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runlai_jiang

New Barriers to Replace Aging Border Wall in California - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-wall-in-california-1520164800

boarder fence

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The structure was one of the first new pieces of a border wall put in place since the start of a lengthy construction project in February just west of the border crossing in downtown Calexico, a small, mostly Hispanic farming town.
  • Mr. Kim said the roughly $18 million project was funded by Congress last year. He said the project happens to be getting under way in the midst of Mr. Trump’s continuing effort to build a wall along the Mexican border. “We want to make sure everyone knows what it is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Kim said.
  • California has become a flashpoint in the debate over the president’s immigration policies, including his proposal to build a wall. The state has sued the administration multiple times challenging its immigration policies.
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  • Mr. Kim said the new barriers in Calexico are replacing solid metal panels that sat as high as 18 feet in some areas. But smugglers and border crossers have cut holes in them thousands of times in recent years, requiring near-constant repairs.
  • The new bollard-style barriers are likely to be harder to breach and will offer agents more security, because they will be able to see what and who is on the other side. The Border Patrol has established a “First Amendment zone” for potential protesters, Mr. Kim said, but so far the area at the western edge of the project hasn’t been used.
runlai_jiang

Your Location Data Is Being Sold-Often Without Your Knowledge - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hout-your-knowledge-1520168400

dataleak location

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.
  • Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.
  • They aim to compile a complete record of where everyone in America spends their time, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers.
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  • The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.
  • Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.
  • is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.
  • A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.
  • There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.
  • Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.
  • WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.
  • Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.
  • Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information
  • Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.
jayhandwerk

Medical schools shouldn't divorce education from politics - 0 views

www.statnews.com/...itics-medical-school-education

politics US medical schools education

shared by jayhandwerk on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • M any medical schools don’t encourage political thought in their students, far less nurture it. That’s a shame because it squanders an opportunity to equip future thought leaders to deal with serious concerns facing the U.S. population, many of which have their tentacles in politics.
  • Politics is the way that civilized societies are supposed to decide how limited resources should be distributed. It makes sense, then, to say that health care is a political issue.
  • What good is teaching medical students to recommend treatments that patients won’t use because they can’t afford them?
oliviaodon

The Biggest Sanctions-Evasion Scheme in Recent History - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549665

foreign policy

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla was found guilty in a Manhattan courtroom for a range of financial crimes. His dramatic trial revealed that tens of billions in dollars and gold moved from Turkey to Iran through a complex network of businesses, banks, and front companies.
  • Here’s what Zarrab testified: The scheme began in 2010, when Iran began to feel the squeeze from U.S. sanctions for its nuclear drive. Zarrab said that around 2012 the Iranian government gave him explicit directions to conduct these illegal transactions.
  • Despite the headlines generated by the gold trade and leaked report, the Turkish government insisted that everything was above board. The Obama administration seemed to echo this sentiment, saying that the gold trade had slipped through a legal loophole (a loophole the White House inexplicably left open for an additional six months, even after the problem was flagged)
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  • The gold trade helped boost Turkey’s flagging export numbers at a moment when those numbers might have hurt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chances for reelection. Zarrab, who became fabulously wealthy by taking a percentage from every transaction (he later estimated his take at $150 million), even received a reward for his efforts from a Turkish trade association in 2015, with Erdogan applauding from the audience.
  • track record of identifying and exposing Iran’s malign activities.
  • In the end, the trial ran long. With the judge calling for the prosecution to wrap things up quickly, I managed to avoid taking the stand. Atilla testified in a last-ditch self-defense, and the jury began its deliberations on December 20.
  • All eyes are now on the United States government and whether it issues a fine against Halkbank, particularly now that it has proven in a court of law that the bank engaged in a massive, illegal financial scheme.
  • Fine or no fine, it’s hard to envision tranquil U.S.-Turkish relations going forward.
  • And now that Zarrab has finally clarified a few things about the Iranian role in his scheme, one troubling question lingers: Why did the U.S. government continue to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran in 2013 and 2014 while Treasury was warning Halkbank about enormous sanctions violations? We may never know. Then again, from the documents I viewed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see other sanctions busters come in the DOJ crosshairs—creating new and uncomfortable challenges for our existing alliances and diplomatic agreements. Perhaps other future indictments will tell us more.
runlai_jiang

