A good programmer was concise and elegant and never wasted a word. They were poets of bits. “It was like working logic puzzles — big, complicated logic puzzles. I still have a very picky, precise mind, to a fault. I notice pictures that are crooked on the wall.”
What sort of person possesses that kind of mentality? Back then, it was assumed to be women. They had already played a foundational role in the prehistory of computing: During World War II, women operated some of the first computational machines used for code-breaking at Bletchley Park in Britain. In the United States, by 1960, more than 25% of programmers were women. At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, most of those the government categorized as “career programmers” were female. It wasn’t high-status work — yet.
Month: February 2019
UBI Might Hurt Poor
Replacing all current US safety net programs, including those aimed at senior citizens, with a truly universal basic income would result in “a massive distribution up the earnings distribution, along with a redistribution from the elderly and disabled towards those who are neither, primarily but not exclusively those without children.”
SS7 Bank Account Attacks
while the attacks were originally only surmised to be within the reach of intelligence operators (perhaps part of the reason intelligence-tied telcos have been so slow to address the issue), hackers have increasingly been using the flaw to siphon money out of targets’ bank accounts, thus far predominately in Europe
Europa
Error Bars
error bars on error bars
Jason Voorhees
Jason Voorhees, the handsome hockey-masked villain of slasher series Friday the 13th, gets plenty of unmasking scenes—and new look each time.
The 5 Families of Feces
Former drivers remain furious over years of abuse. “Who does this fuckin’ scumbag think he is? He looks like he crawled out of a dumpster.” And now the drivers are an existential threat to the business. In June 2015, more of them sued, seeking more unpaid overtime. But this suit has class-action status; more than 1300 pump-truck drivers are currently represented. Charlie has always settled, but not now. “This is the case where I have had it, and I want to fight back to the end. And now the drivers have to, you know, pay.” If Charlie goes to trial and loses, the damages could be in the 10s of millions of $. Call-a-Head would be finished. Charlie has new competition, too: Private equity is making a porta-potty play. In July 2017, Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills–based investment firm, bought United Site Services, the nation’s largest portable-toilet conglomerate. Charlie frequently fields calls encouraging him to sell. His payday would be enormous, perhaps as much as $40M. He always refuses. And then, in December, Gary Weiner dropped a bombshell. He had just sold himself to United Site Services. Mr. John was throwing in the towel. Within days, the toilet giant was calling Call-a-Head’s clients, offering a 30% discount on rentals. (Weiner disputes this.) A battle with Wall Street and “a lot of college-educated people from Harvard” loomed, but Charlie saw only “bean counters” who didn’t understand the industry. “This is my life. I love it. I’ll always be doin’ it.”
All wealth
The Bellewether
It’s rare to find a truly secret space left in New York City but we recently had the opportunity to discover one, right in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Our friends at The Vanderbilt Republic, who run the inspiring programming at the Gowanus Loft, like the camera obscura installation in years past, are converting a raw space in midtown that was once an electrical repair company. The cavernous 800 m2 space is made possible by a combination of history and zoning – it actually spans 3 buildings, grandfathered in when skyscrapers were built on top. The once outdoor courtyards were closed in to fulfill a functional purpose in perpetuity, a state of impermanent operability – until now. The multi-room discovery is to be known as The Bellewether, a flexible performance and production space
Clean energy jerbs
Fastest-growing jobs: solar panel installer, wind turbine techs
2021-04-14: The way to do this is not with silly nonsense like union jobs
What we need to produce are very cheap renewable technologies, ones so cheap that the poorer countries of the world will adopt them as well. If we insist on packing a lot of labor costs (“good jobs”) into our energy technologies, we will not come close to achieving that end.
I was disappointed and unnerved by recent comments from Brian Deese, President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, who in the context of climate change remarked that “…investing in infrastructure can be one of the most effective ways to do that in a way that creates lots of jobs.” The correct Econ 101 answer, of course, is that a low-jobs energy infrastructure liberates labor to produce other goods and services for us, leading to higher overall output. Such policies remind me of the “make-work” fallacy, namely the view that the deliberate creation of domestic jobs (for instance through tariffs) will lead to a better economy. We will wind up with more good jobs in total if we seek to lower green energy prices, not raise them.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 