Saturnine: Adj; cold and steady in mood, slow to act or to change; OR of a gloomy or surly disposition
From renowned pollster/mathematician/poker player/author Nate Silver:
“The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority. They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as non-player characters with no will of their own. When you see everyone as simply a product of their circumstances, you can’t imagine that choice or work matters.” [emphasis mine]
I guess it’s time for another definition: Agentic: Adj; Social cognition theory perspective in which people are producers as well as products of social systems. Of course, the “Harris campaign folks” are WRONG. WHAT you do MATTERS!
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MEI Not DEI…
A new approach to hiring and workplace diversity is gaining traction across corporate America, challenging long-standing DEI initiatives. This emerging movement advocates for a system dubbed “Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence,” which emphasizes selecting candidates based solely on their qualifications, abilities and intelligence. Proponents argue that MEI offers a more equitable and effective method for building high-performing teams, moving away from demographic considerations to focus exclusively on individual merit.
Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, a cloud-based data training and validation solutions company primarily for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications, announced in June that he was codifying his startup’s MEI hiring policy, which has garnered praise from tech leaders like Elon Musk, but has also sparked debate about the role of diversity in hiring practices.
In a company blog post, Wang wrote, “We hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart. That’s why this is the time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success: Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.” [emphasis mine] He added, “We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.”
Wang argued that meritocracy and diversity are not diametrically opposed, stating, “There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.”
While traditional DEI practices often aim to increase representation of historically underrepresented groups, MEI focuses solely on individual qualifications without explicit diversity targets.
Meritum Supra Omnes!
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This CNBC article reports that the expanded College Football Playoff has, apparently, been good for Disney as ratings for college football games on ESPN and ABC (both owned by Disney) are the highest they’ve been since 2016. ABC is on track to have its highest ratings for college football since 2009.
The sticks in the mud purists protested against the expanded playoff saying it would cheapen the regular season. The sticks in the mud are wrong again.
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Driving back from breakfast this morning with my wonderful wife we saw one of the following:
This is a Maserati MC20. An aside: we could have driven in the area around our previous residence in the mid-Atlantic for years and probably never seen one of these on the road. Here I see at least one a month.
I LOVE this car! If we ever won a very large lottery jackpot I think this would be among the first two or three “ready-made” cars I would buy, in this case “ready-made” meaning already existing and not needing to be built.
What other cars would be contenders? Here’s one shown here many times.
This is a Lexus LFA and this specific photo has been published more than once, to say the least. Here’s another car from the same company.
I don’t know if I would buy a Lexus LC coupe or convertible, but buy one I would. I think “ready-made” cars would probably be limited to cars built in this century as I just don’t want the potential headaches of servicing an older car. If I could drive a stick without extreme physical discomfort I might consider a C6 Corvette Z06, but if my aunt had had balls she would have been my uncle.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. These are the first 21st century cars I think of when contemplating what to buy if we were to win an unimaginable sum in a lottery. Your mileage may vary.
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WordPress has still not fixed the issues with blog stats and “Pelated Rosts.” (What a surprise…NOT!) Instead of choosing posts that I think are related to this one, I will simply publish links to the five most-read posts so far in 2024. Please feel free to click on any or all of them, especially since not all of them were published this year.
#SaturnineSaturday
#LotteryCars