Is the regular Samsung model too big for you? S22 and S23. It's just the right size for me and I prefer small phones (or what used to be normal sized phones).
Yeah, it really sucks!! I'm hoping they bring it back in some upcoming gen, maybe a "once every couple years" kind of model. (Or even better, someone on the Android side picks up the ball.)
Which is why you shouldn't be convinced that J&J couldn't pay what they'll owe either. Maybe it will end up that I'm wrong, and the bankruptcy would be necessary, but I have no reason to think that's the case right now. Right now this looks like they're just gaming the system for their own benefit, and not simply doing their best to make sure that their victims (whose well-being they clearly didn't care about while they were being poisoned) are all paid fairly. The idea that J&J is going out their way to apply clever legal loopholes just to protect the people they've been intentionally killing is beyond absurd.
My company has had legitimate 1-2 star reviews removed. I know this because one in particular struck a chord with me, and a month later it was gone. At the same time I saw that many other lower scored reviews were gone.
Glassdoor is simply compromised by money and can't be trusted whatsoever.
If only a third-party archived/screenshotted Glassdoor reviews to preserve them. Then we could see the pattern of deletions by date/location/dept/position/timing of layoffs/stock price/etc. Also, someone could construct a RottenTomatoes-type aggregate of RealGlassdoor vs PurgedGlassdoor (vs Blind) metascore over time. To see when things were being manipulated.
I’ve had two employers that are impossible to leave 1 star reviews for. Doesn’t matter how mundane and kind the review is, it never makes it past moderation.
The relatively modern hate-boner for Columbus is kind of weird, and I'm not exactly sure why it's reached such prominence. I'm not Spanish or Portuguese, but I fail to see why lauding explorers is a contemporarily bad thing, colonialism or not.
As everyone's "hate-boner" will be personal, to me a part that stands out is that Columbus seemed to be a conspiracy theorist akin to the flat-earther. The reason why his expedition took so long to get funding, is not because he was the only one who thought the earth was round, but it's that he used wrong calculations in order to calculate the size of the earth, and he was under the impression that it was much smaller than it actually is. Now at that time, similar to how everyone knew the earth was round, people had a pretty good idea of the actual size of the earth as well - it was already known in ancient Greece after all.
So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.
The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".
It seems using the wrong numbers was more of a marketing trick to attract investors. Otherwise, everyone else wouod just have used the known route to the east.
It's kind of weird to laud one specific explorer, yearly. Before the late 1800s, Columbus Day wasn't really a thing, so it's not like that sort of lauding expresses a widespread innate desire.
Instead, Columbus Day celebrations in the US need to be seen through the lens of xenophobia, as the then-newly immigrated Italian American celebrate a sort of Pride Day in the face of racism (they were not seen as really white) and religious bigotry (most were Catholic, not Protestant).
It's also kinda weird that the century-long love-boner for Columbus caused so many people to omit any open discussion about how horrible a person he was, and the brutal policies he put into place. When do we teach that to the kids?
> It's kind of weird to laud one specific explorer, yearly.
Not really any more weird that celebrating a politician yearly, or a civil rights leader yearly, or a religious figure yearly. I don't think it would be weird at all to have an Armstrong or Neil-Buzz Day or whatever (in fact, it's a bit weird we don't have one, since flying to the Moon seems like a bigger deal than sailing to the New World).
> It's also kinda weird that the century-long love-boner for Columbus caused so many people to omit any open discussion about how horrible a person he was, and the brutal policies he put into place. When do we teach that to the kids?
I'm not sure if he was uniquely horrible in any meaningful way. I know some folks try to argue this, but it seems pretty tenuous. All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.
> All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.
It seems like you’re continually answering your own question about why we should no longer hold these people up on pedestals.
And revisiting horrible actions of historical figures that has taken the shine off them is hardly confined to Columbus, or even focused on him. I’d say the increased visibility of owning, raping, and murdering slaves by the American founding fathers has been more prominent.
> all explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.
What an interesting statement. You praise Armstrong for being an explorer, for going to the Moon, thus putting him in the category of "mostly pretty brutal bounty hunters".
I suppose you think the same of all those polar explorers, and of Jacques Cousteau and other undersea explorers.
Because it sounds to me like you don't have a consistent argument here.
> I'm not sure if he was uniquely horrible in any meaningful way. I know some folks try to argue this, but it seems pretty tenuous.
I've looked into it. It seems he was unusually horrible even for his time. And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.
> You praise Armstrong for being an explorer, for going to the Moon, thus putting him in the category of "mostly pretty brutal bounty hunters".
