jeherr (u/jeherr) - Readit News

jeherr commented on How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising demodexio.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/lkrubner

tptacek · 4 years ago

it isn't even a know it when you see it thing

I'm glad you said this. One of the more infamous gerrymanders in the US is in Chicago --- the notorious "earmuffs". You can just look at it and see that something's hinky.

But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now.

That's not to defend gerrymandering writ large, or even necessarily the earmuffs, but just to second your point about the complexity of the problem.

jeherr · 4 years ago

That's likely due to the Voting Rights act which requires what they call majority-minority districts. It prohibits redistricting to disempower racial minorities. It's another complication in the whole gerrymandering debate that makes it a lot harder to solve, because it requires districts that will look gerrymandered in a lot of cases.

jeherr commented on Head of Design at Dropbox descriminates in her hiring based on skin color twitter.com/libsoftiktok/... · Posted by u/yessirwhatever

ZeroGravitas · 4 years ago

What if you're not wanting less white people in your life because they are white, but because white people in general are more likely to be Republicans?

Race is a protected class but currently it's not illegal to discriminate against political opinions and 'race' is a proxy for those.

> DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats. It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates.

If it's a good enough excuse for Texas republicans to prevent minorities voting, then surely it's a good enough excuse to want to exclude white people from your life?

https://harvardlawreview.org/2014/01/race-or-party-how-court...

jeherr · 4 years ago

What if you're not wanting less black people in your life because they are black, but because black people in general are more likely to be Democrats?

jeherr commented on Head of Design at Dropbox descriminates in her hiring based on skin color twitter.com/libsoftiktok/... · Posted by u/yessirwhatever

Ekaros · 4 years ago

Why are not these people kicked out from the platforms? Why aren't corporates rightfully censoring them?

jeherr · 4 years ago

No financial incentive to do so. Nobody is organizing to boycott over bigotry towards majority groups, and news media won't cover it. There's very little upside for corporations to censor them. On the flip side bigotry towards minority groups will get tons of media coverage and potentially some significant boycotts if they do nothing about it.

jeherr commented on Beyond message passing: A physics-inspired paradigm for graph neural networks thegradient.pub/graph-neu... · Posted by u/andreyk

sandGorgon · 4 years ago

that's like Google's experimental work. I mean Google & Facebook using something is kinda moot.

Is anyone non-FAANG using it ?

jeherr · 4 years ago

Absolutely. Protein folding has been worked on by a large part of the scientific community for a long time and they're not going to look at a breakthrough like that and just ignore it. Pharma companies will be putting significant resources towards this research as well.

Here is an open source implementation of AlphaFold from an academic at Columbia.

https://github.com/aqlaboratory/openfold

jeherr commented on Netflix layoffs hit Tudum, its editorial arm, just five months after launch ca.finance.yahoo.com/news... · Posted by u/mgh2

jeherr · 4 years ago

I've never even heard of Tudum before, so I guess I'm not surprised that it didn't last very long.

jeherr commented on ‘Disabled’ is not a bad word. Stop telling people with disabilities it is irishtimes.com/life-and-s... · Posted by u/Anthony-G

Freak_NL · 4 years ago

Did someone ever work out the relevant academic theory that describes this linguistic process?

A word starts out as neutral, but gradually transitions to becoming a slur (a process that seemingly takes decades), and is replaced by a new politically correct word which is seen as too avant-garde at first, but gets established in part due to a lack of push-back (because any criticism will make the person levelling it seem a bigot/racist/ass), and eventually that becomes the default word, until it starts sliding into slur territory and the cycle starts anew.

I'm not sure if this process can actually be prevented.

jeherr · 4 years ago

I definitely recognize this process (and have heard the term euphemism treadmill from McWhorter the other commenter pointed out) but since when has "disabled" been used as a slur? I'm sure it's happened, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone using disabled in a derogatory manner like you would hear "retarded" commonly used now.

jeherr commented on Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times popehat.substack.com/p/ou... · Posted by u/tptacek

ashtonkem · 4 years ago

> But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.

