Ya, but no. The bottom line is that successful business people know who has the power and lean in to it. Look at how these big companies' CEOs maneuver their companies in China. None of then can say anything controversial against the government and the leaders if they want to do business there. The same thing happens in the US. When things shift they will lean the other way.
It is a masterclass in business strategy that Apple is able to tow the line so well in China where much of its fortunes are based, but come across pretty daring wrt government in the US and EU.
Many companies and leaders can learn a thing of two from Tim Cook on this.
The desire to not be regulated will destroy the system of regulation he depended on to be successful and to have the rule of law, common economic market, educated workforce, global free trade system, reserve currency, American trust and good will that made it safe for every country in the world to use and depend on our tech ecosystem. I hope he sees and feels the pain of his role in unraveling that system. Unfortunately, we will pay the price for generations.
It's really sad that a bunch of people that read atlas shrugged as teenagers and never thought deeply enough to see the flaws in that world view accumulated enough power to undo the world the FDR created and they benefited from.
I listened to Andreesen's appearances on Lex Friedman. He does not strike me as a guy who thoughtfully considers the evidence, but rather someone with a lot of hard opinions and more than a bit of narcissism. And while I think there can be constructive criticism of DEI, most of the anti-DEI sentiment is simply re-branded racism for people who don't like to think of themselves as racists.
Not relevant. The surrounding context created an unfair playing field that is reasonablly rebalanced. Further, even if the playing field was equal, which it isnt based on a cursory review of the facts, society benefits from diverse perspectives in most domains. For examples, if we have no black doctors, medicine demonstrably under performs for black patients, same with any demographic. A broad coalition of perspectives creates a richer ecosystem of ideas and abilities that makes the entire discipline better. A trite commitment to being "race blind" really ends up justifying racism that is an entrenched artifact of deliberate policy choices in the past, not a genuine commitment to antiracism.
Your premise (the premise behind DEI) that people of different races differ in "ideas and abilities" is like weird, old-timey racism. Nobody can ever explain to me what different "ideas and abilities" I bring to a team compared to a white person.
Race is a culturally defined separation of human individual not merely how much sunscreen they need. Irish and Italian people were not considered “white” and ineligible to get many jobs, rent apartments and generally excluded from American society.
I am from the south, black children are taught that they way they speak is inferior and they need to learn “proper” English. That has nothing to do with how much sunscreen they need and everything to do with how other individuals and society treats them.
You are conflating race, culture and class. They are multiple variables that affect what opportunities people have. While I would be the the first to agree with you that race isn’t the basis for any difference between people it is how the world defines the social class and culture of a specific demographic that ends up determining many of the cascading differences between “races”.
No, you're conflating race, culture, and class. You're the one who said people from different races have different "ideas and abilities." And you're defending a DEI system that stereotypes people based on skin color. It's a system that treats people as proxies for their racial groups despite their individual circumstances. The affluent non-white kid from the suburbs is treated as somehow bringing the perspective of disadvantaged inner-city non-white kids. While the poor white kid from rural Oregon is grouped together with more affluent white kids and treated as "privileged."
AEI is a conservative think tank, of course they're going to find numbers that make a policy they disagree with look bad. I wouldn't say the numbers are cherry picked, but they don't tell the whole story either. For example, the rates being compared are national acceptance rates, which is interesting maybe but doesn't tell us anything about the acceptance rates at individual schools.
They're also comparing "similar credentials", not identical applications, and they're only looking at MCAT + GPA, but the aamc says schools look at other factors too, and one school may not use the same factors as another (which is why a school acceptance rate comparison would be better than a national acceptance rate comparison.)
What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
You don’t really have to speculate about this. Universities literally went to the Supreme Court to protect their right to discriminate based on race. The disparities in this data are similar to the internal Harvard and UNC data that came out in the SFFA litigation.
