Was “data journalism” a failure? What went wrong at FiveThirtyEight @ Disney?

https://www.natesilver.net/i/148340021/was-data-journalism-a-failure-what-went-wrong-at-fivethirtyeight-disney

Phil B asks:

I would like to hear more about how Nate’s ambitions for data journalism have evolved since he started 538. What did “conquering the world” mean back then? What changed? Also, with the rise of US sports betting and mainstream sports media coming to terms with that fact, what does Nate think about the prospects for a more data-oriented approach in sports journalism?

Thanks for the question, Phil. This is already a long newsletter, and I was tempted to break this response out into a separate post rather than burying it here. But having multiple threads for SBSQ wound up being confusing last time. I’m going to warn subscribers that I may adapt this response for a standalone post in the future, though — it will go on the Rainy Day List.

The early days of FiveThirtyEight @ Disney, circa 2014-2016 and originally under the auspices of ESPN, was a period I consider unsuccessful despite being presented with a very generous opportunity. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I frequently think about what went wrong. FiveThirtyEight, in my biased opinion, developed into an excellent site by ~2018 (until Disney basically let us stop re-hiring open positions by ~2021, a sign of trouble to come). But those early years were rough, and I was unhappy, so here’s an inventory of Mistakes That Were Made — or really Mistakes That I Made — should any of you find yourself in a similar position

Lessons in Freedom From the Puritans

https://www.persuasion.community/p/lessons-in-freedom-from-the-puritans

The Puritans offer a cautionary tale of what we should and should not do in our own attempts to secure a more robust freedom. John Winthrop was completely correct that the freedom to do whatever we want does nothing to differentiate man from beast, and can cause society to degenerate into a war of self interest. In our contemporary moment, we have perhaps forgotten this important reality—veering heavily into a culture where everyone is submerged in an ocean of their own selfishness. If you walk up to the average person on the street and ask them what freedom is, they will likely say some variation of “doing whatever you want.” This understanding of freedom as license is appealing for obvious reasons, but it has led to a selfish, unhappy, and restless generation.

At the same time, the Puritans also warn us to be careful about how we correct the individualism of the modern age. Many who understand society’s ills move in the opposite direction—they see a listless civilization and argue that the only cure is harsh moral prescription. In truth, neither laissez-faire liberty nor reactionary morals are the solution to the ills that plague our society. We have to find a middle ground. After all, there would be no greater tragedy than vanquishing the despotism of the self only to plunge into the despotism of the collective.

Do tech workers have a reason to love monopolies?

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/feb/19/tech-workers-monopoly-and-monopsony/

This provides the possibility that for tech workers, their employers being monopolists may in fact be a best of both worlds situation.5 Tech workers benefit from their employers' monopolies because those monopolies produce excess profits from which tech workers can be paid substantial salaries, while also reducing the necessary quality of their work.6 At the same time, tech workers face effectively no risk of monopsony, and thus benefit from typical competitive dynamics with respect to their employment, while also not being significantly impacted by output reduction. A market with many buyers, where all of them have lots of cash, is a great market in which to be a seller.

Which means we may have an entire class of employees who have a structural incentive to want their employers to be monopolists.

DOGE Understands Something the US Policy Establishment Does Not: Technology is the Spinal Cord of Government

https://www.techpolicy.press/doge-understands-something-the-us-policy-establishment-does-not-technology-is-the-spinal-cord-of-government/

For the US Digital Service, broken websites or applications were often the tip of the spear that would enable us to go beyond the visible problem, and both understand and address the real problems that were in the invisible layers below it. Those problems might be the technical system itself—or more likely procurement, hiring issues, outdated or misinterpreted policies, convoluted business processes, or some combination of all of these things.

Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been dismissed as an afterthought by policy experts both inside and outside of the government. Over decades, the US government systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through multi-billion dollar contracts. Today, government employees largely do not design or build products or systems, they “manage” implementation of systems developed by contractors or consultants.

In this formulation, technology is subordinate to the policy work, when the truth is that policy is inextricably entangled with technology. Separating policy from the technology it depends on has been a root cause of much of the dysfunction we have grappled with across government for decades.

Technology is not an extra thing that you add onto government programs and services—it IS the service. It’s not an extra thing that you add into the institution—it is the spinal cord of the institution. Sort of like how cars are no longer mechanical, they are now computers wrapped in metal. People working in tech understand this implicitly.

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rifling-through-archives-legendary-historian-robert-caro-180985956/

Caro laughs. “It’s not going to happen,” he says. “Because I’ll tell you why. Because it’s all outlined. It’s one book. His presidency is Vietnam and the Great Society. They’re not two different things. He’s doing Vietnam and doing the Great Society simultaneously. So the book is definitely one book. In this book, there’s an ending. I have my ending, and I have all the things leading up to it. It’s not just Medicare. In ’65, he passes Medicare, Medicaid, seven different education bills. Everything we think of: student loans, college construction, reforms the immigration bill and does other stuff. At the same time, he’s escalating the Vietnam War. It’s one story.” [...]

We talk some more about perhaps his most enduring theme: power. He’s all too aware of the truisms. “I don’t believe that power always corrupts,” he says. “Power reveals.” His work has shown, over and over, that as people fight their way to power, they often hide what they really think, who they really are. But once they have power, the truth—good or bad, ugly or admirable—inevitably reveals itself.

u/turd_ferguson7111 on the death of HVAC

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/1ir2xvn/advise_from_an_hvac_technician_to_homeowners/

A lot of the smaller shops that provided the type of service I was taught as an apprentice have disappeared. When I started in the late 90’s a lot of the owners were baby boomers. These owners started to want to retire in the early 2000’s and that’s when private equity began to buy shops up because they were essentially recession proof. With all the influx of money more people jumped in purely to profit. Then the cycle of private equity turning smaller companies into giant regional companies began. They charged unreal amounts to the customers and mainly preyed off homeowners ignorance and lack of patience. It became more about getting into a service call purely for maximum profit without real intentions of looking out for the customers. This lead to record profits and a trend just about every owner in my industry regardless of size jumped on. It became a money grab. [...]

I truly mourn the death of the industry I knew. Now I’m on my way out since I’m basically a dinosaur in this industry with my ethics. My ask to anyone who can answer what is a good industry for a guy with mechanical skills and ethics?

James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/04/rupert-murdoch-family-succession-james-murdoch/681675/

Lachlan had by now spent years building the case to his father that James was plotting a coup. In the fall of 2022, an unauthorized biography of Lachlan had been published in Australia containing an incendiary quote from an anonymous source about James’s purported plans: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.” When the quote made international headlines, Lachlan told Rupert that James’s camp was responsible. A few months later, in January 2023, the Financial Times ran a story detailing “how the scions could battle for control” of the family trust after Rupert was gone. Once again, Lachlan pointed the finger at his brother.

As it turned out, according to evidence that would later surface at trial, James had no involvement in either story—but Lachlan did. It was McKenna who had, with Lachlan’s approval, spent more than 14 hours giving anonymous interviews to the biographer. And Brian Nick, an executive at Fox, had anonymously briefed the Financial Times. (Nick denied providing information to the Financial Times.) But to Rupert, the stories only confirmed that he needed to act decisively.

[...]

Isn’t it true that Fox is the top cable-news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want? the lawyer asked him.

I would disagree with the idea that respect and giving people what they want are the same thing, James countered.

But the lawyer didn’t seem interested in the distinction. Are you aware that Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020? he asked. James said he was. And you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election-denial coverage, right? the lawyer said.

Milchick and the Ethical Plight of the Decent Middle Manager

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1ip8uc1/milchick_and_the_ethical_plight_of_the_decent/

Most of my personal career has been as a supervisor/manager in warehouses, which is a much more blue collar atmosphere than Severance is depicting, so the comparisons only go so far, but I had a brief (BRIEF) stint working for a chinese-owned company that had expanded into having a few locations in the states, and most of their upper management came from their facilities in China and Thailand, which were legitimately sweatshops. All things it would've been great to know going in, but they massaged that truth quite a bit going in. Their employee base was largely immigrant populations, and given that this was Arizona, well, you can do the math there. Anyway, about a month in I was already looking for a way out and had a one on one with my direct manager who "had some concerns" with the way I was handling my department, namely that I was being too nice with them (i.e. we were hitting all production goals, but I was treating them like human beings too frequently, vis-à-vis bathroom breaks when requested and so forth). We spent like half an hour going back and forth with me not understanding what he was actually trying to tell me to do because he wouldn't just come out and say it and finally he just got this insane fucking smile and said "I need you to tighten the leash." I realized that it wasn't about the numbers. I mean it was about the numbers, but it's not about the numbers TODAY. It's about sustained numbers, and their ethos was that the only way to do that was complete and utter control. Dehumanization. Management is HERE, you are THERE, and I wasn't getting with the program. I left shortly thereafter.

