Slashdot Mirror

Those of Caucasian decent have been told for years that they are racists simply because of their skin color.

No one (serious*) is saying that. There is a strong believe for progressives that the mainstream American society goes out of its way to avoid recognizing or admitting that the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in this country has done serious damage to the social mobility and opportunity available to people of color. As shorthand, progressives will often say something along the lines of "the system is racist" and make the assertion that people who don't see or aren't willing to acknowledge this are practicing racism themselves.

They can't be discriminated against because they aren't the right color.

See above. Progressives are pretty clear that the issue is systemic racism, not individual racism. In the vast majority of places in society where race might be a factor, the systemic racism is biased against people of color. This is supported by statistics across the board. I hope you can understand that because of the huge disparity that exists today, progressives don't generally feel like there's much room to discuss racism against white people. We're generally in agreement that we should focus our energy on fixing the racism against people of color first, since the scale of problem and resulting social harm is so much worse.

They have something called " White Privilege " that, apparently, is some sort of " I win " button available on tap.

No one talk about an "I win" button. "White Privilege" is again a shorthand to refer to the natural outcome of so many functions in society being inherently biased against people of color. The simplest example is the outcome of the policy of redlining. The direct result of redlining was that even those people of color that were financially sound and otherwise prosperous effectively couldn't purchase real estate. This insulated the black community from potential gains in the housing market as real estate has exploded in value over the years. The trickle-down result which is often referred to as white privilege is that further generations of people of color are born into circumstances where their family wasn't able to build generational wealth to pass on and give their kids a boost. I don't know anything about you or your family, but I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that your parents eventually owned their own house. Maybe they willed it to you, or maybe they were able to retire comfortably after paying it off. That's a source of financial stability and opportunity that much much fewer black families have been allowed to have.

They get turned down for jobs and education slots because the Company or University has to have enough minorities lest they be called racists too.

People get turned down for jobs and education for all sorts of reasons. It's never really been about how hard you work, that's a piece of American mythology with little basis in reality. If your interviewer had a bad day, you might not be getting that job. If you happened to apply to a school that had a huge bump in applications that year, you might not be getting that acceptance letter. It's illegal to discriminate against an individual in an application process specifically on their race. It's not illegal, however, to discriminate based on some other innocuous qualities such as their name. Unfortunately, studies have shown that having a name associated with being of color will negatively affect your job acceptance, even when you have an identical resume to someone with a more white-sounding name. There's a

> If salary negotiation was haggling, women would be fine, they are fine hagglers.

What makes you think this? A casual search for verifiable research is flooded with poor quality claims. This article seems insightful about the differences:

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/whe...

More or less free is not exactly free...

"Google demands that you use/prominently feature some of their services. Again, you may free use core Android OS sans Google Play and associated services. Tell me again about the coercion."

I think you are incorrect here and that is the crux of the problem. Device manufacturers that want to sell even ONE device that includes Google Play et al are seemingly forbidden from offering other devices that compete with those services.

"Notably, it seems that the AFA is a company-wide document, binding a manufacturer for all of its present
and even future devices. Thus, AFA obligations apply to the entire operations of the companies that sign."

-source: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pu...

Then it's usually back to business rules for further examination/treatment though. More AI = more software work, not less.

By which, of course, you mean more software work to replace traditional software with AI like Big Blue, which as in this article, figured out exactly which cancer a woman had AFTER they knew she had cancer.

https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/sto...

"Watson was trained on cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City—reviewing research, test results, even doctors’ and nurses’ notes to discover patterns in how the diseases develop and what treatments work best."

https://www.fastcompany.com/30...

If you're not programming AI, watch out!

Studies have shown that employees who are "allowed" to steal diddly items from their employer remain content at lower salaries than those where theft is tightly controlled, the difference in salary being far more than the value of the theft. Human nature being what it is. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/pay-...

I know it's not popular to try and approach things as scientifically as possible, but in this case they describe their methodology in the original paper.

In simple terms, they identify text samples which express either a Republican or a Democratic view, and then tally them up.

This seems like a more disciplined approach than asking one's friends what they think.

The standard accepted approach in economics is to use Total Factor Productivity. You can read about it here: http://www.people.hbs.edu/dcom...

Ok this is just stupid. I earn more money than you but still don't put my kids in daycare. You may have hit it lucky with you eldest child's behaviour, or your friends' may have got unlucky, but I'd be interested to see what research you have that claims outsourcing parenthood is a healthier option for any child.

Looking at day care as outsourcing parenthood is a very cynical way of looking at it. It may be an outdated philosophy in the US, but it takes a village to raise a child. Thinking that a mother (or father) is the only person who can provide quality child development from 8-5 M-F is a very silly notion. Equating that to outsourcing parenting is equally nonsense. Is it outsourcing parenting to send your children to public school? Is it outsourcing spiritual development to send them to Sunday school?

As for studies, I don't have a ton of time but this is a good survey of multiple reports on the topic. High quality day care provides improved cognitive and language abilities in later childhood years. The earlier children started daycare the better the outcomes were, although it doesn't say when the point of diminishing returns was (i doubt 3 months vs 6 months is a huge difference). There were no significant behavioral differences in later childhood for either group.

I have read other studies that say these benefits diminish greatly when the parents are high earners. This makes sense to me since high earners tend to be more educated, which leads them to provide more stimulating environments for their kids (similar to a day care environment). I couldn't find one of these studies in a quick search though, and I need to get to bed.

I did find a Harvard Business School study showing daughters earn more in adult life when their mother worked, although it had negligible effects on sons. Its just one study though so its hard to put too much stock into it.

Define "well distributed" please. The wealthy tend to define as 99% for them, 1% for everyone else.

Here you go: http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnor...

I completely agree; systemd is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to Linux in particular and open source in general. From a competitive strategy perspective, systemd appears to me as a deliberate envelopment attack(pdf) to give RH substantial control over a huge portion of the Linux stack; in fact it's so strategically targeted that I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that a Big 3 consulting firm recommended it to Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for what RH has done for Linux (and OSS in general), but if everyone switches to systemd, their level of control over the Linux ecosystem will be too much. Personally, I'm on Gentoo (have been for over a decade) and run OpenRC and eudev, but if Gentoo/Slackware fall, then I'm off to the BSD land.

Oh, so we're free to buy goods and housing at third world prices?

No, mostly because people like you work hard to keep cheap good from being importated.

All the CEO's that make more than $500k a year have been fired and replaced with MBA's from India?

Why, yes, we're getting there:

http://online.wsj.com/articles...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/...

http://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/...

So, the percentage of foreign-born workers at the top is higher than for regular folks. But you'll find some way of working yourself up about that too.

Men never owned their wives you imbecile. Equating marriage to slavery is insulting to everyone involved.

Calling someone imbecile for sharing a truth you don't like is insulting to everyone involved. I don't care if you find the truth inconvenient. That won't change it's status as the truth.

" These marriage and property laws, or "coverture," stipulated that a married woman did not have a separate legal existence from her husband. A married woman or feme covert was a dependent, like an underage child or a slave,[...]" http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/...

I certainly wasn't the first to compare the legal status of women to slavery. And if you don't like it, you have hundreds of years of scholars and legal opinions to argue with, not me.

The way you continuously go on about white males and rich white males being such a huge problem makes it seem like you think you are fighting the protocols of the elders of the white man. Hilariously ignorant.

I am a rich white male. Why would you think that I don't know anything about "my people"?

If I start with nothing, work hard, and generate superior r results I get nothing?

No, you should get something. Specifically, you should get a reward commensurate to the superiority of your results, rather than with a factor of 0.1x for the low end of the scale, and 1000x for the high end.

The funny thing is that when they went around and asked people what they think the distribution of wealth in the country is like, turned out that most (even liberals, much less conservatives) have a picture that's far more rosy than what the reality is. Funnier still, when those same people were asked to draw the "ideal" distribution of wealth (taking into account motivation with rewards etc), 92% drew a picture that resembled real-life distribution in Sweden, of all places.

Would the author care to mention the name of the study, who it was performed by, or even (*gasp*) provide a link? Otherwise a reference to "one recent study" has no credibility whatsoever.

The OP was quoting from the NY Times article that was linked to in the post. There are even quote marks in the post to indicate that. The times article gives a link to the study: http://www.people.hbs.edu/wkerr/Kerr_Kerr_Lincoln%20Feb2013.pdf .

One could blame the OP for not providing some personal commentary on the article that he or she quoted, but you can't blame the OP for not citing the study. On the other hand, one can and should blame the reporter who wrote the Times article for not summarizing the study better.

The study says that hiring of "young skilled immigrant employment, where young workers are defined as those under 40 years old" is correlated with "expansions in other parts of the firm's skilled workforce". And "a 10% increase in a firm's young skilled immigrant employment correlates with a 6% increase in the total skilled workforce of the firm." That seems logical -- a firm on a hiring spree will look for engineers from many sources. But it doesn't say anything one way or another about why the companies are hiring the immigrant workers. Is it because there's a shortage or because the immigrant workers will work for less money? The study does not say. Moreover, the study does not seem to consider that hiring of foreign workers means that fewer native workers are hired who would otherwise be hired, even if there is an overall increase in the number of native workers hired.

