“Yet they have compromised their news coverage by pandering”
Is this statement opinion or backed by data?
Either way, I’m not sure you understand the purpose of a free press. A free press gives all audiences an opportunity to find contrarian viewpoints in the media. That’s it. There’s nothing else because that’s all that’s possible.
There’s not some perfect state that exists where all media outlets (Fox News, CBS, Mother Jones) are perfectly neutral.
This is why freedom of the press and freedom of speech are so important.
That's all interesting, but it doesn't really address the point that NPR's coverage is biased by a desire to please its audience. Even though tautologically true for all organizations, it is disingenuous to suggest (as GP is doing) that NPR gets to don a mantle of impartiality because they don't run (some) ads to finance their operation. Despite how hard "NPR has tried to avoid this".
So, sure, pick your favorite partisan news source. But don't try to claim that it's unbiased because it doesn't generate revenue with ads.
Journos wouldn’t have to get clicks, if you people (yes, you people) would pay for journalism but no lets continue to post archive links on HN.
I’m throughly disappointed by the pampered, know-it-all tech class who continually complain about the world but refuses to make investments or engage in collective bargaining to force the tech billionaire class.
Apparently all it takes to sell one’s soul is the feeling of superiority, $150k+ wages and stock options.
In the 2010s, we had a similar situation but it wasn’t illegal.
I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during the opioid epidemic.
At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren’t required to notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn’t provide data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.
To increase profits, we identified our best customers of opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they’d buy more earlier.
Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could figure out bonuses easily.
We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.
Judging actions taken at the time with the benefit of what we know now, is not a fair way to assess.
Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of pills. But this was a legal product.
Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, … these actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge and move on.
But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of pro leagues, well…. The actions of the people participating in the enterprise now get considered in a different light.
Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work for Starbucks or McDonald’s or basically any prepared food business, … we will judge them differently ?
People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of some possible future negative impact ?
It’s not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go, and we can say “if we knew then, what we know now…” but it’s not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.
> People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.
I was hoping to get some insight/context into how they actually feel about it, rather than guessing. You can certainly come to peace with a past decision, change your opinion later etc etc.
I think it's still controversial whether manufacturers of substances are morally culpable for the result of people wrongly using them. And while you could hold the marketing or executive team accountable for trying to get people addicted to heroin, I'm not sure the same applies to programmers of an inventory tracking system?
Controversial in general, maybe. In the case of opioids and the pharm industry, absolutely not. It's been well documented at this point that pharm companies were well aware of the abuse, and not only did nothing to stop it, but went out of their way to encourage it because sales were going through the roof.
In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.
As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.
Regardless whether the rest of society finds the programmers responsible, the integrity of that society depends upon programmers in such situations holding themselves accountable. Apparatchik or moral agent? That choice remains ours.
Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.
Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.
Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.
Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.
Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
A bit of an ironic statement, given that this post is you blaming everyone except yourself for the role you played in deepening the opioid crisis to increase profits.
I'm not American; I also wasn't blaming you for anything - I took care to avoid that!
I appreciate the reply none the less.
You mentioned targeted rebates, which feel a lot more "active". My personal ethical barrier seems to be where its a direct interaction with the problem domain. e.g. I'll work on a tool for email marketing, which incidentally gets used by gambling orgs, but I wouldn't work directly on say, Roulette software.
I worked at a health care tech company in Silicon Valley that actively defrauded medicare. When the medicare inspectors came the owner's daughters had a bunch of their friends from college (who didn't work there) sit at computers and pretend to be working, then they told the inspectors all these random people were registered nurses and full-time employees who were helping patients (and thus being billed for). It was a total sham.
I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business and keep getting government contracts.
It's so funny af that when people from the hood are doing it they get locked up or worse, and when business people do it they might as well be the president.
I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive by.
This is extremely common throughout the world for businesses that sell alcohol or variations on gambling - and while I don't necessarily think the advertising should be _illegal_ (in those cases with non-controlled substances at least), I've always been shaken that the many people involved in it don't seem to see how it could be immoral.
