wfo

Small correction: Soros primarily supports pretty mainstream centrist liberal organizations. Stuff like the ALCU, pro-choice organizations, immigrant rights groups, mainstream minority advocate groups, public health and environmental advocacy groups. It is quite a stretch to call it "hard-left" unless your personal Overton window is so far extreme right that you think Jeb Bush is a revolutionary communist.

He definitely funds causes right wingers and Republicans oppose, but let's get the taxonomy correct here.

He is solidly liberal, not left. Think NAACP, not black lives matter. Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders. The Democratic National Committee, not the Democratic Socialists of America.

Instead of worrying about potential foreigners competing for your job, you should wonder why there are so few jobs out there: it's because the rich are hoarding them. The money for them, that is. There is so much work to be done, plenty of work for you and your Indian and Chinese friends to all have well-paying jobs. The reason we all don't have them is that we are just extremely bad at allocating resources: we choose the most inefficient method, market capitalism. We, essentially at random, select a tiny group of elite wealth hoarders who centrally plan and distribute nearly all of the world's wealth without any concern for social good or welfare or anything other than their continued accumulation of wealth and power. Then we beg them to give us jobs, to give us their table scraps and we fight each other for them, terrified at any moment our benefactors might take away our livelihood instead of rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.

If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so.

They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their victory.

Recognizing a lot of your success is because of dumb luck (yes you worked hard, but millions of others worked just as hard or harder and weren't lucky) is a good way to stay humble, and to remind yourself to stop pretending you "deserve" what you have -- we all live in a fundamentally (intentionally) unjust economic system where "desert" has no meaning but we try to superimpose it on our lives because of a need to believe things are fair. Privilege is a word that can be a good way to remember that.

It can also be used as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon people.

The word itself is terrible and I hate it: it is not a "privilege" in my view to be treated decently, to have a chance at success, to not be discriminated against or assaulted by police or have to face anything that the poor, minorities, women face. It is a right. Everyone has the right to be treated the way straight rich white men are and have been for centuries and using the word "privilege" conjures up this notion that they are getting something they do not deserve: rather, they should be viewed as the model, the goal, they are getting something that we all deserve to have as well alongside them.

Oh I certainly agree. And in general, beware anyone who uses the phrase 'common sense' - it turns out it is often not so common, not so sensical, or both.

But the notion that media influences culture (for which there is overwhelming evidence not only scientific but in the form of every for-profit organization that has a marketing division, and which is even a truism - media IS culture) being stated in the New York Times in 2018 is like taking a paragraph in a Nature article to explain yes, the moon exists.

>I am tired of seeing issues framed this way: "Despite all objective evidence, my ideology drives the view that it must be making men brutal and compromising women's power"

The paragraph you quoted is literally saying "although evidence suggests porn does not increase assault, no matter what you believe about it it helps shape the views of people who watch it on sex and gender" which is the most obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement that is devoid of any framing at all. You are literally complaining about an example the author uses of an opinion she does not have. The primary complaint you should have about this paragraph is how contentless it is, not some weird claim about how the statement that media effects culture is somehow malicious framing.

>Seriously, NYTimes? This is activism, not inquiry. I'm disappointed.

Yes, how dare someone who writes about a topic have actual experience with it that informs their opinions. I think it's actually far worse to have a "detached, impartial observer" (which of course does not exist) writing about a topic on which they have zero relevant experience. Which is pretty much standard operating procedure with NYT. How many articles are there in NYT from media elites pretending they understand the poor? Countless. This article is a refreshing positive change.

Sure there is, I'll articulate one: the federal government is giving preferential treatment to people who waive their constitutional privacy rights (and pay money) and going out of its way to intentionally inconvenience those who don't pay up and give up their rights. The government giving explicit preferential treatment to people who waive their constitutional rights and punishing those who don't is a clear violation of citizens' constitutional rights: if the government can do whatever it wants to make you miserable until you waive your rights, you don't really have them.

It's analogous to a state government monitoring citizens' speech, picking out anyone who criticizes the governor's political party, and banning them from using the freeway.

