Slashdot Mirror

Sorry, the paragraph break separated the link from the related point. Removing the break makes things clearer:

And there are other examples of catastrophic consequences of automation. These "automation surprises"...

there is a cognitive disconnect between the autopilot and the 'backup driver' that is supposed to suddenly become situationally aware in a split second

Bull fucking shit. It's about as disconnected as using cruise control and asking people to keep tabs on how fast or slow traffic is going. Just keep your goddamn eyes on the fucking road, it's not brain surgery.

Nice try but we know that if operators are relieved of too much work, their attention will start to drift. And there are other examples of catastrophic consequences of automation.

These "automation surprises" where nobody knows who's in control are like the old quote, "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

Taxes on profits which are specific to a company or industry are passed on to shareholders, which in turn drives investors to invest in other companies/industries with a better return on capital.

Taxes which are universal in application to all companies (like the corporate income tax) in a country with at least semi-free trade are primarily passed on to employees, then a little bit to customers and the even smaller remaining to shareholders.

From the Harvard Business Review:

If a country allows free capital flows and free trade and has a corporate tax rate much higher than that of its neighbors, investors can choose to buy shares in companies elsewhere that face a lower tax, and corporate management can choose to move operations abroad. Consumers, meanwhile, can buy from foreign suppliers. By comparison, workers are pretty immobile. It’s hard for them to switch employers, let alone countries. So the tax lands on them, in the form of lower wages and/or skimpier benefits. And as those at the top of today’s corporate hierarchies seem to have done a pretty great job of keeping their paychecks from being adversely affected, the impact is presumably greatest on those farther down in the organization.

So yeah, if your goal is to tax working people more, then increase the corporate income tax is great for that. Otherwise, it's just a stupid double-tax which is useful to politicians for disguising to people that they're getting taxed extra.

Now, since it is a Republican wanting this, the media, lib sites will condone it as "government spying".
Had Obama requested this, it would be the best thing since sliced bread.

To the contrary, when the Obama administration did announce an AI research policy... nobody paid the least bit of attention.

  hbr.org/2016/12/the-obama-administrations-roadmap-for-ai-policy

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence

How credulous do you have to be to think a survey like this means anything? Might as well ask, "Who here doesn't want to get fired?" Damn.

Meh. Typically these surveys are anonymous, and collected and analyzed at a high level, over large groups, so there's no way to figure out who said what.

Not always, though. Google's annual internal employee survey is confidential but not anonymous, and people answer quite honestly because they know that there will be no negative consequences for them. If an area of the survey shows lots of negative responses, it's just a signal that that's an area where something needs to be improved.

Further, Google has an internal ongoing longitudinal study called gDNA that asks very invasive questions and is also confidential but not anonymous, because they want to compare peoples' responses over time. Much of it is about life and job satisfaction, but it also includes a lot of standard psychological tests which attempt to gauge personality, work style, personal attributes, capabilities, aspirations, etc., and these things are explicitly correlated against job performance. It's intended as an "work life" analogue of the Framingham Heart Study; a long-term (planned duration is 100 years), in-depth research project into how employee life and job satisfaction, personal characteristics and job performance correlate.

This sort of thing is obviously potentially very risky for the employee, but everyone I know that participates (I do; I've filled out all but two of the twelve semi-annual surveys so far) answers honestly and fully. The HR team that runs the study takes confidentiality seriously, and employees are confident we can trust them -- which means HR can have confidence in our honesty. Participants get feedback on their personalized study results, including how they compare to coworkers in their product area and across Google. This is usually interesting and sometimes even useful information.

Anyway, my point is that it's absolutely possible to get useful information from employee surveys. You just have to make sure that all of the employees can be confident that any "negative" responses won't be used against them individually, and might be used to make their jobs better, and/or give them ideas about how they can improve their performance and life and job satisfaction.

While not on the verge of bankruptcy, it will never be a cash generating machine in the current competitive environment.

That is not true at all. Amazon retail generates HUGE cash flow. Amazon's operating cash flow is enormous. Amazon also has a negative cash conversion cycle, meaning they pay their suppliers WEEKS later than they get paid. Very few companies achieve this happy state of affairs and none of their major competitors (including Walmart) can match them on this.

