transfer92
Hot take: This reads like a person who was difficult to work with.
Senior people have responsibility, therefore in a business situation they have authority. Junior people who think they know it all don't like this. If there's a disagreement between a senior person and a junior person about something, they should, of course, listen to each other respectfully. If that's not happening, then one of them is not being a good employee. But if they are, then the supervisor makes the final call.
"In February the BBC apologised over "serious flaws" in the making of the programme about children's lives in Gaza, after it was revealed its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas minister."
But I don't think he's a hero, and I don't think he deserves a statue.
As far as the commercial databases were concerned, I don't think we were told much more than this costs money, so don't waste searches.
But as for things like criminal history searches ("RAP sheets") we had training that stressed the illegality of looking up anyone without a justifiable legal reason. We were told to log the reason for doing every search. The training materials included news clippings about former police officers who were in prison for invalid use of the criminal history database. Once a year we were audited and asked to justify a selection of lookups we had done.
All systems are faillible and can be misused by bad actors. All systems are subject to cost-benefit analysis.
But I think it's valid that we have a system of law enforcement, that it be able, under appropriate circumstances and laws and checks and balances, to gain information that is sensitive and not publicly available.
(Physics A.B. from Harvard & PhD. from UC Berkeley, FWIW)
Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole
There's a more temperate article in the New York Times, that's worth reading analytically. Look at the carefully-phrased responses of other scientists. Some of them appear to be struggling to say something polite about the study. "Interesting," is word used both by victims of amateur chefs and fellow scientists reading a new article when confronted by something they're not sure about swallowing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/us/gulf-stream-collapse.h...
Alex Hall, the director of the Center for Climate Science at the University of California, Los Angeles:
"the findings did not signal to him that any collapse of that ocean system might be imminent" "we don’t really know the reaction we’ll cause"
Andrew Pershing, director of climate science at Climate Central:
"The work is fascinating" "The big challenge is, what do we do with that information?"
Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer and dean at the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech:
She also called Dr. Boers’ study “interesting,” but said she wasn’t convinced that the findings showed that circulation in that ocean system is slowing.