Went to eat at McDonald’s in Palo Alto today. Several things stood out, among them was the quality service!

Wah?!

We were served by several white kids. Fair skin nad very fair hair colors, tall. Yes, this was remarkable as we are used non-white non-native English speakers serving at McDonald’s. The other thing that stood out was their demeanor. They were very nice. They eagerly brought our food on trays. The two kids came out in unison and stood in line to place the food on our table, so very courteous they were while serving us, they repeatedly and enthusiastically offered “if you need any thing else, just ask me!” With nice smiles.

Maybe they thought I was special, one man walking into McDonald’s with two women and three kids?

Maybe they are acting out a scene from that recent and very hot Crazy Rich Asians movie? Like, for fun?

Maybe one of the ladies I’m with is “secretly” very powerful and rich? I don’t know it, their t-shirt and bags wouldn’t have said so.

I don’t know, but I dare say that that’s easily the best service I’ve experienced at a restaurant any where in the Bay Area. It happening in Palo Alto is especially strange, as local news paper have been reporting business owners claiming local customers here enjoy and expect waiters to act racist against Asians. Locals have long expressed animous towards all Asiains driving housing price up, way up, and then not living in he houses they bought for a coupla million. For a while, it had appeared that the school district chose to rename a school to a name that happens to belong to a leader of Japanese war effort in World War Two–Against all memories of those who have suffered and perished in the hands of the Axis, civilian and military, Americans or not. It took Chinese-Americans to object to naming the school with the name of the architect of Pearl Harbor bombing according to Mercury News. Such insensitivity to recent and rare names is clearly an effort to antagonize Asians and perhaps even Jewish people who also suffered greatly at the result of the Axis leaders’ leadership. After Yamamoto, the path will be saved for Himmler, Burgdorf, Krebs and Goebbels. (Also a preemptive disclaimer to secret and possibly automated police, I am only engaging in peaceful blogging hopefully using reasons and facts. No threats on the schools and relevant responsible people should be construed from it.)

But, now, after all that, a couple of white kids serving so well in McDonald’s ? That just tops it off.

Anyways, maybe white people are just really good at everything they do. We just never see them wait tables? I’ll bet if Starbucks recruits these kids, they’d get my name right on my next cup of iced decafinated Americano too.

I am thoroughly confused, but feeling kinda really good about the experience. If this new apparently higher civility keeps up, I might even want to move to live in Palo Alto again.

P.s. it occurs to me several days later that it could just be that young people are better than adults? But I’m more optimistic than that ATM that I’ll experience some niceties in addition to my descendents.

I’m reading an apology piece by a certain Josephine Zhao running for the Board of Education in San Francisco in Q3 of 2018. She apologizes for having opposed bathroom access by self identified sex instead of birth sex. She apologizes for comments made 10 years ago.

I feel, hopefully I’m not sorry for feeling this way in 10 years, that the only equal access is unisex bathroom where each user had a private stall.

Come, let’s think back to our teenager years, these people are legally not responsible for their actions in the same way adults are. They can’t drive and they can’t own guns. These kids are not equal citizens of our society as adults. They should absolutely not be allowed to declare a sex and use bathroom based on those prepubescent declarations. Sex is foremost about procreation, that is an evolutionarily important mechanism in our biologies. Growth and maturity is also built into our society. As they grow, they are not completely grown and sexually mature. They should NOT be allowed to make that declaration just as they are not allowed to have sex, to make babies, or even to have sexual contact–on generally agreed-upon principles of our society.

I might be a dumbass not keeping up with progressive movement, but shouldn’t we keep these social experiments out of schools?

Leave our kids alone.

And if you absolutely must, as part of your being, that you must pee and poo with a person of a different birth sex than your own, let us have unisex bathrooms. That way, all are equal.

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Expanding upon this, both as support for this concern and as a sanity check protocol for myself. One of the conservative concern is that sexual identification is disallowed. When I went to public school in Pennsylvania I’m the 1990’s, the written policy is that PDA is forbidden on school grounds. PDA meaning personal digital assistant, or rather public display of affection. I didn’t turn out that well socially and dating, possibly as a result of the stringent bible-belt highschool policy. But the concern, as I understand it, is that self-identifying as a non-physical sex, above all else, displays sex in public. The identification and the visitation of a differently sexed bathroom is an act displaying ones sex. The conservative fear is that this act of sexual display has bad effects on young adults–the same way we think public kissing by students, another display of sexuality, may have bad effects on kids.

