I think the burden of proof would be on the person claiming that high-energy particle physics does indeed apply to daily life.
The exact same argument applies to this position: You can't know what the effect is until you know what the results are. Claims in either direction do not, and cannot, have any validity.
Clearly, you should publish a paper proving that this theory neatly wraps up all of the unexplained observations that motivate dark matter theories and gain yourself a prestigious tenured post at a top academic institution.
I have been working on writing a paper discussing this topic for more than a year now. Is it wrong to discuss ideas before publishing?
Certainly not. But you have to expect that people will treat your claim of having solved a century-old problem with skepticism.
Thank you for attacking me Sean (Shawn?). Your denigration is very useful and open minded.
What attack? I don't see any attack in anything I wrote. A bit of sarcasm expressing totally reasonable skepticism, certainly, but no attack.
Clearly, you should publish a paper proving that this theory neatly wraps up all of the unexplained observations that motivate dark matter theories and gain yourself a prestigious tenured post at a top academic institution.
We're going to have a hard time funding science that applies to daily life in the near-term globally.
You seem to be assuming that high-energy particle physics research can't apply to daily life in the near-term globally, but you cannot support that assumption. You can't know what useful technologies may come out of the new physics discovered until the new physics has been discovered.
On occasion (city driving), I'll take a moment to turn off the ringer so that I do not encounter subsequent distraction.
Suggestion: If you're using an Android device with Google Now or the Google Assistant, "OK Google, silence ringer" will do that without requiring you to look or touch. I expect that Apple's Siri can do something similar.
I find "slide down from top", "tap do not disturb" to be a much nicer way to silence a phone. I can still use it for other stuff while it's silenced and unsilencing it is the same "flick/tap", and there's no need to wait for it to boot.
Most of the time I don't even have to do that much, though. The phone is set to silence itself automatically during any meeting on my calendar.
What I need is a search engine capable to search and find where I left my Android smartphone. I left it somewhere in my home a week ago, and it is still missing...
After a week I don't have anything to suggest. If you were looking for it earlier, before the battery died, then Android Device Manager might be able to help you. It can show a map with the location of your phone, which might help to localize which part of the house it's in, and it can remotely trigger your device to ring at full volume for five minutes, which usually makes it pretty easy to find.
I once used this to help my brother find his phone, when it had fallen out of his pocket and onto a mountain road, somewhere, in miles of driving. It just happened to be in an area with coverage (which are few and far between). He used my dad's phone to call me and gave me his Google password so I could log into Android Device Manager as him and locate it.
Is this actually the only policy of his that is not actively harmful?
You must attribute superhuman powers to Trump in order to believe that every policy he makes is actively harmful. Honestly, it would be impossible for any human to do that on purpose, it would require omniscience. Odds are that there are any number of policies that you believe in which would also be actively harmful. The same is true for me, and for everyone.
I disagree with most of what Trump is doing and has done, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that I can tell what is and what is not harmful with certainty, and I don't believe that Trump is Satan incarnate, doing nothing but evil.
To put it another way: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Trump will be right sometimes, too.
But I actually think he's wrong on this one. H1-B reform is needed, but his change is inadequate. At a minimum H1-B visa holders also need to be allowed to change jobs without losing their visa.
They have a fair shot - they do seem to hire an awful lot of people.
I was under the impression that hiring has slowed down in recent years. When I did a one-month stint in inventory in 2008, Google was hiring 300+ people per week and equipment came in on Monday to go out the door on Friday.
You're the first commenter who appears to understand that none of the voice assistants, be it Google's, Amazon's or Apple's, are always listening, they're just locally looking for a specific keyword.
I think most of the commenters are just itching for some reason to make themselves look smart by dissing a big tech company. Anyone who both has a tiny bit of technical background and cares to think about it rationally has to realize that there's no way that the devices could be uploading everything they "hear" without it being noticed, and you can bet that if it were noticed there would be articles all over screaming bloody murder about it. For that matter, there would be a lot of Google employees screaming about it (and Amazon, and Apple... geeks care about this stuff and getting hired by a big tech company doesn't fundamentally change them).
That's great that they have various processes in place to counter review bias and train employees on counteracting bias but you're expecting us to take your word for it that these processes are perfect.
