paisawalla

> The ability of regressive partisan elements to break government is a part of the design of the government. I personally find it repugnant and stupid.

It's amazing the way you guys (small-d democrats) are always dressing up what is nakedly the statement that "everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy (because I say it's good for the people), but whatever I dislike is authoritarian (even if the people want it.)"

It may surprise you to learn that, historically, this is exactly how authoritarianism views itself. Even Saddam Hussein conducted polls of his popularity so he could pretend his sovereignty arose from the people. The Vichy government was legal, popular, and internationally recognized. What the law says on paper is a different thing than what is practiced, and conveniently appealing to what the paper says is a time-honored tactic of eliding inconvenient realities.

Democracy, c. 2020s: "The people must be allowed to choose, but only if what they choose is good for them, as decided by me."

The law isn't optional when it restrains things I don't like.

Agreed. To test my belief in probabilities, I occasionally challenge myself to a few rounds of Russian Roulette.

Meaning this only neutrally, and completely respectfully: have you considered that you're a bit abnormal as well?

Their entire product line seems to be "currently unavailable" on Amazon.

Thank you, consider please adding it to Pocket Casts: https://pocketcasts.com/submit/

It would be great to be able to add this podcast via RSS. Seems like it's only available on Apple or Spotify

In that case, you need a subclass of string that does nothing but has its type as FirstNameType. Wherever you create or return strings that are first names, you'll need to instantiate FirstNameType instead.

Yes, simply

    FirstNameType = str

(But don't use ints for postal codes, even if the postal codes are numeric)

They're saying that certain categorical terms are going to be replaced with more descriptive explanations, so as to avoid relying on connotations. As always, the question is, which terms will get this treatment.

I'm sure I could be reading too much into this, but I can't help but view this editorializing under the light of the current post-modern deconstructionist wave overtaking many parts of society, journalism especially. I imagine someone shocked to discover that readers out here have a mental category for conflicts they don't follow very closely, because its contours fit their priors about constantly quarreling people. This person understands that categorization as a moral outrage, especially if the Right People (read: anyone suffering "oppression") are doing the quarrelling, and sets about to correct it and make sure nobody is able to use this evil mental category again.

Maybe this wasn't an "ethnic" conflict, but maybe it's not AP's job to tell me which conflicts to slot into my "those people are fighting again" category and which to pay renewed attention to?

The question was literally asking for critique though.

Purports to be about consent of the governed, will of the people, popular rule etc. In reality, you can't even prevent your own children from being taught as truth some pseudomoral garbage that maybe 5-10% of the population believes. Basically it transfers power to the most motivated actors, almost regardless of their popularity.

It seems at least inspired by the movie in certain ways. For example, Baron Harkonnen is hairless as seen in the movie, not red-haired as described in the books.

You are mistaken: Apple is not submitting that data, that's not how these products work. These data products are collected via scraping, other software integrations (e.g. payroll), or sometimes calling for employment verification, not from first party submissions. An accurate org chart of a company is valuable private knowledge, no company is just exporting it so that anyone with a few thousand dollars can get a copy.

Who's publishing it? Apple is not sending out a list of who's at which level. You need to bring evidence if you're claiming otherwise. Products like Work Number are based on inference or direct observation of these titles through payroll integrations or other exhaust.

Counterpoint: accurately ascertaining an engineer's capability is their secret sauce, why should they be obliged to share that information with anyone?

> I cannot wait to check back in with you when you're trying to get a new job and negotiating salary.

Hi, checking in. Your current/previous salary is no business of your future employer. You don't have to share it, and it shouldn't form the basis of your future salary.

If this seems alien, or improbable to you, people can and do learn how to tactfully steer conversations away from disadvantageous topics.

Sorry to have assumed ignorance on your part, but you see then, it's totally possible that the company name refers to their original positive nature.

This is a bad critique for two reasons:

1. Linking the name of a company to people and places that don't exist doesn't demonstrate anything.

2. You don't even know enough to know that the Palantiri were originally created and used by the elves, not Sauron.

You asked him whether he ever reflected on database visualization and query tools (that's what Palantir is) and considered that he had brought a previously unimaginable capability for destruction into this world?

Non-answer seems about right -- how do you treat nonsensical questions?

