Woke is a Joke

[jakee 1,585]

1 hour ago, winsor said:

I limit mine to toxic posters.  That does, of course, result in threads devoid of posts.

Well, when everyone who doesn’t like racism is considered toxic, it’s actually quite nice to hear it doesn’t leave many to see.

[ryoder 1,590]

6 hours ago, kallend said:

I had given the benefit of the doubt before, but lying for fun to elicit a response is classic troll behavior.

I put obvious trolls on my ignore list.

Bye.

It took you this long???

You have a lot more patience than I do!

[JoeWeber 2,910]

44 minutes ago, ryoder said:

It took you this long???

You have a lot more patience than I do!

No kidding. I marvel at how BillVon is able to decipher his ramblings and give a go at answering.

[normiss 886]

8 hours ago, jakee said:

You know, I have to admire your audacity.

I don't think it is. But anyway, so what?

You won't, because you're incapable of writing a coherent English language sentence from start to finish. No one knows what the fuck you're saying, pretty much ever. We get the vague sense of Trump good, liberals bad but that's about as far as it goes. That you think of yourself as some kind of prophet who could open everyone's eye to the truth around them if only they'd listen is one of the saddest things I've ever heard.

He seems to think he's a "life coach". 

[billvon 3,098]

13 hours ago, winsor said:

where behavior that is despicable becomes okay if one can claim victimhood.

Yep.  No one is better at that than you, who have been claiming victimhood over a "DEI hire" for years.  So, again, welcome to being woke (by your definition this time.)  Fellow conservatives have followed suit:

-Trump is a victim of the deep state who stole the 2020 election, and this justifies insurrections like Jan 6th.
-Middle class Americans are victims of the New World Order, and this justifies violence against immigrants.
-Conservatives are victims of evil journalists, and this justifies removing protections for a free press.
-Whites are victims of the "poisoning of the blood" of America by lesser races, and this justifies murdering protesters.

Victimhood is a central requirement for being a conservative these days.
 

[winsor 236]

On 10/6/2024 at 5:16 PM, tkhayes said:

So you admit that you cannot offer any definition for this woke thing that you are upset about?

Woke is typified by DEI.

'Diversity' is the attempt to rectify perceived racism using racism.

'Equity' is the attempt to achieve uniform outcome, regardless of ability and effort.

'Inclusion' is the attempt to provide uniform participation, regardless of ability and effort.

Woke thus elevates mediocrity to a virtue.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

[SkyDekker 1,465]

7 minutes ago, winsor said:

Woke is typified by DEI.

'Diversity' is the attempt to rectify perceived racism using racism.

'Equity' is the attempt to achieve uniform outcome, regardless of ability and effort.

'Inclusion' is the attempt to provide uniform participation, regardless of ability and effort.

Woke thus elevates mediocrity to a virtue.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

Funny, when I look up the definition of the words you have between apostrophes those are not the definitions that come up.

Always amazes me how you want to be all scientific and precise when it suits you and abandon it all when that suits you better.

I can tell you that my company tracks diversity and equity, but we don't have a policy about targets.

We did have a policy at one point to only hire ENTJs, until we figured out that building balanced teams led to much more productivity. That led to understanding how diverse teams with resources adjusted to their needs led to even better productivity.

Turned out that having only Winsors working for us was pretty disastrous, even if a single Winsor could be highly productive.

Turns out being what you label as "woke" made us significantly more profitable and put a lot more money in my pocket.

[wmw999 2,575]

16 minutes ago, winsor said:

Woke is typified by DEI.

'Diversity' is the attempt to rectify perceived racism using racism.

'Equity' is the attempt to achieve uniform outcome, regardless of ability and effort.

'Inclusion' is the attempt to provide uniform participation, regardless of ability and effort.

Woke thus elevates mediocrity to a virtue.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

Actually, Diversity is an attempt to strengthen products and ideas by including people with a variety of social backgrounds. "othered" people still buy things, and they include considerations that people for whom everything magically works don't think about, and consider the range of people who are going to read their documentation or use their product better.

Equity is an attempt to treat people in a work or other organized environment in a fair manner -- don't assume that a single negative characteristic disqualifies the minority/woman, while assuming that a single positive characteristic qualifies the majority/man. Note that in some worlds, the men aren't dominant, or maybe English-speakers, and should also be treated equitably.

Inclusion is the attempt to provide actual equal opportunity to people who have never even been able to make it to the starting line because of (yes) institutionalized racism, sexism, ableism, etc. 

Woke simply means that you understand that just because there's a law against something doesn't mean enough has been done. There were (according to Statista.com) nearly 4600 lynchings between 1882 and 1968. This may not be an exact count, there were undoubtedly ones that never made the news. Note that it's by no means a white-on-black crime only; there were over a thousand white victims (including Hispanic and Asian, though specifics aren't in there). The fact that there were so many kind of indicates that laws aren't enough, wouldn't you say?

