Hasnain says:

siiiiiiigh.

The legal system works in mysterious ways. I understand he got off on a technicality here and people have a right to fair representation, but at the same time victims have a right to justice that I think should take precedent. If I am reading this right, he is immune from further prosecution here, which does not seem like justice.

"But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that District Attorney Kevin Steele, who made the decision to arrest Cosby, was obligated to stand by his predecessor’s promise not to charge Cosby. There was no evidence that promise was ever put in writing."

Hasnain says:

And they coerced other people to testify against him despite their pleading. I’m glad he was released but there will never be justice here - especially while the cops and prosecutors here are not charged.

“The DA’s search of the police file yielded extensive undisclosed documents, including a failed polygraph test, a statement from Everett’s wife that he had identified a different perpetrator, and an undated letter from Everett to a homicide detective, seeking help in exchange for information.”

Hasnain says:

“Wet bulb thermometer readings are significantly lower than the more familiar dry bulb readings, which do not take humidity into account. Researchers say that at a wet bulb reading of 35C, the body can no longer cool itself by sweating and such a temperature can be fatal in a few hours, even to the fittest people.

“It approximates how warm it feels to humans because we cool via sweating,” Mr Matthews says. “We rely on that exclusively. When you use that measure, the wet bulb temperature, the two regions that stand out on earth are the shores of the Gulf and the Indus Valley in Pakistan. They are truly exceptional.””

Hasnain says:

These weather events are absolutely insane - if I read this right Portland is hotter than most of the world except Death Valley and parts of the Sahara.

Especially given the lack of AC and building designs not accounting for this and how unprecedented this is, I’m sure people will die.

“The strength of the heat dome, or sprawling zone of high pressure centered near the U.S.-Canada border, promoting these temperatures is simply off the charts. Its intensity is so statistically rare that it might be expected only once every several thousand years on average. But man-made climate change has made exceptional events like this many times more probable.”

Hasnain says:

We ended mask mandates too early, and now the problems are starting to show up. :|

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Covid-19 Task Force have discussed whether to press mayors and governors in the Midwest and South, where the highly transmissible Delta variant is spreading quickly, to once again require mask mandates, according to three senior Biden health officials. But the administration ultimately concluded that many people who are not vaccinated are also those who have resisted wearing masks.”

Hasnain says:

The underlying issue seems to be an RCE (per WD’s latest update) which was reported in 2019 and has been unpatched since the product hit end of life in 2016. I expect there to be litigation here, this is definitely not a good look and really sucks for those people who just lost data.

And I just bought a WD drive this week (not using any internet capabilities though).

“The My Book is a popular storage device for consumers and businesses. It plugs into computers, typically through USB. The affected model here, known as My Book Live, uses an ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital stopped supporting the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer.

On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.”

Hasnain says:

“That's how you're supposed to handle these people," Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender. "Crack their skulls!"

Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in and "beat the f--k out" of the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.

"Just shoot them," Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.”

Hasnain says:

So many well reasoned points here. Also goes into the failures of contemporary media.

“America’s experiment with mass incarceration has been such a clear and profound disaster that even conservatives have come around to the idea that it must end. Not everyone cares that it was a racist atrocity, but all corners of the political spectrum have been forced to admit that it is a staggering, unsustainable waste of resources that doesn’t work. Accepting this reality, it is perfectly rational — unremarkable, even — to shift resources from our armed police forces and into social services and other areas that address the root causes of crime. The failure of mass incarceration as a viable public safety strategy is quickly reaching conventional wisdom status, so it would be irrational not to execute a shift in policing as well.”

Hasnain says:

Power to the people!

“"It just speaks volumes. We have these experiences outside of TikTok. As Black folks, we're used to galvanizing, marching, protesting, having to scream and yell to have our voices heard. It's weird that it's also having to be translated onto a space where people are supposed to divulge their creative endeavors and engage creatively," Louis said. "It's supposed to be a safe space but even in those spaces we're forced to make a statement and protest."”

Hasnain says:

This is enraging.

“In another shocking revelation, Spears said that she wanted to have another child, but has been forced to keep an IUD in place.

Throughout her statement, Spears reminded the judge that it was her work financially supporting the people controlling her — namely her father, Jamie Spears.

