privacy, security, and compliance; university administration; the liberal arts
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this was always how it was going to be i think. the drop in violent crime in american cities over the last three decades is illegible until trump can take credit for it. now we'll see an avalanche of takes pointing out how safe DC is "now" and it will all be attributed to him
breaking this correlation on an individual scale is one of the core tasks of becoming mature and, eventually, wise. Doing the same on a societal scale would be.. p cool
I've given a few options but for me really it's this one
these characters should be called Starbucks
Like everything else, this newest colonial campaign by computer scientists is a debased, shallow imitation, wearing its ignorance almost as a point of pride, with old frameworks repurposed for an ideologically inverted program
Quantitative methods were seen at least in part as being full of democratizing and liberatory potential, and even after economics became a colonial power within social science divisions, its wars of aggression against history departments still had some of that force for quite some time.
In Bridenbaugh's famous 1962 AHA address in the midst of the fight over cliometrics in which he railed against "the bitch-goddess ǫᴜᴀɴᴛɪꜰɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ," he less famously dropped a lot of antisemitic innuendo against the new school of historians who were adopting social scientific methods.
"The dismal science" was a coinage by the 19th century Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle, who was irritated by economics because its positivist framework of dispassionate data analysis based on assumptions of rational agents threatened his preferred worldview based on sentimentalist turbo-racism
It's obviously very funny that this guy thinks he just invented quantitative social science, but beyond that, there's an interesting story to be told about the shifting politics of the long fight over quantitative methods in history, dating back well before the rise of cliometrics in the 1960s.
you ever have an interaction with a creative writer where you can feel the moment they start thinking about how they would interpret you
last year I got a ventless heat pump all-in-one, and I had various problems with it until LG released a finer mesh filter to keep lint off the coils. Super simple thing that made all the difference. Now my biggest problem is the big stupid vent hole in the side of my house that I haven't addressed
the democratic party doesn't just need new management, it needs to hang a huge "UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT" banner
also because the democratic brand is so bad, the controlling faction not only has to lose, they have to be *widely seen* to have been overthrown. the very public humiliation of the republican controlling faction was a major part of how they basically rebooted their brand
it's all to help Berwyn stand apart from the crowd
one thing about suburbs that urbanists don't pay much attention to is that there are so many different ones in a metro area because they're basically a marketplace of municipalities and compete with each other (and with the city) on bundles of amenities and branding
the "strong towns" stuff applies to newer exurbs and is totally inapplicable to established, mostly prewar streetcar suburbs. the Chicago suburbs he's talking about are not dependent on Chicago taxes and many of them are denser than most American cities
some of the near west suburbs are a lot more racially integrated than almost anywhere in the city. granted, the fact that suburbs that are wildly different from each other have names that are indistinguishable from each other doesn't help
playing what about with individual artists does just sort of prove the broader point, though. weird how Germany does produce prominent artists and major art scenes but maybe because it's self consciously not nationalistic, it doesn't coalesce into a sense of "German art"
Gerhard Richter is in that rank and I'm petty sure he has always lived and worked in Germany
it has the advantage of being relatively easily achievable, and if it happened, it might start to encourage people to rethink their belief that we're just stuck with our dysfunctional legislative system and can't change it, so we may as well strip its powers and hand them to the executive
our entire society has been taken over by Job's shitty friends
the fact that diseases respond to treatment—with its implication that the disease is something more than physical evidence of your own failings—is an embarrassment to this belief system, which is why they want to abolish the entire practice of medicine
"if something bad happens to you, you must have somehow made it happen" is the core belief that unites new age spiritualism, prosperity gospel, toxic self-help culture, crypto, wellness scams, and every other head on the hydra that is right-wing "culture"
why are they dependent on online grifter culture to teach them how to act around women? Are they priced out of cities and unable to socialize with strangers in person? Are they hooked on social media controlled by tech monopolists that have perfected mechanisms of addiction and compulsion?
the fact that young men are apparently so isolated, online-dependent, and unable to be socialized into the same sex/dating culture that worked well for people slightly older than them is a real social problem made possible by societal factors that the left *should* be well-suited to talk about
it's a lot funny, my favorite is the guy who said he saved the day at a restaurant by lighting the whole place up with a ceiling bounce. but at least nobody has to know how much care went into selecting my keychain light, nor the delight it still brings me when I (regularly) use it
I'm so lucky most people haven't figured out how to bully EDC flashlight carriers yet
Wyden? what a cruel world
the implication that we were being watched over all the time by an evil tower seemed totally natural
as a child I thought it was called the Fierce Tower and was very confused to learn anybody called it anything else
was gonna say, back in the day the only way to properly atone for this was gifting a pile of severed heads. the hague is supposed to fill that role, but, well,
I just tossed off that number as an example, I have no clue what they make. I also don't think there's anything wrong with two industrious people making good professional salaries and I strongly doubt they'd be abnormally high for US House reps. But also 18% of IL-09 households are over $200k.
