Some people are more or less concerned about privacy attacks from the US government, companies, and malicious strangers or acquaintances. Personally I don't care much about US government spying on me. I can't think of much in terms of personal data or opinions that I wouldn't openly tell them if they asked. I'm more concerned about companies and malicious individuals. I'm not saying that others are unreasonable in their fear, distrust, or skepticism of the the US government. Rather I'm just saying that that's not where my concerns lie.
Instead, I'm more concerned about the Chinese (and other foreign) government. If I say something on the forbidden words list, will that impact a future visa application to China? Would proprietary work email potentially make its way to competing Chinese companies? Will my passwords and other files remain private (yes, those files are encypted, but that doesn't mean much to professional e-thieves)? Would holes in my phone's privacy compromise friends and coworkers?
Well, they can mount the phone on gimbals and use other stabilising devices.
True, but then the setup is no longer as portable or cheap, which negates the advantage of using a phone camera. Unless the whole point is simply to use the phone for publicity and marketing.
While the Chinese system may have a lower per capita murder rate, it has a higher capital punishment rate
Dude you just argued against yourself, America with its HIGHER murder rate has a LOWER capital punishment rate than China. Is this the "systematic inefficiency" you speak of?
Uhh... no.... The US systematic inefficiency is largely based on checks and balances, leading to the inability of any one person or party to control unilaterally control any aspect of law or society. I don't understand your implication of a logical inconsistency between the per capital murder and capital punishment rates in the US and China. Perhaps you can lay out your logic for this idea.
it also has a much, much higher genocide rate that swamps any murder numbers of any kind
Literally 50% of the article refer to western nation genocides, with ONE PARAGRAPH in the entire article referring to China. Do you really want to play the genocide card?
And yet, the death toll attributed to Mao swamp all the other genocides put together. I suppose there a semantic argument against classifying Mao's deaths as genocide, but I don't think that really matters to the 15 to 55 millions who died under Mao. In any case, I would still much prefer the US system to the Chinese system.
As an America who values freedom of speech and conscience and the right to directly criticize the government
I give you that, however, ttsai member, please list your SSN in all your future posts to prove America has "freedom of speech" (you're not afraid are you?).
Hmm, this must be a Chinese view of freedom of speech, i.e., you must say what I want you to say. In the free world, freedom of speech means that I get to say what I want to say when I want to say it, and I get to not say what I don't want to say. It isn't a surprise that this concept is foreign to the Chinese system.
is a benevolent dictatorship. China has effectively the latter
you've got a pretty screwed up definition of benevolent. why don't you move to China, criticize the government openly and see how that works out for you.
I think you need to reread what I wrote. "Latter" refers to just the dictatorship part.
For all its many faults, I vastly prefer the US system of systematic inefficiency over the benevolently unstable Chinese system.
murder rate per 100,000: USA=4.88 China 0.74
Over "decades", say 50 years, Americans would murder about one million more of its own people than China (if China were the same population as the US). You're partly correct about the "millions of lives" part.
This just in, thriving democracy India murder rate=3.21
Yes, the US and the US system have many faults, many more than just the murder rate. However, looking at just the per capita murder rate is just one way to look at the issue. While the Chinese system may have a lower per capita murder rate, it has a higher capital punishment rate and higher hard labor punishment rate. More significantly, many of those Chinese prison sentences and deaths are based on defying the government. Over the last half century, it also has a much, much higher genocide rate that swamps any murder numbers of any kind. As an America who values freedom of speech and conscience and the right to directly criticize the government, I would probably be killed in China. So, yes, I vastly prefer the US system.
A lot of people believe in the China Model. There will never be a Trump in China, and that alone has a lot of endorsement
I strongly believe that the most effective and efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. China has effectively the latter and as long as it can grasp onto the former, it can do tremendous things. However, past history in China and indeed in all countries over all time has shown that the grasp on benevolence in leadership is fleeting. The emergence of a Trump and worse in China, the US, and elsewhere is a near certainty. In the US, we can get rid or at least wait out our Trumps in just a few years and with nonviolent elections. That's not the case in China, Russia, North Korea, etc. There, we have seen in our own lifetimes that the passage of non-benevolent leadership in these totalitarian regimes requires the passage of decades and millions of lives.
