of the household chores. So its up to her to know what needs to be done and when. The problem with that is that planning and organizing things (the mental load) is already a full time job.

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

While writing this piece, I was orchestrating a move, planning travel, picking up prescriptions, walking my dog, trying to exercise, making dinner, attempting to participate in work conversations on Slack, posting photos to social media, and reading the news. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to write, packing boxes over lunch, moving piles of wood at dinner, falling into bed at 9. I was on the treadmill of the to-do list: one damn thing after another. But as I finish this piece, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time: catharsis. I feel great. I feel something — which is not something I’ve really felt upon the completion of a task in some time.

There are still things to tackle after this. But for the first time, I’m seeing myself, the parameters of my labor, and the causes of my burnout clearly. And it doesn’t feel like the abyss. It doesn’t feel hopeless. It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

THE TRAUMA FLOOR - The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

Chloe cries for a while in the break room, and then in the bathroom, but begins to worry that she is missing too much training. She had been frantic for a job when she applied, as a recent college graduate with no other immediate prospects. When she becomes a full-time moderator, Chloe will make $15 an hour — $4 more than the minimum wage in Arizona, where she lives, and better than she can expect from most retail jobs.

Pity Writing Studies, the Field That Hates Itself

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pity-writing-studies-the-field-that

Obscure research is one thing; a failure to support teaching is another. A truly toxic dynamic for our university system is that the conferences and journals and organizations are run by the tenured, but the tenured don’t teach low-level classes. In some writing programs at research universities tenured faculty don’t teach undergraduate writing at all. (I in fact know of several professors who had to go to great lengths within their institutions to be allowed to continue teaching basic or freshman writing.) Instead, freshman writing is dominantly taught by adjuncts and, at schools with graduate programs, grad students. Again, the actual brick-and-mortar work of teaching students how to write sentences, paragraphs, and papers is essential to the finances of programs that run writing classes but disdained by many of the faculty who are funded by such classes. But the work continues, and freshman writing is sometimes cited as the single most commonly-taught class in the American university system. The people who teach such classes are typically overworked and undertrained, and they could use better insights into the process. More than once at conferences I met adjunct instructors and professors at teaching colleges who ruefully pointed out that the large conference programs contained not a single presentation that would be of use to people looking to teach actual writing. But the tenured at research universities don’t teach those classes, and the contingent labor that does lacks the voice to induce change.

Yesterday I Was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.

https://www.thefp.com/p/yesterday-i-was-levis-brand-president

Things changed when Covid hit. Early on in the pandemic, I publicly questioned whether schools had to be shut down. This didn’t seem at all controversial to me. I felt—and still do—that the draconian policies would cause the most harm to those least at risk, and the burden would fall heaviest on disadvantaged kids in public schools, who need the safety and routine of school the most.

I wrote op-eds, appeared on local news shows, attended meetings with the mayor’s office, organized rallies and pleaded on social media to get the schools open. I was condemned for speaking out. This time, I was called a racist—a strange accusation given that I have two black sons—a eugenicist, and a QAnon conspiracy theorist.

In the summer of 2020, I finally got the call. “You know when you speak, you speak on behalf of the company,” our head of corporate communications told me, urging me to pipe down. I responded: “My title is not in my Twitter bio. I’m speaking as a public school mom of four kids.”

But the calls kept coming. From legal. From HR. From a board member. And finally, from my boss, the CEO of the company. I explained why I felt so strongly about the issue, citing data on the safety of schools and the harms caused by virtual learning. While they didn’t try to muzzle me outright, I was told repeatedly to “think about what I was saying.”

