In March 2013 at Park Elementary School in Maryland, an eight-year-old boy was suspended for... biting his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. ... In 2010, a 12-year-old girl named Alexa Gonzalez was arrested for doodling [a short] message on her desk in green marker.... Alexa Gonzalez was placed in handcuffs and marched out of school by police in front of her classmates and the staff of Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, New York. ... In 2014, at Stuart Draft Elementary School, a fifth grader was told that she couldn't use ChapStick because it was considered a medication, and she would need a prescription. While most of us wouldn't see ChapStick in this light, the school district saw it differently.
Now you don't always know the context behind these things, but there's clearly something wrong here. Bottom line is that this kind of thing is used to bully the population, and isn't that different in spirit from the Chinese Social Credit System.
One day, someone is going to eat a vanilla-extract flavoured pancake, and then his wife is going to give birth halfway to the hospital, because his car refused to start, and then it will be on Fox News for weeks and weeks, because of how the New Left is now horning in on their traditional territory.
According to Blair, the White House ordered the codes be installed in 1962 despite objections from the U.S. Strategic Air Command, which worried the extra layer of security would delay launching missiles in the event of an emergency.
SAC was so concerned the car wouldn't start at the worst possible time, they effectively flipped the bird to the Commander-in-Chief behind his back.
"The locks had been installed," recalled Blair, "but everyone knew the combination."
Nothing like a zero-tolerance giggle (times eight) at Kennedy's expense behind his back.
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (2018) by Michele Gelfand.
The military is the iconic example of tightness.... "The military is like a machine built out of hierarchy," American marine Steve Colley told me in an interview in 2017. "And if you break the hierarchy, you're breaking the machine."... "We have standards for things as seemingly insignificant as how we dress and as complicated as how to maintain the most advanced battle tank in the world," described James D. Pendry... "Meeting seemingly insignificant standards is as important as meeting the most complicated ones—meeting one establishes the foundation for meeting the other."
I get making a big deal out of the seemingly insignificant (even the Pop-Tart gun). But what goes under the name "zero tolerance" typically involves horrifically disproportionate responses, while all the people paid to be in charge wander around vacuously explaining that their hands are tied. Inevitably, some ridiculous outcome arises that is not a good look for the human species.
The tests were carried out by Jisc's in-house team of ethical hackers, with one of the most effective approaches being so-called "spear phishing"... where an email might appear to be from someone you know or a trusted source but is really a way of concealing an attack, such as downloading "malware".
I can almost see adding "wakey wakey" quotes to "spear fishing" for all the fish out of water.
But adding scarequotes to "malware" is at direct eye level with adding scarequotes around "weed" (and I'm not talking about Colorado, either).
Hippy to Yuppie: I'm sorry you think my lawn is covered in "weeds", but I don't happen to see it that way.
But those aren't scarequotes; they're Birkenstock sarcasm quotes, and 90% of the reason that good fences make for good neighbours.
In nuclear silos, according to every movie I've ever seen, at least two people have to turn keys simultaneously to set a "high value" chain of events into motion.
At present, we don't treat private information with the same respect. But is that a good thing?
Status quo: private information is not a nuclear-tipped ICBM.
Cluestick quo: the cat doesn't go back into the bag
I'd go the opposite direction. Rethinking the purpose of Government would start out by explaining that the sole purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and how all legitimate government power stems from that singular purpose.
Do you imagine that this principle shrinks or enlarges government as we presently know it?
* if smaller, you're using the definition of "protect" endorsed by the powerful * if larger, you're using the definition of "protect" endorsed by the powerless
The correct book title is: Rule Makes, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
Either I cut and paste from a bad source, or had some cut and paste mishap with the last word, and patched it over in the heat of the moment with the wrong tire.
If the US is fully committed to capitalism and the methods of the authoritarian Chinese government proves to be the most profitable for corporate/government stakeholders then it is only a matter of time before the US adopts similar policies.
Not long ago I read a book on Vonnegut's writing career (it was mainly a compilation of his short stories) and it turns out he slaved like a bastard to establish himself as a young author. A few elite publications paid big money if you managed to get one of your works printed. Like most aspiring authors, he mostly garnered rejection letters. Unlike most aspiring authors, he read the letters closely, and followed the advice given.
The big piece of advice was to craft a good payoff. O. Henry was famous for crafting his shock miniatures, where the payoff turns on a dime. What a payoff is, exactly, is hard to define, but the editors know it when the see it, an author of the day failing to breast the tape with a suitably photogenic grin or grimace simply wasn't going to punch his big ticket to the big times.
What I just realized here is the cynicism has the tightest payoff structure of all the literate art forms: * fully committed * profitable * only a matter of time.
Bing bang boom BINGO! Payoff delivered. You may now collect your $200 and proceed to troll another thread.
The $64,000 question here is to analyze just what the reader is seeking from the prevailing payoff structure. Why does it feel so damn good to veni, vidi, vici? (I came, I saw, I pressed "like".)
Last night I wrangled for a couple of hours with Rule Makes, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our Minds (2018) by Michele Gelfand.
She's got all the right blurbs: Pinker, Pink, Adam Grant, Dweck, Baumeister (plus one relative non-entity). She's one of the Edge crowd. She's highly recognized. Yet roughly once a page, in the early going, she dropped an adjectival cliche right out of the most wooden business book you've ever read. And worse, she consistently subjects her statistical outliers to all the scrutiny of Brian Wansink. "Yes, it's true that this group doesn't fit the model, but voila! here's another observational post hoc that sweeps the paradox away." Her editor probably told her not to sound too academic—a sometimes dangerous piece of advice that enables an academic of otherwise sound mind and body to toss the statistically sound baby out with the soundbite bathwater.