Wendy P.

[wmw999 2,575]

18 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

We did have a policy at one point to only hire ENTJs, until we figured out that building balanced teams led to much more productivity. That led to understanding how diverse teams with resources adjusted to their needs led to even better productivity.

Oh, NEVER say that to an ENTJ! You have to tell them that you're "offloading unnecessary minutiae" instead.

Wendy P.

[billvon 3,098]

5 minutes ago, wmw999 said:

Actually, Diversity is an attempt to strengthen products and ideas by including people with a variety of social backgrounds. "othered" people still buy things, and they include considerations that people for whom everything magically works don't think about, and consider the range of people who are going to read their documentation or use their product better.

Yep.  And I would add that diversity includes diversity of people, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of methods and diversity of ideas.  One example:

Up until about 1995 or so, all communications were frequency division (like FM radio) or time division (early GSM cellphones.)  That was the way to do it.  Everyone knew that.  Qualcomm was founded with the idea of trying a third method - code division spread spectrum.  It made no sense to many engineers - "you can't separate signals with a CODE!" - but two people made the seemingly impossible possible.  And they were about as diverse as you can get.

The first was Hedy Lamarr, an actress from the 1940's.  She had a messy background - an immigrant from Austria who had been duped into making a pornographic movie when she was 18.  She was also brilliant, and had been thinking about the problem of making military remote control signals for torpedoes resistant to jamming.  She didn't get anywhere with her approach until she met George Antheil, a musician who was doing some bizarre musical compositions with player pianos.  He had a lot of trouble getting all the pianos to start at the same time - and stay synchronized - but when Lamarr saw this, she realized she could use a similar approach to "spread" a radio spectrum out and use more of it.  Two player pianos might initially select middle A (440Hz) before moving up to C (523Hz.)  Similarly, two radios could exchange information at, say, 800KHz before moving on to 1000KHz, then on to another frequency, as long as their hops were synchonized.  And if an enemy tried to jam any one of those frequencies, the system would still largely work, because the other frequencies would be clear.  She even mentioned you could use this method to send _more_ information on the multiple frequencies as long as the system was coordinated.

The Winsors of her time (and even as late as 2000 or so) claimed that she was a "DEI hire" (or the period-appropriate equivalent term,) that obviously George Antheil was the brains behind it and was just trying to get into her pants, that a movie star didn't have the brainpower to figure something like that out.  George was just using her to get more attention for his patent!  Lamarr was ignored for decades, consigned by misogynists to the only roles she could play in their minds.

The next was Andy Viterbi, an Italian immigrant who fled to the US during World War II.  As a professor at UCSD he developed the Viterbi algorithm to decode convolutional-code encoded data. From there, he developed the first CDMA standard for cellphones, a spread-spectrum, code division communications method.  The "experts" laughed at him.  "Errant nonsense" said one scientist I remember.

One of the benefits of this - convolutional code spread spectrum communication - is that you could take a given "chunk" of spectrum, and since dozens to hundreds of code-division devices could use the same spectrum, you got a much larger number of conversations per band of spectrum.  And because in the US spectrum is what costs money, cellphone companies could make more money per Hertz of frequency allocated.

I learned about the Viterbi decoder in college.  And when I heard that Andy Viterbi and Irwin Jacobs had started a cellphone company in San Diego, I moved out there.  The Viterbi decoder was such a revolutionary and elegant piece of work that I thought Qualcomm's future would be bright.

So I moved out and started working there.  Early tests showed that instead of the 20x improvement they could get in frequency use, in practice it was closer to 6x - still a big improvement.  So Qualcomm started building cellphones and base stations.  And they worked.

In the early days of this, the Winsors of the world would publish letters in EE Times, EDN and the other trade publications of the day, claiming that power control (important for code division) could never work, the 6x improvement was a lie just like the 20x improvement was, code division could simply never work, Qualcomm would never unseat telecom giant Ericsson and their TDMA system.

But over time it did.  And today everything from cellphone communication to wifi to satellite communications use code division spread spectrum communications, albeit at a far higher level of complexity and intricacy than our first simple 64-code "flat" CDMA schemes used.

And this revolution was brought about by a 1940's movie star - "porn star" according to her detractors - and immigrant, and an Italian immigrant who fled World War II to work in the US in the 1970's.  Woke madness, I know.

[JerryBaumchen 1,454]

1 hour ago, billvon said:

Yep.  And I would add that diversity includes diversity of people, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of methods and diversity of ideas.  One example:

Up until about 1995 or so, all communications were frequency division (like FM radio) or time division (early GSM cellphones.)  That was the way to do it.  Everyone knew that.  Qualcomm was founded with the idea of trying a third method - code division spread spectrum.  It made no sense to many engineers - "you can't separate signals with a CODE!" - but two people made the seemingly impossible possible.  And they were about as diverse as you can get.

