My gut reaction is there is no way China is setting up vehicle manufacturing or assembly in Canada because the American President would go absolutely nuts. Canada is increasing ties and joint ventures with Canada but manufacturing would be a bridge too far for our little man in the White House.
It is getting to the point where lots of countries will stop caring how the US feels about things.
Between threatening, and some actual military intervention, with Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, and itself the US is spread pretty thin at the moment. I think Canada will slowly open up to China and boil the frog if you will.
If they are smart about it then it will probably work out really well for them. They will need a new market for their oil, timber, ..etc since the US is no longer a reliable partner. This will take years but as long as China doesn’t do something dumb like invade Taiwan they can just sit back and win while the US is busy self destructing.
I say this as an American, also a veteran, who loves his country but hates what is currently going on.
That's always been true. Perhaps even more so as Astro constantly faced an existential battle for a working business. Now they don't have to do that and Cloudflare makes their money on their infra business. Locking Astro up now or in the future gains them very little compared to how much they make with hosted upsell services. [edit: clarity]
Or perhaps we should watch what happens in Australia and draw lessons from it? I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means. I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends. Though we have done this since the 1950s. Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general? It's destroying the youth!
That's a good point. The problem for me is where the line is drawn. Is a car enthusiast forum social media? How about youtube comments? I think society is generally improved when the teenage generation is at least part of discussions. We need to protect the young people but excluding them and suppressing them leads to unintended consequences. I am not a tiktok apologist. Hey Facebook used to be enemy number 1 and now it's an afterthought for many people.
I would draw a line at user customized wall of content. All content on sites should be organized in a similar way for everybody (by date, by category, etc.). I think this would reduce a lot the problems that we see currently.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention.
A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section.
"you know it when you see it" is a trap and ripe for abuse in its own right. Your description however is pretty spot on for this moment in internet evolution.
Interesting to me is that I pay for youtube premium so I don't see any ads. They even have the jump ahead feature where you can skip in video project promotions. It's the most ad free experience I have on the internet. The comment sections are about the lowest of the low knuckle draggers and outright dimwits.
I'm also a bit out of touch because I quit all social media. Youtube shorts is about the closest I get and that's a mind sink for sure. [Edit: and hacker news which I consider social media without the ads]
I mostly use YouTube without ads, and with sponsorblock, so a similar experience.
I think YouTube shorts is exactly the experience we're talking about. And the youth watch it by scrolling up, not by selecting shorts that look interesting.
I resisted shorts for a long time, but I watch them now as well. Prefer them, even.
The fact we're not seeing ads, and that the comments are atrocious content, is irrelevant--our attention spans are at stake, not our wallets.
Anything that promotes short-form video should be looked at.
Youtube promoting shorts is bad.
A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot.
The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
No, in China, the people running the platforms know what is acceptable and what's not. So, once the government tells them what's cool and what's not, the companies then police themselves.
Because unlike the US, where there are effectively no real consequences for companies that skirt the law, in China, the companies wouldn't dare try to skirt the law - executives in China know they can't bribe their way out of deliberately pissing off The Party when it comes to education.
Everybody exactly knows where to draw the line... No one gives a shit about car enthusiast forums, everyone is talking about infinite scroll x targeted content x advertising powered by algorithms exclusively designed to extract your time, money and attention.
This is not helpful. "everybody" and "everyone" and "no one" are meaningless catch alls. I understand where you are coming from but this is a very limited world view that does not add anything to the conversation. I am sure that where I draw the line is not where someone else will draw the line. We do not know "exactly" where to draw the line.
Below is how New York's new law requiring social media sites defined the covered sites. It's based on how the site works, specifically if they have an "addictive feed" which is defined in the law. I'd expect most laws concerning social media would be drafted in a generally similar way.
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
Can someone link me something that shows that attention spans are decreasing?
I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims.
1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)).
This seems BS.
2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently.
This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?
No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
> Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.
By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers?
I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite.
Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress...
The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.
> I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends.
This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
it makes sense in terms of grooming. Most parents want to deny their children agency until they're no longer minors and giving them the internet massively undermines that idea. You're plugging your child into a stream of information that is mostly a sewer of misinformation.
The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left. Decentralised media is the only chance many kids have of hearing both sides of the story.
Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
> The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left.
Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people.
Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.
That is funny, because the vast majority of leftists, whether it is progressives, social democrats, socialists, or Marxists or what have you would complain that schools mostly ignore leftist ideals in favor of free market capitalism, conservative/traditional US political theory and civics, and propagandized history that always assumes the US was a good guy acting in good faith.
The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.
I don't see any entitlement at all, in fact it's the opposite.
The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement
The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
Interesting. I do not agree with your summary of his post, in fact he goes so far as to say "an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe."
So yes, we can laugh at the proposed mechanism but I feel the world would be a better place if we could funnel more resources to OSS creators rather than just take because that's an easier path.
I haven't done a video call on it but it does work for youtube. It's best to pause a video at the start but it buffers and plays just fine. Blocky but certainly watchable.
Nice that instead of completely cutting you off at the cap they put it in super slow 500 kbits. That is actually usable and used to be the fastest speed you could get at home.
My first company was an ISP, and our selling point was that we had higher bandwith out of Norway than any competitors in our price range.... A whopping 512kps.
I remember being amazingly excited to have saved up enough money to go to the store and buy a 33.6 modem (an amazing upgrade from my 14.4).
A year or so later I upgraded to a v.92 only to realize my ISP (I think it was IDT at the time) didn't support that and only supported some other 56k "standard" (details are sketchy on this, I was like 12). I was devastated and it was too late to drive back to computer city to exchange it for the correct one.
If I remember right we could get 64kb/s or 128kb/s if you bundled them, that was in Germany. But also, we didn't have that, we only had a 56kb/s modem and I remember really wanting ISDN when I was a kid :)
Copper, but not ISDN. Fractional E1 leased line. There were expensive and limited ISDN connections available in Norway at the time ('95), but not cost effective for an ISP.
The standby account -is- 500 kbps, probably it's the same mode, so I'd expect the same performance.
Anecdotally, even though I'd have told you that 500 was probably enough for non-streaming stuff that I do most of the time, in my experience when my connection switches over to Starlink (I have Comcast primarily, but it has had reliability problems the last few months), it usually hits the Starlink limits pretty hard. I've never identified any nefarious activity, it just seems like all the little things on my workstations and various devices that chatter add up to enough to trigger Starlink's controls.
The first modem that I owned was 1200 baud. The first one that I used was 110 and it was exciting when it was upgraded to 300. It took ~20 years from when I first got online until my home internet reached 512kbps.
I bought a cheap 1200 and then once I had use for it I saved up for a USR 14.4 with a shiny extruded aluminum case. At one point I was sharing that with two roommates using SLIP and surplussed Cisco coaxial NICs.
Ok, I’m not normally one to be the pedantic bits/bytes guy, but if you’re gonna go and make a bit/byte “clarification” you need to get the annotation correct or you'll just confuse everyone.
It’s 500kb (small b for bits) and 62.5kB(capital/big B for bytes).
People always use bits for connectivity. 62.5kB/sec -- maybe really 55-60kB/sec downloaded. Or 18 seconds to get a megabyte.
This is simultaneously fast (on my 14400 bps modem that I spent the most time "waiting for downloading", I was used to 12-13 minutes per megabyte vs. 18 seconds here) and slow (the google homepage is >1MB, so until you have resources cached you're waiting tens of seconds).
It would be nice if everything were just a touch more efficient.
I end up transferring 940kB (with a lot of blocking cranked up). Typing "hello" in the search bar takes it up to 1MB. Then the first page of search results is another 1.3MB.
Now, I assume all of this would start working before it's all transferred. But we're still talking about tens of seconds of transfer at 500kbit/sec.
(And Google at least acts like they care about bandwidth a little. So many 15megabyte pages out there...)
Unfortunately, the 56kbps internet was a lot more usable. I've been on 256kbps cellular connections (T-Mobile free international roaming) and it works, but it's pretty bad. Everything takes way more data these days, and nobody thinks about slow connections when writing software so there are a ton of overly aggressive timeouts and bad UI that assume operations won't take more than few seconds.
Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).
So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.
Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".
I'd disagree that that is usable today. A few days ago I had some network trouble that restricted me to about 350kbps, although stable without much packet loss, and a lot of stuff just didn't practically work. At that speed, loading images and resources on webpages within timeout limits is hard. Many web apps don't work, or degrade enough that you wouldn't want to use them.