If you think about it enough, most industries are doing terrible things. Work for an auto company? Thanks for the CO2 emissions accelerating climate change. Work for a consumer manufacturer? Thanks for the plastic waste choking oceans and landfills. Defense contractors? Thanks for enabling wars and killing innocents. Banks? Thanks for enslaving folks to debt and perpetuating economic inequality. Tech giants? Thanks for surveilling billions and eroding privacy on a massive scale. Social media platforms? Thanks for amplifying misinformation and fueling mental health crises. Fast fashion? Thanks for exploiting sweatshop labor and polluting waterways with toxic dyes. Pharma companies? Thanks for price-gouging drugs and prioritizing profits over access. Oil and gas? Thanks for fracking communities into environmental ruin and lobbying against renewables.
Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.
What is your point, besides potentially making yourself feel better about your industry? Those "different degrees" are what it's all about. They're the whole point.
Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.
Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is
also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.
The question was how GP felt about their particular unethical act, and it's consequences which likely includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems unlikely that you can answer this question.
I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.
It's a very smooth gradient from optimizing a sales funnel to writing gambling software. I don't know where the line is, but in both cases you're exploiting human psychology to make more money.
And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.
It is not much different. I would not worked for gambling company either. In fact, gambling companies have to pay more (and do, there are open positions) because their pool of potential employees is smaller.
The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.
It's probably slightly worse because opioids actually kill people whereas gambling just financially ruins them (which can lead to suicide, but still I know which I would pick).
But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.
> Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.
How is it different from smuggling fentanyl or taking hostages for ransom?
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.
Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?
Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.
UCLA's Russell Lewis Centre is the organisation making the proposal.
There are some co-housing and community-housing projects, as well as NYC's venerated housing co-ops (for better and worse). There are some community / sustainable housing initiatives in Davis and Chico California, that I'm aware of (I'd need to research on specifics), though I'm not sure they follow this model specifically.
There's the prospect that occurs to me of working with land banks (mostly practiced in the Midwest / East Coast in the US) as a way of acquiring land.
The proposal itself seems striking to me. Yours is the only comment that's actually cottened on to the main thrust of the article.
This is a great piece that provides a much needed look at the "other side" of James Randi.
Many will claim that it is not right for the author to speak ill of the dead but in this current climate it is best for us to see Mr. Randi and by extension ourselves for who we really are...
We and our heroes are fallible human beings driven by our own desires. We are both capable of great harm and good. Let's not hide our darkness but bring it to light.
I feel like it's kind of cheap and doesn't really back up any of the criticisms it seems to level against him. It makes claims that he's hindered "serious" academic research regarding ESP but doesn't really back that up with any kind of evidence that shows the research is serious (how serious can it be if it hasn't produced any evidence?).
I don't disagree that Randi wasn't flawless or perfect but this kind of hit piece is both silly and pointless.
Thank you for speaking your mind, even though you're being downvoted. We need more people to come forward and speak openly, anonymously or not.
People who are militant-debunkers have made lives hell for people who are genuinely experiencing different things. Be it general public or researchers. This topic needs to be researched, not shunned or ridiculed.
Real science is not based on ridicule or praise. It is not based on ego or status. It is based on data, and an honest determination to increase our understanding of the world.
1. Anti-union propaganda and the union-busting efforts of American corporations and their consultants starting in the 1970's leading up through the policies of Reagan.
2. Globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs.
SADLY, in the interim American wages have been flat since the 70's and class inequality has exploded.
"Had the fruits of the nation’s economic output been shared over the past 45 years as broadly as they were from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, a full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median would instead be making $92,000 to $102,000" instead of $50k. (RAND Corporation) Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-st...
Black conservatives like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have often decried that "affirmative action" is used by whites namely liberals to avoid fixing the issues with public education school systems that are in charge of so many black and brown kids.
THE ISSUES:
- Underfunding
- Disproportionate discipline
WHO IS TO BLAME?
- Conservative legislatures who push funding to rural areas over heavily populated liberal cities
- Democratic big city administrators beholden to teachers unions
- Liberal colleges who "focus on diversity at expense of all else"
Interestingly, Black students in the United States are subject to disciplinary action at rates much higher than their white counterparts. These disciplinary actions put students at higher risk for negative life outcomes, including involvement in the criminal justice system.
QUOTE: "Black children do not misbehave more than their White peers, rather they are punished more. In fact, Black students are more likely than their White peers to receive a disciplinary action for a discretionary offense like talking back, violating a dress code, or being defiant. Black children are also more likely to be suspended out of school for their first offense."
> Interestingly, Black students in the United States are subject to disciplinary action at rates much higher than their white counterparts. These disciplinary actions put students at higher risk for negative life outcomes, including involvement in the criminal justice system.
This is NOT true.
This kind of misinformation is especially harmful to black kids in particular when you erase any real issues that they might be suffering from, and externalize it all as racism.
The fact that black kids are simply less likely to have parents that have free time to spend with them, and are less likely to have a nutritious breakfasts can go a long way to explaining their disciplinary and performance problems. Other factors are that parents are less trusting of social workers, and so learning problems go untreated longer. Black kids are less likely to get glasses, and less likely to get treated for things like dyslexia.
These are IMPORTANT issues, and by blaming any disparate outcomes on racism, you are completely erasing these very real problems that can be addressed, and getting in the way of actually helping.
It is egregious that when there are kids who have very visible health problems from malnutrition, there are these consultants who are blaming everything on their teachers "unconscious racism", and wanting to put their teachers through these laughable unconscious bias apparatuses.
> QUOTE: "Black children do not misbehave more than their White peers, rather they are punished more. In fact, Black students are more likely than their White peers to receive a disciplinary action for a discretionary offense like talking back, violating a dress code, or being defiant. Black children are also more likely to be suspended out of school for their first offense."
I don't think your sources are very relevant. your csgjusticecenter.org link is 404.
The very fact that black kids tend to come from a different socioeconomic background means that they will not have exactly the same needs and behaviors as other kids, so it is unreasonable to assume that they will be disciplined exactly the same.
Victim mentality is not helpful for anyone. Especially not if you train young people to assume they are a victim whenever something isn't good for them.
Victim mentality leads to the ignore mentality. If a kid learns that there are different rules for different groups of people and that the only reason it is in the victim group is something they can not change (wealth, race, gender etc.) then you end up with ignorance. Eventually everything is rigged against them and the only way to fight the unfair rules is to not playing by the rules anymore. That's how you end up with people stealing from "the rich" but they feel like Robin Hood. Like they actually think it is right thing to do. While in reality they should not accept being in the victim group, they should learn that they can achieve the same as everyone else and if someone tries to stop them they should not accept that.
To address any suggestions that children of color in Texas simply are more likely to break school rules than their white counterparts, researchers included in their analyses a comparison between profiles for students whose behavior prompted a discretionary action and students who received a mandatory removal from school.
The "comparison between profiles" part is rather vague, so I can't figure out what exactly it is they did. As for the results of that comparison, I could only find the following:
While refuting some potential explanations why African-American students were particularly likely to be disciplined for lower-level violations of a school code of conduct, this analysis does not pinpoint the reasons for it.
And it might be more apt to compare vs. Hispanic students, since they are the largest demographic in Texas, as the report notes: the student population, which is 49 percent Hispanic, 33 percent white, and 14 percent African American, reflects a diversity that increasingly typifies many school systems in the United States.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford has long supported the data-backed studies of conservative economists on disparities in schooling from Thomas Sowell, Mike Petrelli, Walter White and Chester E. Finn Jr among others.
