So we're mostly down to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter.
Verizon previously tried to merge with Charter back in 2017, but that didn't work out.[1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-is-exploring-combinatio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...
Then you've got things like Canada's Bell buying a controlling interest in Ziply, which acquired Frontier Northwest 4-5 years ago.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion... Discrimination.
What is it with Donald's administration that they so eagerly embrace DoubleThink?
(edit: also to clarify I think what the Trump admin is doing - bribing to take a different political stance - and allowing monopolies - is bad)
That was my point, but I guess subtlety doesn’t work well on the internet.
and emit a photon and antineutrino?
(nerd alert...). https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/...
Your stories don't cancel out, they add up: most DEI programs I've seen have discriminated against Asians at least as much as whites if not more.
Often said. Rarely backed up by such data. Efforts to measure bias in tech has consistently shown preferences favoring women:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112, the chart with the important data: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1418878112/asset/fc20a...
Study on sending resumes to SV tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484, HN discussion on the paperhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
Yet all the DEI programs I've seen firsthand have privileged women over men.
"Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology."
If I create identically qualified black and white applicants and the latter are reviewed positively at 2x the rate as the former is not not evidence of racial bias?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
More positive bias than negative.
None of the DEI programs I've encountered have focused on age or disability. Only race and gender, mostly the latter.
I spent 25 years in the industry and a dozen as a manager and I can tell you that straight up racism against black and latino people has been coddled and tolerated for a long time.
The solution isn't to say: we won't hire white people, but it is to say, we have to create teams that are heterogeneous (and doing what that takes).
Your personal anecdotes are not what makes up racism, writ large. And the fact that this has to be explained is, you know, the thing.
Probably the the most diverse place I worked at had no such quotas.
My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
There are mountains of research and witnesses. What does your statement mean?
Also, maybe you weren't aware of how they made their hiring choice? People don't usually openly say they are doing it for racist reasons.
> My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
I don't think DEI is implemented by quotas usually, nor is racism.
For example, I had a recruiter I relied on heavily. I realized that they only sent me white guys to interview (with one exception).
I have no idea why, but I know the recruiter found people through their own networks, and I bet those networks - usually formed from people we've gone to school with, worked with, socialized with, family, etc. - was white people, and that's who is added to the network. It's self-perpetuating - white people know white people. IIRC, AirBnB's founder knew someone at YC via their MIT fraternity - what do you think they probably looked like (I'm not criticizing AirBnB founders at all - they did amazing; for all I know they are big proponents of DEI)? (There are so many white people - ~60% of the population or ~200 million in the US - that you can spend your entire life without knowing anyone else.) And look around the office of your IT organization; if someone was black, what is the chance that they'd know someone who would help them get a job there?
One method of DEI in hiring is to require that a person from a minority is interviewed for every position (in IT, that includes women). By me requiring that, my recruiter was required to develop networks that included many minorities, and I hope those people - now in the network - got opportunities for other jobs too.
But if you have never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring it is your eyesight that needs checking, my friend.
Education works, I guess?
Maybe kids and others who disagree with you aren't indoctrinated, but form their own opinions, and the great majority have seen the research (in college) and the very obvious reality, and concluded there is discrimination. I don't know how you can say otherwise in the face of reality.
'Decades' ago there was even more open racism. It didn't take much education to say that white-only hotels and restaurants, and lynchings indicated there was racism.
Many people today, since 2016, openly embrace racism. What do you say to them?
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean, it's not changing faster because it takes a generation? The US has been addressing racism for many generations; the civil rights era - which was not the start of the issue - peaked in the 1960s. The US had the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century and maybe before. The US Civil War was in the 19th century.
However, it is best for society to do this. Because it is best for society if all groups are starting from the same point; and that means we need to give a leg up to the groups that are currently being pushed down by the system.
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
That won't solve the problem.
If most Minority-X are born poorer than Majority, then they will have access to a lesser set of opportunities. Less ability to do well in school. Less ability to go to college. Less ability to do well in college. Fewer contacts made through parents. The list goes on an on. And, because of that, the number of individuals in Minority-X that enter the workforce with the same experience and schooling as Majority is much lower. So the pool of people to choose from is skewed towards Majority.
The only realistic solution to this (that's been put forth/tried) is to artificially boost the ability of members of Minority-X to have access to opportunities. Which means there's more members of Minority-X going to school, and doing well, and to college, and so on, and so on. And once the pools start to even out, the artificial boosts are no longer necessary.