I think there's a lot here to chew on in her tightness–looseness theory, but her exposition of this in this particular book left some sand attached to the root hairs, and so much of my chewing involves more tongue than teeth.
On page 97 she attributes the tight culture of the U.S. south to their Celtic ancestors of the 1700s, notably their code of gallantry, courage, and suspicion "a combination of characteristics psychologists call 'a culture of honor.' "
So much for the grand cultural melting pot. So much for the wham bam "only a matter of time" payload cynigasm.
The implied payload is that these people are really just in it for the money, and the entire culture of the U.S. south is only so much shallow showmanship (try saying this out loud in the U.S. south).
The implied cynigasm payload is that we don't even need to notice the exceptional cases.
The implied cynigasm payload is that we don't even need to invoke the Wansink soft shoe.
The implied cynigasm payload is that they are shallow, and we are deep.
Such is cognitive magic of cynicism that from within its powerful bubble, one can press "like" to endorse depth, without evoking the least twinge of psychological dissonance.
The most important idea in undergraduate economics is to think things through on the margin. They pound away at this for years, and some of the students manage to get there.
The paradox is that we're already really good at thinking on the margin, in specific instances.
For example, the French call orgasm la petite mort because as soon as your dick isn't hard any more—for all intents and purposes—it's just an irritating tube of flesh you piss through (in America, la petite mort is primarily a newlywed phenomena, wherein the fresh bride croons to the fresh groom , "hey, there, Happy Feet, you need to piss sitting down", and thus it is decreed that the man shall equate marriage to the hairy promontory of his angular kneecaps).
This isn't precisely marginal thinking as economics would have it, but apparently it's the best we can muster with what comes natural to our native cognitive toolbox.
How does YouTube decide what each video is about and which ones offer high-quality, balanced information on that topic, and which ones contain conspiracy theories?
This is the old Wikipedia fallacy, resurrected. Turned out expertise was overrated. Wikipedia doesn't self-correct at the level of an academic journal, but it self corrects well enough to function as a vast, interconnected web of 5 million knowledge-domain signage posts. People don't go do Wikipedia for "this is true". They go to Wikipedia for "you are here". Wikipedia is the Eternal September for the freshman's first orientation day on the big campus. On a big enough campus, merely hauling your ass to the right building is a though job in the first week.
The same is true for conspiracy. To a rough first approximation, conspiracy theories all smell alike.
I clicked on a YouTube video yesterday and within a minute or so, it was feeling brave enough to intone "the stereotype that ancient Egyptian civilization and their technology was inferior to modern technological civilization".
Oh, yes, of course, it's just a stereotype that ancient Egypt wasn't positively crawling with Stargate-class wormholes. It's just a stereotype that they mostly built the pyramids with simple tools (rope, axles, boats, wedges, ramps, chisels) and their dog-tired bare hands.
Anyway, what I can assuredly detect in one word, Google can sufficiently detect (at scale) from the Limburger-loud signature of a hundred words. And that's not even counting the entire social graph, wherein the same Looney Tunes are always hanging around the same goat-skin bags of 100-proof moonshine, by all the sketchiest Stargates to nowhere good, all operated by all the same sketch money changers.
No-one who regards the human species as a form of animal life says that animals can't consent. On the other hand, barely anyone discusses consent at all in a functional sense outside the enabling context of a literate culture with a long, written history.
Contractual obligations as we now understand them are joined at the hip with the written record (this being the preferred embodiment for anyone organized enough to do it the right way).
The technology of modern consent is mastery of symbolic culture. In this matter, the bees might be further ahead than the dolphins. Not even my border collie ever quite managed to drop a written IOU on my lap to redeem today the walk he didn't get yesterday (though he certainly kept score of our verbal contract, on a minute by minute basis).
In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase wordsâ"words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong.
The word 'consciousness' is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as "how we reason and make decisions, how we represent our intentions, and how we know what we've recently done."
Correct me if I'm wrong, and you regard consent and consciousness to have no conceptual overlap at whatsoever.
[Historically, in deep history, or in rural America in more recent history] when the people in the US have been asked at the ballot if they wish to be a party to homosexual marriages, they [have] almost always [said] no, they do not.
Even after I fixed your abuse of tense, no ballet question in all of recorded history has ever been quite this straightforward.
And this one less so than most, because the opposition side deliberately frames marriage as a question about God's will, and not as an administrative question about contractual terms. Many of the people ostensibly opposing homosexual "marriage" would vote in favour of civil homosexual union, because this small semantic distinction is salient to many voters.
Women's suffrage in the United States of America, the legal right of women to vote, was established over the course of more than half a century, first in various states and localities, sometimes on a limited basis, and then nationally in 1920.
For a long time, the men said "no" and maybe to this day there were more total "no" outcomes than "yes" outcomes, if that's the way we're now conducting our backward-facing straw poll.
The last time I looked into wide-body AVX, a single use of such an instruction on a single core on any thread deturboed the entire CPU down to the 2 GHz range for milliseconds thereafter.
Contrary to popular opinion, it's not "free" to download a "free" book. These sorry punters probably had to wade around in a Microsoft-designed web site, filtering the chaff from the dross. (Bargain tables generally only contain chaff and dross, but sometimes hours of hard prospecting pays off with a big score, that almost feels too good to be true.)
On my Kobo, I even have a few books which I marked up with local annotations (though none with DRM). Poof goes your own work if you were suckered into that, too.
A typical Microsoft half-effort toward making their discarded customers whole.
Would this be the same fake-news Washington Post that assured us for over two fucking years that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary!?
Since "collusion" doesn't have a formal definition under the law (despite Trump's incessant tweeting of the word as if this was the precise legal matter at hand), the Washington Post pretty much had an open field to use the word however they wished to use it, over a wide spectrum of possible meanings, only a few of which encompass dire legal jeopardy, which Trump has now escaped, relatively unscathed (details still to follow), from this one particular investigation.