Regulatory capture’s third face of power

https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/21/2/1217/7030814?login=false#407650172

The study of regulatory capture is thus the study of the third face of power. One of regulatory capture’s hallmarks is the appearance of consensus or a taken-for-granted quality in which certain social and economic facts resonating with dominant cultural schemas are made legible and commonsensical, while others are obscured. Policymakers consent to corporate policy agendas not through coercion or overt corruption, but through a process in which lobbyists embed themselves in policy networks and extend the ‘public interest’ to incorporate their own interests (Figure 4). While public officials initially had no agenda for grappling with data and digital trade at the start of the Obama Administration—and in fact were pursuing policies that would contradict the digital trade agenda—they came to understand digital trade as a natural extension of ‘normal’ trade policy and pursued a legal order for digital trade. As I show in this article, this legal order developed with technology lobbyists driving every step of the process, from initial policy adoptions to knowledge production, implementation and enforcement.

I.R.S. to Begin Trial of Its Own Free Tax-Filing System

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/your-money/irs-tax-filing-free-online.html

The Internal Revenue Service is rolling out a free option for filing federal tax returns this year to some residents of a dozen states.

Last month, the agency published details of its plan to test an in-house filing system, in which taxpayers submit their federal tax returns directly to the agency online at no cost. Residents of 12 states are eligible to participate if they meet certain criteria.

“This is a critical step forward for this innovative effort that will test the feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the I.R.S.,” Danny Werfel, the agency’s commissioner, said in a recent statement.

While the direct filing system is starting on a limited basis, it has already faced some resistance, particularly from commercial tax-preparation companies.

The forecasting fallacy

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-forecasting-fallacy

It’s time we opened our eyes.

Let’s stop clamouring over the ten-year trend decks. Let’s stop counting on the constant conjecture of consultants. Let’s stop trying to guess the future and start trying to build it.

We do not travel through time on a predefined path. The future is not fixed but the result of the actions we take in the present. If you want to be successful over the next 10 years, start building a competitive advantage over the next 10 months. If you want to win tomorrow, start tilting the table today. If you believe things should change in the future, put pen to paper in the present.

The future is uncertain. You cannot predict it. But you can create it.

Or as Cindy Gallup likes to say:

“In order to predict the future, you have to invent it".

Cheap and They Don't Snitch: Drones Are the New Drug Mules

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvma7/drug-trafficking-smugglers-using-drones

Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record. [...]

In October last year the U.K. government was forced to introduce no fly zones around all its prisons due to a “sharp increase” in the number of drones carrying drugs and mobile phones into jails.

HOWTO: Change your behavior

https://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-change-your-behavior/

In theory, behavior change should be easy.

At first glance, it seems like you control your behavior.

So, if you desire different behavior, why doesn’t your behavior change as instantly as your desire to change it?

In short, lasting change of habitual behaviors is a multi-stage process.

In 1977, as psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente were studying the behavior of smokers, they identified these stages.

Their transtheoretical model of behavior change captures the process of behavior change in six different phases: (1) precontemplation; (2) contemplation; (3) preparation; (4) action; (5) maintenance; and (6) relapse.

Risk-Aversion Is Killing Romance

https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/risk-aversion-is-killing-romance

It’s tragic, all of this. Tragic because it’s putting us on a trajectory to miss out on what’s actually meaningful. There’s no love without vulnerability. There’s no life without fear. And you will no doubt derail romance if you are too risk-averse. I’ve written elsewhere about how I think this fear of discomfort is in part why young people are putting off major life decisions like marriage and having children. What’s interesting to me about all these #childfree TikToks everyone likes to dunk on isn’t that people don’t want kids—I don’t think everyone should—it’s that they often don’t want them out of fear. Like that TikToker who created “The List”—a crowdsourced list of reasons not to have children that’s been seen by millions—which includes every possible risk from swollen ankles to rashes to bloating to muscle cramps. Really? We’re willing to miss out on the richest and most beautiful moments of being human—what actually makes life worth living—because it comes with risk?

The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/rebirth-russian-spycraft

How the Ukraine War Has Changed the Game for the Kremlin’s Operatives—and Their Western Rivals

İyad el-Baghdadi on the West's standing

https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi/status/1608104106781974528

For years we've been talking about the "erosion" of the West's standing in the world as a result of the systemic betrayal of human rights, free speech & democracy on the world stage. Decision by decision, admin after admin, year after year

Erosion is gradual and slow-moving, and can be ignored. Sometimes we can doubt if it's even happening. Until we get a natural disaster that reminds us. 

