hackissimo123

Vietnam might not be as bad as China but it still doesn't exactly have a stellar human rights record.

Get outside of central London (and possibly some other big cities like Birmingham? I don't know, I never go there) and you'll never see armed police anywhere. I grew up in a small British town in the Southeast and I can't think of a single time in my entire childhood that I saw a police officer with a gun (or for that matter, anyone else with a gun) anywhere near my hometown, except perhaps for my rare visits to touristic hotspots in London. And again, it's only in central London, at least as far as I can tell. I live in non-central London now (Zone 3) and I never see armed police anywhere near where I live. Come to think of it, I rarely see any police at all around here, at least not on foot.

I can remember going on holiday to France as a kid and being unable to take my eyes off the guns I saw on the hips of French police, because it was such an unusual sight for someone born and raised in middle England.

I think in the UK we're so used to the idea of unarmed police that we forget how astonishingly unusual it is. In most countries the idea of unarmed police is unimaginable. We've really achieved something special by managing it, at least in most parts of the country most of the time.

Reminds me of Sweden's famous "H day": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

Does it make sense to compare an iPhone to "the average Android"? iPhones are a premium product; they're not available in the wide range of prices and qualities that Androids are. People who buy iPhones are the type of people who, if they bought an Android, would most likely buy a top-of-the-line Android at a high price. Those are the Androids we should be comparing iPhones to.

I find it hard to believe that people are choosing Apple products over competitors because of anything to do with "racial equality". Especially since most of the components are manufactured in China, therefore by buying an Apple product (or basically any other piece of modern consumer electronics), you're helping to fund a racist ethnostate that's currently committing genocide.

What has Apple done to promote racial equality beyond the same vague performative gestures as every other major Western corporation?

I think his point is "Democrats bad!" or possibly just "lefties bad!"

> Last year's fires were truly an aberration.

And, as climate change continues to get worse, they'll eventually be seen as unremarkable.

> Pulling a gun is one thing, actually threatening to use it is another. It’s a difference in how police are in the US vs UK.

Well the most salient difference is that UK police don't carry guns at all.

London also has excellent public transport. (Some Londoners might disagree, but have they ever travelled? I've never been to any other large city where it was easier to get around by train and bus.) It's very easy to live in London without needing a car, which brings the cost of living down substantially.

If you're going to lie, make you sure you fake the timezone in your git commit timestamps.

> London is easily as expensive, if not moreso than San Francisco.

As a Londoner, I find that hard to believe. London is a huge, diverse city with many industries other than tech, and the vast majority of London's population don't make anything close to an SF tech salary. If London was as expensive as SF then I know I wouldn't be able to afford to live here.

That doesn't contradict what I said. "Remote-first" was more common in my experience too than "100% remote".

Don't forget this, also within the last week:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...

And that's just recent events, without getting into the disgrace that was the 1619 Project.

I'm applying to jobs now (in the UK) and I'm yet to speak to a single company that plans on a full return to the pre-pandemic normal. Everyone is either staying 100% remote indefinitely, or they're hoping to adopt a hybrid approach like what you describe.

It's a bad time to own city-centre commercial real estate.

Previously: Rails. New job: Elixir.

I can't find it now but I read an article once with a title like "The $10,000 Shirt" or something like that, which argued that in medieval times, the amount of labour that it took to produce a single shirt would cost about $10,000 at modern minimum wage.

If you were a peasant back then you might have owned two shirts: your regular one that you wore every day, and a 'fancy' one for church, weddings etc.. When your shirt got too ragged you cut it up and tailored it into clothes for your children, or used the material to patch up holes in other clothing. When even those got too decrepit you'd use them as kitchen rags etc. until they literally disintegrated. Cloth was too valuable to waste!

We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

I'm in the opposite position; I've spent almost my entire five-year career focusing on one quite narrow tech stack and I'm good at it but I'm also sick of it and desperate to learn something new. I just changed jobs and I took a substantial pay cut for the chance to get professional experience in a new tech stack, which isn't ideal, but I really want to work with a new language and I don't know what else to do (there was no possibility of diversifying at my previous position.)