The first was Hedy Lamarr, an actress from the 1940's.  She had a messy background - an immigrant from Austria who had been duped into making a pornographic movie when she was 18.  She was also brilliant, and had been thinking about the problem of making military remote control signals for torpedoes resistant to jamming.  She didn't get anywhere with her approach until she met George Antheil, a musician who was doing some bizarre musical compositions with player pianos.  He had a lot of trouble getting all the pianos to start at the same time - and stay synchronized - but when Lamarr saw this, she realized she could use a similar approach to "spread" a radio spectrum out and use more of it.  Two player pianos might initially select middle A (440Hz) before moving up to C (523Hz.)  Similarly, two radios could exchange information at, say, 800KHz before moving on to 1000KHz, then on to another frequency, as long as their hops were synchonized.  And if an enemy tried to jam any one of those frequencies, the system would still largely work, because the other frequencies would be clear.  She even mentioned you could use this method to send _more_ information on the multiple frequencies as long as the system was coordinated.

The Winsors of her time (and even as late as 2000 or so) claimed that she was a "DEI hire" (or the period-appropriate equivalent term,) that obviously George Antheil was the brains behind it and was just trying to get into her pants, that a movie star didn't have the brainpower to figure something like that out.  George was just using her to get more attention for his patent!  Lamarr was ignored for decades, consigned by misogynists to the only roles she could play in their minds.

The next was Andy Viterbi, an Italian immigrant who fled to the US during World War II.  As a professor at UCSD he developed the Viterbi algorithm to decode convolutional-code encoded data. From there, he developed the first CDMA standard for cellphones, a spread-spectrum, code division communications method.  The "experts" laughed at him.  "Errant nonsense" said one scientist I remember.

One of the benefits of this - convolutional code spread spectrum communication - is that you could take a given "chunk" of spectrum, and since dozens to hundreds of code-division devices could use the same spectrum, you got a much larger number of conversations per band of spectrum.  And because in the US spectrum is what costs money, cellphone companies could make more money per Hertz of frequency allocated.

I learned about the Viterbi decoder in college.  And when I heard that Andy Viterbi and Irwin Jacobs had started a cellphone company in San Diego, I moved out there.  The Viterbi decoder was such a revolutionary and elegant piece of work that I thought Qualcomm's future would be bright.

So I moved out and started working there.  Early tests showed that instead of the 20x improvement they could get in frequency use, in practice it was closer to 6x - still a big improvement.  So Qualcomm started building cellphones and base stations.  And they worked.

In the early days of this, the Winsors of the world would publish letters in EE Times, EDN and the other trade publications of the day, claiming that power control (important for code division) could never work, the 6x improvement was a lie just like the 20x improvement was, code division could simply never work, Qualcomm would never unseat telecom giant Ericsson and their TDMA system.

But over time it did.  And today everything from cellphone communication to wifi to satellite communications use code division spread spectrum communications, albeit at a far higher level of complexity and intricacy than our first simple 64-code "flat" CDMA schemes used.

And this revolution was brought about by a 1940's movie star - "porn star" according to her detractors - and immigrant, and an Italian immigrant who fled World War II to work in the US in the 1970's.  Woke madness, I know.

Hi Bill,

Re:  could simply never work

This type of thinking is what really gets under my skin.

If this type of thinking were the way things are, then why go to college & get an engineering degree?

Neanderthals.

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  The quote above is right up there with:  This is how we have always done it.

[billvon 3,098]

29 minutes ago, JerryBaumchen said:

Re:  could simply never work

This type of thinking is what really gets under my skin.

If this type of thinking were the way things are, then why go to college & get an engineering degree?

Well, there's more to it than that.  Many of the people writing those articles made some of their money supporting GSM communications, and thus had a vested interest in CDMA failing.  (The smarter ones, of course, jumped ship to the CDMA outfits, or did something else, or kept going with GSM.)  And of course it was just what they were used to.

We see a similar issue in people objecting to DEI today.  It's not the way they did it.  It's different and unneccesary.  It can change a system they understand and benefit from.  And some people may actually lose work to (say) a trans engineer who years ago wouldn't have been hired because she's a freak, and some nonsense about bathrooms.

[JerryBaumchen 1,454]

25 minutes ago, billvon said:

Well, there's more to it than that.  Many of the people writing those articles made some of their money supporting GSM communications, and thus had a vested interest in CDMA failing.  (The smarter ones, of course, jumped ship to the CDMA outfits, or did something else, or kept going with GSM.)  And of course it was just what they were used to.