"All I want is to own my money and for this to end," she said.”

Hasnain says:

Ironically this (history, sociology, psychology) is one thing I regret not learning more about in college. Despite that this seems to sound pretty fascistic.

“None of Florida’s school districts taught the theory before the ban, state education officials acknowledged. But DeSantis, leading up to his reelection bid in 2022, has railed against critical race theory, a legal academic concept that examines systemic racism in American institutions and policies, because he says it is an attempt to indoctrinate children against the United States.”

Hasnain says:

Looking through some of the data and … ugh.

“The department limited disclosure to cases where officers were judged guilty or pleaded no contest in its trial process — some of the most severe cases.

What those records show is that the most common form of punishment was docking vacation time. In some 89% of the cases made public, reduced vacation time was one of the penalties levied, and in more than 60% of the cases it was the only punishment. Officers in the database can have multiple cases filed against them.”

Hasnain says:

“This is what I mean by systemic racism. If, on my 13th birthday, all the country’s laws had been suddenly, perfectly and equally enforced, my community would still have had a massive hangover of history. The structures and attitudes shaped during decades and centuries of oppression would still have existed. Legal equality in theory does not mean a society is justly constituted.”

Hasnain says:

:|

“A trooper on I-87 upstate pulled him and his family over, maced them, and then rammed their car twice at high speed before the crash that took his daughter’s life, Goods and his lawyer say.”

Hasnain says:

Scathing. There were a few really good quotes in here but in the end I had to go with the conclusion.

“What’s shocking about the ProPublica report is not just that the tax bills are so low, but that these billionaires can live with themselves.

If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.”

Hasnain says:

This was really engaging.

“This is what disruption looks like. It happens slowly at first, then very quickly. It seems impossible to imagine a different way to do things, then we’re doing things in a different way. Stay tuned for a whole new way to work.”

Hasnain says:

“Other studies confirm the findings, Wong wrote. She pointed to separate research from the University of Michigan Virulent Hate Project, which examined media reports about anti-Asian incidents last year and found that upward of 75 percentof news stories identified perpetrators as male and white in instances of physical or verbal assault and harassment when the race of the perpetrator was confirmed. Wong said the numbers could even be an underestimate.

"This is really how crime is framed in the United States — it's framed as the source is Black," Wong said.”

Hasnain says:

Really detailed and solid reporting here.

“Gebru has had offers, but she can’t imagine working within the industry anytime in the near future. She’s been thinking back to conversations she’d had with a friend who warned her not to join Google, saying it was harmful to women and impossible to change. Gebru had disagreed, claiming she could nudge things, just a little, toward a more beneficial path. “I kept on arguing with her,” Gebru says. Now, she says, she concedes the point.”

Hasnain says:

“Trantalis said the truck missed Wasserman Schultz’s car “by inches” before crashing through a gate and into a landscaping company.

He believes it was a deliberate attempted attack of the Democratic congresswoman.

“This is a terrorist attack against the LGBT community,” Trantalis told Local 10 News. “This is exactly what it is. Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated, and it was targeted against a specific person. Luckily they missed that person, but unfortunately, they hit two other people.””

Hasnain says:

“This is the best argument for the four-day week: For workers, it rocks. Anecdotally, it allows people to be less stressed, less strapped for time, more physically and mentally healthy, and more, as Hunnicutt, the historian, put it, “fully human.” It cannot, on its own, give everyone enough time and money, or fix miserable jobs. But it leads to a substantial improvement in quality of life. “One of the biggest factors in people’s level of work-family satisfaction is the pure number of work hours they have,” Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who studies time use, told me. “So cutting it is huge … It would re-balance things for working families.””

Hasnain says:

“Many researchers say that mathematicians are unlikely to be replaced by machines any time soon. Proof assistants can’t read a maths textbook, they need continuous input from humans, and they can’t decide whether a mathematical statement is interesting or profound — only whether it is correct, Buzzard says. Still, computers might soon be able to point out consequences of the known facts that mathematicians had failed to notice, he adds.”

Hasnain says:

This is not cool.