So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods. Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools. Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
Society is better served by if a broad coalition of citizens can achieve advancement. We wont benefit from a caste system, which your analysis would create.
> So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods.
If someone is poor, why does it matter what historical circumstances caused that result? If two people inherit their grandmother's houses, and both houses are worth $100k, what difference does it make that one house is worth that much because of redlining and the other because of rust belt deindustrialization?
You keep circling back to economics to justify treating people differently based on race, and it makes no sense. If you want to help poor people, just do that directly.
> Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools.
"This report documents nearly five decades of changes in school funding patterns across the
United States... Districts with the highest non-white enrollment
shares maintained higher spending throughout the entire period studied, although their
advantage was smaller, and in some years reversed if spending is adjusted using CWIFT. Like
high-poverty districts, districts with higher non-white shares also experienced disproportionate
spending growth after the mid-1990s."
> Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality. And the results suggest it remains effective. Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
You’re also assuming I wouldn’t agree that low income families deserve support in a similar fashion. I do. I think it’s important social policy to balance the scales across different issues that cause inequality. I think affirmative action can and should factor in geography and income levels regardless of race.
That brooking paper doesn’t support your thesis or undermine mine. Here is a quote: “ We also find that low-poverty and predominantly white districts were more protected from spending cuts during the Great Recession, and high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts were the least protected.”. So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Here is another: “ differences in average spending between states remain a major driver
of spending inequality overall, even though policy conversations often focus on within-state differences.”. That means the more money spend the more equal outcomes tend to become.
Now this quote supports your thesis that property taxes are less of a determining factor in overall spending and I am open to revising my opinion: “ School finance systems are complex, and local taxes are salient to the public. By contrast, funding from the state or federal government, which disproportionately benefits more disadvantaged districts, is less visible.” But later the authors state that “ We agree with the authors of those reports—and the broader consensus—that high-poverty schools need more funding than their low-poverty counterparts to fulfill their mission; equal is not equitable.” Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance. The reason makes sense when you stop to think of the world outside of the classroom and the effects of poverty and racism. If a child doesn’t have enough to eat, is surrounded by instability, is mistreated in most social interactions their performance in school will suffer. If a high school student is the first in their family to apply to college they may need to figure it out on their own as opposed to a family that guides a student to their legacy Alma Mater, helps them write their admissions essays, connects them with references for letters of recommendation etc all for free. Those support systems cost money for communities that don’t have them built into the fabric of their communities.
> It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality.
Coordinated by who? The applicants who are applying to colleges? Because if not there's no justification for discriminating against them based on something someone else is doing.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
Nobody did any such thing. You seem to be confused: Voting rights are individual rights. There’s not such thing as voting rights for “communities.”
> So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Your claim above was that minority school districts get less funding. But the headline result of the paper is that they don't, and haven't for decades. In fact, they specifically call out the "popular narrative" you repeated: "The findings are broadly consistent with recent academic work on patterns of school spending, which finds within-state progressivity (increasing since the mid-1990s) and usually modest national-level differences in spending by poverty and race (Tyner 2023; Corcoran et al. 2003; Corcoran and Evans 2015; Candelaria and Shores 2019). However, our findings are contrary to popular narratives that often assume that high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts have lower-than-average spending."
> Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance.
You also sound racist like Biden saying "poor kids can be just as smart as white kids." You're flipping back-and-forth between "low income underperforming" and "minority." Even if you're correct that society owes poor communities even more spending than rich ones, that doesn't justify your focus on race. There are low-income underperforming white school districts too, lots of them.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
> What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
I already laid out my argument, I'm not going to reiterate it just so you can argue with me. Find someone else to bellyache to about the supposed racism of DEI, I don't care.
Because it is trite, surface level analysis that is historically inaccurate, oversimplifies the factual record and pretends to be morally superior when the net result would be a deeply immoral continuation of the status quo that was deliberately created with racist intent.
