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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think an important consideration is who gets to decide what knowledge and culture get preserved. For example, I would say that medicine, agriculture, and human language would be much more important to preserve than computer science or economics, but I’m sure someone would disagree.

    In general, I think art is very valuable and should be protected when possible (and not just European art), but if the choice is between a painting or a human life… the painting goes every time.





  • For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.


  • What strikes me is the complete discordance of the realities of Israelis and Palestinians shown in the pictures attached to the article. There’s multiple pictures of a grand funeral with flags, pomp, and circumstance…and compare that to the white sheets and mass graves in Gaza. The Israeli soldier gets a military funeral with honors and fanfare while innumerable Palestinians are interred in barely marked mass graves with little to no ceremony because the number of dead simply does not allow for paying respects to each victim.









  • You’re talking about a population with extremely limited resources that is literally 50% (or more) children that has been under two fascist boots for the last decade and a half. There does come a point where a level of desperation combined with a possibility of a better future will instigate a revolution, but right now? They don’t see a possibility of a better future. With Israel’s Likud on the other side of the wall and no resources to rebuild after a coup, what’s the point in gambling everything on maybe being able to overthrow the more local oppression?

    Also, education in Gaza is very inconsistent and most political revolutions are started by people with education and nothing to lose.






  • It is a profoundly complex issue, and that’s what makes much of this comment section so frustrating. Many of the arguments here are very reductionist and fail to account for detail or nuance. In this particular case, I have a hard time excusing the behavior of the accused interlopers given that this is a women’s conference that has been a recurring event for quite some time and has always been a women’s conference.

    Lack of education or not, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask professionals to act professionally and refrain from attending events not intended for them. I think there’s a significant amount of leeway being given to the men/foreign workers who showed up at the women’s conference as if they cannot be expected to regulate their behavior in a professional context. It’s the same kind of hand-waving and excuses that perpetuate the good ol’ boys’ club that the tech industry already is. It is irksome that people here aren’t realizing that the arguments they are making about exclusivity or discrimination are the same arguments frequently used to excuse the misogyny and sexual harassment that is so ubiquitous in the tech industry to begin with.


  • Admittedly, my sympathies for some of the foreign workers is a bit more limited. One of the worst jobs I had was working as a contracted project manager at Google for an India-based contracting company. The team in India that I was supervising was extremely difficult to work with and my boss and coworkers that were all either H1B visa employees or over-staying expired student visas actively contributed to the problems I was having. There were a few times that my project failed to meet adequate performance metrics because the team in India refused to complete tasks that I had created for them and my supervisor did very little to back me up in that situation.

    The other side of the coin for the foreign worker situation is that the mega-conglomerates like Google, Apple, etc. specifically hire foreign workers and H1B visa employees because they will work for less pay and minimal to no benefits unlike American college graduates that have student loans to pay off and nowhere else to go. I have a couple of friends still in the tech industry, and they are frequently undercut and out-competed by foreign workers that can accept lower pay and worse benefits as it is a temporary situation for them. I have much more sympathy for those that are actively immigrating and assimilating, but the ones who work on H1B visas or other similar contracts are part of the problem that drive down wages and benefits for everyone else. If they were working in genuine solidarity with American workers, I would feel very differently about it, but as it stands, the vast majority of foreign tech workers I have interacted with have been people abusing the visa systems and dragging down the market for everyone else. In some ways, they are victims, but they also help to perpetuate many of the worst problems in the industry.

    California recently passed legislation that now protects social caste against discrimination because the massive Indian population in the tech industry has been horribly discriminatory and brutal to Indians from lower castes. It’s also worth pointing out that many of the H1B visas and more temporary workers are from the upper castes and they intend on moving back to India after making enough money and the ones who are truly immigrating are usually from the lower castes and are working under green cards. The workers from the lower castes are also much less likely to be tech workers in the first place because they did not have access to education in India. All of this to say: there are injustices that foreign workers face, but for foreign workers in the tech industry, I’m more inclined to believe that they are among those that are part of the problem.

    (Not to mention the fact that some of the worst sexism I have dealt with was from Indian workers from upper castes.)