The people I know who work at palantir tend to be next-level smart. 3 and 4 std dev above average kind of smart. I would find it strange that they would be irrationally ignoring talent because they’re prejudiced against Asians.

My guess would be that palantir tackles novel, intricate problems and Asians tend to live up to the stereotype of being grinders. They’ll blow away a white kid when they face a problem that they’ve already been taught to master. But if the task requires orthogonal thinking, I’ll take the neck bearded white guy.

LOL! Just reread the LOTR novels last week. The name Palantir is too much Kek in current-year racial politics.

So this is what it took to take down Gawker.

Maybe the DOJ is concerned that Thiel will go after Hillary next.

Or maybe Zuckerberg wants more Palo Alto real estate.

In the fight against GhostNet and the Shadow Network, I think they were right to hire staff who look like Scarlett Johansson.

She looks way more like Major Motoko Kusanagi than any of those 85% Asian applicants.

My guess is that DOL has wanted to do this to a Silicon Valley company for a while, but most such companies are well-connected and popular. Thiel supporting Trump gave them an opening.

Perhaps Steve can speculate on *why* the Labor department would want to do this, ’cause I can’t figure out who this will make happy. Surely Asians in IT are not eager for diversity lawsuits against Silicon Valley companies? Who then? Democratic constituents complaining that Silicon Valley is too White-and-Asian? Hillary Clinton, facing a challenge from Trump on immigration?

Strange!

“I would find it strange that they would be irrationally ignoring talent because they’re prejudiced against Asians.”

Palantir is involved in intelligence gathering for the US government. Perhaps the management doesn’t want to hire Chinese, because a significant fraction of likely candidates might be spies, or could eventually be recruited to be spies.

By the way, why does the CIA have its own venture capital firm? Can other agencies do this – go into business for themselves? Could the Department of Agriculture open up a chain of burger joints? Could the Department of the Interior open up a bunch of strip clubs and sex-toy stores?

So does that mean that if 85% of qualified applicants are white that they better hire in line with that percentage? LOL. Sorry, don’t know what got in to me.

The suit cited several instances of bias. For a software engineer position, the government said, the company hired 14 non-Asians and 11 Asians among more than 1,160 qualified applicants of whom 85% were Asian.

How does the government know who is “qualified”? Do they know what this company is looking for? And knowing precisely what this company and each hiring manager wants, did they interview 1,160 persons?

Of course not. By qualified they mean “credentialed”, which is hardly the same thing. If this is the kind of evidence the government uses, companies will have to hire according to government mandated quotas by credential. And remember who you are getting – the schools will have to credential by racial quota as well.

What this will lead to is the outsourcing of engineering functions. You don’t have to sit in the US to write code. Engineering teams will be set up in Israel, India, Japan. Idiocy.

I was thinking the same thing. I didn’t know hiring was supposed to match applicants’ racial breakdown.

BTW, is TheBoom The Boom the Japanese ska Okinawa band? I have about a dozen of their CD’s from the 90′s. Or something else?

Yes, they’re trying to limit Chinese espionage. And Obama’s client China is pretty mad about it too!

SEC just brought an insider trading case against Leon Cooperman, who wrote an open letter to Obama criticizing his policies.

For a software engineer position, the government said, the company hired 14 non-Asians and 11 Asians among more than 1,160 qualified applicants

So there is not a shortage of STEM workers after all . . .

Maybe Patricia Shiu standing up for her Chinese side of the family?

In the Obama Admin diversity wars she is just an amiable stooge who is told what to do and who to sue. Her Chinese side is vanishing because her children are only 25% so. The real purpose for pushing workplace diversity is to provide fictional gov’t employment for useless female basket weavers (armed with law degrees) and similar libs.

Palantir is significantly more Asian than the city it is headquartered in. Palantir is 44 percent Asian compared to Palo Alto which is only 27 percent Asian, so that company has a positive bias towards the Ching Chongs and the Slumdog Millionaires.

The only upshot is that white males cannot possibly be allowed to win.

What’s strange is that Asians are generally not counted as “real minorities” in silicon valley because we’re not oppressed enough. That’s why you hear a lot of whining about how tech isn’t diverse even though Asians are disproportionately represented.

It’s possible that Patricia is just some type of SJW who, unable to push blacks and browns into the narrative, was force to use a less desirable victim group (Asians) to signal virtue.

Doesn’t this suit set a federal (Democrat political) precedent that whites do not contribute to diversity? It seems like an inescapable conclusion, given federal diversity preferences for every other group except, it seemed before, Asians.

OT.

The Guardian wonders whether James Flynn might be a crimethinker after all.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/27/james-flynn-race-iq-myths-does-your-family-make-you-smarter

“Go to the American suburbs one evening,” says Flynn, “and find three professors. The Chinese professor’s kids immediately do their homework. The Jewish professor’s kids have to be yelled at. The black professor says: ‘Why don’t we go out and shoot a few baskets?”

Huge lawsuits about institutions that have a very large share of asians not being even more asian is the thing now, ask Harvard College, the oldest corporation in the United States.

So, maybe, the reason Palantir gets 85% of its job applications for software engineer from Asians but only hires 44% Asian has something to do with, I don’t know, Chinese espionage?

You got the “asian” wrong in the case of Palantir, whose niche of giant software contracts for large corporations and governments is heavily South Asian.

The accusations might be all true, Palantir is the biggest company in the sub-niche for projects where you want the programmers to be majority American. Many companies in the same market will give you 100% Indian workforces for your project. That could be OK for a company like Pepsico, they are very international and I think they even have an Indian-American female CEO.

But for the CIA, or even for the top projects at Wal-Mart, 100% Indian immigrants is too big of a culture clash.

I’ve wondered about the legality of setting up an in-house foundation which grants supplemental pay to favored employees.

The corporate pay is set low, so those you want to discriminate against aren’t attracted to apply, the people you favor get “grants” to supplement their pay.

The corporation is not discriminating – all employees are paid low salaries. The foundation has freedom to discriminate, see scholarships for inner city blacks, science grants for female students, etc.

I’ve just noticed – one paragraph on African American IQ scores contains three links – two to Rushton’s work and one to this Unz Review piece

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

Once upon a time there used to be a lot of fuss about institutions that had a very large share of Jews not being even more Jewish, ask Harvard College, the oldest corporation in the United States.

Trump dropped hard in the betting markets overnight. I only watched 10 minutes of it, but I thought Hillary looked and sounded better than Trump.

Trump just did not remind me of a Republican who wins statewide in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, etc.

The Obama Administration out to get Peter Thiel for endorsing Trump?

That was my immediate gut-level reaction. If they actually cared about hiring practices they could go after a bigger fish like Google. Of course, 427 White House visits probably means Google doesn’t have much to worry about there.

why does the CIA have its own venture capital firm?

The intelligence community needs to stay on the cutting edge but the federal government isn’t exactly known for being innovative. Also, being an investor is probably pretty good leverage when you’re trying to convince some anarcho-capitalist tech geeks that putting a backdoor in their firmware isn’t really going against their beliefs.