A drone damaged the outer shell of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-chernobyl-zelenskyy-71d781dbd66754d0a548edd388f3447a

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A drone armed with a warhead hit the outer protective shell of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant early Friday, damaging the structure and briefly starting a fire, in an attack Kyiv blamed on Russia. The Kremlin denied it was responsible.

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/

Unfortunately, things became less fun after a while. First, there were the issues upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, which I’ve already spoken at length about and I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say, being in a position to have to upstream code across practically every Linux subsystem, touching drivers of all categories as well as some common code, is an incredibly frustrating experience.

But then also came the entitled users. This time, it wasn’t about stealing games, it was about features. “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” (nobody ever complained when compared to x86 laptops…) “I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one).

And, of course, “When is M3/M4 support coming?”

For a long time, well after we had a stable release, people kept claiming Asahi Linux and Fedora Asahi Remix in particular were “alpha” and “unstable” and “not suitable for a daily driver” (despite thousands of users, myself included, daily driving it and even using it for servers).

No matter how much we did, how many impossible feats we pulled off, people always wanted more. And more. Meanwhile, donations and pledges kept slowly decreasing, and have done so since the project launched. Not enough to spell immediate doom for my dream of working on Asahi full time in the short term, but enough to make me wonder if any of this was really appreciated. The all-time peak monthly donation volume was the very first month or two. It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had.

I'm a Federal Employee at Social Security, here's a little about my job and why I'm fed up with the way people are talking about us.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1ingu2k/im_a_federal_employee_at_social_security_heres_a/

As for me, within three years I was assigned to a specialized unit that handles SSI redeterminations. This role, while also conducting the regular duties of a claim specialist, is expected to have expertise in SSI and it's system on top of the expected knowledge of SSA benefits. There are only three of us that do this in my office, and we are responsible for reviewing at least 5000 claims in a fiscal year, updating them with current information, and then closing out these reviews. That means that every month we are expected to clear 138 redeterminations. That's 38 a week per reviewer. We have to do this in order to justify our budget to the government. I interview typically 8 SSI recipients every day, except one day a week I do general claim interviews for retirement and disability applications.

Sound easy? Well it's not. The laws that determine SSI eligibility are incredibly complex, far more so than regular disability benefits, and ever piece of information counts. Reviews can take anywhere from 20 minutes to months depending on the severity of the recipient's failure to report changes, work, moves, and more. Never mind the fact that many times these are people who hate SSA employees and are rude and aggressive towards us. There is so much more to my job that I simply cannot list in this post. There are no systems that exist that can do what my coworkers and I do.

No State Improved in Both Math and Reading on the NAEP

https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ERS-2025-National-PR_FINAL.pdf

1. As of Spring 2024, the average U.S. student remained nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in math and reading. Students are even further behind in reading than they were in 2022. 
2. Although no state scored above 2019 levels on the NAEP assessment in both math and reading, a number of districts are scoring above 2019 levels in both subjects. 17 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 are in districts with mean math achievement above 2019, 11 percent are in districts that have recovered in reading, and 6 percent are in districts which have recovered in both subjects. 
3. District-level data reveal pockets of success and continued struggle in most states. For instance, the NAEP reported that only one state, Alabama, had average achievement above 2019 levels in 4 th grade math. Yet, even in Alabama, about one-third of students (38 percent) are enrolled in districts whose math achievement remains below 2019 levels. A number of districts in Alabama, such as Montgomery, remain 40 percent or more of a grade level behind their own achievement in 2019. Meanwhile, some high poverty districts such as Birmingham have nearly recovered in both math and reading.

