Accountability

The more I hear about how West Point is handling the mass cheating incident, the more terrible it seems.

Way to lead by example.

I suppose the true test is how the cadets feel about it. Do they see it as a slap on the wrist, and something they'll try to do smarter next time? Or have they decided not to ever do something like that again?

Anyways. It's New Year's Eve, and I plan to have a very boring night at home.

Here's hoping 2021 is much, much better. 

Investing, Sponsoring, and Other Small Musings

This tweet makes an excellent point. It also reminds me of something else I was thinking about, courtesy of a tweet or article or something (Tchaikovsky's sponsor gave him money on the condition that they never meet) which was that sponsorship is perhaps more important than mentorship.

Or rather, I was trying to think about ways you can expand and make more widespread the personalization and support currently reserved for the few.

The problem is that forcing it doesn't tend to work. Assigning mentors, for example, doesn't generally have the results we'd want. And people tend to connect with and relate the most to people like themselves. Like the soldier who did a stint as an army recruiter, who noticed recruiters tended to recruit those like themselves. (and at my last job, the guy sent to college job fairs tended to select interns a lot like himself.)

Its not necessarily ill-intentioned, just not very helpful for those who don't fit the mold.

And sponsoring is more than mentoring. Sure, it's nice to go to someone who can give you good career advice - but will they nominate you for high visibility projects? Put your name forward for promotion? The sad truth is that plenty of talented people get overlooked and/or taken for granted, and it's hard to shine when you're never given the opportunity to. 

Be nice if the 1% committed to sponsoring someone from the other 99%. Or even the bottom 50%. It's not the sort of thing I can see happening voluntarily though, and there's worse problems with trying to force it.

(Funny, though. Ran into someone in Afghanistan that made me realize being a powerful man came in part by showing how many underlings you could support. Sort of like medieval feudal lords, perhaps? There are some very good reasons we hot away from that, but yet again we come back to the notion that society functions best when a great deal is expected from those who have been given a great deal. To paraphrase Luke 12:48).

Before I continue, I suppose I ought to clarify the part about 'speaking your truth'.

I fully believe that there is an objective truth, mostly with regards to things that can be measured and counted and validated with science. The grass is green (hopefully, if well watered in the spring or summer), and this is something we can go out and see for ourselves.

There is also our own inner truth. It can come from our experiences, the ideas we encounter, the way we relate to those ideas, etc. People can argue about whether those original ideas are true or not, but my experience with them is uniquely my own, and relaying that is my truth. 

Which is also why the things that can't be validated by science are often so subjective. 

When I first started blogging, I generally tried to keep the posts coherent and somewhat well-researched. If I could find an article making the point I remembered I'd link to it. But, well...

This is my own weird little corner of the internet, and if the blogging statistics are right almost nobody is reading it. I've started going more with an attitude (meant in a light-hearted way) of f*** it.

F*** it, I remember reading something, somewhere, and this is what I recall and how it impacted me. I don't necessarily remember where I read it, nor am I 100% sure I remember it accurately. But f*** it, blogging isn't about being 100% accurate anyway. 

I've also decided to keep some of the asides and detours, though I generally circle back to my point. That's closer to how the human brain works anyway, so whatever. I'm not trying to get these things published in scientific journals, or even as op-eds. 

(Speaking of asides - there are some subtleties with 'speak your truth'. For example, if you admire Mohammed a great deal and try to imitate him, you should be very careful that you're not trying to speak Mohammed's truth. Only Mohammed can speak his truth. You can speak about how Mohammed impacted you, and why you admire him, and how you chose to live your life based on him. That's your truth, and yours alone. Don't try to mimic other people, don't try to be other people, or you are missing out on sharing that thing that is indescribably and solely yours.)

So, on to the main topic, the reason I made my earlier post about cloud computing.

I have heard it said that our ability to govern, and how, is related to the technology of the time. More specifically I've heard speculation that there was a size limit to how much the Roman Empire could control, given that communicate depended on how fast people could walk, or travel in horsedrawn vehicles, or sail a boat. That's part of why Roman governors had so much independence. It took too long to send a message to the Emperor, much less get a response. If you were dealing with anything that was time sensitive, you needed the authority to make the decision on the spot.

Our own earlier elections were affected by this. It took time to count the votes and send the results in. It also took time to communicate with whoever you wanted on your staff, and get their responses. The telegraph, telephone, and now the internet have changed that calculus tremendously.

As communication has gotten faster, different problems have developed. There's always been problems with delegating and creating a system that brings the important things to your attention (while delegating the things that can be delegated so that you're not swamped.) Iirc, Philip II struggled with that.

These problems are worse now. 

Previous eras also struggled with getting information in the first place. 

Now we are swimming in it.

A lot of this ties into organizational structures - which often act like my earlier example about the project management triangle. That is, there is no perfect system. There are trade offs, and benefits, and which ones are worth it depend on the circumstances and your own priorities.

The army, as one example, has the structure it does in part because we've learned people can only effectively manage so many things at once. Give a battalion commander a couple of combat companies, a headquarters company, and a staff and that's probably about what one person can manage. The company commander has a few platoons and an XO, and same. (Maybe a little less in number, since s/he's less experienced). But a structure like tends to have many layers between the bottom and the top, which means there are multiple places that can become chokepoints. It can take a while for information to travel up and down the chain, and anyone along the way can slow or speed the transmission rate. (We've all heard of someone going on vacation, and an important document sitting in their inbox until they get back. Sometimes it's even more deliberate than that, too.)

So you get people who try to 'flatten' the structure. Take out a few layers. That can run the risk of overwhelming the people everything is funneling to, but it can also take out some of the lag and bloat.

Technology and communication plays a role in this. The Secretary of Defense, for example, can now send out an e-mail and know that it will reach every. single. person. as soon as they read their e-mail. And the cost of doing so is ridiculously small.

Our companies can now have a zoom meeting where thousands of us listen to our CEO, and we can even ask questions. Verbally or via keyboard.

That means you can flatten a hierarchy to a far greater degree then you could before, but you still have the problem of potentially overwhelming the person at the center of it all. The CEO, other members of the C-Suite... various other people in positions of power and authority.

Now, I've complained before about how a lot of our processes are impersonal and make us feel like we're just a cog in the machine. That's in part because the solutions of one generation become the problems of the next. 

Or rather - policies, procedures, and structure are important. They have helped us create systems that can produce the exact same thing, to a consistent standard. The fact that computer memory cards are consistently the same size, so that we can upgrade with new cards (so long as they fit the socket) is amazing. That we have screws and nuts and bolts of standard sizes, good enough that we can go out and buy anything labeled that size and expect it to fit, is awesome. Impersonal though the army MTOE can be, making sure that your staff has someone specifically responsible for comms, or supplies, or operations... all of these help make sure we're consistent. Yes, every team changes whenever a person leaves or joins. Everyone is different. And the team will adjust a bit (taking up the slack for the weaker members, whether it's one staff officer taking on more duties or a high speed subordinate stepping up.)

The modern industrial age required quite a bit of that to work. Clearly defined standards, clearly defined roles, clearly defined chains of command - there are quite a few people who would be hopelessly lost without it.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention some socioeconomic differences. Or rather, even though we've developed machine-like structures, the people with the best connections often manage to get around them. This causes quite a bit of resentment, in that most of us are at the mercy of impersonal and overpowering bureaucracy that the well-connected are free to ignore. Take the current vaccine rollout (and numerous people upset that the very people who minimized coronavirus and downplayed it used their connections to get a vaccine before high risk people like the elderly and hardworking nurses and doctors are still waiting.) Similar issue with the 'Good Old Boy Network'. Either everyone should have the same access and privilege, or nobody should. Letting some people get cushy jobs without qualifications just because they're well-connected, while others work two or three jobs and can barely make ends meet... and are constantly told they don't have the qualifications for anything better... it's a breeding ground for anger and resentment. 

Now, I've talked a bit about the Industrial Age, and a little bit about what I've heard some people call the Information Age. The latter, if we use the term, is new enough that we're still sorting out all the ramifications. Massive amounts of data and fast communication is just one part of it...

The cloud computing structures I talked about are another. Not just in and of themselves, but as a symbol of some of the differences.

The legacy structure - the capacity planning, the systems businesses created to figure out how much they should buy and when they should replace their systems - are also examples of the policies and procedures I mentioned earlier. It was important work, it helped businesses ensure they had the resources they need, but it was also slow and not very customizable. You couldn't react very quickly to change in demand, and when you had just invested thousands or millions of dollars in new hardware you were probably not going to buy anything new until it reached the end of its lifecycle. Not unless the benefits of upgrading greatly exceeded the sunken costs you'd already put into your system. (Hence why businesses may still be operating on older versions of Windows Server, or RedHat, or whatever.)

