Yes, he did. This value doesn't come from all the "monkey" jobs that most of his employees do. It comes from the ability to produce ideas and making them happen by managing that 341,000 people. You completely underestimate the value of directing a company like Amazon.
Except Jeff Bezos doesn't produce those ideas, or make them happen, or directly manage 341,000 people.
All of that is done by his employees. The ideas, the innovation and the execution are done by people other than him, while the credit and most of the value they create is taken by him.
And yet it is internationally recognized to exist. Here's a video that goes into how war has more formalized ethics than, say romance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc
It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny it.
On the other hand, the Thirty Years War caused such destruction that the institutional memory in European nobility lasted 250 years. Total warfare on such scale was only seen again during the Peninsular War.
Absolutely, and I didn't mean my post to come across that way. This topic makes me a bit glum, and I think that comes across as defeatist, but I'd rather take on the correct, losing fight, than not fight at all.
Which is they Geneva Conventions and other treaties of the like make it clear that the protections only apply to groups that have signed and follow them.
The proto-ISIS militia groups in Iraq did not, and would deliberately target civilians, refused to wear uniforms, and hid among civilian population. Because of that they did not have POW rights that afforded to legitimate militias.
Refusing POW rights is as much a reflection on those they fight as it is on ISIS. If you're making categories like this you have crossed the moral line, if not the legal one.
POW rights are earned by wearing uniforms. Not wearing uniforms means you've passed a moral line that encourages the murder, if not slaughter, of civilians.
That may be legally correct but is that morally ok? How do you apply this to groups history looks upon sympathetically? French partisans come to mind, but there are dozens of other groups that had similar situations. Selectively deciding abuse of humans is ok is a slippery slope. Not wearing a uniform may relate more to total oppression or occupation rather than be an indicator of disregard for civilians.
> Of course, the Just War Ethic suffers from a problem: The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed. The question for the ethicist then is this: Is it more ethical to make continued (and often ignored) normative pronouncements against the existence of war, or to engage with the temporal reality of war with ethics that seek to limit the cases in which war is undertaken, to moderate its effects, and to guide it toward the normative goal, with the understanding that this goal is not immediately or fully achievable? Obviously, advocates of the Just War Ethic, myself included, come to the latter conclusion.
The author's argument is a good one, but note that, in the (perhaps rare) case of just wars, he doesn't even have to concede this point:
> The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed.
With the exception of true pacifism, which is exceptionally rare, essentially everyone agrees that there are just uses of violence. When within a nation with a functioning government, this is the police's uses of force. When it's between nations, it's war. No one would think that rules governing the police's use of violence are inconsistent with the fact that we'd all prefer violence be unnecessary. Likewise, there are at least some just wars (by at least one of the participants), and in these cases the just participant need not be morally flawed at all.
As a defender one is a partaker in a war. As partaker in a war one can choose to either take or not take prisoners and one can choose to torture said prisoners or not. These choices represent different levels of ethicality.
It's also not always necessarily attacker vs defender. You can have wars between two sides that both want to go to war.
Also, there was a whole period of war (the so-called Cabinet Wars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinettskriege) which was for the most part just princes with smaller armies in a very constrained manner fighting each other. So it's not always the same there.
You can't really prove this. Something being said in the front of the camera with a fake smile on the face is one thing, documents being signed that are not released to the public is a different story.
And that's had a direct effect on the attitude and behavior of immigration goons:
"[...] the shift — and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming 'fun.' Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said."
This combined with the fact that they now demand access to your facebook account on entry means I'm scared to post anti trump comments online. I need to travel between my birth country and my new home in the USA regularly. If I get a pro-trump homeland security agent (and it seems many of them are) scanning my phone. I fear I might be denied re-entry despite having a valid work visa.
I guess we'll be seeing more and more of this in the near future. I and other non citizens are now silenced. A few more laws like this to silence a few other anti-trmup groups and the USA will slowly creep into totalitarianism for fear of losing everything they have.
I'm just glad my birth country is Australia and I can happily return there before it gets really bad in the USA. The biggest problem I'm having is where shall I draw the line where I pack up my life here and return.
Any king can claim to be innocent when a bishop is killed in his realm, and may in theory be innocent. One that said "oh, won't someone rid me of this troublesome priest" before the bloodshed can't expect to be believed innocent, though.
There is an easy to prove that they do read private messages. Send a private message with a link that points to your private website. Wait a few minutes and you should see in your server's logs that Facebook's bot is trying to crawl that url.
True, but they also show a preview of the page in the message, which would require fetching it. Pretty much every messaging service does that now. Also, there are legitimate reasons to scan URLs (malware, for example). Again, not trying to defend Facebook or absolve them of violating privacy, just saying that for these specific criticisms, there are technical explanations.
I don't think this will necessarily help. In my experience some people who use Slack consider responsiveness as getting an answer right away. This isn't that different from coming and asking directly - it still interrupts your current thinking process.
More important is to understand how async communication works. Otherwise, you have to create a physical boundary (remote work) to enforce this.
In my experience some people who use Slack consider responsiveness as getting an answer right away.
That's why I still fundamentally prefer e-mail (with a sensible set of mailing lists and an easily browsable archive) for serious decision making. IRC or Slack are great for building a community atmosphere but best reserved for more ephemeral things.
I fundamentally prefer Slack. I don't have threads of various conversations spread across multiple emails and replies, I also don't have to remember to add someone to a email thread, for example.
Also anyone that needs to be in a conversation is in the Slack already. File sharing, code sharing -- all that is much easier than email. With Threads -- conservations are more focused and organized. In-chat images are also super simple (as opposed to sharing actual images or links to images that require clicking as in email.)