We see a similar issue in people objecting to DEI today.  It's not the way they did it.  It's different and unneccesary.  It can change a system they understand and benefit from.  And some people may actually lose work to (say) a trans engineer who years ago wouldn't have been hired because she's a freak, and some nonsense about bathrooms.

Hi Bill,

Make them all unisex and this goes away; eventually.

Jerry Baumchen

[winsor 236]

If the goal is Unity, Equality and Excellence, I'm in.

Competing against those hobbled by DEI is a godsend.

As James Webb noted, training by touch football rules is all well and good, but it doesn't do much if you're going up against the Green Bay Packers.

Those who embrace mediocrity, for whatever noble reason, are welcome to do so.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

Edited October 9, 2024 by winsor

[wmw999 2,575]

I’m so glad you addressed both my and Sjydekker’s points so thoroughly.

oh wait…

Wendy P. 

[lippy 918]

1 hour ago, winsor said:

If the goal is Unity, Equality and Excellence, I'm in.

Competing against those hobbled by DEI is a godsend.

As James Webb noted, training by touch football rules is all well and good, but it doesn't do much if you're going up against the Green Bay Packers.

Those who embrace mediocrity, for whatever noble reason, are welcome to do so.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

You keep posting this BS that assumes DEI means hiring a minority hire despite them being unqualified, when there's a properly qualified white dude just sitting there.  What about when it's just a matter of consciously opening up the hiring pool to make sure that it doesn't consist %100 of graduates from the hiring manager's university (who happen to be 93.5% white Christian dudes)?  Does that scenario get the Winsor seal of approval, or is the chance that a slightly less qualified brown person would get the job make it just not worth the risk?

[billvon 3,098]

51 minutes ago, lippy said:

You keep posting this BS that assumes DEI means hiring a minority hire despite them being unqualified, when there's a properly qualified white dude just sitting there.

Yep.

I'd love to see Winsor match his engineering chops against Linda in power design, or his 4-way skills against Christy, or his courage against Hannah, or his aeronautical skills against Mary Ellen.

Of course he'd come up with some other excuse that explains how those "DEI hires" could possibly top him.

[jakee 1,585]

Winsor and others who are annoyed the world isn’t quite as openly racist as it used to be always push the assumption that you either have DEI or hiring purely on merit. Not only is that simply impossible (if you have five applicants all with first class degrees with a relevant thesis from a top ranked university, how do you know who is definitively better?), it’s simply not how people work - and hiring is done by people.

Winsor slipped once and added something like ‘and best fits into the company culture’ to the ‘most qualified’ bit of who gets hired without DEI. If the company is packed with white prep school guys then then likely another white prep school guy will fit best. So if that company ends up only ever hiring more white prep school guys as a result, that is in Winsor’s mind entirely meritorious and not remotely racist!

[JoeWeber 2,910]

7 hours ago, billvon said:

Yep.

I'd love to see Winsor match his engineering chops against Linda in power design, or his 4-way skills against Christy, or his courage against Hannah, or his aeronautical skills against Mary Ellen.

Of course he'd come up with some other excuse that explains how those "DEI hires" could possibly top him.

I met a delightful young lady last night, an immigrant from Mozambique who waited our table. She spoke impeccable english she learned by watching movies and matching words in a book. She was studying Chemical Engineering and her two sisters were studying Mechanical and Electrical Engineering respectively. She said their motivation was to honor their parents sacrifices. Talk about impressive.

[winsor 236]

10 hours ago, wmw999 said:

I’m so glad you addressed both my and Sjydekker’s points so thoroughly.

oh wait…

Wendy P. 

You had points?

[SkyDekker 1,465]

8 hours ago, winsor said:

You had points?

[billvon 3,098]

10 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

I met a delightful young lady last night, an immigrant from Mozambique who waited our table. She spoke impeccable english she learned by watching movies and matching words in a book. She was studying Chemical Engineering and her two sisters were studying Mechanical and Electrical Engineering respectively. She said their motivation was to honor their parents sacrifices. Talk about impressive.

So DEI student in other words, taking away a spot from a deserving straight white male.

[winsor 236]

1 hour ago, SkyDekker said:

Since nothing you said had anything to do with what I said, I accept your characterization of your stance.

I suppose your three points of contact give stability to your position.

[JoeWeber 2,910]

2 hours ago, billvon said:

So DEI student in other words, taking away a spot from a deserving straight white male.

Yes. And she also had the time and courtesy to help me with my Portuguese. Total rock star.

[wmw999 2,575]

1 hour ago, JoeWeber said:

Yes. And she also had the time and courtesy to help me with my Portuguese. Total rock star.

Why are you studying Portuguese? (As my now-husband said when I told him I spoke it fluently, No one speaks Portuguese!)

Moving to Bonaire? It’d be worth it!

Wendy P.