commentary

Republicans Vote To Destroy Boundary Waters In Giveaway To China’s AI

Republicans Vote To Destroy Boundary Waters In Giveaway To China’s AI:

Traitors. Republicans in the Senate just voted to permit the construction of a heavily polluting mine in the headwaters for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The region’s ecosystem will be destroyed, taking with it $1.1 billion in annual economic activity, 17,000 jobs, and one of the last unspoiled slices of nature left in this country. What does America get in return? Nothing. Profits will go to Chile, the copper will go to China where it will help that country race head of us in its AI buildout, and any jobs created will go to workers from outside the state and country. Polluted water will also flow into Voyageurs, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, and Lake Superior.

[Miserable bastards.]

The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh

The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh:

Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.

That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.

I dove into all that in more detail at this link.

Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.

[Wes Siler does a great job. Go support his journalism.]

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism:

The reckoning has come for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. This patently offensive equivocation — when the correct answer was obviously an unambiguous “Yes” — makes sense in the context of the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world. All three of these elite university presidents are obviously utterly tone-deaf and detached from the real world.

[The disease has risen all the way to the top. Imagine substituting another race, creed, religion, etc. for the word “Jew”. I believe the answer would have changed. Thank goodness there were only a couple of these sorts of people teaching when I went to college. Most of my professors were/are brilliant. ]

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity – kpassa.me:

In reality of course OKRs are just fine. At least they’re fine for Google. For a company with its particular needs and structure, sure, it’s a fine way to run things.

For the rest of us, though, this well-intentioned subtle reinvention of goal setting just creates confusion. It makes us abandon the right tools for the job. It promises to help us think, but only provides us half-ideas without the context that made them work in the first place.

Lately I’ve been feeling the exact same thing about Kubernetes.

[I could not move people off of “it works for Google”… as if that meant it has to work elsewhere. I’ve seen enough shopping lists in my life to understand how little that is true. Same for Kubernetes. We gave a lot of things a try in one little corner of dev, but the principle that we always applied was “did it improve anything?” If the answer was no, with our own sense of priority (for whom did it improve and how much or not etc. etc) we killed anything that didn’t add up.]

Shop notebooks… with advice from Matt Kenney

I have no religion when it comes to shop notebooks. Not a type, nor paper or tech. But use “some thing” because not having anything at all will be a problem.

Your workflow will determine how the next step occurs. You may be prototyping something, and so there’s no notes to guide you. But at some point you will get to “nice” and you’ll want to build it “for real”. That would be the moment to take detailed notes. If you are working in CAD or a drawing app, it might be worthwhile to print out shop drawing and scribble some additional notes as you work. Etc. But these “sources of truth” are very helpful when questions and problems arise.

If I had one rule (snicker) it would be that your scribble paper, notebook, etc. assuming it is atoms not electrons should be graph paper. It was invented for just this sort of thing, take advantage.

Matt Kenny suggests the following…

  • Be as detailed as you possibly can. The more detail, the less work you’ll need to do to make sense of what’s written down.
  • Write in simple, clear statements and equations. A shop notebook is not a Faulkner novel or a Fields-Medal-worthy mathematical treatise.
  • Write down: dimensions, notes about materials, things you discovered that made construction easier, problems you encountered and how you solved them, and anything else that’s important to you.
  • Clearly identify which piece of furniture a note belongs to. A year from now you probably won’t remember.
  • Do not worry about how it reads or looks. If it makes sense to you and you can go back and make sense of it a month later, that’s all that matters. You will develop a style, organizing principles, etc. as you continue to work and fill up notebooks.

Everything all the users know and more

Scripting News: Monday, April 3, 2023:

A sense that because I work for the company that made the product, I know everything all the users know and more. It’s the same fallacy that applies to Silicon Valley billionaires. You have to step into a new perspective to love the product, one that has nothing to do with who you work for or how validated you are by reporters and the public.

[I made a similar point recently. “Just because some process or thing works for you doesn’t make you an expert.” ]

The Vanishing

The Vanishing – Tablet Magazine:

The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.

Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.

In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16). There were 3-4 Jewish Marshall Scholars in 2014. I don’t see any in 2022.

From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forward hasn’t bothered to take note.

Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court. On some level we sympathize with the Asian American plaintiffs, who are suing Harvard for using admissions criteria that discriminate against them on the basis of their race. Maybe they really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers—insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences—that we once did.

On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews.

[I have no words.]

Source:

‘Very Jewish Christmas’ salutes composers who gifted us with holiday hit parade

‘Very Jewish Christmas’ salutes composers who gifted us with holiday hit parade:

At a time when antisemitism has become unavoidable in the United States, the moment seems ripe for a reminder that Jews have profoundly shaped just about every aspect of American popular culture, including the celebration of Christmas.

More often than not, the songs that define the holiday hit parade were written by Jewish composers, from Irving Berlin’s sublimely nostalgic “White Christmas” to Joan Javits and Phil Springer’s gleefully mercenary “Santa Baby.” Celebrating this singularly American confluence of sincere sentiment and winking kitsch, the show “A Very Jewish Christmas Spectacular” tells the story of how Eastern European immigrants (and their offspring) came to create the Christmas soundtrack.

[All this by Lindsay Bonamassa and Michael Meyer. Yes *that* Bonamassa. Joe’s sister (and no, he’s not Jewish). In a year when there’s been so much hate aimed at the Jews, maybe this will remind a few people of the positive contributions. Maybe. I doubt it. Bah, humbug.]

Approaching hard work – by David Hoang

Approaching hard work – by David Hoang:

Purpose and ambition in life looks different for everyone, and it’s important for you to define what that means. Long hours do not equate to success. Grace Walker recently gave a talk, Small on purpose, about the life of a solopreneur and what success, looks like. Success looks different for everyone, and only you can define it.

I’ve seen many contemporaries leave the industry to never return—retired on a farm or finding a new profession. For many, it’s by choice, and for others, it’s the spark burning out. With nearly two decades in the tech industry, I need to be healthy and present enough to endure the next few. If you have ambitious goals, you’ll need to work hard but don’t let them destroy you. Play the long game and make every hour count and it invokes positive energy.

[Lots to consider, but this stuff has always guided me… despite my own “a child of refugees, and a Capricorn, hard work is in my DNA and personality” traits.]

Collaborating away

Collaborating away:

Ideas like the shower. Ideas like our pillows. Ideas like commutes. Ideas like walks. Ideas like the morning, or late nights. Ideas like daydreams. Ideas like you doing something else so they can surprise you.

Ideas aren’t contained. They aren’t located. They don’t reside. They’re nomadic.

They aren’t something you control — they bubble up, they arise. You don’t get to have them when you want. They come to you.

[Yesss!]