I can't sleep

https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/

The propaganda kills me. People I thought were friends, were allies. So much humanity for those killed on October 7th, none for the people killed on the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, or in November or December [16]. 20,000 people, killed by deliberate, indiscriminate bombing [17].

None either for the people killed on Oct 6th, 5th, 4th [18]. For the people massacred in 1948 [19] and since. No protest of the illegal occupation [20], the illegal settlements [21]. The razing of the villages [22] and the olive groves [23]. They don't exist to them; they didn't happen.

Hi! I'm Alicia Johnson, LMFT a licensed therapist specializing in burnout and stress. Ask me anything!

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18hniiw/hi_im_alicia_johnson_lmft_a_licensed_therapist/

You are correct that there is no formal diagnosis of burnout. in the mental health field we describe it as the complete emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion people face and the related symptoms that occur due to it.

People can recover from burnout by setting boundaries, living in line with their values, finding coping strategies, asking for help, changing careers/jobs, negotiating benefits/pay, finding worth in other places, and creating healthy routines.

It 1000000 percent is a structural issue. I use the term systemic but yes you are correct. All work is stressful and has cons but when there are these systemic issues at play that is where the burnout happens. It is when we are not valued at work, not given freedom or opportunity, no opportuntiies for growth, not having boundaries respected, etc.

Like a lot of things, even though we are not the cause, the recovery ends up on the individual.

Once They Were Pets. Now Giant Goldfish Are Menacing the Great Lakes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/science/goldfish-invasive-great-lakes.html

Inside a fishbowl, the goldfish — a species of carp native to East Asia, bred for aesthetic delight and traditionally believed to bring good fortune — is hardly more than home décor. Usually just a few inches long, it is among the easiest of pets to keep.

But released into the wild, the seemingly humble goldfish, freed from glass boundaries and no longer limited to meager meals of flakes, can grow to monstrous proportions. They can even kill off native marine wildlife and help destroy fragile and economically valuable ecosystems.

“They can eat anything and everything,” said Christine Boston, an aquatic research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

How millennials learned to dread motherhood

https://www.vox.com/features/23979357/millennials-motherhood-dread-parenting-birthrate-women-policy

Should we stumble across moms on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok who do seem to be enjoying the experience of child-rearing, we’re taught to be very, very suspicious. Assume they’re “pitchwomen.” Assume they’re ridiculously wealthy. Assume, as Times columnist Jessica Grose put it, that they’re mostly peddling “pernicious expectations.”

Like so many women, I fervently consume this content, wanting both to set realistic expectations for myself and to learn in solidarity with those who are already moms.

College-educated millennial women considering motherhood — and a growing number from Gen Z too — are now so well-versed in the statistics of modern maternal inequity that we can recite them as if we’d already experienced them ourselves. We can speak authoritatively about the burden of “the mental load” in heterosexual relationships, the chilling costs of child care, the staggering maternal mortality rates for Black women. We can tell you that women spend twice as much time as men on average doing household chores after kids enter the picture, that marriages with kids tend to suffer. We’re so informed, frankly, that we find ourselves feeling less like empowered adults than like grimacing fortune-tellers peering into a crystal ball.

Previous generations “did not experience the same vocal outward world that we’re living in today where everybody is telling you it’s almost crazy for you to have children,” said Sherisa de Groot, founder of Raising Mothers, a literary group focused on parents of color. “That it’s selfish for you to have children. That it’s almost, like, a morally wrong thing to do at this point, because look at the hell basket we’re living in.”

Taylor Swift Democrats: Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos" contest

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/taylor-swift-democrats

What many analysts seem not to understand is that most people are paying a lot less attention to politics than they are. If you’re the type who closely follows right-wing media, you will see that Twitter and Fox News provide a nonstop stream of profiles of liberal weirdos. You see the 6’5 man with the receding hairline dominating girls basketball or whatever, and think why can’t everyone else realize how insane liberals have become? Yet, I think for your average voter who’s not paying attention, they’re not necessarily noticing the craziest leftists and connecting them to the Democratic Party. Or maybe they are, but the connection is a lot less clear than the association that Republicans have with their worst elements.

The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity

https://www.okdoomer.io/heres-why-they-want-you-back-at-the-office-so-bad/

Before the pandemic, the internet was filled with stories about the evils of office work. It was bad for your productivity. It was bad for your creativity. It was bad for your health. They were trying to sell us treadmill desks.

Remember all that?

Now everything has changed. If you work from home, apparently you're a lazy bum who wastes company time by snacking, playing video games, watching Netflix, shopping, hanging out with your friends, drinking, spending time with your family, or having sex. You're an awful person.

How dare you cook a healthy lunch at home. How dare you go for a walk in the middle of the day to clear your head. How dare you take a short nap to regain your focus. Didn't you know that an epic commute is actually good for your mental health? Sitting in a cubicle is great for your heart.

So, what's really going on here?

It’s about real estate.

Decarbonization: Stocks and flows, abundance and scarcity, net zero

https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

My annual presentation on the state of decarbonization told with climate, capital markets, technology, and sector data. A coherent view of the future begins with the clearest possible view of the present. 

Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World

https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2023/12/STEVENSON.pdf

This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another.

This has a variety of implications. It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth. Understanding this shifts how we should think about social change and raises important questions about the process of knowledge generation.

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

More generally, most tech folks I'm connected to seem to think that Google search results are significantly worse than they were ten years ago (Mastodon poll, Twitter poll, Threads poll). However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great. E.g., a bluesky thought leader who gets high engagement says:

i think the rending of garments about how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown¹

I suspect what's going on here is that some people have gotten so used working around bad software that they don't even know they're doing it, reflexively doing the modern equivalent of hitting ctrl+s all the time in editors, or ctrl+a; ctrl+c when composing anything in a text box. Every adept user of the modern web has a bag of tricks they use to get decent results from queries. From having watched quite a few users interact with computers, that doesn't appear to be normal, even among people who are quite competent in various technical fields, e.g., mechanical engineering². However, it could be that people who are complaining about bad search result quality are just hopping on the "everything sucks" bandwagon and making totally unsubstantiated comments about search quality.

How to Be a Policy Entrepreneur in the American Vetocracy

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/11/how-to-be-a-policy-entrepreneur-in-the-american-vetocracy/

In our highly polarized political environment, five structural factors originally intended as checks and balances have metastasized into what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy”: bicameralism, the Senate fili­buster, presidentialism, adversarial legalism, and federalism. To be sure, these institutions also have benefits, such as guarding against the tyranny of the majority. But to actually change laws, policy entrepreneurs must design their solutions to run this gauntlet of veto points. It may be difficult, but it is possible to build state capacity while operating within the constraints of U.S. institutions: the federal government can use carrots and sticks to align state and local policy with its goals; Congress can use its authority to limit judicial review; and legislators can add riders to must-pass legislation.

Sam Altman, Freed

To explain, OpenAI as you know it is actually three companies, and its mission is, and I quote, to “create a safe AGI that is broadly beneficial,” which can refer to everything from a totally sentient artificial intelligence to, per Sam Altman, the “equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.” OpenAI, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Public Charity — a non-profit that owns and controls the managing entity, OpenAI GP LLC, which controls the holding company for the OpenAI nonprofit entity, which is the majority owner of OpenAI Global, LLC, which is the “capped” for-profit entity. It is the bizarre result of OpenAI’s 2019 move to a “capped” for-profit model — though one shouldn’t give them any credit, as investors are capped at one hundred times their initial investment.