This is superficial analysis. If you are right handed and I tied your right hand behind your back right before a hand written exam and then based your grade on the content of the written work and your penmanship of your left hand do you think you would do as well as everyone else? Fight your instinct to deflect or call the premise into question like you usually do when you and I are debating and take a moment to reflect on the fact that there are massive historical factors that cause the unfair imbalance that DEI is attempting correct for. You can claim that people against DEI are the only non-racist people, but that just shows you arent considering the fact that wealth, education, and opportunity has been deliberately directed at some races and not others.
DEI isn’t about using race as a proxy for disadvantage. Universities went to the Supreme Court and told them that they can’t use lack of “wealth, education, and opportunity” instead of race, because what they wanted was more people with particular skin colors, not more people who were poor, etc. This is literally in Harvard’s brief in SFFA. See pp. 52-54: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/230739/202.... There’s nothing to call that other than racist, in the most widely understood sense of the term.
I will never get over the outspoken victim mentality most of the tech billionaires have.
Every time I see their talking heads on some podcast it is nothing but a list of grievances and perceived enemies despite their immense success. Non-stop complaints about the government in spite of the fact that most of their success came from government policies that buoyed them the whole way (ZIRP, etc).
I just assume they were bullied as kids and never outgrew it.
Anyway... as a Californian, I'm voting yes on prop 40, and no on 41 and 42.
Ya, but no. The bottom line is that successful business people know who has the power and lean in to it. Look at how these big companies' CEOs maneuver their companies in China. None of then can say anything controversial against the government and the leaders if they want to do business there. The same thing happens in the US. When things shift they will lean the other way.
It is a masterclass in business strategy that Apple is able to tow the line so well in China where much of its fortunes are based, but come across pretty daring wrt government in the US and EU.
Many companies and leaders can learn a thing of two from Tim Cook on this.
The desire to not be regulated will destroy the system of regulation he depended on to be successful and to have the rule of law, common economic market, educated workforce, global free trade system, reserve currency, American trust and good will that made it safe for every country in the world to use and depend on our tech ecosystem. I hope he sees and feels the pain of his role in unraveling that system. Unfortunately, we will pay the price for generations.
It's really sad that a bunch of people that read atlas shrugged as teenagers and never thought deeply enough to see the flaws in that world view accumulated enough power to undo the world the FDR created and they benefited from.
I listened to Andreesen's appearances on Lex Friedman. He does not strike me as a guy who thoughtfully considers the evidence, but rather someone with a lot of hard opinions and more than a bit of narcissism. And while I think there can be constructive criticism of DEI, most of the anti-DEI sentiment is simply re-branded racism for people who don't like to think of themselves as racists.
[flagged]
You are ignoring any racism that occurred prior to measuring these students.
Was the racism committed by the other students?
Not relevant. The surrounding context created an unfair playing field that is reasonablly rebalanced. Further, even if the playing field was equal, which it isnt based on a cursory review of the facts, society benefits from diverse perspectives in most domains. For examples, if we have no black doctors, medicine demonstrably under performs for black patients, same with any demographic. A broad coalition of perspectives creates a richer ecosystem of ideas and abilities that makes the entire discipline better. A trite commitment to being "race blind" really ends up justifying racism that is an entrenched artifact of deliberate policy choices in the past, not a genuine commitment to antiracism.
Your premise (the premise behind DEI) that people of different races differ in "ideas and abilities" is like weird, old-timey racism. Nobody can ever explain to me what different "ideas and abilities" I bring to a team compared to a white person.
Race is a culturally defined separation of human individual not merely how much sunscreen they need. Irish and Italian people were not considered “white” and ineligible to get many jobs, rent apartments and generally excluded from American society.
I am from the south, black children are taught that they way they speak is inferior and they need to learn “proper” English. That has nothing to do with how much sunscreen they need and everything to do with how other individuals and society treats them.
