So does this mean all of our Chromecasts are going to stop working again once this takes effect since (judging by Google's response during the week long Chromecast outage earlier this year) Chromecast is run by a skeleton crew and won't have the resources to automate certificate renewal?
I've never met a single person that had a mindset of "I need to pick up some stuff at Target... oh wait I just remembered they cancelled their internal DEI program, I'd better do some research and shop at a retailer that still has a DEI program instead"
I guess I'm just not sure how the causality was determined. How do I know foot traffic isn't decreasing because of Target's prices compared to Costco's prices?
Target had been pandering to the LGBTQ community for a long time, they released many shirts and ads that tried to present itself as inclusive and forward thinking.
But the very second things change on the top, they flip.
Yes quite a few people are upset at this. They concretely damaged their brand, ruined trust, and pissed off a bunch of their target market. There is an intentional boycott now and it is clearly affecting their stock
My opinion on this is that as a generic business it's better to just stay out of politics and not pander to specific groups. You may score some short-term wins but if you fail any purity test from that point onwards, or pull back at all, that group will feel jilted and retaliate. Then, you're worse off than if you had just remained neutral.
This post counts as another one of the 1.56 billion.
It wasn't because Costco embraced DEI as much as Target actively dropping it as quickly as possible after Inauguration Day. They didn't even wait for a challenge. To me that means they were happy to drop it as quickly as they could. Which means it was all for show in the first place.
I've also seen a few half-assed attempts to go viral and bring customers back, which only makes me want to spend more elsewhere.
Yes my family has stopped shopping at Target unless everyone else is out of stock of something we know they carry. I’ve been there once since they did this while previously we would go once a week or so.
I think the point of the person you are replying to is that you are in a very, very small minority. So small that a decline in foot traffic at Target is likely only correlated with a decline in foot traffic, and nowhere near a cause of it.
Enough drops of water eventually make a puddle. Target was already second fiddle to Walmart so alienating a consumer base they spent years deliberately tailoring marketing for is not a good idea if the boat is already leaky.
I have stopped shopping there as well, but continue to shop at Amazon. Amazon is clear that they are a corporation who only cares about the bottom line. I can respect that vs Target who is pandering.
Yes. This is an anecdote but I personally know people who are boycotting Target and a lot of other companies that backtracked on DEI and LGBTQ rights. I think these companies are all posturing and will say what they think will get you in the door but other people I know are taking this personally and changing their spending habits to reflect that.
If the average target consumer didn't care, Target wouldn't have had 10 weeks of consecutive foot traffic declines. Most things sold in Target can be bought elsewhere, so people have voted with their wallets.
Executives at Target made the calculation that their sales wouldn't decline much (if at all) by publicly canceling their DEI programs.
To the question about Target and Costco's prices: Typically these retailers will have price matching policies in place to keep foot traffic.
Quick google search implies (not sure how accurate this is), that approximately 12% of Target's demographic is black [0]. Seeing close to a 10% drop in foot traffic for a low margin business like Target when a competitor is seeing almost the near opposite gains is a signal someone really screwed up.
Especially because it wasn’t like target came out to say “we hate DEI now”, they just realized that any corporation that had a DEI program was going to open themselves up to legal issues so they just can’t say things out loud anymore.
Yes and practically it's a slippery slope .. marginalizing the weak, via government powers.
May not be needed to say: in an authoritarian society, compliance paradoxically breeds more authoritarianism.
(From AI, and I agree with) The idea of the impact of compliance in authoritarian societies is .., Active Compliance > Passive Compliance > and finally, Pre-Compliance.
- Bonus: discussion of the assertion that those in upperclass authoritarian societies DO comply with, and aren't affected by authoritarian policies ( Note this is for INDIVIDUALS not corporations, I speculate it works the same however ) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradox-voluntary-compliance-...
So, watch as Us here on Hacker News start to encourage Active compliance, move to Passive, and then encourage Pre-Compliance!
Yeah, it has been a reckoning. I’ve never seen liberal boomers and gen x-ers get so organized. I’ve only known the opposite in my lifetime. It’s been great to see and I’m here for it. Keep this up and you’ll turn the hosts of The View into leaders of an armed militia.
Maybe the federal government needs a reset/dismantling/pruning/whatever you want to call it. With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now even though the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget, which itself exceeds the next 9 defense budgets in the world combined.
No need for the scare quotes. The current federal budget is expanding, under the current administration.
Had they the slighest wish to shrink the debt, or at least not expand it further, tax cuts would have been out of the question until the budget allows for it.
Current budget is set to expand deficit spending due to tax cuts and certain spending increases, in spite of project cuts to social safety nets and entitlements.
> With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now
Perhaps, and in such a case, the american economy would not be cratering like it has been lately, and americans would be suffering less, and america would be stronger on the international stage. In fact, all things considered, more spending would have been better for america than the current state of things.
> the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget
There's always taxing the rich, but the plan by the american ruling elites in the republican party currently seems to be to increase the debt sky-high via tax cuts for rich americans, only partially paid for via increased taxes on non-rich americans, with the rest piled onto the american debt burden.
