Actually Baidu Translate does a much better job with Chinese than Google does.
You should be careful with that accusation. Same thing was said about Japan, and then suddenly Japanese cars and electronics were better than the western ones and they were the ones doing all the innovation. It's already happening with China - European car manufacturers who missed the EV boat are now buying in Chinese technology and parts to catch up. Same with renewable energy, everyone just assumed Chinese products were crap and then one day realized that they were both cutting edge and cheap.
They badly damaged Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in France's last election.
The Icelandic government lead by Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson was brought down by information in those leaks.
We learned a lot about how Russia's leaders and their friends hide wealth and funnel it covertly overseas, to interfere in the democratic processes of other nations.
The investigation of FIFA was aided by the release, resulting in raids on their offices in Switzerland. A lot of the bribery that was going on was only proven by these papers becoming available.
Ukraine's government fell apart due to the leaks.
The impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was in no small part due to the Panama Papers, and several members of her government and the Brazilian state have been prosecuted.
The EU has a simple and effective plan: companies pay corporation tax where they do business. If Starbucks sells one of their foul coffees to some unlucky Frenchman, it doesn't matter if they have to pay crippling licencing fees to an Irish parent company and end up losing money. The French tax authority just looks at the profit that the Irish company made on a sale in France, and charges the French subsidiary tax based on that amount.
You just need to educate yourself, and put in a little effort.
And become a contractor, don't forget that.
It's different in the US, but in Europe there are significant advantages to being an employee in terms of job security and rights. Contractors get paid more but don't have that security or recourse. Contracting also makes it harder to get financial services because banks look at your mortgage application and see your future income depends on you getting another contract. Also contractors often have to move around more which isn't good if you have a family.
I guess it's not much different from the US in at-will states, but in Europe contracting is not a good option for many people and so these tax-dodging schemes are not available to them.
The problem with Bombadil is that he adds basically nothing to the story, only serving to waste time explaining why this god-like being can't be trusted to look after the One Ring or do anything about the imminent destruction of the world he lives in.
It's not really clear why he is even in the book, except perhaps to emphasise that the heroes really are the only chance to save the world, even if their plan doesn't seem like a very good one. But the whole book is full of stuff like that, e.g. if the eagles could rescue them at the end why couldn't they just fly them there in the first place?
My Panasonic smart TV is five years old (2012 model) and is still as smart as the day I got it. YouTube and Netflix work just fine, because they had the foresight to make them basically HTML5 apps with a simple wrapper.
Now that the 5 year warranty is coming to an end I guess they might not support it any more. Last firmware update was for Heartbleed last year IIRC.
If I read your post as a whole, you end up saying that you think he's making straw man arguments against feminism, but that's not sexist?
Yeah... You say that like it doesn't make sense to you. You appreciate that it is possible to criticise feminism without being sexist, right?
But don't you think it's a bit weird to label a call for more discussion of nuance as a straw-man?
I took him to be saying that straw-feminist claims about oppression of women are too simplistic because sometimes men do shitty jobs, and in fact the majority of such jobs are performed by men. That ties in with his other tweets about feminism, which usually revolved around straw man arguments.
Which is weird because I would have thought that's what you wanted.
Well, I do want things to get better, but for that to happen we have to move past the straw-feminist man hater "help help I'm being oppressed by this guy" nonsense and have a serious conversation about it. I can assure you that as a feminist I often find that the most frustrating thing in any debate is that people make wild, bizarre assumptions about what I think and imagine I said things I never did.
Having said that it's not limited to feminists. Other Slashdot posters have accused me of being an Islamist!
What is interesting is that while there do appear to be some physical differences between men and women's brains when doing some of these tasks, they basically amount to nothing when you remove the cultural influence. You can devise tests that allow either gender to do better by tailoring to their specific traits, but in practice for almost every real-world task both perform about the same with any cultural differences being overcome with fairly minimal training.
"Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition". Psychological Science. 18 (10): 850â"855.
They should distrust all certificate authorities in countries where there are secret legal means to force the creation of bogus certificates, e.g. the UK.
The whole system needs replacing but while we have to work with it it's important to take a firm stance on not allowing governments to interfere with or subvert it.
While there are biological differences between men and women, they don't have nearly as much influence as people think. The classic one is the old myth about men having better spacial skills. Turns out that if you give girls conduction kit toys they soon catch up and reach the same level as the boys.
In any case, I guess the issue here is that you think he said women and men are equally competent, and I don't.
Interesting that I didn't use the word "sexist" but you think that's what I was implying. It's not.
As for the image, I guess it's open to interpretation but based on his other tweets I took it to mean he thought claims that women are oppressed by men are overly simplistic. That ties in with his comments about "sexual capital", and it's also a straw man argument against feminism.