Falklands War 'true hero' Captain Rick Jolly dies - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-england-cornwall-42682005

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Falklands War 'true hero' Captain Rick Jolly dies
  • A Royal Navy medical officer who saved the lives of hundreds of British and Argentine troops during the Falklands War has died, aged 71.Working amid terrible conditions in the field, Surgeon Capt Rick Jolly, from Torpoint, Cornwall, saved the life of every British serviceman he treated.
  • He said: "Without his organisational skills the surgeons and medics would never have functioned. I can only thank him for saving my life, and many others. "It's a tragedy for everyone who knew him and a tragedy especially for his family."
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  • Surgeon Cmdr Anthony Lambert met him several times, the first time shortly after he returned from the Falklands in 1982.He said: "As medics we aren't heroes, we just do our job, but he did his job incredibly well and was an inspiration to my generation".Tributes on Social media include the Commanding Officer of the Royal Marines 40 Commando who called him a "true hero".
Javier E

Trump is no patriot - and we all should say so - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...triot-and-we-all-should-say-so

trump patriotism nationalism

shared by Javier E on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  •  hurling accusations that one’s political views render one unpatriotic or un-American is a far different thing than calling out a politician who disdains our democracy, its institutions and its citizens. To avoid labeling such actions as anti-American or unpatriotic would be akin to giving the politician a pass.
  • So: Is President Trump a patriot?
  • Surely he wraps himself in the flag and touts his love for the military, but neither suggests he has any devotion to American ideals. Insisting that a protester not exercise his First Amendment rights but rather smile and salute the flag shows no love of American ideals
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  • Equating neo-Nazis with anti-Nazi protesters is not patriotic; it is anti-American.
  • Trump epitomizes nationalism (“We’re Number One!”) but that is quite different from patriotism
  • In short, Trump evidences love of self, love of winning and love of patriotic symbols that he can swipe for his own glorification. His viewpoint and habits of mind denote that of a hard-bitten nationalism, but that mind-set contradicts American ideals
  • It is critical for politicians and citizens of all beliefs to disclaim his outbursts as un-American and anti-patriotic.
Javier E

Opinion | Herbert Hoover's Ghost - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iffs-canada-mexico-europe.html

trump obama trade protectionism crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Protectionism anywhere is invariably bad for local consumers and the global economy, but American protectionism is infinitely worse. It’s a betrayal of the liberal-international order we founded nearly eight decades ago; an invitation to anti-Americanism; a rebuff to our friends; and sometimes (Boston Tea Party, anyone?) a prelude to war.
  • what motivates the president to pick these fights? Rust-belt politics surely plays a role. But it’s also the same ideological obsession he has held since at least the 1980s — as dated and ugly as his mullet — not to mention his sneering indifference to what was once called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
  • When the Wall Street Journal editorial board (of which I was then a member) asked Trump in 2015 whether he worried that his immigration and trade policies could have disastrous political effects in Mexico, he answered: “I don’t care about Mexico honestly, I really don’t care about Mexico.” Next month, Mexicans, who do care, will likely elect their most anti-American president in nearly 50 years.
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  • The administration is blowing up the foundations of global economic order with the same mindless glee as a child popping bubble wrap. Canada now intends to retaliate with $12.8 billion worth of its own tariffs. Mexico and the European Union are set to announce retaliatory levies of their own. And these are our friends.
  • The darker echoes of the 1930s are sounding louder. The shadow of Hoover grows longer. We know how this movie end
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Will There Always Be an England? - 0 views