Don't confuse operating cash flow with profit. Amazon generates excellent operating cash flow but then they plow it back into the company to grow so their profit margins look weak.

AWS is a high margin monster with limited competition and a high degree of lock-in and network effects. These tend to be sustainable sources of value/returns.

All true as well though I disagree that there is limited competition. Google and Microsoft are pretty serious competitors and they aren't the only ones.

As of right now, anyone investing in AWS has to take the risk that AWS profits will be funneled off to cover losses in Amazon's retail business

Amazon makes nearly as much profit from their US retail business as they do from AWS. Don't take my word for it, see their financial statements. The only place they are losing money is their international retail business which they are trying to grow with mixed results. In 2017 Amazon made a profit of $2.8B from their retail operations, $4.3B from AWS and lost about $3B in international operations which was increased substantially from the previous year due to infrastructure investments. (in 2016 their international ops only lost $1.2B)

It is not uncommon for conglomerates to be worth more separate than together.

Amazon isn't a conglomerate in the traditional sense like GE or Siemens. You are correct but sometimes the whole is greater than the parts. See Berkshire Hathaway...

https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-ma...

"Nothing in American corporate law says that business managers have an open-ended, always-on obligation to maximize the financial interests of shareholders."

The No Asshole Rule.

I was wondering this myself and found this article. Very detailed and well written (which I would expect from the HBR).

https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-ph...

https://www.google.com/search?...

https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wa...
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

"People are about twice as productive as they were 60 years ago. That's not all chalked up to machines & computers. A lot of that is just plain less downtime all around."

Working longer doesn't tend to increase productivity. As people work more hours their productivity rate decreases such that they get about the same amount of productive work completed, and sometimes even less.

A sample of sources:
source 1
source 2
source 3

Wrong. Free markets evolve towards consolidation and the only thing that prevents that is government regulation.

Do you think it is a coincidence that all mature markets are highly consolidated? The oligopolies you speak of are the (crappy) compromises of the free market desire for monopolies and the people's desires for perfect competition.

Another topic herein is the concept of 'cartel forming'. It's a dirty term, even for libertarians, yet it is utterly rational behavior from the perspective of the companies involved. In fact, in other areas of life, we would use words like 'alliance' and 'cooperation' to characterize the behavior. Buying up competing companies or trampling them is equally rational from the perspective of the companies and thus that is exactly what they will do, given the opportunity.

The takeaway here is that the concept of an unrestricted free market fundamentally stabilizes on a highly undesirable state of affairs from a societal point of view.

Now, having established that, finding a good way to deal with it is hard. Asking companies to 'take their responsibility', semirandomly blasting them with huge antitrust fines or breaking up companies above a certain size seem like terrible workarounds to me. One of the more creative ideas I've come across is taxing companies progressively based on their dominance in their respective market(s), but that too seems far from flawless.

from 1990 Harvard Business Review... https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengi... Equally don't follow what has been successful if you want to be disrupted...

I don't agree with the analysis in the parent comment.

This amazing quote from the Slashdot story demonstrates an avoidance of reality, in my opinion: "We are not buying GitHub to turn it into Microsoft; we are buying GitHub because we believe in the importance of developers, and in GitHub's unique role in the developer community," explains Friedman.

My opinion: Microsoft bought GitHub because it expects to make money. To begin evaluating GitHub's future, consider what Microsoft did to Skype and LinkedIn.

Harvard Business Review article: Why Microsoft Is Willing to Pay So Much for GitHub. Quote from that article: "GitHub was acquired for close to 30x annual recurring revenue (an astronomical multiple)."

Another quote from the Harvard Business Review article:

"In other words, Microsoft is not paying $7.5 billion for GitHub for its ability to make money (its financial value). It's paying for the access it gets to the legions of developers who use GitHub's code repository products on a daily basis (the company's strategic value) -- so they can be guided into the Microsoft developer environment, where the real money is made."

In my opinion that statement damages the reputation of the Harvard Business Review. What it really means is something like this: "... legions of developers can be FORCED into the Microsoft developer environment, where the real money is made."

Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?

Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?

This misses the point; companies are embracing automation (and "increased productivity") as a way of getting people off the payroll and the pension scheme. Who is going to pay people to retire in their 40s and 50s? Who is going to pay people an income they can live on for working part-time? Even today in the UK there are millions of people on "zero hours" contracts which do not guarantee them any work (and therefore any pay) in any given week/month. These people are technically not unemployed, but they have to rely on welfare to survive.

A future where we all somehow live lives of comfort and leisure while machines do all the work is a utopian fantasy.

Well as more and more jobs are taken by
AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs
will be left for humans?

Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?

Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?

The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.

If we took all the profits away from the investors, how much extra health care could we buy?

The top six health insurers reported $6 billion in adjusted profits for the second quarter of 2017. That was a record quarter, but considering that isn't even all the insurance companies it could be argued that each household would save at least $200 per month on health care costs if not for that profit. That is a far more serious chunk of our health care dollars.

Wasteful spending caused by how our insurance system works is harder to pin down, but it is clear that this drive for profits caused far more economic damage than just the profits it siphons off to shareholders. The total waste has been estimated by some to be $1 trillion per year That would save each household over $650 per month.

There is no honest debate on whether a single payer system would save an enormous amount of money for tax payers. It's too bad even most progressive politicians think enacting such a system is too politically unfeasible to get behind.

I work at a company that is owned by the employees and we are in dire, dire need of a union. The thing is, while employees may have ownership shares held for them in a trust, they have no say in any of the business decisions and the shares of stock function in no way that gives them any votes or power of any kind.

You should tell your managers that they are doing it wrong. Harvard Business School did a study of employee owned companies, and found that they generally outperform competitors, but only if employees participated in decision making and felt involved in setting goals and resolving problems.

IT management should, frankly, become boring. The key to success, for the vast majority of companies, is no longer to seek advantage aggressively but to manage costs and risks meticulously

If you are in a technical position and you aren't describing your job in terms of risk and costs - you are doing it wrong.

Go back to grammar school. You don't advocate "for" something. That is illiterate. You just advocate something. Same as "recommend".

Well someone better tell the Harvard Business Review then: How Not to Advocate for a Woman at Work.

Or, you know, language... fluid... evolve....

Begone! Back to Charlottesville, you nazi!

No, I actually can't. Their own link to the "forthcoming"? paper just runs a search on google scholar and the link is broken as it returns zero hits. Searching for the paper "Don't pitch like a girl" by Balachandra doesn't get me there either. All I could find was This news blurb.

Oh look, "in fact, she says, 94% of venture capitalists are male".

Act like the venture capitalists and they'll be more approving of you? Gasp.

And it was: "Coders noted whether the presenter was male or female and then measured whether he or she exhibited stereotypically masculine behaviors (such as forcefulness, dominance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness) or stereotypically female ones (warmth, sensitivity, expressiveness, and emotionality)." Go figure, VCs want entrepreneurs to be assertive, but not an emotional mess. They don't want the CEO to make friends, they want them to make money. Business is not a democracy. ...OK, unless it's a co-opt.

If it's institutional, it's that all the people with money are dudes, or it's hinged on the fundamental basis of capitalism. The first you can change by unfairly supporting women VCs. (And Balachandra worked at an all female VC fund that only gave money to female entrepreneurs... ). The second you can't change.

I think what can be done is to educate people on what makes a good investment and what doesn't, and how we can be fooled. If we are conscious of it we can a least partially compensate. I don't think investors have some secret plan to keep women down. More likely it will be something about the way men present ideas that will attract them more. People frequently make unwise decisions based on form over substance. This probably a similar thing to something read recently saying we pick charismatic leaders over humble ones even though humble leader are generally better.

https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-hum...

Sure, here's one from last summer: https://hbr.org/2016/07/the-da...

It has plenty of links to other studies and important data points like this particular one which counters the premise of most of the comments I've seen thus far:

If you take 11 or more of your vacation days, you are more than 30% more likely to receive a raise. After reading that stat, we hope you just started planning your next vacation.

A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel

(Warning: if you visit the page without disabling javascript, it'll pop up some stupid shit instead of the article. At least it did for me, but disabling JS fixes it).

...but don't belong in every discussion.

in its attempts to remain apolitical and objective, the march focused primarily on funding and communication aspects of its mission

..., thereby succeeding in its goals to remain apolitical and objective.