For all its many faults, I vastly prefer the US system of systematic inefficiency over the benevolently unstable Chinese system.
Honestly, basically... yes. I think if the New York Times tweets something, then as a public statement, it should be able to be "quoted" as an issue of fair use-- especially for the purpose of reporting news.
Isn't the judge making a distinction between quoting wording and copying an image? If that's the case, someone should create a webpage that takes the words of a tweet and reformats those words into a different image. That should get around the judge's objection.
Socialism has no problems and you are very likely a fascist sympathizer. Fuck you if you think wealth transfer from the rich to the poor is a bad idea.
I think transferring money from the really rich to the really poor is generally a good idea and promotes not only fairness but a more functional society. I'm in favor of that. However, the current situation also transfers money from the not that rich to the not that poor. That's the failing of almost all forms of socialism. The rich get richer with capitalism, but that problem also occurs with all forms of socialism outside of textbooks and manifestos.
So the elderly who can't afford it get a break, while people who can easily afford it get charged more. Sounds like a socialist success story to me.
Yes, I wish it were that simple! Some elderly are not exactly poor, and many people who cannot easily afford it get charged more. That's one of the problems with socialist theory -- most demographic groups and situations are characterized by distributions and not constants.
Not driving the elderly out onto the streets with punitive taxes sounds like a good idea. I wonder if maybe that's why they did it?
Yes, that's a good idea for the elderly and probably for the non-elderly, too! It was indeed part of the motivation for Proposition 13 many years ago.
Of course, this disparity in property tax extends beyond just the elderly. Most of the low property tax homes aren't owned by the elderly but by those with the foresight or luck to buy a house many years ago. The elderly can choose to cash out of their homes and move out of state, but those with jobs cannot easily do so. The system punishes new arrivals, the young, and those that never bought a house.
I'm not complaining about the California property tax inequality because I think it's unfair to me. I'm fortunate to have a job that easily covers that $12k each year. However, there are many people that find that to be a great hardship. Due to the inequality, it's a hardship that is not equally borne across all households.
The reason California taxes everything else so high is partly because of its social and environmental protections, partly because it has such a low property tax and must make up the difference, and partly because it and other blue states subsidize most of the red states.
California's property tax structure is effectively bimodal, i.e., both really expensive and cheap. It all depends on when you bought your home. I pay $12k/year, while my neighbor pays $500/year, even though we have basically the same house. I just happened to buy my house 55 years after he did.
This bimodal property structure also contributes to the housing problem. Senior folks with $500/year property taxes and no mortgage have a big incentive to not sell their homes, thus exacerbating a low-supply market.
Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.
If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws.
But what if Google blocks ads based on putatively altruistic standards and the result is that none of Google's ads are blocked but a significant portion of competitor ads are blocked? Can Google be punished for intent or the resulting impact on the market? Or is punishment reserved solely for explicit declarations of anti-competitive behavior, i.e., I know what the law is and I'm going to flaunt that law in your face?
Where I live I can't see printed newspapers surviving another 10 years, but it is because of the awful quality.
Even if this decline in quality is true, why would this bode poorly for only printed media? Does journalistic quality improve if the same articles are shown on a screen instead of printed? Or do the incompetent writers insist on paper-only distribution and refuse to allow their words to be shown digitally? None of that makes any sense. The difference between print and screen is the revenue model of different advertising media. It has nothing to do with the quality of articles because the exact same articles are usually printed and digitally displayed. Now, perhaps we're talking about the awful quality of print ads...
Guess what? Everyone steals from everyone else, one way or another. Knowing something can be done is more than 50% of the way towards being able to duplicate it. Smart companies don't just duplicate someone else's work, they improve on it, and 'steal' their market share that way. So far as I can tell it's always been this way; it's called 'competition'.