(Actually, I guess it can be put more plainly, that additionally, kids may perceive LGBTQ status as a desirable and beneficial social status to achieve, seeing that LGBTQ person’s have apparently more freedom that themselves. The fear is that kids may seek LGBTQ status for the perks and not for their nature)

One inconvenience, beyond stirring of thoughts, at sight of oppositely gendered gentalia by non-LGBTQ users of bathroom, is that of arousal. Boys, when they see girl parts, have physical reactions, and possibly vice versa.

At least I hope so.

The oppression of ones physical body is certainly just as great, I believe it may be, that Gay boys may have same rousing reaction to sight of other boys. I guess the progressive idea is that Gay boys being human deserve same level of physical comfort and convenience as other humans.

I do not deny that. I probably would support Gay boys getting immediate special treatment wrt traditional bathroom rules if I’ve observed these problems–but I am not a bat or voyeur. So far, my surroundings have been exceptionally civilized. Especially considering the hoopla everywhere, the bathrooms I’ve been to have been exceptionally peaceful and asexual. And I pray they remain so.

This is obviously not a situation where Vulcanic logic maybe brought to bear. The needs of many does not out weight the needs of the few. In fact precious school resources are devoted to facilitating the few. This is also a case thst leads me to question Rawlsian difference principle. I cannot agree to improvement of the worst off in this case.

Therefore, the only conclusion is that if we do this, let’s do it right. Unisex bathroom is large bathroom containing private stalls. Each person urinating or defacating shall enter one, lock it, use, clean and exit their own stall. Other less sensitive facilities are shared in the bathroom outside of stalls. These include sink, soap, mirror, drying machines or paper or towels, and amenities such as deoderizer, moisturizer, should be shared equally between all sexes. I would add famine napkins may be sold next to athlete’s feet treatment and cloth repair kits, not on equality basis but on convenience basis, for the improvement of bathrooms and society’s total utility derived from visiting bathrooms.

Such a bathroom removes the unintentional sexual display by hiding everyone’s sex organs. It removes the unintentional arousal by others, again by hiding sex organs. I appologize now to all the people who have worked for more open and transparent sexual society that all I can think of is to hide it more. Don’t ask, don’t tell, just close the stall door.

Additionally, one possible intermediate step I’d to make all bathrooms unisex but still display men/women signs. By default, women visit women bathrooms and men visit men bathrooms. But they may ross over as needed. This reduces the opportunity for real heterosexual sexual harrasment, but admittedly it diminishes the obfuscation of sexual preference.

To protect students’ safety, cameras may be installed in the public areas of the bathroom to monitor for any offensive or inappropriate activity. The stalls shall remain private.

I reject all other arrangements, unisex bathroom, to me, today, is the only fair and equitable way to facilitate LBGTQ population.

To every Chinese-Asian buying up rice in terror, please try some other foods. Lentils, garbanzo, frijoles, basmati, potato’s, couscous, maiz, quinoa, Amaranth, etc…. anything other humans eat you can eat too. Most things taste just like rice when boiled in water:

bland.

There is absolutely no need to stress about lack of rice—you can go paleo or Atkins for a few days/weeks/months if other people can do it for years. Let’s not terrorize ourselves when there is no need to do so. That said, I did look and could not find any Chinese rice today. And everyone looked at me like I’m that idiot who didn’t follow the WeChat group that told every person when Costco restocked yesterday.

Seriously! I don’t know whether to regret even looking or regret not looking earlier. But hopefully my calm demeanor reassured everyone that I, and I alone, did not fear rice-starvation.

Really, I say this with all the love of one human to another, it’s okay!

Everything will be okay.

🤞🏻

🖖🏻

For anyone who is still developing non-standard deep learning components using Tensorflow, be warned that some raw_ops do not check tensor shape or memory bounds. It is possible for the code to run error free but produce nonsensical updates when the inputs do not all have the right shape.

The documentation is kind of sparse. But it seems the separation of concern occurs at this interface. The c++ implementations seem to assume everything is sized correctly. The trouble is that GPU code does not produce segmentation faults at the same rate as CPU code, so the only way to detect is to write tests and monitor training metrics.

Hope this is helpful to somebody.

