Why is it that so many Bernie supporters are pathetic whiners?
My wife was very interested in Bernie Sanders. And then we started having conversations like: "He is promising X and Y. That doesn't make any sense. Has he read the Constitution?" "Um, why do you ask? He is a long standing Senator." "Because he is making a bunch of stupid promises that he cannot deliver as president. Sounds a lot like that idiot Trump."
The main reason Bernie Sanders lost was Bernie Sanders could not earn enough votes to hit the 51% mark in enough primary states. The rest is whining.
Yahoo was very likely to fail. But it was not quite at the point that the board was prepared to admit the ship was doomed, rather than hire someone with fancy-sounding ideas that could be hyped but would probably fail regardless. That Mayer was easy to hype in a lot of superficial ways was part of the package the board chose to pay top dollar for -- was she supposed to not play along, not cash in?
I do not see any compelling evidence that Mayer's was not at least as good as any other Yahoo CEO. Par for the course is not something to excited about, for or against.
It is not as if it is truly impossible to put a dollar figure on these things. If the AIs are clearly safer drivers than monkeys, then insurance costs go down. The average costs of car insurance >$4k per year. So a smart consumer may well be willing to pay thousands of dollars for such a safer car, and end up with a lower expected mortality rate and a fatter wallet.
BTW, future self-driving cars will have a mountain of hard data about which nearby vehicles did what. So assigning liability may be more precise. It is not going to be easy to claim the evil robot killed my loved one, if my loved one was provably reckless before the accident.
If you do not fit into a neighborhood, you do not fit in. And that means there are all kinds of risks that are hard to calculate when you wander across that bridge. Some of that is police profiling, which can be unsavory at times. But the criminals know that it is harder to have a BS story that will hold up for even 60 seconds when you are not a local.
In terms of a one-off crime, yeah, you probably do better by kicking in the door of a random wealthier domicile. But as a lifestyle, robbing people who are underprotected by the police is "safer", even if you do not get a lot of money for it for an individual crime.
I stand corrected on a few details, as the numbers change year to year, but the main point still holds. The "free ride" claim is built on empty ideology -- not military facts, not strategic analysis.
The world averaged expenditure is 2.1% of GDP. The US and Russia are both substantially higher. China is little lower. The US spends more than twice what Russia + China + Iran spend put together. France + UK + Germany combined spend more than twice what Russia spends.
There are adequate funds for European NATO to defend their borders from military aggression, so going straight to the name calling only undermines what semblance of a point you might have had. This seems to be more about not kissing up to the American MIC enough, like a good patriotic Yankee sheeple, than anything to do with strategic reality.
Europe does not need the US in NATO to defend Europe -- they can defend themselves just fine and the Pentagon knows it. The US needs Europe in NATO to defray some of the costs of American interventionism. The US needs Europe if it wants a credible ability to counter Russian actions in Eastern Europe.
The European nations are spending a smidgen over 2% of GDP on military expenditures, which is ballpark the same amount as China spends. When China spends 2%, it is dangerous expansionism. When Europe spends 2%, they are total wimps.
In the biotech space, it is standard procedure to demand to see peer reviewed published papers, patents, and lab data before writing checks. Theranos categorically refused to provide any. The "investors" threw money at a twentynothing with no college degree, no experience, no expertise. Caveat emptor.
As someone who is bearish on Bitcoin but bullish on blockchains, I would really like to know what portion of the transactions are really being used for the useful economic activities that can positively benefit from kind of system, e.g. sending money back to my parents in the old country.
It is also a little strange to posit that plants became very toxic when being slightly toxic in the first place does not at all save you from being eaten by voracious herbivores. I am not dismissing the idea out of hand, but there are significant missing pieces from this tale, like why those plants who invested precious metabolic activity in toxins outcompeted existing ubiquitous plants that did not.
Assuming they made that decision with a correct understanding of the consequences.
