u/aniopala on a lying jailhouse informant

 https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/uwl4o5/timothy_taylor_and_his_family_speak_on_the/

In 2009, Brittanee Drexel (17) went missing in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during Spring Break. No remains were found and no one was ever arrested.

In 2011, Timothy Taylor drove a getaway vehicle during the robbery of a McDonald's in Mount Pleasant, roughly 1-2 hours driving from Myrtle Beach. He was convicted and sentenced to probation.

In June 2016, the FBI held a press conference in which they stated they believed Brittanee had been abducted from Myrtle Beach and murdered in a second location.

Timothy Taylor, by summer 2016, had finished his probation. He was arrested again for his role in the 2011 robbery. Prosecuers claimed it was not in violation of double jeopardy because the federal government can bring federal charges for the same crime if the state prosecution led to an unfair outcome (the unfair outcome in this case being that Taylor received a lighter sentence than the two other men involved). Since he already pled guilty to the crime, it wasn't a promising outlook.

At his bond hearing, the prosecuter tells the judge the new charges are due to Taylor being a suspect in the rape and murder of Brittanee Drexel. The prosecutor claims bail for the robbery charge should not be granted because Taylor was withholding information about Drexel.

The FBI release the story that Brittanee Drexel had been abducted, taken to a trap house, sexually assaulted, murdered, and her body thrown to the local gators. They release Taylor's name, and state they believe he (16 at the time of the murder) and his father were involved in the abduction, gang rape, and murder of Brittanee Drexel.

Where did they get this information? A prison informant named Taquan Brown. Brown claimed to have been eyewitness to Taylor and 8 to 12 other men raping Drexel. He additionally claimed to have seen Drexel attempt to escape, to have heard gunshots shortly thereafter, and then to have seen a body removed from the house wrapped in a rug.

There was an additional anonymous jailhouse informant. The second informant claimed Taylor "showed [Drexel] off, introduced her to some other friends that were there … they ended up tricking her out with some of their friends, offering her to them and getting a human trafficking situation," as quoted by the FBI.

(Brown changes his story multiple times, and several more in an interview in 2019; some of the people he names as having seen participate were incarcerated during the alleged time of the murder. He has either tried or is trying to sue the FBI agents involved for releasing his name to the press, endangering his life.)

The FBI claim Taylor abducted Drexel for the purposes of human trafficking, then killed her either for trying to escape or because of the increased media attention on her disappearance. Taylor has maintained that he was in class at Lincoln High School during the time Brown claimed to have seen him assaulting her.

In 2017 Taylor is told that federal prosecutors will seek the maximum sentencing... unless he takes a polygraph test about Brittanee Drexel. If he passed, they would recommend a lighter sentence. In South Carolina, polygraph results are admissible in court if all attorneys agree.

The first test is declared inconclusive by the FBI, but federal prosecutors claim Taylor showed "deception" throughout. ABC15 news stated that the FBI claimed Taylor was being deceptive "even when answering his own name". Taylor took a second polygraph, and the FBI declared he had failed to respond truthfully about seeing or knowing Brittanee Drexel. This information was immediately released to the press. The DOJ recommend a sentence of 10 to 20 years due to his deception. In December of 2019 Taylor is sentenced to 3-5yrs probation.

This month, 62yo Raymond Moody was arrested for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Brittanee Drexel on April 25, 2009. He led LEOs to her remains, confirmed through DNA and dental records. Moody had been identified as a person of interest in the original 2009 investigation, but never arrested.

According to Taylor's attorney, the family was never notified that Taylor's name is cleared and the case considered closed; they found out when they were contacted to comment by a newspaper.

u/ReshKayden on diversity in gaming

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/v67r4n/whats_the_deal_with_activisionblizzards_diversity/ibelhis/

Due to an odd quirk in how the game industry developed, went bankrupt, and then re-emerged and marketed itself during other cultural changes in the 1980s that were pushing women away from tech more broadly, for the next couple decades the vast majority of gamers were straight, white, cisgendered boys between the ages of around 12 and 25. Tons of market research and focus groups went into figuring out what kind of characters this specific audience wanted to play, and the result was a bunch of main characters that all looked like this.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this in every case. It's not that gamers were all necessarily racist/sexist, or that the industry had a lack of imagination, or that there was some conspiracy. It's that we researched the hell out of it, and found that characters who looked like that hit the largest overlapping segment of our existing customers in terms of what they wanted to play, for the budgets we had. So we stuck with that. It was a risk calculation.

