[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

Every libertarian I know believes governments should provide intervention in these kinds of situations. If you don't, that makes you an anarchist (or whatever).

I don't see any slippery slope or danger of totalitarian take over. The virus is inherently time-limited.

then you do not have a proper understanding or respect for history if you fail to recognize the dangers of this precedent.

I do, rights and liberty are easy to protect, defend and discuss in times of peace, prosperity and normalcy. However it is in times of crisis were protecting rights and liberty is most crucial

When it comes to rights, we always have to ask "what are the reasonable trade-offs?". There are no absolute rights, even in the U.S.

Most people believe it's clearly reasonable that we lock down our cities to prevent mass death. The economic pain is great, and it's very inconvenient for all, but it's much better than mass death.

You're entirely free to read/watch/do anything you want in your home, you can exercise, talk to anyone about anything you want, get food, take care of essential things.

You're not free to risk killing many people just so you can enjoy leisure activities. That would be privileging your personal liberty over the lives of your fellow citizens. And, incidentally, you would be depriving some of them of their personal liberty by virtue of killing them...

Does it bother you that you can't own significant quantities of radioactive material and carry them around while you're in public? Clearly laws forbidding this are an infringement of personal liberty. But they're an incredibly reasonable infringement so it doesn't bother you, I'd assume.

A democratic society should be governed by the people. We, The People, have decided that the lock downs are good. We have in effect demanded and endorsed them. So you're disagreeing with the majority of your fellow citizens, not some dictator.

For some unknown reason you believe these lock downs are unreasonable, without any clear rationale.

There seems to me to be an overreaction to this virus over other known health crisis, and for that matter other emergencies simply do to the unknown / novel nature of this event.

The other problem with your response is the pure assumption that a total lockdown of all citizens was the only option, and that anyone daring to suggest there may have been another more measured way is simply wanting to put "leisure activities" over peoples lives, the fact remains that several people have suggested alternative measures that could have been used, including isolated only those of the vulnerable population where more than 80% of the deaths are accounted for, and where outside of that vernable population COVID is less deadly than the normal flu. Do you propose these same lockdowns every flu season? after all the flu does cause "mass death" as you seem to define it every year so it must be a reasonable response to shut down the economy every flu season right?

You do understand that the lockdowns where never to prevent the transmission of the virus, but rather simply slow the rate of transmission to allow the health system to sick and not be overwhelmed.

I will not bother to address your reductio ad absurdum on radio active material as it holds no bearing on this conversation, but I will say my position on that would not be what you expect :)

>>For some unknown reason you believe these lock downs are unreasonable, without any clear rationale.

Well allow me to provide some Rationale then

1. There were / are viable less extreme measures that could have been taken

2. It is yet to be seen if the Lock Downs actually were effective, there is some data to suggest they were not, and simply stating "it would have been worse" is not evidence based. Some data suggests that COVID was already widely spread before the lockdowns even went into effect and a large part of the population was asymptotic or suffers very mild symptoms

3. There is no section of the federal or any state constitution I am aware of that reads "These rights can be suspended in a time of emergency" while I am aware that the courts have played mental gymnastics to carve out these exceptions, the fact remains these acts prove the constitution is powerless to prevent infringement of basic rights by government

4. The precedent set by these unprecedented orders will be used to infringe on rights of the population using thinner and thinner justifications for an "emergency", I can see a flu season being used to trigger a draconian response in a few years.

5. One of the bigger problems I have with the lock downs is the open ended nature of them, and the power to extend or lift them is in a single person, in a single branch of government with out limit, oversight or control. It may be needed for a governor to act quickly to get process started, but that should then need to be follow up with some other branch of government oversight no less than 30 days after a governor acts. This is not a dictatorship and we should not devolve into one in a crisis

1. That the lock downs were unnecessary/ineffective.

And since the evidence and experts disagree with you, it seems incredibly dubious that you're right. As with climate change denial, there is always some minority taking the contrarian view, but the scientific consensus should still rule the day.

And even if it does turn out to be true, it was still the scientific consensus during an emergency, so it made sense to do it as the best available option. We can't undo the lock downs and we're already working to phase them out. So there's really no cogent argument here.

Also, the comparisons to the flu are a sign you don't have your facts straight. Expert models predicted the potential for millions of dead Americans without intervention. And it seems entirely backed up by the actual data we got from New York.

You also don't seem to understand that flattening the curve reduces death, it doesn't just spread it out over time.

2. That the lock downs are bad for freedom.

This is entirely based on the slippery slope argument. You can't actually point to any governmental abuse, at all. Every government official seems to be acting entirely in good faith across a massive country. Which is why no reasonable person is worried about this. The people protesting the lock downs are a tiny minority of extremists and contrarians.