Just "expanding your network to people you don't normally interact with" isn't enough, because even the complete pool of _everyone_ that's qualified for a give thing is still biased toward the majority.
We need to expend the networks from the beginning of that pipeline to the end, not just when Corp Z is hiring senior engineers. Colleges need to expand their networks. There's research showing that plenty of disadvantaged kids who could go to elite schools don't apply simply because they don't know what the value is or which schools to apply to. They go to the local college in town.
And you also have a good point: Kids don't go to bad local schools because of a social network, but because the schools are underresourced. We need to boost the resources of those schools.
And that is tough to do unless the people in those schools have political power (for two reasons: For leverage, and because only the locals understand what they need). So political representation needs to be boosted.
And the ideal that all these things will happen doesn't often work out, and we can't ask these kids to wait for this ideal world - it will soon be too late. So we need to provide some artificial help so they can have resources and power and improve those schools, get access to good colleges, etc. ...
- The parents aren't there to help with schoolwork
- Nutrition is poorer (which leads to poorer learning)
- The parent's aren't as available for guidance
- etc
Now, to be very clear, none of this is "you're part of a minority, so it effects you". Rather, it's an impact of being poor; and minorities are more likely to be poor, so as more likely to be impacted. So the end result is the same, but it's not an automatic impact of being a minority, nor is it something that limited to minorities (just more likely for them).
Things like removing names from CVs are fairly effective at fighting bias.
It is not "as racist" because we didn't just magically arrive into this moment.
Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.
DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
When someone says that someone will or won't "fit with the team" what do they mean ?
Exactly this. It's all about awareness.
IMO companies that enforce quotas are not really trying to fix the problem but just forcing the numbers to look good. Because quotas are not solving the mindset that causes this. It's a quick fix. Trainings and workshops are hard work but they actually improve people's self-awareness over time.
Anyone who thinks "you have to hire a certain amount/percentage of minorities" doesn't mean, by definition, that you will need to negatively impact _individual_ members of a majority hasn't spent any real time thinking about how it works. But the point is that it's worth it for society as a whole.
Who decided/determined this? You state it as if positive discrimination is a proven social good, yet I don't think it's so clear. There's still a ton of debate around it, and different western countries have difference stances on it. To me it still seems like an experiment with unclear/unknown long term value to society.
The "correct" answer isn't biasing evaluation pipelines, it's ensuring you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants.
But you don't in most cases. And a lot of that is because minorities, in general, have a less access to opportunities. By lifting up minorities individually, the goal is to raise them up at a systematic level. And the end goal of _that_ is so that they can/do have proportional representation in the pool of applicants. At which point, the biased treatment to get them there will no longer be necessary.
Admittedly, it's debatable as to whether that approach will work; but I haven't seen any other viable options put forth.
Personally, I believe in affirmative action, but it's become evident that it's incredibly unpopular, and the Supreme Court has rendered it actively illegal, so my personal opinion is moot and I know when to cede a losing battle.
What I was describing is literally the steps you would take if you wanted to ensure you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants.
You obviously need to bias your recruitment efforts, and more than slightly if you want proportional representation of applicants, but I believe it's absolutely essential you do NOT bias evaluations, hiring, or promotion of applicants. To do so actively undermines minorities in my opinion by stripping away their credibility by default.
It is like they want to apply the handbook of toxic middle management. If you want to create strive in your minions, provide benefits to one group while disadvantaging the other. They will hate each other more than they will hate you and you can reign supreme.
This is usually basic psychology or at least it is proved to work.
Universal humanism also empirically works better than what DEI proposes. DEI gratifies self-important people to elevate themselves and their ideas above others and little else. None of them would step back to be an example, so they are probably dishonest too.
If people dislike it, which many do, it is usually correct and not due some made up bias.
- Group 1 is doing well
- Group 2 is doing poorly, because the system works in favor of group 1
- We should NOT try to balance things (lift up group 2 at the cost of group 2) in the short term so that things are more balanced in the long term
- Because doing so would upset Group 1
See, the thing is... Group 2 is _already_ upset; and rightfully so. I'd rather see both groups of people somewhat upset then one group happy and the other _more_ upset. Honestly, that's pretty much a cliche description of what a compromise is.
