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throw2016

1,139 karma · joined June 9, 2016

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throw2016··on At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
There seems to be a deep fundamental contradiction between current corporate culture and this relentless drive for efficiency. [1]

Some get untold wealth even for failing and land perfectly after. The system does not seem to be coherent.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/26/containing-ceo-pay/

throw2016··on When Telecom Companies Search Your Home for Piracy
Yet corporates seem to routinely take a 'laissez-faire' approach to policing and get away with it. No one is banging on Google's or Uber's door with orders.

Businesses seem to get away with more, protected by law and due process, and with recourse to lobby and challenge and even if found guilty merely fined while individuals lives can be turned upside down, with processes and records that have far reaching consequences.

There seems to be a fundamental imbalance at work here.

throw2016··on YouTube CEO says EU regulation will be bad for creators
There is already widespread censorship and suppression of dissent [1] and content on these platforms by new 'ministry of truth' government formations like the Atlantic Council that are completely arbitrary with no due process or transparency.

The EFF was recently interviewed [1] and discussed some of these issues and highlighted the importance the Santa Clara principles [2] for more transparent operation.

It's better to have formalized mechanisms than arbitrary behind the scenes processes these companies are running anyway with no transparency. Creators do not benefit from lack of transparency and no due process so this sudden concern for users on article 13 by Youtube and others without rolling out some due process consistent with the Santa Clara principles is entirely self serving and insincere.

[1] https://therealnews.com/stories/social-media-purge-silences-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/09/santa-cla...

throw2016··on Brand New ODroid Single Board Computer
This is a missed opportunity for ARM but its one they consciously took. Even after years of single boards the support for drivers was always abysmal, more of a kick the football around to various stakeholders for open source developers so these single boards never amounted to anything.

And the entire ecosystem has stagnated in terms of performance and improvements so there is no excitement for the future.

Starting a few years ago you could get a Apollo lake NUC for $120 and it would solve all the driver and software issues faced in the arm ecosystem and once you do that you begin to lose interest in all the arm boards because with x86 everything is compatible out of the box. And this seems to be the path Odroid has taken.

throw2016··on Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits. Companies are put together to produce, market and sell surveillance tech to schools, corporates, communities, the police and even nation states.

Individual ethics are meaningless beyond signalling against a system. Individual components may have ethical concerns but the system is incentivized to grow and it has.

Imagine walking into a group of sales or engineering folks celebrating a new deal or release at a restaurant and berating them on 'surveillance and ethics'. That shows you the dissonance of your expectation and the disconnect of ethical concerns from businesses. And the impotence of individual ethics in a system.

The only thing that can counter this are explicit laws against this kind of damaging behavior and rule of law. Individuals are not allowed to do whatever gets them profit, they have to operate within ethical constraints, to advocate businesses not operate in an ethical context and to leave everything to markets is advocating lawlessness. And the system does respond in some cases like in drones, 3d printing of guns. Those are not free for all. Surveillance is a failure of regulation.

throw2016··on Facebook to ban misinformation on voting in upcoming U.S. elections
Facebook and Twitter are aggressively censoring alternative media and news sites that cover police brutality, political opinion and corruption. [1]

It's very strange to see these arbitrary and heavy handed actions not receiving the same outrage as possible censorship by Google in China, when they are in effect the same thing.

Clamping down on political opinion and activism ie dissent is censorship. The chinese do it directly without apology, we are using sophistry by using nebulous ministry of truth terms like 'fakenews', conspiracy and FUD to achieve the same ends.

[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/tide-turning-regulat...

throw2016··on Air India Express 737 Hits ILS, Damages Wall on Departure, Flies for 4 Hours
This is the IATA data for hull loss rates for 2017 per million departures from your link:

Asia Pacific - 0.18

CIS - 0.92

Europe - 0.13

Latin America and the Caribbean - 0.41

Middle East and North Africa - ​​0.00

North America - 0.00

And it ends there. No mention of any problems or concern for 'safety limits' for any region. Infact the IATA data is overall happy with the rates across regions. If you can find anything on that page that points out a problem for a specific region please link to it.

throw2016··on Air India Express 737 Hits ILS, Damages Wall on Departure, Flies for 4 Hours
This is highly misleading and deceptive. You are mixing up the headline and data from link 2 which is mainly focused on which government agency licenses ATCs as the reason for lower scores, to the IATA hull loss data from link 1 which does not single out any country or region for below 'minimum safety target rates'.