Toward a non-constant cancellation function

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8654

The sad part is that, in practice, the criteria for cancellation have tended instead to be things like:

• Is the target giving off signals of shame, distress, and embarrassment—thereby putting blood in the water and encouraging us to take bigger bites?
• Do we, the mob, have the power to cancel this person? Does the person’s reputation and livelihood depend on organizations that care what we think, that would respond to pressure from us? 

Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

https://cacm.acm.org/research/metas-hyperscale-infrastructure-overview-and-insights/

This article provides a high-level overview of Meta’s hyperscale infrastructure, focusing on key insights from its development, particularly in systems software. Where relevant, we highlight differences from public clouds, as varying constraints have led to distinct optimizations. While much of the knowledge presented here has been shared and practiced within the industry and research community, including insights from our past publications, the article’s primary contribution is to provide a holistic perspective that helps readers build a comprehensive mental model of hyperscale infrastructure end to end.

Police-Induced Confessions, 2.0: Risk Factors and Recommendations

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-79126-001.html

Wrongful conviction databases have shed light on the fact that innocent people can be induced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on police practices, core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving multiple methodologies, this article updates the original Scientific Review Paper (Kassin et al., 2010) on the causes, consequences, and remedies for police-induced false confessions. First, we describe the situational and personal risk factors that lead innocent people to confess and the collateral consequences that follow—including the corruptive effects of confession on other evidence, the increased likelihood of conviction at trial, the increased tendency to plead guilty despite innocence, the stigma that shadows false confessors even after exoneration, and the failure of Miranda to serve as a safeguard. Next, we propose the following remedies: 

The Stroad

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad

Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.

Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad — a road on rails — where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.

Stroads: Stroads are a mash-up of these two types of paths. We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.

House Republicans’ Big Open Secret: They’re Voting by ‘Proxy’ All the Time

https://www.notus.org/house/republicans-proxy-voting-house

It’s an irritating situation for GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who has led a bipartisan effort to allow new parents to vote by proxy. She experienced health complications during her pregnancy in 2023 that prevented her from traveling to Washington.

“Every single person on the floor, I think with the exception of like, five, has done it,” she told NOTUS when asked about members handing each other their voting cards, specifying that she’s only seen it happen on the floor or by the voting machines. “Technically, that’s vote by proxy,” she said.

Luna added that it was more reason for her colleagues to support her vote-by-proxy resolution.

A House leadership aide told NOTUS that GOP leaders are concerned that allowing proxy voting in special circumstances could lead to a “slippery slope dynamic,” and that it would be an impediment to “member collegiality.” During the pandemic, some members claimed they were absent and needed to vote by proxy due to health concerns or pandemic-related travel disruption, but they were campaigning for other offices back home — in person — at the same time.

Trump is Doing Surprisingly Well with Minority Voters. It Might Not Matter.

https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/11/02/understanding-trump-success-minority-voters/

That is, on balance, these “racist” messages seemed to resonate more strongly with minorities than whites! Across racial groups, most did not find the messages to be racist or offensive — despite researchers viewing these examples as clear-cut cases of racial dog whistles.

As I pointed out back in 2016, another key factor for understanding minority support for Trump may be that minorities often hold antipathy toward other minority groups. As a consequence, even if we understand many of Trump’s policies and rhetoric to indeed be racist, minorities could support Trump precisely because his rhetoric or policies seem to target other minorities, whom they also dislike. 

Many in academia and the media have a hard time with this. Newsrooms are disproportionately white and liberal spaces — much like institutions of higher learning. However, white liberals tend to hold peculiar views on racial issues — be it as compared to other whites or to people of color.

For instance, they often seem to think in intersectional terms: campaigns to assist Muslims, poor people, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ Americans, women, etc. are viewed as fundamentally interconnected — part of the same overarching struggle for justice and equality. Within this worldview, it would be natural to assume that if Trump says something negative about one minority group, it will likely alienate other minorities as well. Indeed, academics generally avoid examining anti-minority sentiment among members of minority groups — focused nearly exclusively on bigotry among whites.

However, as a matter of fact, people from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups often hold very negative opinions of people from other minority populations — and do not seem to approach social issues in intersectional terms. 

