This is making the rounds. I’m pretty sure what her religious reasons are for not wanting to use Windows and Apple computers. I used to joke that Leviticus forbids operating systems that support multiple threads, but this is about the LGBT friendliness of these companies, and perhaps to a degree the progressive/democratic politics of their boardrooms.

Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”

I recently hired a new employee for my team. Everyone thinks she is a great addition, and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews.

The problem came up during on-boarding when we supplied her with her company laptop. She said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned operating systems. We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.

She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.

What actions can either (1) I take as a manager to protect her rights and get upper management onboard with her religion or (2) I take against her with management for failing to fulfill her job duties?

I’ve never come across any situation like this and am completely confounded as to how I should handle this.

Tell her your transgender IT support person will set her up with the computer of her choice. Then see what happens.

Hello Chinese censors and maintainers of the Great Firewall! I’ve been watching you crawl my blog for years and years. It makes me feel so special! Say…did any of those phish emails I got regularly at work come from you too? 

Anyway…I think it’s high time I welcomed you to my little corner of the Internet Tubes! 

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it“. -John Gilmore. Internet activist, software programmer and contributor to the GNU project

Now fuck off. 

Also…

Keep Taiwan Free! 

Love, Bruce.

This method of securing documents was not covered in my ITAR training that I can recall. So I’m assuming it’s something only those with a higher clearance than mine need to know about…

If it keeps the Time Magazine covers safe, it’s probably good enough. 

Saw the following in my Google News stream, in an article about how Disney isn’t entirely happy with the money its making in the parks. This is about Disneyland but I would hazard a guess it also applies to Disney World…

The Walt Disney Company revenue grew as a whole, but further down in the report, Disney states that the Parks encountered an “unfavorable attendance mix” which it claims is the reason for lower Park ticket profits.

The report claims that per-capita ticket revenue was up due to Genie+ and Lightning Lane but quite offset by actual Disneyland attendance. This is most likely referencing the controversial and hot-button topic of MagicKey renewals, something Disney has remained very quiet on as of late.

If they still had the original Annual Pass system I’d still be a pass holder. But it seems as soon as Chapek got hold of the reins he wanted to eliminate the annual passes, and replace them with something more revenue enhancing. Thus, I wasn’t even alerted to when my pass was to expire. I knew when it was about to expire but I also knew there would be no more annual passes, but this new MagicKey thing which was hideously more expensive for less access than the annual passes were. So I bailed. I think a lot of people did. Now they’re not even for sale anymore, and probably when (if) they ever become available again they’ll be a limited number of them and you and I won’t get a chance to buy one anyway.

So that leaves us with the standard tickets. You buy one of those you are paying the max per day price, and only for the few days that the tickets are good for.

I bought two, thinking (incorrectly) that I’d still visit my favorite restaurants on my birthday week. As it turns out, they don’t let single diners make reservations at those spots anymore, but never mind… I bought two tickets, or rather, one ticket for two days at the parks. But you’re not actually getting two days, you’re getting two days in a five day window. You don’t have to use them on consecutive days, but you have to do the second day no more than four days after you use your first day.

I added the park hopper plus which allows me to hop to another park after 2PM, or visit a water park that day. (only Typhoon Lagoon is currently open), depending on whether or not the park you want to hop to is at capacity. At the moment you only need a park reservation for the first park you enter, not the one you hop to after 2PM, if you can. The water parks don’t need a park reservation currently.

So, two days within five days of each other, park hopper and water park option: grand total is 330 dollars. Well…and 22 cents. And you still need park reservations for whichever two parks you want to visit first on those two days.

I won’t go into how all this is so different, so Constraining, compared to before Chapek took over, but this is what’s being forced on the customers now, who previously had annual passes, or bought tickets as needed, and the uproar online at least is hot and furious.

So the per ticket revenue is down is it? Well I can’t spend any money on dining when I can’t get reservations. And if just getting into a park is this expensive, And complex, it sure isn’t fun anymore either. And that could be a problem.

