Software is so smart that it will soon be driving us around, recognizing and dodging pedestrians. WIRED and similar cheerleaders for technology assure us that our software pals will also diagnose us based on medical imaging and other tests.
Apple Wallet is an app from one of the world’s leading software companies. Every time I open it there is a boarding pass from a flight that occurred a month or two ago. The software is neither smart enough to delete the pass a month after the flight (and after the location subsystem shows that the flight was actually taken) nor pop up a “would you like to delete these old boarding passes?” offer.
If this is the best that Apple can do, how is it that we can have confidence in the hard problems being solved?
Lexington, Massachusetts runs what is generally considered the best of the Boston-area public school systems (a task made slightly easier because the typical student there now is the child of Chinese-American PhDs). Unlike our suburb, when they want to build a gold-plated new school building they (a) do it with roughly 50 percent state money, and (b) do it in the parking lot or soccer field of the old school so that nobody has to move into trailers for three years.
[How good are the best public schools in our state? A Chinese-American PhD friend who lives there says “Most of the teachers are bad.” Fortunately, no matter how bad they are at their job, the union contract guarantees them a paycheck through retirement!]
Waking up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race
Please join the Lincoln community as we welcome Debby Irving – local author, racial justice educator, and public speaker. Debby will present in a workshop format utilizing stories from her life to exploring systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed but feeds long-held radicalized belief systems. By sharing, her struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective of bias stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about color blindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole.
Debby Irving is an emerging voice in the national racial justice community. Combining her organization development skills, classroom teaching experience, and understanding of systemic racism, Irving educates and consults with individuals and organizations seeking to create racial equity at both the personal and institutional level.
Irving grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, during the socially turbulent 1960s and ’70s. After a blissfully sheltered, upper-middle-class suburban childhood, she found herself simultaneously intrigued and horrified by the racial divide she observed in nearby Boston. Her career began in a variety of urban performance-art and community-based non-profits, where she repeatedly found that her best efforts to “help” caused more harm than the good she intended. Her one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience of racial understanding eventually lead her to dig deeply into her own white privilege, where she found truths she never knew existed. Waking Up White describes that journey and the lessons learned along the way.
Now a racial justice educator and writer, Irving works with other white people to transform confusion into curiosity and anxiety into action. She’s worked in private and public urban schools, both in the classroom and at the board level, to foster community among students, teachers, staff, and families by focusing on honest dialog that educates and connects people through shared interests and divergent backgrounds. A graduate of the Winsor School in Boston, she holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MBA from Simmons College. Waking Up White is her first book.
Amazon reader reviews:
A summary of the book: a white person from a wealthy, old-money, well-connected family has a crisis of conscience, then proceeds to take the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions past and present people of color, co-opts it and makes it all about herself, then sells a book to other white people and makes even more money. At the center appears to be a desperate concern about what others think about her. She wants you to think that she is a good person. Your opinion on that topic matters greatly to her.
She gave a talk at my school. Her examples are very dated and her research limited.
There are few books that will lower one’s IQ faster than this smarmy self-centered tome dedicated to the joke called “white privilege.” Leftist drivel combined with pitiful and laughable narratives combine to make a it a horrific read. My horror mounted as I realized that some poor students probably had to read this dreck and pretend that it has meaning in order to obtain the mandatory credit in a self-hate course.
Complete and utter trash. Ideal for use with an open fire, BURNS WELL!
Related:
the school building, renovated or brand new as of 25 years ago, will soon be bulldozed and replaced with the most expensive, per-student, school ever built in the United States (residents voted enthusiastic for the spending project and are now arguing bitterly over how to distribute the burden of paying for it!)
I’m in Shanghai and on WeChat with the imaginative name of “PhilipGreenspun”. Who wants to get together? I’ll be visiting Suzhou and Hangzhou next week before returning to Shanghai (Nov 22) and Boston (Nov 24).