Well, yes. But that assumption is impossible to agree (or disagree) with without a discussion about context. Consequences are a thing that can happen over short, medium, long, and very long time scales. Spending to improve weak accounting practices is something that can protect you from disaster over the medium term. Spending to improve IT pays over the long and very long time scales. In any given quarter, shortchanging IT makes sense if all you care about is the next couple quarters. Yet, it was absolutely inevitable that one day a very professional set of hackers would target Equifax; Equifax made the wrong bet.
I am finding this conception of strategy is weak on practical guidance. It is nice to say these here is our object and here are strategic objectives informed by our strategy, that has some value for planning things that are easy, but that is not enough when things are complicated.
TFA mentions the example, say, Toyota touting its safety. But that seems like little more than a marketing tactic to me. Is Toyota spending enough engineering resources on its safety right now? Could it get a bigger budget for further improvements? If there is an opportunity to leapfrog forward with new technology, how will this be decided whether to write a big check?
TFA mentions "positioning of one business against others" and that seems like a reasonable place to start, because it implies taking risks and making resource decisions to move the needle in market share or something. But I am Toyota and I want some of GM's market share is not quite a strategy either -- its too abstract. Are we going to compete with our present product line? Are we willing to create a new product line to achieve this goal?
A strategy without general guidance about how future decisions should be made does not seem like a strategy to me.
But why should my savings be vulnerable at all, even a single red cent? I can protect it completely with a credit card.
The extent that a credit card is actually really more convenient than a credit card does have something to do with how much is left vulnerable in that savings account. Furthermore, banks love to push "protections" like automatic transfers from savings in case of overdraft of the account tied to the debit card. I presume that some people fall for that one, even if I expect you know better.
Debit cards are not crazy at all, IMO, if you manage your liability by consistent care about how much cash is sitting in the relevant account. But I definitely do not authorize any magic "we will transfer from savings for you because it is so convenient" things. I want that isolated account to fail, and I will pick up the fees for my own mistakes, as a firewall from my pile of savings.
I agree there is no important difference in convenience, under all common scenarios.
The difference is in the legal status and what the burden of proof would be under the bright lights of a courtroom, if things were to go very very wrong.
When things go extremely wrong with a credit card, I can still pay my mortgage, fill my gas tank so I can get to work, and feed my family -- with many months to sort out any problems while negotiations and discussions happen, before any legal actions will even begin to wend their way through the legal system.
When things go extremely wrong with a debit card, I can be stranded immediately and not able to buy food. Immediately.
In theory, I would have such protections on my checking account, too, when it comes to obviously fraudulent checks. But when I heard the magic words "we will see if we can get your money back [emphasis added]", I realized that reality can be very different from the theory.
I am glad that things worked out for you. But I prefer to know with certainty that I am not completely screwed by keeping my money where it is far more certain who has authority to take money out. If things go very wrong with a credit card, I can tell them I will pay the real transactions, close the account, and walk away. They can come at me with the proof that the charges are real for inspection under the bright lights of a courtroom, if they have the $10,000 to throw away for a lawyer. I am game, if it comes to that.
If something dicey happens on your credit card, it is the vendor's problem -- the vendor does not have money yet. If something dicey happens on your debit card, it is your problem -- the money already left the account.
I do not have a debit card. After I cut up the fourth debit card and demanded a clean ATM card with no debit feature, the fifth time I just changed banks.
Boz says that death squads shooting and raping and torturing is a small price to pay for the De Facto Good of connecting the world under the caring wings of FB. In fact, it is so good that FB will cheerfully swindle users out of their personal data with purposefully confusing language around permissions and authorization. FB lies to us for our own good. We should be grateful...
IME, you are about 10X to find intelligent discussion on NetNews and threaded discussions, than feeds like FB. Now 10X a very small number is not exactly a big number, but it counts for something.
Much as I dislike Zuck, I do sympathize with him insofar as he is between a rock and a hard place. Keep his mouth shut, and someone else can take control of the narrative and successfully smear him as dangerously uncaring on top of that. Open his mouth, and the issue gets more complicated and stays in the news.
Part of the problem is the modern good-looking design gets in the way. One big reason I come back to slashdot is that this "NetNews" style of threaded discussion page is thoroughly out of fashion, and thus rarer and rarer.