I think you're just being purposefully obtuse here, as I don't think I'm doing that at all. The fact that explorers 500+ years ago were brutal conquerors is orthogonal to the fact that exploration itself should be celebrated.
> And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.
I mean this to me just reeks of bias, mainly because it's quite well-known that indigenous peoples of the Americas were already well-versed in slavery, and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps. What exactly did Columbus "introduce" here?
> The fact that explorers 500+ years ago were brutal conquerors
You left out a few caveats. You mean that state sponsored explorers with the mission of bringing in money to the state, including by taking gold and slaves, were brutal conquerors.
Other explorers were not brutal conquerors. You need money to conqueror.
Pytheas, the Greek explorer who first visited what is now Great Britain and Ireland, was not a brutal conqueror.
Marco Polo, 800 years ago, was an explorer who not a brutal conqueror. The same for Ahmad ibn Fadlan, the Muslim diplomat and explorer who went to the Volga Bulghars, and for Ahmad ibn Rustah Isfahani, another Muslim explorer of Europe and Asia.
The Polynesian explorers of the Pacific were not brutal conquerors - there was no one to conquer. The same for the explorers that reached Iceland, the Canary Islands, and other uninhabited places. And for the polar explorers, and space explorers.
The fishermen who explored the Grand Banks in the early 1500s did so for fish, not to conqueror land or people.
The Roman explorers who went to south and east Asia, did not do so to conquer. They did so to trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_sub-Saharan_Africa points out the Roman explorations across the Sahara "had mainly a commercial purpose. Only the one conducted by emperor Nero seemed to be a preparative for the conquest of Ethiopia or Nubia."
Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the Italian explorer who entered the court of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, did not go to conquer the Mongols.
That's a good number of counter-examples, yes? At the very least it sure does seem like you need a few qualifiers to your blanket statement.
> I mean this to me just reeks of bias
I mean, your choice of picking Columbus's first voyage just reeks of bias too, so it's getting pretty stinky here.
> and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps
Really? That's the argument you want to make?
The point is that he's unique because he's one who introduced that abominable system to Americas.
Yes, there were other forms of slavery. Then again, there were other explorers. The world was well-versed in exploration before Columbus was even born. If you diminish the uniqueness of Columbus's brutality, you end up also diminishing the uniqueness of his first voyage.
Yes, someone else could have introduced the encomienda system. And someone else would have made the trip across the Atlantic had Columbus not managed it.
And someone else would have been the first person on the Moon had Armstrong caught the flu or been in a bad accident, thus preventing him from flying that mission.
> exploration itself should be celebrated
Because it's called "Columbus Day", not "Exploration Day", and because the holiday started not in celebration of exploration but as a sort of Italian Pride festival to overcome American xenophobia against the newly-arrived non-white/non-Protestant immigrants.
If you're going to rebrand it, that's fine. But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.
> I mean, your choice of picking Columbus's first voyage just reeks of bias too, so it's getting pretty stinky here.
But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates? His first voyage to the New World, not the man himself in particular, all the bad stuff he did, not even his later voyages necessarily. At least that's how I understood it.
> But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.
I very explicitly say the exact opposite (to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal), and at this point it's becoming obvious you're just arguing in bad faith.
> But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates?
No, not primarily and not historically.
President Harrison's 1892 proclamation praised Columbus because "Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment", and because of his "devout faith". He drew a parallel between Columbus's enlightenment and that of the recently introduced "system of universal education". See https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-335-4... .
While yes, it was held on "four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America", it was not a holiday for purpose of celebrating that voyage. It was a day to encourage the "patriotic duties of American citizenship."
It must also be seen in context of white xenophobia, and the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans.
"As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Now, that is not the modern-day Columbus Day. That effort started in the 1930s by the Knights of Columbus, a male-only Catholic Fraternal organization who wanted to promote a Catholic as being also American. They chose the name "Knights of Columbus" back in the 1880s because, to quote them:
"When founding the Knights of Columbus, Father Michael McGivney picked Christopher Columbus as a namesake for the organization because in a time when anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling ran rampant, the American public embraced this famous explorer." - https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/articles/honoring-columbus...
Bear in mind that Americans mostly knew about Columbus through Washington Irving's best-seller "biography" about him. The scare-quotes there are because that book told falsehoods, like the idea that educated people at the time thought the earth was flat. It did not describe Columbus's brutal orders. That's because Irving's book was not written to be historically correct, but as a way to promote American nationalism.
