wegs

I won't argue whether it's accurate, but I think you missed the point. You can swap words around, and get the same for any demographic.

The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."

No. This is not true, and I think I provided a good reference to that effect (it's really quite a good documentary too). A US surgeon engaging in child abuse is a statistical anomaly in the world of child sexual abuse. The best way to find child sexual abuse is to hop onto an airplane, and go to a region of the developing world where child sexual abuse is rampant.

It's not all hard to find such places. Many children are abused at scale, globally. I think few of those kids are getting filmed or turned in CSAM.

I'm also not at all sold on your claim that hands-on offenders tend to collect CSAM materials either, but we have no way to know.

I am sold on the best way of reducing actual abuse involves some combination of measures such as:

1) Fighting poverty; a huge amount of exploitation is for simple economic reasons; people need to eat

2) Providing social supports, where kids know what's not okay, and have trusted individuals they can report it to

3) Effective enforcement everywhere (not just rich countries)

4) Places for such kids to escape to, which are safe and decent. Kids won't report if the alternative is worse

... and so on. In other words, building out a basic social net for everyone.

I think we'll see more globalization, but I think people overstate the level of the transition:

1) Done well, remote work is at least as effective as office-based. However, my experience is that most companies aren't doing remote work remotely well, even 15 months in.

2) Globalization has to do with more than just being remote. An issue we still haven't solved are time zones.

I think the first move we'll see is from San Fran, Mountain View, etc. to cheaper parts of the US, closer to food production, and with more available land.

For the Olympics, this impression is incorrect. It's at least as much a show as an athletics competition.

Billions of dollars are on the line in the Olympics, and that's what it's about, from countries competing with billion-dollar incentives, to news networks, to bribes.

Any capitalist enterprise is driven to make money.

If the athletes don't show up, there are plenty of others who will. Expecting athlete pushback to solve this is a doomed strategy.

Sex sells. The Olympics is fundamentally about eyeballs.

Is it okay to have strip clubs? Is it okay to hire scantily-clad women for ads? In movies? Where are the lines?

I'm not sure where we want the lines, but:

* I don't like the lines drawn based on one-off issues going viral. I'd like a consistent set of lines.

* I feel like it's unreasonable to expect organizations to not follow the Smith's free hand of capitalism. "Good" organizations are out-competed by "bad" ones.

Is this a place where we might have a serious discussion about a new regulatory regime, or otherwise changing market forces and incentive structures?

I feel like that might be a slower, but more comprehensive, more equitable, and more sustainable way of landing on fair ground.

- More comprehensive: Reworking structures effects everyone, and not just Olympics. I'm at least as concerned about thousands of "Hooters girls" as about elite actresses and athletes.

- More equitable: Good businesses don't get punished. Bad ones don't get rewarded.

- More sustainable: Market forces should push for the behavior we want. Otherwise, it's like fighting the ocean.

Perhaps not.

1) "Potential readers" is limited to people who can afford newspapers. NY Times runs around $520 per year in paper, at 2020 printing and delivery costs, and around $100 digitally. Printing and delivery costs, as portion of GDP-per-capita, were much higher in 1921. In 1921, the audience was extremely exclusive. An online audience is more democratic, and ergo, less educated.

2) Newspapers aren't driven by selling papers, so much as by organizational dynamics. I need to satisfy my boss and my peers to keep my job. Sales is one aspect of that, and as organizations grow in size, a decreasing aspect. As far as I can tell, NY Times has hired a bunch of idiots, and a lot of the most competent reporters are heading fast for the door.

Many companies which go under do so because of bad culture, often resulting from wildly misaligned incentives, good people leaving, bad people failing to bring in new good people, and so on. I think NY Times is slowly heading that way. I've seen few organizations able to claw back from where it is. Facebook and Google are moving in that direction too, for that matter.

I'd compare to other industries.

My experience is perceptions of abuse and abuse are very different. What passes for abuse in software engineering would be a dream job in e.g. retail, education, construction, or many other segments of the economy.

Jerks and nice people are everywhere, but the underlying baseline is set by power dynamics.

GOP isn't a person. It's a loose confederacy of people. For small government freedom-loving Republicans, go to e.g. parts of Texas.

Utah is a religious conservative. That's an entirely different sort of person. It's a demographic which, in many ways, would align better with Democrats, if not for a few wings of the DNC such as:

* Dawkins-toting militant atheist wing

* Pro-choice feminist wing

That's a big part of why Mitt Romney so often sides with Democrats on key votes, and takes so much flack from other parts of the GOP. He was also governor of Massachusetts, which is about as blue as you get. It take a special kind of Republican to win there.

I don't agree with a lot of what Utah Republicans stand for, but I don't see much hypocrisy there. It's pretty consistent:

* Against: Porn, anti-abortion, homosexuality, drinking, smoking, drugs

* For: Helping poor people (although with a complex split of private charity, church, and government), good education, clean strong neighborhoods, community, families, churches

COVID19 went a bit wonky, but with a few exceptions like that, it's mostly straight-line honest Mormon views.

Curiously, pre-Romney, who seems among the least corrupt politicians in government, Utah was represented by Orrin Hatch, who seemed to be among the most corrupt of the senators at the time.

I cringed on every third sentence in the Google post.

E.g. "People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising."

This sounded a lot like: "Chickens shouldn't have to accept lower-quality feed in order to get the benefits of a more efficient slaughterhouse."

I don't want the "benefits" of relevant advertising.

I hope Google's moves are too little too late to avoid regulation. We really need regulation.

> Yes, but I guess I wouldn’t label them as scientific processes, which I would assume be in line with the scientific method.

It's that exact assumption which is common, incorrect, and which I'd like to see addressed in K-12 education.

The scientific process in my discipline works as:

1) Graduate students come in to do research

2) Ones which align with hot topics have venues to be published, people to cite them, sources of funding, etc.

3) Some people do diligent work, and write a publication a year. Those don't go anywhere. Some people write 12 publications per year, often based on poor scientific methodology and buggy analysis algorithms.

4) The highest-impact results often come from methodological errors, and never replicate. Most errors are never found, but even if they are, by that point, the people who wrote those papers have found tenure.

5) No one has time for good peer reviews, so reviewers glance at the abstract, sometimes to see if they were cited, and skim the paper.

6) Press picks up the sexiest results, which almost always are nonsense. People also cite the sexiest results.

Increasingly, this has moved from sloppiness to intentional gaming of the system. About half of academics I saw hired in the past decade had some level of intentional sketchiness going on.

This doesn't align well with scientific methods.

In the same way, I think high school civics courses should talk about issues like buying influence, polarization, and corruption as part of civics.

This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a greater role of scientists in decision-making.

It was a good read.

I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes:

* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes

* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines

* Impact over integrity in hiring

* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)

... and so on.

As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact. Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be awesome to see in schools.

If they release 3D CAD models, connector part numbers, and circuit schematics, I'm buying one as my next laptop (when my current one fails or goes obsolete; not as soon as it's released). I expect, if history is any indicator, that they'll be out-of-business by then, though. I'd want to know:

- How parts connect at a modular level (e.g. pinout and signalling between LCD and motherboard, how the battery communicates, etc.). I don't need to know e.g. motherboard schematic / layout

- Mechanicals (enough to 3d print things which fit)

- Ideally, as much firmware open as possible (esp. places like battery)

.. and so on. I'd pay a pretty good markup too.

I do agree with many posts. I'm not obsessive about laptop size and weight. I want something sturdy and which works well for work. Battery life, cooling, robustness, etc. all matter a lot more than weight.