If you want to get rid of undocumented workers I think the smart approach would be to reduce welfare subsidies for able bodied workers.
If you want to get rid of undocumented workers, you simply raise the minimum wage to one on which you can live without being in poverty, as it was originally intended. This is literally the only thing you can do.
That would do exactly the opposite. It would give employers an even greater motivation to use illegal labor so they wouldn't have to comply with the minimum wage regulations. If you want to get rid of undocumented workers you need to make employing them unattractive to American employers.
Great post. I just have to disagree with one point:
9. The only way to make it not attractive to work here is to lower how much American companies pay, and I for one do not approve of dragging our standard of living down into the mud in order to accomplish that. You can punish companies more harshly for using illegal immigrants as labor, but making it objectively less attractive to work here isn't really feasible.
There's a very easy way to make it objectively less attractive to work here, without touching wages or standard of living (well, the cost of goods produced with cheap illegal immigrant labor will go up). All you have to do is ensure that no Americans will hire illegals because the risk of doing so is too high. First step: attach criminal penalties, including non-trivial jail time, to knowingly hiring undocumented workers, and impose heavy fines on those who hired them without doing their due diligence. Second step: offer a green card to any illegal immigrant who rats out his or her employer. Done. No one can hide the fact of the illegal employment from the employee, and the illegal employee's motives for being in the country will be best served by blowing the whistle and getting legal status.
Oddly enough, whenever I propose this strategy to those who are up in arms about illegal immigration, they don't like it. They don't have any coherent response to it, but they don't like it. The reason they don't like it, of course, is that there's a strong undercurrent of racism in their position, and my proposal would punish Americans and reward illegals, at least at first. Even if it's clear that it would work in the long run, it's emotionally unsatisfying to them because they want to punish the illegals for daring to come here. In practice, I don't think very many green cards would be issued because American employers would start being very careful about who they employ, but that still doesn't make the illegal immigration alarmists happy because it merely makes illegals unemployable, rather than punishing them.
Except I fear that we're going to start seeing cases where what was once legal is no longer so.
In cases like that you may well become a criminal through no action of your own.
Start? Hah! I think you haven't been paying attention.
However, in spite of the fact that the criminalization all sorts of obscure things has been going on for generations, I don't think it's actually getting worse. Most of the really obnoxious laws on the books are never enforced, because of the hue and cry that would be raised if they were. Ultimately, the final defense is the outrage of your fellow citizens.
But don't forget that there's another side... you do actually want a lot of the criminal laws to be enforced, because they keep your life more stable and secure. Do too much damage to that and run-ins with the law yourself will be far down on the list of things you worry about. The fact that it's relatively high at present isn't a reflection of the actual risk it poses so much as it's a reflection of the fact that your life is so generally good that you have leisure to worry about it.
There's a balance we must achieve, and that balance is a living, dynamic thing.
This is a joke right? Every one of those published letters has the account identification redacted. Basically Google published what are basically form letters with the actual subject of the inquiry unidentified. In what way does that help anybody? Subjects are still in the dark that the government is monitoring them. This is transparency?
It's as much transparency as the government will allow.
How would one go about proving or disproving this statement?
Well, you could look into trying to buy user information from Google and see what happens. You could also research Google's business model, which will quickly lead you to understand that Google is better at ad targeting than advertisers are, and that Google can therefore extract more value from the data by keeping it to themselves.
As for whether or not Google sells information to governments, look at Google's SEC filings and you'll notice the distinct lack of any such line items. Also look at the public statements from the executives, including the chief legal officer, which deny that Google gives, sells or in any way provides any data to the government except when compelled by legal documents... and in that case the government doesn't have to pay.
so, taking this forward to protect ones self, how can you make it so that the police, even if in possession of the passcode can not de-encrypt the data?
Well, I think the best protection is to avoid committing crimes. Barring that, the old method is to keep incriminating data only in your head. Don't write it down, don't transmit it, don't store it.
so if my lockscreen is an animation of a combo lock that you drag back and forth to enter the unlock code...
Would that make this judge's head explode?
Not at all. The judge isn't saying that the passcode is somehow different from a combination. Exactly the opposite. He's saying that the distinction between a key and a combination is a distinction without a difference, that the focus of the fifth amendment is to prohibit people from being required to give testimony about their acts, not to keep them from being required to give the government access to their "papers". Unless your password is a description of your crime, or the location of the body, or something similar, the password in and of itself has no testimonial value, it's merely a key.
Honestly, although I like the idea that I can't be compelled to give up my passwords, I like it for the same reason I'd like to be able to refuse to allow police to search my house... and I can see the need for police to be able to do the latter and can see no reason it shouldn't logically extend to the former. This notion that you can't be compelled to give up your password has always been a weird loophole.
