Attention conservation notice: only of interest to computer science nerds. The web page discusses a number of topics, but the section on Chaitlin is all I’m really suggesting here.

So, amazingly complex things can be compressed into fairly little information. You can’t help but wonder: how complex can something be?

The answer: arbitrarily complex! At least that’s true if we’re talking about the Kolmogorov complexity of a string of bits: namely, the length of the shortest computer program that prints it out. Lots of long strings of bits can’t be compressed. You can’t print out most of them using short programs, since there aren’t enough short programs to go around.

Of course, we need to fix a computer language ahead of time, so this is well-defined. And we need to make sure the programs are written in binary, so the comparison is fair.

So, things can be arbitrarily complex. But here’s a more interesting question: how complex can we prove something to be?

The answer is one of the most astounding facts I know. It’s called Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem. It says, very roughly:

There’s a number L such that we can’t prove the Kolmogorov complexity of any specific string of bits is more than L.

Source: surprises

Very cool! And highly useful for some things.

Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs. You can create your own by following this URL: itty.bitty.site. From there, you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes, while the Mac version of Chrome can accommodate up to 10,000 bytes.

The site isn’t actually hosted anywhere — the entirety of the webpage exists as a URL compressed using what’s known as the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In an explanation page for itty bitty sites — stored, of course, as an itty bitty site — Jitkoff says this allows for a “significant reduction in size for HTML, and allows for a printed page worth of content in many cases.” From there, the compressed content is converted from binary into a string of characters that can function as a standard web link. The actual data is stored in the end of the link, comprised of everything after the # symbol. You can also share itty bitty sites as QR codes as well, so long as the site can be compressed into about 2,610 bytes.

Source: This amazing new web tool lets you create microsites that exist solely as URLs – The Verge

Here’s a fantastic collection of useful mental models. Covers a pretty diverse range. About 1/4 of it is oriented toward business and startups, but most of it is useful for life in general. For example, here’s one section:

Communication

• Story arc – human beings are wired to respond to storytelling. A story arc is a way to structure ideas to tap into this response, typically by describing a change in the world.
  Example: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

• Writing well – use arresting imagery and tabulate your thoughts precisely. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Don’t hedge – decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.

• Charitable interpretation – interpreting a speaker’s statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. Charitable interpretation makes conversations (and relationships) go better.

• Nonviolent Communication (aka NVC) – a communication framework that allows expressing grievances and resolving conflicts in a non-confrontational way. Structuring difficult conversations as described in NVC makes the process dramatically less painful. NVC contains four components: (1) expressing facts, (2) expressing feelings, (3) expressing needs, and (4) making a request.
  Example: You didn’t turn in the project yesterday. When that happened I felt betrayed. I need to be able to rely on you to have a productive relationship. In the future, could you notify me in advance if something like that happens?

http://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/07/graphic-united-states-immigration-origins-rings-tree-culture/

Yikes O_O

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.

Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”

That tough approach is embodied in the “ghetto package.” Of 22 proposals presented by the government in early March, most have been agreed upon by a parliamentary majority, and more will be subject to a vote in the fall.

Some are punitive: One measure under consideration would allow courts to double the punishment for certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.” Another would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin — described here as “re-education trips” —in that way damaging their “schooling, language and well-being.” Another would allow local authorities to increase their monitoring and surveillance of “ghetto” families.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html

This is a really solid introduction to income inequality, how it’s measured, how it’s changing, and whether it matters:

How do you measure inequality?

Inequality can be defined or measured in a number of different ways.

One traditional approach was to compare the income of a relatively broad swath of affluent people — the top ten percent of the income distribution (the top decile) or the top twenty percent (the top quintile) — to the national median or average. One big advantage of this approach is that the relevant data is readily available from the Census Bureau and other survey-based sources. A major downside is that this method doesn’t tell you much of anything about the earnings of the very highest earners — people in the top 1 percent, for example.

A newer line of research pioneered by Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and their collaborators at the World Top Incomes Database has been to use tax records to focus on the incomes of the very top of the distribution. That lets you understand the top 1 percent, the top 0.1 percent, and even the top 0.001 percent. This work has been the basis of much subsequent discussion about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent but the even finer slices are interesting, too.

