HarryHirsch

Storytime! In a previous workplace a disagreement over fire safety with escalated into uncalled-for and unwelcome dominance behaviour from my supervisor. All attempts to deescalate were rebuffed, and now there is litigation from multiple plaintiffs, this person took out her sociopathic tendencies on many people. With a minimum of professional detachment or a HR department with a clue the peace would have been kept. (Yes, a few months later the fire marshal issued a code violation, as predicted.) You may not wish to live in that internet, but we live in a world where sociopaths are overrepresented in leadership positions.

Something rubs me here just the wrong way. Rachel complains about ageism and contempt for women in tech, and with good reason, and then she takes it out on an overenthusiastic candidate who can't read the room.

When you think about it, the candidate isn't even that wrong. Back then, at university, a certain professor would explain the oral exam to the candidate at the beginning. He would explain that he would incrementally increase the difficulty and skip from area to area. The goal would be to find the limits of the student's knowledge, the student would walk away feeling terrible, and he, the professor, didn't enjoy the experience.

That's how it ought to be, but here? OK, candidate doesn't know ICMP well, next topic, no need to waste time and dig in.

Here's another unfavourable thought: some people with abusive childhoods react very badly to dominance displays, and here is Rachel engaging in just that. One wonders what had happened before.

For what we know, the guy may well have been employing "test-taking strategies", and he may have been led down the garden path by the interviewer.

There's far too many posts in Rachel's blog where she goes on about "the one", who knows much better already, and here she channels the asshat that she complains about when she encounters him at work.

Yes, that happens, and elsewhere she goes on about culture in tech.

That's very strange right there. Vitamin D is a hydrocarbon, it is completely insoluble in water. Vitamin D poisoning requires taking doses way in excess of 10K units for months on end, you aren't doing to slip a person that much through drinking water.

The only way to interpret the statement is that things are not as they are made out to be.

The Linkedin biography of the lady is instructive - she worked in government contracting services for decades and has a consultancy. That's how you worm yourself in and then milk the system. Low-level corruption in the US doesn't exist, you don't slip the post office clerk a ten-dollar bill to expedite your passport. But if you are after a government contract, Ms Diggs-Chavis demonstrates how that is done: become part of the inner circle and start taking from the pot.

Why does the super still have a job?

It'd not wrong to view "the government" as something that is run by a small group whose interests are not congruent with the majority of the population, and experience shows this.

So you go and take personal responsibility for your liver and take the Hep A shot yourself. One wishes the government supported life, liberty and happiness of its people and offered labour protection, sick leave and healthcare to its weakest citizens.

Vaccinations are a few hundred per shot, and the part-time worker hasn't got insurance or the spare cash.

It's interesting and worth watching, but it becomes apparent that Thiel is a financier, and science takes place on a different timescale. Better seek advice from someone who was active when US science was still functional, let's say Roy Vagelos.

The talks of the Women in Chemistry section at the recent American Chemical Society meeting included gems like "Metalloids and mentoring: Life at a PUI as the 'Other" and "Transgender chemistry graduate students navigating between trans and STEM identities".

All of that sounds nice until you start teaching in Alabama or get students from a reservation in New Mexico, then you see that what the DEI folks offer is completely useless when it comes to deprivation.

Counterintuitively, probably yes. Tone flows from the top down, and if you want to change the tone you need to start at the top. It's very difficult to try and build a coalition to change the system from underneath.

Presumably he had a lot of tribal knowledge built-up and who is going to know the system better than him?

Likely he has a lot of political influence and knowledge of the system and for lasting change all of that has to go. If it has gotten that bad it's no good and needs to be swept away.