And I wonder how the researchers who published the study would deal with companies who lay off much of their IT staffs and replace them with contractors through Cognizant and the other large consumers of H1-B visas. The company who laid off their staff does not directly hire the H1-B visa holders, but Cognizant does. Naturally, Cognizant hires support staff and some native engineers to support the buildup of the H1-B staff. This conforms to the study's conclusions, but the net effect is that many native engineers have lost their jobs.

Sometimes it helps to actually click on the articles on google, and see what they cited. A two minute search turned up:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Industrial/chap17.htm
http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/chapman.htm
http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5190.html
http://isme.tamu.edu/JSCOPE97/Belenky97/Belenky97.htm

I'm sure a more thorough search would turn up that much more. There's certainly something on JSTOR, for example.

The bias and prejudice that keep women out of IT could be said to be an informal quota system for men. That too should lead to an inferior product.

Diversifying doesn't necessarily mean a quota system, and it can very well be profitable. Like for IBM.

We're already seeing where things are heading this way just with water. People are pumping antifreeze up from their water wells, and the oil/gas companies pumping god knows what down there insist it isn't their fault. How do you figure out who to sue? When you can't even force the companies to tell you what they're pumping down, how can you prove that what you're pumping up came from them and not some long closed auto shop that for all anyone knows dumped barrels of whatever in the yard decades ago and it just now got down to the water table?

Why does the government have to provide water to the people of Dimock, PA? Oh wait, that's right, the government said that Cabot didn't have to fix the problem, they just had to give them some water for a few years. Imagine, if only the government hadn't been there to make Cabot do anything at all!

The air? How would you even begin to figure out who caused the pollution that gave you lung cancer? It's bad enough WITH government "regulation" where companies have to "self-report" their "accidental" benzene releases.

But in the US, the "rich" - to be specific, let's say the top 1% - earned 25% of the wealth and paid 38% of the income taxes. That doesn't sound like "virtually nothing".

You, like many others, have confused wealth with income. The wealthy 1% have over 50% of wealth (top 20% have over 84% of wealth).

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf

Also income taxes are not total taxes paid (they are 1/3 of the total US tax base) and the proper measure is total taxes (after transfers) as a percentage of total wealth.

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/

On that basis the poor and middle class are massively overtaxed, and the wealthy are drastically undertaxed. Essentially the middle class and lower class are drastically subsidizing the wealthy.

Where do you get this from?

Umm, people I've met who did it, reading and the like.

Here's three fairly prestigious ones for starters:

http://www.hbs.edu/mba/faq/#app_work

http://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/admissions/faqs/index.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/mba/blog/2007/08/no_work_experience_required_to.html

http://www.topmba.com/articles/ukireland/uk-meeting-mba-challenge

P.S. Did your MBA include statistics?

Actually, a major breakthrough has confirmed what that 1/3rd of economists is saying. It seems government spending kills economic growth.

Yes, Keynesian economic policies were recently practically killed by - believe it or not - a group of Harvard economists. Here is a link to the paper. It turns out that if you measure the economic effect of government spending, that effect is net lower employment, net lower commerce, and net lower investment.

Essentially, no one in their right mind competes with someone supported by the government.

Internet access helps alleviate poverty in the same way that cell phones: by removing intermediaries and giving farmers access to up-to-date pricing information and buyers.

This is what that "internet access" (which was actually a broker and micro-loan program) did:
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-122219-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5877.html

The epilogue to this project is not good. One year after the follow-up data were
collected, the exporter refused to continue buying the crops from DrumNet farmers since
none of the SHGs had obtained EurepGap certification. DrumNet lost money on its loan
to the farmers and collapsed, but equally importantly farmers were forced to sell to
middlemen, sometimes leaving a harvest to rot. As reported to us by DrumNet, the
farmers were outraged but powerless, and subsequently returned to growing what they
had been growing before (e.g., local crops such as maize).

As for the "cell phones" link, you don't have to go farther than the article itself:

Most of these unconnected masses live in rural areas that are much poorer and more remote than Muruguru.
Now cell-phone makers and service providers understand that they can make money by bringing cell-phone service within reach of people who live on $2 a day.
Users buy new phones for as little as $20--and secondhand models for far less--as well as airtime in increments of just 75 cents in Kenya, enough for nearly 10 minutes of off-peak calling.
.
They increased their profits by an average of 8% after they began using mobile phones to find out which coastal marketplaces were offering the best prices for sardines. Yet consumer prices for fish dropped 4% because the fishermen no longer had to throw away the catch they couldn't sell when they sailed into a port after all the buyers had left.
"That's what economic efficiencies are about--everyone is better off," says Jensen.

