Nobody ever said Marx didn't correctly identify the problem - only that his solutions sucked. That's no reason to pretend that "late-stage capitalism" isn't full of problems - and that the US can't function as a free society while still reigning it in.
Sometimes. And sometimes they're (yes) very specifically described versions of an obvious idea. But Google really must be losing the support of the Slashdot crowd if they're now presumed evil for infringing patents - without Slashdotters assuming from the outset that those patents must be invalid patents on obvious stuff...
They may monitor for bugcatching and usability, but that's not why they monitor. They want the same kind of information the Google has - and they want to use it for the same purposes. And they're willing to stick themselves in between you and Google to grab it. Remember when Bing used to (did it ever stop?) forward your searches to Google and use the results to prop up the relevancy of their own?
If Google is really stealing people's ideas, that's pretty nasty and they should stop (or be stopped). But they came by the information about your preferences honestly - they traded you some pretty good services for it - including an open source browser that you can get without Google's spyware attached. Feel free to stop using those services if you're no longer comfortable with how they operate, but don't kid yourself that the replacements will be any better. I only occasionally find the results of Google's snooping to be creepy. Facebook, on the other hand, inundates me with ads for every commercial site I visit immediately after going there. It's like being stalked by any and all products you express an interest in. Super creepy - but probably pretty effective. I may even buy those SoftScience shoes one of these years...
You'd think there'd be a market for new services that sold you to advertisers in aggregate (based on age and sex - nothing more), like TV does. If people used those services, they'd be popular and profitable. But good luck getting funding to scale them up to compete with Google or Facebook or Bing or Outlook. The money guys want to maximize profit - they're not interested in a successful business that throws of a decent income. Still, if the public could persuade itself (cause nobody's going to pay to persuade them) to use such services, advertisers would be forced to support them - and their creators would get rich. And if they resisted going public, maybe they could stay rich without being forced to get greedy too...
Really? Google News intersperses various left and right sources - but presents both. Of course you don't always know you've clicked on a right-wing source until you try to read it and discover it's nonsense.
One more time. Fox News is not right wing - it's propaganda. They do not attempt to perform actual journalism - only to present a veneer that looks like journalism. And yes, sometimes that veneer actually consists of some facts - as long as they don't get in the way of ideology. Doesn't change the calculus, though.
MSNBC is left-wing, but they do try to stick to facts - even on their opinion shows. Rachel Maddow sometimes tries too hard to make a point, which can make her seem curiously obsessed on some less than cosmic matter, but she does attempt to provide a factual basis for her arguments. The equivalent on the right are the likes of Brett Stephens and David Brooks. You can see Brooks' wheels turning and generally, reading him is an exercise in waiting for the pivot to the conservative point he's building up to. But he at least sticks to facts. False equivalences, to be sure - but factual ones...
If they can convert to natural gas at the same time as restoring the grid (while the plants are down anyway), the lower fuel cost might pay for the conversion. Probably not feasible, but the point is that it's extremely hard to replace inefficient parts of the system while it's operating at capacity - even if replacing them would end up being cheaper.
Likewise Washington, D.C. But it's a joke to talk about the 'balance' of the EC. It's already so skewed toward Republicans that they've now won two recent elections without the popular vote. Adding 2 new small, but this time Democratic, states would do a little toward restoring some of the balance that's been lost due to the increasing concentration of the population in the biggest states. Without needing to amend the Constitution.
The house is also out of balance, but that's much more because of Gerrymandering, which - with any luck, and Justice Kennedy not being lured away from acknowledging the obvious - may be remedied soon. Of course Gerrymandering wouldn't have gotten as bad as it is now without the brilliantly evil strategy of the Koch's to spend what it took to win state legislatures in 2010. Kennedy could do something to fix that too, but he won't.
...monopoly pays. Every one of those tech giants has - or is verging on - a virtual monopoly on their corner of the tech universe. I'm not saying those positions haven't been earned, but of course, they've remained resistant to competition in no small part due to acquisitions - which allowed them to fend of new technologies around the edges that might have grown into serious competition. And those acquisitions might not have been allowed in a regime that understood the problems of monopolization.
Where there's competition for essentially identical service, there is minimal profit. That's good for the public, and not so good for the corporations. Not so bad for them either. They're still making money and providing millions of jobs. It's just that Wall Street doesn't see enough potential for explosive growth to care. And that, of course, is because they're all busy chasing the new monopolies - and looking for the next one. And that's driven by a tax system that encourages businesses to focus on low-taxed capital gains instead of higher-taxed wage income. Seems there's a way to fix some of this by rewriting the tax code - wanna bet on that happening...;-)
In any case, judging from the diminishing returns in the Airline and Telecom industries - where consolidation has been brutal, it doesn't even take so much competition for it to work its magic. So what we're left with is competition + low prices + shitty service - versus new tech industries with monopoly profits, pretty good service (as long as a machine can provide it) and phantom low prices at the cost of all privacy, and pervasive advertising. Hmmm.
That's because President Trump is candidate Trump. He has no idea how to govern - except some assumption that because he won, whatever he wants to happen will happen. Of course, he doesn't know what he wants to happen specifically. He has no idea what has been in the various Obamacare replacements - he just wants to pass one to chalk up a win.
The only aspect of the presidency that Trump enjoys is bullshitting in front of an adoring crowd.
Samsung is doing just fine. Everybody else - except HTC and LG - has pretty much given up on high-priced flagships and are duking it out in the midrange to see who gets to be the high-end of the midrange tier.
That leaves Google's Pixels competing with HTC and LG - while using them to produce their devices. That can't work - and it shows. The Pixels are nice devices, but they're still compromised by being based on existing HTC and/or LG designs. The first gen Pixels were at least both from HTC - and so had a family resemblance that the prior gen of Nexus devicess did not. But they still had those crazy-big bezels - presumably as a holdover from being based on the HTC 10. And with the Pixel 2's they're back to having a small HTC version and a big LG one. They had to buy one of those guys. And the other one's not gonna like it - but the rest of the Android field shouldn't mind too much.
Doesn't KDE/Plasma have much of the UI/touch interface stuff in place from back when QT was owned by Nokia and Meego was based on it?
If so, why isn't somebody making a tablet with a detachable keyboard instead of trying to compete with iOS and Android? That would at least be a unique category of device - and if they at least did the browser really well, it could find a niche much like Chromebooks did. Of course, now that Android apps are coming to Chromebooks...
How about some nice, flexible options to allow you to control how video and other elements are handled. I certainly don't want video to autoplay anywhere - with sound or otherwise. Though it might be nice for it to start buffering automatically - but only enough so that if I were to hit play there'd be enough for it to start playing immediately. Currently, for example, Huffington Post insists on including autoplay video on almost every story it posts. I almost never want to view it. Especially, since there's usually a text-based transcript, which is quicker and easier to get me to what I opened the story for.
On Chrome, I've installed an extension that prevents the videos from starting - but they still download. On rare occasions, I do want to see the video - but for that to be a smooth experience, only a small portion would need to be downloaded. Then stream the rest if and when I actually ask to view it.
I agree. The robots haven't even begun to touch most job categories. So far, they're only doing some of the heavy lifting and detail work in manufacturing. They're not flipping burgers or fulfilling Amazon orders... yet.
Of course, bank tellers are long gone, and some fast food chains (e.g. Panera) have started replacing cashiers with self-service touchscreens - we'll see how popular that is. CVS has automated self check-out kiosks that, so far, are so cumbersome they need an employee to hover to show customers how to use them.
I suspect the 'less enjoyable' part comes from not watching as part of the communal 'water cooler' experience. Sure, you don't get to discuss the latest episode with your friends and argue over the cliff hanger at the end of last night's episode.
But... You don't have to deal with annoying cliff hangers, and you get the added bonus of spotting the obvious places for commercial breaks that are missing when you stream it. The first program I binge watched was 'Lost' - several years after the series concluded. I enjoyed it immensely - and all the while, I thought to myself that if I had to deal with all the commercial breaks and wait a week for all the cliff hangers to be resolved, I would've hated that show. And the lousy last season would've made me even angrier...
What's bizarre is that these devices are all running 'stock' software from the factory. If they test the update at all, it ought to work the same on all of them, no?
Then again, you're always hearing about how some iOS or Android update is causing problems for owners of some specific model of phone. Again, if these things are all on stock, shouldn't the update work on all of them? Maybe for phones it's a matter of various bits of their hardware or firmware only getting exercised if you're on a particular carrier in a particular location - or if you have a particular bluetooth device connected. TV's should be much easier...
This is being driven by Microsoft, not RedHat. Mono started out based on the assumption that - because it's Microsoft (yes, it was that long ago),.NET would end up snaring a huge developer share, and Linux would wither if C# developers couldn't code for it. But since then, the internet changed a few things. Yes, there are still C# developers, but they're not the majority. Microsoft wants to lure developers to it's Azure cloud, and needs to support Linux for that to happen.
I.e., the assumption today is that if you want the developers, you need to be on Linux. That doesn't mean Linux developers need to actually use.NET, just because it's there...
Yes,.NET from Microsoft introduces an MS dependency for Linux developers that use it. But how many Linux devs actually do? What.NET on Linux does accomplish is to take what wind is left out of the sails of Mono. But Mono was pretty much a dead end anyway. RedHat spent lots of money toward its development, and probably doesn't want to have to continue maintaining the stuff that.NET replaces. Presumably the GNOME hooks for Mono will be adjusted to work with.NET, and what few apps actually are coded in Mono will continue to work. Beyond that, sure, internet back-end developers would do well to be wary of investing too heavily on Microsoft-controlled technologies. And desktop Linux developers aren't really being given anything of use here...
Wasn't KDE 'inspired' by CDE - at very least in terms of its acronym. But seriously, CDE was kind of Windows-like in its day. It's just that it was modeled after Windows 3. But then Windows 3 may well have been modeled after Unix GUIS from that period...
Why can't the phone companies use your email account as they're second factor for all attempts to re-point your phone number? Assuming there's a cumbersome fallback method to get you into your email account without your phone, this would at least require somebody trying to steal your email account by stealing your phone to already have access to that account. But it wouldn't prevent you from replacing your lost phone.
For less than a high-end smartphone, though, you can probably get a digital camera that will last you 10 years. That smartphone needs to be replaced every 2 years - if only to get security updates.
What's needed is a new class of digital cameras that are as good as (or better than) the ones in high-end smartphones and have basic uploading capabilities - maybe just the ability to NFC sync to the smartphone in your pocket. Then you have the nice convenient form factor in a device that you don't have to replace nearly as often - and without the expensive additional costs of phone-related patents.
Or... have that new digital camera be the touch screen device you carry around and interact with - and locate the smarts in a 'smartphone fob' that you simply leave in your pocket. Kind of like the way an iWatch uses the phone as its brain - except in this case, the brain is a small, cheap headless device that you replace now and then to keep up with smartphone OS advances - if you care to. And your smart screen, which is just a good camera and display, lasts you as long as the hardware holds up - while still costing less than a new iPhone or Galaxy.
You guys that think the market always works its magic eventually - and suggest stuff like 'If you know so much, why not try beating them at their own game' - always seem to miss the obvious point that there's more to life than money and winning. And The Market is a grubby little psychopath that we might not want to emulate in our personal lives...
How about because he's not interested in money for its own sake - and got involved in tech because he enjoyed the work and the challenges - before his bosses threw the baby out with the bathwater to 'improve' the bottom line prior to selling the company. And now he's too old to feel like starting over - since his job hasn't been completely eliminated (though the offshore team has).
But he still responds to posts like this, because he feels like the industry has become too inundated by money-managers and young turks who think they'll always be in demand and are too young to believe otherwise - despite ample evidence. He was quite in demand in his day - and still has a decent job and life. But the thinks he industry is in serious trouble - like the rest of our winner-take-all economy...
This. Squared. And as evidenced by the utter failure of many outsourcing efforts in tech, they'll even do it to the point where they destroy their companies.
If you don't factor in the short-range benefits to executives of the brief improvement to the bottom line - before the actual failure of the actual work starts affecting cash flow - you miss the true evil behind it. It's not even a matter of "business will do what's best for the bottom line - and no point trying to stop that". It's a matter of greedy individuals with no stake in anything but themselves being given more or less free reign to do their self-serving best.
If you don't think the right has it's own version of political correctness, you're kidding yourself. I'll grant you that right wing views are not popular on college campuses - and California tech companies. But try criticizing religion or the military or, God forbid, gun ownership in the vast red sea and see how far you get...
The term 'Political Correctness' was coined by liberals to poke fun at their own tendency toward ever more inoffensive terminologies, etc. And the thing itself is plenty annoying. But that doesn't mean the political points are invalid - any more than the rantings about tyranny from gun enthusiasts invalidate the needs of hunters and those that keep guns for protection. What both do is shut down discussion of the nuances and project an absurdly extreme orthodoxy.
What's his 'dissenting view'? That women make bad engineers - so stop trying to hire them, even though the differences are not large and there's lots of overlap in which some women are much better engineers than some men. There's hardly any point there except to say that "I want to rag on Google's attempts to hire women engineers". Perhaps his 'point' is about groupthink and has nothing to do with women in engineering - but then why focus on that and then make an argument full of disclaimers?
Here's a nicely argued rebuttal from an ex-Googler:
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody ever said Marx didn't correctly identify the problem - only that his solutions sucked. That's no reason to pretend that "late-stage capitalism" isn't full of problems - and that the US can't function as a free society while still reigning it in.
Sometimes. And sometimes they're (yes) very specifically described versions of an obvious idea. But Google really must be losing the support of the Slashdot crowd if they're now presumed evil for infringing patents - without Slashdotters assuming from the outset that those patents must be invalid patents on obvious stuff...
They may monitor for bugcatching and usability, but that's not why they monitor. They want the same kind of information the Google has - and they want to use it for the same purposes. And they're willing to stick themselves in between you and Google to grab it. Remember when Bing used to (did it ever stop?) forward your searches to Google and use the results to prop up the relevancy of their own?
If Google is really stealing people's ideas, that's pretty nasty and they should stop (or be stopped). But they came by the information about your preferences honestly - they traded you some pretty good services for it - including an open source browser that you can get without Google's spyware attached. Feel free to stop using those services if you're no longer comfortable with how they operate, but don't kid yourself that the replacements will be any better. I only occasionally find the results of Google's snooping to be creepy. Facebook, on the other hand, inundates me with ads for every commercial site I visit immediately after going there. It's like being stalked by any and all products you express an interest in. Super creepy - but probably pretty effective. I may even buy those SoftScience shoes one of these years...
You'd think there'd be a market for new services that sold you to advertisers in aggregate (based on age and sex - nothing more), like TV does. If people used those services, they'd be popular and profitable. But good luck getting funding to scale them up to compete with Google or Facebook or Bing or Outlook. The money guys want to maximize profit - they're not interested in a successful business that throws of a decent income. Still, if the public could persuade itself (cause nobody's going to pay to persuade them) to use such services, advertisers would be forced to support them - and their creators would get rich. And if they resisted going public, maybe they could stay rich without being forced to get greedy too...
Really? Google News intersperses various left and right sources - but presents both. Of course you don't always know you've clicked on a right-wing source until you try to read it and discover it's nonsense.
One more time. Fox News is not right wing - it's propaganda. They do not attempt to perform actual journalism - only to present a veneer that looks like journalism. And yes, sometimes that veneer actually consists of some facts - as long as they don't get in the way of ideology. Doesn't change the calculus, though.
MSNBC is left-wing, but they do try to stick to facts - even on their opinion shows. Rachel Maddow sometimes tries too hard to make a point, which can make her seem curiously obsessed on some less than cosmic matter, but she does attempt to provide a factual basis for her arguments. The equivalent on the right are the likes of Brett Stephens and David Brooks. You can see Brooks' wheels turning and generally, reading him is an exercise in waiting for the pivot to the conservative point he's building up to. But he at least sticks to facts. False equivalences, to be sure - but factual ones...
If they can convert to natural gas at the same time as restoring the grid (while the plants are down anyway), the lower fuel cost might pay for the conversion. Probably not feasible, but the point is that it's extremely hard to replace inefficient parts of the system while it's operating at capacity - even if replacing them would end up being cheaper.
Likewise Washington, D.C. But it's a joke to talk about the 'balance' of the EC. It's already so skewed toward Republicans that they've now won two recent elections without the popular vote. Adding 2 new small, but this time Democratic, states would do a little toward restoring some of the balance that's been lost due to the increasing concentration of the population in the biggest states. Without needing to amend the Constitution.
The house is also out of balance, but that's much more because of Gerrymandering, which - with any luck, and Justice Kennedy not being lured away from acknowledging the obvious - may be remedied soon. Of course Gerrymandering wouldn't have gotten as bad as it is now without the brilliantly evil strategy of the Koch's to spend what it took to win state legislatures in 2010. Kennedy could do something to fix that too, but he won't.
...monopoly pays. Every one of those tech giants has - or is verging on - a virtual monopoly on their corner of the tech universe. I'm not saying those positions haven't been earned, but of course, they've remained resistant to competition in no small part due to acquisitions - which allowed them to fend of new technologies around the edges that might have grown into serious competition. And those acquisitions might not have been allowed in a regime that understood the problems of monopolization.
Where there's competition for essentially identical service, there is minimal profit. That's good for the public, and not so good for the corporations. Not so bad for them either. They're still making money and providing millions of jobs. It's just that Wall Street doesn't see enough potential for explosive growth to care. And that, of course, is because they're all busy chasing the new monopolies - and looking for the next one. And that's driven by a tax system that encourages businesses to focus on low-taxed capital gains instead of higher-taxed wage income. Seems there's a way to fix some of this by rewriting the tax code - wanna bet on that happening... ;-)
In any case, judging from the diminishing returns in the Airline and Telecom industries - where consolidation has been brutal, it doesn't even take so much competition for it to work its magic. So what we're left with is competition + low prices + shitty service - versus new tech industries with monopoly profits, pretty good service (as long as a machine can provide it) and phantom low prices at the cost of all privacy, and pervasive advertising. Hmmm.
That's because President Trump is candidate Trump. He has no idea how to govern - except some assumption that because he won, whatever he wants to happen will happen. Of course, he doesn't know what he wants to happen specifically. He has no idea what has been in the various Obamacare replacements - he just wants to pass one to chalk up a win.
The only aspect of the presidency that Trump enjoys is bullshitting in front of an adoring crowd.
Samsung is doing just fine. Everybody else - except HTC and LG - has pretty much given up on high-priced flagships and are duking it out in the midrange to see who gets to be the high-end of the midrange tier.
That leaves Google's Pixels competing with HTC and LG - while using them to produce their devices. That can't work - and it shows. The Pixels are nice devices, but they're still compromised by being based on existing HTC and/or LG designs. The first gen Pixels were at least both from HTC - and so had a family resemblance that the prior gen of Nexus devicess did not. But they still had those crazy-big bezels - presumably as a holdover from being based on the HTC 10. And with the Pixel 2's they're back to having a small HTC version and a big LG one. They had to buy one of those guys. And the other one's not gonna like it - but the rest of the Android field shouldn't mind too much.