“The thermostat, operated by the company EnergyHub, appears to have been enrolled in a program known as “Smart Savers Texas,” KHOU 11 notes. The program, which many customers are enrolled in unknowingly, allows power companies to remotely adjust thermostats when energy demands are high.”

Hasnain says:

And this is in 2021. The school was even named after MLK.

“Despite its reputation as a bastion of liberal politics, Marin is the most segregated county in the Bay Area, with most communities fighting affordable housing or even market-rate apartments. Many cities are 90% white, with pockets of people of color in Novato, San Rafael and Marin City. Racial covenants in decades past prevented African Americans from buying homes in certain cities. The effects linger today.”

Hasnain says:

“So as a longtime childless woman who is now wading through insurance forms and hospital preregistration and breast-pump reimbursements, I’ll offer a personal framework for “solving” the “problem”: My family values are fine. The country’s are not. For many years I did not have children because, in policies and practices, the United States is hell for mothers.”

Hasnain says:

“Defenders of private high schools’ overrepresentation at many highly ranked universities might claim the students have reaped the benefit of a more rigorous education in order to earn their spot. When you control for wealth, however, private school’s academic and social-emotional benefits are basically wiped out. Historically, students from the nation’s elite boarding schools “perform[ed] worse in the classroom [at Harvard] than other students over the entire 1924-1990 period” but went on to make more money than their peers by taking advantage of the connections they made in groups like final clubs, which largely exclude anyone who is not wealthy or white.”

Hasnain says:

Pleasantly surprised this is happening

Hasnain says:

Pleasantly surprised at this - they tapped bipartisan hate of big tech companies to get her confirmed here; and then snuck in a change to make her chair of the FTC, not just a commissioner (which, per reports, the Republican members who voted for the appointment would not have approved of).

This is also great for representation, and getting here at 32 is seriously impressive.

"“The Biden administration’s designation of Lina Khan as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission is tremendous news,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who championed breaking up Big Tech in her 2020 presidential campaign, said in a statement Tuesday. “Lina brings deep knowledge and expertise to this role and will be a fearless champion for consumers.”"

Hasnain says:

I have an incredible amount to learn with respect to product management skills and I’m sure this has its flaws; but this perspective did seem compelling given my experience.

“How many MBA programs are teaching this sort of collaboration, versus still teaching the CPG model where the product manager builds a business case, based on predictions of revenue, and expected expenses for design and engineering, and then defines requirements, and finally looks for someone to implement their brilliant ideas?

My suspicion is that most of the MBA faculty are blissfully unaware of their implicit biases on all this, but I think the evidence that it’s happening, and has been happening for decades, is widespread and compelling.”

Hasnain says:

I really liked Khan’s referenced piece here and now that the senate just confirmed her appointment (72-25, even Hawley and 21 other republicans were for jt, even if for “wrong” reasons) this will be fun to watch how it plays out.

“Khan, 32, currently associate professor of law at Columbia University, rose to prominence in 2017 after her Yale Law Journal article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" argued that Amazon's retail business should be separated from its selling platform.

Khan is a hero for critics of tech who want to see broader principles replace the "consumer welfare" standard of antitrust, under which harm from a company's monopolistic behavior is judged largely by whether consumer prices rise.”

Hasnain says:

Amazing is not a word I’d use to describe this but then again I’m not an HR exec.

“"I heard amazing stories about people actually sleeping in data centers," Kristen Roby Dimlow, corporate vice president for total rewards, performance and human resources business insights, said during a conversation with Morgan Stanley analysts Josh Baer and Mark Carlucci. "In certain countries there was huge lockdown, and so we would have our own employees choose to sleep in the data center because they were worried they'd get stuck at a roadblock, trying to go home."

Generally data centers are not places where people sleep. Aisles can be hot from air coming off of servers, and cold because of air conditioning to prevent machines from overheating. A Microsoft spokesperson would not say where employees slept in data centers or how many did it.”

Hasnain says:

I like Casey Newton’s take on this: “Google is gradually moving from introducing new communication apps every four months to simply renaming existing ones twice a year. But the overall goal remains: to ensure that under no circumstances do you ever know which Google product you are using”

Also what is going on in this screenshot

Hasnain says:

This was a really solid read and I felt myself nodding along to most things here.

