Why not? Zuckerberg is clearly a smart man, and he seems to be as qualified as any one else. Infinitely more qualified than the current occupant of the office. Just because you don't think of him as a politician doesn't mean that he won't do a good job.
Why is Zuckerberg infinitely more qualified than Trump? Both came from wealthy families. Both are billionaires. Both are only capable of running due to their billionaire status. Neither has any experience of any kind in politics.
Folks were worried about Trump's conflicts of interest, but Zuckerberg quite literally owns one of the nation's largest news redistributors which is already actively taking steps to control which news is shared.
> Zuckerberg quite literally owns one of the nation's largest news redistributors which is already actively taking steps to control which news is shared.
Not just the nation. He controls much of what the developed world sees and reads, and has access to and control over much of the developed world's public and private communication.
> Just because you don't think of him as a politician doesn't mean that he won't do a good job.
This is a really silly argument. Zuckerberg is not a bad candidate because it is hard to imagine him as a politician. He is a bad candidate because we can see the impact of Zuckerberg's attitude toward the general population in the way he manages the Facebook platform. That is not a society anyone wants.
The product zuck runs is sleazy by nature, and he's made a lot of statements that tell me he's either naive or out of touch with the average persons reality.
I think Trump is a twit but I would rather have someone that seems grounded, like bill gates for example, than a guy with floaty dreamland ideas that Facebook can make everyone like each other.
> Why not? Zuckerberg is clearly a smart man, and he seems to be as qualified as any one else. Infinitely more qualified than the current occupant of the office. Just because you don't think of him as a politician doesn't mean that he won't do a good job.
I'm pretty sure we'll see a Zuckerberg Presidency the same way we see Facebook being run as a business. He'll do the minimum to keep people happy and then quietly sell you out behind closed doors.
Intelligence is important, but intelligent people with very little in the way of ethical standards are far more dangerous than they are helpful.
If by "qualified" you mean not being misogynistic, racist and mentally unstable, then yes. Zuckerberg is more qualified.
But being a politician is not just having an opinion about things - it's also being a strategist, and having a sound knowledge about how the political system works, ethics and being able to cooperate with people you disagree with. Traits Zuckerberg has yet to show he has.
Being smart is not by itself a positive trait just like a hammer is not per-se a good tool. It all depends on how you use your smarts (and your hammer).
Zuckerberg in office could do better than Trump but for now I don't see him as a net positive to the world, magnifying that by handing him the keys to the kingdom could do a lot of damage.
By definition, a whistle blower must reveal evidence of the commission of a crime. The term does not extend to "actions by the government that I disagree with" or "things that violate my personal interpretations of the Constitution"
If you misuse the term, you make it more difficult for legitimate whistle blowers to get the protection they deserve.
> "things that violate my personal interpretations of the Constitution"
The fact that it's even feasible to release confidential information about government action implies that there is some ability for individuals to interpret the law. Otherwise, if the government does it, you just have to accept it as legal.
Yes, sometimes government actions are illegal, but a random individual can't know that unless they A) see a court case actually happen or B) interpret the law themselves and determine that the actions are illegal. Option A doesn't help whistleblowers, since the whole point of whistleblowing is to cause a court case to occur.
You're right that individuals do have to interpret the law, and choose their behaviour accordingly. AFAIK, it's only in the last hundred years or so that we've started to recognise human rights having precedence over a single nation's law, which makes it "legal" for individuals to act contrary to their nation's laws.
That recognition does make it easier (than it was) to counter, but there are still challenges, and they're unlikely to disappear soon.
Murder, torture, blanket domestic spying etc., are not (or have not recently been) considered crimes when the federal government is the actor. The line isn't so clear.
When they're given those labels, they are. The question is whether the actions are accurately described by those particular words. That's why phrases like "enhanced interrogation techniques" are employed, to make a distinction between that and torture, for example.
