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Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle?

He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.

Basically: research, hypothesize, prototype, test, iterate, deliver. It's not new, but here we are with new terminology.

It is good because if you're a design firm you sometimes need an HBR-approved buzzword to get your client, the VP of Marketing, to let you do any kind of user research. But ultimately, like any business concept used primarily to sell in client work and justify it up the ladder, it will be replaced by "whatever the stakeholder wants" when push comes to shove.

Neil Postman has a lot to say on this topic, which he terms the "news of the day" throughout Amusing Ourselves to Death. For example:

"This idea — that there is a content called “the news of the day” — was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation."

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action."

"You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

In neither case is the person's tribal identity used against them for writing things that others don't like. Orson Scott Card holds a professorship. He just published a book this year. A large corporation made a mass market film out of his book, well after he had been writing things that others didn't like.

The controversy with the poet seems like a different issue, but even so -- Michael Derrick Hudson seems to be in exactly the same place before Sherman Alexie assumed he was a Chinese woman 3 years ago.

The colors are great, really comfortable contrast level, and the typeface is easy to read. Fairly tight information density, but low-density layouts are a common complaint with the target audience so I think it strikes a good balance. My compliments to the designer.

WRT your claim that Kavanaugh somehow will not contribute to the prohibition (or extreme restriction) of abortions:

- Kavanaugh was nominated after private meetings with a president who promised to put anti-abortion judges on the court.

- The president himself is not an expert on jurisprudence and selected Kavanaugh from a list of anti-abortion judges provided to him by the Federalist Society, which vets judges with respect to the likelihood of their restricting abortion access.

- There is a lot of wiggle room within the phrase "I would follow Roe v. Wade faithfully and fully", enough to permit a decision that would allow states to effectively outlaw abortion. He could technically not be lying in that specific statement, yet still prohibit or largely restrict access to abortions.

There is no good faith reason to believe that Kavanaugh's nomination is not a threat to abortion access in America.

You have shared two sources of broad, country-level data.

The study tracked localized effects on individuals.

These are not necessarily in contradiction! Though whatever you're inferring with your broad correlation (air pollution has no negative effect on intelligence? air pollution improves intelligence?) is much weaker than the study, which clearly has made attempts to isolate variables.

Nixon _reluctantly_ created the EPA as a response to one of the only periods of sustained popular environmentalism in American history.

I'm unsure why this gets bandied about as a feather in Nixon's cap. Just as a factual matter, as soon as he was politically safe from environmentalist pressure (post-1972), he retreated completely on environmental issues, vetoing the EPA's budget, ordering the EPA to spend less than was apportioned to the agency.

It's an example of the potential for citizen activism, and an example of Nixon's inclination to consolidate power in the executive branch. Certainly not an example of "the post-WWII modern Republican party at one time wanted to expand environmental protections beyond the minimum required to quell citizen activism."

"All politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here's what I can get you." - Nixon, to the Sierra Club, 1970

YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.

YouTube profits from showing people things they might be likely to click on, and from collecting money from people who want people to click on their things. This has something to do with "interests" in some sense of the word but I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.

Despite a few quibbles (especially re: the prominence of browser settings menus), following these recommendations would be a great help. The clock bar at the top of the screen in GNOME 3 is a weird half measure, and its uselessness drives inconsistency in app UI since every app has to implement its own menu.

I would gladly hitch my wagon to the author's star if they wanted to organize a project to implement these improvements. Does anyone with more Linux development experience know where such a project would start? Is it already in progress somewhere?

My point is that whether a belief is popular, or whether you think a belief is common sensical has no bearing on the truth value, social value, rationality, or perspicacity of that belief. I don't think the GP is slandering the GGP, I think they are both missing the point and making an irrelevant quasi-argument.

You know you have a weak point when you rely on "my interlocutor has an unpopular opinion" and "my interlocutor just lacks common sense" as means of argument.

He plans to "give away" money to an LLC he controls, which makes donations and invests in companies with some kind of social mission.

Not saying an LLC that makes investments in for-profit tutoring companies is bad, really, just not a charity in the usual sense, and not a gift to the public good.

