It feels like every time I hear something about Wiener, he's doing stuff that needs to get done. I'm tempted to send him some money even though I'm not in his district.
2,399 karma · joined September 22, 2011
So... Costco? It feels like there's a lot of other options as far as places to buy food that the author doesn't seem to know much about.
And "propaganda outlet"? "push that agenda"? Last I heard, this whole thing was in response to a audience question when he was talking about something else entirely.
To have an useful discussion with someone, there needs to be an assumption of good faith on both sides - that each person will make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other, will set aside semantics and minor errors that don't matter, will directly confront key points that are brought up and will admit errors or spaces where they lack knowledge or clarity.
This assumption of good faith, in my view, has been the major casualty of modern politics and the new means of communication tech has provided to us in the last decades. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with views that match your own, to gorge on straw-men and memes and bad faith arguments that then result in pattern-matching responses when dealing with someone of opposing views.
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That said, I suspect there might be something else at play here in Sam's case. In the last decade we've seen tech grow up, and much of this has shattered the "tech is the way to a better future" idea. Google has gone from "do no evil" to the biggest marketing and personal information gathering force on the planet, with intentions that now seem ambiguous at best. Facebook has gone from a convenient way to stay in contact with people or make new connections to a machine optimized to capture human attention to such a degree that notable former Facebook folk are coming out of the woodwork to say they don't use it and forbid their kids. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the capability to have massive impact on politics, seemingly in negative ways, and seem to avoid interest in taking responsibility for the impacts of their platforms.
All of this leads to people being less optimistic about tech and startups. Sure, Uber sounded like a great idea at the start, but now? All those people working below the API seem to be in the same spot as the taxi drivers before - making minimal money, in debt over a car instead of a medallion, etc. And above it, a valuation of billions. It feels like a resource extraction project, where the average people are squeezed for the wealth growth of investors and techies.
Capitalism has a warping effect on tech. The successful startups aren't about saving the world, or making things better - they're about making money. If that coincides with doing good for the world, great - and if it doesn't, oh well, because making things better isn't actually the name of the game. It's a feel-good thing to put SV above finance or resource extraction or energy - and less people are believing it.
China probably just hasn't gotten there yet. They're still in their tech honeymoon phase, where everything is great - easier ways to pay, communicate, etc. Given that they're used to restrictions on communication and what they're allowed to know and think, maybe they'll never leave it.
Master of darkness, we meet again.
> He sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act (PCIP).
> As the Head of the House Science Committee, Smith has been criticized for promoting climate change denial, baselessly attacking scientific outlets and researchers, and receiving funding from oil and gas companies.[2][3][4][5][6][7] He was formerly a contributor to Breitbart News.[8]
I can only hope that next year after he retires, his district manages to pick someone who isn't even worse.
I further think that Riot often doesn't get credit for the things they do right. I remember back in the day they were rolling out patches weekly, with a 12 hour maintenance window a la WoW on Tuesdays. That fell to half that time, then a third, and has at this point been gone for years. Cheating is a major problem in any current multiplayer game (PUBG has been getting hit hard recently I hear), but it's never been big enough in League that I felt the effects.
Riot has managed to build the biggest gaming phenomena outside of Minecraft in the last decade, and I'd expect corners to be cut in doing that. Clean code doesn't win a startup race, and games are a cut-throat business (see: Epic's Fortnite rolling out a battle Royale mode in a span of months following the success of PUBG). It's a good thing, imo, that Riot can afford the time and energy to start cleaning their code, and are willing to share some parts of that process with the wider world.
For an easy, recent example, look at the Trump tax plan. This is constantly, repeatedly being sold as a "middle class tax cut". And yet it removes the estate tax, which only hits individuals with assets greats than 5.5 million or couples greater than 11 million. Cutting corporate taxes - why would this do anything? Corporate taxes are on profits, and if you're growing your business you aren't getting taxed anyway because you spend it instead - see Amazon and the whole "your margin is my opportunity" idea. How on earth would this lead to more growth? A doubled standard reduction, but other deductions are scrapped, mostly making things a wash; and a removal of the AMT, which hits the wealthy and some upper-middle class folk - none of this seems to really benefit the middle class, and you can pick that up merely by reading the proposal and some of the statements and analysis around it. (Just for good measure, the document itself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4061905/Read-Pres... ).
And yet, the narrative of "middle class tax cuts" continues unabated. Maybe people don't have time to do the research; maybe they don't care, or maybe they don't feel qualified to contest experts and politicians. But the effect is that people make their decisions based on how they feel, and critical thought is largely non-existent.
> One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.
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> Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.
<...>
> About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
> “My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
> The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
> On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Now my memory isn't great, but I think there was a fair amount of uproar of this and Target scrapped the program. There was a line crossed between "useful" and "creepy" somewhere along the way, and it would be my guess that Amazon seeks to avoid that. I'd fully expect them to have the data and engineering capability to create a very powerful recommendation engine (the Target article is five years old now...) - but the expected value isn't there.
