This is Chris Hughes trading on the only credibility he has left, which is that he participated in Facebook as an undergad and Harvard (but never quit school to pursue it full-time), amd by virtue of luck and his early contributions gets the status as "Facebook cofounder." His real ambition has been to become a figure in liberal politics. He bought The New Republic as a vanity project and drove it into the ground in two years. He and his husband moved to NY so that his husband could run for office in a purple district, he lost in a landslide (in a winnable district, too).
It's popular in liberal circles to blame Facebook for Trump, and so punishing them has become a cause celebre, but it will pass.
I think your point ignores that there's a mandatory federal pension system w/ a minimum benefit that people who don't save in private pension plans or who may only have temp jobs do contribute to, and will draw from in old age. It's true that it's not fully funded, sure, but if it didn't exist it would be the obvious policy solution to the problem you're describing.
Yeah the article goes through the mechanism, but it's not a new story that private equity firms buy companies with debt that the target company ends up owning. It's a little bit interesting to read about how it's done but it's basically the same thing you can read about in Barbarians At the Gate. It's not that they wanted or didn't care about Remington going bankrupt -- if Remington doesn't pay back those loans, it'll be harder for Cerberus to fund the next LBO, Cerberus would prefer that the hedge funds who loaned the money make back their money -- it's that it's highly leveraged and very risky. They assume it won't work every time, but the law of averages isn't comforting to the people working at Remington.
I wore this everyday for 5 years, including in Iraq, and I always felt that it was horrible at actually camoflauging anything. One main reason was that it would get brighter and brighter over time, as the colors tended to fade -- a well worn was incredbily light-looking that Soldiers would pop out at you against a darker background. We were told eventually that you can't use regular detergent on it because it has brighteners, that you should use Woolite. It was also supposed to be a benefit to have velcro for nametapes, rank, and unit insignia so that soldiers didn't need to pay to get things sewn on, but it made for very noisy and inconvenient examples of people sticking to each other in close quarters.
I wonder what the rate is at places which skew towards similar entry-level positions; for example, what % of people get fired annually in the fast-casual restaurant industry, or in retail? I don't know.
I do think that in these sorts of industries, it's important to be able to hire people with a "probationary" mindset, because if firing weren't possible an employer would become a lot more risk-adverse. It's actually really important to people with no credentials or who might have a risky profile (a criminal conviction, for example) that they be allowed to prove themselves and start building a resume, so we should be careful about incentives in these cases.
I don't think I'd argue that emotional pain isn't "real." I have felt negative emotions before, I know that negative emotions actually make me feel bad. I also don't think it's some kind of good thing to make people feel bad. Sometimes it's just a matter of good manners -- respect people, avoid offending them, etc. You are positing that when microaggressions occur there was intent, however, and this is obviously false. In fact, it is exactly the lack of intent that is the focus of most of the conversation -- unconscious bias being the main explanation for why the aggressor commited the micro-act that led to the aggrieved's injury. There is a strong analogy to physical pain here, yes -- we're talking about the arena of ideas where unpleasant conversations and thoughts are inevitable if one is going to become and educated person. In a physical arena, say athletics, a similar situation would be where a coach makes everyone practice until they feel micro-pain, like maybe fatigue in their muscles and shortness of breath, or bumps and bruises from normal contact.
Your argument seems to be that "since some speech can be prohibited, it isn't correct that corporations have absolute free speech rights."
That's absolutely true. Neither a corporation nor an individual can engage in libel, some types of obscenity, true threats, etc. Furthermore, there are indeed cases where corporate entities are treated differently than individuals, and no one seriously argues that it's inappropriate to do so (there's no corporate right to bear arms, for instance, and corporations don't cast votes in elections). On the other hand, there are obviously very important situations where a corporation must be treated as a legal "person" (to sue and be sued, to own property, etc.)
The crux of the argument that won in Citizen's United is that, among all types of speech, it's political speech that must be jealously protected. Even though there are serious arguments against allowing corporations to participate in campaign-related speech, it was found that there was not enough of a compelling government interest to overcome the strict constitutional scrutiny that is required when the government seeks to limit political participation. As corporations are just groups of people who form an entity to pool resources and share in ownership, those groups of people do not lose their rights because they pick one social and legal structure over another (for instance, a school, non-profit, or a church). The important example was of a corporate entity producing a video that was critical of Hillary Clinton within some amount of time before an election.
The "you cannot yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" argument makes it seem as if others are denying that the government can regulate any speech, but that is not true, people understand the current state of the law.
I think I can rephrase your argument as: "I cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, so obviously some speech can be prohibited. Therefore, since we're only talking about where to draw the line, it can be drawn over here where I'm advocating it be drawn." This ignores distinctions between situations that have been acknowledged for a long time. You cannot shout "fire" (falsely) in a crowded theater because it would be illegal to say something false when you know it is likely to cause immediate harm. It is also illegal to do other things that are kinda-sort-of free speech related if you look at them the right way -- you can't lie for financial gain, you can't lie to obstruct an investigation, you can't lie under oath, you can't file a false police report, etc. etc. Because these are all true, it doesn't mean that in a different situation speech can necessarily be regulated because we've already crossed the line out of absolutism and into situationally-dependent regulation.
This is precisely not the reason there's a distinction. The problem is that the $15,000 bribe went to the pockets of someone who was subverting the process (mainly the coaches), robbing the university.
Legality aside, "corruption" implies fraud. Fraud implies personal gain by dishonest means. The allocation of spots at a private university to the children of wealthy donors would only be corruption if it were dishonest, but it's not.
This is an example of a NYT reporter filling in context so that they don't get pubicly shamed. It seems like a lot of reporters think it's their job to stop readers from reaching the obvious conclusions of their reporting, lest a larger narrative be lost.
I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).
You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.
Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.
The "regular joe in Queens" may not get the SWE job in Amazon, but they most certainly can understand that with 25,000 well paid workers comes lots of other economic activity. Do you think that retail owners, restaurant owners, construction workers, etc. etc. etc. are too stupid to understand that they're not going to get hired as a UX designer? Maybe the people who run coffee and catering businesses would LOVE to serve execs their food, because they like new customers? I also find it remarkeble that your argument seems to be: "amazon treats their workers poorly, but also they're too well paid and they'll gentrify the place, but also regular Queens residents won't get the jobs anyway" -- so they're going to gentrify the area with their terrible jobs? Why would the Queens workers want to work there if it's so terrible?
Big ticket? Of the abatements, only $500M (the portion related to construction) wasn't available to any business that met the state's requirements. Giveaway? These are tax incentives that are part of the state's tax code -- taking less in taxes to incentivize a particular action is not the same as giving away money that could be spent elsewhere (to illustrate why it isn't the same, that money is not currently available to be spent elsewhere). NYC won HQ2 originally in spite of not giving nearly as much as other jurisdictions were willing to. The polling is much higher than 56% when the question is asked generally, and the polling is highest in Queens which stood to gain the most. The city may or may not "need" 25,000 new jobs but LIC certainly "wanted" those jobs. The proposal was most popular among Black and Hispanic Queens residents and least popular among White Manhattan residents -- suggesting that those who stood to benefit from local economic activity were most excited.
This is, honestly, quite ridiculous in context. It might be true that, say, someone launching an ICBM might be shielded from the horror of the violence with clinical terms. When you are in urban ground combat it's not as if you say "hmm, it makes it feel better if I think of it as only shooting the building!" You are perfectly fine with killing because YOU'RE BEING SHOT AT and you're afraid you're going to die. The correct criticism, if you're looking for one, is that Soldiers and Marines learn to put on a facade of ultraviolent aggression so as to not confront the reality, and as a result they lose perspective and maybe go too far in some cases, and that's what you need to watch for (I was a platoon leader in Iraq)
This is simply how military tactics and strategy are talked about in an academic sense. It might be weird to think that Military Science is an academic discipline when you're not used to talking about war all the time, but when you're at West Point you take these classes and this is the tone. It's because you're not going to stop every 5 minutes to reflect on those who died in combat -- that would be kind of crazy, and there are plenty of other contexts where the moral and ethical issues of war and combat are discussed in great depth.