There is plenty to support in "social justice," but injecting it into every discussion regardless of scope is dumb. And for a self-styled scientist to do so brings into doubt their credibility as a scientist. A current pet peeve is claims that diverse groups are necessarily better, for example this one . The danger of this over-enthusiastic embrace of affirmative action is the contrapositive--if diverse teams are better/smarter/Xer, then less diverse teams are necessarily less good/smart/X. If that were true, then I can say that whites/males/{over-represented group of choice} are either demonstrably less X as individuals, or that they are demonstrably less capable of having team interactions that lead to better X. Once that door is open to racial/gender/etc discrimination, the barrel can be turned right back onto the very groups that were hoping to benefit from greater diversity.

Not to mention the poor sampling of diversity dimensions. Gender and race have some representation in the diversity debate, but what about LGBTQ? Geographic? Philosophical? Political?

Affirmative action is a defensible temporary policy to correct certain historical discriminations, given the intensity and horror of them. But when it becomes unquestioned policy applied across the board, it is an outright danger to the very things it attempts to fix.

unicorns --private, venture-backed companies valued at a billion dollars or more

source:
How Unicorns Grow - Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2016/01/how-un...

HOWEVER, it may take a while for our economy to self-correct by shifting resources to take advantage of that new capacity, or it may self-correct too slowly, and politicians will be reluctant to assist the change because it's uncharted territory with uncharted consequences.

That has already been going on for over a decade and most people have no idea:

https://hbr.org/resources/imag...

You ASSUME yuuuuge inequality is needed to motivate the fat cats sufficiently.

Investors aren't motivated by "inequality", they are motivated by returns. If we don't get 5-7% return on investment year over year, they pull out of the market. Furthermore, most of the stock market is held by small investors and institutional investors.

Thus, investment is not necessary for capitalism in general.

Are you kidding? The very name "capitalism" refers to the use of capital for investing.

Checks and balances and cross-agency audits. It ain't perfect, but often better than waiting until after the damage is done. There's less incentive for gov't officials to cheat because their paycheck varies less per success or failure of a company. It takes fairly blatant cheating to give them a strong incentive.

Government official jerks don't need to "cheat", they "poison babies" simply by not giving a fuck and by not being liable for the consequences of their actions.

https://hbr.org/2014/05/the-be...

You should keep looking, you glossed over most of what it's saying. In particular with polling of non-disclosed political affiliation in media trust. Including things like this. While gallup and journalism's numbers are interesting, it also makes my point correct. Perhaps you should also ask why the trust in the media is in decline...everywhere.

I 'like' this graph, it shows it very well what is going on:

https://hbr.org/resources/imag...

It's great to have this cool new flavor of agile that everyone should use, and I might agree with you, but how do we roll that out and get everyone to buy in?

1) Pilot it before rolling it out. Make sure the pilot group is representative of at least 2/3 of the larger organization.
2) Get local champions per team / department that can be focals. Much easier for me to buy in when I can ask somebody I know and get an answer in 2 minutes than trying to contact somebody I don't know and waiting 2+ days for an answer.
3) Convince the rank and file it will save them time/effort per day IN ADDITION to being good for the business. Otherwise that cuts into my personal time and said time will never be reflected in my paycheck - only in executive management's/shareholders.

Don't have all three? Don't do it.

There is an excellent case study on this with Nike breaking into the women's fitness market. Downside - the team who made this happen worked 80+ hours a - i.e. a handful of people got recognition/promotions/bonuses, everybody else got more work:
https://hbr.org/product/nike-s...

Paywalled but you can find a copy if you look.

No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.

No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.

While I wouldn't disagree that metrics have become a fetish with many management types, and there is a lot of "metrics for the sake of metrics" about, the underlying driver for this kind of employee surveillance is still typically profit. It's the "crank out more units of work with fewer people" mentality. And it's close relative, the "hours at the desk = productivity" mentality which persists despite being debunked.

Of course one will. In the case you set forward, the money is a signaling mechanism. Even if I happen to feel that Y is more productive for the company, It has been signaled to me that the company places greater value on X. As such, I should engage in X.

This assumes that the X in question isn't some perverse gaming of the system.