I think you're using "steal" as a synonym for acquire. There are many ways to acquire technology. Most people generally applaud R&D that utilizes publicly available information. Most people probably also condemn criminal theft of technology. Then there is the gray area, where technology is effectively stolen but where the theft is legitimized via laws that explicitly proclaim such theft to be lawful. This is the case in China. Yes, the companies voluntarily enter into these theft arrangements, but it's still legalized theft. This situation is similar to blackmail, i.e., if you do not give me your technology, the future of your company is in jeopardy.
Perhaps the real question that others have touched upon is why American (and other) companies feel the need to expand into China and enter into this problematic arrangement. I think that a large part of the motivation is the same problem that causes short-term cost cutting at the expense of long-term growth and stability. The decision makers at these companies are incentivized to be short-sighted, to maximize their bonuses even at the cost of longer-term stability. These executives aren't emotionally attached to their companies, and they incur no penalty in sabotaging the future of their companies. I think that's the real problem. It's a problem that could be entirely corrected by the non-Chinese companies (e.g., by making all bonus contingent on long-term success), but again the members of the compensation committees also profit greatly from the current situation and therefore are incentivized to perpetuate the problem.
If all your customers demand take-out, and you lose money on each take-out meal, you still go bankrupt.
The restaurants don't "lose money on each take-out meal".
There's a difference between profits in terms of dollars and profits in terms of margins. Lower margins are not the same as losing money. That reminds me of a Morris Chang quote from a few years ago that addresses this sometimes misguided focus on margins: “You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we [TSMC] measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”
Would you mind telling me where you are from? I'm from the Midwest USA and can tell you as someone who did an internship and had some friends who did as well it was all pretty bad. Then I got into industry around here and saw some seriously negligent, in many cases outright abuse of interns. This was at three unrelated companies, out of maybe 10 or so I was dealing with over a period of a few years. Same goes for grad students. One CS grad student I worked with had to wash and wax his advisors car to be sure he would pass his defense like it was some kind of karate kid parody made real.
I have worked in the telecommunications, computing, storage, and graphics industries in the northeast and California. I should mention that the internships that I've had personal experience with were all in corporate research organizations. For the most part, these interns are paid like new college graduates for about three months, including full health and other benefits. We really were trying to impress the interns, along with giving them an opportunity to impress us. Of course, I've had the good fortune to work for decent employers, so that probably makes a lot of difference also.
As for grad school, my advisor was a decent person, but I've also heard some bad stories. I can understand how grad school might be a worse situation than working in a company. In grad school, the penalty for switching advisors is significant, while switching employers is much easier and generally results in better pay and work.
Im not sure what you are saying. Interns have always been treated like that, plus overworked and yet still paid like crap. In fact I'm pretty sure if your intern experience isn't 'ruined' you were never doing it right to begin with. Though if you really want a ruinous experience you should try engineering college business outreach programs. It's like being an intern, but without the prestige and dignity.
In my personal experience as an intern and as a mentor, I've never seen interns treated like that. The point of employing interns is to have extended hands-on job interviews with them and then hire the best of the bunch. As part of that process, we treat the interns well in terms of pay, gifts, hours, and access to technology, information, and people because we want the good ones to want to join us later.
I'm not sure what to make of some of the numbers from the article.
Salaries peak around age 45 and then level off or drop. Looking at the last chart, I see that salaries start leveling off at around age 35. The averages don't come with any confidence intervals so I'm not sure if any real conclusions about the trends can be made. There are also distributions in the survey responses, so maybe the median might be a more representative statistic.
The global average salary is hard to believe. All listed US cities are significantly below the global average, except for San Francisco which is barely above the average. The only way this number could be accurate is if salaries in non-listed, non-US cities are way higher than in the US or if the overwhelming number (say like 90%) of all US survey respondents live in San Francisco.
