Winners & Losers from the Work From Home Trend - A Wealth of Common Sense

LOSERS

Young people and new employees.

[…]

Being around your colleagues helps you understand organizational culture, intrapersonal skills, communication, developing relationships, office politics and how to move up through the ranks. Plus, when you’re young there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know that you don’t know. You learn a lot just by paying attention and being around others.

Young people are well-suited from a technology perspective to work from home but there’s much more that goes into being successful than simply getting your job done.

Facebook’s New Remote Salary Policy is “Barbaric” - The Startup - Medium Despite the click-bait title (which is a reference to a DHH tweet), this is a well written article about some of the incentives Facebook’s Remote Salary policy is creating - not all of which are good.

Opinion | If We Had a Real Leader - The New York Times

America is a diverse country joined more by a common future than by common pasts.

Only the great books stay in the mind for decades and serve as storehouses of wisdom when hard times come.

All the leaders I have quoted above were educated under a curriculum that put character formation at the absolute center of education. They were trained by people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests, and it was the job of a school, as one headmaster put it, to produce young people who would be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”

Opinion | Coronavirus, Racism and Injustice: No One Is Coming to Save Us - The New York Times

These black lives mattered. These black people were loved. Their losses to their friends, family, and communities, are incalculable.

Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.

Black Americans Have a Message for Democrats: Not Being Trump Is Not Enough - The New York Times

“Our needs aren’t moderate,” Mr. Jackson said in a recent interview. “The absence of Trump is not enough.”

Opinion | Chris Cooper Is My Brother. Here’s Why I Posted His Video. - The New York Times

If you’re an ally, what can you do? Stand with us. Bear witness. Continue the discussion and support legal action. Refuse to accept racism in your midst, even in small ways — call out a cruel joke or rude behavior. Be brave and challenge it all. You can transform your own world through how you teach your children, and how you speak to your neighbors and co-workers. It is up to you, not to a leader nor any single protest or petition. Your everyday commitment is what will start to bring the change you want to see. Start small, step forward and let your action join with others’ to become a rising tide that cannot be stopped.

Opinion | The Case Against Riots - The New York Times & Baltimore Protests: Behind “A Riot Is the Language of the Unheard” | Time

“And I contend that the cry of ‘black power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro,” King said. “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

King also makes the point that those who talk about riots being counterproductive because they caused white backlash are missing the whole picture. “It may well be that shouts of Black Power and riots in Watts and the Harlems and the other areas, are the consequences of the white backlash rather than the cause of them,” he said. Even as major steps forward were taken, steps backward—the backlash, often harder to pin down—were constantly on the horizon. Desegregation was the law of the land and the Civil Rights Act had been passed, but economic inequality and racism were alive and well. The result was, he posited, despair. Despair is linked to anger, and thus to riots.

Opinion | Trump, Twitter and Jack Dorsey - The New York Times

Trump does not seem to realize, however, that he’s removing his own protection. He huffs and puffs about freedom of speech when he really wants the freedom to be vile. “It’s the mother of all cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face moves,” says Galloway.

Minneapolis Ranks Near The Bottom For Racial Equality : Planet Money : NPR

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement — Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement — The Other America

In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. He ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about 6 million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.

Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Claire Willett - Twitter thread

This thread made me ask so many questions of myself, my space, my privilege, and why there are so many gaps in my understanding.

George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show - YouTube

Trevor Noah talks about all of the dominos falling and why the moment in history we’re living came about. So many good observations in here. It’s worth watching and then watching again.

Mike Mullen: I Cannot Remain Silent - The Atlantic

Even in the midst of the carnage we are witnessing, we must endeavor to see American cities and towns as our homes and our neighborhoods. They are not “ battle spaces ” to be dominated, and must never become so.

We must ensure that African Americans—indeed, all Americans—are given the same rights under the Constitution, the same justice under the law, and the same consideration we give to members of our own family. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.

Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarized; too many military missions have become politicized.

This is not the time for stunts. This is the time for leadership.

America’s Racial Contract Is Showing - The Atlantic

“The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone.

Air travel has largely shut down, and many of the new clusters are in nursing homes, jails and prisons, and factories tied to essential industries. Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

America Has No President - The Atlantic

When The New York Times asked Trump yesterday what he was going to do to address unrest, he replied, “I’m going to win the election easily … The economy is going to start to get good and then great, better than ever before. I’m getting more judges appointed by the week, including two Supreme Court justices, and I’ll have close to 300 judges by the end of the year.”

Riots Are the American Way: On the George Floyd Protests - The Atlantic

The philosophy of force and violence to obtain freedom has long been employed by white people and explicitly denied to black Americans.

Throughout history, black people have employed violence, nonviolence, marches, and boycotts. Only one thing is clear—there is no form of black protest that white supremacy will sanction.