You are completely free to provide benefits for the poorest as well.
If you see yourself in group 1, you are very free to take a step back. We both know you don't, you expect that from others.
Neither "balance" nor "long term goals" are in any way defined, you just use random discrimination, which is of course negative between a bunch of negative ideas.
You also draw lines between these group 1 + 2.
The entire young male community right now has circled the wagons around "woke" hatred, which is really funny, because they should see the media I grew up with! Imagine someone saying catching AIDS isn't a personal failing in the 80s! Yet the Golden Girls is considered top quality entertainment. But no, suddenly we have to pretend that the same people who insisted Rock N Roll was hypnotizing our children are suddenly correct that making a movie about a trans person will hypnotize our children into being trans?
The mountains of kids insisting that what "gamers" want is hypersexualized boobs with eyes is awful. They don't know history either, like when Mass Effect 2 was lampooned for giving it's "genetically perfect" female character extremely visible camel toe, and placing a cinematic camera up her butt crack.
Samus Aran is from 1986. And fucking Japan. GI Jane got so much hatred in the 90s. Why are we still doing this?
>I want my old son back
Then why don't you be the parent? Why don't you help your son understand the parts of right wing propaganda that are blatantly false? Why don't you help your son understand what women experience? Why don't you help him see the rhetorical trickery and lies of people like the Fresh and Fit podcast? Why don't you help him understand how to properly research controversial topics like that? Or help him understand how rhetoric in the News might not be an accurate narrative? Or have you ever talked to him about Gell-Mann amnesia?
I want my brother back from 30 years of indoctrination about how the reason he struggles is because of black people going to college, instead of him slacking off and not caring about school. When a Mainer who dropped out of community college flies the fucking Confederate battle flag in 2009, you don't get to blame DEI. I want him back from a century of indoctrination that kids would stop being shot at school if only it was easier to buy a rifle, or that my 65 year old mom who has no interest in being a cop should be made to carry a firearm to shoot one of her students.
Why is it always the democrat's fault for what republicans do?
On the contrary, I think there are numerous errors with multiple premises.
One of the biggest things about the DEI discourse that puts me off is the dishonesty of it. Many, perhaps most, DEI advocates attempt to argue that policies like withholding executive bonuses if their org isnt X% women and Y% URM isn't discrimination. Heck, I've encountered one former co-worker argue that allocating a segment of headcout exclusive to women wasn't discrimination, because it's "extra" headcount. If I have 100 headcount and I prohibit men from 20 of them that's discrimination, but if I have 80 headcount and I add 20 "extra" heads exclusively available to women that's not discrimination, according to this former co-worker's logic.
It's one thing to advance a controversial policy and stand by it earnestly. It's another to advance a controversial policy while lying about it to people's faces. DEI is unfortunately often carried out via the latter fashion. And realistically, that's the only way it can be carried out under our present set of laws, because discrimination on the basis of race and gender are illegal nation-wide in the USA.
That's fair. But it's unfair to state it like _all_ DEI proponents aren't honest about it. Clearly, I'm saying just that and I _am_ a proponent of it.
So, it's not speculation. What it does, taking away from one group to give to favored groups, is exactly what intersectionality/woke/etc called for.
That's right out of the playbook of how to promote racism and descrimination - tell people that the 'Blacks', etc. are taking their jobs. It literally goes back to the days of slavery, when they would turn poor whites against black slaves. God forbid the poor and oppressed got together; then they might vote out the wealthy and powerful.
DEI is not redistribution. It's eliminating bias that favors the powerful groups, mostly white guys, that have benefitted - many unwittingly - from that bias for all of US history. If you want your job on merit, if you want a fair chance rather than a handout, you should favor DEI. If you think there's no bias, you are living in a fantasy - it's gone on for centuries, the documentation and research are overwhelming, and it's boomed since 2016.
This runs directly contrary to my experience with DEI. I demoed setups for anonymized zoom interviews, and blinded resume review. HR didn't want any of it. Instead, we made exec's bonuses contingent on keeping the percentage of male employees in their org below a cap - exceed the cap, lose your bonus. The cap was lower than men's representation in the field.
If DEI was about promoting merit, it would be focused on making interviews more objective, and anonymizing as much of the hiring process as we can. In practice, it's the opposite: directly tying incentives to the demographics of the candidates and penalizing those who don't adhere to the desired ethnic and gender ratio.
