redthrowaway

Do you stack federal, state, and municipal elections in the US? Does everyone vote for all levels on the same day?

Nice idea, but is there any race at any level in SV/CA that's actually competitive? The "let's take action" narrative rings a bit hollow when you could empty out every office in the Bay Area and wind up with exactly the same elected officials that you would have if everyone stayed home.

Can we get a less linkbaity title on this?

Yes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie.

But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.

re: 2, and please forgive the slight necroposting.

That men and women might be biologically predisposed to find certain pursuits more attractive than others should not be controversial.

But even if we cast biology aside, and assume (against all evidence) that differences in preferences are due solely to socialization, is that bad? Is it bad that women feel more drawn to caregiving careers and men to analytical ones? Even if, which I do not for a moment believe, these differences in behaviour and preference were due solely to socialization, so what? As long as people are happy and fulfilled, why would that socialization be a wrong that needs righting?

Google seems to be actively attempting to avoid the trap that Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc have fallen into. When you completely dominate a market, it can be tempting to optimize and be the best at serving that market. But the nature of tech is such that markets have a short lifespan. New innovations are constantly overturning old monopolies--just ask Microsoft. By investing heavily in high-risk, high-reward prospects, Google is insulating itself against future disruption.

If the display ad market collapsed 5 years from now, Google's investment in AI, self-driving cars, AR, robotics, etc. might be the difference between continued dominance and irrelevance. Tech companies rest on their laurels at their own peril.

Self-driving cars look poised to pay off in a big way in the next 5-10 years.

Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement.

Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.

Because all of the protectionism in Canada is in support of local interests: dairy farmers, brewers, etc. Remove the trade barriers, and the crappy ones will die. That's a much bigger deal politically than the win from efficient firms doing better and prices going down.

The federal government just has no real incentive, short of it actually being in the nation's best interest, to force internal free trade. They would have to expend significant political capital to do so.

They have the legal right, but it would be politically awkward, and I'm not sure Trudeau is looking to annoy his base in Quebec to serve the interests of British Columbians, who have never been a part of the LPC's base and only recently elected more than a couple Liberal MPs.

Similarly, it's well within the Federal Govt's rights to mandate free trade within Canada, but they only had the political willpower to suggest provinces work together to reduce barriers.

>No, (3) is insane because it implies that biologically-driven preferences can change dramatically in just a few decades.

That's the strawman. You've said either everything is sexism, or everything is biology. Then you've used the fact that clearly biological preferences have not changed in a couple decades to suggest it must therefore be sexism.

Somebody who's apparently a lawyer should be able to recognize how terrible that logic is. So you're either being disingenuous, or you haven't thought to examine your reasoning.

>And it's hilarious that you keep criticizing me for not offering evidence, when your whole position seems rooted in "women prefer certain fields, because [???]". Seriously, what goes in that box?

Your box: sexism, and only sexism.

My box: absolutely everything that goes into people having preferences for things.

Seriously, your reasoning here is atrocious. The null hypothesis is not "there is pervasive social discrimination against women that prevents them from entering this field", and yet that's what you leap to for all explanations for everything.

(3) is ridiculous because it's an insane strawman that you set up solely to be ridiculous. You've defined any non-biological change in preferences as sexism. And if that's the definition you want to use, then "sexism" sounds like a perfectly normal and acceptable part of society.

You are claiming that physicists are sexist but biologists are not. You are claiming that philosophers are sexist but doctors are not. This is an incredible claim, that requires incredible evidence. It doesn't pass the sniff test.

Conversely, I'm claiming that as women have become more free to pursue whatever career they want, they have self-selected into certain fields that appeal more to them than others do. This is a very common sense claim. It requires no special pleading or special evidence.

Which might explain why men, who are far more motivated by money than women are, would seek to enter the field despite it being a much more difficult degree and arguably less rewarding career.

>Because those preferences are mostly the result of sexism

Another extraordinary claim made in the complete absence of evidence.

Are you claiming that men and women don't have different preferences? Are you claiming that Iran, where 70% of engineering students are women, is less sexist than the US?

>Yet today, women make up 50% of graduates in those professions? Did something change in their genetics? Or did those professions just become less sexist?

So medicine, law, education, biology, veterinary science, and chemistry got less sexist, but philosophy, physics, and engineering didn't. That's your claim. That you've made, again, without a shred of evidence.

>And there is also the problem of women being paid less to do the same job.

How many times does the "wage gap" need to be debunked before people stop spreading it?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-do...

http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gende...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy-...

