On the day Alphabet sends Congress a letter admitting the Biden admin was exercising prior restraint over YouTube

There are no norms, and standards of practice and there have been none for decades now.

Anyone who accuses someone of violating norms is basically just BSing, it amounts to I can't make legal or policy argument, for why they can't do this but I don't like it. Its stupid, because we know the both our guys and the other guys are were doing morally and practically equivalent things just months ago, and both will do it again the instant they think anyone isn't looking.

"Norms!" the battle cry of political losers everywhere!

Motivations and evaluation criteria.

Most employees are evaluated negatively if they spend a bunch of corporate money or invest a bunch of time and human resources in an activity or asset that proves to be a failure.

The top level decision makers though are evaluate on their 'vision' and being able to take advantage of opportunities in the market place.

Look at it this way, how many people are still talking about how much MS wasted building Zune's nobody wanted, vs their early Internet, and mobile phone misses? Which are the subjects of business school seminars? If it really proves the case the case that AI lets you replace half your workforce and rocket ahead of your competitors, but your the CEO who decided to pass, you are done for professionally. On the other hand if you spend a few million on AI investments and nothing comes of it, a quarter or two later its all forgotten.

If I spend a few hundred-K of my bosses money on some wiz-bang new tech-toy, and it proves to be useless or harmful to the business I am either getting laid off or at least my stock and future in the organization are probably a lot lower. If I wait to pitch him on something until it is more clearly a win even if it costs more than getting in on the ground floor might of I probably do alright. If wizbang turns out to be a dud or harmful, I end up looking smart because boss see's my advice to wait and see having been wise.

-The folks your c-suite may or may not be smarter than you or I, they probably are stupid either, they are just playing a very different game with a risk and reward structure that isn't like the one we are playing.

Okay facist!

See you can't write that and seriously believe in government by the people, for the people. Our Constitutional system more or less always described a spoils system. It has the President appointing his cabinet etc. The drafters did not have to do that, they could have written congress selects those positions or they could have made them elected positions as well, but they did not. The States did not have to ratify the the thing either but they did.

It is just strait up lying to say the intent was not have the executive chose a staff friendly to him and his agenda, presumably the agenda supported by the majority who elected him/her.

Progressives had congressional majorities, often significant one for most of the later 20th century, you know that era where modernization started happening far more rapidly and all those "gentleman's agreements" were used to run the country. They certainly could have tried to create some more Amendments and codify those but they did not. It is almost as if these oh so brilliant advisors and minds did not see this coming.

Elections SHOULD have consequences. People should get what they vote for, that is not compatible with a parochial group of Ivy Grads making all the important policy decisions without any real direct accountability to voters.

Fear of bullets. Anyone time someone poses a credible threat to the Federal reserve system, they tend to end up dead!

Come on man, Obama did litterally whatever he wanted as far as military force, drone strikes on civilians, health policy, social policy implementation via the DOE, expanded subservience that would have made even Dubya blush, forced mergers of private entities, interference in bond holder credit disputes with automakers, etc.

The Court did nothing to check executive power in the Obama. The ONLY difference was the approach taken at the time. The Court rather than deal with a precedent, just side stepped the most consequential issues and time and again ruled nobody had standing to sue the government for basically anything. Remember the NSA can rifle thru all your personal communications secretly and as often as you like because you can't prove they did!

If anything the current court is at least generating decisions about the *real* issues before them rather than kicking the can down the line and ruling on legal minutia. These decisions can be debated argued and intentionally over turned by a future court. You might not like the outcomes but this court is serving the country better than it was in the Obama years.

As far as Biden goes, the Biden administration cases (besides perhaps student loans) larger were about individual liberties, Given the pandemic and social conditions that is what the country was focused on at the time. This court has been entirely consistent there too, see some of the losses its handed Trump on things like bump stocks. The court isn't partisan, it just appears so because because the left's political platform is less aligned present courts 'black letter' views.

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

It never really went away.. They just stopped talking about it, and they finally stopped trying to put long form articles and news bulls etc on the desktop. We generally kept the widget, and status content type stuff, from weather and headlines to e-mail.

