If someone robs a bank, or steals a wallet, they're probably hoping to get as much money as they can. If that wallet happened to $1B in it, I don't think it makes the thief more heinous. If we sentence people based on the amount of money they manage to steal, we're sentencing them largely based on luck.
If you shoot someone and hit their head killing them or just their ear, its a matter of luck (and possibly skill), the charges are different. The justice system judges based on intent as well as outcome (i.e. execution X luck).
well you're not wrong. That attempted Trump assassination was a few inches away from being in the same books as John Wilkes Booth, instead of being talked about for less than a week and then forgotten. Sentences would have been night and day.
Many jurisdictions have the same punishment for attempted murder and murder though.
I get that there are different views on how much punishment should be based on intent vs outcome. My opinion is factoring in outcome in criminal sentences is often pragmatic, but if we had omniscient judges, judging on intent would be ideal.
You're either not understanding or refusing to engage with the hypothetical. When you steal a wallet, you don't get to choose how much money is in it. It could have $5, or $500.
You're imagining something like a thief who just intends to steal $X, robs a bank, counts out $X and leaves the rest of the money untouched. In reality, most thieves are opportunists: they will take as much money as opportunity allows without getting caught.
Obviously you couldn't physically fit $1B cash in a wallet, but assuming this hypothetical wallet did have $1B, does that make the thief more heinous or just luckier?
(If you must insist on a literal and physically accurate wallet in the hypothetical, just imagine it held $1B in Bitcoin.)
But if the wallets each only contain $100 and you steal enough of them to get to $1 billion, that is qualitatively different from stealing a single wallet. The man committed fraud repeatedly and caused financial hardships for tons of people. He wasn't lucky in how much he managed to steal, that was a combination of effort, skill, and reckless disregard for the wellbeing of others.
> Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.
The unintuitive thing is that both this article and pg's essay are both advocating this! They're each complaining about another group being mean.
Paul Graham's essay doesn't mention anything about LGBT people or issues. It doesn't really say what specific events he may have in mind, but it complains that woke people are being intolerant, sometimes bullying or ostracizing people for their beliefs, and trying to enforce allegiance to their side over honesty.
The author of this essay is reading between the lines and assuming pg is a bigot who might discriminate against a trans person. They say actions like pg's are "mean", "unkind", and "malicious".
I think a lot of this has to do with people being polarized and viewing every political statement in terms of which team it supports: if someone says something against your team, that means they must be on the other team, and are therefore evil. But regardless of the reasons, these uncharitable assumptions (on both sides) cause way too much conflict between people with similar core values.
I don't think either author would discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or gender. One can disagree with pg's criticisms without calling him a bigot.
This makes no sense to me. If 8% (171,000 people) of Gaza were to perish, that would leave Gaza with the population it had in 2020. The ceasefire reportedly will have Israel pulling out from Gaza fully and a massive influx of humanitarian aid is expected to enter Gaza. If the ceasefire goes through, the death rate will drop greatly and the population will begin to grow again.
As horrible as the destruction has been, this is nowhere close to eliminating the people of Gaza. If genocide was a goal of any of the Israeli leadership, they abjectly failed.
> If genocide was a goal of any of the Israeli leadership, they abjectly failed
This take is incredibly callous. Suppose 8% of everyone you gets killed. This is a shockingly brutal thing to happen to a population. Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so people don't say "there's still Jews left so technically the Holocaust wasn't a genocide". The holocaust was a genocide, and this is a genocide (yes, "is", they're still dropping bombs on a population half of which is under 18). There's a reason the relevant cases haven't been thrown out of the ICJ and ICC.
But genocidal people are callous! I'm not being callous towards the people living through this. You don't need to convince me it's horrible.
But put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical evil genocidal person. Assume 8% of Gaza was killed (though this figure is wrong). Having Gaza at it's 2020 population is negligible to them. They were hoping to murder everyone and reclaim their holy land or something and instead (purely from a population standpoint) they're basically just back to the status quo after the truce. Even most Nazis would say they ultimately failed in their genocidal ambitions and they killed two thirds of the Jews in Europe and 90% in Poland.
