https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/pregnant-athlete-sponsor-climber.html

Since she’s such a meticulous planner and a pro, I have to assume she’s totally on top of the “fatal fall” scenario. That being said…

«Topping out on a 5.14 is great, but creating this discussion was the most empowering thing I’ve done in my career.

Regularly now I’m contacted by other professional women outdoor athletes — skiers, snowboarders, fellow climbers, who are terrified about planning or announcing a pregnancy and in need of advice on how to maintain their careers. I don’t have all the answers but I do have one: Find a sponsor who will support you. Almost all the brands who sponsor elite athletes sell the vast majority of their merchandise to people who don’t climb or run or ski for work. They sell to people who have full lives. If they sell to women, they sell to mothers.»

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-3-shark-attacks-in-north-carolina-2019-6

Thank you, global warming. At least we’re getting a Northwest Passage out of this.

«”Global climate change has prompted warmer water temperatures farther northward,” Burgess said. That means more fin sightings in places historically considered shark-free.

A 2018 study published in the journal Scientific Reports noted that between 2011 and 2016, bull sharks moved their nurseries farther north, into North Carolina waters. The study authors found that the bull shark presence near the Pamlico Sound was correlated with water temperature: When temperatures in Pamlico Sound dropped below 22 degrees Celsius, no juvenile bull sharks were observed in the area.

….

“Bull sharks are animals that want to continue their attack after the first bite and don’t give up,” Burgess said. “Not all sharks are that way.”

Naylor said Winters’ father was smart to intervene during his daughter’s attack.

“It was exactly the right thing to do, he likely saved her life by upending the animal,” he said.

….

“Bull sharks like brackish water and are known to even ascend into freshwater rivers that are farther inland to hunt,” he said.

These river deltas, where fresh and salt water mix, are also prime fish habitats for fish — another factor that draws sharks closer to shore.

“Bull sharks … pursue a variety of prey and interesting objects, which occasionally include people,” Naylor said. “They’re large animals, and quite tenacious.”

….

“If people are playing in the same waters, sharks will encounter the people, mistakes happen and someone gets bitten,” he said. “If you see schooling fish, you’d be well advised to get out of the water.”
Burgess said another factor in the higher number of shark attacks is simply that North Carolina’s tourism industry has attracted more visitors to the state’s beaches than in years past.»

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-permafrost/scientists-amazed-as-canadian-permafrost-thaws-70-years-early-idUSKCN1TJ1XN?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Here we go.

«The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

Torn between professional excitement and foreboding, Romanovsky said the scene had reminded him of the aftermath of a bombardment.

“It’s a canary in the coalmine,” said Louise Farquharson, a post-doctoral researcher and co-author of the study. “It’s very likely that this phenomenon is affecting a much more extensive region and that’s what we’re going to look at next.”

Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.»

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/salesforces-tableau-acquisition-admitting-organic-innovation-failure/

Interesting emphasis on organic innovation for a software company. Who’d’a thunk?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/magazine/elizabeth-warren-president.html

Another good article.

This:

«But Wall Street and its allies “are more afraid of her than Bernie,” Zingales continued, “because when she says she’ll change the rules, she’s the one who knows how to do it.”»

I have always felt that Sanders is more interested in posture than effect.

«Two years later, Warren asked Mann, whom she had met at a conference, to marry her. He gave up his job at the University of Connecticut to join her in Houston.»

🙂

«Biden’s tiny state, which allowed credit-card companies to charge any interest rate they chose beginning in 1981, would become home to half the national market. One giant lender, MBNA, contributed more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Biden strongly supported a bill, a version of which was first introduced in 1998, to make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy and more difficult to leave behind debt. He was unpersuaded by Warren’s charts and graphs showing how the change would increase the financial burden on families. “I am so sick of this self-righteous sheen put on anybody who wants to tighten up bankruptcy,” Biden said during a Senate hearing in 2001.

….

And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis.

….

The answer raised “a troubling specter of women exercising powerful political influence within a limited scope, such as rape laws or equal educational opportunity statutes.

Warren wanted feminism to be wider in scope and centered on economic injustice. She urged students to take business-law classes. “If few students interested in women’s issues train themselves in commercial areas, the effects of the commercial laws will not be diminished, but there will be few effective advocates around to influence those policy outcomes,” she wrote. “If women are to achieve true economic equality, a far more inclusive definition of a women’s issue must emerge.”

….

Warren has work to do to persuade people of color to support her. In the last couple of Democratic primaries, these voters started out favoring candidates who they thought would be most likely to win, not those who were the most liberal.»

Pragmatism, again.

«When Warren makes the case about what needs to change in America by leaning on the period from 1935 to 1980, she’s talking about a time of greater economic equality — but also a period when people of color were excluded from the benefits of government policies that buoyed the white middle class. In a video announcing that she was exploring a presidential bid, Warren acknowledged that history by saying that families of color today face “a path made even harder by generations of discrimination.”

….

In “The Two-Income Trap,” [2003] Warren called these kinds of loans “legally sanctioned corporate plans to steal from minorities.”

….

