Real talk.

The right as spent years trying to paint @NancyPelosi & @HillaryClinton as extreme leftists who will take your guns, sterilize your sons, outlaw Christianity, and tax you at 80%.

Meanwhile...

The far left has tried to insist that they were both Republican-lite.

1/

Some on the far left call them war mongering neoliberal corporate owned whores.

That's on a good day, for both.

None of these charges, by either side, are remotely true of course. Not that this matters to the people putting this shit out there.

2/

The facts are these.

@HillaryClinton and @NancyPelosi have been fighting people, usually white men, for tnings their entire lives.

With little respite.

At times they have had to make impossible choices and compromises just to beo let in the door. Most women have.

3/

It must be easy to be some 26 yo white dude who has never had anyone tell him no his whole life to sit in judgement of women like them.

"How dare she..."

...do what was necessary to get a place at the table.

...do exactly what men have been doing w/o your disapproval.

4/

Let's face it, most men suck when it comes to issues that don't pertain directly to their own self interests. White men are even worse. We just are.

Most men especially suck when it comes to women's issues and I mean really suck.

How many left leaning men fell to #MeToo?

5/

A man just said “WHAT IS THAT?”when I walked by and then quickly yelled “IT WAS A COMPLIMENT” and then a small child said, and I quote, “Uncle Joe you can’t say that to ladies.” This boy will one day lead us all to greatness as a nation.

This is the second time in a month some dude has said something to me on the street and been shut down before I even said a word. Granted the LA version was more polite than when an NYC dude told me to smile and a lady cursed him out. People are hilarious.

I wouldn’t have been rude to either dude but wow, I didn’t even have to make the choice because we Americans are chatty.

Also I’m worried about Uncle Joe because $10 says his sister is the boy’s mom and we now know she’s not afraid to tell guys what to do.

My eyes got SO BIG and I almost laughed and Uncle Joe said, “That’s fair, my dude” to this kindergartener and I was like oh God the children will lead us.

I’m contemplating leaving @twitter. The platform has proven to be instrumental in harming people with marginalized identities, which normally I wouldn’t blame a media platform for except that @jack has demonstrated negative interest in doing anything about it.

in the past when I’ve thought about this I’ve thought about it from the perspective of my own safety/comfort. And I’m good on that front; I can handle it. But now I’m thinking about it differently: thinking about the people who tell me they join or stay on twitter because of me.

Every time someone in the press refers to me as a “twitter celebrity” (actual phrase that I don’t fully understand or subscribe to but this is what people say) it means that my presence and voice are adding social cachet to a company that I find to be quite terrible.

People tell me that they learn a lot from what I have to say here, and sometimes that it’s their first or only exposure to certain ideas, histories, perspectives, etc. and I have to weigh that too. But I could post that stuff elsewhere.

We’ll see. I’m just thinking aloud for now but I’m watching closely to see what @twitter and @jack do in the coming days and how they respond to what we now know about Cesar Sayoc (beyond one really stupid tweet). Because we know it’s not just him. Big changes need to happen.

"If you then discovered that the majority of the committee members had financial interests in the drug being developed, how would you feel?" 1/n
@zoeharcombe @RosemaryFreiTO @simondolan @Francis_Hoar @BreesAnna @toadmeister @NeilClark66 @allisonpearson

#KBF
"The advice was stay home if you’re sick, wash your hands, protect the vulnerable, most people will have a mild illness, wearing face masks is “usually quite a bad idea“, & “big gatherings don’t have a big effect so we don’t want to disrupt people’s lives.” 2/n

"1) Organisations invested in vaccines make money from vaccines. If people acquire natural immunity, they have reduced or no need for a vaccine and thus the potential gain for the vaccine company is reduced." 3/n

"2) Locking people in their homes and other lockdown measures will reduce the number of people who acquire natural immunity." 4/n

"The notable exception was that @neil_ferguson resigned from the SAGE committee when it became known (on 5th May) that he had broken lockdown rules" 5/n

And since today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science, let's highlight a few of them - just a few women among thousands of others who helped shape the world we live in today.

Thread.

Dorothy Hodgkin discovered the structure of insulin after 36 years of work.

"I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals."

Sophia Jex-Blake fought for women's rights to study medicine. She was involved in founding two medical schools for women.

"It seemed discreditable to Great Britain that all her daughters who desired a University education should be driven abroad to seek it."

Alice Augusta Ball developed the "Ball Method", the most effective treatment for leprosy during the early 20th century. She was 23.