I remember some years ago, I’m sitting in one of my favorite Disney bars, the Tune-In Lounge in Hollywood Studios. I’m talking to a man seated next to me who is taking a break from the family he’s with and we start talking about the cost of doing Disney. This was before Chapek started jacking up prices on Everything (including the ice machines in some hotels). He says to me…

You know, they talk a lot about magic here. Let me tell you how the magic works. You walk into a park here with maybe 100 dollars in your pocket, and you walk back out with maybe five. The magic is they make you want to do it again the next day.

But that was then. This is now.

I have seen this obsessive focus on profit margin at every little point no matter how trivial drag companies into the gutter. Disney is probably big enough they can survive on media revenue instead of what they used to make in the parks. But the parks used to be their big money makers and they’re not fun anymore, and the magic isn’t what it used to be.

I might not even go back next year. I’m doing it this year in large part to flip the bird at DeSantis and Florida republicans. But if Chapek is going to keep flipping the bird at park goers than why even bother.

But this year anyway, I still want to give some love to my inner Mouseketeer. It’s his birthday after all.

But Trump endorsed him. Could get even more interesting in the general, if the MAGA decide that it was the hated RINO establishment that took Trump’s guy down. 

Some days I just gotta thump my pulpit. But this is why I blog I suppose…

I’m slogging through a New Yorker profile of Dan Bongino, the new extra strength Rush Limbaugh, whose YouTube channel was recently taken down (more of that please!) because Bongino tried to do an end run around a previous YouTube timeout. The New Yorker often goes into deep detail about its subjects and that makes the articles quite long at times, but they’re almost always worth the read. New Yorker and Consumer Reports are the only two magazine subscriptions I’m going to keep when I transition into living on retirement money.

I want to talk…okay, vent…about this exchange with Bongino and the New Yorker reporter that caught my eye the other day:

For Bongino, the policies of the pandemic – mandates for masks and vaccines, admonitions against experimental treatments – have always rested on a dubious expectation of trust. When I asked him why he challenged the science, he cut in: “Time out.” He fed my words back to me: “’You challenge the science’ No! That’s not the way science works! Science is a process of challenges.” He went on, “What are you, a lemming? Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out.”

This is such a perfect example of how these wingnut talk radio babblers manipulate not just the facts but also, and slyly, the language, that it takes your breath away. It is pure gold. And the reporter, unless he covers it later in the article that I haven’t read yet, does not push back on any of it. But I can cut this reporter some slack for that because without a doubt your typical New Yorker reader can see through this multilayered bullshit. 

But let’s us take it apart…

Science is a process of challenges. Well…yeah. Jacob Bronowski talked in The Ascent of Man, about the newly arrived students at Göttingen University bringing to their studies “…a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” And in that same episode, titled “Knowledge or Certainty”, he argued passionately against arrogance and dogma, what he called “the despot’s belief that they have absolute certainty.” 

All knowledge he insisted, is confined within an area of uncertainty, or as he preferred to call it, an area of tolerance. Science is what we do to sift out the facts from the fictions, however passionately hoped for. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. But there is more to it than that. In Science and Human Values Bronowski wrote that “When you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard with it what a man is.” It is the search for knowledge, the habit of truth Bronowski spoke of, that makes us human.

But that is precisely what Bongino discards here. You challenge science, with more and better science. Not with theology, not with strongman politics, not with a lot of half assed goofball conspiracy theories, not by calling anyone who follows the science lemmings. For one thing, lemmings don’t hurl themselves off cliffs in mass suicides. That’s a myth, popularized here in the United States by a Disney nature documentary that was…well…lacking in science.

Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. See how deftly he shifts the focus from science tells us, to what “people tell you to do”? Now he’s not challenging the science, he’s quite reasonably not blindly letting “people” tell him “to do things”. What people? What things? No need to be specific, the point is to derail the question. If crazy uncle Batsinthebelfry tells you to go jump off a bridge you wouldn’t do that would you? So don’t listen to Dr. Fauci unless you’re a lemming. And as it turns out…unsurprisingly…Bongino doesn’t know any more about Thalidomide than he does about lemmings.

Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out. Notice he doesn’t say it was the consensus of the science of the time. Because the science wasn’t quite all there. And to get the full story on that, you need to look up Frances Oldham Kelsey, who in 1960 was a reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration. It was Kelsey who kept the thalidomide tragedy in Europe from becoming one here in the US. Because…

Kelsey had the power to prevent a drug from going to market if she found the application to be lacking sufficient evidence for safety. After a thorough review, Kelsey rejected the application for thalidomide on the grounds that it lacked sufficient evidence of safety through rigorous clinical trials. -Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2017, “The Woman Who Stood Between America And A Generation Of Thalidomide Babies”

That “consensus of the time” Bongilo casually throws out there, was in fact careless marketing of a drug initially as sedative, that was never tested on pregnant women, but was marketed to them for morning sickness after the drug maker discovered it could also be used for that. There was no “consensus of the time”, there was only marketing and tragically superficial approval based on nothing more than the drug maker’s own testing. And Kelsey didn’t think that was entirely honest either.

Reports of the side effect peripheral neuritis—painful inflammation of the peripheral nerves—were published in the December 1960 issue of the British Medical Journal. This raised an even bigger red flag for Kelsey: “the peripheral neuritis did not seem the sort of side effect that should come from a simple sleeping pill.

She asked for more information from Merrell, who responded with another application merely stating that thalidomide was at least safer than barbiturates. Kelsey then sent a letter directly to Merrell saying that she suspected they knew of the neurological toxicity that led to nerve inflammation but chose not to disclose it in their application. Merrell grew increasingly upset that Kelsey would not pass their drug, which had been used in over 40 other countries at this point.

The science was not there. It was only Kelsey demanding to see the science before she’d sign off on it that prevented a bigger tragedy in the US than happened. 

Eventually, after reports of birth deformities began appearing overseas, Merrell withdrew the application. But samples of the drug had been distributed to more than 1200 physicians and from these to tens of thousands of their patients. That resulted in 17 reported cases of congenital deformities here in the US. It could have been thousands “…had the FDA not insisted on the evidence of safety required under the law (despite ongoing pressure from the drug’s sponsor).”

For Bongilo to use this as an example of why not to trust the scientific evidence of the effectiveness of vaccinations is stunning in its brazenness. But these people are nothing if not brazen about it these days. What Trump taught them is not to hold back. Don’t just fudge the facts. Go ahead and brazen it out. Everyone knew thalidomide was safe until it wasn’t. Now they’re telling you the COVID vaccinations are safe. We all know how that’s going to turn out… Bongilo isn’t merely challenging the science, he’s challenging the very thing that makes us human…our rational facility…short circuiting it with tactical rhetoric and disinformation.

So his side can win the culture war. But what, exactly is the prize? Ends and means are not separate and unrelated items. To paraphrase Bronowski, when you discard the test of fact in how effective a vaccine is, you discard with it what it is to be human. Also, you get people killed. People. Not lemmings. People with lives. People with families and friends who loved them.

Is Donald Trump really worth dragging yourself down into that abyss? Is he really worth discarding everything inside of you that could have been noble and decent? If the devil is still out there trying to buy souls, he must be really pissed at the downturn in quality lately.

I’ve Been Trying To Explain The New York Times To People For Years And He Just Tweeted It Out

Atrios points to the following tweet from Clyde Haberman…

@ClydeHaberman
I confess to some ambivalence about Chris Cuomo’s suspension. It’s deserved on many levels. But wouldn’t you help your brother if he fell into trouble, even of his own making?

Yeah. Quite. This is Haberman, who as Atrios points out has a long history with the Times, and is the father of their current White House Correspondent, saying that he’s ambivalent about a fellow Times staffer, and the brother of the governor of New York, helping to cover up his brother’s sex abuse scandal because…family. Atrios responds thusly…

A lot to work with here (“fell into some trouble” lol), but I would submit that most of us would not actually do what Chris Cuomo did, or anything analogous, to help our “brothers.” Sure I would help my brother, but I wouldn’t do *that* to help my brother. Make sure he had a good lawyer. Help him figure out how to stop abusing people. That kind of thing.

And the point here isn’t simply, “oh, well, family is family, you can sympathize a bit,” it’s “since you can sympathize a bit, it seems a bit harsh for the man to be suspended from his job.” This is “there should be no consequences for people who are, in many ways, qwhite like me.”

