RasputinsBro

> However, we all have our moments where we do dumb things. If you expect anyone to be perfect, you're in for a rude surprise. One has to look at the whole picture, and that incident was an anomaly.

"our moments"? Didn't he double down on it? Didn't he offer someone a bet, that it would eventually be discovered that the could was a pedophile?

It's in "these moments" that you can peer inside a person's mind. In normal times, anyone can put up a facade.

I know what the word "discount" means.

When I say "what do you mean by 'I'm discounting'?", is "What do you mean when you say that I'm regarding a possibility as being unworthy of consideration?" What possibility are you referring to that I'm regarding as being unworthy of consideration?

I'll ask again because you didn't actually answer my question. What do you mean by "discounted"?

What do you mean by discounting?

"pedo guy" was the thing that broke the camel's back for me.

When you have millions of followers and billions of airtime on you, it's absolutely inexcusable to call a random guy a pedo.

When he did that my view of him went from a "fake it till you make it" type, to a dishonest and malicious person.

No, science was not hype. It's not like the fashion is over and now we're gonna go back to making worse decisions based on less data.

Another instance of google propping up puppet competitors.

You haven't answered the question. What is your definition?

What do you mean by educated?

This is a person who is only able to entertain themselves by spending money. That doesn't sound educated to me.

"Entertainment", in the sense that it's commonly used, should really be called "paid entertainment". There's plenty of free entertainment. Read a book, good for a walk, or my favourite: learn something new that is complementary to your current skills and that might make you more econmically valuable. But he doesn't like these things, he just likes being with friends in the pub and playing FIFA. I promise you that I know a lot of educated people and their lives look nothing like that.

I'm a trader and we call it currency.

If the big boss happens to walk by for the 3 minutes you're taking a mental break and that is a problem, I would say the problem is the boss/culture, not the space.

Think about it. You just said that someone "catching you" taking a break is an issue and that in your mind that is a justification for keeping your screen hidden.

Again, I totally understand the "it's distracting" argument, I have made the same argument myself. I was pointing a finger at the "I don't like it when people can see my screen" argument.

> This smacks to me of an "If you have nothing to hide why do you care about your privacy?" argument. Which we should all know is a major fallacy.

The fallacy here is conflating the two. To me the most important argument in the usual privacy conversation (i.e. people vs government) is that people defending themselves from government surveillance is a very important part of keeping the balance of power from swinging too much in one direction.

This is nothing of the sort. If you work for a business and you don't like their open-plan offices, find one where they don't have open-plan offices. But saying that you don't like their open-plan offices because you're so productive without distractions, but then you're afraid that people see your screen seems dishonest. Also, if you're super productive but you need to take breaks to look at cat pictures during office hours, why are you afraid that someone will catch you looking at cat pictures? If you actually are as productive as you claim I'm sure people will respect your need for breaks: after all according to you we all need breaks, so "other people" will be doing the same thing. And if they don't respect _your_ need for breaks, then the problem isn't really the office style, but a lack of trust in colleagues. Again, the entire thing seems dishonest.

> We were already working from in open office, but at least I had a desk facing the wall behind me, so there was a modicum of privacy and psychological safety. Then management decided that it would “look better” if we went to circular desks where several of us would be sitting with our backs to the hallway, so everyone walking past would be looking at our screen as they passed.

This seems dishonest to me. Can some body explain if I'm missing something?

I understand the argument that open-plan offices increase distractions in general, and the damage that loud people do in particular. But if you really intend on being super focused and productive, I don't understand why it would bother you that someone would look at your screen.

I have worked in an open-plan office and the only times when I was embarrassed that someone saw my screen was because I was wasting my time on reddit/HN, which I shouldn't because that's not what they're paying me for... Once I managed to force upon myself the discipline of just don't open reddit/HN, I was happy to accept one of the desks with the back to the center of the room, because I no longer cared that someone was looking at my screen.

Am I missing something?

I worked in advertising and I saw how scared AdSense publishers constantly were of getting banned by Google. I understand that Google has to defend their business, but some times they were really harsh on things that were debatable grey areas. I always thought that Google was just needlessly giving itself a bad reputation as a business partner.

$11M is about 1 hr of Google's revenue (365 x 24 x 11/100000 = 0.96)

EDIT: This actually reminded me of that post a few days ago on HN, about the guy comparing foxes and racoons with some companies in the financial industry, and how some could be winning at the game but losing at the meta-game. Google should be more careful with its meta-game.

