How I Fell Out Of Love With Facebook | Tantacrul (video, 3:10 hours) – A comprehensive review of all the scandals that Facebook got involved in. I had known about a few of these but hadn’t heard of the more international scandals, like Free Basics. I mostly remember how Facebook sought to reduce bias on their platform, and through the funhouse mirror of corporate priorities it turned into refusing to take down politically conservative posts less they generate an appearance of bias. Facebook really is a nightmare of corporate immorality.
Fast Crimes at Lambda School | Sandofsky – A long article about the scandals surrounding Lambda School, a coding boot camp.
My husband went to a bootcamp (under an income share agreement), and I went to something like a bootcamp (under a hiring fee model). Both of us owe are career success to them. There’s nothing about the idea that makes it inherently bad or unworkable. But… the one my husband went to was exaggerating its job placement rates by excluding people they kicked out of the program, and excluding people who remained at their current job (!?). The program I went through was more honest–but it all but collapsed during the pandemic. Both of our programs were extremely selective. From what I can tell, bootcamps operate on very thin margins, and are not easy to scale up. It sounds like Lambda School immediately tried to scale up, and simply could not get its unit economics working, no matter how much they fleeced students.
The great nonreligious gender realignment | Daylight Atheism – Adam Lee points to new surveys that suggest US women are now becoming disaffiliated with religion in greater numbers than men. (Caveat: the research is from the American Enterprise Institute.) This is probably because evangelical Christians have aligned themselves with Trump, and there’s a big gender gap in politics these days.
HRC and the Fight for Gender Justice | Pervert Justice – Crip Dyke reflects on the role of HRC during the time that they were fighting for same-sex marriage. The thing they’re infamous for is at one time supporting a version of the employee non-discrimination act which excluded trans people. ENDA never passed, and still hasn’t passed, so perhaps they sensed that they needed to make every concession available to them lest they gain nothing at all. They failed to account for backlash from other activists. Beyond signaling a willingness to deprioritize trans issues, it also just seems like bad political strategy. HRC is by no means an anti-trans organization, but neither are they as progressive as their peer organizations.
How to Monetize a Blog | Modem.io – No comment.
The Narcissist Scare | Sarah Z (video, 58 min) – Sarah Zed critiques the culture of blaming abuse on narcissism.
Crip Dyke reflects on the role of HRC …
For a bit I read that as Hillary Rodham $[C-name], and got thoroughly confused. However, that HRC is not really pro-active or progressive, either…
Wow that link about Lambda School is wild. My favorite part was “They were told that most of programming is just Googling for answers.” Like, okay, yes, that’s true, but *knowing what to google* is a skill that requires a lot of experience!
This reminds me of a tweet where somebody said “why read a book if we can just do a keyword-search on the text?” And then people were making jokes in the replies like “yes, to make things easier, I copy the text of a book into excel and then sort all the words alphabetically and delete the repeats, this saves so much time compared to reading.”