This is something I would do myself, therefore it isn’t really wrong and there should be no negative consequences for it. QED. Boom!

Who amongst us would not abuse our power to smear victims of sexual harassment and assault (whatever “groping” would legally be in your jurisdiction)? Disobeying my employer’s rules and edicts and lying to them? Why would we ask for anything different from the most powerful people in the country? And should we really face consequences for that? Famiglia.

What would elite journalists do to protect their families and people in their close social circles? People who they cover, but are also quite friendly with, even party with and see on vacation? What happens in the Hamptons… Believe people when they tell you who they are.

This is something that I think many of us who subscribed to the Times figured was what the social strata was like in the top floor offices. Villagers. It’s a term Atrios coined I think, for the Georgetown DC mindset. That DC circuit party schmoozing among media executives, Capitol Hill politicians and their Very wealthy Georgetown money teats. but it can apply to a lot of other places where the same dynamic exists. Villagers. They stick together.

It’s something to keep in mind when you’re reading their newspapers and magazines: You are getting the Villager’s point of view. That’s not always a bad thing, which is why I bought Woodward’s books about Trump. Sometimes you want to know what they’re thinking. But a steady diet of it is disorienting.

Eventually I had enough of it an cancelled my subscription. I’m still subscribed to the Post though.

I know I love mine. This headline was laughing at me this morning…

Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership

Upset that it was being mocked for low traffic, Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery

This cheers me up considerably, and motivates me to take better care of my own measly little readership blog. I haven’t posted to it in almost two months now because I’ve been so plague weary scatterbrained. I do have another episode of A Coming Out Story in the works that I should be able to get up here in a couple weeks. And a photo gig I will hopefully be doing this Saturday for Wayne Besen. I did a political cartoon for him that I’ll post here as soon as he’s got it up on his site.

And a bunch of stuff to talk about that I’ll put up here shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Former president Donald Trump’s blog, celebrated by advisers as a “beacon of freedom” that would keep him relevant in an online world he once dominated, is dead. It was 29 days old.

This blog has been running since 1998 in various forms and on various hosts. I started it when blogs were more of an artistic thing rather than a political and/or commercial thing. It’s a life blog. That is what blogs originally were. People talking about their lives online. If you have no life, there is not much point in blogging. Donald.

…or you’re just your usual brain dead Arizona republican. The quote is Chaplik’s from the Arizona House debate on a bill to allow businesses to ignore local mask mandates.

We did. They’re called condoms.

And by the way, something else condoms prevent is passing on the family dimwit gene. Just saying…

A friend linked me to this today…

Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

By now, you may have heard of the hacker who says she scraped 99 percent of posts from Parler, the Twitter-wannabe site used by Trump supporters to help organize last Wednesday’s violent insurrection on Capitol Hill. What you may not know yet is the abysmal coding and security that made the scraping so easy…

People who know how to code are not all that difficult to find, though it is a specialized skill set. People who can do it well, as it turns out, are. And the problem for managers is you almost have to be as good at it as they are to know which from which when you’re hiring. But then these people would probably not have hired mostly on the basis of IT skills, but political affinity.

Call the above an example of Sturgeon’s Law. But also, if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s the kind of logical, clear headed thinking that makes a good coder is not a skill set very many right wingers have.

My personal experience working on code others have left behind tells me it’s not a matter of education…some of the most brick brained idiotic code I’ve ever seen came from people with their BS in Computer Science. It’s how well you can think logically and above all, clearly. There’s a limit to how well schools can teach that. It’s in a way, an art. And to paraphrase Marx (Groucho) right wing art is to art, as military music is to music.

This came across my Facebook stream today. Some days I just don’t know what to make of people….

I just don’t get people who make up stories about themselves. You only get one life, don’t fritter it away faking it. Look around…your life is probably more interesting than you realize. And nothing in it is worth more than trustworthiness. You lose that you’ve lost everything.

This guy’s going to have this hanging over him for the rest of his life. It’ll follow him past the grave. Don’t be this guy.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Virginia Human Rights Commissioner Kenick El…

Un…

This is why we need to stop giving men in dresses passes.