“You’ll see it is a lot of work, and if you think that you still have time to do individual contributor work once you’ve done all of this, then you’re probably working too much. If you’re not doing all of this (and more) you’re probably not meeting my very high standards for management :-)”

Hasnain says:

“Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.

And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.”

Hasnain says:

In what world did their social media person think this was a good idea?

I think I lost it at the ridiculousness of this when someone pointed out that the standard Pfizer box has 195 vials, so they literally had to open a box, take out 115 vials and put them somewhere else. Like why not donate at least one full box?

“The tweet has been widely shared, with many comments expressing surprise at the size of the gift compared to Trinidad and Tobago's population of 1.4 million. Many mocked the gift, with some users sharing memes about the donation.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s worth noting, as I wrote when India’s second (and still-in-effect) TikTok ban came into play, that the app had become an easy-to-use arena for conscientious citizens to counter mainstream media censorship, spread the word about protests, and give voice to Indians of different castes, gender and sexual identifications, and ethnicities, many of whom found themselves under attack from the BJP’s Hindu nationalist government. Speaking of that very administration: In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that India’s then–Facebook head opposed applying the company’s hate speech rules to BJP politicians who’d spouted Islamophobic rhetoric online. And the New York Times reported that wealthy Indian workers who emigrated to the U.S. to work for Silicon Valley firms often perpetrated the same caste-discrimination systems that are so rampant in Hindu-fundamentalist regions of India.”

Hasnain says:

“This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t care much for baseball or sports these days but this was engaging!

“Those punishments are supposed to send a message, but players hear a louder one.

“The calculus is whoever gets outs better gets to play major league baseball,” says the NL reliever who says he uses Pelican. “There’s some guys that might have a moral dilemma about it, but I’m not one of those guys. It's not bad for your health. Steroids ... could kill you. That’s different than washing your hands of stick at the end of the game.””

Hasnain says:

“Taxing the rich is an incredibly rare sweet spot: a policy change that meets the approval of the party’s centrist technocrats and the voters and enables other popular and morally compelling reforms. The cause has been losing ground to an inside game dominated by the prejudices and self-interest of the rich and powerful. Every cent of Biden’s tax hike on the wealthy that Democrats leave on the table, because of a handful of gutless members of Congress, will be a sickening waste.”

Hasnain says:

“Note that nothing here implies abdicating responsibility. You still have to be responsible for all the projects and teams you own, and you have to be for as long as you are in your role. This is important because this responsibility is what will open up new gates.”

Hasnain says:

Trigger warning, since the violence described here… ugh

“The link between extremism and violent misogyny has become very evident in recent years as more mass shooters have been found to have a history of violent behavior toward women. Though most abusive men do not go on to perpetrate larger acts of violence, the ties between violence against women and extremism are too clear to ignore, experts said.

“We still, in this day and age, treat violence against women as a personal or family issue, as opposed to a troubling indicator of someone who could become more violent,” Bridget Todd, communications director at the feminist organization UltraViolet, told HuffPost in February. “

Hasnain says:

“If this is what it takes to transfer a file nowadays, no wonder every service that does it needs to charge money, or put arbitrary limits on file sizes, or show you ads, or worse.

You know what, on second thought, all this was a terrible idea, maybe we should have tried the p2p method after all. Okay, no, not that.

And this is why Tailscale is different.”

Hasnain says:

“You can’t monopolize someone’s time when you can’t trap them and act as a hall monitor over their every action, and so they want you back in the office. They deep down know you’re not working all 8 hours of the day at your work station, but they know that you know that they could walk behind you at any time and see that you’re doing something else. They don’t want to make the office a place where things actually get done, because that’s not the point to them - the point is that they own you.

And it’s hard to keep control of something that’s out of arm’s reach.”

Hasnain says:

“In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp — at a time when China denied that such places existed.

“In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its entry for the prize. “It would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and stymie journalists. The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a trickle.””

Hasnain says:

So well written. The numbers and graphs speak for themselves.

“Our analysis of tax data for the 25 richest Americans quantifies just how unfair the system has become.

By the end of 2018, the 25 were worth $1.1 trillion.

For comparison, it would take 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together to equal that same amount of wealth.