The article also says that the data includes "420,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year facilitated through our marketplace" including "69,000 job seekers". That seems like a huge number. This is the first time I've heard of hired.com, but apparently they are connected with a significant portion of all job interviews and offers in the tech industry. The article also mentions that the data also includes "survey responses from more than 700 tech workers on the Hired platform". The implication is that the 700 internal responses are weighted more than the other responses because otherwise those 700 responses would be statistically insignificant.
They are the only public facing company making any significant efforts toward a better future.
Wow, what a cynical (and unsupported) opinion.
Your comment is completely useful - not. Hyperbole aside, some people actually feel like Tesla is the only company building for a better future.
Why is Tesla the only such beneficent or visionary company? It can't be because they build electric cars, batteries, solar systems, spacecraft, or other leading-edge technologies because they're not the only such company. It can't be because they treat their employees better than other companies because numbers such as salaries and benefits and other new articles don't seem to support that idea. Maybe the reason is that Elon Musk has Steve Jobs magic fairy dust and is the fount of innovation?
Seriously, I like Tesla. I think they're doing some interesting things. I think Elon Musk has tried some visionary things. Time will tell whether those efforts impact society in a significant and positive way. That they are the only well-intentioned company in existence seems hard to substantiate.
Furthermore, the fatal flaw in the Chinese system is the inability to peacefully change leaders, governments, and laws. The current US president's tenure and his party's hold of much of governmental power will eventually end regardless of how much that president and party attempt to hold onto power. The US system allows the election of "undesirable" leaders but also provides a way to get rid of those undesirables. In the Chinese system, the undesirables never leave. The Chinese Communist Party has an unbreakable grip on the country. It remains to be seen if the current Chinese president will yield power at the traditional end of his terms or if he will adopt the Putin model of government.
"Tesla’s Solar Roof, which is just now hitting the market, is about $52,000 for an average home."
I'm not sure where the affordability (i.e., volume market viability) threshold is for this type of solar roof, but I imagine that it's less than $52,000, probably way less.
In the domain of math questions, I saw an example: if a person has 4 boards of length 2.5 metres each, and cuts them with a saw, how many 1-metre boards can that person make? Obviously the correct answer is 8 (two per board, with 4 left-over pieces of length 0.5 metres minus the width of two saw cuts). If you were just playing with the numbers abstractly you might think that since 4 * 2.5 == 10 that you could produce ten 1-metre board segments. You can't actually glue together 4 boards to make a single board, and you can't actually make zero-width cuts.
I can't speak for others, but I enjoy word problems more than abstract problems. (Good ones, anyway... you can take a simple problem and write an annoying and confusing word problem, and nobody likes those.)
This is one of the problems with open-ended word problems that are intended to probe critical thinking. Usually the author of the problem has a specific trick in mind to be tested. Looking at the problem above, my immediate answer was infinite because I didn't understand the author's unspoken constraints. Instead I thought about cutting the boards in one of the non-length dimensions. This is also why puzzle questions for interviews aren't that useful.
There's a big benefit to Backblaze for publishing these yearly stats: this ensures their drive purchases will be the cream of the crop, reducing their replacement costs.
I believe this concern outweighs those (valid) concerns you listed.
I totally agree about the value of the availability of this data. I applaud Backblaze for releasing the numbers and actually attaching manufacturer names and models to the numbers.
One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.
Yes, exactly, but actually attached to all tables/charts and not just a few. It's not an accident that the small sample size tables don't have confidence intervals. Those are the tables that need them the most to indicate that the estimated values should be taken with a huge block of salt.
"Quarterly failure rates can be volatile, especially for models that have a small number of drives and/or a small number of drive days. For example, the Seagate 4 TB drive, model ST4000DM005, has a annualized failure rate of 29.08%, but that is based on only 1,255 drive days and 1 (one) drive failure."
Yes, the naive will assume that the stated failure rates are gospel. However, the real truth is that the Backblaze reported numbers are sampled estimates that are a combination of the intrinsic reliability of the drive and the operating environment and workloads. It is not clear how well their failure rate estimates translate to other environments. Cooling systems, vibration mitigation, duty cycles, etc. are significant.
One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are more or less concerned about privacy attacks from the US government, companies, and malicious strangers or acquaintances. Personally I don't care much about US government spying on me. I can't think of much in terms of personal data or opinions that I wouldn't openly tell them if they asked. I'm more concerned about companies and malicious individuals. I'm not saying that others are unreasonable in their fear, distrust, or skepticism of the the US government. Rather I'm just saying that that's not where my concerns lie.
Instead, I'm more concerned about the Chinese (and other foreign) government. If I say something on the forbidden words list, will that impact a future visa application to China? Would proprietary work email potentially make its way to competing Chinese companies? Will my passwords and other files remain private (yes, those files are encypted, but that doesn't mean much to professional e-thieves)? Would holes in my phone's privacy compromise friends and coworkers?
Well, they can mount the phone on gimbals and use other stabilising devices.
True, but then the setup is no longer as portable or cheap, which negates the advantage of using a phone camera. Unless the whole point is simply to use the phone for publicity and marketing.
While the Chinese system may have a lower per capita murder rate, it has a higher capital punishment rate
Dude you just argued against yourself, America with its HIGHER murder rate has a LOWER capital punishment rate than China. Is this the "systematic inefficiency" you speak of?
Uhh ... no .... The US systematic inefficiency is largely based on checks and balances, leading to the inability of any one person or party to control unilaterally control any aspect of law or society. I don't understand your implication of a logical inconsistency between the per capital murder and capital punishment rates in the US and China. Perhaps you can lay out your logic for this idea.
it also has a much, much higher genocide rate that swamps any murder numbers of any kind
genocide
Literally 50% of the article refer to western nation genocides, with ONE PARAGRAPH in the entire article referring to China.
Do you really want to play the genocide card?
And yet, the death toll attributed to Mao swamp all the other genocides put together. I suppose there a semantic argument against classifying Mao's deaths as genocide, but I don't think that really matters to the 15 to 55 millions who died under Mao. In any case, I would still much prefer the US system to the Chinese system.
As an America who values freedom of speech and conscience and the right to directly criticize the government
I give you that, however, ttsai member, please list your SSN in all your future posts to prove America has "freedom of speech" (you're not afraid are you?).
Hmm, this must be a Chinese view of freedom of speech, i.e., you must say what I want you to say. In the free world, freedom of speech means that I get to say what I want to say when I want to say it, and I get to not say what I don't want to say. It isn't a surprise that this concept is foreign to the Chinese system.
is a benevolent dictatorship. China has effectively the latter
you've got a pretty screwed up definition of benevolent.
why don't you move to China, criticize the government openly and see how that works out for you.
I think you need to reread what I wrote. "Latter" refers to just the dictatorship part.
For all its many faults, I vastly prefer the US system of systematic inefficiency over the benevolently unstable Chinese system.
murder rate per 100,000:
USA=4.88
China 0.74
Over "decades", say 50 years, Americans would murder about one million more of its own people than China (if China were the same population as the US). You're partly correct about the "millions of lives" part.
This just in, thriving democracy India murder rate=3.21
murder rate
Yes, the US and the US system have many faults, many more than just the murder rate. However, looking at just the per capita murder rate is just one way to look at the issue. While the Chinese system may have a lower per capita murder rate, it has a higher capital punishment rate and higher hard labor punishment rate. More significantly, many of those Chinese prison sentences and deaths are based on defying the government. Over the last half century, it also has a much, much higher genocide rate that swamps any murder numbers of any kind. As an America who values freedom of speech and conscience and the right to directly criticize the government, I would probably be killed in China. So, yes, I vastly prefer the US system.
A lot of people believe in the China Model. There will never be a Trump in China, and that alone has a lot of endorsement
I strongly believe that the most effective and efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. China has effectively the latter and as long as it can grasp onto the former, it can do tremendous things. However, past history in China and indeed in all countries over all time has shown that the grasp on benevolence in leadership is fleeting. The emergence of a Trump and worse in China, the US, and elsewhere is a near certainty. In the US, we can get rid or at least wait out our Trumps in just a few years and with nonviolent elections. That's not the case in China, Russia, North Korea, etc. There, we have seen in our own lifetimes that the passage of non-benevolent leadership in these totalitarian regimes requires the passage of decades and millions of lives.