While this may seem confusing, the ultimate result is that OpenAI is controlled at its heart not by its investors, but by a board of directors that doesn’t hold any equity

Sidenote: Currently, some in the valley are complaining about OpenAI’s board being “inexperienced,” as if tech’s boards of directors have traditionally done a good job. The same board that fired Steve Jobs was filled with prominent venture capitalists and executives, as was the board of WeWork, Theranos (which included military leaders and former secretaries of state), and Juicero. Jawbone, a company that went from a $3bn valuation to bankruptcy, had industry figureheads like Ben Horowitz, and doomed entertainment startup Quibi had the CEO of Condé Nast and the founding partner of top entertainment law firm Ziffren Brittenham LLP. In fact, I’d argue that the boards of major tech firms have overwhelmingly failed to police their companies, rarely, if ever, taking action against executives behaving badly.

Rosalynn Carter's Caregiver Legacy

https://www.southarkansasreckoning.com/p/rosalynn-carters-caregiver-legacy

You can also help caregivers. Text them. Take a plate of food to them. Offer to give them a break for an hour. Just say hello on the phone. A human voice goes a long way.

Caregivers are the strongest among us, but often forgotten. They can always use support and love, every day but especially around the holidays.

In Mrs. Carter’s memory this week be a bright torch for those caregivers who are weary and worried. Offer hope. Reach out to someone who may need a simple “How are you?” to keep hanging on another day.

And remember Mrs. Carter's words: 

“There are only four kinds of people in the world — those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”

Why I Am a Liberal

2. [Liberalism] consists of a set of commitments in political theory and political philosophy, with concrete implications for politics and law. In North America, South America, Europe and elsewhere, those who consider themselves to be conservatives may or may not embrace liberal commitments. Those who consider themselves to be leftists may or may not qualify as liberals. You can be, at once, a liberal, as understood here, and a conservative; you can be a leftist and illiberal. There are illiberal conservatives and illiberal leftists. Historically, both Republicans and Democrats have been part of the liberal tradition. Right now, some Republicans are illiberal, and the same is true of some Democrats. [...]

20. Liberals think that on both left and right, many antiliberals and postliberals have manufactured an opponent and called it liberalism without sufficiently engaging with the liberal tradition or actual liberal thinkers. They think that some antiliberals wrongly conflate liberalism with enthusiasm for greed, for the pursuit of self-interest and for rejection of norms of self-restraint. They think that some antiliberals describe liberalism in a way that no liberal could endorse. Liberals agree with the Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who complained of those who try to refute a position by mischaracterizing it: “The refutation of a caricature can be no more than a caricature of refutation.”

On Tyranny

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558051/on-tyranny-by-timothy-snyder/

1. Do not obey in advance.

2. Defend Institutions

3. Beware the one-party state

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world

5. Remember professional ethics [...]

12. Make eye contact and small talk [...]

19. Be a patriot

20.  Be as courageous as you can

Tim Scott’s landmark July 2016 speech on racial profiling

https://time.com/4406540/senator-tim-scott-speech-transcript/

I also think about the experiences of my brother who became a command sergeant major in the United States Army, the highest rank for an enlisted soldier. He was driving from Texas to Charleston, pulled over by a law enforcement officer who wanted to know if he had stolen the car he was driving because it was a Volvo. I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell, no matter the profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life. I also recall the story of one of my former staffers, a great guy, about 30 years old, who drove a Chrysler 300. A nice car, without any question, but not a Ferrari, not a super nice car. He was pulled over so many times here in D.C. for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car. He sold that car and bought a more obscure form of transportation. He was tired of being targeted.

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/04/brian-wildsmith-birds-company-terms/

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found

https://nishtahir.com/i-looked-through-attacks-in-my-access-logs-heres-what-i-found/

I've been self-hosting for over a decade. It's freeing because I own my data, and do not depend on any platform other than my cloud host, which I can easily switch off. Self-hosting gives much insight into what it takes to run a cloud service. Anyone who's had some practice doing this will likely tell you that the internet is a dangerous place.

Exposing any IP onto the public internet immediately invites a flood of malicious traffic[1]. While it's undesirable there's a lot to learn from this traffic so I poked through my access logs to see what sorts of attacks I've been hit with recently.

