I would argue that his ideas, outside his domain, are not communicated well because they are not well-formed. Criticizing him for being boorish and ill-informed about social issues does not take away from him being an accomplished biologist. Assuming that he's just botching the expression of an otherwise worthwhile thought is furthering that appeal to his inappropriate authority.
It's dehumanizing to the victims to dismiss allegations of sexual assault because of a convenient theory that aligns with your politics. While it may be your version of Occam's Razor to assume that this is an internationally-coordinated plot against him, I find it much easier to believe that a person with a lot of public self-regard could be guilty of one of the most common crimes committed by humans: acquaintance rape.
What's really frustrating is watching people conflate Assange with Wikileaks and defend the individual as if he's the organization. It causes people who are skeptical of rapists and cult-of-personality individuals to be made out to be anti-whistleblowers and that's not fair. I think Wikileaks operates best as an anonymous organization and not under the control of a figurehead.
I dismissed no allegations. Let me put this as clearly as possible: Assange is a target of multiple powerful intelligence agencies, all with world-class experience executing dirty tricks. Having the figurehead of Wikileaks charged with an abhorrent crime, guilty or not, is very much in the interest of these groups. Not because Assange matters, but because of the backlash you describe in your second paragraph.
Personally, I think they didn't have to lift a hand. Assange discredited himself, with his own actions. But it's an indisputable fact that Assange is the target of one or more agencies whose job it is to conduct internationally-coordinated plots. If you want to ignore the possibility of foul play that's your choice, but don't pretend that you're standing up for truth and justice by making assumptions.
> it should be noted that this policy started to be dismantled 4 years ago
Sure, if by started to be dismantled you mean "was completely unchanged other than they stopped assigning the thumb-twiddling teachers to big rooms/facilities (too visible a target to critics) in favor of assigning them to smaller spaces - spare cubes, broom closets, locker rooms, conference rooms - more widely distributed around the city and hence harder to count."
I'll refrain from pointing out the strong political biases your sources because I did cite the NYT, but I wish to note their use of tone arguments to highlight waste. $22M a year spent on teachers awaiting arbitration sure sounds like a lot as a number out of context. Take a minute to note that they have close to a $20B[1] yearly operating budget, putting the cost at roughly 0.11% of their spending.
I don't wish to make the argument that this makes the spending or this practice ideal, but rather than in scale of the NYC DOE it does not appear to be as large of a leakage as the press might like to make it seem.
The other way to figure it is that ~220 out of 75k teachers affected suggests a waste factor of 0.3%. (which agrees with your number if teacher salaries are about 1/3rd of the operating budget.) It's still substantial because in absolute terms $22M is a lot of money and it's all waste - the only sane policy would be to just fire these people or put them on unpaid suspension.
Nonetheless if we are to believe the official figures, they claim the number of rubber-roomers has declined from ~700 to ~200. Which isn't "dismantled" but is certainly "reduced"; it does seem like some progress is being made.
I find your frequent use of "tumblr-isation" as a negative to be alarmingly anti-intellectual for this site. Do you realize that the terms you pick out, "privilege" and "patriarchy" are of academic origin from Gender Studies and that they have been co-opted by Tumblr? It seems that your entire case against Shanley is that they write in the convention of their academic peers.
I don't think it's petty at all to link to publicly available information, when others have requested that information. Google-fu differs between individuals.
I do find it particularly petty that someone would go to great lengths to expose the private details of the life of a man who just wants to be left in peace.
So it's OK for you to use your Google-fu, but not for her to do the same thing?
I, for one, am quite interested to know more about Satoshi Nakamoto and this article is responsive to my curiosity about him. As someone else has pointed out, a great deal of information is public anyway in the form of property tax records and what not. If this were not the case I would get much less direct mail.
Well that line of reasoning is exactly what I was referring to. The reporter doing due diligence and fact gathering is in ill taste, but responding in kind and releasing personal information about her is justified? That doesn't hold water, logically. I don't think anyone is that naive. It's alright if you're upset about divulging Nakamoto's personal details, it's the tit-for-tat mentality that comes across as childish.
Well there seems to be some misunderstanding about who released what. I have not released anything because I didn't have to.
All I have done is link to some items that she released into the public domain on a previous occasion.
Sharing the stupidity of others is a long-lived internet tradition. It's almost adage status; be careful what you post, it may come back to haunt you later. The same is true of this, I suppose.
I think the argument against your anecdote is that it was the best solution for you--no doubt a technologically literate person who has confidence in their mental model of what bitcoin is. For the general populace, it's a distant novelty still which reduces its general practicality greatly.
So then, the real statement is that Bitcoin is useless, except for the people who are savvy enough to use it? I can accept that, but it's a very weak statement. You could have said the same thing about PayPal (which is now quite popular in the general populace) or even credit cards before they became mainstream.
I don't entirely disagree, but even still people understood both of those things conceptually before they existed. Credit, arguably, predates state-backed currencies and PayPal provides the same functionality as a bank for online transactions. Bitcoin is a traded commodity represented by long hashes stored on disk. It's very abstract and coupled with its current volatility it makes it hard to pull people in if they aren't already convinced that its massive deflation will make them rich.
That said I have mined and sold bitcoin (luckily a few weeks ago) I just remain skeptical about its viability to go mainstream considering these and many other barriers. I was personally frustrated by it when making a recent purchase due to the fact that my buying power fluctuated by 10% while proceeding from shopping cart to checkout.
I think that it does, to some degree, in order to fulfill some of the promises that proponents claim will be delivered in the near future. There are ceaseless calls by BTC advocates for retailers of all kinds to accept bitcoin payments. For this to happen on a large enough scale there needs to be distributed demand by a great number of consumers, not frequent demands by a few edge cases.
I say that's the minority of the BTC users claiming that widespread adoption will happen.
But Bitcoin is already useful as it is, it doesn't need any more use cases, they just may emerge naturally.