The trouble is, the game industry started to hit saturation in terms of that customer space back 10-15 years ago. In other words, the gamers who want to play characters who all look like that are a relatively stable number, and they were already all playing our games. In order for the industry to grow, and to get the increased sales to experiment with new types of game designs like everyone wanted, we needed to find new customers outside of that already saturated customer base. 

1,000 True Fans? Try 100

 https://future.com/1000-true-fans-try-100/

More than a decade ago, Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “1,000 True Fans,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of “true fans”—those who will “buy anything you produce”—to the tune of $100 per fan, per year (for a total annual income of $100,000). By embracing online networks, he believed creators could bypass traditional gatekeepers and middlemen, get paid directly by a smaller base of fans, and live comfortably off the spoils.

Today, that idea is as salient as ever—but I propose taking it a step further. As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success. I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans—not 1,000—paying them $1,000 a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans.

One Good Thing: 107 minutes of Wall Street traders behaving badly

https://www.vox.com/23138194/margin-call-one-good-thing-morals

Toward the end of the film, Rogers is giving a pep talk to a room of traders, “People are going to say some very nasty things about what we do here today, and about what you’ve dedicated a portion of your lives to,” he tells them. “But have faith that in the bigger picture, our skills have not been wasted. We have accomplished much, and our talents have been used for the greater good.” This is a man doing something he knows is wrong, and not just that but wielding his power to make dozens of other people do something he knows is wrong. The brilliance of the movie is its illustration of why he, and so many like him, make that choice, again and again and again.

The Surreal [possible] Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues? 

Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/google-caste-equality-labs-tanuja-gupta/

Two days before Soundararajan’s presentation, seven Google employees sent emails to company leaders and Gupta “with inflammatory language about how they felt harmed and how they felt their lives were at risk by the discussion of caste equity,” according to emails sent by Gupta. Some of the complaints “copied content from known misinformation sites to malign the reputation of the speaker,” Gupta’s emails said — sites and organizations that have targeted academics in the United States and Canada who are critical of Hindu nationalism or caste hierarchy.

Then the controversy within Google migrated to an 8,000-person email group for South Asian employees, according to three current employees. After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is not a thing in the United States, and that efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division. Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs. Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes.

We Clerked for Justices Scalia and Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/supreme-court-heller-guns.html

Kate believes that Justice Stevens’s dissent in Heller provided a better account of both the text and history of the Second Amendment and that in any event, the method of historical inquiry the majority prescribes should lead to the court upholding most gun safety measures, including the New York law pending before the Supreme Court. John believes that Heller correctly construed the original meaning of the Second Amendment and is one of the most important decisions in U.S. history. We disagree about whether Heller should be extended to protect citizens who wish to carry firearms outside the home for self-defense and, if so, how states may regulate that activity — issues that the Supreme Court is set to decide in the New York case in the next month or so.

But despite our fundamental disagreements, we are both concerned that Heller has been misused in important policy debates about our nation’s gun laws. In the 14 years since the Heller decision, Congress has not enacted significant new laws regulating firearms, despite progressives’ calls for such measures in the wake of mass shootings. Many politicians cite Heller as the reason. But they are wrong.

Heller does not totally disable government from passing laws that seek to prevent the kind of atrocities we saw in Uvalde, Texas. And we believe that politicians on both sides of the aisle have (intentionally or not) misconstrued Heller. Some progressives, for example, have blamed the Second Amendment, Heller or the Supreme Court for mass shootings. And some conservatives have justified contested policy positions merely by pointing to Heller, as if the opinion resolved the issues.

Neither is fair. Rather, we think it’s clear that every member of the court on which we clerked joined an opinion, either majority or dissent, that agreed that the Constitution leaves elected officials an array of policy options when it comes to gun regulation.

Five years on food stamps

https://island94.org/2022/03/five-years-food-stamps

Delta: Maintain Client Success as the centerpole during growth

I think of “scaling” entailing both size and health. Early on, “Client Success” was the unifying intention of everyone (“close the participation gap”). Everyone was exhorted to use their whole selves to help clients receive benefits. I remember being mindblowingly told “you have their phone number, call them” when I observed clients hit technical or process barriers; I did, again and again. Technology was in the truest sense an extension of our embodied capacity to help.

