Category Archives: Uncategorized

the costs of incarceration

«the costs of incarceration are coming due in suburban and rural areas, squeezing state budgets and competing with education. It’s not a comeuppance but a bitter cost of the white majority’s willingness to accept the suffering of others, a cost of racism itself.»

#theSumOfUs

College debt

Why is college so expensive? Why is everybody in debt? Greedy Big Education?

«In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.

….

State legislatures began to drastically cut what they spent per student on their public colleges, even as the taxable income base in the state grew.

….

The average public college tuition has nearly tripled since 1991, helping bring its counterpart, skyrocketing student debt, to the level of $1.5 trillion in 2020.

….

The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans,

….

In 1978, a [California] ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes. Property tax revenue from corporate landowners and homeowners in the state dropped 60 percent the following year. The impact was felt most acutely in public K–12 schools;

….

Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.

….

A decade later, voters in Colorado… passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes. TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) has forced Coloradans to go without a long list of public services, including for two years children’s vaccines when the state couldn’t afford to purchase them—and the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.»


https://a.co/d3rw2xn

UK air traffic failure blamed on ‘extremely rare’ circumstances as CAA opens inquiry

«“an extremely rare set of circumstances” with two identically named but separate waypoint markers outsidethe UK’s airspace»

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/06/uk-air-traffic-failure-blamed-on-extremely-rare-circumstances-as-caa-opens-inquiry

Somewhere there is a software dev who advocated for disambiguating waypoint names seven or eight years ago, and a manager (or managerS) who said, no, that will add a month to the time this project takes. We’ll go back and fix it later.

IEEE Spectrum: How Python Swallowed the World

«Some forgiveness can be given for a borrowed name that’s unlikely to cause a semantic collision in normal use, such as Python or Lisp. But there can be none for such abominations as Processing or Go. These are words so often used in computing contexts that not even a regex match pattern written by God could disambiguate all the indexing and search collisions.»

https://spectrum.ieee.org/python

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – Hapgood

«What is harder to understand is how in nearly 25 years of the web, when people have told us what they THINK about local subsidies approximately one kajillion times we can’t find one — ONE! — syllabus-ready treatment of the issue.»

https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/#:~:text=What%20is%20harder%20to%20understand%20is%20how%20in%20nearly%2025%20years%20of%20the%20web%2C%20when%20people%20have%20told%20us%20what%20they%20THINK%20about%20local%20subsidies%20approximately%20one%20kajillion%20times%20we%20can%E2%80%99t%20find%20one%20%E2%80%94%20ONE!%20%E2%80%94%20syllabus%2Dready%20treatment%20of%20the%20issue.

Of course, “can’t find” isn’t quite the same as “doesn’t exist” (unless you ask me again in an hour), but… good point.

(In case it’s not obvious, “local subsidies” is not the topic here.)


I really need to #readLater this essay on #knowledgeManagement #ontology

(I might be misusing “ontology”. Oh well.)

Or… maybe I’m ok, after all:

«Ontologies. Ontology is the newest label to be attached to some knowledge organization systems. The knowledge-management community is developing ontologies as specific concept models. They can represent complex relationships among objects, and include the rules and axioms missing from semantic networks. Ontologies that describe knowledge in a specific area are often connected with systems for data mining and knowledge management.»

https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub91/1knowledge/#:~:text=Ontologies.%20Ontology,knowledge%20management.

Found via Google search «is there an “-ology” for knowledge organization and management?»

Oh my goodness, there are at least two organizations dealing with this:

Georgia’s Brian Kemp Rebuffs Calls To Remove Fani Willis | HuffPost Latest News

What the heck is up with Ga. Republican leaders? (I still don’t trust them, but at least they support democracy? Maybe?)

«Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, another Republican, made similar remarks in a letter Wednesday after some of his colleagues suggested they could defund Willis’ office….»

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brian-kemp-fani-willis_n_64f0c220e4b03bdff3ae0643

Proud Boys Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl Sentenced For Jan. 6 Plot

The Year of Finding Out:

«Biggs wore an orange prison jumpsuit and black, thick-rimmed glasses as he spoke before Judge Kelly early Thursday afternoon, taking breaks to sob during a brief statement.

“My curiosity got the better of me and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Judge Kelly responded with a note that the actions taken by Biggs and the Proud Boys upended not just the election process on Jan. 6, but the election process going forward.

“What happened that day … it broke our tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, which is the most precious thing we had as Americans,” Kelly said. “Notice I say had — we don’t have it anymore.”

Rehl, who bragged in communications with Proud Boys about being “proud of what we accomplished” following the Capitol attack, sobbed during his sentencing hearing.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit with shackles around his feet, Rehl stood to address Judge Kelly and expressed remorse for his actions.

“A complete lapse in judgment cost me everything,” Rehl said, according to reporters in the courtroom.»

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/proud-boys-joe-biggs-sentenced_n_64ef3e5de4b0efecbcb97d74