Blog-style looks so much better. But the typical blog style also means that once the stream hits a certain volume, intricate back-and-forth between two viewpoints gets harder and harder to track.
Sure, I often fail to have an intelligent discussion here, but it does happen here more often than elsewhere.
Another factor is that the human brain much more easily has a strong emotional reaction to negative news -- that is just a result of how our genes wired us up. Thus negative content is more memorable. Thus negative content is more likely to create "engagement".
Well, now that he machines are taking over, we are subjects of real time machine experiments trying to increase engagement by tweaking the various news feed. Guess what kind of news is more likely to be blended in?
What Boz means by "connecting people" is just empty bullshit. He has a very superficial metric and he has decided that actually thinking is no longer necessary -- let the metric rule all.
In fact, I do not have a great problem with the parts about how sometimes good things will be used for bad ends. The language was unfortunate, but he has a point I can understand, even if I do not agree with his unsubtle approach.
The part that is beyond dicey is his handwaving ends justify the means argument. Let's examine that for a moment:
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends.
"Justified"? "Questionable"? "Subtle language"? Hmm...that sounds an awful lot like a man who is dancing around lying, cheating, and stealing data from users for the greater good, where good is nothing more than his dumb metric that allows the real paying customers to more easily fleece the sheep.
Even Zuck, a man not known for insight into the human condition, could spot this one as deeply troubling.
So, maybe I can give him the benefit of the doubt on the first half. In the second half, he tries to lie to himself and the employees, while accidentally revealing FB's complete moral nihilism and perfect disinterest in doing better.
I still do not understand how you know that overtreatment is not occurring. You can detect anomalous numbers deaths that are the result of significant undertreatment. How do you know treatment is too aggressive?
A woman with a tiny lump is rushed under the knife -- lump and nearby lymph nodes are removed. She is immediate given chemo. She does not die of cancer in one year or five years. Maybe that lump was not very dangerous in the first place?
Have there actually been any careful studies where patients with small lumps that are probably cancer but not necessarily dangerous, where some women are treated and some not?
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one. What is the Truth Table we use to figure out whether a particular pathologist is good?
There is strong circumstantial evidence that American doctors significantly overtreat suspected cancers. You know what happens when you as an oncologist treat as cancer something that is not dangerous? Your survival rate goes up! And the patient, who has suffers enormous physical and psychological damage during the year or so of controlled poisoning (chemo) enters into the throngs of The Cult of Cancer Survivors, who will testify about his or her brush with death and how we need more aggressive cancer screenings so that cancer survival rates can continue to go up.
All kidding aside, I think what the GP is saying is that regardless of whether or not the lower paid worker *ACTUALLY* has a valid grievance, they will in every case *PERCEIVE* that they have one. Personally I don't think I would engage in that kind of talk with any of my co-workers because while it is easy to understand the equal pay part, I think it's nearly impossible to objectively assess the equal work part. It might be easy in a factory setting where you each pump out 100 widgets a day, but no two people on my team have the exact same skill set... that's kind of the point: different skills make for a well rounded team.
Salaries are like tax cuts and tax rises: you put them under a microscopic and it is very easy to find a reason to declare them unfair, no matter what form they take. For most competent employees, there are always some outliers such that you could make a case that they are overpaid compared to you. And if you get a good raise because of it, probably there is someone out there who can point to you and make a valid seeming case that they now need a raise.
From management's POV, there is little reason to believe that radical openness will actually make employees happier. It takes a big cultural shift that includes a healthy dialog, or the result could easily be both a higher salary bill and unhappier workers. At least that is what most managers believe, including one that I respect who treat employees well. Are they wrong? Maybe. But they are not crazy for believing as much.
I guess in my situation someone could point to me and say that I must be worth less because I only work 45 hours a week. Then, again, this year my well earned gray hairs helped me sniff out some serious problems that are hard to put a price tag on. I think it is reasonable to argue I saved some senior managers a million bucks in both dollars and embarrassment, in a way that a new college grad working 70 hour weeks never could.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that so many Bernie supporters are pathetic whiners?
My wife was very interested in Bernie Sanders. And then we started having conversations like: "He is promising X and Y. That doesn't make any sense. Has he read the Constitution?" "Um, why do you ask? He is a long standing Senator." "Because he is making a bunch of stupid promises that he cannot deliver as president. Sounds a lot like that idiot Trump."
The main reason Bernie Sanders lost was Bernie Sanders could not earn enough votes to hit the 51% mark in enough primary states. The rest is whining.
Yahoo was very likely to fail. But it was not quite at the point that the board was prepared to admit the ship was doomed, rather than hire someone with fancy-sounding ideas that could be hyped but would probably fail regardless. That Mayer was easy to hype in a lot of superficial ways was part of the package the board chose to pay top dollar for -- was she supposed to not play along, not cash in?
I do not see any compelling evidence that Mayer's was not at least as good as any other Yahoo CEO. Par for the course is not something to excited about, for or against.
It is not as if it is truly impossible to put a dollar figure on these things. If the AIs are clearly safer drivers than monkeys, then insurance costs go down. The average costs of car insurance >$4k per year. So a smart consumer may well be willing to pay thousands of dollars for such a safer car, and end up with a lower expected mortality rate and a fatter wallet.
BTW, future self-driving cars will have a mountain of hard data about which nearby vehicles did what. So assigning liability may be more precise. It is not going to be easy to claim the evil robot killed my loved one, if my loved one was provably reckless before the accident.
If you do not fit into a neighborhood, you do not fit in. And that means there are all kinds of risks that are hard to calculate when you wander across that bridge. Some of that is police profiling, which can be unsavory at times. But the criminals know that it is harder to have a BS story that will hold up for even 60 seconds when you are not a local.
In terms of a one-off crime, yeah, you probably do better by kicking in the door of a random wealthier domicile. But as a lifestyle, robbing people who are underprotected by the police is "safer", even if you do not get a lot of money for it for an individual crime.
I stand corrected on a few details, as the numbers change year to year, but the main point still holds. The "free ride" claim is built on empty ideology -- not military facts, not strategic analysis.
The world averaged expenditure is 2.1% of GDP. The US and Russia are both substantially higher. China is little lower. The US spends more than twice what Russia + China + Iran spend put together. France + UK + Germany combined spend more than twice what Russia spends.
There are adequate funds for European NATO to defend their borders from military aggression, so going straight to the name calling only undermines what semblance of a point you might have had. This seems to be more about not kissing up to the American MIC enough, like a good patriotic Yankee sheeple, than anything to do with strategic reality.
Europe does not need the US in NATO to defend Europe -- they can defend themselves just fine and the Pentagon knows it. The US needs Europe in NATO to defray some of the costs of American interventionism. The US needs Europe if it wants a credible ability to counter Russian actions in Eastern Europe.
The European nations are spending a smidgen over 2% of GDP on military expenditures, which is ballpark the same amount as China spends. When China spends 2%, it is dangerous expansionism. When Europe spends 2%, they are total wimps.
In the biotech space, it is standard procedure to demand to see peer reviewed published papers, patents, and lab data before writing checks. Theranos categorically refused to provide any. The "investors" threw money at a twentynothing with no college degree, no experience, no expertise. Caveat emptor.
As someone who is bearish on Bitcoin but bullish on blockchains, I would really like to know what portion of the transactions are really being used for the useful economic activities that can positively benefit from kind of system, e.g. sending money back to my parents in the old country.
It is also a little strange to posit that plants became very toxic when being slightly toxic in the first place does not at all save you from being eaten by voracious herbivores. I am not dismissing the idea out of hand, but there are significant missing pieces from this tale, like why those plants who invested precious metabolic activity in toxins outcompeted existing ubiquitous plants that did not.
Assuming they made that decision with a correct understanding of the consequences.
Well, yes. But that assumption is impossible to agree (or disagree) with without a discussion about context. Consequences are a thing that can happen over short, medium, long, and very long time scales. Spending to improve weak accounting practices is something that can protect you from disaster over the medium term. Spending to improve IT pays over the long and very long time scales. In any given quarter, shortchanging IT makes sense if all you care about is the next couple quarters. Yet, it was absolutely inevitable that one day a very professional set of hackers would target Equifax; Equifax made the wrong bet.
