Advocate of gender discrimination loses gender discrimination lawsuit

by philg

“Robert De Niro: Hillary Clinton Should Be the Next President” (Daily Beast 2016):

“I think that she’s paid her dues. There are going to be no surprises, and she has earned the right to be president and the head of the country at this point. It’s that simple. And she’s a woman, which is very important because her take on things may be what we need right now.”

I.e., hiring for the President of the U.S. job should be done based on gender.

“Robert De Niro’s Company Is Found Liable for Gender Discrimination” (New York Times, November 9, 2023):

A federal jury in Manhattan on Thursday found Robert De Niro’s company liable for gender discrimination against a former employee who claimed that the actor assigned her “stereotypically female” job responsibilities such as washing his sheets and attending to his home even as she climbed the ranks of his company, awarding her $1.3 million in damages.

In more than six hours of sometimes colorful and explosive testimony, Mr. De Niro fiercely denied any wrongdoing and dismissed Ms. Robinson’s claims as “nonsense,” though he acknowledged that he could have called Ms. Robinson a “bitch” and a “brat” when she was his employee. He also addressed Ms. Robinson’s claim that Mr. De Niro asked her to scratch his back on occasion, saying that it may have happened one or twice, but that there was never any “disrespect” or “lewdness” attached to it.

Lawyers for Mr. De Niro, 80, portrayed Ms. Robinson, 41, as someone who exploited the trust and generosity of her boss, who had already given her significant perks and gifts — including a Rolex watch and part of a vacation in Hawaii — while also agreeing to pay her a salary of $300,000 per year in 2019, far more than other Canal office workers were paid. They argued that even though she received title changes, per her own request, her job responsibilities remained that of a personal assistant throughout her 11-year employment, and they repeatedly underscored the fact that she had not made any formal complaint over gender discrimination until she had been accused of financial improprieties.

Related:

  • “Years after presidency, Donald Trump is still living rent-free in Robert De Niro’s head” (Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2023): The actor has welcomed his seventh child, which he mentioned in passing earlier this year. The mother is his girlfriend Tiffany Chen, whom he credited with doing the “heavy lifting” with the newborn — De Niro may be an octogenarian, but she is a martial arts instructor. He told the Guardian: “[S]he does the work. And we have help.” … He’s also a grandpa several times over.
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How did Ron DeSantis do in the debate with Governor French Laundry?

by philg

Americans have so few shared values or interests (see my favorite Harvard analysis on why we can’t agree on whether open borders are good or bad; low-skill immigrants are great for the rich and terrible for the working class) that they can watch different political events even while watching the same political event. Was last night’s debate between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis an example of that phenomenon?

Based on a casual sampling of Twitter, every account with rainbow flags, #FreePalestine banners, etc. declared that Newsom was the winner while all of the conservative accounts tweeted how impressed they were with Ron D. Here are two that happened to show up adjacent:

Readers who watched: How did Ron DeSantis do? Is it time for me to switch allegiance from Nikki Haley?

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Checking the COVID-19 Olympics scores for Florida and California ahead of the DeSantis v. Newsom debate

by philg

Governor French Laundry and Governor Science Denial are debating this evening. Let’s do a little pre-debate fact-checking. Americans have agreed that all of a society’s success can be measured by the society’s score in the COVID-19 Olympics. A society that achieved 0 COVID-tagged deaths by pushing all of its citizens into Hamas-style tunnels for 10 years (until a vaccine-style vaccine became available that definitively reduced deaths on a population-wide basis) would, for example, be celebrated as the best of all possible societies.

Lockdown-champ California starts off in the lead in the COVID-19 Olympics by having a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate. Once you adjust for the percentage of the population over 65, however, the death rates are about the same and the excess death rate may actually be higher in California (the CDC makes these data available, but somehow doesn’t bother to make it easy to compare states).

Where is SARS-CoV-2 having a field day right now? The CDC’s wastewater page:

The Science-denying Republican strongholds of Minnesota and Vermont are seriously plagued (God hates Republicans and loves #Science). California is moderately plagued and the plague level in Florida is “low”. In other words, if we accept that current Scientific dogma that humans, especially politicians and bureaucrats, are in charge of viruses, Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, mask orders, forced vaccinations, school closures, etc. have resulted in a higher rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection than the Team Sweden approach that Ron DeSantis adopted in the summer of 2020 (see Ron DeSantis and Coronapanic for excerpts from the not-so-great man’s book).

