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lsiebert

3,038 karma · joined March 14, 2012

I'm Looking for Full Time Work in the SF Bay Area

Full Stack (Angular/Mobile with REST API, Rails mainly but have worked other stacks) Web Developer experience in working with non profits, political campaigns, and mobile Webview based real time games backed by Redis and MySql.

tmux and vim are awesome.

e-mail lawrencesiebert@gmail.com Github: https://github.com/gryftir Blog: http://constantcoding.blogspot.com/

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lsiebert··on Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
0. There's no singular leftist philosophy in a world where anarchists and socialists and moderates and centrists are all ostensibly on the same side, but there are points of agreement (nazis are bad, every human being deserves equal dignity, people should have agency over their own bodies except where that agency meaningfully harms others, etc). When I refer to leftist thought I'm trying to refer to my understanding of that overlap. Also I'll number by paragraph I'm responding to.

1. To your first paragraph I'd say that's not the usual argument that I've heard from people on the left. I mean there are kooky people out there, but I think most people would say having privilege doesn't make you inherently immoral, nor is lacking power inherently moral. Morality is based on choices, with the understanding that choosing not to act is still seen as a choice.

Having systemic power gives you a greater capacity to affect change. I do think some people will see refusing to act appropriately to change things for the better when it's easier because you have power as more immoral than if you refuse to act when you lack systemic power, so in that sense you are right, but that's only true if you don't act.

Further I just don't think guilt is really the focus for most people on the left, except to understand how we got to the current status quo; What's more important is people taking responsibility and acting, and attempting to share power so that others can also act.

2. There are certainly people who intentionally work to maintain and expand their power; wealthy people who push for lower tax rates on the wealthy come to mind. Still, a large part of feminist and anti-racist theory seems to be about creating knowledge of privilege in people who take it for granted, and then pointing out the responsibility that suggests. There are conspiracy minded folks to be sure, but I don't know that that jibes with the idea of invisible privilege. I suppose you could argue it doesn't and suggest leftist philosophy isn't perfectly coherent or in agreement though. I'll have to think about this.

3. There's a whole thing in leftist philosophy about how intent is not the same thing as impact. It doesn't matter if systems that perpetuate injustice were built for the best of intentions or the worst or are just weird historical artifacts like the electoral college, what matters is the harm done, and how it falls disproportionately on members of marginalized groups. Thus the whole emphasis on anti-racism instead of not being racist, since merely not acting to further racism doesn't mitigate the harm that exists currently, and is thus also immoral. If that's confusing, look up Good Germans.

4. I'm not sure I understood why you were saying this, but to the extent that I understood I think I agree with you that not every relationship with power is affected. I see a meaningful difference in situations where a person has significant institutional or structural power vs situations where the power comes with the approval of those over whom power is wielded directly.

5.A cute trick? So does that mean you are suggesting that racism was not historically a term mainly used to describe the Nazis and other white supremacists, and sexism a term mainly used to describe the gender inequality that women faced?

I would argue that your original definition is in fact a conservative redefinition, one that treats an unequal status quo as an entitlement of those with power by pretending they are the true victims because people are attempting to redress social injustices.

I guess in the post modern sense any viewpoint can be correct because everything is subjective and based on one's viewpoint, but I'm not a post modernist and to me that seems like BS. I think terms are regularly redefined by people on the right in order to muddy the water and generate fear.

I guess I can say, at least we agree the water is muddy?

This has been fun, not sure I'll respond more or not in this thread but you've given me some food for thought.

lsiebert··on Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
I appreciate the clarification.

I don't however agree with you that that's the logical extension of what I stated. Can you explain? I don't feel it particularly relevant to take an idea and carry it to an extreme to judge it's usefulness either.

Perhaps you might instead address what I said initially on it's own terms.

lsiebert··on Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
Wow are you barking up the wrong tree in describing me. This is some strange strawman version of what some left wing people believe, not a description of my philosophy.

Did you read this on Brietbart, or in The National Review, or what?

lsiebert··on California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
I tend to take the view that laws like this are attempts to reduce existing racism and sexism in corporate governance.

For example, and I'll link to an article for all of this at the bottom, Hispanic people are the biggest ethnic group in California, making up 39.4% of the state, but 83% of public companies boards have no Latino or Hispanic board member. Latino and Hispanic Board members make up 2.5% of the population of California board members of public companies, and in the 12 months from June 30 2020 to June 30, 2021, only 3.5% of new directors were Hispanic.

I don't think you get those kind of disparities in this day and age if board members are awarded entirely on merit. I think there are often many qualified candidates for any position, but historical and structural and cultural reasons often push people to hire people like themselves, thus perpetuating inequity.

Maybe you disagree, but at the very least it seems like board rooms don't reflect the state's population very well.

The article talks about people like the Chief Medical Officer at Merck becoming a board member now, and a Black division head at United Talent Agency with 40+ years of experience becoming a board member now. Not exactly people lacking experience and expertise, but not people who were being asked to serve on boards.

If corporations are people, and if a person was only hiring white men for a particular role at a company and not looking to hire equally qualified candidates who happened to be women or minorities, I would consider that the opposite of a meritocracy, and likely indicative of discrimination. And if that was what's happening, I don't think the problem was going to correct itself. If it was, I imagine it would have done so by now, or at least there would have been much greater progress.

Further, studies from Morgan Stanley and others linked in the article suggest that diversity is better for shareholders! If true, then these changes help pave the way for people who have more merit in terms of benefit to the corporation. I don't think diversity is some magic that makes companies run better, I think racism and sexism makes people ignore the value that people could bring in to a company in favor of choosing people more similar to themselves.

Corporations under these two laws have to have someone who is a woman and someone who is part of a minority community, and I believe they can be the same person, so it's not like white male board members are going to disappear just because a board seat or two is required to be more diverse.

A white male board member is almost certainly wealthy, so nobody is going hungry even if they lose a board seat, and boards can, I believe, just add additional seats, so nobody actually has to lose their position.

Ultimately it seems like this may make companies perform better, and promote racial and gender equity, and it doesn't cost taxpayers anything to make it a condition of a California corporate charter.

So what exactly is the real harm, when compared to the benefits?

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/califo...

lsiebert··on Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
I've never seen anybody suggest that you can't be bigoted against a dominant group.

I have seen it suggested that specific terms like racism and sexism are not generic terms that apply to any sort of discrimination along racial, ethnic or in the case of sexism along gender lines, but apply specifically to actions that maintain or reinforce the power of dominant groups and existing privileges and positions that advantage them, and that trying to expand those terms to describe all discrimination serves to obfuscate and minimize the existing structural and institutional power disparities.

Or to analogize, if my boss hates me, that's probably a big problem for me and my work. If alternatively hate my boss, that's not really a problem in the same way for my boss. I can't fire them, or decide what projects they can work on. They aren't the reverse of each other, because the power dynamic isn't the same.

lsiebert··on Deaf Man Who Couldn't Hear Police Commands Was Tased and Spent 4 Months in Jail
Well, first off, when the courts are able to hold people individually accountable for their actions, they behave better. One of the reasons that police officers can't be held accountable is qualified immunity. If you don't know why it's problematic, basically it prevents people from being held accountable for their actions by dismissing cases unless they are identical to past cases... and since cases are dismissed before trial, there is regularly no case law to compare cases too.

You can write your elected representatives at the federal level and encourage them to end qualified immunity, thus allowing people to sue individuals when their rights are violated.

You can write your state level elected representatives and encourage them to provide a right of action under state law against law enforcement to end qualified immunity.

You can contact your local (city, county) representatives and encourage them to rewrite contracts with law enforcement such that law enforcement members who are found to have acted innappropriately face financial penalties, can be fired, etc, and those who have done so in other jurisdictions are not eligible for hiring locally.

