No serious* person in the Progressive movement has said anything remotely like what you enumerated. It sounds like you're erecting straw-men, but I'll bite and address things individually.
Those of Caucasian decent have been told for years that they are racists simply because of their skin color.
No one (serious*) is saying that. There is a strong believe for progressives that the mainstream American society goes out of its way to avoid recognizing or admitting that the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in this country has done serious damage to the social mobility and opportunity available to people of color. As shorthand, progressives will often say something along the lines of "the system is racist" and make the assertion that people who don't see or aren't willing to acknowledge this are practicing racism themselves.
They can't be discriminated against because they aren't the right color.
See above. Progressives are pretty clear that the issue is systemic racism, not individual racism. In the vast majority of places in society where race might be a factor, the systemic racism is biased against people of color. This is supported by statistics across the board. I hope you can understand that because of the huge disparity that exists today, progressives don't generally feel like there's much room to discuss racism against white people. We're generally in agreement that we should focus our energy on fixing the racism against people of color first, since the scale of problem and resulting social harm is so much worse.
They have something called " White Privilege " that, apparently, is some sort of " I win " button available on tap.
No one talk about an "I win" button. "White Privilege" is again a shorthand to refer to the natural outcome of so many functions in society being inherently biased against people of color. The simplest example is the outcome of the policy of redlining. The direct result of redlining was that even those people of color that were financially sound and otherwise prosperous effectively couldn't purchase real estate. This insulated the black community from potential gains in the housing market as real estate has exploded in value over the years. The trickle-down result which is often referred to as white privilege is that further generations of people of color are born into circumstances where their family wasn't able to build generational wealth to pass on and give their kids a boost. I don't know anything about you or your family, but I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that your parents eventually owned their own house. Maybe they willed it to you, or maybe they were able to retire comfortably after paying it off. That's a source of financial stability and opportunity that much much fewer black families have been allowed to have.
They get turned down for jobs and education slots because the Company or University has to have enough minorities lest they be called racists too.
People get turned down for jobs and education for all sorts of reasons. It's never really been about how hard you work, that's a piece of American mythology with little basis in reality. If your interviewer had a bad day, you might not be getting that job. If you happened to apply to a school that had a huge bump in applications that year, you might not be getting that acceptance letter. It's illegal to discriminate against an individual in an application process specifically on their race. It's not illegal, however, to discriminate based on some other innocuous qualities such as their name. Unfortunately, studies have shown that having a name associated with being of color will negatively affect your job acceptance, even when you have an identical resume to someone with a more white-sounding name. There's a
Social science is pretty clear that hatred and fear are the strongest motivators of human behavior in groups. I probably could've contributed something pleasant and productive to that particular YouTube conversation but I didn't know it was going on. Even if I did, there's little chance I would've cared enough to participate and share my civil, if not insightful thoughts. Meanwhile, if I was the type of person that has intense hate, anger, fear, etc. in my heart regarding the subject matter, I may very well have been in those comment sections posting "@#$% you nazi" and "I'm gonna @#$% you in your facist %&£!!!" etc...
The most motivated people in that comment section were not there to "be social" as you describe. They were there to foster conflict, because more conflict results in more hate which is going to boost their hate-filled agenda even more.
They were switching between both slogans, from what I remember. In any case, "Jews will not replace us" is a direct reference to the (clearly ridiculous) white genocide conspiracy theory which is sometimes referred to as the jewish replacement theory. It basically asserts that the supposed jewish rulers of all world institutions have a master plan of breeding, advancing and manipulating subhuman/inferior black and brown races to use as slave labor. Meanwhile, the theory goes that this necessitates the marginalization of the "superior" white/aryan races. White supremacists use this abhorrently racist and intellectually baseless theory to justify their actions of violence and hate as a necessary self-defense against a future where white people are the victims of genocide.
Hah. I hadn't played StarCraft II or any video games with some sort of general chat in a long while. A few weeks ago I opened it up and glanced at the chat room while setting up a game. Oh man... it gave me flashbacks to when I was a teenager and what I can assume were other idiot/asshole teenagers were flinging around verbal abuse and filth. I simply had forgotten that's what it was like.