Would my argument pass legal muster? No, I'm not a lawyer and I thought of it in 3 minutes on a Friday afternoon. Is it articulable? Yes. Could the court rule in my favor if it were explained better by someone with esquire at the end of their name? Sure. Judges often accept or make any argument they like no matter how bad so long as it fits in with their political ideology.

Oh yes I agree strong leaders like I've described with the power to change society can be bad. Change is not always good. But a qualified technocrat will not ever change anything much, for better or for worse. Why change a system that worked perfectly for you? That you thrived in? Where you can do a bunch of spreadsheets in your off time comparing private insurance plans and cleverly pick the best one for you and save money, and if you screw up, your child's hospital visit isn't covered and you are instantly homeless! How fun! If you want change, don't pick the Harvard valedictorian "wonk".

They will suggest policies like: what if instead of feeding the hungry we define a specific income bracket adjusted dynamically to the purchasing power parity of... and in the first three words you've already lost 99% of the population who thinks it's unnecessarily complicated because it is: they're turning a moral issue into a technical one because they've been trained to do technical analysis and to not see things in moral terms, rather, to shift numbers around in spreadsheets. They are wholly incapable of stepping back and recognizing that the spreadsheet itself is wrong, not technically wrong, but morally wrong: that simpler is better, that universal programs (like roads, NHS) are better than means-tested ones, that these things which are simple moral imperatives should be able to be explained simply.

>But current screening measures are not unconstitutional.

That really depends on what nine partisans in fancy robes think, a group whose makeup changes over time and who can change their minds.

I think what GP was getting at is that it seems so fundamentally unjust that it should be unconstitutional (which is what anyone who is not a constitutional law scholar means when they say unconstitutional), not a claim about legal opinions of powerful judges.

> It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work

Where? By whom? I looked for a while and I couldn't find a single source to suggest this. There are plenty of lists of good software workplaces, Amazon shows up on none of them.

People like working there because it is a great resume-booster. Work a couple years at Amazon, kill yourself for work, then move on to a real company with that on your CV.

>despite NYT hit pieces

Or as everyone else in the world knows it, "accurate reporting".

Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it: “Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”

If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that. It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.

A lot of the swing states are controlled by Republican state governments who impose draconian racially targeted voter suppression measures yes, but this is true in every election. 2000 was won for Bush first by deep and massive illegal voter suppression in Florida (taking people who had the right to vote off the rolls because they had a black-sounding name, for example) and only second by the Supreme Court.

The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.

>Converted an un-safe warehouse district into prime, central real estate and a thriving neighborhood (South Lake Union)

SLU was not un-safe. The idea that there is a seriously unsafe neighborhood in the city of Seattle is laughable. I remember SLU before Amazon. It has become extremely expensive and gentrified, that's it.

>Grown a progressive, thriving economy that has in turn supported development of mass transit (ST2, ST3 - citywide light rail)

Has massively inflated the population with wealthy transplants over a short period of time, pushing non-tech workers into the suburbs and requiring the citizens to pay for the added infrastructure costs due to Amazon-caused overcrowding without chipping in to help the city.

>Pushed the median household income up 13% over the last decade

You don't actually believe this is due to Amazon? I'm sure they helped a little.. mostly by pushing the poors out...

>Seattle ain't perfect, but there is no question in my mind that we'd be worse off without the thriving local tech economy.

Agreed, and Seattle has always been home to a thriving tech sector which is great. But other companies behave better with respect to their local community. Microsoft set up shop across the water, with a big campus so that employees could head into Seattle but didn't invade it and has adopted the culture of the area fairly well. Employees are treated well.

Okay, if you will only accept extremely specific tailored data on tiny fractions of the population you are perfectly capable of finding it yourself. I'll be happy to review it with you when you do.

The other responder to you has already done this for you, in fact, and the data there backs up my claims.

Plus, my main claim is that Trump voters are not the poor, they are middle-class suburbanites. My source absolutely backs that claim up.

Also, I'm not sure you understand the electoral landscape very well. Iowa is one of the more purple states, it was VERY blue for Obama and almost exactly dead even on Bush both times.

The makeup of Iowa is actually very similar to nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, which were the surprise red states that took the election for Trump.

If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose.

For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.

Are you a software engineer in one of these cities struggling to find a job?

Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions?

Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon?

If you said yes to all these questions, your response makes sense. Congratulations, you are the .25% of the population that my argument doesn't apply to and I'll gladly note you as an exception and admit my argument was a generalization, though a reasonable one.

edit: It's also worth noting that I don't blame Amazonian transplants to Seattle themselves, I find them wholly sympathetic and I think it's sad these people are blamed for the state of affairs: rather, the company, that draws so many from outside, makes no effort to acclimate them to local culture, works them to the bone so they have no time to do so themselves, and provides nothing for the city to aid in the overcrowding, traffic, and housing crises they have created is to blame.

First link on google on poor voters going Democratic:

http://www.businessinsider.com/exit-polls-who-voted-for-trum...

Every income group over $50k voted Trump. If you scroll down you see that rural voters did indeed go for Trump, but they are much smaller proportion of the population than city folk or, the largest group, suburbanites (who went for Trump solidly as well).

I don't have a source handy for the poor being largely non-voters but I've seen hundreds over the years, it's well-established fact.

>Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries

Most people might make this attribution but it is not correct.

>you have no ability to negotiate because they have something you want, and you're unwilling to give them anything they might want. would a meaningful fraction of the population pay even $1/mo to receive better contractual terms on their dropbox account?

Yes, you've accurately described the power relationship in the contract "negotiation" and how it allows exploitation and abuse.

>whoa there. there's allll sorts of stuff that can go into a contract besides waivers of "fundamental rights", that you'd really not want to agree to willy nilly.

Agreed, I was being hyperbolic. You should of course read EULAs (though there's an argument to be made that they should be required to be streamlined, or expressed in plain-language and short)

But you don't have to check the EULA for a "slavery clause" that promises you and your children in eternal servitude to the company, similarly you shouldn't have to check to see if you are giving up other fundamental rights.

It is terrifying how this power is being wielded. Cities try to compete to see who can be more obsequious and subservient to corporate interests in the hope that they win some "victory" -- the company moving to their town -- which in the end does very little for the actual city or the people in it. It is just an impressive line item on the mayor's resume when they try to move up in politics, "I got Amazon!"

Seattle hates Amazon and what it has done to the city. They provide nothing for the city, do nothing to help ameliorate the problems they create, they overcrowd every area with ultrawealthy out of towners who push actual Seattleites out of the neighborhoods they've lived in for generations, replacing local culture with bland silicon valley tech-ennui. And the jobs they offer aren't even good. They create new white-collar sweatshops in their office buildings to mirror their blue-collar sweatshops in the warehouses.

If they are paying attention, people in all of these cities should be praying to god that Amazon doesn't choose their city. If they can, they should protest, riot, refuse to let it happen.

If you want a left-wing prospective on this general issue (which is called "lotteryism") there's a great podcast that does media analysis on this and issues like it. As it turns out, for example, reporting describing the supposed 'benefits' Amazon could bring to a city are literally copied without attribution or further investigation from Amazon press releases. There is a reason Jeff Bezos bought a huge newspaper, and it's not charity.

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/lotteryism-part-i-how...

With far-right racist and anti-immigrant sentiment rising and taking power in the US, as a brown immigrant even if you can get a visa wouldn't you be concerned about moving your life here?

Just an aside, Trump supporters are NOT poor or the working class, this is a myth. The poor are non-voters and if they vote it's mostly Democrat by and large. Trump voters for the most part were middle class suburbanites or exburbanites.

A man with a gun and a baton beating you (if you resist) and physically forcing you into a tiny windowless cage and locking you in for an extended period of time is... not violence, you suggest?

And you claim words mean things? Who is being Orwellian here? The only difference between your argument and literally 1984 is you've introduced a new ministry of non-violence, the organization that enacts non-violence on citizens by physically forcing them into torture chambers.

Is grabbing someone in an alley and kidnapping them violent? No?

You are very correct, the fundamental problem here is not that people don't read the EULA, it is that the world "agree" is not meaningful in this context, there is no equitable power relationship between you and the company you are "agreeing" with, they can insert any demand they wish and you have no ability to negotiate or power in the discussion. You should not have to read the EULAs, because companies should not be allowed to require that you waive your fundamental rights like this as a precondition of using their service. If you have a right to sue but every company can demand you waive it before you interact with them, you actually have no right at all.

If mandatory arbitration is allowed, the right to sue does not exist. You cannot have one but not the other.

The theory that a party that has consistently screamed bloody murder for the last 60 years about anything that even smells like toning down the war on drugs or carceral state is somehow playing 1000 dimensional political chess and cracking down on drugs because of their secret plan to legalize them is... well, how do I put this... wildly speculative?

Do you think your theory is really more likely than this being Sessions simply doing exactly what he's explicitly said he has wanted to do every single moment of his entire adult life, crack down on people who use pot?

Crushing states where pot is legal will lose them the most heavily blue seats that they would never win anyway, but why should they care? It will give their base what they say they want whenever you ask them, the thing that they want most, that drives them to the polls. It is an assault in a culture war against the smug, pot-smoking coastal elites and despised pot-smoking minorities, hippies, college kids. Perhaps they see the drug war for what it is, for how it was designed: not a war on drugs, but a war on the demographic groups of people who tend to use them. And that's why they support it.

At best, I'd see them allowing a vote on it then let their vulnerable reps in purple/blue states vote yes but make sure it fails anyway: "I'm on your side, I promise, see, I tried".

It is not wrong, but it is irrelevant except as propaganda: it frames the cost of government services as being borne by the wealthy and suggests the wealthy are being charitable already or that they should have some extra say over where their money goes. In fact it is the labor of the poor, extracted by the wealthy, then partially recovered from them in taxes that funds society. The wealthy hold the wealth not because they deserve it, but because they have used their power to take it.

Choosing to talk about what the rich pay, rather than how they have siphoned wealth from society (i.e. how much of their ill gotten gains should they be allowed to keep, rather than how much do they give) is not a "fact" even if it is a true statement, it is a political position, a rhetorical strategy, and a framing device -- it is an assault on your brain, an attempt to trick you into accepting a conservative frame covertly without being honest about it: "I'm just stating facts, what's wrong with that?" Well, everything is wrong with that. There are trillions of facts yet they state this one. For a reason, obviously.

You can reconstruct perfectly an ideological argument (of any ideology) based only on the sequence of facts they choose to present.

Being fired from a private sector job is a due process issue as well.

It is not OK for these companies to be huge either. Companies, no matter how large are always dictatorially controlled by a tiny group of ultrawealthy oligarchs. Large company == massive concentrated power with zero oversight or democratic input which is always dangerous and bad.

Tech companies are worse because they control the tools we use to communicate and think: this unchecked power can exert massive influence over our minds and thoughts.

Millenials aren't whiny, they are angry. They have been screwed and want revenge. They correctly asses that boomers climbed up the ladder then burned it to the ground. They took cheap publicly subsidized education then massively defunded it. They benefited from regulated financial markets then gifted them to oligarchs. They took pensions then ensured no one would ever get one again. They destroyed unions and therefore the middle class. They destroyed the environment for their own personal profit. They took all the benefits of the new deal, and the moment it looked like those benefits would start helping the new generation they stripped them away. The boomers will go down as the most selfish and short sighted generation in US history.

And millenials are very tired of these people who have had it so easy and worked to make it so much worse for their children, talking about "personal responsibility" and "participation trophies".

Unregulated corporate power destroyed your life and your response is "no, this is actually good" and then you tell us not to be blinded by partisan ideology?

Recall that for someone "making" $5M per year, the majority of income that high is inevitiably extractive and exploitative and comes from ownership and power, not the output of their actual work. One could argue if they deserve any of it beyond their actual real wages at a fairly evaluated rate, which might cap out at $1M in a democratic society. FDR proposed a 100% marginal tax rate on the highest earners, his opponents argued him down to something in the 90s, spawning the most productive period in US history.

But their owners and managers who actually tell them what to do and have all of the power over the networks are nearly all Republicans (or right-wing democrats). They don't do it for free, they do it out of self-interest.

For example, Sinclair broadcast group that owns a huge amount of local broadcasting in every media market in the US. Their national corporate governance literally requires all subsidiaries run blatant pro-Trump hyper conservative propaganda pieces.

Totally agree. But the only way for software people to take any power or control (really, for any worker to have any say in the business at all) is to unionize, and us tech folks tend to treat that like a curse word.