A Legal Expert Explains Why Alec Baldwin Was Indicted by a Grand Jury for the Rust Shooting

https://slate.com/culture/2024/01/alec-baldwin-indicted-charged-manslaughter-rust-shooting-gun-halyna-hutchins.html?via=rss

I talked to an entertainment lawyer about the first indictment, and he suggested that that’s not the understood standard on Hollywood sets. Around the time of the first indictment, almost everyone in Hollywood said that an actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert. Could Baldwin’s defense make the case that whatever understanding there is about who’s supposed to know what about firearms in other circumstances, there’s a different understanding on a movie set?

A movie set is still governed by law of New Mexico, and there’s no exception to movie sets.

Free to be Muslim and an American & Responding to Current Events

https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/free-muslim-and-american/r243jCUp87NVaT5mJPBNEI/

For me, this moment isn’t just a celebration, but an opportunity to continue to heal the false conflict between America and Islam that Osama bin Laden has tried to create. Born to an American Catholic mother and a Lebanese Muslim father, I have struggled to understand what it means to be an American Muslim. That day in 2001 changed not only the world and the U.S., but also challenged an entire population to define itself. Bin Laden not only created the plot that hijacked those four planes, but he also hijacked the message of an entire religion. No one has been as troubled these past 10 years as those moderate Muslims who have had to repeatedly hear this man try to speak for us. An Egyptian man once said it perfectly in a State Department focus group: “In the Middle East, if you don’t define yourselves, they [extremists] will."

https://willslack.com/responding-to-current-events/

But regardless, let this not be a week about fireworks, politics or the celebration of a terrorist’s death. Let this be the week that we can be reminded which causes are worth dying and sacrificing for. We will not always uphold these values perfectly, but there are angels to guide us on our way.

He Died in a Tragic Accident. Why Did the Internet Say He Was Murdered?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/nyregion/obituary-pirates-matteo-sachman.html

In the hours after his death, friends and family scrambled to find out more about Mr. Sachman’s death. Few details were available — no obituary, no news stories.

But as people searched Google for information, someone on the other side of the world was searching for exactly the kinds of reverberations that Mr. Sachman’s death had caused.

Faisal Shah Khan, an internet marketer in India, knew nothing about Mr. Sachman. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “Matteo Sachman” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.

To Mr. Khan, the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.

Mr. Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online, in which enterprising people take advantage of the void of information in the wake of a sudden tragedy to drive web traffic to hastily assembled articles and YouTube videos.

George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior

https://customsitesmedia.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/370/2015/05/17225158/George-Washingtons-Rules.pdf

By age sixteen, George Washington had copied out by hand, 110 rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. They are based on a set of rules composed by French Jesuits in 1595....

38. In visiting the sick, do not presently play the physician if you do not know therein.

44. When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well blame not him that did it.

48. Wherein you reprove another be unblameable yourself; for example is more prevalent than precepts.

50. Be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any.

73. Think before you speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring out your words too hastily but orderly & distinctly.

110. Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

Thomas Friedman takes stock of the war, over 100 days in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tom-friedman.html?showTranscript=1

On Israel, the three thoughts are that Israel is an amazing place. What it’s built in 75 years is amazing by way of ingathering of exiles, of culture, of revival of literature, of science, technology, agriculture. Israel, it’s an amazing achievement, number one.

Number two, Israel does really bad stuff sometimes, particularly in the West Bank, steals Palestinians’ land, allows settlers to kill Palestinians with impunity, lets Israeli Arabs be treated as second-class citizens. And third, Israel lives in a crazy, dangerous neighborhood, and the weak don’t survive.

Now, the same, I believe, is true with Palestinians. Thought number one, Palestinians suffered a true what they call Nakba, a communal tragedy. Another people, an Indigenous people but another people, came back in large numbers to claim their historic homeland. And even if they were ready to share it, in the end, for Palestinians, it resulted in a mass refugee population being created of people who were driven out or left by fear.

And it was a real communal tragedy that no community should ever want to endure. And they’re calling it a Nakba. A great tragedy is not an exaggeration.