It is simply wonderful seeing such selective blindness.

A mobile phone costs as little as 1000% of your daily costs.
10 minutes (charged by a minute, so that is less than 10 calls) of mobile-credit costs you 37.5% of your daily costs.
And to even that out, your income has increased by 8%.

So, on average, that one 10-minute charge eats up that 8% increase in profit five out of seven days a weak.
But all is not so dark and dreary - if they work 7 days a weak, they will earn 0.32$ of extra profit each weak.
That way, they get to pay off that 20$ phone of theirs in only 1.2 years. Not accounting for interests.

After that - the sky is the limit!

 
Sure. For some people in developing nations mobile phones are providing A phone for the first time.
For some even a way of long distance communication of any kind for the first time.
And there are bound to be benefits from that as well as some measurable increases of quality of life.

But attaching the "it alleviates poverty" label on the mobile phone is way off the target.
Only people whose poverty is alleviated are mobile-phone merchants and local telecommunication companies (that practice the best kinds of monopolies - uncontrolled and rampant).
For a "regular Joe" they are more of a resource drain than a "poverty alleviation".

Funny thing is, I believe Jobs was responsible for both those quotes.

Here's what Jobs thought of the Segway:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

What else would you expect of the man who said 64K would be enough memory?

Funny thing is, I believe Jobs was responsible for both those quotes.

Here's what Jobs thought of the Segway:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

Maybe they should head to Universities such as Brigham Young or more traditional christian schools

Porn consumption is higher (PDF) in the more religious states.

Oh and maybe I shouldn't amend my posts that often but here is a good description of the attack process in a disruption.

...as the country's largest per-capita paid consumer of internet pr0n ( http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf )

Heh, you may be more right about the hypocrisy of Mormons than you realize. According to a study done by a Harvard Business School prof, people in Utah consume more online porn than those in any other state.

People don't give a fuck about computers. It's like a car: the only time they care is when it isn't doing what they want it to.

Well said. Put slightly differently by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt:

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

There's a reason why most Mac ads talk about how the Mac makes "real stuff" (photos, video, music, email, setting up a new printer...) easy: it's the holes they're talking about, not the drill.

We already have a business model that works well in practically every situation.

Well, good. Then there is no need to discuss business models at all. If the current one works, then piracy won't be a problem. On the other hand, if piracy became a problem, it becomes a business model issue.

Which shows that the average pirate's taste is similar to the average legitimate media user's taste. What's your point?

You got it nearly all wrong. It's not that the average pirate's taste matches the average legitimate media buyer's taste, it's that the average pirate is the above average media buyer. Those are 4 different studies in 4 different countries.

Back in the early days of home computing a number of companies started up by selling vaporware, collecting the money, and using it to fund the development. (I don't recall if Apple was one of the companies that started up that way. But Woz and Jobs were pretty hard up for cash back at the start.)

The Woz already had a working Apple before offering one for sale. He was showing it to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, of which the Two Steves were members of. At the tyme the Woz was working for HP as an engineer and asked them if the company wanted to make the Apple, management turned him down. Jobs was able to find a store that would place a large order but in order to fulfill it the Woz had to quit working at HP. In order to fund the company the Woz sold an HP 65 calculator he owned for $500.

Background.

"Educational Entrepreneurship" is an enormously powerful nation-wide effort to sub-contract educational administration, curriculum, and professional development services in low-income public school districts to private for-profit partners, after districts are taken over under NCLB. Mass Insight is a leader in this drive, and you can view its proposal to coordinate the takeover process for its partners in a report on its website. They are explicit, in their report, that their eventual target is to take over the entire public education system and run it, free of "bureaucratic interference."

Another powerful player is New Schools Venture Fund, which has just added former Mass. Education Board chairman Jim Peyser to its partners; The Gates Foundation is a backer, and the Harvard Business School now offers MBA classes in
Educational Entrepreneurship.

The eventual for-profit providers of services are located under several layers of interlocking "advocacy" organizations, with a conscious strategy of leveraging investment of public and private money to promote the takeover. Texas, Massachusetts, and California are epicenters of the project, where Republican governors have built Education Boards dominated by adherents. An example of a "partner" might be K-12 Inc, which went public last week with a stock offering that raised $108 million, according to the current issue of Education Week.