It’s presumably at the behest of other tech companies, to punish him for not toeing the line on H-1Bs. (Not sure what his views are, but Trump support is objectively anti-H-1B).

[Trump dropped hard in the betting markets overnight]
> after Brexit
> using betting markets to predict
And no mention of your own prediction that the media would call Trump the winner?

Or maybe it’s just an egregious abuse of power and taxpayer money by a despicable administration and its hack political appointees?

Shiu is part of the Minority Occupation Government (and an ugly part at that).

Nothing galls me more than these useless non-white rent-seeking parasites who now serve as diversity enforcement goons and overlords — they are paid by money coerced from Whites and then turn around and tell us, in various way, what shitty racists we are. In our own country. Or what used to be our own country.

Is this true? Isn’t this an abuse of power?

Czechs think Trump won:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2016/09/most-czech-viewers-trump-won-1st-debate.html

The American media claim that polls shows that about 70% think that Hillary has won and 30% think that Trump has won. The percentages are reverted in the Czech media. A poll at center-right mainstream server iDNES.cz shows a 2-to-1 vote in favor of Trump’s victory in the debate. A discussion on the major traditional left-wing Novinky.cz server shows a much bigger support for the comments in favor of Trump.

I feel closer to iDNES.cz readers so here are the top upvoted comments as of this moment:

Petr Novák, 47+/0–

Cybersecurity. Clinton: All hackers are from Russia. …

František Popluhař, 66/3

OMG, when Hillary is smiling, it sends shivers down my spine. If a new remake of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will be shot, I have a proposal for the role of the insane nurse.

Tonda Hejlík, 90/6

So far it’s typical. Donald wants to lower the taxes to stop firms from fleeing abroad or returning to the U.S. Hillary wants to invest, increase wages, welfare payments, but she doesn’t say who will pay the bill. Typical socialist wasting out of other people’s money.

Tomáš Vrábel, 74/6

Trump: Secretary Clinton, what’s your plan?

Clinton: Look at my website – sometimes she changed “website” to her “book”. She couldn’t add anything, not even a general cliché.

If the Democrats were trying to make sure that she shows that she has a plan, unlike Trump, it hasn’t been successful so far.

Karel Nedopil, 66/6

An empty and fake [two adjectives that ex-president Klaus used against a center-right prime minister in a legendary SMS message] Hillary Clinton will send the U.S. to an even faster decline. She really has no plan.

Jiří Fogel, 32/1

Given the careful methods with which “ert” is praising his favorite politician Clinton, it seems that she hasn’t done too well.

Štěpán Binko, 30/1

If the … [c*nt] really said that the financial crisis was caused by the reduction of the taxes for the rich, I will really start to pray for a Trump victory.

Petr Michalík, 39/3

Trump: “You are informing the ISIS about your plans in advance. Then you are fighting them for your whole life.”

Clinton: “You want to lower the taxes for you and your family to have even higher profits.”

Trump was more to the point, clearer. Clinton was closer to clichés and began with her family and granddaughter’s 2nd birthday. Maybe the female voters will be impressed by that.

Jan Souček, 35/3

According to the information in the article, Trump is right at least when he claims that the companies are moving to Asia where the labor is cheaper and therefore steal the jobs from America. It’s happening to Europe, too. He’s also right that the U.S. is responsible for the birth of the Islamic State. I am not sure whether the Iraq invasion was the cause but it surely hasn’t helped to calm the atmosphere in the region. Clinton’s talk was dominated by the traditional political clichés we know from our politicians, too.

Hoang Anh Binh [Vietnamese Czech], 33/3

When one is listening what comrade Clinton is saying, it sounds just like the vacuous clichés from [Czech socialist prime minister] Sobotka. [I couldn't distinguish this comment from an all-Czech right-wing commenter.]

That a thought such as this can clearly be correct tells us everything we need to know about the Obama regime. Hillary would be worse. The scalping will begin the last week of January. Remember Travelgate?

The ‘Department of Labor’ needs to be shut down and given a burial, decent or otherwise.

Correct. They are in oversupply. Kids in my field are graduating with 200k debt and earning the same amount I made in 1985. Something’s got to give.

Trump dropped hard in the betting markets overnight. Trump just did not remind me of a Republican who wins statewide in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, etc.

My bet is that in the polling this this week Trump will still be doing great in the new swing state of Colorado. And not get hurt in the states you mention. Down a point at most. Wisconsin is always the most dicey for Trump.

The rather elastic term “Asian” includes both Indians and Chinese, among other ethnicities, as far as I know.

Perhaps Palantir weeded out most Chinese applicants and took in Indians who accounted for most of the 44% of hires?

I’m speculating, but perhaps some weird race-envy thing set off Ms. Chiu’s investigation and lawsuit? While working in Asia in the 1990s, I observed the sometimes severe face issues many Chinese professionals had relative to Indian professionals. This leads me to suspect something like that is at work.

I find it hard to believe that anyone would blow the whistle and cry anti-Asian discrimination if fully 44% of the hires had been Chinese. More like somebody got wind of something along the lines of an Indian mafia at Palantir favoring their own and turned to a friendly Fed official. It may be a turf battle-and in their minds, white guys need not apply, so to speak.

As I said, I’m freely speculating.

And no mention of your own prediction that the media would call Trump the winner?

I didn’t think she’d win so clearly.

> after Brexit

Well if they were perfect predictors, they would not be very fun.

The market probably overreacted. The polls over the next two days will be more important.

You know, this needs more play. Diversity silliness is actually starting to affect *national security*. We’re not going to have smart people spying for us because they have to be the right shade. The Chinese have got to be laughing their heads off. Same with the Russians, though they’ve probably got a bottle of vodka open.

Once upon a time there used to be a lot of fuss about institutions that had a very large share of Jews not being even more Jewish, ask Harvard College

It was a reasonable policy initially, and Harvard dropped it eventually when it no longer made sense. Discrimination lawsuits were not necessary. Even for the policy’s “victims,” going to a good sub-Harvard college was hardly a grand injustice. And the 20% or so of Jews at Harvard during the Jewish quota era got what they wanted: a chance to assimilate into the American elite. That would have been harder to do in 1925 or 30 if it had been 35-40% Jewish.

The policy was more questionable for medical schools that had Jewish quotas.

Patricia Shiu hasn’t realized that blacks are 14% of the US population. Once she figures that out, she will amend her complaint so as to force Palantir to crash-hire top-level software engineers until that level is reached.

America is in love with Diversity, the Justice Department should keep giving it to them good and hard. With the right policies imposed from above, the US can become as successful as Brazil. Or Burundi. Or Burma. You go Patty, the sky’s the limit!

I like how Apple invented another make work job (VP of Social Initiatives) but couldn’t even be bothered to put a POC in the position.

Will the DOJ investigate this Klan meeting or did they give enough money to the Obama campaign?

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

I sort of agree from overseas watching it on tv as a neutral.

‘swings and roundabouts’. Who was laying more punches on who?

Trump got bruised but he was as good in debate as Dukakis in ’88 against first President Bush.