Number two is Palestinians do bad and stupid stuff. They missed enormous opportunities. They’ve fought each other. They’ve done vile things to Jews. They have had a government that tolerated too much corruption. They do bad stuff.

And third, Palestinians live in an incredibly dangerous neighborhood that has often exploited them. There’s a phrase in Arabic for many years from 1948 until the present. It said, no voice shall be louder than the battle. Every Arab dictator loved to use that quote, no voice shall be louder than the battle.

That was saying no voice should be louder than the battle for Palestine. Therefore, don’t pay attention to my autocracy and my corruption. Let’s just talk about Palestine. They were used by the neighborhood in ways that were unfair and deeply detrimental to their cause.

The Queue

 

A vent about what happens in a court of law when rape is tried

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/199a9mh/waited_5_years_for_a_trial_and_got_a_4_minute_not/

and it only took the jury 4 minutes to make a "not guilty" verdict.

what was the point of all this. I waited so long. he had lied to police authority multiple times saying he never even touched me and it's in the evidence, but im the one lying? well it's now public and he just walks out of the courtroom literally laughing out the door. and nothing happens except me being depressed and feeling stupid now.

i was told it wasn't an "innocent" verdict but what's that supposed to help? because 12 people thought it didn't happen, he just walks out there after fighting for 5 years.

State SNAP agencies are overloaded — what *actually* can be done?

https://daveguarino.substack.com/p/state-snap-agencies-are-overloaded

One of the primary things that jumps out from that thread to me is the systems nature of the problem. In a lot of ways, caseworkers and the clients they serve are not in drastically dissimilar situations. The effect of the system being overloaded is different on each side, but this is not some zero-sum game where either clients get the benefit or the workers do: interests are more aligned than not, even if sometimes clients don't perceive it as so.

But the question I wrestle with in this is — given things are so overloaded, what actual interventions can be feasibly made here?

Kmart Elegy: A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction.

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/kmart-elegy

A REMARKABLE FACT: Despite the former ubiquity of both Howard Johnson’s and Kmart—and notwithstanding the nostalgia of their small communities of fans—both chains have left hardly a trace in the popular culture. In business, as in life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The demise of Howard Johnson’s, and likewise that of Kmart, is a cautionary business tale. But it’s also a humbling and almost spooky story. The orange-roofed, sharply angled roadside structures you’ll still occasionally notice along the highway have become something like artifacts; those big empty stores, many of them too dated or distressed to ever be occupied again, are our moss-covered ruins. Their big empty parking lots testify to something that once was—something that drew people by the thousands.

Apart from historians of retail or of the culture of the twentieth-century American roadside, few will care about these chains or their stories. And why should they, really? Without the nostalgic ties of personal memories to create a context for these places, they’re just buildings in a sea of others like them. But I find they have an almost spiritual use as reminders that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed.

An Idealistic Cop, a Forbidden Ticket and a Police Career on the Brink

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/nyregion/mathew-bianchi-nypd-traffic-tickets.html

The month after he stopped the Mazda, a high-ranking police union official, Albert Acierno, got in touch. He told Bianchi that the cards were inviolable. He then delivered what Bianchi came to think of as the “brother speech,” saying that cops are brothers and must help each other out. That the cards were symbols of the bonds between the police and their extended family and friends.

Bianchi was starting to view the cards as a different kind of symbol: of the impunity that came with knowing someone on the force, as if New York’s rules didn’t apply to those with connections. Over the next four years, he learned about the unwritten rules that have come to hold sway in the Police Department. 

Small Kindnesses - Danusha Laméris

https://grateful.org/resource/small-kindnesses/

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.....

u/MLeek on using "Karen" energy

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/191nv95/the_karen_phenomenon_has_silenced_me/kgwsmnz/

I just ask myself if I wielding my Karen energy for good or for evil. Because I inevitably have it. I'm a white woman of a certain age, with a certain level of education and entitlement. I can trip into it or access the Karen narrative the moment I express any criticism or anger in public.

Against a waiter or retail clerk? Absolutely not. Against a stranger just trying to live their damn life? No. Who needs that bullshit drama.