The rationale for forcing public schools to consume these private services is that the services are "research-based" and have proven their effectiveness. A problem is that the research is often biased or distorted by researchers with hidden agendas. In many cases, especially in Texas, it was fabricated outright [she means Reading First]. Most activity has been in math and reading, since those are the high-stakes targets of NCLB. But as concern has risen over the condition of science instruction, vast amounts of money have been appropriated to improve it, and entrepreneurial attention has now focused on science education.

As you may know [remember this was originally sent to other teachers], the federal "What Works" clearinghouse has

Yep.

Not only that, but your chances of success go up markedly if your codebase is (a) functionally complete enough to be immediately useful to many users *very* early on, and (b) highly modular, so that where a feature *isn't* available, it's worth more to the potential developer to write a new module for your codebase, rather than to start a codebase of their own.

There's a great Harvard Business School paper on this topic. Game theory and all. A mathematical proof about why projects like Drupal expand dramatically, and why projects like OpenOffice rot. :)

--a different Greg

At its peak in early 2001, right before the beginning of the end, Enron had a market cap of $48B USD. While that's big by normal people's standards, it's only enough to have gotten them to #77 on the top-100 list at the time. (Source, from April 2001.) Enron employed 21,000 people prior to its collapse.

Microsoft, during the same period, was #2 at $370B, and today it's still $281B, almost six times larger than Enron was; Microsoft employs 71,000, or about 3.5 times as many people. Given that Enron's collapse is frequently described using words like "unprecedented" and "disastrous," and led directly to the one of the biggest changes in corporate securities law since the 1930s (Sarbanes-Oxley), not to mention the dismantlement of one of the nation's largest accounting forms (Arthur Anderson), a Congressional investigation, and jail time for most of the people responsible (except for Kenneth Lay, who had the good fortune to die first, to much applause), and speculation that its long-term effects would be greater than 9/11, I'm not sure I'd be so blasé.

It's great to read about the interaction between Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Dean Kamen

"'There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of,' Jobs continued, 'things that would make you shit in your pants.'"

source: Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger.

"You walk away rich whether you're good or bad--where can I sign up? "

Here:http://www.hbs.edu/ or here:http://skullandcrossbones.org/articles/skulla ndbones.htm

Who cares? Figureheads make niceypoo, blah, blah, blah.

The linux kernal is going whereever patentholder IBM wants it to go.

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-028.pdf

Corporations are supposed to be sociopathic. They are supposed to put profit above all else.

Stop trolling Bill - just because you lack morals does not mean it is beneficial attribute for corporate managers, or even desirable. It certainly is not a good long term corporate strategy.

"What is Jobs susposed to say? "I'm scared, help me!!!" ?

This is the same Steve Jobs who shit his pants when someone introduced a battery-operated motor scooter.

Steve Jobs take on the Segway

Browsing the site, it looks like they're doing just what I talked about. Teaching how to be a manager, how to finance something, how to get people to be creative. They're not teaching how to come up with ideas, how to identify undervalued resources, i.e. the stuff that constitutes genuine entrepreneurship.

I know, it sounds like a nitpick, but I don't like when people act like, hey, once you teach this course, you'll be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship comes precisely from not following standard thinking. Maybe I didn't say that right...

Entrepreneurship is something that, almost by definition, can't be taught

Where did this use of 'consumers' come from?

http://www.hbs.edu/

Why the rubes^H^H^H^H^H general populace themselves use it is beyond me.

KFG

Given the rarity with which people RTFA, it would be even more surprising if someone downloaded the accompanying pdf academic paper (linked from within TFA).

"People are stupid. Microsoft decided for them what they use, by distributing IE with windows."

Well, now they don't have to download it! Believe it or not, you've just summarized most of the conclusions of the paper. Of course the authors do not put it as simply as you did. (Don't blame them; HBR referees are about as good as Slashdot mods.)

OTOH, one would still have to download the pdf paper to observe that it was written not in LaTeX or similar, but in... you guess it... M$ Word. "Game over," indeed.

I'm thinking that the Internet will be a disruptive technology that makes the media conglomerates irrevelant.

Hey, who are we in IT to question what thousands of MBAs and Microsoft have done?

From the Washington Post

From the Harvard Buisness School

From New Scientist

There are tons more out there.

Oh the joy, Microsoft mutilating themselves. Maybe they've not renewed their Harvard Business School Magazine subscriptions - they should read http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4980&t=marketin g

Unfortunetly the RIAA and other such organizations want you to belive this is the Norm. I go to concerts all the time, I would rather give my money to the artist (who get a much greater percentage from concert sales) than the Record Execs (who take most of CD Sales). Besides new studies are out (I believe mentioned on here before but I couldn't find the article) that show on average pirates are buying music anyways See here http://www.tcervo.com/?p=156/ and here http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4206&t=innovati on/