The World Bank specifically and the neo-colonialist world-view it embodies have both been severely criticised in pretty much this vein since not too long after the bank was founded.
2,564 karma · joined August 27, 2007
I had thought it was inventive and evocative, but sort of unrealistic.
I was wrong. Yikes.
Or would it be legal for me to just go and release a cloud of mosquitoes myself?
Have a look over here:
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/facts_over_time.htm
The US ratio of female/male employment experienced a strong long-term upward trend during and after WWII (1940s), and the absolute number of women working jobs in the US has climbed steadily right to the present day.
The modern era of wage stagnation relative to productivity started in the 1970s, somewhat before the strongest growth in the female/male employment ratio, and continuing even after that ratio flattened out.
http://www.epi.org/files/2013/ib388-figurea.jpg.538 http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
...a corresponding increase in demand with the supply of workers would have kept incomes moving upward...
Or it could send jobs overseas to poor countries with low wages and little in the way of labor or environmental regulation.
Photography, on the other hand, is a very common hobby in the tech community. And the comments here seem to reflect that this effort strikes a little close to home: “Those pictures are lousy, if you find them appealing you have no taste! Just because they're 'professional' doesn't mean they're good! Machines can’t replace human judgment, they have no soul! I bet that machine had a lot of human help!”
Tech people may tell you great stories about meritocracy and reason, but in the end we are just emotional monkeys. Like the rest of humanity.
Those of us who can accept this may at least aspire to be wise monkeys.
The chart shows districing plans with larger efficiency gaps but the article does not offer any of the really damning plan simulation or sensitivity test results for those plans.
"If you don't believe ownership matters, you're not playing capitalism anymore."
Really, you shouldn't need to go to such a reductionist extreme to find stats like these troubling. "Tone at the top" is a real enough phenomenon, and you're not going to have much variety of tone at the top if there are only a few tops.
"Critiquing" the same hypothesis by sea-lioning ("We're just asking some questions," when the questions have been well answered a hundred times), over and over again for years on end, is very much "anti-science." It's the same minimally-within-the-rules strategy used by the Holocaust deniers, Gamergate shitlords, and the neo-Fascists. It's not debate in good faith, it's a strategy of attrition, an attempt to waste human resources.
I wouldn't expect an explanation, I wouldn't say the author is obliged to that kind of effort.
I did sort of expect a link to an explanation, though.
At this writing, other comments in this very HN thread claim there are many intro-level explanations of IVs out there to choose from. They don't link to them either.
Hypertext is what makes the web special, you know? The article would be more useful with a link. Think of this: even this discussion, here on HN, would have been more fruitful if the author had included a link to some explanation.
Similarly maybe the author didn't explain what "IV" means because their audience understands that term.
I have actually shipped a couple of products that made use of encryption packages, and I've never heard of an IV. Maybe the encryption advice I followed was terrible; maybe the instructions were terrible; maybe the packages were terrible. Maybe I'm an idiot suited only to the digging of ditches.
Why shouldn't the burden be on the other side? Can you - can anyone - demonstrate that "close monitoring" actually makes it possible to prevent terrorism? That states will actually use it that way, when the threat of terror is so politically useful?
Because without making a strong case along those lines first, you can't even take the "I'll trade privacy for safety" position in good faith at all.
The 9/11 attackers were already subjects of surveillance when they attacked. The Boston Marathon bombers were already being closely monitored but were not stopped.
Disciplinarians, cops for example, have dreamed of omniscience since the dawn of time. The panopticon dates to the 1790s! Despite the fact that we come closer to a state of all-seeing every day, I'm not aware of any compelling evidence that it's actually turning out to be very useful to prevent violent crime or acts of terror.
Or you could hire a female CTO maybe.
... business could be torpedoed.
Your CTO could be hit by a bus at any moment and your business could be torpedoed, and if that wasn't in the back of your mind all the time already, why not?
You know what kind of business depends entirely on a single personality? A cult.
The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload over my WiFi today. This is because I'm using an ad blocker; without one, the page makes more requests to more domains and transfers more stuff, slower.
It seems likely that cutting bloat would have a much bigger impact on responsiveness than infrastructure upgrades. Cutting bloat would produce benefits even (especially) in times and places where signals or infrastructure are marginal. Cutting bloat could mean your old phone or tablet computer could browse the web tolerably instead of ending up in a landfill. Cutting bloat from a website today produces a benefit, for all visitors, worldwide, today. Improving infrastructure may be a good investment, but cutting bloat is a force multiplier.
The responsiveness of the web has been adjusted to optimize the number of eyeballs that see ads. If a site is too sluggish, people leave, but a site that's too fast is leaving money on the table. How many advertising, tracking, and affiliate domains would a web page like this connect to, if latency were cut by two thirds?
Maybe this is more about training and retaining Russian tech talent, creating friction for foreign vendors, and spreading a proto-fascist FUD and distrust of governments all over the world.
Because yes, I would think inspecting binaries (probably secretly) would be more productive in pursuit of the stated goal.
It's a natural guess, but no. Check out:
Neal Stephenson wrote a book called Interface which predicted a form of tech-enabled micro-targeted politics over 20 years ago. It was disturbing at the time; it's almost considered business-as-usual now.
I believe American democracy would benefit from including the study of such techniques in our educational curriculum. When I was in school, we studied advertising techniques to help us be skeptical. We need the same for targeted political messages now.
There's a strange mindset at work here. Everyone perfectly well knows sexism is a real thing that happens in billions of incidents all over the world every single day. Yet somehow the possibility that somewhere, sometime, an accusation of sexism might have been misjudged to some degree, gets some people revved up.
