fishtank

Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle?

He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.

Basically: research, hypothesize, prototype, test, iterate, deliver. It's not new, but here we are with new terminology.

It is good because if you're a design firm you sometimes need an HBR-approved buzzword to get your client, the VP of Marketing, to let you do any kind of user research. But ultimately, like any business concept used primarily to sell in client work and justify it up the ladder, it will be replaced by "whatever the stakeholder wants" when push comes to shove.

Neil Postman has a lot to say on this topic, which he terms the "news of the day" throughout Amusing Ourselves to Death. For example:

"This idea — that there is a content called “the news of the day” — was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation."

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action."

"You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

In neither case is the person's tribal identity used against them for writing things that others don't like. Orson Scott Card holds a professorship. He just published a book this year. A large corporation made a mass market film out of his book, well after he had been writing things that others didn't like.

The controversy with the poet seems like a different issue, but even so -- Michael Derrick Hudson seems to be in exactly the same place before Sherman Alexie assumed he was a Chinese woman 3 years ago.

Who has been destroyed in this fashion?

The colors are great, really comfortable contrast level, and the typeface is easy to read. Fairly tight information density, but low-density layouts are a common complaint with the target audience so I think it strikes a good balance. My compliments to the designer.

What injustice has been dealt to the subset of "the players" who are outraged about this?

WRT your claim that Kavanaugh somehow will not contribute to the prohibition (or extreme restriction) of abortions:

- Kavanaugh was nominated after private meetings with a president who promised to put anti-abortion judges on the court.

- The president himself is not an expert on jurisprudence and selected Kavanaugh from a list of anti-abortion judges provided to him by the Federalist Society, which vets judges with respect to the likelihood of their restricting abortion access.

- There is a lot of wiggle room within the phrase "I would follow Roe v. Wade faithfully and fully", enough to permit a decision that would allow states to effectively outlaw abortion. He could technically not be lying in that specific statement, yet still prohibit or largely restrict access to abortions.

There is no good faith reason to believe that Kavanaugh's nomination is not a threat to abortion access in America.

You have shared two sources of broad, country-level data.

The study tracked localized effects on individuals.

These are not necessarily in contradiction! Though whatever you're inferring with your broad correlation (air pollution has no negative effect on intelligence? air pollution improves intelligence?) is much weaker than the study, which clearly has made attempts to isolate variables.

Nixon _reluctantly_ created the EPA as a response to one of the only periods of sustained popular environmentalism in American history.

I'm unsure why this gets bandied about as a feather in Nixon's cap. Just as a factual matter, as soon as he was politically safe from environmentalist pressure (post-1972), he retreated completely on environmental issues, vetoing the EPA's budget, ordering the EPA to spend less than was apportioned to the agency.

It's an example of the potential for citizen activism, and an example of Nixon's inclination to consolidate power in the executive branch. Certainly not an example of "the post-WWII modern Republican party at one time wanted to expand environmental protections beyond the minimum required to quell citizen activism."

"All politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here's what I can get you." - Nixon, to the Sierra Club, 1970

YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.

YouTube profits from showing people things they might be likely to click on, and from collecting money from people who want people to click on their things. This has something to do with "interests" in some sense of the word but I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.

If you are there to live rather than to tour you will find that the traditional date format is pervasive in daily life. Banking, legal documents, etc.