The Moscow police are notoriously strict when it comes to speeding. One day, Gorbachev and his driver are going to a meeting, and they are running late. Gorbachev admonishes the driver to go faster, but his driver refuses.
Finally, Gorbachev says, "Fine! Pull over! I will drive."
Gorbachev starts speeding through the streets of Moscow with his driver in the back seat. They are pulled over by the police.
The first officer gets out of the car and walks to Gorbachev's car. They talk for a moment, then the officer returns, as white as a sheet.
"Well? Was it someone important?" says the second officer.
The first officer replies, "Important?! You have no idea! Gorbachev is his driver!"
What me and other people are trying to get across to you, is that you only feel this way because you support the cause.
The practice of filling every place and institution with your partisan beliefs is a sign of disrespect, essentially a power move. "You're here to read up on an OS, but joke on you, you actually can't escape the all-pervasive hand of my religion. Here's some propaganda diet before you read anything".
To know what that feels, imagine if every time a mainland Chinese scientist published an academic paper they were forced to write at the end "Long Live The CCP" with big bold letters. Or imagine if every time a Muslim scientist published a paper they must write "In The Name Of Allah, God Of All Creation" in the beginning. Etc... Can you see why this is ridiculous to a non-communist or a non-Muslim ?
Why is this ridiculous belief-signalling an expression of power ? 2 reasons :
1- Like I said above, it asserts existence in a space where its competitors don't. No Christian, Jew or Hindu declares their religion in the academic papers they author, it feels fair that Muslims also shouldn't, it's like an unspoken agreement on keeping Academia free of an irrelevant controversial subject that gets people riled up and generates more heat than light. When Muslims (in the hypothetical world) violate this, it's a unilateral violation of the agreement that signals power and superiority. "Rules Don't Apply To Us". It's a fighting stance.
In the concrete case we're discussing here, only progressive tech companies signal their beliefs in this vulgar way, no conservative tech firm have ever put "Blue Lives Matter" or "Make America Great Again" on their technical docs, although there are tens of millions of people who believe just as sincerly as you that those causes represent worthy and moral goals. The reason sane well-adjusted people refrain from expressing politics and religion in workplaces is because of common sense social protocols and unspoken consensus, when you break those, you're deliberately asserting power and inviting challenge.
2- It's probably forced. Just like the vast majority of Chinese scientists or Muslim scientists would probably do the above hypothetical signalling out of fear (of being labelled a traitor and a heretic, respectively), the vast majority of people in progressive-dominated social bubbles probably virtue-signal out of fear, rather than any geniune conviction. It's morally disgusting to force people to express beliefs they don't actually hold, or hold in lesser intensity than being forced to express. It's tyranny 101, straight from 1984.
Growing up, the idea of a career in computing was implausible. The only computing course my school offered was scheduled against doing a full science course, and they had nothing for the 16-18 range. The local night school programming class I signed up for was cancelled because I was the only person who signed up for it. My parents made it extremely clear that the idea that I could ever make money writing software was unrealistic, which meant I was 27 with a PhD in genetics before I jumped ship into software full time.
And maybe because of that, I'm pretty ok with things? Every day I'm aware that I could do more. I know people who could take over my job right now who are 15 years younger than me. And that's ok, because I have achieved so much more than ever seemed possible to me as a teenager, and every time I stare out the window and realise I'm in San Francisco and part of the industry that was so far away when I was growing up I have to take a moment to come to terms with the fact that this is actually reality.
I know this article is satire, but I also know that many people hold themselves against standards that are not realistic. Almost none of us have achieved everything that we could be, and that's just fine. If you're spending a lot of time troubled by the fact that you feel like you're falling short of your potential then this is a great time to find a therapist who can help you work through that. It's ok to want more than you have, but if you're objectively in a basically good place then you really shouldn't be constantly aware of that in a negative way. I'm at peace with the fact that I'm never going to found the next unicorn company or be CEO of Google or even write some software that a lot of people care about. Let's be kind to each other and ourselves about what we've achieved, rather than holding ourselves to a model of what we could theoretically be if literally everything had gone our way.
the file is gzip compressed and the decompressed data reveals some strings that are probably related to the question asked in the `cat` file:
tag:valentine";Only localize if Valentine's Day is relevant to your localeJ2�SS[If I could have a Valentine, it would be all 7.5 billion people on Earth. That is<sub alias=",">…</sub> a lot of heart-shaped lollipops.]:�SS[If I could have a Valentine, it would be all 7.5 billion people on Earth. That is<sub alias=",">…</sub> a lot of heart-shaped lollipops.]
