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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#231

Post by dgfitz »

ryandrake wrote: post #207
bluefirebrand wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically most people don't get many opportunities to flip the coin Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row

Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game: Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life. Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of mone…

How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults.

Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind.

So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste?

Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along?

Nothing stops anyone from reading and learning, having hope for the future, and pursuing it. WhatsApp had a staff of like 15-25 people. Linux wa started by some dork with an idea and a lot of time.

Treating the world like victims that need protecting isn’t the play.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#232

Post by bluefirebrand »

dgfitz wrote: post #231
ryandrake wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game: Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life. Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of mone…

How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults. Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind. So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste? Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along? Nothing stops anyone from reading and learn…

> So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste

Well, take a look around?

The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous

Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#233

Post by bluefirebrand »

ryandrake wrote: post #190
bluefirebrand wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have…

The cartoon "On A Plate"[1] comes to mind in this discussion. 1: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

Thanks for sharing, this is spot on

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#234

Post by jeffbee »

tristor wrote: post #224
acdha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a publi…

>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that. > but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. Tha…

> The memo was published unredacted.

As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.

> That's pretty much the high-level set of events.

The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#235

Post by dgfitz »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #232
dgfitz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults. Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind. So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste? Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along? Nothing stops anyone from reading and learn…

> So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste Well, take a look around? The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43849966

That’s me, asking the same thing.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#236

Post by tristor »

jeffbee wrote: post #234
tristor wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that. > but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. Tha…

> The memo was published unredacted. As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim. > That's pretty much the high-level set of events. The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

> As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.

Cool story. Here's a rational basis, a link to the unredacted memo that was leaked to Gizmodo and published online, confirmed to be legitimate by James Damore: https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity...

> The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

What part, specifically? The part where he's living outside the US (in Luxembourg per an article linked in another comment in this larger thread)? The part about him being fired from Google? The part about him being blackballed in the tech industry?

Seriously, the dude is as cancelled as it is possible to get, what more do you want? Argue against his actual statements, if you choose to do so, but don't be a blatant liar. This is the Internet, the Internet is forever, anybody can look this stuff up.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#237

Post by jeffbee »

tristor wrote: post #236
jeffbee wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The memo was published unredacted. As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim. > That's pretty much the high-level set of events. The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

> As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim. Cool story. Here's a rational basis, a link to the unredacted memo that was leaked to Gizmodo and published online, confirmed to be legitimate by James Damore: https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity... > The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way. What part, specifically? The…

A guy leaks a doc to Gizmodo, same guy authenticates it, and that works for you?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#238

Post by tristor »

jeffbee wrote: post #237
tristor wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim. Cool story. Here's a rational basis, a link to the unredacted memo that was leaked to Gizmodo and published online, confirmed to be legitimate by James Damore: https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity... > The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way. What part, specifically? The…

A guy leaks a doc to Gizmodo, same guy authenticates it, and that works for you?

Damore is not the one that leaked the doc to Gizmodo, as far as I am aware. The controversy that ultimately lead to him being fired, cancelled, blackballed, and literally leaving the country were directly a result of the internal memo intended for an internal audience becoming public. It would seem the height of stupidity for him to leak the memo himself. He confirmed its authenticity because he was given the opportunity to provide a public response to the comments people had made on it, which is posted at the end of the version I linked.

What's your claim here? That the published memo is fake? That Damore didn't write the things he said that he wrote, and that he suffered serious consequences for having written?

Like what's your play?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#239

Post by arduanika »

jeffbee wrote: post #218
arduanika wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?

You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent. HTH.

Hmm, so which of those three cases are we in? To his critics, his gender sure doesn't seem irrelevant, and in fact the whole gist of his odd appearance in TFA is to lump him together with all males, who the author sees as "more or less all the same person". And his gender is certainly not unknown.

Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers?

Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases?

HTH indeed.

FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#240

Post by nobody9999 »

bsder wrote: post #216
mandevil wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter. For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax. Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly il…

>For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.

In 1992, SCOTUS ruled in Quill vs. North Dakota[0] that a business must have a "nexus" in a particular state to be required to collect sales taxes. I'd note that Amazon was founded in 1994.

And so, yes Amazon did have an advantage WRT sales taxes. But it wasn't, as you said, "outright illegal" until 2018 with SCOTUS' ruling in South Dakota vs. Wayfair Inc.[1] At which time, IIRC, Amazon continued collecting sales taxes that it had already been collecting in many states, as already it had nexuses (warehouses, distribution centers, etc.) in many places.

I'd note that I'm not "defending" Amazon here. They do plenty of shady stuff WRT pricing, as well as abusing their employees, suppliers and third-party sellers.

Why don't we take them to task for that stuff instead of making stuff up? Just sayin'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair%2C_Inc.

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