Second, 8% of Gaza hasn't been killed. By the Gaza health ministry's estimate, about 2% have been killed. Your source arrived at 8% literally by just quadrupling the number without any basis in data from Gaza. This is out of line with all the estimates from Gaza.
> Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so...
I'm aware and I didn't say anything factually wrong. Killing just part of a people doesn't legally exempt it from being genocide. But killing part of a people also doesn't imply genocide. Every war has killed part of a people. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars each killed far more people than the Gaza war, but neither is considered genocide.
If Israel were acting like the Nazis, there wouldn't be any Palestinians left in Gaza. They'd all be carpet bombed, shot on sight, or sent to forced labor camps. There's a world of difference between the two.
That's not even remotely what anyone is saying. If you're denying there's a difference in quality between what the Nazis did and what Israel did, that's also rather appalling.
To qualify Israel's actions as a genocide, lawyers don't have to show that Israel killed every Palestinian in Gaza, but they will have to prove they intended to. The ICC is not going to rule this a genocide.
As should be obvious, the "in part" wording of "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group" does not mean killing any part of a ethnic group can be genocide (e.g. killing 7 people of an ethnicity in an airstrike is not a genocide). The part must be an identifiable subgroup. For example, intent to kill all Palestinians in Gaza, rather than all Palestinians everywhere, would qualify as genocidal intent. There has to be intent to physical eradicate an identifiable group. Forcing people to leave is also not genocide (it's an ethnic cleansing). Other war crimes do not qualify as genocide.
The C-suite are humans and as humans, many of them have ideologies. It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
> but never really actually cared about the outcomes
To be clear, I'm referring to the outcomes of the DEI programs in and of themselves; not the outcomes that resulted from having those programs (and/or appearing to have them). And to be clear - some C-suites really might have cared about the programs because they believed in them.
> It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
I disagree, wholeheartedly. The majority of executives have shown, time and again, that they primarily care about money. A close second is power. It's not to say that they don't have goals beyond enriching themselves, but rather that does appear to be the goal they overwhelmingly choose when said values are in conflict.
I suspect the conditions were the opposite at the time: competition for good non-white employees was fierce after BLM, making them harder to find. If I'm understanding the Bloomberg numbers correctly, a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
I had an interesting experience asking a startup I worked at why they had no female engineers. The answer was they couldn't afford them. They were in such demand that they commanded a significant premium over male engineers at the same level.
This is real. Female engineers are overrepresented in big tech something like 3-4x the graduation rate. There just aren't any left over for startups that can't afford FAANG rates.
Why would those quality traits be specific to females in engineering? Engineering as a whole is a skill fungible regardless of gender so if a gender is hired by big-tech at 3-4x their graduation rates compared to the other gender, then there must be something at play.
Think about it like this, if you'd use the same argument you gave me if the roles were reversed with men being 3-4x overrepresented in a well paying white collar career, everyone would cry sexism and discrimination and action being taken to "fix" that. So why isn't it when the genders are reversed?
>Men occupy a position of institutional and societal power that makes such a comparison unhelpful, at best.
That doesn't justify discrimination. You're using the same argument Nazis used to genocide Jews: "they're overrepresented in positions of wealth and power so it's ok to discriminate and kill them all because it's obviously their fault for your problems".
You average man has no benefits in common with the top 1% of wealthy and powerful men who write the rules. The top 1% of Americans have more in common with the top 1% of Russians or Chinese then they do with your average Walmart American male.
Why punish men todays for the original sin? This only leads to extremism as backlash.
And price is determined by both supply and demand.
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
Conservatives believe the truth supports conservative beliefs, and liberals believe it supports liberal beliefs. This type of comment is about the same as just saying "I am a liberal", which almost by definition means you think liberal beliefs are true. It doesn't add much to the conversation.
Well, no. It means when facts are tested by objective means, more of them align with liberal beliefs than conservative beliefs. Unless you believe that facts can't be objectively tested?
If you comment with evidence showing that, you might be enriching the comment section. Simply having a bunch of people leave unsubstantiated comments like "truth has a conservative bias" or "truth has a liberal bias" is only adding noise. And it shows a certain lack of self-awareness.