You have to ask yourself "am I being too extreme in my views, or is every educated/informed person blind to the danger?" and it's pretty obvious which of these is the case.

There is simply no justified cause for concern that lock downs are going to become a tool of oppression. The lock downs are happening with the consent of the people and the courts.

And it's extremely time-limited, not open-ended. There is absolutely no way the lock downs will go on indefinitely. And there is no way they will happen again without the consent of the people. There is simply no reasonable cause for alarm.

P.S.

I would expect your position on allowing people to poison their fellow citizens with radioactive material might be similar to your position on poisoning people with a deadly virus. That would be consistent with the extremist views you're espousing.

The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

... If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-i...

>>We can't undo the lock downs and we're already working to phase them out. So there's really no cogent argument here.

This is simply not true, there are lots of people claiming we should remained locked down for alot longer with many many governors continuing the lock downs when they should be phasing them now, this main link in this thread is about extending the lockdown and several people pointed out the unrealistic "targets" of the Bay area for them to "phase out" the lockdowns

>You can't actually point to any governmental abuse, at all

I guess that depends on your definition of abuse. Lets go through some of the items I am aware of in the US that has occured by the government that I consider abuse

1. CA Police arresting a man in the middle of the ocean by him self

2. police harassing old people on the beach because they dared sit in a chair instead of directly on the sand

3. WI Police threatening a teen child with arrest over a instagram post

4. RI Police stopping all people with a NY Plate for questioning at the border "Papers Please" style

5. RI Governor sending the national guard door to door to question people about their movements, and activities

6. MI Governor banning the sale of gardening supplies while still allowing lottery sales because she need to protect state revenue

7. CT police using drones to monitor people activities to ensure they are conforming to social distancing

8. KY CPS investigating people with large numbers of children for child abuse for failing to "social distance" with each other

9. TX creating a COVID Task force to go undercover to crack down on home based businesses during the lock down

10. Many States banning the sale of Self Protection Tools as "non-essential"

I could probably list dozens or hundreds more abuses by state and local authorities, that is with out getting in the arbitrary definitions of "essential business" many states have come up with, which many of them seem to be purposefully to aid political supporters and ensure the business owned by those supporters were essential, or hypocritical actions like the Chicago Mayor claiming her getting a hair cut was "essential activity" since she is a public figure but it was non-essential for everyone else, the rules for thee but not for me position has been rampant through out this event

>>Every government official seems to be acting entirely in good faith across a massive country.

If you believe that then our definition of "good faith" is very different or you are not paying attention

Would you rather fly in business class comfort for 8 hours or with less comfort for 4 hours? Almost doesn't seem worth the expense and risk of going supersonic.

I would be so much more excited about an airplane that was large enough that economy class seating was as comfortable as business class seating is today. That would be much more revolutionary.

I would also get excited about an airplane that was vastly safer than the already-quite-safe airplanes we have.

An airplane with a fail-safe fuselage that can disconnect from the rest of the plane, parachute to the ground and land (or float) safely. This could potentially eliminate fire danger by jettisoning everything flammable (gas filled wings, engines, cockpit, and whatever else).

The fact that flying is uncomfortable and still-too-scary to millions of people are the biggest opportunities for innovation that I see.

Flying at 500+ MPH is already quite fast given the size of the planet.

The thing is, the vast majority of airplane crashes happen at takeoff or landing, because that's when there's the least time to react if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, this is also when a parachute would be least effective, because there isn't sufficient altitude to deploy one. (Never mind that we don't even have a design for parachutes large enough to safely land an airliner fuselage.) Additionally, by giving the fuselage the ability to separate from the wings, you seriously weaken the strongest and most critical point of the aircraft: the main wing spar. In other words, you gain an additional risky emergency landing method, which could only be deployed in certain very unlikely circumstances (if the plane is high enough to safely deploy parachutes, it it probably high enough to glide to a safe landing, or at least safer then landing wherever you end up with parachutes) - and in the process you also now have a much higher chance of the wings falling off in midair.

I think I prefer a normal airliner design.

Not sure how you can desire better safety. The last fatal crash of a US airline flight was in 2009.

I'd take the 4 hours any day. At that point, it's reasonable to take a trip to Europe for a long weekend.

There's gotta be a market for an all-business-class plane, since we know that first/business subsidize coach, but nobody's doing it yet. The airlines want to throw those business class seats out as perks to people spending corporate dollars, not charge the end user what they actually cost, in which case "real humans" could afford them.

