markoman

The stories are in the NY Times Magazine and not the mainline NY Times and are a 'reframing' of historical event viewed in the context of slavery. I get that this is a sensitive topic and often is interpreted as an attempt to make Americans feel guilty about their nation's past. How Germany approaches study of their Nazi history in schools is surprisingly less problematic, apparently because of this history's unequivocal evil.

Still, you suggest that the NY Times is revising history and you call it a 'fraud'. I suppose you wouldn't mind offering some examples of the misstatements made in the 1619 Project stories.

The "They hate us for our freedom" line was merely a hamfisted attempt on G. W. Bush's part to pander to disciples of 'American exceptionalism' while his search for WMD had foundered & we faced the disgust of the world. I'm not sure that the phrase is even in opposition to God's Law since Bush surely believed that America was subject to God's Law (albeit a different one), yet surely didn't think that American Freedom would suffer for (being subject to His Law). Indeed, while the American Right now enjoys a resurgence nationally and works to roll back LGBTQ and abortion rights in favor of what they deem God would proscribe, they surely won't think that we are any less 'free'. And that is the largest point -- that freedom needs quotes, since its purely subjective.

Trump kept CNN in the public eye, too, with all his outbursts against Jim Acosta and near constant mentions of 'fake news CNN'. Thereafter, anyone who opposed Trumpian tyranny would seek out CNN.

If you're thinking that Fox is the home of American Wholesomeness and Truth, you should note that CNN hired Chris Wallace from them, after all, just for CNN+.

CNN is bland news. That's one reason why it does so poorly. Fox News is entertainment and it is entertaining. Rupert Murdoch wanted to indoctrinate Americans and he knew just how he'd do it when creating Fox News in the early 90s. An unending line of leggy blondes and unbridled, brash male hosts that would make you want to watch it. And voila, you have today's Fox News, where you can barely get notice of that scandalous Kevin McCarthy audio versus their coverage of his defense against the story itself. Does truth matter when getting entertained feels so good?

Have you seen Netflix's stock this week? It's also just a really poor time to start up a streaming service.

CNN lacks 'marquee talent' because they wanted their programming to be less about the personalities reading the news and more about drilling down into the stories themselves and finding experts who can offer insight.

Fox News, on the other hand, has found that they can drive viewership not only with a bevy of leggy blondes but with strong, domineering hosts in weeknight commentary slots. Witness Bill O'Reilly and his 'shut up' and faux 'no spin' catchphrases. Fox held onto Bill until the sexual harassment suits forced them to shut him down. As bad as Bill was, he wasn't as toady as Hannity is today, towing the party line to a point that he is unwatchable for all but the most indoctrinated. The Five is another Fox show that offers Fox personalities a means to build up their own personal brands, much like how Greg Gutfeld has done now in his own show. In fostering a stable of personalities, Fox places few limits on how far they can go. On Monday of this week, the mononymous Kennedy gratuitously muttered about how Bruce Springsteen was a 'massive pinko', merely as 'Glory Days' was playing on her show's return from commercial break [0]. Only a show that feels like it has its viewers eating of the palm of it's hand would act so brazenly.

While CNN is flawed with weak hosts and is overly repetitive, it was surely a source of fresh air during the Trump impeachments when the bias of both Fox News & Business made their shows mostly a fictional defense of Trump.

Your 'business school case study' discussion needs to consider the fact that right now is a very poor time to start up a streaming service, regardless of the quality of the CNN+ service itself. Look at what just happened at Netflix earlier this week with the drop in subscribers. The market is simply reaching saturation. Also, give CNN credit for cleaning house of Cuomo, Zucker and even his girlfriend -- but this meant that CNN+ lost its brainchild Zucker. Let's not forget there was a time when Zucker was a wunderkind [1]. At the same time, the fee structure was poorly thought out and the material just wasn't there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCJn4giT9c

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/endurance-of-jeff-zu...

The '1619 Project' is peddled clearly as an essay project -- quite clearly differentiated from a pure news orientation. The essays were pretty light fare and nothing like overly sympathetic eyewitness reporting from the deck of a slave ship. Perhaps the NYT thinks that the country that unwaveringly holds itself out as the greatest country in the history of history (and the bastion and promise of liberty and democracy, still) can look inward and assess the legacy of slavery and the impacts felt today. One essay touched on whether race had a bearing on why the U.S. never adopted universal healthcare, which at least seems to be a worthwhile question.

American introspection is a notoriously unwelcome commodity by a people much more at home shouting 'USA USA USA!', often as a means to drown out any opposing speech.