Values

https://buildingslack.com/values/

Writing down our values

On a sunny day in the spring of 2015, Stewart gathered a small set of early employees and leaders at the company. He projected a list of company values on the screen in bold block letters:

• INTEGRITY
• COMMUNICATION
• RESPECT
• EXCELLENCE

“Guess which company has these values?” he asked. After a beat, he delivered the punchline: “Enron.” A byword for corporate fraud, corruption and failure. “We’re not allowed to have any of these words in our values. Integrity is probably in the corporate values of half the Fortune 500. And look at how they behave.”

His point? Words don’t mean much if you don’t actually live up to and embody their meaning in how you work.

In Manifesto, Ministers United Against Intolerance

https://web.archive.org/web/20220629230241/https://www.npr.org/2007/10/26/15643777/in-manifesto-ministers-united-against-intolerance#15643953

4. HATRED and scorn for those of another race, or for those who hold a position different from our own, can never be justified. It is only as we approach our problems in a spirit of mutual respect of charity, and of good will that we can hope to understand one another, and to find the way to a cooperative solution of our problems. God is no respector of persons. Every human personality is precious in His sight. No policy which seeks to keep any man from developing fully every capacity of body, mind and of spirit can be justified in light of Scripture. This is the message of the Hebrew prophets as it is of Christ and His disciples. We shall solve our difficulties when we learn to walk in obedience to the Golden Rule: "Therefore, all things, whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them for this is the law and the prophets."

u/GuessWhoIsBackNow on joy vs drugs

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1iby7in/is_orgasm_the_best_feeling_a_human_can_get_or/m9mllgl/?context=3

Going on a good and challenging run, having sex with someone you love, accomplishing something you worked very hard to achieve, these generate these kind of, healthy, serene feelings of joy. It’s a really comfortable, enjoyable type of happiness that doesn’t feel straining or overly intense. Drugs cannot beat this.

What drugs can do, is artificially boost you far beyond that level of joy. Yet the joy feels different.

Even though it’s a far more intense kind of happiness, there’s always that lingering, creeping feeling in the back of your head. That little voice that says ’it’s going to stop working soon and then you’ll feel like shit’. ’The party’s over, all good things come to an end buddy’, ’you’re a useless, drug abusing piece of shit, why are you up at 6 a clock, you have work tomorrow!’

Neither U.S. Spy Nor KGB Foe Could Turn the Other

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-30-mn-3494-story.html?repost=true

Almost immediately, Platt found that despite his secret mission to recruit Vasilenko, he was being charmed by the Russian. “Halfway through the game I realized, I really like this guy,” he recalled in an interview.

Platt persisted, even though Vasilenko showed no interest in the American’s blandishments.

“I never stopped trying to recruit him,” sighed Platt. “But he never crossed the line.” The best evidence: Vasilenko never told Platt about Pelton, who wasn’t caught until he was compromised by a Soviet defector, KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, in 1985.

Instead, Vasilenko tried to turn the tables, asking Platt to work for the KGB, with dismal results. Platt recalls telling Vasilenko: “What in the hell can you offer me?”

Through their awkward espionage courtship, Platt and Vasilenko gradually discovered they were soul mates--streetwise risk-takers who shared a voracious love for the spy game and a disdain for the faceless bureaucrats back at headquarters.

Wheel of Fortune: How I prepared and how I did

https://www.kiratebbe.com/?page_id=31

I was a contestant on the 01/22/2025 episode (#8108) of Wheel of Fortune. Read more about my audition process, how I studied, a play-by-play of my game, and my retrospective of what preparation ended up mattering.

Ladies & Gentlemen...50 Years of SNL Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxYQd51Xuk

My Last Trial

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amanda-knox-murder-slander-trial/681457/

The lie that I was at the house when the crime occurred led to repeated instances of what is called forensic confirmation bias. The lie colored the collection and analysis of all the other evidence. It led police to ignore exonerating evidence, such as my lack of a motive or any history of violence or mental illness, my alibi, and the virtual impossibility of participating in such a brutal murder without leaving a single trace of DNA in the room. And it led them to distort and magnify the significance of trivial evidence, such as the fact that my DNA had been found in the bathroom where Guede attempted to clean off Meredith’s blood. Of course my DNA was found there—that was my bathroom too.