This is the IATA data for hull loss rates for 2017 per million departures:

Asia Pacific - 0.18

CIS - 0.92

Europe - 0.13

Latin America and the Caribbean - 0.41

Middle East and North Africa - ​​0.00

North America - 0.00

The second link does not mention or link to anything about hull loss, safety issues, aircraft, training but talks about lower ranking due to ATC licensing by government agencies.

throw2016··on Air India Express 737 Hits ILS, Damages Wall on Departure, Flies for 4 Hours
The accidents rates by country paints a completely different picture. [1] This wikipedia list of glaring pilot incompetence leading to fatalities doesn't seem to show any bias for specific regions. [2]

When using anecdotal data one just can't make sweeping judgements and conclusions data does not support, that takes discussion into the region of prejudice and bigotry.

This anecdotal one person usually 'an insider' finding one thing wrong or incident in some country and casually conflating it to the whole is seen too often and creates grossly inaccurate stereotypes, when the exact same issue or incident exists everywhere else.

This is not harmless and derails informed discussion. It creates prejudice and in this case stress among travelers when they travel to other countries thinking about 'training, hull loss, safety' based on uninformed discussion not supported by data on the ground. If you are going to travel in a Cessna the standards including pilot training is not comparable to jets whichever country you are in. But no stable functioning country in the world takes passenger and running jets casually as the accident and safety data shows.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/america-russia-and-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_error#Notable_examples

throw2016··on No, Google, We Did Not Consent to This
This is the classic 'emperor has no clothes' moment but some 'loyal subjects' still pointing to imaginary clothes.
throw2016··on Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots
Technology is not stoppable and if jobs are going to be lost they will be. Ultimately all tech has been absorbed into society.

But many also cynically use 'threats' of technology to scaremonger and try to keep wages low. This is incredibly exploitative. For instance this story itself is thin on details and talks up 90% without mentioning the actual numbers or details of the automation. Amazon bought Kiva and while the robots are used they continue to hire aggressively.

If McDonalds or anyone else can use robots efficiently today they will. No company is employing workers out of goodwill but because they need them. If one must worry current trends show the environment may create far more disruption than automation.

throw2016··on Why Paul Romer Won the Nobel Prize in Economics
Its surprising to see one of the most prominent critics of modern macroeconomics getting a nobel. [1]

Till now egalitarian Sweden has made no secret of their love affair with libertarian economists with 8 winning the prize. [2]

One would think the tide is finally turning after the banking crisis with macro economists in deep introspection on dubious models, data and narratives but just last week they were out in force demonizing Bernie Sanders amazon bill.

1. https://ccl.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/The%20Trouble...

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/nobel-f...

throw2016··on Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public
Google's Project Zero is always taking others to task for security yet not a peep from them on this. Their front page today is focused on bugs in Safari, Linux and Windows. Perhaps they should focus on their own products.

Its complete hypocrisy to affect commitment and then slink away when it comes to your own products. That raises questions about conflict of interest and credibility.

throw2016··on Don't shoot, I'm disabled
These are deeply disturbing. Given the sheer number of police killings and the repetition of the same odious frivolous justifications one can only conclude there is no desire for a more humane police force.

The problem is not only the police but a justice system that seems to justify brutality and arbitrary killings. This not only sustains the cycle of violence but 'normalizes' police executions and police officers who think they can kill at will and be protected. This is a dangerous level of power to give to the police in any civilized society and none accept it.

To the victims this is a police state, there is no accountability and no justice and forgot any rights their right to life can be extinguished in seconds with no consequences and accountability. This is not the behavior of a civilized state.

throw2016··on Viral “Manspreading” video is said to be staged Russian propaganda
This is like saying fake pick up videos on youtube are funded by the CIA. This is a witch hunt and an insult to informed discussion.

There are attention seeking groups like Femen who are known for staging stunts. This group has a fake upskirt video, now this mansplaining video and presumably they will keep trying.

If it works out you get tons of media interviews, attention, become a media personality and spin it into some serious income.

throw2016··on Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts (2015)
The problem is lobbying and laws being written with the help of banks and financial firms like Deloitte with intentional loopholes, who have large wealth advisory services and then go on to market and sell their services to wealthy clients.

This is brazen corruption and everyone knows it. There has been focus on offshore havens for decades now with no resolution suggesting a lack of interest in fixing the loopholes.

It's like saying every employee can sell their services to a marketing firm which can then lease it out to employers. And the marketing firms can exist in low tax regions. If the law allows this it is not 'tax evasion', merely 'tax optimization'. The end result is is lower tax revenue but of course employees as a group do not have this kind of clout so won't happen. But let us not pretend we do not understand what is happening and muddy the waters in the face of brazen opportunism and corruption.

throw2016··on The Dickensian Conditions of Life in a For-Profit Lockup
This is not an accident. It's the result of systemic neoliberalism propaganda by well funded think tanks and a fawning media. The economic crisis has discredited their irrational faith in markets and raised fundamental questions about economic theory but they persist.