Where did I -- or anyone! -- claim perfection? Of course they're not perfect. I'm quite confident that any thorough and properly-done analysis of the data will show that Google is *far* better than average in this respect. Well, with the exception that, like the rest of the tech industry, there aren't many women working in technical positions.
The government has data leaked by an employee at Google that shows a significant disparity in compensation between men and women.
No, they don't. You have the source of the data wrong (not a leak, not from an employee; the data was provided by Google pursuant to labor contract requirements), and you're taking as fact an unsubstantiated interpretation of that data.
I'm not buying Google's PR blog post's assertions when the DOJ says something quite a bit different.
DOL, not DOJ.
My guess is that the DOL has fallen afoul of Simpson's Paradox. In particular, my guess is that they have simply looked at mean salaries for men and women, without taking job role into account. Because most of the highly-compensated positions in Google are in engineering -- or managers of engineers, all of whom must be engineers themselves -- and because women are underrepresented in these highly-paid positions, the mean salary of women is lower. I expect that dynamic would even show up if you controlled for experience and education level, but not education category. That's just a guess. We'll know for sure over the next few weeks.
You will come back and post a followup admitting I was right when that's proven, won't you? I certainly will if I turn out to be wrong.
..have you considered.. NOT having your gods-be-damned Google contraption turned on 24/7/365??? Seriously, people..
It would completely defeat the purpose of the Google Home to have to walk over and turn it on every time you wanted to use it. Actually, though, depending on what you mean by "turned on", it's not turned on 24x7. It does nothing but sit and run audio input through a DSP looking for the hotword most of the time, drawing very little power, and using no network (well, it polls for software updates once per day or so).
I realize that it's cool to impress the other kids by hating on such things, but my family and I quite like the Google Home. It gets used quite a bit, to play music, add to the shared shopping list (which still works via the Shopping Express app, though not as well as it did when it went to Keep; I really hope that change gets reverted), provide news and weather reports, look up random topics, act as a cooking timer, set the thermostat, etc., etc., all hands-free. It's also rather hilarious to listen to my brother-in-law (who lives with us; he's an adult but my wife and I are his legal guardians because he had a head injury when young) talk to it. Honestly it does a better job at understanding his impaired speech than most humans who haven't spent significant time around him, but the results are often really funny.
This Burger King commercial thing hasn't hit us because (a) there is no TV anywhere near the Home, and (b) we don't have broadcast TV anyway (we live up in the mountains where there's no over-the-air signal available, and don't pay for cable).
Note that I do work for Google, but I'm certain I'd like the Home just as much if I didn't work for Google.
ffmpeg has had the vid.stab filter for several years. The only news here seems to be another cloud service.
YouTube's stabilization is better than vid.stab, and the new Google Photos stabilization is better than YouTube's, so I'd say there's something new here.
My thoughts focus more on larger trucks since that's what I need/use -- mine is a Ford F350, though I could probably do fine with a 3/4 ton -- which may be harder to make cost-effective. I think they'll get there.
If a calculation's input is biased, the calculation is biased. Based on Google's public statement on this topic, they have a giant blind spot in the form of employee evaluations which have been proven to be biased in favor of men.
It's not in any way a blind spot. Google fully recognizes that risk, and takes many actions to combat it.
Facebook provides seminars to their employees on combating bias in the workplace and they're so good my company suggested we watch them too, as they're freely available for all to see. I haven't seen something similar from Google.
Google has awesome internal training seminars on bias in all of its various forms. Day 1 of employment includes a class on cognitive biases (which is only partly relevant to discrimination against humans, but it's an important starting point), and then there are several other courses that are taken over time. There's an excellent general course on unconscious bias, teaching you how to recognize and counter biases you didn't even realize you had. They just launched a course on transgender issue awareness. I haven't attended that one yet, but reports from people who have are that it's a real eye-opener.
