McGhee, the former Demos president, framed progressives’ decision-making as a matter of priorities. “You have to be committed to winning real gains for the people at every step of the way as you build power,” she said. Progressives “stopped fighting on Medicaid expansion in predominantly Black states, and people are dying because we only want to talk about Medicare for All.”

This great profile of Sean McElwee is also the perfect description of why I think the Left, and especially the DSA, are both horrificially bad at politics and making it harder to achieve the progressive goals I mostly share with them.

Hey #rstats, so I do a pattern like this all the time— essentially fill in missing values from some other data source. I feel like there must be some *_join or other incantation that does this cleaner… is there or should I just write my own utility function?

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transactions %>%
  left_join(po_vendors, by = "po") %>%
  mutate(vendor = coalesce(vendor.x, vendor.y)) %>%
  select(-matches("\\..$"))

The one liberal value blands tend to elide is inequality, because while blands are, by definition, not opulent, neither are they bargain-basement. For the rich, blands are an ironic normcore trifle; for the aspiring middle, blands offer a fleeting facsimile of prosperity; and for the poor, blands are either the products they make, or the services they provide.

— Ben Schott, Welcome to Your Bland New World

I both loathe and love Blands myself. I am the target market, of course, but often find them disappointing relative to the standard bearers.

What I find attractive about most direct to consumer companies is not discussed too much in this article, which rightly criticizes their faux ethics and VC-backed rise and fall. No, what I like about most blands is an uncomplicated, consistent buying experience. Blands and their marketing buzz means I can get access to sufficient reviews and testimonials to know if the product is good. I can rely on an easy online shopping experience. Shipping is consistent and tracked. Return policies are reasonable.

It wasn’t long ago that none of this was a given on the web, and therefore your choices were in person shopping or Amazon. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

In that sense, the really disruption to Blands has not been their proliferation beyond what the market can bear, nor has it been the Instagram dropshipping clones. The real change has been Shopify, and to a lesser degree Stripe and Square, which have made it easier for small businesses to have the same solid online shopping experience that Blands had.

Increasingly when I buy online, I recognize the same store design, the same email confirmation, and the same shipping tracking. Thi s is not bland— my experience in stores is consistent when buying in brick-and-mortar stores, and this consistency online is welcome. It increases my personal trust. It’s enabling small businesses with quality products to have presence.

Most of the Blands don’t have much to offer me anymore. They can’t differentiate amongst themselves, and they can’t compete with quality products from companies who sell great products for a profit instead of blitzscaling.

Worth It is an occasional series on this blog where I post a bunch of links to things I’ve read recently.

The reality of Black pain is breaking American sports’ status quo:

The most powerful corporations in this country have said these routine encounters have become unacceptable, thus it is not an embarrassment for the leagues that the players chose not to play, but wholly appropriate, an exacting of the promise. The message players sent was not that point guards are now moonlighting as legislators, but literally, their humanity must come first – that these Black lives literally matter.

Kaepernick was right then, he’s right now, and the conservative, white backlash will be judged poorly by history. It’s thrilling to see athletes use their power.

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?:

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

It’s hard for me not to see a failure to empower experts in favor of proliferating small democracy everywhere as one of the main things that ills American society. Easy for me to say as a white, well-educated technocrat myself. But over and over again, in transit, in health, in education, and land management it seems, we seem to face insurmountable problems creating by decades of failure to value and empower expertise. It’s a dangerous game– just look at the racist impacts of “urban renewal” in the recent past to find ample examples of why we should be cautious of experts. But the unfortunate combination of racism and ideal about individual freedoms have commingled into what at times feels like an insurmountable barrier against positivist action for good.

The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans:

If you tripled the population of the United States, adding the new Americans only to the Lower 48 and leaving Alaska and Hawaii intact and unchanged, the main part of America would be only about as dense as France and less than half as dense as Germany.

I probably won’t read One Billion Americans, but that’s mostly because I find it hard to imagine I’ll disagree with any of it.

What Does Everyone See in Jesse Plemons?:

Plemons can toggle easily between eggheads and dimwits, good guys and bad guys, and it’s almost impossible to describe what he’s doing differently because he doesn’t appear to be doing anything at all.

A fascinating profile of a recent that guy in Hollywood.

Georgia accused of wrongfully purging nearly 200,000 from voter rolls: report:

Anyone paying attention knows how evil the Georgia’s Secretary of State office has been in recent years. Just another reason to be terrified of the fragility of our system.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’:

But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Yes, everyone has read or has read a hot take about this story. Here’s the essence though– Trump cannot fathom the existence of sacrifice or altruism. Individuals can only act in self-interest, and any hint otherwise is not just suspect, but a sign of being a “loser” or a “sucker”. Our country is in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use the word “our” unless speaking in the majestic plural.

Speak no evil: The secret to keeping Connecticut segregated:

One offered that Black people didn’t live here because “they” don’t like rural areas. Or because they can’t afford it. If Will Smith wanted to buy a house in town, he certainly could… Grown men actually argued that there was no segregation here, because the town would welcome the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Not one person in this story would recognize or understand their actions as racist. They would be appalled if you used that word. And perhaps worse, as a result, not one of them would understand that their actions are a part of an entire system chipping away at Black people in America ever day of their lives in this, 2020. This is the use of that small-d democracy from earlier posts to create a system of oppression and deny it– to put ones knee on the neck of Black America and then claim that the knee never existed, no matter how many times we’ve all seen the footage. This is the worst kind of racism, because it is so hard to eradicate even as it is so effective at stopping liberation.

Today’s Hike

Today’s Lunch

And some updates on our Lettuce Grow

What have I done?

In my attempts to reduce doomscrolling in this triple tsunami of pandemic, recession, and election, I began subscribing to Twitter accounts in my RSS reader using Feedbin.

The idea was, hey, it’s really easy to choose just a few accounts. I want to actually see what these, say 50 people say, and make sure I don’t miss things. But I can read these 50 outside of the algorithm, in a place that’s harder to mash the retweet with comment button, in a place that won’t encourage me to post and jump into The Discourse ¹.

Two fucking hundred unread. 36 accounts, one day, two fucking hundred unread. Dread.

What have I done?

I didn’t want 200 things to read from across the day in chronological order. This feels like doomscrolling in a new place. Why are you all tweeting so much? Why can’t I get rid of some of these accounts without a feeling of remorse?

So I did two things that helped make me feel sane. First, on many days, I just Mark All as Read and clear it out. It doesn’t matter if I’ve read these posts are not. No one is checking. There’s no penalty to opting out if it feels pointless, or overwhelming, or uninterested.

The second thing was more interesting. I thought a bit about how I organized my own webpage, chronological by day. I did this because I wanted my own stream of thoughts to be read in order. I want my first post of the day to be read first, and my last post to be read last. This is a personal blog, and the narrative on here is my life and there’s no reason why looking at my blog that my life should be running in some bizarre reverse order.

So I sorted and read the Tweets I subscribed to the same way. Rather than putting each of the accounts in a Twitter folder and attempting to recreate a chronological feed, I instead pretended that each Twitter account was a blog, and I read those blogs in chronological order, person by person. And you know what? Their lives had narrative too. Reading their posts in order, together, and each account I followed this way had a narrative. It was not this mixed up jumbled feed of different thoughts and ideas and topics and voices coming at me all at once, whether reverse chronological or algorithmically sorted. Instead, I was reading what people were writing.

And it turns out done like this, 200 posts can be churned through in tens of minutes. That includes me clicking over and reading full articles or blog posts that are linked to, one of the main reason I follow these accounts anyway.

What’s overwhelming and terrible about Twitter, what I contribute to that I hate so much, is the Twitter conversation. There are only a few true conversations each day worth following and paying attention to in my feed. Most of the time, what’s actually quite nice about Twitter is that it’s where people write microblogs. It’s the ideas they’re thinking about, stories they’re telling, and great articles I would otherwise miss that they’re sharing throughout the day.

I knew it back when Facebook introduced the News Feed, but I forgot about it over the last 14 years or so– the feed is the problem, not the posts and not the people.

Based on the data, there’s no question in my mind that NYC should be leading the country in showing us how to get back to in-person schooling, safely. Cases are clearly now at 100-200 per day, hospitalizations in the low tens, deaths in single digits in a city of millions.

It’s ok to start cautious– elementary school only, maybe even not a full 5 days a week. This isn’t really supported by the data, but it’s good to build confidence in procedures and confidence in parents. Show that you can do contact tracing when a student or teacher gets sick– it will happen. Show that you have a plan in place to respond to some event. But NYC is as safe for children as anywhere will be for quite some time.