In December 1866, the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote an essay for The Atlantic in which he reflected on the benefits of rebellion: “There is cause to be thankful even for rebellion. It is an impressive teacher, though a stern and terrible one.” He then concluded, “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”

The Shocking Racial Gap of Madison WI – fascination hub

And perhaps one of the worst effects of the racial poverty disparities in Madison can be found in the Madison jails. When I worked as a protest organizer in Madison’s Black Lives Matter movement as a member of the Young Gifted and Black (YGB), I learned about YGB’s “Free the 350” campaign. The backstory was shocking: Of about 800 people in Madison’s jails, a whopping 400 (50%) of the inmates are black. Even worse, 350 of the 400 black inmates were arrested for crimes of poverty. It’s called a crime of poverty, because it means that almost 90% of Madison’s black inmates are in jail for a small crime (like public urination), and they’re still in prison simply because, with Madison’s poverty disparity, the bail is one that they just can’t pay off (while their white counterparts could). In Madison, black people are arrested at a rate 11 times higher than that of whites, even though study after study shows that blacks and whites use drugs like marijuana at roughly the same rate, as seen in the nationwide chart below.

Race in the heartland A study looking at racial disparities in the midwest. Sobering.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reflects on George Floyd protests - Los Angeles Times

African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

What I want to see is not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice.

Dust in the Light – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The one state competing with Wisconsin for the highest measurements of disparity is the neighbor to the west: Minnesota.

When frontend means full stack – Increment: Frontend

Frontend development is at the intersection of art and logic, business and expression, left brain and right brain, design and nerdery. I love it.

Opinion | America, We Break It, It’s Gone - The New York Times Opinion: “Lincoln, in our darkest, most divisive hour, was able to dig deep into his soul and find the words “with malice toward none, with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in” and establish “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.””

Black Lives Matter.

Last Wednesday evening I was (virtually) at an event that started with a silent moment in the memory of George Floyd. I wasn’t expecting it but appreciated the moment before it moved on to other topics. That silent moment came back to me the next morning, and threw into sharp contrast the extent that George Floyd’s death simply didn’t exist within the communities where I spend the majority of my time.

His death didn’t exist in my spaces in the same way that Ahmaud Arbery’s death didn’t exist in my spaces, nor did Breonna Taylor’s among the uncountable others. Like most people, I go to sleep at night thinking of myself as a principled person with strong moral convictions, but in this moment a veil dropped and I suddenly saw how acutely absent I’d been in acknowledging George Floyd’s senseless death and those before it.

In learning this historical context, I was also forced to recognize how many of my own, nominally logical, beliefs were engines that perpetuated these injustices.

Will Trump leave office if defeated? - Vox

Opinion | Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe - The New York Times

What does one learn when reading great political speeches and writings? That well-chosen words are the way by which past deeds acquire meaning and future deeds acquire purpose.

Opinion | Tom Cotton: Send In the Military - The New York Times Opinion | Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed - The New York Times Opinion | A Congressman Responds to Tom Cotton: ‘This Is Not War’ - The New York Times The New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed: Why the media must defend American values - Vox

Democratic institutions, including journalism, assume a level of good faith

[…]

The small-l liberal model is roughly as follows: Certain shared values and rules, enshrined in America’s founding documents and developed in its social and legal traditions, define the small-d democratic playing field. Values like respect for accuracy and shared facts, devotion to equality under law and democratic participation, and opposition to unlawful power are necessary to create a level playing field, but on that field, ideas about government and issues of the day should compete on merit. The more speech the better; let the best speech win. (Obviously I’m describing the liberal ideal, never actually reached in practice, either journalistically or politically.)

Why Elders Are Indispensable for All of Us - WSJ

But it’s hard to prac­tice a skill and teach it to some­one else at the same time. (Sun­day pan­cakes take twice as long when the kids help.) Prof. Gur­ven and his team found that, math­e­mat­i­cally, the best evo­lu­tion­ary strat­egy for de­vel­op­ing many com­plex skills was to have the old teach the young. That way the peak, prime-of-life per­form­ers can con­cen­trate on get­ting things done, while young learn­ers are matched with older, more knowl­edge­able but less pro­duc­tive teach­ers.

Four Weddings & A Funeral | No Mercy / No Malice

It’s worth asking: how does Facebook, a free service, monetize its users so effectively? Opinion | How Moderates Failed Black America - The New York Times

Opinion | Why Juneteenth Matters - The New York Times

But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

And as the historian Martha Jones details in “ Birthright Citizens : A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen.

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

iAddiction | No Mercy / No Malice

Most articles will focus on what we, Americans, view as the profound risk with the surge in rookie online traders … that the markets might go down. Most market tops coincide with retail investors entering. We haven’t, to my knowledge, seen the scale of a market crash driven by twentysomethings investing government rescue funds, levered up via preapproval on their smartphones.