He says that their biology makes them on average more neurotic and less able to deal with the demands of being an engineer, then suggests that the job be changed to better suit that biology. Kind of ironic since he also complains about the bar being lowered for "diversity" candidates.
I guess you are right, it is basically forbidden to call your work colleagues biologically handicapped. I'm not really sure how to respond to that... Would it make any difference if he was claiming that some races have a smaller average skull size and are therefore less intelligent (on average)?
As for the female engineer example you give, it doesn't sound like she is saying her colleagues are inferior... Maybe an unwarranted accusation of sexism, which could land her in trouble, of she is saying that it's some kind of deliberate policy.
He is welcome to his opinion, my only point here is that he's not the rational, good intentioned actor people seem to think he is. When let loose on Twitter he starts spouting standard anti-feminist/MRA rhetoric.
His Twitter statements undermine his claim to be rational and scientifically literate.
I refer you to the second part of my answer. You are absolutely correct that Damore is obligated to uphold Google's policies, but you also have to consider the nature of those policies and the nature of non-compliance.
If Damore had gone about this in a different way it might have been okay, but he did something that made his position untenable.
If someone refused diversity training then I'd probably look at if the training was needed, what the nature of the training was, that sort of thing, before forming an opinion.
He clearly stated that on average women are more neurotic and less able to deal with the demands of engineering jobs. He claims that this is due to biology.
The basic problem is that he asserts that women make, on average, biologically inferior engineers. That assertion is largely rejected by experts in the fields he cites as evidence.
Consider the position this puts Google in. Employees at Google evaluate each other. Say he gives a women a poor evaluation. He stated belief is that women are biologically unsuited to software engineering. Would you even want to work with someone who considers you biologically inferior based on a faulty understanding of the science?
Slashdot Mirror
The backup one that they dismantled was "destroyed", in the sense that it no longer exists.
Actually Baidu Translate does a much better job with Chinese than Google does.
You should be careful with that accusation. Same thing was said about Japan, and then suddenly Japanese cars and electronics were better than the western ones and they were the ones doing all the innovation. It's already happening with China - European car manufacturers who missed the EV boat are now buying in Chinese technology and parts to catch up. Same with renewable energy, everyone just assumed Chinese products were crap and then one day realized that they were both cutting edge and cheap.
They badly damaged Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in France's last election.
The Icelandic government lead by Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson was brought down by information in those leaks.
We learned a lot about how Russia's leaders and their friends hide wealth and funnel it covertly overseas, to interfere in the democratic processes of other nations.
The investigation of FIFA was aided by the release, resulting in raids on their offices in Switzerland. A lot of the bribery that was going on was only proven by these papers becoming available.
Ukraine's government fell apart due to the leaks.
The impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was in no small part due to the Panama Papers, and several members of her government and the Brazilian state have been prosecuted.
That's all I can remember off the top of my head, but Wikipeida has a really, really long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The EU has a simple and effective plan: companies pay corporation tax where they do business. If Starbucks sells one of their foul coffees to some unlucky Frenchman, it doesn't matter if they have to pay crippling licencing fees to an Irish parent company and end up losing money. The French tax authority just looks at the profit that the Irish company made on a sale in France, and charges the French subsidiary tax based on that amount.
Companies can either comply or go bust.
You just need to educate yourself, and put in a little effort.
And become a contractor, don't forget that.
It's different in the US, but in Europe there are significant advantages to being an employee in terms of job security and rights. Contractors get paid more but don't have that security or recourse. Contracting also makes it harder to get financial services because banks look at your mortgage application and see your future income depends on you getting another contract. Also contractors often have to move around more which isn't good if you have a family.
I guess it's not much different from the US in at-will states, but in Europe contracting is not a good option for many people and so these tax-dodging schemes are not available to them.
How about Buck Rogers? A society run by AI, lots of opportunities to contrast with modern times.
The problem with Bombadil is that he adds basically nothing to the story, only serving to waste time explaining why this god-like being can't be trusted to look after the One Ring or do anything about the imminent destruction of the world he lives in.
It's not really clear why he is even in the book, except perhaps to emphasise that the heroes really are the only chance to save the world, even if their plan doesn't seem like a very good one. But the whole book is full of stuff like that, e.g. if the eagles could rescue them at the end why couldn't they just fly them there in the first place?
My Panasonic smart TV is five years old (2012 model) and is still as smart as the day I got it. YouTube and Netflix work just fine, because they had the foresight to make them basically HTML5 apps with a simple wrapper.
Now that the 5 year warranty is coming to an end I guess they might not support it any more. Last firmware update was for Heartbleed last year IIRC.
If I read your post as a whole, you end up saying that you think he's making straw man arguments against feminism, but that's not sexist?
