They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.
Can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Generally speaking, tolerating other beliefs and opinions until it inflicts obvious harm or is itself intolerant is considered “good.”
It’s one of those things we will never get perfect but I find we generally do it well enough to continue advocating for it. The problems start when people with extremely polarized beliefs fixate on marginalized groups that are not actually causing issues (transphobia), or they find something incredibly fringe then deliberately twist it and use it for fear mongering (satanic panic). Neither is done in good faith. They’re looking for a tool to project their moral frameworks in an aggressive, invasive manner.
“Live and live” is a pretty good role of thumb to live by for most people in most cases
Well, presumably you outsource the job of inflicting violence to others, like most people do. Voting for pretty much any political candidate is equivalent to doing so.
All politics is based on violence because violence is how laws are enforced. Thus by participating in politics (which includes voting), one implicitly endorses violence.
By contrast, an online service is not “based on destroying the climate”, that’s at best an unfortunate side effect, and possibly not even that as there are plenty of hosters that are climate neutral now.
More importantly, the fact that Internet infrastructure is damaging to the climate is widely recognized as a problem and there is a large-scale effort to fix it. There isn’t an effort to remove violence from the state though; the state is effectively defined by violence and anyone who supports the modern state in any way is inflicting violence by proxy.
Pandemic checks were from expanding the money supply IIRC rather than distributed taxes on the already very wealthy. These are very different mechanisms. What they did (expanding the money supply) drove inflation way more than the actual money in people’s pockets. Otherwise you’d have argue people shouldn’t get paid because it causes too much inflation.
We all filter and “nudge” the truth during interviews. We all cater our responses to the person in front of us. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Your interviewers sure aren’t.
> Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
A cursory search says 74-90% (in the US), but also that’s just tech companies and usually you need to be early. It’s also often in the form of options that take years to exercise and companies have gotten very creative lately in how they screw people out of them.
I don't think they hid the point that he was issued stock? I thought it was pretty obvious? Which is why they're talking about it now, because the value of those stocks shot up because they went public
Yes! What's wild is that the story is a microcosm of what's wrong with the economy as a whole, where his work was worthless in comparison to his winning lottery ticket, which itself was (charitably) 10% due to SpaceX achieving its original mission and 90% due to investor optimism about AI datacenters in space.
> The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.
Both of these comments need citations. The first I can maybe buy but the second is harder to accept without proof.
> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.
How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?
Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).
Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.
It would entirely be possible to limit the scope of things, by making sure the company that has your address (UPS or USPS, say) never has the other information. Each business would hand off a zero-knowledge identifier to you that you'd give to the others: Amazon would only know that the payment identifier they gave to you was fulfilled at VISA somehow, and then hand the package off to UPS with an identifier that they would never see again.
An argument about whether or not to deploy differential privacy on large statistical databases has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you give your address to have a package delivered. If you want the package delivered, you have to give your address.
On the other hand, it’s not at all clear that people should have to involuntarily, my force of law, offer up all sorts of personal details about their lives. And questions about whether the use of differential privacy can or should justify the collection of sensitive information are quite valid.
The census is justified by the idea that it will help us plan for the future. But the track record of central planning is poor to disastrous.
A small example: in theory population changes could inform land use decisions. In practice however, the ability of population to increase is softly capped by the amount of housing that exists, or will exist. If you restrict or frustrate housing, you will also restrict people from living where they want to live. Then the planners will point to the census data and tell you that nobody wants to live there and therefore there’s no need for change.
Ironically, if you wanted to measure where people want to live in order to get information for planning purposes, the number is right there and doesn’t require any personal data collection at all - it’s the price. (in this example $ per square foot of floor space). But in my experience people who like central planning don’t believe in prices so they ignore that and they look at their reams of personal data and they conclude that all is well in the world. It is hard for me to be sympathetic if one day folks like that had
have less data to look at.
> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
We agree that doxxing is dangerous online yes? Your point about the white pages is exactly what I’m talking about. A piece of data isn’t inherently dangerous or not dangerous. It’s about context and ease of access by actors with various intentions.
Not to mention smaller (successful) production teams are often comprised of veterans of the industry who have worked on large scale productions and bring that knowledge set with them. Same with many indie games. You have to play with the big dogs to understand what is and isn’t necessary for a product. You can’t just walk in with a plucky attitude and a dream unless you want to waste a lot of time and money.
The part that is also usually glossed over is how exploitative the production is (low pay/awful hours), even if it’s sometimes self-inflicted.
Not just knowledge but personal connections for favors. “Hey, [talented editor] it’s [famous DP], do you think you could tame a crack at this scene in your spare time? I’m trying to make something out of nothing and I’m positive you’ve got the chops.”
I don’t think anyone could reasonably call any of the exploitation self-inflicted. You have to take shit work a lot of times because a) nothing else is available and you still need to eat, or b) that’s the only way to get your foot in the door for the chance of being slightly less exploited. Unfortunately the industry collapsed when I graduated school as a career switcher getting into Houdini simulations. The software skill set is utterly devalued on the open market. I couldn’t get exploited if I wanted to. Now I’m a union tradesman. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I worked in the industry for over a decade and unfortunately it is very exploitative :/ i’ve watched line producers pressure production assistants, the lowest of the low on set, into lying about their hours so they don’t have to pay them OT under the guise of “being team players.” Lots of nonsense like that, mostly on non-union gigs.
The self-inflicted comment is a bit tongue in cheek because they do it to their own production to effectively “crunch” (to use video game parlance) but they also crunch themselves in the process. Difference is they have way more to gain. The sound mixer on an indie darling isn’t getting much out of it.
It’s pretty sad. I knew a lot of people in the union crafts (New England, which is way different from LA from what I hear) during the good times and they said it was all great, but as soon as things got tight, it was tribal as fuck. (The IATSE set building roster went from a few hundred dues-paying members to a couple dozen, and most of them were persistently out of work… it is in pretty bad shape, so there’s only so much you can do I guess.) Most of the other people I know were in VFX houses/animation and that hasn’t been non-exploitative in like 20 years. Considering how much money a few people make in that business, it’s pathetic.
Dude vfx houses are awful. They pull insane hours, win awards, and then get shut down. It’s working as a video game dev by all accounts. My buddy worked Bladerunner 2049 and the third post house he’s worked at since just shut down.
Even the video game industry reformed significantly after the bad press they got a few years ago. I mostly know people at Rockstar, but also Blizzard and Epic and they said they’ve really rented over a new leaf. I’ve still heard bad things about CD Projekt Red. It’s crazy how shit the VFX houses are.
Sadly they’ve demonstrated a decades-running pattern of promising to do better and then just doing exactly what they did before. I don’t support their games anymore at this point.
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