Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,515 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 50 of 152).

Multitasking Is Killing Your Brain | Inc.com

Sort of like dumping a lot of articles on one’s blog, eh? 🙂

Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, and bombarding them with information only slows them down.

MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller notes that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”This constant task-switching encourages bad brain habits. When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dollop of dopamine, our reward hormone. Our brains love that dopamine, and so we’re encouraged to keep switching between small mini-tasks that give us instant gratification.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop that makes us feel like we’re accomplishing a ton, when we’re really not doing much at all (or at least nothing requiring much critical thinking). In fact, some even refer to email/Twitter/Facebook-checking as a neural addiction.

Source: Multitasking Is Killing Your Brain | Inc.com

The millennial work ethic – Baltimore Sun

Some of my older friend scoffed at this column, but any mocking comes at one’s own peril, because this is how it will soon be.

The bar has been raised. If you as an employer want to attract the best and the brightest of the millennial generation, you will have to treat your employees a bit better than you once did.

Once upon a time, employment was for life. Joining a company meant you were looked after until retirement and even beyond. Then companies found that having massive layoffs and gutting these generous employee benefits appealed to Wall Street. Generations of workers became expendable to employers and learned wisely. The game had changed and job security was redefined as “how quickly one can get another job.”

Now the pendulum swings in favor of the worker, particularly the knowledege workers building our digital economy. This generation is building our new economy and the opportunities ahead of them and the awe-inspiring imagination they bring are like no other. This generation is responsible for the dizzying, accelerating pace of change in our world. They will hold you to your promises. They won’t play by the old rules. They demand a better way and they have the hustle and moxie to get it.

Laugh now if you choose, but soon you’ll be living in their world. Employers who understand this will help build this world.

Dear Previous Employer,

You may think that you have gotten the best of me, but you have not. I am a millennial. You may think that you have put me in a bad spot, but you have not. I am a millennial. You may think that you can threaten me, but I am not afraid. I am a millennial.

I didn’t write this letter on a program that I installed with a disc on my computer, I wrote it on the cloud. I didn’t grow up hungry during the Great Depression, I grew up safe and comfortable. I didn’t walk to school uphill both ways, I took a bus.

Source: The millennial work ethic – Baltimore Sun

Hillary Clinton is going to really regret saying these 4 words about Goldman Sachs – The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton spent an hour talking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper and a handful of New Hampshire voters in a town hall on Wednesday night. For 59 minutes of it, she was excellent — empathetic, engaged and decidedly human. But, then there was that other minute — really just four words — that Clinton is likely to be haunted by for some time to come.

“That’s what they offered,” Clinton said in response to Cooper’s question about her decision to accept $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in the period between serving as secretary of state and her decision to formally enter the 2016 presidential race.

The line is, well, bad. More on that soon. But, the line when combined with her body language when she said it makes it politically awful for her.

Source: Hillary Clinton is going to really regret saying these 4 words about Goldman Sachs – The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton’s Wildly Unrealistic Puppies and Rainbows Plan – MattBruenig | Politics

Hillary Clinton’s supporters like to say that Bernie Sanders stands little chance of getting his initiatives through a Republican Congress. They overlook the fact that Clinton’s odds are just as dismal.

The funniest thing about pro-Hillary punditry is the claim that her proposals are achievable while Bernie Sanders’ proposals are not. This has been all over the punditry of late, especially in the oldsplaining get-off-my-lawn punditry aimed at the rude teens who support Sanders. For an example of it, look no further than the New York Times official endorsement:

In the end, though, Mr. Sanders does not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers. His boldest proposals — to break up the banks and to start all over on health care reform with a Medicare-for-all system — have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren’t realistic, while Mrs. Clinton has very good, and achievable, proposals in both areas.

This is frankly insane. Hillary Clinton’s legislative agenda has a 0% chance of passing through the GOP-controlled Congress. None. Nothing. Zilch. This is true, not only because the GOP fundamentally disagrees with her proposals, but also, crucially, because the GOP pursues obstruction for its own sake. It has been very explicit about this. The GOP has (probably correctly) determined that helping a Democratic president pass things of note benefits the Democrats and hurts the Republicans.

Source: Hillary Clinton’s Wildly Unrealistic Puppies and Rainbows Plan – MattBruenig | Politics

Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer

Time-Warner-Cable
Former Raleigh City Councilor Barlow Herget wrote to the N&O about his abysmal recent experience at the Time Warner Cable office.

Mr. Herget asks if the City Council could change the law to go back to local control of cable TV franchises. Local control went out the window in 2005 when a group of “business-friendly” Democrats in the state legislature successfully passed the “state franchise for cable television” bill into law for their friends at Time Warner Cable. This stripped control of cable franchises from city and county governments and placed it in the hands of the state. It’s easier to pay off state leaderss rather than local leaders, it seems.