We have unprecedented resources for combining industrial age consistency with a level of customization that hadn't existed before. Or rather, you could have a master craftsman customize anything if you had the money for it. It was much harder to do so for the less well off. (Also why clothing was ridiculously expensive back in the day, whereas now we can all get cheap and ill fitting clothes at a low enough cost that most of us have wardrobes full of things we never wear.)

The cloud computing structure highlights this. You can customize the resources you use to fit your particular need, even as you draw on the cloud provider to ensure consistent and reliable access. There's the potential for great resilience (though also potential for great vulnerabilities. Consider how the Nashville bombing took out the internet and cell phone service for a large region. Or the recent AWS outage, and I think Google recently had something similar. Not sure what the root cause was, whether it was an internal problem or something else. I'm digressing again, though.)

I'm not sure I can foresee all the changes heading our way... Heck, I'm still kind of interested in seeing whether 3D printing will make a difference. New technology seems to go in these cycles where people hype it up, then it fails to live up to the hype and they forget about it. Then people get a better sense of how to use it, and it comes back and actually transforms industries. (Something like that.) 3D printing has the potential to totally change logistics, shipping, customization, and storage. After all, if you can make the exact part, exactly as demanded, in a 3D printing facility that serves a particular region... then you don't need to store the manufactured parts in a warehouse. Just ship the raw components to the 3D printing site as needed. (I am not saying it's going to happen. I don't know near enough about 3D printing, or it's current status. But if we got to the point where the bulk of our manufactured goods could be created that way, it would change a lot of things.)

I do think, though, that we have the potential to combine the benefits of mass manufacturing, standards, and consistency with the customization and personalization that had been missed before.

And there's probably the potential for similar changes in organizational structures, if we can sort out the processes and procedures for doing so.

Cloud Computing, Background Knowledge for a Future Post

My company is pushing for us to learn more about cloud computing (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, Google, etc.) Since we will be working with whatever our clients choose, that generally means learning all of the above.

Anyways, it's interesting seeing the business from this side of things. Most of them - Amazon in particular - are known more for what the average person uses it for. Ordering all sorts of goods and services. (I wonder how much of Jeff Bezo's fortune comes from the consumer side of things, and how much from cloud computing and serving other businesses.)

I want to talk a little bit about another topic, but understanding the cloud will help with that discussion. The training sometimes feels like a really long sales pitch, but the point they're making (and the benefits they're selling) are undeniable. Let me explain.

Your average person is most familiar with the PC. Well, these days it might be a laptop (and many do everything with a cell phone), but most are at least a little bit familiar with how a personal computer works. 

Maybe you've got gigabytes of music, or videos, or movies. The computer doesn't access all of them all the time, but it's saved on your hard drive. You might even buy an external hard drive, which you can attach to your computer if/when you want to access anything.

Sometimes your computer stops working. Maybe an update went wrong, or the hard drive failed. Maybe you got a 'blue screen of death'. You cuss and grumble and either fix it or find an expert who can fix it for you.

A business can't afford that, though. Customers expect the ability to access a website, to make a purchase, to check their balance or file a dispute 24/7. It's one thing to lose out on an hour or two of work because you can't get the blasted computer to work, it's another thing for a business to lose out on millions of customer transactions. (And if outages happen too often, you may lose your customers entirely.)

So quite a bit of what makes the business side of things so different is ensuring high availability (HA) of services, as well as making sure you can operate at the necessary scale. It's one thing to use your PC to play a movie every evening. It's another thing to stream video to millions of people all at the same time.

And oh, btw. That heavy business level use puts far more wear and tear on business computers than an individual puts on their laptop or PC. You, as an individual, might have a hard drive that lasts well beyond the time when you replace your computer. A business? They're using and abusing their machines continuously, so failures are far more likely.

Okay. Let's talk about the old legacy way of doing things before I start discussing the cloud.

You're a business, and you offering up some sort of product. Maybe it's just a web site where people can reserve spots on a summer kayaking trip, maybe it's a small business that sells cute little knick knacks. Whatever. You need a website, you need a way of letting people look through your catalog, and you need a way of handling the purchasing. You probably have a database to store all the information on your product, plus maybe your customers (if they create accounts).

You need to make sure your website is up 100% of the time, or as close to that as possible. You have a computer (or two or three) that acts as a server. It serves up the website, which customers (i.e. client machines) access. But one server might go down, so what you really want is two or three computers serving up the website - and a load balancer that receives the website requests and sends them to whatever server has the lightest workload.

You have to figure out what the likely requirements are going to be. How many people will access your site at any given time? Large businesses might have a department called 'capacity planning', which tries to predict what sort of traffic you'll get and make sure you have enough resources to manage it. Is two servers enough? Three? How large do they need to be? What's their processing power? When will they get old and obsolete and need to be replaced?

Getting the calculation wrong can have serious consequences. If you don't have the customers you expect, a lot of your equipment will be idle. Hardly doing anything but collecting dust. 

The opposite is also a problem - if some crazy fad makes you popular, you might have far more traffic than you expected. More than your servers can handle, which means it starts dropping requests and potential customers can no longer access your website.

It's even worse if your business is seasonal. That kayaking site might get a lot of hits in the summer, and almost nothing in winter. The site selling knick knacks might sell a lot during the holiday season, and almost nothing the rest of the year. Which causes problems for capacity planning.

Do you purchase what you would need during the busiest time of the year, and let the equipment sit idle the rest of the time? Do you purchase enough to satisfy average use (and maybe a little more), but accept the potential losses when the busy season rolls around and your site gets overwhelmed?

Now... let's talk about cloud computing.

For most users, cloud computing is practically invisible. You surf the net, you access a site, and you have no idea what is going on behind the scenes. You get your website or your streaming video, or a game on your cell phone, and as long as it works it's all good.

But the business world has long worked with virtual machines. After all, your computer functions because of a bunch of 1's and 0's, stored in sequence. You can copy over those 1's and 0's and run them on a much larger machine to do the same thing. Hence, a 'virtual machine', that operates just like your personal computer or laptop. It's just that it's one of many programs running on an enterprise level computer. (There's a lot of technical terms here - a hypervisor that hosts images. I'm trying to keep this simple so I'm kind of avoiding them.)

They're still running on a physical computer somewhere, sure. But you can make a virtual duplicate of just about any of the hardware you used to manage yourself. There's actually quite a bit of advantage in doing so. After all, for most home users they generally use only a fraction of their computer's processing power. If you're on a windows machine and you open the Task Manager (just right click on the task bar. A menu pops up and Task Manager is one of the options) there's a section for 'Performance' where you can see how much your CPU - i.e. central processing unit, or computer processor - is using. Mine is fluctuating around 10-15%.

For various reasons businesses like to have one application per machine, but that one application may not use a lot of processing power. If you make them virtual, then the processor on the machine hosting them can process everything more efficiently. 10% to your web server, 10% to your database, it can allocate CPU time as needed.

Cloud computing takes that idea and runs with it. There are still extremely powerful physical machines running everything. Somewhere. The cloud provider decides where, and does the capacity planning, and manages all of that.

The business just uses a small fraction of that hardware to run the virtual machines it needs for its business. Instead of two or three web servers sitting in a closet somewhere with a load balancer, there are two or three virtual web servers and a load balancer operating on a cloud provider's machine somewhere (along with other companies, and only the cloud provider knows how many are on each actual piece of hardware.)

Here's where the advantages come into play.

Instead of trying to predict how much your business will grow over the next year (or five) and purchasing the hardware needed to support that, you can order just what you need to handle your current level of traffic. If your business grows and you need more web servers, you can easily make a copy of your existing virtual machine and create another. Those two web servers easily become three or four (or ten, or twenty) as needed.

You can easily adjust to seasonal differences. You don't have to try to plan for the Christmas rush, or the March/April tax season. You don't have your machine sitting idly by during slow periods.

The cloud provider hands all the icky hardware decisions. They get the physical machines, they handle the physical network cables, they handle the high availability processes that allow your virtual machine to continue running even if some of the hardware breaks.

The cloud also makes it easier to come up with disaster recovery plans. If one site gets hit by a tornado or earthquake it's not too hard to have another duplicate site up and running some distance away. (This is more complicated then it sounds, and a Disaster Recovery plan on paper might not be as good as it needs to be... which is why good businesses actually test their Disaster Recovery procedures. But that's another topic.)

There are a lot of buzz words used to describe these benefits. Scalability. Pay-as-you-go. Software-as-a-service. They describe a very real, tangible benefit to businesses. After all, that small kitschy business doesn't really want to spend a lot of time trying to decide how much hardware they need to manage their web traffic. They just want to make and sell cute little knick knacks. That kayaking business doesn't really want to worry about whether they need to order another server, or retire their existing equipment before it breaks. They just want to help people schedule a fun and exciting adventure.

And cloud providers can generally work on a scale that makes them efficient than having one hundred small businesses managing their own equipment. 

