If this is about private individuals being more capable of managing money than governments, why isn't Zuckerberg investing in another charity?
People invest in charities instead of giving directly because of the overhead in setting up a charity.
But once you start talking about billions of dollars the overhead in starting the charity is trivial. Moreover if you donate to existing charities a lot of that money gets wasted because they're optimized for small fundraising and small donations. There's also a buyout problem, if Zuckerberg gives $45 billion to one charity or even spreads it over 10 then those charities suddenly feel a huge obligation to change towards Zuckerberg's interests.
Now it does sounds like the plan is to dole it out in smaller more manageable units. This is just the organization to figure out those units.
Does he not even trust Bill Gates to run a good charity? Probably not, I sure don't.
I hate MS and Gates's business practices, but his charity work is generally sound. But Gates's charitable interests aren't necessarily the same as Zuckerberg's, why shouldn't Zuckerberg donate his money to the causes he cares about.
He could do a lot worse, and he could abuse the system much more than he is, I won't argue that. But I'm not going to sing his praises and I would still like to see this mechanism shut off. He should realize his (unimaginably large, impossible to spend) gains, pay taxes to the country that made him successful and try to make it better with his still
Do you lessen your charitable contributions so you can pay more tax? Then why should he?
God knows they are running around like squirrels on cocaine right now, and there's an entire political party of people who seek to represent rich white guys who are clearly not being given anything like a coherent direction. Donald Trump is the best they got...Donald Born-Rich Trump, that's it. Bill Gates? He could probably tell them a thing or two about the working world, and obstacles to actual american business.
WTF are you rambling about? You think rich white guys have chosen to nominate Trump as their representative or something? They probably hold him in as much contempt as anyone. What does this even have to do with Zuckerberg?
Mostly we're reacting to the utter bullshit of it all. Zuckerberg is not giving away his money, he's sheltering it in a tax-free, obligation-free loop hole.
Brilliant. You just made the claim that he's giving away $45 billion dollars out of greed.
I honestly find it kind of fitting that you brought up Trump because that's about the only other place you find reasoning that incoherent.
All this criticism is just absurd, did people expect him to liquidate his FB shares and donate $45 billion in the course of a week? How else do you manage the giving away of $45 billion?
The guy is trying to give away an absurd pile of money in what is honestly the most logical way possible. This is a generous act on his part, it doesn't make him a saint or even a good person overall. But the act itself is good. Anyone claiming otherwise should really take a moment to consider why they're so desperate to criticize.
DBA's are known for being rational and objective when discussing competing RDBMSs, I'm looking forward to this discussion. Maybe next we could discuss which is better Islam, Christianity, or atheism.
"Since the lawsuit is trying to force the CEO to buy out his co-founder based on the CEO's prior greed, lowering the short term profitability of the company while boosting his positive PR seems to be a likely motive for the pay hike."
Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source). Did his plan then backfire?
Actually I'd expect the primary benefits to be short-term rather than long-term. One of the big effects of the pay hike was an ad campaign, the more time goes on the smaller the effectiveness of the ads but they're still paying the 70k salaries.
There's other effects that might kick in long term (ie employee satisfaction & retention), but the biggest positive effects would come at the start.
Which is completely meaningless given they're vastly different cultures.
Guns may make it easier, having tons of guns may result in having more suicides by guns but where's your evidence that guns mean more suicides?
There are lots of studies, here's a quick primer I googled. The mechanism is really obvious (guns are very quick, effective, and highly associated with dying) and whenever there's a big drop in gun control there's also a big drop in suicide rates.
Fewer guns and the rejection of gun culture is a good idea independent of mass shootings.
Those in the "gun culture" are the ones you want to have guns. Because the grow up understanding them, knowing how and when to use them, and because they've been around them since childhood, don't invest in them the sort of cartoonish mystique that not-raised-around-them video game playing idiots do. People who fantasize about getting and using a real firearm to scratch their sociopathic itches aren't part of the gun culture.
Well some of the spree shooters have come from the specific gun culture you speak of, but as I said that's not really what I'm talking about. In the part of the quote you cut off the inner city gangs are just as valid a "gun culture" as the middle class NRA members you allude to. And it's a gun culture supported by the NRAs insistence that guns are a good thing to have and the assertion that they're a cool and acceptable thing to have in the US.
Guns also mean a lot more suicides, this is a very well established fact.
But The President is already calling for new gun control laws.
And I'm expecting to hear within the next couple of days that this could have been prevented if we'd not stripped the Feds of the authority to do mass surveillance on the US population...
Fewer guns and the rejection of gun culture is a good idea independent of mass shootings.
But mass shootings offer a reason to talk about it, whether it's the best time to bring up the topic is another matter. The conversation should really be motivated by inner city violence and suicides, unfortunately voters are not motivated by inner city violence and suicides.
This always cracks me up how wage slaves erm people continually fall for this.
Foundations are the biggest tax dodge ever. In fact, since Zuck is opening up a foundation he can "donate" his shares to an organization he wholly controls who can then sell that stock capital gains tax free. The best part is he can use that f*ck all amount as a tax write off on his future earnings as well.
Then with whatever the obscene amount of money he can pay some small group of people to manage it. His daughter when she comes of age can then become a "director" or some other BS title and get paid $350,000 or more for the privilege of doing so. His family can then live off of this foundations free cash from being properly managed for the remainder of time. It's how the Rochefellers and Rothchilds continue their wealth without doing any real work.
He's smart to be doing this now before the next big dip in the market which should be coming soon enough.
To do this, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company - not a charity or charitable trust. Legal filings show that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is owned and controlled by Zuckerberg.
A spokesperson has confirmed to Buzzfeed that as a company, the Initiative can spend its money on whatever it wants - including private, profit-generating investment.
So all of the criticisms you just made don't actually apply.