I've also had this issue with the "Premium Service" United flights between SFO and NYC/BOS. It supposedly exists, but whenever I search, I can't filter on those particular flights.

Really? How come first has all but disappeared on European flights and business keeps shrinking?

there is really no point where it becomes worth it to make seats bigger without charging more. If there is more space on the plane, it makes more since to put more seats there, not keep the number of seats the same

Why is it less comfort? I dont see how the two are mutually exclusive.

The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a lot of game state that enables cheats. With a "thin client" like Google Stadia, there should be a lot less opportunity for hacks. The incoming game data is an audio/video stream, which makes many hacks hard/impossible.

It would be great to play FPS games without any cheaters, they can easily spoil an otherwise amazing game. Maybe future online tournaments will be cloud gaming only.

There is already too much rent-seeking in gaming.

I like competitive games, or at least I did when I was younger, but nowadays I yearn for some good-ol' tribes server community where you have 32 players playing CTF and there are actual administrators who are engaged with the community. If someone becomes a problem you just ban them from your server. Similarly if someone brings a friend to your LAN party and that friend is a cheater, you uninvite your friend and/or punch the cheater.

"Cloud gaming" sounds like a hellscape.

It reminded me of the Heavy Personnel Carrier. Loading the HPC with 5 heavies armed with Grenade Launchers and Heavy Mortars was fun.

You don't need to be across the world for it to matter, just across the continent.

it'll just turn the cheats from memory manipulation to computer vision -- less powerfully 'psychic', but still fast enough to cheat.

Not sure if something like that exists (I don’t game really)

Alternatively, servers where certain categories of cheats are allowed, so if you just prefer playing with a minimap you can be with like-minded people.

This is assuming the mind of a cheater is “I prefer playing in this mode”, rather than “I want to win a lot of fake internet pints”. Idk which is more accurate.

Of course, that doesn't address all of it: one could still have the very best cheats that never get detected on a highly trusted account. It's silly, but then if they did get detected one day, they'd lose all their precious skins (which have non-zero to significant monetary value), as they become untradeable forever.

But yeah, I think ESEA has some of what you're talking about built in already. Why spend a bunch of money on accounts that keep getting banned?

Valve also do this on their matchmaking servers semi-secretly using Trust Factor. Unfortunately this can make the experience for new players much much worse.

I almost want to write one of these that looks at Twitch streams to figure out how common the "no-reg" that streamers complain about actually happens. (Or, if I were the game company, I would write one of these to figure out if there's a bug in the netcode, or people just aren't really as good as they think they are. I have a theory, but data is better than a theory.)

To eliminate cheating, I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, which is harder to write a cheat for. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the new heroes in Overwatch have projectile-based weapons instead of hitscan weapons -- even if you're cheating with a projectile, you're not guaranteed to hit the shot. The enemy can just move out of the way. (Of course, a "move out of the way" bot could be written, which would be a lot more insidious and harder to detect. Overwatch streamers accuse everyone that hits a hitscan shot of cheating, but nobody has ever accused someone of moving out of the way of cheating. There is enough spam in the game that eventually you'll kill the enemy; writing a cheat that kills enemies more quickly will get you better results than a cheat that lets you live longer.)

There is also a lot of low-hanging fruit where the client is trusted when it doesn't need to be. Hearthstone had a combo where people could generate infinite copies of a card ("SN1P-SN4P Warlock"), but the animations on the client limited the number that could actually be played in a turn. This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. So people hacked their client to skip animations. This would be fixed with a thin client, but it's also possible to fix with 100% certainty on the traditional fat client. Just calculate how long the animations take on the server side, and reject client updates after the server thinks the turn is over. Add a few seconds of slop for people playing on 2G networks.

This isn't true for a number of reasons:

1. Good players are exceptionally good. In pro gaming you'll hear the term "pixel shot" because someone fired at essentially one pixel. The shooter is holding an angle where they know that a change of one pixel is someone running by. That sort of thing; and

2. If you watch any streams you'll see aimbots from cheaters (eg when the streamer gets killed and spectates who killed them) and it's pretty funny to see just how blatant aimbots are, like shooting through bushes that don't block bullets but have no visible indication of an enemy.

But I agree with other comments: I think cloud gaming is 100% never going to be relevant for competitive esports (of this kind) because of latency. That's not a technology problem. It's a physics problem.

> I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management,

It's interesting that you bring that up. That's actually a criticism a lot of people have of games like Overwatch (that you mention) in that it's not about gun play but ability management. That's actually seen as a negative by many. Riot Games apparently has made a deliberate design decision to focus more on gun play than ability management in Valorant, as just one example.