The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018: $1.9 billion.

The bill for the wage earners: $143 billion.”

Hasnain says:

So moving and well written.

“Could we ever open our eyes here in the United States to confront the lies in our founding myths? Could we comprehend the strength that comes from learning the real story? Do we have the fortitude for a reckoning that goes so much deeper than placing a Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard or insisting that fidelity to the Confederate flag is really about honoring Southern heritage instead of an institution based in hatred? Can we hope to produce a generation of leaders who can speak and be heard and perhaps even embraced by people who occupy those opposing terrains? Our future as a united country of people ever more divided depends on it.

When I first learned about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, I kept thinking about the encounter I had with the woman who had asked me if “slavery could be optional” within a museum dedicated to Black life in America. She wanted it swept from the story like an unsavory item on a menu: I’ll take a serving of patriotic history, but please hold the whippings and the bondage.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a solid list.

“How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else”

Hasnain says:

So it’s ok for one party to unilaterally destroy the right to vote, but another party looking to ensure everyone can vote is anti democratic? Sigh.

“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster. For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

“Democrats in Congress have proposed a sweeping election reform bill called the For the People Act. This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why? Are the very Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump because of actions that led to an attack on our democracy unwilling to support actions to strengthen our democracy? Are these same senators, whom many in my party applauded for their courage, now threats to the very democracy we seek to protect?”

Uh, yes and yes?

Hasnain says:

:|

“Police took her husband’s pistol away. Nine months later, the state’s top law enforcement agency gave it back, despite pending domestic violence charges and an active protective order. Just 16 days after that, he used the gun to shoot and kill her during another late-night dispute.”

Hasnain says:

This is the same ruling in which the judge said these aren’t dangerous because mass shootings have killed fewer people than the COVID vaccine. Umm...

“"There is no sound basis in law, fact, or common sense for equating assault rifles with swiss army knives — especially on Gun Violence Awareness Day and after the recent shootings in our own California communities," his statement said.”

Hasnain says:

“Over the last year we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored. Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office,’ with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating. Not only do many of us already feel well-connected with our colleagues worldwide, but better-connected now than ever. We’ve come to look forward to working as we are now, without the daily need to return to the office. It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.”

Hasnain says:

“For the Trumpist base, defined by the sense that a country that belongs to them is slipping away, a future full of elections contested by a right-wing party and a slightly less right-wing party would be an ideal outcome. Trump’s election was, among other things, a gesture of outrage from his supporters at having to share the country with those unlike them. Successfully restricting democracy so as to minimize the political power of rival constituencies would mean, at least as far as governing the country is concerned, that they would not have to. Most elected Republicans have repudiated the violence of the Capitol riot, but they share the belief of the rank and file that the rioters’ hearts were in the right place.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading

Hasnain says:

“Open collaboration can be delightful, with thoughtful people. Three people’s combined insights and refinements broke new ground (I believe) on an old question. I'm not sure any of us would have gotten there alone.

This is an existence proof that there are websites on the internet where it’s worth reading the comments.”

Hasnain says:

Not going to leave the detail in for fear of spoilers but this had quite the twist.

“In his defense, perhaps the meeting may have gone differently had I not been given a low-key Australian introduction. That's an Australian cultural problem (tall poppy syndrome). To an Australian, introductions in the US can sound boastful, but they can also be useful as a quick way to share one's specialties.”

Hasnain says:

Very well researched and in depth article on the new hype re: origins of COVID. In contrast to the other article I just shared; this also goes into a lot of politics within the US and elsewhere regarding the investigation, while also detailing the history and science.

“China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.

The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.”

Hasnain says:

This was very engaging. I don’t think we will ever have a definitive answer to what happened here; but this shows the power of internet sleuthing and how narratives change over time. And it goes into some COVID history.

“But it's now clear that the question of whether a biolab could have caused this pandemic—and could cause the next—is going to be explored in a way that might never have happened if a radical and decentralized group of outsiders hadn't challenged the status quo.

That's a lesson The Seeker won't soon forget. "I no longer see science as an exclusive domain," he wrote to Newsweek. "Everyone can make a difference."”

Hasnain says:

Title gore aside, this wasn’t too bad a piece at trying to raise awareness for important issues.

