blackbagboys

Not taking sides in this particular dispute, but it's generally naive and incorrect historiography to take source documents at face value like this.

Can't say I blame the bereavement guy. Nearly every firm in the United States has an unacceptably stingy PTO policy.

This is almost certainly true. Breakthroughs in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering occur when the conditions are ripe; if you look into every major famous breakthrough, you find that it was being duplicated or research along similar lines being pursued elsewhere in a very close timeframe. Geniuses are fungible.

I suspect this effect only holds on extremely broad issues where people don't consider their core identities material interests to be at stake. It's one thing to be amenable to arguments about very 'zoomed out' policy issues advanced by some bloodless columnist in a mass market publication. It's quite another to convince a NIMBY that the housing market needs to be glutted, or plutocrat that their money needs to be spent on poor people instead of private islands.

The continued health and well-being of our fellow human beings take precedence over most other 'things'. If it's a choice between letting someone buy an extra boat and giving someone potentially life-saving preventative care, the choice is clear.

Given that my 'nuanced position' was included in the same post as my 'overbroad claim', and that you're apparently now seriously arguing that there is no difference between handful of guys in a start-up making a decision to ignore regulations for profit and a policy decision made by a body of democratically elected representatives, I think it's clear your commitment here is to reddit-style 'logical gotcha' argumentation rather than a good-faith effort at grasping the issue.

Most of the people responsible for the most vicious atrocities in history look, act, and speak like reasonable people. In the U.S., staid corporate lawyer types like John Dulles have been responsible for vastly more human suffering than outlandish super villain caricatures like Trump (not to say he's good). Recently I've been reading up on the history of lynchings and violent strikebreaking in the U.S. - one of the chilling things about that kind of history is the people who ordered or participated in anti-black or anti-labor death squads were usually reasonable, sober, responsible community leaders, businessmen, local lawyers and Chamber of Commerce types.

Always be suspicious of people with power, especially people with the power of life and death.

The YC credo is to encourage these companies to think of themselves as judges of what is and is not acceptable lawbreaking. That's the problem.

No, there are two separate points being argued here.

You first implied that there are plenty of rules that are completely pointless - mitigating no negative externalities. I challenged you to provide an example of a start-up whose business was based on breaking those kinds of rules - since usually the reason you can make money off rule-breaking in the first place is because you're externalizing the costs onto the rest of society.

I then said that rule-making is a trade-off, and that you don't get to unilaterally decide those trade-offs are illegitimate because you want to make money. In the case of medical marijuana, yes, obviously, there are negative social consequences to selling marijuana and there are people who would vigorously argue in favor of federal drug laws. But these clinics are not unilaterally operating in defiance of federal drug laws; they have the backing of the government of their states.

Of course, there are also plenty of profiteers who just break the law and then reinvest the profits in the task of forcing communities to accept their social irresponsibility and lawlessness as a fait accompli (AirBNB, Uber).

If you really want to think seriously about these issues, you need to move beyond just name-dropping 'logical fallacies' to try and win arguments.

They're in conflict with federal law, but they're following a legal and regulatory framework that was established by their local governments, so there's a broad consensus where they are operating that it's OK to break those rules. That's not unilaterally deciding to ignore the law. A better example of a start-up in the marijuana space that did do that might be, say, the Zeta Cartel.

(obviously, I'm not saying that no one should ever break an unjust law, but I don't believe for a second that we should allow profit-motivated companies to be good judges of what are just and unjust laws)

Can you offer any recent examples of start-ups routinely breaking the law where nearly everyone is in agreement that their law-breaking has no negative social effect?

Again, all rules involve trade-offs. It may be that those trade-offs or preferentially unfairly benefit some special interest group or otherwise aren't worth the cost to society, but it's not up to profit-seeking hucksters to unilaterally make that determination.

Rules and regulations require trade-offs. The YC types that run these companies notice the inefficiencies resulting from these trade-offs, recognize the opportunity to profit from them and arrogantly assume they have the right to ignore any rule they can't immediately see the harm in breaking; either because they aren't / wouldn't be affected by the negative externalities the rule is mitigating, so they don't understand why it exists, or, more often than not, because they don't really give a fuck about anything other than making money and being big-time shot-callers.