I despise email and hate phone calls even more.
I think the 'problem' with Slack is how some people use it. The 'expectation' of a quick answer isn't Slack's fault.
> Large companies are judged by the diversity of their employees
And here is the problem - diversity has become a goal rather than a natural consequence of everyone having equal chances.
It's not the lack of diversity that those companies should focus on - much more important is an elimination of any kind of discrimination based on gender/race/religion etc.
I see it as more of a temporary compensation for earlier gender based biases.
In a world where boys and girls are given the same opportunities at (even) younger ages, you wouldn't need something like this.
As it stands right now, it is intimidating for a girl to sign up for her first computer science class knowing that it will be full of boys that have been encouraged to do computer sciencey things from an earlier age. There is the perception that the girl will come in at a disadvantage.
Allowing a them to sign up for a class with the perception that they all have equal footing/previous knowledge could give them the confidence they need to join the classes with boys that are perceived to have more experience.
When the time comes that girls are signing up for computer science classes at the same rate as boys, then classes like this would no longer be necessary.
That being said, public schools cannot create X-only classes. There is no discrimination in which students can signup for my computer science classes and I have unfortunately low female enrollment.
> I see it as more of a temporary compensation for earlier gender based biases.
So you tolerate that a complete sex shall be punished for former sins. Clearly not my sense of justice.
> In a world where boys and girls are given the same opportunities at (even) younger ages, you wouldn't need something like this.
Everybody can use the internet to learn coding. But at least to me it seems that mostly boys (with few exceptions) seem to love doing this - in particular from young age on.
> > So you tolerate that a complete sex shall be punished for former sins
> This is not a zero-sum game. Creating a new opportunity for girls does not remove an existing opportunity for a boy.
Not when quotas are involved. In Germany, where I live, every few years serious attempts to introduce women quota for companies are attempted to pass as a law (which typically are only prevented in the last moment because of massive protests of business associations).
Some political parties already have quotas in their statutes for a long time (Die Grünen (Green Party) - 50%; SPD - 30% I think).
Since Januar 2016 gender quotas for the supervisory council of the 106 largest market-listed companies were introduced. For restaffing in the supervisory council there is a quota of 30% for both gender (or the position has to be left vacant).
Here an "official" article by the Federal Minestry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth ["Federal Minestry for everybody except men" ;-) ]:
> So you tolerate that a complete sex shall be punished for former sins.
You are not inoculated from the past sins of gender discrimination. So simply because you did not discriminate does not mean you did not benefit from past discrimination. While this fact should not be used to hold you accountable, it should be used to pursue policies that offset that advantage.
A company offering a program for girls is not punishing boys. It's giving girls a boost that was given to boys of previous generations.
Simply giving equal opportunity after decades (longer, really) of inequality is not truly equal. As an analogy, imagine if a government gave extremely preferential treatment to one company over another for an extended period of time (lower taxes, looser regulation, etc.) and all of the sudden started treating the two companies the same. Would you expect them to have an equal chance of success? Surely the accumulated benefits of the one company would still provide a significant advantage that would have to be remedied before the companies have an equal chance of success.
Edit: I realize I assumed you are male, which your comment does not state. Mea culpa. Read this comment as directed at any male who opposes policies that promote gender equality in STEM education.
Apologetics only gets you so far. In this case I don't care for the attempt. Let those who have an interest take advantage and the rest catch as catch can. This marketed approach is badly conceived.
You cannot stop an object in motion without applying a force in the direction opposite the motion. And you cannot eliminate a large scale social trend by declaring it over.
It's a wrong assumption that diversity of demographics is the same as diversity of thought. It's also wrong to assume that a lack of diversity in demographics automatically equates to a lack of diversity in thought.
A competitive advantage would be gained through diversity of thought. Making gender, skin color or any other superficial characteristic into a numbers game in order to look diverse is in no way a competitive advantage.
> It's a wrong assumption that diversity of demographics is the same as diversity of thought. It's also wrong to assume that a lack of diversity in demographics automatically equates to a lack of diversity in thought.
> A competitive advantage would be gained through diversity of thought. Making gender, skin color or any other superficial characteristic into a numbers game in order to look diverse is in no way a competitive advantage.
Well, not really. I mean, not at all. I appreciate you took your time to tell me I'm wrong, but you might want to support it with something more solid. Diversity of thought is not just what happens when you get two people together. If those people have a very similar upbringing, chances are they think in a similar way. They might reach different conclusions and one of them might reach the right one, but they might be missing points of view that could increase their accuracy when making decisions.
Your upbringing shapes how you think, what you fear, what you wish. Of course even inside the same communities very similar people might have completely different trains of thought, but what you call "superficial characteristics" as gender or skin colour it is (unfortunately) not superficial in many places. Many men can't even imagine the things a woman has to endure at the workplace, or your skin colour when you're a minority.
Even things like being a native speaker of a foreign tongue shapes how you think. The culture of your hometown, province, region, country defines you, too.
If you've lived a different life because of your gender, ethnicity, passport, disability, country of birth or even family wealth chances are you can bring quite different points of view than people with different gender, ethnicity, passport, disability, country of birth or even family wealth.
There are studies that show correlation between higher diversity and better performance (Forbes, McKinsey).
P.S.: I suspect you're the one that downvoted me (just above 500 karma, only reply to my comment). I appreciate you followed up with a comment, but downvotes are not "I disagree" signals. Please learn to be a bit more tolerant with people that does not think like you, instead of trying to shut their voice down.