for me personally the top 20 spots would all be types of grad students, followed by administrative staff, but you could come up with a whole alternate list for faculty
even if this stereotype were valid, the idea that it ranks among the top 20 saddest figures at *universities* of all places really underlines how ignorant he is about actual universities
I think part of the disconnect here is that it's actually very common for people relocating here for work to move somewhere around there first. They don't know the area, they just know it's very convenient, they're okay overpaying for a bit. This is actually one of the main purposes of Streeterville
off topic but does commencement at Columbia usually involve baseball caps? Or is there some light cultural signification happening there
setting aside everything else, why should the public care how hip their neighborhood is? They seem a little too busy to be making the scene.
even 4k/mo is not Lucille Bluth money. Like I'm sure they're doing well, but two people each making $130k could very easily swing that rent. All I'm saying is that being around there doesn't automatically mean they're fantastically wealthy the way it would if they, say, bought in Kenilworth
I don't know anything about her finances but this is really overstating the exclusivity of that neighborhood. Gold Coast/Streeterville are packed with 2BRs that rent for like $3k. Whether or not someone finds it personally tasteful to live there, a lot of people with normal corporate jobs do it
on the bright side, "the senate is a sham" is a good focus for non-maga populist conspiracism from the left. it's largely true, the conspiracy is bipartisan, and it's much easier for average people to understand than the total failure of the judicial branch
People keep sharing the dog meme but honestly whatever fire that dog was in is long extinguished by now
well not the *first* draft, but, you know
It's interesting to look back and see the seeds of this in the absolutely poisonous 90s-early 00s left centered around the likes of Nader and Kucinich, both of whom were basically the first draft of MAHA and have since embraced Trumpism. The Gen X left always had this in them.
quite a few more on Metra UP-N all the way up to Illinois Beach State Park too
the Telecommunications Act of 1996 strikes again. Obv can't be reduced to just that, but the degree to which media has been homogenized at the national level has basically obliterated any sense that small town MN is meaningfully different from rural TN
The fact that every university administration is trying to keep quiet about this to avoid being singled out by the feds for the nuclear strikes inflicted on Johns Hopkins and Northwestern, and to project strength to prevent an enrollment collapse, is really not helping. People just have no idea.
I keep thinking about how it's a movement that draws on aesthetics, celebrity, and TV logic for its appeal, and eventually they will simply go out of style, like all hot TV shows and celebrities eventually do once they've been cultural hegemons for long enough
the other thing boston and chicago have in common is really dark winters because of the cloud cover, so they're extra SAD. for those of us who tough it out though, the public lakefront is still awesome in the winter, in its terrifying way
i thought you lived in boston? that's about as cold, snowier, and notably lacks the otherwordliness of lake michigan in dead of winter
it's especially amazing because several times now, people have seen grok turn into an insane monster because someone twiddled a knob on it, yet they don't recognize the implication that LLMs are always heavily controlled by their makers
from my poking around, even the high-end models designed for argumentation show no sign of any concept of saliency. They don't pick out small distinctions that make all the difference and they're extremely sensitive to the way prompts are worded. Can't imagine how lawyers could use them for briefs
the woods wander back
*in brazil they'd be riririing
it's like an AI image generator mangling "hitler"
one of the main things about country as a genre originally was, much like blues, clever double entendre and other subtle use of language to tell stories on multiple levels simultaneously Then again, bastardizing this heritage is as old as Elvis turning Hound Dog into a song about a literal dog
8am is also a comically late start to the speech-allowed part of the day
even our crackpots suck now. nonspecific vibe physics, woo hoo. where's the wealthy amateur archaeologist using LLMs to figure out places to dig for noah's ark? why are we not finally proving velikovsky's theory that biblical history comes from an earth-mars near collision
it's a messy area that's even harder to learn about because the phonics issue is unfortunately a soft entry point into right-wing politics
still a stretch compared to the big obvious phone problem but it's a hill i will, not die on, but defend until i'm forced into retreat
it's not so much about context clues but about practicing really inefficient ways of reading that make the task more cognitively demanding at the sentence/paragraph level, even though they do memorize thousands of words and can seemingly read just fine
i suspect this is a persistent effect of reading instruction that teaches you to learn an unfamiliar word or phrase by looking at the context and guessing a word that makes sense. just vibing out a whole text where you mentally fill in chunks instead of actually reading everything
prob still a smaller effect than phones though. a perfect addiction/compulsion machine that updates in real time is not so good for concentration, even if saying so makes you a boring conservative or whatever
i've also become convinced the damage from "balanced literacy" education is real and the effect it has on functional literacy is subtle and insidious
even if this were somehow copying a trend that started in Brooklyn (it's not), the idea that the only reason to dine this way is to be the first to do it rather than for its own sake is a very Brooklynite mental disease
I don't doubt that that will work for a while at least, but wow, that's a lot of cognitive load to maintain just to culturally impoverish themselves
I've often wondered how Republicans deal with the cognitive dissonance of practically the entirety of Hollywood filmmaking up to the present being plainly incompatible with the values they're now trying to make take root. are they going to say *all* of it has always been anti-American?