It's interesting, though, that transitioning to the cloud generally creates a more confusing structure (even if it is more efficient and scales more easily.)

The Tree of Liberty

 We may have been too complacent.

Let me circle back to that. I'll return to my statement, I promise.

I've been thinking about some of my political science classes - one on interest groups and party politics in particular. The class was fascinating for a variety of reasons. Like most white midwesterners, I grew up thinking that all politicians were lying scoundrels and that politics was a deeply corrupt enterprise (which probably says something about me, that I chose to study it despite that. I mostly would argue that if you avoid politics for those reasons you're leaving the field to the ones who actually are lying scoundrels. That's overly simplistic, like always, but not my focus right now.) The class was interesting, because it gave me a way to reconcile a bit of cognitive dissonance. After all, one of my rules of thumb is that people generally don't wake up and decide to be evil. If politicians don't think of themselves as corrupt or evil, then how and why do we have such a bad impression of them? Figuring that out was critical in determining what sorts of warning signs indicate when you're crossing a line. (This is, again, a long and complicated topic that isn't really my focus right now.)

One of the things that stuck with me was the role of lobbyists and truth. We were taught that knowingly telling lies would destroy your ability as a lobbyist. Politicians might rely on think tanks, interest groups, and lobbyists to do the long and complicated research that they're not staffed for... but if one of those groups was discovered to be concealing the truth and lying, no politician would rely on their research. 

Hence why I generally accepted the idea that incorrect analysis had more to do with biases, groupthink, and other failures in our ability to reason rather than deliberate malevolence.

But we have seen a spate of lying, especially in the last year, and I wonder if that analysis still holds true. That's part of why I started commenting about 'bad faith actors'. It's hard to believe that the people who claimed coronavirus would kill maybe 10,000 people were honestly mistaken. Or that the shenanigans I see online to hide the toll and push for everyone to open back up... how can that be typical human biases and denial? There feels to be too much effort put into it, from bad statistics to misleading news articles. 

It feels - deliberate. Intentional. To the point where the people pushing it are either terribly deluded or knowingly evil.

I hate how dramatic that sounds, it's all judgy and makes things sound black and white. And yet I have no other word for people who understood that a lot of people would die if we didn't handle covid properly... and just didn't care.

Where was that understanding that, regardless of whether you liked the results or not, you had to be honest? Where were the politicians who stopped accepting meetings with think tanks and lobbyists that knowingly gave false information? 

Democracy, the social contract, the wisdom of crowds - for these to function correctly we need good faith actors. That doesn't mean everyone has to agree...

One of the things about politics is that you have to deal with reality. Where there are limits and constraints and you often have to choose between one value and another. It's sort of like the classic project management triangle:

You can pick 2 of 3:
a) Good
b) Cheap 

c) Fast

Everyone values all three of these, but having something be good and cheap means it's generally not fast. Having something be cheap and fast means it's probably not good. And having something good and fast is probably not cheap. When you can't get all three at once, what do you prioritize?

Politics is like that. We all generally care about things - like freedom, education, infrastructure - not having masses of people dying, not having a lot of homeless people on the streets.

That's also why 'red states' and 'blue states' is misleading. Or rather, even two red states will prioritize things differently. Same with blue states. I don't envy the people trying to shape a coherent national policy given the wide variety of differences here, though I would encourage pushing most of those down to the state level unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. (Don't take that as a 'states rights' argument. Not until you understand what I'd consider a compelling reason to handle something at the federal level.)

The marketplace of ideas is a fine thing - when honesty is valued and dishonesty punished. It becomes something else entirely when bad faith actors knowingly push bad information. 

This is where the complacency comment comes into play. I thought we'd had a shared understanding on the importance of the social contract, the marketplace of ideas, honesty, etc. I know every nation/state/society has it's fringe elements that would love to overturn the status quo. We've had our militias, for example. And the Branch Davidians in Waco. We've also got anarchists (who may have an overly bad rap, but were definitely responsible for the Wall Street bombing in 1920). 

It's a bit like cancer... a healthy person is able to keep cancerous cells in check, it's only when things get out of whack and the cancer metastasizes that you run into problems. 

It's one thing to have some two-bit radio show host spewing a late night conspiracy. It's an entirely different thing for the President of the United States to spend 45 minutes spewing electoral fraud conspiracy to an audience of millions.

And the support and silence from the Republican Party and from right wing news sources is particularly telling.

They either are marks themselves (believing the BS), or they're going along with it despite the damage it's doing. In other words, they're letting the cancer metastasize.

We were too complacent, in thinking that most of our politicians and business people understood and accepted the importance of democracy, of the social contract, and of honest analysis and reporting.

I had long resisted the cynical claims that 'they're all just in it for power', and that the system is 'too corrupt', 'too broken'.

Seeing what Trump has done to us, seeing what Republicans have allowed Trump to do to us, seeing what a group of out-of-touch plutocrats and oligarchs are willing to support - it gets harder to do so.

The next couple of years will be particularly telling, I think. First is making sure Trump leaves office, of course. He doesn't look like he's going to do so without a fight, and we'll still have to deal with the millions of Trump supporters that believe his lies.

But we also have to address the underlying reasons why Trump came to be. The disconnect between the average American and the oligarchs/plutarchs. The racism, yes, but also the fact that we've utterly failed at passing significant infrastructure bills for over a decade. Even though the idea is wildly popular. We have to address the people who have decided they want government to be shrunk down to the point where they can drown it in the bathtub... an attitude that has contributed to the sense that it's 'smart' to find ways not to pay your taxes, thereby making it very difficult for the government to pay for things (like infrastructure, or education). 

I can see them making the point that these shouldn't be government responsibilities in the first place, and that might make sense - if the wealthy were therefore funding these things privately. But they aren't, are they? 

I suppose, if the majority of us truly want to live in some libertarian ideal where there's absolutely no government regulation - and they're all truly okay with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in a pandemic. Or having Flint-like water problems all across the US. Or having our bridges collapse and roads fail...

I mean, I personally think it'd be a pretty horrible place to live, and I won't vote for it... but if enough Americans choose that then I guess we get the government we deserve. 

I just think it should be an honest choice, and Americans should fully understand what they're choosing. (I'm fairly sure they aren't choosing that when they fully understand the choice, which is part of why we're dealing with such blatant dishonesty.)

How Being Poor is Expensive

A Twitter thread with numerous examples of how poor people wind up paying more than the rest.

Trump's Command Climate

I don't think I can share this to Facebook, since the people I would want to read it would probably tune out as soon as the extremely poor opinion of Trump appeared.

But it expresses a lot of what I find so horrible about Trump's term in office.

Its not so much his policies you see (though many were awful). It's exactly this. Ignoring all the checks and balances, seeing every one of them as an obstacle to bully his way through... And in the process destroying a system and making it utterly dependent on him.

Its like..  

Like, the army functions as a giant machine. Nobody can be irreplaceable, so we have MOS's and staff positions and a bunch of policies and procedures that make sure we're able to be where we want to be, with the resources we need to succeed. That's a large part of what makes us powerful (even if it has its drawbacks, especially in making people feel like cogs in a machine).

And he governs more like old school war chieftains, where it's all about being the biggest baddest guy around. Something our military has long since learned is terrible. I think John Keegan had a book on that, maybe Mask of Command?

Its a pretty terrible leadership style for a modern society. 

Merry Christmas

I will try not to doomscroll today, though I'll probably make an exception the explosion in Tennessee, as we learn more about what happened. 

Putting On a Back Burner

An interesting thread on federal budgets, computer security, and why it's hard to secure federal agencies.

An Example of RCA

An article that asks the '5 why's', and digs deep into why black men are particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. 

Some Light Officer Humor

https://twitter.com/Doctrine_Man/status/1341388464416313345?s=19

Business Skills, Personal Skills

Quite a bit of business advice is about networking (something I personally suck at. I get the importance, intellectually. I've even gone to networking events to try to build contacts and stuff but... Idk. You're supposed to regularly reach out with info of interest, so when you reach out for something important - like a reference, or job - it's just one part of the relationship and not like you only contact someone when you need something. I just... Don't. I don't think I'd ever want to be known as the person who always knows where the part is, for similar reasons. It feels like work, it feels forced... And I'm getting off track here. Back to the point.)

Networking matters. What I find kind of interesting is that those are the exact same skills needed to build relationships. And yet we still have a lot of gender based expectations for that. Men often rely on their wife or girlfriend to stay in touch with their family. To call brothers or sisters or nieces or nephews (and in some cases even their own parents). If you can network yourself into a good career, you also ought to be able to build and maintain a strong relationship with your spouse and children.

That we act as though these things are separate says something.

I was actually thinking about that for another reason though. I'm business we have this thing about the '5 why's'. About asking 'why' repeatedly in order to get at the root cause of a problem. It doesn't have to be exactly 5,of course. The point is that it can help you find long term solutions.