You can, if you favor more bold choices, also explore ideas around which government programs are priorities, and giving more money to social support programs, homelessness prevention etc, so that people don't need to interact with law enforcement, and less to law enforcement.

lsiebert··on Facebook to target harmful coordination by real accounts
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.

Any system is going to be imperfect. The question is, is it better than things currently are?

lsiebert··on U.S. court upholds dismissal of lawsuit against NSA on 'state secrets' grounds
If you care about an issue, any issue, the answer is to find like minded people and build or attend a meeting, a coalition, a movement, or some other form of solidarity between individuals to pursue it. Maybe that means you get elected, maybe it means candidates seek your support, but unless you have millions of dollars to donate, your biggest power is not as an individual, but as part of a group.
lsiebert··on Engineers grow pancreatic organoids that mimic the real thing
I'm pretty sure you are well compensated and all that (though probably not as well as your bosses), but also just personally, thank you to you and everyone in your lab.

Cancer killed my grandfather, my best friend, my aunt, and so many other people I know, and what you are working on isn't just making money, it's saving lives.

lsiebert··on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
So the biggest complexity is in terms of capital investments as opposed to income.

Basically if you are paid money and put that money in the bank, you pay yearly income taxes on the income the money earns.

If you are instead given a bunch of stock shares, you don't pay taxes on the stock when the price goes up, only when it's sold, which leads to all sorts of possible ways to side step paying taxes, or put them off and then paying them in a lump sum, or paying interest on loans secured with the stock, where the loan isn't considered income for tax purposes, etc.

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-av...

lsiebert··on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
Think you mean defacto :-D
lsiebert··on Tesla opens a center on Native American land, selling cars straight to consumers
Yes it's true that states want to reduce alcohol consumption; drunk driving, alcohol related illnesses and crime are all tied to alcohol use, so there is a public health aspect.

But like many things that are opined on on HN, it's a little more complex than what you wrote, in that they were also trying to prevent tied houses (1) and vertical integration wherein brewers would basically tie into every local bar, creating a local monopoly.

Washington State got rid of the common three tier (2) system in 2012, and it seems to have lead to higher prices. (3)

The options we have for alcoholic consumption might not exist without these sort of regulations.

To be clear I'm not an expert on liquor laws and their economic impacts, but my point is that it seems like there is a complex interplay wherein regulation, enforcement, and power relationships between companies can affect availability and pricing in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

And that's not even getting into smaller regulatory policies that I don't know enough about to even throw out an opinion on. Unlike food, alcohol distributors aren't isn't pay for play slotting fees for shelf placement, and many states require distributors to post and hold prices for 30 days, for example.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_(alcohol_dis... 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_house 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608622/

lsiebert··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
While many Democrats do support it, Biden doesn't support medicare for all.
lsiebert··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
On a lot of things, universal health care, how strongly they are in favor of nuclear disarmament, gun control, etc. Remember President Biden is the head of the Democratic Party, And the US itself has been pushed further to the right by a conservative dominated supreme court.

Here's the 2021 Labor party platform https://alp.org.au/media/2594/2021-alp-national-platform-fin...

Here's the 2020 Democratic Party platform https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/08/202...

lsiebert··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
This is all accurate and detailed and I appreciate it, but I'm comparing them directly to US parties, hence center left, not centre-left.

It's possible I'm just splitting hairs though.

lsiebert··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
For US folks, The Liberal Party is Center Right and further to the left than the Republicans, Labor is Center Left and further to the left of the Democrats.
lsiebert··on Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
America fixed it's British Colony issue by doing just that.
lsiebert··on Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods
Yes, depending on where you buy. Many homes are much cheaper outside of major cities.
lsiebert··on SEO warring against the Texas abortion snitch site
It's a privilege to be able to ignore people who don't agree with you, one that people who can get pregnant in Texas don't have atm.
lsiebert··on Apple banned a pay equity Slack channel
Union leaders are all elected by the workers, so at least they are accountable at some level. That definitely isn't true about your boss.
lsiebert··on Apple banned a pay equity Slack channel
Yeah but only one tech company has a union, right?

