We have cancer

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/we-have-cancer

When procedures proliferate unchecked, they impair our bureaucratic functions. We should treat this as seriously as we treat cancer.

Ellen DeGeneres Is in Her Boss Era on Her New Netflix Special

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-netflix-for-your-approval.html

In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”

I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: A joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.

She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”

RESCUE AT SEA: Fishermen Reunite With the Girl They Saved 35 Years Ago, the Sole Survivor of Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwjR37keKs0

The Canary - Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI1NTk1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2OTc3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjU1OTUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImQyZTIzZDVjLWZiYTgtNGZkMy1iZjdjLWQyNTNlMzdjOGUxOSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tL29waW5pb25zL2ludGVyYWN0aXZlLzIwMjQvbWljaGFlbC1sZXdpcy1jaHJpcy1tYXJrcy10aGUtY2FuYXJ5LXdoby1pcy1nb3Zlcm5tZW50LyJ9.Ej8f5wr9mAhAoZixnV0LqwkbifeupQvSVB10tzpLVsY&itid=gfta

Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it....

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up. Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one. It felt like a rookie mistake — to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being. Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.

A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?

https://another.rodeo/tasks/

The whole thing started on the Midwest Dev Chat Slack, when someone posted a screenshot from their work Slack that read:

The fact that we only have "Herculean task" and "Sisyphean task" feels so limiting. So here's a few more tasks for your repertoire:

Icarian Task: When you have a task you know is going to fail anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down.

Cassandrean Task: When you have to deal with people you know won't listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start.
Odyssean Task: You'll complete but it will take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures.

From those first screenshots it took off, with the wits on Midwest Dev Chat adding more:

‘People need to see it’: How politics hung up a $42B Biden internet buildout

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/04/biden-broadband-program-swing-state-frustrations-00175845

The 2021 infrastructure law contained tens of billions of dollars intended to help rural parts of the country like southwest Virginia — but mounting political snags will mean the administration will have virtually nothing to show for it by Election Day.

 

I Never Expected To Run For Office—Here's What I Learned

https://www.offmessage.net/p/what-i-learned-running-for-office-stancil

“All politics is local,” goes the cliché. It’s wronger today than ever before. In 2024, all politics is, if anything, national. But local politics are where you can glimpse what politics used to be—before 24/7 cable news, before Trump, before social media sloganeering. Today's hyper-polarized elections are simpler, flatter, and meaner. They reduce people to numbers in a bloc, and strip away the voices of everyone in the smaller share. In these local campaigns you can still see the vestiges of a more complicated, less-certain style of democracy than we have today. Once seen, it's hard to unsee, whatever the electoral benefits of doing so.

Into the Valley of Death: The crash of American Eagle flight 4184 and the ATR icing story

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/into-the-valley-of-death-the-crash-of-american-eagle-flight-4184-and-the-atr-icing-story-29e64faee67c

The legacy of American Eagle flight 4184 is not free of controversy, and probably never will be. The answers to some of the questions posed in this article about the safety of the ATR will still depend on who you ask, and although I’ve tried to approach every argument with an open mind, I obviously have my own opinions that not everyone will share. Readers are free to draw conclusions that differ from mine, but I hope this article provides a solid informational basis regardless.

At the very least we can say, all controversies aside, that the tragedy at Roselawn was caused by a failure of imagination, a failure to ask, “what would happen if things were a little bit different?” The pieces of the puzzle were there, and ATR even assembled some of them, but whether due to complacency, arrogance, or disinterest, no one ever quite went far enough. The miracle of flight does not forgive these qualities — not in pilots, not in manufacturers, and not in regulators. One cannot observe an anomaly, no matter how seemingly minor, and leave it unexplained simply because it didn’t matter this time — because next time, it might, and then it will be too late. And because of that careless indifference, flight 4184 rode headlong into the valley of death, and 68 souls were lost, having been ripped from the sky as though by an invisible hand, and yet it was not the hand of god, but the hands of real people who possessed the power to change some small thing for the better, and did not do so. Now it’s up to those who have come after them to ensure it never happens again.

Japanese Medical School Accused of Rigging Admissions to Keep Women Out (2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/world/asia/japan-medical-school-test-scores-women.html

A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.

The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.

Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Thursday.

Two decades of Top Gear and The Grand Tour — by Clarkson, Hammond and May

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/top-gear-grand-tour-jeremy-clarkson-hammond-may-tx9m9zrjm

Then again Top Gear was never really a show about cars. It was about three blokes making a show about cars. It scratched some of the laddish itch, but we weren’t laddy. Women watched us as well as men. We got to a stage where if we forgot our lines or cocked up a stunt, everyone was delighted because that’s exactly what they wanted to see. In a weird way at that point we couldn’t lose. But we always believed in what we were doing. An audience can sniff it out if it’s not authentic. Every discussion between us was driven by passion. It still is. We really did care about the difference between oversteer and understeer, and four-wheel and two-wheel drive and 50-50 weight distribution — all of those things.

Seeing America by train

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/interactive/2024/amtrak-train-travel-diary/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI0OTA0MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2Mjg2Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjQ5MDQwMDAsImp0aSI6ImIxNjczYWY5LTJhNmMtNDU3NS05ZGI2LTc5NjNmZGY2NmQyMiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90cmF2ZWwvaW50ZXJhY3RpdmUvMjAyNC9hbXRyYWstdHJhaW4tdHJhdmVsLWRpYXJ5LyJ9.6YRU2fjGQ0Csf8P2DilQUC6vSiuJdevXShIRExumEws&itid=gfta

What it’s really like to travel cross-country by rail.

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social‬ on social media

I wonder if this is a side effect of social media. When I post a bit of data or something I learned, I think of it as throwing a fact out into the ether. People who read the post, however, experience it as someone they know telling them *as an individual* something that should be relevant to them.

