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It could be a sustainability thing:

If you butcher an animal, you have X lbs of meat now. Maybe you don’t need all of that immediately just to survive.

If you only need Y < X to feed yourself, you can sell the excess and buy a new animal plus food to fatten it up.

This converts a onetime benefit (killing an animal you have now) into a sustainable way to provide for yourself.


That explanation makes sense, but the author's phrasing still seems clumsy to me.


Traffic regularly goes above the speed limit without mass arrests — or any arrests at all.


A repentant CEO is gone, but unrepentant gangsters are still celebrities.

Social justice!


false dichotomies are really weak arguments


It’s not a false dichotomy — it’s pointing out a differing standard in conduct based on race, which is racism.

It’s also pointing out that the fundamental choice in what’s acceptable or not is dumb: someone who made a mistake while young and genuinely has tried to build a better life should be welcomed into society, while criminals who continue to promote a criminal and violent lifestyle should not be.

It’s also mocking that people who talk about “social justice” are often deeply racist and unforgiving people — which perhaps could be fairly criticized for tone, but is again not a false dichotomy.


I think you point out a dichotomy that's interesting, except that I can't find any evidence that people who talk about social justice "often" support violence-inducing criminals and condemn reformed criminals who are white. This sounds like a specter manufactured to make a point about a reality that doesn't match up with the world we (or at least I) live in.


> It’s not a false dichotomy

You are creating a false reality where people can only be for "urban" gangsters and against the white CEO. Reality strongly disagrees with this and I suggest you join us on the other side instead of constantly trying to find things to be outraged about.


For a $1B endowment, Mr Musk could fund 20 seed rounds a year — personally.

Mr Musk won’t put 2.5% of his money where his mouth is. If he genuinely thought there was a problem to fix, he’d fund a demonstration of the solution.

The US government already spends $2B a year funding small business innovation across a range of industries. What more can we do?


Elon believes that only problem humanity is facing is how to establish colonies on Mars. He also believes that no one else is going to fund it, so had to acquire tons of money to do it.

I think it’s BS, but those are pretty much his believes.


Well, to be fair to Musk, there's also the whole "switch to renewable energy and transportation, since putting all this CO2 into the atmosphere is a dangerous experiment that must stop, or the future will be terrible."

Somewhat closer to Earth and immediately necessary for civilization's future.


Where do you intend to shop that treats their warehouse staff better?


The CDC says we’re slightly under expected deaths in the US, including COVID cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm


I read that data as showing that the USA has had a sharp excess death event for each of the last four weeks reported. I'm seeing a much greater excess death rate than the official Covid19 reports.


This isn't true, deaths reported lag, so the numbers continue to go up after the week is over.


Looks at the data by state or city. VA shows a huge spike over normal in early April. NY and NYC show even bigger spikes.

And the data is only through April 1. I suspect the excess death rates will be higher nationwide from April 1-May 1.


Where are you seeing "only through April 1" ?

The tables say 2/1/2020 to 5/2/2020 and shows 5 weeks of data for April thru May (the page is updated as-of today, 5/8/2020).


Okay — but is the AI overconfident in choices more or less often than a human?


“The thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There is something wrong with the way that you are measuring it.”

— Jeff Bezos

Trusting your eyes over people with replication rates in the 20-50% range (ie, social scientists) is probably a rational choice.

There’s plenty of evidence that polls have systemic inaccuracies — question phrasing, people giving “right” answers, etc.


[flagged]


I’m genuinely unsure what point you’re trying to make.

Can you explain what a made up quote has in common with repeating a quote from the CEO of a famously data driven company on problems with data models?


Who would you suggest online shopping from instead — perhaps that treats their employees better?


Try googling "ethical amazon alternatives"


Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that.

Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer.

Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?


Right, that's the other side of the equation that needs to be fielded beyond a certain size in organizational scale. Organizational processes need to be in place that protect the organization from bad actors, in a manner which is most resistant to being corrupted. As you say, even a few parts per million is essentially enough to get a large scale PR headache.

With that said, the question of whether the system could improved (and significantly, in a step-wise manner) how it handled this situation remains an open question to me. I don't know well enough what happened in the cases that caused Tim Bray to resign to comment, but it's possible that actions taken by the corporate management, HR and legal have taken backfired in a way that will be looked at as unforced errors. At a company (ostensibly THE company) that prides itself on operational excellence, I'd be surprised if this doesn't end up being the case. High profile resignations like this are sometimes the spark that sets the whole process in motion and the few externally visible signs that you can see later on as evidence. If this was attrition was truly regretted by corporate, and was something that could be prevented ahead of time, it will have been a very expensive black eye, waste of resources and loss of true executive leadership talent. For folks like Tim Bray, the difficulty of filling the organizational void they leave is very high, and potentially not guaranteed.

I guess time will tell.


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