Yet whenever it's DEI, it's the fault of DEI for some manager being incompetent.
>HR didn't want any of it
Why would they? I've never seen an HR department that actually cared about outcomes. I've been in multiple companies that struggle to hire people because HR insists on being the one writing the requirements, and they blatantly fuck it up, like asking for multiple years experience in a brand new tool, or "requiring" a programming language fluency that we don't use.
Why is it DEIs fault that HR sucks at their job?
If we had this same standard for other ways HR sucks, we would have reverted to Waterfall design methods, and we would eliminate sexual harassment training since sometimes companies retaliate.
Meanwhile how quickly lots of companies are running from DEI shows they never really cared about it, and did not hire competent people to run it. Why is that DEI's fault?
Funny how this standard only applies to DEI
>it would be focused on making interviews more objective, and anonymizing as much of the hiring process as we can
It literally is in a shitload of companies. Why do you think you get to generalize from your singular experience?
I know Interviewing.io does, but they don't have the final say in hires. They just forwarded candidate to companies, which were under no obligation to maintain anonymity. Ironically Interviewing.io's anonymity is why Meta refused to work with them: https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-...
Once it is in place, they always take from specific groups that they label as advantaged, privileged, or oppressors. They give to other groups they favor. I'll let you guess who the bad guys always are. Even if minorities become dominant, they still talk like white males are the advantaged people and still work against them. So, it's just hateful and systematically racist against specific groups.
How about some examples of what I ran into. Please note these are not arguing race is the cause but a specific culture that comes with DEI. This is not how I think about black organizations or anything like that. These are all DEI, liberal run, etc.
At one employer, they did a hiring event that caused the entire workforce to be mostly black within a week or so. Then, management and corporate people were that way. They put out big, "diversity" signs in front showing non-whites being promoted. They were evil and into cronyism like the whites before them but looked different so society is better?
When I lost my job, it was hard to find new ones. Our area was more equally white and black than most places. The companies now were mostly black: workers, managers, and who hired. At some, the white people acted more black than white. So, add any of those jobs. Some would laugh at or mock white people.
My friend gets in a hospital that's also DEI. The mostly-black staff were always rude. One knocked her on the ground to move her as she worked. People there said whites and women never last. That it was pointless to try to correct it.
My step-dad was at a warehouse at the time. Of nearly 100 people, only a few were white. They were treated more strictly and petty. For instance, he said they got in trouble for not having the new shirts but only the black people knew about them. They didnt bother telling the white people.
Many tech companies I looked at overtly said they wanted diversity (not whites). They showed pictures of their staff that had few to no white people. Some like Babbel played up transgender a lot. Local and remote companies had special, support groups for non-whites, women, and LGBT people (eg Plaid). Groups like Best Buy offered in-house mini-MBA's for advancement... unless you're white.
Many of the organizations doing training, networking, mentoring, and grants were focusing on needy minorities. The minority members often got more at the EBT office. The media would always talk about their plight, too, like many of us didnt have empty fridges and no insurance.
So, however you would quantify all that multiplied by however many whites or men were financially or medically impacted by it. I'm glad it's starting to reverse under the Trump administration. At least one politician thinks whites, males, and straight people are human beings, too.
Anything that teaches you to hate and fear is a red flag - a sign to run the other way. They are doing it for a reason, they are appealing to the worst and most emotional parts of people for a reason. (And no, DEI doesn't teach that; it's just the propagandists that portray it that way).
Intersectionality is a descriptive term to understand how a person's advantages (say from being white) and disadvantages (say from being gay) interact and how all the different combinations have unique struggles and challenges. It doesn't do or call for anything.
In practice, they always treat whites, males, and straight people as the problem. The DEI policies they pushed certainly "call for" Something.
You don't need a whiteness tax or other nonsense, when you have equitable systems (like heating assistance programs) the benefits naturally flow to disadvantaged groups because they'll be the ones disproportionately qualifying for aid.
Ideas should also allow criticism, which DEI was notorioulsly bad for. So maybe the idea is indeed just bad.
Yes, Trump here uses simple populism, but it isn't only his achievement that it does work so effectively. And no, that isn't due to racism. Maybe we should rethink it thoroughly anyway.
The nature of dog whistles is that some people use the term in earnest, without the subtext. But in my experience most people enthusiastic about DEI ultimately do condone discrimination in one way or another.
