code_sardaukar

In my high school they had a lot of words for this attitude, including "faggot", "square", "nerd" and "nerd faggot". As someone who grew up in this environment, I'm very interested in the critiques of people such as myself who allegedly held these attitudes.

So if you vote democrat, you have to pay your workers whatever they ask for?

So why do you think that other employees will become less productive when they get their Appalachian Trail leave?

You say that it's very sad for people to lose their jobs, but how sad is it if a business does not grow as fast as it might have, and so doesn't employ those people in the first place?

>They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do.

How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).

It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.

While I don't agree with everything you said, you are right that modern economics puts a lot of emphasis on the bond market.

Their reasoning is that the bond market is like a giant, distributed bank. Bondholders borrow short-term, and invest long-term, thus providing liquidity for businesses that need to make long term investment.

The problem is, we have no idea what the actual economics of liquidity provision is. The standard Diamond–Dybvig model is used to justify bailing out the banks (and also the "shadow" banks, i.e. the bond market) when things go bad. But if the Diamond–Dybvig model is correct, then liquidity provision is a mechanical process that could be done just as well by the government, and the bond market is just a way to get the free market to do this at exorbitant cost.

We need better theories to understand liquidity. I think the best work in this area is by Holmstrom and Tirole. Holmstrom's nobel price should help raise the profile of this work.

Actually the smug, dismissive tone of your comment is equally common on HN. Neither you nor the OP have given direct evidence on the matter, and it is presumptuous to think that the narrative you presented trumps the OP's vague reference to twin studies.

A quick google study yields "Using 15 years of data on Finnish twins, we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women’s (men’s) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible."[0] But I don't want to claim this is the final word, it's just the kind of evidence that is useful rather than blithe assertions and name calling.

[0] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER...

I guess the comment triggers me in the same way as reading "you don't have to be effeminate or gay to be a male ballet dancer" might trigger some people.

While it doesn't directly paint gay or effeminate men in a negative light, it also doesn't do enough to distance itself from the negative stigma men who don't follow traditional male roles face.

As someone who was bullied for being a nerd, your statement is very triggering. Do you think there is a way we can encourage all people to explore tech without denigrating people with certain personality types/interests?

I think most of the people making these comments would identify as anti-racist. Furthermore, they would be shocked by similar comments addressed to students from Africa, the Middle East or Latin America.

Personally I think everything said about Asian students is true, I just wish we could be as open and realistic when discussing other cultures, rather than simply blame "racism" when people from other cultures encounter difficulties.

It's a general pattern that comments that would be considered "racist" when applied to any other non-White culture, are ok when applied to Asia (see the constant flood of orientalist articles about Japan on HN).

It's only natural to feel more empathy for people in situations we've been in, but this isn't the entirety of morality. I've never been a cow but I go out of my way to avoid causing suffering to cows and other animals.

Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.

I read the whole article and it's very hard to judge the correctness of most of the article's claims. Most importantly, it's hard to judge the most important thing: the author's own research.

However, I can say that there are different ways to interpret things. The author sees tenure as a way to establish obedience to the unwritten rules of the department. Based on my knowledge of academia, including friends who were granted tenure, the process is mostly fair, but of course most people are going to want to do everything they can to maximize their chances. What the author interprets as proving obedience, I interpret as not wasting time on things the committee can't measure objectively, or doing things that might piss off people on the committee.

As someone in industry, I see academia as somewhere where people can make immense contributions to human knowledge, that cannot be done elsewhere, but they have to jump through certain hoops to do so. Outside of academia there is very little opportunity to do research. Industry is conservative, and prefers to implement and refine known techniques.

At least people should recognize the symmetry of hiring and firing. At some point, Bombardier hired each of those 7,500 people. Did this make the news? Were there HN posts praising the management for creating those jobs?

I think you're missing the implication in the original comment, that the NSA has put a backdoor into NIST and the Russian equivalent has put a backdoor into GOST, but neither can use the other's backdoor.

As a former "left-anarchist" I'm familiar with this sort of story. We had similar stories of left-anarchist utopias from (1) pirates (2) partisans in the Spanish civil war and (3) various "workers collectives" throughout history. None of them lasted and most collapsed due to internal problems not being crushed by the nation state.

What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.

Just to clarify, you think that opposing immigration makes someone a nazi?

