rickyplouis's comments

Slightly tangential, but in Brave New World they trained future embryos to be rocket-plane engineers altering oxygen levels based on their vertical orientation.

> The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embyronic rocket-place engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. "To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained. "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads."

The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".

The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources.

Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the U.S. DoJ.

https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2

For some some petty crimes (running red lights, not socially distancing, etc..), all neighborhoods actually commit them at a fairly consistent rate, but it is not enforced consistently.

For instance, here in Chicago it is common to find people not following the social distancing rules, but predominately white neighborhoods largely get a pass while black and brown neighborhoods get enforced.

So to answer your question, the crimes are occurring everywhere but statistically speaking black and brown people are more likely to face penalties for crime while white people are not.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-...

This also applies to parking tickets

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-...

and jaywalking

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-ch...

Thought it would be relevant but a few years back California was also in the news for building a gang database of children as young as one year old (for which they've since acknowledged as a mistake).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calgang-california-gang-databas...

The phrasing of "predictive policing" sounds fairly harmless, but in practice it is a way of finding out which kids are going to be future criminals, thus robbing them of their self-determination.

These types of tools seem excellent for prototyping, but always fall short in addressing the real world issues of increasing scope and maintainability. No code web development (Wordpress, and Squarespace) has largely thrived due to blogs and largely static content, but I fail to see a similar use case in mobile app development. Maybe it's a lack of imagination, but how valuable is a tool like this outside of todo lists, blogs, and other minor use cases?

If this were a chrome extension, I'd be down.

Does end to end encryption help when it's known that much of the traffic is routed through China? Genuine question.

I agree, he does not believe it to be dangerous. That's kind of my point. He does not believe it to be dangerous, but many of his readers and even black journalists have acknowledged it is. At this point you either accept that black journalists are saying this piece is dangerous or you reject it, you can't pretend it to be indifferent.

Before reading this I had a feeling it was related to the James Bennet situation at the Times. I've been following the narratives unfolding around news rooms and I would offer this article as a counter narrative to the one being portrayed in this piece.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t...

If you look at the James Bennet situation specifically, he willingly published a piece that he said could be dangerous. He tweeted the following

"We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton's argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate."

While this sounds like a noble undertaking of the advancement of public discourse, black journalists have publicly condemned this act because it will put their lives in danger. The problem is that Bennet and many other journalists believe it is ok to push dangerous, even racist narratives in pursuit of "objectivity". For many non-black journalists these debates are exciting and stimulating, but for black people these debates are validating toxic ideologies by giving them a platform to spread.

I agree to an extent. I'm one of those people that believes corporations are more likely to function and government intervention is likely to deepen disfunction. However, I don't share the same laissez faire attitude that many share about big businesses.

As stated by Buffett in Bray's article, anti-trust enforcement has fallen so far into the favor of large corporations the past few decades that the average age of public companies has increased. One would think that public opinion should reflect the swing of the pendulum, but this hasn't entirely been the case.

I often see many people show immediate solidarity with Amazon as soon as the ideas of anti-trust or monopoly are brought up. If the government is allowed to break up a large corporation then where does it stop? Will they come after my small business next?

The ironic part of this is that the same large companies they are showing solidarity with are implementing anti-competitive practices to prevent smaller entrants from standing a chance. Between google and facebook's unknown algorithms, Apple's secretive approval process for iOS apps, and Amazon's practice of pushing their products up and pushing new entrants out, the large companies already act as gatekeepers for their dominion.

Perhaps it's marketing, maybe it's brand loyalty, but it seems bizarre that people are more willing to give control of their lives to a large corporation than to have any government intervention.

Hey Y'all, my name's Ricardo and I spent the past couple of months building The Carrot App. Like many others I started off with a spreadsheet for tracking dividend income, but soon found it too cumbersome to keep up with. I looked around and found tons of tools for tracking dividends, but most required higher barriers to entry (brokerage account, min net worth) or were free solutions missing some of the key features I needed. I built this primarily to be a middle of the road tool for the average, self-managed investor to look at and project their dividend income. Currently it's a one-man crew behind the dev, marketing, and customer support but I've thoroughly enjoyed working these multiple roles. Let me know what you think!

As already repeated here, unionize or find someone with the leadership capable of leading one. As an individual you may not have much power, but a group of AWS engineers collectively unionizing and protesting within the company is a powerful force to be reckoned with.

The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented growth for our country and the world as a whole. It ushered in a new era, built immense fortunes, and led to the creation of critical infrastructure that we still use hundreds of years later. But with the great achievements came the unparalleled exploitation of the poor, minorities and even children, resulting in some of the most progressive labor laws ever developed. History rightly criticizes the robber barons and clearly illuminates the miseries they inflicted upon mankind for their wealth.

Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that the industrialists of the past faced, it’s inevitable. So it’s worth wondering if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.

Credit is due to anyone willing to sacrifice, no matter how small, for the voiceless and underrepresented.