“This is probably not a Hatch Act violation, because it's not tied to an election,” Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-partisan ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Forbes.
Not tied to an election? What? What rock are you living under?
At the time, retailers were the customers. Before online storefronts took off, there was no way to sell one copy to Alice, one copy to Bob… you had to sell 50,000 copies to Best Buy with a promise to buy them back in a year if they don’t sell out. If they tell you up front, “we won’t buy that”, what are you gonna do?
But the marshmallow test is a tricky one. Replication studies reveal important details that are missing from Mischel’s triumphant analysis. On average, the kids who “fail” and eat the marshmallow rather than waiting and doubling their haul were poorer, while the “patient” kids were from wealthier backgrounds. When the “impatient” kids were asked about the thought process that led to their decision to eat the marshmallow rather than holding out for two, they revealed a great deal of future-looking thought.
The adults in these kids’ lives had broken their promises many times: Their parents would promise material comforts, from toys to treats, that they were ultimately unable to provide due to economic hardship. Teachers and other authority figures would routinely lie to these kids, out of some mix of overly optimistic projection about the resources they’d be given to help the kids in their care, or the knowledge that the kids’ poor, time-strapped, frantic parents wouldn’t be able to retaliate against them for lying.
So the kids had carefully observed the world they operated in and concluded, on balance of probability, that eating the marshmallow was the safe bet. At the very least, it foreclosed on the possibility that the adults running the experiment would come back in 15 minutes and declare that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they were taking back the original marshmallow, rather than providing two of them. They were thinking about the future, in other words.
These kids didn’t grow up to do worse in school and life because they lacked self-control: Those outcomes were dictated by America’s two-tier education system, which funds schools based on local property taxes, topped up by parental donations, which means that poor neighborhoods get poor schools. If these kids’ brains show up differently on a scan 20 years later, Occam’s Razor dictates that this is caused by a life of desperation and precarity, whose stresses are compounded by inadequate health-care.
“Putting the same person in charge of both the IRS and SSA creates a conflict of interest when SSA wants access to legally protected taxpayer data,” Kaercher said.
Sure does. Really bad idea even if “CEO of IRS” was even a role that made sense in the first place.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”
Powerful words.
Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?
When Wall Street finally says “Okay, enough stalling, let’s see what we got with our trillion-dollar investment” and sees that the answer is “bupkis”, lots of innocent people will definitely lose their jobs.
Probably not 97M though. That’s more than half of the total jobs out there.
Having to resolve the same conflict multiple times suggests excess noise in your git history. You might want to pay closer attention to creating a useful git history. It’ll help with any future archaeology, and it’ll also help rebasing go smoothly.
Not tied to an election? What? What rock are you living under?