To Palantir’s credit, they have Palan-queer.

From their ‘Diversity’ page.

Over the years, Palantirians have organized many community and interest groups that receive support and resources from the company. Active groups include Women in Technology, Veterans at Palantir, Palantir Parents, and Palan-Queer (our group for the LGBT-identified and allies).

Yeah.

In the normal commercial world, a private company that is a client, represents the majority of revenue to a service provider and wants to see some new faces across the table would simply drop a hint or two. But Palantir and the government are different-or rather, they are the same, in a deep state sense.

I know about independence of executive departments in our government but it certainly appears that one arm of the executive, Ms. Shiu’s, is working at cross purposes with another, namely, the national security apparatus that signs the checks to Palantir and requires high security employees at Palantir, i.e. white guys. I’m surprised no one has ridden herd higher up and and simply told her to shelve the investigation. Or maybe I’m not surprised.

has something to do with, I don’t know, Chinese espionage?

A video of Laszlo Bock leaving for work.

For a software engineer position, the government said, the company hired 14 non-Asians and 11 Asians among more than 1,160 qualified applicants of whom 85% were Asian.
“The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in 3.4 million,” the government said in the filing.

Let’s check this arithmetic. Among n = 14+11 = 25 hirees randomly chosen from a pool of qualified applicants 85% of whom are Asian, what is the probability of hiring no more than 11 Asians?

p = .85 = prb that a qualified applicant is Asian, q = 1-p = .15 = prb that a qualified applicant is non-Asian, P(k) = prb that exactly k of the n hirees are Asian = C(n,k) ways to choose k out of n applicants * p^k prb that these k applicants are Asian * q^(n-k) prb that the other n-k applicants are non-Asian; i.e., P(k) = C(n,k)*p^k*q^(n-k). So the asked-for probability is P(0)+P(1)+P(2)+…+P(11).

Here is a TI-83/84 programmable calculator routine to compute this probability:

25 sto N:.85 sto P:1-P sto Q:0 sto S

For(K,0,11):(N nCr K)*P^K*Q^(N-K)+S sto S:End

Disp S

When I run this routine, I get S = 2.493574543E-6, which is approximately 1 in 401,031, not 1 in 3.4 million. Did I do something wrong?

When will they just simplify things and make it illegal to hire white men?

You watched 10 minutes and think she won clearly. Thanks for the insight.

By the way, why does the CIA have its own venture capital firm? Can other agencies do this – go into business for themselves? Could the Department of Agriculture open up a chain of burger joints? Could the Department of the Interior open up a bunch of strip clubs and sex-toy stores?

I’m confident the men who wrote the Constitution would say this is ultra vires, like having the unconstitutional Fed engage in an unconstitutional bailout of private companies. Or ceding war powers to the Executive. Or Departments of Education, Energy, Interior, HHS, HUD. It’s a long list.

That’s why I don’t take “Constitutional conservatives” seriously. The original Constitutional scheme was destroyed by the 14th and subsequent amendments, and the document means what those in power say it means regardless.

No, we have already had national security totally compromised by diversity.

We have unindicted co conspirators of Al Qaeda and ISIS in the FBI and CIA. We have the Muslim brotherhood as the closest aide to our future president.

We have had ethnic Chinese whose families are still under the direction control of the PRC in our national labs and IC for decades now.

And the bulk of the mathematicians in the NSA have strong ties to Israel.

We’ve got transgenders in the military, lowering standards for combat to allow women to pass, and we have a ship named for Harvey Milk.

The ship has already hit the iceberg.

“Maybe Patricia Shiu standing up for her Chinese side of the family?”

I can’t imagine Silicon Valley Chinese thinking Federal discrimination lawsuits against tech are a great idea. The optics are terrible — “only” 40 % Asian, 85 percent(!) Asian applicants, a rock-star company — and they’re surely smart enough to know it. Plus zero chances of enthusiastic support from the Democratic coalition.

IMO, WAY too much is made of these presidential debates. The media whips up a huge frenzy b/c they want viewers but I don’t think most people are looking for the best BSr and master of weasel words and slipperiness (at which cankles is pretty good), but rather a leader with a vision for the country. I believe Trump is greatly superior on the latter, and that last night’s debate will be a distant memory by this coming weekend. I thought the debate was kind of boring. I thought hillary looked arrogant and dismissive and was kicking up a lot of dust with no ability to follow through and achieve on anything; and I thought Mr Trump missed several opportunities to take H out to the woodshed on obamacare, the world’s highest corporate tax rate, wide open borders and cheap labor destroying job prospects for young black men, and her awful record and behavior on ‘cybersecurity’ when she set up her own server to do an end run around federal cybersecurity law and protocol.

That’s funny, was just thinking about how the internet is a modern-day, real-life version of the Palantiri, with similar dangers and power.

That was because of explicit quotas – caps on the number of Jews allowed entry, no matter how qualified they might be. It is similar to what Malaysia currently does to its Chinese minority.

IRONY ALERT

Asian employees in SV are usually not considered as an example of diversity when the subject matter is SV diversity.

“The intelligence community needs to stay on the cutting edge……….”

Who says? Them? What statutory authority is there for a government agency to go into business? Or is the CIA supposed to be above the law?

The chance that you know multiple people that work there, all of whom are “3 and 4 std dev above the average kind of smart” seems… unlikely.

I agree that Shiu is a rent-seeking parasite who has made a good living out of the diversity racket, but the Chinese have been here a long time. There’s a good chance Shiu’s Chinese ancestors have been here longer than yours. Or does the fact that your ancestors looked more like many of the people who were already here when your ancestors immigrated than Shiu’s Chinese ancestors did make this more of “your country” than Shiu’s?

One also notes the Orwellian deceit of calling a half-”white” person “non-white”, unless you consider the Irish to be “non-white”, which you presumably do not.

I think THE lasting memory of obummer’s terms will be the complete and utter destruction of even a hint that our Federal alphabet agencies are anything but goon squads at the beck and call of the demoncrats.

IRS, FBI, DOJ, DHS, etc.

We are so FUBAR.

Not that the debate increased my respect for the vile sociopath Hillary one iota but she won the debate by any reasonable measure. She appeared healthy and, unlike Trump, she didn’t ramble, interrupt the moderator, hit below the belt or go past her alotted time much if at all. Trump missed a lot of great opportunities. He also said some ridiculous things (like saying she’d been fighting ISIS her whole life). He also missed a great opportunity to call her out on a really really stupid thing she said (she implied that Trump unjustifiably believes women shouldn’t get equal pay for inferior work).

Trump really is not a serious candidate.

It’s a win-win for big government. Palantir pays off DoL with taxpayer money given to them by the deep state. There’s also the added bonus of making the government look more accountable and less corrupt. So the taxpayer gets double raped while being led to think their government is run by honest, fair-monded people.

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

I like the inscrutable Kung Fu master scowl on Jonathan Ives face. What a fakir!
And how come the two black executives out of nineteen have their photos at the bottom? I see racism and misogyny from the gaily ruled Apple Corps.

Since when was Chinese espionage a disqualifying factor?

