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Apple Uses Women and People of Color as Props in Adverts
Apple is happy to use women and people of color as art, not authority
"Apple's boardrooms look nothing like its advertisements."
Site seems to block archive.is. Wayback may be available later.
David Blumberg: Not Your Typical Silicon Valley VC
- The venture capitalist David Blumberg is a white man in Silicon Valley, and still he says he's a minority.
- In addition to being a supporter of President Donald Trump, the investor is gay — he has two children with his partner — and has a strong faith in God.
- Blumberg said that after coming out as a Republican more than a decade ago, he "got dropped from a lot of cocktail-party lists."
- But being an outsider has its advantages, he says.
I Just Got Offered $265 To Participate In A Wine Tasting
Back in the day I registered with a Portland Focus Group service. From time to time they invite me to taste NEW! Sugar Frosted Chocolate Bombs but either I'm not into showing up that day or I don't fit their client's target market.
In my honest opinion there are only two kinds of wine:
- White
- Red
I was down with drinking white wine when I was with my ex but now as a divorcee I only drink red.
But when you get right down to it I could really use two hundred and sixty five clams right about now, so I'll fill out their pre-qualification questionairre.
when the headline is better than the story
Tittiecoin Acquires Titcoin and Launches Tittiecoin 2.0
According to the wiki page this happened a few days ago. I checked out the official site, but it was not terribly interesting (something about an island?) https://tittiecoin.com/
svn ci --message "Thrashed around helplessly and hopelessly"
Despite having resigned my contract I had some hope of sending my client a driver that actually _worked_.
I at least have identified the immediate reason as to why I've been unable to accomplished that but I do not yet understand the root cause.
In other news, I just now had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a banana and a cup of black coffee. That's A Winning Combination!
Geoffrey Owens and Job Shaming
Actors and fans defend 'Cosby Show' actor after articles job-shame him for working at Trader Joe's
An honest man doing an honest day's work used to be something to be celebrated in America. But it didn't seem like it -- over the Labor Day weekend, of all times -- after actor Geoffrey Owens was spotted at a Trader Joe's in New Jersey, bagging groceries.
It all started with an article in the Daily Mail late last week. A customer at the store in Clifton, New Jersey, spotted Owens -- best known for his role as son-in-law Elvin Tibideaux on "The Cosby Show" -- working as a cashier and snapped a picture.
The image became the basis for the Daily Mail's story under the job-shaming headline, "From learning lines to serving the long line!" The details in the story were just as insulting: "Wearing an ID badge bearing his name, the former star wore a Trader Joe's T-shirt with stain marks on the front as he weighed a bag of potatoes."
The story exploded on social media over the holiday weekend after Fox News picked it up and tweeted out its own version. But the articles seemed to produce a flood of support for Owens, as well as a conversation about job-shaming and classism. Other actors, as well as fans, defended him.
Geoffrey Owens' message to job-shamers: Honor the 'dignity of work'
Leave him alone, he's not a rapist.
It's OK to job shame anyone working at the Daily Mail.
Statistics and gender
Or, perhaps a bit more precisely, I would say that almost everyone misunderstands common statistics - but not in the same ways!
So we'll pull in sex for an example. There's a school of thought that says that there's virtually no difference between men and women, statistically, on anything important. There's another school of thought that says they're so incredibly different, statistically, on virtually everything important, they almost don't look like the same species! And to make this even funnier, these two schools of thought can often point to the SAME data to support their diametrically opposed conclusions!
Ok, so let me break this down for you with just a little more detail. Let's pick an attribute we test for, aggressiveness is a good one here, because the statistical differences between the sexes are about as dramatic on this measure as you'll find anywhere.
So, if I pick out two individuals randomly, and I tell you nothing other than their sex - one is male, the other is female - and ask you to guess which one is more aggressive, what's your guess?
If you guessed the male, of course that was the better guess statistically. But your edge isn't very big, you're only 60% likely to be right. If I answered female I still have a 40% chance to get the question right - you've only got a little edge, not a solid distinction of kind.
In fact, if you go select a group of women who are just a little more aggressive than average, and set them up against a group of males who are just a little less aggressive than average the women are absolutely going to use the guys as footstools and doormats.
This is the no significant differences argument simplified a bit for easy digestion. And it's valid. It's true. On average, women are only a little bit less aggressive than men, and many women are more aggressive than many men. So it's ignorant prejudice to say that men are the aggressive ones and women are not aggressive. It's radically contrary to the facts! And if that's true in terms of aggressiveness it's much more true on most other metrics.
