>If you, a consumer, are making the decision then it's not censorship. If some company, government, organization, school, etc is making the decision then it is censorship.
That seems too strong, what about curation or editorial discretion? The NYT deciding not to publish my op-ed screed about the lizard people isn't censorship, it's just how you run a good news agency.
Does Perl have mature equivalents for pandas and sklearn (setting aside what everyone else is saying about numpy)? The python ecosystem has a bunch of killer apps that make the workaday tasks of data science extremely ergonomic. R is similar with the tidyverse imo, but I don’t know of other languages with a comparable package landscape.
Quick addendum: data science != computer science, most data scientists learn coding on top of another skillset, not as their primary area of expertise, so things like under-the-hood efficiency are often second order concerns to learn-ability, ease of use and maintenance.
Your example is a little specious in that a bookcase is very different from a song. The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. I agree that producing things competitively is important to improve overall efficiency, but with the music industry you really have a small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else (ie. engaging in massively anti-competitive behavior). It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
> small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else
Only for those who sign with them. So this brings the question
as what's stopping these musicians to make music independently and market using internet along the way avoiding these labels. It is not even the case that music can be listened only via monopolistic mobile app stores.
I have used small independent service providers for tax filing, lawn mowing, cleaning and myriad other services by finding at internet. They are not backed by big corporate chains. Why music has to come from big labels.
I think generally the point of cartelization is to make it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that it's impossible for an artist to start their own label. Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be challenging to go it alone.
Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want. I do it all the time on Bandcamp and independent stores, for both digital and vinyl releases.
Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up from there, but there is literally nothing stopping consumers today from paying more for music except that they don't want to.
>Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want.
I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc.
Like I don't know how you can read something like this and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"
'''
Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.
Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.
'''
Further down:
'''
The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.
> The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't.
Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that).
> It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few. There is now far more opportunity for success and distribution without labels than there has been since they started.
>Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
Not really, I think roads are a convenient example but the same dynamic described (cities getting out over their skis through cheap-in-the-short term development and debt) can be seen playing out for other types of expenses. The next highest costs up that list, hospitals and education, are often also financed through debt, expensive to maintain over a long time horizon, and essential to growing the tax base. This seems totally cromulent with the basic "growth addiction" framework to me.
Because I don't want to be politically involved in steering the future of yet anther organization. I want to program. I have enough trouble staying informed enough to steer the futures of my state and federal governments.
I can basically guarantee that you will have both an easier time and a more rewarding outcome getting involved in a members union of like 250 people than with a state or federal government in the US
Yes but I don't feel a union is necessary in my case. I am happy with my wages, benefits, and working conditions. If not I'll vote with my feet, no union necessary.
Fair enough, and it's great that you're in a position to walk to if you don't like your employment situation. With that said, workplace bullshit can sneak up on you, and looking for a job can be pretty time-consuming. IMO a good union is a form of insurance. Usually you don't need it, but when you do it's very nice to have
> it's great that you're in a position to walk to if you don't like your employment situation
From a person who doesn't work in Google, or Big Tech, or even in SV. This is one of the reasons why these attempts at unionization from Google employees tend to annoy me slightly.
These are the few people in the world that would get hundreds of job offers in seconds. Yet instead of moving out if they don't agree with Google's projects, they would influence the projects and maybe affect the future of the company rather than give up their place for the hundreds like me who would gladly work on any defence-related project.
1. > These are the few people in the world that would get hundreds of job offers in seconds.
AWU is wall-to-wall, so not only are the cushy FTEs represented, but also all the less cushy contract workers, part-timers, etc (of which Google employs many!)
2. > Yet instead of moving out if they don't agree with Google's projects, they would influence the projects and maybe affect the future of the company
Isn't that their right? Shouldn't the people doing the work of the company get a say in that company's future? The "if you don't like it leave" attitude is so strange to me. What if they like their co-workers and parts of Google, and want to use their (supposedly) meritocratically-won power to exercise control over the things that are close to them? That hardly seems like privilege to me.
That's a great question. I don't know if it is. Unless they are shareholders of the company (granted, many FTEs are shareholders), what is it that gives them the right to influence a company based on their own personal values?
> Shouldn't the people doing the work of the company get a say in that company's future?
I mean if the outlook is for the company to continue to make profits. Sure. However, here, the profits are trumped by politics, and personal values. Why do the personal values of some employees get to decide/influence the future of a company?
> What if they like their co-workers and parts of Google, and want to use their (supposedly) meritocratically-won power to exercise control over the things that are close to them? That hardly seems like privilege to me.
