Ein Wutausbruch, der verstört: US-Präsident Trump droht, manchen US-Staaten nicht in der Coronakrise zu helfen, weil sie seine Arbeit nicht genug wertschätzen.

Work/life balance is at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth, today’s senior executives will tell you. But by making deliberate choices about which opportunities they’ll pursue and which they’ll decline, rather than simply reacting to emergencies, leaders can and do engage meaningfully with work, family, and community. They’ve discovered through hard experience that prospering in the senior ranks is a matter of carefully combining work and home so as not to lose themselves, their loved ones, or their foothold on success.

Here's (via https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/30/deafhood/#diagnosis-cure) an admirably compact diagnosis of the malady afflicting capitalism and a suggestion for a cure from Yanis Varoufakis:

In 2008, we had an "endogenous" crash, caused by the finance sector itself. Governments gave them trillions, but "this liquidity did not turn into actual investment in the real economy."

"Banks recovered, the oligarchy found themselves with appreciating assets, the majority our there had to face harsh austerity. This boosted the disconnect between the world of money (that was doing well) and the world of the real economy (which was not)."

Now we face an "exogenous" crash, caused by the pandemic, but, "when Covid-19 arrived on the scene, it acted like a pin that bursts a gigantic bubble. Reflating this bubble, in the absence of public investment, will not be possible however much money Central Banks pump in."

But even today, TrackPoint fans across the internet still swear by their favorite input method and will broker no argument that it isn’t the superior form of computer navigation (the ThinkPad subreddit, for example, is full of appreciative posts). It’s like non-QWERTY keyboard layouts in that respect: well thought out, potentially better-to-use alternatives that exist only at the fringes of computing because other input methods are so much more popular, and it would take too much effort to switch.

it’s easy to see “where the money went:” It never existed in the first place. If my stock had a quoted price of $100 on an exchange, and that price fell to $75 per share, that means the forecast of the present value of future earnings for that company fell. The stock is a claim on the future stream of profits; the estimated value of the stream fell because of new taxes, new regulations, changes in consumer preferences, or the invention of a new competing product.

“Managers should provide employees working in demanding jobs more control, and in jobs where it is unfeasible to do so, a commensurate reduction in demands. For example, allowing employees to set their own goals or decide how to do their work, or reducing employees’ work hours, could improve health,” Gonzalez-Mulé says.

Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden says that tech workers need to think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all.

Inquiry and introspection may be a more meaningful use of your time and energy than buying up the last roll of toilet paper on the planet.

It was a public hearing held online. Billions of people crowded into the meeting room, in suits, in pajamas, on treadmills, on sofas, in groups in front of large screens suspended above busy streets, alone at home with VR headsets on. The host called for silence and their words were translated into myriad languages, in both sound and text. The audience held its collective breath and waited for the special guest to show. A face appeared, vague in detail, like billions of faces merged into one. The face began to talk, in an equally vague voice, in thousands of languages at the same time, alien but also familiar to everyone

Robert Auld, an audio engineer and former chair of the New York chapter of the Audio Engineers Society, is one of many in his trade who sees LRAD deployment as a military-style escalation of force.

“I would characterize it as a terror weapon, up there with tear gas and flash-bang grenades,” Auld tells Popular Mechanics. “The latter are supposed to be ‘non-lethal,’ but they can hurt you. Same for the LRAD.”

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which described his three laws of motion. In the process, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics and redefined the way the world looked at physics and science.

What most people don't know, however, is that Newton's three laws of motion can be used as an interesting analogy for increasing your productivity, simplifying your work, and improving your life.

Allow me to present this analogy as Newton's Laws of Productivity.

ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a disk utility for Unix systems. Its name refers to its similar purpose to the du utility, but ncdu uses a text-based user interface under the [n]curses programming library.[2] Users can navigate the list using the arrow keys and delete files that are taking up too much space by pressing the 'd' key. Version 1.09 and later can export the file listing in JSON format.

Vor allem aber kostet der Fehlschlag den Steuerzahlern viel Geld. Wie viel genau, darüber hatte der Verkehrsminister nach Informationen des SPIEGEL und dem Rechercheteam des Bayerischen Rundfunks (BR) schon zwei Tage nach der Niederlage vor dem EuGH eine ziemlich genaue Vorstellung.

eine "Überschlägige Abschätzung potenzieller Entschädigungen" für die Betreiber der Straßenabgabe, die Firmen CTS Eventim und Kapsch TrafficCom. Die Gesamtsumme, die im schlimmsten Falle vom Ministerium zu zahlen wäre: 776 Millionen Euro.