There's a very powerful political machine in the US that actively fights against voting. Progressives such as myself not only want to increase access to IDs for voting but also make voting day a national holiday.
Throughout the US, drivers licenses are used as proof of age and identity for all sorts of legally restricted things. Getting a drivers license or even having permission to drive is not a constitutionally guaranteed right. Voting is.
travel on public transportation
Not sure what you're referring to here. In NYC, you can purchase a subway MetroCard with cash. That MetroCard doesn't contain any identifying info and you are free to use it however you wish. It also is used only on entry to the system, so it's not possible to track individuals traveling from point A to point B.
Voting in more than one district
I hope you already are aware that this is effectively impossible. Throughout the US, individuals have a registered polling location that has their name on a list. If you don't go to the right location, your name won't be on the list and you won't be able to cast a real ballot. At most, you can cast what's known as a provisional ballot. These don't get counted unless you contact the election authority afterwards and provide proof of who you are and that you had a right to cast that vote.
I have to produce ID to buy damn 1 box of sudafed
I know I sound like a jerk, but you don't have a constitutional right to purchase Sudafed.
Vaguely casting accusations at "mega corporations" and "illegals" makes it sound like you are personally prejudiced and not very well informed on the realities of what happens in this country's elections.
(repost because I accidentally selected AC)
If content matching algorithms supported by human checkers removed a million copies and yet there were still copies available to see, that means that no their safety policies simply aren't good enough. Maybe they need to implement a manual review for every video uploaded. Maybe they need to implement a grace period where a newly create account isn't allowed to post videos for 48 hours. Maybe they need to implement an identity verification system to match accounts to real people and not bots or sockpuppets.
There are definitely ways that YouTube and other companies could more effectively police their platforms to guard against violent, immoral and illegal content. They don't want to implement these policies because it would reduce engagement and impact their revenue source.
The entire point of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc is that they decide what you see through their feed algorithms. Consider if you were a gun store owner and you had a big sign out front saying "our guns are great for killing cops!" The vast majority of your customers aren't going to kill cops with the guns they purchase from you. However, when one guy finally does shoot a cop with your gun, you better believe the police are going to be showing up at your door.
The wires, the electricity, your internet connection, and heck even your ISP are basically agnostic to the communication you're passing through their channel. Facebook, however, is not. It has a giant algorithmic process to promote and demote the communication that you produce and consume on their website. It has a giant scraping and affiliate system to analyze the communication that you produce and consume off their website. Facebook's primary revenue model is to interlace the content you consume with content from their advertising business. It's well-understood and documented that to increase engagement with their paid advertising content, Facebook's software is designed to present you with content that manipulates your psychology to engage more.
Yes, you can adjust a Nest thermostat by hand. You could use it as a "dumb" thermostat without ever connecting it to a network or assigning it to a remote management account.
I spoke to a friend who is senior in their desktop tech deployment. They do have multiple orgs and certs but Apple revoked all of them. Presumably, Apple's logic is they wanted to a) ensure anything that may have been improperly deployed was bricked and b) send a message.
These days, Apple’s rules allow a single company to operate multiple developer accounts. It’s possible and likely that this Facebook Research app was being signed by a separate account than e.g. the internal corporate apps that Facebook undoubtedly uses.
In NYC, it's possible to do sudden large rent increases by several ways. One way is by proving that according to property value and rent history, the landlord could've legally been charging a much higher rent for years already but they had kept it low for market reasons. Another way is by claiming that the property is actually much more valuable than it had been previously valued by documentation of renovations or improvements. I suspect similar loopholes exist in the Bay Area of CA.
I suspect you're just reciting truisms. Unfortunately, this problem has been growing massively in the past two decades. The scale and visibility is such now that some journalists, investigators and generally insightful people are taking long hard looks at it.
A sizable percentage of stray animals in shelters don't end up getting "rescued by a family in a traditional home with children that will play with them." According to the ASPCA, approximately a third of shelter animals are euthanized instead of adopted.