You can't just spend your troubles away forever. It might temporarily alleviate things, but long term it will collapse the entire system. At some point there need to be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's necessary for survival.
You can't just cut your troubles away: Poor educational system; low education; high income inequality; low real income growth rate; high rates of drug addition; low social mobility; housing shortages; poor public transit; decreased access to healthy food; private equity buying everything and jacking up the prices; etc.
In fact, most solutions to troubles require spending time and/or money. Very few are resolved by "do less, and do it worse".
> At some point there need to be painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like.
Perhaps: america can start with increasing taxes on the rich, instead of decreasing taxes on the rich and increasing taxes on the non-rich. That should get america more money and hurt fewer people.
I don't disagree with you - I'm in favor of both slashing spending and increasing taxes.
It seems as though republicans like to decrease both spending and taxes while democrats like to increase both spending and taxes. Both strategies are not helpful when it comes to national debt. Perhaps when democrats come to power again they will be wise and raise taxes without restoring all the spending/programs Trump cut.
you have a fundamental misunderstanding of govermental debt and the US.the US CAN 100%, its not a guess its a fact, spend away their troubles forever.
learn how the global economy is, understand what fiat is, find out what your missing. (first hint, money is a construct - and follow the tbills)
you know what does make the US have to do "painful austerity measures - budget cuts, increased taxes, and the like. It's unpopular to do painful things, but it's necessary for survival" ??
Watch everything the current administration does because they dont understand modern economics and you'll see.
Yes, the US can spend away their troubles, as long as it maintains treaties it signed on to, can, at least, to some degree, demonstrate some maintenance of its debt, and doesn’t alienate its trade parters, much less the whole world.
If you think I’m just being a partisan, take a look at the US Bond market for the last two weeks.
Trump is looking to increase spending. Musk's future is dependent on increasing spending. Where do you get the idea they're cutting the budget? They're cutting normal people ...
Agree - unit tests are best for pure functions and the like. If you are having to do a ton of mocking and injection in order to unit test something, it's probably a sign black box testing might be higher value
It's more possible at giants, IMO. Level of technical competence/excellence tends to be inversely proportional to company size. FAANG might be exceptions, but IMO large companies (like big banks, etc) have a lot of hidden technical incompetence you can't see.
A major goal of the complex computing infrastructure at large orgs is to wall off the ignorance and/or incompetence to contain, mitigate, or prevent its consequences.
(Note that "ignorance" is not pejorative here: not everyone can know everything.)
Adding a progress bar back might cause people to just skip to the part they want to see instead of watching the whole thing again though, and I'm worried that might not be in the best interests of the content creator or advertisers.
Agreed. This book helped me really understand the people in a country are not all defined by the ruling party or the ruler. In this case, not all Germans were Nazis and some had much honor in how they conducted warfare. Maybe this was obvious to many people but it wasn’t obvious to me until this book.
I can recommend “They Thought They Were Free”. The book is imperfect, but it hit home to me the horrific truth on National Socialism: that the people who did it were regular people, not the monsters of myth.
We know the probability of life arising in the universe is >0 because we exist.
However, we don't know if life can arise spontaneously given the right conditions (abiogenesis) or if must it be "seeded" at some level by an existing life form (i.e. deity, asteroid containing bacteria, etc)?
I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.
> I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.
Hijacking someone else's comment to ask without judgement or agenda - How, if at all, would it alter your religious beliefs were life/intelligent life to be found on another planet?
I keep my religious beliefs and scientific beliefs mostly segregated, so they don't affect each other too strongly for the most part. The reason for this is that those 2 things are reinforced by different sources. My religious beliefs are reinforced by spiritual experiences (such as repeatedly being stumped by [challenging life/work problem], praying for help, and then getting distinct thoughts or impressions that miraculously unblock me... or sometimes I'm miraculously unblocked through the actions other people), my scientific beliefs are formed and are refined by reading scientific literature + critical thinking. If the 2 are in conflict (which is pretty rare), it's usually my religious beliefs that adapt to new scientific understanding. For example, if evolution seems to be in conflict with intelligent design, I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed (i.e. "this computer program can't have been intelligently designed, we've proven it was created by an LLM" --> "ok, then the LLM was intelligently designed").
One thing that would probably alter my religious beliefs significantly is if abiogenesis or synthetic life were proven possible (i.e. you can clearly show in a lab how to make life arise from non-life, or how to create artificial life). I don't find the current "primordial soup" or other abiogenesis arguments convincing enough to abandon religion, though I do re-visit the wiki every couple years to see what's new on that front.
> I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed
I don't understand why I don't hear anyone else take this position. To me it's obvious and it's hard to find any other way to reconcile them. (But I'm not religious.)
Well, actually there's two quite different things that could be asserted along that line and it's not clear which you meant: either that evolution is a mechanism by which the hand of God can meddle in random occurrences to pick outcomes, or that it's completely hands-off.
But I would state the second one differently: that the universe was set up to allow evolution and all the other systems of natures to create the world today. Evolution itself is ultimately a consequence of physics and statistics.
I'd expect the same, the problem is just the vast distances involved with space (meaning we are looking into the past) and the enormous quantities planets to check make it difficult to find other life out there
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