I think it's immoral. I think it's unethical. I think it's unpatriotic. And, yes, I think it's corrupt—and evidence of collusion. Now I have always said that the question of whether this amounts to proof of conspiracy was another matter...
You're entirely sure that nothing in there would have amounted to "collusion" in the minds of the WP editorial staff, as the WP elected to use that word, in that context, at that time?
Sometimes I maybe trust the Slashdot eggheads to fill in the blanks more than I ought to.
If you were paying full attention, you would have noticed that by managing to misspell Andreessen as "Andreesen" and "Horowitz" as "Horrowitz" he effectively fudged A16z into both A15z and A17z (not to mention a crypto A16z, because sometimes two wrongs do make a square number).
Which is partly why I drew attention to this being exactly the wrong venue for that double-action slovenliness.
Also, for the nit-picky record, "Luddite" remains a proper noun: it hearkens back to a tribal rift, and bears no kinship with clingy dripstone stalactite.
Somehow it appears I fat-fingered ^Z en route to the "submit" button, and castrated my last amendment of clever verbiage (not even Lazarus had captured the goods, and I had to key it again from memory).
For some reason, I'm especially clumsy today: * accidentally cross-posted a large post into the wrong future of work woe, woe, woe tab * dropped a plastic spice-bottle cap onto a thin layer of hot oil — a carefully judged bullet-snatch saved both lid and oil * fat-fingering ^Z just now
Don't recall doing either of the first two at any point in the last decade, and the third maybe happens to me once per year.
I've always believed in Postel's robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. For this reason, I'm harder on myself than I am on other people in fiddly matters orthographic.
But this is not a good venue to misspell both Andreessen and Horowitz, once each.
First:
But Andreessen and Horrowitz were known as super angels.
Second:
What a world that would be," particularly as "technological progress is precisely what makes a strong, rigorous social safety net affordable," tweeted Andreesen.
In his defense, he did get "Andreessen" right in 53 other instances, and it all honesty, if any modern software (including Firebox) had half a spell-checking clue, your helpful software agent might have inquired: did you really mean to spell "Andreessen" differently one time out of fifty four? So I guess he only has Andreessen, himself, to blame, after all.
Also, for the nit-picky record, "Luddite" remains a proper noun.
Shite. I had two tabs open at the same time on the future of employment, and landed my comment on the wrong thread, which I've now reposted there in full with a bold header explaining my mistake.
Note: this is the correct thread for the same comment moments ago mistakenly cross-posted at Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create with two tiny revisions.
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headlong into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Is Gillette Foamy thick and rich enough to stop this speeding sports car?
[Stock car smashes through giant pile of foamy.]
No. But it's still thick and rich enough for a great shave.
[Man inverts hand with a lump of fresh Foamy that stays in place.]
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Is Gillette Foamy thick and rich enough to support this beautiful women?
[Beautiful woman lowered on a trapeze bar onto a giant mound, undulating receptively on a swanky swimming pool, sinks without a trace.]
No. But it's still thick and rich enough for a great shave.
[Man inverts hand with a lump of fresh Foamy that stays in place.]
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
George Gilder listened to the technology, and became guru of the telecosm. The markets listened to his newsletter, and followed him into the Global Crossing abyss, yet he's never stopped believing.
The predictions Gilder has made in the intervening decade suggest that he vowed to never again permit anyone else to convey a vision of the world more exuberant than his own.:... In 1996 he foresaw that, because of broadband's potential to deliver online learning, within five years "the most deprived ghetto child in the most benighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today's suburban preppy."
It was a preposterous assertion, and hardly the only one that seems absurd in the harsh fluorescent light of the morning.
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headfirst into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Is Gillette Foamy thick and rich enough to stop this speeding sports car?
[Stock car smashes through giant pile of foamy.]
No. But it's still thick and rich enough for a great shave.
[Man inverts hand with a lump of fresh Foamy that stays in place.]
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Is Gillette Foamy thick and rich enough to support this beautiful women?
[Beautiful woman lowered on a trapeze bar onto a giant mound, undulating receptively on a swanky swimming, pool sinks without a trace.]
No. But it's still thick and rich enough for a great shave.
[Man inverts hand with a lump of fresh Foamy that stays in place.]
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
George Gilder listened to the technology, and became guru of the telecosm. The markets listened to his newsletter, and followed him into the Global Crossing abyss, yet he's never stopped believing.
The predictions Gilder has made in the intervening decade suggest that he vowed to never again permit anyone else to convey a vision of the world more exuberant than his own. ... In 1996 he foresaw that, because of broadband's potential to deliver online learning, within five years "the most deprived ghetto child in the most benighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today's suburban preppy."
It was a preposterous assertion, and hardly the only one that seems absurd in the harsh fluorescent light of the morning.
With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages — things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have.
If the ten most prestigious universities in America put their heads together (not counting the football teams), this system of extortion could be ended almost overnight. They merely have to collectively announce that these kinds of journals will have their tenure clout progressively de-weighted in the realm of future academic promotions.
institutional_ubiquity is a value between 0 and 1, which approximates the number of institutions of higher learning where faculty and students have cost-free access to the journal in question (any stable, approximate metric will do; you don't have to scour the world down to the last accredited college in Uganda or the Australian outback—though you can if the spirit moves you).
k is an integer, initialized to zero for the coming academic year, which increments annually.
alpha is a constant of moderation, probably somewhere around five. If your gated journal has ubiquity 0.5, then in five years it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5; in ten years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^2 = 0.25 = conservation status "critically endangered"; in twenty years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^4 = 6% = conservation status "zoo specimens only".