The economics profession itself is in crisis for capture, dubious theories, bad data and unrealistic assumptions. These are then used to spread baseless narratives of 'wealth creators', 'trickle down', 'financial wizards' all disconnected from reality. There are always economists on hand to scaremonger or justify any decision that benefits the wealthy, notice their behavior during Bernie Sanders Amazon bill. It's naked propaganda.

A corporation is centrally planned but when it comes to a country we are supposed to believe a market will sort it out? How? This is fantasy. A country is not a corporation. This childish demonizing of government at the core is really about disenfranchising citizens and democracy so the wealthy can operate unimpeded.

throw2016··on Hire by Google: Applicant tracking system and recruiting software (2017)
This is a negative business model and should be subject to anti-trust. It's another ruse to hoover up more data by Google. How are software companies going to compete with a google subsidized alternative?

Tomorrow google could attack other software verticals with their vampire data collection business model with negative dystopian externalities for society, businesses and their employees.

Who is going to pay for all the software employees made redundant by these kinds of business models? This is a kind of dumping which is illegal in most economic systems.

throw2016··on Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks
Containers can be easy to use, once you drop devops. Containers are simple, a much more flexible alternative to VMs.

Unfortunately the devops community always wanted to promote themselves as the only option for containers and even though they were based on the LXC project they did not explain the technical decisions and tradeoffs made as they did not want users to think there are valid alternatives. And this is the source of fundamental confusion among users about containers.

Why are you using single process containers? This is a huge technical decision that is barely discussed, a non standard OS environment adds significant technical debt at the lowest point of your stack. Why are you using layers to build containers? Why not just use them as runtime? What are the tradeoffs of not using layers? What about storage? Can all users just wish away state and storage? Why are these important technical issues about devops and alternative approaches not discussed? Unless you can answer these questions you cannot make an informed choice.

There is a culture of obfuscation in devops. You are not merely using an Nginx reverse proxy or Haproxy but a 'controller', using networking or mounting a filesystem is now a 'driver'. So most users end up trying Kubernetes or Docker and get stuck in the layers of complexity when they could benefit from something straightforward like LXC.

throw2016··on IQ Matters Less Than You Think
IQ tests have been plagued with controversy including cultural markers and yet many continue to be obsessed with attaching more meaning to them that they can deliver.

How can we design tests and make definitive judgements about the best way to test intelligence when we do not fully understand it or even define it? What about things like curiosity, passion, emotional intelligence and team work?

Are we testing abstract thinking, visual thinking, language skills? What do they measure and how exactly do the scores translate into the real world? Without any comprehensive studies, data or evidence this quickly becomes a pseudo science.

Is there any guarantee and precision that a person with IQ of 140 is more 'intelligent' than a person with an IQ of 120? In what? In the IQ tests yes, but beyond that in what? The real world is much more than a single test in a controlled environment.

This is like claiming a student scoring higher than classmates in an english test will write a better novel or compose better prose. Does not follow, in the same way ascribing value in the real world to an IQ test does not follow.

throw2016··on 'Siri I'm getting pulled over': New shortcut can automatically record the police
The situation in the US is very unique. You will be hard pressed to find any country with this level of paranoia and fear with police stops, acts of excessive violence including completely unnecessary killings, and requirement for complete 'submission' by the police. It's like a police state, but for minorities.

Its tragic the loss of life in this vulgar way can be hand waved away in a civilized country. It's a double dehumanization of victims, one to allow this callous behavior by the police and the second to justify it and let it stand. Often juries release brazen case of murders and elected justice officials support the police by default so its not just the police but the entire justice system that enables this cycle of murder, terrorism and violence.

What is also unique is the support and justification for this kind of policing by many who do not experience the same behavior from the police and infact can count on them to 'protect' and defend.

This is intimately linked to privilege and racism and how the police have been used systematically to harass and terrorize minorities right from enforcing segregation, laws like jaywalking against mostly black people, suppressing the civil rights movement, the drug war, demonization of blacks by administrations like Reagan who ran systematic advertising campaigns linking black populations to crack. [1] [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/us/new-jim-crow-book-ban-...

throw2016··on Khosla Rebuffed as Supreme Court Rejects Beach-Access Appeal
The problem here seem to be inadequate laws around public access. Since this kind of publicity makes one look petty and small minded one can only assume like a lot of SV billionaires he is a libertarian with 'religious' views on property.

Most other countries have well established laws regarding public access, some things are not for sale. Without the laws or a 'public oriented' justice system a wealthy person can keep on litigating for decades. In the interim the local community do not have access or informal sporadic access and will not have the time or resources to persevere for decades.

Because this is connected to property rights few in the political or justice system will touch an issue that would ideally be fixed in days in a proper democracy. The community now chastened may have a new perspective on absolute property rights come elections but they will find few mainstream candidates support their position. In many ways like the justice system, democracy too will fail them.

throw2016··on New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
Going through your personal papers is totalitarian and the definition of a police state. The fact that this is being openly done in 'democracies' with no shame makes the word meaningless.

Where are the protests, free press in arms, academics, ngos and call for sanctions by the 'international community'?

Is anyone going to bomb New Zealand and the US for violation of human rights and restore democracy? So much for 'our values' and the western tradition of 'enlightenment, freedom and democracy'.

throw2016··on [dead]
The irony is his rant like other recent controversial cases proves the bias they are arguing against. He has 'come out' but given his deep seated beliefs what are the chances a female receives fair and equal opportunity from 'professionals' like him?

If you believe in 'meritocracy' and rational behavior you can't suddenly 'choose' to ignore the real risk to women and their careers from men who hold such views. Even with a small proportion of such men and there is no way to tell the numbers, there is a huge risk women will be discouraged right at the start and face a possibly hostile environment.

Research and life is difficult enough and women will drop off or be discouraged. And this will then further feed sexists more data points to justify their positions making a neat cycle of discrimination and 'scientific data'. The large number of men who continue to defend these regressive and unscientific positions proves beyond doubt the huge risk women in professions continue to face with them in it.

throw2016··on UK intelligence agency admits unlawfully spying on Privacy International
We are beginning to look like fake democracies. The press and commentators seem to have no trouble getting 'charged up' about China or Russia but there is a shocking absence of scrutiny and outrage about actions at home.

What makes this absurd is its being done in a 'democracy' making that word increasingly meaningless as a marker. Activities that define a surveillance state cannot coalesce into 'western democracy' without rendering it meaningless.

Its unlikely without mainstream protest the surveillance state project will simply fold on its own. And the dangerous dynamic of denial and dissonance that systematically focuses attention and outrage on 'the other' is letting citizens and media affect commitment to these values while letting their own governments off the hook.

throw2016··on Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
It's only 2 large companies, Google and Facebook who are now out of control in building invasive surveillance systems so its completely disingenuous to try to pass this off as some sort of generic corporate issue.

People who work for known unethical organizations are hardly celebrated so these are poor attempts at muddying the waters and distraction.

The bottom line is if you can't behave ethically you can't expect ethics from others in society. If 6 figure earning engineers can't exercise ethical choice then who can? Its incredible given the level of discourse how anyone can expect any ethical behavior from the poor and starving and yet we do. The double standards and greed from educated classes is stunning.

throw2016··on CEO’s Plan to Save Sears Would Hand His Hedge Fund $1B
Libertarians will now make themselves scarce. They will soon resurface with a complete revisionist history of ifs and buts to wash their hands off this latest disaster of their ideas in practice.

Meanwhile others will continue to pay the price for their delusional anti-social ideology.

throw2016··on Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company
This is like appealing for ethics after the river is polluted, wondering why none of the people involved didn't protest earlier, and worse hoping that individual protest now will somehow fix the problem while the pollution continues unabated.

The only reason someone is not building a nuclear plant in your neighborhood or polluting rivers and poisoning your kids is regulations. The idea that this 'dampens innovation' is an extremely narrow view of 'innovation' without context of consequences.

Building surveillance infrastructure is unethical and pollutes the commons and democracy, every educated person knows this, yet hundreds of thousands of 6 figure earning engineers did it anyway. These are the same old problems of commons that have been solved by human societies with governance, rule of law and democracy.

The 'repositioning' of government and rules and regulations as a 'constraint' is fundamentally anti rule of law. Governments is 'you' in a democracy. Constraints and laws exists for businesses but also individuals, how will lifting constraints lead to a civilized society?

This promotes an unstable society that regresses to barbarism by those who want all the benefits of civilized society in terms of stability, peace, education, science and markets but do not want to think how this comes to be.

throw2016··on UK Surveillance Regime Violated Human Rights
Authoritarian regimes using courts against dissenters is not new, this is like saying yes he is a dissenter but the court process must be allowed to complete.

How is it that after the Snowden revelations not a single person is held responsible or accountable and its the whistle blowers who are facing the full force of the 'law'?

Assange is stranded, Snowden is in exile and Manning faced the full force of the law. What law is this?

throw2016··on Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change
Everything has an adoption curve, when Chrome launched why would the average user use it? But eventually it went through the adoption curve and even with Google aggressive nagging too time to gain mainstream traction.

The same thing is happening with surveillance and spyware and the self serving 'users don't care' that many tech apologists use to distract from their stalking and lack of ethics is already out of touch and disconnected from increasing mainstream awareness and disgust with surveillance.

Just yesterday Craig Newmark announced a $20 million donation to a new publication modelled on propublica to examine tech surveillance. It's only a matter of time before surveillance implementors and apologists begin to look like the sellouts that they are in the public eye.

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