giantsloth

The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005). Consumers are better off now, because technology has gotten better, not because App Stores have made things better. App Stores have actively caused harm to the consumers through lock in and through a compression of imagination amongst end users of how much better things could be.

You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.

https://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

Being pro democrat is not being left at all. It’s being center right. The left since Carter has pushed forth far right neoliberal economic policy. Bill Clinton is universally known for his right wing policy. Obama literally bailed out the banks rather then the people with mortgages. Obama could have easily bought up the bad debts from the bank at a discount and allowed people to restructure their mortgages with 4.7 trillion dollars. Instead he gave it to the banks, allowed everyone to lose their house and be bought up by predators like Blackstone Realty.

This seems like a case of capitalist imposed enculturated guilt for not having a butt in seat for 8 hours a day (regardless of actual productivity).

Rather than alphabetizing your socks, go to the gym or improve some other skill set interspersed with your paid work.

Embrace the fact that you can build a schedule around you and your wants and desires and not that of your companies.

I’m not worried about the fictitious and overblown “SJW” strawman youtube has lead everyone to believe are everywhere. I’m worried about corporate interests, ideologues, and charlatans publishing biased nonsense and making the world even more crowded with bad information without any recourse or ability to investigate what the motives behind the papers may have been.

I recently started strength training as a software developer and it’s been a huge boon on my mental health, my confidence and for sticking with decent eating habits.

For people looking to get started, I would suggest Starting Strength, which is a book on Amazon (pretty lengthy, but extremely thorough) or Strong Lifts 5x5 (google it to find the program it’s free on the web).

The basic gist is to do full body barbell movements for 5 sets of 3 or 5 and increase the weight by 5 pounds (2.5 pound plates on each side of the barbell) per session.

The basic barbell movements are

  Squat
  Deadlift
  Overhead press
  Bench
  Bent over row
  (I don’t do power cleans)

YouTube channels I watch to keep motivated and to learn stuff like form and nutrition (they limit the bro science as far as my untrained eye can tell):

  Alan Thrall
  Jujimufu
  Eric Buggenhaggen
  Jeff Nippard
  Scooby1961
  Omarlsuf

-no one is looking at at the gym

-lift only what you can lift, start slow, you will progress very quickly

-Commit to going every week three days a week, except for illness and injury

-Carefully watch form videos on YouTube for the lifts (Alan Thrall and The Art of Manliness are the best)

-If you do sustain an injury, let it heal for a weak or two, but continue lifting around the injury

-strength training is not body building, but it is the ideal place for creating a foundation of strength and overall health, you will lose weight, you will gain muscle and you will be out of the gym in under an hour with the basic barbell movements.

I’ve been lifting for 7 months now and I love it. I suggest everyone do it.

You’re an immoral and evil person. Anyone who makes excuses for the powerful restricting the rights of people with limited power is a horrible human being. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.

Spoken like a true boot licker.

It is absolutely the responsibility of every sovereign citizen and every company made up of those citizens to resist objectively evil behavior regardless of the larger apparatus at work.

Saying it “isn’t fair” for google to take the high road is the most asinine childish argument you could possibly put fourth.

It isn’t fair that people are having their human rights curtailed for profit. So that some people in some part of the world get amazing healthcare and amazing lunches, others have to suffer.

ICE was invented recently under Bush in 2003 preceding the Homeland security act. You are wrong to say we democratically voted in ICE. Even if we did vote it in, kidnapping children is evil fullstop and should be protested.

No American is free of using third world slave labor. This is unavoidable and all we can do is bring attention to it.

Your kowtowing to the powerful and buying into their propaganda is insanely stupid, evil and you should be ashamed of yourself.

No this is actually a myth.

“More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price.”

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Did this guy pay for this article? It's a pure personal branding/ego piece about a guy who watched a lot of YouTube and had also happened to write for Washington Post (owned by Amazon) and The New York Times, known for publishing absolute reprehensible garbage op-ed pieces justifying atrocities perpetuated by neoliberals while ostensibly still being on the left.

Reading his website makes him seem less like a master of anything serious and more a master at self aggrandizing douche baggery.

B=MAP reads much like any self helpy gimmick, something so obvious and so useless you somehow feel smart for having had your obvious thoughts on a topic reworded and handed back to you in corny new configuration you can share with your vapid fake friend group.

You can just imagine that the function that would normally generate DOM elements with something like document.creatElement(‘div’), has been replaced with boundObjectiveCCreateNativeUIView() ... there is no platform check for the browser, so in the render step it will create native UIViews or whatever Androids native View primitive is.

What does "fulfills himself as a flight."?