Based on my experience growing up in New York City, grandparent's suggestions would help out a great deal here. All the high-rise and high-density housing construction here is ultra-luxury, $1M+ one bedroom apartments and condos in the most popular city districts. A lot of that property is bought by shell companies that are used to shield foreign buyers and their laundered money from scrutiny. We have laws that require transparency in real-estate purchases as well as due diligence in sellers that funds used in cash purchases aren't the result of illegal enterprise, but the real-estate lobby is ridiculously strong in New York State so most of that enforcement is toothless.
Much of advertising is trying to subvert your better judgement of keeping your precious dollars in your pocket and radicalize you into a rabid fanboy showing off your new fashion accessory/tech toy/luxury car to all of your friends. The problem is that targeted advertising works so much better than the age range & gender categories of yesterday.
Both at work and at home, I use a pair of Apple Extended Keyboard II Model M3501. They're more than 15 years old, one of them came with my first Power Mac in the early 90s. These are true mechanical keyboards that aren't too large (unlike the famous IBM ones) and have a standard modern key layout. As I've gone through the successive generations of Apple keyboards I've found myself more and more disappointed by their feel and durability. A couple years ago I stumbled on my old Mac parts in the basement and was pleased to discover that everything, including the keyboard, still worked. It was a joy to use that hardware again so I looked for a way to adapt it to my current Macs.
They do use an Apple-proprietary PS2 equivalent called ADB connectors but it's trivial to build a USB converter for them. You don't even need to splice up a cable to make the adapter, the ports on the keyboard are connected to the main board with removable ribbon cables.
I know an Apple engineer that uses an Android phone. Last I saw he had a Pixel. Another guy I know who does sales for an Apple B2B reseller carries both an Android phone and a Windows Surface into his meetings with Apple SEs.
I know a couple people that work at Facebook. One of them recently mentioned in passing that when he was interviewing, he created a Facebook account for the first time. That was because he had been nudged by the guy who recommended the position to him that they won't hire anyone who doesn't have a Facebook account.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of Caucasian decent have been told for years that they are racists simply because of their skin color.
No one (serious*) is saying that. There is a strong believe for progressives that the mainstream American society goes out of its way to avoid recognizing or admitting that the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in this country has done serious damage to the social mobility and opportunity available to people of color. As shorthand, progressives will often say something along the lines of "the system is racist" and make the assertion that people who don't see or aren't willing to acknowledge this are practicing racism themselves.
They can't be discriminated against because they aren't the right color.
See above. Progressives are pretty clear that the issue is systemic racism, not individual racism. In the vast majority of places in society where race might be a factor, the systemic racism is biased against people of color. This is supported by statistics across the board. I hope you can understand that because of the huge disparity that exists today, progressives don't generally feel like there's much room to discuss racism against white people. We're generally in agreement that we should focus our energy on fixing the racism against people of color first, since the scale of problem and resulting social harm is so much worse.
They have something called " White Privilege " that, apparently, is some sort of " I win " button available on tap.
No one talk about an "I win" button. "White Privilege" is again a shorthand to refer to the natural outcome of so many functions in society being inherently biased against people of color. The simplest example is the outcome of the policy of redlining. The direct result of redlining was that even those people of color that were financially sound and otherwise prosperous effectively couldn't purchase real estate. This insulated the black community from potential gains in the housing market as real estate has exploded in value over the years. The trickle-down result which is often referred to as white privilege is that further generations of people of color are born into circumstances where their family wasn't able to build generational wealth to pass on and give their kids a boost. I don't know anything about you or your family, but I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that your parents eventually owned their own house. Maybe they willed it to you, or maybe they were able to retire comfortably after paying it off. That's a source of financial stability and opportunity that much much fewer black families have been allowed to have.
They get turned down for jobs and education slots because the Company or University has to have enough minorities lest they be called racists too.
