The the phrase white privilege is an ingenious attempt by malicious people and their useful-idiots to divert attention from issues of class to issues of race.
These toxic propagandists have tricked millions of people into believing that the poorest white person is as responsible for the poverty of black people as the richest.
Transforming the political fight from the 1% vs the 99% into a fight of the racial majority vs a racial minority. If the 99% are fighting among themselves, they can't unite against the 1%.
Millions of powerless white people predictably take offense at the idea that they're responsible for an economic system rigged by the rich to oppress poor people of all races. Of course prejudice exists but the core issue holding people back is purely economic, not racial.
Until I had kids of my own I did not quite comprehend just how capable little kids can be.
A 5 year old holding an AK47 is entirely capable of being a legitimate competitor to an adult holding an AK47. An average 10 year old armed with an AK47 might be more dangerous than an average 40 year old. Child soldiers are likely very effective, as depressing as this thought is.
Small children are profoundly ignorant but they're not dramatically less intelligent than adults. In limited domains, like driving or shooting, a high performing child can easily beat a low performing adult.
Kind of strange comment, but one of the problems I've seen in schools is the assumption by teachers that children are not as intelligent as adults. Generally this isn't true. Usually they lack a framework for reasoning and lack experience with language for communicating. There are some differences with brain development of young children for sure, but in my experience people underestimate children by a fairly large margin. You see the same phenomenon with people trying to talk to adults who are just learning the language. There is an assumption that the person is stupid rather than that they have difficulty communicating.
People underestimate kids in some ways, and overestimate them in others. The underlying framework for highly abstract thinking takes time to develop, as does the ability for understanding empathy and moral behavior. A five-year-old kid literally has no notion that driving a car he's not the owner of is theft, and thus grossly unethical conduct. The car is just there for the taking; to him it's no different than playing GTA.
5 year old kids are capable of very complex ethical thinking and empathy, most definitely including understanding of ownership. Maybe it's not as common in the US, but you can see it clearly in any country where kids regularly go to child care from age 3.
They do, but the intelligence of kids is highly underrated. This started with Piaget, and although Piaget has been widely debunked, teachers still believe it.
Also, a 10 year old child will likely not fear bodily harm or death the same way a 40-year old adult would, of course that can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation.
To be fair, an AK47 is a hell of a lot easier to use than a car. My son was able to manage a rifle pretty well at six years old, but I very seriously doubt he'd have been able to drive a car successfully.
I'm not a fan of Airbnb's business but this is highly commendable.
The severance package is the core metric to judge a company that is doing layoffs. In this case, it sounds like Airbnb did the right thing. Airbnb fired people well in advance of when they were actually forced to. This enabled them to provide an ethical severance.
Some companies wait until the last minute and then provide two weeks or similar. These companies should be publicly shamed for all time.
I wouldn't judge them too softly, they did after all promote having an internal services food team for years and virtue signaled all over the place that they wanted them to be team members and not contractors like every other tech company (they got stock, sick days, vacation, benefits etc), then fired them all over Christmas break one year and replaced them with contractors.
4x12 = 48 weeks of compensation disbursed by the entity. Restated compared to some nightmare no severance scenario meant they effectively terminated 4 FTEs to achieve slightly less than 3 FTEs of cost savings (adjusted for healthcare costs).
I'm not arguing against AirBNBs approach btw. Their CEO had a wonderful podcast on the Masters of Scale pod roughly two weeks ago.
However the Rawlsian philosophy on that marginal employee that got terminated effectively to fund the severance for herself and her colleagues is a tricky ethical consideration.
It doesn't seem all that tricky to me. While losing any job is rough, losing a job with enough severance and benefits to cover the ensuing period of uncertainty and a job search likely isn't going to be that bad for people who were able to get hired by Airbnb to begin with. But losing a job without a safety net could be a disaster. Imo it's far better to put more people in the 'bad, but not that bad' situation than to put anyone in the 'disaster' situation.
Sounds like we need better heuristics. It doesn't make sense to ignore research papers based on their origin.
Each paper should be evaluated on its merits. A system with submission, voting, and comments (HN/reddit) is a good way to filter the wheat from the chaff. It's hard to believe this basic technology hasn't reached the scientific fields.
They have. It's called "peer review". It is just that peer review is a slow process, so it doesn't really work in a fast-moving crisis environment.
Part of peer review being a slow process may be fixable (although it is difficult to compel unpaid, volunteering reviewers to adhere to strict deadlines), but part of peer review being a slow process is specifically that if you do not want to rely on heuristics such as author credentials you need to take the time to really analyze a paper to avoid falling into the traps mentioned in the original article (confirmation bias, being misled by an authoritative tone etc.). And HN/Reddit votes IMHO are definitely not a good example of avoiding any of these.
Voting doesn't ensure that the most accurate comment/submission will show up on top, instead a wrong but popular claim (as "many people agree with it") can easily get to the top.
If there are aliens flying around, it would be nice if at least one country made high quality evidence public.
The U.S. Navy videos are intriguing but very far from conclusive. And yet they are likely withholding a ton more data that citizens should have access to.
If it's all a cover story for top secret stuff, then it's likely an unnecessary deception. I doubt any U.S. military project is actually safe from Chinese and Russian spies. So all they're doing is increasing the sense of distrust between U.S. citizens and their own government.
Modern people don't want to live in the Cold War secrecy paranoia of the last century. The U.S. military should focus on what really matters and leave that toxic cold war culture behind.
> I doubt any U.S. military project is actually safe from Chinese and Russian spies.
Your doubt is reasonable, based on the string of mishaps this past decade, but likely not the case given the nature of compartmentalization. Also, appearing weak when actually strong is a strategy. It’s quite possible the USG has amassed futuristic tech in secret, while playing the fool.
These toxic propagandists have tricked millions of people into believing that the poorest white person is as responsible for the poverty of black people as the richest.
Transforming the political fight from the 1% vs the 99% into a fight of the racial majority vs a racial minority. If the 99% are fighting among themselves, they can't unite against the 1%.
Millions of powerless white people predictably take offense at the idea that they're responsible for an economic system rigged by the rich to oppress poor people of all races. Of course prejudice exists but the core issue holding people back is purely economic, not racial.