The judge is looking forward and realizing that in the not too distant future, essentially all documentary evidence is going to be in digital form and encrypted and that if search warrants can't compel access then police will simply be unable to obtain a great deal of evidence needed to convict criminals of crimes.
Requests for access to 20ish user accounts in five years from Google?
That has to be on the order of the likelihood of a Powerball winner.
20ish user accounts from a handful of NSLs where the gag order has been lifted. There are many other NSLs that Google is still gagged over, I'm sure. And the transparency reports document tens of thousands of requests for similar numbers of accounts, requests made through search warrants or subpoenas.
NSLs get highlighted because, unlike the other instruments to compel information, can be issued without judicial oversight and are kept secret.
Either that or the FBI got a warrant or you were a foreigner or they did PAY for the information, like everyone else;).
Warrants or other appropriate legal documentation is required for foreigners as well. And Google doesn't sell user information, so trying to pay wouldn't help.
Hmm.. Fascinating stuff, I guess. But I'm not sure I would have chose the word "broad" to describe the level of information requested by at least some of these NSL's. I looked at a few, two of them simply wanted name, address and length of service, nothing else. Another asked for that, and a history of communication transactions, even goes out of the way to say 'don't give us subject lines, or content, we can't look at that," and for a very specific datetime window.
The laws that created the concept of a National Security Letter and authorize its use specifically limit the scope of NSLs to metadata only. So NSLs really can't be used for what most people would think of as "broad access".
Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.
Um, I have a very good understanding of what SWE salaries are, thank you very much for the condescension, and my IBM salary wasn't bad at all. I was making $140K, in Utah, almost six years ago. When I joined Google I had to move to Colorado, which has a comparable cost of living. Then later the bonus and stock grants started to kick in and it got really nice. Even in Silicon Valley my salary would be perfectly adequate to raise a family, though I'd probably have to live 40 minutes' bus ride from the office, which is exactly what all of my colleagues with families who work in Mountain View do.
However, my colleagues in Mountain View make more money than I do, though, all things being equal. If I were to move to MTV I'd get a bump to compensate for the increased cost of living.
Figuring out what to do about it requires climate research. We need to understand the mechanisms in much greater detail, to be able to predict the effects of various actions,
Really? What "actions" are there besides reducing CO2 and methane emissions?
Reducing insolation is probably the biggest one. There are lots of options for that, ranging from space-based shades to attempting to adjust the albedo of large regions, plus I'm sure many others I haven't considered. Simply reducing insolation won't fix ocean acidity levels, so some other action may be required there. There are also schemes for large-scale carbon sequestration, drawing the CO2 from the atmosphere.
In a phrase: planetary climate engineering. Note that right now we need to cool the planet, but it's also possible that in the future we'll need to warm it up, so we should learn how to do that, too.
bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination
Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.
My own compensation begs to differ. When I was hired as a SWE with 20+ years of industry experience, from another large enterprise company with a national pay scale (IBM), I got a 20% raise, and I was pretty well-compensated before. That's base salary only. My total compensation package is more than double what I was making at IBM... and I'm not in a particularly senior position. I was hired as level 4, which means "competent individual contributor", and have seen been promoted to level 5 which means "expert individual contributor or small team lead". Level 3 is "new grad".
interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.
When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had.
It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers. Sorry, that happens, but it doesn't represent the norm.
the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down
This doesn't match my experience at all.
The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off.
That sounds like a completely different company than the Google I'm familiar with. <shrug/>
I'm pretty sure that it was reported upon and in fact even re-posted here on Slashdot when it was noticed publicly that they had removed it from their company charter. It's worth noting though that it was never any sort of official, legally-binding commitment. More just an idea about a statement of purpose that they have since apparently changed their minds about.
Sigh.
1. The motto is "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". The latter is impossible for anyone to accomplish, the law of unintended consequences -- among other issues -- guarantees that. The former makes clear that the goal is to avoid systematically doing evil, which is achievable.
2. It was never part of any company charter. It was an important internal guideline.
3. Google has never "changed their minds" about the motto. It remains an important internal guideline. I can vouch for the fact that it still gets employed in internal decisionmaking meetings to shoot down ideas that mistreat users or have big potential social/cultural negative implications.
4. I don't really see how providing anyone with better Internet service could be evil. In particular in this case it sounds like the plan is to deploy Google's content distribution network (CDN) to Cuba. That mostly means caching YouTube videos on local servers so they load faster. Oh noes! Rich/powerful Cubans (and tourists at fancy hotels) will have quick-loading cat videos!
5. Google is clearly hoping that the many changes going on in Cuba and in its relations with the United States will begin to make Internet service more broadly available to the Cuban populace, which will make this CDN infrastructure more valuable over time.
Disclaimer: In case it's not obvious, I work for Google but I am not speaking for Google. The above represents my personal opinions and observations, not official company policy. Oh, and I don't know anything about this Cuban deployment except what I read in the public news.
CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because Trump and his science-hating peons get rid of the scientists
And CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because we keep hiring more scientists that keep telling us the same thing over and over again. We don't need thousands of researchers researching something on which there is basically broad consensus.
Where there isn't broad consensus is what to do about it. That's a tradeoff between economic growth and carbon emissions. Climate scientists are not qualified to speak to that, and their beliefs, opinions, or research results are irrelevant to that question.
Figuring out what to do about it requires climate research. We need to understand the mechanisms in much greater detail, to be able to predict the effects of various actions, and to figure out just how bad the problems are going to be so we know what kind of actions make sense.
They really do seem to love the concept of getting "hot shots". They once tried to headhunt me after I won the Underhanded C contest one year. Um... that contest is about doing malicious things in the middle of tasks you were assigned to do and getting away with it - is that really a skill you want in your programmers?
Makes perfect sense to me. No, that's not a skill Google is looking for, but it's evidence of cleverness and deep knowledge of C programming and programmers. You'll note that winning the contest got you an opportunity for an interview, it didn't get you a job offer.
Google isn't abandoning the project, they're just going to sell systems to carmakers rather than becoming a carmaker.
I worked for them for three years.
I'll have my six-year anniversary as a Google Software Engineer in February.
their age discrimination practices prevent them from finding anyone who comprehends what that entails.
I could debate the rest of this post, but I'm replying just to pick on this point. I see absolutely no indication of age discrimination at Google. I'm nearly 50 myself, and not the oldest person on my team. My previous team included several engineers in their 60s and one guy in his early 70s (former Bell Labs guy; crazy smart and achieved independent wealth decades earlier but enjoyed working).
About the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination is that the interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc. That stuff is clearly top of mind for new CS grads, not so much for professionals who've been in the field a few years.
However, professionals who know this and take a little time to brush up before going into the interview do fine. Recruiters point this out to candidates and are willing to delay scheduling the interviews if needed. I asked the recruiter to wait a couple of weeks so I could brush up and I was hired. On the occasions when I interview someone who seems pretty sharp but struggles because they're rusty I strongly encourage them to go refresh their memory and try again.
Thus the conclusion is that methane emissions will not cause runaway warming.
I don't think anyone who knows anything is seriously concerned about runaway warming. The concern is about global temperatures rising a few degees and causing large shifts in local climates around the world and raising sea levels. If the planet were prone to runaway warming, it would have happened regularly and scoured life from the planet (all but perhaps some extremophiles). Still, non-runaway but significant warming could have major repercussions on humanity, forcing us to spend tremendous amounts of resources on relocating populations, etc.
For our own comfort and allowing us to continue spending our productivity on making our lives better, rather than mere survival, we need to both curb greenhouse gas emissions and start investing in geoengineering research. In the long run (thousands to millions of years), we know the planet will be both much hotter and much colder than it is now, so we need to learn how to stabilize it, and this seems like a very good time to start.
"Non-breeders needn't look at this as discrimination."
But they should, after all that's EXACTLY what it is.
It's exactly the same sort of discrimination as non-breeders having to pay taxes to support schools.
Kids weren't neglected when this wasn't available.
This clearly enables parents to take the time to bond more strongly with their young children, and that pays dividends later. Can that be done without? Sure. We also used to have our kids breathe lead fume-filled air and society got by... but had a significantly higher violent crime rate. Stronger, more stable families benefit everyone, including those who don't have kids.
Does the earth care where the population growth is?
Doesn't matter. Population growth is not a problem. The developed world is already at negative population growth overall and the whole world is already at negative growth in annual births, which means that all of the net population growth worldwide is due to filling out of the age categories. That in turn means that, barring significant increases in lifespans, as soon as those are all filled out worldwide population growth will go negative as well. It appears we'll hit that peak population point in the 2050s, at around 10B people.
almost as if there were a House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. They do a much better job than you're willing to accept, because you want to believe that the republicans are evil, the progressives are good, and that the world is a nice place full of nice people.
I don't believe any of those things... and yet it's clear that the oversight committees have not been doing a good job.
Commuting cost is because Amazon shuttle is expensive.
We don't know that. We know that one employee preferred not to pay it. Maybe it is expensive, maybe the employee in question is just very tight-fisted. Some numbers would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but then they would have to delete half their current emojis.
What people-denigrating emojis do they have?
If you want to get rid of undocumented workers I think the smart approach would be to reduce welfare subsidies for able bodied workers.
If you want to get rid of undocumented workers, you simply raise the minimum wage to one on which you can live without being in poverty, as it was originally intended. This is literally the only thing you can do.
That would do exactly the opposite. It would give employers an even greater motivation to use illegal labor so they wouldn't have to comply with the minimum wage regulations. If you want to get rid of undocumented workers you need to make employing them unattractive to American employers.