For example. We had made a configuration change, per request. A few weeks later that change was reverted. We'd updated some urls and now they were set to the old ones. Fixing it wasn't hard, but why did the old urls come back?

We, like many companies dealing with IT, have version control for our code. Wasn't hard to dig into the history and see that the code changed when someone on our sister team synced it with another repository. 

I don't want to bore anyone with the details of how and why those repos needed synced, and what we did to make sure that our changes weren't reverted again. I just wanted to illustrate some why and how you can dig deeper into a problem. 

And to point out that this, again, is the exact same skillset that can be used in other areas. 

For example, our race issues in the US. 

I've never actually been taught about critical race theory. Like almost any idea that influences enough people, I'm sure there's at least a grain of truth that makes it useful. And there are also some people who will take it to the extreme. (there's always somebody. Like... The map is not the territory, and most ideas are useful for creating 'maps' that are useful for one reason or another, but inevitably people start acting as though they're all more than just overly simplified tools used for specific purposes).

Anyways. I might be wrong, but the term itself implies thinking critically about race. Asking those '5 why's'. Like 'black people are disproportionately poor. Why is that?'

Fewer of them own homes. Why?

And as you dig into that, you can soon see how people who were freed with nothing. Who then only had access to jobs that paid a pittance. Who were unable to take out mortgages for their homes... There's an entire slew of reasons that it was very difficult for them to build up generational wealth, and to have the resources for things like college or starting a business.

That doesn't say anything about what we should do once we've dug into the root causes ofc. But it's awfully telling that so many people resist doing the RCA (root cause analysis).

I can't speak for minorities, but I personally don't care about making people feel guilty, or bad. That honestly just gets in the way of fixing things.

But we can't fix things if we refuse to do that analysis. 

Carousel Scams

Why share an article about a complicated EU illegal money making scheme?

Two reasons. The first because it's an example of how organized criminals can exploit international borders. Related to this, it hints at the scale and complexity of such organizations, and how problematic it can be if they capture the judiciary. (Given what just happened politically in the states, that's something that really struck.)

Second. It's an interesting unintended consequences of the Value Added Tax. I vaguely recall European countries get more of 5heir funding through sales taxes? I think I remember some paperwork to use if I wanted to avoid paying the VAT. Anyways, the US is a hodgepodge of tax systems, so there are sales taxes... But the federal government uses income tax. I've heard a few people argue that shifting to something like a VAT would be better (though since it taxes consumption and part of our current problem is essentially hoarding by ultra rich people who only use a fraction of their wealth on purchases, hence why giving the average American a tax return - which they almost immediately spend - stimulates the economy more. In other words, a tax scheme that discourages consumption is probably not the best idea in our current set of circumstances).

In the unlikely event our tax code changed, this would be the kind of abuse we'd need to look for. 

Speaking Your Truth

 Now that I think about it, trying to create an environment where everyone can 'speak your truth' underlies quite a bit of my thinking.

Gerrymandering, for example... is a problem because it means our represents don't truly reflect the will of the people. They aren't 'speaking their truth' for that particular region, because some voices are amplified and others are suppressed.

Part of the reason I disliked the trend towards pushing out 'RINOs' and 'Blue Dog Democrats' is because our nation is not really composed of red states or blue states. Or rather, Illinois (a blue state) has Chicago... but downstate Illinois is generally red, and a lot more like their neighbor across the border in Indiana.

Indiana is 'red', but I lived in South Bend (where Joe Kernan was mayor, and later became a Democratic governor of Indiana) and Bloomington - a college town that, like many, trends blue.

Because our system favors two parties (first past the post elections, winner-takes-all, etc) those parties tend to be 'big tents' with a variety of different reasons people support one over the other. That also means two different blue states or two different red states can still be wildly different. Colorado leans more towards the libertarian side (legalized marijuana, support for the 2nd Amendment) whereas many of the Bible belt states lean more towards the Christian conservative. It means it's hard to say how many people voting blue or red are truly prioritizing one issue or another, which is also part of why I wish we did have something like mixed member proportional representation. Speak our truth, reflect the will of all people. Not the views of whoever has managed to get a lock on the national party.

Even within the more red or blue regions of a state, we're all mixed up. That article talking about a rural town in Kansas (I think) that got hit hard by the coronavirus said 80% of them voted Trump. That means 20% didn't. 

(This is part of why muttering about seceding is mostly just that. There'd be a helluva lot of things to work out to divide us up by political views. Tbf, quite a bit of that is happening on it's own. Self-selection, the big sort. People have been complaining about the relatives on the other side of the political aisle for ages, some even going so far as to cut them off. People move because they're tired of being a political minority - like a couple of my own relatives, who left Oklahoma because it was 'too red'.)

I understand the pressures driving these trends. They're there throughout all of history.

Harnessing the wide variety of opinions out there so that they drive everyone forward is tough. It's like the old cliche about herding cats. 

It also takes a lot of maturity to hear criticism and not take it personally. To appreciate and respect the 'loyal opposition', and use their feedback to make improvements. It's all too easy to see it as yet another roadblock. Yet another frustrating obstacle.

 To decide that 'if you're not with us, your against us' and punish people for signs of disloyalty.

This is, btw, why I think libertarians have cognitive dissonance regarding Trump. I've heard people on the right complain about how extremists on the left can also be fascist.

There's a bit of truth to that criticism. Or perhaps we should say 'authoritarian'. I don't really know the exact semantics for the proper word, but what I think they're trying to say is this: How people deal with opposing viewpoints, how they design their decision-making processes - those have a great deal to do with whether or not they become dictators on a larger scale. In some ways it doesn't matter what the larger political goal is - those who need absolute loyalty in order to accomplish it, who punish opposition by arresting or exiling their opponents for purely political reasons - they're all creating the exact same type of system. 

And it's a pretty terrible one, tbh. Every time it happens it has a tendency to go poorly, for a lot of the reasons I've described in this blog. They punish the truthtellers, so they only have 'yes-men' and women telling them what they want to hear. Which means they make faulty decisions, because they're not really aware of the facts on the ground. They are threatened by anything that makes them look 'weak', even the smallest little thing (which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) Their control of the levers of power mean that nobody else is able to do anything without convincing them first, and there are very limited ways of doing that. Talented people become threats, and thus targets. All of this also means that change becomes hard, and the system is slow to react. After all, talented people have either been driven out or taught not to take initiative... so things keep getting pushed up the chain. Which means people higher up have to make more and more of the decisions, which slows the process down...

And so on, and so forth. Death by a thousand cuts. A million and one little things that all pile up to create disaster.

There are alternatives. Of course there are.

They aren't easy, of course. Or may be just difficult in different ways. It involves building systems where people are encouraged to speak their truths, which comes with a lot of challenges. There are entire libraries of books about things like that - change management, business leadership, organizational behavior... psychology. Sociology. 

Helps to have experience too. Naturally. A leadership pipeline where people learn on the job and/or put into practice the things they learn. It's one thing to read about 'groupthink', to hear about change management - it's quite another to recognize when you're in a situation where it applies and to figure out a way of dealing with it.

Still, I think the end goal is worth it. Just feeling like your opinions are heard and appreciated does wonders for morale, as does feeling like you're able to push for the changes that really matter to you. Having a process for doing that, one that draws on all the different takes on an issue (when done right) can lead to solutions that are effective, nuanced, and less likely to have undesired and unintended consequences. They tend to be more well thought out, and take into account challenges that might otherwise have been overlooked.

There's a lot more I could write about this, but it's enough for now. The only thing I'll add is this - creating such a system also means taking seriously any attempt to ignore, marginalize, or penalize unwanted opinions. That's true for BLM, and also true for white supremacy. I would argue that white supremacy threatens the system in a way that BLM doesn't, since white supremacists are essentially trying to 'ignore, marginalize, and penalize' the people they don't like, whereas BLM supporters are generally trying NOT to be ignored, marginalized, and penalized... but that's for another time.

On Integrity and Persuasion

 Woodrow Wilson believed in the League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations... and he spent his last days campaigning to an American public that just didn't want to hear it. He didn't live to see the US join the UN.

I think about that, because I think that's an important commentary on... well. Democracy, the will of the people, and the social contract.

Sometimes the public doesn't go along with what we think is right. Maybe the timing isn't right, maybe it's too early. Maybe you're the one who is wrong and they'll never go along. But if we are to hold true to our founding beliefs, we have agreed that this is how the game gets played.

You can campaign. You can protest. You can write op-eds and make speeches. And then people vote. And if they don't vote the way we want, then we just have to keep working at the campaign.

I didn't like what I had heard about Obama using his executive powers to get around Congress, because workarounds to deal with a broken system don't generally fix said system. I thought that the longer, slower, harder (but more appropriately American way) would be to campaign loudly about all the things he couldn't do due to lack of control in Congress.