As time went on the client success function became less of a critical inspiration, and instead came to feel closer to the status quo: handling the overwhelming externalities of the service, rather than the service being the multiplier of our puny human abilities. I feel a responsibility to help balance “we don’t need to help ourselves” with “put on your oxygen mask before helping others”; and “leave a seam” with “a stitch in time saves nine”.

And “success” felt narrowed with a refocusing towards “Systems Change” and the subjectless “Build with”. My desires for lighting escalation paths (“click here to talk to a supervisor; a director; your state representative; the FBI”), and consciousness-raising (“20k people in your county also had their benefits denied this month too”) remain unfulfilled.

u/TerribleAttitude on Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/v16z3j/eli5_why_was_uncle_bens_considered_racist/iakv2bs/

In the antebellum and Jim Crow south, black people were virtually never referred to as adults by white people. Young and middle aged adult black people would still be referred to by (at best) their first names and more often as “boy” or “girl” (or possibly some other even less polite words). Because it’s ridiculous to refer to an elderly person as “boy” or “girl,” elderly black people, especially those who had a certain level of status as slaves, would instead be referred to as “uncle” or “aunt.”

The south at that time was highly formal about these things; you’d never refer to an adult white person, even if they were a servant, as “boy” or “girl” in that same way, and first name only was for people you were very familiar with, or maybe children. You’d pretty much always be expected to refer to adults by Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, Reverend, etc. Even young children would sometimes be referred to with an honorific (Miss or Master. Note, in this context, “master” does not necessarily mean “slave master,” it’s just a way to differentiate between a boy and an adult man, who would be “mister”). Referring to adult black people with familiar terms like “uncle” or “aunt,” or juvenile terms like “boy” or “girl,” or over familiar terms like their first name, while simultaneously requiring that same person to refer to a white toddler as “Miss Susie” or “Master Jimmy,” means that black people were permanently placed in a subservient child class below actual children. Aunt and Uncle aren’t “child” titles, but still have an implication of extreme familiarity. Your aunt and uncle are people who take care of you. There’s a reason the term Uncle Tom is used to refer to a stupid black person who caters to white people for validation at the expense of other black people and their own dignity.

Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima were originally conceived as nostalgic characters of the antebellum south. They were implied to be, if not explicitly stated, to be literal slaves who spoke ignorantly and found joy only in cooking for their white “masters” (as in slave owners). They were drawn or acted as shucking, jiving minstrel caricatures of black people. As time went on, those aspects of the characters were obviously dropped, with Uncle Ben looking more like a chef and Aunt Jemima having more of a businesswoman or housewife vibe, but the terms still carry an implication of slavish black servants looking only to cater to white people’s tummies. 

How our free plan stays free

https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan/

We also get users who write in to support asking, “How can it possibly be free?!?” In certain tech communities, you will sometimes see a comment like this1 on articles about Tailscale:

“If you’re not paying, then you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”

I’ve always disliked that claim. It starts from a grain of truth, especially for advertising- or spyware-based companies. But it’s not universally relevant. Sometimes a free lunch is just a free lunch.

Is there really such a thing? What’s the catch? Let’s discuss Tailscale’s business model.

a reddit user on a terrible stillbirth

https://www.reddit.com/r/beyondthebump/comments/uh8fnl/roe_v_wade_megathread/i78casz/

I just don’t even know what else to say. I’m so tired of anyone aside from my doctor and me making decisions for my own health.

I had a stillbirth 5 years ago in Texas. I didn’t want a stillbirth. I didn’t want to ever need an abortion. I’ll say it again. I DIDNT WANT TO NEED an abortion. Ever.

My baby girl was very much wanted. By both my husband and I. Fuck. We did everything “rIgHt” according to their fucking conservative social norms.

Married first. Had our first baby. We wanted a second. Though we were a little surprised on the timing. And I had gotten pregnant while on the pill. No biggie. We wanted a second anyways.

I was thrilled. My husband was happy. Went in to do all your prenatal testing and that was the fucking start to the worst year of my life.

We did the quad-screen and it popped positive for possible Down syndrome. Of course we were worried and scared. But in the few days before seeing a specialist we had decided that Down syndrome wasn’t going to be something we wouldn’t be able to handle.

Cue the visit at the specialist. First we met with the geneticist who talked about ang and all possible inheritable diseases that could hide in our family history and explained that sometimes the quad screen will pop positive for DS and it could be anything else. Or nothing. And only an amniocentesis would give a definite answer. Which I insisted on doing because I wanted to be able to prepare as much as I could if I were to have a special needs child.