I don't see why everyone is trying so hard to find the bad side or hidden motive in this. Most likely Zuckerberg realized 45 billion is a ridiculously large amount of money and there's no way for you and your children to spend more than 0.45 billion and retain their sanity. So he decided to designate the extra 44.55 billion for future charitable work in the easiest way possible while leaving himself the future option of pulling some back if FB stock has an epic collapse at some point.
It's still a huge gesture on his part of course, saying you'll give away that much wealth must be extraordinarily difficult.
Anyway, it's not really on most of them to fix it. It's on us in the west, and those in the far east to develop clean energy so that it is cheaper than coal anyway, at which point they will switch to it. We are already well on the way, we just need to speed the process up.
I apologize for being indelicate, but that line of thinking is complete bullshit. The people of India and the Far East are not some sort of subhuman animals who can't be held accountable for their actions and it's not on the West to take responsibility for fixing everybody else's problems. I absolutely abhor PC finger-wagging, but that is some of the most bigoted tripe I've read today, even if it was couched in platitudes for our Western saviors.
Except it's mostly our actions that created the problem of global warming, it's us who have most benefited from all the industrialization that caused global warming, and as a result of that industrialization it's us who have the most wealth and technological skill to mitigate global warming.
Yes India and the Far East will bear the brunt of the problem, but it's really our mess and we should take responsibility for fixing it.
No, we don't have airports in city centers because airports are enormous and noisy.
For years Edmonton had a municipal airport close to the downtown used mostly by small planes, even with the small planes there were height restrictions on the buildings in the downtown. Now this is much more a concern with landing and takeoff rather than flying at altitude, but landing and takeoff are dangerous and that's a factor they consider.
As usual, the whole "drones will fall on my head" thing is luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this, I offered specific reasoning based on economics and the reality of hardware failures and you just called it "luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world". You didn't even offer me an actual point to counter.
Did you mean the part where there will be lots of drones in the sky above cities? That's a question of economics and how the usages develop, I don't think assuming a big market is "luddite horseshit".
What about thinking that some will fall out of the sky? Surely the drones in Amazon's fleet won't last forever, how do you expect them to be pulled from service and recycled? Don't you think there's going to be companies looking at the slightly less reliable drones and thinking "rather than buying a new one I'll accept a 0.1% this drone will spontaneously fall out of the sky in the next month".
Or maybe you think the actual falling won't be a problem. If it's a low population suburb you're probably fine. If it's a downtown during rushhour, it might be pretty hard to find a safe place to drop a 20kg object.
If you're going to call something "luddite horseshit" then please be specific about what the actual horseshit is.
Same is true of airplanes and the same objections were raised when they were new.
And we don't have major airports in the downtown core of major cities for partly that reason.
But even the cheapest airplanes are extremely expensive and contain at least one pilot who really doesn't want to die. If your plane is getting to the state where it might fall out of the sky you repair or retire it.
But say you have a fleet of 5 year old drones. You'll probably get another 3-4 years out of most before they fail completely so it's a waste of money to throw them out and buy new ones. Instead you'll just run them into the ground until they die, sure the threat of lawsuits might keep them well maintained but that's not the same guarantee as airplanes.
Hardware fails, drones will fall from the sky, and no one seems to be discussing this. If they fly over the roads they'll fall in traffic and cause accidents, if they fly over the sidewalks they'll hit pedestrians and cause serious injury. I'm sure the hardware is reliable but I don't think people will have a lot of tolerance for drone related injuries, is the tech really so reliable that they could be deployed large-scale without falling drones becoming a concern?
But I don't see why they're only talking about negative behaviour since positive behaviour should also spread by the same mechanism. Perhaps upper management is more likely to spread negative things, or the cost of Enrons is too great to offset the benefit of really functional organizations, but I wish they had at least acknowledged the possibility.
Sure, but as the guys on the factory floor can tell you, "shit always rolls downhill." It is the first thing to look at. Don't presume that studies are intended to be definitive; they never are, they're always incremental. I agree they might not have asked the most important question first, but they did ask about one of the most commonly perceived aspects of the topic, which is a normal place to start.
Though I think that's also a bias on the part of the guys on the factory floor, the job of the manager is literally to tell you what to do, your default reaction will be to reject that. Even external things beyond the manager's control will end up attributed to them as the conduit.
I do get that the study could, and should, only look at one narrow question (ie do the negative behaviours spread). But I think my opposition is to their implication that it's the only relevant question and organizations should spread out management as a result.
The original goal of the fashion industry and catwalk models was simply to promote slim women - women who were a healthy weight. This was fair enough, and a decent goal - the happy medium. But the fashion industry didn't stop there. They became psychotic about thinness until the point where they now fetishize anorexic women who are very far from attractive and need to see a fucking doctor.
Yeah, I've heard two competing theories and I think they're both right, albeit more the first one than the second one. The first one is that when women are attractive people look at the women and not the clothes, so they wanted women who are more like a clothes hanger. Second, the influence of the homosexual fashion designer, who doesn't want to look at women anyway. (I know queers who like to look at boobs, so it's not all of them, but I also have met queers who seem to have a problem with women. It's a lumpy world.)
Or it's like the peacocks tail, guys don't like thinness because it's healthy, they like it because it's difficult to achieve. In our society there's a huge excess of calories and the standard person tends to be overweight. If you manage to be thin in that environment it suggests you're a higher quality mate because you've achieved a difficult task.
Supposedly a bit of fat tends to be attractive in societies with low food security, that would be completely consistent with this mechanism.
For one thing this isn't about sitting far away from your boss, the study was about managers being more likely to treat their subordinates the way their own bosses treat them when they sit closer to them. The/. summary actually seems to understand this a little better.
But the more confounding thing was when they were talking to the researchers.
The study demonstrated that when someone works near their manager, they also feel psychologically closer to them, and the opposite was true at larger distances.