Slackware was themed after the Church of the Subgenius, which is a satirical religion and online movement about "slack" as a cosmic force. It came from a time when software projects could be more whimsical and show some character. It's almost impossible to imagine a software project today expressing any kind of off-topic flair, or really be eccentric in that kind of way. There's hardly anything like it today, but the appeal of something so quirky I think is still easily understood.

Edit: I think at one point there was a Linux distro based on My Little Pony, is that right? It was a different time, you had a new space that had just opened up for creative exploration, and it was accessible mostly to nerds and people on the fringe. There were a lot of weird things coming out back then.

The other person could also have been 8 or 9. In fact, I was doing dumb things to strangers on the internet well into my teenage years.

Also, don't just concede to him that the characterization of the rioters as "poor" or "members of the community" is accepted. Nobody has done any kind of survey of who the rioters are, and from what little we do know, many of those arrested in the larger riots were out of state travelers.

He's painting the most optimistic possible scenario and it's still stomach turning. It's complete moral depravity through and through.

My pipeline of interesting Twitter users/threads to Substack mailing lists has served me well. I recently discovered Google Assistant's "read this article aloud" functionality and it's been amazing to help cut down the backlog of unread newsletter emails. The experience is quite good, makes a newsletter feel almost like a podcast.

> arrogant

And how do you think you come off to me?

"You can't have an opinion about race matters that is different from the official, scientifically correct view as descended from, and endorsed by, all the big brain people and institutions with whom I already agree. We already know the permanent and unchanging answer for all of history, so why would you think your own experience would entitle you to an opinion on such an important question?"

I truly could not have caricatured your position worse than you've expressed it. Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the fact that this flavor of academic anti-racism is not incontrovertible, but deeply disputed by people across the spectrum?

As I said, this response is not for you, but for someone who grapples with these issues seriously.

>Looks like one small step to racism to me.

This word is meaningless when uttered by true believers like you. In my life I've been called all sorts of racially-based slurs, or worse. I've earned the right to refuse the orthodoxy of arrogant white liberals, and follow my own conscience on this topic.

I'm sorry, I got it wrong again, it's LGBTQQIP2SAA

https://oie.duke.edu/knowledge-base/glossary/lgbtqqip2saa

As you well know, the ordering and meaning of these last letters changes. It can't be refuted that the acronym continues to accumulate identities.

What's the evidence that stack ranking is unreasonable or that it doesn't correlate (even imperfectly) to merit? I think it's pretty trivial to construct a case that, given pressure to apply resources efficiently and to incentivize growing performance, stack ranking or similar are reasonable approaches.

I'll engage as though this is a good faith attempt to read the complaint, for the benefit of anyone who is interested by this critique.

1. A union purports to represent the interests of a labor force to its management. Those interests are diverse, because the workplace is diverse, but the issues with largest intersection tend to be compensation, time off, and health benefits.

2. In the past several years, there has been an unambiguous inclination for the stultifying, puritanical, logocentric manner of leftist political spaces to also invade and supplant workplace norms and office culture. This goes as far back as Brandon Eich being ousted for making a donation that follows his conscience, but also includes a funded menstrual app startup that has to claim to serve not women, but "people with periods". It's an insane worldview that maybe 5% of Americans agree with, yet it's the dominant corporate culture.

3. These supposedly moral issues (I called them fashions) being broadly unpopular are nonetheless enforced norms. The way they are enforced is through the actions of HR departments, and particularly on the backs of legal theories such as disparate impact and workplace fairness.

4. Unions, i.e. labor relations, are exactly the type of concern that would fall under (3) and therefore susceptible to becoming another vector for propagating (2). That, along with the fact that most Google employees are extremely well compensated, make it reasonable that progress on (1) is not nearly the likely outcome of a union, while (2) is an easily foreseeable side effect, intended or otherwise.

5. Again, evidence of how unions in other knowledge work fields such as journalism, supports this. Journalists have been outed from their positions, without support from their unions, for expressing basic journalistic freedoms. Isn't the union supposed to protect you from being fired for doing your job? Education is another such field where we can see plainly what's happening.

Lastly, anti-racism is a moral abomination under its current critical theory construction popularized by e.g. Kendi, DiAngelo etc. Also, it's not the union's job to propagate morals or enforce them onto labor.

What's your argument? That talented people can't get ahead at Google or competing employers?