This immediately bequeaths a nail-studded bargaining club to the underfunded libraries of poorer countries, because Elsevier will be in a blind panic to keep their ubiquity scores well above 0.5 for the foreseeable future (about a decade) to milk what's left of the cow—a cow that's now thoroughly sterilized, never to breed again. Elsevier's predicament in this Brave New World: without viable tenure_clout you receive nothing of impact to publish; with nothing of impact to publish, the lemming compulsion of all these institutions to blindly pony up instantly withers on the wine.
This small problem in extirpation design is easily solved, by Bitcoin ^ (1/10), by which I mean a mere Satoshi fingernail clipping could architect the whole scheme in under ten minutes, 99% bug free, and binding for perpetuity.
That this is so translates as follows (for those of you whose Japanese is the least bit rusty): what we're really dealing with here is institutional capture, or this would have been done already, and elite America universities would not be voluntarily donating blood to Dutch pirates, as they continue to do. Maybe they don't mind paying Elsevier these giants royalties, for the same reason that Apple customers everywhere reach exactly the same conclusion: it's not so much the product you're paying for, as the exclusivity the arrangement creates. From the perspective of the Ivy League, exclusivity generally maps to a feature, not a bug.
Now you might need to choose a larger alpha for narrower specialties so as not to unduly punish academics presently in the tenure pipeline, who were not notified in advance that the rules were in aggressive flux. This is why a piracy shakeout leveraged around standards of academic promotion needs to be clairvoyantly tuned to take on the order of ten to twenty years. (Not a big deal: one Satoshi Fingernail Clawback, coming up.)
If these same universities bond together on an economic footing, it would smack of collusion, and also open the alliance up to divide and conquer (if the end game boils down to nothing more than getting the largest subscription discount, the first to move can be enticed with the largest reward).
Elsevier would have a much harder legal-grievance row to hoe sticking their beak into tenure-committee standards of merit.
I have seen the game-theoretic matrix, and it tilts heavily toward the formerly Philandric Ivy League, yet somehow Elsevier continues to run the table on pocket sevens.
But now the fix is in, as outlined above, and there's nothing remaining to do but make it so.
If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.
Missed lecture three of Classics 101, did you? Many people did. As I recall, there was some kind of shooting incidence on campus that morning; only a few eggheads tuned out the drama and showed up for class.
A peerage is a legal system historically comprising hereditary titles in various countries, comprising various noble ranks.
Bottom line: If they're not behind the right peerage wall, they're not your peers.
Who else remembers the Clipper chip saga from the first light of eternal September?
The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the NSA as an encryption device that secured "voice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor. Each clipper chip had a unique serial number and a secret unit key programmed into the chip when manufactured.
It was part of a Clinton Administration program to "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions."
It was announced in 1993 and by 1996 was entirely defunct.
Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography (1994) had just come out, and it was a glorious rip in the kimono of the grotesquely secretive surveillance state. (At one point, in the institution's formative adolescence, even the NSA's name was hard to find out.)
In those glorious, turbulent years of eternal onset we—the open source greybeards of minimal middle—managed to score some surprising victories over the rather clumsy NSA, clearly dazed by those first insistent rays of sunshine, now stumbling around in the public sphere like John Oliver fresh out of bed, blinded by paparazzi flashbulbs en route to his underwear drawer.
I enjoyed this comedic spectacle while it was happening to the power of ten.
Meanwhile, another part of my brain was going "they'll be baaack". If you catch Rommel with his pants down at 06:00, enjoy it while you can; by 0:900 you'll wish you hadn't. Clearly the hard-boiled eggheads of this imperious and paranoid institution weren't going to consume their crumpets of crow quavering cadaverously. Now there's so much crepuscular silicon—how shall we best phrase this?—of mixed utility that you need avail yourself of the extended edition of Hogwart's Almanac merely to decode the confounding acronyms.
Clinton's Clipper comeuppance was the most glorious greybeard insurgency I've ever witnessed, but with a teeny, tiny fly embedded in the silver lining: we basically started a land war in Asia we could not ultimately win. Not even a historic Snowden dump changed matters much at the end of the day. With the persistence of the North Vietnamese (augmented by Mexican mechanization) minions of the NSA have cunningly scrabbled subsoil, stealth supply lines all the way to Moscow's front door.
This story is a somewhat different offensive than Operation Typhoon. They don't want to conquer Moscow, they want to become Moscow, under cover of ubiquitous onion domes, now tinier than anyone had once imagined, shrouded in RF-transparent Mandelbrot onion skin: you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
All said and done—and duly intercepted—the moral of starting a land war in Asia remains mostly the same.
I don't sign up to free trials that want payment details in advance, so generally I don't get free trials.
Same here. But I generally regard this as a feature, not a bug. If they need your payment details just to give you a taste, the taste is almost certainly bitter in the end.
Driving 150 km/h in places where 130 km/h is allowed on almost empty and dry roads? No issue for me if people do that. To me the 130 km/h is way to low then.
It's not that simple. 160 km/h is just fine on a highway in an optimal state of maintenance, under otherwise optimal circumstances: weather, traffic, angle of the sun, hours of restorative sleep, recent sugar intake, condition of tires on vehicle and all around general mechanical soundness, no giant trucks shedding part of their loads, no giant piles of leaves migrating to the opposite bank without using a marked crosswalk, etc. etc.
Long, long ago I crossed much of Canada on my motorcycle at a typical cruising speed around 145 km/h—a speed where my bike absolutely purred along—completely aware that at every minute of every hour I was one short, inattentive moment away from becoming a giant road pizza. (Consequently, I had very very few inattentive moments, and I was aware of every vehicle in my viable light-cone of paint exchange, 360 degrees, at all times.