You are conflating race, culture and class. They are multiple variables that affect what opportunities people have. While I would be the the first to agree with you that race isn’t the basis for any difference between people it is how the world defines the social class and culture of a specific demographic that ends up determining many of the cascading differences between “races”.
No, you're conflating race, culture, and class. You're the one who said people from different races have different "ideas and abilities." And you're defending a DEI system that stereotypes people based on skin color. It's a system that treats people as proxies for their racial groups despite their individual circumstances. The affluent non-white kid from the suburbs is treated as somehow bringing the perspective of disadvantaged inner-city non-white kids. While the poor white kid from rural Oregon is grouped together with more affluent white kids and treated as "privileged."
Why is this downvoted?
I can’t downvote things, but I would have. It seems intended to inflame, and ended up doing so. The guidelines tell us to avoid “fulmination.”
AEI is a conservative think tank, of course they're going to find numbers that make a policy they disagree with look bad. I wouldn't say the numbers are cherry picked, but they don't tell the whole story either. For example, the rates being compared are national acceptance rates, which is interesting maybe but doesn't tell us anything about the acceptance rates at individual schools.
They're also comparing "similar credentials", not identical applications, and they're only looking at MCAT + GPA, but the aamc says schools look at other factors too, and one school may not use the same factors as another (which is why a school acceptance rate comparison would be better than a national acceptance rate comparison.)
What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
You don’t really have to speculate about this. Universities literally went to the Supreme Court to protect their right to discriminate based on race. The disparities in this data are similar to the internal Harvard and UNC data that came out in the SFFA litigation.
So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods. Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools. Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
Society is better served by if a broad coalition of citizens can achieve advancement. We wont benefit from a caste system, which your analysis would create.
> So what, red lining robbed most black families of the ability to finance homes, and decimated the equity of entire neighborhoods.
If someone is poor, why does it matter what historical circumstances caused that result? If two people inherit their grandmother's houses, and both houses are worth $100k, what difference does it make that one house is worth that much because of redlining and the other because of rust belt deindustrialization?
You keep circling back to economics to justify treating people differently based on race, and it makes no sense. If you want to help poor people, just do that directly.
> Property tax funding primary school through high school has resulted in broad under investment in minority schools and over investment in white schools.
False, and has been for decades: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Reber_S.... See page 27:
"This report documents nearly five decades of changes in school funding patterns across the United States... Districts with the highest non-white enrollment shares maintained higher spending throughout the entire period studied, although their advantage was smaller, and in some years reversed if spending is adjusted using CWIFT. Like high-poverty districts, districts with higher non-white shares also experienced disproportionate spending growth after the mid-1990s."
> Legacy admissions has preserved a egregious preference for affluent students that is a far larger distortion to a meritocracy than affirmative action ever was.
Legacy admits have slightly academic scores than the average person admitted: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/upshot/ivy-league-legacy-...
It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality. And the results suggest it remains effective. Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
You’re also assuming I wouldn’t agree that low income families deserve support in a similar fashion. I do. I think it’s important social policy to balance the scales across different issues that cause inequality. I think affirmative action can and should factor in geography and income levels regardless of race.
That brooking paper doesn’t support your thesis or undermine mine. Here is a quote: “ We also find that low-poverty and predominantly white districts were more protected from spending cuts during the Great Recession, and high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts were the least protected.”. So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Here is another: “ differences in average spending between states remain a major driver of spending inequality overall, even though policy conversations often focus on within-state differences.”. That means the more money spend the more equal outcomes tend to become.