To make an analogy, your comment would be like my reading a Computer Science paper about something technical and then commenting: "why is this person writing about technology in such technical terms? Is it because they don't want to confront the negative consequences of technology on our political and social fabric? Don't they care about the privacy issues?" It's kind of just a way to say that you wish they were talking about what YOU want to talk about.
It makes a lot of sense -- it's possible that this ends up being a very viable, scaled business with low margins. If the margins are lower than Alphabet enjoys as a whole, and if there isn't an argument for synergies with existing Alphabet businesses, it could simultaneously be a very good opportunity but also not accretive for Alphabet share holders. Part of the restructuring of Alphabet/Google and the hiring of Ruth Porat was to be more disciplined about not doing everything possible with shareholder money. $24M here, $24M there, sooner or later you're talking about real money.
Do you know for a fact they only had access to those messages? If that's the case, Facebook should be very clear about this in their response, and I'm not sure why they wouldn't be. Copying from their response:
"Did partners get access to messages?
Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature."
So, why wouldn't Facebook add here: "to be clear, the third party apps only had access to messages which were sent and received from the app. Private conversations with friends could not have been leaked to the third party companies" or something like that?
I'd agree if the facts were that the 3rd parties only had read/write access for messages that were coming from their platform. The NYT article implies that the 3rd parties had read access for all messages, including messages unrelated to the integration. The FB response article doesn't dispute this. If it is truly the case that FB gave the 3rd parties read access to all messages, that wouldn't be what users expected when they gave permission -- and it seems like unnecessary sloppiness and a lack of privacy controls at Facebook.
I agree, and I think your point can be even more generalized -- businesses can collect information about their customers, there's nothing wrong with it.
The key difference is that, while a website may know from your ad click that you were targeted by a campaign looking for college-aged men or whatever, it doesn't necessarily know who you are. That's the difference between personally identifiable information and simply targeted information.
There needs to be safeguards to avoid abuse. For example, if the targeting dimensions of an ad campaign are so narrow that the few people fall into it, it shouldn't be targeted (a good example would be geographic targeting of devices that are inside of your house -- too granular).
But, I don't care if a website knows that I am likely male or my coarse age or whatever, because i don't have to tell the website who I am in the real world if I don't want to. "Selling your data" is commonly understood by the public to mean something like this -- people suspect that facebook just gives lists of their users to third parties and asks them who they want to send ads to, which is the accusation that Facebook is denying.
If I end up making a purchase w/ a website, then sure, they'll know some things about me from the FB ad click referral and the underlying ad campaign they ran. I feel fine with that, I'm entering a relationship with the business where they know quite a bit about me anyway -- like my name, my address, what I'm buying, etc. I don't buy things from places if I can't trust them.
I assure you that there's no real way to spend Google's money on ads and then somehow make it back on rev share w/ publishers (or on the money you didn't collect from the real advertisers who didn't win the auctions you overpaid for)... of all the possible scams, I don't think this one would work very well. I'm willing to look into it though.
If someone in the EU buys it while they are in the EU, you just imported something to the EU and the EU's laws apply to you, yes. If that person buys it from you in the US and then carries it back to the EU, they have the liability for following law, paying duties and taxes, etc. When it comes to things that are completely digital, I believe where the money is changing hands is what matters most.
Article 4.1 itself, as it goes on, defines personal data in a way that it relates specifically to that which can identify someone, so it doesn't mean literally anything about the ad placement simply because a person is seeing the ad. Definition of personal data: "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person."