Much of the trans-Canada wasn't even divided at that point, especially in the prairies, so you're often undertaking passing manoeuvres in the oncoming lane with extra haste, despite multiple miles of forward visibility; I very patiently awaited my main chance, and then lowered the boom, dropping a gear down and spiking up to 90% of red line as I hit the gap hard; there's a brief wind-waggle as you come hard around the ass-end of a big rig, which doesn't much change your vector (if you ignore the effect, as you should), but it does slam you into ten degrees of sideways tilt before you bounce upright again half a second later; not quite Yeager punching through Mach 1, but as close as I ever got).
This was entirely unlike some of the grocery-getters who were drafting along behind the big rig, completely unaware they were riding a giant wave, then they try to punch out into the passing lane at half throttle, and almost fall back once the hit the brunt of the wind, before they finally get religion about the throttle, by which point their passing manoeuvre—if they stick it out—has stretched out to 15 to 20 long seconds, by which point the halfway-panicked driver is struggling to figure out whether that oncoming car in the far distance is less than a full mile, which is darn hard to do—though, unfortunately, it won't be at all hard to do by the time the the struggling grocery-getting pulls even with the big rig's powerful hindquarters, not if he's misjudged this treacle adventure the least bit. Good work, Sherlock. You can punch the brakes, drop back 30 m in a heart beat, and tuck back in behind the big truck—supposing he's not also so jumpy by now he punches his brakes at the same time, thinking he's giving you a necessary out in the forward direction. Compared to this kind of thing, my three-second power surges well north of 145 km/h seemed like a giant oasis of unadulterated prudence.
Never once did I leave a big rig speculating nervously about whether I had competently managed this business of darting in/out of the oncoming lane. Not only that, I tended to start these manoeuvres from 3 seconds back, beginning my hard acceleration still safely tucked in my own lane, on an inside line, perfectly timed to hit the open gap behind the oncoming car, at speed, hard off the ass-end of the truck ahead, the precise moment the maw opens up. This involves solving (simple) differential equations in three dimensions simultaneously: where (right off the ass-end of the truck in front), when (the precise moment the maw opens up), and how fast (a lot honking faster than the truck ahead)—all have to perfectly align at a single moment in time (though there is some rubber in the "honking fast" constraint, with leeway up or down, to absorb minor miscalculation).
Point of view from the big rig: oncoming car on undivided highway blows past on the left; 500 ms later, motorcycle pops out ti
Slashdot Mirror
10 Ridiculous Instances Of Zero Tolerance In Schools — 10 October 2015
Now you don't always know the context behind these things, but there's clearly something wrong here. Bottom line is that this kind of thing is used to bully the population, and isn't that different in spirit from the Chinese Social Credit System.
One day, someone is going to eat a vanilla-extract flavoured pancake, and then his wife is going to give birth halfway to the hospital, because his car refused to start, and then it will be on Fox News for weeks and weeks, because of how the New Left is now horning in on their traditional territory.
'Secret' Nuclear Missile Launch Code During Cold War Was '00000000' — 5 December 2013
SAC was so concerned the car wouldn't start at the worst possible time, they effectively flipped the bird to the Commander-in-Chief behind his back.
Nothing like a zero-tolerance giggle (times eight) at Kennedy's expense behind his back.
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (2018) by Michele Gelfand.
I get making a big deal out of the seemingly insignificant (even the Pop-Tart gun). But what goes under the name "zero tolerance" typically involves horrifically disproportionate responses, while all the people paid to be in charge wander around vacuously explaining that their hands are tied. Inevitably, some ridiculous outcome arises that is not a good look for the human species.
I can almost see adding "wakey wakey" quotes to "spear fishing" for all the fish out of water.
But adding scarequotes to "malware" is at direct eye level with adding scarequotes around "weed" (and I'm not talking about Colorado, either).
Hippy to Yuppie: I'm sorry you think my lawn is covered in "weeds", but I don't happen to see it that way.
But those aren't scarequotes; they're Birkenstock sarcasm quotes, and 90% of the reason that good fences make for good neighbours.
In nuclear silos, according to every movie I've ever seen, at least two people have to turn keys simultaneously to set a "high value" chain of events into motion.
At present, we don't treat private information with the same respect. But is that a good thing?
Status quo: private information is not a nuclear-tipped ICBM.
Cluestick quo: the cat doesn't go back into the bag
Do you imagine that this principle shrinks or enlarges government as we presently know it?
* if smaller, you're using the definition of "protect" endorsed by the powerful
* if larger, you're using the definition of "protect" endorsed by the powerless
The correct book title is: Rule Makes, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
Either I cut and paste from a bad source, or had some cut and paste mishap with the last word, and patched it over in the heat of the moment with the wrong tire.
Not long ago I read a book on Vonnegut's writing career (it was mainly a compilation of his short stories) and it turns out he slaved like a bastard to establish himself as a young author. A few elite publications paid big money if you managed to get one of your works printed. Like most aspiring authors, he mostly garnered rejection letters. Unlike most aspiring authors, he read the letters closely, and followed the advice given.
The big piece of advice was to craft a good payoff. O. Henry was famous for crafting his shock miniatures, where the payoff turns on a dime. What a payoff is, exactly, is hard to define, but the editors know it when the see it, an author of the day failing to breast the tape with a suitably photogenic grin or grimace simply wasn't going to punch his big ticket to the big times.
What I just realized here is the cynicism has the tightest payoff structure of all the literate art forms:
* fully committed
* profitable
* only a matter of time.
Bing bang boom BINGO! Payoff delivered. You may now collect your $200 and proceed to troll another thread.
The $64,000 question here is to analyze just what the reader is seeking from the prevailing payoff structure. Why does it feel so damn good to veni, vidi, vici? (I came, I saw, I pressed "like".)
Last night I wrangled for a couple of hours with Rule Makes, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our Minds (2018) by Michele Gelfand.
She's got all the right blurbs: Pinker, Pink, Adam Grant, Dweck, Baumeister (plus one relative non-entity). She's one of the Edge crowd. She's highly recognized. Yet roughly once a page, in the early going, she dropped an adjectival cliche right out of the most wooden business book you've ever read. And worse, she consistently subjects her statistical outliers to all the scrutiny of Brian Wansink. "Yes, it's true that this group doesn't fit the model, but voila! here's another observational post hoc that sweeps the paradox away." Her editor probably told her not to sound too academic—a sometimes dangerous piece of advice that enables an academic of otherwise sound mind and body to toss the statistically sound baby out with the soundbite bathwater.
I think there's a lot here to chew on in her tightness–looseness theory, but her exposition of this in this particular book left some sand attached to the root hairs, and so much of my chewing involves more tongue than teeth.
On page 97 she attributes the tight culture of the U.S. south to their Celtic ancestors of the 1700s, notably their code of gallantry, courage, and suspicion "a combination of characteristics psychologists call 'a culture of honor.' "
So much for the grand cultural melting pot. So much for the wham bam "only a matter of time" payload cynigasm.
The implied payload is that these people are really just in it for the money, and the entire culture of the U.S. south is only so much shallow showmanship (try saying this out loud in the U.S. south).
The implied cynigasm payload is that we don't even need to notice the exceptional cases.
The implied cynigasm payload is that we don't even need to invoke the Wansink soft shoe.
The implied cynigasm payload is that they are shallow, and we are deep.
Such is cognitive magic of cynicism that from within its powerful bubble, one can press "like" to endorse depth, without evoking the least twinge of psychological dissonance.
The most important idea in undergraduate economics is to think things through on the margin. They pound away at this for years, and some of the students manage to get there.
The paradox is that we're already really good at thinking on the margin, in specific instances.
For example, the French call orgasm la petite mort because as soon as your dick isn't hard any more—for all intents and purposes—it's just an irritating tube of flesh you piss through (in America, la petite mort is primarily a newlywed phenomena, wherein the fresh bride croons to the fresh groom , "hey, there, Happy Feet, you need to piss sitting down", and thus it is decreed that the man shall equate marriage to the hairy promontory of his angular kneecaps).
This isn't precisely marginal thinking as economics would have it, but apparently it's the best we can muster with what comes natural to our native cognitive toolbox.
This is the old Wikipedia fallacy, resurrected. Turned out expertise was overrated. Wikipedia doesn't self-correct at the level of an academic journal, but it self corrects well enough to function as a vast, interconnected web of 5 million knowledge-domain signage posts. People don't go do Wikipedia for "this is true". They go to Wikipedia for "you are here". Wikipedia is the Eternal September for the freshman's first orientation day on the big campus. On a big enough campus, merely hauling your ass to the right building is a though job in the first week.
The same is true for conspiracy. To a rough first approximation, conspiracy theories all smell alike.
I clicked on a YouTube video yesterday and within a minute or so, it was feeling brave enough to intone "the stereotype that ancient Egyptian civilization and their technology was inferior to modern technological civilization".
Oh, yes, of course, it's just a stereotype that ancient Egypt wasn't positively crawling with Stargate-class wormholes. It's just a stereotype that they mostly built the pyramids with simple tools (rope, axles, boats, wedges, ramps, chisels) and their dog-tired bare hands.
Anyway, what I can assuredly detect in one word, Google can sufficiently detect (at scale) from the Limburger-loud signature of a hundred words. And that's not even counting the entire social graph, wherein the same Looney Tunes are always hanging around the same goat-skin bags of 100-proof moonshine, by all the sketchiest Stargates to nowhere good, all operated by all the same sketch money changers.
No-one who regards the human species as a form of animal life says that animals can't consent. On the other hand, barely anyone discusses consent at all in a functional sense outside the enabling context of a literate culture with a long, written history.
Contractual obligations as we now understand them are joined at the hip with the written record (this being the preferred embodiment for anyone organized enough to do it the right way).
The technology of modern consent is mastery of symbolic culture. In this matter, the bees might be further ahead than the dolphins. Not even my border collie ever quite managed to drop a written IOU on my lap to redeem today the walk he didn't get yesterday (though he certainly kept score of our verbal contract, on a minute by minute basis).
Unpacking Suitcase Words — October 2009
Correct me if I'm wrong, and you regard consent and consciousness to have no conceptual overlap at whatsoever.
Even after I fixed your abuse of tense, no ballet question in all of recorded history has ever been quite this straightforward.
And this one less so than most, because the opposition side deliberately frames marriage as a question about God's will, and not as an administrative question about contractual terms. Many of the people ostensibly opposing homosexual "marriage" would vote in favour of civil homosexual union, because this small semantic distinction is salient to many voters.
For a long time, the men said "no" and maybe to this day there were more total "no" outcomes than "yes" outcomes, if that's the way we're now conducting our backward-facing straw poll.
The last time I looked into wide-body AVX, a single use of such an instruction on a single core on any thread deturboed the entire CPU down to the 2 GHz range for milliseconds thereafter.
Contrary to popular opinion, it's not "free" to download a "free" book. These sorry punters probably had to wade around in a Microsoft-designed web site, filtering the chaff from the dross. (Bargain tables generally only contain chaff and dross, but sometimes hours of hard prospecting pays off with a big score, that almost feels too good to be true.)
On my Kobo, I even have a few books which I marked up with local annotations (though none with DRM). Poof goes your own work if you were suckered into that, too.
A typical Microsoft half-effort toward making their discarded customers whole.
Since "collusion" doesn't have a formal definition under the law (despite Trump's incessant tweeting of the word as if this was the precise legal matter at hand), the Washington Post pretty much had an open field to use the word however they wished to use it, over a wide spectrum of possible meanings, only a few of which encompass dire legal jeopardy, which Trump has now escaped, relatively unscathed (details still to follow), from this one particular investigation.