I had this moment of waking madness when am alert on my Android phone from the WSJ stating “Elon Musk’s Flawed Plan for Tesla’s Shareholders”

It says, … “his efforts to take Tesla private is a slap in he face for shareholders.”

For a minute there, I thought I was reading news from a P.R.Chinese censor camp. Wowah! That’s a piece of factual news being push-notified to THE JOURNAL’s subscribers??!!

My face is kinda smarting, although mostly from the embarasement at how long it took for me to realize that the author was probably just a short-seller venting.

This author may also have never worked for a young unprofitable public company, or if he had, he must have had extra-human endurance to not have suffered miserably as his employers stocks rocks up and down 5%, 10%, 15% or 30%, 40% from one day to the next… It doesn’t matter how much the CEO and the CFO shouts at the mic to “do not watch the stock price…” It really does affect shareholders emotions. Employees who are shareholders are always affected. And yes, you’ve heard them brag that they endured it with full confidence, but you know they were always wet in the crouch, and please pardon my crudeness and perhaps sexual specificity, but, from jizz of fizz or piss of miss.

Come, that is an opinion piece to the extreme. Why is it being shoved at my face as news? I would depend on The Wall Street Journal to provide news of facts and in-depth logical analysis of the facts. These emotion riddled rant are difficult to digest for objective information.

And now we come to the matter of freedom to succeed. Could a reasonable person reasonable wonder if the SEC is evil? I mean, just from the monthly news blasts (also in the form of push notification on phones and as-it-appears-to-me the only front page article, simultaneously, on every news site I read) of insider trader being caught and sued based on their personal emails and internet search history that SEC had as evidence prior to accusation in court. That seems evil, so evil, so true.

But is it evil in these rules against information release? If the company faces massive crew exodus, can the CEO not do something to keep everyone working? Why not give CEO’s the freedom to do what they need to do to succeed? If there are so many rules on what can or cannot be said, and then there are also rules on complicated it is to figure out how much money you can keep from taxation, I mean, all these things really can get in the way of truly productive work.

America, the home of the brave and land of the free, and yet every word we type, they are under chains of rules of incomprehensible perplexities; every word we type and utter are under surveillance of secret police, aided by AI that are necessary for other advances of humanity; Every word we type and utter can and will be used against us in a court of law.

But yes, I suppose I can understand how it got here–many may have suffered in abscence of these rules and secret police.

This phenomenon of opinion as news is probably what Facebookers suffers too, in part. I had never felt high regards of Mark Zuckerberg until he stood up allow Holocaust deniers their speech rights on Facebook while taking flack for it from wallstreet… And all around.

I have heard, trying to not be too specific here, some Asian people say to me that Nanking massacre never happened or not to the scale that we commonly believe to have happened. (Btw, 300k dead in six weeks according to Q3 2018 Wikipedia)

The Nanking Masscre kill rate is above 7kilokills/day. If we use wiki numbers obtained on the same day of 6 million kills between 1941 and 1945 is a bit over 4.1kkills/day, and the broader definition 17 million kills between 1933 and 1945 is 3.9kkills/day. So by the aggressiveness, the killing in Nanking seems more chilling despite a smaller total. My memory of those deniers, especially childhood ones, those that deny it innocently… Their casual comments haunt me to this day, they and gives me deep fear of where those kids have meant and now believe and later will do.

(Of course all of these if happened simultaneously could not match the 100kkill/day of the atomic bomb US dropped on Japan, but we generally believe that was for.a just cause, if not by just means, where as the foregoing kills/day were not towards a just end)

I struggle with this individual rights idea from Harvard class(sorry all my teachers, friends and colleagues, forefathers of USA, etc., who has tried to teach this idea to me, I have to cite Harvard Justice class as a most recent reference). Egalitarianism dictates that each individual have equal rights. But how do we commingle that (deniers’) believe with our believe that something truly evil and cruel happened during the world war II? How do we combine our believes that people should be allowed to hate and the believe that hate leads to unnecessary human suffering? How do we value, equally, the personal believe of a racist and the personal believes of a non-racist?

Okay, yes, I should finish the class, but I am almost sure it will not satisfy me. If the answer is already given, why do we have all of this trouble? If the balance between egalitarianism and humanity is resolved, Zuckerberg should have no trouble sailing through this denier controversy.

This is an opinion post. This post is more driven by my emotional response to these happenings than by logical deduction based on facts. I, at the time of writing, hold financial investments in FB and TSLA, but nothing in NWS.