ARM will be 27 years old this year.
https://wagwalking.com/
Now, does that make the essay sillier or does it make it scarier?
That's certainly not the only reason but it would be naïve to wave it away at this point. As the article points out, the situation we find ourselves in has been years in the making. US PV production has actually been in decline just as PV is starting to make sense.
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/soccer-moms-reven...
Once we unloaded our gear, luggage, tires and a bunch of other junk from the same Honda Odyssey—a minivan, remember—that had just carried us 400 or so odd miles while watching DVD movies in air-conditioned comfort while sitting our bourgeois asses on cushy leather seats, it proceeded to storm around the autocross course in 49.09 seconds. In other words, it cruised to a near dead-heat with the Porsche [356].
That can work if you have millions to spend and the time, connections, and access to pal around with dozens of founders, looking for the good eggs. For a "small investor" who has a small fraction of a middle-class paycheck to spend and access only to the web, it would just be the most boring form of gambling ever invented.
Who "expected" a crowd of small investors for this, exactly?
I'm surprised by the concerns over refunds. In my experience, brick-and-mortar stores that sold computer games were generally not too friendly about refunds. GameStop's website says downloadable PC purchases are not eligible for refunds at all.
I was going to say that Steam's monopoly status is overstated, since there are a few (much smaller) competitors. But in fact it looks like the games I bought on Impulse years ago have vanished; GameStop bought Impulse, rebranded it, and later shut it down. As far as I can tell, my licenses have disappeared into the ether. Motivating just about any former customers to avoid GameStop in future, I would think. Boggling.
I'm guessing the vast majority of modern patents are held by enormous multinationals which do not have renewal-fee problems. And which generally do not turn loose the patents they aren't monetizing.
If you want to tut-tut about the public interest, this strikes me as a strange spot to start. Let's turn that "limited time" moralizing on the organizations that actually abuse the system.
African-Americans traditionally have had a reputation of enjoying watermelon and fried chicken. Is it "reasonable" to label casual and/or backhanded references to that reputation as racist?
Hint: Yes. Yes it is.
It would have been perfectly easy to write a story like this, decrying the modern marketplace full of cheaply made, disposable, plastic, ghost-shift junk products, counterfeits, and fly-by-night non-brand brands, without naming the most common country of origin. We all know the stuff largely comes from China; pointing it out explicitly doesn't add information, only sentiment.
Yet so many stories bring up China specifically. There's an impulse there the author(s) aren't examining in themselves. The author(s) may not have explicitly racist intent, but the result is absolutely a racist pattern.
Flickr is still bigger and more important than anything I'll ever be able to take credit for. Any random reader of this comment will almost certainly have to admit the same.
So Flickr is a hit with photo hobbyists, and general-interest snapshot-sharing happens elsewhere. Big deal. That only makes Flickr "dead" if you have a very narrow vision of what it means to run a business, of what it means to succeed.
Authoritarians (like cops, broadly speaking) have always tried to spy on people who might subvert their own authority and the status quo, like protestors, activists, and the journalists who cover such things and who keep in touch with such people. It has ever been thus.
Social reformers sometimes actually change things - think of the labor movement, the civil rights movement - but foreign terror against random civilians usually only re-enforces the social order and the status of cops. The cops are, and have historically been, more concerned with domestic journalists than with foreign terrorists or even actual criminals.
"Cops caught spying on journalists and activists, won't even apologize" has been a pretty common headline for many decades.
Ugh. It's not remotely censorship to stop funding something. You don't have any obligation to pay me to jabber in front of a camera, and neither does anyone else. Putting the distinct ideas of "refusing to pay for X" and "censorship of X" in such proximity is either the result of confusion or a deliberate attempt at emotional Roveian conflation.
The linked Guardian article makes no mention of YouTube removing either videos or channels. If that's not happening, then whatever is happening isn't even similar to censorship. Just because the Guardian author throws the term around so casually doesn't make it true.
...we should ask ourselves how comfortable we are with large corporations essentially setting the terms of acceptable political discourse by pressuring media platforms into banning unpopular opinions.
Back in the 1970s, when video in America was dominated by three huge networks, an argument like this would have made a glimmer of sense: if advertisers pulled out of a program en masse, the network management would cancel the show in search of something more profitable, and the attitudes or opinions the program espoused might not be represented on television at all anymore.
But the internet isn't like that. YouTube isn't like that. You can keep making your show, your blog, your own personal website, etc., regardless of what the advertisers do. There is no panel of bean counters controlling access to limited, valuable airwaves, because the "airwaves" are unbounded in breadth and unmoored from time. One might argue that this is the principal, signature difference between broadcast television and internet video.
Even if YouTube was deleting videos outright, they're hardly the only way to share videos online. They simply aren't capable of "banning unpopular opinions" in any effective general way.
It's a little tough to take "righteous" "Wiseman's" internet-censorship-based startup ideas seriously when 1) he doesn't seem to understand what censorship is 2) he doesn't seem to understand important differences between the internet and older media systems.
But I actually like writing XAML by hand.
The GUI-based GUI designers I've tried were never very good about expressing the subtleties and details that you have to deal with if you hope to make a professional-grade result.
GUIs that are good at specificity and detail also tend to be quirky and difficult (think CAD systems).
The fact that XAML is so closely tied to the actual structures you're creating means you learn the language and its domain together. And you can trivially re-use or re-purpose chunks of XAML by copying, pasting, editing.