And in the next election, if people wanted what he was selling he'd gain more seats.

That's overly simplistic and naive, I know. Incumbents have a tremendous advantage in keeping their seats, mid-terms almost never favor the incumbent, convincing people to pay attention to complicated and boring messaging like that is hard. Most elections are more about local politics then national, etc.

So also work on fixing those things. And understand that (no matter how much you despise the other side) everyone who has been elected represents a segment of our population. I may personally think they are wrong, but I wouldn't ever completely disregard that opinion because doing so also means disregarding the millions of Americans who, for whatever reason, voted for that official.

What's currently going on undermines all of that, undermines the peaceful mechanisms we've had to resolve our differences, and threatens to destroy the social contract.

I won't dwell on that because you either know that already, or you're probably never going to be persuaded. I want to add on something a little different.

It's always challenging, and frustrating, when you believe in something deeply and other people just don't seem to get it. Sometimes it even feels hopeless, or like a lost cause. I wrote the other day about how illogical we are, but if logic is useless then what hope do we have?

And I generally think - why do I value logic so much? If we're hopelessly irrational, if being unbiased and logical seems so impossible, then how did we ever develop such strong preferences for logic and rationality?

It can't truly be that hopeless. 

Answering those sorts of questions sometimes means digging deep. It means realizing that what seems like a simple statement 'using logic is good' actually comes from a deep foundation. On the importance of science, critical thinking. That there is a truth (at least for some things), that that truth can be discovered. That we can create experiments and test hypothesis and use our minds to reason things out.

I didn't bring that up because I wanted to actually discuss the importance of logic and rationalism. (I lean towards what Khalil Gibran said about it.)

I brought it up because of the process I described. Of trying to persuade people, digging deep into our reasons for believing... and the thing is, if it persuades us then it has a pretty decent change of persuading others. Going through that process helps make good arguments that can change people's minds.

Arguing in such a way also comes from a deep place of integrity. Not 'integrity' in the sense of 'someone who is honest and forthright', but 'integrity' in the sense of 'integral', and 'whole'.

You are speaking your truth, and I have the distinct impression that speaking in such a way resonates more. You can call it 'speaking from the heart' or saying things that have 'the ring of truth', whatever you want to describe it. It can be powerful.

The reason I talk about bad faith actors so disparagingly isn't just about how they're trying to manipulate people into doing what they want. It's not just about the arrogance involved in thinking you know better than everyone else, and are entitled to lie to them  in order to get them to do what you are utterly convinced is right.

It's also because doing so loses that integrity. If you think one thing privately, but argue differently in public simply because you think that's what will get people to support your cause, then you are not speaking your truth. What are you scared of? You believe those things for some reason. Afraid that if you say it publicly, if you let everyone hear and argue, that someone will point out the flaws in your arguments?

Are your beliefs that poorly thought out, that weak? Maybe they should be challenged then. 

Either way, what you are trying to do is completely at odds with our deeply rooted belief in the social contract and the importance of government by the people, for the people, and of the people.

Post-Election Thoughts

 I feel I need to write a bit more about my previous post.

It's just... complicated. As is almost anything important, I suppose.

If it were anyone other than the sitting president, I think a case could clearly be made for subversion of authority if not outright sedition. But... he is the president. Even aside from whether a president is capable of sedition (I hinted at that problem before, when I asked who he was asking people to rise up against) there's a few problems with our current situation. Namely the difference between absolute immunity and quality immunity from legal action for our elected officals. You remember me saying that we can only choose the consequences? There are some valid reasons to push for immunity. We don't want our leaders having to worry about getting sued for every little thing, or have political battles become even more about who can pay for litigation rather than who can convince the most Americans to vote for their cause. At the same time, nobody should be above the law. 

Nobody. 

For that reason alone, I lean against absolute immunity, but I'll admit it opens the doors to at least some abuse. Both have consequences (i.e. the risk of massive litigation against a sitting president, vs the risk that a sitting president will act as though he or she is above the law).

I think you can mitigate against the former... restrict what qualifies so that it doesn't interfere with what's required to do the job. Exactly where that line is drawn is the sort of thing that gets hashed out over the years.

I don't know exactly where we are, legally speaking, in how this is interpreted and what it means for legal action against Trump, that's the sort of thing you need lawyers for. (is it a capital crime? Doesn't the government have to bring suit for capital crime? I can't see our current justice system doing that. And, again, it opens the doors for future politicians to abuse the option. Sort of like how even though Richard Nixon seemed appropriate for impeachment, Republicans then used the same process against Bill Clinton in a move that was widely seen as inappropriate for the crime... which then increased some of the cynicism and willingness to overlook the character of a candidate, but I digress.)

We do have impeachment... but that's already been tried. And failed. And there's no reason to believe we'll have anything other more ugly partisan division if we tried it again.

Which means part of the reason people are reluctant to address this is because it's hard to say what or how we can do pretty much anything.

Oh, if all the states can get together and file some stupid electoral lawsuit I suppose the same can be done in reverse. And I'm sure there's libel laws and other types of things that can be done to make things painful. (Though, again as I noted in a previous post, opening that door could be a bad idea. I'm not sure I'd want to deal with the consequences of going that route. Btw... another very real problem with what Trump and his supporters are doing right now is that the result they're pushing for would throw out millions of legitimate votes. Again, not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that's why various judges have said they didn't have standing. Trying to say that ignoring the wishes of millions of legitimate voters is required to make up for whatever fraud they think happened destroys the very notion of a social contract, or democracy. Some lone idiot deciding to vote by mail-in ballot and go in person, or to vote for their dead grandfather as well as themselves - that's not enough to ignore the votes of millions.)

Anyways.... so what do we do?

I'm not exactly a fan of the idea, but in a weird way ignoring it sometimes works in our favor. That is, some of Trump's own supporters don't pay attention and/or dismiss his attempts to stir up trouble as political theater, which means they're not exactly rising up on his behalf. If enough of them ignore it, then maybe we can get through to Biden's presidency without things getting ugly. (I have no idea how many people are just grumbling, but not planning to do anything... and how many seriously intend to cause trouble.)

Not drawing attention, not provoking, not making a fuss... sometimes seems like a safe way to survive until Trump is finally removed from power.

But there will be consequences to that, just as there's consequences for going in the other direction. One of which is that Trump and his supporters keep upping the ante. They keep coming up with these insane ideas that I definitely wouldn't have predicted, and then somehow get enough people on board to go through with them. It is, quite frankly, nuts.

I am exceedingly concerned about what I see going on right now because it's not just Trump. It's not just one person taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. It's all the people standing around enabling him. Guarding him. Taking a turn with the sledgehammer themselves. I have absolutely no idea if anyone is being blackmailed, or if it's fear of getting on Trump's bad side, or what...

Though it's exactly that sort of behavior that makes me think Libertarians aren't worthy of the name. (How much liberty do you think you're going to have from someone who bullies anyone who stands up to him, punishes anyone who disagrees with him, and will go to such lengths to win? If you try, you'll probably end up like a few of those Russian oligarchs Putin dealt with.)

Something needs to be done, but I see few people with the capability and fortitude to do anything about it. Biden is probably handling it best by biding his time, keeping calm, and continuing to work on transitioning.

Maybe whatever we do has to be done once Biden takes office (and I'm not entirely sure yet what 'it' will be. I might ponder that and write more some other time) but something has to be done. We need to make sure that we never, ever, ever get this close to subverting the will of the people again.

On Election Fraud

I'm sharing this thread not to say anything about whether or not there's fraud involved, so much as an example of why certain tactics are short sighted.

People who justify doing something to win rarely seem to realize that the same tactic they used can and probably will be used against them. That, and it can lead to closer scrutiny for yourself as well as others. 

Its also really, really, really hard to put the genie back in the bottle. 

Which I suppose can be a good thing. That is, in order to restore trust in our elections we'll need to pass legislation like @jennycohn1 has suggested. Have an audit trail, paper records, secure the voting machines from the internet and unauthorized access...

If what the link above suggested has any merit whatsoever, those necessary changes will hurt the people who started *waves hand* all this.

In which case, they completely deserve it. 

People Being People 🤣

This thread... Smh 🤣

On Biblical Truth

Although she's speaking of Jewish history and tradition, she explains rather well something I've come to believe. 

The Uncomfortable Bits

 There's part of the current situation I've sort of been glossing over, and I want to pull it out and look at it a bit more clearly.

Please talk about 'damage to our democracy', but they don't go into a lot of detail. Partly because, well...

It's like talking about structural damage to a bridge. You can see the cracks, you can see them getting bigger... You know that somebody needs to fix the damage... 

but you don't really know when or how the bridge is going to break. It might last another ten years, or break tomorrow. 