My point is that both the "short and fat" and "spikey" approaches have their pros and cons.

Sharks rarely attack humans too, despite the popularity of Jaws. I was always taught that sharks generally only bother to attack humans when they mistake us for another animal.

To add to this, "endangered" languages aren't necessarily those with few speakers, and languages with few speakers aren't necessarily endangered. What matters is how many children are being raised to speak the language; some languages are rare but are in no danger of dying out (at least not within the next generation) while others are more common but the speakers are disproportionately old and few children are learning it.

I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."

Is that the case in the whole EU? Because my AmEx gives me 1% cashback here in the UK, and that's been true since long before Brexit.

> Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?

I pay for Andrew Sullivan's Substack and reading his weekly column is always a highlight of my Friday.

He's not really a "journalist" but John McWhorter's Substack is excellent too.

Or, as with much else in the woke lexicon[1], they don't use the word "safety" in the way that most people understand it.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/

It becomes a lot more explicable if you assume that the journalist was lying and the piece was not going to be positive.

> content which teaches people to hate

It's called "critical race theory".

The examples you give at the end aren't remotely comparable to Scott's situation. Success in the film or music industries is synonymous with fame; it would be absurd to pursue a career in either while expecting to preserve your anonymity. You can't compare these career paths to "blogger who already has a successful career elsewhere, writing pseudonymously in his spare time to a niche, nerdy audience."

If you want to use Wikipedia as the gold standard, check out Wikipedia's own policies regarding privacy of article subjects. E.g.: "When the name of a private individual has not been widely disseminated or has been intentionally concealed, such as in certain court cases or occupations, it is often preferable to omit it, especially when doing so does not result in a significant loss of context." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

I saw those tweets from Yglesias when he posted them; I didn't realise he'd deleted him.

To clarify: you say that Yglesias deleted his tweets "for clear reasons" - are the reasons really clear (e.g. Yglesias confirmed his reasons) or is that just your surmise? Also, you mention a private media Slack group but the tweet thread you linked doesn't say anything about a Slack group - is there another link where I can learn more about this?

I remember there was some other woke controversy at the NYT a couple of years ago where a private NYT Slack thread was leaked; I can only imagine the inner turmoil at the NYT given recent controversies (and an extra two years' worth of new, woke graduates entering the org.)

"In the last few weeks"? The NYT has been going in this direction for years.

FWIW the CEO of Lambda School had the following to say on Reddit regarding whether the piece would really be positive ("you" in this quote is addressed to Scott):

> I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but they’re going to say you’re a far-right racist who supports eugenics, based on you not immediately supporting the firing of Hsu. I know this probably sounds improbable to you because the author was pleasant, but they’ll have a quote from you they’ll strip of nuance and context to make it clear that you’re evil. Probably something about why you want to remain anonymous and they’ll paint it as you wanting to be anonymous because your views are beyond the pale or a dog whistle or something.

> ... It was absolutely going to be a hit piece and they don’t tell you that upfront because they need your participation.

> Pui doesn’t care, she’s cracking open champagne right now. This is what she thinks their job is. Exposing everything because reasons and feeling good about it.

> It will absolutely be a hit piece, probably call SA a racist, and will be unapologetic. To expect anything different is impossible if you’ve spent a lot of time around this particular brand of new age journalist.

> ... The editor SA is referring to is a known quantity in many circles, including mine, as is the author of the piece (I know people who were asked for comment; all refused). This is a win in their book, and they couldn’t care less about whether SA’s life will be destroyed.

> I hope that the journalist gets revealed

The name of the journalist in question is no secret; spend 5 minutes browsing Twitter or the SSC subreddit and you'll figure it out.

I don't think The Spectator claims to be neutral? Everyone knows that it's a right-leaning magazine and it doesn't pretend otherwise. I'd describe myself as centre-left but I agree with GP that The Spectator is one of the better sources for a right-of-centre perspective. (I also agree with GP that there are exceptions... God I can't stand James Delingpole.)

Just because a source has an editorial slant doesn't mean it doesn't provide any insight. The problem is when journalists push their opinions on you while pretending to be impartial.