Also what do we actually use the web for? A lot of streaming video and audio that won't work. A lot of reading webpages with a lot of images and ads, that won't work. I'm sure that Wikipedia would load and work slowly, but that's not really representative of web usage today.
There's a separate argument about whether the web should be like that, but regardless of your thoughts on that, it is like that.
Set your device to "metered network" and all the background shit will stop running. That's what I had to do to get my Starlink mini working in Standby mode. As soon as your device is on WiFi it thinks it's a free for all and starts updating and downloading shit in the background.
The 500KB/sec is more than enough as long as that isn't happening.
I need to go improve my knowledge, I haven't paying enough attention to the options lately, and I experience the same phenomenon -- I have a few workstations along with some IoT trash and Starlink standby mode pegs just from the chatter from the devices. As you say, on WiFi they don't bother controlling themselves and they are constantly finding things to do.
- News, phlogs, Wikipedia, translation services -> Gopher or Gemini, gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev plus gopher://sdf.org and Bongusta Phlogs. It's magical.
- IRC or IRC+Bitlbee -> IM, Jabber, IRC, most protocols
- Email -> Mbsync+msmtp + mutt. Caching helps there
- Usenet -> Slrn+Slrnpull, it has tech groups, caching and there's a web news discuss group too
This is fine if you're the sort of person who knows about IRC, is satisfied with content on Gopher, etc.
But most people depend on contacting family and friends via WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, they depend on YouTube for entertainment and education, their TV is increasingly online, they read their newspaper on a website with images, etc.
It's a privilege, and a lifestyle choice, to be able to live on 2.7KBPS.
You can use whatsapp over IRC->Bitlbee and reading newspapers at least for text mode. Privilege? more like the reverse. There are phone data plans for $10 that upon finishing your monthly data, you got throttled like that until the next month.
And in my country people did crazy stuff in order to ilegally watch soccer matches in cable TV's, such as writting magnetic deco cards with an electronic PICF84 based tool.
That compared to using Lagrange and gemini://gemi.dev to read the local newspapers and bookmark them in order to avoid typing down the https:// URL over and over, it's lke going for a Ph.D instead of joining a local library.
People isn't that dump, it's just lazy. And, sadly, uninformed.
In the infamous blackout in Spain, I was the only one in the bus that could fetch the news reliabily over Gemini due to the low bandwitdh.
The rest were waiting over and over.
And after that everyone got a pocket radio tuner just because. Something I was just doing over decades too because FM and AM radio will actually work anywhere.
But the web doesn't offer a nice degradation. In the blackout, they just kept sending the full raw data, literal thousands of cookie trackers, JS scripts and the mandatory ads. You at least have https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.com. My country? They just pushed the web SPA's and OFC they set no OPUS stream (something every smartphone understands from at least 2012) with a smaller bitrate.
I hope we get LLM browser agents that will convert the web back to that state again. You can get sorta close now with adblockers, various "lite" modes, and unofficial client sites, but it would be nice if it were universal.
This is a separate discussion, but while I agree in general that pages should be less bloated than they are, ads shouldn't burn my CPU, etc, I think it's a sign of progress that the web takes much more bandwidth. 4K video is better than HD, is better than SD, is better than no video. Illustrations improve articles. More client side Javascript tends to mean more interactivity which is often a good thing (not always). The web today does so much more than it did 20 years ago, and we should be proud of that achievement rather than push back on progress by expecting the web to work on a connection from 20 years ago.
No, not nice. Previously, if we exceeded the 50Gb cap, there was the option to continue on at high-speed for $1/Gb. And that's the same price per Gb as the base plan of 50Gb/month for $50. Now, it's either upgrade to unlimited, or enjoy Netflix at 500Kbps. I want the old plan back.
It's unlikely that we will exceed 100Gb/month in the camper. But if we do, it's either slow speeds, or pay $165/month for unlimited roam every single month we use it, versus paying a little extra for the few times we go over. In the end, it'll probably work out okay for us, but I liked the previous option of being able to get high-speed data at a reasonable price should we go over the limit.