This phenomenon has been demonstrated by the cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror. In a 2006 study, he gave six fingerprint experts pairs of prints that, unbeknownst to them, they had previously judged in their own casework as matching or not. The experts were given some made-up context for each pair of prints. For the nonmatches, they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime; for the matches, they were told that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. This fictional information resulted in two-thirds of the experts changing some of their original judgments. Believing that a suspect confessed alters the supposed objectivity of scientific experts. Dror went on to show a similar effect in other forensic domains, including DNA analysis and forensic pathology.

[update 1/26/24: has been reversed] Obeying Trump order, Air Force will stop teaching recruits about Tuskegee Airmen

https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/trump-dei-tuskegee-airmen-banned-air-force-20054637.php

A video on the pioneering Black pilots, famed for their World War II exploits, was stripped from an Air Force basic training curriculum at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.

Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/life-lessons-from-the-first-half-century-of-my-career/#B6

Seek out honest feedback; it might be right.  Getting honest feedback is critical to success. You don’t want the first comments on your ideas to come from the decision makers. Remember that criticism of a project or idea is separate from criticism of you as a person. Offering suggestions is an endorsement that reviewers think your ideas are sufficiently interesting to be worthwhile of their time.

Listen hard to the feedback and never push back. At project retreats, the most important session is when we get reactions from outsiders, and we enforce the rule that no one argues with feedback.15

For papers, I send drafts to many people for feedback as early as possible. (I sent this article to a dozen.) I especially recruit reviewers who might not be fans, as they’ll give unvarnished comments.

Gretchen Ronnevik on refutation

https://x.com/garonnevik/status/1819090982429958284

In classical rhetoric, ad hominum attacks, and twisting the words of your opponent where they would say "but that's not what I said, nor how I meant it," is actually the weakest way to refute their arguments. It shows that you don't have a good case against their issue, so you resort to theatrics and distractions instead. 

The reason that you want your opponents to agree with your representation of them is that you are seeking to win them over and persuade them. If they feel they have been misrepresented, they will never be persuaded, they will just continue to clarify again and again, until they realize you have no intention of actually hearing them.

If your goal is to persuade and reason with people, it's all in how you handle your refutation. If you are seeking to be polarizing, or popular with your own friends, you will misrepresent and do ad hominum attacks. Your goal will show through in how you handle your refutation. 

SLS is still a national disgrace

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/

In 2019, NASA awarded Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower – a glorified steel truss far simpler than the booster catching towers SpaceX assembles in weeks – by March 2023 for a total cost of $383m. 

As of today, the OIG reports that the tower will cost $2.7b and is to be finished by September 2027, but more likely 2029. For reference, the Burj Khalifa is seven times taller, contains paying tenants, hotels, and shops, and was built in five years for just $1.5b. 

If you had $2.7b in 27 million $100 notes, and you piled them up, they would be so much taller than Bechtel’s non-existent launch tower that you’d need not one, not two, but 23 separate piles to exhaust the supply. Whoever wrote Bechtel’s side of the contract certainly earned their bonus. Whoever wrote NASA’s side should be made to paint the entire structure with a toothbrush – but I expect they’ve long since been on Bechtel’s payroll in some kind of advisory no-show job. 

Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-with-rss

With most online platforms, it’s becoming more and more difficult to view a feed of content that is not generated by an algorithm whose purpose it is to keep you engaged. Often, these algorithms are a black box where you don’t know why certain content is being promoted, let alone have full control over the content you consume. The incentives and needs of those controlling the algorithms are different from your own. Platforms may seek to politically influence you or sell you something you don’t need. Platforms may change hands, changing the influence they wish to have on their users. The good news is RSS and Atom offer a decentralized alternative.

Decentralization is becoming more popular as people are growing increasingly frustrated with centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Reddit. Protocols such as ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AtProto give people more control over their data, identity, and content feeds. Allowing people to consume the content that they want to consume, in a way that works for them.