Given your comments about your Spring Boot 'bread and butter', it looks like you changed to Python & FastAPI. If so, why? Was it due to a reduction in overall complexity (despite the apparent rise in line of code)? Curious, thanks.

How does making donations to a charitable activity constitute an interest?

On the other hand, Mrs. Thomas was coordinating with POTUS's Chief of Staff Meadows in illegal activity (a coup attempt) that her husband may likely have to decide on later. Further, her activity has the appearance that she was funneling legal advice (or legal coordination) from her husband and to Meadows. These acts (of hers) call for her husband's recusal at a minimum, but SCOTUS justices conveniently aren't ethically accountable to anyone and so it is enforceable only by impeachment. However, impeachment of a judge won't require a 2/3's majority.

As long as the experience of the candidate lines up with the position, I don't think not having a degree will be a deal-breaker.

I'm in my mid-50s and while I'm definitely not a high-flyer, I've found work for the last 15 years as an FTE of state gov't in the U.S. I've had friends who've been let go in the private sector as they passed 50, but government employers don't typically do such purges. It may not be easy to get into gov't service at your age, but it's worth a shot.

Also, I wonder you should create your own 'Ask HN' to uncover whether your approach to job finding may have flaws, since there are many older IT workers out there who are finding work.

Exactly. This article on Rolling Stone only gets published because there is a market for it, i.e., there are Right-wingers out there looking for 'evidence' that CNN is just as bad as 'fair & balanced' Fox News. In a free enterprise world, pieces only get published when there is a demand for it. I'm not quite persuaded by the Rolling Stone piece. To me, it has 'what about CNN' written all over it.

CNN does have adverts semi-disguised as news stories but they are labeled as either 'Paid Content' or 'Paid Partner Content' and put in their own sections. And, of course, the Fox News site does something very similar. What one does, the other often has to do, just to remain revenue competitive.

Still, I think a number of things can be said in CNN's favor (relative to Fox News) regarding its neutrality, or lack thereof. I simply don't see the same emphasis and extremism that occurs in the few opinion shows that they have. While on Fox, the steady drumbeat heard from the cavalcade of Carlson, Hannity, Watters, Pirro, Ingraham, appear with near-coordination in messaging so that no opportunities are missed to blast Democrats from every angle. Carlson's messaging is particularly extreme and opportunistic, arguing both that Biden should be doing more and yet asking why we should be involved in the Ukraine conflict at all since he finds that Russia's grievances have merit. The rare respectable Fox news hosts have been driven away in the past couple of years, such as Sheppard Smith and Chris Wallace. The latter is now employed at CNN, notably. I don't see this type of brain drain happening at CNN.

For a while, Fox News would hide behind a 'fair and balanced' tagline which they eventually had to abandon because it was obviously false. For example, recently I've seen Fox inviting guests on who waste no opportunity to attack Biden with either outright lies or misleading statements, such as how gas prices are suffering due to a ban on fracking on public land by the administration. In fact, the ban is only on new permits for fracking -- and the extent to which it would affect gas prices is being great exaggerated. Biden also comes under criticism for failing to provide all the arms that Zelenskyy wants to fight off the Russian invaders, as an indication of so-called 'weakness', yet in fact Biden has provided $700 million worth of arms including javelin missiles.

CNN (and Wash Post, etc.) was criticized over the Nick Sandmann affair when they played the video of the face-to-face confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial (1/18/2019) between the 16 year old Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist. While the video made it look like the boy (with a MAGA hat and perceived smirk) and his schoolmates were blocking Phillips and his fellow activists, it turns out that other videos available later described a different story that muddied the issues and that a third group of demonstrators were involved as well at an earlier point. Sandmann never apologized after Phillips said that he thought he was owed one in an interview. Public opinion was starting to come down on Sandmann's side especially considering that he was a minor. CNN ended up settling the lawsuit with Sandmann as did two other news outlets. Surely, CNN saw that a jury would have similar sympathy for such a young litigant and wisely settled. However, the Right then painted it as an example of a bias. CNN is more guilty of sloppy reporting perhaps, since the initial video spoke volumes owing to the similarly boorish behavior of those who wear the MAGA hat. Yet, CNN should have sought to secure more videos at the scene to get a fuller story.

CNN deserves credit for having policies and pushing out (or directly firing) those hosts who violate said policies. Chris Cuomo, while nonetheless stating that he would never be impartial when it came to his brother Andrew, was found by management to be in violation when he helped his brother navigate his sexual harassment and public relations crisis. Jeff Zucker and then Allison Gollust were fired when it was discovered that they were carrying on with a secret relationship.