So this isn't just about a/b testing but also about feeding current data into Siri to allow some local processing of timely events.
Do note though, that I have Siri disabled on my Mac, so this is of questionable value
My drug of choice for colds is NyQuil. It's always been great for opening up my nasal passages enough to let me breathe easily and then knocking me the fuck out so I could sleep off most of the cold.
I remember several years ago when all of a sudden NyQuil stopped doing anything useful. I had no idea why but I directly observed that it was like it had been replaced with a non-functioning placebo.
Only a couple years later did I make the connection that this was right when they passed the law restricting pseudoephedrine. I got my hands on some NyQuil D and everything was back to normal and I had a functioning cold remedy again.
I generally do not like cities, at least not to live in, but I really liked HK, Shanghai, Phnom Penh, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Tokyo and Melbourne are often mentioned as the greatest and I spent months in both; it really depends what you want, situation you are in, what period in your life etc. I though Melbourne was dead; after midnight the city is just a graveyard. And so was Tokyo. I like cities that are alive: in HK , Shanghai and Bangkok you can do whatever 24/7. It is lively. If I wake up at 3 am craving something or wanting to see a band, chat with someone, I can walk outside and get all of that in many places (not so sure about Shanghai now: that was the longest time ago since I worked there, well in Suzhou, but went to Shanghai all the off time). Even small towns in Asia have that but a mega city like Tokyo was dead; the apartment we were in was in a popular district and friends invited us to craft beer things and such; they shut down at 11pm. In my village (with 100 people) bars are open until 3 am or until the last guest leaves (often after 9 am).
It really all depends what you want from a city. As I do not have or want kids, and I work 12 hours a day (by choice!), when I finish, I don't want to hear kitchen is closed etc. No clue why I would pay the money to live in a city then (and I don't as there are no real 24/7 cities that I like in the EU; Berlin but too cold; for the atmosphere I would live there though).
I know this was hashed out on the other threads a bit, but can someone please explain to me why folks are so up in arms about this, compared to, say, studies that scrape user data without consent (something the IRB allows all the time by saying that no human subjects are involved)? Is it simply because there is no visibility into this practice (i.e., no email sent?) Scraping user data from public profiles, aggregating it into a model, and publishing a paper or whatever -- that seems demonstrably more invasive to individuals, storing and keeping their user data, than an email quoting a statute.
I agree that the deception was unnecessary, but that's it. It doesn't feel any wronger than that.
Especially because these researchers really were acting in "meta" good faith trying to probe the privacy ecosystem, I fear there may be a chilling effect. Consumers deserve privacy rights and privacy knowledge in the asymmetric surveillance economy we find ourselves in, IMO.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.
But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?
It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.
My job offered 4 months of of paternity leave with pay. And an optional 2 extra months off without pay. So you could think of it as 6 months at 2/3rds pay. It didn’t have to be taken at one time either. There was a small restriction that you had to start the leave within 1 year of the baby’s first birthday. The company also offered it for people adopting, so it applied for all people regardless of gender or lifestyle. You could only apply for it 3 times though. So no having 10 kids to escape working. :P
I took two months off when our baby was first born. Then I took 4 months off when the baby was about 9 months so we could spend New Years in Japan with my wife’s mother. While abroad on leave the pandemic hit, flights we canceled and we got stranded. Upon returning everyone was working remote so we stayed in Japan for about a year.
I’m so grateful for that time. We spent the mornings watching morning kids shows, paying with grandma, going to the park, etc. My daughter speaks Japanese as a first languages and has advanced in so many ways because of that time off.
I’ve heard stories of very senior people being pressured to take less time. The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? My advice from those people was the company puts it there for a reason, take your time, you earned it, everyone is jealous.
It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming.
Get out of your bubble.
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
The divide is bridged one person at a time.
PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.
EDIT:
His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.
> And a part of me wonders whether the same daily outpouring of hatred you see dumped on Trump/Trump supporters has also created a very large class of marginalized, ridiculed people who are going to let us know exactly what they think come time to vote -- and like the Brexit we may not even see it coming, because we live in the Twitter, FB, MSM bubble that does not accurately sample the people.
I am skeptical of Trump's general election chances. His polling was reasonably accurate throughout the primary campaign season and I'm not sure voters in the general election will be more likely to hide their support of Trump than voters in the primary elections.
But you are absolutely right about the contempt poured on the classes that will vote for Trump. And you can see the extent to which that hatred and contempt has completely permeated the establishment, the media culture, and the sunny sides of the Internet - look at how many people on HN comment about how they are 'terrified' of Trump, or that he has no policy ideas other than Make America Great Again.