Fortunately 1. For slow speeds, it’s not like you have to live with that slowness every day. The impact is limited to the remaining few days of the month where you ran up against the 100GB, so the either-or in your statement looks worse than it is; and 2. Starlink makes it dead easy to switch from plan to plan right in the app so you can go right back to a lower plan when the higher one is not needed. With the caveat that they do change what plans are available sometimes as we’re seeing here.
If I calculate correctly then 500 kbps is actually enough for Netflix in standard quality. If one wants to binge watch 4K (7 GB per hour) then the unlimited plan makes more sense anyway.
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?
For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
Taking being passed for promotion all the way to SCOTUS is a big ask. For decades the default position was the law defends non-white/non-men against white men. In most other western countries you still can put out job ads saying basically "white men need not apply".
The fact that the top 0.00001% are white men doesn't make it any easier for the bottom say 30% white men. I have no problem with whoever is in bad situation getting helped, I have a problem with a Ukrainian getting penalized compared to an Chinese because long time ago a German bought some African slaves.
The argument is not about supporting the bottom, it's about supporting groups with some correlation to being in the bottom with no regard to actually being at the bottom.
For much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women.
I mean, the legal discrimination against people of color throughout history has been accompanied by extreme violence and oppression. It's a brutal legacy that cannot be overstated.
Slavery and human trafficking, lynching and extrajudicial killings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, denial of voting rights, economic exploitation, forced relocation and genocide, invasive medical practices, cultural suppression, and educational disparities... when you whinge about "decades" of legal protections for marginalized identities, I just wonder why you think you're making anywhere close to a salient or meaningful contribution to discussions of justice.
>>> For much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women.
For much of history, most countries did not have an upper class made up of white men.
The people who effected slavery and what not are long dead. A poor white boy of today or 30 years ago getting penalized in favor of a black lawyer's daughter achieves nothing in terms of justice.
Nearly half of my aunts and uncles saw Martin Luther King Jr speak live on TV.
Donald Trump was in college when active discrimination by the government became illegal.
Do you think that after Jim Crow was dismantled in the 60s, that all of those people who were against it, that you see in the video footage and photos violently protesting it, suddenly disappeared?
Yes, 20 year olds from the 60s are in retirement homes.
Still waiting for a good argument on penalizing one set of people who weren't born then in favour of another set of people who weren't born then is fixing any wrong done in the past.
A miserable person is a miserable person. Any affirmative action style policy gives less-miserable people a boost over more-miserable people.
Do you believe that the law should treat people differently based on the color of their skin? Do you believe my father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, should be given disadvantages due to his being white, even though neither he nor his ancestors had anything to do with slavery in this country? Do you believe the likes of Claudine Gay, who hails from a wealthy family and grew up in the very picture of privilege, should be given advantages due to her being black?
Do you believe in punishing the son for the sins of the father? Do you believe in punishing someone who just happens to look like the sinners of the past? Do you believe that nonwhite people's ancestors did not commit the same atrocities at some point or another in history as white people's ancestors?
I'm not white, but I find ideas you espouse to be just simple racism, and nowhere close to "justice".
Your father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, benefits from ongoing racialized distributions of privilege, power, and money.
So, yes, I do believe he is "cutting in line," and should have the humility to stand in solidarity with, rather than standing on the necks of, marginalized communities. Your father-in-law is not climbing out of anywhere so deep a hole as the Black and Hispanic populations on this continent. Not even close.
Even the Gulag Archipelago pales in comparison to the centuries of slavery, genocide, rape, and disenfranchisement we have visited on these peoples in order to accrue the wealth that your father-in-law now has the privilege to work for.
You're still talking promoting group A at the cost of group B for what group C did to group D, people in groups A and B having not much to do with C and D. Even considering descendants of original group D, the benefits are overwhelmingly reaped by those affected by whatever extant systemic injustice remains the least.
You are currently standing on the shoulders of minorities to rise yourself above others.
If you are indeed honest about it, you can personally take a step back and promote anyone you want. Demanding it from others is just self-righteous and your intentions are questionable.
That Eastern European immigrant is a result of centuries of feudal slavery. The serfdom of population east of Oder meant lack of freedom of movement, mandatory free work for the lord and the clergy, great poverty and no education. Lord could decide about life and death of their serfs and killing of serf by a different noble was just resolved as part of the business with a fine/repayment. Serfs were just another commodity in lords property, the further east, the worse serfs were exploited.
