pimmen (u/pimmen) - Readit News

pimmen commented on China Uighurs 'moved into factory forced labour' for foreign brands bbc.com/news/world-asia-c... · Posted by u/echelon

hedora · 6 years ago

Your link is an extremely thorough investigation into prison labor in China. Thanks for sharing it.

It doesn’t justify China’s actions, but note that the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r...

and many (most, I think) of them are forced to work:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

We are much smaller than China, so as a percentage, a much larger percentage of our population is forced labor.

You could argue that the people in these prisons are all convicted criminals, but enforcement and sentencing in the US varies widely by race, especially for non-violent drug offenses.

It is likely that approximately a million of the blacks and hispanics currently in the prison population would be free if they were white (either due to lax sentencing, or lack of police enforcement).

It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US. Ignoring the ethical issues, forced prison laborers are paid a tiny fraction of the minimum wage, stealing paid jobs from unskilled workers outside of the system.

Given the recent populist turn in national politics, I’d think that there would be bipartisan support for reforming the system, but for some reason there is not.

pimmen · 6 years ago

The justice system in the US is not perfect but the people who are in US prisons had access to defense attorneys, hearings about bail, trials where the prosecution had to publicly present evidence and testimonies to explain why the defendant should go to jail ("they are a muslim" is not enough), and also a process for appeal. And International observers are allowed to thoroughly investigate US prisons, and when they publish scathing criticism of the US prison system it's not cracked down by jailing the reporters or diplomatic pressure.

That is, by any resonable definition of the word "better", much better.

And this statement is just categorically false:

"It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US."

I can name five news segments or documentaries about the US prison systems role in structural racism on National television off the top of my head. Try pitching a segment about the CCP's human rights violations to Chinese television where you have full editorial control and you'll get laughed out of the room, at best.

pimmen commented on Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained axios.com/olympic-officia... · Posted by u/doppp

pbhjpbhj · 6 years ago

The USA is objectively corrupt from the top, have recently removed themselves from non nuclear proliferation and climate treaties .. as a country the message seems clear that USA don't care two shits about the rest of the World.

The idea Trump would open his response to an epidemic up to international inspection is just laughable - and I say his, rather than USA government's because that's how things appear to work there.

pimmen · 6 years ago

Trump has not even nearly as much power as you seem to think. We hear about his abuses of power because hearing ”California government implements reforms to reduce carbon emissions, in spite of Trump” doesn’t generate as much emotions as his corrupt practices.

Imagine a Chinese provincial government openly (key word openly) going against the CCP’s wishes. Or a judge, or a prosecutor.

pimmen commented on Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained axios.com/olympic-officia... · Posted by u/doppp

grandmczeb · 6 years ago

I expect they would be allowed. The US also allows international observers for its elections as well.

pimmen · 6 years ago

And for its justice system. And its infrastructure.

The difference in transparency between China and the US is hard to overstate.

pimmen commented on To get good, go after the metagame commoncog.com/blog/to-get... · Posted by u/shadowsun7

Proziam · 6 years ago

The truth is, (and this applies to games like MTG, Hearthstone, Poker, etc.) piloting the deck you have correctly matters more than people really like admitting. If you copy a 'known-good' strategy, you can crush with it at every level except the very top of the game. This applies even if your known good strategy is off-meta.

The main issue at the middle level is that people don't push to the next level of thinking, despite often thinking that they do. The reality is that most people have the thoughts but not consistently. Or, they have the thought, but don't apply it (well) to their decision making.

(I'm going to butcher this concept for this example)

Level one - You play your cards. You look at what you've got; you do stuff that has a big effect based on what you have in your hand. Your opponent's counter-play options aren't considered.

Level two - You now consider that your opponent might counter the cards you play in some fashion, and you adjust accordingly. This is the level most people are at. ('If I play BIG CARD and he just kills it with EASY COUNTER that would be bad...let's hold off on it until there's a lower chance of that happening...')

Level three - You now consider that your opponent is making the same kind of decisions you are. The game becomes more about information. You know that when X card is played, it indicates certain other possibilities. And, you are aware that your opponent might be making the same considerations about you, so you consider the plays you make in the context of how they might be perceived. (A lot of this becomes near-autopilot because of the sheer volume of games put in - often thousands -> tens of thousands).

This is the short version of the concept, but it applies to all games that have incomplete information, MOBAs, Card Games, RTS, and so forth.

pimmen · 6 years ago

This is illustrated with the deck Affinity. It sweeps beginner players consistently even if the pilot keeps making mistakes but once you meet tougher opposition all of the options the deck presents become overwhelming and you know that you need to maximize the value of every play to beat a good opponent, especially if they have boarded in counters for your deck.

pimmen commented on To get good, go after the metagame commoncog.com/blog/to-get... · Posted by u/shadowsun7

mercer · 6 years ago

I've noticed this to be true for table tennis and other sports too. When I play against a less experienced player, it's quite frustrating to notice that most of the points I score are clear mistakes on their part, rather than any kind of skilled moves on my part.

pimmen · 6 years ago

Whenever I play poker with friends this is my experience too. I don't do anything really fancy at all, I basically just follow very simple guidelines anyone can look up on the Internet. I just wait for good cards, permit worse cards the further down I am in the betting chain, raise or fold instead of calling most of the time, and I bet agressively when I have really good cards to get the most value. I win because my opponents have no idea of what they’re doing, and even if you would point out an obvious misplay they wouldn’t even agree.

