My PhD is in machine learning. Politics is my hobby. Civis Analytics is a politically-connected machine learning tech-startup. I was very excited to work there.

After an awkward conversation with a friend and colleague, I came to find out I was being paid 20% less than the PhD physicist that I had to train in machine learning. Civis is a machine learning startup. Civis is not SpaceX. When we discussed our salaries, he apologized to me and said I should be senior to him. Were his 9 years of doing academic research in a tangentially-related field 25% more valuable than my 8 years of research in the relevant field?

There was another physicist with some machine learning knowledge and some industry experience. I showed him more advanced material and coached him through complicated algorithms. He advocated for me to an almost embarrassing degree… circling by my desk when the executives were around, heaping praise in a loud voice. He also apologized to me when I told him my salary.

(snip)


You might think this has nothing to do race or ethnicity. After all, I’m only half-Mexican and I frequently pass for white. This is why I’m occasionally put in awkward positions:

Acquaintance: The damn spics are ruining this country!

Me: What!? I’m Mexican you f$#!# @$$#%^&!

Acquaintance: Oh, uh… Sorry, I wasn’t talking about you.

Me: Who were you talking about? My dad? My grandfather, the WWII vet?

This even happens with people who know I’m Mexican. I am just so Assimilation: Mission Accomplished that they forget.

http://troyhernandez.com/2016/01/27/im-suing-civis-analytics/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/javieraceves/la-cocina-mexicana-omg#.cxnQjgKZL

What's your score?

I can't embed the link; FB is being assholish as usual.


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153234012937443&set=a.10153232260552443.1073741861.601472442&type=3&theater

Still, it's nice to have close friends that get this close to Mme Secretary.

Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

(snip)

Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?

DUCKING THE SUBJECT

One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already-rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/after-i-lived-in-norway-america-felt-backward-heres-why/

Tonight is a night to reminisce.

To raise a toast to absent friends and empty chairs.

A decade ago, I resigned my position as an adjunct professor at Boston College to protest the selection of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the school’s commencement speaker. I did so in an open letter to the Boston Globe, which I dashed off in disgust, on an airplane.

I never expected the Globe to publish this epistle, which excoriated Rice for issuing misleading statements in the run-up to the Iraq War. Nor did I anticipate that the letter, once published, would go viral. But within the next 48 hours more than 500 emails arrived in my inbox.

“Hey [Expletive],” one began, “You are a [expletive] idiot!!! And your daughter in the picture on your website looks like a maggot! You are a disgraceful american [sic] and it would have been so nice if you had been a passenger on one of the planes that crashed into one of the [World Trade Center] towers on 9/11/01.”


http://www.salon.com/2016/01/25/i_love_my_fox_news_enemies_what_i_learned_from_the_most_hateful_emailers_in_the_world/

I'll tell you whether I've had it and whether I would eat it again.

Let's make this challenging; I'll take the obvious ones out:

Balut is out

Bird's nest soup. Also out.

On video on demand.

You guys see teh repuglican debutts.

Bye...

I can't wait.

Given his tête-à-tête with el Chapo, and subsequent arrest, The Cacique of Caciques may not be pleased with him.

So, Sean should: