RodericDay

"Men have different distribution of extremes, more dumbasses but also more brilliance, eg. autistic savants, which explains more CEOs and Nobel Prize winners, and therefore systemic sexism is a myth to deny biologically determined outcomes."

it's a very important shibboleth for modern sexists

It's funny how you guys take some kind of pride in maneuvering what to an outsider obviously sounds like a dystopian-style bureaucratic nightmare of unevenly applied laws and insider-connections.

Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.

I interned for SNC Lavalin Construction in my undergraduate, and a finance guy gave a presentation where he literally laughed out loud in this evil way about how much money SNC was going to make out of it and what a stupid deal it was for the public.

Literal quote: "They think they're getting a Cadillac, but they're getting a Toyota." Now the CEO-at-the-time has been charged with corruption and the Prime Minister is involved.

Fuck Public-Private Partnerships.

As a newcomer to the field, parent post is far more welcoming than the bevy of trash Ninja flavor-of-the-week bullshit that makes it seem impossible to catch up.

I only actually got my bearings and self-confidence as a programmer when I realized that most of the people pushing blogs with subscriptions about "cutting-edge" tech were literally snake-oil salesmen and shovel merchants.

That coding wasn't actually different from anything else I had learned in my life, and that there were some fundamentals I could latch onto, and grow from there upwards. All this nonsense about the field experiencing a revolution that upends all existing knowledge year-after-year is far more mentally taxing.

it's just as much your responsibility as it is theirs to insist on ethical standards

engineers don't get to go around running saying "i was gonna put some basic safety procedures in there, but they just wouldn't pay for it"

you make them pay for it

I find it incredibly easy to follow.

In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand.

The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.

I don't want to send all my calls to google

"The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25510906-the-mushroom-at...

It's all about how in Japan there's this tradition of gifting (and never purchasing for oneself) matsutake, as a way of showing appreciation. However, this tradition grew alongside deforestation.

Japan has done a pretty good job conserving forests, but this strange mushroom they like so much only grows in deforested forests out of skinny pines, so now it has to be imported from Oregon, Finland, and China.

The author embeds herself a bit with Laotian refugees that do mushroom hunting in Oregon, and describes the various interesting ways these communities operate. Auctions, forest hunting, how kids get started, etc.

And then she explains how these two intensely social and human concepts (the gift giving and the harvesting) are connected via an impersonal cynical international supply chain that commodifies everything.

Beautiful book tbh.

...that's not what wage theft is

It's funny how bloodthirsty people are when it comes to someone being ultra-punished stealing a consumer product,

but I bet when people talk about wage theft and capitalist malfeasance this guy turns into a corporate lawyer.

Boys

Thankfully girls, poor smooth-brained things that they are, don't have to deal with the issue of passion, or genius, right?

Honestly, the way flagship american news corporations publish fawning hagiographies of people like McCain and Bush and Obama and Bill Gates, justify and promote wars, etc. it's really not meaningfully distinct from "statist" equivalents.

Americans criticize countries singing anthems and making military parades and all that stuff, while seemingly completely unaware of Mt. Rushmore, anthems and jets in sports games, etc.

all of that + global warming and ecological devastation

fetch() + response.text() is usually two. add a user-defined third and you're there.

I usually find the issue, point it out, then they make sure they implement the fix in a way that is not alien to their codebase.

It's not many hands on one project but everyone taking care of their own projects, so it's a bit different where I'm at right now.

Second this. Mithril.js is absolutely incredible, and my coworkers are often surprised at how quickly I can dive into a React project and fix an issue because I don't carry the baggage of doing things "the react way".

Every now and then I use software tools where rather than complaining about how x or y should be different, everything seems to be the best possible version of something I'd have come up with myself, and I have zero complaints. Mithril.js is one of those tools.

You're not "in a Mithril project", you're basically just using javascript but the VDOM is expertly and minimally handled by some key functions.