“… why does the CIA have its own venture capital firm?”

Why should the Congress Critters and their staffers be the only govt employees to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing? Where do you think they get all their insider trading ideas? Consider In-Q-Tel and it’s peers to be a Co-investment scheme.

How much of this is revenge against Peter Thiel?

Also, I’m going from assuming that the establishment types – on both left and right – are just that freaking stupid to assuming they actively hate their own country.

Over half of the guys look seriously gay. Just a coincidence, I suppose. It’s not like Tim Cook would surround himself with toyboys, no way?

>CIA have its own venture capital firm? Can other agencies do this – go into business for themselves? Could the Department of Agriculture open up a chain of burger joints?

Interestingly enough, the Department of Agriculture is a major mortgage lender, or more accurately, a major guarantor of mortgage debt.

http://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/single-family-housing-guaranteed-loan-program

However, I don’t think they did this with the intention of making money, and I doubt they are making money on the program.

Another Charles Murray class divide marker: Do you know about USDA home loans?

Why would anyone be surprised by this? National security and effectiveness have long been thrown overboard in the arrogant belief that US margins are so robust that we can handicap ourselves and still win easily. Or at least be defeated with no real consequences, like Vietnam. Even perhaps better for Nice White Ladies and their allies among NAMs.

As Michelle Obama said, some (WHITE) people will have to be fired so (incompetent) Blacks and Hispanics and Nice White Ladies can take their jobs.

This is the end result of SJW/PC/Civil Rights movements. Expulsion of Whites particularly White men from every job and their replacement by incompetent non-Whites, and White women. Who are not exactly a picture of competence in most fields outside medicine. Melissa Mayer at Yahoo?

Indian programmers are useful for stuff that is cheap and non-consequential. Every time performance and reliability and accuracy are important, Indian programmers fail. They are cheap, that’s about it.

Hillary looked like a sneering, Nice White Lady in the debate, and Trump was rattled and IMHO ineffective in his responses. However I figure that Hillary did marginally better as White women love that sneering Nice White Ladyism and the idea of hereditary aristocracy.

Sued for hiring not enough Asians? Looks like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. As for Asians spying, I’ve heard it’s actually a big problem from someone who works in the industry.

OT, but used to be they retired your number because of a lifetime’s batting average over 300, lots of home runs, RBIs and few errors or for a career with a great won/loss ratio, high strikeout rate and low ERA but today all you have to do to gain baseball immortality is go for a midnight joy ride with your friends in your hotrod boat and smash head-on into a rock jetty at high speed and kill yourself and your friends. This is a great example of sterling behavior to set before your kids as worthy of undying praise.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2016/09/26/marlins-honor-jose-fernandez/91134160/

As the Derb says, “We Are Doomed.”

Sometimes I see white mothers bragging about how their child is majoring in STEM, and I feel almost pity for them and want to tell them that the propaganda about the STEM shortage and STEM as a path to future career success is mostly a lie. But, I don’t want to crush them, plus their child might be one of the exceptions who goes on to really make it big or to simply have a really very nice STEM career.

OT: Fatties for Hillary!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fat-people-rise-up-we-could-swing-this-election

Any non-US Citizen Asians Palantir hires are probably (hopefully?) all working on Palantir’s healthcare, legal, and financial projects. That said, in light of 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim immigrants contracting Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, a rational nation would be asking itself what proportion of its intelligence apparatus it feels comfortable putting in the hands of people who may have ethnic loyalty to competing powers.

In 2011 a Palantir engineer went rogue trying to take down WikiLeaks: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/3/#5f2bb6211886

The Hacker News crowd isn’t too hot on Palantir for reasons all over the board ranging from toxic culture to delivering a supposedly mediocre product.

OT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/opinion/im-black-does-america-have-a-plan-for-my-life.html?_r=0

Yale SJW/Prof: “I’m Black. Does America Have a Plan for My Life?”

The usual contracting processes get in the way of procuring super-dooper secret stuff. They like flexibility, low profiles, and getting the best value, not the lowest bid. The problem is that contracting processes are rigid in order to prevent abuse, like having your own tax-payer funded venture capital firm.

For a software engineer position, the government said, the company hired 14 non-Asians and 11 Asians among more than 1,160 qualified applicants of whom 85% were Asian

Talk about burying the lede – for 25 skilled job openings they received over 1,000 applications – more than 40 applicants for each job. For jobs in Silicon Valley, where no matter how much a programmer makes, he can expect to spend most of it on astronomical rents (forget about actually owing a house) or be crammed into some kind of miserable overcrowded situation. To live a normal American middle class life with a 3 bedroom house and a yard for your kids that doesn’t involve a 2 hour commute, you need to make millions. Whatever they are paying these employees – $150K, 200K or more, is not nearly enough given what the local housing costs are.

Fundamentally, our economy really really sucks. No wonder there is no growth in wages (especially if you look at discretionary income – what is actually left after you pay for taxes, housing, health care, etc.) – if you can get 40 people to fill each job, there is no pressure to offer increased pay. If our economy was really healthy there would never be that kind of disparity between the # of applicants and the number of positions available. That gives employers crazy bargaining power to underpay you and exploit you. Marx used to talk about “the reserve army of the unemployed at the factory gates” who would lead to the “immiseration of the proletariat” – his idea was that there would always be so many more workers than jobs that wages would be driven down, down, down. During the post-WWII boom, that wasn’t true at all – workers were in short supply and companies competed with better wage and benefit packages to lure them. But now, Marx is being proved right again. If a full grown man with a college degree and a valuable skill is being forced to share a 2 br apt. with 5 other people, isn’t that in effect immiseration by historic American standards?

Maybe some of the 40 already had lower paying jobs in software but I’ll bet a bunch of them were underemployed somewhere outside their field. Something like half of college grads are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. You have a cascade effect. Rather than college grads being completely unemployed, you have college grads taking blue collar jobs, blue collar workers taking menial jobs, people who used to have menial jobs staying home and living on welfare and in the illegal economy. So 40 underemployed software engineer applicants ultimately mean that somewhere there are 40 yout’s hanging around on street corners and shooting at each other.

And out of that 85% Asia applicant group, how many were immigrants? If these folks were back home in Bangalore, maybe the competition for Americans wouldn’t be so rough? But maybe Palantir really LIKES it that they can get 40 people for each opening?

Another buried lede is that NAMs were not even in the game – even the leftist gov’t doesn’t pretend that they could have hired blacks or Hispanics. What about all the black software geniuses you see in the movies? Couldn’t they have hired some of those?

Agree.

Oh Steve, you are an inveterate conspiracy theorist!

“You know, this needs more play. Diversity silliness is actually starting to affect*national security*.”

What tipped you off? The Obama Administration allowing women to become Navy SEALs? The fact that Obama has now promoted as many (or more) blacks to the rank of four star general than all previous presidents combined?

At the last count (and this was probably a year ago) there were 8 blacks appointed to four star by presidents before Obama, and Obama alone had appointed 8. At that time 18% of currently serving four stars were black. That despite the fact that blacks are only 13% of the US population and a far smaller share of the officer corps.