We need to define flight here: "a brilliant, imaginative, or unrestrained exercise or display" [1]. So he fulfills himself as a a brilliant, imaginative, or unrestrained exercise or display. He toots his own horn, to promote oneself; to boast or brag; to tout oneself [2].

What does the quote mean?

They (some doctors and professors in this quote) have abdicated their freedom to their discipline or interest. They see all things through the single lens of their discipline, and all things outside of it as trite, "stupid", something not to think on at all or to think of only in how it relates to their specialty.

Take the result of Zuckerberg's "need" to monetizing Facebook. This has dire consequences on peoples security, and even peoples personal sanity. To Zuckerberg these things are dealt with in a way "lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity", all that matters is Facebook's bottom line. Further on in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity she quotes "The rest of the world is a faceless desert. Here again one sees how such a choice is immediately confirmed. If there is being only, for example, in the form of the Army, how could the military man wish for anything else than to multiply barracks and maneuvers?"

The overall idea being that people highly specialized and competent in one area make the logical fallacy of arguing from authority (themselves being the authority they are arguing from) and put forth the most mundane, lacking in nuance "ordinary values" in areas that they have little understanding, haven't researched and aren't really interested in.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flight definition 5

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toot_one%27s_own_horn

You are making a simple assertion that the metaphor was good without any explanation, while the author made a deep and cutting explanation as to why he he believes it’s a terrible metaphor. You’ve made no counter argument.

This is a perfect opportunity to whip out one of my favorite quotes by Simone de Beauvoir:

“Proust observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor often shows himself, outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity. The reason for this is that having abdicated his freedom, he has nothing else left but his techniques. In domains where his techniques are not applicable, he either adheres to the most ordinary of values or fulfills himself as a flight.”

I think this quote applies to a lot of people on this site.

This happened with trains in the 19th century and it was an absolute disaster. Please learn your history on privatized public goods. It results in massive fragmentation in standards, extreme levels of corruption and an overall worse experience for most people.

You are propping up a very weird straw man definition to tear down which has absolutely no basis in material reality, so that you can simply state that taxes are bad.

From an actual real world level, it’s unfair that the stock market is used to decide how good the economy is when 84% of the stock market is controlled by the top 10% richest segment of the population. It’s unfair that corporations get massive tax breaks provided by local municipalities for short term political wins in the establishment of jobs that they will summarily destroy if another town comes in wit better incentives 5 or 10 years down the line living that town in ruin when they leave. It’s unfair that companies are allowed to offshore their headquarters and pay no income tax at all to their countries of origin. It’s unfair that these giant companies can control and manipulate our political system with money.

The point is it’s irrelevant how you define rich, we have real unfair realities that we can look at and address. Coming up with an arbitrary definition of rich is a distraction rooted in no reality.

This is a very naive statement, with a heavy helping of dog whistling libertarian utopian memes and philosophical navel gazing.

The crisis was largely due in part to deregulation and private companies getting kick backs for their ratings. Crypto currency is mostly unregulated and rated on a private market. Also, there is a small elite group of people who own most of the crypto currency, which very quickly and easily could result in market manipulation at the expense of small holders. While your anger is understandable and banks are indeed criminal, cryptocoins are just as susceptible to criminal behavior as any other market place and even more so do to the lack of regulation. And I’d just like to note that major banks like Goldman are saying that btc is bullshit while quietly buying a massive stake in it. So, the fact is, the banks will get involved if it’s worth money and they will manipulate the market, so we will be right back where we started.

When people say corporation they clearly mean the board, the C level execs and regulations need to be put in place that promotes a culture of morality for the people that comprise and make these businesses function. You're blaming the individual for a cultural context that has been set by poor and morally bankrupt leadership.

I also agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden than smaller ones, but if we make any business pay in a headcount sensitive way, then we are creating disincentives which may be explored in opaque ways.

Your third paragraph you say that this points to collective burden, so you actually don't agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden. You are more worried about the actions of the company then the moral implications to actual human beings, so you are highly immoral, noted.

I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.

Your third paragraph you say that this points to a collective burden, yet in this one you say richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily. Aside from this being a statement as vacuous as "the sky is blue", you are also completely missing the fact that higher education is already highly subsidized by alumni, government and corporations. If you are talking about k-12, yeah they are funded by local property taxes already, and are completely irrelevant to this conversation, as this conversation is about corporations.

I think these things point to a collective model of burden.

It's hard to tell what you actually think.

This is an awful suggestion. Next you're going to be suggesting employers ask where on the Andre Walker Hair Typing System potential recruits fall so they don't have to ask whether or not they are black.