Now this quote supports your thesis that property taxes are less of a determining factor in overall spending and I am open to revising my opinion: “ School finance systems are complex, and local taxes are salient to the public. By contrast, funding from the state or federal government, which disproportionately benefits more disadvantaged districts, is less visible.” But later the authors state that “ We agree with the authors of those reports—and the broader consensus—that high-poverty schools need more funding than their low-poverty counterparts to fulfill their mission; equal is not equitable.” Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance. The reason makes sense when you stop to think of the world outside of the classroom and the effects of poverty and racism. If a child doesn’t have enough to eat, is surrounded by instability, is mistreated in most social interactions their performance in school will suffer. If a high school student is the first in their family to apply to college they may need to figure it out on their own as opposed to a family that guides a student to their legacy Alma Mater, helps them write their admissions essays, connects them with references for letters of recommendation etc all for free. Those support systems cost money for communities that don’t have them built into the fabric of their communities.
> It matters specifically because there is a coordinated effort to prevent minority communities from building wealth and achieving equality.
Coordinated by who? The applicants who are applying to colleges? Because if not there's no justification for discriminating against them based on something someone else is doing.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
Nobody did any such thing. You seem to be confused: Voting rights are individual rights. There’s not such thing as voting rights for “communities.”
> So when society is cutting budgets they cut minority education first.
Your claim above was that minority school districts get less funding. But the headline result of the paper is that they don't, and haven't for decades. In fact, they specifically call out the "popular narrative" you repeated: "The findings are broadly consistent with recent academic work on patterns of school spending, which finds within-state progressivity (increasing since the mid-1990s) and usually modest national-level differences in spending by poverty and race (Tyner 2023; Corcoran et al. 2003; Corcoran and Evans 2015; Candelaria and Shores 2019). However, our findings are contrary to popular narratives that often assume that high-poverty or predominantly non-white districts have lower-than-average spending."
> Which think, read fairly means that it may take more spending in low income underperforming communities to achieve equal outcomes. So it may mean than minority communities need 3x the spending to white communities to achieve balance.
You also sound racist like Biden saying "poor kids can be just as smart as white kids." You're flipping back-and-forth between "low income underperforming" and "minority." Even if you're correct that society owes poor communities even more spending than rich ones, that doesn't justify your focus on race. There are low-income underperforming white school districts too, lots of them.
> Look how quickly southern states disenfranchised black communities of equal voting rights when the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act.
No such thing happened.
> What is your argument? That the data in the chart is incorrect?
I already laid out my argument, I'm not going to reiterate it just so you can argue with me. Find someone else to bellyache to about the supposed racism of DEI, I don't care.
Because it is trite, surface level analysis that is historically inaccurate, oversimplifies the factual record and pretends to be morally superior when the net result would be a deeply immoral continuation of the status quo that was deliberately created with racist intent.
This is superficial analysis. If you are right handed and I tied your right hand behind your back right before a hand written exam and then based your grade on the content of the written work and your penmanship of your left hand do you think you would do as well as everyone else? Fight your instinct to deflect or call the premise into question like you usually do when you and I are debating and take a moment to reflect on the fact that there are massive historical factors that cause the unfair imbalance that DEI is attempting correct for. You can claim that people against DEI are the only non-racist people, but that just shows you arent considering the fact that wealth, education, and opportunity has been deliberately directed at some races and not others.
DEI isn’t about using race as a proxy for disadvantage. Universities went to the Supreme Court and told them that they can’t use lack of “wealth, education, and opportunity” instead of race, because what they wanted was more people with particular skin colors, not more people who were poor, etc. This is literally in Harvard’s brief in SFFA. See pp. 52-54: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/230739/202.... There’s nothing to call that other than racist, in the most widely understood sense of the term.
Apologists. MAGA's single purpose is upheaval. There is no upside.
March Andreessen will go wherever he can to do whatever it is he does
I will never get over the outspoken victim mentality most of the tech billionaires have.
Every time I see their talking heads on some podcast it is nothing but a list of grievances and perceived enemies despite their immense success. Non-stop complaints about the government in spite of the fact that most of their success came from government policies that buoyed them the whole way (ZIRP, etc).
I just assume they were bullied as kids and never outgrew it.
Anyway... as a Californian, I'm voting yes on prop 40, and no on 41 and 42.
[dead]