Yeah... You say that like it doesn't make sense to you. You appreciate that it is possible to criticise feminism without being sexist, right?
But don't you think it's a bit weird to label a call for more discussion of nuance as a straw-man?
I took him to be saying that straw-feminist claims about oppression of women are too simplistic because sometimes men do shitty jobs, and in fact the majority of such jobs are performed by men. That ties in with his other tweets about feminism, which usually revolved around straw man arguments.
Which is weird because I would have thought that's what you wanted.
Well, I do want things to get better, but for that to happen we have to move past the straw-feminist man hater "help help I'm being oppressed by this guy" nonsense and have a serious conversation about it. I can assure you that as a feminist I often find that the most frustrating thing in any debate is that people make wild, bizarre assumptions about what I think and imagine I said things I never did.
Having said that it's not limited to feminists. Other Slashdot posters have accused me of being an Islamist!
Try "Male Superiority in Spatial Navigation: Adaptation or Side Effect?". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 87 (4): 289â"313. ISSN 0033-5770
Here's a less rigorous but interesting experiment: https://www.livescience.com/15...
What is interesting is that while there do appear to be some physical differences between men and women's brains when doing some of these tasks, they basically amount to nothing when you remove the cultural influence. You can devise tests that allow either gender to do better by tailoring to their specific traits, but in practice for almost every real-world task both perform about the same with any cultural differences being overcome with fairly minimal training.
"Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition". Psychological Science. 18 (10): 850â"855.
They should distrust all certificate authorities in countries where there are secret legal means to force the creation of bogus certificates, e.g. the UK.
The whole system needs replacing but while we have to work with it it's important to take a firm stance on not allowing governments to interfere with or subvert it.
True, it's the idea that they are colluding against conservatives that is the conspiracy.
While there are biological differences between men and women, they don't have nearly as much influence as people think. The classic one is the old myth about men having better spacial skills. Turns out that if you give girls conduction kit toys they soon catch up and reach the same level as the boys.
In any case, I guess the issue here is that you think he said women and men are equally competent, and I don't.
Interesting that I didn't use the word "sexist" but you think that's what I was implying. It's not.
As for the image, I guess it's open to interpretation but based on his other tweets I took it to mean he thought claims that women are oppressed by men are overly simplistic. That ties in with his comments about "sexual capital", and it's also a straw man argument against feminism.
As I pointed out, that's not the argument he made. It's the opposite. Go read his memo, it's there in black and white.
I read the whole thing. Explain your argument if you have one.
the term SJW means an attention seeker who creates an imaginary grand conspiracy against their gender / race / political position
Like that James Damore guy and his giant anti-conservative conspiracy, right? Got it.
He says that their biology makes them on average more neurotic and less able to deal with the demands of being an engineer, then suggests that the job be changed to better suit that biology. Kind of ironic since he also complains about the bar being lowered for "diversity" candidates.
I'm saying that the assumption he is motivated by rationality and science is wrong, nothing more.
Why does everyone who uses the term SJW always make a load of other unfounded assumptions too?
I guess you are right, it is basically forbidden to call your work colleagues biologically handicapped. I'm not really sure how to respond to that... Would it make any difference if he was claiming that some races have a smaller average skull size and are therefore less intelligent (on average)?
As for the female engineer example you give, it doesn't sound like she is saying her colleagues are inferior... Maybe an unwarranted accusation of sexism, which could land her in trouble, of she is saying that it's some kind of deliberate policy.
He is welcome to his opinion, my only point here is that he's not the rational, good intentioned actor people seem to think he is. When let loose on Twitter he starts spouting standard anti-feminist/MRA rhetoric.
His Twitter statements undermine his claim to be rational and scientifically literate.
I refer you to the second part of my answer. You are absolutely correct that Damore is obligated to uphold Google's policies, but you also have to consider the nature of those policies and the nature of non-compliance.
If Damore had gone about this in a different way it might have been okay, but he did something that made his position untenable.
If someone refused diversity training then I'd probably look at if the training was needed, what the nature of the training was, that sort of thing, before forming an opinion.
Yes and yes.
He clearly stated that on average women are more neurotic and less able to deal with the demands of engineering jobs. He claims that this is due to biology.
You know I actually despise Islam, right?
It's it really just that one comment that made you think this or is there more? I want to understand what happened.
The basic problem is that he asserts that women make, on average, biologically inferior engineers. That assertion is largely rejected by experts in the fields he cites as evidence.
Consider the position this puts Google in. Employees at Google evaluate each other. Say he gives a women a poor evaluation. He stated belief is that women are biologically unsuited to software engineering. Would you even want to work with someone who considers you biologically inferior based on a faulty understanding of the science?