(Note, I'm not arguing that I think any particular actions are or are not criminal. I'm too ignorant of the details to meaningfully speak one way or the other.)
In the spirit of Pascal, I apologize in advance for not having a more eloquent, concise reply, though on my part its more exhaustion and laziness rather than lack of time.
People have different definitions of what constitutes torture. There is also a legal definition of torture (which may be vague, but will be determined judicially if it comes to that). By definition, torture is against the law. As people have different definitions of what constitutes torture, some acts will meet the legal definition, while others will not even though they meets the definition held by someone else.
I happen to agree with you that "enhanced interrogation techniques" is a euphemism for torture. By defining certain acts as such, it gives proponents of using such acts a legal basis of arguing that they're not torture, whether it's ultimately justified or not.
Does that make sense? I'm not asking whether or not you agree with the distinction (which would be hard to do as I haven't defined which acts fall under either). I'm just asking whether the argument follows, that you understand why the language matters.
A similar distinction is made for killing in war and murder. Some people believe all killing is wrong and murder. That said, there's a legal distinction between the two. Which term is applied is legally important.
But what we have seen is that the govt violated the rules that were supposed to constrain them, hiding the illegal acts they committed. They fight to avoid having court cases address the true legality.
If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].
Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
I agree that a big part of the solution lies in retraining -- as a new way of life. In the future, no job will last long. We all must retrain continuously.
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
Edit: This also works by keeping the focus on shallow things that can't be legally damaging. The media is in a cycle of reacting to gaffe after gaffe rather than digging into boring details that might lead somewhere.
My favorite one is when USIC released their statement saying they were confident Russia had compromised U.S political organizations to try and influence the election[1] and the "grab em by the pussy" tape was released that same day[2]
I'm not so sure he leaked that one. It seemed actually damaging. The DNC/Clinton hacks stuff is win for trump no matter how it ends up because what the leaks exposed is far more damaging than who leaked them.
Those leaks showed that the DNC and Clinton were colluding with the media to give Clinton an unfair advantage in the election. Broaching this subject can't escape that.
I think what happened next was accidental, Trump didn't expect to win. Right before the election He goes out of his way to make claims about how the election was rigged beforehand. This sparked rebuttals from the left including president Obama. Now that he's won, the people recounting and investigating the election look like hypocrites.
If Trump lost all of MI,WI,PA by a fewer than 80K votes, I doubt any Democrat would consider a recount particularly outlandish - especially if he won the popular vote by close to 3M votes.
As for the leak, we may never know who released it. But I wouldn't put it past them. Some people spend their entire lives studying psyops and it may have been a gamble that paid off.
I don't know why we couldn't have voted on this. Whether it's a good idea or not, trying to impose something so broad on a community of hackers is an exercise in masochism.
I agree with everyone who has said that we're capable of making up our own minds about what to talk about. I don't think political discussions were ever a problem
Practically this almost never works out. The 10% cluster is using a very small dataset and will produce inferior results. If you train a model based on only 10 people, you're prone to overfit that small sample
Right is right and wrong is wrong. You have to stand up for the right thing even if that means telling other people that they are wrong, or even stupid.
You don't have to be smug about it, but that can be a tricky line to walk. Personally, I think it's better to advocate for certain values as respectfully as you know how and not worry about offending people who disagree. Placing too much emphasis on phrasing and tone is what people refer to derisively as "political correctness". It's best to focus more on saying the right thing, and less on how you say it
I would humbly challenge your opening sentences. Right and wrong are constructs of judgement created in the human mind. So while I agree that people should stand for their beliefs I completely disagree that you have any moral authority to tell people they are wrong or stupid. I believe in a free market of ideas protected by the freedom of speech and mutual respect. I also believe that if you want to change someone's point of view you should do so with facts and reason. If your goal is to change someone's thinking outright rejection of their beliefs on the basis of biased judgement and name calling will not achieve your goal and will most likely close that person's mind.