And the workers there seem to think it's valuable. Here's the oral history I've been listening to.

https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes

lsiebert··on Apple banned a pay equity Slack channel
I've been listening to the Oral History of the Kickstarter Union and I don't believe the charge of rent seeking or the implication of close ties to organized crime is accurate.

Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run.

I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989.

And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair.

Here are my references for the above

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/alleged-street-boss-and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/nyregion/brothers-plead-g...

https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes

lsiebert··on Old iPhones become faster if you change the region to France
Old iphones become faster if you reboot them, like most devices. This is true whether or not you change the region. There's no qualitative difference when you test repeatedly.

https://knowtechie.com/want-to-speed-up-your-old-iphone-try-...

lsiebert··on Court rules California's Prop. 22 on Uber, Lyft drivers unconstitutional
They can also be changed by a voter referendum approved by the legislature.
lsiebert··on Court rules California's Prop. 22 on Uber, Lyft drivers unconstitutional
Let me break this down based on my understanding after reading the opinion and the law. I am not a lawyer.

From the judge's opinion

"The Court finds that Section 7451 is unconstitutional because it limits the power of a future legislature to define app-based drivers as workers subject to workers’ compensation law....

Because Section 7451 is not severable from the remainder of the statute, the Court finds that the entirety of Proposition 22 is unenforceable.

The petition is therefore GRANTED."

Why is that?

7451 says that workers are independent contractors, but per the Judge's ruling:

"The California Constitution vests in the Legislature the “plenary power, unlimited by any provision of this Constitution, to create, and enforce a complete system of workers’ compensation.” (Cal. Const. art. XIV, § 4)

Since that specific enumerated power conflicts with the more general ballot initiative rule in the constitution regarding the legislature not being able to amend ballot initiative passed laws, that section of the law is unconstitutional. (See Scalia's Canons of Construction, The Specific/General Canon)

Since Prop 22 explicitly said if that section is invalid the whole law is invalid (7467 (b)) the whole law is thus invalid.

This is likely to be appealed and stayed upon appeal so it's not taking effect immediately.

Judge's opinion (provided by lwf in a comment): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21046832-castellanos...

Text of prop 22: https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2020/general/pdf/topl-prop22.pdf

lsiebert··on Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse
This links to Doug McKenty's twitter, where he is retweeting people saying that Covid-19 is a hoax.

Make of that what you will.

lsiebert··on Dating in Delhi when you're poor
Generally my sense is that people are not good at measuring their expertise about topics. We infer a lot of data into our world views based on paltry facts and analogy to our own experiences. We think we understand because our minds paper over the lacuna of our knowledge. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know, and how quick people are to believe that other people's experience is much like their own.

That's why I ask people to cite sources often, or listen to their personal stories, so I can learn more.

lsiebert··on The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
The very fact that Republicans continue to deny the existence and threat from anthropocentric climate change leads to simple understandings of what Dems actually want to do.

The Democratic party has a wide range of opinions on how to deal with climate change, but I'd suggest people look at the Party Platform from 2020 to see how it wants to address it.

It includes some bold stuff in terms of changing the US economy towards being zero emissions, but with goals set five, ten or fifteen years from 2020. That's hardly setting the cost at infinity.

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/08/202...

lsiebert··on The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
Please cite your source for that? My understanding, based on studies like the one discussed here, is that misinformation does tend to be concentrated along partisan extremes. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform...

That said, it's absolutely true that it wasn't just democrats pushing the idea that bernie sander's was cheated. It was also russian disinformation campaign. https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020...

lsiebert··on The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
It's centrist, it's just that looking at facts instead of simply accepting what politicians say at face value often tends to lead to support for political talking points from the left.

This isn't intrinsic to left or right wing ideologies, there are plenty of areas where nobody has a monopoly on good policy, but when it comes to Democratic and Republican political leaders, The Dems look to scientific consensus (climate change, public health, economic disparities) and factual information in deciding on policy outcomes, while the GOP has a preferred set of outcomes they are looking to support.

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