It wasn’t the 14th Amendment (being pro-slavery is pretty extreme even for an alt-righter). Most government programs fit under post New Deal interpretations of the general welfare clause – ” The Congress shall have Power To …. provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.” EVERYTHING conceivably promotes the general welfare and fits under this clause. Under the S. Ct. precedents, Congress is its own judge as to what promotes the general welfare – if they say it does, then it does and the courts have no right to question this. The 16th Amendment (income tax) also had a major effect because it created a huge slush fund to pay for all this nonsense.

As the US becomes more and more like a Communist country, it becomes useful to look at other Communist countries. In China it is very common for the military and other government agencies to have their own businesses and often in fields that have nothing to do with the underlying mission of the agency but are just good investments (or at least provide lucrative corruption opportunities for gov’t officials). In the US, this has been done up until now by subsidies and loans – the Dept. of Energy didn’t actually own Solyndra, they just provided all the funding for it. In some ways this is even worse – what we do is that we socialize losses and privatize gains. Goldman Sachs really likes this setup.

I actually know a bit about Palantir:

- Palantir has lots of Asian employees. Palantir PR videos heavily feature asian employees (with popped collars). I am highly skeptical of claims that they discriminate against Asians.

- A legit scandal about Palantir: they fund “news” outlets like Wired to run fake news stories that are very thinly veiled advertisements for Palantir. Read the following, it’s not subtle. It’s so outrageously obviously fake journalism, but I guess people who aren’t on guard and wary will fall for it.

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/palantir/

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/software-brain-not-survivable/

- The whole military intelligence defense contractor space is a wreck. They have a reputation for having large well paid staff pumping out low quality software. Top software talent is easy to buy, but the political + organizational culture of the defense contracting world just does not lead to awesome software. It’s _extremely_ regulation heavy. Palantir wants to sell themselves as a lean and efficient alternative to traditional defense contractors, but in reality, they are exactly just another defense contractor wanting to get their hands on large defense contractor contract dollars.

Coalition of the Fringes fraying? Trying to apply a little kkkrazy glue … ?

So Thiel is obviously a Trump-supporter and a mensch, and despite our popular sideline of taking potshots at him over male growth hormone use and “power-glute” sex ads so is Andrew Sullivan (he defended John Rocker’s right to speak his mind back in the day and is still an uncompromising defender of free speech) what is it about gays and surveillance/intrigue/spying? Thiel owns Palantir, and Tim Cook Apple, maker of the real-life version of 1984′s telescreen, which provides you information but is also an incredibly comprehensive way to spy on you and control your life (it even now tells you to do your “daily jerks”- the only thing Orwell got wrong about the future is failing to see it would come in a much more convenient form factor).

I was struck by the point from ZERO DARK THIRTY that real diversity is hiring a woman analyst to track bin Laden, since she would be more attuned to the network of family and personal relationships that could be used to snare him. So is the higher-than-expected preponderance of gay males in the intrigue professions simply their world-beating combination of cold, male analytics with a more female-attuned sensitivity to relationships, social status, and interiority?

Having read the 14th, it seems focused on the events of the War of Northern Aggression and seems totally redundant these days. The constitution and the bill of rights seems to cover it.

I particularly dislike the ‘birth-right citizenship’ vapors I detect emanating from it.

Does that make me a pro-slavery extremist?

Personally, I find the economic arguments and the human arguments against slavery pretty persuasive and consider it a huge mistake to have ever imported slaves to the US and think that the penalty for involvement in the slave trade should be hanging by the neck until dead.

Or maybe I’m not surprised.

+1

It is a bit sobering to glimpse the workings of the top levels of government and see all the petty feuds and other disorganization.

National security being threatened by hiring people with obvious ethnic loyalties to a different nation is nothing new – in fact, it’s one of the oldest arguments for discrimination. Jonathan Pollard and the Rosenbergs are the American prototypes, but of course l’affaire Dreyfus is the most famous.

What tipped you off? The Obama Administration allowing women to become Navy SEALs?

Notice that for jobs that really, really cannot fail (apparently Sec. of State and President of the United States are now jobs that merely cannot fail) they are still occupied exclusively by craggy old white dudes- Comey at FBI, Brenner at CIA, Carter at Defense? (BTW, pro tip which my homie AnotherDad will back me up on- the one weird way you can tell who is gay, especially by the time they reach middle age, is whether they have the ebullient, boyishly awake look (gay) or the beaten-down, how can I kill myself and the family still collect the insurance ’cause my wife is a b!tch and my kids are spoiled jerks daily though experiment look (straight).

But, yeah, those jobs will be in the sights of the diversity headhunters soon enough. As you mention, special operations (Rangers, if not Seals just yet) have been tagged for improving their womyn quotient and it’ll soon be 10 years since Gen. Casey said diversity is the most terrible casualty our armed forces could sustain. I can’t wait till Congress approves funds for next generation nuclear submarines with lactation stations, halal kitchens and prayer rooms- that’ll show those stale pale Ruskies who still cling to dying notions about submarine speed and stealth! Wonder also when the pressure will begin to drop intelligence services’ traditional prejudice against people with messy personal lives (affairs, divorces) as it discriminates against gay men and their situational notions of commitment, or to be spiteful go the other way and make national intelligence a lesbian old girls’ network, since where else can you find candidates with such impeccably clean personal lives that they’re creeping up on their silver wedding anniversaries but haven’t had sex with anyone in 20 years!

Very good comment.

I can just imagine a series of espionage scandals breaking out, with a number of Chinese-”American” federal employees implicated in the various acts of treason. After about three or four of these the general public begins to catch on to who and what is this Fifth Column and a President Hillary Clinton takes to the mike, paraphrasing Manuel Valls: “As devastating a blow as these security leaks are, it would be an even greater loss if we began calling the merits of our diversity and tolerance into question.”

Thought that immediately, too. But, this legal pursuit will have the unintended consequences of having all the pan-Asian guys and white guys working in SV realize that an existential crisis looms over them: their hopes of having a family – affording it; hanging on to their job/a job, once they are middle-aged.

The American People & the future of the USA is at stake. This will galvanize more people, not just the ones who are working in SV to vote for Trump. Why in the world would they not? No one will vote against their economic interests ever again…2008 Wall Street-owned crisis was the last straw. Even the What’s the Matter with Kansas people are voting for Trump.

Remembering Herman’s, “the rent is too damn high,” together with “Everyday” American’s reality (all worker bees) in SV/Pacific Northwest, will instill a sense of dread. So many of the techies still have student loans to pay, and the cleaners, cooks, security personnel, yoga instructors, etc. at these corporations are dependent on the paycheck. Brexit was the first calving of the EU iceberg, after all.

OT: my wonderful late father often said, “this country has too many lawyers, and, eventually too many frivolous lawsuits, or unwinnable lawsuits, will bankrupt the USA, destroy companies that employ thousands of people who are dependent on their paychecks.” No other country in the world has a zest for lawsuits like the US. Was it Shakespeare who said something about offing lawyers? I’m too tired to remember the specific words.

