VictorPath

Douglas Adams made jokes in his fiction about boiling complex systems down to a number. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how unscientific the idea of IQ is - it's akin to astrological charts.

Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty. When scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons turns left or right. You can tell it's religious or political or whatever by how people defend it - no one gets that agitated by how many light years away some star is.

> My impression was that D&I initiatives are far more prevalent in tech/SV companies than elsewhere

Well of course, blacks in the US are over 12% of the population and are 12% of the L5s in FAANG companies.

Which of course is not the case - less than 2% of Facebook's technical workers in the US are black, 3% of Google overall is black etc.

It's clear that diversity is not prevalent at all in Google, Facebook etc.

Wow, you'd almost think wage slavery might be a problem along with racism.

Oh - you mean the problem is white wage slaves might have less power to exclude and discriminate against non-white wage slaves.

> some Romanian scientist teams were required to put her name in front of theirs when publishing

Would never happen in the capitalist west, where the only names on scientific papers are people involved in the experiment, and the name order is by who did the most work!

From the 1940s on there was a Fairness Doctrine for companies with broadcast licenses. The Republicans killed this off in the 1980s, saying private business should be able to do what they want. Hoisted by their own petard.

I am not the one saying OpenStreetMap is making a special exception only for Crimea, the secretary of OpenStreetMap said it. I agree with the secretary that an exception is being made.

You are right that this exception is not all-encompassing of everything pertaining to Crimea.

Well, the secretary of the OpenStreetMap foundation also said they are making an exemption to their rules in the case of Crimea ( https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-Feb... ).

So either what I and the person in charge of it are saying is inaccurate, or what you are saying is inaccurate.

There might be some phenomenon he is pointing out here, but his logic in doing so makes no sense. Even his internal logic makes no sense.

He starts out by talking about the value of a product (commodity) determined by the labor theory of value. Then he jumps to how much someone is compensated in salary. Then he jumps to a company's value and the ease at which someone at the helm can raise capital.

In terms of comparing two systems of value, this is jumping all over the place. How value is added to a specific nascent commodity going through an assembly line is a different thing than the ability of one person versus another to raise capital and how that affects a company market cap and is different than what they should be compensated.

People like Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote well-reasoned arguments against the labor theory of value, which might be right or wrong, but at least they have a clear line of reasoning. This piece talks about value but jumps all over the place. There might be an interesting phenomenon being pointed to, but there is no well reasoned argument.

OpenStreetMap has an "on the ground rule" where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground. So the Malvinas are the Falkland Islands, Derry is Londonderry etc.

The sole exception to this is the Crimea, which the OSM board ruled is exempt from this rule, as they favor the Ukrainian government over the Russian government.

Gould said that one faction of evolutionary biologists were mostly wasting their time, it's not a surprise that they would be firmly negative about that.

The letter signers you posted say they are from the center for evolutionary psychology, departments of anthropology and psychology. This is the whole problem, they have one foot (if not both feet) outside of science and in social science.

What is an "imbicile"?

Soviet sailors would anchor in European ports in the years after the revolution, and people would ask if they wanted to defect to the West. Why would we want to live outside the USSR they replied.

Actually, French and German authorities feared the ideas these sailors might put into the heads of their working class and tried to stifle them. Pictures like Battleship Potemkin were banned for similar reasons.

This started changing in the 1950s. China declared during the Sino-soviet split that the USSR had played itself out and the Chinese communist party was now at the vanguard of fast-moving change, and that seems to have been correct.

> In any event, why should people feel happy about living under an oppressive system -a system which stunted their potential? Their "police" were soviet milicija

They can be happy to live in the US and have police kneeling on their neck until they're dead.

One counter-vailing fact is Republican internal polls showed Trump losing up until election night in 2016. Polls they did for themselves, which they did not share at the time, showed him losing.

Aside from this, to influence opinions with sharing polling information, one just needs to change the question, or the audience, or both. "Should the US seek peaceful resolutions with Russia" will get a different answer than "Should Biden oppose Russia's military buildup on Ukraine's border". You can tailor the question to the answer, and have Americans either supporting or opposing abortion, or whatever.

Also, a poll of everyone will yield different results from a poll of, say, likely voters. You have to look to who is polled along with what is polled.

With these things done, there is little need to fudge the numbers, other polling organizations can ask the same question to the same demographic and get similar answers.

Read the Anarchist FAQ, Why is capitalism exploitative? You can find it on the Internet for free.

Marx's Capital discusses relations of production, surplus labor time etc. as well, but is famously not an easy read (certain chapters any how, including the first one).

> Then you can get onto the real issue - what are the power dynamics and are real resources being used effectively or hoarded.