To use as an example, I worked at a company that was obsessed with EBITDA. All meetings, and management contact, were required to include emphasis on EBITDA objectives (yes, this resulted in a manager hiding in his office a lot). I realize that was just plain stupid. However, it was clearly expressed that the EBITDA objectives were what the company was concerned with.

I could have forged off in my own direction. I do think the company would have been better for it. However, to do so would have been an act of insubordination, yes, I would have also missed my bonus. However, the bonus was not the issue; the issue was that the company had, clearly, signaled its primary area of concern. It was my job to focus on that concern.

[EBITDA -- Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization is a measure of a company's operating performance. Essentially, it's a way to evaluate a company's performance without having to factor in financing decisions, accounting decisions or tax environments.] BTW, it is a worthless measure https://hbr.org/2009/11/how-eb...

If you want an unbiased view on this, please don't ask just the mobile payment providers who have everything to gain by painting a rosy picture of a very bad situation in India. The markets across the country are crumbling following this idiotic decision with markets falling as much as 70% in some sectors (agriculture is an example) and 100s of 1000s of people losing their jobs as a direct result of this bone headed move by the government.

Washington Post: India just made a big mistake with its currency ban
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

The Harvard Business Review article on this is far more factual: Case study in poor policy and even poorer execution.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/indias...

The Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 allows government agencies to pay cash awards to employees who accurately classify government documents consistently ...

So it is down to paying government employees bribes to actually do the job they are hired to do ... Why not fine the ones that over classify the information instead ...

And such plans actually don't work.

I'm lazy and don't want to get up in the morning. Why should I continue working when I could quit and get paid less?

I'm lazy and don't want to get up in the morning. Why should I continue working when I could quit and live on welfare or UBI?
The problem is completely analogous.

People who only work because they fear starving or not being able to pay for their houses generally do bad work. More generally, extrinsic reward tends to destroy creativity. So not only does a weak reward scheme not hurt, but a strong reward scheme may be actively counterproductive.

Y'all ever been to Texas?

Not only have I been there I have family that lives there. Outside of Austin they should ask for a passport for most of the state to go there. I make no apologies when I say many Texans have some seriously messed up ideas about what constitutes "justice".

Algorithmic sentencing is one way to move toward a more consistent system, less subject to the vagaries of individual jurisdictions.

Consistency isn't necessarily as valuable as you might be implying. The entire point of having a judge is, you know, to judge things and come to a reasoned opinion about how the law should apply to a particular case. I could see an algorithm being useful as an aid to advise a judge on possible options but there are WAY too many corner cases for it to be a good idea to put it front and center. Are judges imperfect? Yep! That's why we have appeals systems. But you literally cannot come up with an algorithm that will properly address all the corner cases. You are merely turning the programmer and lawmakers into the de-facto judge which is a terrible idea. See three strikes laws if you need an example of how stupid algorithmic sentencing can be.

Judgements still have to be made based on something, and credit scores (and, more specifically, the underlying data from which they are computed) are one of the strongest windows into personality and prediction of future behavior we have in today's society.

I reject your framing of the issue. You are presuming that credit scores have any meaningful relationship to criminality without presenting any actual evidence that such an assertion is backed by facts. You are extrapolating purchasing and financial management behavior to have some relationship to criminality without any basis. Even a correlation isn't adequate because there are all sorts of ridiculous correlations between completely unrelated things. You have to PROVE a causal relationship between an individual person's credit score and their likelihood to commit future crimes for your argument to have any basis at all. Good luck with that.

Oh, so by providing lower prices and a much wider variety, Amazon out competed a number of retailers you used to walk to? I, on the other hand, buy much more on line than I could at small retailers before Amazon.

When brick-and-mortar stores existed along with Amazon, there was more competition in marketplace. Now there is no competition in the marketplace. More choices at lower prices can result in consumers buying less stuff and becoming less satisfied. A serious problem for virtual stores with unlimited shelf space.

Marketers assume that the more choices they offer, the more likely customers will be able to find just the right thing. They assume, for instance, that offering 50 styles of jeans instead of two increases the chances that shoppers will find a pair they really like. Nevertheless, research now shows that there can be too much choice; when there is, consumers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they do buy, they are less satisfied with their selection.

https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better

I wouldn't worry about who gets the most money, the problem is the lowering income of the lower and medium wages:

https://hbr.org/resources/imag...

