{"id":3490,"date":"2016-07-04T12:09:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-04T16:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3490"},"modified":"2016-07-15T18:17:56","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T22:17:56","slug":"life-and-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3490","title":{"rendered":"Life and links"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Life is a thing. The parents came and went, and it was an awesome time, even though we didn&#8217;t really have many scheduled activities after the <a href=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/?list=Parents_Trip\">road trip<\/a>. It was nice just generally having them around, I guess.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/070416parents.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The latest house project is the deck. We fell behind on our time estimates (and also the forecast called for rain), so we&#8217;re only done with the scrubbing\/cleaning part. We still need to sand and stain it at some point, but it needs to be when it&#8217;s going to be dry for a while, so we&#8217;ll see. It&#8217;s funny how much of a difference the cleaner makes.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/070416deck.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had a lot of interesting reads recently, so here&#8217;s a dump of links to interesting things.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@SeanBlanda\/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-2670c1294063\">People that disagree with you aren&#8217;t necessarily wrong, or stupid<\/a> &#8211; I think this is something that a lot of SJW (and other general) people are bad at recognizing. This is particularly true with things like abortion, LGBTQ rights, and Brexit&#8230; the other side has reasons for disagreeing, and digging your heels in is just going to make things worse. This is also why I feel strongly against things like the (successful) campaign to force Brendan Eich to resign over his prop 8 donations&#8230; he&#8217;s allowed to have opinions, however unpopular, as long as he&#8217;s treating people equally in his role as CEO. The fact that people bullied him and tried to force him to change his views to keep his job was completely unacceptable.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2016\/06\/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer\">Inside private prisons<\/a> &#8211; Just generally a super interesting read.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/ink-splotch.tumblr.com\/post\/136242702639\/what-if-harry-potter-the-chosen-one-had-turned\">What if Harry Potter was a squib?<\/a> &#8211; An awesome alternate reality fanfic. Massive spoilers (obviously), and requires a lot of background knowledge about the series, but this was super enjoyable.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fanfiction.net\/s\/7066670\/1\/Harry-Potter-and-the-Return-of-the-Squib-Son\">What if Harry Potter&#8217;s twin was mistakingly thought to be the boy who lived?<\/a> &#8211; Another alternate reality fanfic that is good if you get can get past the multitude of grammatical and spelling errors, run-on paragraphs, and strange writing.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/petapixel.com\/2016\/06\/30\/photographer-points-camera-wrong-way-famous-places\/\">Photographing landmark locations without landmarks<\/a> &#8211; Super interesting from many perspectives.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sanjoseinside.com\/2016\/06\/29\/mass-eviction-san-joses-largest-to-displace-670-people\/\">San Jose displaces 670 people from rent-controlled apartments<\/a> &#8211; Yay for yet more bay area housing problems. At least they&#8217;re doing the right thing by building more high-density apartments, but I wish there was more help in place for people affected by such construction.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/fusion.net\/story\/320557\/brexit-hamilton-democracy\/\">Thoughts on Brexit and democracy<\/a> &#8211; It&#8217;s always interesting to me to read things that argue that mass democracy is problematic&#8230; and what&#8217;s been happening lately around the world sure supports that. In particular, the leaders in the UK seem to have no idea what to do now that they&#8217;ve actually passed their proposal to leave the EU. I stumbled across the wiki page for Germany&#8217;s Basic Law recently, and I found it super interesting that they couldn&#8217;t remove the Chancellor without a replacement lined up. Seems like a lot of populist movements need better ideas of what to do what happens after they succeed&#8230; in the Brexit case, it seems the people in charge were using the situation for political gain without any expectation of actually winning. And now that they have, they are clueless.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.askamanager.org\/2016\/06\/i-was-fired-from-my-internship-for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html\">Fired for a proposal for relaxing the dress code<\/a> &#8211; After my initial impression of &#8220;What is wrong with you?&#8221;, I actually can understand a lot of why this made sense to the OP. Coming from an academic environment, it isn&#8217;t normal to assume that some people are more equal than others, and work is not a democracy. Still, hopefully she (he?) learned a lot of valuable lessons from this. (Also, that entire blog is really interesting and informative to read.) Also I feel bad for the other interns, since it sounded like she was the ringleader, and managed to really screw a lot of other people in the process.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/722614\/a-civil-servant-missing-most-of-his-brain-challenges-our-most-basic-theories-of-consciousness\/\">Guy functions without most of his brain<\/a> &#8211; Brains are super interesting and crazy adaptive, I guess?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yay life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life is a thing. The parents came and went, and it was an awesome time, even though we didn&#8217;t really have many scheduled activities after the road trip. It was nice just generally having them around, I guess. The latest &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3490\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-houses","category-trips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}