"Literary critics have noted that Irving "saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voya...
Furthermore, in 1882 when the KoC started, the US was finishing it's own conquest of the native population, and looking towards expanding its own (short-lived) empire, which by 1900 included Cuba and the Philippines.
So it's not like Americans at that time were against violent attacks on people they considered savages. They were doing something similar!
Again, very little of this is a celebration of exploration. It's using that one event as a hook to promote that Italian immigrants and their descendants, and Catholics, can be patriotic Americans.
> to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal
To quote you: 'All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.'
That is not true about explorers.
Your discussion about orthogonality is that someone can be an explorer and be a brutal bounty hunter, and those two can be separate.
I don't think anyone questions his tenacity as an explorer. I always thought calling what he did the "reunification" of the old and new world was about right. It's more the plunder and enslavement of the native people that people have a problem with I'd guess. I'm also under the impression that a lot of the positive Columbus marketing was a 19th/20th Century US thing to help boost the social status of Italian immigrants; I don't really know his approval rating throughout the centuries, but I think you've right that it's down as of late.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day explains how Columbus was unusually bad (and, accurate or not, might have been a partial cause of the modern hate-boner for Columbus, along with waves at everything else).
The war against the American working class I think is something that was waged by Capital against the majority American working class starting centuries ago.. Capital was always been opposed to the majority of the working class in America because there's always been a conflict between Capital versus labor over the use of cheap labor.. the war waged by Capital extended to propaganda war, and all things associated with the culture of the European American working class came under attack by capital.. including Columbus
I doubt Columbus's conquest was uniquely brutal for its time. The distinctive fact about him is that he discovered America, and kicked off the events that led to the formation of the US.
> I doubt Columbus's conquest was uniquely brutal for its time
"Uniquely brutal" is a very high bar. I trust you didn't mean it as a rhetorical technique to require demonstration that no one else was as brutal as he was, before acknowledging that he was brutal even for his time?
Since you argue that Columbus was unique in "that he discovered America", then he is also unique for being the first European to lead slave raids of indigenous Americans, and the European to introduce the genocidal encomienda system.
And he was brutal. If Bobadilla's accusations of Columbus's brutality are correct, then Columbus's conquest was exceptionally brutal, even to other Spaniards of the time.
"Bobadilla reported to Spain that Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery. He claimed that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola.[l] Testimony recorded in the report stated that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartholomew on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut because she had "spoken ill of the admiral and his brothers"."
Columbus was removed as Governor of the American due to these accusations, though later pardoned by the royals.
When do we teach this history of Columbus in school?
> and kicked off the events that led to the formation of the US
What an odd focus. Using the exact same argument, Henry the Navigator also kicked of the events that lead to the formation of the US, because of his work to initiate what is now called the Age of Discovery.
Well yeah. In the same sense you can discover a restaurant or a nice pub without meaning that nobody ever went there before. Lots of things have been discovered more than once.
A not-insignificant number of people think that Europeans should never have settled there, and it should have been left in its pastoral state to tribal people, meanwhile the rest of the world advanced technologically and industrially on its own.
Pastoral describes people who raise grazing animals, generally sheep or cattle, both species introduced by European explorers and colonizers (as were horses). Prior to Columbus no species of domesticated cattle or sheep existed in the New World, thus no "pastoral state." Describing the world Columbus and those who followed him discovered (for Europeans at least) as a "pastoral state of tribal people" shows a poor understanding of pre-Columbian history in the New World.
Early European explorers and conquerors described finding large-scale farming, cities, extensive trade networks, empires, warfare, and of course slavery. Archaeology and the remaining records of those people confirm European accounts.
We can condemn Columbus for many things, but neither he nor the Europeans who followed introduced violence and slavery to the New World. They did introduce novel pathogens which led to large-scale, if somewhat accidental genocide (prior to a germ theory of disease).
Large-scale industrialized slavery as introduced by Europeans was a new thing, though, outside of perhaps the Aztecs (if you look at the whole mass sacrifices thing as an 'industry').
Large-scale slavery existed prior to the European colonizers. Look at the history of Rome, Greece, Egypt, China, India. Ancient Rome and Greece had fully slave-based economies, more or less so depending on when and where you look. Over time the process got more efficient in economic terms, "industrialized" as you call it, but slavery existed almost everywhere, in many forms, as far back as we have records, and of course still goes on.
…yet those same people argue out of the other sides of their mouth that people who have “too much” stuff should have that stuff taken away from them and redistributed.