I am on the US left by any survey measurable by my principles, while not from US, this logic also sounds juvenile. Stooping to the level that a single person should be able to represent a whole side, did you see Joe at the debates?
Oh boy. Are you trying to do the "both sides" thing? Joe was pretty bad at the debates. His voice was weak. He stuttered. He misspoke. It was bad. And then what happened? He stepped down as the party's candidate, and the rest is history, as they say.
That is quite different from making up wild stories about immigrants eating cats, fabricating nonsense about widespread election fraud / stolen elections, suggesting injecting bleach is a sufficient remedy for coronavirus, sharpie-ing atop hurricane maps to prove previous incorrect statements were totally real because... look: sharpie! And this man has never had more widespread support.
These. Parties. Are. Not. The. Same.
By the way, it wasn't just one man making this "immigrants are eating our pets" thing. In addition to Trump, other prominent Republicans such as J.D. Vance, Marc Molinaro, and Laura Loomer also repeated this lie.
Statistically, most US seems to believe that the Democratic party is obviously worse at the Federal level. They just lost an election on every metric, although they did win the lost-to-Trump-twice award after almost a decade of opportunities to come up with an effective counter-Trump strategy.
He's been the undisputed head of the "conservative" party in the U.S. for 10 years now. And just won his second election, this time winning the popular vote. If that's not mainstream, I don't know what is.
Accurate. It's difficult to argue that the mainstream US Republican isn't a populist now. Twice is not a fluke.
And ever since the 70s there's been a tension between the blocks of the Republican party: fiscal business conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and rural/religious conservatives.
After couple decades getting the final group fired up, they decided they wanted to drive. And the primary system rewarded them.
> the final group fired up, they decided they wanted to drive. And the primary system rewarded them.
I've been an outside observer of US politics for many decades, I'd characterize what happened not so much as the primary system rewarding them but more as a consummate grifter and snakeoil carpetbagger fooling them into thinking they've won.
They got fired up, they got the candidate they voted for, I'm not sure the expected rewards will follow as hoped and expected.
I have definitely heard conservatives complain that reality has a left-wing bias. Not in quite those words, but close enough that you wonder if it’s possible to die of cognitive dissonance.
> The WIV just published 56 new sequences, proving him wrong (but still exonerating themselves per the headline)
You're picking out one point from a 15 hour debate. A much larger fraction of the debate was spent debunking false points made by the lab leak theory side.
But it's also not even clear whether the zoonosis guy was wrong. He argues that the WIV didn't secretly have BANAL-52, but not that they didn't have any unpublished or unsequenced viruses collected any time up to 2021.
I see two arguments based on published sequences, often presented without clear distinction between the two:
1. If the WIV had a progenitor, they would have published it pre-pandemic. That was always ridiculous, since any active research group in the world has unpublished work in progress. These new samples confirm that to be specifically false, since they were collected "between 2004 and 2021".
2. If the WIV had a progenitor, they would have published it post-pandemic. In other words, they would publish that sequence, knowing that it establishes the WIV's research as the most likely cause of the pandemic. I don't think many people, no matter how honorable, would wish to confess to ~7M deaths. Even if they did, it's likely that the PRC would impose terrible consequences on themselves and their loved ones, since that contradicts the PRC's preferred story of zoonotic origin outside China followed by import on frozen fish.
So I don't think the absence of published sequences means much. Do you disagree?
Or is there any other piece of evidence that you believe strongly establishes that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans by natural zoonosis, and you'd be willing to discuss? I understand you think the points I mentioned from that debate aren't the most important, but you didn't say which ones you think are.
If it was mealy, it was probably improperly stored or grown in too warm weather. They aren't normally mealy. They're more tender and less crisp than Honeycrisp and have a pleasant texture.
You're likely not getting good McIntosh apples in your area. The texture should be similar to a typical apple, but not as crisp as Honeycrisp. A slice of McIntosh should snap if you try to bend it.
Part of the reason for this is online job postings.
The good candidates apply to some jobs, get hired, and stop applying. Some terrible candidates will apply to hundreds of jobs, never get hired for long, and just keep applying on every job posting. So a small minority of terrible coders end up being a disproportionately large fraction of interviewees.
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