Look, I can absolutely, one-hundred-percent get behind not supporting Trump and not voting for Trump. But dig down deep: what terrifies you about Trump? He doesn't drink coffee or alcohol, he doesn't appear to have any mental issues, he doesn't have any kind of loose cannon reputation in his business dealings. And he's 70 years old, he's not going to change. And if you're cynical of Trump, you can definitely say that Trump is all about Trump. He builds all these big buildings and casinos and puts his name on them. Clearly, he cares about his legacy. He might have awful, awful policy ideas, but he's not stupid: he's not going to act against his own self-interest (to make his mark) and he's going to be limited by the power of the office of the Presidency. There would be reason to be discouraged if Trump won the election; there would be reason to prepare to do battle on many policy fronts, if Congress somehow isn't totally anti-Trump. But terrified? Why?
The fundamental reason is that Trump represents the same type of people in America that Brexit represented in the UK. You could group voters in America into two different classes: the traditionalists and the cosmopolitans. The latter group are more likely to be university educated. They're more likely to be immigrants. They're more likely to participate in online discussions. They have experience with people from all around the world. They dominate the media and the political establishment. America is little more to them than a patch of ground with a Constitution. You and I are probably cosmopolitans, and we pretty much rule the western world. And we live in a bubble.
The former group are usually older. They are often less educated. They and their families have lived in America for a hundred years, or even longer. Their America is more than a patch of land with a Constitution. It's a home, it has a shared culture, it has an official language, and they are proud of who they are and they love their culture. They know it wasn't that long ago the US was more than 90% white and the rest of it black. The same goes for the UK, except you have people whose ancestors have lived there for a thousand years or more. The new cosmopolitan, globalist economy has left them behind. They subsist on what little work they can find and often various forms of welfare.
Cosmopolitans celebrate multicultural London, where white British are now a minority. Traditionalists feel a vague sense of despair that their country has been taken from them without a fight, their culture extinguished one little bit at a time as the cosmopolitans tell them that this is how it's going to be, and they had better get out of the way or be called racists. Traditionalists want to know why it's so important to have a cosmopolitan London rather than an English London.
I live in Mississippi, which voted for Trump overwhelmingly. I'm an extreme edge case - I think based on the election results and exit polling, there were maybe five other white Obama voters in my county. Make no mistake, these people don't vote Republican because they think that Republicans have their back. They vote Republican because they feel that liberals in general have nothing more than sneering contempt for them as backwards hicks. They know perfectly well that Republicans are pro-business, not pro-traditionalist - thus why you see the Republican establishment in panic and revolt over Trump. Trump is a godsend to them. I don't think they believe that Trump will fulfill all his promises. They think they can't return to a pre-globalist world. What they hope is that he will be able to fuck the establishment cosmopolitans. They talk about Trump getting into the White House and finding out "what's going on" and sending half the government packing and the other half to prison. They voted Trump because they wanted to hear "you're fired!"
When you start looking for the contempt, you see it everywhere. For example, look at all the hand wringing about how Trump voters are white men - they must be racist, voting for their perceived self-interest. Yet when blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama, voting for their perceived self-interest, it was noted, it is used as an election strategy, but there weren't thousands of news articles condemning them for being racist. (Except in niche conservative outlets that nobody cares about.) There are unbelievable amounts of contempt and hate poured on these people. It is not that their views are to be disbelieved, or refuted, or argued with: they are to be ignored, unspeakable, considered stupid, called racist. They are not even worth mentioning or talking about if you can get away with it, unless it's to make them a butt of a joke or to generate clicks for outrage.
I think Clinton will likely win, but the split between the traditionalists and the cosmopolitians will only grow worse. Maybe we can age out of it - I think the Internet has been a great cosmpolitian-izing force, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing. If not, I'm afraid it will come to a worse head than Trump somewhere down the line.
NB: I do see some value in the traditionalist worldview. I don't think free trade has been the savior I thought it would be. I'm not convinced the idea that people should uproot themselves and follow the jobs around is a great idea. And I suspect the big push for immigration has a lot more with benefiting big businesses by increasing the supply of labor than it does noble ideals about freedom of movement.
This really shows the value of anonymity on the internet. Buzzfeed may try to label 4chan a “haven for far-right trolls and white nationalists” but it’s exactly the type of platform we need right now. It’s at the very least a check on mainstream media, which has proven itself very untrustworthy.
"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.
/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.