The fact that you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist:-)
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
I agree that in a few years it will be feasible.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I'd like a hybrid with a detachable ICE which is placed in the bed, up front like a large truck box so it wouldn't interfere with fifth-wheel or gooseneck towing, and with extendable legs so you can jack it up and drive the truck out from underneath it. This would allow you to eliminate most of the front hood; you'd still need to keep a bit for a crumple zone, but wouldn't need much. That would be a huge improvement for off-road driving, where the big projecting hood often obscures the driver's vision of the road. The ICE wouldn't need to be big enough to fully power the vehicle while towing a tall load at highway speeds, it would just need to provide enough range extension to give you, say, 300 miles loaded range. Then you could recharge the battery at a charging station, or let the ICE recharge it, while you eat, etc.
Of course, most of the time I'd keep the ICE parked and use the truck as a pure EV. Give me a couple hundred miles of unloaded range and my everyday driving is covered, and then some.
For camping, I'd drop the ICE in and hook up the camp trailer and take everything up to the mountains, then drop both trailer and ICE at the camp site. The ICE could act as a generator, if needed (though my camp trailer has solar panels), and I could roam the hills on electric power, with the very low center of gravity provided by that big battery along the very bottom of the vehicle (and the big steel plate underneath it). When the battery gets low, back to camp to recharge from the ICE.
What would make it even better is if you could power the vehicle with hub motors, and put the wheels on four independently-suspended extensible jacks. That would dramatically increase the net clearance, with no axles or down-hanging differentials, and would allow the truck to be lowered close to the road for better efficiency on the highway or raised for greater clearance off-road. You could even lift one side for traversing a hillside. And you would no longer have to raise or lower trailer tongue jacks. Lower the truck, back the ball under the tongue or gooseneck and raise the truck. No need for pneumatic levelers, obviously. Granted that there are a lot of challenges with hub motors, since they're unsprung weight, but I think it could be done and there would be huge advantages.
For boating, most of the time I don't go far so I'm sure I could leave the ICE home. But this raises the possibility of getting an electric boat... which the truck's ICE could also be used to recharge on extended trips. I'm a little skeptical of the practicality of an electric ski boat, though. Given how they burn
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think. You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing. That's probably $100K just in battery, plus the cost of the rest of the truck. It would probably make sense for commercial fleets with particular needs, but I don't think many consumers would buy one. I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price? It would be a small market, even if you're wrong about truck buyers.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them.
Actually, I think Tesla is the only one that uses a radiator to cool the battery. I know my Nissan LEAF doesn't have one -- which has been a problem for LEAFs in hot locales.
Google offers several months' paid leave to both mothers and fathers, and all are strongly encouraged to take it.
I'm not blaming Google of this, but "encouraging" would technically still cover "encouraging despite the inevitable career drawbacks"
I've seen enough cases where companies try to encourage a certain kind of behavior through trainings, policies, motivational posters and the usual stuff instead of removing the reward for doing otherwise.
Yep. Corporate culture is what you reward, not what you talk about.
There are young people who have no idea what that means.
I had no idea what it meant, so there are also old (well, old-ish) people who have no idea what it means.
I may have used WinAmp once or twice, but by 2000 I had left Windows for good, so I never used it enough to get that stuck in my head. I also never listened to Wesley Willis.
The claim is so utterly at odds with the way Google operates.
Now try to keep that same skepticism when you hear similar claims by the government or some academic paper about places you don't know about directly (other companies, industries or the country as a whole) and you'll be closer to the truth than if you just believe them.
In fact, I do. Or try to. The same applies to news stories. I've yet to read a news story about which I had personal knowledge that was accurate. They try, but fail.
The confusion comes from the goal of these sorts of accusations not actually being to convince people to treat other people equally. If you can do the math on the statistics, then you'll realize:
1. Based on normal distributions, a significant number of companies will have these sorts of "problems" even when there is zero actual illegal discrimination.
2. The only way for a company to ensure it doesn't get labeled as discriminating by these people is to start discriminating against non-favored groups in order to make the numbers come out "right".
Perhaps. Maybe I'm naive but I think there is another way, which is to prove with data that the numbers fall within appropriate statistical distributions. I'm sure that's what Google is going to do with the DOL.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the burden of proof would be on the person claiming that high-energy particle physics does indeed apply to daily life.
The exact same argument applies to this position: You can't know what the effect is until you know what the results are. Claims in either direction do not, and cannot, have any validity.