People get turned down for jobs and education for all sorts of reasons. It's never really been about how hard you work, that's a piece of American mythology with little basis in reality. If your interviewer had a bad day, you might not be getting that job. If you happened to apply to a school that had a huge bump in applications that year, you might not be getting that acceptance letter. It's illegal to discriminate against an individual in an application process specifically on their race. It's not illegal, however, to discriminate based on some other innocuous qualities such as their name. Unfortunately, studies have shown that having a name associated with being of color will negatively affect your job acceptance, even when you have an identical resume to someone with a more white-sounding name. There's a
Social science is pretty clear that hatred and fear are the strongest motivators of human behavior in groups. I probably could've contributed something pleasant and productive to that particular YouTube conversation but I didn't know it was going on. Even if I did, there's little chance I would've cared enough to participate and share my civil, if not insightful thoughts. Meanwhile, if I was the type of person that has intense hate, anger, fear, etc. in my heart regarding the subject matter, I may very well have been in those comment sections posting "@#$% you nazi" and "I'm gonna @#$% you in your facist %&£!!!" etc...
The most motivated people in that comment section were not there to "be social" as you describe. They were there to foster conflict, because more conflict results in more hate which is going to boost their hate-filled agenda even more.
They were switching between both slogans, from what I remember. In any case, "Jews will not replace us" is a direct reference to the (clearly ridiculous) white genocide conspiracy theory which is sometimes referred to as the jewish replacement theory. It basically asserts that the supposed jewish rulers of all world institutions have a master plan of breeding, advancing and manipulating subhuman/inferior black and brown races to use as slave labor. Meanwhile, the theory goes that this necessitates the marginalization of the "superior" white/aryan races. White supremacists use this abhorrently racist and intellectually baseless theory to justify their actions of violence and hate as a necessary self-defense against a future where white people are the victims of genocide.
Hah. I hadn't played StarCraft II or any video games with some sort of general chat in a long while. A few weeks ago I opened it up and glanced at the chat room while setting up a game. Oh man... it gave me flashbacks to when I was a teenager and what I can assume were other idiot/asshole teenagers were flinging around verbal abuse and filth. I simply had forgotten that's what it was like.
51% are for and only 21% are against the government manufacturing and selling generic drugs
Don't forget that allowing Americans to buy drugs from Canada and other countries is also hugely popular - over 70% according to this
There's a very powerful political machine in the US that actively fights against voting. Progressives such as myself not only want to increase access to IDs for voting but also make voting day a national holiday.
Do they still have that ridiculous "obscene device" law that makes it illegal to own a dildo?
get a drivers license
Throughout the US, drivers licenses are used as proof of age and identity for all sorts of legally restricted things. Getting a drivers license or even having permission to drive is not a constitutionally guaranteed right. Voting is.
travel on public transportation
Not sure what you're referring to here. In NYC, you can purchase a subway MetroCard with cash. That MetroCard doesn't contain any identifying info and you are free to use it however you wish. It also is used only on entry to the system, so it's not possible to track individuals traveling from point A to point B.
Voting in more than one district
I hope you already are aware that this is effectively impossible. Throughout the US, individuals have a registered polling location that has their name on a list. If you don't go to the right location, your name won't be on the list and you won't be able to cast a real ballot. At most, you can cast what's known as a provisional ballot. These don't get counted unless you contact the election authority afterwards and provide proof of who you are and that you had a right to cast that vote.
I have to produce ID to buy damn 1 box of sudafed
I know I sound like a jerk, but you don't have a constitutional right to purchase Sudafed.
Vaguely casting accusations at "mega corporations" and "illegals" makes it sound like you are personally prejudiced and not very well informed on the realities of what happens in this country's elections.
(repost because I accidentally selected AC)
If content matching algorithms supported by human checkers removed a million copies and yet there were still copies available to see, that means that no their safety policies simply aren't good enough. Maybe they need to implement a manual review for every video uploaded. Maybe they need to implement a grace period where a newly create account isn't allowed to post videos for 48 hours. Maybe they need to implement an identity verification system to match accounts to real people and not bots or sockpuppets.
There are definitely ways that YouTube and other companies could more effectively police their platforms to guard against violent, immoral and illegal content. They don't want to implement these policies because it would reduce engagement and impact their revenue source.
The entire point of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc is that they decide what you see through their feed algorithms. Consider if you were a gun store owner and you had a big sign out front saying "our guns are great for killing cops!" The vast majority of your customers aren't going to kill cops with the guns they purchase from you. However, when one guy finally does shoot a cop with your gun, you better believe the police are going to be showing up at your door.
