RickRussell_CA

They need Dimo Higgins, Goblin Hunter

Anything that complements your career as a Cheese Greeter

Do what you enjoy. Half-ass all the things.

FYI, the new official Office default is Aptos. I’ve been making work docs with it for a few weeks and I have to admit, it looks really clean and technical.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/a-change-of-typeface-microsofts-new-default-font-has-arrived-f200eb16718d

The differences between victim survey statistics and crime reporting statistics are not easy to explain. In the US, trends in victim reporting tend to lead law enforcement statistics by a year or two, which makes one wonder whether law enforcement is padding the numbers – either to make themselves look good (when crime is increasing according to victim reports and it would reflect badly on them if LE statistics followed suit), or to make themselves look necessary (when victim-reported crime is going down and LE statistics might make LE look redundant).

RC cars. I was into local club racing in the 90s, dropped out of it when my kids were born, now I’m getting back into it.

The technology improvements in power, battery capacity, and radios have been frankly astonishing. Setups that would have cost $1000+ back in the 90s come as ready-to-run kits for $200 now, and perform better.

License to kill -9

Maybe 8 to 10 days. My kid got it at school, a little more than a week later I was coughing. I tested positive on home tests for another 10 days or so, I remember because I had to cancel some Dr. appointments.

But I was very vaccinated and it really was no worse than a short cold.

IMO, I think the world is going to transition to using they/them for gender unspecified folks. I’ve been practicing using they/them in written and spoken communications, and it comes off a lot less strange than you’d think.

Yeah the Senvion situation is an object lesson in the dangers of proprietary systems.

Yeah, but look up the story on the Senvion turbines. Basically, Senvion operators have had to pay big money for service contracts with 3rd parties since Senvion went out of business.

So, if I’m reading this correctly, this is the Konigshovener Hohe wind farm which is built on the site of the Garzweiler open-pit lignite mine. According to this article, the site was inaugurated in 2015 with 21 Senvion turbines.

The problem is, Senvion went out of business in 2019, and customers have been struggling to support their turbines. Apparently the Senvion design is exceptionally dependent on software access. Siemens and others have stepped in to offer support contracts to Senvion turbines in good working order, but with the opportunity to mine more lignite at the site, maybe RWE felt that it was time to spin down the Senvion turbines.

It seems like there may be many factors in this decision.

The act of conferring with only a subset of that group

Cis women are stakeholders, I didn’t mean to imply that they are the only stakeholders That may be lack of clarity on my part. I definitely did not mean to suggest that ONLY cis women’s opinions matter, or should be considered in rulemaking.

I offered that as a counterpoint to the assertion that the opinion of cis women is morally equivalent to the opinion of racists.

Again, I don’t really know how or if women chess players (cis or trans) were solicited for their opinions on these rule changes.

The assumption with this line of thinking is that trans women don’t inherently belong to that class of participation

I don’t think it’s right to call it “an assumption”. By definition, a restricted competition class uses rules to establish who is allowed to participate. These rules are willfully and intentionally composed. When circumstances arise that make the rules ambiguous in some way, the participating community is called to clarify them.

This isn’t unique to women’s chess, it applies to any restricted class sport or competition.

But following this analogy through, you’re not asking all PoC. You’re asking the majority of the subset (for example, black participants) whether a minority of the subset (for example, Asian participants) should be allowed to participate or not.

To be clear, I am not in any sense telling the chess world, much less women players, how to set the rules for their restricted class of competition. I am saying that women chess players are stakeholders in the rules of women’s chess. Precisely how their input is to be converted into a decision is not in my scope of understanding, and it would be presumptuous of me to hazard a guess at how they prefer to operate women’s chess.

The decision is already made, and pointing to the remainder to justify the decision is working backwards

Agreed, and that was not my intent.

I genuinely don’t how or if women chess players were involved in this decision, I’m only responding to the assertion that asking “what cis women think about playing trans women” is morally equivalent to asking racists whether they want to play against black people. It paints current women players with a broad brush and disenfranchises them from the management of their own competition.

I think similarly. If, as a previous commenter implied, the main concern is discomfort related to social mixing between men and women participants, then the vast majority of female chess players are probably fine with including transwomen. But it’s their restricted class and they should be full stakeholders in any decisions.

I think every sport has its own challenges regarding trans/intersex participation in restricted women’s classes, and it’s certainly not my role to tell women participating in those classes that they should accept participants with male genetics. I’m 100% behind social acceptance of trans identity, but athletic contests add a dimension that I am in no way qualified to comment on.

if a racist said they didn’t want to play with black people

If the larger community proposed a restricted class for black people, we would still listen to black people about whether they thought it was a good idea, not the racists.

The previous commenters’ statement that we need to listen to the women in the women’s restricted participation class, with respect to rule changes for the women’s restricted class, is valid. I think you’ve jumped to a conclusion that women chess players would oppose including trans chess players, without a basis in fact. It’s not clear to me that proposed restrictions on trans participation are actually coming from women participants.

But if women players are concerned about the effect of including trans players (whatever effect that may be), clearly we should listen to them. The limited participation women’s class exists to serve the needs of the women in that class.

She’s obviously pretty frustrated, it’s just not clear to me that she’s been permanently silenced, that’s all I’m saying. She said specifically that she doesn’t want to be ammunition in an ideological war between east and west, so perhaps she anticipates a relaxation of the restrictions after a cooling off period.

EDIT: Honestly, I may be misreading her. We only get a few sentences from Naomi Wu herself, but she seems at the same time dismissive of Western attention (“we’re just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war”), and seems to think her notoriety in the West was keeping authorities at bay (“Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me”).

Anyway, I hope the authorities back down, it’s not clear what agenda they are serving by restricting her video & social media access.

Because it’s a restricted participation class, and like it or not the details of those restrictions are important to the participants.

If the class exists because women want it, then it’s reasonable ask women participants what they want.

If someone proposed a restricted class limited to PoC, it would be entirely appropriate to ask PoC what they think about the proposal.

it’s a signal suggesting that a significant portion of western media may be increasingly compromised by Beijing’s influence

Maybe? It’s only been a month, and Naomi Wu has been fairly clear in the past that she doesn’t want too much scrutiny of her personal life. It’s possible that her allies in Western media (and she definitely has some) have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about it. If the government is putting heat on her (or her partner), the last thing she wants is an international kerfuffle over it.

Like all humans, I consume organic matter and I am covered in skin.

My own skin, that I grow, from my body.