I continue to maintain my position that Nikki Haley would be more likely to prevail over Joe Biden in November 2024 because Ron D doesn’t have the soothing optimistic tone that Americans love. For example, Americans want to believe that someone who hates Jews and loves jihad will do a 180-degree flip once exposed to suburban life in Michigan or Minnesota. Ron just says “no”:

(Possible influence for Ron D’s rejection of Immigration Dogma: Florida is where, in 2016 (prior to Ron DeSantis assuming the governorship), first-generation Afghan-American Omar Mir Seddique Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub. Mr. Mateen came from a “moderate Muslim” family and had spent his entire 29-year life in the land of Diversity is Our Strength (TM).)

Loosely related:

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Medical School 2020, Year 4, Week 35 (Advanced Anatomy)

by philg

It is March 30, 2020. Our rotations are now “socially-distanced”: medical education (Zoom meetings with M1s and M2s), pathology (share a screen with a pathologist), and anatomy (handful of masked people in a large lab). The most popular choice is an additional two-week block of “study time” (i.e., vacation) for the Step 3 exam, a two-day multiple choice exam that costs $895 and duplicates material from Step 2. It is impossible to register for the exam until after we graduate, so nobody is actually studying. Jane and I have decided to learn anatomy from our favorite retired trauma surgeon for two weeks.

There are just two other students on our elective, including Buff Bri who matched into neurosurgery and a Canadian who matched into Internal Medicine. School administrators have decreed that everyone wear masks in the anatomy lab and that no more than two students at a time can be present in the thoroughly ventilated cavernous anatomy lab. Jane: “I’m surprised that our professor is teaching. She’s the ideal patient to actually be harmed by COVID-19.”  We will meet five times over two weeks, starting at 10:00 am and working until the early afternoon.

The first week we focus on trauma exposures. Jane and I start Monday on a cadaver with an untouched abdomen! Our attending first goes over how to make a midline incision. “A lot of residents do not extend the incision all the way to the xiphoid process. That few extra centimeters gives you a much better exposure.” We both take turns cutting, then suturing each fascial layer back together, and then cutting the sutures. Next we play the “Exposure Game”: she tells us an organ or structure, and we have to describe how to get to it once inside the peritoneal cavity. We perform the Kocher maneuver, medialization of the duodenum through incision of the inferior lateral border of duodenum, and the Cattell-Braasch, medializing the lateral edge of the ascending colon. A typical abdominal organ can be mobilized (or “medialized”) from its natural resting place by incising a thin layer of connective tissue (“peritoneum”) thereby releasing its long blood supply attachment (mesentery) to its full length. From this principle, you can bring the right colon or spleen out of the abdominal cavity while still attached to its blood supply. 

We quickly realize that the cadaver’s anatomy is way out of whack, which makes winning the game a lot more challenging. There is a seven-inch predominantly solid mass in her midline, which encircles the aorta and pushes her vena cava to the right. We cannot identify the abdominal aorta at all, but slowly dissect it out moving backwards from the bifurcated right and left iliac arteries. We also perform the Mattox maneuver in which the left colon and kidney are medialized to reveal the aorta.

We go in Wednesday and Thursday to continue to dissect the abdomen and remove the mass. During our dissection, we find that she had a ureteral stent placed in her left ureter due to obstruction from the mass. Our professor hands us a bucket to save the specimen for future classes. “Next year’s class wont have cadavers because authorities are requiring all cadavers be Covid-negative. There just won’t be any supply.”

