onfocus

“Some stories demand collaboration, and this one is a plain example. The nation’s newsrooms — working together and, crucially, with the help of the public in communities around the nation — could find out and explain what is going on, at the macro and micro level,” he said.

Dan Gillmor on how the media should work to ensure the postal service story is told.

Fun experiment: see if loading up Paul Ford's random archive.org ephemera thing gives you the same dopamine hit as the random crap social media gives you to look at. I enjoy it.

"Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement."

Gates has a great point here. If companies weren’t reimbursed for tests that take longer than 48 hours to return you’d start seeing results faster than 14 days which is next to useless.

In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

Heartening to hear Facebook employees are continuing to speak up and challenge management. If you haven’t seen Max Wang’s departure video, it’s well worth your time: Leaving facebook: a critique of fb's policies, priorities, and ideologies, ft. hannah arendt. It’s a very personal take on the difficult ethical spot the company is putting its employees in.

"Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades’ worth of institutional postal knowledge."

Oh good, Democrats have requested an audit to get to the bottom of this. That should be swift and effective. *headdesk*

"Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again."

"Given these possibilities and Trump’s well-known opposition to voting by mail, logic might suggest that he would attempt to strengthen the USPS to alleviate those concerns. Instead, he’s weakening it and then using that weakness as a reason to argue against mail-in voting."

Congress needs to step in quickly here to make sure the right to vote is safe and available during a pandemic.

"But at the highest levels of most news organizations and the big social media platforms, executives and insiders told me that it simply hasn’t sunk in how different this year is going to be — and how to prepare audiences for it."

TV and social media executives are experts at engagement, not democracy. They thrive on conflict and chaos, not on functioning government processes. They have no business incentive to educate their audiences. We have to require it through regulation.

"Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered."

Devastating. Continued essential pandemic reporting from Ed Yong at The Atlantic.

"Teachers don’t feel safe. Most parents said in a survey that they’re “very concerned” about sending their kids back to school. So why are we getting bullied into opening?"

School administrators are being forced to choose between the health of their communities and losing part of their funding. They shouldn’t be put in this position.