used to attend a regular seminar where it was always funny to see which visitors already knew they had to preemptively satisfy the resident Statistical Significance Is Not Economic Significance warrior
or whether or not he legitimately occupied the presidency at the start of this term, by seizing anti-constitutional dictatorial power, he vacated his legitimate office. It's intolerable that he has no obligation to the constitution but we're still bound to honor the power he claims from it
I'm not sure there's a US parallel that comes close to capturing the crudeness of deba'athification but it would probably be more along the lines of firing and blacklisting everybody who's ever had a security clearance
I think the difference between these two stages is what defines being conversant in a language? I don't think you can carry on a conversation about anything that's not completely routinized if you have to think in your primary language and then translate
the government created a need for them to exist. In some cases, even dated and postmarked personal letters could be used. Now, Vance wants to create a post-bureaucratic state in which there is no treasured record sufficient to establish your personhood.
from his darling mother since his house had burned down decades prior, and would the surgeons’ board please send it back when they had established his eligibility. It was still there in the file, of course. Few people had documents proving such things as the date and place of their birth until /
the Union Army manuscript records are in boxes organized by company at the National Archives. I’ve handled family bibles with handwritten birthdates sent in by veterans to prove they were old enough to qualify for a pension. One was accompanied by a letter explaining that it was his only memento /
the kerr county transcripts lay all this out so blatantly that of course the rest of the country will simply look away in embarrassment, unwilling to acknowledge that these people are screaming from the top of their lungs that they care more about hating the left than about their own lives
eagle has tech neck
no, I was smack in the middle of youth culture from the late 90s through mid 2010s. there have been plenty of changes, but what made back to the future work was a broad-based revolutionary cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity that dwarfs anything that has happened since then
yes, I don't think 9/11 was actually the cause, but the point where hindsight makes the stasis since that point very clear. the 90s marked a deceleration but the recency of the end of the cold war meant that wasn't clear at the time
I think there's a very real sense in which our culture sort of froze in amber around 9/11. yes some things have changed, but nothing is unrecognizable.
it's actually useful for the movement to let rogan voice the immense cognitive dissonance a lot of supporters are feeling while channeling it safely into continued tepid support, quietism, cynicism, or any other endpoint than actual organized opposition, which remains beyond the pale.
the key clause in that gizmodo article is "while he made clear he would never vote for kamala harris." it's perfectly fine with the maga movement for rogan to express dissent and even to disengage from politics. the one thing that will never be okay is to join the opposition, and he never will.
really though, rogan needs to periodically renew his cred as an independent who brings other self-styled independents into the trump fold, and that means giving voice to dissent in a way that still allows him to stay aboard "cautiously" and "independently"
really though, rogan needs to periodically renew his cred as an independent who brings other self-styled independents into the trump fold, and that means giving voice to dissent in a way that still allows him to stay aboard "cautiously" and "independently"
there's a reason he's surrounded by the world's most punchable boyars
being a malort old head (ish) means I always find the fact that they advertise weird, but the phrase "two-fisted drinker" resonates with me very deeply
it seems untenable for them to have a strict social media policy applying to staff while having zero interest whatsoever in the professionalism or collegiality of their regular contributing writers, especially when their output shares bylines with staff
one thing AI has been very good at is making targeted phishing--say, to university registrar staff--extremely effective and difficult to spot
they're also reporting this on the same day the administration is talking about casting around for any pretext to deport him
Interestingly this started to abate somewhat before the development of actually effective public health measures because yellow fever is much less dangerous in children, so as new generations were born in the American colonies, it was mainly just adult immigrants who died of "the strangers' disease"
The summer die-off in the North American colonies was also huge because malaria (falciparum) and yellow fever, in particular, took up residence in the cities for the summer. Massachusetts, which was much colder than anywhere in the British Isles, was still much more habitable for that reason alone
yeah, in the early colonial period the caribbean colonies were an absolute death machine for any non-indigenous people. They kept importing huge numbers of African slaves because they were expected to die within a few years and never become a self-sustaining population. Tropical diseases, man
"when bad things happen it's your own fault" is also the core principle of MLMs and other scams, new age spirituality, prosperity gospel, and the entire right-wing movement. To understand the right wing is to recognize this belief guiding all the others
i think a lot of commentators understandably reach for the wrestling analogy but a better one is real housewives. the distinction between real and kayfabe loses coherence when the people involved have no center. their real actual psyches are indistinguishable from the performance of their personas
it's kind of grimly funny that a future Democratic administration will probably be a lot more squeamish than all the former DOJ people they hire back and will waste months trying to rein in their righteous crusade of vengeance for an audience of noone
hospitals being unable to fill residencies because the med school pool has dried up, plus not being able to hire foreign docs, would ordinarily be a problem, but if the hospitals are all closing anyway, well,
republican voters don't even need to blame republicans for it. they can go on not acknowledging reality and even meekly trying to blame it on democrats, but they'll be increasingly confused, demoralized, and obviously in denial, and more likely to simply disengage. and that is how they lose
executives also operate more heavily on peer pressure than probably any other adults on earth, and once an idea has taken hold among them, there is truly nothing that will change their minds until the thing has run its course
getting shit done (passing a small handful of laws that hand over my entire job to the president)