Rep. Schiff: You Might Say That's Okay.
You're entirely sure that nothing in there would have amounted to "collusion" in the minds of the WP editorial staff, as the WP elected to use that word, in that context, at that time?
Because I'm not.
Sometimes I maybe trust the Slashdot eggheads to fill in the blanks more than I ought to.
If you were paying full attention, you would have noticed that by managing to misspell Andreessen as "Andreesen" and "Horowitz" as "Horrowitz" he effectively fudged A16z into both A15z and A17z (not to mention a crypto A16z, because sometimes two wrongs do make a square number).
Which is partly why I drew attention to this being exactly the wrong venue for that double-action slovenliness.
Somehow it appears I fat-fingered ^Z en route to the "submit" button, and castrated my last amendment of clever verbiage (not even Lazarus had captured the goods, and I had to key it again from memory).
For some reason, I'm especially clumsy today:
* accidentally cross-posted a large post into the wrong future of work woe, woe, woe tab
* dropped a plastic spice-bottle cap onto a thin layer of hot oil — a carefully judged bullet-snatch saved both lid and oil
* fat-fingering ^Z just now
Don't recall doing either of the first two at any point in the last decade, and the third maybe happens to me once per year.
I've always believed in Postel's robustness principle: be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. For this reason, I'm harder on myself than I am on other people in fiddly matters orthographic.
But this is not a good venue to misspell both Andreessen and Horowitz, once each.
First:
Second:
In his defense, he did get "Andreessen" right in 53 other instances, and it all honesty, if any modern software (including Firebox) had half a spell-checking clue, your helpful software agent might have inquired: did you really mean to spell "Andreessen" differently one time out of fifty four? So I guess he only has Andreessen, himself, to blame, after all.
Also, for the nit-picky record, "Luddite" remains a proper noun.
Shite. I had two tabs open at the same time on the future of employment, and landed my comment on the wrong thread, which I've now reposted there in full with a bold header explaining my mistake.
Note: this is the correct thread for the same comment moments ago mistakenly cross-posted at Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create with two tiny revisions.
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headlong into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
The Madness of King George — July 2002
I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headfirst into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.
Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an underhand application? It's almost as if Gillette thought to themselves: screw the magnetic screwdriver—we'll invent the magnetic screw head instead.
[*] Note: this is the seventies, man. Any hint of metrosexual grooming (outside of San Francisco) was a standing invitation to the hombre prom, out behind The Oak and Dagger, at closing time. The proposed use is not for visible grooming.
Question answered all too well: why are they lowering this scantily clad woman into your manly foam product?
Tom Chanter manages in this piece to revive some of the old Gilder magic. "I was there, Gandalf." Deep down, Gilder was barely left of the Taliban, but he a definite knack for massaging the adrenal glands of the unwashed masses to plummy plumes of imminent mass technogasm.
The Madness of King George — July 2002
If the ten most prestigious universities in America put their heads together (not counting the football teams), this system of extortion could be ended almost overnight. They merely have to collectively announce that these kinds of journals will have their tenure clout progressively de-weighted in the realm of future academic promotions.
tenure_clout = institutional_ubiquity ^ (k/alpha) * traditional_clout;
institutional_ubiquity is a value between 0 and 1, which approximates the number of institutions of higher learning where faculty and students have cost-free access to the journal in question (any stable, approximate metric will do; you don't have to scour the world down to the last accredited college in Uganda or the Australian outback—though you can if the spirit moves you).
k is an integer, initialized to zero for the coming academic year, which increments annually.
alpha is a constant of moderation, probably somewhere around five. If your gated journal has ubiquity 0.5, then in five years it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5; in ten years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^2 = 0.25 = conservation status "critically endangered"; in twenty years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^4 = 6% = conservation status "zoo specimens only".
This immediately bequeaths a nail-studded bargaining club to the underfunded libraries of poorer countries, because Elsevier will be in a blind panic to keep their ubiquity scores well above 0.5 for the foreseeable future (about a decade) to milk what's left of the cow—a cow that's now thoroughly sterilized, never to breed again. Elsevier's predicament in this Brave New World: without viable tenure_clout you receive nothing of impact to publish; with nothing of impact to publish, the lemming compulsion of all these institutions to blindly pony up instantly withers on the wine.
This small problem in extirpation design is easily solved, by Bitcoin ^ (1/10), by which I mean a mere Satoshi fingernail clipping could architect the whole scheme in under ten minutes, 99% bug free, and binding for perpetuity.
That this is so translates as follows (for those of you whose Japanese is the least bit rusty): what we're really dealing with here is institutional capture, or this would have been done already, and elite America universities would not be voluntarily donating blood to Dutch pirates, as they continue to do. Maybe they don't mind paying Elsevier these giants royalties, for the same reason that Apple customers everywhere reach exactly the same conclusion: it's not so much the product you're paying for, as the exclusivity the arrangement creates. From the perspective of the Ivy League, exclusivity generally maps to a feature, not a bug.
Now you might need to choose a larger alpha for narrower specialties so as not to unduly punish academics presently in the tenure pipeline, who were not notified in advance that the rules were in aggressive flux. This is why a piracy shakeout leveraged around standards of academic promotion needs to be clairvoyantly tuned to take on the order of ten to twenty years. (Not a big deal: one Satoshi Fingernail Clawback, coming up.)
If these same universities bond together on an economic footing, it would smack of collusion, and also open the alliance up to divide and conquer (if the end game boils down to nothing more than getting the largest subscription discount, the first to move can be enticed with the largest reward).
Elsevier would have a much harder legal-grievance row to hoe sticking their beak into tenure-committee standards of merit.