And then we went in for the ultrasound. The tech was nice and showed us everything. We found out we were having a girl yay. And then the doctor came in. He spend some time looking at the ultrasound himself before showing and explaining everything to us. At this point I was still hoping this was just a rare false positive.

But that hope was just shattered. Our baby girl had a severe heart defect. Cystic Hygroma, hydrops fetalis. A full body edema. He looked at us. And I can still hear the words. “I’m sorry. I don’t think your baby will survive the next 6-8 weeks.” I decided I wanted the amniocentesis, because I needed to know what was going on. Which happened just the next day.

The results came back 2 weeks later. Our baby girl had Turner Syndrome. Which about 1% of pregnancies with Turner Syndrome will make it to term. If she survived the pregnancy TS wouldn’t be as much of an issue as her heart defect: Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. The problem was the sum of her physical health.

We went to a second doctor because if I were to need to make a decision to terminate my pregnancy I wanted to know all I could. She basically confirmed what our first doctor said.

What do you do if you’re told your baby won’t survive to be born? The baby you had plans, hopes and dreams for? The baby you have a name for?

So I talked to my doctor what our options were. And at this point. None. The law made all abortions illegal past 20 weeks. And I was more than 20 weeks pregnant. The only exception in the law at the time was if the physical health of the mother was in danger. My physical health wasn’t in danger as long as my daughter was still alive. My mental health didn’t matter apparently. I was diagnosed with antenatal depression, to no surprise of anyone on my medical team.

I had to go to weekly check ups. Sit in the doctors office surrounded by dozens of pregnant women, who were excitedly talking about names, nurseries etc. it was pure torture.

Until at my last appointment they couldn’t find her heartbeat anymore. They allowed us to stay in the room until I felt strong enough to stop crying and sobbing. And I left to go home with an appointment to be induced the next morning.

The whole thing lasted a couple hours. But they gave me all the pain meds because they didn’t have to worry about the baby. I just wish that could’ve also knocked out the mental pain. After a bit I pushed out my baby girl. The placenta didn’t come out in one piece though. Of course why would anything go smoothly? So to prevent me from bleeding out they manually extracted the rest of the placenta. Which - fun fact - your uterus itself isn’t numbed when you’re on all the pain meds. So for a manual extraction the doctor takes their hand and pushes through the cervix into the uterus to use their hand to carve out the placenta. While you feel it.

I was screaming in pain.

After all that I was able to spend the rest of the day holding my daughter. Before we had to say goodbye forever.

All this and you still get hospital bills. Funeral bills. Therapy bills. But sure. Almost making my husband a widower, forcing my oldest to possibly growing up without her mother or pushing a family into debt is better than allowing a mother to make the decisions regarding her own pregnancy with her medical team.

Abortions are healthcare. Mental health is physical health. You won’t be able to stop abortions. You’ll only be able to stop safe abortions. You’ll see more women die. Congratulations. I’m terribly grateful for modern medicine or I’d have died.

This isn’t about saving babies. If they wanted to save babies they’d care about the ones that are born and alive. Not the hypothetical babies. They just want easy brownie points to feel morally superior

Scarcity Truthers

https://philo.substack.com/p/scarcity-truthers?s=r

We fret about how hard we work and what tools we use when our organizations routinely refuse to adopt simple best practices due to not-invented-here syndrome or other similar biases. This is the reason so many underperforming companies have a miraculous turnaround after a change in management, even though the new management team is much less knowledgeable than the old management team – they will improve the situation simply by making the obvious changes that the previous management team refused to accept. This is also why skilled salespeople are so important even for products that seemingly should sell themselves; there is a natural resistance to anything new in an organization.

And for all of the benefits that a small dose of self-deception can have for our mental health, it should go without saying that many of the problems we have in our personal lives are because we live in denial of certain important truths, and we can experience a major turnaround the moment we manage to accept them.

We can be optimistic that the abundance agenda will eventually make some headway, if only because society cannot long tolerate too much artificial scarcity. However, it is human psychology that is at the root of our problems with artificial scarcity, and history suggests that that is a problem we can never fully solve.

They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!

https://theap.substack.com/p/they-know-how-journalism-works-theyre?s=r

It’s more like they need people to just randomly trust whatever bullshit feels right, to get them to fall for scams and believe propaganda. In the grandest dreams of the pathetic people doing most of the unpaid work, the end game is the eradication of “deviance” from public life. And that is a real threat that the people opposing this should take more seriously. Upstairs from them are the people whose job it is to make sure old people set up recurring payments. Upstairs from them, the goal is that no one finds the boss’s shell companies or offshore accounts. The mission is mainly to prevent, stigmatize, and delegitimize the discovery and confirmation and dissemination of information about how a few people got their money, where they keep it, and what they do with it—like spending it on subsidizing bigotry about trans people and getting gay teachers fired.