For all its many faults, I vastly prefer the US system of systematic inefficiency over the benevolently unstable Chinese system.
Honestly, basically... yes. I think if the New York Times tweets something, then as a public statement, it should be able to be "quoted" as an issue of fair use-- especially for the purpose of reporting news.
Isn't the judge making a distinction between quoting wording and copying an image? If that's the case, someone should create a webpage that takes the words of a tweet and reformats those words into a different image. That should get around the judge's objection.
Socialism has no problems and you are very likely a fascist sympathizer. Fuck you if you think wealth transfer from the rich to the poor is a bad idea.
I think transferring money from the really rich to the really poor is generally a good idea and promotes not only fairness but a more functional society. I'm in favor of that. However, the current situation also transfers money from the not that rich to the not that poor. That's the failing of almost all forms of socialism. The rich get richer with capitalism, but that problem also occurs with all forms of socialism outside of textbooks and manifestos.
So the elderly who can't afford it get a break, while people who can easily afford it get charged more. Sounds like a socialist success story to me.
Yes, I wish it were that simple! Some elderly are not exactly poor, and many people who cannot easily afford it get charged more. That's one of the problems with socialist theory -- most demographic groups and situations are characterized by distributions and not constants.
Not driving the elderly out onto the streets with punitive taxes sounds like a good idea. I wonder if maybe that's why they did it?
Yes, that's a good idea for the elderly and probably for the non-elderly, too! It was indeed part of the motivation for Proposition 13 many years ago.
Of course, this disparity in property tax extends beyond just the elderly. Most of the low property tax homes aren't owned by the elderly but by those with the foresight or luck to buy a house many years ago. The elderly can choose to cash out of their homes and move out of state, but those with jobs cannot easily do so. The system punishes new arrivals, the young, and those that never bought a house.
I'm not complaining about the California property tax inequality because I think it's unfair to me. I'm fortunate to have a job that easily covers that $12k each year. However, there are many people that find that to be a great hardship. Due to the inequality, it's a hardship that is not equally borne across all households.
Except property taxes!
The reason California taxes everything else so high is partly because of its social and environmental protections, partly because it has such a low property tax and must make up the difference, and partly because it and other blue states subsidize most of the red states.
California's property tax structure is effectively bimodal, i.e., both really expensive and cheap. It all depends on when you bought your home. I pay $12k/year, while my neighbor pays $500/year, even though we have basically the same house. I just happened to buy my house 55 years after he did.
This bimodal property structure also contributes to the housing problem. Senior folks with $500/year property taxes and no mortgage have a big incentive to not sell their homes, thus exacerbating a low-supply market.
Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.
If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws.
But what if Google blocks ads based on putatively altruistic standards and the result is that none of Google's ads are blocked but a significant portion of competitor ads are blocked? Can Google be punished for intent or the resulting impact on the market? Or is punishment reserved solely for explicit declarations of anti-competitive behavior, i.e., I know what the law is and I'm going to flaunt that law in your face?
Where I live I can't see printed newspapers surviving another 10 years, but it is because of the awful quality.
Even if this decline in quality is true, why would this bode poorly for only printed media? Does journalistic quality improve if the same articles are shown on a screen instead of printed? Or do the incompetent writers insist on paper-only distribution and refuse to allow their words to be shown digitally? None of that makes any sense. The difference between print and screen is the revenue model of different advertising media. It has nothing to do with the quality of articles because the exact same articles are usually printed and digitally displayed. Now, perhaps we're talking about the awful quality of print ads ...
Guess what? Everyone steals from everyone else, one way or another. Knowing something can be done is more than 50% of the way towards being able to duplicate it. Smart companies don't just duplicate someone else's work, they improve on it, and 'steal' their market share that way. So far as I can tell it's always been this way; it's called 'competition'.