"We saw that the more distant someone is, they’re less likely to identify with their boss or describe themselves in relation to their boss," van Houwelingen said.
[...]
"Distance is a very useful tool that can be used to stop negative behaviours from spreading through an organization," he said "It creates the freedom to make up your own mind."
But I don't see why they're only talking about negative behaviour since positive behaviour should also spread by the same mechanism. Perhaps upper management is more likely to spread negative things, or the cost of Enrons is too great to offset the benefit of really functional organizations, but I wish they had at least acknowledged the possibility.
Okay, this is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Can we please stop with all the articles vaguely related to Uber that have zero tech interest.
This is a site for techies, not taxi enthusiasts.
I actually think this is one of the better ones with a tech interest.
I'm not a fan of Uber and their flagrant lawbreaking, but one of the arguments in favour of them is that the taxi industry was broken, and I think this is a good example of that.
London cabs don't accept credit cards?!?! I don't see how you can look at that fact and imagine it is anything resembling a healthy market. I still don't like Uber but this really does show how tech can be disruptive in a positive way.
Many statements from the summary directly contradict my personal experience. The summary states:
"Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious."
Well, I'm an engineer and I work with engineers all day. I find the majority to be fairly liberal and not very religious. I always thought that it was a result of people being intelligent and familiar with the scientific method that made them less likely to swallow propaganda and dogma. Also, it is a largely foreign population and that is a factor since I meet the people who were educated enough to get jobs in different country from their own. I find that it is we Americans who are conservative and religious.
Liberal minded people are more likely to pursue the sciences or arts, conservatives to pursue engineering or business. It's certainly not deterministic but there's a bias. I know a lot of people who came to software development from engineering and some from computing science, in general I find the CS people to be more liberal and less religious.
As for the foreign origins of your co-workers note that you're working with a sub-population who explicitly emigrated to the US. You'd expect them to be a lot more liberal and irreligious regardless of profession.
Also, the summary states:
"Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers."
I speculate that Gamgetta and Hertog are fearful and jealous of engineers. I work in chip design and there are very few clearcut answers. Furthermore, your opinion on whether or not something is a good idea has no bearing on whether or not it actually is. I find that to be a major difference between engineering and the the more "normal" fields; you have to build things that work in the real world, your ability to persuade someone will not improve the quality of whatever it is you are building. If my chips don't work, I can't argue in front of a judge that they really do work. Nor can I publish a book speculating how good they really are. No, I fscked up and I have to deal with it.
I speculate that you're just being defensive:)
I think it's more the case that different failure modes exist for different disciplines.
With engineering it seems to be an idea that you can nicely solve things and create a robust solution, this works well with chip design, but when applied to societies there's a tendency to want to enforce a conformity that helps everyone work. I think this appeals to terrorists who want to bring their solution. There's also a tendency to reject slightly fuzzier sciences, for instance skeptics of AGW and even evolution tend to come from the engineering ranks. Some comes from pre-existing religious beliefs but some is just their experience in not trusting systems that rely a lot on random or statistical components.
For Liberals the failure tends to be towards excessive non-conformity. If someone is exhibiting self-destructive behaviour they tend to be overly accommodating or even idolize it. If someone becomes critical of non-conformity they'll attempt to punish that person so people feel free to be non-conformists (ie SJWs). They also tend to be sceptical of Western medicine due to the power structure and conformity it implies. I consider myself a Liberal and I'll readily admit that Jenny McCarthy has killed more people through her ignorance than most terrorists could dream of.
It seems like if we had any sense at all, we'd immediately dump the corporate income tax and replace it with a revenue-neutral increase in the capital gains and dividend taxes. The corporate shareholders ultimately end up paying any dollars that get paid anyway, and humans are much easier to tax than corporations are. A corporation is a shape-shifting non-entity that can "spend a year dead for tax purposes," so trying to change the laws fast enough to get any revenue out of them is a losing battle. All we end up doing is giving them an incentive to do ridiculous things like hold money in foreign accounts and set up subsidiaries all over the world to move revenue around. It's great for the tax lawyers and financial consultants, but it doesn't really get us any real revenue. It's the tax enforcement equivalent of the drug war.
Then rich people who own those corporations shift their assets overseas to low tax jurisdictions and pay the taxes there.
I was never sold on that explanation. The notion that North Korea even could pull it off - let alone would - I find to be absurd. Certainly if they had the ability, someone in that crew would have been aware of the Streisand Effect by now and would have said it was an awful idea. I watched The Interview, which was an awful movie - if the North Koreans wanted it to go away the right thing to do would have been to let it fail on its own. Had Sony not gotten this free PR for it, the movie would have promptly fallen into the same realm as Manos: Hands of Fate and various other un-watchables.
I thought it wasn't awful, it wasn't great, but it was more or less an average to slightly below average comedy flick.
As for NK's objectives, was their plan to stop The Interview, or to deter future projects? I doubt other studios are anxious to do another film critical of NK and draw a potential hack or something worse.
Lucas came up with story treatments for a new trilogy, those materials, to put it bluntly, were discarded
This is absolutely the best thing that could have happened to Star Wars. While he did have good ideas back in the 70's, he's long since used up whatever talent he ever had. He single handedly turned his franchise into "mule fritters" with Episodes 1-3. There is no way for the franchise to go but up now that Lucas is no longer involved.
Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
I'm not sure it's so much that he lost the talent as he lost the perspective or relationship with the state of film that made the first trilogy so good.
Both the first and original trilogy involved a boy getting recruited into an order of what was essentially mystical monks.
Both had really goofy aliens in the main cast (Chewy and JarJar), both had influential family connections (Anikan's wife and mother and Luke's sister and father), and both really pushed the technological bounds of what was possible.
