> How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?

I’m a hiring manager and where I work we have an unwritten “understanding” that if your candidate recommendations don’t include any women you are a sexist.

I just make sure I include a few female candidates even if none in the recruitment pool are capable because it’s not worth the trouble.

However, I imagine that for many “by the book” hiring managers this causes significant anxiety and stress.

The inhumanity is nothing to do with economics of it. It is do with how they are being treated.

What rights they have if they are selected out a shopping mall. They have zero avenue for support when they face abuse whether physical, sexual or emotional. visas in places like these ask you to leave immediately if you get quit or fired from a job.

The issues with abuse are terrible, yes.

But what's wrong with the shopping mall part? I'd be happy to sit in a shopping mall as potential employers come by to hire me for 3x what I'd make elsewhere. Maybe even 1x; I'm not convinced I would dislike it more than the normal job interview process.

Well, this story doesn't strike me as a shining example of "law and order" working.

I think you underestimate the psychological effect of constantly being treated as a disposable guest worker; there's a difference between that and working off-shore or being an expat treated as an equal. As I mentioned in my other reply[1] it is a "good deal" for many Indonesians in a way, but it comes at a price, a price which strikes me as quite needless as well.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563416

> I don't know, I guess it's possible? Maybe you have a better idea for how it could be happening, but it just doesn't seem very likely at all.

I’ve seen this kind of thought pattern a few times and frankly the way you are thinking doesn’t match reality.

I work on a 1000+ person enterprise software project.

Less than 5% of those 1000+ understand our customers requirements and use cases in any real depth. This is despite trying for years to incentivise developers to have a broader understanding of our business.

Within that core 5% most decisions are driven by the 3-5 people who care about the particular area.

So for a 1000 person+ org you would need to corrupt 3-4 people to drive a hidden agenda.

This is for a project not trying to be secretive in any way.

To relate it back to Twitter you would probably need the right 3-4 people to push hard for content moderators to be hired in San Francisco instead of Bangalore in order to push hard left views.

You don't even need to discuss your "evil plans" with anyone. Hell, it doesn't even need to be a plan. You just only hire people who already agree with you. You don't even have to do this consciously, it's the default human behavior.

> You just only hire people who already agree with you. You don't even have to do this consciously, it's the default human behavior.

Exactly - our product uses angular because two of our core engineers loved angular, helped people who were having trouble with angular, and hired people who also liked angular.

Not because angular was the best tech choice. We didn’t even do a proper evaluation.

And this is for a hundred million+/year project......

> move somewhere else and have the significant monetary gain to compensate them for their trouble

People don’t want to leave their homes and move away from family and friends just so a city can grow.

Life isn’t just about money.

I don’t want my city to grow any larger - higher density means lower quality of life for the people who have lived here for decades - aka my actual community.

Why would you want to? when the same unit test coverage will run under 1 minute, and be smaller easier to understand/change tests and can all be done on your laptop.

it all depends on your definition of unit/integration, what I am talking about as unit tests you may very well be talking about as integration tests...

one of the main points I was making is you shouldn't have significant duplication in test coverage and if you do, I'd much rather stick with the unit tests and delete the others.

> Why would you want to?

Because they catch more bugs than unit tests, are easier for our product team to understand, and rarely break when refactoring.

Even a simple business flow like registering a new user will touch half a dozen systems.

5 or 6 integration tests can cover this flow far better than 100 unit tests.

> and be smaller easier to understand/change tests

That’s not my experience at all.

Unit tests are generally much harder to understand and need to be changed much more frequently.

Where unit tests help in my experience is:

A) in pinpointing where in a complex bit of logic the bugs are.

B) for generic libraries and building blocks where you don’t know exactly how your users will actually use them.

> Unit tests are generally much harder to understand and need to be changed much more frequently.

Changed more frequently, yes.

Harder to understand is usually because they're not-quite-unit-tests-claiming-to-be.

Eg: a test for function that mocks some of its dependencies but also does shenanigans to deal with some global state without isolating it. So you get a test that only test the unit (if that), but has a ton of exotic techniques to deal with the globals. Worse of all worlds.

Proper unit tests are usually just a few line long, little to no abstraction, and test code you can see in the associated file without dealing with code you can't see without digging deeper.

> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative

Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.

Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.

Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.

> Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.

It's ironic that this is exactly how many feel about the police themselves.

Focusing on the rare cruel cases has meant we aren’t funding preventive measures which could prevent the vast majority of other crime.

> which could prevent the vast majority of other crime.

Could it?

California is one of the richest places on earth and has an incredibly progressive population.

So “we” have the desire and the money - and have for at least 20 years - and yet we have more violent crime than much poorer places.

> Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated

That’s almost certainly not the case.

Any economic gains from slavery were more than wiped out by the civil war.

> Any economic gains from slavery were more than wiped out by the civil war.

Does that mean white Americans and Black Americans were on economically equal after the civil war?

> Does that mean white Americans and Black Americans were on economically equal after the civil war?

Where are you going with this line of questioning?

They aren’t economically equal now in 2020.

He's saying that if the economic gains where wiped out, then blacks and whites should have had equal economic standing after the war. But we all know that didn't happen, which is why he posed that question.

> Covid primarily spreads through droplets, which are largely stopped by regular surgical masks.

Interestingly I don’t think that’s quite true.

Droplets don’t explain almost any of the super spreader events.

And it is the super spreader events that are so concerning.

Note: I have no idea if masks help with the clearly airborne super spreader events.

> What "virtue" is being signalled?

Care for others in your community?

Yes. If I wear an N95 mask with exhalation bypass (The most common type here in Canada, due to our freezing weather) — I’m not protecting anyone else, at all. As for protecting myself, if someone infected sneezes in my proximity, I’m stopping the large particles, but inhaling about 5% of the billions of small water droplets in the air around me. Remember, if you can smell it, you’re breathing it.

So, virtue signaling. And, deluding the elderly and those w/ comorbidities that you are caring for them and that they are “safer”, neither of which is true.

As I said - if you are at risk, you should be wearing a HEPA filter and sealed eyewear.

> This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...

Do these cities simply have terrible private transit options?

I don’t know anyone who would prefer to take public transport except in cities with poor car infrastructure.

I do know lots of people who would rather walk or bike to work.

You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.

> You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.

Even in those cities very few enjoy taking public transport - and would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc

This is not true, driving in european cities is stressful (narrow streets with irregular layout, high density of pedestrians/cyclists, not enough parking places). The public transit, when done right, is way more convenient.

> would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc

So basically your argument is that people would drive if it weren't terrible in every way? By that logic, people would eat plutonium... if only it were more available, tasted good, and didn't kill you.

That would still make things worse, because cars need roadspace. Getting rid of the road space for cars and making public transit good enough is a pretty good solution.