Another possibility is that the prosecutor didn't consider it relevant to the case whether Goodman was a journalist or not, but chose to answer the question anyway. E.g. the quote "I think she put together a piece to influence the world on her agenda, basically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t immunize her from the laws of her state" in no way implies that her actions would have been legal if she were a journalist.

It is the article that asserts that "arresting a working journalist" requires a special explanation.

I wish the press would call her out on using the term "leverage". If the US military confront Russia's proxies at the no-fly-zone and force them to turn back, then this would given them leverage against Russia. That's what the term implies. Changing that situation on the ground and then going to Russia and saying "now what". When Clinton uses the term "leverage" it's misleading voters, who don't realize that enforcing the no-fly-zone will require confronting Russian planes directly.

This is a very real problem for Trump. Trump has already been forced to change his rhetoric on Israel, and even Pence doesn't support Trump's plan for Syria (letting Russia/Assad win).

On the other hand, Trump has a huge amount of support for him personally that hasn't been seen before, so maybe he can leverage this against the neocons in his own party.

Clinton's plan for Syria is scary. Ironically it displays the kind of toughness that Trump claims to represent. Personally I think it is a bad move, and Russia has already been reasonable, e.g. backing the Iran deal.

You don't even need to be a libertarian or an isolationist to believe that the neoconservative approach is wrong.

Putin made two points about this in June, 2016[0]. First, it's not possible to verify what's in the warheads of anti-ballistic missiles. Second, defense and offense are part of a single set of capabilities. If you remove the opponent's ability to retaliate against a first strike, that is just as dangerous to them as if you had increased your offensive capability. I'm well out of my depth in terms of judging if these statements are true, but this is what he said.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo

So how does that work? The government/rich people/"capital" conditioned people to consume services whether they need them or not, in order to create these jobs? If so can you give some examples of this? Or is it that government/industry created regulations and practices that created these jobs (I could think of law as being like this, but not many people work in law, less than 1% of non-farm employment in fact)?

My take is that we use the labor that was being used in farms for new productive purposes including health, education (as consumption, not investment) and entertainment. It's undeniable that life expectancy is increasing so we are getting something out of this increased efficiency.

There's a difference between efficiency wages and paying market rate for a group with specialized skills. Efficiency wages means paying more than market rate in order to get some other benefit such as reduced turnover.

In my opinion, tech companies pay market wages for a rare skill (being good at programming). Some will say this is arrogant, but it's just my honest opinion given my knowledge.

If it helps, Walmart don't pay their employees poorly because they are less moral than other companies, but because they hire a different type of employee from, for example, Starbucks. If you happen to live in a place with Starbucks and Walmart, try visiting both and then ask yourself if the Walmart employee would stand a chance of getting a job at Starbucks.

Look's like I've said one of those "true if you think it's a good thing, crazy conspiracy if you thank it's a bad thing" facts. No one really denies the link between Jewish Americans, the various Jewish organizations that are active in politics (AIPAC, ADL etc) and US Foreign policy. But people strongly deny this in the context where people criticize foreign policy, and want to redirect discussion towards safe topics like the military industrial complex or oil.

Some will say the most American Jews are liberals and therefore wouldn't support neoconservatism. It's true that they are mostly liberals on domestic policy, but by judging candidates on a single issue (Israel) they end up implicitly helping neoconservative thinking, which places the most emphasis in the US-Israel relation.

Neoconservatism isn't just about the military industrial complex, or oil, it's also about the Jewish lobby.

Well from the point of view of China the nation, these aren't externalized: Chinese people will have to pay this cost. But you're right that this contributes to lower costs. I still the main reason is the first one I gave though.

The root distinction seems to be whether you prioritize reality or abstractions.

If reality comes first, you might not even believe that there is a set of universal mathematical laws governing nature (Feynman expresses this viewpoint, and raises the possibility that no such laws exist here[0]). Edward Nelson came up with similar ideas on the limits of abstractions in mathematics, based on Christian philosophy [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkhBcLk_8f0

[1] https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/warn.pdf

I think the endgame for programmers is very different to pastry chefs. Yes there are bootcamps, but part of their success is being selective in who they accept. No one has yet shown how to take an average person and get them a well paying programming job. Egalitarian dogma states that programmers don't have special abilities or interests but the market has been very stubborn so far.

that's fascinating, though I'm not into sweet things enough to invest in the required equipment.

I do agree with your overall point that chef's skills probably aren't specialized or difficult enough to command high wages in the long term.