Author: tsprad

Mostly nothing, but the very last few lines tells the story:

We’re living in a hateful, argumentative time. To realize that, I realize it was a rare era I lived through with the peace and love movement.

Source: Country Joe McDonald – SFGate

They apparently think they’re fighting a real war — against drugs.

Source: New documents show the surprising reasons local cops want vehicles designed for war – Vox

Source: Should search algorithms be moral? A conversation with Google’s in-house philosopher – Quartz

Google’s search engine—and that of Bing, DuckDuckGo, and most of the other tools out there—is indifferent to truth.

Indifference to the truth happens to be part of the established philosophical definition of bullshit. “Bullshit is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true,” wrote Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt in his seminal 1986 paper on communication theory, “On Bullshit.” “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Source: A Cop Killed A White Teen And The #AllLivesMatter Crowd Said Nothing

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that white Americans have, for the most part, collectively shrugged at police violence. Polls have repeatedly shown that white people are much more likely to have confidence in the police, suggesting that they’re either more willing to believe that officers are justified in their actions or that the system can be trusted to sort it out if they’re not. […] speaking up about Hammond now would create a conflict for many of those people”

The Counted

 

 

 

Source: Kansas Underfunded Education And Cut Tenure. Now It Can’t Find Enough Teachers To Fill Classrooms.

I’ve been embarrassed to admit I was educated in Kansas ever since they made the national news for denying evolution.  Back when I lived in Kansas, the education system there was well above average.  But that was a long time ago.  Sad song.

 

Damn, this is depressing.

These Are The New Rules of Work | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

But it’s the new reality.  I’m sure glad I’m not young and just getting started in this mess, where everybody has to be out on the hustle 24 hours every day.  In my lifetime I’ve seen the transition from one worker supporting a household with several kids to every adult having to have a full time job just to support (not very well) one child.  Now “full time” is no longer enough.  Every adult has to be on the hustle 24 by 7.

Has your productivity been improved by technology?  Are you enjoying any benefit from that?

 

ArchitectNotes – Varnish.

This article impressed me the first time I read it, a few years ago, because it’s the sort of thing that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time, but I haven’t had a need to bring it forward.

 

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/shouldnt_be_hard.png

 

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo is a best-selling guide to winning the war on clutter..

I need to take a closer look at this, maybe read the book.  Lord knows I have plenty of clutter to get rid of.

 

The world is not falling apart: The trend lines reveal an increasingly peaceful period in history..

“Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.”