domfletcher's comments

The thing is that this guy clearly thinks some things that affect his ability to do his job. Would you trust him to write a peer review for a female colleague or mentor a black intern?

I think what you say is true about people searching for ways to express themselves when the lines between work and personal are blurred but fundamentally people have to attempt to be unbiased. It's pretty clear that this guy wasn't willing (or able) to do this and keeping him on would open up Google to a lot of bad PR and potentially lawsuits from people who's reviews/interviews etc that he was involved in.

I disagree, Uber for all its obvious faults has a top notch UX, I don't need to find cash, I barely need to break off conversation with my friend let alone speak to a person on the phone who will inevitably be confused about where I am. All that stuff drives adoption and retention.

No, if everyone doesn't use Facebook then they have no power. My decision has, at best, a tiny marginal impact.

I had a lot of mileage avoiding row count actually in the sheet buy using an API to retrieve data directly when a user is interested in a particular record. Then the only think you need to keep in the sheet is an index which is lighter because (as far as I can tell) it's cell count that really affects performance.

"I (/my company) should be allowed to avoid my taxes because the government will just waste the money" Is a pretty antidemocratic sentiment. You may think it's inefficient but you're a constituency of one and you don't get to make that call for everyone in the country.

Ahh my mistake. I didn't realise that you could just retrieve a full list of users for a group (I just tried it and you can) I suspect this API may be fairly closely watched however.

From my reading of the article it seems like you had to be admin of the group in question because the exploit seems to take advantage of a bug with inviting users to that group. I don't think the vector you describe would work.

I absolutely hate it as a term. It's an exercise in rebranding of an ideology and it's a pretty clever one as well. Alternative (alt) implies that they're somehow ideologically different from the rest of the "right". They aren't, they're as you say just further right.

Also alt with the lower case a carries with it some techy payload as well which together with people like Thiel makes it look like its some expression of ideas about the future when it's mostly about nostalgia for the past.

I can't believe how easily this has been swallowed by everyone particularly the media.

I'm talking to OP's specific point around siding with Trump. I think the point is that no body on my side understands what matters in terms of motivating the electorate.

I disagree that it's fear mongering and I don't think it's helpful to reasonable debate to call it that. I'm trying to understand what Trump wants to do by looking at what he has said.

On immigrant rights, maybe you're right, maybe all Trump wants to do is secure the borders but he certainly hasn't done much to discourage the nasty parts of his base form thinking otherwise.

On abortion rights you're taking a massive gamble with a hard won and important right. If you're comfortable doing that in the name of marginal free speak then that's for you to decide. I'm not.

The perception of Obama abroad is pretty good still. I live in the UK so I can tell you that he's perceived as one of the few grown ups on the world political stage.

They both may be opposing TPP but only Trump was talking about putting a large tariff on Chinese steel. Irrespective of the issues with global trade, trade wars are definitely bad for everyone involved.

I think you're right about the need for debate around how identity politics can be better expressed and that is a debate that seems to have been slightly suppressed on the left. I would say two things about why I don't think this is a good reason to support Trump:

1. The situation you describe is fundamentally about freedom of speech vs the right not be be offended. Trump is not an advocate of freedom of speech and doesn't believe in a free press. In my estimation this is much more dangerous than what you describe.

2. This doesn't even register on my scale of the pros and cons of Trump. The Presidency is not about who decides who gets to say what to whom, that is a matter for society at large. As has been described elsewhere in this thread the damage he will do (if he enacts even half of his platform) to immigrant and womens rights, America's standing in the world and free trade will outweigh a hundredfold any small gains you get from a backlash against political correctness.

> Trump's accusations of Clinton being "a liar" and "a criminal" (IOW a typical career politician) were pretty harmless compared to the hyperbole (deserved or not) hauled at him

I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. Now maybe it's my liberal tendencies talking but the things that have come out of his mouth are flat out dangerous for a person who has that much power (now). Not much of it was hyperbole because it didn't have to be. He was already after foreigners, women, "the washington elite", the internet etc. before any of the media got involved. He was addicted to the cycle coverage but he still said all of those things and you can't wish that away.

The dangerous thing is not about policy or specific proposals but who is empowered. Ann Coulter will be treated as a serious policy voice now because she stood with Trump. See Brexit with Farage, Boris et al.

I have some sympathy with this but I think people ignore a lot of the stuff which Google just gives away with some fairly light advertising. Think about navigating with Apple maps, or trying to organise your life with Hotmail or trying to do anything without Google search. Some of their product decisions wind people up but I think they do a lot more good than harm.

I have a bit of an issue with their definition of a "Questionable" account. I mostly use twitter as a way to aggregate a stream of news from people I think are interesting and as such my following/follower ratio is about 10:1.

When the author says Questionable accounts had "4.2x more accounts than were following them" that's not that surprising as that was part of their (flawed?) classification to begin with but I don't think it says anything about them being a bot.

I also wonder how many Law enforcement officials are turning up at 39.8333333,-98.585522 because they're using a different geoip provider.

Tell that to all the working class EU migrants we have staffing our farms, building sites etc.

Stunning video. I don't know if it's the setting or the fast forward but the whole thing looked like a video game to me. One that I'd definitely play by the way.

It's certainly not entirely the governments fault. Airlines need to be strongly regulated with good reason and pretending that they don't lobby and campaign to increase regulation that acts as a barrier to entry is myopic at best.

I'm not saying there isn't hard evidence for this but The Express is a not a reputable newspaper and it's articles should always be looked at with a very skeptical eye. In case that wasn't obvious from clicking around their site for 20-30 seconds.