This is so disconnected with history its almost delusional. Go read about how civil rights advocates were treated in the south, or gay rights advocates a mere 30 years ago. Go read about how distributing information on birth control was a crime, or how being a socialist brought the state down on you. Go read about the labor movement before WW2, and how many workers and would be reformers were shot for their words.

For a decent chunk of the 20th century, straying outside the bounds of “civil discourse” wouldn’t get you “shut down”, it might get you killed or jailed.

jeherr · 4 years ago

This doesn't prove that we haven't taken steps backwards in terms of what is allowed as civil discourse in recent years. You're correct that many things were once completely unallowed by virtue of repercussions, which we now see as within the overton window. We've worked towards getting better though and we shouldn't throw that away. What people today are reacting to is that it feels like we are less free to speak our minds, at least on some topics, than we were just a few decades ago. Just because it used to be worse long before that doesn't mean it isn't a problem worth dealing with now. Racism also used to be much worse than it is today, but that's not an excuse for the amount of racism that still exists either.

jeherr commented on Why More and More Environmentalists Want to Go Nuclear interestingengineering.co... · Posted by u/mpweiher

ncmncm · 4 years ago

We don't refine waste because it costs more than refining mined uranium. Which itself costs a lot.

Everything around nukes is massively expensive -- building, fueling, operating. To the extent they steal money from building out renewables and storage, everything spent on them only adds to the climate crisis.

jeherr · 4 years ago

If we're talking about the limit on the global supply only lasting us about 100 years, then it's irrelevant that it costs more now because the point is fissile material still exists and is a viable source for more energy beyond what the OPs projection was.

jeherr commented on Why More and More Environmentalists Want to Go Nuclear interestingengineering.co... · Posted by u/mpweiher

floppiplopp · 4 years ago

What's always missing in these kinds of propaganda articles is the resource issue with fissile material. If you look at the data given by the International Atomic Energy Agency you'll see that there are roughly 6 million tons available at the moment, with the price for uranium doubling over the last 20 years and cost for exploration quadrupling in the same time. Now, we get around 10% of all energy worldwide from fission, using 60k tons of uranium per year. So, at the current rate, we can do this for maybe 100-150 years. Increase the power output, reduce this time accordingly. And don't mention non-existing or experimental reactors like fusion of thorium, that have been just 10 years away from working for the last 50 years. We cannot solve climate change with current nuclear energy technology. There's just not enough fissile material.

jeherr · 4 years ago

We don't currently refine "spent" nuclear reactor fuel, in the US at least, which still contains significant amount of fissile material. When the fuel is "spent" we really just mean that the amount of fissile material is too low to sustain the nuclear reaction needed to collect energy. We would get more energy out of our uranium if we did, but instead we just let it become waste. Russia is very good about refining their uranium for nuclear power. We don't do it in the US for nuclear proliferation reasons. I'm less certain about the rest of the world on this though.

jeherr commented on Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents? · Posted by u/ftio

sidpatil · 4 years ago

Wouldn't the filesystem suffice for this? It already tracks creation and modification times, so all you'd need to do is sort chronologically in your UI of choice.

If you wanted something Web-based, you could use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and get similar functionality.

jeherr · 4 years ago

It could, but like another user pointed out the last file modification time isn't necessarily going to stay chronological forever, so something that understands the order in which documents are put in is immutable unless I explicitly rearrange them would be good. Easy text searching through multiple file types to help narrow down a search faster, automated encryption and cloud storage backup, syncing between multiple devices. All the usual nice stuff you would expect for an app like this.

It could watch certain directories on your computer or in cloud storage and create a queue to suggest adding new documents that appear there in the same order of their appearance, that way you never forget to add an important document and they still get put in chronologically even if you haven't checked the queue in months. It could make different "vaults" you could use to separate documents by person, or separate work and personal life. Vaults could have long-term upkeep rules to keep them from getting bloated, like maybe you delete everything that's 10 years or older.

Basically if it can help me even if I have sloppy organization and take a ton of the pain out of it for me, I'd definitely be willing to pay a bit to try an app like that. Can't say for sure that I would stick with it, but it's a reoccurring problem for me as I have documents across multiple devices, cloud services, emails accounts, and thumb drives that I just can't make myself organize or create and maintain a system to do it for me.