onfocus

“We have never seen this level of destruction from an infectious illness before. It rendered the placenta unfit to carry out its duties,” said Dr. David Schwartz, a perinatal pathologist in private practice in Atlanta, who led the study. “These fetuses and newborns died from asphyxiation due to lack of oxygen.”

Covid is still a horror show. I’m just learning about this particular horror now. We don’t hear about it.

I’ve done my best to explain what’s going on with these terms, but they cover basically every single major feature of git which is definitely too much for a single blog post so it’s pretty patchy in some places.

I really like this approach to understanding something with confusing terminology—assume the audience has necessary context and just jump in and unpack the confusing parts without starting from zero. I learned some new git tricks from this.

It is, of course, possible that Johnson really has no bank accounts and just keeps all his money in sacks of cash hidden under his mattress. Another explanation could be that he has selective amnesia and has forgotten to disclose his assets for seven years. But several ethics experts offered another reason: Johnson is terrible at managing the money he makes and may be in massive debt.

Ethics for thee but not for me. If you haven't heard, the new speaker has some strange stuff going on. Third in line for the presidency.

Do No Harm has used its small slice of the Edelmans’ wealth to launch a successful campaign against health care services for trans Americans.

So frustrating that billionaires have more than they could ever need and still look around and say: now, how can I make people suffer?

Our emotional responses to these massacres are valid. Strike while the iron, and our blood, is running hot. Let our emotions fuel the urgency of our attempts to respond with overwhelmingly popular gun control legislation, and let Republicans head into elections in two weeks opposing them.

Now is absolutely the time. The time has been now since the epidemic of shootings began. We have tried doing nothing for a long time and it's not working.

Trump’s supporters in trying to overturn the election have not fared well in elections since the violent assault on the Capitol, with a slate of conspiracy theorists attempting to assume positions overseeing elections in key swing states all losing their races last year. Instead, they have excelled at winning internal party contests and taking control of some state parties. Now they also have claimed one of the nation’s most powerful political positions.

This is what it looks like when your party is at odds with most of the voting public. You elect people with widely unpopular views to leadership positions and then try to limit public voting as much as possible through gerrymandering, voter supression, and legislating via Supreme Court decisions.

Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley.

Neil Postman explained why this strain of techno utopianism is dangerous in the early 90s in his book Technopoly. We have even more evidence supporting his warnings since then. This "manifesto" displays such depressingly retrograde thinking from the people with money.

It particularly galled them that Mr. Scalise, the No. 2 Republican, defeated Mr. Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, in the initial party vote to choose a replacement for Mr. McCarthy only to then watch Mr. Jordan’s allies immediately pivot to denying Mr. Scalise the speakership on the floor.

This is your regular reminder that Republicans don’t want a functioning government. Government shutdowns and inability to legislate are a success state for them. I wish the media would make that more clear.

How am I supposed to use the internet now? The experience of asking that question and getting a series of good answers, to me, it felt like the conversation you have with a friend that finally convinces you to make a break-up stick. A break-up with someone who maybe has always sucked, or at least, sucked for awhile.

This episode of Search Engine is a great conversation with Ezra Klein about being aware of where your attention is going.

Full-time office workers are spending roughly $1,020 every month to report to the workplace, while hybrid workers spend an average of $408 per month on attendance.

But in return you get the life affirming joys of navigating traffic. (sarcasm)

In a just world, publishing such confidently incorrect pieces in an actual newspaper would result in the author’s career in opinion journalism coming to an end soon after. This is not a just world. The Post, a real newspaper that people read to learn about the important issues of the day, doesn’t seem to care if their columnists know what they’re talking about.

Trolling the libs for clicks is one way the media makes money. Making money is a higher priority than accuracy.

These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

Nice confirmation that the social media effort wasn't and isn't worth the return for news orgs. You're building someone else's platform—and they're platforms that can rug-pull at any moment because their profits aren't directly tied to that organization-generated content.