Real political leadership in New York starts now. Cuomo and de Blasio fighting, among other things, disastrously delayed the initial coronavirus response. Since then, NYC has succeeded at a level only seen outside of the US at flattening their curve to as near 0 as is possible. That is in spite of the disaster forecasting of, frankly, ignorant media commentary about how density would be the end of New York. We should look at NYC’s curve and recognize it as the global city it is– having faced uniquely horrific consequences of COVID-19 followed by success that is somewhat unique in the United States but common elsewhere. In the beginning, NYC unfortunately looked like Italy, but so to now, months into the crisis, NYC fortunately looks more like Italy.

It is time to say, “We are going to reduce other forms of opening that we have successfully done for a period of time now to give schools a chance to ramp up. We want all NYC schools students to be able to safely enter classrooms, so we’re going to reduce other forms of contact, ramp up schools in a deliberate manner, and then, having shown we can do this safely, re-open other parts of the city again. We’re going to show the country that no one responds to crisis like New Yorkers do.” It would work, and NYC would be better for it.

I had hard time choosing just one.

When I first learned that Automattic ran a remote team on Wordpress, I thought that it was a crazy strange example of dogfooding. Of course, eventually I realized that was foolish– a CMS is a great tool, not unlike Basecamp or any other intranet, and could easily be used as an internal company knowledge base, project planning tool, and more.

Today Automattic has made P2 free. My understanding is that P2 is a heavily custom theme (maybe even whole instance?) of Wordpress that is used to run all of their internal systems. Seems like a great idea, although I’m surprised it took them this long to make it available.

I think Slack, and chat in general, is a dead end for collaboration. As excited as I was for tools to advance beyond IRC and have good work chat with mainstream acceptance, I’ve come to realize overtime that Slack has gotten more wrong than right. At work, we’ve started to mix in Basecamp over the last year as we implemented Shape Up for our product development strategy. It’s pretty ok– the best thing about Basecamp is that it is reliable and inexpensive. But using Basecamp has really piqued my interest in non-chat, asynchronous-first ways of working on remote teams.

P2 just exposes one more way to do this kind of work, tried and tested by a very large company for over a decade. I hope we’ll see many more tools like this.

I want a new desk, but I am struggling to figure out what exactly I want.

Here’s an old picture of my desk setup. Some small things have changed, but it’s roughly accurate.

I have three core problems I’d like to solve.

1. I do not want my speakers to be on separately, ugly stands like they are.
2. I do want to be able to center my monitor– currently there is a not very helpful “wire organization” shelf that makes it so that I cannot clamp my monitor arm where I would need to in order to center the monitor.
3. I do not want seesaw style legs that take up so much room under the desk itself.

The current dimensions of the desk are 67" x 20".

The speakers have a large footprint – they are 8.5" x 7" x 12".

The wall the desk is up against is approximately 10 feet.

I have thought about doing a very large, 98" desk that essentially takes up the wall using the Ikea KARLBY countertop, but everyone seems to think this is ridiculously large. They’re not entirely wrong– at that length, I would need some kind of center support and/or metal bars down the center to avoid sagging. That seems no good.

Most of the “hot” desks are sit-stand desks like the Fully Jarvis or Uplift (which Elsa has). I had a standing desk once before and found I really didn’t use it. While I like the design and simplicity of these desks, paying for an adjustable height desk that will stay static feels a bit silly to me.

I have contacted a local furniture maker whose style I like, and they quoted me a very reasonable base price for a large desk that was quite reasonable– I just have to actually decide on designs.

So here’s my dilemma– I don’t know what the right size desk is! I am confident I don’t want to go to the “standard” 30" depth– my current 20" is largely “enough”, and so while I could go to 24", 30" seems bonkers to me. One idea I had was adding a 48" shelf to the desk. This way my monitor could go on the shelf, so could my laptop, but my speakers could be on either side. The problem– this monitor has a 10" deep “foot” to the base, which is enormous and why I put it on the monitor arm. A 10" deep shelf seems ridiculous on a 24" desk. That means still using the arm, which is not really compatible with having a shelf.

Here is an image to scale of a 72" x 24" desk, outlining my speakers, the monitor, my laptop stand, and the desk mat area. As you can see, while the geometry does allow everything to fit on this desk, I am not sure it will feel any larger. By adding 4" in one dimension and 6" in the other, I am adding 388 square inches (467 + 524). I take away 120 square inches by tossing on the two speakers. The 268 square inches of additional space, added all around, is just not that much. It would achieve all three goals, but I think would still feel a bit like a “small” desk in spite of its size because how large everything I’m placing on it is.

Anyway, I would love for some advice. Is the above plan really the right size? Might I come to regret having to tuck my laptop behind my monitor? Is any larger simply unwieldy? Are their solutions I’m not considering?

Help me buy a new desk.

A ‘Safety Net’ That’s a Kafkaesque Mess

Beneficiaries can keep additional assets and income by setting up a Plan to Achieve Self Support — a written plan that must be submitted to and approved by the agency — but doing so is sufficiently complex that only 568 people in the entire country made use of this option in 2018. Nor are benefits so generous that recipients have no need to work — the monthly federal S.S.I. payment for 2020 was a mere $783. While many states supplement this, recipients still face terrible poverty.

Keeping track of these arcane details would be difficult for anyone. For low-income adults with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses, who make up most working S.S.I. recipients, it is nearly impossible. Failure to do so can have awful consequences. The agency often overpays working disabled recipients, only to notify them that they must pay back thousands of dollars, sometimes years after the fact.

We work remarkably hard at making government impossible to navigate for people who need and deserve our assistance, and then use that remarkable mess as an excuse to allow government to do nothing else. The mess is designed, not inevitable.

Op-Ed: It will take a lot more than diversity training to end racial bias in hiring

While 90% of the employers reported explicitly factoring into their hiring the goal of increasing racial and gender diversity, we saw no preference for female or minority candidates in their ratings. In fact, employers hiring in STEM fields penalized résumés with minority or female names. The effect was big: These candidates were penalized by the equivalent of 0.25 GPA points, based solely on the name at the top of the résumé. That meant such a candidate needed a 4.0 GPA to get the same rating as a white male with a 3.75.

Powerful evidence of continued bias in the form of the wide gap between stated and revealed preferences.

Filmmakers’ look inside US immigration crackdown draws legal threats

Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.

At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.

“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.

The cruelty is the point.

“I Was a Starter Wife”: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce

Elon Musk is a huge piece of shit. I wish I wasn’t so inspired by the work of SpaceX and so attracted to the Model Y.

YIMBY and Production Theory

New Urbanism and Richard Florida’s theory both hold, in different ways, that if cities make themselves nice to specific (different) classes of people, they will attract people who are morally and economically better to have as residents, stimulating further growth.

This was the Richard Florida critique I needed.

The Rise of the Netflix Hit

Are we better off not knowing the details of what’s popular and what is not? Part of me wants to believe that box office transparency became self-reinforcing– things became popular because they were popular, which could be bought to some degree, and therefore, smaller, high quality movies weren’t getting made. Popular movies were memetic and spreading somehow through their economics and not their quality. Another part of me thinks that the “surprise” hits that perform much better than expected and then reap massive rewards are an important part of finding and rewarding the folks that make quality culture.

Mostly I think that gifs will always reveal how popular something actually is and ensure it spreads. Unless you’re Quibi.

Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot

In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds.

Further moral challenges to my continuing to eat mammals for personal health and desires.

This Tiny Fern is the “Most Economically Important” Fern on Earth

I want to grow all the super plants everywhere to combat climate change.

One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?

In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.

This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.

Does anyone else find it sickening that there’s a notion of “our people” in the White House and that this is accepted by the GOP leadership? Since when is the president not supposed to see all Americans as “our people”?

Trump administration says massive Alaska gold mine won’t cause major environmental harm, reversing Obama

Everything is fine here.

*But aren’t blogs dead? *· Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.

– Tim Bray

I love a great blog. I admit, I use this space mostly as a “life blog” or “daily log” space, which is probably my least favorite genre of blog. But it’s also the easiest to write, and part of why I maintain it is to get into the habit of blogging at all. This way, one day, I can write more things that great blogs are made of. In Bray’s words,

Dense information from real experts, delivered fast. Why would you want any other kind?

Never has a piece so completely failed to engage with its actual critics– the side stepping done here on the actual impact on protection from discrimination is incredible.

A Black poor student is being served by a Catholic School with government support because the public system has been starved of resources by regressive state tax schemes compounded by new exit rights for individuals starving the system further. They happen to be non-cis gendered. Their state mandated and supported education now denies their identity and their ability to practice that identity because religious groups define membership. Their teacher, who teaches math, turns out to be non-binary and fired because during period 1 math they say a prayer.

The only black member of the entire school staff wants to teach The New Jim Crow in their social studies class, and as a result is fired, because the teacher is a lunch monitor and grace is said before meals. The state pays to teach them there is a scientific, rather than political, controversy on climate change and evolution. They are unable to request the use of accurate pronouns. When they are bullied and harassed about their gender, they are told they are in the wrong.