We can push for higher journalistic standards and also push to punish crooks who intentionally deceive the public in order to line their pockets, especially when it's at the expense of struggling populations like heavily indebted students.

In practice, this is what breaking 'rules that don't matter' looks like - you break the rules that don't matter to you, but those rules were probably put in place for a reason.

Well, they have the apparatus of the entire state protecting them, so the guys directly on the payroll are mostly just for show.

Phase in high land value taxes (not property taxes) when personal residences are sold

1.9 million kilograms is only ~2100 tons. I think it is perfectly reasonable to look into why a handful of suppliers are exporting ~5% of Syria's annual pre-war demand to an active war zone without bothering to follow the proper licensing procedures.

>> That did not happen.

Counterpoint: It did happen. Only the country currently propping up the regime's genocidaires with all-out military support is claiming it was unspecified 'militants' who blocked the inspectors.

Yes, it's unsurprising that the pro-government press supports the government's campaign against their rivals.

This is incorrect. A considerable amount of opposition to slavery came from "Free Soil" farmers, laborers, and mechanics who did not want to compete with slave labor. After the war they continued to pursue their class interests and supported labor rights and, eventually, unionization.

The northern capitalists who ultimately constituted the financial engine of the Republican Party did turn against labor rights, also in accordance with their class interests (and, depending on the industry they were in pre-war, some of them had been pro-slavery or pro-southern 'Copperheads').

What is programming other than a way of embedding human knowledge into machines in order to generate value?

Which series are you using? I have nothing but positive things to say about the T-series. I think the E-series is just a garden variety commodity laptop with the ThinkPad branding, though.

The Philippine press is not free. Duterte has made his "fake news" nonsense a key part of his project to crush opposition media. It's no surprise that the Manila Times has gone out of its way to avoid stepping on his toes, although the overheated stuff about 'communist propaganda' is maybe a little too obvious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/asia/philippines-du...

Somewhat tangential to the main article, but I have a hunch (as yet uncontaminated by hard evidence) that some sizable fraction of the decline in writerly fortunes over the last hundred years or so is that even though literate audience has expanded tremendously, barely any of them have enough leisure time to actually read for pleasure. I doubt more leisure time would make 'short story writer' a potentially lucrative career path again like it was in the 20's, but it'd be interesting to see a comparison with the market in Western Europe, adjusted for the much smaller market size of each of its component national languages.

So a tiny handful of top performers - plausibly few enough that you could fit them all on a schoolbus - in an ultra-hot technical field are raking in huge sums, for the moment.

Unless you are a top professor at an R1 research university or have a PhD from an R1 university studying under the other top minds in the field or are otherwise in the most elite fraction of the profession, it doesn't sound like this is particularly useful information for the average practicing or aspiring data-tician. What's the typical salary for someone with, say, a two-year professional masters?

I'm crimes I'm talking about all come from the rapacious desire for either land to speculate on or new markets to exploit, both of which are quintessentially capitalist in character.

Again, to play this game, we could just as easily say that your crimes are all about authoritarian dominance hierarchies, which certainly occur under capitalism, as well (how many people did Pinochet throw out of helicopters?)

Greenspun is notoriously, shall we say, “contrarian” when it comes to modern gender issues, so I don’t think that’s an incorrect gloss on the piece.

I'd be pretty amazed if it was even possible to construct a model that would answer that question.

In the article's example, you're constructing a model to determine how a movie might be reviewed. The data indicates that movie reviewers may be reviewing movies with male leads more positively than movies with female leads. There are a lot of possible reasons for this other than "men are better than women", so why would you simply reject the result out of hand?

I'm not unsympathetic to your concerns, but the obvious retort is that if you already know which results are accurate, why bother doing analysis?

>> Normally, we'd simply choose Model C. But what if we found that while Model C performs the best overall, it's also most likely to assign a more positive sentiment to the sentence "The main character is a man" than to the sentence "The main character is a woman"? Would we reconsider?

It seems like you have discovered that movie reviewers tend to review movies with am male main character more highly than movies with a female main character; what you need to consider is that while this may tell you something about movie reviewers, it doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the movie.