>If there is no gender parity, there is a problem.

This seems to be an extraordinary claim made in the complete absence of evidence. Is it a problem that there are more women going into early childhood education or biology, but more men going into petroleum engineering? Why? Why aren't men and women allowed to express their preferences without it being pathologized?

> and engaging in stuff like this?

Only the left has a problem with his support of Hogan, because it was an attack on your tribe. Stop assuming the rest of us share your outrage. We don't. Thiel essentially insured Hogan's lawsuit, so that Hogan could proceed without fear of losing millions in legal costs. That's it. Billionaire swoops in and enables aggrieved party to sue evil corporation for abominable behaviour. It's practically an Erin Brockovich story.

> Disliking both Gawker and Thiel is one thing that can unite us all.

Speak for yourself. I've nothing but respect for Thiel.

Gawker Media, along with Vice, Salon, Vox, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, etc., are left wing online publications. It has nothing to with GamerGate. It would take some impressive sophistry to claim they're not left wing, just as it would take quite some sophistry to claim Breitbart, Daily Wire, National Review, etc weren't right wing.

It's amazing to see how the left latched onto this as a "billionaire buys lawsuit" narrative, as opposed to the much more accurate "shitty darling of the left that habitually engaged in abuse got its comeuppance" narrative.

Gawker repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, broke the law. They repeatedly, knowingly, unabashedly, tried to ruin innocent people's lives. They absolutely deserve everything that happened to them and more. Thiel is a goddamned hero for the part he played.

Edit:

>Also. This has nothing to do with left v. right.

Only people on the left believe this. GawkMedia was loathed by the right as pretty much the worst example of how bad leftist media could get. Trust me, we were all popping champagne and lighting off fireworks when we got the news on this side of the aisle.

Two points, one minor and one major:

1) Reddit and Infogami merged into Not a Bug, not reddit.

2) Musk acted as a cofounder after the merge; Swartz did not. Swartz stuck around for a couple months post-merge then disappeared. So if you want to call him a "reddit cofounder", you can only do so in the loosest terms possible. He wasn't there for the founding and he didn't put in the work, but it says "cofounder" on the company papers.

Not showing up for a few weeks without telling anyone, after collecting your rather large cheque while your "cofounders" bust their ass is likely to up the sodium content, yes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_th...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexisOhanian/posts/HJz9Vd58Wtb

web.py was not an internal project. Yes, Swartz wrote the framework that they rewrote the site in (before later ditching it), but he did so outside of reddit and, iirc, wrote it before joining reddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51093

Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to do with reddit outside of writing web.py.

Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies.

Edit: Background: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman...

This implies there is no such thing as a culture worth saving, and that the only reason someone might find value in it is because of racism. Not coincidentally, this is the globalist message. All people are the same, the only thing that matters is economic growth, and nation-states will soon be a thing of the past.

Turns out, normal people have something to say about that.

It happened to a DJ at a club I was at about a month ago. Middle of his set, his Surface Pro decides it's a great time to restart and "upgrade" to Windows 10.

Somebody at Microsoft seriously needs to be fired for that "feature".

What culture do Germans, Greeks, Latvians, Bulgarians, Fins, and Spaniards share? It takes more than vastly differing attachments to a vague sense of liberalism and a desire to not blow the continent to high hell again.

The US did not magic itself into existence as a united state. It began in common purpose with a shared, very strong, external enemy. It then assigned itself a shared dream of settling the content. And, crucially, it already had a shared cultural identity, shared language, and shared religion when it began.

The EU does not have a common enemy to force it together. It does not have a shared language, or culture, or identity. Its dream, while noble, does not speak to ordinary people. And it is pretty damned incompetent at what duties it has assigned itself.

The prospect of a United States of Europe was extremely remote even before today. It's dead, now.

"Freedom of expression" is guaranteed, but not defined, by the first amendment. It's defined by 250 years of jurisprudence and precedent. Courts have repeatedly, explicitly, said that this sort of thing is not covered by the first amendment.

Why does anybody believe there are constitutional issues with the case? Freedom of expression explicitly does not cover the sort of revenge porn that Gawker habitually engaged in. There is absolutely no first amendment cover for their actions.

Thiel in essence insuring the lawsuit so that an unfavourable verdict would not harm Hogan is in no way an attack on free speech or the free press.

Something tells me that if Breitbart had decided to host Jennifer Lawrence's nude pics and gloat about how they were refusing a court order to remove them, liberals would not be engaging in this hand-wringing.