A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Devoted readers may recall a report on an August 2021 trip to the Palm Beach County library (Jupiter branch): Not everyone in Florida is a Deplorable Neanderthal (children’s section of a Palm Beach County library)
Here are some photos from a return visit (literally) last month:
From the American Medical Association’s Organization Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity:
We acknowledge that we are all living off the taken ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
From “Prioritizing Equity video series: Police Brutality & COVID-19” (AMA):
I am Dr. Aletha Maybank, I am chief health equity officer at the American Medical Association over the Center for Health Equity. … We work to ensure equitable opportunities and conditions and innovation for marginalized and minoritized people and communities. … So I first want to recognize and acknowledge the land in which we are all sitting on and the Indigenous people who have been here for thousands of years before us, whose land was dispossessed at the same time, able to thrive and survive till this day.
(Doctors accuse the police of “brutality” (see the title), but aren’t doctors collectively a principal reason why lower income Americans end up entangled with the police? Medical bills, oftentimes starting at 5-10X what an insurance company would have paid, lead to evictions and personal bankruptcy (see “Enforcing Eviction: As a national housing crisis approaches, the police side with property against people.” (The Nation)).)
From the American Medical Association’s Advancing Health Equity: Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts:
The Association of American Medical Colleges’ headquarters is located in Washington, D.C., the traditional homelands of the Nacotchtank, Piscataway and Pamunkey people. The American Medical Association’s headquarters is located in the Chicago area on taken ancestral lands of indigenous tribes, such as the Council of the Three Fires, composed of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo and Illinois Nations.
Doctors are fairly rich. If they admit that they’re on stolen (“taken”) land, why don’t they give the land back to the nearest Native American and then pay him/her/zir/them rent?
Separately, the above language guide contains some helpful tips. It is not “individuals” but “survivors”; it is not “the obese” but “people with severe obesity” (remember that, whatever the term used, the #science-informed optimum medical response to a virus that attacks the obese is a next-to-the-fridge lockdown!):
Sometimes it is not that hard to achieve equity:
Sometimes it is, in fact, way easier than you’d think:
A revenue source by any other name would be just as lucrative?
If you hire people of only one skin color, that’s a “race-conscious” process:
How many enslaved persons show up at the typical U.S. healthcare facility?
If Justin Trudeau’s use of 2SLGBTQQIA+ has you scratching your head, turn to the glossary:
(“It is also not a term that can be used by a non-Indigenous person” yet there is no indication that a Native American contributed to this document. Isn’t putting the term in a glossary a “use” of the term?)
Full post, including commentsOne weekend per year devoted to being thankful doesn’t seem unduly burdensome. Today I’m expressing thanks for archive.org. Especially given the recent American tendency to rewrite history in accordance with current #Science/religion/belief/etc., where else would would we be able to find evidence of just how bad things were in the bad old days? (though the evidence might not be complete; see Web publishers can delete stuff from archive.org)
archive.org enabled at least the following blog posts here:
Harvard University attracted a bit of attention when it hosted a theatrical performance restricted to audience members of one skin color earlier this fall. Emboldened by the federal judiciary saying it was okay to discriminate against Asians, the school apparently decided that Massachusetts General Law, Section 98 did not apply (“Discrimination in admission to, or treatment in, place of public accommodation… Whoever makes any distinction, discrimination or restriction on account of race, color, religious creed, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, which shall not include persons whose sexual orientation involves minor children as the sex object, … in any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement, … shall be punished by a fine of not more than twenty-five hundred dollars or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, …”). The web page has been scrubbed from the theater’s web site, but it remains alive on archive.org:
We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.
Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.
A Facebook friend attended and wrote “I can now tell my grandkids that I tasted segregation first hand, just like my mom and dad.” He attached this picture that includes a sign regarding Harvard’s expressed commitment to “anti-racism” (which includes “we will not tolerate racism”) and a sign saying that prospective audience members with the wrong skin color should go elsewhere.
Note that the above-mentioned web page contains an admission that the theater is on stolen land:
A.R.T. acknowledges that its theaters are situated on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Massachusett Tribe.