Charter Schools’ Enemies Block Black Success - WSJ

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In - The New York Times

[The police are] enforcing segregation. Segration is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol and they patrol the border between the two Americas.

There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country.

The enemy is noise. The goal is clarity.

Every society lies to itself to some extent. Every person does. And sometimes you have to face the truth.

We’re basically having giant public fights about symbolism, while the reality of our situation goes unexamined.

Are you hopeful about what lies ahead? Always. Because the view we get of the country is not accurate. We get the artifice of it, the conflict of it. I’m not naïve. I don’t think that true divisions and animosities and bigotry and prejudices don’t exist. We see that every day. But fundamentally, we are a resilient and strong and resourceful nation that has oftentimes overcome our worst tendencies — “overcome” is probably too strong a word. But our biggest problem as humans is ignorance, not malevolence. Ignorance is an enterable curable disease. How? Information and work. You need to talk to people. Ignorance is often cured by experience, by spending time with what you don’t understand. But I honestly don’t know. Well, you kn what? I do know: In the same way that Trump’s recklessness is born out of experience, so is my optimism, because good people outweigh [expletive] people. By a long shot.

Opinion | A Plague of Willful Ignorance - The New York Times

We’re also doing badly because, as the example of pellagra shows, there’s a longstanding anti-science, anti-expertise streak in American culture — the same streak that makes us uniquely unwilling to accept the reality of evolution or acknowledge the threat of climate change .

We aren’t a nation of know-nothings; many, probably most Americans are willing to listen to experts and act responsibly. But there’s a belligerent faction within our society that refuses to acknowledge inconvenient or uncomfortable facts, preferring to believe that experts are somehow conspiring against them.

Michael Lewis: Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Has Weapon in Covid-19 War

Back in 2003, when the original SARS virus started killing people in Hong Kong at a frightening rate, DeRisi sequenced its genome. But the process was too slow and expensive to be of practical use. “It’s 50,000-fold cheaper now than it was for SARS,” he told me. “What cost me $10,000 to do in 2001 now costs a penny.” And so we might now test for the virus in a way that gives us a picture that you can’t get from more conventional random sampling. Explore how the virus works in one neighborhood and you can apply what you learn to others. “Our state government should be doing this,” said DeRisi. “It should be asking: What are our social relationships and which ones lead to the transmission of disease? That’s what you would do in a rational society.”

What comes after Zoom? — Benedict Evans

When Snap launched, there were infinite way to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels - you’re communicating.

Tech Firms Face a Stark Choice Between China and the United States in New Cold War

Zoom, a California-based videoconferencing company whose profile has soared during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, responded that the takedowns resulted only from the company’s obligation “to comply with local laws”—China’s laws, in this case. It apologized for impacting users outside of China, reinstated the accounts of U.S.-based activists, and pledged not to censor non-Chinese accounts.

Zoom also says that it is developing technology “to remove or block at the participant level based on geography.” In other words, Zoom is rolling out a “one company, two systems” model—participants in China would be subject to censorship, but those outside of China would not.

Stuff I’ve learned about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion over the past few years.

There is the popular concept of a “level playing field”, which is one where only skill differentiates participants from one another, but as you dig into this concept I find it’s mostly a construct to help folks ignore their own privilege. In reality, there are no level playing fields.

Bert Fan - Senior Staff Engineer at Slack | StaffEng

If you haven’t already, try to become the engineer that people want to work with. There are a handful of engineers at every company who, if you ever left your job, you would try to circumvent a non-solicitation agreement to work with again. Become one of those engineers for other people and it’ll unlock a lot of doors for you in your career.

Model, document and share.

Freelancers Aren’t (Yet) Business Owners - DaedTech Business Profit 101: A Primer for Freelance Software Developers - DaedTech The Freelancer’s Condition: Quagmire of the Owner-Operator - DaedTech Stop Firing the Innocent - The Atlantic

Opinion: “She put it this way when, as part of a “Note to Self” feature on “CBS This Morning,” she read aloud a letter that she had written to the younger Tammy: “You’ll make it out alive completely because of the grit, sacrifice and outright heroism of others. You haven’t done anything to be worthy of their sacrifices, but these heroes will give you a second chance at life.” She paused there briefly, fighting back tears.”

Keep Running!

One, competition isn’t like a football game that ends with a winner who can then take a break. It never stops. A species that gains an advantage over a competitor instantly incentivizes the competitor to improve. It’s an arms race.

Two, some advantages create new disadvantages. Most species tend to get bigger over time because big things are strong. But being big also makes you slow, clumsy, and unable to hide . “The tendency for evolution to create larger species is counterbalanced by the tendency of extinction to kill off larger species,” one study wrote.

Evolution is the study of advantages. Van Valen’s idea is simply that there are no permanent advantages.