> This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client.

This is surprisingly common actually. Timers on many games are really just approximated with frame rates. Good players will do better at a game if they can get 200fps over those that get 100fps.

An example of this is the much-beleaguered Fallout 76. Bethesda games use this pervasively and, at least for awhile, Fallout 76 had a cap put in place of 63fps to avoid some of the benefits high frame rates gave players (eg faster movement), such that I took to calling it Fallout 63.

But a streaming-exclusive game would be impossible to pirate. That's why publishers are so enthusiastic about it.

The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire.

Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school".

Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.

Everyone said it was impossible.

She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools.

She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job.

People (especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended, when it doesn't seem to be that predictive of workplace success.

definitely not. french companies actually have engineering salary tables depending on your age and university

It discusses how there are 6 ranks for business schools, and your salary for the first N years will be based on that. Same for engineering. It’s funny that one of the companies is proud to declare that they can move salaries by “up to 5%!!!” based on the candidate themselves (whereas the school can make a 20-30% difference...)

Source: am a dropout of a shitty university, still have no degree. It does not bother HRs, as far as I could see so far.

That happens literally everywhere, especially at big companies that make easy money. The elites don't like sharing the pie with the great unwashed.

Perhaps it's bad in other places too. I personally think it's idiotic, as the point of interviewing is to find great candidates, and I have never felt like the University they attended was a particularly good predictor of that.

Can I have a citation?

Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companies actively recruit from top schools only insofar as every other company in every other industry does. But that doesn't mean they recruit exclusively from top schools either. Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League literally don't graduate enough students for that to be a feasible new grad hiring strategy.

You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. My personal experience is after you've worked a few years, no one in software engineering cares where (or even if) you went to school. And any software engineer with a pulse located in the SF Bay Area can get at least a phone interview with any of the top tech companies.

I've worked for 10 years and recently applied for a position. The manager told me I was a good candidate, and that I checked the box for coming from a top school.

He didn't use the phrase "checked the box" but did explicitly say that my coming from a top school meant he could skip most of the technical portion of the interview and just focus on the people aspect.

But for the most part I agree with you. It usually is important for the first job.

As someone who went both to a top school and a very average school, I do have a problem with it. If you've not been to an average school, you may be surprised at how many bright and motivated students there are.[1] And if you've not been to a top school, you may be surprised at how average most of the students are.

I don't know if this generalizes, but it was my observation: Top school students tended to be a bit less honest (soft cheating, etc). At least where I was, it appeared to be clearly tied to the competitiveness needed to get in and get top grades.

[1] My grad school group-mate, who had only been at top schools, once went for an internship in a national lab. He was shaken at the fact that another intern from the University of Alabama-Huntsville was as capable/smart as he was. I saw this often in top school students, where they just assume that if they're doing well in school, that they are somehow better educated than the rest of the country.

If I were in a position to interview and hire someone, graduating from a top school would at least garner some attention, assuming the degree was relevant, but it's not a 'free pass' through any of the steps of the interview process, and may even earn them a more critical assessment in the implicit 'culture fit/personality' category.

This is just my opinion on the matter, not trying to make any sort of factual claims.

That may be true, but likely both of these have poor GPAs and thus are filtered out anyway. Usually you'll be evaluating candidates with at least a decent GPA.

I'm not claiming the average is the same between the two. But when there are a lot more average schools than top schools, chances are that numerically most good candidates do not come from top schools.

When I look at resumes of new grads, I ignore the school altogether. GPA has to meet some not-high threshold, and then it's just a peek at interesting projects they may have done.

And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.

Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.

Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms:

1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities.

2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women.

3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women.

4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately.

5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men.

6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women".

And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men.

BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.

If cardinality(pigs + sheep) > cardinality(work horses), the truth will be downvoted.

In software, the work horses need to be more proactive and not give up what is theirs.

Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity.

There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.

You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.

The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates.

Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.

I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed.

This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss.

> Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour

Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages.

> For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before!

Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.

To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.

Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption.

The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable

My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims

If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it.

I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s

Edited previous comment for the missing source, that's my bad. (and despite calling me out you still can't find a single source for your claims (short of a vague command to go read a document you clearly haven't read, which is just, beautiful))

Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios and instead just look at the rates graduating with CS degrees. That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school] and, by your own admission, we close to half that on average (the numbers fall of faster if you consider technology leadership[1] or look more at smaller companies (which is harder to source considering a lot of places aren't very open with regards to their hiring stats, but in my experience working in nyc I’ve only seen sub 10% (N=3). Sub 10% to me essentially none, since that can basically evaporate with normal engineering churn). If we were to assume there was a grand bias, you'd expect an over representation in relation to the rate graduating at the very least.