I think you're using "steal" as a synonym for acquire. There are many ways to acquire technology. Most people generally applaud R&D that utilizes publicly available information. Most people probably also condemn criminal theft of technology. Then there is the gray area, where technology is effectively stolen but where the theft is legitimized via laws that explicitly proclaim such theft to be lawful. This is the case in China. Yes, the companies voluntarily enter into these theft arrangements, but it's still legalized theft. This situation is similar to blackmail, i.e., if you do not give me your technology, the future of your company is in jeopardy.
Perhaps the real question that others have touched upon is why American (and other) companies feel the need to expand into China and enter into this problematic arrangement. I think that a large part of the motivation is the same problem that causes short-term cost cutting at the expense of long-term growth and stability. The decision makers at these companies are incentivized to be short-sighted, to maximize their bonuses even at the cost of longer-term stability. These executives aren't emotionally attached to their companies, and they incur no penalty in sabotaging the future of their companies. I think that's the real problem. It's a problem that could be entirely corrected by the non-Chinese companies (e.g., by making all bonus contingent on long-term success), but again the members of the compensation committees also profit greatly from the current situation and therefore are incentivized to perpetuate the problem.
If all your customers demand take-out, and you lose money on each take-out meal, you still go bankrupt.
The restaurants don't "lose money on each take-out meal".
There's a difference between profits in terms of dollars and profits in terms of margins. Lower margins are not the same as losing money. That reminds me of a Morris Chang quote from a few years ago that addresses this sometimes misguided focus on margins: “You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we [TSMC] measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”
Would you mind telling me where you are from? I'm from the Midwest USA and can tell you as someone who did an internship and had some friends who did as well it was all pretty bad. Then I got into industry around here and saw some seriously negligent, in many cases outright abuse of interns. This was at three unrelated companies, out of maybe 10 or so I was dealing with over a period of a few years. Same goes for grad students. One CS grad student I worked with had to wash and wax his advisors car to be sure he would pass his defense like it was some kind of karate kid parody made real.
I have worked in the telecommunications, computing, storage, and graphics industries in the northeast and California. I should mention that the internships that I've had personal experience with were all in corporate research organizations. For the most part, these interns are paid like new college graduates for about three months, including full health and other benefits. We really were trying to impress the interns, along with giving them an opportunity to impress us. Of course, I've had the good fortune to work for decent employers, so that probably makes a lot of difference also.
As for grad school, my advisor was a decent person, but I've also heard some bad stories. I can understand how grad school might be a worse situation than working in a company. In grad school, the penalty for switching advisors is significant, while switching employers is much easier and generally results in better pay and work.
Im not sure what you are saying. Interns have always been treated like that, plus overworked and yet still paid like crap. In fact I'm pretty sure if your intern experience isn't 'ruined' you were never doing it right to begin with. Though if you really want a ruinous experience you should try engineering college business outreach programs. It's like being an intern, but without the prestige and dignity.
In my personal experience as an intern and as a mentor, I've never seen interns treated like that. The point of employing interns is to have extended hands-on job interviews with them and then hire the best of the bunch. As part of that process, we treat the interns well in terms of pay, gifts, hours, and access to technology, information, and people because we want the good ones to want to join us later.
I'm not sure what to make of some of the numbers from the article.
Salaries peak around age 45 and then level off or drop. Looking at the last chart, I see that salaries start leveling off at around age 35. The averages don't come with any confidence intervals so I'm not sure if any real conclusions about the trends can be made. There are also distributions in the survey responses, so maybe the median might be a more representative statistic.
The global average salary is hard to believe. All listed US cities are significantly below the global average, except for San Francisco which is barely above the average. The only way this number could be accurate is if salaries in non-listed, non-US cities are way higher than in the US or if the overwhelming number (say like 90%) of all US survey respondents live in San Francisco.
