dieterrams

It is completely silly that you have to jump through these hoops, though, assuming it’s even still an option.

Btw, hiding something from your timeline has absolutely no effect on whether it appears in friends’ feeds or not. It’s purely about whether people can see if it they go to your timeline. Which is pretty unintuitive and anti-user: if I don’t want something in my timeline, why would I want it showing up in people’s news feeds?

You're certainly right about the long tradition behind 'debate', and yet, it does still carry the connotations I mentioned earlier, to the extent that one would likely have to say "let's a have a fair and honest debate about X" in order to temper some of the unproductive tendencies that tend to arise in a debate.

Moreover, in this scenario where the entire market is now able to spend their advertising budget "more effectively", there are many possible outcomes besides more products being sold for the same ad cost. The market-wide increase in "ad effectiveness" may effectively cancel itself out. Ad spend may remain the same, but with more budget allocated to speculative ad strategies. Or the savings may be funneled back into product to further differentiate it from competitors.

That said, I certainly don’t blame them for being transgressive.

To be fair, there are human feces all over downtown.

Does company need to generate more revenue?

Company will give in to X.

An exaggerated analogy: someone who’s never had wine buys a bottle recommended by a highly respected wine expert, tries it, and goes, “Oh, that really is good!”

I don't necessarily believe he's a misogynist, but I do think he's in denial about the impact of sexism on gender gaps. To quote his letter:

"We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."

The fact is that we don't have to assume. It's fairly unlikely such gaps are entirely the result of sexism. But to suggest that sexism does not play a role in gender gaps is absurd.

Edit: To respond to similar points in the replies, yes, I'm quite aware that you can read this sentence in the strictest logical sense as saying a gender gap, in and of itself, does not imply sexism. This is obviously and trivially true. But studies on evaluatory bias tell us that biases, such as and including sexism, are in fact the norm. It is so fantastically unlikely that they are not present among Google's interviewers / hiring committees that the sentence, taken in the strictest sense, is making an irrelevant point.

Rhetorically, however, it serves the effect of suggesting we ought to consider it plausible that perhaps sexism isn't at all at play in Google's hiring. Which, again, is absurd.[1] It would be far more likely that Google's hiring tilts sexist against men than sexism not being a factor at all.

[1] Note that this has nothing to do with Google specifically, but rather with humans generally.

"Respectable" is questionable, but the economists that do are invariably motivated by ideology.

I'm not sure how this is a response to what I wrote. I'm talking about the tolerability of outcomes for the UNwealthy, while you're talking about a rich person being intolerable?

The semantic quibbling I'm referring to is the idea that when someone like Bernie Sanders rails about "economic inequality", they are implicitly advocating economic equality (which is incorrect, as I've stated in my original comment), and bouncing off that to present "fairness" as the real thing at issue.

And yes, of course we care about fairness. There is nothing insightful about presenting it in contradistinction to concerns about inequality, as though it's the thing we are "really" concerned about. Fairness alone does not guarantee a society where the outcome for the unwealthy is tolerable (unless you're John Rawls). Hence, we care about both.

That said, I'm sympathetic to the general problem of government not utilizing resources efficiently.

Whether or not you think an "extra right" is necessary has no bearing on why that right is provided.

The right to a fair trial is about two things: you must be tried before being found guilty and punishment/sentencing is administered, and that trial must be executed fairly. In effect, you have the right to a (fair) trial.

A trial and especially a fair trial are undeniably interventions on how things would otherwise proceed. But I agree with moomin that the positive/negative distinction is not really meaningful.