“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms. Also, as an aside, people are talking about inequality in the HR field, you’re just not paying attention to it (tldr it is weird that there are more women and even with the numerical advantage they’re still underrepresented in leadership which reflects in their comp) [2]. When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present. Despite what men on the internet like to believe there’s no evidence women that go into math or computer science are worse at it than men. Estrogen is great but it doesn’t change your ability to write code. Hell no mechanism to explain why the ratios are more skewed than medicine [5] or law[4] even.

As for women being “uncomfortable talking with you about this”, I’d suspect that has a lot to do with your fear of a nonexistent feminsit boogieman and repeated claims that they don’t deserve their jobs than any kind of conspiracy. Imposter syndrome acts across genders and this repeated narrative plays to a lot of people’s insecurities.

[0]http://oue.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/Georgia%20Tech%20C... [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/4467/female-employees-at-tech... [2] https://recruitingheadlines.com/71-percent-of-hr-professiona... [3]https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-... [4] https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen... [5]https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...

This was far more effort than you deserve, but, I can only hope one day the culture at some of these major tech companies start to change, if only so I don't have to hear think pieces about how hard it is to hire from people that auto exclude 50% of the population. I can't imagine why women are uncomfortable talking you, a proud sexist that openly claims there's feminist propaganda involved in their hiring. I can't think of any reason short of shame of being involved in such an obvious conspiracy.

This isn't even a grammatical sentence, but you appear to be suggesting that being told what to read isn't providing a source, which is nonsensical.

Go read: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

To repeat - for most of what I've written I'm the source. Make of it what you want. What I've seen is consistent with similar claims made by others, many times in many contexts. The tech industry discriminates against men systematically, and it's because of the distorted ideological beliefs of people like you!

That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school

GA Tech isn't representative. Even your own linked document says that: "Georgia Tech also awards more engineering degrees to women than any other U.S. institution"

GA Tech is famous for having a much higher proportion of women on its courses than normal. I guess someone told you it's a success story and now it's your go-to example.

They "achieved" this by systematically discriminating against men, which has led to a Title IX complaint against them for no less than ten different programs:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/title-ix-updates-ocr-opens-in...

They routinely ban men from all sorts of events so if you believe this is an example of an unbiased selection process you're making my case for me. Men are systematically discriminated against and women never are: the disparate outcomes reflect fundamental differences and NOT some sort of non-existent bias against women.

Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios

You act like it's an absurd position to "abandon", but it's an absurd position to have in the first place. Let's not do for-the-sake-of-argument, let's deal with reality. Nearly all jobs have distributions different to base demography.

Here's a chart you should look at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

You're picking on engineering here, but why not pick on:

1. Kindergarten teachers, 97.% female

2. Dental hygienists, 97.1% female

3. Nurses, 90% female

4. Phlebotomists, 86.% female

5. Insurance claims processors, 85% female

All these jobs are less representative of the population than programming, which at merely 80% male is significantly less far from 50/50 than a huge number of teaching and medical related roles.

If you scroll the list you'll see that most professions aren't even close to 50/50.

“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms

Actually this kind of thinking is itself a logical fallacy. You're starting from a base point of assuming you can understand the reasons for absolutely every fact about the world, which clearly isn't the case. To believe you can decide what is ideal in any area of human existence requires a vastly over-exaggerated sense of one's intellect.

What you call traditionalism is really just a starting assumption that when studying complex evolved systems there are reasons for its current state that you may not understand. This is a perfectly rational assumption and made all the time in e.g. medicine. It's an assumption of incomplete information and inaccurate methods, that can lead to creating new problems instead of solving them. It's what led to "first, do no harm" as a medical concept.

When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present.

This is the root of the problem - that belief is pure ideology. The obvious explanation is that women find technology less interesting than men because they're women and women are different to men, in all sorts of complex ways. This statement is like saying "there's no clear mechanism for why almost everyone who works with children is a woman". Of course there's a clear mechanism for it: they're women, they have babies, they evolved to want to care for children as a result and thus women very often enjoy children's company more than men do. The idea that anything other than the base 50/50 case must be bias ignores not only vast amounts of basic evolutionary theory but also common sense.

In the end I'm arguing with you because it's people like you who ultimately argue for and implement anti-male discrimination, on the belief that you're on some grand moral quest to eliminate discrimination against women. But like Animal Farm, the evil you think you're fighting is in fact yourself - the only gender based discrimination I've ever seen in my entire career was done by feminists.

Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.

If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male

Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.

And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.

And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.

Fact is, hiring is in the instant a zero sum game. If recruiters are prioritising women it means they're putting men to the back of the queue in the hope they won't be forced to hire them. It's sexism, it's wrong and it makes a mockery of everything feminists claim to believe.

The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion.

Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.

Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that.

One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance.

that's the definition of "more attempts".

Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...

I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.

Yes they do. They are not subject to the same cool down period on a phone screen failure. Remember, google pitches it as “looking for a good signal” so retrying until the candidate passes isn’t lowering the bar in their mind (even though it is because phone screens are flawed but that’s another discussion).

> If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences.

I have, I worked there when this started several years back. Several got a chance at a phone rescreen sooner than the normal back-off and one got an invite to come back for a second on-site because “the signal wasn’t clear” on the first.

Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data.

[And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]

Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.

It wasn't that there were not qualified people from each school, it was just easier to find them at schools with hard-<subject> educations.

There were other schools that were physically closer even within a few miles, but he could go all day without finding a promising candidate.

He hires many minorities, women, people of different orientations, so it wasn't that.

It was more like, "does anyone understand a linked list?"

Despite that flaw, I do like it. I hope they keep em coming.

Unfortunately, the gaming industry really does seem to work on a model where darned near every major game is a near-death experience for the company in question. It remains fairly common even today for relatively large companies to essentially be brought down by one bad release, resulting in them getting acquired by EA. If you look out at the studio landscape over history, it is still very, very frothy. There aren't really that many studios that have been around for even five or ten years; most of the names that will leap to mind are now actually particular name brands of conglomerates.

I think it's a real thing to a large degree, not a contrived framing.

(I would credit this to the way that games have been getting exponentially more expensive over time; in such an environment, the next game is going to naturally take most of your money, even if your previous game was a wild success. I think we're now about in the middle of that no longer being true. We're not done yet; AAA games are still trying to slug it out on the exponential curve, but more and more we're seeing successful games made at an earlier plateau of cost, including the entire output of companies like Nintendo.)

Yeah, this ignores the role publishers play, but I doubt a publisher is going to give a relatively new studio too many opportunity. You're game needs to make money if you want another shot.

But the Game Boy and DS were the biggest markets of their time. Perhaps we’re finally valuing smaller teams more than the Titanic AAA studios.

Very much worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4

(However it's bit more about organizational failures than technical failures.)

The problem is that, as states, we are not translating these increased profits into increased quality of life for citizens. UBI is the most obvious way to start doing it.

What we want is to in effect charge companies in relation to how much profit they're making off replacing workers (increasing productivity). When a company is able to replace 10 workers with technology, they should pay at least enough taxes for 5 workers to live off UBI. Repeat until everyone that wants to can live comfortably off UBI. While other people voluntarily work to make a lot more money than UBI.

Are you sure about that? For example, air travel used to be a luxury only for the wealthy, and you wore your best clothes for a flight. Now airplanes are filled with people dressed in sweats and paying very cheap fares. Tourist destinations are buried in tourists the world over.

Buying a home computer used to cost $3,000. Now you can get one for a couple hundred, and that's in inflated dollars.

What you get when you buy a car is enormously better than what was available in the 1960s. I love old cars, but I'm well aware of the overall poor quality of them, lousy crash resistance, high maintenance, crummy handling, etc.

Clothes are historically cheap as dirt. My mom would sew layer after layer of patches on my jeans. Nobody does that anymore. My aunts would knit socks for me. Nobody does that anymore. (Still have the socks, they're treasures now.)

In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.

Kids get a small mountain of toys for Christmas. Back in the 60's you got a handful of items, and did not feel deprived at all.

You can get a color TV for a couple hundred bucks, one that is far better than the $$$$ ones from the 1960s.

Think about all the entertainment you can get for free from the push of a button. You can get an MIT education for free in your home. You can get any question answered by typing into your computer.

Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy. Then it was a luxury.

Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year, at your local grocery.

Our homes are much bigger than they used to be.

Car stereos used to be so expensive people stole them all the time. Today car stereos are so cheap they are worthless.

I built a home theater in my basement from equipment I got at the thrift store for $50. The HD projector was $600 new, and is probably even cheaper today. The screen was $50. The same setup would have cost $20,000 25 years ago, and wouldn't have been HD.

I remember when home stereos were expensive, like $thousands. Now you can buy excellent equipment at the thrift store for $20.

I remember buying stuff mail order from Sears with 3 to 6 weeks delivery time. Now I am spoiled rotten by getting it in 2 days.