nymag.com/...here-always-be-an-england.html

immigration diversity identity anxiety working class

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • For the under-40s, economic insecurity, college debt, and inability to own a home drive the angst. For the over-40s, it’s a sense that the England they identified with, that gave their lives meaning and pride — the England that was nearly destroyed in the “finest hour” of 1940 — this “sceptered isle,” is disappearing.
  • That’s the reason for Brexit. Period.
  • The more you investigate what Brexit actually, practically means, it turns out to be an attempt to keep everything the same but somehow change it completely.
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  • It’s a policy that makes no sense, is being negotiated by a prime minister who voted to remain in the E.U., is being debated by a Parliament overwhelmingly pro-staying, in deference to a referendum that was a blizzard of disinformation and ignorance
  • they voted against it because they are scared. Last week’s PRRI/Atlantic study of the key voters who brought us Trump brings this out with stunning and, for me, decisive clarity:
  • Sixty-eight percent of white working-class voters said the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. And nearly half agreed with the statement, ‘things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.’
  • Only a small portion—just 27 percent—of white working-class voters said they favor a policy of identifying and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally. [But] among the people who did share this belief, Trump was wildly popular: 87 percent of them supported the president in the 2016 election
  • Nearly two-thirds of the white working class say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s. Sixty-eight percent say the U.S. is in danger of losing its identity, and 62 percent say America’s growing number of immigrants threaten the country’s culture.
  • What few on the left seem to see is that cultural anxiety, given the ethnic and cultural transformation of the last few decades, is an entirely predictable and entirely understandable response
  • If people felt that someone in charge actually saw their point of view, sympathized with it, and attempted even minor changes to accommodate it, we would have a different politics. But all they had was Trump. And all they still have is Trump.
  • the little, overcrowded, once remarkably homogeneous island that is Britain. This country’s core identity is thousands of years old. Yes, it has long accepted immigrants, but until the 1950s, net immigration was a rounding error. Since then, it has exploded. In the last 20 years, it has reached American levels
  • For those whose self-understanding is wrapped up in bluebells and tea, in English accents divided solely by class and region, in a nearly all-white and all-English country for centuries, these times are culturally terrifying.
  • It wasn’t their economic insecurity that gave us Brexit. It was that no one in charge even sensed their unease. Elites — and I count myself among the guilty — gave them nothing by way of reassurance or even a sense that they were understood instead of reviled. So all they had was Brexit
  • Their pride and self-identity are bound up in it now, just as a critical slice of America’s is bound up in Trump. Which is why, despite the mounting evidence that the Brexit gambit is a disaster, they will never let it go.
  • Home is indeed where one starts from. Change it too rapidly and it will disintegrate. We have been fools on mass immigration, we have been fools for preventing an honest debate about the benefits and drawbacks of diversity, and we have been contemptible in our contempt for so many of our fellow citizens. Both countries are now paying a terrible, terrible price.
Javier E

Trump Tries to Fix His Foreign Policy-Without Bolton - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...593284

foreign policy USA history trump crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Bolton manipulated him by advocating for the most extreme options—such as imposing secondary sanctions on European countries to truly destroy the Iran nuclear deal, and pulling out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—when more modest ones would have sufficed.
  • Bolton’s priority has always been to advance his unilateralist theory of international law, and he seems unable to think strategically about America’s interests.
  • It has been obvious for months that Trump did not want war with Iran, but Bolton kept the president from hearing from officials who would offer a contrary view to the hawks.
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  • A former senior official in the George W. Bush administration who is sympathetic to Bolton on some issues told me that Trump is so wrapped up in the image of a dealmaker, yet so ignorant of the issues, that he will “sign on to half-assed deals that he does not understand.”
  • It was obvious in Osaka that his heart is with other authoritarian leaders. He embraced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and joked with Putin about Russian election interference. He did not know what Putin meant by his comment that Western liberalism is obsolete, and didn’t care to find out.
  • Meanwhile, U.S. relations with the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan are at post–Cold War lows
  • It is often, and rightly, said of Trump that he is undisciplined and loses interest in subjects quickly. But he has slowly and steadily chipped away at the pillars of the free world and used the rubble to lay the foundations of an illiberal alternative.
  • For Bolton, leaving because he’s too tough for Trump is the perfect way to save face. Otherwise, he may be remembered as the man who presided over one of the weakest national-security teams in modern American history and someone whose myopic obsessions—such as international treaties and communism in Venezuela—meant the United States lost precious time in preparing for the national-security challenges of the future
  • One way or another, Trump seems determined to present an image of himself in 2020 as a dealmaker who is getting tough with allies who have taken advantage of the United States and making peace with the country’s enemies. The risks are enormous. Trump may strike bad deals. He could permanently weaken America’s influence and encourage aggression against allies. But it may work for him politically, throwing the Democrats off balance and setting the stage for a second term
Javier E