Ada Lovelace is regarded as the first to recognize the full potential of computers and as one of the first computer programmers.

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.”

Three years ago this week, I beat up a man who groped me in a club. It was fucking glorious. Celebrate that anniversary with me!
https://t.co/SSFfVCYvA0 #IBeatMyAssaulter

I’ve lost count of the # times I’ve been sexually assaulted and I know that my reactions have spanned a spectrum, all of them valid. That night it was: Are you fucking kidding me? And my body went into autodrive; it knew exactly what to do.
Tell me your #IBeatMyAssaulter stories

And sign up to FEMINIST GIANT.

It's free, no paywall, no ads.

If you can pay, it helps to keep it

I know that we can’t always fight back. My priority is to survive. I never want what I have shared here to make anyone feel guilty for not beating up her assaulter.

I also know that we are not socialized to fight back. We are not taught to fight back. #IBeatMyAssaulter

Men are not socialized to expect us to fight back. I think of that when I hear of the spike in intimate partner terrorism during the pandemic. I wonder why those men never fear that those women could poison their food or simply kill them in their sleep for being abusive fucks.

Remote isn’t just about the future of work

It’s a bridge to a higher quality of life

Rather than a job – and an office – being the anchor of our social lives, it’s about democratising access to opportunity

[ a thread ] 🌍🏠💻

Remote work should lead to individuals having more choice

Not just spending time with people selected by HR teams, where your deepest common bond is a shared reliance on the economic success of that employer – where if that changes relationships end

Offices have been great for certain demographics – but disqualified/discriminated against almost most others

- single parents
- caring for family members
- health conditions and impairments

The offices makes staying in office work incredibly difficult if not impossible

‘What about young people in shares apartments’

Absolutely.

But is this an issue with remote or the implication of expensive cities and needing to live close enough to commute daily?

‘There are mental health implications’

Absolutely.

But is this a natural issue with remote work, or an implication of COVID-enforced lockdown WFH where we can’t see family, friends, go to coffee shops or travel?

THREAD: Today ONS has published a report on how it decided that the Census question "what is your sex" should *not* mean the sex you were born

The ONS considered 5 difference concepts of sex:
Sex registered at birth,
Sex recorded on birth certificate,
Sex recorded on legal/official documents,
living / presenting sex,
Self-identified sex.

/2

A big part of their evidence for why asking 'sex registered at birth' was unacceptable was that trans people won't like it and might boycott the Census. /3

From this they concluded "The highest negative impact on accuracy & reliability is anticipated if sex registered at birth was collected due to the likely negative impact on response rates caused by the perceived invasion of privacy" /4

and that "The data need [for birth sex] is not considered to be strong enough to justify collecting this" /5

Is it possible to fight against totalitarian statists without ever compromising conservative "principles?" Is it better to play "fair," and constantly lose? Can you grapple with monsters without becoming a monster? That's the question at the heart of the schism on the Right.

I've been working my pitch to better explain how I think we can better understand/eliminate sexual harassment and assault in our force. Buckle up for a thread; also usual disclaimers that I'm not a psychologist, therapist, sociologist, doctor, or lawyer. (+usual TWs) 1/

I suppose what I’m asking for is your feedback, your thoughts, and your criticisms- particularly if you specialize in one of these areas- but try and take it easy on me… understanding my expertise lies in decades of military leadership and not the social sciences. 2/

I believe that fundamental to our understanding is the idea that Sexual Harassment and Assault lie along a "Objectification Spectrum;" (taken from John Rector: recommend). One end of the spectrum is the ideal state of enlightenment, inclusivity, empathy, trust, & equality. 3/

On the other end lies a fundamental lack of empathy, lack of respect for ones existence, dismissive of social and physical autonomy, failure to respect consent, and ultimately, complete dehumanization; all which set conditions for sexual violence to occur 4/

Constantly tugging at us along this spectrum are psychosocial factors driven by our upbringings, societal constructs & influences, psychological makeup, experiences, peer groups, and overall worldview. In this case the most important are toxic masculinity, misogyny, & sexism. 5/

'Stay at home' for #LekkiMassacre protest is not a sign of weakness. The likes of Odanz -or is it Odense? - have called attention to this and they are not pacifists. They are strategist-realists.
Activism is the art of war. Pounce when the enemy is at its weakest [Thread]

As a young activist in 1991 and NANS President, I knew activism was and still the art of war; and also knew that in war you pounce when your enemy is at its weakest.