I think one of the main problems is that acting styles have changed. In the first trilogy Lucas got more emotion when ranges were subdued and got emotional connection, in the second trilogy he did the same when actors tend to overact and he got whiny melodrama.
The other big problem is in the 70's he was very limited to a few props, cheap costumes, and lines drawn on the film. So by necessity he ended up with a very stark aesthetic that gave the feel of a western and felt very physically present.
In the 2000's he could give people superpowers and create entire cities, instead of a fantastic turn on real life he ended up with a completely different world no one could relate to.
Put today's George Lucas back in the 70's with the same concept of a fantasy space opera and he might make the original Star Wars again, but take the George Lucas from the 70's and take him to 2000 and Star Wars IV-VI might look a lot more like I-III.
Seems to me this could help the sport more than hurt it. If the guidance is more visible, it makes it more interesting to spectators. Something that swerves is more fun to watch than something that mostly stays in a straight line.
The problem is you can make rocks do this and this. The thrower is irrelevant on a shot like that since even a moderate sweeper can put the rock wherever they want. The skill and precision of the throwers is the big draw of the sport, along with the sweepers working like crazy to cause a moderate difference. With those brooms you end up turning it into a weird game of chess.
Note that the brooms from that video were never actually released to market, they were just used to spark the controversy as a demonstration of what could be done.
In fact both those brooms and the sweeping technique used were likely illegal under the previous rules.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I've been following this very closely since is started and the media account has been highly misleading so far.
Basically this is largely a controversy involving two companies, BalancePlus (BP), a long established broom manufacturer, and Hardline (HL), a company that's been around for about 5 years and is built around their broom.
Both companies sponsor teams, that's the major way they market equipment since brush effectiveness is really hard to evaluate, so often the only way a club curler will trust a broom is if they know elite curlers are using it.
Hardline's broom was a big step technologically. There's a number of nice features but a couple are the fact it's very light (you can sweep a lot faster), and instead of sweeping with a woven fabric there's a diamond pattern applied to the fabric that seals it against moisture (brooms become less effective when they're wet).
Now no one really heard much of Hardline for the first few years but then last year they sponsored some of the top young teams and a couple of those teams had breakthrough seasons and started winning a lot. It could just be because they were young teams poised for a breakthrough, or it could be because the brooms gave them a huge advantage. Either way a lot of elite curlers started looking at the brooms and thinking they were really good, some decided to try getting Hardline sponsorship, some pushed their own sponsors to design comparable brooms, and others may have started thinking the brooms were too effective and were detracting from the skill of the game.
Now jump to October of this year and people are suddenly talking about a players meeting that happened in Toronto and some agreement among top curlers. Eventually over the next week the news starts leaking out. There was a big World Curling Tour event with a lot of the top teams including those sponsored by both BalancePlus (BP) and Hardline (HL). The BP teams came with a special kind brush that was doing ridiculous things, they could make a rock that would normally curl 6 feet one way fall 4 feet the other way, or make a draw run completely straight, the brooms also destroyed the ice in the process. Everyone present could see that whatever they were using shouldn't be allowed in the sport. Either way the BP teams said they'd stop using their brooms if the HL teams stopped using theirs.
BP then released a statement talking about how they'd been told the HL brooms were doing unnatural things to the rocks, so they investigated and found they used "directional fabric" (no one know what this means). So BP says they did this stunt to show that if they really wanted they could make a broom so effective it would wreck the sport but that they really felt that no one should use directional fabric (this was mixed in with all sorts of shots at the HL broom).
So within a week of this event there was an agreement that the HL sponsored teams would flip their brushing material inside out (it's just a cover with ordinary fabric on the underside). If the diamond pattern was "directional fabric" they'd just have an ordinary fabric. Of course they kept on winning and so people decided it must be something else. This seems to the motivation behind the World Curling Federation ruling that bans the texturing HL used on their fabric (supposedly the "directional fabric") and some other extra modifications to make the brush head firmer.
Here's the problem, there's absolutely no actual evidence that's been presented that the HL brooms are any different than other brushes, the only thing BP released is the two videos of their own demo brooms doing unnatural things. No one has ever shown HL brooms doing the same (and there's a lot of people who have them). In fact they only actual test I've heard of involved two teams trying to sort it out by testing with both brooms at some event. The test finished with both brushes perfor
And then there's Curling. Real blood sport. My experience with Curling: Went to Ottawa for business, stopped in Vancouver for a connecting flight. In one waiting area bar was a few televisions with people watching Curling. I had two hours to kill so I sat down with a beer and watched Curling. Two hours later I left to get my connecting flight. Two hours of looking at my watch, drinking Molsen's, and watching Curling. Two hours. Seemed like 5. I tried to get into it, honestly. Then I left Vancouver. That was my last experience with Curling. Seriously. It could have been an English documentary on cheese making. I left with the same impression. Woah. Need a sleep-aid? Watch Curling.
Could have been worse, you could have been watching baseball.
Though seriously curling is like any sport, way better if you understand it and have some context for what's going on.
All PETA members and their families should be identified.
If they should ever turn up needing medical services, they should only receive services that were not devised/tested via animal experimentation.
I expect they'd quickly be whistling a different tune.
I don't think that's entirely fair since their belief is those same medical services could have been produced without animal experimentation.
I think they're mostly wrong of course, and more than a bit loopy, but I'd rather treat them with well deserved scorn than trying to saddle them with our version of what we think they want.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is about private individuals being more capable of managing money than governments, why isn't Zuckerberg investing in another charity?
People invest in charities instead of giving directly because of the overhead in setting up a charity.
But once you start talking about billions of dollars the overhead in starting the charity is trivial. Moreover if you donate to existing charities a lot of that money gets wasted because they're optimized for small fundraising and small donations. There's also a buyout problem, if Zuckerberg gives $45 billion to one charity or even spreads it over 10 then those charities suddenly feel a huge obligation to change towards Zuckerberg's interests.