So the publisher, through a platform, issues a bid request to an exchange with a lot of information in it. The parameters of that bid request contain all kinds of context like the site, the browser or device, etc. Critically, it also includes the cookie. The way GDPR has been interpreted by Google (btw Google is considered to be overly conservative in its approach by the adtech world): Cookies can only be passed by publishers who get consent to collect and pass them, and they must get consent for each adtech vendor. Furthermore, Google will not pass those cookies to anyone else because it can't be sure that the vendor receiving them was given consent by the user. Other platforms haven't done that last part; and some publishers are even saying that they refuse to collect affirmative consent. This is because people interpret it differently. From my reading, Brave seems to be trying to drive for a new interpretation: it's not only a matter of cookies, which is the parameter associated with a user, it's a matter of ALL the info even when it's not related to tracking a single user. My guess is that Eich's hoping to get a court to adopt this new stricter interpretation, but if that were to happen it would mean that the regulators' guidance thus far would be moot and all of the mitigations the adtech world has gone through to prepare would be out the window.
As a general rule, in most jurisdictions, you cannot do business across international borders in this way, no. As soon as someone from the EU pays Google while they are physically inside of the EU, that business is subject to the EU's laws.
I went to a military academy (and now I interview a lot at Google, too). Doing a lot of soul searching now...
But seriously, I agree with the top comment about interviewing at Google, and as far as the military academy "hazing" it's generally misunderstood. It's very, very rare for an upperclassman at my particular school to be cruel in the movie-sense, or what I think is the stereotypical fraternity-sense. More common is an institionalized set of standards for the freshmen that may seem overly tough or even arbitrary but serve several purposes: a) they give the freshman a crash course in being accountable for details, b) they give the upperclassman a crash course in enforcing accountability and holding others to high standards, and c) they create a sense of shared hardship and camaraderie. These are actually all very important lessons before a second lieutenant takes on responsibility for decisions that could mean life or death for his or her soldiers (which, in the case of my graduating class, was a reality for us as quickly as 4 months after graduation). You have to force the upperclassmen to come out of their shells and make the freshmen wear their uniform correctly, or make their bed correctly, etc. so that when they graduate they will have the courage to tell their soldiers that they really do need to inspect the vehicles, or maintain the weapons, or wear their safety gear. It takes practice to be accountable for standards on a team. It's not supposed to be about making people suffer for the fun of it, but of course there are jerks everywhere.
While everyone is pointing out the practical, long-term benefits of pure mathematics, I disagree with the premise that there needs to be a practical pursuit associated with mathematics or any other theoretical fields (including the humanities). Sometimes we study things to pursue knowledge itself. If we're talking strictly about public funding, then sure, let's talk about practicality, but otherwise I'm happy that someone is getting funded by a university to devote their lives to something like the Riemann hypothesis. Expanding known human knowledge is justification itself I think. One shouldn't expect it to be easy, or to pay especially well -- it's its own privilege.
One more example of why income is not the right measure: Naples FL is always on these lists, a place I'm very familiar with. There are a few hedge fund types using Florida as a haven from state income tax, they have big houses on the beach. That's your 1% of Naples. Then there are tons of retired folks from across the wealth spectrum. Retired people can be quite well off and have a low "income."
Many who argue this point are usually the ones who would be doing the distortion when the time comes -- for example, when Yanis Varoufakis argues that there needs to be more income redistribution across Europe or else the pitchforks and torcehs are coming, I wonder what the difference is between predicting instablity and vaguely threatening political violence.
The Gilded Age refers to the last several decades of the 19th century, and yet the article compares today's data to 1928. That would be "the Roaring Twenties."
Also, if a group of urban westerners WERE to stop eating such a large quantity of meat en masse, it would have the effect of lowering the price of meat and not the effect of simply reducing the meat eaten in the world. Most of that meat will just get bought by others for a slightly cheaper price. Making protein cheaper for poorer people in the world would arguably be the best outcome of this experiment if the magnitude were anything close to their estimates.