I expect massive amounts of people to just hide who they will vote for. Upshot: no stupid, wasteful lawn signs to ruin the Halloween decor. As a person concerned with aesthetics, this is quite nice.

A decent opposition political party would use this as an opportunity to end the HB-1 visa program for the tech industry. Too bad we don’t have one of those.

How does the government know who is “qualified”? Do they know what this company is looking for? And knowing precisely what this company and each hiring manager wants, did they interview 1,160 persons?

My thoughts exactly. If we go by what DPG (comment #1) said, Palantir employees tend to be exceptionally smart. If Silicon Valley SW engineering hiring situation is anything like here in Seattle, which is a safe assumption, there is no way that there are that many truly qualified applicants for each position. “Qualified” if you BS on your resume, yes.

…for 25 skilled job openings they received over 1,000 applications – more than 40 applicants for each job.

The first comment (DPG) mentioned that, from his personal experience, Palantir employees are exceptionally smart. Meaning, there is no way that Palantir received 40 really qualified applicants for each position. I know a bit about hiring SW engineers in Seattle, and you just don’t get 40 really qualified applicants for each position, especially on the high end. I have no doubt that most of those 40 were under-qualified or just BS’ed on their resumes to appear qualified.

A good hiring manager would quickly cut through the crap and weed out the marginal applicants. But I can see why the DOL would want to over-inflate the number of qualified applicants in their lawsuit, in order to make Palantir’s negotiating position weaker.

From my experience again, the only SW engineers that companies can afford to underpay are H1-Bs, because they can’t leave. The competition for qualified staff (citizens or green card holders) is just too high to allow systematic underpayment, at least here in Seattle.

I agree with the rest of your comment.

“14 non-Asians and 11 Asians among more than 1,160 qualified applicants of whom 85% were Asian”

A bag contains 1160 balls. 174 of the balls are colored white while 986 of the balls are a color other than white or yellow. Usual disclaimer about drawing being done in a fair way with no replacement blah blah blah.

25 balls are drawn from the bag, what is the probability of drawing exactly 14 white balls?

What is the probability of drawing 14 or more white balls?

Post your answer here because I don’t care enough to solve it. I could not find an online calculator within my allotted 30 seconds of internet search time.

Astute pupils will want to go further by looking into confidence intervals to see if the single Palantir draw is really out of bounds and by how many standard deviations. Feel free to make assumptions about the apriori distribution of white balls, you get super duper bonus points if you can work Bayes theorem into this somehow.

Doesn’t everyone BS on their resume?

Breitbart claims it is payback:

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/09/26/palantir-obama-admin-sues-peter-thiels-racial-discrimination/

I’m surprised no one has ridden herd higher up and and simply told her to shelve the investigation. Or maybe I’m not surprised.

This is a political parting shot from Obama to Thiel for his support of Trump.

Lot still mad Cruz got rolled by the Trump Train. News at 11.

Agreed.

We know how Asians excel at credentialism. This is a direct attack on the remaining whites working in STEM fields.

Remember to pull this one out when some clown suggests that Asians might ally with whites against the diversity extortion coalition. Asians are part of this, they covet white held jobs in STEM, the professions and small business as well as white seats in the top universities.

The conflict between whites and Asians is just getting started. Asian ethnic activist groups have a raft of similar complaints, arguing that not enough executives, CEO’s, Ivy League professors, judges etc. are Asian because too many are white.

Obama may be doing this to stoke tension between whites and Asians. It will work, whites in STEM are already under siege and know it.

A legit scandal about Palantir: they fund “news” outlets like Wired to run fake news stories that are very thinly veiled advertisements for Palantir.

There isn’t a single corporation on Earth that doesn’t do this.

Suppose you’ve got a coin weighted 85/15 in favor of heads. You flip it 25 times and get 11 heads. That is what happened at Palantir with “heads” = “Asian”. The chances of that happening by chance are roughly .000002, or two in a million. So it is a tad more than what the story says: “one in 3.4 million.” And yes … I am Asian.

I wonder if Obama will sue Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for only having 17% Asian enrollment. Plus they are a little lopsided religiously as well.

What appears to be out of line is not the number of Asians hired by Palantir, but the number of Asians who applied for the job.

I find these statistics quoted in another article (complaining about women’s low numbers instead of Asian low numbers, so they can be honest about the Asian thing.)

White employees are 61 percent of Google’s workforce while Asians make up 30 percent, blacks 2 percent and Hispanics 3 percent. The majority of leadership roles – 72 percent – are held by whites with Asians holding 23 percent and other minorities claiming less than 6 percent of top spots.

Four percent of employed software developers in the United States are African American, 5 percent are Hispanic and 29 percent are Asian, according to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics]. Comparatively, 1 percent of the Google’s tech workforce is black, 2 percent is Hispanic and 34 percent is Asian.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/29/most-google-employees-are-white-men-where-are-allthewomen/

Obviously, 11/25 Asians (=44%) is more than compatible both with Google’s numbers and the numbers nationwide for Asian software engineers.

But how did 85% of the “qualified applicants” to these jobs at Palantir turn out to be Asian? (And does “qualified” mean only technically qualified, or also eligible to get a top secret security clearance?)

The virtue-signalling down here is embarrassing and disgusting. They are flying the flag at half-staff, for Christ’s sake.

There were times when he didn’t even finish his thought, like during the birther question when he kept talking about Blumenthal and Doyle but never actually reaching a conclusion.

He definitely could have stood to be more zen.

Just had this conversation last night with my brother – a $400K/yr medical doctor working for a large insurance company. He’s strongly discouraging his two sons (ages 12 & 14) from going into medicine. He wants them to study engineering. I’ve argued with him about the severe limitations on a successful, lucrative engineering career, but he knows a guy that has a brother that studied engineering and became a big VP at GE, so there.

I earned my BS Computer Science 30 years ago followed up w/ a well-regarded MBA, and due to a couple of layoffs & blown opportunities, the “Great Recession,” H-1B immigration, and crushing competition, I’m earning exactly what I earned in 1999 – well under $100K. My sis-in-law is a $150K per year optometrist working 35-hour weeks as an employee of some established practice. They plan to retire at 55 y/o with over $10 million net worth.

just that freaking stupid to assuming they actively hate their own country.

The country we know as America is not their own country. They’re (enthusiastic) citizens of the world. Ask them.

Insightful read on the topic:

The Insider Threat, from an Alt-Right Viewpoint
Carl F. Robinson

http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/08/the-insider-threat-from-an-alt-right-viewpoint/

The White Savior Narrative Influencing American Leadership Policies

After Major Hasan went on his rampage, the US Army’s Chief of Staff General George Casey stated that “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”[16] Under the Civil Rights narrative, American government officials are put into a position where they must be a “white savior” to the non-whites and keep the regular mission going. The “white savior” is a white person who motivates, saves, improves, etc. some group of non-whites. Due to this sub-function of the Civil Rights environment, no Chief of Staff can possibly say that Islamic soldiers punch above their weight in insider threat behavior. To this day, more Americans have been killed by Muslims in the US Army than Muslims have been killed on the American side in combat. Saying so is admitting failure as a “white savior.” For the same reason, no American official can say that employing Chinese in sensitive technical positions is a bad idea.

