blahblahthrow's comments

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: No Shenanigans

I work at a place that also has "draw the owl" as a kind of corporate culture joke? It's funny at small scale when everything is uncertain, but when you grow to a thousand employees it kind of turns into an embarrassment.

We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: EFF is at a public hacking conference, publicly shaming individuals

I've seen this talk, the person in question wrote stalkerware and acknowledged it would be used for abusing women. The title is misleading, the EFF isn't "publicly shaming individuals", they're talking about one case where someone wrote highly unethical software.

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Frab – free and open conference management system

Automatically pairing people by gender is pretty weird IMO. As a trans woman I have to find my own roommate or find an organizer to intervene and explain my life story to them.

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

As someone who has this flexibility, it's expensive and not that fun to go work in a hotel in a strange city for a couple weeks. I'd rather have a week off to ignore work and immerse myself

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Suicide Attempters’ Long-Term Survival

As someone who chronically ideates about suicide (but has never attempted), things like VR rock climbing and (real life) bungee jumping have just made me scared of jumping. But it doesn't make me not want to die, it just makes me want to do it a better way that's less scary

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

There's absolutely a movement for people to keep house cats inside because they maul grounded bats and other small animals they don't intend to eat. They're also at risk of getting hit by cars, eaten by coyotes, etc.

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Tech Jobs Lead to the Middle Class, But Not for the Masses

It's cool how nobody with a PhD ever committed a crime and only worthless, stupid people do crimes.

blahblahthrow | 6 years ago | on: Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years

Given the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make 10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions we have now.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Man Who Bribed Son into Penn Guilty in $1.3B Health Fraud

Wait so you stopped being vegan to ... protest the fact that some vegans are self-righteous? Do you also drive a V8 to protest the fact that some people with Teslas are smug?

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: New Zealand banning assault and semi-automatic rifles

Look at it this way: if you're going to lead an illegal insurrection to overthrow what you think is a tyranical government, why do you care what the gun laws are?

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

While I don't doubt ageism is a real factor in tech, this article conflated a bunch of stuff:

- the first woman was called a "mom" and basically drummed out of the industry to academia. That seems like sexism is the more pernicious aspect

- especially when you consider the next example is a guy who was discriminated against at one big name company, but also found a role

- then we get into IBM lifers having trouble moving into new roles after IBM downsized. The downsizing at IBM was inherently ageist, but their subsequent struggles in the job market could have a lot of contributing factors - a whole career at a single company doesn't set you up for success in interviewing, at the very least.

- finally we have the "how will my career develop" issue, which isn't ageism? Outside of management, higher-level IC roles inherently have "squishy" aspects - you're making hard, long-term investments and the payoff takes years in some cases. You can't administer a test to say "this person is a principal engineer and this one is a staff engineer", and complaining that the categories are arbitrary is kind of silly - they're created arbitrarily so you can feel like you're advancing even though the substance of your work is largely the same because you chose to keep doing IC stuff

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

It could be argued the Brazilian authorities are biased towards Embraer, much the same way US authorities might be biases towards Boeing.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding

Most people's gripes about socialism are senseless whataboutism. "But Venezuela!"

Anarchism (or libertarian socialism if you prefer) isn't just about "offering services for free". It's about a lack of hierarchy. You don't have billionaires. Americans today are not ready to embrace anarchism.

If you want a good sci-fi novel that explores practically how anarchism could evolve from the current US state, The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin is a classic.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

Conversely, what if every single person in a small town agrees on a regulation that they feel is in their best interest? Why shouldn't transport providers be bound by that? These are mostly local services, it's only the behemoth tech companies coming in to offer "ride sharing" that really benefit from uniform laws across the state in 99% of cases.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Taxing Top Incomes in a World of Ideas [pdf]

Exactly. I would argue that the existence of giant, monopolistic companies like Amazon leads to increased income inequality and social instability. We shouldn't be figuring out how to order our economy to make more Amazons, we should be trying to reduce the harm of the current ones with stronger employee protections, stronger consumer protections and stronger anti-trust enforcement.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: GM closing all operations in Oshawa, Ontario: sources

One example of a state business failing doesn't seem like a countercase? Almost every American car company was privately owned and failed, except the few that didn't.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: 30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network

What do you think is harder, being a senior engineer or breathing underwater?

Whoops, guess you're not as good as a fish.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

If there isn't a community on Reddit for something, what are the odds people are going to flock to a new platform? The quality issue is because these groups are generally peer-organized and some groups have better organizers. But like, what is technology going to do to make a better Reddit for people with depression, transgender people, people whose partners have cheated on them and people with incredibly rare medical conditions? Those are disparate groups that only have the common thread of needing a support group as far as I can tell.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Wikipedia bans Breitbart as a source for facts

It feels like you're moving the goal posts - "celebrating national pride" is something you can do without banning people from your country or marginalizing them. Nationalism seems fundamentally opposed to multicultural society - it's not about people electing to do folk song and dance, and multiculturalism doesn't prohibit celebrating culture.

blahblahthrow | 7 years ago | on: Wikipedia bans Breitbart as a source for facts

What is the national culture of America? Would nationalists deport all the people of European ancestry and give the land back to it's original inhabitants? What culture is preserved by stopping people moving between Mexico and Texas, which are pretty culturally similar and until recently were the same country? I don't there's a narrow line, I think there's no line and they're just branding to try and save face.