Thanks for calling this out, as it is almost certainly against HN guidelines to karma farm or post other's comments as your own. Not the first time either, as I've seen people post links that were in OP as comments as if they weren't in the OP, as well as have seen people steal comments from substack articles and post them as their own on the HN submission of the substack.
There's a difference between a company directly backing a candidate and employees of company backing a candidate. Most of the contributions you're referring to came from employees, which makes sense given that most well-to-do tech employees are socially liberal. It would be a mistake to attribute these donations to "big tech". You wouldn't attribute a donation from a farmer to "big agriculture".
Campaign contributions are tracked and searchable by employer though. Additionally, large contributions from companies are recognized and curry favor from the parties.
For example, Morgan and Morgan was the largest corporate campaign donor (by dollars donated by employees) to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. John Morgan was a very vocal Clinton supporter. High level staffers from Hillary's campaign ended up attending some Morgan and Morgan company party events bringing powerful media connections with them as guests (I was there).
Also in tech companies which are socially liberal, you will have coworkers who will search for right-wing donators within the company and out them publicly (in a negative context) in Slack, etc. I've seen such messages.
> Campaign contributions are tracked and searchable by employer though.
Which is mostly misleading – corporations represent the shared interests of their stockholders not their employees, who often have adversarial material and political interests to their employers. Corporations political participation is through corporate PACs and independent expenditures, not primarily through the direct campaign contributions of people who happen to work with them.
Interesting, while contributions are reported blindly by employer, federal election law on corporate PACs recognizes this distinction in the “restricted class” of decision–making employees from whom corporate PACs may solicit donations. It would be interesting if direct contributions by employees were divided between this “restricted class” and other employees. (Though, again, stockholders are still more indicative of corporate interest than any class of employees.)
You're completely missing the point though. Companies get political favor by the donation activity of their employees and also the employees work to discourage contributions by the unfavored party.
Companies/shareholders exercise their interests by _controlling who they hire_. We even cover over this with how we recruit and demographically.
When you're talking about industries that skew towards highly paid employees (tech, legal, etc), you're actually determining winners and losers in society by political affiliation.
> Companies get political favor by the donation activity of their employees
No, they don’t. The general public may have no further insight and basis to assign credit or blame than FEC reports by employee donations, but actual political actors have a lot deeper understanding and, if they are inclined to reward companies for political support, are a lot more specific to the support from the firm as a firm vs support from employees which may well be orthogonal or contrary to corporate interest.
Small correction: The PAL doesn't handle presidential authentication. It's an extra layer of security to prevent a third party from detonating a warhead should they come into physical possession of one, and is (presumably) a static code which is integral to the operation of the weapon itself. Changing it would require complete reassembly of the warhead. The presidential authentication is handled by the missile crew, and the codes rotate daily. The PAL code is fixed and kept safe in the silo, where it is only accessed and input after the presidential order has been authenticated.
I hate to say it, but that article is inaccurately reported, and I cringe every time I see it linked. It conflates the PAL codes with the presidential launch codes, which are two distinct layers of security. Even if the PAL is hard coded to all zeros, you still need presidential authorization to initiate the launch procedure.
Well, as long as it wasn't stick by the silo entrance on the wall on postit we can call it an improvement, eh? I mean you have to at least remember the number of zeros required
Well over ten million votes are still yet to be counted on the West Coast. Is there a reason why you haven't considered this? If you add uncounted votes then the total count is only 5 million less than 2020. Such swings have certainly happened before between adjacent elections, such as from 2000 to 2004.
Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient, because masks are very effective at trapping both droplets and aerosols that are emitted from the wearer. They are not designed to protect the user from lingering aerosols as masks are too loose to form a good seal, so most air breathed in simply enters from around the sides of the mask.
Surgical masks defined as the ones that gape at the sides are comparatively ineffective at stopping aerosolized particles.
The idea that ballistic droplets are the primary means of infection is the old, old misunderstanding.
If we compare the objective of preventing transmission of pathogens from surgeon to patient to the objective of covering nudity, surgical masks are as effective as shorts.
Seeing as the objective is the objective, the ends should define the means. Therefore it is clear that any use of surgical masks is a fundamental and entrenched misunderstanding.
There are many studies which show that surgical masks are quite good at stopping a majority of expelled particles, even those well within the aerosolized size regime:
Outward filtering efficiency above 50% is certainly worth it compared to the cost of a surgeon wearing a mask. It's arguably worth it even at much lower efficiencies.
If you read my comment, you'll notice I'm not disagreeing on the aerosol/droplet size boundary. I'm arguing against the apparent subtext of your comment, which seems to indicate that surgical masks aren't effective at protecting patients.
Not least due to the subtle knock-on effects: surgical masks cast a fog on public awareness of face-fitting masks, which are superior in all respects (including comfort, which – case in point – came as a surprise when I tried one).
—
The effectiveness of face-fitting masks is so much greater that I honestly regard the use of surgical masks as morally indefensible.
It seems telling that as camera and detection equipment has gotten better, presumed "alien" UFO elusiveness has advanced precisely in lockstep: not too much to stop being detected altogether, but not so little as to be definitively identifiable.
As our sensors got better, objects which would previously be UFOs turned into "oh, it's a balloon" and forgotten. Objects that previously wouldn't be visible at all, but are now marginally visible, turn into UFOs.
We've actually gotten more UAPs than ever as our detection capabilities have increased. We are picking up more things than ever that we can't explain. You'd think that would be the opposite, implying that previously unknown objects became known with better optics, radar and detection systems, but that's not the case.
Well, they're different objects. The lost weather balloon that would have been unidentified before is now identified. You don't hear about those though, since they're boring.
The weather balloon that would not be detected at all before can now be detected as a UFO. As the range of sensors expands the LIV probably gets bigger too just because the radius is larger. The more sensitive and numerous the sensors, the more false positives you get.
reply