You also don't know what sort of load it will have to bear. It could be all the traffic is fairly light. Moderate. And the bridge can last a while longer.  Or you might get a heavy convoy adding stress after stress.

In one sense, there's always people muttering about 'damage', and nothing seems to happen. Right? The bridge is still standing, cars and trucks are still driving over it. Study after study has shown people distrust government more than ever. I don't know if you can say that it started with Vietnam, but there's a definite downward trend since that time.

It's been there my entire life, tbh. I don't know if the way people stopped caring about character is one of the results of that trend or not, but I've hated that ever since I heard of it. "All politicians lie. Character doesn't matter, I'll just vote for whoever supports the policies I want." (I think I heard this at least once in association with the Clintons, because regardless of whether it was impeachable or not Bill Clinton did lie. Ofc, the Republicans trying to impeach him were rather guilty of the same sins, so in some ways the whole fiasco is an indictment of the entire Washington establishment.)

I'm not writing this to get into why character matters though. I'm writing because surveys show a large portion of our nation has lost faith in the electoral process. They think the votes were rigged. It's a rather large crack, though as with structural damage to a bridge it's hard to say when or how the effects will be felt.

But there's more to it than that. People mutter about 'damage to our system', and complain about all the frivolous lawsuits that keep getting thrown out of court, but the people who have bought into this idea that the election was stolen don't care about that. They want something to restore their trust in the system, they want 'justice'... and even though they are mostly looking for evidence to support the conclusions they've already made (as opposed to honestly and openly evaluating the evidence), it needs to be addressed because that's where the damage was done.

I made the tongue-in-cheek comment about redoing the election because even though Trump and his enablers don't really deserve the chance (and there's always the fear that they'd somehow manage to win, and then what?) because that's the sort of thing that would restore trust and fix the damage. Make it all transparent, obvious. Invite them to be pollwatchers, make them go through the training and learn how elections really work - because a lot of these conspiracies took hold because they just really didn't know. They didn't realize most of the people running elections are volunteers from their own community, and instead imagine some sort of shadowy network of party hacks. 

I don't honestly think we should redo the election, mostly because of the tremendous amount of problems that would create (shouldn't all the elections be affected, in which case we'd have to question who won all the other local, state, and federal elections. Then there's the problem of who would be in charge while we did it, how much time it would take - and oh, btw, there's still this damned pandemic going on and it's escalating fast.)

But we all know that, to be honest. The part that I sort of keep pushing aside because dwelling on it raises uncomfortable questions is this -

The damage we're dealing with now isn't some sort of accident. 

It's not the normal wear and tear on a bridge. It's not even that an unusually heavy convoy came through and put extra stress on the structure (one could argue that this metaphor could be used for something like the pandemic.)

This is the sort of damage most of our politicians have spent a couple of centuries avoiding. Yes, there are liberals who still mutter about the election in 2000. And in 2016. 

But leaders can not say the things the average person can. To go back to my time in the military - if I, as an officer, could not say some of the things my enlisted soldiers said. 

Why? Because it's different when someone in the chain of command says it. Because enlisted soldiers just blowing off steam are rarely in a position to do something about it... but when their commanding officer joins in, then it adds legitimacy to their complaints and raises the spectre of mutiny. 

It sucks, sometimes. Having to be careful of what you say. Having to make it sound like you agree with or support the chain of command even when you don't. (And ultimately if that happens too often you will probably leave... because who wants to work for people like that?) But it's not just something you do because you're a bootlicker, or playing the game, or whatever...

At the most extreme, the end of the road if you go down that path, you can have a military (and nation) fall apart right when they need to work together the most. I don't like you, so I'm going to take my platoon and run off to support the other side. That battalion commander disagrees with your order, so he'll leave the front line open. 

I generally try to encourage people to speak out, and for the system to listen and respond... because most of the time groupthink and obedience are more of a problem than the reverse. That's dependent on the situation, and there are definitely times and situations where coming together and supporting the chain of command is more important than our disagreements. (Judging how important an issue is, how willing the chain of command is to listen and respond, and what the consequences of letting that disagreement break the organization are all part of what you have to consider when trying to decide how to deal with whatever it is.)

There is a reason that we expect duly elected public officials to condemn violence, regardless of whether their politics align with the groups involved. (We expect liberal politicians to condemn antifa violence, and conservative politicians to condemn maga violence. As leaders of their factions, and as public servants, they shouldn't be encouraging people to act in ways that undermine the system.)

And here's the part people shy away from.

Trump - in his entire time in office - has never done that sort of thing. Never condemned the violence done by those he agrees with (those 'very fine people.'). 

People act like it's always some sort of gotcha thing when the mainstream media asks him about it, and there are definitely elements of political theater involved...

But it's extremely problematic that the leader of our nation, the President of the United States - speaking with all the symbols of his office - says these things.

It's one thing for some random person on twitter to complain that the election was stolen.

It's something entirely different for the President of the United States to spend 45 minutes giving the 'most important speech' of his career, in which he alleges (without any real evidence) a massive attempt to steal the election.

This isn't the usual wear and tear on the infrastructure supporting our system. This isn't even an unusually heavy load, like a pandemic.

It's deliberate. It's targeted. It's as though someone took a sledgehammer and slammed it into the bridge supports.

And we all look away. We've learned that it's useless to say anything. His supporters are either cynical and power hungry enough to ignore it, or they honestly believe (despite all the evidence) Trump... and they think Biden is the one taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. 

We have learned over the past four years that every time Trump says some over-the-top, outrageous thing... his supporters don't care. They either don't actually pay attention (possible - many people don't. These days a lot of people get their news from Facebook, after all), or they explain it away as 'just joking'. or they say it was misconstrued or taken out of context and people are unfairly villainizing him...

They sometimes even twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain away the things Trump has said.

But regardless of whether they listen or not, regardless of whether previous examples were exaggerated or unfair...

Right now we have a POTUS who is whacking away with a sledgehammer.

Minor Thoughts and a Quick Post

I'm really enjoying this guy's posts.

I definitely have concerns that Congress is more concerned with pleasing their party leaders than they are with representing their constituents. Although I still really like the idea of mixed member proportional representation (or even ranked choice voting), pushing for those sorts of systemic changes will be an uphill battle, I think. You'd have to educate a lot of people in order to get the support you'd need. Beau's proposals here are much simpler and clearer - and if it makes it harder for congressional representatives, too bad. They should never have let it come to this in the first place.

One other side thought. Someone posted a thing about redoing the election, and I gave a tongue-in-cheek response to it, but it got me thinking...

My tongue-in-cheek response is 'make the changes @jennycohn1 has been advocating for to secure our elections, have them be auditable... And if the Republicans are willing to pay for it I'd be more than happy to prove all over again that Trump lost', but here's the thing.

Unfortunately, a large number of people have lost faith in the system. (I have very strong feelings about the how and why of that, and how people lacking in principles took advantage of low information voters, but that's neither here nor there)...

Maybe that's what it would take to restore that trust. Though you'd best believe I'd stick to the requirements I just listed. No redos just to give anyone a second chance at cheating. You put the countermeasures in place. Make it easy to audit, let states start counting mail in ballots earlier, ensure machines are secured and not connected to the internet (unless there's a legitimate reason for it, in which case it's documented), etc.

And since Biden won, and elections cost money, it's on Republicans requesting the redo to compensate the states for the costs. 

I know, it's not likely to happen... 

I wonder how much of that is for the same reasons Republicans didn't care about making our elections more secure after 2016? (congressional Republicans - local states have generally taken their role in securing the vote seriously. Hence the state officials on a panel at defcon)

Edited to add: oh, and if there's a redo, Trump is still out of office on the 20th. Since he didn't win and demanded a do over, we should follow the presidential line of succession. I think if the president and vice president are gone, it next goes to the speaker for the house? 

Background Thoughts for After Inauguration Day

 There's a lot of talk going around about post-inauguration. A lot of anger about what our country has come to. I have mostly avoided discussing it because I'd rather we get through to the inauguration first, but I have some rather complicated thoughts on this and felt the urge to write about it.

I suppose, first, I want to emphasize that the ultimate goal is to heal this country. It’s not about revenge, it’s not about punishment, and if it’s not done in a manner widely seen as just and fair it’s far more likely to deepen our divisions than it is to help. (This is part of why, for example, the lack of bipartisanship with Trump’s impeachment hurt.)

There’s a concern, though, that in the interests of healing we will overlook or ignore things that shouldn’t be – and that’s a fair point, too.

Hence why I said my thoughts were ‘rather complicated’.

Holding people accountable is hard, but important… and also needs to be done right. I think about my time as a people manager, for example. When someone isn’t performing well it’s my job to tell them that. To sit down and have the difficult conversation.