Doesn't KDE/Plasma have much of the UI/touch interface stuff in place from back when QT was owned by Nokia and Meego was based on it?
If so, why isn't somebody making a tablet with a detachable keyboard instead of trying to compete with iOS and Android? That would at least be a unique category of device - and if they at least did the browser really well, it could find a niche much like Chromebooks did. Of course, now that Android apps are coming to Chromebooks...
How about some nice, flexible options to allow you to control how video and other elements are handled. I certainly don't want video to autoplay anywhere - with sound or otherwise. Though it might be nice for it to start buffering automatically - but only enough so that if I were to hit play there'd be enough for it to start playing immediately. Currently, for example, Huffington Post insists on including autoplay video on almost every story it posts. I almost never want to view it. Especially, since there's usually a text-based transcript, which is quicker and easier to get me to what I opened the story for.
On Chrome, I've installed an extension that prevents the videos from starting - but they still download. On rare occasions, I do want to see the video - but for that to be a smooth experience, only a small portion would need to be downloaded. Then stream the rest if and when I actually ask to view it.
I agree. The robots haven't even begun to touch most job categories. So far, they're only doing some of the heavy lifting and detail work in manufacturing. They're not flipping burgers or fulfilling Amazon orders... yet.
Of course, bank tellers are long gone, and some fast food chains (e.g. Panera) have started replacing cashiers with self-service touchscreens - we'll see how popular that is. CVS has automated self check-out kiosks that, so far, are so cumbersome they need an employee to hover to show customers how to use them.
I suspect the 'less enjoyable' part comes from not watching as part of the communal 'water cooler' experience. Sure, you don't get to discuss the latest episode with your friends and argue over the cliff hanger at the end of last night's episode.
But... You don't have to deal with annoying cliff hangers, and you get the added bonus of spotting the obvious places for commercial breaks that are missing when you stream it. The first program I binge watched was 'Lost' - several years after the series concluded. I enjoyed it immensely - and all the while, I thought to myself that if I had to deal with all the commercial breaks and wait a week for all the cliff hangers to be resolved, I would've hated that show. And the lousy last season would've made me even angrier...
Because their ad business is their business. The search engine and browser are just loss leaders.
And at very least, CNN does not continue to repeat their mistaken stories as though they'd never been found to be false.
What's bizarre is that these devices are all running 'stock' software from the factory. If they test the update at all, it ought to work the same on all of them, no?
Then again, you're always hearing about how some iOS or Android update is causing problems for owners of some specific model of phone. Again, if these things are all on stock, shouldn't the update work on all of them? Maybe for phones it's a matter of various bits of their hardware or firmware only getting exercised if you're on a particular carrier in a particular location - or if you have a particular bluetooth device connected. TV's should be much easier...
This is being driven by Microsoft, not RedHat. Mono started out based on the assumption that - because it's Microsoft (yes, it was that long ago), .NET would end up snaring a huge developer share, and Linux would wither if C# developers couldn't code for it. But since then, the internet changed a few things. Yes, there are still C# developers, but they're not the majority. Microsoft wants to lure developers to it's Azure cloud, and needs to support Linux for that to happen.
I.e., the assumption today is that if you want the developers, you need to be on Linux. That doesn't mean Linux developers need to actually use .NET, just because it's there...
Yes, .NET from Microsoft introduces an MS dependency for Linux developers that use it. But how many Linux devs actually do? What .NET on Linux does accomplish is to take what wind is left out of the sails of Mono. But Mono was pretty much a dead end anyway. RedHat spent lots of money toward its development, and probably doesn't want to have to continue maintaining the stuff that .NET replaces. Presumably the GNOME hooks for Mono will be adjusted to work with .NET, and what few apps actually are coded in Mono will continue to work. Beyond that, sure, internet back-end developers would do well to be wary of investing too heavily on Microsoft-controlled technologies. And desktop Linux developers aren't really being given anything of use here...
