tesseractive

"Should we let children cut off their genitals?"

It is currently against any kind of recommended practice to perform genital surgery on children. It is not approved nor is it practiced. This kind of intentionally hyperbolic language is the sort of thing that is the stuff of tabloid headlines, not reasoned discussion.

Well, I know both gay and trans people who have survived conversion therapy, but there's a really high incidence of suicide among people who have been through it. Also, the people I know have described literal torture as being part of existing conversion therapy techniques. There is also no evidence of it actually working.

All of these things seem to counsel against conversion therapy being an accepted practice.

Amazon is in Seattle. We are arguably the most trans-accepting city in the US (source: being a trans person living in Seattle). Trans people are mostly just an accepted part of the community here. And people here are generally not super impressed by the "think of the children!" wedge issue any more than they were impressed with the "OMG trans women in bathrooms!" wedge issue. I'm sure TERFs exist here, but they keep it to themselves, because it's not something to admit to in polite company.

Depending on how much volume you have, inventory turns are an important gate on how many items you can afford to carry. And I would imagine that there are practical limits on how many SKUs you can pull stock from and still deliver in an hour.

Another big difference between this and Wal-Mart is geography. Wal-Mart's strongest areas are less-densely-populated rural areas where one store can draw customers from miles around. And indeed -- you can't easily set up a same-day Amazon delivery service in rural America. The distances and low population density make it completely impractical. For the foreseeable future, Amazon will compete with Wal-Mart in these areas using traditional UPS-style delivery and larger selection.

But this is going into New York City. And the flipside is that you can't put a Wal-Mart in the middle of NYC -- it's cost prohibitive. So it's not clear that this initiative even competes with Wal-Mart really. And brick and mortar stores in the middle of an expensive city have huge real estate costs, so it's difficult (though not necessarily impossible) for them to compete on cost the way Wal-Mart does.

It's in no way clear that Amazon wins on selection. In 25K SKUs, Amazon will have electronics, but almost certainly hace fewer SKUs than a dedicated electronics store. They will have groceries, but not as many as a grocery store. They will have clothing and housewares, but surely only a small sampling relative to Macy's.

I shop at Amazon Fresh in Seattle sometimes, and the selection is significantly trimmed relative to pretty much any local grocery store I can walk into. The tradeoff is the convenience of not having to go to the store and spend my time traversing the aisles.

Only people who are not members of minority groups think that someone saying something degrading to you is an easy path to riches. It simply doesn't work that way in real life.

First off, no one is going to believe you, and everyone will seek to explain it away and inpugn your credibility. But even if you somehow have audiovisual evidence that proves your claims conclusively and you have a slam dunk court case, there's zero chance that you're going to make enough money from it to cancel out the income you will lose from making yourself effectively unemployable to anyone who runs a background check on you. If you're on record as a troublemaker that sues their employer, no one will hire you.

When people "unknowingly" out themselves as bigots, no, you don't have to be "considerate" and take it to them. That's terrible advice.

Yes. And those people are racists.

In general, if you make jokes that a member of another race would perceive as racist, you've already done something wrong, even if you don't perceive it as racist, but just as some sort of "weird" humor.

If it made the interviewee feel unwelcome at the company, there is no possible explanation that would make this ok -- the simple fact that they feel excluded is what makes it not ok.

Making people feel excluded, or even doing or saying things behind closed doors that would make people feel excluded if they knew about them, is part of the problem that makes people who are not part of the majority feel unwelcome in a company's culture, and in the industry as a whole.

Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems.

Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.

But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.

Given that these supposed "energetic amateurs" have created an enormous percentage of the code that web applications across the internet run on, their votes automatically count. If PHP developers had never produced anything of value, that would be a different discussion.

These goals aren't in opposition. But they aren't the same thing.

Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.

So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.

So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.

Given the widespread use of PHP for web programming, it seems obvious that in the domain of web programming, developers have voted with their feet for PHP.

Facebook doesn't use web servers or operating systems written in PHP either, right? So if the language that web applications are written in isn't very important to the overall dependability of web applications, then it stands to reason that Facebook's choice of PHP for their web applications shouldn't be a problem either, right?

What point are you trying to make?

What does it mean to say that it lasts longer than wood framing? There are wood framed houses that are well over a century old, right? So is this being measured in centuries, or am I missing something important?

Yes, that's exactly what that kind of tax is for.

According to the article, she did this because she was being anonymously, publicly slandered on Secret.

It's not just for the benefit of hotel owners. Cities typically charge huge taxes on hotel stays, so illicit hotels are dodging taxes. And there are actually some vestiges of regulations directed at protecting consumers from hotels that are firetraps, lack adequate ventilation, etc.

1. Which is why I have to estimate risk from incomplete information. Which is a pretty common thing for people to have to do in real life.

If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?

2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?

No, I'm using risk analysis to conclude that the cost to me of accepting a job there if she's telling the truth is much higher than the opportunity cost of not taking the job (assuming I have other options) if her complaint turns out to be wrong.

Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.

Being an evangelist for women at a company is actually not the same thing as having the right to speak for all of them any more than a "developer evangelist" has a right to speak for all the developers.

It sounds a whole lot like you're saying:

A. There are only two impossibly simplistic solutions to the problem.

B. Neither of them are workable in practice, so clearly the problem is intractable.

There are people out there who have spent more than 10 minutes considering the problem. Many of them have conducted research and published on the topic. You might consider reading some of them before concluding that it's hopeless.

So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?

All it would take for me personally to reverse my stance on an employer being a good place for women is a single case in which I reported being sexually harassed and management then took the side of the harasser over me. Because one case is not acceptable, and it's all it takes to turn a workplace into a hostile and unpleasant environment.

That's not to say "oh, if she says something, she must be telling the truth", but the possibility that she is telling the truth is a huge red flag.

You are starting from the assumption that this movement is in error rather than arguing it to be. The whole point of their argument is that the word "bossy" is used to police women's behavior in situations where the same behavior is considered positive for men -- so simply asserting that it always describes negative behavior doesn't exactly make a useful point.

Their claim may in fact be false. But starting from the assumption that it is false doesn't really add anything to the discussion.

If you mean a form for user feedback, I think that's a different case. The point of a company soliciting user feedback is for them to gather information about what people who use their product want, so that they can make better decisions. The baseline presumption with user feedback is not normally that you should build whatever any user suggests, but that you should treat requests as raw data that needs to be aggregated, considered, filtered, and prioritized.

When I use a product, whether it's a blender or a website, the producer's business goals aren't really my problem. If I communicate to them at all as a customer, my only relevant area of expertise is how I use their product. (And possibly how I would like to use their product, if it were improved in some way I would prefer.)

That's not any more reasonable an interpretation than accusing anyone who prefers double-blind medical studies of believing that doctors can't be trusted.

The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.

Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.

But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.

Suppose we set a goal to build a dirigible the size of a small town that could float up in the air and people could live on it and it would have an expected lifespan of at least 30 years? It would be enormously expensive and I have little doubt that some new technologies would have to be pioneered to produce something so audacious. But at the end of the day, it's still reasonable to ask why that's a goal we should spend so much to achieve, and the fact that we would invent a bunch of cool technology along the way seems insufficient as a response. There are lots and lots of things that we could spend tons of money on that would produce a bunch of spin-off technology -- how would we decide which of these things we should dump truckloads of money into, and which ones we shouldn't?

The entertainment industry seems to be doing better than ever. Did piracy actually reverse growth at any point in their history?

The shift to digital absolutely did reverse growth in the music industry (part of the entertainment industry) for about a decade. Exactly how much of that can be attributed to "piracy" in particular is a question that's difficult to answer, because it was a combination of not being able to easily buy music in the way people wanted combined with piracy that created a situation in which it was considerably easier to pirate/share music than to buy it.