Building Trust Across the Political Divide

https://comment.org/building-trust-across-the-political-divide/

Perhaps hardest of all, a profound integrity is required for this kind of bridge-building. Most organizations of all varieties handle conflict poorly, from management on down. Integrity here means practicing internally what you teach externally. It takes the shape of concentric circles: using fairness and welcome to carry yourself through internal conflict, loving your team through interpersonal conflicts, and teaching others to love one another through conflict with those they barely know.

The good news is that conflict that is channelled in a healthy direction is one of the most powerful forces for good we have at our disposal. It puts us in touch with our deep moral roots, and brings out the differences between us that, when combined productively, can create genuine dynamism. It produces a powerful sense of freedom, acceptance, and the bracing pleasure that comes with growth. In a word, it is the progenitor of flourishing, for both the bridge-builders and the world they seek to mend.

MICHIGAN REDISTRICTING MAP ANALYSIS

https://ippsr.msu.edu/sites/default/files/redistricting/redistrictingreportv2.pdf (about gerrymandering)

There are two alternative ideas as to what is “fair.” One notion of fairness is an idea of symmetry: each party must be equally able to translate statewide vote share into seats. For instance, if two parties each net exactly half the votes, symmetry requires that they each are awarded half the seats. Despite its intuitive appeal, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that this idea of fairness as symmetry is “based on a norm that does not exist in our electoral system.”

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania proposed a different notion of fairness: the seat outcome is “neutral” if it is similar to the outcome we would expect if the electoral institutions were designed without considering partisan considerations. A redistricting map is “fair” under this second notion if it leads to neutral seat outcomes.

WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. 

On Elon Musk And Free Speech

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/25/on-elon-musk-and-free-speech/

But maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason why every website learns that you have to do some moderation. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll come to understand that the “principles of free speech” also include the right of private companies to set their own policies and to exclude those who violate those policies. I mean, usually, that’s done in a more systemized manner than Musk banning a journalist for criticizing him, but, hey, everyone makes mistakes sometimes.

The Russia we have lost

https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-russia-we-have-lost/

Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists  had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340

“Sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again,” Hill told me.

Those old historical patterns include Western businesses who fail to see how they help build a tyrant’s war chest, admirers enamored of an autocrat’s “strength” and politicians’ tendency to point fingers inward for political gain instead of working together for their nation’s security.

But at the same time, Hill says it’s not too late to turn Putin back, and it’s a job not just for the Ukrainians or for NATO — it’s a job that ordinary Westerners and companies can assist in important ways once they grasp what’s at stake.

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

25 Differences Between Private Sector and Government Managers

 https://www.powermag.com/25-differences-between-private-sector-and-government-managers/

1. There is very little personal gain in the government for taking risks on policy or programs and being successful in achieving the goals more effectively. However, there is potential for substantial criticism and other personal loss if the innovative attempt fails.
2. The key reality to the private sector is market-driven competition, whereas the same in the government is almost always a legislated monopoly.
3. Private sector managers worry about creating added value, that is, a product or service that can be sold competitively to the public. This requires the ability and skill to change, evolve, adapt, and improve constantly. Government is frequently quite different. Managers in the government often know what needs to be done and desire to do it but are facing restrictions of laws, regulations, and policies—often made years earlier for other circumstances—that prevent prompt action.
4. Authority and responsibility in the government tends to be asymmetric while authority and responsibility in the private sector are more clearly balanced. Responsibility in the government can be enormous while authority is frequently quite limited.
5. Authority in government may be ambiguous and unclear in some circumstances. In other cases, it is very clear and tightly restricted through laws, regulations, policies, and directives that leave little, if any, room for individual initiative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/opinion/tara-westover-educated-student-debt.html

To poor kids today, we present a no-win scenario. We shout shrilly that they must get a college degree, because without one they can’t hope to compete in the globalized economy, but even as we say it, we doubt our own advice. We know that we are asking them to bury themselves in debt at a moment when it is very uncertain what kind of job they will be able to get or how long it will take them to repay the loans. We know it, and they know it. For them, the American dream has become a taunt. Perhaps my story is proof not of the persistence of the American dream but of its precarity, even its absence.