Luigi Zingales, the University of Chicago economist, comes from Italy, and he feared Trump’s rise back in 2011, having watched the ascension of Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt billionaire tycoon who was elected prime minister of Italy in the 2000s as a right-wing populist. After Trump’s victory in 2016, Zingales pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed that the two candidates who defeated Berlusconi treated him as “an ordinary opponent,” focusing on policy issues rather than his character. “The Democratic Party should learn this lesson,” Zingales wrote. He now thinks that Warren is positioned to mount that kind of challenge. “I think so,” he said, “if she does not fall for his provocations.”»

https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/1140929067740536832?s=17

“The revolution was stolen from the people.” Surprise! \o/

Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) Tweeted:

Sudan’s brutal new leader, Hemeti, one of the leaders of the Darfur genocide, is now consolidating power over all Sudan, after murdering pro-democracy protesters. The big question is whether the Sudanese army stands up to him as he drags the country backward. https://t.co/j75hVL9Slm

https://www.redstate.com/joesquire/2019/06/17/really-really-stupid-assume-trump-will-lose-2020/

I take issue with all this guy’s snide asides, BUT… the people of Israel recently voted to give Benjamin Netanyahu a fifth term, in spite of all his many flaws. He’s right; there are no guarantees, and there’s no reason 47% of the country can’t put Trump back in office in 2020.

«Sure, Trump takes a beating when it comes to character – I readily admit that I take part in that – but you cannot deny that his administration has had a positive impact on the economy.

Do you think the American people are concerned with Trump the person or their personal financial situations right now? I can almost guarantee you can ask all the questions you want about his character, but if the economy is still trucking along, it won’t mean much come 2020. It’s the jobs people will consider. They either lost theirs or knew someone who lost theirs during the recession, and now virtually everyone they know has a job. That will (likely) still be the case in 2020. And that’s the case Trump should make.»

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/there-should-be-age-limit-presidents/591724/

I love this stuff (also, it’s a good article):

«To be sure, anyone who criticizes our gerontocracy must insert a “to be sure” paragraph right about now, praising the gumption and resilience of our oldsters, marveling at their energy and their bottomless reservoirs of wisdom.»

The power of curious generalists. (See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox.)

Kind of makes one wonder if there’s something behind Michael Gove’s statement that “we’ve had enough of experts.” Besides Russia, that is.

Or this could just be my happy confirmation bias.

«Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.

The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

….

Tetlock, along with his wife and collaborator, the psychologist Barbara Mellers, ran a team named the Good Judgment Project. Rather than recruit decorated experts, they issued an open call for volunteers. After a simple screening, they invited 3,200 people to start forecasting. Among those, they identified a small group of the foxiest forecasters—bright people with extremely wide-ranging interests and unusually expansive reading habits, but no particular relevant background—and weighted team forecasts toward their predictions. They destroyed the competition.

Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.»

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/can-elizabeth-warren-win-it-all

“High voltage.” I like that.

This is a really good article, and I recommend the whole thing.

«“Gentle and soft-spoken she isn’t, on anything,” Charles Fried, one of Warren’s former colleagues at Harvard Law School and a Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, told me. “She either doesn’t speak or it is high voltage.”

….

“You know who agrees with that, by the way?” Warren continued. “Steve Bannon. It just hit me as I was telling you this.” She paraphrased something that Bannon, the adviser who helped engineer Trump’s victory, had said in 2017: “If the Democrats are talking about what’s happening in the lives of working people—if they’re talking about the economics of America—they’re going to win.”

….

“And I went from down seventeen points to beating Brown by seven and a half points.

“The same will be true in 2020,” Warren went on. She leaned forward, her eyes gleaming: “People all across this country understand that government works great for the rich and powerful, and isn’t working for them. We’ll get organized. We’ll fight for working people. We’ll build a grassroots movement. And that’s how I’ll be the first woman elected President of the United States.”»

I actually don’t care about that “first woman” part, except that I think less testosterone would be good.

«“Because when my mama walked off to the Sears and got a minimum-wage job, a minimum-wage job in America would support a family of three. It would pay a mortgage, keep the utilities on, and put food on the table. Today, a full-time minimum-wage job in America will not keep a mama and a baby out of poverty.” Her voice grew hard: “And that is why I am in this fight.”

….

Under Cordray, the C.F.P.B. forced financial institutions to return twelve billion dollars to customers who had been targeted by scams such as unauthorized overdraft charges and illegal fees for student-loan repayments. Congressional Republicans kept up their opposition; by 2017, they had introduced a hundred and thirty-five bills and resolutions to weaken or eliminate the agency.

….

At an event in Salem, New Hampshire, she pointed out that most middle-income voters are already paying a form of wealth tax, through property taxes. “All I want to do that’s different is include the Rembrandt and the diamonds!” she said. A man called out from the audience, “And the yacht!” Warren replied, “And the yacht with the imax theatre!”

….

“Markets are terrific at spurring innovation, driving down costs, and producing consumer benefits—if those markets operate according to some basic rules.” …. But, Warren went on, “capitalism without rules is theft. People say the game is rigged, and they’re right.”

Even some corporations and wealthy individuals have begun publicly acknowledging that the financial system is badly off balance. During a company event in March, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, said, “I don’t want to be a tone-deaf C.E.O. While the company is doing fine, it is absolutely obvious that a big chunk [of Americans] have been left behind.”»