Wasn't KDE 'inspired' by CDE - at very least in terms of its acronym. But seriously, CDE was kind of Windows-like in its day. It's just that it was modeled after Windows 3. But then Windows 3 may well have been modeled after Unix GUIS from that period...
Why can't the phone companies use your email account as they're second factor for all attempts to re-point your phone number? Assuming there's a cumbersome fallback method to get you into your email account without your phone, this would at least require somebody trying to steal your email account by stealing your phone to already have access to that account. But it wouldn't prevent you from replacing your lost phone.
For less than a high-end smartphone, though, you can probably get a digital camera that will last you 10 years. That smartphone needs to be replaced every 2 years - if only to get security updates.
What's needed is a new class of digital cameras that are as good as (or better than) the ones in high-end smartphones and have basic uploading capabilities - maybe just the ability to NFC sync to the smartphone in your pocket. Then you have the nice convenient form factor in a device that you don't have to replace nearly as often - and without the expensive additional costs of phone-related patents.
Or... have that new digital camera be the touch screen device you carry around and interact with - and locate the smarts in a 'smartphone fob' that you simply leave in your pocket. Kind of like the way an iWatch uses the phone as its brain - except in this case, the brain is a small, cheap headless device that you replace now and then to keep up with smartphone OS advances - if you care to. And your smart screen, which is just a good camera and display, lasts you as long as the hardware holds up - while still costing less than a new iPhone or Galaxy.
You guys that think the market always works its magic eventually - and suggest stuff like 'If you know so much, why not try beating them at their own game' - always seem to miss the obvious point that there's more to life than money and winning. And The Market is a grubby little psychopath that we might not want to emulate in our personal lives...
...because he has no money
How about because he's not interested in money for its own sake - and got involved in tech because he enjoyed the work and the challenges - before his bosses threw the baby out with the bathwater to 'improve' the bottom line prior to selling the company. And now he's too old to feel like starting over - since his job hasn't been completely eliminated (though the offshore team has).
But he still responds to posts like this, because he feels like the industry has become too inundated by money-managers and young turks who think they'll always be in demand and are too young to believe otherwise - despite ample evidence. He was quite in demand in his day - and still has a decent job and life. But the thinks he industry is in serious trouble - like the rest of our winner-take-all economy...
This. Squared. And as evidenced by the utter failure of many outsourcing efforts in tech, they'll even do it to the point where they destroy their companies.
If you don't factor in the short-range benefits to executives of the brief improvement to the bottom line - before the actual failure of the actual work starts affecting cash flow - you miss the true evil behind it. It's not even a matter of "business will do what's best for the bottom line - and no point trying to stop that". It's a matter of greedy individuals with no stake in anything but themselves being given more or less free reign to do their self-serving best.
If you don't think the right has it's own version of political correctness, you're kidding yourself. I'll grant you that right wing views are not popular on college campuses - and California tech companies. But try criticizing religion or the military or, God forbid, gun ownership in the vast red sea and see how far you get...
The term 'Political Correctness' was coined by liberals to poke fun at their own tendency toward ever more inoffensive terminologies, etc. And the thing itself is plenty annoying. But that doesn't mean the political points are invalid - any more than the rantings about tyranny from gun enthusiasts invalidate the needs of hunters and those that keep guns for protection. What both do is shut down discussion of the nuances and project an absurdly extreme orthodoxy.
What's his 'dissenting view'? That women make bad engineers - so stop trying to hire them, even though the differences are not large and there's lots of overlap in which some women are much better engineers than some men. There's hardly any point there except to say that "I want to rag on Google's attempts to hire women engineers". Perhaps his 'point' is about groupthink and has nothing to do with women in engineering - but then why focus on that and then make an argument full of disclaimers?
Here's a nicely argued rebuttal from an ex-Googler:
https://medium.com/@yonatanzun...