Deux…

I have daughters and I won’t accept them sharing a restroom with a grown man suffering from this mental illness

Trois…

Men trying to be women and women trying to be men is really confusing our children…

Quatre…

…and I’m tired of seeing this nonsense promoted to our children.

Cinq…

Homosexuality is a mental illness and should be treated as such.

Six…

Homosexuality is an abomination to the Human Race and it corrupts the hermetic principle of gender by interfering with the laws of nature just to gratify the lower self.

Sept…

I felt like it was very important for me just to express my views on my page in a very sincere, polite manner.

Le Curtain…Applaus a vous…

So I’m told, once upon a time in the old west, some good folks decided executing criminals was an act they could not morally put upon another human. To make someone into an executioner, even if the sentence was arrived at in a completely legal and prudent way, was morally wrong. So they devised a system, whereby the condemned would be made to stand on a trap door, the noose around their neck, and their weight would cause a valve to open and water would drain out of a bucket until a lever dropped far enough the trap door would open and the sentence was carried out. There…no human hand pulled the lever, so nobody had that death on their hands. It was the condemned’s own weight that did it. Our hands are clean. We are not responsible.

One of my first jobs as a contract software developer was at my local utility company’s household appliances division, which sold and serviced everything from washing machines to central heating and air conditioning systems. A couple years into the work I was tasked with developing a work measurement reporting system for the field technicians, to work in conjunction with the new mobile data terminals they were installing in the field technician’s trucks. The idea, as it was told to me, was to treat each field technician as a “virtual business”. Track what the expenses were in terms of parts and labor, track the revenue in terms of billing and whether it was a warranty job.

The techs who were, luckily for them, unionized, forced considerations as to the difficulty of the work, and the skills of the technician. If you only did a few jobs that week, but they were among the most demanding, that was factored into the system. It took them 18 months to reach an agreement as to how the system should measure the profitability of the field technicians. I gave them a system that crunched the numbers from their mobile data terminals, the warranty system and the payroll system, just the way they spec’ed it out. But by then it was starting to make me a bit nervous. I was still pretty new at this trade, but I’d started at it by building my own computers from parts and teaching myself how to write programs, and I knew intuitively that there was nothing really all that special about them. They were machines, just with transistors instead of gears and motors. Bazillions of transistors that could do bazillions of calculations in a fraction of a second…but still machines. Tools, in other words. Helpful when used right, dangerous when used carelessly. 

Under all this was the utility company trying to prove that it wasn’t subsidising their household appliances division from the utility side of the company which was a protected monopoly. The appliance division technicians could also do utility side work when needed, or when they didn’t have any appliance work to do that week. All the independent contractors hated the big utility company for this because it gave the utility company a massive competitive advantage over them. Which of course, it denied.

Until they saw the first run of my reporting system. So I was told later, jaws dropped in the boardroom when they saw how much the utility side was actually subsidising the household appliances division. So plans were made to spin it off, before state regulators stepped in.

And then the layoffs came. And they used my reporting system to tell them who were the most costly and least productive field technicians to lay off. And I kept telling anyone who would listen that you can’t just blindly let a blind, deterministic, computer algorithm substitute for managerial judgement. But who listens to a little computer geek? So I saw a lot of good people get laid off, and a few not so good ones stay on board. One really nice guy, who always had a smile for me whenever we crossed paths in the hallways, died so I was told, when he had a heart attack just a couple days after being laid off. He was at the dinner table with the rest of his family and suddenly keeled over. I think about this. Lots.

This is Silicon Valley’s biggest blind spot. Well…this and libertarianism, which is so closely related they might as well be one and the same. Just get the algorithm right and everything magically takes care of itself.  It was my own hallucination back in my Ayn Rand days. We can reduce it all to just a few simple rules and presto…civilization just happens! But no. Computers can crunch the data, but then again garbage in garbage out. In my trade we say beware the hidden assumptions in a system. What do you know, and how do you know it? There are no substitutes for human judgement.

Or to put it another way: you can’t escape responsibility by off loading it onto a computer. Or a bucket of water.

Link to article Here.

Aaannd… She’s back. And I’m feeding her again. And I put out a freshly washed blanket for her. Because I’m a sucker.