Re: Fantastic
 

Really? Coastal whites don't know minorities?

Look, I'll buy that whites in deep flyover land are segregated. But if you're in the coastal corridors, it's impossible not to have friends, co-workers, and business associates of various non-white backgrounds.

What's ridiculous about the identity politics at work here is it's fucking up efforts to find some common ground. I'm part of the 25% of whites WaPo discounts in that story. My suburban neighborhood is half minorities.

I enjoy (hell, I revel in doing it) explaining to white conservative friends that BLM has rock solid claims, and it's an obligation of all white people to do something to assist with justice reform (or at least not vote for some asshole who supports more "tough on cri-- er, minorities" legislation).

But when people use terms like "all whites," I cease listening. A person who generalizes is a person who is not thinking. (That asinine article about why we cannot assess Trump's policies discretely is a good example of that stupidity.) I know this complicates things, because everybody wants to simplify the arguments - particularly the most strident advocates of identity politics - but you cannot generalize by race, religion, or sex and sound credible. You're not. You're applying short cuts. It's not scientific, and it's ultimately counterproductive.

I can't imagine myself saying something like, "Blacks are...," or "Asians are...," or "Jews are..." It reminds me of conservatives discussing gay marriage a few years back. They'd say things like, "Well the gays tend to be..." You knew whatever followed wasn't worth hearing. It wasn't thought out, and it employed no empirical rigor.

I don't think identity politics can be entirely discredited. It has value. But identity politics that broadly generalizes? Yeah, that can be ignored. And nationally, it will be.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

No, it’s like if the Chick-Fil-A opened in the Google building and then Wendy’s and Taco Bell lost business. A city, I think, may have a legitimate interest in not having a large hermetically sealed self-contained fiefdom taking up a block of real estate to the detriment of local businesses and the surrounding neighborhood.

I also get pissed at those bastards at Acme Industries who always have a fleet of idling black cars lined up at their entrance on Park waiting for the execs to get their company-provided rides back to Cos Cob. The drivers all smoke and I have to walk by them to get to my golden chariot.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Is it really that hard to zone to exclude company cafeterias? I mean, they're able to zone so that abortion clinics can't be within 100 miles of a baptist church.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I absolutely agree that the city has legitimate interest in the health of its businesses. But it's not an externality when businesses make business decisions that affect other businesses detrimentally.

Google is no more hermetically sealed than the financial institutions and law firms that fill New York. It just offers its employees better food than you find in their cafeterias.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm not sure that is the case. I can think of a couple of law firms and two private banks in Boston that offer food in their in-house cafeteria that is on par with Google. I can also think of several shops whose cafeteria do not meet that mark.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Would Makan Delrahim agree? Stay tuned.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

People loved the cafeteria of the New York office of my old firm so much we eventually got one in DC too.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I hate this idea, but since we're exploring awful social engineering concepts, why not tax employees on the free food? It is a form of income, I believe -- several thousands of dollars of income per year, in fact. Use the proceeds from the tax to provide tax breaks to local restaurants.

I'd file this story under "Reason 38353928 We Need to Start Seriously Discussing UBI." Or, "Reasons a World War Which Resets Everything Might Be US Labor's Best and Last Hope."

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I avoided mine. The food was decent, but it required eating with colleagues. That's kind of creepy. To use a Star Trek reference, "Borg-like."

Lunch is time to take a break from co-workers. Get out for a moment and recall, You Have a Life. Or time to work through, so you can finish what you're doing earlier and get out of the office sooner.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
 

I love Jaron Lanier... He's like a gentle, contemplative, and slightly smarter Nassim Taleb.

https://www.ft.com/content/a3ea16f6-...5-50daf11b720d

https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Del.../dp/125019668X

Re: Fantastic
 

Chastised by Coltrane, I did some more reading on this, and even found the exchange with Gary Cunningham that I think you are referencing on the web site you linked to. I noticed that Cunningham said the following:

"It is shameful when well-meaning people use the issue of racial inequalities to justify and advance policies that are tangentially related and offering no real solutions to get at the underlying issues that have created and exacerbated these large economic racialized inequalities. Please stop!"

And yet, here you are, asserting that anyone who opposes this plan is "standing up for racism." There are so many compelling points you can make about the status quo being based on systematic racist housing policies (including, possibly most egregiously, racial restrictive covenants that quite literally created a "white privilege" and concrete economic gains via property values for people solely on account of those people being white), or about the fact that at least some of the opposition to the 2040 Plan is based on white fears of integration, or at a minimum, whites being unwilling to give up the economic privileges they obtained through overtly racist housing policies in the past. If you want to continue to castigate everyone who opposes a plan that may do little or nothing to address racial inequalities as being aligned with the forces of racism, that's your choice. But it just makes me inclined to disregard everything you say about the Plan as nonsense propounded by "well-meaning people" engaging in "shameful" tactics to silence or deflect potentially legitimate criticisms of the Plan.

I am now done being earnest. Forever.

Re: Fantastic
 

If I may quote a wise person:

If you're standing up for the status quo, you're standing up for racism.

Keep in mind that we were, in fact, not making compelling points favor of the comp plan, which is irrelevant to everyone on this board except you and me, but rather talking about the ways that white people fail to see the racism in front of them, of which I offered some of the comp plan reactions as an example.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I believe it is taxable - I think there was a recent case. Ask Adder to research it.

Re: Fantastic
 

Oh fuck, I guess I am still earnest for a bit. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the Plan is deeply flawed. Let's even assume that, due to the fact the nobody seems to know what effect the implementation of the Plan will have on addressing racial disparities, it is at least possible that the plan could worsen those disparities, at least in some neighborhoods. (For example, I have heard arguments that some of the real victims of the plan will be the Mexican-Americans who own small houses in the single-family home blocks of my neighborhood, whose blocks could be disrupted by the Plan so that young white professionals who are not ready to own a home yet can have increased access to high end apartments close to downtown). If that is true, and yet you are saying that anyone who opposes the plan is standing up for the status quo and thus is standing up for racism, you come off as disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. Are some people opposing the plan because they are standing up for the status quo? Sure. But you seem to dismiss the possibility that some people (maybe even rich, white people) who oppose the plan are not actually standing up for the status quo, but are instead saying that this particular change to the status quo does not accomplish what people say it will and could have very negative unintended consequences. For you to dismiss the people making those arguments as "standing up for racism" -- which is really you just calling them racists -- is indeed shameful. I realize you are too entrenched in your beliefs on this issue to hear what I am saying, as evidenced by the fact that your argument shifts dramatically with each post you make. But you are far from the only person in the city who is dismissing anyone who opposes the plan as simply being racist. That is only going to undermine support for the plan, and turn an already highly emotionally-charged debate into an escalating series of screaming and name calling, making it even more difficult than it already is to evaluate the plan on its merits.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

DOJ says it's going to treat no-poach agreements more harshly going forward, fwiw.