That's pretty clever.

So this seems to be a pattern. The link that I posted elsewhere in this thread and the occurrence there was precisely because of poor support. (Again, I'm not affiliated with that guy in any way)

Coinbase lost this radio show's money and won't take responsibility for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E7FSs6oXak

(I'm not the show host, I just enjoy the show)

> One could argue about the intention of affirmative action, but I don’t think one could argue that it’s not racist, using the dictionary’s definition of racism.

As is often the case, the dictionary gives multiple definitions.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/racism

You're using definition number 2, the person you were responding to was maybe using definition number 3.

(Although we get it, your point still stands.)

> You are buying what the racists are selling - the idea that progress for minorities comes at the expense of white people.

I didn't say that affirmative action comes at the expense of white people, I said (implicitly, by presenting an example) that it comes at the expense of the people it tries to help.

> I’ve never met anyone who claims racism doesn’t exist. Perhaps I haven’t met the right troll?

I think you haven't met the right troll.

If you ask "are you saying that racism doesn't exist?", the sophisticated troll will not give you a yes or no answer. If he said yes he would lose because there are so many examples that it exists and he would be unmasked as an obvious troll, if he said no he would lose because then you would have some justification in whatever your claim was.

> The problem is that discrimination based on categorization is how the human brain works.

Yes, I think that is right.

> Even if it was a case of affirmative action, their work still gets the chance to get criticized and touch people’s eyes. Arguably with no action it could have rotten in some binder in a desk, so isn’t “something” still better than nothing ?

To be clear: I'm NOT saying this was a case of affirmative action.

You pointed a positive consequence of affirmative action. I agree it exists and that it's positive.

My observation was just that in my opinion it has a much much larger negative consequence. It gets neutral people like me, for whom race has always been a non-issue, to now wonder "is this a real achievement, or is it just affirmative action?" This is a real effect, I just caught myself doing it.

Slight off-topic. I'm sure this has been said before, but I'm saddened to catch myself doing it. All my life I've been indifferent to matters of race, and so if I'd read 10 years ago about 3 black girls doing whatever I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But after what's been happening in recent years, I just caught myself thinking: "3 black girls? I wonder if they didn't win as part of the diversity quota" :-/ I maintain that "affirmative action" does more bad than good in the vast majority of the cases.

On-topic: In any case, prevalence of occurrences like the reported trolls are why I no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who claim "there's no racism". For a while you had the excuse of not being aware, but now you're just intentionally adding noise to the conversation.

> In the words of Syndrome "if everyone is super, no one is". If every one has a BS/BA , masters, PHD then in a real sense no one really does.

This is a very small minded view of the world.

If I have a PhD, and everyone else does too, it's like I don't have one? No! I learned many things during my PhD, and that knowledge doesn't disappear because others have more knowledge too.

It seems the only thing you consider is jobs, but even there you're wrong. The job market is not zero sum.

> Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education. While universities are places of learning, they are also social sorting mechanisms.

Yes, so? The universities being a social sorting mechanism does not stop them from also being places of learning. This is American anti-intellectualism 101.

I was going to say "if I call washingtonpost.com links pro-American tilt", would you subscribe to that view? But then you'd say "but the RT is state-sponsored!" to which I would say "there are many mechanisms to influence media other than owning them, see e.g. Manufacturing Consent" etc etc.

It's like we're running around in circles with this conversation, neither side seems to be getting to the other side.

Instead I'll take a more pragmatic approach. Could you please share one of these RT.com links which you say have a pro-Russian tilt? I want to see if I agree with you. Then I'll share a washingtonpost.com link which I think has a pro-American tilt; I want to see if you agree with me.

In my opinion Brexit/Trump go back way before Facebook. Facebook was just another tool to be exploited for those with the agenda.

This comment reminded of this clip of Chris Hitchens about North Korea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8-Vr_r36Fg

(paraphrasing:) "Going in, I knew I wouldn't call them Orwellian. But eventually they make you do it"

Tor Browser.

The page just reads "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

Hey, I can't really see the website. The page is blank..

Just to point out that "Granger causality test" is a terrible name as is does not really test causality, it tests correlations between time-lagged series; time-lagged correlation is not causation.

It's just a popular correlation test in the field of autocorrelated time-series.