Clearly, you should publish a paper proving that this theory neatly wraps up all of the unexplained observations that motivate dark matter theories and gain yourself a prestigious tenured post at a top academic institution.
I have been working on writing a paper discussing this topic for more than a year now. Is it wrong to discuss ideas before publishing?
Certainly not. But you have to expect that people will treat your claim of having solved a century-old problem with skepticism.
Thank you for attacking me Sean (Shawn?). Your denigration is very useful and open minded.
What attack? I don't see any attack in anything I wrote. A bit of sarcasm expressing totally reasonable skepticism, certainly, but no attack.
Clearly, you should publish a paper proving that this theory neatly wraps up all of the unexplained observations that motivate dark matter theories and gain yourself a prestigious tenured post at a top academic institution.
We're going to have a hard time funding science that applies to daily life in the near-term globally.
You seem to be assuming that high-energy particle physics research can't apply to daily life in the near-term globally, but you cannot support that assumption. You can't know what useful technologies may come out of the new physics discovered until the new physics has been discovered.
On occasion (city driving), I'll take a moment to turn off the ringer so that I do not encounter subsequent distraction.
Suggestion: If you're using an Android device with Google Now or the Google Assistant, "OK Google, silence ringer" will do that without requiring you to look or touch. I expect that Apple's Siri can do something similar.
I find "slide down from top", "tap do not disturb" to be a much nicer way to silence a phone. I can still use it for other stuff while it's silenced and unsilencing it is the same "flick/tap", and there's no need to wait for it to boot.
Most of the time I don't even have to do that much, though. The phone is set to silence itself automatically during any meeting on my calendar.
Ah, you're building a device, not an app. Sorry, that wasn't clear.
The Android product I work on can not have Play Store as we are not allow to include it because we use our own mapping software, not Google Maps.
Huh? I don't know of any Play store rule against other mapping software, and in fact there are many, many other map apps on Play.
What I need is a search engine capable to search and find where I left my Android smartphone. I left it somewhere in my home a week ago, and it is still missing...
After a week I don't have anything to suggest. If you were looking for it earlier, before the battery died, then Android Device Manager might be able to help you. It can show a map with the location of your phone, which might help to localize which part of the house it's in, and it can remotely trigger your device to ring at full volume for five minutes, which usually makes it pretty easy to find.
I once used this to help my brother find his phone, when it had fallen out of his pocket and onto a mountain road, somewhere, in miles of driving. It just happened to be in an area with coverage (which are few and far between). He used my dad's phone to call me and gave me his Google password so I could log into Android Device Manager as him and locate it.
Is this actually the only policy of his that is not actively harmful?
You must attribute superhuman powers to Trump in order to believe that every policy he makes is actively harmful. Honestly, it would be impossible for any human to do that on purpose, it would require omniscience. Odds are that there are any number of policies that you believe in which would also be actively harmful. The same is true for me, and for everyone.
I disagree with most of what Trump is doing and has done, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that I can tell what is and what is not harmful with certainty, and I don't believe that Trump is Satan incarnate, doing nothing but evil.
To put it another way: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Trump will be right sometimes, too.
But I actually think he's wrong on this one. H1-B reform is needed, but his change is inadequate. At a minimum H1-B visa holders also need to be allowed to change jobs without losing their visa.
Having an interest does not remove credibility.
It absolutely does. He says what he does to try to defend his employer and source of money.
And you have no credibility for trying to defend a stupid shill.
FTFY. Obviously I must be a stupid shill because a smart one would hide the relationship, not highlight it.
They have a fair shot - they do seem to hire an awful lot of people.
I was under the impression that hiring has slowed down in recent years. When I did a one-month stint in inventory in 2008, Google was hiring 300+ people per week and equipment came in on Monday to go out the door on Friday.
It hasn't.
You're the first commenter who appears to understand that none of the voice assistants, be it Google's, Amazon's or Apple's, are always listening, they're just locally looking for a specific keyword.
I think most of the commenters are just itching for some reason to make themselves look smart by dissing a big tech company. Anyone who both has a tiny bit of technical background and cares to think about it rationally has to realize that there's no way that the devices could be uploading everything they "hear" without it being noticed, and you can bet that if it were noticed there would be articles all over screaming bloody murder about it. For that matter, there would be a lot of Google employees screaming about it (and Amazon, and Apple... geeks care about this stuff and getting hired by a big tech company doesn't fundamentally change them).
