Delusional. And no way to run a country. Far higher barriers to trade with the EU from Friday. And still subject to EU influence on our laws. To deny this is also to deny the ability to tackle the problems we will face.

We ended up with particularly high level playing field conditions in the EU deal because the UK didn't take the subject seriously. We got a worse deal on fish than anyone thought possible, and got nothing in return. All because of cakeism. Or patriotism as they call it.

Now we face higher trade barriers to our nearest market, which means our businesses need to be even more competitive to overcome them and succeed. Is that acknowledged?

Our neighbours, the EU, use all manner of pressures to keep neighbours in line in terms of trade. That financial services equivalence, pity if you didn't get that. Data equivalence, have 6 months free if you don't change your laws while we make you sweat...

Northern Ireland, as we repeat endlessly, Johnson cakeism of no checks? Somehow no longer mentioned after the EU got what they wanted. See also, fish, level playing field. EU priorities, EU won. Johnson cake, all gone, not eaten.

1/
This car pulled up to a 4 way stop just after me the other morning. On my left. As I pulled out, they did, too.

We nearly collided.

After a brief pause, I continued. Moments later, the driver swooped alongside me, extended an arm over the passenger seat, & flipped me off.

2/
Then, they sped off. But got stuck at the red light just ahead.

2 lanes. An empty street. On an early morning.

And this person in a car now beside me who, after not having the right of way, decided to greet me with a middle finger.

Mmm hmmm.

3/
Did I mention that this was on December 26? And that I'd worked not only on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day--but 12 consecutive days before?

And where I come from? Flipping folks off is not compatible with life.

Or at least compatible with not having it threatened.

4/
Anywho.

I stop at the light and allow my eyes to drift to my bird-shooting comrade. And then, after a few moments, they looked over toward me.

Mmm hmmm.

I felt my lips curling. My eyes narrowing. My hand reaching for the window button.

And then I stopped.

5/
I thought about this instance where someone made me very mad when I was an intern. A really intimidating person who was tasked with performing a complicated straight cath on my unstably housed patient who had urinary retention.

Yup.

Here's how it went down:

#tomwolf #pennsylvania Administration Urges Pa'ers to “Resolve to be Ready” for Emergencies. ***Hmmm what does he have PLANNED 🤔🤔🤔
Look at the presser
Next

Writing Emails to Professor; Important tips & Samples for your consideration

Every year, Profs get several emails from students & difficult to accept all. You want to ensure yours is concise & deserve a response. This thread will provide insight & some samples you can use.

1/n

Your opening statement; Here, please briefly introduce yourself & connect your interest with the Prof's own (refer to sample attached). Mention one or two of the Prof's research areas that you've checked and find interesting.

2/n

Following this, let them know what you've done in the past: Demonstrate your experiences & tools you use (this is important for them to gauge your fit). E.g: I have good experience working with neural networks, ensemble forecasting & published a paper in ABC Journal.

3/n

Lastly, quickly summarize what you'd like to research & state again the skills you've got that will be a good addition to their lab. E.g: I'm interested in conducting research on improving model prediction in AI (the Profs interests). I use Python, ArcGIS & R for modeling.

4/n

SOME IMPORTANT POINTS TO CONSIDER

1. Your email should not be verbose. Ideally, I'd keep within 3 paragraphs (something one can read in 2minutes)

2. You can attach CV & Transcript, but not in a drive or folder. Have it there as an attachment, they decide to open it or not

5/n

I'm creating a recommended book list for students of South Asian history and politics.

What do you think should be on it?

- "Annihilation of Caste" by BR Ambedkar
- "Walking With the Comrades" by Arundhati Roy
- "Hindutva" by VD Savarkar
- "Slavery" by Jyotirao Phule
- "Mogul India" by Niccolao Manucci
- "Sketch of the Sikhs" by John Malcolm
- "Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" by Mohandas Gandhi

- "The Mughal Throne" by Abraham Eraly
- "Aurangzeb" by Audrey Truschke
- "What Gandhi and Congress Have Done to Untouchables" by BR Ambedkar
- "A History of the Sikhs" by Joseph Davey Cunningham
- "Travels in the Mogul Empire" by François Bernier

- "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple
- "A Free Man" by Aman Sethi
- "Ants Among Elephants" by Sujatha Gidla
- "Jahangir's India" by Francisco Pelsaert
- "The Sikhs in History" by Sangat Singh
- "We or Our Nationhood Defined" by MS Golwalkar

- "War at the Top of the World" by Eric Margolis
- "The Argumentative Indian" by Amartya Sen
- "The Age of Kali" by William Dalrymple
- "The Temptations of the West" by Pankaj Mishra
- "For Reasons of State" by John Dayal
- "The Punjab" by Henry Steinbach

My highlighted passages from The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel. Thread below

1. The 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth Ira was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink

2. NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success - both your own and others': "Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems."

3. Margin of safety - you can call it room for error or redundancy

4. "Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd."

5. "The average equity fund investor underperformed the funds they invested in by half a percent per year, according to Morningstar - the result of buying and selling when they should have just bought and held."

Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.

1/

2/

The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.

To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.

3/

Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.

These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).

4/

There's an interesting detail in one of the frames: glimpse of a facility worker observing an industrial robot moving a rack.

5/

What is interesting is that:

✅ Cell production facilities are Class 7 clean rooms, while the worker doesn't wear the usual "bunny suit" protective gear.
✅ There's a barrier between the worker and the robot: likely separating clean-room air from unprotected air.

The Premier League schedule can just about handle the games that have been postponed... so far.

But the league is on the brink of a fixture crisis, and the failure to entertaining agreeing curtailment / abandonment options may come back and bite them hard.

From the initial fixture build there were three Premier Lague catchup dates built in - the midweeks of March 2, April 20 and May 19.

However, these placeholders were primarily for teams which reached the Carabao Cup final and/or the FA Cup final.

Added to that, even without COVID postponements, if a PL team were to get the semis of the Champions League or Europa League and the final of both domestic cups there aren't enough spare midweeks to fit those games in.

Looking at you, Man City, Man United and Tottenham.

Now it looks like we have the added complication of Tottenham v Fulham being postponed.

If at least one of those clubs remains in the FA Cup through to Round 5, the game can only be played on March 2.

But it could get even more complicated.

If Tottenham reach the Carabao Cup final, they also have to rearrange (coincidentally) Fulham v Tottenham which is due to be played April 24.

If Spurs go far in the UEL and to the FA Cup final, they will have nowhere to play TWO matches before the season deadline of May 23.

This Day in Labor History: December 30, 1900. Advisors from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the college run by Booker T. Washington, arrived in Togo to help German colonialists institute a southern-style cotton regime in their African colony. Let's talk about this shameful event!

This moment demonstrates the globalized nature of the American cotton production economy as it developed after the Civil War, as well as the active assistance of the nation’s leading black institution of higher education in propagating it.

In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Compromise speech, when he told a white audience that African-Americans should give up on fighting for political rights and instead just work hard, while whites support that work, especially his own Tuskegee Institute.

The setting for that speech was the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. In the audience for that gathering of cotton capitalists was Baron Beno von Herman auf Wein, the agricultural attaché to the German embassy in Washington.

The Baron was very interested in learning from American agricultural techniques. He, like many white elites on both sides of the Atlantic, believed that cotton growing was best done by black labor in some sort of forced or semi-coerced manner.

@USNavy @USNavyCNO @USNavyUnderSec @NavyTimes just wanted to know, when the contract was signed with IAL to ship our vehicles did you question the wording of the clause, "It will get there in the same condition it left, occasionally."
At this point I don't care how much it costs-

IAL needs to be held responsible for their poor quality of service and attempts to deny claims that are obviously the fault of their staff and subcontractors.
Backstory:
I just got out of the Navy after serving 8 honorable, rewarding years. Covid-19 is in full swing. I am living-

- off of savings while I wait for the spring semester at school to start because finding part time work in my skill-set is difficult in this climate. I have no vehicle and am still waiting for my household goods to arrive at my home. I'm informed that my car has arrived in NJ--

--and is ready for pickup. Imagine my surprise when I take a train across four states and walk 30 minutes in snow to pick up my car, only to find it has been damaged mechanically in transport because someone didn't know how to drive manual and couldn't be bothered to operate--

-a winch. My car is now ruined and I'm stuck in NJ trying to find a mechanic to replace my clutch on December 23rd. I ended up having to tow the car 30 minutes to a mechanic, out of pocket, and leave it in NJ, then try to catch a train to make it home to my family for the--

2020... what a year.

I just put the finishing touches on my Annual Review.

Here are 30 lessons I learned about myself and the world across five areas:

• Health
• Wealth
• Relationships
• Online creativity
• Personal operations

🧵👇🏼

Feel free to treat each of these as standalone tweets and comment on the lessons that resonate most heavily with you.

HEALTH

1. Health starts with removal, not addition.

This year I officially hit 100 lbs lost. And looking back, it wasn't what I started doing, but what I stopped doing that got me there.

Fewer carbs, fewer beers, fewer hours sitting, these things add up.

2. Recognize you are undisciplined instead of trying to fight it.

The most "disciplined" people actually are the most undisciplined.

But they recognize and accept this.

So they set up constraints that prevent them from having to rely on self-control and willpower.

3. Your health, especially mental health, is your foundation.

If you can't sit comfortably alone with the voice in your head, no amount of "success" will change that.

12 weeks alone in NYC during peak-COVID forced me to learn this lesson.

GA hearing:

A Question which begs to be answered.

1/ Georgia State Senate Hearing Live Tweet Thread:

The current Senate witness, J. Hutton Pulitzer, claims that the state's ballot auditors audited reproduction ballots because the original ballots are missing.

2/ This is concerning because previous witnesses testified that stacks of ballots appeared to be machine-made missing telltale creases and having identical vote markings for Biden and no other candidates.

3/ J. Hutton Pulitzer states his team can review 100% of Georgia's ballots to determine if they are REAL or FAKE within two hours. The State of Georgia has refused to allow any examination of the ballots for authenticity.

