If you've ever compared branches using GitHub, same thing.

What's ethical about letting Silicon Valley unicorns plunder world markets?

While not a popular topic here, Silicon Valley is starting to become the enemy.

Secondly, consumerism is possible only in the presence of production, and it cannot exist unless there's a product to consume. Are you questioning the ethics of value-production?

You're breaking the law, laws with good reason.

> Secondly, consumerism is possible only in the presence of production, and it cannot exist unless there's a product to consume. Are you questioning the ethics of value-production?

Yes. Must I list human abuse that takes place because of "demand" and "production"? Child labor? Child prostitution? Slavery? Unregulated economics is anarchy.

You are mixing together ethics of "producing a value as such" with immoral acts. One person's needs is not a claim on other people's life/time.

Slavery and child abuse is immoral based on exactly the same fundamental principle that makes regulations of volunteer trade in the market immoral - the principle that a human being belongs to oneself (which leads to the right to make decisions and to take choices based on their own reason and their capacity to think reasonably).

As for the child labour, it is not immoral as such - it's just a phenomenon of life that had better be absent in the contemporary society. Absence of it improves the quality of life, yet this quality is neither an inherent trait of life, nor something which is granted to a person upon his/her birth. It's quite the contrary - a human being must work in order to sustain their life and to prosper. It's a law of nature for all humans.

And an unregulated market multiplies opportunities for those who are willing to earn their own living by their work - by producing values and exchanging these values with other people, voluntarily, to a mutual benefit of each party. That's the essence of unregulated economy. And no government can either know beforehand or reasonably regulate or even be on the same page with all the possible volunteer transactions in the market that may benefit all parties. It's impossible because of a continuous technological advancement of humanity, of processes being improved and revisited for efficiency, and of many other aspects of human ingenuity. And that's why people might break laws - especially the laws imposed by government regulations, which are far from being reasonable most of the time.

I don't think that's true. Unregulated markets can result in a number of situations that limit people's opportunities significantly. Monopolies are a clear example and various externalities can also have significant impacts on commerce. To maximize the opportunities we need carefully tuned regulation. The problem is that our political systems for creating and enforcing that regulation are, shall we say, "a little broken".

Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly (i.e. a monopoly, that is not associated with government regulations, subsidies, grants, medallions, quotas and other things that have to do with regulating the market by the government), yet is capable of preventing other players from entering the same market?

No, because we have regulations to prevent them and break them up.

There are a number of entities that are clearly restraining their classically monopolistic behavior BECAUSE of the regulations such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

I can actually walk that in under an hour if I need to.

I've found myself in countless situations where the walk is maybe 10-15 mins longer than any available public transport (Uber included), so I've saved myself the money and taken a hit on a little bit of time.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

- Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]

- A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

- Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

- Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)

- Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.

I've seen smart people pointing at 'evidence' on both sides of the discussion. Your claim that can 'irreparably' harm google is equally baseless IMO.

let me know what industry you work in where you can poison the well so badly and not get canned.

Policies that are effectively affirmative action are by definition lowering the bar for diversity candidates. His statement that it can lower the bar is correct but still not something people like to be reminded of. Google (and others) not recognizing this distinction and treating his lack of discretion as hate speech is irrational mob PC rule or just plain cowardice (if he was fired for PR reasons).

In an n-dimensional space where we take into account all the factors that go into whether or not a candidate is given an offer, you're actually complaining about "lowering the bar" when the bar is already lower for people (for people that's not being targeted for affirmative action) due to systemic effects? You're actually complaining that we're lowering the bar by tweaking other variable so that the bar will be effectively the same obstacle for everyone?

Please explain your rationale for doing so.

Or sued, seems like this would be an easy basis for a hostile work suit. Couple promotion denials, a documented complaint and this manifesto would probably be an easy lawsuit, though INAL.

Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?

> or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color

This is utter bullshit. As someone who used to work for Alphabet, gender and ethnic background never came up during interviews, simply because the interview process does not account for that. You are either able to solve the technical problems you are presented with during the interview or not. "Culture fit" - which is the one item that might be influenced by things related to gender or ethnic background - is actually a liability for minority groups.

> Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?

Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.

He knows them. Everyone knows them. The average Alphabet employee does multiple interviews a month, sometimes multiple interviews a week (complaining about how many interviews you have to do is of the favorite pastimes in the company.) We are trained for this, and - surprise - none of the training says (or even suggest) 'you should lower your standards for minority candidates.' In fact, none of the interviewing training even mentions gender or ethnicity.

I feel that this guy is coming from a disgruntled conservative-leaning position where he feels the company values don't represent his. That's a valid concern, but there's plenty of companies out there. He should just leave and find one that has values matching his.

> This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing

That's sad. Hope you had better luck with the next one!

> Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.

Sorry, didn't meant to be offensive. I just know intrigue (which this memo tries to stir up) is the shortest path to a dysfunctional workplace.

People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.

This has nothing to do with the company, but rather with the individuals working for it. How many people, do you think, felt free to discuss their support for a Democratic candidate in the Alabama?

> People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.

And they did! Heck, Google encouraged everyone to vote, not just Democrats. Maybe your anger should be directed to the companies and governments that did their utmost to stop their own citizens from voting. North Carolina is a good place to start, move South from there.

I'm sure you could imagine walking in with a Hillary/Pussy Hat no problem whatsoever. But you would not walk with a Trump hat even as a joke. Ok, maybe in Moncks Corner or some boonie office.

Please stop trying to bring the "librul intolerance" right-wing talking point. It's pretty pathetic to paint yourself as a victim, even when you have everything in your favor.

On to voter fraud!

    But those numbers likely don't indicate
    anything nefarious like widespread voter
    fraud. It's actually pretty common for
    voter rolls to be a mess. In fact,
    Judicial Watch threatened to sue 11 other
    states in April for the same reason.

    A 2012 Pew Research study found around
    2.75 million people were registered to
    vote in multiple states and more than
    1.8 million deceased people were still
    registered to vote.

    Oftentimes, people don't realize they
    need to notify local voting officials
    when they move or when a loved one dies.

    But outside of a few isolated incidences,
    those extra numbers don't generally lead
    to voter fraud.

Q: How big a problem was voter fraud in the 2016 election?

A: There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-...

Carter won in '76 and it's been within +-10% R/D till 2000. So not that lopsided as you might suppose.

"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

Lowering the rate of false negatives does not lower the bar. If anything, it just improves the process and yields more qualified candidates. If you increase the rate of false positives, then you would in fact lower the bar.

It's muddled thinking like this that makes me doubt his ability as an engineer, not to mention his ability as a social scientist.

Edit: Another way to say this is, if an applicant simply meets the bar, the person is most likely not hired. Conversely, an applicant needs to far exceed the bar in order for interviewers to vouch for the person and improve odd of hiring.

On the other hand, applicant that fits into the targeted demographics are probably afforded additional consideration, even if the person's interview did not wow the interviewers as much, hence the "lowering the bar" argument. It is not lowering the standard bar, but rather the "score", if you will, the applicant needs to clear the bar.

The best analogy I've read so far is that the candidate's score and its error bar must clear the bar. But affirmative action applicants are extended the courtesy of second look, which reduces the error bar, hence lower score is needed for the score and error bar to clear the Google bar.

Well now I just doubt his ability as an engineer, social scientist, and writer of the English language... ;)

> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

> decreasing the false negative rate

(Again! This is from his POV): The false positive rate has not gone up. The diverse candidates are, in fact, qualified and should have their jobs. They are excellent. I am going out of my way to make sure no one interprets this deluge of text as me questioning my peers ability; something that I will fail at in spectacular fashion.

> lower the bar

(His POV don't pin this on me): However, diverse candidates may now have a lower bar than non-diverse candidates.

How is it possible that some candidates have both a "lower bar" and yet are still qualified?

> Hiring practices

(still his POV folks): Because for diverse candidates we have different hiring practices. Practices which are tailored to diverse candidates. It's not a lower bar, it's a different bar. A bar specifically designed to help us discover the best side of these diverse candidates.

(Speaking for myself now): I think the author is saying that going out of your way to create specific affordances for _some_ and not for _all_ is discriminatory. I _don't_ think he's a horrible monster for thinking this. I _do_ think that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge the fact that an organization that is already steeped to the brim with a specific group of people is likely to _already_ have built in affordance for that group.

He fucked up. Hard. Like so hard that I find it kind of funny (wtf was he thinking?). I, personally, don't think that the ideas that he espoused merit firing, I think they merit careful correction wherein the person doing the correcting attempts to read his meaning charitably, carefully, truthfully and fully. I feel that most of the public responses have failed in this regard. Most of what I've seen start with "he's basically wrote: {$straw_man}". Some are pandering to an audience, some are more interested in winning than in being right, but some people who retort in this way just have limited time and patience. I can understand why the straw man is appealing. I've just written three paragraphs about a single sentence, who has time for this shit?

Here's the thing though, careful correction, truth, charity—that's my "ideal world" case for him. The simple matter of fact is that Google is not the ideal world, they have no incentive to apply my ideal to him. He's a professional and the fuck up alone (separated form the ideas) represents enough potential harm to Google that he had no hope of keeping his job. Maybe one of his friends can give him the careful walk through of how his ideas are flawed. Hell, maybe a good friend will do that and he'll decide that he was right all along.

Edit: After further reading I realized I had made a mistake when I (speaking from his POV) said: "it's not a lower bar, it's a different bar". He did actually use the words "lower the bar", something I failed to fully account for. One could, with liberal amounts of charity, imagine that he meant that the bar was lower but still sufficient? We're getting into logical acrobatics. That said, logical acrobatics are part of the point. The goal in reading someone whose world view is different to your own is to better understand their logic. To imagine how, within their world view, their ideas are consistent. We could be reading the words of a monster who doesn't care about logic. Or we could, and I think this is much more common, be reading the words of someone with flaws and ignorances and prejudices. Someone not so unlike ourselves.

Slavery and Jim Crows laws no longer on the books? Therefore there is no systemic racism!

Are there laws discriminating against women? No? Therefore they have all the same opportunities as men!

Why are Black Entertainment Television and Gay Pride okay, but White Entertainment Television and White Pride not!

Black Lives Matter is Racist!

Not all Men are Rapists!

This essay started from precisely this set of emotions and found data to justify it after the fact.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant-purescript

I'm using this with Halogen and it works great

I've only recently been noticing how applicable the lessons I learned in the Royal Marines are to software development. Thanks for putting it so eloquently.

I just hope that when it comes time for me or my loved ones to go, that they will be able to do it on their terms.