Just want to say thanks for sharing your perspective
The wires, the electricity, your internet connection, and heck even your ISP are basically agnostic to the communication you're passing through their channel. Facebook, however, is not. It has a giant algorithmic process to promote and demote the communication that you produce and consume on their website. It has a giant scraping and affiliate system to analyze the communication that you produce and consume off their website. Facebook's primary revenue model is to interlace the content you consume with content from their advertising business. It's well-understood and documented that to increase engagement with their paid advertising content, Facebook's software is designed to present you with content that manipulates your psychology to engage more.
+1 to that. I love how easy it is to change the oil/filter on my Subaru and my mechanically-inclined friends have noticed and commented on it as well.
Yes, you can adjust a Nest thermostat by hand. You could use it as a "dumb" thermostat without ever connecting it to a network or assigning it to a remote management account.
I spoke to a friend who is senior in their desktop tech deployment. They do have multiple orgs and certs but Apple revoked all of them. Presumably, Apple's logic is they wanted to a) ensure anything that may have been improperly deployed was bricked and b) send a message.
These days, Apple’s rules allow a single company to operate multiple developer accounts. It’s possible and likely that this Facebook Research app was being signed by a separate account than e.g. the internal corporate apps that Facebook undoubtedly uses.
In NYC, it's possible to do sudden large rent increases by several ways. One way is by proving that according to property value and rent history, the landlord could've legally been charging a much higher rent for years already but they had kept it low for market reasons. Another way is by claiming that the property is actually much more valuable than it had been previously valued by documentation of renovations or improvements. I suspect similar loopholes exist in the Bay Area of CA.
The problem of "homeless people with full-time jobs" is most definitely not a small problem or only located in certain areas. Cite 1 (extremely informative and well-researched investigative series) Cite 2 Cite 3 Cite 4
I suspect you're just reciting truisms. Unfortunately, this problem has been growing massively in the past two decades. The scale and visibility is such now that some journalists, investigators and generally insightful people are taking long hard looks at it.
A sizable percentage of stray animals in shelters don't end up getting "rescued by a family in a traditional home with children that will play with them." According to the ASPCA, approximately a third of shelter animals are euthanized instead of adopted.
Based on my experience growing up in New York City, grandparent's suggestions would help out a great deal here. All the high-rise and high-density housing construction here is ultra-luxury, $1M+ one bedroom apartments and condos in the most popular city districts. A lot of that property is bought by shell companies that are used to shield foreign buyers and their laundered money from scrutiny. We have laws that require transparency in real-estate purchases as well as due diligence in sellers that funds used in cash purchases aren't the result of illegal enterprise, but the real-estate lobby is ridiculously strong in New York State so most of that enforcement is toothless.
Much of advertising is trying to subvert your better judgement of keeping your precious dollars in your pocket and radicalize you into a rabid fanboy showing off your new fashion accessory/tech toy/luxury car to all of your friends. The problem is that targeted advertising works so much better than the age range & gender categories of yesterday.
Best thing I read was The World as it Is by Ben Rhodes
Both at work and at home, I use a pair of Apple Extended Keyboard II Model M3501. They're more than 15 years old, one of them came with my first Power Mac in the early 90s. These are true mechanical keyboards that aren't too large (unlike the famous IBM ones) and have a standard modern key layout. As I've gone through the successive generations of Apple keyboards I've found myself more and more disappointed by their feel and durability. A couple years ago I stumbled on my old Mac parts in the basement and was pleased to discover that everything, including the keyboard, still worked. It was a joy to use that hardware again so I looked for a way to adapt it to my current Macs.
They do use an Apple-proprietary PS2 equivalent called ADB connectors but it's trivial to build a USB converter for them. You don't even need to splice up a cable to make the adapter, the ports on the keyboard are connected to the main board with removable ribbon cables.
I know an Apple engineer that uses an Android phone. Last I saw he had a Pixel. Another guy I know who does sales for an Apple B2B reseller carries both an Android phone and a Windows Surface into his meetings with Apple SEs.
I know a couple people that work at Facebook. One of them recently mentioned in passing that when he was interviewing, he created a Facebook account for the first time. That was because he had been nudged by the guy who recommended the position to him that they won't hire anyone who doesn't have a Facebook account.