I think this rosy view of corporate competence paints too pretty a picture. People very often do get to the top more based upon who they know and how many resources they have, rather than their accomplishments. Peoples' accomplishments in corporate environments matter to some extent, but usually don't result in any dramatic role changes.
The main check against incompetent people reaching upper-level jobs is that businesses that allow this to happen often don't last very long. Tellingly, Trump has had an impressive string of failures in his past, and his personal wealth has likely grown less than it would have if he'd just invested it in an index fund. This also demonstrates that when you have a lot of money it's very possible to get around any competency checks. Furthermore, if a company doesn't have much in the way of competition (which is increasingly the case for many US corporations), then it takes egregiously bad behavior to bring a company down, removing competence checks on upper management further.
That said, I think you're spot-on with regards to government. I'm sure it doesn't always work, and internal cultures of various agencies can sometimes have problems that persist unchecked. But I think that overall, these represent fairly modest inefficiencies in the system. If Trump destroys this system, it will cause lasting damage to the US government for decades to come. I'm sure Republicans are salivating at the thought.
There are some significant protections that prevent many of these people from getting fired at a whim. For now, at least. Trump would have to significantly change the rules by which these organizations act internally, and that would probably involve a significant number of lawsuits.
In the mean time, there's zero value in having people in the organization who are sympathetic but unwilling to act to counter Trump's policies. There is a word for such people: collaborators.
There's no way that Trump's policies will substantially increase inflation, for a number of reasons.
The biggest reason is that it's very easy for the Fed to reign in inflation by increasing interest rates, and by all accounts a Trump presidency is likely to try to push the Fed to be more aggressive about doing this than the current Federal Reserve Board.
The next biggest reason is that Trump won't really be doing much of anything to increase spending. Trump and the Republicans will very likely blow the federal deficit wide open, but this will primarily be through tax cuts to the rich, which have very little impact on inflation.
I'm pretty sure that we can expect low inflation and decent economic growth over the next couple of years. But Trump, by removing financial regulation, will make another crash like the 2008 crash much more likely. When that next crash happens, then Bitcoin and gold will very likely spike in price (it'll be impossible to predict precisely when: sooner with Trump than it would have been with Clinton, but it could still be 5-10 years away).
This study is just way, way too small to have the conclusion it claims to have.
Whether left-leaning or right-leaning results turn up depends upon a wide variety of factors, not least of which is wording (left-leaning sites and right-leaning sites often use slightly different wording for the same issue). I don't see how it is even remotely possible for a group of four people to review enough searches to make up a representative sample, and four people is too small a number to provide a solid opinion.
Also, there's a distinct possibility that for some issues, left-leaning sites have talked about those issues far more frequently and in far more depth, while right-leaning sites will have discussed other, different issues.
Finally, I see no reason why Google should be held to any sort of standard of false balance: there are many issues for which the facts very solidly support the left, and it makes sense for Google's search results to reflect that bias. One of the clearest examples here would be global warming, but there are many others.
That may have been a reason that some put forward, but it doesn't have much to do with the arguments among politicians that were happening at the time. See here for a more in-depth analysis. Without slavery, I sincerely doubt the electoral college would have won out over a simple direct election.
Yes, it does hurt China more than it hurts us. But it still hurts us. There will be precious few winners if Trump engages in this trade war as promised.
My own hope, perversely, is that corporations in the US have a lot of influence in politics, most especially within the Republican party. I have a hard time thinking that he wouldn't get huge pushback from a number of large corporations if he actually tried to implement the trade war he says he wants.
Note to those who think that Trump is an outsider who isn't beholden to those same political forces: his transition team is entirely composed of Republican establishment politicians and corporate leaders.
Except that Clinton has been cleared of all wrongdoing, and none of her scandals have been shown to be anything more substantive than innuendo.
By contrast, Trump has multiple legal cases that seem to be quite substantive, such as regarding his Trump University, and his mismanagement of funds from the Trump Foundation.
The news media spent huge amounts of time discussing the innuendo around Clinton, but barely any talking about Trump's much more substantive legal problems. No, these two candidates are not and never were in the same realm of bad behavior. But the media has pretended that they are, even sometimes to the point of indicating that Clinton had much worse issues of corruption (which is patently absurd to anybody that has actually paid attention to the evidence).