The solutions are multitude. We could restore funding to public universities and insist that they operate as public utilities, rather than as strictly profit-driven businesses. We could increase Pell grants and reform student debt. If we were more ambitious, we could tackle the supreme inequality that, in recent decades, has disfigured every fact and facet of social and political life.

How to Fix Social Media

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-fix-social-media

The amateurs — adolescent boys, many of them — played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and most used their sets responsibly. But some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem. Shielded by anonymity, they would transmit rumors and lies, slurs and slanders. The U.S. Navy, which relied on radio to manage its fleet, was a prime target. Officers “complained bitterly,” Slotten reports, “about amateurs sending out fake distress calls or posing as naval commanders and sending ships on fraudulent missions.”

The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs.

Opinion: Restoring our troubled Republic

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/opinion-restoring-our-troubled-republic/W6GZLKZAQVB7ZDWLDSARAKMET4/

What is now being exposed ought to chill every citizen to their core and move them to engage in the affairs of the nation. We now have ample evidence that all of us, whether we voted for Trump or not, by our actions and choices, through our protests, and through our personal social and network media accounts, helped create and drive a situation in which our democracy was defiled, and the public was confused, indoctrinated and incited to violence and riot -- even killing and injuring those sworn to protect it. No person, no media personality or outlet and no political party who supports such conduct contrary to the law and the Constitution deserves our attention, much less our support. Indeed, they demand our condemnation.

As Lincoln observed in the same speech quoted above: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”

The Intellectual Incoherence of Cryptoassets

https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html

Setting all these models aside, there are two far more coherent perspectives on the crypto assets that have far more explanatory power for the behavior we see. Crypto assets are the synthesis of a speculative mania and a financial scam built around an opaque technology, phoney populism, with a tolerance for intellectual incoherence at its core. And it is a novel type of a scam, one that we don’t have a precise term of art for. They share the obscured and circular payouts of Ponzi schemes, the cult-like recruiting of multilevel marketing schemes, the ephemeral nature of high-yield investment fraud, and payout mechanics of pyramid schemes but strictly speaking they aren’t exactly like any of the classical scams. They’re something entirely new that we don’t have a word for yet. Some people have cleverly suggested we adapt the German compound word schneeballsystem or snowball scheme to refer to this new type of scam.

However there is a simple inescapable truth behind these schemes. These schemes around crypto tokens cannot create or destroy actual dollars, they can only shift them around. If you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it’s only because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did. And then they expect to do the same and so on and so on ad infinitum. Every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency needs to come from a later investor putting a dollar in. Crypto investments cannot be anything but a zero sum game, and many are actually massively negative sum. In order to presume a crypto investments functions as a store of value we simultaneously need to suppose an infinite chain of greater fools who keep buying these assets at any irrational price and into the future forever.

The moral calculations of a billionaire

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/30/moral-calculations-billionaire

They’d given away $150 million to a hospital in New Jersey, $50 million for college scholarships to Newark high school students, $40 million to Columbia Business School, $40 million to Hunter College, $30 million to performing arts, $25 million to the Jewish Family Fund, $20 million to skilled nursing, $15 million to food banks, and on and on it went. But no matter how much they gave away, their money continued to make more money even as wages for the middle class remained essentially flat. In the past 50 years, the gap between poor families and the top 0.1 percent had increased more than tenfold. Children now had only a 43 percent chance of out-earning their parents.

u/zornthewise on Joscha Bach

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/sg0hiu/what_do_you_think_about_joscha_bachs_ideas/

• Another example of an organism/agent would be a modern corporation. They are sentient - they understand themselves as distinct entities and their relation to the wider world, they are intelligent - they create models of the world they exist in and I guess I am not sure if they are conscious. They are instantiated on the humans and computers/software that make up the corporation and their goals often change over time. For example, when Google was founded, it probably did have aspirational and altruistic goals and was succesful in realizing many of these goals (google books/scholar etc) but over time as it's leadership changed, it's primary purpose seems to have become a perpetuation of it's own existence. Advertising was initially only a way to achieve it's other goals but over time it seems to have taken over all of Google.

• On a personal note, he explains that there are two goals people might have in a conversation. Somewhat pithily, he refers to "nerds as people for whom the primary goal of conversation is to submit their thoughts to peer review while for most other people, the primary goal of conversation is to negotiate value alignment".