I am finding this conception of strategy is weak on practical guidance. It is nice to say these here is our object and here are strategic objectives informed by our strategy, that has some value for planning things that are easy, but that is not enough when things are complicated.
TFA mentions the example, say, Toyota touting its safety. But that seems like little more than a marketing tactic to me. Is Toyota spending enough engineering resources on its safety right now? Could it get a bigger budget for further improvements? If there is an opportunity to leapfrog forward with new technology, how will this be decided whether to write a big check?
TFA mentions "positioning of one business against others" and that seems like a reasonable place to start, because it implies taking risks and making resource decisions to move the needle in market share or something. But I am Toyota and I want some of GM's market share is not quite a strategy either -- its too abstract. Are we going to compete with our present product line? Are we willing to create a new product line to achieve this goal?
A strategy without general guidance about how future decisions should be made does not seem like a strategy to me.
Your point makes sense, to a significant degree.
But why should my savings be vulnerable at all, even a single red cent? I can protect it completely with a credit card.
The extent that a credit card is actually really more convenient than a credit card does have something to do with how much is left vulnerable in that savings account. Furthermore, banks love to push "protections" like automatic transfers from savings in case of overdraft of the account tied to the debit card. I presume that some people fall for that one, even if I expect you know better.
Debit cards are not crazy at all, IMO, if you manage your liability by consistent care about how much cash is sitting in the relevant account. But I definitely do not authorize any magic "we will transfer from savings for you because it is so convenient" things. I want that isolated account to fail, and I will pick up the fees for my own mistakes, as a firewall from my pile of savings.
I agree there is no important difference in convenience, under all common scenarios.
The difference is in the legal status and what the burden of proof would be under the bright lights of a courtroom, if things were to go very very wrong.
When things go extremely wrong with a credit card, I can still pay my mortgage, fill my gas tank so I can get to work, and feed my family -- with many months to sort out any problems while negotiations and discussions happen, before any legal actions will even begin to wend their way through the legal system.
When things go extremely wrong with a debit card, I can be stranded immediately and not able to buy food. Immediately.
In theory, I would have such protections on my checking account, too, when it comes to obviously fraudulent checks. But when I heard the magic words "we will see if we can get your money back [emphasis added]", I realized that reality can be very different from the theory.
I am glad that things worked out for you. But I prefer to know with certainty that I am not completely screwed by keeping my money where it is far more certain who has authority to take money out. If things go very wrong with a credit card, I can tell them I will pay the real transactions, close the account, and walk away. They can come at me with the proof that the charges are real for inspection under the bright lights of a courtroom, if they have the $10,000 to throw away for a lawyer. I am game, if it comes to that.
If something dicey happens on your credit card, it is the vendor's problem -- the vendor does not have money yet.
If something dicey happens on your debit card, it is your problem -- the money already left the account.
I do not have a debit card. After I cut up the fourth debit card and demanded a clean ATM card with no debit feature, the fifth time I just changed banks.
Boz says that death squads shooting and raping and torturing is a small price to pay for the De Facto Good of connecting the world under the caring wings of FB. In fact, it is so good that FB will cheerfully swindle users out of their personal data with purposefully confusing language around permissions and authorization. FB lies to us for our own good. We should be grateful...
Fair point. NN was not always exactly nice, which I know you know, from your question.
IME, you are about 10X to find intelligent discussion on NetNews and threaded discussions, than feeds like FB. Now 10X a very small number is not exactly a big number, but it counts for something.
Much as I dislike Zuck, I do sympathize with him insofar as he is between a rock and a hard place. Keep his mouth shut, and someone else can take control of the narrative and successfully smear him as dangerously uncaring on top of that. Open his mouth, and the issue gets more complicated and stays in the news.
Part of the problem is the modern good-looking design gets in the way. One big reason I come back to slashdot is that this "NetNews" style of threaded discussion page is thoroughly out of fashion, and thus rarer and rarer.