Germany Has Some Revolutionary Ideas, and They're Working - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ny-renewable-energy-revolution

germany climate change energy policy revolutionary ecological culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today.
  • Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.
  • The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now
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  • “It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”
  • The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest
  • . The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.
  • So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.
  • I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.
  • energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”
  • NG STAFF; EVAN APP
  • Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.
  • Chernobyl was a watershed.
  • The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”
  • It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.
  • The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.
  • In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.
  • At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide
  • Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some
  • The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.
  • Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.
  • Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.
  • “Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”
  • Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.
  • Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.
  • The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.
  • “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”
  • All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though
  • For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.
  • here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.
  • Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years
  • Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.
  • “The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”
  • In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.
brookegoodman

The coronavirus-themed foods bringing light relief to customers | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

culture crisis economics

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN) — Among global efforts to offer some light relief to the current crisis, bakers and chefs have been producing coronavirus-related dishes that are hopefully a lot tastier than the epidemic which has inspired them.
  • According to Reuters, the takeaway shop is currently selling around 50 of the burgers every day, which is particularly impressive considering the number of businesses that have been forced to close down as a result of the pandemic.
  • Pré told French language newspaper Le Telegramme he devised the eggs to bring some humor to the situation after growing "tired of hearing" about coronavirus.
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  • Meanwhile in western Germany, the Schuerener Backparadies bakery has added two different coronavirus-themed creations to its selection.
  • A nod to the well-documented toilet paper shortage that's occurred across the world as consumers frantically buy up huge quantities, the marble cakes are wrapped in white fondant etched with tiny diamond shapes in the style of quilted toilet roll.
  • Like France, and many countries around the world, Germany has imposed extensive restrictions and many non-essential businesses have been forced to close.
  • Over in the US, a New York doughnut shop has dedicated its latest offering to infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force who's won the public over with his straight-talking approach.
  • According to Semeraro, the shop has sold thousands of the buttercream-frosted doughnut, which features Fauci's face printed on edible paper, with customers asking for the treat to be sent to various cities and states.
brickol

Fact check: Trump makes another round of misstatements during coronavirus briefing - CN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

COVID-19 us trump

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump on Friday continued the false and misleading claims that have become a part of White House briefings on coronavirus, wrapping up a week in which the number of confirmed cases across the country topped 100,000.
  • Trump claimed that 22 days ago, "everything was going beautifully" before the US got hit by what he calls "the invisible enemy."
  • While the market had previously set all-time records under Trump, on March 5, 22 days before Trump's comments, the Dow dropped 3.6% or 970 points, then its fifth-worst single-day point drop on record, adding to a 3,000-point drop since its peak on February 12.
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  • Multiple times throughout Friday's press briefing, the President claimed the current situation was unprecedented and unforeseen. According to Trump, "nobody was prepared for this," not even past presidents. He added, "In all fairness to all of the former presidents, none of them ever thought a thing like this could happen."
  • This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.
  • Trump said of the coronavirus: "You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you know you can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody even knows what it is."
  • You cannot accurately call the coronavirus "a flu." They are, simply, different viruses with different characteristics, though they share some symptoms the coronavirus has a much higher mortality rate.
  • it's significantly more serious" -- with a mortality rate approximately 10 times higher than the 0.1% for the flu. It's also obviously untrue that there is not "anybody" who knows what the coronavirus is.
nrashkind

Coronavirus: Trump backs away from New York quarantine - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-52080119

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • US President Donald Trump has said quarantining New York "will not be necessary", after the state's governor said doing so would be "preposterous"
  • Mr Trump said the latest decision was taken on the recommendation of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
  • The president had earlier said he might impose a quarantine on New York, and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, to slow the spread of Covid-19.
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  • There are more than 52,000 cases in New York.
  • The state has about half of the total confirmed Covid-19 cases in the entire US.
  • Mr Cuomo also said he would sue nearby Rhode Island if the authorities there continued targeting New Yorkers and threatening to punish them for failing to quarantine. Skip Twitter post by @RyanWelchPhotog
  • The CDC then published a statement urging residents of those three states to "refrain" from all non-essential domestic travel for 14 days.
  • "If you said we were geographically restricted from leaving, that would be a lockdown."
  • He added later: "I don't know how that can be legally enforceable. And from a medical point of view, I don't know what you would be accomplishing.
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded by saying that quarantining the state of New York would be "preposterous" and "anti-American".
  • On Friday, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo deployed National Guard troops to stop cars with a New York licence plate, to remind them of their state's advice that they quarantine
  • Soldiers are going door-to-door in coastal vacation communities to ask if any residents have recently visited New York City.
Javier E

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594802

politics culture influencer podcasting

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
  • His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.
  • there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
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  • He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet
  • The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys
  • Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
  • There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.
  • The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.
  • how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)
  • “Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”
  • He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?
  • Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets
  • if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to
  • the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast
  • Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.
  • the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.
  • that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.
  • like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic
  • It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.
  • Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.
  • His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.
  • a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.
  • At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.
  • In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.
  • More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
  • if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,
  • All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time
  • The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization
  • Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.
  • It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.
  • His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”
  • My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.
  • And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.
  • I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron
  • Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”
katherineharron

90% of people are biased against women. That's the challenge we face - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Almost 90% of the world's men, and women, are biased in some way against women, according to the Gender Social Norms Index. Half of men and women feel that men make better political leaders. More than 56% feel that men have more right to a job and/or make better business executives. Read Moreclose dialogGet the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the weekSign up for CNN Opinion’s Provoke/Persuade weekly newsletter.Please enter aboveProvoke/Persuade MeBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy. Thanks For SubscribingContinue Readingclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1118904 *//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1118904 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 38px 40px 30px 40px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;padding: 20px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 285px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #1a1a1a;border-style: none;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 100%;padding: 0px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 90%;padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {width: 80px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: absolute;left: 30;top: 20px;width: 80px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: relative;left: 0;top: -10px;width: 80px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {width: 100%;padding: 20px 0 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 28px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 25px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {width: auto;padding: 0px 0px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 17px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;letter-spacing: 0.01em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 13px;padding: 0px 20px ;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {padding: 15px;font-size: 12px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {font-size: 12px;padding: 12px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-
  • Around the world, women are equally likely to vote, but only 10% out of 193 heads of government are female, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are overrepresented in low-wage employment, but represent only 21% of employers and 12% of billionaires. They are about equally represented in jobs at S&P Fortune 500 companies, but represent only 5.8% of the total CEOs, the index found.
  • People's reactions to a woman's pregnancy at work is a good example of how much bias still exists. In the United States, as recently as 2011, some employers still fired employees on the spot who had become pregnant, according to a report by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. (That's illegal.) More subtly, women announcing a pregnancy may be taken off the partner track or denied raises and bonuses. (Also illegal.) A pregnancy can easily reset the course of a woman's career. Pregnancy discrimination is widespread and difficult to police.
katherineharron

Trump's new strategy on coronavirus is already being undermined by his own actions - CN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • It's a stunning reversal President Donald Trump would like Americans to forget.Only days after dismissing the coronavirus threat as a distraction, he's now assumed the title of a resolute war time president fighting an "invisible enemy" while promising to rally the nation behind him in pursuit of "total victory.
  • And it is already being undermined by his own actions. He's casting doubt over whether he will actually implement a move to invoke the Defense Production Act -- that he signed on Wednesday and that gives him authority to order industry to work towards homeland defense and national goals. In this case, it could speed the production of badly needed ventilators, masks and other supplies for hospital workers.
  • Trump's initial decision was welcomed by state governors and representatives for frontline medical workers who fear being exposed to the virus due to shortages of protective equipment.Read Moreclose dialogSign up for CNN's Meanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's Meanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sMeanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1109534 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1109534 *//* custom css from creative 46373 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1109534-spin { from { -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -ms-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-moz-keyframes bx-anim-1109534-spin { from {
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  • Only days after dismissing the coronavirus threat as a distraction, he's now assumed the title of a resolute war time president fighting an "invisible enemy" while promising to rally the nation behind him in pursuit of "total victory."
bluekoenig

The Tawana Brawley Case | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture retro report retro report new york times

shared by bluekoenig on 29 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 29 Jan 20
     
