Quite. Moreover and with apologies to Marx, where is this 10x coming from? The simple fact is that it's the fruit of other people's labour that is being appropriated.
Wow, liberal fascism distilled, pretty much a call to arms for the destruction of individual cultures and global imposition of wrongthink. South Park's Death Camp of Tolerance comes to mind. I await the introduction of the reeducation gulags.
Edit: I'm just amazed that people cannot see this guy is blantantly arguing for the exact thing he claims to despise:
'Meanwhile, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re in this together against Lord Voldemort and House Slytherin.'
He goes on at length about why us and them is bad and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
Since we've asked you repeatedly not to take HN threads into ideological flamewar, and you're still doing it, I've banned this account. We also ban accounts that use HN primarily for political battle, which you have. Given that your profile references "things geospatial" and not "liberal fascism" I'm sorta sad about that, but a fireman must do his job.
Sapolsky is just arguing for us to understand each other a little bit more, recognize unconscious biases, and move towards judging one another on individual merits rather than groupthink. These are basic free-society, founding fathers kind of ideals. I think you're projecting modern (maybe justified) worries onto these old and common ideals.
> and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
I'll argue that he doesn't refute his own point by closing with a claim that we're all the US against a THEM of eternal evil embodied. It's like the non-overtoned version of saying "it's all of humanity vs satan".
To say bluntly -- Sapolsky was not arguing for us to strive towards including the principalities of timeless spiritual evil in the _us_ group.
OK, but look at the context - out of nowhere we have obvious diversity at all costs propaganda. I'm watching the BBC's Christmas trailer now which involves a brown skinned single father and his daughter. This in no way represents the average in the UK in fact the UK is almost 90% white - so what message is the BBC trying to send? Am I one of the bad guys to recognise the colour of the skin? Because you can bet that whoever came up with the idea certainly had race at the front of their minds. Is the UK really so racist that we deserve to be subjected to this type of manipulation? Is it beyond the realms of possibility that the people behind this agitprop are in fact the very same nefarious forces you mention?
>This in no way represents the average in the UK in fact the UK is almost 90% white - so what message is the BBC trying to send?
"Hey brown people. You're not being completely ignored by our society. When we have to make decisions based on arbitrary characteristics like race, we prefer to occasional choose people you might be able to relate to on the bases of colour, rather than trying to appeal to some obviously incorrect notion that we should only relate to 'the average UK citizen' (which doesn't exist)."
Or maybe those actors just worked best? Or maybe they drew straws. Either way, there's no reason to believe that the skin colour of the actors on your screen is some kind of manipulation/propaganda against you. That's an irrational leap.
>Am I one of the bad guys to recognise the colour of the skin?
No. You're one of the bad guys for failing to recognize that the colour of the skin is an arbitrary choice and thus not relevant. The only thing about a person you should consider relevant is their ability to make good decisions.
The BBC will not occupy any moral high ground by using only white actors. (Which is what you're saying they should do, on account of some frankly stupid appeal to 'averages.' The 'average' UK citizen is riddled with disease and missing most of their limbs. So maybe don't try to tacitly substitute 'average' for 'ideal/typical/most common'. And why does the BBC has any obligation to represent any of these anyway?)
Maybe that's a harsh-seeming way of putting it, but that's the logical alternative you imply by using crappy metrics.
For a grad level position I'd argue it's just about acceptable - outside of the big tech companies UK salaries aren't that amazing, and it could probably be a nice stepping stone onto something bigger and better. Usual story in SE UK though - on that salary it would likely be a long and dull road of saving hard even to afford a shoebox, and patriotism doesn't pay the bills.
I selected PostgreSQL for a geo project recently. Still haven't got my head around tuning, but apart from that I've found it great to use. I use psycopg2 to connect from Python. No nasty surprises in use, and found that all my pidgin SQL translated easily. Also worth knowing that ogr2ogr supports PostgreSQL and is an awesome tool.
Some obvious discrepancies around permitted speech on this topic. Say you like traditional British values and think they are being undermined by immigration: "Racist! Xenophobe! There are no traditional British values anymore! Go back to the Daily Mail little Englander!"
Point out that Israel or Japan have immigration policy that are highly exclusive: wind blowing, tumbleweed..
This reminds of a trend I read about a while back where the rewards accrue to an increasingly small number of high profile people in a field while the majority just get poorer.
Malcom Gladwell had written about it, how most gangsters, Sumo fighters are poor. It can also be observed in other industries like art, sports, music. In India till some years back it was difficult to get food money in these industry. With rising income and middle class some sources like local events and training to kids have come up, but still these career options are seen as a high risks.
'First Round Capital reports that its investments in companies with a female founder have posted 63 percent better returns than men-only firms.' so what? Correlation does not imply causation. Also it might be that female founded firms are less risky, and so less likely to generate mega returns. Or it could be the opposite. Point is we don't know and the stat is useless on its own.
'This man naturally assumed that he knew more about it than I did. It was his ingrained view of women — a view that’s costing all of us.'. This is nothing more than an assertion.
Finally I think only the most naïve or faux-naïve would be surprised to find that Wall Street contains some pretty serious/insane characters. Isn't that kind of the nature of the beast? I bet there are plenty of men that have to deal with terrible behaviour also. That's not to excuse any of this behaviour, but I'm sure the idea that if you are a man you are guaranteed an easy ascent to the upper reaches is risible.
The EU is doing a pretty good job of disuniting itself without help from outside what with eurozone woes and consequent blight of mass youth unemployment in many countries, unilateral adoption of mass immigration by Germany, interference in sovereignty of Hungary, Poland, etc.
>>unilateral adoption of mass immigration by Germany
If you actually followed what happened, there was a vote on accepting the immigration numbers and every member state of EU accepted them. I don't know what you're reading, but Germany didn't "unilateraly" accept anything here.
>>interference in sovereignty of Hungary, Poland
You mean, pointing out to Poland that it's slipping into far-right fascist state and that maybe this is not acceptable for a EU member state?
You are seriously claiming that Merkel did not play THE key role in setting immigration policy across the EU? That seems to go against what most reasonable sources conclude.
As regards Poland I think perhaps you are believing what you see in the MSM rather than taking things with the pinch of salt they deserve. Putting the MSM to one side there are plenty of commentators that consider recent EU actions towards Poland as an unprecedented interference with sovereignty. Also you are verging on Godwin's law with this assertion: 'slipping into far-right fascist state'. Have you actually looked at photos of the recent march? Protestors had anti-communist AND anti-nazi flags.
You are playing with words now. First you say "unilateral adoption of mass migration by Germany" and then you say that Merkel had a key role in setting the policy. These two are not the same.
As for Poland - And why do you think protesters had those flags? Maybe because current government is enacting policies that are reminiscent of the fascist ones? You can see it in education, in foreign policy, in how the local governments are managed - the ruling party wants to keep everything in hand and labels anyone who is against them as unpatriotic and "not a true Pole". Macierewicz is telling young people to "fight the external, and internal enemy that is already here" - that's not what I want to see in my country. If EU stops that from happening - more power to them.
No, you are the one playing semantics. The consensus is that Merkel forced mass immigration on the rest of the EU. Look how well that went down in recent elections in Germany - she barely escaped and only after an unprecedented intervention by the president.
Personally I'm on the side of Poland in resisting the globalism-at-all-costs push. One could just as easily describe the 'accept mass immigration and fuck your population's feelings' attitude of the EU as a form of fascism.