My personal favorite charity (after the Clinton Foundation, of course), is Kids on Computers, which sets up labs in public schools. They are headed to Oaxaca, Mexico in December and if you want an end-of-year tax deduction as well as the satisfaction of helping out, you can send a Raspberry Pi straight from Amazon to Oaxaca (Amazon added shipping and an import duty reserve so my bill for one worked out to $114.)
If you want to do some networking and setup while in one of the world’s most beautiful and historic places, try to jump on as a volunteer!
The [annual salary] advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.
Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.
The story was similar for women. Those with applied STEM majors earned nearly 50 percent more than social science and history majors at ages 23 to 25, but only 10 percent more by ages 38 to 40.
The article doesn’t get into the brevity of the typical STEM career. I know plenty of sales guys who are still working and valued at age 70. Although I know more programmers than sales guys, I don’t know of any programmers who are still working (as programmers) and valued by employers at age 70.
So the lifetime earnings of a STEM graduate might be substantially lower than those of a history major!
When I was in Ireland back in May/June, I learned that, despite being part of the UK at the time, Irish men were exempt from the World War I draft. Nonetheless, quite a few volunteered. The most dangerous job was surely that of pilot. William Butler Years wrote a poem about these volunteers: “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” The first few lines…
I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love;
In our risk-averse age it is difficult to fathom how anyone would have volunteered to serve in combat in World War I, let alone volunteer to get into a machine that most pilots would today consider far too dangerous to take around the pattern.
The implication of the article is that, given sufficiently aggressive government regulation, we should expect improved air quality every year.
But if we combine a growing population (chart) with a trend toward greater urbanization (data), wouldn’t our starting assumption about air quality be that the typical American would be breathing filthier air every year? If we hit any kind of technological plateau, a larger denser population should experience dirtier air, no?
We are gradually adopting some cleaner technology, but we are also gradually growing in number of people and density. Why is CNN shocked that one growth curve can’t beat the other consistently?
Our plan to fly to Washington, D.C. on a recent Friday was thwarted by 40-knot wind gusts and a SIGMET for “severe turbulence.” The goal was to attend a 7:30 pm concert so we couldn’t simply wait out the weather. We didn’t see a way to have reasonably comfortable passengers and arrive at the hall before 8:00 pm.
The Google said that it would take 7 hours and 20 minutes to drive from our Boston suburb, so my friend picked me up in his Tesla X at 10:40 am. Not only would we make it to the concert on time, but we’d save the Earth in the process. Generations from now, this would be remembered as the moment that the oceans began to recede and the planet began to heal.
The car had not been been plugged in overnight so we had only about 100 miles of range at the beginning. The Tesla owner said that this wouldn’t make a lot of difference to our total time because the superchargers work much faster when the car is down to below 50 or 100 miles of range.
There are no supercharger stations at the rest stops on the Mass Pike, so we left the highway near Worcester to charge at the Auburn Mall. As we wandered among the half-derelict retail, my friend checked his app and found that the charge rate had slowed. When we got back out to the car we found that someone had pulled into the adjacent bay. “The charging points share a feed,” my friend said. “So you only get full power if there is nobody on either side.”
The Tesla software automatically calculates charging stops, but offers no interface to tweak the plan. If there is a supercharger you’d particularly like to visit, you might have to enter it yourself as the destination. The software is also unaware of how many people are at or going to be at a supercharging station so the software does not factor “charging congestion” when choosing a stop.
The next stop was a rest area on the Merritt Parkway. These have a Dunkin Donuts, a Subway, a convenience market, and a handful of interior chairs for scarfing down a Subway sandwich. They seem to have been designed with the idea that people would stop for 5 minutes to tank up the car, use the restroom, and perhaps purchase a coffee. With the Tesla, however, we were there for 40 minutes to bring the car up to 200 miles of range. This does not include our brief wait for planet-destroying cars that identify as planet-saving cars to back out of the Tesla charging spaces:
Traffic in the NY Metro area slowed to a crawl starting at 3 pm. Combined with two additional stops (NJ Turnpike and Chesapeake House on I-95 just over the border into Maryland), we arrived at the concert hall at 9:15 pm, roughly 10.5 hours after departure. The hotel was 2 miles away. We got there with 30 miles of range, but fortunately the parking lot had a $1.50/hour public charging point. This was adding range at the rate of 16 miles per hour (not too different from D.C. traffic!) and at a slightly higher cost than an efficient midsize sedan would consume in gasoline.