I have seen the game-theoretic matrix, and it tilts heavily toward the formerly Philandric Ivy League, yet somehow Elsevier continues to run the table on pocket sevens.
But now the fix is in, as outlined above, and there's nothing remaining to do but make it so.
Missed lecture three of Classics 101, did you? Many people did. As I recall, there was some kind of shooting incidence on campus that morning; only a few eggheads tuned out the drama and showed up for class.
Bottom line: If they're not behind the right peerage wall, they're not your peers.
Who else remembers the Clipper chip saga from the first light of eternal September?
Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography (1994) had just come out, and it was a glorious rip in the kimono of the grotesquely secretive surveillance state. (At one point, in the institution's formative adolescence, even the NSA's name was hard to find out.)
In those glorious, turbulent years of eternal onset we—the open source greybeards of minimal middle—managed to score some surprising victories over the rather clumsy NSA, clearly dazed by those first insistent rays of sunshine, now stumbling around in the public sphere like John Oliver fresh out of bed, blinded by paparazzi flashbulbs en route to his underwear drawer.
I enjoyed this comedic spectacle while it was happening to the power of ten.
Meanwhile, another part of my brain was going "they'll be baaack". If you catch Rommel with his pants down at 06:00, enjoy it while you can; by 0:900 you'll wish you hadn't. Clearly the hard-boiled eggheads of this imperious and paranoid institution weren't going to consume their crumpets of crow quavering cadaverously. Now there's so much crepuscular silicon—how shall we best phrase this?—of mixed utility that you need avail yourself of the extended edition of Hogwart's Almanac merely to decode the confounding acronyms.
Clinton's Clipper comeuppance was the most glorious greybeard insurgency I've ever witnessed, but with a teeny, tiny fly embedded in the silver lining: we basically started a land war in Asia we could not ultimately win. Not even a historic Snowden dump changed matters much at the end of the day. With the persistence of the North Vietnamese (augmented by Mexican mechanization) minions of the NSA have cunningly scrabbled subsoil, stealth supply lines all the way to Moscow's front door.
This story is a somewhat different offensive than Operation Typhoon. They don't want to conquer Moscow, they want to become Moscow, under cover of ubiquitous onion domes, now tinier than anyone had once imagined, shrouded in RF-transparent Mandelbrot onion skin: you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
All said and done—and duly intercepted—the moral of starting a land war in Asia remains mostly the same.
Same here. But I generally regard this as a feature, not a bug. If they need your payment details just to give you a taste, the taste is almost certainly bitter in the end.
It's not that simple. 160 km/h is just fine on a highway in an optimal state of maintenance, under otherwise optimal circumstances: weather, traffic, angle of the sun, hours of restorative sleep, recent sugar intake, condition of tires on vehicle and all around general mechanical soundness, no giant trucks shedding part of their loads, no giant piles of leaves migrating to the opposite bank without using a marked crosswalk, etc. etc.
Long, long ago I crossed much of Canada on my motorcycle at a typical cruising speed around 145 km/h—a speed where my bike absolutely purred along—completely aware that at every minute of every hour I was one short, inattentive moment away from becoming a giant road pizza. (Consequently, I had very very few inattentive moments, and I was aware of every vehicle in my viable light-cone of paint exchange, 360 degrees, at all times.
Much of the trans-Canada wasn't even divided at that point, especially in the prairies, so you're often undertaking passing manoeuvres in the oncoming lane with extra haste, despite multiple miles of forward visibility; I very patiently awaited my main chance, and then lowered the boom, dropping a gear down and spiking up to 90% of red line as I hit the gap hard; there's a brief wind-waggle as you come hard around the ass-end of a big rig, which doesn't much change your vector (if you ignore the effect, as you should), but it does slam you into ten degrees of sideways tilt before you bounce upright again half a second later; not quite Yeager punching through Mach 1, but as close as I ever got).
This was entirely unlike some of the grocery-getters who were drafting along behind the big rig, completely unaware they were riding a giant wave, then they try to punch out into the passing lane at half throttle, and almost fall back once the hit the brunt of the wind, before they finally get religion about the throttle, by which point their passing manoeuvre—if they stick it out—has stretched out to 15 to 20 long seconds, by which point the halfway-panicked driver is struggling to figure out whether that oncoming car in the far distance is less than a full mile, which is darn hard to do—though, unfortunately, it won't be at all hard to do by the time the the struggling grocery-getting pulls even with the big rig's powerful hindquarters, not if he's misjudged this treacle adventure the least bit. Good work, Sherlock. You can punch the brakes, drop back 30 m in a heart beat, and tuck back in behind the big truck—supposing he's not also so jumpy by now he punches his brakes at the same time, thinking he's giving you a necessary out in the forward direction. Compared to this kind of thing, my three-second power surges well north of 145 km/h seemed like a giant oasis of unadulterated prudence.
Never once did I leave a big rig speculating nervously about whether I had competently managed this business of darting in/out of the oncoming lane. Not only that, I tended to start these manoeuvres from 3 seconds back, beginning my hard acceleration still safely tucked in my own lane, on an inside line, perfectly timed to hit the open gap behind the oncoming car, at speed, hard off the ass-end of the truck ahead, the precise moment the maw opens up. This involves solving (simple) differential equations in three dimensions simultaneously: where (right off the ass-end of the truck in front), when (the precise moment the maw opens up), and how fast (a lot honking faster than the truck ahead)—all have to perfectly align at a single moment in time (though there is some rubber in the "honking fast" constraint, with leeway up or down, to absorb minor miscalculation).
Point of view from the big rig: oncoming car on undivided highway blows past on the left; 500 ms later, motorcycle pops out ti
Will Mike still have a boner for spacesuit chastity conquest when NASA finally fesses up that modern PC optics mandate a mixed-gender crew?