With a $53 billion endowment, Harvard apparently can’t afford to give the land back to the nearest Native Americans and then pay for a ground lease from them. If the rightful owners do show up to reclaim this land and Harvard scrubs its damaging admissions from the live pages, archive.org will be the dispossessed owners’ best friend.
Readers: What have you found on archive.org that the original authors/publishers probably wish had remained forgotten/hidden?
Full post, including commentsReaders (especially those who followed the complete trial, which I did not): What is your prediction regarding the most likely verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case?
I probably shouldn’t offer an opinion because I did not watch any of the videos from the courthouse. However, since I’m asking you to guess, maybe I am obligated also to put forth my best guess…. guilty of at least one count.
My rationale for predicting a guilty verdict is not based on any of the facts in the case nor any evidence or argument that was presented at trial. My prediction is based purely on the psychology of compliance. One thing that we’ve learned from the 2020 lockdowns and the recent elections (national and California governor recall) is that Americans are generally compliant with whatever the government tells them to do. The non-compliant spirit among at least some young Americans in the 1960s is dead. In the specific case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the government is telling a group of Americans to convict him and therefore I think that he will be convicted.
Related:
Full post, including commentsI have skimmed headlines regarding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. This is not the kind of news that I follow closely, so I hope that readers will catch me up on everything important. Is it correct to say that there was a gunfight in Kenosha among a bunch of white people who had different points of view regarding Black Lives Matter? And there is photographic and/or video evidence of who was pointing guns at whom? How did this evidence come to exist? Were people holding up mobile phone cameras while guns were drawn? Or is the electronic evidence coming from surveillance cameras that happened to be on nearby buildings?
Is there so much electronic evidence that it is possible to reconstruct what happened? (Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially if there is a lot of drama, such as gunshots.)
Full post, including commentsFor several years I’ve been a member of “Airplanes for Sale” on Facebook. The software at Facebook apparently thinks that an airplane is a car and therefore tries to display the mileage. The result is “NaN“, a value in the IEEE floating point arithmetic standard used for the result of dividing by zero and similar outrages against Mathematical Justice. Here’s an example: “1999 Cessna 172 R · Driven NaN miles”
With all of humanity’s money (except for the cash that Google and Apple have harvested) and a healthy fraction of the world’s best programmers, you might think that Facebook would have noticed that it was displaying this internal value from IEEE floating point to end-users. The company’s software is smart enough to flag anyone who has questioned the idea that a COVID-19 vaccine is in the best interest of a 20-year-old. The company had the energy to kick Donald Trump off the platform (to keep us safe from another insurrection, was the justification). But they don’t have anything left over to catch this error that occurs literally millions of times per day (87,000 members in this group times lots of ads that show NaN).
Full post, including commentsIf you’re passionate about #StopAsianHate, you’ll probably want to invest $11.99 in a “Tolerant” wok from IKEA. Photographed October 3, 2021 in Sunrise, Florida:
#ProblemSolved
I proudly showed a Korean-American friend the above photo and told him of my sincere intention to spend $11.99 plus applicable Florida sales tax on this aluminum pan as part of my personal #StopAsianHate plan. His response to my SayGooding? “If it’s not carbon steel, it’s garbage.”
Separately, it would be good to get an FBI investigation going into IKEA’s ties to Vladimir Putin. Note the “Made in Russia” on this entryway table:
The Federal government says that today is the last day of “National Hispanic American Heritage Month”. What did you do to celebrate?
Why doesn’t the post headline agree with the government’s web site? A TV show from state-sponsored media corrects the name of this celebration to “Latinx Heritage Month”:
(Most of the government-run events linked to from the government’s official site do use the term “Latinx” rather than “Hispanic”. Example:
)
Full post, including commentsLast month, Uber was 100 percent devoted to helping Afghan refugees (using $2 million from shareholders and customers rather than executive personal contributions, of course!). See Relative importance of getting a ride from Uber versus helping the Afghan refugees for example.
How about this month? An email from Uber today:
The rest of the page:
Uber is committed to supporting the LGBTQIA+ community and helping create safe spaces where you can be you. Every moment and every interaction matters. Everyone has the right to move.