Most people who play casually have some romantic ideas about poker from spy movies, where it's about bluffing. Bluffing only works if people actually believe you have good cards, people won't believe you have good cards if you play with mediocre or bad cards every hand.

I am by no means good enough to beat a person who is good at the game that could profile my playing style, do the mental math faster than me and who can tell the difference between whether or not I have analysis paralysis or bluffing.

pimmen commented on Why Susan Fowler blew the whistle on sexism at Uber theverge.com/2020/2/19/21... · Posted by u/Tomte

pimmen · 6 years ago

I don't know if this was just the culture and influence from Kalanick, but Uber all around seems like a terrible company. Tehy cover up data breaches, they lie to regulators when they test their self driving cars, they act passively when women get harassed on their watch. I haven't worked there but from the outside it seems pretty much "do whatever you want, but don't get caught".

pimmen commented on Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019) weforum.org/agenda/2019/0... · Posted by u/saadalem

burntoutfire · 6 years ago

It's also the country where not being able to live in a detached house is mostly seen as not worthy of middle class. That's far above the standard of Western Europe, where people in middle class lives in flats.

pimmen · 6 years ago

In Sweden, most middle class people live in detached houses. However, most young professionals desire to live in apartments because it's simply more convenient. I hate the garden and I hate driving.

This article is about Sweden, remember. My parents have two houses, one outside Gothenburg (big enough that they have converted the floor me and my younger brother lived in into two apartments, one if four bedrooms the other one is two) and a beach house further up north. They're from a completely different generation with different priorities.

pimmen commented on Kickstarter employees vote to unionize vice.com/en_us/article/3a... · Posted by u/danso

elicash · 6 years ago

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

If you want to improve your workplace, you have additional leverage to fight for changes if you're in a union. There's often very little you can do alone. This might be things like pay, or it might be something else entirely.

2. But aren't tech workers elite coddled rich kids who are lucky to make what they receive?

I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union. Folks who run these companies are even more elite than the person who codes. Why not negotiate for a better workplace? Why be a weak negotiator? Isn't that especially important to do when you have flexibility to go somewhere else?

3. Why don't they just leave their job?

Some issues are systemic across an industry. Additionally, some people like to improve their jobs rather than just leave. People are wired differently. Creating lasting change at a company can be rewarding. Some also care about the mission of the company they work for.

pimmen · 6 years ago

A comment on #2 would also be that you should organize and enshrine your rights when you have the power, not when you're weak. Developers are powerful now, can possibly become weak later.

pimmen commented on Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019) weforum.org/agenda/2019/0... · Posted by u/saadalem

strictfp · 6 years ago

Swede here. We have a largely regulated rental market throughout the country, stupid as it is. In my view, this is an old remain from bygone times, but for some reason it is romanticised by many.

With this system you have to stand in line for at least 20 years to get a decent rental apartment in inner-city Stockholm. As you can probably guess, this system doesn't exactly encourage free movement. And it's created a huge black market, plus that it's pushing everyone into buying.

pimmen · 6 years ago

The issue is far more complicated than simply not having de-regulated rents. De-regulating rents would do something, no doubt, but there are so many more reasons why we have astronomically high real estate prices at this moment (and didn't have them just 20-25 years ago).

* We have massive tax cuts and subsidies for home owners. You get to make deductions off your interest rate payments, something that was introduced as an emergency measure in the 90s. We also have effectively no real estate tax, meaning there is no incentive to move out when your kids have moved out and the home is more than you need.

* For a long time, there was no need to even pay the principal of your mortgage. Now there is and it's one of the primary reasons the prices have gone sideways in Sweden for the past year.

* The local governments don't want renters and have gradually been given more and more power to get rid of them. They own a lot of the rentals and especially in Stockholm they have aggresively converted them into apartments that are owned (the common, Swedish system of buying a membership into a home owners organization is a bit hard to translate into an appropriate English term, but it's called "bostadsrätt"). The national government is basically powerless to increase the housing stock, if you go back to the 60s when my grandparents were facing a housing crisis the national government had the power to build one million homes mostly in the bigger cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. They have nowhere close to that power anymore and the local governments have no incentive to solve the problems of low income people in a completely different city who would like to switch cities to get a decent living.

There are more than these too, these are just the first ones that popped into my head.

And all of this is unfortunately hard to change because most Swedes live in homes they own and it's a very common retirement plan. People who are in their 30s, like me, also think that falling interest rates well below inflation is the new normal because they've known anything else throughout their adult lives and thus take larger risks than they should.

pimmen commented on Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019) weforum.org/agenda/2019/0... · Posted by u/saadalem

timwaagh · 6 years ago

They might offer judicial support insurance as part of their membership fee. I have never looked at it, to be honest. It really depends on the price.

pimmen · 6 years ago

In Sweden the unions are the ones who will go to court and negotiate for you because they know that if you go it will set a precedent that exposes everyone else too.