This weekend I stumbled across Alexander Fury writing in T Magazine about the social significance of men’s fashion. Like many people, I default to thinking of high fashion as frivolous and mostly irrelevant. When you expand your time frame, it becomes clear that’s not the case.
When I opened a tab with Radley Balko’s lengthy Washington Post article, How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty, I had some preconceived notions. It’s become increasingly difficult to raise taxes to pay for government programs, so governments are increasingly relying on alternative means to raise funds. In many cases, the burden winds up falling largely on the poor. The classic example here is state lotteries. The article does cover that territory – it explains how small municipalities around St. Louis fund their governments through fines, court fees, traffic tickets, and so forth. What I didn’t expect was how intimately tied to racism this is. In the present, this manifests itself in white elected officials presiding over white cops squeezing black populations for as much money as they can get, leading to harassment and ultimately alienation. The current circumstances are the result of prior racism. When African Americans started moving to the St. Louis suburbs, whites responded by trying to zone them out: ...
Normally the performance of utilities and scripting languages really isn’t an issue – they’re all fast enough for the task at hand, but sometimes, that isn’t the case. For example, my team has built a database replication system that copies many millions of records from a set of sharded databases to a data warehouse every day. When it exports data from the originating databases, it needs to add a database identifier to every record, represented by a line in a TSV file. ...
Journalist D. Brian Burghart is compiling a database of police killings in the United States. He has a theory as to why it’s up to him to compile this database: The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why. ...
In an article about Presidential vacations, Ezra Klein makes this observation about the President: Obama has limited patience for the idea that he should act like he’s doing his job rather than just do his job. A Democratic political consultant once told me that the problem with President Obama is that he doesn’t care to “get caught trying.” That is to say, he doesn’t put on a show of trying to get things done when he doesn’t think the show will help get the thing done. ...
I’m a bit fixated on cases where the personal advice one might give to a friend or family member does not align with the policy we should pursue (see this post). Sunil Dutta, a 17 year veteran of the LAPD, recommends offering no resistance when you are detained by police, if you want to prevent a bad outcome: Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long? ...
Creating tools that facilitate online A/B experiments is a big part of my job. My team makes sure that we’re collecting data as accurately as possible, and we also created a tool that aggregates the results of experiments and performs statistical analysis of them to insure that our analysis is valid. Needless to say, the controversy over experiments run by Facebook and OkCupid has been interesting to watch from a distance. ...
I pulled this from an op-ed by Arthur C. Brooks in the New York Times this weekend: The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the No. 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss (which, as a boss, made me unhappy to learn). This is simply the nature of the relationship. As a manager, this is the ground on which your relationship starts, and it’s up to you to build something better. ...
In a fit of World Cup enthusiasm, I bought Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. The book is roughly 10 years old, and ages less well as you progress through it. The initial chapters on soccer history and racism in soccer feel fresh and are really interesting. Foer says in the introduction that the book progresses from bad news to good news, and unfortunately gets gets worse as you make your way through it. ...
Jean-Louis Gassée’s critique of Microsoft CEO’s latest is really an excellent primer on how to communicate about strategy. It also includes the shortest useful guide to how to identify a platitude that you’ll ever read. Great stuff.