“(T)he 2020 election revealed that, at least with respect to an administration’s senior most officials, the Hatch Act is only as effective as the White House decides it will be. Where, as happened here, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, then the American public is left with no protection against senior administration officials using their official authority for partisan political gain in violation of the law,” it reads.

It’s not just the hyper-social and the flirtatious who have found themselves victims of the New Puritanism. People who are, for lack of a more precise word, difficult have trouble too. They are haughty, impatient, confrontational, or insufficiently interested in people whom they perceive to be less talented. Others are high achievers, who in turn set high standards for their colleagues or students. When those high standards are not met, these people say so, and that doesn’t go over well. Some of them like to push boundaries, especially intellectual boundaries, or to question orthodoxies. When people disagree with them, they argue back with relish.

Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky.

In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.

Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

One of the people I spoke with was asked to apologize for an offense that broke no existing rules. “I said, ‘What am I apologizing for?’ And they said, ‘Well, their feelings were hurt.’ So I crafted my apology around that: ‘If I did say something that upset you, I didn’t anticipate that would happen.’ ” The apology was initially accepted, but his problems didn’t end.

All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans.

There is a reason that Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern, required an entire book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, to recount the repercussions, including to herself, of two allegations of sexual harassment against one man at her university; after she referred to the case in an article about “sexual paranoia,” students demanded that the university investigate her, too. A full explanation of the personal, professional, and political nuances in both cases needed a lot of space.

There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

Respect, Trust, and Equity

I will use Drexel’s treatise asrepresentative of the basic principles of note taking that were widely sharedin sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe across national and religiousdivides.

Analog zur Struktur des Zettelkastens baut Luhmanns Systemtheorie nicht auf Axiome und bietet keine Hierarchien von Begriffen oder Thesen. Zentrale Begriffe sind, ebenso wie die einzelnen Zettel, stark untereinander vernetzt und gewinnen erst im Kontext Bedeutung.

We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

example from your colleague, Victor Lee. We began a recent talk about Annotation.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(57, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Remi Kalir with Victor’s tweet. His perspective on access, ownership, and power helped us to discuss a tension between readers who can and do write annotation —whether in books or the built environment— and the cultural rites of annotation, often unwritten, that also constrain where and how notes are added to everyday texts.

Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.

One major problem with top-down hierarchies is that they contain concentrated points of failure, since individuals are subject to bias and have limited bandwidth. The interests of the powerful few are often misaligned with those of the less powerful many, leaving the decision-makers frequently incentivized to act against the common good.

As a result, cloud-rendering servers typically face utilization issues due to the need to plan for peak demand. A cloud-gaming service might require 75,000 dedicated servers for the Cleveland area at 8PM Sunday night, but only 4,000 at 4AM Monday. As a consumer, you can purchase a $400 GPU and let it sit offline as much as you want, but data-center economics are oriented toward optimizing for demand.

And even at ultra-low latency, it makes little sense to stream (versus locally process) AR data given the speed at which a camera moves and new input data is received (i.e. literally the speed of light and from only a few feet away). Given the intensive computational requirements of AR, it’s therefore likely our core personal/mobile devices will be able to do a ‘good enough’ job at most real-time rendering.

time as the new currency

THE SUNDAY THING

journalism historian David Mindich

As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the sameway they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful,ungrateful, dishonest. . . .”

The real conspiracies are hiding in plain sight.

The agenda item did bring in one detractor in resident Mike Mohill, who called it “polarizing” and described the city as being “very fine” in its current era.

power doesn't give up power easily. Power doesn't topple very easily. All of these organizers are working in tremendous conditions of uncertainty. 

At the most foundational level, everything in the world is named: dwarves, elves, fortresses, fell beasts, books, artifacts, lands, and even the world itself are all given custom names, often in fictional languages complete with English translations.

Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

A Congolese leader, toldof the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: “What is the

n the extraordinary Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works. Here, at the very birth of the large-scale unit in manufacturing industry, the old autocrat, Crowley, found it necessary to design an entire civil and penal code, running to more than Ioo,ooo words, to govern and regulate his refractory labour-force.

mill dam, attending a Baptist association and a public hanging.56 This general irregularity must be placed within the irregular cycle of the working week (and indeed of the working year) which provoked so much lament from moralists and mercantilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu

ry. The debate provoked by the attempt to impose a tax on all clocks and watches in 1797-8 offers a little evidence. It was perhaps the most unpopular and it was certainly the most unsuccessful of all of Pitt's assessed taxes: I

paid urban artisan. Recorded time (one suspects) belonged in the mid-century still to the gentry, the masters, the farmers and the tradesmen; and perhaps the intricacy of design, and the preference for precious metal, were in deliberate accentuation of their symbolism of status

“The scroll is written in code, but its actual content is simple and well-known, and there was no reason to conceal it,” they write in the Journal of Biblical Literature. “This practice is also found in many places outside the land of Israel, where leaders write in secret code even when discussing universally known matters, as a reflection of their status. The custom was intended to show that the author was familiar with the code, while others were not.”