HOW AMERICA FRACTURED INTO FOUR PARTS

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/

The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.

Reflecting on a Career in Product Management

https://newsletter.bringthedonuts.com/p/reflecting-on-a-career-in-product

The “art” of product management matters more than the “science” over the long term. In product management, there’s an art and a science. The science is all of the stuff you read about: managing a backlog, writing a PRD, KPIs, marketplace dynamics, growth metrics, analytical thinking, the latest agile whatever. The “art” gets dismissed as soft skills: communicating, empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, dealing with ambiguity, inspiring others, and connecting deeply to customers and their problems. The thing is, science gets more attention because it’s easier to understand, and therefore better for hustling boot camps and selling software tools. This trend is troublesome because it implies there’s one “right way” to do product management, and all you need to do is learn the technique or buy the right tool, and you can pass the interview, get the job, and win. If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, you know I’m far more interested in the art than the science. When PMs fail, it’s usually because of the art. The most important thing you can do early in your career is grow these skills. Don’t let them be dismissed as “soft skills,” don’t get lured by the promise of tactics and techniques: they’re essential, but the craft depends more on the art over the long term.

Statement on DeFi Risks, Regulations, and Opportunities (aka blockchain, crypto)

https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/crenshaw-defi-20211109

DeFi presents a panoply of opportunities.  However, it also poses important risks and challenges for regulators, investors, and the financial markets.  While the potential for profits attracts attention, sometimes overwhelming attention, there is also confusion, often significant, regarding important aspects of this emerging market.  Social media questions like “who in the U.S. regulates the DeFi market?” and “Why are regulators involved at all?” abound.  These are crucial questions, and the answers are important to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. This article attempts to provide a short background on the current regulatory landscape for DeFi, the role of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and highlights two important hurdles that the community should address.[3]  

How to Mislead with Facts

https://consilienceproject.org/how-to-mislead-with-facts/

Verified facts can be used to support erroneous conclusions. Here is how we can put an end to that.

Fact-checking has become popularized as the definitive process for certifying truth in the media. This has occurred in response to the proliferation of a wide variety of internet subcultures, often based largely upon misinformation. Propaganda and bad faith communication are all too common, making the checking of facts an important part of sensemaking.

While fact-checking is necessary, it is often not enough to provide the whole picture. Under current conditions of escalating culture and information war, facts themselves have become weapons.[1] Neither propaganda nor bad faith communication require the speaking of falsehoods.[2] It is often more effective to mislead and misinform through a strategic use of verified facts. The ability to critique and correct for the misuse of facts in public culture is an essential component of the democratic way of life.

Unfortunately, today it is standard practice for both institutions and individuals from all sectors of society to offer strategically cherry-picked and decontextualized facts,[3] set within a predetermined emotional or ethical frame.[4] This way of using facts is an effective tool to bring some people towards previously unappealing conclusions. It also provides rhetorical ammunition to those already predisposed to drawing these conclusions. While honestly passing the scrutiny of the fact-checkers, such an approach is nevertheless far from entirely truthful.

A Fox News ‘Defector’ on How the Network ‘Played Footsie’ With Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-jonah-goldberg.html?showTranscript=1

And I think that one of the key indicators about whether or not you were going to flip is to look at people and institutions that were dependent upon mass audiences. If you were talk radio, which depended on maintaining your audience, those were the first gatekeepers, as it were, who flipped. And you could hear this on the “Rush Limbaugh Show.” I mean, you really could. In the early parts, he would criticize Trump and then he would catch hell from his listeners. And by the end of it, he saw his role as defending Trump, rather than actually keeping a Republican president honest.

And we got this dysfunctional, sociological phenomenon that said any criticism of Trump was joining the libs, blah, blah, blah, all that nonsense, but also that Trump himself was utterly immune to constructive criticism. And the way you would get praise from him is only by compliments. And we saw this with people like Lindsey Graham. If you can only influence someone through compliments, you get sucked into the logic of that, and everything that they do is great.

And on the intellectual side, you know, there was a real attempt— and some people are still trying, I think in vain— to create a coherent intellectual construct called Trumpism. And the problem with that is that Trump has no core principles. So if you are in a situation where you have a president who, as a matter of pride, boasts that he will change his mind on a dime, where he says, I go by my instincts and I’m not bound by any ideology and all this kind of stuff, the only safe harbor is cult of personality. And that cult of personality thing spread.

