The objective of sit-ins was to protest, not to buy lunch. If you wanted lunch, you'd go to a place that would serve you and the status quo would be maintained. It's immaterial whether people participating in sit-ins had money or planned to eat.
You might say that the long term objective of sit-ins was to gain service, but only inasmuch as "gaining service" fell under the umbrella of "equal rights".
Finally, as a possibly unwelcome aside, I find it somewhat irritating to see civil rights protestors referred to as "people of color". The Civil Rights Movement was about acknowleging shared humanity, not dividing people into groups based on privilege. Also, Americans, dark-skinned and otherwise, participated in these movements. Many sit-ins involved large groups of white people sitting down with at least one black person, so all of them would be refused service. The Civil Rights Movement of the 60s sought allies regardless of race, which is perhaps why it was so successful.
Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through.
But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I (sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is closer to activism than journalism.
But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.
He probably quit Facebook due to Facebook being constantly defamed in the media - and now the media is reporting on him leaving. It's like that Jake Gyllenhaal movie where he starts off as an ambulance chasing freelance reporter and ends up causing crimes so he can film them.
> I don't get the scare mongering in this discussion. People are saying to always boil the water, to not cook with hot tap water, etc. Don't these people bathe in hot tap water? Don't they drink cold tap water? Do they all live in areas with super unsafe tap water?
My understanding is that you can generally drink water with this amoeba in it and be fine. This makes sense intuitively - our digestive systems evolved to handle "adversarial inputs".
> Or is there a specific danger that comes from the water going up your nostrils? (Which can easily happen while bathing)
It seems that this particular amoeba only enters the body through the nose, so yes. Also, a significant amount of water doesn't usually go up your nostrils when bathing or swimming unless something goes wrong. And if it does, you experience a painful sensation that will immediately compel you to clear your airway.
But, looking it up, it appears that swimming in amoeba-infected water can lead to infection. Still, I imagine a neti pot is a great way to increase chance of infection because you're pouring lots of water through your nasal cavity, which is not something that happens while bathing or swimming.
> Some people just want to write a book...and have it be read as a book, not a sociopolitical statement. Call it the "craftsman ethos", if you like.
I've read My Brilliant Friend. I liked it a lot (I'll probably read the other three someday), and I'm not curious about the identity of the writer.
At the same time, Elena Ferrante gives interviews. It's one thing to write novels pseudonymously and have them published. It's another to give interviews - when you do that, you're taking on the role of public intellectual, and you can't really blame people for being curious about who you are.
> Google got the market share purely based on its good reputation and sure also with a good product but mainly because of its reputation it was given a chance.
The exact opposite is true.
Google's market share came, first and foremost, from having the best product in each space it dominates: search, browser, email.
The people primarily concerned about "reputation" are a vocal minority. That doesn't mean they're wrong -- but when we're talking about the browser choice of millions of people it's definitely wrong to suppose that reputation is the key factor.
It seems like a bad decision to pay $500-1000 for a smartphone if you can't pay upfront.
My sense is that people push their financial situation to the limit in order to get more stuff faster. You might say "if they had more money it wouldn't be an issue" but my feeling is that, for most of these people, if they had 20% more money, they'd just find the new limit. I don't necessarily fault this behavior, if the things you're buying make you happy then maybe it's perfectly rational.
But if that's true, it seems nonsensical to define poverty as "precariousness of one's finacial situation". The only definition of poverty that makes sense to me is the material one.
Your argument boils down to "everything is political". I understand that some people think this -- but I don't.
I believe the goal of this writing is to convey to the reader the scale of the bombings and some fraction of their effects on the populace. A secondary aim is to evoke emotion in the reader. I think that's it, I don't see a political aim.
It's facile to say "war is immoral". Inasmuch as anything is immoral, war certainly is. But it's unclear to me how we ought to apply that axiom because it's unclear to me that the world would be better off today if the US hadn't entered the war, or the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, or if the Allied policy had been something other than pursuit of unconditional surrender.
I think the Assange/wikileaks indictment is a misstep by the justice department/current administration.
My understanding is that it's far from clear how a case again Assange/wikileaks would play out in court. Like the article mentions, the New York Times and others have published classified information repeatedly -- how can Assange be indicted but not the NYT? Assange also isn't an American citizen and he hasn't leaked information himself, just published it. I think there's a good chance Assange would be acquitted.
I also think it's a bizarre exagerration to argue that an attempted prosecution of Assage would result in "broad new powers to put Trump’s media 'enemies' in jail".
Don't get me wrong -- I don't much care for Assange. It seems to me that there's a lot of hot air coming from him and he appears to have quite an ego. Also, though I understand there is disagreement about this, I think countries keep secrets for a reason and I consider it naive utopianism to expect everything to be brought into the open. In an ideal world, sure, but the world is not ideal.