“Data show a gap between how well employers think they are supporting employees and how supported those employees feel. A survey by McKinsey & Co. published earlier this year found that 65% of employers say employee mental health is supported well or very well; 51% of employee respondents agreed.

Survey research also indicates that younger workers are more likely than older colleagues to report mental-health struggles. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Census Bureau, rates of people between 18 and 29 years old reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorders rose from 49% to 57% in surveys conducted between August 2020 and February this year. By contrast, those figures for respondents in their 50s were 35% and 41%, respectively.”

Hasnain says:

Motivating

“Of course, none of this is easy. Nurturing the full flowering of these innovations and speeding their deployment will require immense political will, big investments, and a whole passel of supportive policies. But we should have the imagination and faith to understand that climate change is one problem that we can solve.

There’s no Gates-ian fairy tale, no Franzen-like acceptance of disaster, and no awaiting the invention of some Kerry-like miracle technologies.

As physicist Ray Pierrehumbert once wrote in these pages about renewable technology, “It is time to stop quivering in our boots in pointless fear of the future and just roll up our sleeves and build it.””

Hasnain says:

“LinkedIn says it realizes there is "no price on the emotional labor and investment of time" ERGs contribute and that $10,000 is a start, in addition to a formal systematized recognition plan.”

Hasnain says:

Wait, *this* was the thing all the Pakistanis used as ammo for their latest anti-Malala activism? Sigh.

“After a life of extraordinary resilience, it seems all the options are finally on the table for her. “You have to find a future for yourself,” she says, smiling. If anyone knows how to do that, it’s Malala.”

Hasnain says:

Whew. Another word for this would be “a scam” :|

“Their business model is ingenious: a marketplace with a 100% take rate. They are one of the very few two-sided marketplace who managed to pull off: all money goes to the middleman, and none to the suppliers creating the value of the marketplace. The other notable example is Elsevier or Springer in the academic publishing space who charge high fees to access to papers whose authors and reviewers they pay nothing. For comparison, Uber has a take rate of 15-25%; Cameo sits with 25%, and YouTube at 45%.”

Hasnain says:

The tweet I saw this linked from sums this up:

“*** After $1,400 stimulus checks:

-- 42% decline in food shortages
-- 43% decline in gauge of financial instability
-- +20% decline in anxiety & depression”

Hasnain says:

Legacy code taken to a whole new level.

“First introduced in the Windows 98 Plus Pack and later included with Windows Me+ directly, Compressed Folders allows billions of Windows users to interact with ZIP files without downloading third-party software. Perhaps surprisingly, the feature was itself was acquired from two third-parties — Microsoft acquired the Explorer integration from Dave Plummer’s “side project”, while a company called InnerMedia claims credit for the “DynaZIP” engine underneath.

Unfortunately, the code hasn’t really been updated in a while. A long while. The timestamp in the module claims it was last updated on Valentine’s Day 1998”

Hasnain says:

Great little debugging story. Also a very surprising set of circumstances that caused it.

“Sometimes the simplest problems might point at big mistakes within. I could’ve probably fixed this by just swapping the order of the arguments right then and there, and it would’ve worked; until someone else came along and changed the order again. Thankfully, now we will be able to look at tubas with correct colors in peace.”

Hasnain says:

The follow up responses sent on the listserv are hilarious.

“Wallace’s email was designed to mock the Stanford Federalist Society for refusing to disavow the many Federalist Society luminaries who fomented the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including Hawley and Paxton. It worked: The flyer went viral, prompting USA Today to confirm that it was, indeed, satire. But the Stanford Federalist Society was not amused. In March, one of the group’s top officers filed a complaint against Wallace with Stanford’s Office of Community Standards. (This person’s name has been redacted from all documents.) The student alleged that Wallace’s satire “defamed” the Stanford Federalist Society, causing “harm” to the student group and to the “individual reputations” of the officers.”

Hasnain says:

“The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assumes that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award. Henry and Davenport, for instance, were denied awards but would have qualified had they been white, according to their lawsuit, which Brody dismissed in March, calling it an improper “collateral attack” on the settlement. They have appealed the ruling.”