BUT, there are more facts than have been mentioned. What if we look beyond the average, at the distribution?
What if, instead of randomly selecting a male and a female from the general population, we FIRST randomly select 100 individuals, 50 males 50 females, THEN select the most aggressive individual of the bunch. This time, we guess which sex that individual is. Again, you say male, leaving me with the contrary position.
This time the odds are entirely different. There's virtually no chance I'll win.
The average woman is only slightly less aggressive than the average male, and more aggressive than many. Many women are more aggressive than the average male. But the most aggressive man on the planet will be a male. In fact, if we could rank every individual on earth, something like the top 5-6 million people would be males. Only after that would you start seeing females.
A really neat thing is this actually works almost as well in the opposite direction as well. Lots of women are fairly low on the aggression scale but if you want to find someone that is really freakishly low on it, yeah, that's probably going to be a male. Imagine that!
The middles of the distributions aren't far off. But the shape is different, and there are a lot more males waaaaay out on the limbs. On lots of different metrics, not just aggression.
Black Strap Molasses
The song's lyrics discuss popular health foods of the time. The verses make "absurd" claims about the supposed benefits of these foods, and the chorus runs:
Black strap molasses and the wheat germ bread
Makes you live so long you wish you were dead
You add a little yogurt and you'll be well fed
On the black strap molasses and the wheat germ bread.One contemporary review interpreted the lyrics as referring specifically to the "Live Longer" diet advocated by nutritionist Gayelord Hauser. Hauser, labeled a "quack" by the American Medical Association, gained widespread popularity in the mid-twentieth century promoting "wonder foods" including blackstrap molasses, wheat germ, and yogurt, as well as brewer's yeast and powdered milk. He was known as a nutrition guru to many Hollywood celebrities.
Amazon is pretty screwed up - yet again.
I purchased a book through Amazon. No big deal, I have a couple dozen ebooks that I purchased through Amazon. I checked my email a little bit ago, and found this:
"Some Old Guy, did 'A State of Disobedience' meet your expectations? Review it on Amazon"
Ehhh, I liked the story, and was prepared to write a review on it. So, I clicked the link. Odd - the link loaded, and they asked to send me a code to verify that I'm me. Didn't ask for my password or anything like that. I approved the code thing, then pasted that code into their form. The next page to load told me:
To submit reviews, customers must make a minimum number of valid debit or credit card purchases. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don't qualify towards the purchase minimum. For more information, see our Customer Review Guidelines.
Now, that seems pretty screwed up. I didn't exactly volunteer to spend my time doing book reviews for Amazon. They asked me, not the other way around. FFS, they know that I don't spend thousands of dollars per year on their products. Why bother to send me an invite, if they didn't intend to honor the invitation?
Just more stupid shit from a big corporation. Fek Amazon, and double-plus double-good double-fek Jeff. I'll probably spend even less money at Amazon after this.
Another quick thought on left and right
I think it's important that we realize that both of these ideas have both positive and negative aspects. It's important that we do NOT harden these tendencies into tribal division as we are doing now - it's important that each side recognize the positive aspects of the opposition - and the negative aspects of their own side.
So what are they? Off the cuff, the left is, at it's best, the champion of the oppressed, the vanguard of positive change, the people that are making the world better. But it's also envy. It's refusing to believe that anyone could be richer than me without doing something wrong. It's creating the oppressed so that you can be their champion, it can tend too easily not just to tribalism, but to a particularly virulent and harmful form of tribalism - the assumption of moral superiority which so easily escalates to dehumanization and thence to mass murder. Look at the Soviet Union after the fall. It's change for the sake of change, it's that idea that somehow burning down the system that keeps food in the mouth and roof over the head of so many of your fellow humans is actually going to improve their lot. It won't.
And the right? At it's best, it is indeed the champions of civilization, the willingness to stand up and strap on your gear and go face the barbarian at the gate. But it's also greed. It's taking the easy choice of acceding to tradition, as if you were helpless before it - but only when doing so benefits you financially. At it's worst, it too veers into tribalism, to nationalism and racism and every form of jingoism - and with those things the same tendency to dehumanize, to excuse murder, war, genocide.
When we divide into right and left, we lose. We need to do the opposite. We need a middle ground, not in terms of a compromise, but of selecting the best qualities of each.