Yes, there are many indigenous Americans who think that the lands and gold that were taken from them by the ancestors of those who now have "too much stuff" should be taken from those people and returned to them.
> Though the modern state of Italy had yet to be established, the Latin equivalent of the term Italian had been in use for natives of the region since antiquity; most scholars believe Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa.
"Antiquity" meaning the time of Augustus. By then the Romans had conquered all of the Italian peninsula, including the area in the southern-most tip the Greeks called "Italia."
Referring to the people of the peninsula as "Italian" dates from medieval times, not ancient. In Columbus' time the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sardinians, etc. would not have referred to themselves as Italian, as that Roman term for a province (not a single people) had fallen away with the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier.
At this point we’re just arguing semantics. Do we mean to refer to the geographic Italian peninsula? The Roman province called Italia? The peoples and cultures collectively called Italian? The medieval or Renaissance definitions of Italian? The modern nation-state called Italy?
Historians mostly agree that Columbus came from Genoa — then an independent principality among many others that eventually coalesced into Italy the nation state. But Columbus lived in Portugal and Spain and married a Portuguese woman, obtaining Portuguese citizenship. And he spoke fluent Castilian Spanish. We don’t know how Columbus identified his nationality, but when he got funding from the Spanish crown he did so as a subject of Spain, not of Genoa or Portugal.
I think the original point, nit-picking really, intended to point out that Columbus and the modern nation-state called Italy have different timelines, and “Italian” did not yet exist as a political identity at that time, though the concept of Italy as a geographic region, or Italians as a people more alike than not by culture, history, and language did exist in Columbus’ day.
Perhaps most relevant, at the time Columbus could not ask any king or queen of Italy to fund his voyage because no such kingdom existed.
Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, who married and then defeated the Emirate of Granada in 1492, the year Columbus sailed to the New World. Spain as a nation didn't exist until then.
It existed as a unified kingdom from 1492. A kingdom occupied the same place in international relations and national identity back then that modern nation-states occupy today.
Just want to nitpick everyone. Spain, less Navarre and Portugal, would have existed as a state at that time, but probably not yet a nation, as I presume the people still saw themselves as Aragonese, etcetera, and not yet Spanish. They even spoke different dialects at the time.
Just to nitpick your nitpick, much of Spain still speaks different dialects (if not different languages entirely). So speaking Catalan is a different thing than speaking Galician, which is very different than the Basque language. There's also Andalusian and the Canarian dialect, among others I probably don't know about.
Weeeellll you hand waived a lot away there with ‘colonialism or not’. “I don’t know what the hate-boner for Bill Cosby is, why is lauding comedians a bad thing”
I'm genuinely curious, I wasn't trying to hand-wave anything. I think it's probably a cultural zeitgeist, but in my opinion it's interesting how Columbus was so specifically targeted (when there's inarguably much worse historical people out there that are still celebrated). With that said, just think about how disingenuous your comment comes off: you're literally comparing a person that's still alive and held to today's ethical and legal standards (able to face his accusers, etc.) to someone that lived 500 years ago.
Columbus has a holiday named after him here in the US, so there’s a visible target. He’s more an avatar than anything else, though obviously problematic.
There are plenty of terrible people - living and dead - that are worthy of disdain. But the dead, like children, can’t speak for themselves so they’re decent as far as avatars go re: making a point.
Columbus was bad enough, but what followed after him was worse.
The Tainos and other island tribes were cursed to have gold jewelry. If they had never had it the Columbian discovery of the Americas may not have been that much bigger a deal than the Viking discovery of the Americas.
It was always going to go the way it did, because of sugarcane. Columbus introduced “white gold” in 1493 on his second voyage even. By 1515-1520 there were sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the Portuguese had them in Brazil.
> Of course, his “discovery” wasn’t new either as the Americas had been known to indigenous people for thousands of years, and Vikings since the 11th century
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but why would we celebrate Jack Dorsey rebuilding the same flawed system that went too far towards censorship in the name of "misinformation"?
Not to say if it's the best or worst, but considering his experience of running a platform he himself say failed at what he wanted it to do, wouldn't he be a good person to have on your side in order to stay clear of making the same mistakes?
He openly say he fucked up with Twitter, and his involvement as funder of both Bluesky and Nostr is him trying to correct his mistakes with new platforms that cannot be abused in the same manner.
Because Jack Dorsey may have funded BlueSky, but he's not involved in running it, he's instead focused on Nostr, the web3 answer to the problem. And as for "misinformation" vs "censorship", I think Fox News just demonstrated over $700 million reasons to care about misinformation.