While Fox News was the subject of a wave of sexual harassment lawsuits years ago, it only fired CEO Roger Ailes after nearly 20 women including Gretchen Carlson accused him of such. Bill O'Reilly was another firing but only after lawsuits were filed. Where are the internal investigations over there and why did it take a lawsuit? Hannity and Carlson have also been the target of lawsuits against Fox in 2020.

Any consideration of Biden's mental state should also factor in the fact that he has always been gaffe-prone (speaking without a filter) and has suffered from a stammer/stutter. This is one reason why dementia testing includes a written portion instead of simply relying on speech evidence. These types of speech impediments can often lead to moments of halting speech that unavoidably lead to the impression that the speaker is mentally deficient. There is also the excess and aged skin that he has around his eyes and the squinting appearance this leads to. Added together, it's tempting to form a narrative that he must be senile. However, senility rarely takes a vacation, and I've seen enough press conferences and speeches where Biden is forceful, direct and focused to leave little doubt that he's not senile. He simply looks like a 79 year old man who is accepting and feeling the weight of the office, and during the particularly difficult contemporary conditions of pandemic and national division. The weight of the office has in modern times had a tendency to make ordinarily intelligent people look mentally weak, e.g., G. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, although Obama suffered this to a lesser degree, I'd say.

As an aside on speech impediments, when I was in my late teens I worked retail with another teen who so profoundly stuttered that he could barely get any words out. I knew that he went to my high school but hardly saw him because he was in the special education program. If you took the time to let him get his words out, you could see that he was at least of average intelligence, however, I can imagine the type of education he got from high school was much different than the average student. Had he been properly treated by a speech pathologist in elementary school, perhaps he could have led a different life. He could only work as a trash collector, roving between all the dept store register trash bins. That was 30 years ago and there are times when I wonder what happened to him.

Why is it that those who want to fear monger about the current inflation and how long it will last are so resistant to the fears about sea level rise?

Wait until its determined how high the loss in real estate (especially as a tax base) will be with the sea a foot higher by 2050. Think of areas, especially Miami, that are in for serious impact without any mitigation plans.

Specifically, no, I'm not giving him credit for violating federal law and I don't dispute that the order lacked statutory authority. However, since a president is the only official tasked with protecting the country, he has certain emergency powers (e.g., the same powers Trump used to take money from the Pentagon against Congress' wishes to fund his wall construction) to ensure national defense, at a minimum. COVID is such a threat. (Was the border?)

While the Supreme Court (which isn't tasked with this same security role) decided against him on this order, as the executive it was reasonable for him to attempt to use this tool to gain control of COVID spread.

Given the divided, political state of our country and seeing that the COVID outbreak has taken an even worse upswing now, I personally feel like he did the right thing here. You'll note that I was not opining on the legal nature of the move. Other presidents have made orders without knowing their legality when the circumstances call for it. Lincoln and habeas corpus comes to mind.

What federal law did he ignore?

You are certainly correct that Trump didn't refer directly to COVID as a hoax, but only in the literal sense and especially when given the chance in the following days to clean it up. However, applying literalism to Trump's words or even divining a context is a fool's errand. He so often seemed to be talking directly to his 'fifth avenue', ride-or-die supporters, hungry to depict him as a victim of the treachery of an 'angry', 'elitist', liberal Left.

One time he failed to clean it up was the very famous time he referred to getting disinfectant into the body as a COVID remedy, although he never literally said the oft-repeated phrase 'inject bleach'. After doctors were left condemning his comments, he said that he was being sarcastic, which I think is non-sensical given the subject matter (i.e., in the middle of the a pandemic, during a press conference surrounded by doctors, POTUS wants to go spit-balling on potential remedies and get all sarcastic on... disinfectants & their applicability to this virus).

As far as presidential responsibility for COVID deaths go, I think things are a bit different now owing to personal responsibility. Since we have vaccines now, should you refuse the vaccine and then die from the virus can you really blame POTUS for your death? Biden took the unusual step of reneging on his promise against vaccine mandates to do just that later once there was a new wave of deaths in August 2021. I give him credit for casting aside the obvious political implications of reneging on a promise and that of a obviously unpopular mandate, as well. To then blame this same POTUS for more deaths seems especially unfair. Biden and his medical advisors know the truth that this virus just won't 'go away' as Trump would like to say with a flick of his wrist in its early days, and that we will have to get bare-knuckled about it or suffer more deaths from evermore mutations.

Nobody blamed Trump for the pandemic even after he downplayed it and referred to it as a 'democrat hoax' at a rally. Now, it seems like Biden is left holding the bag, simply because he claimed to have a plan to address it. A pandemic isn't some finite, controllable force. It adapts and mutates when given the chance to do so. And the failure of almost 40% of our highly-fractured population to accede to vaccines, masks, or lockdowns is making these mutations possible and likely. You can't just spray the air to rid the world of this virus. It has to be killed within its human hosts or blocked at points of infection.

