General Politics Discussion (III) [ARCHIVED] • Page 967

another real good DSA platform proposal (feat. RL stephens apparently)

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If only all those Hollywood Elites donated enough money to Hillary!

"It seems the cast of “Silicon Valley,” in Miller’s estimation, failed to live up to this obligation. Just before the 2016 presidential election, he told HuffPost, he spoke with the show’s cast about the campaign. “I asked, ‘How much money did you donate, you Hollywood elites, how much did you donate to Hillary Clinton’s campaign?’ And everybody in the cast said nothing. They hadn’t given a dollar,” he said. “What did they think was going to happen? How had they not joined a fight that they had such strong opinions about?” He noted that despite “not even really being a fan of hers,” he donated the maximum amount permitted to her campaign.

Miller didn’t name any specific cast members who were present for this conversation. Middleditch and Amanda Crew (VC executive Monica Hall) are Canadian, though both currently live in California. FEC law prohibits foreign nationals from making any political contributions; however, there is an exception for immigrants with green cards. Weconfirmed that Miller did indeed donate the max, and according to the Center for Responsive Politics, cast members including Middleditch, Crew, Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr and Zach Woods were not listed as donors. Representatives for those actors did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment."

T.J. Miller Slams 'Silicon Valley' Cast For Not Doing Enough To Stop Trump | HuffPost

 

So scary that these senators aren't even sure what the vote is going to be on. FFS, demand to be informed so people like me won't die long before I should.

 

ok i totally get that and you know this haha. but we have to at least address that is a thing in some circles, and has been increasingly so with the right-wing populist resurgence the past year.

there seems to be a lot of glossing over of that on the Left (see: recent convo about CDM and the term "zio", etc) which i find really harmful. like i said, we need to be able to realize when it is and when it isn't. being aggressive about it the other way doesn't educate people about your position.

i know someone who firmly believes the majority of Western criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and they're otherwise pretty Left on most issues. it's not easy to talk about some of this stuff, esp in regards to MENA in general.

 

i don't often post this stuff but i needed a laugh.

 

The output by the left on the nuances of being anti-Israel, but not anti-Semitic, could fill libraries around the world. The folks that link these two things aren't actually interested in freeing Palestine. I would prefer to dismiss them and speak with people genuinely interested in the subject.

 

Related to the skills discussion:

Just on the basis of understanding how capitalism works, this doesn't make sense. Let's say every kid is now a coder of some sort. We fill the marketplace with them. That job will then be worth 8.50/hr. So, attaching monetary value to skills makes no sense.

 

The argument would be that there's a difference in ok/good/great coders. One would be worth less than the other based on the skill level and talent. It's still a bad argument because at some point 1) there will be enough good coders to do 80% of the work, 2) we're already seeing an increase in the profession and talent pool anyway, (people are underemployed), and 3) coders are still paid a fraction of what the top of the companies usually are, the inequality still will exist.

Basically it's a clearly focused grouped phrase, since the idea of "have skills! get job!" plays into a mindset that I think a lot of Americans have ... it's the "work hard for it" mentality, which fails for all the reasons we've talked about before, but it still persists. People wanna believe if they work very hard they can be very successful, and others wanna believe people are lazy so they don't feel as bad for letting them suffer.

 

When I say "regularly," I mean virtually every time someone criticizes Israel. Their "Top 10 Anti-Israel Groups," the "worst of the worst," include Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and CODEPINK. To get on the list, you did things like support BDS, participate in anti-Israel activities, or supported anti-Israel policies. None of this is even inherently antizionist, let alone antisemitic. Equating virtually any criticism of Israel with antisemitism is antisemitism. It is antisemitism to automatically associate me with Israel, and it is antisemitic for the ADL, JDL, fucking Brand Israel Group, to invoke Jews as a whole to defend their colonialism. In fact to do so is an extension of that colonialism in and of itself.

Nazis love to equate all Jews with Israel, and with their doublespeak, use this as an example of why Jews are bad while also proudly pointing to Israel as a good model for creating a fascist ethnostate. I'm sure Richard Spencer envies the nakba. I do not need to be reminded that antisemitism exists, on the right or the left, but antizionism is not inherently antisemitism. Honestly in my experience rabid anticommunism is a better indicator of antisemitism than antizionism. The vast majority of antizionists I know are Jews.

 

If everyone at my dad's old job had moderate coding skills (instead of just 'able to use DOS' level), they probably would've been able to lay off even more of them because they would've been able to automate their own jobs

 

Right, but even if you account for skill level, such a deluge still gives employers, not workers, any sort of power.

 

Yep. But everyone think they're gonna be the boss someday and that's when they'll make all the monies. Or at least that's what I've come to surmise.

 

This was going around all the tech circles the other day:

Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?

I currently work on a legacy system for a company. The system is really old - and although I was hired as a programmer, my job is pretty much glorified data entry. To summarise, I get a bunch of requirements, which is literally just lots of data for each month on spreadsheets and I have to configure the system to make it work, which is basically just writing a whole bunch of SQL scripts.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because whoever wrote the system originally really wrote it backwards, and in fact, the analysts who create the spreadsheets actually spend a fair bit of time verifying my work because the process is so tedious that it’s easy to make a mistake.

As you can guess, it is pretty much the most boring job ever. However, it’s a full time job with decent pay, and I work remotely so I can stay home with my son.

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

There might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email etc, but overall, I spend probably 1-2 hours per week on my job for which I am getting a full time wage.

I really enjoy the free time but would it be unethical to continue with this arrangement without mentioning anything? It’s not like I’m cheating the company. The company has never indicated they’re dissatisfied with my performance and in fact, are getting exactly what they want from employing me.

I clearly have the ethics of a 5 year old, cause I automate all parts of my job an if I worked somewhere else, I'd probably look for efficiencies I could automate there too.

 

Part of the problem is this competitive framework, in which, one day, you will have the skills necessary. That sculpts people's consciousness. If we were really honest, we would understand that the amount of people necessary to work is a fraction of the population, then go full-on luxury communism. But, both parties are invested in the idea of work as a necessity for income and dignity, which is wrong. Nobody likes to fucking work.

 

As long as I get avocado on my bread line, I'm good.

(This is meant to be a joke. )

Yeah, I mean, I like a lot of what I do, but it's cause I fell bassackwards in to this "job" and am very much in the minority on that one. But full on space-communism would be pretty great. I'd still run this website. Just free dark mode I guess. Haha.

 

"Is it unethical?" answer: not even a little bit

 

great we're bringing back forced sterilization
A Jail In Tennessee Is Giving Inmates Shorter Sentences If They Get A Vasectomy

 

me rn

 

so that's why Arabella speaks fluent Chinese

 

Goddamn, dude's handle is Goth Skunk. That's ridiculous as hell.