What I didn't realize is the strength of the "pouncer"

NANS Senate - the highest organ of NANS- met in Ilorin in March 1991 and issued 13 points 30-day ultimatum to IBB, chief of which was to scrap the political transition programme, resign and handover to the Government of National Unity.

As NANS Chief I was saddled with the duty of moving around Nigeria mobilizing for a showdown with the junta beginning from 1 May 1991. Negotiations between NANS and FGN led by Prof Babs Fafunwa and Alex Akinyele broke down before the expiration of ultimatum on 30 April 1991

At the joint press conference addressed by Fafunwa and Akinyele on 27 April 1991, Akinyele threatened that "students leaders will be picked like snails" and asked parents to advise their wards. Traditional rulers joined in the blackmail.

In much of SF, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a sign declaring that Black lives matter and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against the new housing that would bring those values closer to reality.

Poorer families — disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant — are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. Those inequalities have turned deadly during the pandemic.

And it's not just SF:

"What we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street," @Scott_Wiener told me.

There is a danger — not just in California, but everywhere — that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program.

It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets and owning the libs than passing bills.

It’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.

H/T @PatHarrison2
A decent report from the NY Times...
"As the new year made Brexit a reality, Tony Hale encountered the pitfalls of Europe’s redrawn geography. Specifically, he confronted the need to extricate 53 tons of rotting pork products from administrative purgatory

a port in the Netherlands.
For more than two decades, Mr. Hale’s company had shipped pork to the European Union without customs checks, as if the United Kingdom and the continent across the water were one vast country.

With Britain now legally outside the bloc,

exporters suddenly had to navigate inspections, safety regulations & a bewildering crush of paperwork.
For Mr. Hale, incorrectly prepared documents meant sending five containers full of pork to an unplanned final destination : the incinerator.
“It’s a new game,& we have to learn”

Mr. Hale said. “We are having to double- and triple-check every document.”
In the early days of the post-Brexit era, Britain is struggling to adapt to its new position in the global economy — its fortunes still tethered to the European Union; its companies now on the outside.

The trade deal Britain struck late last year with the European Union stopped tariffs from being imposed on goods exchanged across the English Channel, but did not prevent the revival of customs procedures, health and safety checks, value-added taxes on imports, and other

0/ When large eng orgs rely on metrics for both monitoring *and* observability, they struggle with cardinality.

This is a thread about “the two drivers of cardinality.” And which one of those we should kill. :)

🧵👇

1/ Okay, first off: “what is cardinality, anyway?” And why is it such a big deal for metrics?

“Cardinality” is a mathematical term: it’s *the number of elements in a set*... boring! So why tf does anybody care??

Well, because people think they need it, then suddenly, "$$$$$$$."

2/ When a developer inserts a (custom) metric to their code, they might think they’re just adding, well, *one metric*. …

3/ … But when they add “tags” to that metric – like , , or (shiver) – they are actually creating a *set* of metric time series, with the *cardinality* of that set being the total number of unique combinations of those tags.

4/ The problem is that some of those tags have many distinct values.

E.g., when I was working on Monarch at Google, there was a single gmail metric that became over 300,000,000 (!!!) distinct time series. In a TSDB, that cardinality is the unit of cost.

So again, “$$$$$$$.”

🧵on the Toronto area SGTF (S-Gene Target Failure) study to detect B117 (UK variant). It looked at 11,485 positive tests over Dec 16 to Feb 3 and found 448 had SGTF* (3.9%). These charts show the growth.
https://t.co/5L8tF0MwDv

2. Note: Not every SGTF is B117 but almost all were confirmed with WGS (whole genomic sequencing). Rt for the SGTF was 1.17, non-SGTF were .82 meaning SGTF had an Rt 44% higher. This means that B117 is growing quickly (80% per week in recent weeks) and is projected to overtake

3. the old variants around Feb 20th in the Toronto area. Because the Rt (reproduction number) was only .82 without B117, we know the lockdown was working well in Toronto. It's only because the variant was a small share that infections and cases fell. If it had reached 100%,

4. then every infection would have infected 1.17 more infections and we would have had exponential growth EVEN IN LOCKDOWN where we have seen cases plummet.

5. This data is for the Toronto area. The projections have uncertainty - Feb 20 is approximate but once B117 becomes increasingly dominant over the next 6 weeks, current lockdown efforts would be hard-pressed to stop R from moving above 1, meaning an exponential growth in cases.