Which is also really bad for the economy, because medium wages are the largest spenders

This article in the National Business Review, "First, lets fire all the managers", is the best example I found of the type of company you mention. Everyone is their own manager, yet each person is accountable to everyone around them. Compensation and responsibilities are peer negotiated annually. Go-to problem solvers are naturally rewarded. I hope rigid hierarchical companies die a slow death in the next century as they fail to compete with more innovative nimble companies.

UBI would speed up the process by letting people feel safe enough to quit their old job to start their own company, without worrying about how they will pay their rent for a year.

I think that the problem isn't that people are trying to do something to fix the issue, it's that what they're trying to do is ineffective or counter-productive (PDF warning). Alternatively here's an article that reports on the main findings of that study or incorporates data from a few others if you don't want to read ~30 pages of journal article yourself.

Basically the people who constantly push these programs don't tend to follow the science to find the most effective ways to go about doing it so they just end up failing, wasting time and money, and alienating the people they're trying to connect with and it seems like with many they refuse to try to do anything different. It's just another case of trying to be tough on crime or ratchet up the drug laws even more because it's about appearing to do something or people simply feeding their own egotistical desire to feel like they're changing the world rather than doing something that's actually good.

I thought that RedK and Rockoon were being a bit shrill calling you an SJW until I read,

"...I would happily accept STEM being 90% male if there was evidence that all involved made a free choice, but there is actually a lot of evidence to the contrary."

In the spirit of fairness, I'm going to first present an article that aggregates support for your general argument in a well organized advocacy piece: https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-stem

Academic settings tend to encourage examinations into topics that have the potential to over turn accepted ideas. This is actually a significant bias especially regarding fuel for the social justice agenda. So it won't be surprising that there are studies looking into this "problem" and coming out with support for the idea that it's a problem.

Here's another way to view it that is sufficiently obvious that it doesn't need a study.

American society has been actively encouraging girls and women to take an interest in STEM for about 40 years and got focused about it 10 years ago.
The Association for Women in Science was founded in 1971
WEPAN was founded in 1990
The AAUW started the Tech-Savvy program in 2006
The National Math and Science Initiative was founded in 2007
National Girls Collaborative Project

And there's Scientista and Million Women Mentors and... and... and....

My point is that there is AMPLE support for girls and women to enter STEM education and STEM careers. That support has been around long enough to successfully work its influence. And the result has been zero or negative change in the number of women entering college in STEM.

It seems remarkably biased and disingenuous to HUNT for reasons for this in STEM culture. Will you find some male bias there? Sure! Is that male bias the signal you should come away from after beating a drum to increase women in STEM for decades and getting no significant increase in APPLICATIONS for STEM in higher education among women (a class of people over represented in college populations already)?!

Here's what this tells me - A certain percentage of girls and women are into STEM. A certain greater percentage of boys and men are into STEM. The cause of the disparity between these percentages is not due to a lack of support or an exclusionary STEM culture.

This doesn't mean that STEM culture is without male bias. It doesn't mean that it's legitimate to ignore concerns about that bias. It doesn't mean that there aren't gender biases in the greater culture at work on girls and women that keep them from taking an interest.

But it also doesn't mean that men in STEM are part of a pervasive culture of denial when they observe that there are less women interested in their field. It doesn't mean that when all the digital assistants end up defaulting to female that it's part of some blind male presumption. We've been imagining robot voices sounding like Sigourney Weaver for 30 f**king years. In Hollywood, with the exception of Kit, J.A.R.V.I.S, and Max Headroom, EVERY GODDAMN COMPUTER VOICE sounds like Sigourney Weaver. Every countdown sounds like her. Every warning system... every magic talking box.

That voice is a MARKETING decision- not a tech decision. The order in which bugs are fixed is largely a business decision - not a tech decision. And, if you've done enough work in tech, you know that the shortfall in women programmers is made up for in a larger percentage of women in marketing and management.

So, when the various commenters went on their tirade about the SJW nonsense posing as an article in the OP, they had a pretty good point. They weren't demonstrating that they were

The use of cash involves several social costs to individuals --- especially the poor --- as well as business and the government.

