Month: August 2013

by Patrick Appel

Patrick McConlogue’s wants to teach a homeless man to code:

The idea is simple. Without disrespecting him, I will offer two options:

1. I will come back tomorrow and give you $100 in cash.

2. I will come back tomorrow and give you three JavaScript books, (beginner-advanced-expert) and a super cheap basic laptop. I will then come an hour early from work each day—when he feels prepared—and teach him to code.

Noreene Malone, along with much of the internet, trashes the idea:

What this suggestion shares with earlier ideas to turn the homeless into wireless hot-spots and to act as app beta-testers is a belief in the saving power of the tech world.

It’s not that the ideas are intentionally exploitative or ill-intentioned; rather, it is the bubble-bound thinking that is bothersome. In this worldview, involvement in the startup scene is the kind of transformative thing that can be a cure-all balm. It’s a narrow sort of Utopianism, one that doesn’t fully consider that there might be problems that the tools they have at their disposal can’t solve. These instances get noticed because it’s not good PR to be insensitive to the less fortunate, but this mindset pervades the tech world far beyond its interactions with the homeless.

Will Oremus partially defends McConlogue:

McConlogue’s post makes people uncomfortable not only because it is naïve and condescending, but because it raises an issue over which many of us quietly harbor guilt and doubts of our own. What is the proper response when your heart aches for a homeless person you pass every day on the way to work? Is it to flip a few coins in the guy’s direction now and then? Maybe buy him a sandwich or two? Resolve to donate some money to a local shelter this year? Turn your head and walk on? And if your answer is any of the above: What makes you so sure that your approach is doing any more good than McConlogue’s?

In a follow-up post, McConlogue reports that the homeless man, Leo, chose the coding lessons.

by Brendan James

Jake Tapper interviewed a friend of Manning’s:

Emily Greenhouse notes that Manning could face serious danger in prison now that she’s announced her identity as a woman:

Discrimination and violence, especially sexual violence, against transgender women is disproportionately bad. And in prison, according to a 2009 study of inmates in California, some sixty per cent of male-to-female transgender individuals locked up with cisgendered men suffered sexual assault. Not one of the transgender inmates in the study trusted guards to protect them against rape and harm.

Amanda Hess explains the legal measures that are in place:

[D]etention facilities (including military ones) must follow special policies to protect inmates like her. In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Though real-world implementation of the PREA standards has been slow-moving, the act ostensibly requires facilities to—among other things—take extra care in assigning housing to transgender inmates to reduce their risk of assault. That often means respecting the prisoner’s stated gender identity. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, housing decisions “must be made on a case-by-case basis” and “cannot be made solely on the basis of a person’s anatomy or gender assigned at birth.”

The transgender inmate’s “views regarding their personal safety must be seriously considered,” as well, and the “decisions must be reassessed at least twice per year.” Simply placing the at-risk inmate in solitary confinement to sidestep the gender issue is not an acceptable option.

Winston Ross notes how the same act could allow Manning to end up in a women’s prison:

[The Prison Rape Elimination Act] led to regulations from the federal Department of Justice to determine housing for transgender inmates on a case-by-case basis, “taking into account factors like personal preference and safety needs,” according to the ACLU, not solely based on their genitals. The act bans “protective custody” for transgender inmates, along with segregated LGBT housing units, and it requires staff to be trained on how to communicate with and treat transgender inmates, even including the ban of “genital searches of transgender inmates just to determine their gender.” Those rules, as of June, apply to all correctional facilities that require federal funding.

Manning’s notoriety and her public revelation about being transgender already put her at serious risk of harassment and/or rape at Leavenworth. No giant leap from there, then to argue that Manning would be best protected by the prison rape act by doing time in a women’s facility, [Dru Levasseur, transgender rights project director at Lambda Legal] said.

Previous commentary here.

by Patrick Appel

Commenting on yesterday’s Nasdaq shutdown, Felix argues that our “system of stock exchanges is so incredibly complex, with so much information flowing around at mind-boggling velocity, that it is certain to fail from time to time — and to fail in unexpected ways”:

As Alexis Madrigal says, the surprising thing isn’t that the Nasdaq broke, it’s that we don’t see this kind of thing far more often.

In fact, if I had the opportunity to interview Edward Snowden, that’s one of the questions I’d love to ask: How well do the NSA’s systems work? How often do they just crash, or otherwise stop working for an unexpected and unpredictable reason? The NSA is dealing with orders of magnitude more data than the Nasdaq, and has to do so in conditions of great secrecy. My guess is that things go wrong on a pretty regular basis. But the real-world consequences of today’s market outage, just like the real-world consequences of the flash crash, were pretty slim. And so too is it hard to determine what if any harm might be done by a temporary failure of America’s national security apparatus.

by Patrick Appel

David Graeber believes that “bullshit jobs” are on the rise:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

In response, Ryan Avent claims that “administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of the industrial line worker”:

Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same. …

The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don’t; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work. Early in the industrial era real wages soared and hours worked declined. In the past generation, by contrast, real wages have grown slowly and workweeks haven’t grown shorter.