It's called compromise. I have stayed in jobs where I wasn't paid enough but my manager was pretty awesome. I compromised.
Same for these employees. The "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude stems from the fact that the "contract" implies a give and take relationship. The power granted to the employee is only if that employee continues to provide value. If they stop providing that value i.e. provide their skills and knowledge to work on projects that benefit the revenue of the company, then that power is gone.
It seems to me that the personal values at play here are redefining what people seem to think of this. Let's pretend that the personal values were something else. Let's say that I, an employee of Acme Company, refuse to work on any work that is not FOSS yet also want to continue to be paid by the company. That sort of thing would usually not be defensible. I believe that most people would side towards the employer in that scenario.
Why is that essentially the same situation i.e. Employee refuses to work on projects based on "personal values" is somehow acceptable?
So many in this thread talking about a contract, rigidity, voting, etc. This is not a card-signing campaign, nobody will be voting on a CBA. AWU is running a minority unionism campaign which means that it's closer to a lobbying group or non-profit than eg. your standard public teachers' union.
FYI: AWU is a no-contract (minority/solidarity/members) union. Their strategy for the foreseeable future will be pursuing precisely what you are describing here (organizing workers for walk-outs, without locking in a CBA).
I'm extremely ignorant about OS design, but based on this it sounds like WSL1 could be fairly described as basically Linux for the Windows kernel, whereas WSL2 is more like a really fancy VM. Is that the gist of it?
More or less. Though I'd rephrase your description of WSL1 as "Linux for the NT kernel".
In that sense "Win32" (the API used by Windows programs) could also be described as "Win32 for the NT kernel". They are both subsystems that translate their APIs into NT kernel calls.
Windows NT used to have a number of these subsystems but all except Win32 were deprecated and eventually removed.
I see, that makes sense! This is a really interesting design and seeing it this way gives me more respect for the Windows operating system generally. Is this subsystem concept something that has a parallel on the *nix/BSD side of the fence? Or is it unique to the NT architecture?
The closest example outside Windows I can think of is the idea of "zones" in Solaris/Illumos/SmartOS. You can have a "LX branded zone" where the OS will respond to linux syscalls.
I don't know if the native solaris syscall interface is itself a zone, while Win32 is a subsystem on Windows.
This is a cool example, and now that you mention it docker as well seems to provide similar functionality. I guess what's striking about WSL1 then (and maybe what the author was saying) is that it's a mix between a docker container and like wine.
WSL1 is like the "kernel personalities" in other operating systems like the BSDs. WSL2 is more like Linux for Windows, because it is the actual Linux kernel in a VM, hypervised by Windows.
These comments are wild and the headline is not great. I know this is a contentious issue and that people like to armchair philosophize about stuff like this, but I think the study conclusions warrant a lot of critical attention before you say anything about "equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome".
First off: this is one study. No matter where you fall on gender politics, I wouldn't hang anything too seriously on a single paper. Obviously gender discrimination has been a historical cause of the gender STEM gap; so are we saying that we've solved that particular problem? Is there still room to improve? How much room? To me it seems naive to assume the first one without lots of evidence, and this paper is not that.
Second: the regression shown in the article doesn't seem great. For one thing: there's a small cluster of countries with pretty high X values, and pretty low Y values which suggests that they have relatively high leverage over the results and should probably be excluded. If you cover up UAE, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey does the regression line make any sense at all? To me it seems way too steep, ie. leverage. (Maybe the authors talk about this in the paper, I can't get behind the paywall). Also my priors would be that there are a number of country- and regional-level effects at work for an issue like this. It would be way more informative if the authors were to perform subgroup regressions by region of the world, cultural factors, ecnomic factors, etc. It's very possible, for example, that these two variables have an opposite correlation within region, education system, etc, but appear to have a negative correlation on aggregate. Simpson's Paradox is real and can cut many ways.
Third: choice of metric. Per the article
"""In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects"""
This could be caused by a lot of things, but this suggests to me that the "Global Gender Gap" metric may not be giving us the whole picture. I think it's real hasty to draw basically any conclusions about eg. the US STEM culture based on this study. When the results suggest a paradox like this, I think it calls for looking at a variety of metrics to see if the same results are borne out repeatedly.
tl;dr there's a lot of research on the gender STEM gap, and a lot of people shooting from the hip in these comments.
That seems too strong, what about curation or editorial discretion? The NYT deciding not to publish my op-ed screed about the lizard people isn't censorship, it's just how you run a good news agency.