I see RSS curation like the practice of cooking one’s own meals. There’s something magical about picking specific ingredients, using custom tools to prepare them, and then consuming the output.

Or—perhaps an even better metaphor—cultivating a bookshelf. With the only difference being that bookshelves are usually constructed using only one’s favorite books, while I think an RSS reader should be designed for “exposure to other” as well.

The point is that curation of an RSS reader forces one to think about their inputs, and to exercise their values in doing so. Are you building a list of inputs that agree with you? Are you including people who you respect but disagree with? What about people you can’t stand at all?

What you choose to include will not just define how you see the world, but how well you understand other peoples’ perspectives as well.

Here are some things that highly creative people gravitate towards:

1. lots of coffee!
2. working hard but, surprisingly often for only a short burst of time. Many writers only work for 3 or 4 hours each morning. (Architects and painters on the other hand tend to work all day.)
3. long walks. lots and lots of very long walks.
4. eating the exact same meal every breakfast, and lunch etc. So you don't have to waste time thinking about it. (It's weird how often this one shows up— Ingmar Bergman, Glen Gould, Patricia Highsmith, Oliver Sacks, David Lynch.)
5. alcohol to unwind . . . or some kind of daily "vigorous exercise" to unwind.
6. avoiding social obligations.
7. naps.
8. habitual reading. often artists will re-read a handful of their favorite authors again and again.
9. indulging in eccentricities. (Beethoven would pour giant pitchers of water over his hands each morning while he bellowed scales.)
10. either being a very early bird or a night owl. It's easier to concentrate when there is no one around to distract you.
11. tobacco
12. avoiding TV.

The report shows that the vast majority of information security spending in the US is though the military, not through defensive organizations like the DHS, a trend that began with Clinton and has been continued by every president since, with massive acceleration under Trump.

Ironically, Trump has criticized previous admins for neglecting defense and pledged to increase it as a priority, but all he did was redefine "defense" to mean "punishing those who use cyber tools for malicious purposes" and attaining "peace through strength."

Which is why the DoD's cyber budget is 25% higher than the total infosec budget of all defensive agencies, with US Cybercommand HQ getting 33% more to cover program administration than the entire State Dept cyber budget, including operations.

The DoD's cyber ops budget is 250% of the budget for then entire Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and 1000% of the budget for the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

And that's just the part of the budget we know about

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also coined by British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in the 1950s.

The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things. Major, complex issues get the least discussion while simple, minor ones get the most discussion.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is also known as “bike-shedding,” after the story Parkinson uses to illustrate it.

Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Here’s how we can change our perceptions by making and experiencing art.

Zendesk has built out a global engineering team spread across four continents, nine countries and 10 cities around the world. We started the journey relatively early in our company’s life, it’s been difficult, and we’ve learned lessons along the way. Many of the things we got right, came from key people who had run global teams before (and knew the mistakes they didn’t want to repeat). Many of the things we got wrong, were based on assumptions that Zendesk would work as another business did. We’ve learned there’s no perfect strategy for expanding beyond head office, but we have been able to refine down some of the core beliefs that anchor us. These seem applicable beyond Zendesk, so I wanted to share. To do that, it’s worth spending a little time talking about how Zendesk grew up, so you can understand the incremental decisions we made to get to where we are today.

Sowohl der deutsche als auch der österreichische Verfassungsgerichtshof haben im Zusammenhang mit E-Voting bereits Erkenntnisse getroffen: Wahlverfahren müssen so konstruiert und implementiert sein, dass auch StaatsbürgerInnen ohne besondere technische und wissenschaftliche Kenntnisse in der Lage sind, zu verstehen, warum diese Verfahren die Prinzipien einer geheimen, persönlichen, anonymen und fälschungssicheren Wahl zweifelsfrei verwirklichen.
Das ist bei technisch vermittelten Wahlverfahren nicht der Fall. Die Wahlkommission, die für die ordnungsgemäße Durchführung einer Wahl verantwortlich ist, kann das nicht einmal dann verifizieren, wenn sie aus entsprechenden ExpertInnen zusammengesetzt ist. Zu intransparent ist Code, der auf Computern läuft.
Da muss darauf vertraut werden, dass die eingesetzten Systeme frei von Fremd- und Schadsoftware sind, eine Annahme, die InformatikerInnen zu spontanen Heiterkeitsausbrüchen verleiten kann.