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I/O 2022

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Re: I/O 2022

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default was yellow which basically represents white people.

Maybe in an advanced stage of liver failure. It's really stretching to say yellow == white. The default color made nobody happy, which is exactly why it was the right solution to the problem.

There's a good history of it in Lego here [0]. You can see its a complex relationship but yellow has been used for caucasians (and asians) and has always had a difficult relationship for people of color.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...

Re: I/O 2022

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excluding skin color and gender is being blind to prejudice, not fighting it. It's largely a generational thing. The new generations (Millennial, Z) were taught that "celebrate diversity" is the goal. Which means to highlight all the different races, creeds, colors, etc... Previous generations (X, Boomers) were taught that being "color blind" was the ideal. Which means to treat every person the same, and disregard th…

Motivation doesn't matter when the impact is different, even if motivation is the same. Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism. It discredits the reality of those who experience race- or gender-based discrimination because the systemic blindness won't acknowledge the differences even exist. Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.

Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism.

No, it doesn't. That's a lovely slogan, but nothing more. People have the capacity to both treat everyone equally, and also notice when some people have not, currently or historically, been treated equally.

Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.

Mirrors are very useful tools.

Re: I/O 2022

#233
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "There are people who evaluate these people's contributions differently than I do" That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions. But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertio…

So you don't have proof, just more ad hominem and appeals to authority.

I did reply in a sibling thread to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31345710

But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.

So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.

But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?

Re: I/O 2022

#234
post #3

So far it's been a lot of "look how smart we are: we make things easy!" It brings me to a pretty forlorn place, that there is such high & mighty technology, but delivered in such preconcieved, packaged products. Technological goods have become much better distributed, but the art of technology keeps evaporating upwards. Subliming up into the cloud. Part of the allure of the personal computing era (RIP) was that it in…

The same thing happened with cars. A half century who, anyone with a bit of an interest used to be able to understand pretty much everything going on under the hood of a car of the era. Today no one person fully understands the symphony between all the mechanical, hardware, and suffocate systems in a given brand new vehicle. As technology matures, the underlying systems that drive it increase in complexity, but the u…

*software systems, not suffocate systems

Re: I/O 2022

#235
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's workforce is 53.1% white, and 36.3% Asian (so, not far). 2.5% is black. Their marketing graphics - to put it charitably - bely those demographics. src=" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/... " />

If you're looking for photos of employees, you should look around their careers site. There are plenty of white people there: https://careers.google.com/locations/seattle-kirkland-bellev... The rest of their marketing is not made up of employee photos, though. We would expect it to roughly reflect their target audience, and it does. > to put it charitably To put what charitably? What are we even talking about? I don'…

Ah, sorry for the late response.

Respectfully, I think it's a bit dishonest that you've linked to one very specific subpage for one specific office in Seattle, presumably the one page you found which contained a lot of white people.

I'm not sure if I even need to write any more, because the fact that you needed to do that demonstrates my point probably better than I can.

But, to say the obvious, have a look at their root careers page (I think that's a good "nothing-up-my-sleeve URL", so to speak): https://careers.google.com

> To put what charitably?

Well, the phrase immediately surrounding that one in my comment: "their marketing graphics bely those [i.e. 53%-white] demographics".

(To be clear, I don't say this with any racist intent. I'm just allergic to insincerity. Whatever one's political commitments, it's plain – to anyone who hasn't completely subordinated their critical faculties to some or other ideological dogma – that Google's photos make great play of their few minority ethnic staff, more than would an equally-large set of random samples from their 53%-white staff. It reminds me of my sister (who's mixed-race, as I am) being summoned whenever her china-white private girls' school was taking photos. My own - hers was our sister school - mustn't've deemed me sufficiently dark..)

Re: I/O 2022

#236
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's workforce is 53.1% white, and 36.3% Asian (so, not far). 2.5% is black. Their marketing graphics - to put it charitably - bely those demographics. src=" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/... " />

Those demographics are US-only.

Indeed, as are the graphics we're discussing.

Re: I/O 2022

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the most insane recurring argument and I'll never understand it. sure that's how The Simpsons works, but that's not how LEGO works, so that argument gets canceled out. then you look at the yellow smiley face iconography that I'm sure has cultural roots somewhere but was universally used to specifically express universality—back when WAL*MART used it as their logo, were they specifically trying to market to wh…

> that's not how LEGO works It is how Lego originated. See discussion at [0]. Early on they had a limited palette and would use yellow for caucasians and asians and at times used black for POC and red for native americans. The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited - and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets. [0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-…

> The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited

1978-2003 is hardly a limited timespan in the history of LEGO!

> and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.

right, because this is when they decided to make minifigs look like real people, instead of imaginary, race-neutral-ish, yellow people, once they got into licensing the appearance of real people for their minifigs!

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