Patience Grasshopper.

So is the higher-than-expected preponderance of gay males in the intrigue professions simply their world-beating combination of cold, male analytics with a more female-attuned sensitivity to relationships, social status, and interiority?

“A single life does well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground when it first must fill a pool.”

- Francis Bacon, Essays

http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/8.html

Trump missed a lot of great opportunities. He also said some ridiculous things (like saying she’d been fighting ISIS her whole life). He also missed a great opportunity to call her out on a really really stupid thing she said (she implied that Trump unjustifiably believes women shouldn’t get equal pay for inferior work).

Trump had a slip of the tongue with the “whole life” comment; everyone knows what he really meant. Same for Clinton saying it unfair women should work as hard for equal pay. The great Aspergers electoral tidal wave we’ve been hearing about for so long has not gone through the formality of actually coming into existence.

but the political + organizational culture of the defense contracting world just does not lead to awesome software

Often it doesn’t lead to software at all. It’s not unusual for the DoD to spend billions on a project that never results in a working product. The millions and millions of lines of spaghetti code just trip over each other and will never run. Sort of like the Obamacare software.

This is textbook anarcho-tyranny. They can go after whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason. It’s up to their whim.

“Statutory authority?” What, are you in the second grade?

That being said, maybe there is a law; I don’t know. But they don’t need one. The CIA is not supposed to be above the law, but practically it is. So is the rest of the executive branch, not to mention the federal government as a whole. They make it up as they go.

The 13th amendment abolished slavery (or some of it), not the 14th. You can oppose the 14th without regard to slavery. Why even bring it up?

That was because of explicit quotas – caps on the number of Jews allowed entry, no matter how qualified they might be. It is similar to what Malaysia currently does to its Chinese minority.

This is a nonsense point. It was just Jewish striving and whining.

As i’ve pointed out repeatedly these were *private* Protestant institutions serving the NE WASPy elite. They are entitled to define their mission as they see fit and even refuse to serve *anyone*–no Jews, none of my Irish Catholic folks, no Asians, heck no downmarket Protestant rednecks (still pretty much the case). They could have filled their student bodies with your Cabots and Lowells, Lodges Eliots, Forbes, Delanos and Coolidges with your occasional Bush thrown in. If that’s what they wanted to do. They chose instead to continue to cater to their historic WASP founders, but also take a quota of folks from talented outgroups … and then those folks whine about it.

Your claim that the complaint was about explicit quotas “no matter how qualified” is just mathematically\logically a nonsense point. (Yes, the Supreme Court has used it–but then they gave us Griggs v. Duke Power and “disparate impact”, math is not what they do.)

Once you wade into affirmative action at all, you’re doing this. You’re saying “i’m willing to live with inferiority\superiority in my (normal) selection metric to get the results i want. Making what you’re doing fuzzy is irrelevant. Harvard manages to rustle up a 10-12% African American class every year despite no-conceivable academic metric yielding them anything close to that (even after tapping Africa). What actually chaps your hide is simply that the quota was on you–*your people*. That, of course, everyone seems to think is uniquely “unfair”.

Some sort of “affirmative action”–i.e. quotas–seems to come down like rain whenever you have “diversity” and democratic politics (even often non-democratic politics)–see India.

The best policy is far and away … do not have diversity!

But if you have it, then the honesty of a quota–like the Indians–is far better. Then you can have the straight out political fight about the size of the quota for various groups. Which lets you also discuss the cost v. benefits of the quota.

My take is once you’re having affirmative action and quotas, you *should* have quota on the high achieving groups as well–they bear the cost not just the groups in the middle of the pack. Which in the case of the US is in fact the white gentiles entirely responsible for building the nation!

A quota range, say representation of no less than 1/2 X–where X is your group’s share of the population–to no more than 4X, strikes me as very fair. Blacks would get 8%–not their share, but significantly represented. Hispanics maybe a point more. On the other end, Jews would be limited to 8% and Asians to 16%–again perhaps not their shares of the most talented, but the truly talented ones get their due. White gentiles in the middle would be squeezed, but not the squeeze out they get now. You could have under-represented groups–say Scots-Irish rednecks–petition for their own quota to make sure they had representation.

Diversity sucks. But if you’re going to play these games, then best to play them in the daylight with fair rules.

Red Indians have been here even longer than Railroad-Americans. What’s your point?

Not unlikely. “The Bell Curve” on social stratification.

… How much partitioning has really occurred?

Perhaps a few examples will illustrate. Think of your twelve closest friends or colleagues. For most readers of this book, a large majority will be college graduates. Does it surprise you to learn that the odds of having even half at them be college graduates are only six in a thousand, if people were randomly paired off? [341 Many of you will not think it odd that half or more of the dozen have advanced degrees. But the odds against finding such a result among a randomly chosen group of twelve Americans are actually more than a million to one. Are any of the dozen a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, University of Chicago, or Brown? The chance that even one is a graduate of those twelve schools is one in a thousand. The chance of finding two among that group is one in fifty thousand. The chance of finding four or more is less than one in a billion.

Most readers of this book — this may be said because we know a great deal about the statistical tendencies of people who read a book like this — are in preposterously unlikely groups, and this reflects the degree of partitioning that has already occurred.

Orwellian? Get out of here. You think Obama is deceiving people when he presents himself as black? We all know about his white mom but play along anyway. Why do you think that is.

You have to study up on racial conventions. You can’t deduce them logically from general principle.

I don’t know about the legality of it. I was just giving a rationale.

Espionage is an arms race that doesn’t end. Of course the CIA should try to stay on top of current technology.

Whether or not they should do it by gambling tax dollars is a separate issue. The government gives grants all the time. In-Q-Tel at least can make its money back. It’s the federal government though, so it’s probably fair to assume the system is extremely corrupt.

It was the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery not the 14th (i.e., the Anti-Gnostic is not pro-slavery). Like most bad laws, the 14th may have been well-intentioned, but its vague wording and dubious enactment made it a platform for every judicial activist and progressive utopianist since. It now guarantees little or nothing that isn’t guaranteed better elsewhere, while it exclusively guarantee a bunch of activist claptrap its drafters and promoters never foresaw. Exhibit A: birthright citizenship.

One also notes the Orwellian deceit of calling a half-”white” person “non-white”, unless you consider the Irish to be “non-white”, which you presumably do not.

It’s the Shius, Obamas, and the Colin Kaepernicks of this country who have made the choice to identify so for their benefit.

Lord yes! That’s the look.

BTW, life insurance purchased more than three years before your suicide is still payable. Unless, you commit suicide by cop. Then the insurance company would more than likely consider your death happened during the commission of a felony. Much better to pull the trigger yourself in the privacy of your own kitchen while the wife is shopping and the kids are gone.

OT. Again.

