sololipsist's comments

Welcome to hacker news. I hope your first day is pleasant.

I said:

> horizontal or vertical

And what if she's using the relationship to get ahead? What, are we going to pretend that women are powerless, agentless puppets that smart, capable men can use?

If the company you're in doesn't prohibit relationships, if you get into one you need to resolve conflict in those relationships outside of work.

So what? People who work together have sexual relationships, and people who have relationships will have conflict.

"People who disagree with me are ignorant." Come on, man. Seriously? You sounds like a college kid on facebook.

If a company is not going to prohibit employees from having sexual relationships with each other, horizontally or vertically, that company also need to expect those employees to work their conflict out outside of work. If google does want to prohibit this, they should have disciplined both of them the moment they heard about it and fired them if it continued.

What's with people expecting companies to be mommy and daddy when we have conflicts in our relationships? That's crazy.

..... And what if the accusation isn't credible, and it wouldn't actually hold up in court to fire him because of it?

Rubin deserves to be punished for sexual harassment....

IF, in fact, he sexually harassed, right?

A) What in the hell was his partner doing reporting to his place of business that she felt like he had compelled her to have sex with him in a hotel room? What does that have to do with work? That smells like using an accusation as a weapon to me.

B) What does "compelled" mean? I had a girlfriend once who was into kink and I wasn't. We did kink all the time and it wasn't fulfilling to me, and once time in particular I was trying very hard to just get her to have sex with me (which I thought was going to be part of the relationship and was just beginning to realize it was not). I kept asking, she kept saying no. Eventually she gave in. After our break-up she cited this as a rape to a friend. Is this rape? Is it even sexual harassment?

There are so few details here it's shameful it's even being reported on.

So what if Google gave a severance to someone who was accused of harassment? It's not even clear, from the details, that he did. Shit, what if they did an internal investigation and determined that he didn't?

What's wrong with people here, acting like this is something we know he did?

Do you understand that if you perceive non-harassment as harassment, you're perceiving it as harassment, so of course you think you're not misperceiving it? Like, you get that reality is sometimes different from your perception of it?

If someone suggests you're misperceiving something and your only reply is "I'm not because I know I'm not," you have an obvious epistemological problem.

That's an example, yes.

> How much more clearly can you out yourself as biased garbage?

Are you really surprised, or are you just pretending to be?

This is par for the course for every major journalism outfit - from Fox to MSNBC down to NPR and PBS. There isn't a single major outlet, irrespective of funding model or platform, that isn't blatantly biased.

I have found over and over and over that when I read "memos" or "screeds" or whathaveyou coming from the tech industry I inevitably find that a huge portion of the media is pushing a narrative that is so uniform and so disjoint from the actual content I have a hard time imagining how it wasn't coordinated journo-pros-style.

okay mom ::rolls eyes::

Some things don't deserve a response. In that cases it's perfectly acceptable to note this and move on with your life.

If you correct every brain-dead thing people tell you on the internet, either never say anything remotely controversial so you don't get ill-informed but confident replies, you spend all day correcting people, or you literally just started saying things on the internet to tell me how to live my life.

I didn't say a word about Kissinger.

If you need to pretend someone is arguing something they've never argued so you can disagree with them, you really need to take a step back and ask yourself what the fuck you're really doing.

Appreciate it.

It also reveals a weird logic I can't wrap my head around. If you vote, and you think others should vote, you believe that we have significant influence on politics. So if we abandoned our military dominance, what other country is going to fill that power vacuum? Do we trust their country with that power, a country which might or might not have a government that is influenced by its populace? Honestly, who are the other players that would likely make such a move... China, Russia, and the EU? Well, unless you're particularly fond of two of those governments, I don't like your odds.

Isn't it better to just keep the military dominance here, with a government influenced by the people, pretty much half of which are strongly opposed to the mobilization of that power? Absent some unintuitive answer to that question, I don't see the consistency of a person who thinks we should "get out and vote" genuinely wanting to degrade US military dominance.

> iceland has no military, and no real political or economic significance in the world. it has no genuine allies to whom it is worthwhile. why doesn't anyone/everyone invade them? nobody would risk a major war over them. they're what could amount to a strategically useful port. they might have some minerals or something. it wouldn't even be hard.

> the answer is that nobody cares to.

This is an over-simplification of truly mind-boggling caliber.

People forget that gunboat diplomacy is literally a violence deterrent. There is no better solution to geopolitcal mass-murder than to be so god-damn scary we can resolve things without death.

Sure, you can do a lot of bad shit with gunboat diplomacy - but giving up dominance doesn't eliminate bad shit, it just creates a power vacuum - which will be filled either by another geopolitical entity with the capability to do that bad shit or geopolitical violence on a massive scale.

Getting rid of our army does not lead to peace. I can't understand how any adult thinks it will, or is willing to act like it will.

Why? Air superiority is important for power projection.

Edit:

So I'm getting a comments here that are much lower-quality than I expect from this place.

Geopolitics is not like interpersonal relationships. There is nobody governing governments. It's a free-for-all, literally the state of nature. In societies it seems like "Might makes right" is a dated concept, but you have to remember that's within the frame of a governed society. Geopolitically we're literally in a kill-or-be-killed mode.

There is no game-theoretical solution to geopolitics except to be able to defend yourself with deadly force. At a minimum you must be able to inflict enough damage on other geopolitical entities to disincentivize them from projecting their power within your borders. A better solution is to have as much be able to inflict so much damage other geopolitical entities can't do this to you so that you have the choice to deploy that power wisely, as opposed to not having the opportunity to deploy it wisely.

The military dominance of the US post-WW2 has unambiguously been a stabilizing force on the world. I understand that doesn't guarantee it will continue to be so, but that isn't an argument against game-theoretical geopolitical realities.

We can't let the fact that we're inside a governed society make us forget what it's like outside a governed society. Acting like geopolitical dynamics are like social dynamics is profoundly stupid.

> The rest of us will continue to ~~learn and innovate~~ buy $tsla after silly controversies cause it to tank, and sell $tsla once everyone remembers they like money and it climbs again.

I've got to say, I think this is parallel to the issue that faaaaaaar too many people are getting bachelor's degrees. Generic sales jobs require them at this point, which is nuts. One should absolutely be able to get a sales job with a 6-digit income potential with mere experience in lower-powered positions, but for some reason we're forcing these people to study humanities for four years before we let them sell a CRM tool.

Shit, there's no reason most low-level programming positions need a CS bachelors. We really, really need good associates degrees that teach functional coding (logic structures, two common languages, git, agile). There is no reason to expect someone to be in school for four years to be able to code.

Grades must be inflated to accommodate the horde passing through universities. The masters degree is the new bachelors degree.

You got a few. Satisfied?