https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

Listening to an analysis of the Supreme Court case decided today regarding affirmative action at colleges, it sounds like they’re saying that the colleges may not allow the race of an applicant per se to affect their scoring for admission.

Does this mean that laws that favor certain classes of people, based, say, on race, are on their face unconstitutional? So, for example, if Congress was to pass a reparations bill to address the lingering effects of slavery, it would be struck down as unconstitutional?

From The Guardian, discussing the accusation that the dam in Ukraine was deliberately sabotaged by the Russians, this gem presented by an NGO in support of its claim:

a “recently passed Russian law that prohibits investigations into incidents at hydrotechnical structures in Russian-occupied Ukraine offered compelling albeit circumstantial evidence for that case”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/19/kakhovka-dam-collapse-image-apparently-explosive-laden-car-ukraine-russia

V. Specific and useful bit of legislation if you’re a saboteur …

The New Libertarian Elitists : Democracy Journal
— Read on democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

Anyone else notice how ironic it feels when you update something under Windows and it says things like “Update Successful!”, where the exclamation mark seems to say “surprise, I didn’t think _that_ would work!”? Or you get a dialog congratulating you on successfully updating something, where the subtext seems to be “I’m amazed that you managed to step through all the bizarre requirements we need you to do to get our software up-to-date!”?

For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids. What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

An article in the Atlantic speculates on the high relative “average” mortality rate in the US, and looks at health care and overall health correlations. The example they cite is interesting, because it played out here on Whidbey with the local soccer club. I have friends whose own kids have all their kids signed up for pay-to-play leagues, and I know from personal experience that that often leaves the Rec leagues unable to field a team.

(From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/america-mortality-rate-guns-health/673799/)

On our fridge there is a magnet that says:
“I find it ironic that, several times a day, *I* have to persuade a machine that I’m human.”

From a comment on David Brin’s blog, https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-only-way-out-of-ai-dilemma.html?showComment=1680354662591#c7494427921247995483

Composer and visual artist Gino Robair presents Radical Divination, his “opera of augury through papermaking.” During this event, papermakers…
— Read on www.facebook.com/events/5455169067923041/

call out to Gino. He’s still hard at it. Thank god.

Your schools are decaying. Your teachers are leaving, because they’re not allowed to teach. Your gynecologists are leaving, because they’re not allowed to practice medicine.

It might be time for you, the individual Idahoan, to consider upping sticks and moving on, too. It’s clear that some portion of you want things this way and they seem to be in charge, so for the rest of you: time to move on? And let Idaho sink into the mess of angry ignorant low-tax society-is-a-myth states that it wants to be?

Oh, and: there’s a couple of counties in Eastern OR that want to join you. Maybe just a house swap?