That's great that they have various processes in place to counter review bias and train employees on counteracting bias but you're expecting us to take your word for it that these processes are perfect.
Where did I -- or anyone! -- claim perfection? Of course they're not perfect. I'm quite confident that any thorough and properly-done analysis of the data will show that Google is *far* better than average in this respect. Well, with the exception that, like the rest of the tech industry, there aren't many women working in technical positions.
The government has data leaked by an employee at Google that shows a significant disparity in compensation between men and women.
No, they don't. You have the source of the data wrong (not a leak, not from an employee; the data was provided by Google pursuant to labor contract requirements), and you're taking as fact an unsubstantiated interpretation of that data.
I'm not buying Google's PR blog post's assertions when the DOJ says something quite a bit different.
DOL, not DOJ.
My guess is that the DOL has fallen afoul of Simpson's Paradox. In particular, my guess is that they have simply looked at mean salaries for men and women, without taking job role into account. Because most of the highly-compensated positions in Google are in engineering -- or managers of engineers, all of whom must be engineers themselves -- and because women are underrepresented in these highly-paid positions, the mean salary of women is lower. I expect that dynamic would even show up if you controlled for experience and education level, but not education category. That's just a guess. We'll know for sure over the next few weeks.
You will come back and post a followup admitting I was right when that's proven, won't you? I certainly will if I turn out to be wrong.
It would completely defeat the purpose of the Google Home to have to walk over and turn it on every time you wanted to use it. Actually, though, depending on what you mean by "turned on", it's not turned on 24x7. It does nothing but sit and run audio input through a DSP looking for the hotword most of the time, drawing very little power, and using no network (well, it polls for software updates once per day or so).
I realize that it's cool to impress the other kids by hating on such things, but my family and I quite like the Google Home. It gets used quite a bit, to play music, add to the shared shopping list (which still works via the Shopping Express app, though not as well as it did when it went to Keep; I really hope that change gets reverted), provide news and weather reports, look up random topics, act as a cooking timer, set the thermostat, etc., etc., all hands-free. It's also rather hilarious to listen to my brother-in-law (who lives with us; he's an adult but my wife and I are his legal guardians because he had a head injury when young) talk to it. Honestly it does a better job at understanding his impaired speech than most humans who haven't spent significant time around him, but the results are often really funny.
This Burger King commercial thing hasn't hit us because (a) there is no TV anywhere near the Home, and (b) we don't have broadcast TV anyway (we live up in the mountains where there's no over-the-air signal available, and don't pay for cable).
Note that I do work for Google, but I'm certain I'd like the Home just as much if I didn't work for Google.
ffmpeg has had the vid.stab filter for several years. The only news here seems to be another cloud service.
YouTube's stabilization is better than vid.stab, and the new Google Photos stabilization is better than YouTube's, so I'd say there's something new here.
My thoughts focus more on larger trucks since that's what I need/use -- mine is a Ford F350, though I could probably do fine with a 3/4 ton -- which may be harder to make cost-effective. I think they'll get there.
If a calculation's input is biased, the calculation is biased. Based on Google's public statement on this topic, they have a giant blind spot in the form of employee evaluations which have been proven to be biased in favor of men.
It's not in any way a blind spot. Google fully recognizes that risk, and takes many actions to combat it.
Facebook provides seminars to their employees on combating bias in the workplace and they're so good my company suggested we watch them too, as they're freely available for all to see. I haven't seen something similar from Google.
Google has awesome internal training seminars on bias in all of its various forms. Day 1 of employment includes a class on cognitive biases (which is only partly relevant to discrimination against humans, but it's an important starting point), and then there are several other courses that are taken over time. There's an excellent general course on unconscious bias, teaching you how to recognize and counter biases you didn't even realize you had. They just launched a course on transgender issue awareness. I haven't attended that one yet, but reports from people who have are that it's a real eye-opener.