Teenagers were expected to work starting at age 16, at least up through the 70s. Now a person's first job is often after college.

Nobody had a microwave or dishwasher when I grew up. Every meal meant time at the sink washing everything by hand. People rarely ate out. My how that has changed.

Seriously, we live in a golden age.

You used to be able to cover tuition and living expenses on a single part time job as a college student.

A single family household from a single high school educated worker could support a house, a car, children, a non working spouse, food and utilities.

Healthcare did not used to be this ruinously expensive.

Our TVs being cheaper, bigger and more colorful is cold comfort in comparison. It's great the tech, car, logisitics and textile industries has delivered more for less, but the rest have gone the opposite direction. Many would be very happy if they could buy a 1970s lifestyle at 1970s prices.

I live in a neighborhood full of 50's era ranch houses that are ~800sq feet and between 80-120k. It's an industrial area surrounded by factories and shipping yards, for that authentic, disco-era experience. Without the internet, cable, and cell phone bills, you could probably keep monthly living expenses under $1500. There's a grocery store within walking distance and bus service (not sure how great it is though).

Depending on what you call "high school educated," this is doable and more on a single income. Not for a McDonalds fry cook, but someone making $40k/yr could raise a family here. It would just be a sacrifice. I'm surrounded by single parents doing this everyday.

Health insurance is still fucked though.

Building codes require houses to be middle class houses. That means they cost more. If there are any left, take a look at homes in your area that were built before 1960. Quite a different. It would be illegal today to build the house I first bought, in almost every aspect. But it was a typical mass produced house built around 1970.

Secondly, at least in Seattle, the city government regularly heaps more and more expensive burdens on landlords. For example, recently they passed a law that the landlord is financially responsible for damage to an apartment caused by domestic violence. Regardless of your feelings about that, that causes rents to go up. Ever increasing restrictions on evictions causes rents to go up, again, regardless of whether those restrictions are justified or not.

It's not until the land is completely used that cities turn to revitalizing their core. But even then, new construction favors the upper class. If you're going to tear down a bunch of old bungalows, they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.

> they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.

Which implicitly requires there being lots and lots and lots of people who can buy them.

One thing to note, what we often think of as luxury housing or new building regulations adding cost tends to be %10 of the cost of new housing. Expensive housing typically comes from expensive land and zoning bureaucracy delaying things.

I call it the lexus effect. A luxury lexus vs the camry it was based on is often a %10-%20 BOM difference vs. bigger margin it has when sold.

People have more money available, the resource is scarce, and the bare minimum to live costs less. This means that people are willing to pay more of their income and these people end up taking up the supply.

Housing is more general of a problem, probably because it's also considered investment (with zoning as a way to add value), renting is a business...

In Canada for example, housing is significantly more expensive on a cost/hours_worked basis than large chunks of the USA, and many households have debt load levels higher than the US. Cost of normal goods such as gas, utility bills, food, consumer goods, etc are also more expensive than the USA. You can see similar dynamics in Europe too.

IIRC you were talking about regular people's problems. Europe is not uniform, but in the richest countries you can live comfortably off a blue collar salary, no matter the taxes or cost of living. Actually it's infuriating how our government compares our taxes (Spain) to northern countries in percentage, omitting the fact that what you make after taxes and expenses is still higher because raw salaries are much higher there.

Since the price of housing is more land than the building itself typically, a house that is literally double or triple the size in interior sqft (1500 to 3000 sqft for ex) can cost 'only' %25-%50 more.

There is also an availability factor, most of the US & Canada is suburban, you don't really have much of a choice to buy a small house. And with the price dynamic described above, it doesn't matter as much. You need a house to live in either way.

I've also heard that housing is crazy expensive in places like stockholm, and people do crazy ass stuff in amsterdam like no principal payment mortgages, but I'm not as familiar with the real dynamics there.

I'm not sure things are much different today vs back then. Two working parents were always the norm, even in the mythical 50/60s.

https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2...

Prior to that most households were single income.

For example, these days said couples tend to be older, more educated and with less kids on average. Which may explain why they're more likely to be dual income. You don't have time for a second job when you have 5 kids to raise. But that's less likely to happen today, statistically speaking.

So your comparison most likely compares people in different stages of life, not the same people across generations.

But in any case, the worker participation rate has stayed between 58% to 68% over the last 70 years, with around 63% today. Doesn't sounds that big of a difference to me.

I missed the note about the grinding cost-increases of college that people don't apparently need to work to pay for (and everyone apparently goes to!).

And the entry for the increasing deaths-of-despair rate that is turned the US life expectancy rate negative.

