The Washington Consensus is a set of ten economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by Washington, D.C.-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and United States Department of the Treasury.[1] The term was first used in 1989 by English economist John Williamson.[2] The prescriptions encompassed free-market promoting policies[3] in such areas as macroeconomic stabilization, economic opening with respect to both trade and investment, and the expansion of market forces within the domestic economy. Subsequent to Williamson's use of the terminology, and despite his emphatic opposition, the phrase Washington Consensus has come to be used fairly widely in a second, broader sense, to refer to a more general orientation towards a strongly market-based approach (sometimes described as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism). In emphasizing the magnitude of the difference between the two alternative definitions, Williamson has argued (see § Origins of policy agenda and § Broad sense below) that his ten original, narrowly defined prescriptions have largely acquired the status of "motherhood and apple pie" (i.e., are broadly taken for granted), whereas the subsequent broader definition, representing a form of neoliberal manifesto, "never enjoyed a consensus [in Washington] or anywhere much else" and can reasonably be said to be dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus (more)

Fluvoxamine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and is used for other conditions, including depression.

Zvi Mowshowitz Covid-19 6/2/22: Declining to Respond. *Executive Summary (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/26/22: I Guess I Should Respond To This Week’s Long Covid Study. Covering Covid means that the subject matter is always, at its core, a combination of people dying and a portrait of civilizational collapse. The whole situation is usually rather dismaying. It is likely to remain rather dismaying permanently. (more)

More than 1 in 5 adult Covid-19 survivors in the U.S. may develop long Covid, a C.D.C. study suggests. One in five adult Covid survivors under the age of 65 in the United States has experienced at least one health condition that could be considered long Covid, according to a large new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (more)

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20 years old, fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook ElementarySchool in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Connecticut. He killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their nearby Newtown home before driving to the school. After shooting the students and employees, he committed suicide. (mass shooting) (more)

Jay Rosen: Bad headline, small changes at the New York Times. It started on August 5th. Public reaction to a majestically bad headline, "Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism", was so strong that executive editor Dean Baquet had to do multiple interviews to explain what happened and limit the damage. These pieces are still coming in. (more)

Hillel Wayne: Are We Really Engineers? Mat, idly chatting... What’s your job?” Right now I’m working on microservices for a social media management platform.” “And before that?” “Geological engineering (more)

Dan Froomkin: Dean Baquet interview demonstrates why bothsidesism is alive and well at his New York Times. Talking to Michael Barbaro on the Times’s “The Daily” podcast... I transcribed a fair amount of the podcast for those of you who don’t have that kind of time. (more)

Joe Kahn Is Named Next Executive Editor of The New York Times. Joseph F. Kahn, the managing editor of The New York Times, is expected to start his new role as executive editor in June. (more)

New York Times editor Dean Baquet doesn't care what you think. Baquet’s “objectivity” reflects an ideology of incrementalism, solidly based on the premise that people who want to change things need to be interrogated and doubted but people who defend the status quo don’t. (more)

The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio.[2] The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."[3] Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"[4] This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test (more)

aka Thinking Out Loud, Working in Public (more)

A 3-phase version of the salesman/entrepreneur classic story. ...two salesmen from competing companies who are sent to a foreign country to assess the market for shoes. Salesman One scouts around for a few days and then heads for the telegraph office to contact company headquarters. He writes: "Research complete. Unmitigated disaster. Nobody here wears shoes." Likewise, Salesman Two does his research and heads for the same telegraph office. Once there, he composes the following: "Research complete. Glorious opportunity! Nobody here wears shoes!"

Ash Maurya: My New Project — Unpacking the Innovator’s Gift – Love the Problem. Problem Discovery (Problem Interview) Before Solution Validation (Solution Interview) (more)

Continuous Innovation Framework: Ash Maurya's "framework of frameworks" for the Lean Startup.

On Preserving Human Memory: Evernote Founder’s Impossible Mission. Stepan Pachikov today suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. (more)

WebP is an image file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. WebP yields files that are smaller for the same quality, or of higher quality for the same size.[6] It supports both lossy and lossless compression,[7] as well as animation and alpha transparency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP (more)

Ariel Zev Emanuel (born March 29, 1961) is an American businessman and the CEO of Endeavor, an entertainment and media agency. He was a founding partner of the Endeavor Talent Agency and was instrumental in shaping its June 2009 merger with the William Morris Agency... Emanuel's relationships with his clients, coupled with his stature in the industry, has led to various homages and parodies over the years, including Bob Odenkirk's character Stevie Grant on The Larry Sanders Show, and Ari Gold, played by Jeremy Piven on the HBO television show Entourage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Emanuel (more)

an American politician and former White House Chief Of Staff to President Barack Obama. He served previously as senior advisor to President Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998 and as a Democratic member of the United States House Of Representatives, representing Illinois's 5th congressional district, from 2003 until his resignation in 2009 to take up his position in the Obama Administration. Emanuel was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) during the 2006 mid-term elections and remained a top strategist for House Democrats during the 2008 cycle. After Democrats regained control of the House in 2006, Emanuel was elected chairman of the Democratic Caucus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emanuel