311–320 of 320 posts
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funny that no one said that to the parent comment that blindly speculated that holmes caused more sexism simply for being a woman yet bring up the ruling class and that gets called out for sexism despite the endless string of fraud cases covered by those demographics
I’m sure that if parent comment said that he doesn’t trust black women he’d get called out.
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Sure, what Elon and his DOGE buddies did was a travesty. But I believe if we're going to fight this, we can't just rest on arbitrary made-up numbers of foreign deaths as a reason to retain a funding vehicle.
Yeah but what exactly are we to do? If the bar for proof is so high, there isn't a way to meet it as these things are super complex. I'm all for being rational but at some point we need to accept something is stupid and stop trying to prove it so we can do something about it. What I observe up and down this thread is a demand for very specific evidence for something which is stupid on its face.
It's unlikely anybody can actively prevent the executive wing of the government in the short term, especially with a president who violates all norms and ignores legal decisions.
As a bit of an aside, I would like to know how the US got into the situation where we were being depended upon to provide millions of dollars in aid to prevent millions of deaths- the engineer in me says "there is a root cause that should be solved"
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Yeah but what exactly are we to do? If the bar for proof is so high, there isn't a way to meet it as these things are super complex. I'm all for being rational but at some point we need to accept something is stupid and stop trying to prove it so we can do something about it. What I observe up and down this thread is a demand for very specific evidence for something which is stupid on its face.
If your question is "what is the most rational process to follow to reduce the impact of the current administration on US aid funding around the world", then I think getting as many people to vote for democrats is probably the best approach. It's unlikely anybody can actively prevent the executive wing of the government in the short term, especially with a president who violates all norms and ignores legal decisions.…
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If your question is "what is the most rational process to follow to reduce the impact of the current administration on US aid funding around the world", then I think getting as many people to vote for democrats is probably the best approach. It's unlikely anybody can actively prevent the executive wing of the government in the short term, especially with a president who violates all norms and ignores legal decisions.…
I don't think this is hard to understand. The biggest employers in America have people who are on food stamps. When we deprive people of resources, what else do we expect?
Super creepy. Reviewing the trailers and other interviews, I actually get the same vibes as from Sam Altman. Almost exactly same voice. The way they look and try to be handsome and nice while straightly telling lies to your face... Scary stuff.
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By that logic don't read anything at all.
? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.
> What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
And by that logic one cannot know anything or anyone by merely reading about them, which I find to be absurd, hence my comment.
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
That's the thing about confidence artists, they know how to rope people in.
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> As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion. How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomis…
Thanks, this is more thoughtful than most of the replies I've seen. I don't think anybody proposed or considered running a randomized trial. I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded. Otherwise it's just emotional manipulation- "fight the change by making u…
I mean, this is basically the evidence standard that we use for flu/respiratory illness deaths, along with lots of other hard to measure interventions.
Personally, even if there were no deaths due to USAID being removed, it would still have been a strategically bad thing for the US government to do, in terms of soft power.
Additionally, the US are noted in development circles for circular aid, in that they gave a lot, but then required it all to be spent on US goods, so it was more of a subsidy for domestic producers.
I do agree that lots of people just jump on these numbers uncritically, because of prior beliefs about Musk/Trump/DOGE, but it would be very very surprising if there weren't lots of avoidable deaths due to the cutting off of aid. Like, the same thing could have been accomplished in a much better way by tapering off the aid as programmes expired.
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Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
> Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic. Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur"). Unfort…
Male is still the default gender in society. Especially in SV.
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The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
Gender etc provided a new vector. The lack of awareness was the prof not realising corporate and upper class women are just as capable of being con artists with a dysfunctional grasp on reality as men are. (Other women are too, but they don't get the opportunities.) It's an ironically sexist assumption. Although at the same time men are less likely to face consequences - unless they defraud big-ticket investors witho…
This is a lie. Look at the OIG's blotter-- every name on it is going to be male.
Women comprise 60% of all embezzlement convictions.
Women also occupy 60% of all accounting jobs.
You'll see men facing consequences more, when you give men more opportunity to steal.
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/why-are-more-women-convi...