Despite XIX century reforms dismissing serfdom in some regions, generational poverty of peasants kept them in serfdom like conditions up until end of WW2. And even after WW2 you could end in Ukraine with forced exports of food resulting in genocidal famine.
That Eastern European immigrant has family history of half a millennium or more in slave like conditions.
That would be circular reasoning - we know Adams' claim is true because DEI was pervasive in the 80's, and we know DEI was pervasive in the 80's because Scott Adams said so.
Google is notorious for pulling this and numerous people have come forward pointing it out and the CEO of IBM was on air back in 2021 (?) pointing out that any white men who have a problem with not being promoted can essentially pound sand.
This is/was an incredibly common behavior in tech, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully argumentative or is incredibly isolated.
Well, I can’t speak to that with enough confidence to say it was “not a thing”, but I never saw that sort of thing in the eighties. Although, it would not necessarily be unusual for a manager to be that blunt and open at that time without fear of lawsuits, so that part tracks as possibly true for me if there was some sort of effort within his company.
However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
Just to throw my anecdote in ... In the 1980s, I met a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower scores.
So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.
Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")
> a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower score
Were these people trustworthy? Because that sounds exactly like the kind of urban legend that people like to parrot, or like a pretty standard way to cope with not getting hired. I heard a bit of very similar chatter about college admissions back in the day. “Maybe I would have had a shot if I was Asian.” Etc.
> I heard a bit of very similar chatter about college admissions back in the day. “Maybe I would have had a shot if I was Asian.” Etc.
I’m not sure you can really say this was an urban legend, as there was a number of court cases regarding it (At least one from that far back) and a recent SCOTUS (2023) ruling specifically ending the capability of colleges to utilize affirmative action considerations for admissions. Not to say that every person who claimed such a thing was accurate, but it was happening.
It was a long time ago (obviously). In general, yes, they were trustworthy, but they themselves could have been victims of misinformation--I don't really know is the short answer. But this is true for just about any bit of "news." Unless you have direct knowledge of a piece of information, you evaluate the information (and the person relating the info) and you make your best guess as to its "truth/falsity."
These days, I find it extremely difficult to trust a lot of federal "truth", so I get your overall point. :-(
I'm not disagreeing with you, but this is the exact same argument that some people use to say that racism is no longer an issue. "I've never seen racism"
“Politically Correct” came out of the late 80s / early 90s era. I’m certain you saw socially insane things in the 80s. I’ve had similarly insane anecdotes of investors holding court in strip clubs dangling venture capital in front of our firm in the late 2010s. Shitty people in power will always exist.
Strippers... brothels... and /hypothetically/ I could tell one story from a well known company where a sales team got in trouble for trying to expense hookers AND blow on a business trip.
People did all kinds of crazy shit at work (and everywhere else too) in the 80s before everyone lawyered up - guys would literally pinch a girl's ass, people used slurs to each other regularly (and often laughed about it), they smoked and drank all the time. A manager somewhere telling a rejected candidate straight up "sorry man but I've got to hire a <<insert minority>> this time" is not at all difficult to believe.
It was 1999 I think, I was doing a placement at a media company. One of the PAs was heavily pregnant, an old guy in the office said to her "My my Jane, your breasts are coming along nicely."
How many times have we read about managers that explicitly tells women they won't get promoted because they are expected to get pregnant and later leave? Sometimes the conversation even get recorded on tape.
Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.
My SIL, this week(!) was told by her supervisor that if she tries to apply for another team and doesn't get that job, she'll be set back in her career progression in her team. Asshole managers are everywhere.
Is there anything similar to this in the local world? I’m setting up a full local “ai” stack on a 48gb MacBook for my sensitive data ops. Using webui. Will still use sota cloud services for coding.
There are lots of similar tools to Claude Code where a local executor agent talks to a remote/local AI. For example, OpenCode and Aider both support local models as well as remote (e.g. via OpenRouter).
This was 1996. A typical computer had tens of megabytes of memory with throughput a fraction of what we have today. Appending an element instead of reading, parsing, inserting and validating the entire document is a better solution in so many ways. That people doing redactions don't understand the technology is a separate problem. The context matters.
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