merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Friends are a bloatware. 2 days ago:
Not yet, but there don’t need to be. As I said, Whatsapp is owned by Meta which is part of a duopoly (along with Google) that controls virtually all ads on the Internet. They slurp all your private data in Whatsapp and use it to target ads to you on every other internet site and every other app where they power the ads. In addition, since Whatsapp has all your contacts, they use that data too. Using what they know about you as part of the ad profile for your mom, your sister, your boyfriend, etc.
- Comment on Friends are a bloatware. 2 days ago:
IMO the issue with WhatsApp isn’t that it’s proprietary. The issue is that it’s owned by Meta and it’s only free because they slurp down all your private data to target you for ads.
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 2 days ago:
Only 20% of graduates in engineering are women.
Yeah, I wonder why that is. Could it be that getting hired and promoted is much harder so a lot of women don’t bother? I wonder how you could fix that…
They’re picking from a smaller pool
Yes, good thing they’re IBM and can can pick the highly qualified women from that smaller pool.
I’m supposed to think they won’t be underqualified?
You’re clearly a heavily biased individual, so who knows what you’re going to believe.
When I look for an attorney, I’m not just looking for someone who passed the bar
Let’s be real, when you’re looking for an attorney, the most important thing for you is how much they charge.
She’s not a terrible judge, necessarily, but not great either.
Oh really, care to provide any evidence of that? I assume you’re an extremely qualified lawyer? Maybe a professor of law?
Justice Thomas proves that merely sharing someone’s race does not represent that constituents of that race.
If you want to talk about someone who is incredibly unqualified, he’s your guy.
I don’t think Biden already knew qualified judges that were black women for SCOTUS
You don’t think a man who was a senator for 22 years and voted on the confirmation of 11 Supreme Court justices, and who served as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 8 years where he personally led the confirmation hearings of 7 of them was aware that there was a pool of qualified black women who would make good Supreme Court justices? Maybe you better think about that a little harder…
Trump did the same when he picked a woman strictly because he was replacing another woman.
If you want to argue that Trump had no idea what he was doing, I’m not going to dispute that.
Only anecdotal.
So no.
I suspect tech companies really avoid hiring underqualified people
Well there you go. There’s no problem, and no reason to get mad at DEI.
The lawsuit could be related to that public “policy”.
Ah yes, the lawsuit. What happened in that lawsuit?
I work in tech
No, no, no. You’re a professor of law, remember? You have strong opinions on the qualifications of Ketanji Brown Jackson. You couldn’t just be some shlub who is watching Newsmax and parroting their opinion. C’mon professor, I’m not going to believe you’re just a guy who works in tech.
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 2 days ago:
Those “other parts of DEI” are parts that don’t actually exist.
Nobody’s out there hiring unqualified or underqualified people. When IBM hires engineers they’re not hiring women who are underqualified just to get to 50%, they’re just hiring very qualified women instead of very qualified men.
Like Biden in 2020 campaigning on the promise of hiring a black woman to SCOTUS
Do you think Ketanji Brown Jackson is unqualified? Or is it that you think that Biden couldn’t possibly have known that there were black women who were qualified to be on the supreme court?
Let’s not pretend that everybody who gets a seat on the Supreme Court is incredibly qualified. Justice Hugo Black (who was a white man, despite his name) was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937 and served until 1971. His only experience as a judge before being appointed to the Supreme Court was 1 year as a police court judge. Other than that he worked as a personal injury attorney for a few years, then as a country prosecutor for a short time before joining the army in WWI, and then he was elected to the US senate.
Biden undoubtedly knew that there were plenty of black women who were qualified to be Supreme Court justices, but who simply had never been given the chance because of racism and sexism. The woman he ended up choosing had clerked for 3 judges for 3 years (including 1 supreme court justice), had had a stellar career as a lawyer for 10 years, was vice chair of the US Sentencing Commission for 4 years, then a district court judge for 8 years, then another year on the US Court of Appeals before she joined the Supreme Court.
