Skip to main content

Is Giving Good?

There is an unquestioned belief that charity s good, so while America as a whole gives away enormous amounts of money, it is also one of the most grotesquely unequal, with a significant portion of its population living in poverty, and with the worst social outcomes in the developed world. My belief is that charity is linked hand-in-hand with the grotesque inequities of our current political/economic system. The solution to our current set of social ills would be a responsive government, one that fostered the welfare of its citizens, not just its corporations. It's absurd to think that giving to most charities will change much of anything.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.