And the one for young folks' increasing need to delay what used to be normal young adult things, like home purchase and marriage. And...

I think what you mean is that, if you have money and are over 40, the world will cater to you. (And to be clear, I'm in that category, as are many here.)

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...

About 10 years more than 1960.

Try this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

I also notice your time scales jump back 50+ years to the 1960s ... But, do all of your same observations hold up within the last 30 years? Some, maybe. How about 20? Much fewer. How about 10 years? Almost none.

Funny, that must be why attempting to make objective arguments with anecdotes does not actually qualify as "objective". Huh, imagine that.

housing - a couple factors at work here. Increasing population means housing is going to cost more. There's no getting around that.

education - you can get an MIT education for free on youtube. I've been filling in gaps in my education that way. For FREE!!! How awesome is that? The cost of attending college has indeed gone way up - due to government policy.

healthcare - this cost increase is driven by government policy.

Which is a very relevant form of regulation with regards to housing costs, because this regulation tends to exist more in places with high housing demand. So, you can still buy a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where there also is likely (gasp) no regulations on housing. Not sure what the causal relationships are exactly but the correlation seems to be there for sure.

I just sum it up as the baby boomers fucking over their kids for a quick buck, but shrug what do I know?

novok, by contrast, makes all the same points, correctly, and without all the histrionics.

It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.

Indeed, this appears to be the case. Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format, so that other people can fill things in!

Please do not make personal attacks against people on HN. There is literally no reason to tell someone that their on-topic and very-relevant comment/response "is low quality doesn't add to the discussion". It is petty.

> Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format ...

Again, my response was utilizing the HN format to fill in some missing information and make a very relevant point about improved formatting of arguments in general.

> It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.

It CAN be true, yes. It can also be true that the technical dividend is far out-weighed by rising costs. It can ALSO be true that globalization has changed the pricing dynamic mentioned in GP more so than a "technical dividend".

> Sigh ... I hope this style of commentary comes to a swift end on the internet (and especially places like HN)

?

The birth rate going down will help a lot in making things more sustainable long term.

> In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.

> Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy.

> Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year,

This is terrible for the planet. I'm on board with the other stuff but our disposable economy and distant supply chains are a disaster.

Or to put it another way, most people don't have to work 16+ hours/day just to stay alive.

What people choose to spend that time doing is up to them. Most will use it to watch TV/Netflix/etc while a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better.

They almost never had to, so that's a pretty lousy bar to use.

If you're working a ton of hours in a low wage job, there's a good chance you can't get a stable home if you cut back to a reasonable amount of hours. In a situation like that it's not "optional", even if you wouldn't actually die.

Even if you have a solid 40 hours a week job, and you get paid well enough that you'd be happy cutting back to 32 hours a week, it's very hard to arrange something like that. It's only optional if you have an especially good negotiation position or you're lucky, not if you're a normal worker.

> a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better

It's pretty awful to expect someone that's already working far more than full time to spend even more time practicing work skills on top of that. Anyone that can do so is amazing, but anyone that doesn't do so should not be blamed.

Edit: To the dead reply to this: No one with an ounce of self respect is going to incentivize leisure? Even if you have no humanity in you, and don't think people deserve a single free hour in the week, it's less efficient to work people until they're worn out. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face because the poors don't "deserve" it. People don't get depressed because they lack 100+ hours of labor to slog through in a week. The ennui of feeling no purpose kicks in a hell of a lot lower than that.

That's a pretty naive thing to say IMO. Humans almost always had to work that much, especially after agriculture was invented.

If you limit your perspective to the last ~120 years, you are correct. I did not.

There were a couple periods where the norm for many was horribly long factory hours. But in the long view it was definitely not normal to work 16 hour days, year round, with modern minimal break lengths.

As automation becomes more pervasive, billionaires and VCs are not the only ones who should be benefitting from it. Wage laborers should also get rewards from that, meaning higher wages, and no need to work 40+ hour weeks. We should be working on improving QOL for all people, not just wealthy asset holders.

But sure, just call them lazy so you can feel good about yourself when you keep treading all over them.

So, it is a stretch to say that these are the productivity-boosters that have brought us into a post-scarcity+UBI phase of humanity. The real problem in our modern economy is very clearly our lack of productivity booster innovations. Most recent advancements in standard of livings have been in mobile apps and games. Wowzers.

True job productivity innovations are near nil in recent times, specifically for very physical businesses like a Resorts. Globalization does make certain things much cheaper, however. But, that doesn't really help the Resort and that is entirely different conversation all together.

As the pretend hero, Malcolm Reynolds, said "It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another."