Like Google and other tech companies implementing policies to favor non-asian minorities and women.
The case you link to was someone suing Google claiming that it had such policies. Did he win that lawsuit?
Do you have any actual evidence that tech companies are actually choosing unqualified or underqualified non-white men? Or is it that they’re making sure to give a fair chance to people who aren’t white men?
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 3 days ago:
For those who stumble across this and are confused, this isn’t how DEI works.
The reason DEI policies exist is that without them white male bosses were just blindly hiring white males and not considering anybody else because of their racism and sexism (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious). That meant pilots who weren’t as good, musicians who weren’t as good, bankers who weren’t as good, etc. Aside from this being a guaranteed jobs program for white makes, and a roadblock for everyone else, it also led to problems because when everybody came from the same background, they all had the same kinds of blind spots.
So, DEI policies came along to try to make sure that companies were actually hiring the best people, and not missing out because of entrenched racism and sexism. So, instead of having a concert violinist hand her resume to a committee and then perform for them on stage, the person performing on stage performs behind a screen and uses a number so their age, name, gender, and connections aren’t a factor, just the way they play.
So really, when you see yet another white male airline pilot who looks like he’s former air force, you should be saying to yourself “I sure hope this airline has a DEI policy, and they didn’t just hire yet another guy who was drinking buddies with one of their pilots when they were both in the air force together.”
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 3 days ago:
Not nearly as many guns. No other country even has half as many guns per person as the US. But, even the ones that have a few guns (plus the ones that have almost no guns) have strictly enforced gun control laws, and treat gun ownership as a privilege not a right.
- Comment on DEI, more like DIED 3 days ago:
Kissinger’s intellectual prowess and abilities were vastly overrated.
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 3 days ago:
Does it count if an LLM is generating mountains of code that then gets thrown away? Maybe he can win the prediction on a technicality.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
Yes, but it’s one of the few first world countries who do almost nothing about it.
It’s true that the US social safety net is bad, but the US isn’t that much more crazy than other places. If you search for “mental health care crisis in ______” you’ll see every country thinks they have a mental health care crisis.
Did you know mass shootings are on the rise in Europe
Is this based on statistics or a feeling? Statistically it seems like it’s a very low but steady rate, although statistics are skewed by Spiders Anders.
this is happening in a time of social and economic uncertainty
It’s also happening at a time of mass social media where fear about this sort of thing spreads like wildfire.
one reason I say it’s a mental health thing is that America has more knife-based violent crime than, say, Britain
Sure, but Brazil’s stabbing death rate is 8x that of the US, I guess their mental health is 8x worse? South Africa is more than 30x the US rate, so they must have some really crazy people there. There are some other major differences between the UK and US, just like there are other major differences between the US and Brazil or the US and South Africa.
The US does have issues with its response to mental health, but it’s not so different from other places. The lack of a social safety net in general causes problems. It means both untreated mental health issues, plus people living in poverty which leads to crime too. But, the bigger issue is that when Americans have a bad day, guns are so incredibly easily accessible.
Take a look at stabbing deaths in the UK vs. US and gun murders in the UK vs. the US. Yeah, stabbing deaths are maybe 50% higher, which points to something causing more violence. But, gun murders are 7000% higher, which suggests that the #1 issue really is access to guns.