We then perform a resuscitative thoracotomy (creating a hole in the chest). I make an oblique incision from below the nipple to the sternum, dissect down to the ribs, and place a rib expander (“Finochietto”) device in between the two ribs. Jane starts turning the crank to expand the ribs apart. We switch and Jane takes over to dissect out the heart and lungs. “Bedside thoracotomy is a procedure that is a last ditch effort to bring a trauma patient back from death,” our attending explains. “Imagine a 30 year old with multiple stab wounds is dropped off at the ED entrance. He is in extremis – he doesn’t open his eyes and is groaning only. His heart rate is 160, and the automatic BP cuff cannot get a reading. He has a pulse when he is transferred over to the trauma bay bed, but shortly thereafter, an astute medical student says that she cannot feel a pulse. What do you do?” A resuscitative thoracotomy is performed to try to bring this dead patient back to life. A large incision is made, the ribs are spread. The heart is delivered out of the chest. The aorta is clamped to decrease the circulating blood volume and divert blood flow to the brain. Frankly, attendings sometimes let residents do it to practice even though it doesn’t significantly improve patients’ outcomes.” She concludes, “The best evidence suggests performing resuscitative thoracotomy after traumatic arrest from penetrating injuries to the chest – maybe you can stitch a hole in the heart – or penetrating injuries to the abdomen where you can halt massive hemorrhage by clamping the aorta.”

On Friday, we perform a mastectomy, much to Jane’s disappointment after her two-week breast service rotation. “After a few mastectomies, it is boring. You’re just cutting into fat.” I make an oblique incision along the cadaver’s breast and find the pectoral fascia (connective tissue plane overlying the pectoral major muscle). I then dissect, mostly with my hands, to remove the breast tissue (all fat in this 86-year-old). We then perform the much more exciting axillary lymph node dissection! Jane begins it by reflecting the pectoral major to identify the clavipectoral (“clavipec”) fascia which runs up to the coracoid process (bony protuberance on the front of your shoulder). “The coracoid is the key to the axilla,” exclaims our attending. Jane and I have not studied this anatomy for awhile, having not been in the hospital since almost January, let alone on a surgery rotation. We pull out Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy, multiple copies of which are strewn around the lab, and turn to the axilla plates. We receive a ten-minute tangent about the most important books for surgeons to have: Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy,  Maingot’s Abdominal Operations, Skandalakis’ Surgical Anatomy, Netter’s Surgical Anatomy and Approaches.

We review the shoulder anatomy, and head back to our dissection. “In an axillary node dissection, you typically should not see the neurovascular bundle. You mostly have to watch out for what two nerves?” Jane responds, “The thoracodorsal (latissimus dorsi) and the long thoracic (serratus anterior).” Women are already self-conscious enough about losing a breast. It’s best not to also give her a winged scapula [injury to long thoracic nerve leading to impaired function of the serratus anterior].” 

Buff Bri comes in every day for several hours, defying social-distancing orders from the administration, but our elderly trauma surgeon doesn’t care (“the cadavers are far enough apart”). From the first two cadavers he removes the brain by removing the skull and cutting the brain stem from the spinal cord. On the third cadaver, however, he spends hours meticulously dissecting out each vertebral arch/lamina to have an undisturbed nervous system from the brain to the end of the spinal cord. When it was time for final removal, our attending hands him the scalpel. “You know what to do.” He shrieks, “No, no, I can’t! You do it!” After a few more shrieks, he begins cutting each of the spinal nerves to finally remove the entire central nervous system – the brain connected to the spinal cord. I am amazed how small it looks. “We’re saving this one,”  as she grabs a bucket. “Not a bad haul for two weeks. Two interesting specimen buckets!”

Type-A Anita is actively sharing “Sassy Socialist Memes” on Facebook. She adds her own gloss: “People, if we’re afraid that giving people $600 per week in unemployment benefits will stop them from working, that’s an argument for raising wages, not for refusing to bail out the people!” If any of her friends are turning to her posts in hopes of reassurance regarding coronavirus, they will be disappointed: “viruses can mutate into different strains. Look at how hard it is to guess which flu strain to account for in annual vaccines. We just don’t know enough about this virus to assume anyone is immune.”

During small group sessions, Anita frequently expressed her hatred of immunology (e.g., “Who cares about CAR-T cells and HLA types?”). A classmate who has specialized in immunology responds to Anita’s fear of lethal mutations: “The mutation rate of this virus is orders of magnitude less than either the flu or HIV, two viruses that have much more genetic diversity than SARS-CoV-2 due to extremely error-prone replication machinery. This bodes well for development of effective vaccines and possibly antibodies in comparison to circulating influenza viruses. Doesn’t change the fact that the duration of post-infection immunity is unknown, though!”

