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Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

Read Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber by Susan Fowler (Susan Fowler)
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go. 

Continue reading Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

Watched "The West Wing" Galileo from HBO Max
Galileo: Directed by Alex Graves. The President and NASA plan a TV event for a probe's landing on Mars; satellite photographs show a suspicious-looking fire in Russia; Leo asks Toby and Josh to decide on the next postage stamp; Sam and C.J. have personal reasons for not wanting to accompany the President to a concert.
Liked a tweet by Maggie Appleton (Twitter)

👓 Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images | Jetpack for WordPress

Read Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images by Nicole Kohler (Jetpack for WordPress)
Today’s release of Jetpack 5.8 includes several features that have graduated from beta testing. We are very excited to bring them out for you to try. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update, and how today’s additions will help you speed up your site and deliver faster...
I like the idea of Elastic Search being added in here and that alone might make it worth the subscription price! I’m surprised that it wasn’t bundled in from the start or that Elastic Search isn’t making an smaller subscription version available via plugin for a smaller price.

📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Annotated Community, Privatization, Efficiency by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
Reversing the trend toward privatization will thus require not just massive public mobilization and demand of elected officials, but also a hard turn away from efficiency as a primary value, a recognition that the building of relationships and the cultivation of care is slow and difficult and of necessity inefficient. In fact, that its value lies in its inefficiency — but making the case for such inefficiency as a necessary value requires a lot of effort, and a lot of caution.
There’s a kernel here of something about the value of links (social, business, etc.) as put forward by Cesar Hidalgo in Why Information Grows. Where is the real value? How can it best be extracted? Built up? Having a more direct means of valuing these otherwise seeming intangibles will be important in the future.
Read - Reading: Go Jump in the Pool! (Macdonald Hall, #2) by Gordon Korman (Scholastic)
When Bruno and Boots learn that Macdonald Hall is about to lose some of its best students to its arch-rival, York Academy, because the Hall doesn't have a swimming pool, they go on the warpath, determined to save the school. But their fundraising schemes turn to hilarious chaos!
Finished reading Go Jump in the Pool!

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🎧 The Power Of Categories | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to The Power Of Categories from Invisibilia | NPR.org
The Power Of Categories examines how categories define us — how, if given a chance, humans will jump into one category or another. People need them, want them. The show looks at what categories provide for us, and you'll hear about a person caught between categories in a way that will surprise you. Plus, a trip to a retirement community designed to help seniors revisit a long-missed category.
The transgender/sexual dysphoria story here is exceedingly interesting because it could potentially have some clues to how those pieces of biology work and what shifts things in one direction or another. How is that spectrum created/defined? A few dozen individuals like that could help provide an answer.

The story about the Indian retirement community in Florida is interesting, but it also raises the (unasked, in the episode at least) question of the detriment it can do to a group of people to be lead by some the oldest members of their community. The Latin words senīlis ‎(“of or pertaining to old age”) and senex ‎(“old”) are the roots of words like senate, senescence, senility, senior, and seniority, and though it’s nice to take care of our elders, the younger generations should take a hard look at the unintended consequences which may stem from this.

In some sense I’m also reminded about Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and why progress in science (and yes, society) is held back by the older generations who are still holding onto outdated models. Though simultaneously, they do provide some useful “brakes” on both velocity of change as well as potential ill effects which could be damaging in short timeframes.

Stepping back from POSSE | Ben Werdmüller

Liked Stepping back from POSSE by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
Just a quick note: ostensibly to fight algorithmic propaganda, Facebook is shutting off API access to publish to profiles tomorrow. I expect other platforms to follow. That's completely their right. The indieweb has this intrinsic idea of Publishing on your Own Site, Syndicating Elsewhere: automatic...

👓 Kavanaugh’s Yearbook Page Is ‘Horrible, Hurtful’ to a Woman It Named | New York Times

Read Kavanaugh’s Yearbook Page Is ‘Horrible, Hurtful’ to a Woman It Named (nytimes.com)
The Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and some high school friends described themselves in a yearbook as “Renate” alumni. The woman they were referring to is furious.