Or, we could go with proportional representation, make it a single district, and now we can reasonably expect to get 2-3 blue reps and 2-3 red ones, handling both the districting problem and efficiency/fairness problem in one go.
As a society we put effort into finding ways to help sick people that are not old because we can generally expect them to have a good number of productive years if they are cured. There's a good return value, and it feels just.
This isn't the case with older folk. At a guess, if we found a magical way to cure heart disease and completely take it off the list there, most of those people will still die, a few months/years later, from something else (cancer maybe, or that very descriptive "other" block).
Old age isn't just some single disease we can fix, its a general purpose failure of the body. If you can heal that in a cost effective way (or in any way, really), congrats, you're a trillionare, but I'd bet we'll see full-body cybernetics before we figure out a way to cure aging.
http://www.fairvote.org/ - Promotes IRV, and I think they were in favor of proportional representation, but I can't seem to find the pages now (go figure).
http://www.equal.vote/ - Promotes a customized score voting system, which seems more solid than IRV from my reading, but no mention of proportional representation.
It's too bad, really, I'd be hugely in favor if something like this came up in a CA statewide ballot/proposition.
> Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken.
If you're driving along the freeway looking out the window, I could see how you might think this. Surprise - people that have any amount of money don't want to live within hearing distance of a freeway. Most of the spaces slightly further away are fine. I have friends in the Oakland Hills along 13; perfectly respectable area. Those friends have parents out near Richmond - lots of typical older middle class housing from the 50s.
> The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there.
I do get out there, and most of Alameda county away from the edge of the bay is comfortably upper-middle class (Dublin/Pleasanton/Fremont/Livermore; Hayward/Castro Valley/San Leandro feel more middle class with upper-middle surroundings + urban gentrification starting to take hold). I have friends out in Stockton; they have a comfortably middle-class house, as do their parents (though on the whole I've seen less of Stockton than I have of the Bay).
I could go on (grandparents in Orinda, an uncle in Fremont, friends scattered through SF, SJ, etc.) but my main point is that most of the Bay is suburbs on suburbs, most of them are at least middle class, and our ridiculous zoning/prop 13/NIMBY problems trap people wherever they are and discourage new construction, which contributes to the crappy old look of a lot of places.
Side note - the US population is heavily urban/suburban, so even if I was running some kind of internet-based business, the loss from ignoring/losing rural areas is something like ~25% of the population; imo it doesn't really matter that much.
No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.
The problem, up until the advent of MOOCs, was there was no incentive for higher education to improve. Prices go up every year, more instruction is dumped on post-docs and adjuncts instead of professors, but the number of people going to college continues to increase. Why improve your product if people keep buying it regardless?
And this idea of active learning is nothing new. Maria Montessori did extensive research on effective teaching methods more than a hundred years ago and moved more and more heavily to small projects and physical interaction as the most effective means of instruction.
http://www.infomontessori.com/sensorial/visual-sense-binomia...
I happen to like the binomial cube as an example, because it takes a confusing, "just memorize FOIL" type of concept and turns it into something you can directly interact with to develop a much clearer understanding.
And of course, there's things like this: https://xkcd.com/1356/
Or the explorable explanation that was on the front page the other day about game theory and trust: http://ncase.me/trust/
Or Brett Victor's classic Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
The ability to interact with a model blows traditional educational methods out of the water as far as gaining serious understanding (imo), and I expect this type of instruction to only grow in importance as time goes on.
And it isn't hard to see the direct effects this is having, now. When the governor of Texas calls out the national guard to keep an eye on the US Army doing training exercises, because of right-wing conspiracy insanity that has hit the mainstream, we are having problems. When President Trump can claim that Obama is the founder of Isis and people just eat it up, we are having problems. For God's sake, the man had his press secretary go out on Day One of his presidency and lie about crowd sizes. He spouts bullshit about crime statistics in Sweden and for months, Breitbart suddenly has constant articles about how immigrants are causing everything wrong in Sweden ever (I particularly remember an article with an image of a mangled child, with the claim this was caused by immigrants, only for word to come out later it was a dog attack).
The "mainstream media" (and I use the term in quotes because all the biggest radio shows are right-wing, fox is the biggest cable channel and the WSJ is the biggest paper aside from USA Today) is like a dog chasing a car, towing a pro-business line and chasing after whatever will give them the most eyeballs at the moment. But at least they aren't a goddamn propaganda force for the left, marching in lock-step and feeding off each other the way the right media does.
> Sessions also formally withdrew a signature part of Attorney General Eric Holder's "Smart on Crime" initiative, which sought to target the most serious crimes and reduce the number of defendants charged with non-violent drug offenses that would otherwise trigger mandatory minimum sentences.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/12/politics/sessions-criminal-cha...
Without even considering the rest of the Trump administration, Sessions is taking this country backwards and encouraging policies we already know don't work.