Hasnain says:

“It is unsurprising that the disinformation campaigns against the 1619 Project and critical race theory come directly after 2020, a year in which many Americans explicitly grappled with police brutality, anti-Blackness, and white privilege. They directly construct and reinforce the idea that traditional white American identity and whites’ status at the top of the economic, political, and cultural hierarchy in the U.S. is under threat, which many political scientists argue led to Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016. And, like many other disinformation narratives, they build on preexisting conservative white beliefs about race and inequality—that to talk about race is to be divisive, that critiquing the United States is unpatriotic, and that racial inequality is due to individual failings rather than systemic inequalities.

And yet it is precisely actions, or more accurately inactions, like those taken by the UNC board of trustees that demonstrate that systemic racism exists and the 1619 Project is vital. “

Hasnain says:

“America’s living standards at this point are so incredibly abysmal that a child born in a poor Southern county has a lower life expectancy than someone in Bangladesh — one of the world’s poorest, most decrepit nations.”

Hasnain says:

“"If you look at the blueprints for residential schools when they were first built, many blueprints indicated that there were plans for graveyards to be put in," she told BuzzFeed News. "You don’t build a cemetery into a high school for white kids."

She added that there were indications of mass abuse and deaths at these schools as early as the 1920s, but there was never any formal tracking of the violence while they were operational.”

Hasnain says:

“Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.”

Hasnain says:

I still can’t get over the fact that someone forced employees into the office for a six minute meeting. Like... what?!

“A six-minute meeting drove Portia Twidt to quit her job.

She’d taken the position as a research compliance specialist in February, enticed by promises of remote work. Then came the prodding to go into the office. Meeting invites piled up.

The final straw came a few weeks ago: the request for an in-person gathering, scheduled for all of 360 seconds. Twidt got dressed, dropped her two kids at daycare, drove to the office, had the brief chat and decided she was done.”

Hasnain says:

This should win some headline award.

“That argument was a pitch-perfect distillation of how Manchin views the Senate. How it was received—with just six Republicans voting for the commission—would perhaps indicate to a more mutable senator that his view may be out of step with reality and necessitate eliminating the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold for passing bills.

But not for Manchin.”

Hasnain says:

“Quarantine has given us all time and solitude to think—a risk for any individual, and a threat to any status quo. People have gotten to have the experience—some of them for the first time in their life—of being left alone, a luxury usually unavailable even to the wealthy. Relieved of the deforming crush of financial fear, and of the world’s battering demands and expectations, people’s personalities have started to assume their true shape. And a lot of them don’t want to return to wasting their days in purgatorial commutes, to the fluorescent lights and dress codes and middle-school politics of the office. Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the facade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.”

Hasnain says:

This was way more interesting than I thought it would be from the title alone - goes into not just American history, but human history and a lot of sociology and psychology.

“After more than a year in relative isolation, we may be closer than we’d like to the wary, socially clumsy strangers who first gathered at Göbekli Tepe. “We get drunk because we are a weird species, the awkward losers of the animal world,” Slingerland writes, “and need all of the help we can get.” For those of us who have emerged from our caves feeling as if we’ve regressed into weird and awkward ways, a standing drinks night with friends might not be the worst idea to come out of 2021.”

Hasnain says:

Every time I hear of a ruling Alsup does I become a bigger fan.

“In an early case, Keller Lenkner recruited more than 5,000 DoorDash drivers who claimed they were improperly classified as contractors. When the food delivery company found itself faced with millions of dollars in arbitration fees, it attempted to push the drivers into filing a class-action lawsuit. US District Judge William Alsup instead forced DoorDash to arbitrate each claim, costing the company nearly $10 million even before the cases were decided. In November, DoorDash individually settled claims brought by 35,000 drivers for a total of $85 million.

“No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration,” Alsup wrote in his order. “Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed.””

Hasnain says:

I still don’t get how questions like this are at all acceptable - let alone right after the press is under the spotlight for something else going on at the exact same tournament.

““You are often compared to the Williams sisters. Maybe it’s because you’re black. But I guess it’s because you’re talented and maybe American too," the reporter started off by saying.

"We could have a final between you and Serena. Is it something you hope for? I mean, 22 years separate you girls.””