CARROLL MOORE MAKEMSON

https://www.2bcliberty.org/our-blog/carroll-moore-makemson

Once upon a time, in Roanoke, Virginia, under the light of the Mill Mountain Star, Mary Carroll Moore was born to proud parents William and Mary. Carroll’s aunt and long-time fellow do-gooder and mischief-maker, Frances Eddy (Aunt Boo) attended Carroll’s birth, cementing their soul connection from the start. Carroll’s early childhood was spent in Pennsylvania, where her father attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Carroll encountered school for the first time. She never left education after that. 

AI Written, AI Read

https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

In Celebration of and in Thanksgiving for the Life of President James Carter - 1.9.25

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state.

If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.”

Maybe he is working off a thesis where red tape expands to consume the resources available to it (as measured in bureaucrats). But my impression is that the amount of red tape is determined more by things like:

— How likely is it that their decision will get challenged in court?

The day my bullies apologized: Race, the South and a reconciliation decades in the making

https://www.salon.com/2015/04/25/the_day_my_bullies_apologized_race_the_south_and_a_reconciliation_decades_in_the_making/

It all came back in vivid detail as Greg sat in his Subaru opening the mail, hundreds of miles and decades away from Georgia. There were other letters after David’s. One came from South Carolina, from Celia Harvey, whom Greg remembered as a cute, shy girl who had assiduously avoided him at school. “I’m writing this letter today to ask for your forgiveness,” she wrote. Another envelope came from Alabama, from Joseph Logan, who had been cocaptain of the Americus High football team. He had enclosed a four-hundred-word sketch about an assault on Greg that he had witnessed during their senior year. “I hope your reading it does not cause unpleasant memories about AHS,” he said in an accompanying note, “but I am sure it will.” The most anguished letter, postmarked in Florida, was from Deanie Dudley, one of the most popular girls in the senior class, the homecoming queen. Greg smiled at the thought of Deanie; he had nursed a secret crush on her in high school, something she’d have been mortified to know about at the time. Her apology was couched in religious terms and suggested a keen sense of guilt. “I will never again say, ‘How could the Holocaust have happened—how could all those Christian people in Poland and Germany have stood by and allowed it to happen?’ I was present with you over a long period of time, and I never once did one thing to comfort you or reach out to you. It was cruelty.”

u/Schattenspringer: Need a fake kid to piss off my wife

https://www.reddit.com/r/BORUpdates/comments/1hxajz9/need_a_fake_kid_to_piss_off_my_wife_short/

I can't decide what amused her more... the effort I put into the ruse or the fact that I ended up proving her right in the process.

Here a couple gems from wife after I told her the truth.

"Where the hell did you find that guy?" "I'm glad your son wasn't a serial killer." "I might have been mad if he came here looking for money." "Next time you can save $100 and just assume you're wrong." "You know I'm going to get you back, right?"

Smells Like American Spirit

https://slate.com/life/2024/12/work-jobs-sales-telemarketing-america.html

But in a very real sense, salesmen built the American economy and, by extension, America itself. In his book, Friedman notes that in the mid-19th century, more than half the U.S. population lived on a farm. Consumer markets were nonexistent. Salesmen went out and made them from scratch, a sale at a time, and not simply by bringing quality goods to eager buyers; they took them by their lapels and didn’t let go until they signed on the dotted line. Fortune magazine observed, in the mid-20th century, “Mass production would be a shadow of what it is today if it had waited for the consumer to make up his mind.”

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty

One of the reasons I have found so much success with The Odyssey, aside from the monsters and murder, is that the emerging generation of translators, including Dr. Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley have been transparent about their processes of bringing new life to canonical treasures like The Odyssey and Beowulf. In one lecture, Wilson explains that historically, translators would often intentionally foreignize their language to establish gravity and reverence for these works as products of “alien cultures,” a tradition the new generation of translators are choosing to break from because of the exclusionary effect it has on readers. Contemporary translators have shifted their mindset from one of preserving tradition, to one of illuminating narrative and purpose. Homer wanted his audiences to be both entertained and shepherded into the culture. Wilson seems to want that too, and so she gives us a deeply relatable, heartbreakingly honest, and eminently readable translation of The Odyssey. In allowing her understanding of the story to expand with time, she remains true to the story’s original purpose and relevant to a new generation of readers.