RemoteStorage requires the server to support a subset of OAuth, and that's the only kind of authentication supported. It also requires WebFinger support

"power knows the truth already, and is busy concealing it"

The statement helped set in motion a way of thinking that places the struggle for justice within the self. This thinking appeals not to reason or universal values but to the authority of identity, the “lived experience” of the oppressed. The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

Powerful suppliers, including suppliers of labor, can squeeze profi tability out of an industry that is unable to pass on cost increases in its own prices.

Forty years ago, Michel Foucault observed in a footnote that, curiously, historians had neglected the invention of the index card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which explores the relationship between knowledge and power. The index card was a turning point, Foucault believed, in the relationship between power and technology.

black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform

it is not about the product

that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning

This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

One pastor, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, put it to me this way:Having grown up in the South, [I think] Southern Baptist culture is probably uniquely this way, but working in a church that isn’t in the South, this stuff still rears its head. Not as much the same presenting issues, but you still fundamentally get people who are in love with power and will take any means necessary to beat you down so they have power and you are subservient to them, not the Gospel.

Firmina will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. 

Of the different instantaneous HRV indices computed by the point process technique, we selected the instantaneous high frequency power (HF) as our representative HRV metric. Heart rate HF power has garnered the greatest consensus for reflecting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) modulation by parasympathetic activity

one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment

an iterative process of knowledge production through reference, review, and refinement

Right now, fewer than half a dozen tech firms concentrate huge resources on a small number of global post-graduate AI programmes around the world. They directly and indirectly influence the training and content of those programmes, especially through access to data-sets. Compliance of senior academics is easy to gain, however they individually rationalise it.

I know tech policy pretty well, and this absolute dumpster fire of a policy area isn’t just a cool new place to build a blockchain-based commons, but a hard-right haven of male libertarians asset-stripping the social democratic state to build global monopolies that re-run nineteenth century colonialism, but bigger.

The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

he new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

Prominence as a critic tends to reinforce itself. The person who appears on news shows is the person who gets to star in a documentary is the person who gets to testify before the Senate is the person who gets invited back onto the news shows, and so forth.

Which brings us back, once again, to the question with which we began: why does it matter who gets to be seen as a prominent “tech critic”? The answer is that it matters because such individuals get to set the bounds for the discussion.

the three types of power commonly discussed in management theory: power-over, power-with, and power-to. These three types of power were first identified by the Mother of Modern Management, Mary Parker Follett. You may also recognize her as the person who coined the term “win-win.” Here are the three types of power: Power-over is extractive. Power-over is extracted from other people, the natural world, etc. Power-over means getting more of the pie. Power-with is gained when we work together, i.e, collective action. Power-to is generative. Power-to is the power we have to create new things. Power-to means making the pie bigger. 

When asked if she has a message for her fans, Williams pauses before reassuring them not to worry. “The main thing is I can still sing. I’m singing my ass off, so that hasn’t been affected,” Williams says. “Can’t keep me down for too long.”

satire

Franklin thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers since he believed that the press had a public-service duty

Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent.

Democrat Chicago to allow the economy to open up less than a week after Biden's inauguration...it's all planned to make Biden appear successful! Democrats allowed millions of people to suffer and lose businesses all for their own greed and power!

Further, when using a dumbbell, the diameter of the dumbbell plates puts the weight forward of the axis of rotation of the shoulder, placing high levels of stress on the muscles involved in external rotation (such as the teres minor and the infraspinatus) that help stabilize the shoulders.

The Lord led me to a wonderful Christian ophthalmologist with unconventional methods of arresting the disease through diet alone and that has saved my sight.

Whoever controls the third place controls the community. If the third place is a building, and they decide to renovate, tough luck. It's being renovated. The third place is where the community lives, it's where they go by default essentially. If you own that place, you own a considerable amount of power in the community.

Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck.

SankeyMATIC unlocks the capabilities of the D3 Sankey tool for anyone to use.

SankeyMATIC builds on the open source tool D3.js and its Sankey library, which are very powerful but require a fair amount of work & expertise to use.