(Why only LGBTQIA+ and not 2SLGBTQQIA+? (“Two Spirit, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Questioning Intersex Asexual Plus”))
This email comes from UberEats rather than Uber in general. The whole point of UberEats is that you don’t leave the house. Is the message from Uber that the only safe space for a 2SLGBTQQIA+ person is at home eating out of a plastic container?
Perhaps the rationale for shifting from Afghan refugee awareness is that the 86 cents/refugee that Uber’s highly paid executives previously arranged to generously scoop out of shareholders’ and customers’ pockets was sufficient and now nobody need worry about Afghans anymore? My Uber app now opens with an exhortation to “Rent a car with Uber” rather than anything about either refugees or the 2SLGBTQQIA+. The only sign of virtue in the app is a “vaccine” icon. There is nothing about National Coming Out Day.
A year ago, the CEO of Coinbase paid employees who were the most passionate about social justice and political causes to leave. See “Coinbase is a mission focused company” and also “Taking a Stand Against Social Stances” (NYT, 9/29/2020). (If he’d been a Southerner he might have said “Don’t let the screen door hit you on the butt on your way out.”)
In other words, he was trying to create something like the Florida that we’ve experienced. After nearly two months here, I have seen exactly one Black Lives Matter message (bumper sticker on a black (not “Black”) Toyota Prius as we were on an excursion to Miami (IKEA, Guitar Hotel, and Marlins baseball game)). Supposedly there are a lot of people here who voted for either Trump or Biden, but there is no evidence of that from lawn signs or bumper stickers. Bumper stickers are display at perhaps 1/200th the rate compared to in Maskachusetts and the most common type of bumper sticker is school-related.
What happens at a company without on-the-clock activism? Discrimination against those who identify as Black, according to the NYT… “‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups” (11/27/2020):
One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black.
The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.
One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible.
“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,” said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. “But I’ve never experienced anything like Coinbase.”
(Wikipedia says Coinbase is “remote-first”, so how do employees know anything about the race IDs of other employees? See Achieve college student skin color diversity via image processing? as well)
How did it go for Coinbase from Management’s perspective? The CEO who wanted people to fight their social justice and political battles on their own time followed up with a Twitter thread:
It’s been about a year since my mission-focused blog post. It wasn’t easy to go through at the time, but looking back, it turned out to be one of the most positive changes I’ve made at Coinbase, and I’d recommend it to others.
We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction.
One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we’ve grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.
Several people told me this would never happen when I circulated the original draft internally. It turns out that there are people from every background who want to work at a mission focused company.
…
If he is putting employees into buckets based on skin color in order to get “diversity numbers”, isn’t he himself engaging in a social justice cause at work? There was no legal requirement for Coinbase to gather these data, right? (Let me guess right now that age is not one of the axes of diversity for which Mr. Armstrong is anxious to get numbers!)
In other diversity news, the guy who stirred up hatred at University of Chicago (see “Geophysical Sciences Grad Students Call on Faculty to Denounce Videos By Department Member” 12/2/2020) got literally canceled at MIT, where he had been scheduled to give a lecture. From the Daily Mail:
…. after outraging ‘totalitarian’ Twitter mob by arguing that academic evaluations should be based on merit not racial ‘equity’
Dorian Abbot was denied the opportunity to give the Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to ‘new results in climate science’ and hosted by MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.
The lecture was scheduled to be delivered on October 21, but Abbot learned over the weekend that EAPS would be canceling his talk.
In August, things took a turn when Abbot co-wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he argued that the ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) initiative embraced on many college campuses nationwide ‘violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.’
DEI, according to Abbot and co-author Professor Ivan Marinovic, ‘treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.’
Abbot and Marinovic instead proposed ‘an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.’
(But who decides “merit”?)
It is kind of exciting for alumni when MIT can share a newspaper with Joe Biden’s $2.5 million granddaughter.
What would Dorian Abbot have talked about? He seems to be at least a little interested in Snowball Earth, one of my favorite geology subjects ever since reading an awesome book on the subject. He’s also interested in exoplanets, which fascinate everyone far more than how their Windows 11 computer or iPhone work. Maybe if Professor Abbot can get Elon Musk to blast him off to Gliese 273b (shouldn’t take that long to go 12.2 light-years in a Plaid Edition rocket), his critics will forget about him?
Related: