Apple employees petition demanding investigation into ‘misogynistic’ new hire
theverge.com
theverge.com
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https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A company’s internal chat should have a moderator or forbid off-topic (meaning work-related) discussions. Doing neither is naive. Basecamp was right
I was recently asked to participate in a "community diversity and inclusivity survey". Not one question was concerned with freedom of expression or diversity of thought. It seems immutable characteristics are of paramount importance, or rather cynically, perhaps just the optics of their proportions are a valuable commodity. In a corporate setting neither inclusivity or diversity are at all what they purport to be.
It's not about safe spaces or offensive ideas. It's about enabling sexism and racism to freely propagate while telling minority groups that it isn't harmful despite past experience.
Ads is a services market that is growing fast and as the phone market saturates, services will become more important for Apple. This will also help reduce the margin pressure on iPhone hardware.
I suspect that adblocker usage is also a lot lower than you expect, with a quick Google showing less than half of people worldwide using adblockers on desktop and adoption below 20% for mobile devices in the US. So there’s still a broad market to target.
So they want to exclude someone for having different opinions to them, in the name of inclusivity?
Clown world.
“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”
It's especially ironic after an epidemic plague where 70% of health care workers are women. But I guess they're mostly useless baggage who are full of shit. Unlike this guy. See, he really understands how the world is and is just "telling it like it is". Let's trade all these useless women for shotgun shells, and hire people like this guy instead.
"When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London.
She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..."
So it's a passage in a (novel? Definitely a literary piece anyway) where, in order to better sing the praise of one particular woman, she is compared to another common type in the same environment. All clearly point of view of a narrator (who might or might not be the author). If these are the parameters, we should throw in the bin almost all literature, from men and women alike.
What's interesting in this episode is how the culture has shifted. The exact same style that once delighted the counterculture, which at the time was what progressives all identified with, is now a transgression that gets you banned from progressive circles, which have since become elite circles culturally, with growing political power as well. All of this is a tectonic cultural shift, and it's fascinating!
There's a very interesting intermediate case at the midpoint between Hunter S. Thompson and this guy: that is the similarly gonzo The eXile which was produced by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi during their time in Russia in the 90s. The worst passages from that publication—which were far more misogynistic than anything this guy wrote—were dredged up a few years ago, with the intention of denouncing the authors as part of MeToo. In the end, nothing much came of it, partly because one of the women being written about came forward to say that those passages were satirical and that she had always been treated well by the authors. But I think the more important difference between that case and this is that the culture has shifted significantly in the intervening 3 or 4 years. If this incident were happening now, I bet the outcome would be different. The very same gunpowder that made counterculture heroes of Thompson and his ilk, and which the eXile guys got away with by a hair, now blows up in your face, and at much smaller doses too.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who...
It's not fiction. It's an autobiography. These are his personal opinions and feelings.
There are other situations—Teen Vogue, for instance—where I think the world greatly overreacts, but this doesn't strike me as one of those cases.
That’s a reasonably difference of opinion to make choices over.
I wouldn’t trust performance assessments from him.
"British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back— required doing"
In other words he is comparing personalities and attitudes, not making generalisations about literally all women. But the subset of women he is generalising about are exactly the sort who are now trying to make him unemployable by quoting him out of context (i.e. being "full of shit") and demanding that Apple shield them (i.e. "cosset") by getting rid of a guy who finds other kinds of women more attractive. They also appear to be objecting to a passage that states something about the murder rate and naming of high schools in a particular area, which is presumably factual? So, they're kind of proving his point for him.
Saying things like "women soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit." is more than just a difference of opinion. You cannot hold that opinion and be a fair leader.
> notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.
It seems that people just keep tacking on “sins” to see what sticks to people’s reputations regardless of the facts. Was there anything in Danmores article that even mentioned people of color?
James Damore never said anything of the sort. He was concerned that women might feel excluded in an engineering-focused environment and be less likely to seek such a role because of the different aggregation of preferences and inclinations among women as opposed to men. He said zilch about quality or potential for success, or for that matter about any individual woman (as opposed to aggregate trends and their influence on 'big picture' stats).
Being as generous with the interpretation as possible, I guess suggesting new programs to replace existing ones could be interpreted as "programs that are aimed at a helping women and people of color should be ended", as ending one and replacing it is kind of ending. Saying "repeatedly" seems a stretch though.
Can you explain what I'm missing that lead to your beliefs?
There is another section with programs Damore claimed would be more effective. I am confused why replacing programs equates to ending them. Unless the goal is only to have good intentions, shouldn't the effectiveness of programs matter?
He uses that to suggest the programs increase racial tensions, not to suggest that we shouldn't be trying to get more people of color involved in tech. He cites this article [0] as his reasoning.
Is there something I'm missing?
James Damore's point was that diversity hires make for low quality hires. People who believe that may see a PoC working in tech and automatically assume they got hired for their skin color and not skill.
He is comparing Bay Area girls to a girl he was sleeping with whose family moved here from Russia when she was a teenager and who “had spent years backpacking through jobs in rougher parts of the world”.
This is the reference to “worldliness”.
Being raised in the Bay Area compared to the experience of a family descended from Russia is of course going to result in a different upbringing and personality.
I don’t think this is hard to argue with unless you are naive to history and have not spoken to those who lives through 20th century Eastern Europe.
Ironic, as the lack of “worldliness” that those refute, is the same quality that prevents them from appreciating the sentiment in the quote.
Forget the bigotry ... just the lack of self awareness is pretty crazy.
I don't like the infusion of Damore however, that's a different discussion, I wish people would stop crossing streams on such an important subject, full of nuance in every direction. This guy's statements are of a different kind than Damores.