Everybody who comes to know about systems calls will have learned the concept for the first time. Some people come to that knowledge by becoming a web developer, gaining some rudimentary understanding of the command line, typing `which cd`, and eventually reading the bash source. The fact that this is even possible is a testament to the author's curiosity and the value of free software.

Others come to that knowledge by reading a 650 page book about System V after graduating from university. Maybe they already learned it before getting the book, in some practical circumstance, like the author. Maybe they have always known it. But for me, an article by someone in the midst of their learning is a great help, an opportunity for others to share what they know, and exemplary of the hacker spirit.

The Poison We Pick 8 years ago

You may be interested in reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which says (roughly speaking, and after Kierkegaard) that the striving to find a meaning in life is the primary motivating force in the lives of people, and its frustration creates an existential vacuum that leads to boredom, distress, depression, aggression, addiction, and the rest. He would agree that there has been a sort of crisis of meaning since around the middle of the last century, loss of religion and other societal conventions having a lot to do with it.

I think what you regard as "people engaged rabidly in the consumption of fiction" he might interpret as people living passively, bored and confused, abdicating a sense of responsibility for their own lives. I think he is a precursor to the Neil Postman line of cultural criticism, if anyone's looking for more books.

Man's Search for Meaning is a short and compelling book, he describes a way forward that doesn't involve resurgent nationalism or religious fundamentalism, and I've gotten a lot out of it personally.

It is possible to include minority groups in a community without pandering or using reductive caricatures. It can be difficult if the community has little familiarity with the actual experiences of those minority groups. In that case, it would be important to seek out people who are from those minority groups, or who at least have a great familiarity with those groups, to direct efforts to grow the community in their direction.

If a person is anxious about being reprimanded for using an offensive stereotype, they do not have the expertise to employ "culturally appropriate" materials and ought to do more research/inquiry or delegate the responsibility of the outreach to somebody else.

I have traveled a lot from Chicago to Iowa City, which has no rail service, via both Megabus and a Greyhound subsidiary. Don't know that I would call it a rural route. Or rather, I don't think it's so rural as to be invisible.

People under various hardships have different needs. Greyhound you can pay cash, if you don't have a credit/debit card, though you do need a photo ID. Amtrak is the same, but doesn't go everywhere. Megabus you can ride without a photo ID, but you need a credit/debit card and access to the internet.

When I was traveling that way there were a lot of families moving out of Chicago by bus, with all their possessions in black garbage bags.

Also, prisoners in Illinois tend to get a bus ticket when they're released: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-prison-releases-bus-me...

I would encourage anybody who thinks cyclocommuters are particularly bad actors to stand on a busy urban street corner and count the percentage of drivers who are actively engaged with their mobile phone. You can identify them easily because they will be shiftily looking downward at sporadic intervals, rolling stop signs, and failing to notice traffic light changes.

In addition to the phone-related dangerous behavior, I would encourage people to count the number of unsignaled turns that happen at an urban intersection. As a pedestrian and a bicycle commuter in Chicago, I have to operate under the assumption that cars will jump in any direction at any moment (especially after having once been hit by a truck making an unsignaled right turn).

People who ride bikes in the city seem to attract extra scorn from the public for their supposedly higher rates of scofflawism. Cyclists do not have true impunity because they are in constant danger, whereas drivers have de jure and de facto impunity. A drunk driver in Chicago received no jailtime for actually killing a cyclist last year, for example. The rulebreaking of the cyclist is always taken as less acceptable. For motorists, there is no strong social expectation to follow the rules. I hope this will change as bicycle commuting gets more popular.

As someone who uses Vue every day at work I would not say that Vue has a simple API, though it has many conveniences.

I think a fair comparison would be to look at React's component API: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/react-component.html

And compare it with the Options / Lifecycle Hooks and Instance Properties and Instance Methods sections of the Vue API docs: https://vuejs.org/v2/api/

Vue may be simpler if you have passing familiarity with Angular 1, or if you are very familiar with Mustache-style templates. But I think it's wrong to say the API is simple, or has a small surface.