The fact that you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist :-)
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
I agree that in a few years it will be feasible.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I'd like a hybrid with a detachable ICE which is placed in the bed, up front like a large truck box so it wouldn't interfere with fifth-wheel or gooseneck towing, and with extendable legs so you can jack it up and drive the truck out from underneath it. This would allow you to eliminate most of the front hood; you'd still need to keep a bit for a crumple zone, but wouldn't need much. That would be a huge improvement for off-road driving, where the big projecting hood often obscures the driver's vision of the road. The ICE wouldn't need to be big enough to fully power the vehicle while towing a tall load at highway speeds, it would just need to provide enough range extension to give you, say, 300 miles loaded range. Then you could recharge the battery at a charging station, or let the ICE recharge it, while you eat, etc.
Of course, most of the time I'd keep the ICE parked and use the truck as a pure EV. Give me a couple hundred miles of unloaded range and my everyday driving is covered, and then some.
For camping, I'd drop the ICE in and hook up the camp trailer and take everything up to the mountains, then drop both trailer and ICE at the camp site. The ICE could act as a generator, if needed (though my camp trailer has solar panels), and I could roam the hills on electric power, with the very low center of gravity provided by that big battery along the very bottom of the vehicle (and the big steel plate underneath it). When the battery gets low, back to camp to recharge from the ICE.
What would make it even better is if you could power the vehicle with hub motors, and put the wheels on four independently-suspended extensible jacks. That would dramatically increase the net clearance, with no axles or down-hanging differentials, and would allow the truck to be lowered close to the road for better efficiency on the highway or raised for greater clearance off-road. You could even lift one side for traversing a hillside. And you would no longer have to raise or lower trailer tongue jacks. Lower the truck, back the ball under the tongue or gooseneck and raise the truck. No need for pneumatic levelers, obviously. Granted that there are a lot of challenges with hub motors, since they're unsprung weight, but I think it could be done and there would be huge advantages.
For boating, most of the time I don't go far so I'm sure I could leave the ICE home. But this raises the possibility of getting an electric boat... which the truck's ICE could also be used to recharge on extended trips. I'm a little skeptical of the practicality of an electric ski boat, though. Given how they burn
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think. You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing. That's probably $100K just in battery, plus the cost of the rest of the truck. It would probably make sense for commercial fleets with particular needs, but I don't think many consumers would buy one. I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price? It would be a small market, even if you're wrong about truck buyers.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them.
Actually, I think Tesla is the only one that uses a radiator to cool the battery. I know my Nissan LEAF doesn't have one -- which has been a problem for LEAFs in hot locales.
Google offers several months' paid leave to both mothers and fathers, and all are strongly encouraged to take it.
I'm not blaming Google of this, but "encouraging" would technically still cover "encouraging despite the inevitable career drawbacks"
I've seen enough cases where companies try to encourage a certain kind of behavior through trainings, policies, motivational posters and the usual stuff instead of removing the reward for doing otherwise.
Yep. Corporate culture is what you reward, not what you talk about.
It really whips the llama's ass.
There are young people who have no idea what that means.
I had no idea what it meant, so there are also old (well, old-ish) people who have no idea what it means.
I may have used WinAmp once or twice, but by 2000 I had left Windows for good, so I never used it enough to get that stuck in my head. I also never listened to Wesley Willis.
Sorry, but "several", "a few", "a handful of", and many similar terms are all interchangeable in common use, and all mean "3 or more".
Not to me :-)
Now try to keep that same skepticism when you hear similar claims by the government or some academic paper about places you don't know about directly (other companies, industries or the country as a whole) and you'll be closer to the truth than if you just believe them.
In fact, I do. Or try to. The same applies to news stories. I've yet to read a news story about which I had personal knowledge that was accurate. They try, but fail.
The confusion comes from the goal of these sorts of accusations not actually being to convince people to treat other people equally. If you can do the math on the statistics, then you'll realize: 1. Based on normal distributions, a significant number of companies will have these sorts of "problems" even when there is zero actual illegal discrimination. 2. The only way for a company to ensure it doesn't get labeled as discriminating by these people is to start discriminating against non-favored groups in order to make the numbers come out "right".
Perhaps. Maybe I'm naive but I think there is another way, which is to prove with data that the numbers fall within appropriate statistical distributions. I'm sure that's what Google is going to do with the DOL.