    In 1988, sixteen-year-old Tawana Brawley was found wrapped in a plastic bag with signs of being raped and sodomized. She accused a police officer in the area for her rape and multiple civil rights activists including Rev. Al Sharpton came to her side to support her case and portray it as a racial crime. The case turned out to be fake setup and many false reports and accusations arose against the police in the area. Ultimately, the accusations went too far and those entirely uninvolved were accused of heinous crimes. The biggest victim of the case was the family of the police officer she accused of raping her, Harry Christ, who killed himself briefly after her attack. Brawley and the civil rights activists who were with her were charged with defamation of some of the people they accused and all parties have yet to explain themselves in full.
blythewallick

Opinion | Changes to the Census Could Make Small Towns Disappear - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...census-algorithm-privacy.html

politics US history culture

shared by blythewallick on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • According to the 2010 census, 590 people lived in Toksook Bay. State demographers expect the total to rise by about 100 people when census results are published next year.
  • The law requires individual census records to be kept confidential for 72 years. Fearing that data brokers using new statistical techniques could de-anonymize the published population totals, the bureau is testing an algorithm that will scramble the final numbers. Imaginary people will be added to some locations and real people will be removed from others.
  • In Toksook Bay, the population dropped from 590 people to 540 in the test run. Mr. Pitka said that a decrease in the count due to the privacy algorithm would be “disappointing and hurtful.”
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  • In Toksook Bay, federal grants helped pay for a permanent path to the nearby village of Nightmute, according to Mr. Pitka. “Now people aren’t making their own trails and tearing up the environment with their A.T.V.s.,” he said.
  • “When a small tribe puts its own money into getting all members to participate and it gets back information that it has a population of zero, it’s certainly not going to be willing to promote the census in the future,” said Norm DeWeaver, a consultant for Native American tribes on data issues.
  • Census officials have already exempted state population totals from the algorithm’s effects, so congressional apportionment will remain as accurate as possible. Dr. Abowd said that the census plans to increase accuracy for the populations of some small areas, such as reservations, and that the undercount of Native Americans in the test run is “unacceptable.” There is still time to modify the algorithm — the bureau has more than a year before it releases results to the states for redistricting.
  • The goal of the Census Bureau is to “count everyone once, only once and in the right place.” Trudging through the snow, enumerators in rural Alaska are helping the government reach that standard. But if the bureau uses its privacy algorithm without hearing from small communities like Toksook Bay, it risks undermining their efforts and damaging the census’s reputation for decades to come.
Javier E