The general conservative reaction to the mountain of data is that the studies are correct. The concern is in "what to do next?" or "Yes, the data is bad but it doesn't mean that racism lurks behind every tree."
A change in policy may result in even worse outcomes.
To be fair, the fact that something happens to be true (which, I feel the need to point out, no one here is actually disputing in this case) doesn't have any direct bearing on the question of whether polite society, in the counterfactual case that it were not true, would allow studies to conclude accordingly.
Not understanding the point, unless your aim is to be conspiratorial in nature.
The Stanford/Hoover Institute studies are obviously the contrarian view so yes "society" allows an opposing viewpoint...backed by data.
Last I checked, you're free to conclude whatever you wish even when lacking verifiable data unless your actual goal is to be liked by some particular segment of "society."
I believe you're acting in good faith, and am a little sad you think I'm acting in bad faith.
Can't speak for ed25519FUUU, but I certainly do not have anything against the above linked research. I think ed25519FUUU's point was that doing honest research has become tricky: if a researcher were to get a factually correct but politically incorrect result, could the researcher publish it without facing negative consequences?
It was not an argument against the linked research, it was just a tangential hypothetical.
There is a reason why factories put their punch clock AT THE DOOR.
Workers leave their assigned areas, pass through security, proceed to the punch clock and exit the facility.
Apple is one of the wealthiest companies in the world. The cost of adding an additional security guard and letting their employees exit from the rear of each store is negligible.
Not negligible for the person responsible for that facility. Someone with a VP title is given a budget and freedom to run the shop and optimize expenses. Soon that VP realises that moving the punch clock inside the facility saves 3 millions a year and he gets to pocket half. Unfair, but legal. And if he doesn't pocket the easy money, he will be seen as incompetent by his manager - an SVP.
Last line shows it is a company issue not individual. Think if some VP in Google recommends reducing free beverages inside company to shitty cola only it will not be accepted by higher ups. If your VP/SVP/CFO are reading only number and not the text line attached to it and its implications it is a culture issue.
In this example with Google, the higher ups might reject this idea, but only because the measure would have a net negative impact on their own bonuses: pulling the cheap drinks would make 0.3% of employees move and the execs won't get bonuses because retention rate is a metric the company owners look at.
I see execs as a blind force of nature that does everything possible to enrich itself within the constraints set by higher ups. If the company owner hires an exec and gives him a task "give me more liquid assets by end of year no matter what", the exec will liquidate the company, because the constraints were loose. Same with those sleazy VPs running the facilities: SVPs set very loose constraints (likely intentionally), and got the rather expected result.
No, not justifiable. Illegal. Rich people blatantly stealing from poor people. Wage theft is more common in the United States than all other types of theft combined, and we shouldn't normalize it. It's criminal, and it's morally despicable.
- If you're a proclaimed CENTRIST, read everything.
Schools don't teach us how to read and process information objectively but hopefully your first history professor explained that historical bias and bias in writing well...is human and old as history itself. Embrace it!
1. Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories, social media posts and political statements.
2. Additionally, there is a separate body, International Fact-Checking Network, that checks the common fact-checking organizations above for bias and truth as well in their fact checking.
3. There's also the independently run MediaBiasFactCheck site which has found that the fact-checking sites above are pretty close to the center in their fact-checking and myth-busting.
The stuff you really have to worry about is the stuff that the liberal, right wing and centrist billionaire owned media outlets all agree upon or agree isn't important enough to talk about.
It's an interesting exercise to read contrasting viewpoints from opposing sides though (e.g. Russian media vs. American media on a us-russia conflict).
Is this statement opinion or backed by data?
Either way, I’m not sure you understand the purpose of a free press. A free press gives all audiences an opportunity to find contrarian viewpoints in the media. That’s it. There’s nothing else because that’s all that’s possible.
There’s not some perfect state that exists where all media outlets (Fox News, CBS, Mother Jones) are perfectly neutral.
This is why freedom of the press and freedom of speech are so important.