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Response I would make at themotte, if I was not in self-imposed exile

link removed because I don't know what the protocol is to link to posts there in an acceptable fashion

> I work at a large company that provides free disposable silverware. About 20% of our workforce is Asian. The leadership is mostly white. I don't have a specific problem with that, just relevant to the example. At a company-wide meeting, an Asian guy raises his hand and politely asks for chopsticks along with the silverware. Wild. Applause. People had been thinking about needing this forever, but cutting through the bureaucracy was apparently undoable without the CEO's own ear. Here, it wasn't leadership that was necessary, but representation. Once the people had some level of representation at high levels, their reality more closely approximated their cultural needs.

I want to take a moment to talk about a more mundane element of this, rather than the culture war aspect.

Amazon lists a pack of 40 chopsticks at $6. 22 working days per month means that that's $3/month to bring your own chopsticks to work.

Meanwhile, well, I'm going to go out on a limb here but given the details provided (white leadership, 20% asian, company-wide meeting where CEO gets talked at by leaf-node employees, and thunderous applause for virtue signalling) I'm going to assume that the company is Google. I'm going to further engage in some stereotyping and assume that the person making this comment is an engineer or some other relatively highly paid individual.

That means that their total comp is going to be easily above $150,000.

I can't fathom the mentality of someone who makes above $150,000 per year, and yet claims to be oppressed because someone isn't giving them, for free, something that costs $3/mo. This is absolutely insane, the pinnacle of abdication of agency.

Like, for comparison, let me list all the things I have at my desk, that I've paid out of my own pocket:

• $800 big ass monitor (because work wouldn't give me one, and it's important for professionals to have good tools)
  
• $250 fancyass keyboard (same reasoning)
  
• boxes of cereal for breakfast
  
• Box of disposable straws (because fuck your straw ban)
  
• 12-pack of coke zero (Not anymore, but I used to, because my employer only stocked diet coke)
  
• 4-pack of monster zero ultra (sometimes you don't want coffee)
  
• 30-pack of canadian chocolate bars (they are better than US chocolate bars)
  
• Personal coffee mug that I brought from home (Not anymore, because they tend to go missing, but I used to)
  
  But this individual, who in all likelihood makes more than double what I do, not only can he not be arsed to spend LITERALLY ONE SINGLE UNITED STATES DOLLAR to get himself some chopsticks, but this is such a major problem for him that he wastes the CEO's time over it
  
  I don't understand this mentality, not one bit.

> Often, militant recruits are isolated people looking for group, rather than happy and well-adjusted people who are merely extremely politically committed.

I’m in the middle of selling my house so all my books are packed away, but I believe it was “Wars Guns & Votes” in which the author built an MLR^^1 on “probability of future conflict in the next 10 years”, and found that the value for “% of population composed of unemployed males aged 18-40” was significant & predictive in the final model. I think the other important variables included “the number of very hot days”, the binary for Africa, and a few surprising ones I can’t remember.

(Hopefully this was Off-Topic and Low-Effort enough for this thread. I love this topic but it’s been years since I’ve dug up my sources on it)

1 - “it’s only an Econometric model if it comes from the Econometrics region of Chicago - otherwise it’s just a sparkling Multiple Linear Regression”

> At the UK’s Tavistock gender clinic
>Tavistock

There's that name again.

Also, related previous thread; and one on /r/TheMotte.

>It's hard to believe we would countenance experimentation on children like this under any circumstances

"Odd thing it is—the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental'. You mustn't experiment on children: but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!"

Was a little busy to post this last week, but VioletBlue was delisted from Amazon's Affiliate program. Typical combination of "we're only mentioning what you did, where you did it, or what you'd need to change in the vaguest sense" with "also, we're keeping the money".

This isn't the first time she's run into problems -- Blue tried to use a .ly domain for a sex-and-alcohol-friendly url shortener, with all the resulting problems, and was memory holed by BoingBoing over undisclosed reasons, double irony given Doctorow's involvement there. Indeed, there's a certain temptation to say that what's good for the gander is good for the goose, as Blue has promoted (and even used this delisting to promote) more active censorship against Nazis and 'nazis', or to suggest that this reflects palace intrigue in the same way that the BoingBoing stuff likely did.

What's interesting to me is that she's pretty bland. I mean, yes queen slay, lesbians-no-the-other-l-word, you don't want to talk pegging or cuckolding with your grandparents. But we're not talking incest, or the dinosaur porn, or the awkward-what-age-is-the-main-character-in-this-coming-of-age-story question. The reason I say delist rather than deplatform is that, as far as I can tell, all of her books are still there, and this only removed her blog from the auto-update tool, and there's nothing there that would even reach Dan Savage levels of grimacing.

Financially, though, combined with other restrictions from other sources it gets back to the "build your own payment processor" problem. Blue wasn't using Affiliate out of personal preference, and without knowing what triggered the delisting, she has no reason to suspect that any other Amazon service will keep her on. However, as one of the few people who actually tried competing with Amazon, one notices that she literally can't manage to beat Amazon's prices for the same content, even with Amazon's cut -- and those who've followed the censorship wars know that's little more secure (both Shopify and PayPal technically already prohibit her content, and have gone after Blue Tribe groups; as far as I can tell, DigitaPub's been safe simply because even Blue herself seems to have forgotten about it).

Most of all, it's noteworthy for how basic it is, and that as a reminder that it's not just the Right or Red Tribe under attack. Blue seems to have dropped from the inner party or connections in the SFWA, but she's a relatively big name as Kindle people go. Cliff Pervocracy being pushed out from Tumblr got my dander up because he, if not much more principled, is at least wrong in more interesting ways, but at least probably was an accident of larger programs (run by incompetents or malefactors). Amazon's decision might have been automated, but by now must have had some human review.

Nope. /u/wlxd left his referral URL in there, and I'm betting that's it. Here's a clean version of the link which should work and not get caught by automod.

There is no need for trust anymore. Paternity test kits are $100. Every self-respecting man should be testing every one of his children, just in case (unless you happen to live in France, which is so literally cucked that it made paternity testing illegal). If your wife objects, that's your test result right there.

Best tool for smashing windows is spring loaded center punch. However, I suspect that office tower windows might be laminated glass, so although you might be able to break it, you might not be able to get the broken glass out of the window.

Then there's the #edgy position: there was no bubble.