Against a cop or an older man, or another white lady, feeling a bit too comfy in their assumed authority? My 'Karen' voice is useful AF. 

Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/business/music-streaming-fraud-spotify.html

For all intents and purposes, Bad Dog’s music now belonged to someone else. Disc Makers wouldn’t press the discs until the band proved it owned the songs on “Jukebox.” Which meant the duo couldn’t even get a CD to hand out as a freebie.

“It felt like someone had broken into my house and stole my prize possessions,” said Mr. Blackwell. “And it’s not like I’m looking to make $10 from Spotify. It’s about attribution.”

Few in the business have ever heard of this kind of musical hijacking. That includes Bad Dog, which would spend weeks trying to reclaim its music, with little success. The fight was maddening even though it occurred on turf that both band members know well. Mr. Blackwell, 58, is a practicing lawyer who spends time on intellectual property rights. Mr. Post, 72, is a retired law professor who specialized in internet copyright.

When graphs are a matter of life and death

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/21/when-graphs-are-a-matter-of-life-and-death

This case study, based on real data, and devised by a pair of clever business professors, has been shown to students around the world for more than three decades. Most groups presented with the Carter Racing story look at the scattered dots on the graph and decide that the relationship between temperature and engine failure is inconclusive. Almost everyone chooses to race. Almost no one looks at that chart and asks to see the seventeen missing data points—the data from those races which did not end in engine failure.

William J. Crawford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Crawford

Cadet James Moschgat "was reading a book about World War II and the tough Allied ground campaign in Italy," when he read an incredible story of a private William Crawford who was presumed killed in action and whose father received the Medal of Honor for his son. Unknown to the Army and his family, Crawford had been captured by German soldiers and held as a prisoner of war for nineteen months until the war ended. In that book was a picture of a man who resembled his squadron janitor. Moschgat shared this with the other cadets and confirmed the story with Crawford who replied similar to "Yep, that's me." When asked why he did not talk about it, Crawford said, "That was one day in my life and it happened a long time ago." The word spread with new formed respect for Crawford.^[7][8]

In time, Crawford told his story and things he had learned in life to each academy class. His example also taught them many lessons. These sometimes subtle lessons became of great importance to many of the cadets. Here was a man presumed dead, whose father had received the Medal of Honor for his son from an Army general, then who returned with honor and continued to serve his country and later served them.^[7][8]

After Crawford rejoined the military and throughout his career he reluctantly wore his medal. For over 40 years, Crawford never had a single ceremony or recognition regarding his Medal of Honor award. The cadets at the USAF Academy decided to change this. In 1984, Crawford was a guest of the graduating class. Many past graduates, generals and VIPs attended this graduation. President Ronald Reagan arrived and presented the Medal of Honor to Crawford and formally recognized Crawford's action. In his remarks, President Reagan cited a few leadership lessons they learned from their janitor. Later these lessons were formalized by a former cadet, now COL (Ret.) James E. Moschgat:^[8]

Bill Crawford, our janitor, taught me many valuable, unforgettable leadership lessons. Here are ten I'd like to share with you.^[7][8]

• 1. Be Cautious of Labels. Labels you place on people may define your relationship to them and bound their potential. Sadly, and for a long time, we labeled Bill as just a janitor, but he was so much more. Therefore, be cautious of a leader who callously says, "Hey, he's just an Airman". Likewise, don't tolerate the O-1, who says, "I can't do that, I'm just a lieutenant."
• 2. Everyone Deserves Respect. Because we hung the "janitor" label on Mr. Crawford, we often wrongly treated him with less respect than others around us. He deserved much more, and not just because he was a Medal of Honor winner. Bill deserved respect because he was a janitor, walked among us, and was a part of our team.
• 3. Courtesy Makes a Difference. Be courteous to all around you, regardless of rank or position. Military customs, as well as common courtesies, help bond a team. When our daily words to Mr. Crawford turned from perfunctory "hellos" to heartfelt greetings, his demeanor and personality outwardly changed. It made a difference for all of us.....