Uyghur kids recall physical and mental torment at Chinese boarding schools in Xinjiang

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1073793823/china-uyghur-children-xinjiang-boarding-school

ISTANBUL — In quiet, polite voices, Aysu and Lütfullah Kuçar describe the nearly 20 months they spent in state boarding schools in China's western region of Xinjiang, forcibly separated from their family.

Under the watchful gaze of their father, the two ethnically Uyghur children say that their heads were shaved and that class monitors and teachers frequently hit them, locked them in dark rooms and forced them to hold stress positions as punishment for perceived transgressions.

By the time they were able to return home to Turkey in December 2019, they had become malnourished and traumatized. They had also forgotten how to speak their mother tongues, Uyghur and Turkish. (The children were being raised in Turkey but got forcibly sent to boarding school during a family visit to China.)

"That was the heaviest moment in my life. Standing in front of my two Chinese-speaking children, I felt as if they had killed me," says Abdüllatif Kuçar, their father. 

Dalia Mogahed on raising kids

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10158855576951699&id=507181698

I often get asked for advice about how to parent rebellious teenagers by struggling parents. I’m usually like, “please let me know when you find out.”  

So what I’m about to share is from the deepest part of humility. It’s hard as hell. But here are a few thoughts on the matter, things that have helped me and that I’ve observed in the lives of others. 

1.  Know this: your kids are separate human beings, not a reflection of you. They are not trophies. They cannot be extensions of your ambitions, unfulfilled dreams or to make up for what you failed to achieve. They don’t exist to be your fulfillment. They are servants of God. Allow them their individual dreams, personalities, goals. 

2.  Even if they don’t tell you, you are still their first and biggest example. Be a person they can respect and admire without being shamed into doing so. Work on yourself so that the kind of man or woman you wish them to grow up to be would look up to someone like you. Be a role model. Be kind, generous and patient if that’s what you’d like for them. Call your parents. Cook for your sick friend. They will do what you do, not what you say. 

3.  Humans have at least three essential needs: security, belonging and purpose. They will find and fulfill these needs, or numb the unfulfillment of them, one way or another. If the home doesn’t provide a safe space to be who they are and be loved, they will find that elsewhere. If the home and the mosque isn’t a place of belonging, they will find that elsewhere. If they have no sense of purpose other than avoiding punishment, they will search for it elsewhere or numb it’s absence. 

4.  Your kids will likely disappoint you on occasion, or a lot. Refer to point number one. You can do everything perfectly and you still won’t have perfect kids. It’s not your fault. Prophets had kids who rebelled. It doesn’t mean you failed. They are not an extension of you. They have agency. We are only accountable for our actions and intentions, not the way others behave, even our kids. Don’t indulge in self flagellation. 

5.  If your kids are perfect, praise the Lord, not yourself. Don’t take credit. Children are a gift, like health or wealth. Those who say “it’s because of my own effort” weren’t dealt with kindly in the Quran. Don’t feel superior to another parent who is struggling anymore than you should look down on a person with less money than you. God gives to whom He pleases. It’s not a sign of your awesomeness. It’s a sign of His generosity. 

Are Jews a Race? (by Yair Rosenberg)

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61f992de9277230021ae11f7/are-jews-a-race-whoopi-goldberg-holocaust/

Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused—and understandably so. In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don’t know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like “race” or “religion,” and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

Instead, Judaism is an amalgam of all these things—more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition—and so there’s no great way to classify it in English. A lot of confusion results from attempts to reduce this complexity to something more palatable for contemporary conceptions.

Mel Mermelstein, Auschwitz survivor who challenged Holocaust deniers, dies at 95

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/02/01/holocaust-survivor-mel-mermelstein-dead/

Mr. Mermelstein, however, considered himself “duty-bound” to challenge the group and the ideology it represented.

“I watched my mother and sisters being led to the gas chambers, and they tell me it was a hoax,” he said. “They are hate-mongers, Jew-haters. I’m going to get them if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it.”

With the counsel of William John Cox, a public-interest lawyer who took the case on a pro-bono basis, Mr. Mermelstein charted a strategy that ultimately led them to court. Mr. Mermelstein accepted the institute’s challenge, submitting for the contest an account of his experience at Auschwitz, a copy of his 1979 memoir, “By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685″ — and a claim for the $50,000.

When the institute failed to pay, Mr. Mermelstein sued the group and related defendants for the $50,000 in prize money and $17 million in damages, alleging libel, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress and — perhaps most consequential — “injurious denial of established fact.”