So when someone like will points out technically the economy is "good", it feels like obliviousness to the overall shitty workings of the system as is at best, and rubbing salt in wounds at worst. It feels like he's gaslighting\bullshitting people, even if that wasn't the intent.

— Space Man (@spaceds8008s.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:39 AM

— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:47 AM

The crank realignment is bad for everyone

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for

For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome.

A related issue is that once an expert community obtains a sharp political skew, it’s easy to confuse the interests of the expert community with an ideological vision of the public interest. It’s important to make energy policy in a way that aligns with scientific facts about climate change and public health. But that’s not the same as saying that “the science” dictates specific policy measures. We saw this really clearly during Covid when “defer to public health academics” became constitutive of progressive politics, but public health academics also seemed to feel considerable pressure to align their recommendations with the progressive policy priorities of the moment. Ideally, we’d live in a world where empirical information “pulls sideways” in a way that’s orthogonal to values-based ideological conflict. But we’re not even close.

u/KhanTheGray on Cyprus's tragedy

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1f1tewj/cyprus_an_island_divided/lk22hct/

The truth is that too much blood has been spilled for a peace to come. People are scared. There are still lot of people around who has seen the days where people would get rounded up and murdered just for belonging to wrong ethnic background.

Lot of people want peace but they don’t know how it’ll happen. Turks fear that if Turkey pulls back its army there will be none left to protect them. I mean, people talk about international law and all that which is all noble and all but look at what’s happening at Gaza in 2024. In this new millennium. Where we thought we’d leave the horrors of WW2 behind.

I have never seen the south side of my country in my life. I left before the borders were open.

To be honest I have a love-hate relationship with Cyprus.

I love the island of my childhood as part of nostalgia and what it had the potential to be one; a place of love and understanding.

But I have no hope for this ever happening. My best friends overseas are Greeks from Greece, my first girlfriend overseas was also a Greek Cypriot, her family were wonderful people, it was incredible how similar we are, yet extremists always played to our differences.

My grandparents used to tell me how they lived in mixed villages and slept with their doors open, and if they lost a wallet their Greek Cypriot neighbours would bring it home to them.

The respect they had for each other, their traditions and religions, was another level.

Turks would have a parade with drums and people would walk through the village road, dancing and singing before weddings, but when they approached the Greek church on their way, with people praying inside, they’d go quiet to avoid disturbing the church service.

Greeks would do the same when they had similar events and they walked past the village mosque.

When their harvest turnout was too much and Turkish farmers didn’t have enough manpower, my grandpa would ask his Greek neighbours if they could let their sons help them with harvest, as thank you, my family would organize a big feast for them in their house with roast lamb and baklavas.

Everyone talks about wars and our differences but I rarely see our similarities and good memories shared.

How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html

A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.

Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.

The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.

Behind the Pageantry of Shen Yun, Untreated Injuries and Emotional Abuse

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/nyregion/shen-yun-dance-abuse.html

As the popular dance show grew into an international juggernaut, some of the group’s young performers paid a steep price.

Emily White was dragged for predicting the future of music streaming 12 years ago. Where is she now?

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-08-01/the-millennial-messiah-of-spotify-in-exile-emily-white

It seems harmless now, but at the time, the article meant war. “I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With,” read the headline of the 2012 NPR blog post, written by Emily White, then a 20-year-old intern at the public radio institution.

White, an obsessive music fan who had cultivated a substantial digital library through less-than-legal means, had started working on the essay before her internship started, and arrived at the NPR offices in Washington, D.C., with a draft in hand. Floating along in the unsteady musical landscape following the Napster era, White felt compelled to share the vision she saw in front of her: The future was streaming, and it was cheap. In other words, the writing was on the wall, and the CDs were piling up in the trash. For the vast majority of listeners, the days of purchasing individual albums were over, like it or not.

Parks and Degradation: The Mess at Yosemite

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-yosemite-national-park-aramark-mess/?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcyMjk1NzgzMCwiZXhwIjoxNzIzNTYyNjMwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTSFNKU0xEV1JHRzEwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGQTEyREYyMDg1QUQ0Njk1QkYyNjIwMDYyQzE5MjNENCJ9.bxR7T-Tb2K4JGKbLzDZ5FSJHhjUAf1CTU8fidSCNQ8A

The excitement faded quickly. Within the first year, Aramark was laying off Yosemite staff, including many of the longtime managers whose knowledge kept the place running. The NPS provides basic infrastructure and law enforcement, and it manages trails, interpretation programs and the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness within park boundaries. But Aramark is responsible for the majority of visitor services in the 7-mile-long, 1-mile-wide valley where tourists flock and most employees work. Its remit includes nine lodging options, 23 restaurants and cafes, 15 gift shops and grocery stores, a shuttle system, mule and horseback rides, a ski mountain and mountaineering school, four swimming pools, three gas stations, an on-call tow truck service and a golf course. “I don’t think they realized they were going to be managing a city,” says Bob Seddon, a retired California Highway Patrol supervisor who worked as a seasonal driver in Yosemite from 2011 to 2018.

How I Got My Laser Eye Injury

https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye-injury/

It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.

Bear Found in Central Park Was Killed by a Car, Officials Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/nyregion/bear-cub-found-dead-in-central-park-was-hit-by-a-car-investigators-say.html

The initial details of the case were clear: A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle. The Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad began looking into the bear’s death, and the cub was taken to Albany for analysis by the conservation department’s wildlife health unit.

But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?

After revealing the results of the necropsy, Lori Severino, a spokeswoman for the state conservation department, said that the agency still did not know where the bear had come from, only that it was “likely not the park.”