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540393

software programming failure design

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.
  • Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”
  • This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.”
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  • Code is too hard to think about. Before trying to understand the attempts themselves, then, it’s worth understanding why this might be: what it is about code that makes it so foreign to the mind, and so unlike anything that came before it.
  • Technological progress used to change the way the world looked—you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise. Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code.
  • Software has enabled us to make the most intricate machines that have ever existed. And yet we have hardly noticed, because all of that complexity is packed into tiny silicon chips as millions and millions of lines of cod
  • The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.” Dijkstra meant this as a warning.
  • “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.”
  • What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer.
  • The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.
  • “The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work.
  • As programmers eagerly poured software into critical systems, they became, more and more, the linchpins of the built world—and Dijkstra thought they had perhaps overestimated themselves.
  • a nearly decade-long investigation into claims of so-called unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. Toyota blamed the incidents on poorly designed floor mats, “sticky” pedals, and driver error, but outsiders suspected that faulty software might be responsible
  • software experts spend 18 months with the Toyota code, picking up where NASA left off. Barr described what they found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around
  • Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control. The fail-safe code that Toyota had put in place wasn’t enough to stop it
  • . In all, Toyota recalled more than 9 million cars, and paid nearly $3 billion in settlements and fines related to unintended acceleration.
  • The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little.
  • “Visual Studio is one of the single largest pieces of software in the world,” he said. “It’s over 55 million lines of code. And one of the things that I found out in this study is more than 98 percent of it is completely irrelevant. All this work had been put into this thing, but it missed the fundamental problems that people faced. And the biggest one that I took away from it was that basically people are playing computer inside their head.” Programmers were like chess players trying to play with a blindfold on—so much of their mental energy is spent just trying to picture where the pieces are that there’s hardly any left over to think about the game itself.
  • The fact that the two of them were thinking about the same problem in the same terms, at the same time, was not a coincidence. They had both just seen the same remarkable talk, given to a group of software-engineering students in a Montreal hotel by a computer researcher named Bret Victor. The talk, which went viral when it was posted online in February 2012, seemed to be making two bold claims. The first was that the way we make software is fundamentally broken. The second was that Victor knew how to fix it.
  • Though he runs a lab that studies the future of computing, he seems less interested in technology per se than in the minds of the people who use it. Like any good toolmaker, he has a way of looking at the world that is equal parts technical and humane. He graduated top of his class at the California Institute of Technology for electrical engineering,
  • WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.”
  • “Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.”
  • in early 2012, Victor had finally landed upon the principle that seemed to thread through all of his work. (He actually called the talk “Inventing on Principle.”) The principle was this: “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.” The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.
  • Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling.
  • With the right interface, it was almost as if you weren’t working with code at all; you were manipulating the game’s behavior directly.
  • When the audience first saw this in action, they literally gasped. They knew they weren’t looking at a kid’s game, but rather the future of their industry. Most software involved behavior that unfolded, in complex ways, over time, and Victor had shown that if you were imaginative enough, you could develop ways to see that behavior and change it, as if playing with it in your hands. One programmer who saw the talk wrote later: “Suddenly all of my tools feel obsolete.”
  • hen John Resig saw the “Inventing on Principle” talk, he scrapped his plans for the Khan Academy programming curriculum. He wanted the site’s programming exercises to work just like Victor’s demos. On the left-hand side you’d have the code, and on the right, the running program: a picture or game or simulation. If you changed the code, it’d instantly change the picture. “In an environment that is truly responsive,” Resig wrote about the approach, “you can completely change the model of how a student learns ... [They] can now immediately see the result and intuit how underlying systems inherently work without ever following an explicit explanation.” Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • . In traditional programming, your task is to take complex rules and translate them into code; most of your energy is spent doing the translating, rather than thinking about the rules themselves. In the model-based approach, all you have is the rules. So that’s what you spend your time thinking about. It’s a way of focusing less on the machine and more on the problem you’re trying to get it to solve.
  • “Everyone thought I was interested in programming environments,” he said. Really he was interested in how people see and understand systems—as he puts it, in the “visual representation of dynamic behavior.” Although code had increasingly become the tool of choice for creating dynamic behavior, it remained one of the worst tools for understanding it. The point of “Inventing on Principle” was to show that you could mitigate that problem by making the connection between a system’s behavior and its code immediate.
  • In a pair of later talks, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” and “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations,” Victor went one further. He demoed two programs he’d built—the first for animators, the second for scientists trying to visualize their data—each of which took a process that used to involve writing lots of custom code and reduced it to playing around in a WYSIWYG interface.
  • Victor suggested that the same trick could be pulled for nearly every problem where code was being written today. “I’m not sure that programming has to exist at all,” he told me. “Or at least software developers.” In his mind, a software developer’s proper role was to create tools that removed the need for software developers. Only then would people with the most urgent computational problems be able to grasp those problems directly, without the intermediate muck of code.
  • Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,” he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers—as he put it to me, “these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.”
  • “people are not so easily transitioning to model-based software development: They perceive it as another opportunity to lose control, even more than they have already.”
  • In a model-based design tool, you’d represent this rule with a small diagram, as though drawing the logic out on a whiteboard, made of boxes that represent different states—like “door open,” “moving,” and “door closed”—and lines that define how you can get from one state to the other. The diagrams make the system’s rules obvious: Just by looking, you can see that the only way to get the elevator moving is to close the door, or that the only way to get the door open is to stop.
  • Bantegnie’s company is one of the pioneers in the industrial use of model-based design, in which you no longer write code directly. Instead, you create a kind of flowchart that describes the rules your program should follow (the “model”), and the computer generates code for you based on those rules
  • “Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantegnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
  • On this view, software becomes unruly because the media for describing what software should do—conversations, prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper—are too different from the media describing what software does do, namely, code itself.
  • for this approach to succeed, much of the work has to be done well before the project even begins. Someone first has to build a tool for developing models that are natural for people—that feel just like the notes and drawings they’d make on their own—while still being unambiguous enough for a computer to understand. They have to make a program that turns these models into real code. And finally they have to prove that the generated code will always do what it’s supposed to.
  • tice brings order and accountability to large codebases. But, Shivappa says, “it’s a very labor-intensive process.” He estimates that before they used model-based design, on a two-year-long project only two to three months was spent writing code—the rest was spent working on the documentation.
  • uch of the benefit of the model-based approach comes from being able to add requirements on the fly while still ensuring that existing ones are met; with every change, the computer can verify that your program still works. You’re free to tweak your blueprint without fear of introducing new bugs. Your code is, in FAA parlance, “correct by construction.”
  • The ideas spread. The notion of liveness, of being able to see data flowing through your program instantly, made its way into flagship programming tools offered by Google and Apple. The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.
  • The bias against model-based design, sometimes known as model-driven engineering, or MDE, is in fact so ingrained that according to a recent paper, “Some even argue that there is a stronger need to investigate people’s perception of MDE than to research new MDE technologies.”
  • “Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”
  • Newcombe was convinced that the algorithms behind truly critical systems—systems storing a significant portion of the web’s data, for instance—ought to be not just good, but perfect. A single subtle bug could be catastrophic. But he knew how hard bugs were to find, especially as an algorithm grew more complex. You could do all the testing you wanted and you’d never find them all.
  • An algorithm written in TLA+ could in principle be proven correct. In practice, it allowed you to create a realistic model of your problem and test it not just thoroughly, but exhaustively. This was exactly what he’d been looking for: a language for writing perfect algorithms.
  • TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy
  • Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code. But code, Lamport argues, was never meant to be a medium for thought. “It really does constrain your ability to think when you’re thinking in terms of a programming language,”
  • Code makes you miss the forest for the trees: It draws your attention to the working of individual pieces, rather than to the bigger picture of how your program fits together, or what it’s supposed to do—and whether it actually does what you think. This is why Lamport created TLA+. As with model-based design, TLA+ draws your focus to the high-level structure of a system, its essential logic, rather than to the code that implements it.
  • But TLA+ occupies just a small, far corner of the mainstream, if it can be said to take up any space there at all. Even to a seasoned engineer like Newcombe, the language read at first as bizarre and esoteric—a zoo of symbols.
  • this is a failure of education. Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. “Very few programmers—and including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,” Lamport says. “The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.”
  • “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”
  • Programmers, as a species, are relentlessly pragmatic. Tools like TLA+ reek of the ivory tower. When programmers encounter “formal methods” (so called because they involve mathematical, “formally” precise descriptions of programs), their deep-seated instinct is to recoil.
  • Formal methods had an image problem. And the way to fix it wasn’t to implore programmers to change—it was to change yourself. Newcombe realized that to bring tools like TLA+ to the programming mainstream, you had to start speaking their language.
  • he presented TLA+ as a new kind of “pseudocode,” a stepping-stone to real code that allowed you to exhaustively test your algorithms—and that got you thinking precisely early on in the design process. “Engineers think in terms of debugging rather than ‘verification,’” he wrote, so he titled his internal talk on the subject to fellow Amazon engineers “Debugging Designs.” Rather than bemoan the fact that programmers see the world in code, Newcombe embraced it. He knew he’d lose them otherwise. “I’ve had a bunch of people say, ‘Now I get it,’” Newcombe says.
  • In the world of the self-driving car, software can’t be an afterthought. It can’t be built like today’s airline-reservation systems or 911 systems or stock-trading systems. Code will be put in charge of hundreds of millions of lives on the road and it has to work. That is no small task.
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Trump Targets Permits to Cap Off 'Infrastructure Week' | US News - 0 views

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  • Trump Targets Permits to Cap 'Infrastructure Week'
  • President Donald Trump wrapped up his administration's "infrastructure week" Friday by unveiling a council and a new White House office tasked with streamlining fixes for America's infrastructure. During a speech at the Department of Transportation, the president announced plans to create a council designed to "help project managers navigate the bureaucratic maze." "This council will also improve transparency by creating a new online dashboard allowing everyone to easily track major projects through every stage of the approval process," Trump said. "This council will make sure that every federal agency that is consistently delaying projects by missing deadlines will face tough, new penalties. ... We will hold the bureaucracy accountable."
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