747 karma · joined September 11, 2021
I wouldn't use Amazon since they have so many warehouse workers, unless you can restrict it to IT.
I was imagining some data scientist (call her "Diane") at Exxon, getting so-so wages in Dallas, and yearning to triple her salary at Facebook. Exxon just can't do that for Diane, because they have too many middle-managers who make only 30% more than Diane does now.
To me, that's somewhat like: your parents went to college, got good jobs, and sacrificed, all so you could have a better life than they did.
But hey, that doesn't mean you can't criticize them for being heteronormative.
Then do the same for some big tech companies. Call that 'Y'. The employee count is way less than for Exxon.
Most likely, Y >> X. Vastly greater.
So to a corporate bean counter, the "value" of an Exxon employee, X, is about what they're paying them now. Hiring one more, even a brilliant tech guy, will have a negligible effect on any numbers they care about. Especially since he'll be frustrated by the dinosaur culture and his inability to have any impact.
You can say "you're wrong, what about <new energy thing>?" Well, this finance guy understands Exxon's numbers pretty well.
> a culture that’s increasingly out of step with the world around it. Those interviewed describe an organization trapped in amber, whose insular and fear-based culture—once a beacon of corporate America—has become a drag on innovation, risk taking, and career satisfaction.
It's a giant, old company, with 1000s of employees who were not at that town hall because they don't do things like that. They live in Texas, not in Palo Alto or Manhattan.
Bad opening line. Hard pass.
This is a straight-up exposé of "journalists" and nothing more. They print "experts say" and "studies show" stories when they don't or can't even do the most rudimentary verification.
So yes, trust IS a beautiful thing, and he's demonstrated that any trust you still have in "trusted sources" (looking at you, fact-checkers) is misplaced.
I grew up in the Midwest fishing on a lake with a spin-casting outfit. The arm movements you use for that are completely counterproductive for fly fishing.
So, yeah, I could learn to throw a fly. But life's too short. As superkuh says: fish are fish.
Before anyone jumps up & objects: yes, there are a lot of homeless who don't want to talk to you, or who are downright dangerous. You can avoid those.
There are, as any doctor will tell you, large numbers of people who will see their doc for any questionable data and demand treatment. Preferably a pill they can take once a day. They are not willing to be reassured and will happily go to a different doctor who gives them what they want.
If you ("you" being a scientist) are explicit that your "science" is in service of your political agenda, then you've accomplished this:
Anyone who disagrees with your agenda will reject your "science"
As we saw with vaccines & lockdowns.
On the other hand, if they trust you to just report what the data says, even when you don't like it, then you have a chance of not being vilified.
So there you have it: if you want to stand above the Twitter mob and be believed, you have to earn back the public's trust.
That's a laudable goal. You will never, never get any body of scientists, or any other class of people, to agree on their overall goals for society, so if science IS indeed political, you've lost already.
On the other hand, if they only have to agree on what the data and logic tell us, that's still hard, but it's much closer to being achievable. It requires everyone to take a deep breath and say "I might be wrong but this is what I think, and here's why." And then listen.
And Foucault is only "prominent" for people who can't do science, or really anything else useful.
That's where you're off into Error Land. Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science. If you wanted to benefit society, you should have gone into a different line of work.
Can they be credible if don't support any right wing causes?
Non-profits are free to adopt whatever slant on civil liberties or any other issue they care about, as long as they don't support political candidates or parties, or otherwise violate the IRS's rules.
Now it apparently means "subscribes to currently trendy theories of social justice."
I deliberately parodied your words. If you think a non-profit should be non-partisan (a reasonable argument, by the way), then Media Matters should be as well. Correct?
Or maybe a vast number of 501(c)(3) organizations support only causes associated with one side or the other, and your criticism is highly selective.
Can you name a few?
I guess now the length constraints are less, unless there's also a print edition. But in any case, it's still probably the job of someone other than the writer.
I hope no one believes this, but apparently one guy did.
I suppose you can find people who started a business, made it big, said "OK, I have enough," and then retired to a contented family life. Not many, though. Most of the time, they tried it, got bored, and went back to work. Maybe they poured their energy into passing it on to the next generation.
Entrepreneurs are just wired that way. They're addicted to the game.
Yeah, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We can't run a natural experiment where everything but that one thing goes wrong, and see if Rome survives. Kind of like a very old organism whose health just goes off the cliff.
> “The battle to feed all of humanity [was] over,” he said in no uncertain terms. Soon hundreds of millions of people would die no matter what emergency measures were adopted. Things were so bad he was even willing to bet England would not exist by the year 2000.
A little humility here would be nice. Ehrlich said certain things would happen; they didn't. He made a bet; he lost.
While we're at it: I've actually been in scrums where the "burndown rate" was analyzed as if it was actually A Thing. It is not A Thing.