@Seda Our CIO is, I think, a Microsoft employee
@left_adjoint As someone whose food tastes tend towards the extreme, I recognize the possible appeal of this, but at the same time it does not speak to me personally. I don't react viscerally against it; it just doesn't work for me.
@regehr @krismicinski @adrian @wingo (We're in a period, and may be for some time, where all of this is relevant again, and I wish we were not.)
@regehr @krismicinski @adrian @wingo But even if it hadn't: Karp, Lawler, and most of the others who were there in the '60's and '70's when things got messy still came down on the right side, even decades later. You can try to advise the young, but it's pointless to flat out tell them they're wrong, and offer no alternatives. Because they won't listen to you, and you're just doing it for self-satisfaction.
@regehr @krismicinski @adrian @wingo Yeah, someone like Vel Kahan would be so cancelled today. Even at the time... we had a meeting of grad students in the lounge to plan a response to the anti-apartheid protests, and his office was just down the hall, so he came over to tell us all we were making a big mistake. When in fact that was one of the few boycott/divest efforts that actually worked, in the end.
@regehr @krismicinski @adrian @wingo ... I also got a PhD there eleven years later, and there was no defence, only signatures and a seminar requirement. Kahan was still around and known to be a terror; if he wasn't your supervisor, no way would you ask him to read your thesis. I did have two other future Turing Award winners quiz me during the oral part of my prelims (no choice involved on my part), probably my most enjoyable hour in academia.
@regehr @krismicinski @adrian @wingo I once heard a story about Kelly Booth's PhD defence (Berkeley, 1975): Bill Kahan (Turing Award, 1989) was on the committee, and at one point said, "This all sounds pretty mushy to me. State and prove any nontrivial mathematical theorem," at which point Kelly fell apart. Now, the person telling the story had a plausible claim to knowledge, but...
But we genuinely can make common cause against these afflictions. We came here in good faith, hoping to make it work. It wasn't a stepping stone to something grander (though, yes, I believed the young Europeans who told me they didn't feel nationalistic, and I wanted to share that feeling). But if the tolerance of this country dissolves into petty recriminations, then something very precious will be lost.
When complaining about Portugal, I have to keep in mind that those born here, while having the advantages of citizenship and language, still have to put up with most of the same dysfunctionalities that we do, without our incomes (not tied to this country and so much higher than average) or even the ability to get jobs like ours without leaving the country (as something like 10% of the population has). I can see why they might resent us.
The bill making it harder to get Portuguese citizenship, which the government wanted to pass this month, will now go through hearings until September. Hopefully they remove the probably unconstitutional bits. The substance of it that affects us (ten years residency, no grandfathering) is likely to remain. Meanwhile, we'd like our initial two-year residence permits, which have expired, to be renewed. No idea when that might happen, and it constrains our travel in the meantime.