Now it does sounds like the plan is to dole it out in smaller more manageable units. This is just the organization to figure out those units.
Does he not even trust Bill Gates to run a good charity? Probably not, I sure don't.
I hate MS and Gates's business practices, but his charity work is generally sound. But Gates's charitable interests aren't necessarily the same as Zuckerberg's, why shouldn't Zuckerberg donate his money to the causes he cares about.
He could do a lot worse, and he could abuse the system much more than he is, I won't argue that. But I'm not going to sing his praises and I would still like to see this mechanism shut off. He should realize his (unimaginably large, impossible to spend) gains, pay taxes to the country that made him successful and try to make it better with his still
Do you lessen your charitable contributions so you can pay more tax? Then why should he?
God knows they are running around like squirrels on cocaine right now, and there's an entire political party of people who seek to represent rich white guys who are clearly not being given anything like a coherent direction. Donald Trump is the best they got...Donald Born-Rich Trump, that's it. Bill Gates? He could probably tell them a thing or two about the working world, and obstacles to actual american business.
WTF are you rambling about? You think rich white guys have chosen to nominate Trump as their representative or something? They probably hold him in as much contempt as anyone. What does this even have to do with Zuckerberg?
Mostly we're reacting to the utter bullshit of it all. Zuckerberg is not giving away his money, he's sheltering it in a tax-free, obligation-free loop hole.
Brilliant. You just made the claim that he's giving away $45 billion dollars out of greed.
I honestly find it kind of fitting that you brought up Trump because that's about the only other place you find reasoning that incoherent.
All this criticism is just absurd, did people expect him to liquidate his FB shares and donate $45 billion in the course of a week? How else do you manage the giving away of $45 billion?
The guy is trying to give away an absurd pile of money in what is honestly the most logical way possible. This is a generous act on his part, it doesn't make him a saint or even a good person overall. But the act itself is good. Anyone claiming otherwise should really take a moment to consider why they're so desperate to criticize.
DBA's are known for being rational and objective when discussing competing RDBMSs, I'm looking forward to this discussion. Maybe next we could discuss which is better Islam, Christianity, or atheism.
The answer is obvious:
Emacs
"Since the lawsuit is trying to force the CEO to buy out his co-founder based on the CEO's prior greed, lowering the short term profitability of the company while boosting his positive PR seems to be a likely motive for the pay hike."
Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source). Did his plan then backfire?
Actually I'd expect the primary benefits to be short-term rather than long-term. One of the big effects of the pay hike was an ad campaign, the more time goes on the smaller the effectiveness of the ads but they're still paying the 70k salaries.
There's other effects that might kick in long term (ie employee satisfaction & retention), but the biggest positive effects would come at the start.
The United States ranks 50th for rate of suicide. Japan, with very strict gun laws ranks 17th. (List of countries by suicide rate)
Which is completely meaningless given they're vastly different cultures.
Guns may make it easier, having tons of guns may result in having more suicides by guns but where's your evidence that guns mean more suicides?
There are lots of studies, here's a quick primer I googled. The mechanism is really obvious (guns are very quick, effective, and highly associated with dying) and whenever there's a big drop in gun control there's also a big drop in suicide rates.
Fewer guns and the rejection of gun culture is a good idea independent of mass shootings.
Those in the "gun culture" are the ones you want to have guns. Because the grow up understanding them, knowing how and when to use them, and because they've been around them since childhood, don't invest in them the sort of cartoonish mystique that not-raised-around-them video game playing idiots do. People who fantasize about getting and using a real firearm to scratch their sociopathic itches aren't part of the gun culture.
Well some of the spree shooters have come from the specific gun culture you speak of, but as I said that's not really what I'm talking about. In the part of the quote you cut off the inner city gangs are just as valid a "gun culture" as the middle class NRA members you allude to. And it's a gun culture supported by the NRAs insistence that guns are a good thing to have and the assertion that they're a cool and acceptable thing to have in the US.
Guns also mean a lot more suicides, this is a very well established fact.
So, we have no idea who did it or why.
But The President is already calling for new gun control laws.
And I'm expecting to hear within the next couple of days that this could have been prevented if we'd not stripped the Feds of the authority to do mass surveillance on the US population...
Fewer guns and the rejection of gun culture is a good idea independent of mass shootings.
But mass shootings offer a reason to talk about it, whether it's the best time to bring up the topic is another matter. The conversation should really be motivated by inner city violence and suicides, unfortunately voters are not motivated by inner city violence and suicides.
This always cracks me up how wage slaves erm people continually fall for this.
Foundations are the biggest tax dodge ever. In fact, since Zuck is opening up a foundation he can "donate" his shares to an organization he wholly controls who can then sell that stock capital gains tax free. The best part is he can use that f*ck all amount as a tax write off on his future earnings as well.
Then with whatever the obscene amount of money he can pay some small group of people to manage it. His daughter when she comes of age can then become a "director" or some other BS title and get paid $350,000 or more for the privilege of doing so. His family can then live off of this foundations free cash from being properly managed for the remainder of time. It's how the Rochefellers and Rothchilds continue their wealth without doing any real work.
He's smart to be doing this now before the next big dip in the market which should be coming soon enough.
Except this isn't a registered charitable foundation but a limited liability company:
To do this, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company - not a charity or charitable trust. Legal filings show that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is owned and controlled by Zuckerberg.
A spokesperson has confirmed to Buzzfeed that as a company, the Initiative can spend its money on whatever it wants - including private, profit-generating investment.
So all of the criticisms you just made don't actually apply.
I don't see why everyone is trying so hard to find the bad side or hidden motive in this. Most likely Zuckerberg realized 45 billion is a ridiculously large amount of money and there's no way for you and your children to spend more than 0.45 billion and retain their sanity. So he decided to designate the extra 44.55 billion for future charitable work in the easiest way possible while leaving himself the future option of pulling some back if FB stock has an epic collapse at some point.