Vindication? Clinton has a pretty significant popular vote lead, likely ending up at more than 2 million. In pretty much any other electoral system in the world, that would have been sufficient to grant the win to Hilary.
But no, we have the electoral college. And the reason it exists is explicitly because of slavery: the southern slave-owners wanted to ensure that their disallowing their slaves to vote wouldn't prevent them from winning the presidency. This was the foundation of the 3/5ths compromise, and the electoral college was the mechanism that was created so that the 3/5ths compromise could operate for both presidential elections as well as House elections.
Donald Trump is a flagrantly racist candidate who won because of racist institutions set up by racists in our distant past.
For the most part, higher frequency = shorter range, so probably quite a bit shorter than today's 5GHz WiFi. I'm sure you could boost the range with more powerful transmitters, but that's not going to be feasible much of the time.
Ummm, I hope you learn at least a little bit about child psychology before having any children. Children very, very quickly learn to show empathy and concern for others' needs, if they are given the right environment to do so.
Children (usually) only show sociopathic tendencies if their parents treat them like that's the only option. Sadly, this kind of mistreatment of children is absurdly common in the US, particularly as many parents don't even realize that they could be have far less frustration and a far more enjoyable time as parents if they just learned to stop setting up power struggles with their children.
Of course, sometimes there's brain chemistry that gets in the way here, but most children, even toddlers, can learn to notice and respond to the needs of others in positive ways, albeit clumsily.
Is that why he's threatening to lock up his opponent once he has the power to do so? Why he's claiming that unless he wins, the election was illegitimate?
Trump is ridiculously authoritarian. Sure, he's completely ignorant of how government works. In part that means that what would actually happen in a Trump presidency is that his advisors would set most policy. But he's got an ego as massive as any I've seen, and is very likely to push for lots of absurd and horrifying policies if he ever gets a chance.
Fortunately, it's virtually impossible for him to win the presidency at the current time. There are even some (rather unreliable) early indications that Trump may end up vastly underperforming in the polls due to historically low voter turnout among Republicans.
A similar option would be to just tap the finger print sensor a bunch of times with the wrong finger. Really don't know if this would be a safe thing to do legally, as others have mentioned, but for me it'd be almost worth it to force a fight in court over it rather than just handing them my personal information.
If you look into it in a bit more detail, the actual claims made are much less ridiculous than the headline makes them sound.
They're basically claiming to be able to predict (with lots of uncertainty) whether or not next year's winter will be particularly severe. This is useful, but not nearly as precise as the headline makes it seem.
It's probably not as big a deal as you're thinking. Go's support of interfaces covers most of the operations you might want to perform using generics, even if it's sometimes a bit cumbersome to implement.
There is generally far more variation within groups of people than between them, though. For the most part, measured differences between different groups have proven to be due to research that didn't fully account for researchers' and society's biases.
Simple example: there's a stereotype that girls are bad at math. It's been demonstrated that merely reminding girls of the existence of that stereotype causes them to do worse on math tests. This is an example of stereotype threat, where the existence of the stereotype itself causes a cognitive burden: even knowing that the stereotype is bullshit doesn't prevent it from causing harm. You can bring girls' math scores back up by creating an environment where the stereotype is minimized. And, of course, if that stereotype is enforced during school for a few years, those girls will end up definitely worse at math than their male peers just because later math builds on earlier math.
So in essence, you can't be sure that most any measured difference between two groups of people is a real difference, rather than just a difference imposed by society.
The effects of radiation in humans have been studied pretty extensively. People tend to have many severe health effects of other kinds long before cognition is impacted. We should be worrying about the astronauts dying long before we worry about them having reduced cognition.
Bigotry in general is more about the systems that society has in place that combine to make it so that people with certain backgrounds are disadvantaged with respect to others. These systems are extremely varied and reinforced by a variety of societal traditions, personal prejudices, business practices, government practices, and more.
At an individual level, bigotry involves supporting and continuing those systems of oppression, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Sure it can be. It depends upon the data and the questions being asked.