Starting with a full battery would have made the trip go faster, but given the charge level at which we started I don’t think we could have done the trip more efficiently. The car was plugged into a supercharger during every minute that we were stopped.
The entire trip was done in 55-60-degree temperatures. My friend says that the range for a given battery charge would have been substantially less in the winter, perhaps 30 percent less.
Traffic jams could occur at any time or any hour. Note the stopped traffic next to the new “American Dream” mall. Soon the American dream will be to have a transportation system as efficient as the one in Mumbai or Delhi?
How about comfort? The Tesla is significantly noisier at highway speeds than our Honda Odyssey, so it is more fatiguing to ride in. The Tesla also does not absorb bumps as well, but fortunately the roads were mostly in great shape.
As someone who loves a good road trip, I notice that the Tesla changes the character of a leisurely journey. In a gasoline-powered vehicle, favorite Connecticut stops are a NY-style deli, an aquarium store, Cabela’s for the taxidermed trophies, etc. Tesla keeps the Climate One Percenters tied to shopping malls and highway rest stops with their national fast food chains. There is no point putting a supercharger on a back road, in the parking lot of a local diner, or next to an obscure tourist attraction.
On the plus side, we did get to see what kind of souvenirs our best business minds can come up with for rest stops on I-95:
Maybe conversations at the superchargers could make up for the lack of local color? It would be like the Turkish Airlines San Francisco flight. Despite the fine weather, however, people did not stand around chatting near their beloved planet-saving vehicles. We did not actually meet any fellow Tesla believers.
(We did catch enough of the performance to make the trip worthwhile and also an after-party in which the conductor referred to “a coloratura soprano”. I gently remonstrated with him: “We don’t say that anymore. It is ‘soprano of coloratura’.”)
There’s something about the situation here this season that seems like a stage set for the current political moment: fires raging, a giant company, PG&E, responsible for so much of the death and destruction; the incredible salaries and compensation of that company’s executives, the huge shareholder dividends; the company’s decision to create giant blackouts for millions of people, presumably while it fixes the negligence that caused the problem in the first place. And all this, with 59,000 people living homeless in Los Angeles. This is the apocalyptic backdrop against which, it seems to many of us here, President Trump is trying to destroy the planet in so many ways. Of course, the builders of this set predate the Trump administration, but the script playing out on the set — the underlying themes and angles and shots — fits well with his direction.
One way to make sure the homeless don’t end up starting fires might be to house them, which Los Angeles has not figured out how to do.
Meanwhile, all my neighbors are in the “resistance” against Mr. Trump and his policies.
Or putting together events in their backyards to fund-raise for various Democratic candidates and for important causes like reproductive rights, climate change initiatives, homeless housing and criminal justice reforms.
All of the problems mentioned by the author are ones that can be addressed without interacting with the federal government and the hated Trumpenfuhrer. California can build apartments for those currently homeless, run new power lines, pay people $10,000 for each abortion that they want to have (“reproductive rights”; note that selling an abortion privately in California can be substantially more lucrative), and open its prisons (“criminal justice reforms”).
Yet instead of getting together to create state programs to solve all of the problems that they say they’re concerned about (voting to tax themselves as necessary to pay for the new programs), Californians invest their time and energy complaining about a guy who is 3,000 miles away.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire running for the Democratic presidential nomination currently, is a good example of this way of thinking. He’s pledged to give half of his money to charity (i.e., he’s pledged not to pay state or federal tax on half of the money he has earned). Why wouldn’t he instead build some apartment buildings in California and give away half the units to those currently homeless?