They are a minor. They are placed where their parents demand. Their options are limited, because the system has been designed to hollow out all other options. They are not empowered to choose their association or membership at all.

What if they are Jewish?

Religious groups should get to choose their membership and teach their doctrine, freely. Their entanglement in public purposes, with public money, involving minors is their choice. What the courts have done is secured the rights of religious groups over all individual rights.

If these groups solely engaged in voluntary religious activity with their own money and purposes, I’d have concerns, but they’d be minor. When they are engaging in state mandated education with state money in areas where there’s no functional choice… well.

The Lemon Test is a good standard and we should take excessive government entanglement seriously. Unfortunately, our response is to allow religious groups to do whatever they want on behalf of the state because they are religious, rather than excise religion from state action.

I love civil society. I have the same small c conservative appreciation for volunteer association and lots of distrust of large, concentrated power and coordination. But this reframing of the conversation is too divorced from the critical reality

Every time the House GOP and right wing media attacks Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, they make her so much stronger. There’s a special hatred that is seething among them, and they have to believe they are playing somehow to their base supporters by going after a young, left, Latina congresswoman. But they also seem to think they can reach beyond the base of people who are afraid of her just due to her identity.

From what I can tell, the right has seized on AOC also in part because they want to appeal to me. I’m exactly the kind of cosmopolitan, well-educated, elite, male, white liberal that is set up to bristle at someone like AOC rising in the ranks due to her “fame” more than her accomplishments. And yet, the right just raises my estimation of her every time she overcomes their bile.

Who is AOC other than a safe congresswoman on the left end of the party? That’s what I’m supposed to think. But then the right coordinates merciless attacks against her, and she just rises above the mountain of shit they sling, with grace, humor, strength, and, importantly, the kind of humility they are desperate to prove does not exist.

Without the right wing scorched earth campaign against her, I would be waiting 10 years to see if she can build coalitions and pass laws, demonstrating she’s more than a charismatic politician. Instead, she’s been tested for leadership and she keeps passing the test.

I don’t view her as a freshman congresswoman. The right did that.

So now what? I have customers who are breaking the law and putting my life at risk, and what am I supposed to do? I’m a freaking retail clerk. I ring up beer and boat supplies for 10 bucks an hour. I don’t want to deal with this. If I didn’t need the money, I’d be home working in my garden or visiting my grandkids.

– A North Carolina store clerk on urging customers to wear masks amid pandemic - The Washington Post

A functioning country would at least have a political conversation about this vast increase in government surveillance. This is why it’s not paranoia to be worried about mass troves of private data or privatization of government functions.

I have no idea if we should, ulimately, make a stink about this. The point is that private data very quickly can be used and sold for other purposes, including government surveillance. We can’t have solid vehicle-mile taxes, supposedly because of surveillance concerns. Yet private providers roam the streets, collect data on where you are, and hand that over to the national government already. The actual surveillance state is already here, and we have given into it for parking tickets.

At the same time, potentially good policy like VMT is blocked for privacy concerns.

Why? Policy is explicit.

Either there is something superior or inferior about the races, something dangerous and deathly about black people, and black people are the American nightmare; or there is something wrong with society, something dangerous and deathly about racist policy, and black people are experiencing the American nightmare.

– The American Nightmare by Ibram X. Kendi

Sarah Jeong, unsurprisingly, get’s this week’s internet controversy completely right in Letterheads: Social media and the end of discourse.

For all its pretense to logic and debate above all else, the old paradigm bred an irrational and incomprehensibly unjust society. The opinionators frequently circulated debunked or faulty science, and they kept alive a “debate” around climate change that has not existed among scientists for decades. They tolerated the intolerant and treated dehumanization as a difference of opinion. They were — despite being held as the paragons of rational discourse — never particularly rational. One only needs to point to the war in Iraq as proof of that.

Author’s Note: The title of this post is taken from Jeong’s piece as well.

Over the course of Williams’s 18-year career with the NYPD, 60 complaints, involving 21 separate incidents, were lodged against him… For comparison, 41 percent of current NYPD service members have never had a complaint lodged against them… Between 2008 and 2018, there were 11 lawsuits that named Williams (usually including other officers) alleging police misconduct … Williams has been accused four times of anally penetrating a suspect

— from NYPD’s Culture of Impunity Sees an Officer Repeatedly Accused of Physical and Sexual Abuse Rising Through the Ranks by Tana Ganeva