Good. We can expect such behavior from vile conservative companies like Cambridge Analytics, funded by Mercer and the cause for Brexit. Why are they even allowed on FB? Such extreme groups should never be allowed.
Could you please stop using the site for political and/or ideological battle and start commenting civilly and substantively? The guidelines should be quite clear on this.
I apologize if I did something wrong. It's a political post and I am just trying to make the point that we should hope and expect FB to be moral and do the right thing. They control so much of our information that they should make sure far right ideologies (ok, far left also) should never be able to manipulate the data for their purposes.
If such a discussion is not expected on HN, I am probably in the wrong place.
CA's political stance is basically irrelevant here, they're mercenaries. "Liberal" companies of this stripe would easily do the same thing if given the opportunity. The sort of work they do is intrinsically compromising unless your business is operating with a very firm moral/ethical code and it really hinders your ability to chase opportunities and maximize revenues.
It's not a coincidence that Google ditched 'don't be evil', and doing that doesn't indicate a twist to the far right or anything of the sort: It's just the reality that being a wildly profitable advertising firm can require a lot of moral/ethical flexibility that leads to outcomes like what we have here with CA & SCL.
The significance of CA's politics is specifically that they gave their services for free to a political campaign that aligned with their goals, which is already of questionable legality - and in this case, likely expected and possibly already received regulatory kickbacks in exchange. But that doesn't really matter in the context of FB deciding to enforce rules.
EDIT: To clarify, Trump's campaign did pay CA but sources have claimed that they received a deep discount.
Naming a liberal-leaning political consultancy that is this slimy would help. (The DNC’s behavior during the primaries comes to mind, in fairness to your argument)
Can you name a liberal company equivalent? I'm having trouble coming up with anything close to this sort of behavior except maybe the Russians pretending to be liberals to rile up Americans as part of an equal opportunity rile up Americans of all political stripes campaign.
FB and Google are huge companies and control majority of the information people get today. We should want them to be moral arbiters. Otherwise what else can we do? Most of us are so gullible.
No, of course not, but like everything, it's a spectrum. I wouldn't want a big corporation like FB to play a meaningful role in deciding what is and what is not moral (or factual), but at the same time I don't want FB to be a trivially manipulated medium for targeted disinformation and divisive propaganda. For example, a hostile state actor doing things like showing white rural retirees ads for fictional BLM recruitment drives to stoke fear/hatred/misunderstanding among the US population.
A completely hands-off approach is also corrosive and destructive. They're stuck trying to thread the needle, to balance civic responsibility while avoiding being an overbearing gatekeeper. I don't think it's possible to pull it off in such a way that they are not overstepping bounds in one direction or another, but as long as the pros outweigh the cons of whatever approach they take, it'd still be infinitely better than doing nothing.
"The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, in 1963. At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years.[253][254]"
It must be quite taxing to have been given that diagnosis at such a young age, and then live to a relatively old age. I wonder how that marginally impacted his view on life, work and relationships.
It's good. Let's make sure the following conspiracy theories and extreme views are highlighted:
Anything about men's rights, "rape culture", white "oppression", "72 genders", marxism, neoliberalism, fascism, Antifa, conservatism, libertarianism, white nationalist, black nationalism, "Irish" nationalism, hindutva, islamophobia, islamophilia, Catholic church paedophilia, pizza gate, Russia collusion, 9/11 was an inside job, 9/11 was by Al Qaeda, George Soros, Koch brothers, uranium one, Castro Trudeau, PewDiePie, Alex Jones, Rachel Maddow, Sean hannity, morning Joe, ... Just to begin with.
It would be nice if the list of conspiracies and extremist views was a open source list so that we get an honorable and democratic process of deciding it as a people and community. I am sure we as good human beings will be able to peacefully maintain such a list. I wouldn't mind the great overlords of YouTube to maintain such a list either.
Obama is also I think one of very few presidents who explicitly targeted and killed American natural born citizen. Not accidentally, but actually targeted. Didn't even bother hiding it.
But I agree with the original point, GOP did start this mess on the lie of weapons of mass destruction.
Well you go back to 911 itself and the government involvement with Osama Bin Laden going back to the 1980s, go back to the CIA making my childhood incredibly dangerous by dumping incredible amounts of guns and drugs into cities such as Los Angeles. When do the American people get to tell the CIA "you're fired!"
Maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate, but is what Obama did significantly different from Union soldiers under Lincoln's orders during the Civil War? The form of warfare has changed dramatically, but wouldn't that be something of a parallel?
P.S. I don't want to sound like an apologist regarding Obama's actions here. My personal feelings are that he was largely better than Bush, but not without fault.
No it's not different. I just said that not many presidents have targeted and killed their own citizens. Lincoln was probably one of them. Perhaps one could argue Obama was in a civil war with Americans of the Muslim faith / extremists.
One could argue it was justified. I would personally feel horrible if it was justified that way. But, hey, it's not my country.
Jeff Bezos' blog is hardly neutral and it does not appear they did the original research, but regardless, thanks for laundering the analysis through legacy media.
In media and film, the gender of the employee makes a much bigger difference to the product. As an example, I'm sure female models are more effective at selling bras than male models.
Why would you want parity? And your have to force women into fields they don't want in order to get it, just so you can balance your little scale. Whether or not someone is female isn't a particularly interesting aspect of their personality of software development skill. If your company has way below or above the industry average then there's pribably some unfair bias going on, but having women (or any other categorisation du jour) just to tick a box is absurd.
If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.
Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;)
I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could make in a half a dozen related fields.
Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5 PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff.
Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.
> It should be important to specifically source and hire women.
I read this that you believe that an applicant's genitals or gender identity ought to be a positive qualification for employment. Am I reading you correctly/charitably?
Use it for a week while visiting leftist websites. It will show you how obsessed they are with people's melanin and chromosomes. Shocking beyond belief...