Learning algorithms match input data to output variables. They are trained by using a set of "known" relationships between the input data and the output variables (e.g. images that have already been classified as containing a dog or a cat or neither). If the training data is skewed as a result of prejudice, then the learning model will reflect that prejudice.
For example, there is today copious evidence that police are far more likely to arrest black people for the same crime as they are to arrest white people. So if we have data that uses arrest rates to measure how often crimes are committed, it's going to claim that black people commit crimes more often even if the only difference is police bias.
"Completely politely"? What universe are you living in? Gamergaters participated in sustained harassment of multiple women, including death threats and publishing of personal information (e.g. addresses). Women who dared criticize them, no matter how mildly, became the subject of targeted harassment themselves (e.g. when Felicia Day posted that she had been fearful of saying anything at all on the subject, her home address was posted within minutes).
The problem is the particular business model they use: impose a specific cap based upon the plan, and then charge large overage rates if you go over.
If it were just a matter of paying a base charge and then paying per GB (or similar) used, then it might make sense. Those overage rates, however, make the model problematic at best. Especially when they fail to notify customers that they're getting close to their quota.
I think that there's a good probability that this claim is true, but all that this shows is that people who pirate or don't pirate believe it to be the case that having legal options for accessing content is a better deterrent. Unfortunately, humans very often do not understand their own motivations.
What you'd need to do to actually tease out the causation here is to do actual policy trials. This is exceedingly difficult, unfortunately, as it's not so easy to just mandate that some number of people be given access to legal content: there's a lot of infrastructure work involved, and it requires licensing agreements. I don't think it's completely impossible, just hard.
In the mean time, I think it should be natural to accept the conclusion of the OP article until evidence against it is presented.
Yup! What's more, in this particular case very roughly half of the people who said they would ride in a self-driving car said they would do something else. This doesn't indicate that there would be no productivity gain. It indicates that there would be none for some people (and I'd bet nervousness would decline over time).
Slashdot Mirror
I think this rosy view of corporate competence paints too pretty a picture. People very often do get to the top more based upon who they know and how many resources they have, rather than their accomplishments. Peoples' accomplishments in corporate environments matter to some extent, but usually don't result in any dramatic role changes.
The main check against incompetent people reaching upper-level jobs is that businesses that allow this to happen often don't last very long. Tellingly, Trump has had an impressive string of failures in his past, and his personal wealth has likely grown less than it would have if he'd just invested it in an index fund. This also demonstrates that when you have a lot of money it's very possible to get around any competency checks. Furthermore, if a company doesn't have much in the way of competition (which is increasingly the case for many US corporations), then it takes egregiously bad behavior to bring a company down, removing competence checks on upper management further.
That said, I think you're spot-on with regards to government. I'm sure it doesn't always work, and internal cultures of various agencies can sometimes have problems that persist unchecked. But I think that overall, these represent fairly modest inefficiencies in the system. If Trump destroys this system, it will cause lasting damage to the US government for decades to come. I'm sure Republicans are salivating at the thought.
There are some significant protections that prevent many of these people from getting fired at a whim. For now, at least. Trump would have to significantly change the rules by which these organizations act internally, and that would probably involve a significant number of lawsuits.
In the mean time, there's zero value in having people in the organization who are sympathetic but unwilling to act to counter Trump's policies. There is a word for such people: collaborators.
There's no way that Trump's policies will substantially increase inflation, for a number of reasons.
The biggest reason is that it's very easy for the Fed to reign in inflation by increasing interest rates, and by all accounts a Trump presidency is likely to try to push the Fed to be more aggressive about doing this than the current Federal Reserve Board.
The next biggest reason is that Trump won't really be doing much of anything to increase spending. Trump and the Republicans will very likely blow the federal deficit wide open, but this will primarily be through tax cuts to the rich, which have very little impact on inflation.
I'm pretty sure that we can expect low inflation and decent economic growth over the next couple of years. But Trump, by removing financial regulation, will make another crash like the 2008 crash much more likely. When that next crash happens, then Bitcoin and gold will very likely spike in price (it'll be impossible to predict precisely when: sooner with Trump than it would have been with Clinton, but it could still be 5-10 years away).