When a UK women’s champion fell-runner (1 British and 3 English titles in one of the toughest athletic disciplines) stabbed a (black) senior UK Athletics official and was convicted of attempted murder, I assumed it was a case of unrequited lust or similar – media reports were pretty vague about motive and the victim was a hunky former rugby star. Hell hath no fury etc.

Turns out the athlete, Lauren Jeska, was formerly a male, and was (allegedly) facing an inquiry into her status as a “female” runner.

“Her titles could have been in doubt if UK Athletics ruled that she had had an unfair advantage while competing against women, sources suggested.”

https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/uk-transwoman-athlete-admits-to-triple-stab-attack-on-sports-officials-who-discovered-he-was-male/

(The site I think is very against that sort of thing, but it links to the press reports)

S/he is in a women’s prison now – hopefully not in the kitchens.

if you can get 40 people to fill each job, there is no pressure to offer increased pay. If our economy was really healthy there would never be that kind of disparity between the # of applicants and the number of positions available.

I don’t know. Palantir is at super elite. Maybe they get 40 applicants for each position because they pay well? Certainly Palantir employees are not there because they have nowhere else to go.

Similarly, how many applicants do you think Goldman gets for each position? Are you going to argue that Goldman employees are underpaid based on that?

I tried a google spreadsheet and got your number too. It took me a while though. Math is hard

But they created Ada to fix that problem, so surely it is no longer so.

It wasn’t the 14th Amendment (being pro-slavery is pretty extreme even for an alt-righter).

Huh? Jack i thought you were a lawyer or legal knowledgeable or something? (My age addled brain gets confused.)

The 14th amendment isn’t about slavery. The 13th finished that off. And in line with Anti-Gnostic’s argument, i hear its Equal Protection clause being trotted out all the time by the left when they want to rip up some tradition or legislate via judges.

Here’s Section 1–the part that gets trotted out:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Clearly the equal protection clause was there simply to insure that blacks\ex-slaves had the same rights and protections under civil and criminal law. But indeed it has been stretched repeatedly by the left, to anti-democratically strip majorities from making normal distinctions–age, sex, marital status, criminal background, etc. etc.–in law. Who knew for instance that the states approving this amendment were requiring gay marriage?

I agree with you that the New Deal era was a significant break in our constitutional tradition with the idea Congress should decide everything. Honestly it had a great deal to do with the War and the Cold War in legitimizing an all powerful federal government. But the Civil War was a huge break as well. And in this post-War identity-politics era the 14th amendment has been a significant tool of the left.

class divide marker: Do you know about USDA home loans?

They certainly know about that other USDA venture, EBT, or “Eat Before Thursday [midnight]“, when the paycheck is posted.

Could the Department of the Interior open up a bunch of strip clubs and sex-toy stores?

Department of Interior indeed. Well done.

“It’s possible that Patricia is just some type of SJW”

The majority of Asian Americans in general are Social Justice Warriors.

But the Civil War was a huge break as well…

…as were the fugitive slave ordinances before that which, although constitutional, were a crushing blow to state sovereignty. Why would crossing the Great Lakes free a slave, but not crossing the Ohio? Why didn’t the states in-between have a say in the matter?

Didn’t Sauron have a Palantir? Just sayin’.

what is it about gays and surveillance/intrigue/spying?

1. No families.
2. Degenerates.
3. Easily blackmailed/security risk.

Trump dropped hard in the betting markets overnight. I only watched 10 minutes of it, but I thought Hillary looked and sounded better than Trump.

I watched a good hour, before i had to leave for my scout meeting. For someone who really cares it was painful. Hillary was not “good”–she was her usual smarmy self, with the typical Democrat\big-state crap about a plan for everything. And she is deathly boring. But she showed up to do her shtick competently.

I’m guessing that the betting markets had a lot of people like me, who aware of Hillary’s vulnerabilities and the opportunities to clear make a nationalist case *expected*–had “priced in”– Trump to show up and do some of that. And he utterly failed to do so.

“Another buried lede is that NAMs were not even in the game – even the leftist gov’t doesn’t pretend that they could have hired blacks or Hispanics. What about all the black software geniuses you see in the movies? Couldn’t they have hired some of those?”

Why didn’t Palantir hire Donald Glover from The Martian, after all he is obviously a MENSA genius.

By the way Donald Glover’s guilty of racist cultural appropriation, because his rap name is Childish Gambino and he’s obviously not Italian or part of any other Mediterranean ethnic group for that matter.

What else are you gonna major in? Some left-wing field where you have to kiss the PC professor’s behind all the time?

I think you all had best think of strategies for the contingencies where Trump doesn’t win. Of course that should have been done from the beginning – hope for the best and plan for the worst – but I’m not especially sanguine about his chances right now.

Hillary had all the support, possibly knowing the questions, possibly earpiece, definitely Holt helping her all he could. Trump did well to fight all this, which effectively limited the damage. Even if Trump looked good to true believers and average sincere people, it shows that Hillary will have such extra help all the way to the election.

And that last point might be what drove the betting odds in her favor.

Get liquid and go to one of the many countries with a better climate. I am not going to contribute my skills to Hillary’s America.

There are more laws preventing wholesale theft of government money if the work is done through an actual government agency. By outsourcing such work to the “private sector” they get to loot the public purse, fire American workers, sell secrets to the Chinese, etc. Privatization and outsourcing have rarely, possibly never been about efficiencies. They’re created to facilitate plutocrats stealing from taxpayers, plain and simple.

There’s a good chance Shiu’s Chinese ancestors have been here longer than yours. Or does the fact that your ancestors looked more like many of the people who were already here when your ancestors immigrated than Shiu’s Chinese ancestors did make this more of “your country” than Shiu’s?

You have a point–for some whites. (3/4 of my ancestors were here before Shiu’s Chinese ancestors could possibly have showed up–and i’d bet the German 1\4 was here before them too. But i realize that may not true be for folks who are predominantly Great Wave, depending on when Shiu’s ancestors came.)

However, he still has a point: America is nice because it is a white nation.

Specifically a NW European, Anglo-origin nation. It isn’t nice for example because of blacks–who have been here almost as long as anyone. (If the blacks weren’t here it would be a whole lot nicer.) It isn’t nice because of the native Americans. It isn’t nice because of the Mexicans. It isn’t nice because of the Jews–whatever their scientific contributions. And it certainly isn’t nice because of the Asians–most of whom are in fact very recent immigrants despite a small longtime Chinese presence.

I think this is all pretty obvious. But in this case we have pretty solid proof, in that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are also … all pretty darn nice in a very similar sort of way, despite differing geography, native populations, and follow on slave and immigrant populations.

This is absolutely not to say that Jews and East Asians can’t create nice societies of their own. They obviously–Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–can. But they are different. What has made the United States “nice”–prosperous and free–is the Anglo sphere version of the special sauce that characterizes NW European built nations and makes them very very nice.

So his point stands. If you’re white, you’re aware that “your people”–your race, your culture–are precisely what has made the country pleasant and prosperous. To then get these tedious heckling lectures from non-white origin people who are enjoying this pleasant prosperity created by your people … yes, it’s annoying.