Blog-style looks so much better. But the typical blog style also means that once the stream hits a certain volume, intricate back-and-forth between two viewpoints gets harder and harder to track.
Sure, I often fail to have an intelligent discussion here, but it does happen here more often than elsewhere.
Another factor is that the human brain much more easily has a strong emotional reaction to negative news -- that is just a result of how our genes wired us up. Thus negative content is more memorable. Thus negative content is more likely to create "engagement".
Well, now that he machines are taking over, we are subjects of real time machine experiments trying to increase engagement by tweaking the various news feed. Guess what kind of news is more likely to be blended in?
What Boz means by "connecting people" is just empty bullshit. He has a very superficial metric and he has decided that actually thinking is no longer necessary -- let the metric rule all.
In fact, I do not have a great problem with the parts about how sometimes good things will be used for bad ends. The language was unfortunate, but he has a point I can understand, even if I do not agree with his unsubtle approach.
The part that is beyond dicey is his handwaving ends justify the means argument. Let's examine that for a moment:
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends.
"Justified"? "Questionable"? "Subtle language"? Hmm...that sounds an awful lot like a man who is dancing around lying, cheating, and stealing data from users for the greater good, where good is nothing more than his dumb metric that allows the real paying customers to more easily fleece the sheep.
Even Zuck, a man not known for insight into the human condition, could spot this one as deeply troubling.
So, maybe I can give him the benefit of the doubt on the first half. In the second half, he tries to lie to himself and the employees, while accidentally revealing FB's complete moral nihilism and perfect disinterest in doing better.
Telling it like it is this is not.
Thank you, for an informative reply.
I still do not understand how you know that overtreatment is not occurring. You can detect anomalous numbers deaths that are the result of significant undertreatment. How do you know treatment is too aggressive?
A woman with a tiny lump is rushed under the knife -- lump and nearby lymph nodes are removed. She is immediate given chemo. She does not die of cancer in one year or five years. Maybe that lump was not very dangerous in the first place?
Have there actually been any careful studies where patients with small lumps that are probably cancer but not necessarily dangerous, where some women are treated and some not?
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one. What is the Truth Table we use to figure out whether a particular pathologist is good?
There is strong circumstantial evidence that American doctors significantly overtreat suspected cancers. You know what happens when you as an oncologist treat as cancer something that is not dangerous? Your survival rate goes up! And the patient, who has suffers enormous physical and psychological damage during the year or so of controlled poisoning (chemo) enters into the throngs of The Cult of Cancer Survivors, who will testify about his or her brush with death and how we need more aggressive cancer screenings so that cancer survival rates can continue to go up.
All kidding aside, I think what the GP is saying is that regardless of whether or not the lower paid worker *ACTUALLY* has a valid grievance, they will in every case *PERCEIVE* that they have one. Personally I don't think I would engage in that kind of talk with any of my co-workers because while it is easy to understand the equal pay part, I think it's nearly impossible to objectively assess the equal work part. It might be easy in a factory setting where you each pump out 100 widgets a day, but no two people on my team have the exact same skill set... that's kind of the point: different skills make for a well rounded team.
Salaries are like tax cuts and tax rises: you put them under a microscopic and it is very easy to find a reason to declare them unfair, no matter what form they take. For most competent employees, there are always some outliers such that you could make a case that they are overpaid compared to you. And if you get a good raise because of it, probably there is someone out there who can point to you and make a valid seeming case that they now need a raise.
From management's POV, there is little reason to believe that radical openness will actually make employees happier. It takes a big cultural shift that includes a healthy dialog, or the result could easily be both a higher salary bill and unhappier workers. At least that is what most managers believe, including one that I respect who treat employees well. Are they wrong? Maybe. But they are not crazy for believing as much.
I guess in my situation someone could point to me and say that I must be worth less because I only work 45 hours a week. Then, again, this year my well earned gray hairs helped me sniff out some serious problems that are hard to put a price tag on. I think it is reasonable to argue I saved some senior managers a million bucks in both dollars and embarrassment, in a way that a new college grad working 70 hour weeks never could.