Skip to main content

A Hillbilly and a Survivalist Show the Way Out of Trump Country

#1

I've read Educated by Westover, so one immediately realizes that, of course, institutions saved her, although the people she left behind would strongly disagree. Westover's isolated Mormon parents hated all manner of organization, even the Mormon church itself, not just the government and medicine, and Tara had to leave that backward culture, to embrace education and academia, to finally grow. Nothing has changed. We still see the people of that world as backward, and the only way forward as leaving it behind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30426296

#2

@Terry McKenna - I can empathize, since I have a similar story, my father died when I was 12, my sister 10, back in 1972, left with a stay-at-home mother with little real-world skill. We received Social Security and VA benefits until we were 21 or so, eventually curtailed by Reagan, but they kept the family middle class - my mother still worked 50+ hours per week, first as a clerk and then later as a manager of a local store - both my sister and I graduating from college and attending grad school. Both of us have six-figure incomes, are property owners, and presumably pay fairly high taxes.

Without that support, who knows where we would be now? When I hear about someone giving back, I can only think of the government, along with a few supportive elders. Rather than the state being a creator of dependency, it freed us to develop into educated, employed individuals. But maybe that's the problem. Republicans, with their love of authority and fear of change, need the poor to be poor, to justify their moralism...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30425978:30427158

#3

@Mary Brooke Baria - Have you heard of the success that cities have been having with giving the homeless homes? Part of the problem of being down is that the requirement that they climb out before they can move on likely makes the holes they are in bigger, as they struggle with the hole. Once they can get a hand out of the hole, with some assistance moving forward they very likely will be good to go, on their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html?comments#permid=30425978:30427158:30431542:30438411

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming