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

I was fortunate enough to spend time with my parents this July 4th weekend when this video of protestors in Baltimore pulling down Christopher Columbus’s statue went viral. First, because it happened to be Spencer’s video, a good friend from high school ¹, and so it caught their attention, and second because they asked me why people were tearing down Columbus’s statue. What’s wrong with Columbus?

The thing is, my parents both have voted for democrats my entire life. Their politics have consistently been center-left. My fiancé is half Haitian. They should know about Columbus and how he treated the Taino on Hispaniola. They should, but they don’t. Because although I had classroom conversations about Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain, they did not. When they were in school in the 60s and 70s, Columbus was a fully fictionalized, canonized, rehabilitated hero of American folklore. While controversy over Columbus’s legacy has shown up in campus newspapers, short local news stories, and opinions pieces each year in October, it’s easy to miss, forget, and ignore.

When we keep monuments to historical figures in every major city, the controversy is drowned out by the ubiquity. These monuments do not cause us to wrestle with history, they allow us to ignore it. We assume the presence of these celebrations are endorsements, and they make it seem as though the controversy is out of the mainstream and unimportant. We can live on with the folklore, because if things were really terrible, why would there be a statue in every city?

These statues must come down. There is no contextualization that will cause folks passing by to grapple with history when they see these bronzed men staring down from their pedestals. Tearing them down has already caused more conversation about the legacies of these individuals than the statues that dot this country.

Don’t mistake the statue for the history. The statues themselves are modern, and they don’t mark a significant history themselves. They are the constructed folklore of America constructed, a physical manifestation of an ahistorical narrative meant to build national, white pride. We can learn about the canonization of Columbus and the discrimination of Italian-Americans without maintaining public monuments throughout our cities. We can keep a few in a museum, and talk about Columbus not as some grand explorer who “discovered” an occupied land and started centuries of theft and slavery, but instead as a flawed man lifted from obscurity and shame to generate pride among another people who were being mistreated by the dominant white, protestant American nationalists.

The statues must come down. They celebrate a rebellion to maintain slavery. They were built not as monuments to shame, nor as monuments to history. These largely 20th century inventions are a justification for the South and the United States as a whole to continue to refuse to have any kind of truth and reconciliation or reparations for the sins of their nation. It was about not feeling the shame and defeat, but instead restoring pride in their actions to subjugate, past and present, black people.

We don’t need to celebrate these people. We don’t need to cling to imagined heroes that we created to reinforce narratives we need to shed. We don’t need these statues.

It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning

So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then.

It’s not surprising Charles Marohn (of Strong Town fame) wrote this, but I was a little surprised to find it in The American Conservative. But it turns out that Charles Marohn has been published there many times, mostly saying great things. It’s too bad the conservative audience has far too much self-interest in the suburban form.

Never forget:

The suburbs run on federal subsidies.

In April of 2018, Elsa and I visited Hong Kong for the first time. It now seems likely that this will be the last time we will have visited Hong Kong. It’s certainly true that if we ever return, we will be entering a very different place.

Visiting the Hong Kong Museum of History was an important experience. I better understood the brutal conditions of colonialism in Hong Kong and the complexity of reunification with China. But I remember even then having the sense that the political situation in Hong Kong was untenable– how can individuals invest so massively in a place whose future, in a thirty year timeframe, was so uncertain? Why wasn’t there more demand for democracy or for a longer term resolution on Hong Kong sovereignty? Are people really just going to wait it out?

I recognize that these were privileged, WEIRD thoughts, and I did feel the subtle complexities that challenged my more simple confusion.

I don’t feel prescient that things have escalated to the violent, authoritarian extreme that it has in Hong Kong so rapidly from then. I feel sad.

Read every word of Nikole Hannah Jone’s piece on reparations, but a few pull outs:

As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.

This is my answer, consistently, to the people I grew up with who were largely White, European immigrants to the US in this period.

Reparations should include a commitment to vigorously enforcing existing civil rights prohibitions against housing, educational and employment discrimination, as well as targeted investments in government-constructed segregated black communities and the segregated schools that serve a disproportionate number of black children. But critically, reparations must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap.

Too many folks focus on the cash payments, which should be made. But it’s important to realize that a large part of reparations is about race-conscious investment. For example, there’s no world in which Baltimore’s Red Line should have been cancelled in favor of the Purple Line, and a part of reparations should be the legal and policy structure to make the reverse decision.

Shortly after this constitution was written, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the C.S.A., offered a political manifesto for the slaveholders’ new republic. Training his sights on the eight upper-South states that were still refusing to secede, he offered a blunt assessment of the difference between the old Union and the new. The original American Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” he explained. But “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural … condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great … truth.” A statue of Alexander Stephens now stands in the U.S. Capitol; it is one of a group that includes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, targeted for removal.

– From The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State by Stephanie McCurry

This great piece in the New York Times points out that banks are already requiring higher down payments on houses in coastal flood zones in anticipation of rising sea levels due to climate change. Even buyers are increasingly taking “interest only loans”, where they are a building 0 equity, presumably because they believe that the home will be worth nothing, shortly.

The changes are modest, but starting. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still backstopping these mortgages, under the guise that flood insurance is a sufficient protection, but the reality is many homes in the US, and therefore quite a bit of property value and household wealth, will be destroyed in the next 50 years.

What can we do from a policy perspective? With our politics utterly polarized on the belief of science, the government seems unable to begin to price in the costs of climate change to protect our economy and provide a true caveat emptor to homebuyers. I expect that the debate of the 2040 election might be which wealthy people get a bailout due to climate change destroying their homes and wealth.

I don’t expect to be sympathetic.