Large businesses do not pay their fair share to society and therefore should incur the cost of helping pay for the people that maintain and build their business.

Money objectively provides the means to purchase health services, legal services, investments, decent living spaces, etc. [Insert Ethnic Group] group does not objectively mean [insert stereotype].

I think you are most likely confusing the petite bourgeoisie (the vast majority of programmers) with the haute bourgeoisie (the monopolistic owners of our means of production, think Bezos).

The petty bourgeoisie are well off, and look to emulate and think of themselves as similar to a haute bourgeoisie like Elon Musk, but they are not, your 200,000 a year salary is closer to your porters 30k salary and you often work alongside your workers/coworkers. Our owners of the means of production, such as Tim Cooke cornering the high end hardware market, do not work alongside their employees. They view workers in the abstract, as literal numbers on paper.

It is much easier for say people like Zuckerberg and Schmidt to collude, because it’s a lot fewer people to coordinate. And this in fact happened with wage fixing in Silicon Valley between tech companies until they were caught.

I don’t know what the answer is, and it’s especially fraught in a world economy where unionizing in the USA may mean that Google simply highers programmers in Eastern Europe instead. But I do know that government should be leveraged for the people and not for big business, that’s its point and that’s currently not the case.

It’s extremely intellectually dishonest to compare people who live in extreme comfort and can afford tremendous amounts of power because of their money to people who are historically oppressed by law and culture because of their ethnicity.

Edit: Also, who has said they hate the rich? Stop propping up silly YouTube strawmen for you to take down with your logic lording.

Religion is a perfect example of guerilla marketing, multilayer marketing, grassroots marketing and a pyramid scheme. They advertise by hooking guilable people looking for easy answers, the churches convince their local populace to give them money, those churches then pay up to larger regional institutions and so on.

The people need to be presented something to believe in before they can pay money for it or else they wouldn’t know it existed and therefore wouldn’t be able to put their money where their mouth is. Getting the word out is the most important thing. missionary work and preaching the gospel is a main tenant of Christian theology for example... because they understand advertising and marketing is important. This is why the Catholic Church covered up the molestations of children, because they understood bad PR would hurt their bottom line.

You are basing your analysis purely on your own personal experience and attitude towards the world which is definitionally anecdotal and extremely anti scientific.

If people are not influenced by advertising and marketing why then do governments put fourth propaganda, why is advertising a multi billion dollar industry, why is it an extremely sought after undergraduate degree, why are there advertisements literally everywhere you look? The answer is because it works, and it makes people a lot of money and gives them a lot of power.

We are highly influenced by the mainstream and by culture, I mean culture is what is allowing us to communicate with each other by providing us with a set of symbols (alphabet and English language). In fact we don’t know what we don’t know and therefore can never truly be objective in our view of the world, it’s always built and based off of cultural artifacts and norms.

So it’s not a problem per say that people do the wrong thing at large, it’s simply a fact of life, people tend go with the flow. That means people who don’t go with the flow need to make the flow flow better. Or else you are suggesting we leave normal people behind because they suck. Where I personally think we are as individuals defined by how we help people that are weaker than ourselves.

Well aren’t we confusing good advice for the individual vs good advice for the mean. There is room for both sets of advice, but I think on average we need to look towards implementing policy that takes the whole into consideration. Not everyone has access to people or content that will motivate them to make the right individual choices. But, most everyone has access to advertising that actually promotes us making the wrong decision to make people money.

Disney is able to creat tasteless childlike story arcs that challenge nothing.

There’s a good guy, there’s a bad guy, there’s the struggle and sacrifice of the good guy, which eventually trumps the bad guy leading to a rich life.

They are selling you American mythology 101.

The fact that you enjoy these myths isn’t a problem, they are literally manufactured to have as broad an appeal as possible.

What is a problem is you excusing the dilution of nuance in our culture that is used to perpetuate western hegemony which directly leads to our politicians doing literally whatever they want for themselves.

If you supported them, you’re still in love with the franchise and the characters, and now they have a giant marketing/pr push behind them which will grow the brand even more. The idea that you can just “opt out” like some emotionless automaton is beyond stupid. All the reasons you fell in love with the franchise will still be available to new fans, plus a massive cultural push to consume more of it. This idea that we are all rational consumers who can just turn on and off our love for things and therefore have any actual effect on the market is both extremely stupid and extremely toxic.

This is a quaint sentiment, but marketing, sales, PR is all about misleading and creating unnecessary want. This is a major tenant of running a business and living under capitalism. There is also a moral argument for doing what you need to do in order to survive the difficulties of the market in order to survive it and change it into something more akin to your honest attitude about it.

Donald Trump