It's still a huge gesture on his part of course, saying you'll give away that much wealth must be extraordinarily difficult.
Anyway, it's not really on most of them to fix it. It's on us in the west, and those in the far east to develop clean energy so that it is cheaper than coal anyway, at which point they will switch to it. We are already well on the way, we just need to speed the process up.
I apologize for being indelicate, but that line of thinking is complete bullshit. The people of India and the Far East are not some sort of subhuman animals who can't be held accountable for their actions and it's not on the West to take responsibility for fixing everybody else's problems. I absolutely abhor PC finger-wagging, but that is some of the most bigoted tripe I've read today, even if it was couched in platitudes for our Western saviors.
Except it's mostly our actions that created the problem of global warming, it's us who have most benefited from all the industrialization that caused global warming, and as a result of that industrialization it's us who have the most wealth and technological skill to mitigate global warming.
Yes India and the Far East will bear the brunt of the problem, but it's really our mess and we should take responsibility for fixing it.
No, we don't have airports in city centers because airports are enormous and noisy.
For years Edmonton had a municipal airport close to the downtown used mostly by small planes, even with the small planes there were height restrictions on the buildings in the downtown. Now this is much more a concern with landing and takeoff rather than flying at altitude, but landing and takeoff are dangerous and that's a factor they consider.
As usual, the whole "drones will fall on my head" thing is luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this, I offered specific reasoning based on economics and the reality of hardware failures and you just called it "luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world". You didn't even offer me an actual point to counter.
Did you mean the part where there will be lots of drones in the sky above cities? That's a question of economics and how the usages develop, I don't think assuming a big market is "luddite horseshit".
What about thinking that some will fall out of the sky? Surely the drones in Amazon's fleet won't last forever, how do you expect them to be pulled from service and recycled? Don't you think there's going to be companies looking at the slightly less reliable drones and thinking "rather than buying a new one I'll accept a 0.1% this drone will spontaneously fall out of the sky in the next month".
Or maybe you think the actual falling won't be a problem. If it's a low population suburb you're probably fine. If it's a downtown during rushhour, it might be pretty hard to find a safe place to drop a 20kg object.
If you're going to call something "luddite horseshit" then please be specific about what the actual horseshit is.
Same is true of airplanes and the same objections were raised when they were new.
And we don't have major airports in the downtown core of major cities for partly that reason.
But even the cheapest airplanes are extremely expensive and contain at least one pilot who really doesn't want to die. If your plane is getting to the state where it might fall out of the sky you repair or retire it.
But say you have a fleet of 5 year old drones. You'll probably get another 3-4 years out of most before they fail completely so it's a waste of money to throw them out and buy new ones. Instead you'll just run them into the ground until they die, sure the threat of lawsuits might keep them well maintained but that's not the same guarantee as airplanes.
Hardware fails, drones will fall from the sky, and no one seems to be discussing this. If they fly over the roads they'll fall in traffic and cause accidents, if they fly over the sidewalks they'll hit pedestrians and cause serious injury. I'm sure the hardware is reliable but I don't think people will have a lot of tolerance for drone related injuries, is the tech really so reliable that they could be deployed large-scale without falling drones becoming a concern?
But I don't see why they're only talking about negative behaviour since positive behaviour should also spread by the same mechanism. Perhaps upper management is more likely to spread negative things, or the cost of Enrons is too great to offset the benefit of really functional organizations, but I wish they had at least acknowledged the possibility.
Sure, but as the guys on the factory floor can tell you, "shit always rolls downhill." It is the first thing to look at. Don't presume that studies are intended to be definitive; they never are, they're always incremental. I agree they might not have asked the most important question first, but they did ask about one of the most commonly perceived aspects of the topic, which is a normal place to start.
Though I think that's also a bias on the part of the guys on the factory floor, the job of the manager is literally to tell you what to do, your default reaction will be to reject that. Even external things beyond the manager's control will end up attributed to them as the conduit.
I do get that the study could, and should, only look at one narrow question (ie do the negative behaviours spread). But I think my opposition is to their implication that it's the only relevant question and organizations should spread out management as a result.
The original goal of the fashion industry and catwalk models was simply to promote slim women - women who were a healthy weight. This was fair enough, and a decent goal - the happy medium. But the fashion industry didn't stop there. They became psychotic about thinness until the point where they now fetishize anorexic women who are very far from attractive and need to see a fucking doctor.
Yeah, I've heard two competing theories and I think they're both right, albeit more the first one than the second one. The first one is that when women are attractive people look at the women and not the clothes, so they wanted women who are more like a clothes hanger. Second, the influence of the homosexual fashion designer, who doesn't want to look at women anyway. (I know queers who like to look at boobs, so it's not all of them, but I also have met queers who seem to have a problem with women. It's a lumpy world.)
Or it's like the peacocks tail, guys don't like thinness because it's healthy, they like it because it's difficult to achieve. In our society there's a huge excess of calories and the standard person tends to be overweight. If you manage to be thin in that environment it suggests you're a higher quality mate because you've achieved a difficult task.
Supposedly a bit of fat tends to be attractive in societies with low food security, that would be completely consistent with this mechanism.
For one thing this isn't about sitting far away from your boss, the study was about managers being more likely to treat their subordinates the way their own bosses treat them when they sit closer to them. The /. summary actually seems to understand this a little better.
But the more confounding thing was when they were talking to the researchers.
The study demonstrated that when someone works near their manager, they also feel psychologically closer to them, and the opposite was true at larger distances.
"We saw that the more distant someone is, they’re less likely to identify with their boss or describe themselves in relation to their boss," van Houwelingen said.
[...]