It is also at times interesting to look at the gap between the poor (say the bottom 10 percent) and the median household. Metrics that define poverty in relative terms tend to, in effect, look at this kind of inequality. So discussions of the living standards of the poor are normally framed in terms of poverty rather than inequality.

Last but by no means least, there is a widely used summary method of calculating inequality that is known as the gini coefficient. A gini coefficient of 0 corresponds to precise equality while a gini coefficient of 1 corresponds to a state of total inequality.

https://www.vox.com/cards/income-inequality

A useful reminder of how much standards of living increased over the past century.

Consider the “Little House on the Prairie” books, which I’d bet almost every woman in my readership, and many of the men, recalls from their childhoods. I loved those books when I was a kid, which seemed to describe an enchanted world – horses! sleighs! a fire merrily crackling in the fireplace, and children frolicking in the snow all winter, then running barefoot across the prairies! Then I reread them as an adult, as a prelude to my research, and what really strikes you is how incredibly poor these people were.

The Ingalls family were in many ways bourgeoisie: educated by the standards of the day, active in community leadership, landowners. And they had nothing.

There’s a scene in one of the books where Laura is excited to get her own tin cup for Christmas, because she previously had to share with her sister. Think about that. No, go into your kitchen and look at your dishes. Then imagine if you had three kids, four plates and three cups, because buying another cup was simply beyond your household budget – because a single cup for your kid to drink out of represented not a few hours of work, but a substantial fraction of your annual earnings, the kind of money you really had to think hard before spending. Then imagine how your 5-year-old would feel if they got an orange and a Corelle place setting for Christmas.

There’s a reason old-fashioned kitchens didn’t have cabinets: They didn’t need them. There wasn’t anything to put there.

https://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article26250226.html

Here’s a moderate-to-conservative think-tank-based view of poverty and poverty policies:

It would increase the productivity and reduce the heat of the Washington debate on poverty and opportunity if all sides agreed to base their understanding of poverty and mobility on the basic facts laid out above, all from reliable sources. Here is a summary of these facts:

• Government spending on poor and low-income families has increased almost every year for five decades; since 1980 spending has tripled as measured on a per person in poverty basis in constant dollars
• An improved measure of poverty shows that government spending focused on poor and low-income households cuts the poverty rate by about half; government spending on these programs and the Unemployment Compensation program prevented poverty from increasing during the most severe recession since the Great Depression
• A CBO analysis shows that when government benefits are counted at their full value, households all along in income distribution, including those in the bottom 20 percent, enjoyed increased income between 1979 and 2007
• The same CBO report shows that because income increased more the higher up we look in the income distribution between 1979 and 2007, income inequality has also increased since 1979; by far the biggest increase in inequality is between the top and the rest of the distribution
• Several studies show that claims that intergenerational income mobility has slowed down in the U.S. are false; the U.S. has less income mobility that many European nations, but mobility has remained constant over the past four decades or so; nonetheless, children whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have more than a 40 percent chance of staying in the bottom themselves.

https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/poverty-and-opportunity-begin-with-facts/

In-depth article on what Obama’s priorities and choices are like now.

Barack Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad.

The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days later, the Boy Scouts’ leader would apologize for Trump’s speech.

In Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more than he expected to. He issued careful statements defending the Affordable Care Actand supporting the Paris climate-change agreement, avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb.

It was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant (mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat is positioned to give.

But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/where-is-barack-obama.html

Here’s a terrific, in-depth investigation of how arbitration clauses, often forbidding class-action suits, have tipped the scales of power dramatically toward corporations. Highly recommended. (2015-16, NYT)

On Page 5 of a credit card contract used by American Express, beneath an explainer on interest rates and late fees, past the details about annual membership, is a clause that most customers probably miss. If cardholders have a problem with their account, American Express explains, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.”

Those nine words are at the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to apply for a credit card, use a cellphone, get cable or Internet service, or shop online without agreeing to private arbitration. The same applies to getting a job, renting a car or placing a relative in a nursing home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitration-everywhere-stacking-the-deck-of-justice.html?_r=0