4/ J. Hutton Pulitzer claims he can determine the authenticity of the ballots from the State Farm Arena within hours if the state will make them available to his company. He calls the physical ballot the Holy Grail.

5/ The Senate has moved to compel the Georgia Secretary of State to turn over the physical ballots. The fight will likely end up in the courts as the Secretary of State has refused to comply with the Senate's request.

1/

2021 is a year when I need to work much smarter.

I need to build #collaborations with folk to make better progress on the projects I want to work with.

These are in the following areas:

1) Education - the current system is both skewed by nation state imperatives ...

2/

... and by the huge and still growing burden of knowledge it attempts to package and deliver both at school and beyond school in working environments ...

Folk need to switch to alternate education, finding leaders to first follow in the footsteps and then ...

3/

... assume the mantle of the late, great @SirKenRobinson

We need to find current leaders, build practice on the ground, connect internet guides to folk wanting to learn, and lift accreditation and connectivity systems into the cloud to make learning far more accessible ...

4/

2) As far as global ecology is concerned, #BigAgri is still ruling the airwaves, and #RegenAgri still needs all the support it can get.

Leaders like #JohnDLiu and #GabeBrown have made a mark this year in the film @kissthegroundCA , but we all need to do more ...

5/

... to support the grassroots projects out there and get #RegenAgri practice much more widely known and adopted.

Again we need practitioners on the ground, but we also sorely need top communicators to be able to help the #grassroots movement tell its story.

I've worked in IT for a few decades. The 2020 election is fraudulent. No one explained the core of the fraud, the configuration of the servers. I'm talking best practices
USB ports are disabled on every server and on many workstations to protect data and prevent intrusions.

Logs are reports of events on server functionality visible on screen or in print. Levels of users are defined w/ permissions. Administrators have full control over the server and software. They can read, edit, and write code or change internal server settings.

Next, there are Power Users. A Power User can't install new software. Others can read but can’t change anything. Access is severely limited. If the server is configured correctly their NAMES are visible.

Login are multifactor. Logs also show any intrusion attempts and can show the IP address (unique set of numbers identifying every computer) if the server is configured to do this. You can backtrack using the IP to identify the location of intruder.

Logs show backup schedules and data loss. Given the sensitivity of the data, assume a full backup. A couple of ways to do this. Another identical server, or the Cloud or RAID – Random Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID disks located in the server itself capture pieces

After my first reading of the draft EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement, here is a short thread with some initial thoughts:

1) this is a massive and complex document, covering very diverse & highly specialist fields. No single person could ever plausibly claim properly to master/understand it. So I’ve focused on my own (“big picture”) interests. Not, eg the (in fact marginal) details of fishing quotas

2) Let’s start with how draft treaty is being framed by UK Gov & client press. They compare it to “no deal” & thus treat it as some sort of triumph. Well: even on own terms, that is far from accurate: for many sectors, draft treaty is barely better than no deal at all

3) But of course: such UK Gov framing of draft treaty = entirely if sadly typically misleading. Real comparison should be draft treaty versus what UK already enjoyed for 45 years as a Member State of the EU. And judged by that benchmark: Johnson’s proposed deal is truly pathetic

4) Draft treaty gives UK nothing it didn't already enjoy, in relations with EU, as a Member State in its own right. Eg Johnson boasts about “zero tariffs and zero quotas” – even though we had that already for decades and Brexit simply risked throwing even those basic things away

Education secretary @GavinWilliamson now delivering a statement in the Commons on plans for bringing children back to school. Stay tuned for live updates.

The government's response is proportionate to the risk at hand, @GavinWilliamson says.

.@GavinWilliamson says in a small number of areas where infection rates are highest, only vulnerable pupils and children of key workers will attend primary school face-to-face. This is NOT all Tier 4 areas. The overwhelming majority of primaries will open as planned on Monday.

For secondary schools, it will be a staggered start, says @GavinWilliamson – with staff testing starting from 4 January, exam years returning on 11 January and everyone back in by 18 January

In particularly hard-hit areas, @GavinWilliamson says that exam year students, as well as vulnerable students and children of key workers, will still attend secondary schools in person, with all other classes taking place remotely

As promised, a thread explaining our newest BioRxiv paper, where we’ve discovered that C. elegans can transfer memories of pathogen avoidance to naïve individuals.

What if one worm could tell another that it has learned it is infected with a pathogen, and warn others? The idea of memory transfer has a checkered past, since the earliest reports of memory transfer in planaria.

We- @rebeccasmoore1 and Rachel Kaletsky, primarily- have been studying how C. elegans learns to avoid Pseudomonas after becoming sick. We previously found that they eat bacterial small RNAs, and one small RNA (P11) that is only around when the bacteria are pathogenic triggers...

...an avoidance response that happens not only in mothers, but is remembered by four generations of their progeny. We know that this process involves uptake and Dicer processing of small RNAs in the intestine, germline amplification, piRNAs,

and downregulation of a neuronal gene, maco-1, in the ASI neuron.