If you get into the real issue of power dynamics, then you realize that resources are not what is important. What is important is the social relationship between two classes - the class of heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from the class of workers who create all wealth.

The very deep but unspoken assumption in the hegemony spread by the heirs is this revolves around resources. From the perspective of the worker who may not even contemplate it, is that this revolves around relationships.

Even the name of the study shows this. Originally, people studied political economy. As the study itself became political on the side of the current ruling class, the word political was dropped, and the scientific sounding -ics suffix was attached - economics.

> restrictive housing

I visited San Francisco thirty years ago and surveyed somewhat the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Collapsed freeways and so forth were still visible. I think of this as I hear the Milennium tower is sinking into the sand - and San Francisco has not been hit by an earthquake for a while. I don't know what the future of building upward in the city will be.

Why not fix up Caltrain? Why not have BART be fixed up and something people find safe and convenient instead of curse?

Decent public transportation is not completely absent in the US. Decent public transport from the East Bay would fix a lot of problems.

I don't think "remove regulation on business" is some stroke of genius, it sounds fairly lazy. Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.

> political threads

I thought this was a discussion site about "hacking and startups".

If there's enough daily top of the front page US/EU bash China/Russia/Iran/Cuba/Venezuela (put your developing country not bowing down to the west here) threads for someone to have a "colorful comment history", then maybe this new focus of the site can be updated in the about section.

> I wish whole of EU would declare in unison support for Taiwan.

Sure, Spain can take a break from hunting down Catalonian referendum politicians in France, or hunting down the Basque separatists that Franco didn't wipe out in Guernica, and can declare Taiwan should be an independent country.

The British PM can visit soldiers in Thiepval, Holywood or other UK barracks in north Ireland and declare support of Taiwan breaking off of China.

The Italian newspapers can take a break from condemning the northern League wanting to break off from Italy and form another country, and praise Taiwanese independence.

Maybe after an EU council meeting denouncing the people of Crimea voting to be annexed into Russia, we can have an opening of Taiwanese embassies in preparation for Taiwan announcing a break from China.

The Church Committee hearings (particularly some of the "family jewels" stuff) and Iran-Contra hearings pertaining to Nicaragua and Contras establishes to some extent which sabotage manuals are real and who wrote them.

> Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?

How much are the heirs collecting dividend checks from the wealth I create working? Should I crawl at the boots of some St. Grottlesex graduate, telling them I could have worked harder, trying to gain some Stakhanovite hero of labor award from them?

If you have time to spare, which apparently you do, study CS so that you can be an L5, L6, L7 etc. at some FAANG. That benefits you and them.

Even your link does not say what you say.

It says US secretary of state James Baker told Gorbachev NATO forces would not move east from Germany. Then it goes into that there is a lack of formal, legal enforcement of these promises, and how the US changed its mind later. So even this source with its leanings does not say what you say.

I mean we have an example of that, there was a radical change in the Russian government and nothing changed on either side.

Destabilizing Russia or China means the West can grab more from the Russian or Chinese people. Look what the West did in China in the 19th century.

> Russia trying grab bigger and bigger chunk of the territory

You're a little late, the Russian military moved into the Crimea back when British red coats were still stationed in New York City, and they have been there ever since.

On the contrary, the grab is the other way, the West is trying to push out Russian military bases in the Crimea which have existed for centuries.

When is the US going to close up the Guantamano Bay military base, something the Cuban government has been asking for decades?

> Marxist terms like “redistribution in this context is giving value back to the workers who created that value”

The notion that created wealth is made by workers is not one that Marx credits to himself, but to another revolutionary - Benjamin Franklin.

> redistribution

Of course the real redistribution is the expropriation of the fruits of surplus labor time by those who work to heirs who do not. Redistribution in this context is giving value back to the workers who created that value.

> Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.

It's funny to me that you were marauding around Afghanistan a couple of years ago and would use the word indiscriminate to describe Assange.

A satellite dish salesman with a storefront in Brooklyn, New York, was jailed in 2009 because he turned on the ability to watch al-Manar, a station associated with a political party that has made up 10+% of Lebanon's parliament since 2005 (both associated with the Shia organizational group in Lebanon, Hezbollah).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/nyregion/24cable.html

Germany, France and other European countries have banned the channel as well.

> Your argument is not with profit but with human nature

As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?

Disney was actually founded on Alice in Wonderland, Mickey Mouse was created years later.

At the time, Alice in Wonderland would have still been copyrighted if it were under the copyright regime Disney etc. instituted since. The corporation pulled the ladder up after it.

Incidentally, Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's Oswald the Rabbit.