While I don't think Assange/wikileaks are necessarily "siding with Russia," I do think that Russia has made use of wikileaks. Wikileaks is heavily promoted in Russian propaganda, and it seems at least plausible that Russia could obtain information and leak it through wikileaks. This is a problem for wikileaks: if you're all about freedom of information and you make public everything passed onto you, it's totally possible for state actors -- the same state actors whose behavior you find reprehensible -- to use you as a tool to further their own interests.
> Why do we keep selling weapons to such a repressive regime?
Realpolitik.
The US (and UK, I guess) are closely allied to the Saudis in order to counteract Iranian influence in the region. The theory is that the world will be in better shape if the Saudis have a military capable of deterring Iran.
It's a theory -- I don't know if it's correct, but it seems at least plausible.
This sentiment is as old as religion: it's the good old millenarian instinct. People constantly think the world is on the precipice of something transformational (good or bad).
We'll see. My money is on things chugging along pretty much as they have been. I think this planet can take far more than we can throw at it.
RE: the article - seems like common-sense recommendations but no specifics. We'd all like to see more competition. The question is how to get there with as few side effects as possible. The specifics are the hard part.
> There's a fairly simple explanation: in egalitarian societies femininity is socially acceptable even in "traditionally male" occupations. So women don't need to act "masculine" to make progress in those jobs. When it's socially acceptable for a CEO to be a mother and a woman, more women will feel comfortable pursuing a family in addition (rather than in exclusion) to a career.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here. The study doesn't seem to say anything about women "acting masculine" or "acting feminine". It's about gender disparity in careers, and how that disparity is larger in egalitarian soceties and smaller in less egalitarian societies.
> There's another fairly simple explanation: "equal opportunity" is not the same as "non-sexist". Without knowing how "gender-egalitarian"-ness is measured (it's suspicious that it uses the phrase "more developed") it's impossible to tell what the societal attitudes actually look like. But it's entirely possible that the countries with the most egalitarian laws still have strict gender roles that are socially reinforced.
Are you arguing that that North America, Western Europe, and Scandinivia may actually enforce stricter gender roles than Iraq, Iran, and Kazakhstan? That seems...unlikely.
Anyway, the abstract mentions a "Gender Equality Index" that's being discussed here. I imagine they go into more detail in the paper itself if you're curious.
> So either way the lesson isn't "feminism is wrong" or "equal opportunity is meaningless": either equal opportunity allows women to succeed without abandoning their gender role, or egalitarianism masks the harm of socially reinforced gender roles, or maybe even both.
Again, the abstract doesn't seem to be saying anything about gender roles -- it's purely about male and female representation in various careers.
Also, egalitarianism would have to do more than "mask the harm of socially reinforced gender roles," it would have to increase that harm, as less egalitarian countries have less gender disparity.
My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not.
> I'm pretty good at what I do, and when people tell me they're jealous of my talent, and kind of hint that it's innate, I get a bit insulted. I had to work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like I had it easy.
This is a common sentiment, but I don't find it convincing. The discussion here is about nature vs. nurture. There's a lot of data points on that subject, and, from what I've seen, they mostly support nature (twin studies, intelligence being 60-80% heritable, etc).
The fact that you like to think it's mostly nurture isn't really relevant. I'd like to live in a world where ability and virtue were absolutely correlated and everyone got what he or she deserves based on how much good that person does in the world. But I don't think we live in that world.
You might call it mild stupidity - and that may be accurate - but I'd call it being human.
Humans react differently to the same information based on how it is presented. It seems to me that activists - specifically those on the left - often fail to take this into account.
I almost always agree with those activists. I certainly agree about global warming. But - pragmatically - if your goal is to convince skeptics, you ought to be very concerned about tone. For better or worse, how you tell your story is at least as important as the evidence backing up your story.
Specifically, he resigned due to protest/pressure relating to his 1000 dollar donation in support of prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage in CA).
It seems inconceivable to me that his resignation was unrelated to this. An excerpt from his resignation announcement:
> I have decided to resign as CEO effective today, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of u, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader.
You might say that the long term objective of sit-ins was to gain service, but only inasmuch as "gaining service" fell under the umbrella of "equal rights".
Finally, as a possibly unwelcome aside, I find it somewhat irritating to see civil rights protestors referred to as "people of color". The Civil Rights Movement was about acknowleging shared humanity, not dividing people into groups based on privilege. Also, Americans, dark-skinned and otherwise, participated in these movements. Many sit-ins involved large groups of white people sitting down with at least one black person, so all of them would be refused service. The Civil Rights Movement of the 60s sought allies regardless of race, which is perhaps why it was so successful.