The problem with the desktop is a organizational space you visit briefly to switch or start tasks, and maybe move some files around. If it is actually displayed other than around the periphery for any amount of time it means the user isn't really 'using' the PC at all. They are idle. Now maybe they are an office worker sitting waiting for e-mail to arrive, but even then they'd rather be looking at an entertainment website of their choosing or just watching a video would a bunch of junk overlaid until something chimes or whatever.

The 'Desktop' is really a bad spot for content. Either people don't see it, or they'd rather consume it in some other virtual space.

I know exactly what it means thank you very much.

Literally everyone who ever used the term before this thread, was thinking about the 'production' of information when they said information economy. We were going to pay all these knowledge workers to sit and analyze data to produce information on demand. That is what they meant by information economy! Except nobody is going to need that in the very near future there will be relatively few questions big-data and machine learning can't answer, at least not to practical satisfaction. Nobody will care about your materials patents when they can just say "find me a polymer that has the characteristics x,y,z that I can synthesize for feed stocks a,b,c..." and get an answer in hours.

What I am talking here is more trade secrets that enable industrial production. Those secrets are only valuable as long as you use the to effectively control the actual production and restrict the entry of others into the market place. There is a non-zero cost associated with keeping such secrets, and it only grows more expensive the more people you have to let in because you don't want to do the manufacturing and vertical integration yourself.

In the end it gets out, and when it gets out the parties with the most industrial capacity win the marketplace. China has understood this and planned accordingly. We on the other-hand have ignored the constantly accelerating rate at which information becomes defuse. It will be worth less and less and need to be better and better to be of any value.

You can even see this in ad tech, it used to be that with a little demographic understanding you could make a mint. Now that we putting ads on peoples refrigerators the ad saturation is near its max, you have target ads better and better, 30 somethings with a child under 18 at home isn't good enough anymore to make money, now you need to know what they had for dinner last night and what color their carpet is to be worth anything to clients.

Only brain washed Marxist would say that. FUCK YOU

Not sure about all that but to me this might be the sell signal for NVIDA.

Making direct investments in your biggest customers when your product has the higher entry barriers, is always a little suspect in my book. If you believe that much in what they are doing why not build your own business unit?

Obviously there are very real and very good reasons, but as an outsider I can't distinguish those motivations from, I am buying into them so I can protect market share, make the core volume continue to look great and hope nobody questions the anticipated but returns I don't really believe the clients can generate.

We also know information obeys the laws of entropy. fundamentally it wants to be defuse.

We do not live in an economy based on information. We live in an economy based on secrecy and superior knowledge and technical capabilities. It worked great back in the 60s when the Chinese did not have the technology to do a lot of precision manufacturing at scale.

We got cherry pick the high value, low input cost commercial activities - a science and tech dividend. They have caught up now, partly because we believed our own BS about 'information economy' without understanding the value came for 'secrecy and scarcity' or refusing to admit it anyway.

Now the pandemic should have shown you once and for the 'post-informaiton-age' economy is absolutely about industrial production. It no matter how clever a piece of software is, it not going to transport you from point-a to point-b, it won't keep you warm at night. Now that electric motor built on the assembly line might pull your car down the road or be the blower in your hvac assembly.

Now remembering all the supply chain challenges and looking at what sectors are really driving inflation, it is clearly not 'information' that is the key price component..

Nice hand wave there. That is called public policy, in a free society. Like you say it is about what the proportions will be. You don't know the policy won't achieve its goals, of employing more Americans in net, you are just assuming that part because you don't like the current leadership and not for any informed reason.

The real questions if this is more to little to late, and it might be. Even so trying something is better than doing more nothing. At the end of the day what difference does it make if you get laid off today so they can hire a cheaper h1b to replace you vs you getting laid off so they can outsource your entire project. - None. Arguably the later might buy you a little more time.

Of course the administration is looking at taxing some foreign employment as labor imports as well. So it is likely that this is one of a multiple prong approach to a broader protectionist strategy for American knowledge workers. I just hope the current bunch can stay in office long enough to implement it all.