I was going to say, I think voters have long been able to mislead themselves, lol. Eating the onion is/was a real thing.

Hey, hang in there. I hope your week stays ok. I hope you can invest some time in yourself. Have a great week!

I've never had a Starbucks gift card or used the app, but in the article they say that in store you can do a split payment using up either gift card or app balance, and pay the remainder cash. Is that something you've tried?

I can't speak to political science, but my background is computational maths. I've published papers in what I view as a very data driven field.

I cited every direct quote from prior work, and listed additional resources that I didn't explicitly reference but consulted.

So it seems sloppy to me.

I work in academia and am used to these sorts of issues of primacy, attribution, intellectual honesty, etc. While there are many examples of research dishonesty or sloppiness in higher ed at large, there is also an expectation that people who take leadership positions lead by example. Faculty led institutions expect that their leaders can walk the walk. I don't think it is unfair to expect the president of the top rated university in the world to not have engaged in this sort of sloppiness. I also think it is fair that leaders are able to "rise to the moment" commensurate with the prominence of their role. She wasn't the president of a local community college (nothing against them, but you have different expectations).

The politically motivated and racist attacks against Dr. Gay are abhorrent. It is only unfortunate that they ended up finding purchase in very real issues of attribution, and in a leadership failing to navigate and control the narrative around their testimony and comments.

Dr. Gay was hired after the shortest search for a Harvard president in recent memory, and already had a slight publication record compared to past leaders. That there are multiple elements of sloppiness in her work just further errodes her ability to lead the worlds top university.

Additionally, it is true that Harvard is currently ranked at the very bottom of the campus free speech index, with the university of Pennsylvania second to last. At least MITs lawyerly answers were somewhat backed by the history of their institution trying to balance speech. That two ousted university presidents only felt the need to go to bat for first amendment rights now, of all times, and without addressing the potential hypocrisy of the position given their universities track record, as them leading a new change of direction, was shockingly bad judgement.

So Dr. Gay doesn't deserve the hate and attacks that have come her way. But she failed to deliver on the promise of any president of a top, R1 university. If you can't publish to the highest standards, and navigate the most difficult of public relations situations, you shouldn't be in the top leadership role of these universities.

I read through the article but found the authors point muddled. They kept switching between the points they were arguing, which made it less persuasive.

Specifically, they make many references to the term being racist. But they mostly argue that the term is reductionist to African history, and let us conclude that is how the term is racist. But I don't know that many historians or serious scholars are using the term to describe the history of Africa. It certainly isn't a term I recall from my anthropology or history classes, though I'm now some years removed from them. Instead I remember "North Atlantic slave trade" sometimes in conjunction with the Spanish silver trade.

So I'm not sure who their audience is. Who is going around making claims about African history using a very nondescript term? Any history buff could tell you that the notion of African is just as complex as Greek given the span of culture of the old Greek kingdoms. Is it the general public? But if so, don't most people use it to denote a time period, e.g., before 1700?

So the lack of framing and structure leaves me really luke warm to the article. They don't do a good job of explaining the context of the terms use that is problematic, and they don't structure their arguments well. They use inflated language for its own sake, not for the sake of scholarly precision or clarity, and they leave too many things as unspoken assumptions.

I suppose if the main point is the term lacks precision, I agree. But so do many terms we use to describe epochs of history. China before the opium war, post-civil war America, etc. These are just proxies for time period references that would be used before detailed explanation of a before, after, and causal link to the event specified.

I feel like the author has a point here that could be made significantly better by someone else.

That's good to know, thanks!

Here's an article that summarized the claims and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

It sounds like a little of EGS not being as upfront as they should have been and a little bit of running with a misunderstanding by the Internet.

I remember hearing things like the epic game store launcher rifling through your steam games and contact lists, etc. I just don't want to install anything like that and running a VM just for that seems silly.

Edit: article summarizing the claim and counterclaims.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/

Sounds like a little bit of epic not being clear in what the software does and a little of the Internet running with a misunderstanding.

I appreciated the person giving an explanation. I don't closely follow developments in the LGBTQ+ community, but try to evolve with the language to be inclusive. I assumed the person making the statement about queer being a slur was pursuing some agenda, but I didn't understand the context. When you are trying to learn from what you observe to be inclusive, but are presented with conflict around a word it can be confusing without a thorough explanation.

I'll play devil's advocate.

The author is basically complaining that search results aren't tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.

Using the search term "YouTube downloader" and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?

I searched "YouTube downloader" and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched "YouTube downloader Linux" and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.

I've seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn't know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.

Anecdotally, I've used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn't testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.

I've been vegetarian for 22 years or so now, and the recent uptick in vegan food reminds me of the early years of being vegetarian. When I first started there were very few options to eat out where I lived (more rural area didn't help) and not even a lot of good grocery options. Eventually places started offering in house attempts at vegetarian mains, which led to wildly variable quality, and eventually we saw some standardization across restaurants. It's rare now to get a vegetarian dish at a restaurant that is terrible.

The article mentions mass market vegan butter being pursued, which makes me hopeful that restaurants will start introducing more vegan meals, and upping their game on that front. The more options for people the better, and as much as the article romanticizes the boutique shops with their in house versions, that isn't achievable for most restaurants who would otherwise tuck one or two options into their menu.