For individuals, cash usage imposes a regressive tax with the highest impact on the unbanked.

By FDIC estimates, 8.2% of U.S. households are unbanked and 20.1% of U.S. households are underbanked. The unbanked pay four times more in fees to access their money than those with bank accounts, and they pay $4 higher fees per month for cash access on average than those with formal financial services. Examples of such fees are those charged for payday lending, buy-here-pay-here auto loans, and check cashing. The unbanked have a five times higher risk of paying cash access fees on payroll and EBT cards.

Poorer consumers have to spend far more time getting cash. On average, Americans spend twenty-eight minutes a month travelling to get cash, but that time isn't evenly distributed. People who don't use a bank spend about five minutes longer getting to the place where they can get cash, and unemployed people spent nearly nine minutes more.

For businesses, paper money has to be managed: it must be stored, guarded, and accounted for. It can be difficult to transport and is inherently insecure.

U.S. retail businesses lose about $40 billion annually because of the theft of cash alone. This cost is also disproportionately borne by mom-and-pops, many of which operate in poor neighborhoods and rural areas. These cash-dependent small businesses cannot afford sophisticated security and cash transportation services.

For the government, the annual value of under-reported taxes in the United States is $400 billion to $600 billion. According to the national taxpayer advocate's estimates, 52% of this gap is because of under-reporting by self-employed taxpayers. If even half of this under-reporting is directly enabled by a cash economy, the U.S. Treasury loses at least $100 billion annually because of cash.

The implications for a shortfall in tax revenues are quite direct in terms of their impact on the poor (even after accounting for the fact that many of those who under-report are themselves poor).

About 12% of the federal budget in 2012 supported programs that provide aid (other than health insurance or Social Security benefits) to poor families. Such government safety net programs kept some 25 million people out of poverty in 2010. The existence of the tax gap puts pressure on the government to cut back on safety net programs, because they are the ones that are among the first to get cut.

The Hidden Costs of Cash [Harvard Business Review, June 26, 2014]

Link for the lazy: https://hbr.org/2009/10/when-h...

Mainly, they drop in price from scale of production (which makes the advance in tech investible). As more billions of people can afford the device, more devices are made, smaller and smaller margins on each device add up to greater total stock value (or if you prefer, profit). https://hbr.org/2007/09/the-ba...

> Henry Ford said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Not likely.

Corporate tax avoidance is a very big problem which is robbing citizens, but Cook should feel no shame for it. Everyone does it. Well, everything big and rich does it. It's because of the sociopath "companies are people" and "we must act in the best interests of our shareholders" mantras. If citizens do not like it, they should pressure their elected representatives to stop it, but if citizens vote for elected representatives that allow it, then those citizens deserve to be fucked over.

What The Founding Fathers Thought About Corporations http://www.addictinginfo.org/2...
10 Founding Fathers Quotes That Will Make Conservatives’ Heads Explode http://aattp.org/9-founding-fa...
What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Corporations https://hbr.org/2010/04/what-t...
Why did our founding fathers hate corporations? http://www.justplainpolitics.c...

True. Unfortunately there is almost nobody to complain to, and if there is, they won't/can't do anything. From my experience HR is there to cover the companies butt from legal problems. They will tick off a list of boxes so if an issue lands before a judge the company can say they were fair and tried everything. When I refused to tolerate my managers crap the whole thing degraded into a high school popularity contest, with each of us trying to rally as many supporters as possible. Most of my colleagues would rather buckle under the pressure and become doormats than put up a fight. I don't blame them. It's simpler, quicker, and cleaner.

I hope workplaces become more cooperative in the future, rather than the rigid hierarchical structure older companies have now. The same old problems will always arise, but at least it puts everyone on the same level so people can't abuse power imbalances. Google X lets people self organize in such a way that good ideas/people gather the most support. People work on the projects they think their skills can be used best. I read a great article about a large tomato processing company that had a similar flexible approach. Each worker must negotiate a contract with each of their stakeholders. The services/resources/money they have to supply, and what they need in return. Management then becomes a service. Good managers are chosen by more people, and are therefore paid more. Bad managers need to find something else to do. Same for workers.