This study is just way, way too small to have the conclusion it claims to have.
Whether left-leaning or right-leaning results turn up depends upon a wide variety of factors, not least of which is wording (left-leaning sites and right-leaning sites often use slightly different wording for the same issue). I don't see how it is even remotely possible for a group of four people to review enough searches to make up a representative sample, and four people is too small a number to provide a solid opinion.
Also, there's a distinct possibility that for some issues, left-leaning sites have talked about those issues far more frequently and in far more depth, while right-leaning sites will have discussed other, different issues.
Finally, I see no reason why Google should be held to any sort of standard of false balance: there are many issues for which the facts very solidly support the left, and it makes sense for Google's search results to reflect that bias. One of the clearest examples here would be global warming, but there are many others.
That may have been a reason that some put forward, but it doesn't have much to do with the arguments among politicians that were happening at the time. See here for a more in-depth analysis. Without slavery, I sincerely doubt the electoral college would have won out over a simple direct election.
Yes, it does hurt China more than it hurts us. But it still hurts us. There will be precious few winners if Trump engages in this trade war as promised.
My own hope, perversely, is that corporations in the US have a lot of influence in politics, most especially within the Republican party. I have a hard time thinking that he wouldn't get huge pushback from a number of large corporations if he actually tried to implement the trade war he says he wants.
Note to those who think that Trump is an outsider who isn't beholden to those same political forces: his transition team is entirely composed of Republican establishment politicians and corporate leaders.
Except that Clinton has been cleared of all wrongdoing, and none of her scandals have been shown to be anything more substantive than innuendo.
By contrast, Trump has multiple legal cases that seem to be quite substantive, such as regarding his Trump University, and his mismanagement of funds from the Trump Foundation.
The news media spent huge amounts of time discussing the innuendo around Clinton, but barely any talking about Trump's much more substantive legal problems. No, these two candidates are not and never were in the same realm of bad behavior. But the media has pretended that they are, even sometimes to the point of indicating that Clinton had much worse issues of corruption (which is patently absurd to anybody that has actually paid attention to the evidence).
Vindication? Clinton has a pretty significant popular vote lead, likely ending up at more than 2 million. In pretty much any other electoral system in the world, that would have been sufficient to grant the win to Hilary.
But no, we have the electoral college. And the reason it exists is explicitly because of slavery: the southern slave-owners wanted to ensure that their disallowing their slaves to vote wouldn't prevent them from winning the presidency. This was the foundation of the 3/5ths compromise, and the electoral college was the mechanism that was created so that the 3/5ths compromise could operate for both presidential elections as well as House elections.
Donald Trump is a flagrantly racist candidate who won because of racist institutions set up by racists in our distant past.
Not for home Internet.
For the most part, higher frequency = shorter range, so probably quite a bit shorter than today's 5GHz WiFi. I'm sure you could boost the range with more powerful transmitters, but that's not going to be feasible much of the time.
Ummm, I hope you learn at least a little bit about child psychology before having any children. Children very, very quickly learn to show empathy and concern for others' needs, if they are given the right environment to do so.
Children (usually) only show sociopathic tendencies if their parents treat them like that's the only option. Sadly, this kind of mistreatment of children is absurdly common in the US, particularly as many parents don't even realize that they could be have far less frustration and a far more enjoyable time as parents if they just learned to stop setting up power struggles with their children.
Of course, sometimes there's brain chemistry that gets in the way here, but most children, even toddlers, can learn to notice and respond to the needs of others in positive ways, albeit clumsily.
Is that why he's threatening to lock up his opponent once he has the power to do so? Why he's claiming that unless he wins, the election was illegitimate?
Trump is ridiculously authoritarian. Sure, he's completely ignorant of how government works. In part that means that what would actually happen in a Trump presidency is that his advisors would set most policy. But he's got an ego as massive as any I've seen, and is very likely to push for lots of absurd and horrifying policies if he ever gets a chance.
Fortunately, it's virtually impossible for him to win the presidency at the current time. There are even some (rather unreliable) early indications that Trump may end up vastly underperforming in the polls due to historically low voter turnout among Republicans.