The article also says that the data includes "420,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year facilitated through our marketplace" including "69,000 job seekers". That seems like a huge number. This is the first time I've heard of hired.com, but apparently they are connected with a significant portion of all job interviews and offers in the tech industry. The article also mentions that the data also includes "survey responses from more than 700 tech workers on the Hired platform". The implication is that the 700 internal responses are weighted more than the other responses because otherwise those 700 responses would be statistically insignificant.
They are the only public facing company making any significant efforts toward a better future.
Wow, what a cynical (and unsupported) opinion.
Your comment is completely useful - not. Hyperbole aside, some people actually feel like Tesla is the only company building for a better future.
Why is Tesla the only such beneficent or visionary company? It can't be because they build electric cars, batteries, solar systems, spacecraft, or other leading-edge technologies because they're not the only such company. It can't be because they treat their employees better than other companies because numbers such as salaries and benefits and other new articles don't seem to support that idea. Maybe the reason is that Elon Musk has Steve Jobs magic fairy dust and is the fount of innovation?
Seriously, I like Tesla. I think they're doing some interesting things. I think Elon Musk has tried some visionary things. Time will tell whether those efforts impact society in a significant and positive way. That they are the only well-intentioned company in existence seems hard to substantiate.
Furthermore, the fatal flaw in the Chinese system is the inability to peacefully change leaders, governments, and laws. The current US president's tenure and his party's hold of much of governmental power will eventually end regardless of how much that president and party attempt to hold onto power. The US system allows the election of "undesirable" leaders but also provides a way to get rid of those undesirables. In the Chinese system, the undesirables never leave. The Chinese Communist Party has an unbreakable grip on the country. It remains to be seen if the current Chinese president will yield power at the traditional end of his terms or if he will adopt the Putin model of government.
"Tesla’s Solar Roof, which is just now hitting the market, is about $52,000 for an average home."
I'm not sure where the affordability (i.e., volume market viability) threshold is for this type of solar roof, but I imagine that it's less than $52,000, probably way less.
In the domain of math questions, I saw an example: if a person has 4 boards of length 2.5 metres each, and cuts them with a saw, how many 1-metre boards can that person make? Obviously the correct answer is 8 (two per board, with 4 left-over pieces of length 0.5 metres minus the width of two saw cuts). If you were just playing with the numbers abstractly you might think that since 4 * 2.5 == 10 that you could produce ten 1-metre board segments. You can't actually glue together 4 boards to make a single board, and you can't actually make zero-width cuts.
I can't speak for others, but I enjoy word problems more than abstract problems. (Good ones, anyway... you can take a simple problem and write an annoying and confusing word problem, and nobody likes those.)
This is one of the problems with open-ended word problems that are intended to probe critical thinking. Usually the author of the problem has a specific trick in mind to be tested. Looking at the problem above, my immediate answer was infinite because I didn't understand the author's unspoken constraints. Instead I thought about cutting the boards in one of the non-length dimensions. This is also why puzzle questions for interviews aren't that useful.
There's a big benefit to Backblaze for publishing these yearly stats: this ensures their drive purchases will be the cream of the crop, reducing their replacement costs.
I believe this concern outweighs those (valid) concerns you listed.
I totally agree about the value of the availability of this data. I applaud Backblaze for releasing the numbers and actually attaching manufacturer names and models to the numbers.
Something like this chart, you mean:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Yes, exactly, but actually attached to all tables/charts and not just a few. It's not an accident that the small sample size tables don't have confidence intervals. Those are the tables that need them the most to indicate that the estimated values should be taken with a huge block of salt.
"Quarterly failure rates can be volatile, especially for models that have a small number of drives and/or a small number of drive days. For example, the Seagate 4 TB drive, model ST4000DM005, has a annualized failure rate of 29.08%, but that is based on only 1,255 drive days and 1 (one) drive failure."
Yes, the naive will assume that the stated failure rates are gospel. However, the real truth is that the Backblaze reported numbers are sampled estimates that are a combination of the intrinsic reliability of the drive and the operating environment and workloads. It is not clear how well their failure rate estimates translate to other environments. Cooling systems, vibration mitigation, duty cycles, etc. are significant.
One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.