"Distance is a very useful tool that can be used to stop negative behaviours from spreading through an organization," he said "It creates the freedom to make up your own mind."
But I don't see why they're only talking about negative behaviour since positive behaviour should also spread by the same mechanism. Perhaps upper management is more likely to spread negative things, or the cost of Enrons is too great to offset the benefit of really functional organizations, but I wish they had at least acknowledged the possibility.
Okay, this is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Can we please stop with all the articles vaguely related to Uber that have zero tech interest.
This is a site for techies, not taxi enthusiasts.
I actually think this is one of the better ones with a tech interest.
I'm not a fan of Uber and their flagrant lawbreaking, but one of the arguments in favour of them is that the taxi industry was broken, and I think this is a good example of that.
London cabs don't accept credit cards?!?! I don't see how you can look at that fact and imagine it is anything resembling a healthy market. I still don't like Uber but this really does show how tech can be disruptive in a positive way.
Many statements from the summary directly contradict my personal experience. The summary states:
"Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious."
Well, I'm an engineer and I work with engineers all day. I find the majority to be fairly liberal and not very religious. I always thought that it was a result of people being intelligent and familiar with the scientific method that made them less likely to swallow propaganda and dogma. Also, it is a largely foreign population and that is a factor since I meet the people who were educated enough to get jobs in different country from their own. I find that it is we Americans who are conservative and religious.
Liberal minded people are more likely to pursue the sciences or arts, conservatives to pursue engineering or business. It's certainly not deterministic but there's a bias. I know a lot of people who came to software development from engineering and some from computing science, in general I find the CS people to be more liberal and less religious.
As for the foreign origins of your co-workers note that you're working with a sub-population who explicitly emigrated to the US. You'd expect them to be a lot more liberal and irreligious regardless of profession.
Also, the summary states:
"Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers."
I speculate that Gamgetta and Hertog are fearful and jealous of engineers. I work in chip design and there are very few clearcut answers. Furthermore, your opinion on whether or not something is a good idea has no bearing on whether or not it actually is. I find that to be a major difference between engineering and the the more "normal" fields; you have to build things that work in the real world, your ability to persuade someone will not improve the quality of whatever it is you are building. If my chips don't work, I can't argue in front of a judge that they really do work. Nor can I publish a book speculating how good they really are. No, I fscked up and I have to deal with it.
I speculate that you're just being defensive :)
I think it's more the case that different failure modes exist for different disciplines.
With engineering it seems to be an idea that you can nicely solve things and create a robust solution, this works well with chip design, but when applied to societies there's a tendency to want to enforce a conformity that helps everyone work. I think this appeals to terrorists who want to bring their solution. There's also a tendency to reject slightly fuzzier sciences, for instance skeptics of AGW and even evolution tend to come from the engineering ranks. Some comes from pre-existing religious beliefs but some is just their experience in not trusting systems that rely a lot on random or statistical components.
For Liberals the failure tends to be towards excessive non-conformity. If someone is exhibiting self-destructive behaviour they tend to be overly accommodating or even idolize it. If someone becomes critical of non-conformity they'll attempt to punish that person so people feel free to be non-conformists (ie SJWs). They also tend to be sceptical of Western medicine due to the power structure and conformity it implies. I consider myself a Liberal and I'll readily admit that Jenny McCarthy has killed more people through her ignorance than most terrorists could dream of.
Engineers are handy personnel assets in nearly every venture, and the field of terrorism is no exception.
It is likely many promising young jihadists are schooled to suit the perceived needs of the movement.
If only there was some part of the summary where they talked about looking into and dismissing that hypothesis.
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
To have a bias about a group, seeing evidence that contradicts your opinion, then twisting that evidence so it instead re-enforces that bias.
Can you even conceive of such a thing?!?!
It seems like if we had any sense at all, we'd immediately dump the corporate income tax and replace it with a revenue-neutral increase in the capital gains and dividend taxes. The corporate shareholders ultimately end up paying any dollars that get paid anyway, and humans are much easier to tax than corporations are. A corporation is a shape-shifting non-entity that can "spend a year dead for tax purposes," so trying to change the laws fast enough to get any revenue out of them is a losing battle. All we end up doing is giving them an incentive to do ridiculous things like hold money in foreign accounts and set up subsidiaries all over the world to move revenue around. It's great for the tax lawyers and financial consultants, but it doesn't really get us any real revenue. It's the tax enforcement equivalent of the drug war.
Then rich people who own those corporations shift their assets overseas to low tax jurisdictions and pay the taxes there.
I was never sold on that explanation. The notion that North Korea even could pull it off - let alone would - I find to be absurd. Certainly if they had the ability, someone in that crew would have been aware of the Streisand Effect by now and would have said it was an awful idea. I watched The Interview, which was an awful movie - if the North Koreans wanted it to go away the right thing to do would have been to let it fail on its own. Had Sony not gotten this free PR for it, the movie would have promptly fallen into the same realm as Manos: Hands of Fate and various other un-watchables.
I thought it wasn't awful, it wasn't great, but it was more or less an average to slightly below average comedy flick.
As for NK's objectives, was their plan to stop The Interview, or to deter future projects? I doubt other studios are anxious to do another film critical of NK and draw a potential hack or something worse.
Lucas came up with story treatments for a new trilogy, those materials, to put it bluntly, were discarded
This is absolutely the best thing that could have happened to Star Wars. While he did have good ideas back in the 70's, he's long since used up whatever talent he ever had. He single handedly turned his franchise into "mule fritters" with Episodes 1-3. There is no way for the franchise to go but up now that Lucas is no longer involved.
Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
I'm not sure it's so much that he lost the talent as he lost the perspective or relationship with the state of film that made the first trilogy so good.
Both the first and original trilogy involved a boy getting recruited into an order of what was essentially mystical monks.