- Comment on if charlie kirk is so pro life then why is he dead? 4 days ago:
Needs more gums.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
Apparently his oldest just turned 3, his youngest is 18 months or so. I wonder how often they’re going to be pushed in front of a camera in the next year or two. They’re probably going to be raised hearing that their daddy was this wonderful man who died trying to make the US a better place. I just hope that when they’re adults they’re able to shake off the brainwashing.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
Imagine being Steven Crowder today. Half the Internet is out there celebrating your death because one fat headed white conservative man who goes on college campuses saying “debate me!” is indistinguishable from another one.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
It was clearly a lucky missed shot. Nobody with any training would aim at the neck intentionally. So, the shooter missed the target but still hit a vital spot. Could be they aimed at his head and didn’t account for the Earth’s gravity pulling the bullet down. Or maybe they aimed at his chest and didn’t account for his head’s gravity pulling the bullet up.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
healthy and well-adjusted people don’t grab the closest murder weapon and kill random people
People are still fundamentally apes. People get angry, people get drunk or high, people are low on sleep. Well functioning societies realize that at times people are not healthy and well-adjusted and try to limit the damage that someone can do to themselves and others in those circumstances. The US isn’t the only country in the world where people have mental health crises, or have road rage, or get depressed. What makes the US unique is that it makes tools for murdering people widely available to anybody who wants them.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
It’s too bad that he just suddenly appeared in hell(*) looking around like Confused Travolta. It would have been more just if his brain had had a minute or two to process that after spending his life promoting guns, he was killed by a gun.
(* Yeah, hell doesn’t exist, but he thought it did)
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
No, Louder’s the other guy.
- Comment on Aged like milk 4 days ago:
It’s a lucky shot. No trained shooter is going to aim for the neck, so whoever shot him missed their target but still managed to hit a vital spot.
- Comment on Too soon? 4 days ago:
- Comment on Too soon? 4 days ago:
He died doing what he loved, making excuses for gun violence.
- Comment on Too soon? 4 days ago:
Surely the sniper was stopped by all the people conceal carrying though? I’m told that lots of guns makes everything ever so much safer.
- Comment on Too soon? 4 days ago:
Charlie Kirk wouldn’t have wanted you to feel any empathy for him or his family.
“I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics”
- Comment on Too soon? 4 days ago:
Empathy for the other people attending that rally who had to see such a violent event. Some were there to cheer him on, so fuck them. But, others were there to try to debate him. It was dumb of them to play into his game and participate, but still, some will be leaving that event pretty traumatized.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
Honestly, they’re all so interchangeable. I thought Charlie Kirk was the Change My Mind guy. It turns out that conservative white guys with big fat heads are a dime a dozen.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
Sounds good to me.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
Great foreshadowing too.
Earlier this year, Utah passed House Bill 128 allowing people to conceal carry firearms on university campuses. One of the campuses where conceal carry was now permitted is, of course, Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was visiting today. He was sitting under a tent with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong”.
Immediately before the shooting, he was taking questions from the audience:
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked. Kirk responded, “Too many.”
The questioner followed up: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
Then a single shot rang out.
pbs.org/…/conservative-activist-charlie-kirk-shot…
It’s unfortunate that he’s ineligible for the Darwin Award because he leaves behind 2 very young children and a culture warrior wife, because otherwise he’d be a great nominee for the 2025 Darwin Awards. Normally to get a Darwin Award someone has to directly kill themselves. But, I think in this case we could have make an exception for someone who was a cheerleader for gun rights and was sitting directly under a banner saying “Prove Me Wrong” when he was killed with a gun.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
He was literally lying about mass shootings when he was shot:
Immediately before the shooting, Kirk was taking questions for an audience member about mass shootings and gun violence.
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked. Kirk responded, “Too many.”
The questioner followed up: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked
Then a single shot rang out.
- Comment on Too soon? 5 days ago:
His daughter just turned 3, and his son is 16 months old. I don’t think they’re going to celebrate. But, they’re going to grow up hearing stories about how their father was a martyr who died heroically, trying to save the soul of the USA. Let’s just hope that as adults they’re able to see past that brainwashing and understand what a truly horrible person their father was.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 6 days ago:
Urgh. There’s a unit for that, it’s WATTS. That’s literally 77 Watts.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 6 days ago:
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules, especially when they’re not just watt hours but kilowatt hours or megawatt hours. At that point just use megajoules or gigajoules.
I can understand things like eV where the scale is so different that you’d have to constantly use tiny and unusual prefixes. But, for most other things like calories, it’s just tradition rather than a well thought out reason.