I predicted this would happen back in 2006 and time has proven me correct. I just wish I could’ve convinced more state legislators at the time.

I recently had the dreadful occasion to visit Time Warner’s office in Raleigh. We needed a “box” for a new television. It was a hot 95 degrees outside, and inside the Atlantic Avenue office, there were 35 to 40 people waiting, including one crying baby.

The room was the size of a typical school class. We took a number and asked how long we should expect to wait. Thirty minutes. We luckily found two chairs together and sat down.My fellow subscribers were lined along the walls, a few standing, more coming in. Mostly patient, the steam was starting to rise in some of these customers. There was an inane game show on a big screen TV that a few were watching.

One lady came in carrying a big box, saw the crowd and asked how long she had to wait. Told 30 minutes, she declared she was on her lunch break and, after waiting 10 minutes, departed, muttering, “Some people have to work for a living,”

Source: Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer

What Would Sanders Do? An Analysis of His Proposals

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed an ambitious program of social reform, including regulatory changes to raise wages and protect workers’ rights, progressive tax reforms, and universal health insurance (Improved Medicare for All). Taken together, these policies would not only dramatically increase employment and national income, but would also raise wages, reduce poverty, and narrow the gap between rich and poor Americans.

Source: What Would Sanders Do? An Analysis of His Proposals

The Water Next Time: Professor Who Helped Expose Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken – The Chronicle of Higher Education

When Marc Edwards opens his mouth, dangerous things come out.

Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech, has been investigating dangerously high lead levels in the Flint, Mich., water supply. “The agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem,” he says. “They were the problem. What faculty person out there is going to take on” the government? In 2003 the Virginia Tech civil-engineering professor said that there was lead in the Washington, D.C., water supply, and that the city had been poisoning its residents. He was right.

Last fall he said there was lead in the water in Flint, Mich., despite the reassurances of state and local authorities that the water was safe. He was right about that, too.

Source: The Water Next Time: Professor Who Helped Expose Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Case for Very Hot Water | Science News

For years, conservation advocates have told consumers to turn down the thermostat on their hot-water heaters — largely to save energy, but also to avoid scalding showers and baths. At least for some people, however, this green tactic could prove dangerous, new studies indicate.

The number one cause of waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States,” says environmental engineer Marc Edwards, “is not contaminants leaving the water treatment plant (we do a good job of killing those). It’s the pathogens that grow in home water heaters.”

Source: The Case for Very Hot Water | Science News

If You’re Liberal and You Think Hillary Clinton Is Corrupt and Untrustworthy, You’re Rewarding 25 Years of GOP Smears – The Daily Banter

Bernie Sanders will never be president. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. He stands very little chance of pulling down the Democratic nomination and no chance at all of winning a general election. His rabid acolytes can argue with this all they want but they’ll be wrong for several inarguable reasons: because the “political revolution” Bernie Sanders needs to advance his campaign and agenda is pie-in-the-sky thinking that simply doesn’t occur in representative democracies like ours, where change always comes incrementally and our entire system is designed so it can’t be remade in one fell swoop; because he’s a one-note candidate who concerns himself with nothing other than his admittedly noble lifelong obsession with wealth inequality; because America isn’t evolved enough to elect an avowed socialist, democratic or otherwise, and it unfortunately won’t get near someone who openly eschews religion; and maybe most importantly because once the GOP considered Bernie a sworn enemy rather than the perfect foil it can use to destroy Hillary Clinton, it would eat him alive. Eat. Him. Alive.

Source: If You’re Liberal and You Think Hillary Clinton Is Corrupt and Untrustworthy, You’re Rewarding 25 Years of GOP Smears – The Daily Banter

Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street

Clinton’s attack on Sanders is as simple as it is untrue: Unlike Sanders, Clinton has argued, she is willing to take on “shadow banking” — a broad term for various financial activities that aren’t regulated as strictly as conventional lending.Sanders has in fact proposed attacking shadow banking in two principal ways: by breaking up big financial firms that engage in shadow banking, and by severing federal financial support for shadow banking activities by reinstating Glass-Steagall.

These would be substantive changes. A lot of shadow banking takes place at firms with traditional banking charters, like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Some of it takes place at specialized hedge funds, or at major investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Breaking them up would not eliminate the risk shadow banking poses to the economy, but it would limit it. Risky shadow banking activities cannot bring down institutions that are too-big-to-fail if there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.

Yet the Clinton campaign has repeatedly said Sanders is wholly ignoring shadow banking, accusing Sanders of taking a “hands-off” approach to it that would not apply to firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG. This barrage has come from Clinton’s press aides, campaign CFO Gary Gensler, and Clinton surrogate Barney Frank.

Source: Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling The Truth About Wall Street