It’s not about being mean, or hurting them. (I’ve heard of managers who actually liked firing people, and I rather think they shouldn’t be in the job if it’s just so they can be on some sort of power trip)…

It’s because in the grand scheme of things, it hurts them and everyone around them. That is, if you don’t have those sorts of talks then all their coworkers see and know that someone on the team is slacking off… and it hurts morale to feel like someone is getting paid the same amount to do less.

It’s not good for the business, either… because you’re keeping someone on who isn’t doing the job well.

And it hurts the employee, because they generally know when they’re not doing well either… and don’t like feeling scared that they’ll lose their job, or that they have to hide and cover up their inability. Hell, most of them don’t like feeling incompetent or incapable in the first place.

So it’s essential to sit down and have those tough talks, but there are ways and ways of doing so. (It’s sort of the difference between saying ‘this is f***ed up’ and ‘you’re f***ed up’)

I kind of like Jim Collins’ point about having the right people in the right position on the bus. Sometimes someone isn’t in the right position. It doesn’t mean they’re bad, or untalented. It just means it’s not a good fit.

In an ideal world, well. I wish I had the resources to get them into a position that is the right fit. I don’t exactly like knowing the fear and uncertainty people go through when they have to find a new job, after all. I also don’t like knowing that healthcare benefits are tied to work, because people will try harder to stay in jobs they aren’t suited for out of fear that they’ll lose their health insurance. Especially if they or someone in their family has medical problems, like juvenile diabetes. Like… I shouldn’t have to even think about that, right? It should just be about whether or not they’re a good fit for the position. But that’s the way our system works right now.

Anyways. Giving feedback is important, and can actually be a good thing. It gives them the chance to do better, especially when you give them the resources (i.e. training, time, etc) to succeed.

The problem is that it should come from a place of care. Of wanting people to be their best self. And so giving feedback should be about helping them do so, and not about making anyone feel bad or trying to say they’re a failure.

I think, sometimes, of stuff I’ve heard about military leadership. There’s some conventional wisdom about how the officers who get promoted in peacetime do so for very different reasons, and with very different skillsets, from wartime promotions. That generally a war will make a peacetime army shake out some of the dead weight. (I forget the actual phrasing, and don’t feel like looking it up right now. You get the gist).

I’ve also heard similar comments about holding generals accountable. That they shouldn’t get ‘promoted up’ for failure, or protected when they make bad decisions. There are stories about some of the general officers relieved of command during World War II. Except that, iirc, those general officers had a chance to also learn from their mistakes. They were able to grow, and eventually get promoted again.

These things go hand in hand – if you want to hold people accountable, and want harsh punishments for failure… there also has to be a way for people to learn their lessons. To grow and succeed afterwards. If failure is considered a lifelong sentence to suffering, then people have incentives to try to hide their mistakes, shift blame, etc.

There’s more to it than that, even. Consider how nation/states said ‘never again’ after the Holocaust, and created resolutions against genocide…

But when it happened again, they didn’t really want to deal with it. And so we call it ‘ethnic cleansing’, or something else. If we use the word ‘genocide’ then we’re obligated to take action (or admit that we don’t actually live up to our stated principles), and the action we’re obligated to take is hard. Challenging.

It won’t be easy, may not be popular, and may lead to people dying for things that seem outside our lane. Like, what was the national interest of the United States in preventing Hutu from slaughtering Tutsi? If we admitted it was a genocide, we’d have to actual do something about it. Send troops probably. Some of which would die. It would cost money, and effort, and as things got hard people would start questioning why we were risking our own over something going on in an entirely different country. Better to just look the other way. Pretend we aren’t aware.

Looking the other way has consequences. Deciding to actually do something has consequences. It’s really about choosing which consequences you’re most willing to deal with.

People, being not all that logical honestly, tend to push these sorts of things to the back of their mind. It creates cognitive dissonance, and it comes with a certain amount of self-deception. You hear something bad going on, and it rather sucks… but then you forget about whatever is going on in some place way the hell over there, and focus on all the more immediate stuff going on in your life. (Ethiopia is currently at ‘stage 6’ of the ten stages of genocide, but after a brief moment of upset how many of us are going to just forget about that and worry more about our own problems. Coronavirus, the 2020 election… all of it seems a bit more important than stopping the genocide going on right now.)

I say this because I want people to think about what we actually want to have happen, rather than pushing it to the back of our minds and pretending the results were decided by forces outside our control. If you think doing something about it isn’t the right answer, say so. Make the arguments. Admit that this is something we’re not willing to do anything about. List out what the reasons are. Same for the other side – if you think we should get involved, explain why. Make your case. And discuss the ‘how’. Sanctions? Military force? UN Peacekeepers? What tools in the diplomatic arsenal are you willing to pull, and when/how/why will you use them?

And are you willing to accept the consequences of your choice?

Bringing this back to our current situation – Gabriel Sterling gave a hard-hitting speech that’s now gone viral, talking about death threats and how it ‘has to stop’. Some people focus far more on why he hadn’t said anything earlier, but I prefer to welcome and encourage anyone willing to speak out at a time like this. (Especially in stark contrast to members of Congress, who have been rather pathetic enablers.)

We have people taking out full ads demanding martial law. One of Trump’s attorney’s has called for violence against a former cybersecurity official for publicly rejecting Trump’s claims of voter fraud…

This is not normal, it’s not okay, and even though I’m far more focused on getting to Biden’s inauguration, the problems creating this sort of behavior won’t magically go away after 20 Jan.

There’s a reluctance to publicly admit what is going on, and I get it. I’m rather reluctant to state it myself. It either sounds overblown and melodramatic, or like admitting it will blow the fissures fracturing our nation wide open.

In some ways it’s easier to pretend that these guys are ‘just joking’ or ‘don’t really mean it’ or are doing it for ‘political theater’.

And yet there are a large number of people who sincerely think Biden is the one trying to steal the election, and that any sort of violence is justified. And, as Gabriel Sterling said (quite clearly and emphatically) someone is going to get hurt.

It’s one thing when fringe elements say stuff like this. You can easily ‘both sides’ the problem with a simple online search. But there is a vast difference between Joe Schmoe or Karen or Chad on twitter calling for people to take action…

And having POTUS say it. Or tweet it. Or do nothing to tell his followers that they need to settle down and cut it out.

There’s also something deeply wrong in encouraging mob justice. In forgetting due process. And for publicly arguing that various people should be locked up, or arrested, or threatened – because why? They oppose you? You have to have an actual crime, with actual evidence.

Our justice system has its flaws, and it’s not as blind as it’s supposed to be… but there is an entire history of law, and due process, and legislation, that are all meant to give us a trial and ensure a decision is made for reasons that are a bit more than simply ‘they oppose me.’ (Even though I’m not truly shocked by it, it still astounds me that anyone who calls themselves a ‘libertarian’ is willing to overlook these sorts of things. It’s okay when it’s your side doing it? Why are they ‘your side’ anyway? You honestly think someone who comes into power in this fashion is going to care about or protect your precious liberty? The cognitive dissonance of libertarian Trump supporters has got to be off the charts.)

I am not sure what the answer is here. These sorts of things shouldn’t be ignored or overlooked, but taking action will have consequences… (Trump is apparently trying to pardon his children ahead of time, which seems like a pretty big admission of guilt if you ask me. But it reminds me a bit of a problem I’ve discussed before with Pablo Escobar and some of our foreign policy stances on human rights. Namely that for people who don’t believe in principles, or justice… they tend to disbelieve actions taken against them for those reasons. Escobar didn’t believe the US was seriously after him for running a drug cartel, and seemed to think it was a cover for something else. Just like Russians never seem to accept that we really do care about human rights – really! Honestly! Even if we’re pretty haphazard about what catches our attention – and think it’s always a cover for something else. They don’t seem to believe that you can actually rule a diverse nation without keeping minorities and dissidents under an iron thumb. Idk, something like that. So anyways, Trump trying to pardon his children does sound like an admission of guilt… but someone said it was because he thought the following administration would use its power against him. And, like… on the one hand no. It’s not like that, nobody should be making stuff up in order to arrest him and his family. Uncover actual offenses, sure. And if he and his did engage in illegal behavior they really should worry… but not if they didn’t do anything illegal. On the other hand – it’s kind of hard to prove they’re wrong to worry if they did do something illegal, and we really do open up investigations. It’s all just… ugh.)

It would help if we had Republicans who did put country over party, if we could trust that there would be a bipartisan investigation into anything that needs investigating.

But that very trust is what seems so badly frayed right now.

It’s pretty bad… though I don’t know how much of that will translate into things we actually need to worry about. (i.e. people on the left have been muttering about stolen elections since 2000, a few people on the right doing the same is not necessarily the end of the world.  And protesting about it is their right as an American, so that’s still not going to be a problem. The ones willing to do more than that… well. That’s normally something for the FBI to worry about.)