[Editor: Maybe they were both wrong, like most people who made predictions about COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 never mutated into a virus capable of killing people with different characteristics than the early victims (i.e., the death rate kept falling because the virus killed those susceptible to death in the first year or two). But the immunology nerd was also wrong. We never developed a vaccine that reduced infection or transmission and maybe the vaccine had no effect on the death rate either. See “Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates?” and “Did vaccines or any other intervention slow down COVID?”. Anita’s prediction that Americans would go back to work after long-term unemployment was at least partly wrong. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that the U.S. labor force participation rate remained lower in 2023 than it had been in 2019, though the most dramatic fall was from 2009 through 2015, after the 99 weeks of unemployment authorized by Congress during the first weeks of the Obama administration (“99 weeks of Xbox”).]

Statistics for the week… Study: 0 hours. Sleep: 9 hours/night; Fun: 2 nights. Jane and I continue packing up our house and training our two puppies. We go to the dog park every other day.. Pinterest Penelope ordered graduation-themed tee-shirt pullovers for each dog and arranged a class dog photoshoot. Wine night every night.

The rest of the book: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

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International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result)

by philg

It’s the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, established by the United Nations. The most recent scientific poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was conducted by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), a West Bank-based organization. The English-language version of the tables of results disappeared from the AWRAD web site, but I managed to find an archive copy and am making it available from this server.

If we’re going to have solidarity with the Palestinians, we might want to look at what they want and how they’re feeling. Western media tends to portray the Palestinians as helpless victims. They lack agency, know that they’re defeated, are cowering in fear, and feel “humiliated”. Example from the New York Times:

The Palestinians interviewed just as bombs were falling and artillery shells were exploding, however, tell a different story. First, 73 percent expect to win the current round of battles (or maybe the entire war that Arabs declared in 1948):

What’s the long-term goal? “A Palestinian state from the river to the sea” (say 75 percent):

They are overwhelmingly supportive of what the pollsters refer to as “the military operation” of October 7 (let’s put aside whether raping, maiming, killing, and kidnapping civilian women and children is “military”) as progress toward the above goal of river-to-the-sea liberation:

How are the current leaders of Gaza government and society viewed? The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have 75-85% positive ratings among Palestinian civilians:

What do the United Nations folks who created this day of solidarity offer? Here’s a tweet from the top executive:

His way of expressing solidarity with Palestinians is to propose a two-state solution when that is supported by only 17 percent (see above) of the Palestinians (75 percent want river-to-the-sea).

Where can Palestinians who want true solidarity turn, then? California, of course! “Anti-Israel protesters defend Hamas as Oakland city council meeting descends into chaos over cease-fire resolution” (New York Post):

The city council in Oakland, California, unanimously passed a resolution Monday calling for a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war — while spurning language that would have condemned the terrorist group for the Oct. 7 massacre following an uproar from anti-Israel protesters.

Councilman Dan Kalb’s amendment spotlighting Hamas’ role in the slaughter of an estimated 1,200 people across southern Israel was rejected 6-2.

The proposal was met by boos from demonstrators, who condemned the language as “anti-Arab” — with some going as far as to spread conspiracy theories that the Israel Defense Forces had slaughtered Jews to justify an invasion of Gaza.

“There have not been beheading of babies and rapings. Israel murdered their own people on Oct. 7,” one woman told the city council.

Another woman, who was eventually cut off from speaking, claimed: “The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. Many of those killed on Oct. 7, including children, were killed by the IDF.”

“To hear [the Jews] complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife-beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back,” the man said.

UNRWA, which has provided the basics of life (food, health care, education, etc.) to Palestinians for 75 years (funded by US and EU taxpayers), thus enabling both one of the world’s highest rates of population growth and the ability by Palestinians to maintain a permanent wartime footing (up to 100 percent of GDP can be spent on military because UNRWA pays for the essentials) is also more supportive than the top UN guy: “It is a day to affirm our support for the full rights and national aspirations of Palestinians”. (“national aspirations”, as noted above, means river-to-the-sea for about 75 percent of Palestinians)

Feminists in India support the guys who broke through the fence on October 7 to interact with Israeli women and girls:

Readers: What are you doing today to follow the United Nations guidance for expressing solidarity with Palestinians?

Related:

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Shifting gears: Why Tesla’s previous failures in Full Self-Driving might not predict future failure

by philg

From Elon Musk, the book:

Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full Self-Driving was just a year or two away. “When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they’ve arrived?” Chris Anderson asked him at a TED Talk in May 2017. “That’s about two years,” Musk replied. In an interview with Kara Swisher at a Code Conference at the end of 2018, he said Tesla was “on track to do it next year.” In early 2019, he doubled down. “I think we will be feature complete, Full Self-Driving, this year,” he declared on a podcast with ARK Invest. “I would say I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.”

So they’ll fail again in 2024? Maybe not.

For years, Tesla’s Autopilot system relied on a rules-based approach. It took visual data from a car’s cameras and identified such things as lane markings, pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signals, and anything else in range of the eight cameras. Then the software applied a set of rules, such as Stop when the light is red; Go when it’s green; Stay in the middle of the lane markers; Don’t cross double-yellow lines into incoming traffic; Proceed through an intersection only when there are no cars coming fast enough to hit you; and so on. Tesla’s engineers manually wrote and updated hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code to apply these rules to complex situations.

C++?!?! Seriously?

According to the book, Tesla is shifting to a ChatGPT-style machine learning approach:

“Instead of determining the proper path of the car based only on rules,” Shroff says, “we determine the car’s proper path by also relying on a neural network that learns from millions of examples of what humans have done.” In other words, it’s human imitation. Faced with a situation, the neural network chooses a path based on what humans have done in thousands of similar situations. It’s like the way humans learn to speak and drive and play chess and eat spaghetti and do almost everything else; we might be given a set of rules to follow, but mainly we pick up the skills by observing how other people do them. It was the approach to machine learning envisioned by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

By early 2023, the neural network planner project had analyzed 10 million frames of video collected from the cars of Tesla customers. Does that mean it would merely be as good as the average of human drivers? “No, because we only use data from humans when they handled a situation well,” Shroff explains. Human labelers, many of them based in Buffalo, New York, assessed the videos and gave them grades. Musk told them to look for things “a five-star Uber driver would do,” and those were the videos used to train the computer.

During the discussion, Musk latched on to a key fact the team had discovered: the neural network did not work well until it had been trained on at least a million video clips, and it started getting really good after one-and-a-half million clips. This gave Tesla a huge advantage over other car and AI companies. It had a fleet of almost two million Teslas around the world collecting billions of video frames per day. “We are uniquely positioned to do this,” Elluswamy said at the meeting.

Despite grand claims by academics seeking funding, rules-based AI generally failed to do anything interesting or practical from 1970-2010 (see MYCIN and CADUCEUS, for example). Statistical approaches to AI, however, began to deliver useful systems, e.g., for speech recognition, starting around 2010.

How Tesla describes the future:

FSD would provide a huge lifestyle boost here in South Florida where there are a lot of 1- and 2-hour drives that lead to interesting places, such as parks, cultural events, theme parks, etc. The drives themselves, however, are boring: straight highways, a lot of traffic close to Miami and Orlando. FSD should work quite well. FSD would also be good for getting to/from international airports. There are a lot more flights from FLL and MIA than from PBI, which is closer to our house, but with a self-driving car it might become more sensible to fly out of farther-away airports.

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Science is a fundamental right for humans…

by philg

…. as long as they can afford $15,000 for a lifetime of access to Nature.

A tweet from the righteous:

Science is a right, which means it is something that anyone, regardless of wealth level, should be able to claim and, if denied, be able to enforce the claim.

Suppose that a person attempts to claim his/her/zir/their human right to science at the nature.com web site? He/she/ze/they quickly hits a pay wall:

My response via X:

Aren’t you the same people who say that nobody can have access to the science published in your journal unless they pay $200/year (that’s $15,000 during a human lifetime)? Science is then a “right” for anyone who can afford to pay you? If that’s the standard then we can say that owning a superyacht is a right as well because anyone with enough money can buy a 100-meter yacht. Here are some yachts that are available on the same terms as the science published by Nature:

Related:

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Immigrants can get U.S. passports in one day

by philg

For native-born U.S. citizens, it takes about three months, including mailing time, to get a passport if you pay extra for “expedited” service. From the State Department web page (retrieved end of October 2023):

As of October, they were saying that it would take 2 weeks to mail, then 5-7 weeks to “process”, then 2 more weeks to mail.

Friends who are immigrants have been reporting U.S. passport renewals in just a day or two. How do they do it? The U.S. government offers an emergency service. The immigrant uses Adobe Acrobat to create the required PDFs regarding the “life-threatening illness or injury” from which an immediate family member back in the old country is suffering. The American bureaucrats have no means of verifying these documents so entirely fictitious physician names and addresses work fine. The immigrant buys a fully refundable plane ticket back to the old country, makes an appointment, walks into a U.S. government passport agency.

Why can’t State Department clear the backlog, especially for simple renewals? What stops them from paying overtime to the existing staff to work nights and weekends until the processing time is back to something more reasonable? (or hiring Venezuelan asylees to assist? We are informed that 500,000+ Venezuelans who’ve joined us are eager to work and highly qualified) What’s “reasonable”? In 1971, when the U.S. population was 200 million, it typically took between 5 and 21 days to get a passport (New York Times) and when the backlog increased the government would add night shifts to clear it. In 1961 (US population 180 million), it took 3 days:

A native-born American might be able to work a similar process via the “urgent travel” channel. Buy a refundable ticket for travel within 14 days and then begin to work the phones and try to get an appointment and travel to a major city (a customer in Tallahassee, Florida would have to drive perhaps 6 hours to Miami or Atlanta or New Orleans).

Finally, why do we need to show passports when returning to the U.S.? The passport was already checked twice by airline personnel on the departure side. If the southern border is open to millions of new Americans who choose to walk in, why must we stand in line for a third check after an exhausting international flight?

Related:

  • “Airport travel delays after U.S. Customs computer outage” (NBC, 2019): International travelers were waiting in long entry lines at some of the nation’s busiest airports Friday … The outage affected New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, among others. Images on social media showed travelers jammed into terminals at JFK and O’Hare as they awaited admittance to the United States.
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Elon Musk at war in Ukraine

by philg

Can a private citizen change the outcome of a foreign war? The answer is “Yes” for Citizen Musk. From Elon Musk, the book:

An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company Viasat that provided communications and internet to the country. The command system of the Ukrainian military was crippled, making it almost impossible to mount a defense. Top Ukrainian officials frantically appealed to Musk for help, and the vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, used Twitter to urge him to provide connectivity. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” he pleaded. Musk agreed. Two days later, five hundred terminals arrived in Ukraine. “We have the US military looking to help us with transport, State has offered humanitarian flights and some compensation,” Gwynne Shotwell emailed Musk. “Folks are rallying for sure!” “Cool,” Musk responded. “Sounds good.” He got on a Zoom call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, discussed the logistics of a larger rollout, and promised to visit Ukraine when the war was over.

Every day that week, Musk held regular meetings with the Starlink engineers. Unlike every other company and even parts of the U.S. military, they were able to find ways to defeat Russian jamming. By Sunday, the company was providing voice connections for a Ukrainian special operations brigade. Starlink kits were also used to connect the Ukrainian military to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and to get Ukrainian television broadcasts back up. Within days, six thousand more terminals and dishes were shipped, and by July there were fifteen thousand Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine.

How much of a difference did this make?

“Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war,” one Ukrainian platoon commander told the [Wall Street Journal].

Musk is lucky that the Russians don’t currently have a space machine like Bird One (from You Only Live Twice) that can vacuum up the Starlink satellites!

Elon Musk ended up making decisions at least as consequential as any made in Kyiv, according to Isaacson:

“This could be a giant disaster,” Musk texted me. It was a Friday evening in September 2022, and Musk had gone into crisis-drama mode, this time with reason. A dangerous and knotty issue had arisen, and he believed that there was “a non-trivial possibility,” as he put it, that it could lead to a nuclear war, with Starlink partly responsible. The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and they were using Starlink to guide them to the target. Although he had readily supported Ukraine, his foreign policy instincts were those of a realist and student of European military history. He believed that it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. The Russian ambassador had warned him, in a conversation a few weeks earlier, that attacking Crimea would be a red line and could lead to a nuclear response. Musk explained to me the details of Russian law and doctrine that decreed such a response. Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

He also called the Russian ambassador to assure him that Starlink was being used for defensive purposes only. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” Musk says. “We did not want to be a part of that.”