A similar option would be to just tap the finger print sensor a bunch of times with the wrong finger. Really don't know if this would be a safe thing to do legally, as others have mentioned, but for me it'd be almost worth it to force a fight in court over it rather than just handing them my personal information.
If you look into it in a bit more detail, the actual claims made are much less ridiculous than the headline makes them sound.
They're basically claiming to be able to predict (with lots of uncertainty) whether or not next year's winter will be particularly severe. This is useful, but not nearly as precise as the headline makes it seem.
Go had a very different concurrency system than the one supported by Java. Go's concurrency is largely built on the concept of message passing.
It's probably not as big a deal as you're thinking. Go's support of interfaces covers most of the operations you might want to perform using generics, even if it's sometimes a bit cumbersome to implement.
There is generally far more variation within groups of people than between them, though. For the most part, measured differences between different groups have proven to be due to research that didn't fully account for researchers' and society's biases.
Simple example: there's a stereotype that girls are bad at math. It's been demonstrated that merely reminding girls of the existence of that stereotype causes them to do worse on math tests. This is an example of stereotype threat, where the existence of the stereotype itself causes a cognitive burden: even knowing that the stereotype is bullshit doesn't prevent it from causing harm. You can bring girls' math scores back up by creating an environment where the stereotype is minimized. And, of course, if that stereotype is enforced during school for a few years, those girls will end up definitely worse at math than their male peers just because later math builds on earlier math.
So in essence, you can't be sure that most any measured difference between two groups of people is a real difference, rather than just a difference imposed by society.
The effects of radiation in humans have been studied pretty extensively. People tend to have many severe health effects of other kinds long before cognition is impacted. We should be worrying about the astronauts dying long before we worry about them having reduced cognition.
Bigotry in general is more about the systems that society has in place that combine to make it so that people with certain backgrounds are disadvantaged with respect to others. These systems are extremely varied and reinforced by a variety of societal traditions, personal prejudices, business practices, government practices, and more.
At an individual level, bigotry involves supporting and continuing those systems of oppression, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Sure it can be. It depends upon the data and the questions being asked.
Learning algorithms match input data to output variables. They are trained by using a set of "known" relationships between the input data and the output variables (e.g. images that have already been classified as containing a dog or a cat or neither). If the training data is skewed as a result of prejudice, then the learning model will reflect that prejudice.
For example, there is today copious evidence that police are far more likely to arrest black people for the same crime as they are to arrest white people. So if we have data that uses arrest rates to measure how often crimes are committed, it's going to claim that black people commit crimes more often even if the only difference is police bias.
"Completely politely"? What universe are you living in? Gamergaters participated in sustained harassment of multiple women, including death threats and publishing of personal information (e.g. addresses). Women who dared criticize them, no matter how mildly, became the subject of targeted harassment themselves (e.g. when Felicia Day posted that she had been fearful of saying anything at all on the subject, her home address was posted within minutes).
The problem is the particular business model they use: impose a specific cap based upon the plan, and then charge large overage rates if you go over.
If it were just a matter of paying a base charge and then paying per GB (or similar) used, then it might make sense. Those overage rates, however, make the model problematic at best. Especially when they fail to notify customers that they're getting close to their quota.
That's what a lot of research on criminal deterrence seems to support.
I think that there's a good probability that this claim is true, but all that this shows is that people who pirate or don't pirate believe it to be the case that having legal options for accessing content is a better deterrent. Unfortunately, humans very often do not understand their own motivations.
What you'd need to do to actually tease out the causation here is to do actual policy trials. This is exceedingly difficult, unfortunately, as it's not so easy to just mandate that some number of people be given access to legal content: there's a lot of infrastructure work involved, and it requires licensing agreements. I don't think it's completely impossible, just hard.
In the mean time, I think it should be natural to accept the conclusion of the OP article until evidence against it is presented.
Yup! What's more, in this particular case very roughly half of the people who said they would ride in a self-driving car said they would do something else. This doesn't indicate that there would be no productivity gain. It indicates that there would be none for some people (and I'd bet nervousness would decline over time).