Just saw a clip of Trump’s speech today, and that absolute fucker is actually standing up there arguing that black is white and up is down! The complete and utter nerve of him, to use his podium and say outright lies like that!

I’m still focused more on getting to inauguration day than anything else, but we have some serious problems here. Fixing them is going to take a LOT of work.

Coronavirus, Bias, Etc.

This year has changed my opinions on human nature, but it's hard to really explain how or why.

Mostly because I hadn't actually thought we were all that logical in the first place. I mean, I adore people. We're quirky, and weird, and have the potential for astounding acts of kindness and sinister acts of selfishness... but we're not actually all that good at logic. This is not to say we're terrible, we've got some great advantages in other ways. Pattern recognition, quick decision-making. All things that have allowed us to survive over the years. Logic is important, and worth striving towards, but mostly because we should try to be aware of when we're not being logical.

That's one of the first things Sudoku teaches you. When you're in there trying to figure out what number fits in the square, if you go with your instinct and put in a number that feels right - you're probably wrong. You absolutely have to have some basis for deciding what number fits in the square, if not you'll screw up the game and lose.

Pattern-recognition, giving personal anecdotes more weight than statistical analysis, confirmation bias and using emotions to decide which facts we believe (rather than science) - they're all pretty typical human behavior. Awareness of when we do this makes it easier to recognize and correct for it. And logic is ultimately better than the alternative. (There's a whole discussion I could have on belief systems, and the ways belief systems reinforce themselves when something seems to prove them wrong, and the role science can play as something different and also the same. That is, science has the potential to self-correct and focuses on evidence... but there are also scientists who use it more as a belief system, with all it's flaws, so that commonly accepted science is sometimes wrong. More research and experiments and scientific studies can eventually correct for that, though. Not in the way that evangelical Christians explain away something they assume God isn't behind - like a political loss - as 'the work of the devil', either.)

So anyways. We're not all that logical, and I've known that for a while, so I'm not exactly shocked by the multiple examples of this that 2020 has given us.

And yet...

And yet I had expected better. I don't know, I suppose I'd thought death and dying would be a huge wake up call. That all those biases and anecdotes and whatnot might affect people's thinking for politics in a normal year, but 250,000+ dead would matter.

Stalin said that "the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." I have never liked the cynicism, lack of empathy, and sheer evil behind a statement like that.

And yet, as goal posts have moved and the death toll continues to rise, I think there is more truth to that then I want to admit.

I have seen what I had previously thought were somewhat credible news sources publish the worst and stupidest assessments of coronavirus. I mean, I'm not an epidemiologist myself, so take it for what it's worth... but even though illnesses do appear to rise, and spike, and taper off that's generally either because it spread so far and wide that it's hard to find new people to infect, or because of actions taken to stop the spread. So when one of the earliest and most widely publicized predictions for coronavirus decided to use the Chinese experience to model the data, well. Our experience would only mimic the Chinese one if we had taken the same sorts of actions. 

If we weren't quarantining, and testing, and doing what China did to control the virus then why the hell would you think our coronavirus infection rate and death rate would follow the same trajectory?!?

And okay, again. I'm not an epidemiologist and the articles don't go much into the nitty gritty. Maybe the models took that into account? (Though given how wildly wrong the predictions I linked to were, it seems like they either didn't - or assumed the US would lockdown to a degree that hasn't happened.)

As with so much in life, these wildly inaccurate predictions have already been forgotten. And yet they served their purpose. That is, they were published during the height of uncertainty, and gave people looking for a reason not to freak out something to cling to. Gave decision-makers cover for saying 'it won't be that bad, don't worry'...

And here we are, over 250K dead. And it's just a statistic.

I know part of why that is. Part of it is our human tendency to rely more on anecdotes and personal experience. I mean, nobody in my immediate family has been diagnosed with covid yet. Nobody I'm close to. I think I had one facebook friend, a rather loose acquaintance, who tested positive and told everyone.

If all I went by was my own personal experience, I would probably think coronavirus was overblown.

However.

However, statistics matter. However, for as lucky as I have been (so far), there are others who have seen coronavirus sweep through their entire family. 

However, it shouldn't have to affect me personally for me to care, or take it seriously. With the way exponential growth works, by the time its hitting me and mine it'll be far too late. 

However, we all should be able to learn from other people's experiences, so that it doesn't take the loss of someone we care about to make us change our minds.

I don't know how much of our current situation is because of the absolute disaster of our national leadership and how much truly is human nature. I can't help but think it's worse, though. There probably would always be people who think it's overblown, and refuse to wear masks, and all that... I've seen some articles about the Spanish flu that show as much. I just don't think it would have been as widespread if we didn't have the President of the United States refusing to wear a mask and giving out massive amounts of disinformation. 

Which brings us to today, in a sense. Because the issue has become so polarized that there's pretty much no ability to talk to each other. We live in vastly different worlds, with vastly different ideas of what's going on, and it's hard to see how and when we'll ever have a shared reality again.

That's the strange part, to be honest. I had thought that people dying would be an indisputable reality. I had always thought the notion of 'truthiness' and a post-truth world was pretty much bullshit. It works for philosophical things ungrounded in reality, but again - dead bodies are pretty much indisputable. Dead is dead, you can't pretend that they didn't die (though you can apparently say that it was pneumonia, or the regular flu, or a stroke, and pretend that it wasn't actually covid that killed them. And most people aren't comparing the current overall mortality rates to previous years to realize that there's a ton of unaccounted for deaths. And if you do make that point, they then argue that those unaccounted for deaths come from the lockdown.... even though I think we would have noticed thousands more people dying of suicide or whatever it is they think the lockdowns are doing to get people killed.)

Florida, by the way, is one of the worst for fudging their data and pretending everything is fine. I've been monitoring the state because I'm wondering how long that will truly last. Surely people are noticing that a lot of people are dying? Even more than can be accounted for by the number of covid deaths? 

Then again, on an individual basis maybe there's no reason to. They don't know anyone who actually died, or accept that it was for non-covid causes, or something. (Whenever I check for Florida covid on twitter, there's almost always some sort of misinformation push. Most recently it was some Federalist article saying Florida is doing better than Illinois and wondering why mainstream media drags Florida so much... and it's no use telling them how badly Florida is lying with their statistics.)

It's the degree of willful blindness that bothers me, I think. I've long accepted that partisan bias and confirmation bias means that there's always someone extreme on the edges. But I've seen even people I thought were reasonably good at critical thinking buy into some of the worst arguments.

And, like... I sympathize. I really do. I hate sounding all doom and gloom (and considering we've gotten this far, I have considered revising my estimates. Then again, we seem to be facing the worst parts of the epidemic now. As expected, more and more hospitals are nearing capacity... and people have gotten exhausted of social distancing, the holiday season is coming up, the weather is turning colder. The crazy thing is that a vaccine is right around the corner, and if we'd had halfway decent leadership a lot more people would have survived long enough to see that... which is also maddening if you think about it. But there's almost no point dwelling on it right now. If things get bad enough that might change, but for now... well. Not a lot to do about it.)

Anyways. I remember how strange it felt in March, when I'd  investigated enough for my own satisfaction and expected a long period of lockdown to come. My Little had a school dance, and I had a sinking feeling I knew how awful the next few months would be and privately decided to hell with it all. I was going to help her and her friends make some good memories, something that hopefully would give them a bright spot to look back upon in the months to come. So one of her friends couldn't afford to get a manicure? I'll pay for it, why not? And they want to eat out for lunch? Sure... no problem. Kid needs a ride home after the dance? I gotcha. (I do think it worked, though I'm pretty sure none of the girls realized how much thought went into it. They were shrieking and giggling and goofing off and being teenaged girls just like they should be.)

It's sort of the same feeling now, tbh. I expected we'd reach a tipping point earlier. I mean, I knew we'd be in lockdown for months... but I hadn't really expected it would be eight months and counting. I hadn't expected it to take so long to get to the more remote parts of the US, either.

The vaccine is right around the corner, and maybe it won't ever get as bad as I fear. 

On the other hand - as I've said. More and more people are talking about hospitals that are maxed out. Staff members that are exhausted and unable to keep up. People who need treatment and no beds are free - not just for their hospital, but anything in a two hour radius. 

And we just had Thanksgiving, where there's still a large portion of the population that doesn't take coronavirus seriously. That's on top of election day, and people celebrating Biden's win (mostly masked, thankfully) and MAGA folks protesting...

All signs point to a terrible, horrible, and dark winter. 

And nobody wants to hear it.

Thanksgiving

Turkey turned out pretty good, did a Zoom with the family so it still felt like we were celebrating together. Turkey carcass is in the stock pot, and I'll probably be eating leftovers and making turkey soup over the next week.

Trying to spend the day actually, you know, giving thanks. Less doomscrolling or worrying about things that'll still be there to deal with tomorrow. Read the latest book in a series I enjoy. Overall, not a bad day. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!