Isn’t this a bit like the United Nations in Gaza? For 75 years, they’ve been providing nearly everything that the Palestinians to raise the next generations of soldiers/martyrs and simultaneously claiming to be involved only in peace/defense. Musk strengthened Ukraine’s defensive capability, which gave them more resources to put into offense.

Like the UN, Musk tried his hand at diplomacy:

He took it upon himself to help find an end to the Ukrainian war, proposing a peace plan that included new referenda in the Donbas and other Russian-controlled regions, accepting that Crimea was a part of Russia, and assuring that Ukraine remained a “neutral” nation rather than becoming part of NATO. It provoked an uproar. “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you,” tweeted Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany. President Zelenskyy was a bit more cautious. He posted a poll on Twitter asking, “Which Elon Musk do you like more?: One who supports Ukraine, or One who supports Russia.” Musk backed down a bit in subsequent tweets. “SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable and support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far,” he wrote in response to Zelenskyy’s question. “Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine.” But then he added, “Trying to retake Crimea will cause massive death, probably fail and risk nuclear war. This would be terrible for Ukraine and Earth.”

Eventually he ended up in a text message exchange with Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Fedorov:

Musk: “Russia will stop at nothing, nothing, to hold Crimea. This poses catastrophic risk to the world…. Seek peace while you have the upper hand….”

After his exchange with Fedorov, Musk felt frustrated. “How am I in this war?” he asked me during a late-night phone conversation. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

In a world of war profiteers, Starlink seems to have been the only involved company that didn’t get rich off the conflict:

[SpaceX President/COO Gwynne] Shotwell also felt strongly that SpaceX should stop subsidizing the Ukrainian military operation. Providing humanitarian help was fine, but private companies should not be financing a foreign country’s war. That should be left to the government, which is why the U.S. has a Foreign Military Sales program that puts a layer of protection between private companies and foreign governments. Other companies, including big and profitable defense contractors, were charging billions to supply weapons to Ukraine, so it seemed unfair that Starlink, which was not yet profitable, should do it for free. “We initially gave the Ukrainians free service for humanitarian and defense purposes, such as keeping up their hospitals and banking systems,” she says. “But then they started putting them on fucking drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers. That’s what companies and people should do. But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.”

Related:

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Randomized controlled trial of therapy for teenagers

by philg

“These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.” (Atlantic, by Olga Khazan; paywalled, but readable in the Google cache):

Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-health treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. After eight weeks, the researchers planned to measure whether the DBT teens’ mental health had improved.

The therapy was based on strong science: DBT incorporates some classic techniques from therapy, such as cognitive reappraisal, or reframing negative events in a more positive way, and it also includes more avant-garde techniques such as mindfulness, the practice of being in the present moment. Both techniques have been proven to alleviate psychological struggles.

The author and editors forgot to capitalize “Science”!

This special DBT-for-teens program also covered a range of both mental-health coping strategies and life skills—which are, again, correlated with health and happiness. One week, students were instructed to pay attention to things they wouldn’t typically notice, such as a sunset. Another, they were told to sleep more, eat right, and exercise. They were taught to accept unpleasant things they couldn’t change, and also how to distract themselves from negative emotions and ask for things they need. “We really tried to put the focus on, how can you apply some of this stuff to things that are happening in your everyday lives already?” Lauren Harvey, a psychologist at the University of Sydney and the lead author of the study, told me.

But what happened was not what Harvey and her co-authors predicted. The therapy seemed to make the kids worse. Immediately after the intervention, the therapy group had worse relationships with their parents and increases in depression and anxiety. They were also less emotionally regulated and had less awareness of their emotions, and they reported a lower quality of life, compared with the control group.

Most of these negative effects dissipated after a few months, but six months later, the therapy group was still reporting poorer relationships with their parents.

Last year, a study of thousands of British kids who were put through a mindfulness program found that, in the end, they had the same depression and well-being outcomes as the control group. A cognitive-behavioral-therapy program for teens had similarly disappointing results—it proved no better than regular classwork.

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