Turn a Computer Power Supply into Bench Power

I've already said this, but if you think the average desktop computer user thinks a sentence beginning "I just make a chroot..." makes any kind of sense, you haven't been paying attention to the level of intelligence of the general public.

Well, that user can safely stay with Windows. Hiding these things from me makes wish that.

Linux on the desktop won't take off until it is equally easy. Snap may be dumbed down, restricted and all the rest of it, but for ordinary users it's easier - and more secure - than the alternative.

What will it take to break this circuit, where white supremacists see that violence is rewarded with amplification and infamy? While the answer is not straightforward, there are technical and ethical actions available.

Most users frankly don’t care how software is packaged. They don’t understand the difference between deb / rpm / flatpak / snap. They just want a button that installs Spotify so they can listen to their music.

In addition, PPAs are awful for software discovery. Average users have no idea what a PPA is, nor how to configure or install software from it. Part of the point of snap is to make software discovery easier. We can put new software in the “Editor’s Picks” in Ubuntu Software then people will discover and install it. Having software in a random PPA somewhere online is only usable by experts. Normal users have no visibility to it.

While you may have some objections due to your specific setup, please consider you’re not the usual use case. Most people install Ubuntu on a single drive, not separate /home, and not multiple disks. Most are quite happy with automatic updates - in line with how their phone is likely setup - both for debs (with unattended-upgrades) and snaps (via automatic refresh in snapd). Experts such as yourself are capable of managing your own system and are interested in twiddling knobs and adjusting settings everywhere. There are millions of Ubuntu users who are not like that. We should cater for the widest possible use case by default, and have the option to fiddle switches for experts, which is what we have.

The effort of confronting that machine, day in and day out, compounded over a lifetime, leads to stress so corrosive that it physically changes bodies

They were the very people communities would have turned to first to help recover from the pandemic: entrepreneurs who were also employers; confidants like coaches, pastors and barbers; family men forced into a sandwich generation younger than their white counterparts, because their parents got sick earlier and they had to care for them while raising kids of their own.

It is quite large, the letters along its spine are big and bright, and readers are required to own it in print, because Mr. Caro, who still uses a typewriter, has refused to distribute the written version in any other way.

With some frameworks, you may find your needs at odds with the enterprise-level goals of a megacorp owner, and you may both benefit and sometimes suffer from their web-scale engineering. Svelte’s future does not depend on the continued delivery of business value to one company, and its direction is shaped in public by volunteers.

What’s truly sad (but not shocking) about this whole situation is that this person, James Damore, a Havard educated, seemingly well-intentioned fella, had steadfast beliefs based on his complete misunderstanding of how “sexism” or “discrimination” actually work.And that’s the problem with the way we talk about diversity and inclusion in the business world.People are learning about unconscious bias WITHOUT the foundational knowledge of the cycle of socialization.People are learning about microaggressions WITHOUT the context of power dynamics.People are learning about “diversity programs” WITHOUT true understanding of concepts such as privilege or allyship.

If this is populism, it’s an aggressive strain. Left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein calls Trump’s general appeal “herrenvolk democracy.” It’s not conservatism at all. It’s big government, and big government programs, but only for the deserving.

Power Analyses

if you’re just the casual web surfer type, learning about Internet terminology might not be of much real use to you

And would a hip hop fan question, much less downvote, a “verified” Genius annotation authored by Kendrick Lamar that explains the meaning behind his music?

Selectively redacting Weinstein’s words, O’Hare’s entire poem reads: “I came of age in a culture of demons I respect more than women.”

“Every Cambodian... including the King has the right to express freely their view.”

In fact, if you do the math, if failure equals knowledge and knowledge equals power, then failure equals power by the transitive property.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

Public writing became a venue for retaining parts of myself that I would not submit to institutional transformation.

Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.

The approach proposed here can allow us to examine howthe deployment of future-oriented grammars reflect (or, in fact, help to discursivelyconstitute) differential authority, access,and influence in relation to decision-making processes, at various levels of institutional power

The approach proposed here can allow us to examine howthe deployment of future-oriented grammars reflect (or, in fact, help to discursivelyconstitute) differential authority, access,and influence in relation to decision-making processes, at various levels of institutional power

To make this “if you install me, you better also install X, Y, and Z!” problem easier, peerDependencies was introduced.

Our technology is like a universal translator, driven by switches, eye gaze, and jerking screen touches.

I can’t do without Gabriel Betteredge

Attic fans work great and sure DO reduce electric bills

A powered exhaust fan will not work without proper soffit venting