Both had really goofy aliens in the main cast (Chewy and JarJar), both had influential family connections (Anikan's wife and mother and Luke's sister and father), and both really pushed the technological bounds of what was possible.
I think one of the main problems is that acting styles have changed. In the first trilogy Lucas got more emotion when ranges were subdued and got emotional connection, in the second trilogy he did the same when actors tend to overact and he got whiny melodrama.
The other big problem is in the 70's he was very limited to a few props, cheap costumes, and lines drawn on the film. So by necessity he ended up with a very stark aesthetic that gave the feel of a western and felt very physically present.
In the 2000's he could give people superpowers and create entire cities, instead of a fantastic turn on real life he ended up with a completely different world no one could relate to.
Put today's George Lucas back in the 70's with the same concept of a fantasy space opera and he might make the original Star Wars again, but take the George Lucas from the 70's and take him to 2000 and Star Wars IV-VI might look a lot more like I-III.
Seems to me this could help the sport more than hurt it. If the guidance is more visible, it makes it more interesting to spectators. Something that swerves is more fun to watch than something that mostly stays in a straight line.
The problem is you can make rocks do this and this. The thrower is irrelevant on a shot like that since even a moderate sweeper can put the rock wherever they want. The skill and precision of the throwers is the big draw of the sport, along with the sweepers working like crazy to cause a moderate difference. With those brooms you end up turning it into a weird game of chess.
Note that the brooms from that video were never actually released to market, they were just used to spark the controversy as a demonstration of what could be done.
In fact both those brooms and the sweeping technique used were likely illegal under the previous rules.
Train with steroids, then stop at some threshold before testing, so you get a pass result. Worked for Arnold (and almost everyone else in the sport).
Why would he stop? I didn't think professional bodybuilding involves drug tests.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I've been following this very closely since is started and the media account has been highly misleading so far.
Basically this is largely a controversy involving two companies, BalancePlus (BP), a long established broom manufacturer, and Hardline (HL), a company that's been around for about 5 years and is built around their broom.
Both companies sponsor teams, that's the major way they market equipment since brush effectiveness is really hard to evaluate, so often the only way a club curler will trust a broom is if they know elite curlers are using it.
Hardline's broom was a big step technologically. There's a number of nice features but a couple are the fact it's very light (you can sweep a lot faster), and instead of sweeping with a woven fabric there's a diamond pattern applied to the fabric that seals it against moisture (brooms become less effective when they're wet).
Now no one really heard much of Hardline for the first few years but then last year they sponsored some of the top young teams and a couple of those teams had breakthrough seasons and started winning a lot. It could just be because they were young teams poised for a breakthrough, or it could be because the brooms gave them a huge advantage. Either way a lot of elite curlers started looking at the brooms and thinking they were really good, some decided to try getting Hardline sponsorship, some pushed their own sponsors to design comparable brooms, and others may have started thinking the brooms were too effective and were detracting from the skill of the game.
Now jump to October of this year and people are suddenly talking about a players meeting that happened in Toronto and some agreement among top curlers. Eventually over the next week the news starts leaking out. There was a big World Curling Tour event with a lot of the top teams including those sponsored by both BalancePlus (BP) and Hardline (HL). The BP teams came with a special kind brush that was doing ridiculous things, they could make a rock that would normally curl 6 feet one way fall 4 feet the other way, or make a draw run completely straight, the brooms also destroyed the ice in the process. Everyone present could see that whatever they were using shouldn't be allowed in the sport. Either way the BP teams said they'd stop using their brooms if the HL teams stopped using theirs.
BP then released a statement talking about how they'd been told the HL brooms were doing unnatural things to the rocks, so they investigated and found they used "directional fabric" (no one know what this means). So BP says they did this stunt to show that if they really wanted they could make a broom so effective it would wreck the sport but that they really felt that no one should use directional fabric (this was mixed in with all sorts of shots at the HL broom).
So within a week of this event there was an agreement that the HL sponsored teams would flip their brushing material inside out (it's just a cover with ordinary fabric on the underside). If the diamond pattern was "directional fabric" they'd just have an ordinary fabric. Of course they kept on winning and so people decided it must be something else. This seems to the motivation behind the World Curling Federation ruling that bans the texturing HL used on their fabric (supposedly the "directional fabric") and some other extra modifications to make the brush head firmer.
Here's the problem, there's absolutely no actual evidence that's been presented that the HL brooms are any different than other brushes, the only thing BP released is the two videos of their own demo brooms doing unnatural things. No one has ever shown HL brooms doing the same (and there's a lot of people who have them). In fact they only actual test I've heard of involved two teams trying to sort it out by testing with both brooms at some event. The test finished with both brushes perfor
American footballers are schoolgirls.
And then there's Curling. Real blood sport. My experience with Curling: Went to Ottawa for business, stopped in Vancouver for a connecting flight. In one waiting area bar was a few televisions with people watching Curling. I had two hours to kill so I sat down with a beer and watched Curling. Two hours later I left to get my connecting flight. Two hours of looking at my watch, drinking Molsen's, and watching Curling. Two hours. Seemed like 5. I tried to get into it, honestly. Then I left Vancouver. That was my last experience with Curling. Seriously. It could have been an English documentary on cheese making. I left with the same impression. Woah. Need a sleep-aid? Watch Curling.
Could have been worse, you could have been watching baseball.
Though seriously curling is like any sport, way better if you understand it and have some context for what's going on.
All PETA members and their families should be identified.
If they should ever turn up needing medical services, they should only receive services that were not devised/tested via animal experimentation.
I expect they'd quickly be whistling a different tune.
I don't think that's entirely fair since their belief is those same medical services could have been produced without animal experimentation.
I think they're mostly wrong of course, and more than a bit loopy, but I'd rather treat them with well deserved scorn than trying to saddle them with our version of what we think they want.