The anti-vaccine crowd at first pointed to lacking FDA approval and once that came, refused due to possible 'long term side effects'. I'm unfamiliar with any infamy around long-term side effects of past vaccines, so I see this as something of an excuse. It's just easier to blame the President who promised to get it under control, isn't it? But is it fair?

I have to agree with the 'adorable' comment, me being someone in his 50s and wishing I could have had the same experience. While I, too, thought that the blog started a bit uneven, it was cool that you then focused on the technical side and finished on the successful project conclusion and the human connections made.

Whether the friendships end up lasting forever or not, what I can tell you is that you'll never forget how you felt on that 7am zoom call or when you got the invite to return later. That excitement is palpable to me as a reader, in the same way that it will be to you as you advance in your career and look back.

So, the solution is to live with employer-controlled and -connected healthcare and watch them as they cut the coverage and hike the costs year after year. This might be fine when your a SWE in your 20's and not on any meds but for those on BP or diabetic medications, this isn't much of a solution.

Government didn't create this problem because it didn't mandate that employee healthcare be a benefit from employers. That was simply "laissez-faire capitalism", i.e., the belief that the market is all-knowing and will eventually guide us to an efficient and effective equilibrium. Except that really only happens in perfect markets and they don't exist outside of textbooks.

Yes, this is "the Llama book" -- Learning Perl. Next to read would probably be Intermediate Perl, and then probably "the Camel book", which is Programming Perl.

What technology are you in, if I may ask? (I'm curious for whatever technology or field would allow you to take such a pay cut yet still make enough to make life interesting.)

I'm a Perl guy too. May I ask what Perl technology you're using? Dancer perhaps?

This project will make a great blogpost once you complete it. I for one would be interested to hear more. My power meter was replaced a couple of years ago (to a more modern remote-read version) and I would definitely like to directly access usage information in real time.

What type of actions on behalf of a John Q. Public would qualify as this 'pulling' that you're referring to? Just go solar, since wind really isn't feasible for a single family?

That 'bootstraps' is an old term that doesn't really apply to today's highly-siloed civilization. Everyone has their specialty and making anything out of bailing wire & bubble-gum just isn't as likely as it was in 1920.

Going bankrupt on a hospital bill isn't freedom, either.

Oh, does this mean that you're anti-death penalty? White collar crime can exact costs on society close to a Bundy or Gacy type level. Too bad we don't have the death penalty for Corporate crime. Think of what opioids and Purdue Pharma have done to the U.S.

If you deplore the left-wing politics of academics because (perhaps) they live in an impractical, protected world, do you also deplore the right-wing politics of the clergy -- who also certainly live in a protected, isolated world? And what experience do the clergy have in the lived experience of 'real' people?

Why is it that the politics of academics is found to be so distasteful, when we accept the politics of businessmen such as Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch as a matter of course? In a country that had always worshiped technological innovation, why are academics who provide the very seeds of this innovation, disrespected so easily?

Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. It got us an egomaniacal dotard, drunk on power, who shifted his politics when the opportunism suited him. His TV show got him just enough notoriety to move the needle among the masses. When he found that his toxic personality, based on name-calling and blustery bufoonery found a reception from Right-wing voters, there was nothing that could stop him from winning their side. But this was a man who could work with no one who wasn't willing to serve him without question, be they judges or legislators, and certainly a deal-breaker for our allies.

His world-view was an American centric one entirely, at a time when China had earned and demanded a role he couldn't conceive of or negotiate. Behind the scenes, he ruled a chaotic White House that was fortunately tested little. Still, the stories that escaped from this White House show that he was not to be contained by any legal constraints, and that he fostered an atmosphere where staff worked at cross-purposes to one another. Their singular focus was on the media, yet they couldn't even manage this successfully, despite the allegiance and sycophancy from Fox.

Finally, COVID-19 was the test they would not pass. Although Trump was due to receive some sympathy from his two impeachments, once America saw the reckless way he managed this pandemic and the huge toll it bore on us, there was little chance he could win the 2020 election. What we saw after the election was an unheard of nothing-to-lose strategy of trying to steal the election by any falsehood necessary, whether within the courts or in the streets. The books are coming out on the market now, but they show that our wildest dreams of what could have been happening in that White House paled when compared to horrid reality of what did.

We likely have to thank a mere few individuals such as Gen. Mark Milley, Mike Pence and such for holding together our country in the moments when it was the most vulnerable to those whose only concern was for power.