Participating in the project via Gitter was very welcoming as well. Long live Mithril!

now apply this to Google and Facebook's "free" offerings

If the flowchart is so good, they should expose it in clickable form online.

Mithril is my favorite by far.

It's not even close. It's depressing how little-known it remains.

Mandela never renounced violence. In 1985, Mandela was offered a conditional release if he were to renounce violence; he refused.

Rick Stengel on Mandela, via FAIR:

One of most interesting things he ever said to me was this idea of nonviolence. Remember, we compare him to Gandhi, we compare him to Martin Luther King. He said: “I was not like them. For them, nonviolence was a principle. For me, it was a tactic. And when the tactic wasn’t working, I reversed it and started” –that’s a very important difference.

Labor markets are extremely uncompetitive, because prices (salaries) are not public information.

Price transparency is the crucial reason why markets can claim to propagate information quickly and lead to efficiency.

The opacity in the labor market and the drug market is not an accident.

Let's not forget the role "political data science" played, as well. You have an unlikable candidate in Clinton, a campaign strategy based on voting against Trump, voters debating whether to commit against Trump or to cast a protest vote lest Clinton gets a strong mandate...

...and the NYT and other newspapers run front-pages saying "Clinton 85% likely to win". I can't imagine a better recipe for fostering voter apathy and absenteeism.

"one of the most energy efficient" + "safe"

I don't know if it's just the money. I vastly prefer Montreal to SF, and I willingly took the paycut + taxation trade-offs because I prefer the way society works here (entertainment, health care, education, social status of non-white-collar jobs, etc.)

However, attempting to switch jobs, I find the gelid pace at which recruitment works here incredibly frustrating. People take weeks to reply. Sometimes they don't reply at all. When I visited SF I got offered an interview + a job in a single day.

Companies need to pay more, but currently they're failing at more than just that.

I much prefer GitLab to GitHub.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty of Genius was a great ride, as well as a fantastic introduction to powerful ideas about communication and non-scientific disciplines' wish to imitate science.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X makes a brilliant case for angry speech, making the mainstream portrayal of figures like Gandhi and MLK Jr. seem like straight-up whitewashed propaganda.

Delusions of Gender is a fierce analysis of the nature/nurture discussion that rears its head over and over, explaining various mistakes people when interpreting results, both at the research level and at the journalistic level.

Marx's Inferno reinvents Marx in a super clever way.

I'm hellbanned so you probably won't see this, but it's already there! The default key is F12.

"It's not race, it's poverty!" is a pretty well discussed idea in philosophy circles. The concept is called "Intersectionality", and you may want to read up on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality).

I agree that there are a ton of liberals going around protecting their wealth by trying to get people to focus solely on racism. These people indeed have a lot in common with conservatives.

However, just because those people exist, doesn't mean that one should take the diametric opposite position to them, and basically claim that race is an insignificant factor compared to poverty. That would be wildly ignorant as well. Plenty of poor white people enjoy advantages that even the richest minorities don't (eg: societal role models). Same applies to gender, and to sexuality.

It's interesting how many tech guys consider this guy some kind of martyr.

People are upset about his odious "Google Memo" because it's not their first rodeo with a dude who weasels around and justifies his racism/sexism with pseudoscience, not because they were "misled" by "clickbait media" or whatever.

They weren't incorrect. The 32 supposedly-critical citation links point ovewhelmingly to garbage, including 5 wikipedia links, a dozen opinion pieces, some more "academic" essays, a link to MRA-founder Warren Farrell's blog, and, perhaps best of all, a link that simply points to a google search for the term "political correctness" (lol). The "graphs" are made in powerpoint with the curve tool (one of them the infamous bell curve), and the axes don't even have ticks on them.

It's evident to anyone familiar with "the scene" that the dude got all his info from anti-feminist YouTube/Reddit, and this was proven beyond a doubt when he went on to speak at anti-feminist YouTube channels immediately after getting fired. he wasn't widely misunderstood, people just saw right through his multiple disclaimers.

This Quora answer was pretty final for me: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...