There are incompetent people on both sides of the issue. the difference is that one side has correctly identified a problem with how institutions choose people. The other side is screaming bloody murder that there's no problem at all and that we have to stop talking about the obviously inadvertent and innocuous inequities in our society and institutions.
Not every inequity is the result of discrimination or bias. Should we strive to have a 50/50 gender split in murder convictions? A quota restricting murder convictions to 50% men would be an equitable policy but an explicitly unequal one as it'd require either men being let off or women being falsely convicted.
If DEI was carried through policies like anonymizing resumes and interviews, I'd believe the claims about how DEI is about reducing discrimination. Instead, all the DEI program I've actually seen firsthand have either directly discriminated on th basis of protected class, or incentivize people to discriminate (e.g. bonuses tied to quotas).
I'm involved in hiring at my company, which is fairly diverse compared to my perception of the average. There are no quotas, only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
> one side has correctly identified a problem
There is no substance to this, you just believe your perspective to be superior. You could of course take a step back to let others take your place. Perhaps that would be convincing.
> ...only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
Care to elaborate? The overtly discriminatory policies I listed above were supposedly just ensuring everyone gets a fair take. The language of "ensure everyone gets a fair shake," is no different than how my previous employers described our policy to restrict a segment of headcount to one gender.
If you're interested in non-anecdotal evidence on tech hiring bias, here's a few studies tracking applicants submitted to companies and universities:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112, the chart with the important data: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1418878112/asset/fc20a...
Study on sending resumes to SV tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484, HN discussion on the paperhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
Also, DEI is about giving people with special needs the things they require to function. And providing managers insights into the things they might struggle with. We do information packs about LGBT, different religions etc just so managers understand and can accommodate. We have resource networks for managers (and really, all employees) that have questions about such things. We organise awareness events about LGBT and minority topics so employees can learn from each other and create a better understanding. And it works. It's not just about hiring but also creating better awareness for existing employees.
We do look at numbers to guage how we're doing but nobody is being penalised. If we have very few minorities compared to the local demographics it just means our trainings are not getting heard properly and we need to improve them.
I would go as far as to say that a company that has strict quotas doesn't really care about DEI. They just want a quick fix. This is not how these things work. You're working with people, not numbers.
What bothers me the most is that the Trump administration is even trying to force foreign companies like my employer to abandon DEI programs. It's none of their business what we do in the EU. We like what we do and we're not going to change. They cherrypick a few bad examples and pretend everyone works like that.
If a law is passed requiring drug use to be prosecuted and making it illegal not to, you have criminalized decriminalization.
Just because words or concepts are opposed in isolation doesn't mean they can't appear in a sentence or thought together. That's not how grammar works, and it's not what 1984 is about.
Carr has shown himself to be nakedly partisan, and at risk of doing serious damage to the industry. Anyone who believes otherwise should be referred to his consistent rhetoric that news agencies that show unfavorable coverage to the Trump administration will be investigated and brought to heel.
https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/brendan-carr-ta...
Ending DEI is unlikely to impact their bottom line but mergers do so out with DEI programs they go.
The speed with which they all dropped DEI programs was shocking. Especially after years of saying how it's critical, it makes them more vibrant, stronger, etc. I guess they never believed any of that.
It seems Stripe CEO is the only one left wondering what the heck happened: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/05/16/john-collison... ( https://archive.ph/5PFgq )
> “I am baffled by all the companies doing an about-face on their social initiatives right now. Did you not actually mean it in the first place? Either don’t do it, or do it and stay doing it, but don’t do this ‘DEI is cancelled now’,” he says. “It’s very odd to me.”
Did you really think Target had any strong opinion on LGTBQ people? Or were they just aware of the fact that LGTBQ people buy shit. The Stripe CEO knew that, he's just doing PR.
But it's not like they started needing more stuff and now they figured they'll buy less stuff again. The demand was already there and the customers were already there. That's why it's kind of surprising. Not just Target, Boeing, even Meta and so on. Nobody stood up and said, "no, we stand by it".
> The Stripe CEO knew that, he's just doing PR.
Well, maybe his actions will indicate it's not just PR? He's the CEO, after all, so he can certainly make it happen.
> It uh, was not shocking at all, unless you believed that companies are honest about anything.
No of course not, but we can point their hypocrisy out so every one can see it.
