Making the decision to host a conference in Israel in the first place is a form of political posturing, as is message censorship. If they truly wanted to be apolitical (and it appears that Alexander Wirt very much does not) they could have held it somewhere more neutral (e.g. Turkey).
>Are you serious? There was an article on HN just yesterday about how Turkey censored Wikipedia for two years.
And yet it would maximize those who would be able to attend. Both Israelis and Arabs can fly to Turkey pretty easily.
>I think a lot of Israeli engineers would just like to be able to host conferences without it turning into a geopolitical debate
I'm sure a lot of North Korean and Venezuelan engineers would love that too, but until the Israeli government ends racial apartheid the chances of it not turning into a geopolitical debate are zero.
I don’t want to get inti a huge debate here, but you’ve repeatedly talked about apartheid which is a highly inappropriate metaphor that often gets tossed around as if it’s somehow factual. There are Arab citizens of Israel, and they don’t have codified laws that require them to live separately from Jews, nor do you find signs that say “beware of Arabs” and other such hallmarks of apartheid. It’s a disservice to both the history of South Africa and Israel to use this term.
There are few places that don’t have geopolitical concerns for _someone_. I don’t think the community would be up in arms for a conference in the US, but plenty cannot come to the US (and it’s hardly not geopolitically controversial). I don’t think you’ll find many Armenian or Kurdish developers who want or could come to Turkey, for example. If you host in Palestinian territory, you won’t find many Israelis, Jews, gays, or other persecuted minorities able to attend that either.
I ask you to recognize that these things are complicated and multi-faceted, with a wide variety of “valid” viewpoints depending on who you are, and not worthy of such reductionism.
> but you’ve repeatedly talked about apartheid which is a highly inappropriate metaphor
The apartheid accusation doesn't have much to do with Arab Israelis; the fact is that Israel exercises complete civil and military control over vast portions of the West Bank; in these areas, you can be Jewish- in which case you're an Israeli citizen, subject to civil law and able to vote for the government that effectively controls the area; or, if you're Palestinian, you're subject to the military law and vote for a government that is powerless on the territory. This is an apartheid situation, but Israel can deny it because it happens outside of its legal borders, where Israel enjoys every privilege of sovereignty without any of the duties.
> you’ve repeatedly talked about apartheid which is a highly inappropriate
There's a wall with guard towers. I've been there and seen it myself. The existence of some 2nd class Arab citizens that they couldn't ethnically cleanse or expel any other way while the world was watching doesn't change that fact.
>I ask you to recognize that these things are complicated
It was never complicated. Israel was a racist European colonization project just like South Africa. The fact that it screams anti-semitism until it's blue in the face and asks you do to the same does not change that fact.
I can understand it, but how can you expect to keep living normally as if nothing was happening, when your army's snipers are shooting live bullets on protesters and 10% of your population lives on illegally occupied territories?
This is not "a geopolitical debate", this is a fundamental human rights issue.
>This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers.
Trust is highly transitive for highly technical developer focused products though. The core of stripe's trust, even among non technical decision makers, is down to their killer APIs and docs.
This is why the National Restaurant Association always lobbies furiously against minimum wage hikes - it will never destroy the restaurant industry but it sure as heck destroys actual restaurants.
Which seems absolutely crazy to me. I would have expected them to push for them harder than your typical org since such a sweeping change would affect everyone basically the same. Nobody would be immune from raising their prices and the value differential would nudge customers away from fast food.
I think it doesn't affect not-yet-open restaurants nearly as badly as existing restaurant owners. NRA doesn't represent the restaurant market as a whole it represents a % of restaurant owners that currently exist.
Restaurant workers are, of course, going to be fairly indifferent to restaurant bankruptcies especially if an existing restaurant is swiftly replaced by a new one that pays more.
It will discourage hoarding. Unproductively using land in high value locations that are growing is currently rewarded - with asset appreciation.
If it is discouraged - with taxation, that land will be yielded to more productive use.
Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it. Either we can let that revenue stream fill up government coffers or it can go into private pockets. It's our decision.
> Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it.
Well put. If I suggested privatising air and that you needed to pay the owner to breathe it, that would be seen as ridiculous, and rightly so. Meanwhile, land is an equally natural resource and equally essential to human life, but private land is just accepted as "the way it is".
This isn't a reasonable comparison because air is almost completely fungible; it's automatically redistributed throughout Earth by the magic of physics. Not only that, it's not scarce.
People in fact do pay for 'special' air in the form of air purifiers, air conditioning, heating, etc.
Potentially we are if an even more polluting investment becomes more profitable and they go for that. Gas, for instance, usually emits less CO2 but emits a lot more methane, which is ~90 times more warming. This is what coal is typically being replaced with.
I'd like to know what is the point of giving investors a pat on the back for engaging in selfish behavior? It's like thanking a full tiger for not eating you.
>It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly
The nuclear industry has spent a lot on PR to convince the public that they're safer but so far criminal liability for accidents is still minimized and the liability cap (i.e. free government insurance for accidents) is still incredibly low.
I'd personally be more convinced of their frequent protestations that they're 100% safe if they lobbied to increase their own liability rather than engaged public relations firms to put a happy face on their industry.
Actions do speak louder than words, don't you think?
Moreover, if you raised the liability then the research into making them safer ought to more or less take care of itself. The greatest incentive for executives is avoiding criminal liability.
This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more.
While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.
Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the market and so is not compensated.
Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.
There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.
Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth.
For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?
Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.
It would still make these things more affordable. And, save perhaps childcare, increasing the cost of low waged labor would not have an outsized inflationary effect on them.
Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.
Wouldn't be the opposite? Supply-constrained, limited housing. Everyone is suddenly twice as rich competing for the same fixed number of units. Price has to go up.
Untaxed as a verb. E.g. California reducing property taxes to absurdly low levels with prop 13, diverting the spoils of the land to the owners instead (in the form of ridiculously high valuations and streams of rental income).
DRYing existing code to handle exactly what is needed to support the current uses with no additional axes of variation isn't adding functionality (well, if it handles more than the existing values in the existing axes of variation, it's adding some but arguably de minimis functionality.)
Building code with support for currently-unused variation to support expected future similar-but-not-identical needs, that is, pre-emptively DRYing future code, is adding functionality.
If the it's neoliberal journalism surely the market, rather than ideology, should decide how it should be paid for?
Currently, the market seems more keen on ads.
Personally, I'd be happy to pay for investigative journalism (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations)... but not the kind of journalism which cites "tweets" as research and doesn't think enough of its journalists to give them a byline.