Great post. I just have to disagree with one point:
9. The only way to make it not attractive to work here is to lower how much American companies pay, and I for one do not approve of dragging our standard of living down into the mud in order to accomplish that. You can punish companies more harshly for using illegal immigrants as labor, but making it objectively less attractive to work here isn't really feasible.
There's a very easy way to make it objectively less attractive to work here, without touching wages or standard of living (well, the cost of goods produced with cheap illegal immigrant labor will go up). All you have to do is ensure that no Americans will hire illegals because the risk of doing so is too high. First step: attach criminal penalties, including non-trivial jail time, to knowingly hiring undocumented workers, and impose heavy fines on those who hired them without doing their due diligence. Second step: offer a green card to any illegal immigrant who rats out his or her employer. Done. No one can hide the fact of the illegal employment from the employee, and the illegal employee's motives for being in the country will be best served by blowing the whistle and getting legal status.
Oddly enough, whenever I propose this strategy to those who are up in arms about illegal immigration, they don't like it. They don't have any coherent response to it, but they don't like it. The reason they don't like it, of course, is that there's a strong undercurrent of racism in their position, and my proposal would punish Americans and reward illegals, at least at first. Even if it's clear that it would work in the long run, it's emotionally unsatisfying to them because they want to punish the illegals for daring to come here. In practice, I don't think very many green cards would be issued because American employers would start being very careful about who they employ, but that still doesn't make the illegal immigration alarmists happy because it merely makes illegals unemployable, rather than punishing them.
Except I fear that we're going to start seeing cases where what was once legal is no longer so. In cases like that you may well become a criminal through no action of your own.
Start? Hah! I think you haven't been paying attention.
However, in spite of the fact that the criminalization all sorts of obscure things has been going on for generations, I don't think it's actually getting worse. Most of the really obnoxious laws on the books are never enforced, because of the hue and cry that would be raised if they were. Ultimately, the final defense is the outrage of your fellow citizens.
But don't forget that there's another side... you do actually want a lot of the criminal laws to be enforced, because they keep your life more stable and secure. Do too much damage to that and run-ins with the law yourself will be far down on the list of things you worry about. The fact that it's relatively high at present isn't a reflection of the actual risk it poses so much as it's a reflection of the fact that your life is so generally good that you have leisure to worry about it.
There's a balance we must achieve, and that balance is a living, dynamic thing.
This is a joke right? Every one of those published letters has the account identification redacted. Basically Google published what are basically form letters with the actual subject of the inquiry unidentified. In what way does that help anybody? Subjects are still in the dark that the government is monitoring them. This is transparency?
It's as much transparency as the government will allow.
And Google doesn't sell user information
How would one go about proving or disproving this statement?
Well, you could look into trying to buy user information from Google and see what happens. You could also research Google's business model, which will quickly lead you to understand that Google is better at ad targeting than advertisers are, and that Google can therefore extract more value from the data by keeping it to themselves.
As for whether or not Google sells information to governments, look at Google's SEC filings and you'll notice the distinct lack of any such line items. Also look at the public statements from the executives, including the chief legal officer, which deny that Google gives, sells or in any way provides any data to the government except when compelled by legal documents... and in that case the government doesn't have to pay.
It's pretty obvious if you actually look.
so, taking this forward to protect ones self, how can you make it so that the police, even if in possession of the passcode can not de-encrypt the data?
Well, I think the best protection is to avoid committing crimes. Barring that, the old method is to keep incriminating data only in your head. Don't write it down, don't transmit it, don't store it.
so if my lockscreen is an animation of a combo lock that you drag back and forth to enter the unlock code...
Would that make this judge's head explode?
Not at all. The judge isn't saying that the passcode is somehow different from a combination. Exactly the opposite. He's saying that the distinction between a key and a combination is a distinction without a difference, that the focus of the fifth amendment is to prohibit people from being required to give testimony about their acts, not to keep them from being required to give the government access to their "papers". Unless your password is a description of your crime, or the location of the body, or something similar, the password in and of itself has no testimonial value, it's merely a key.
Honestly, although I like the idea that I can't be compelled to give up my passwords, I like it for the same reason I'd like to be able to refuse to allow police to search my house... and I can see the need for police to be able to do the latter and can see no reason it shouldn't logically extend to the former. This notion that you can't be compelled to give up your password has always been a weird loophole.
The judge is looking forward and realizing that in the not too distant future, essentially all documentary evidence is going to be in digital form and encrypted and that if search warrants can't compel access then police will simply be unable to obtain a great deal of evidence needed to convict criminals of crimes.
Requests for access to 20ish user accounts in five years from Google?
That has to be on the order of the likelihood of a Powerball winner.
20ish user accounts from a handful of NSLs where the gag order has been lifted. There are many other NSLs that Google is still gagged over, I'm sure. And the transparency reports document tens of thousands of requests for similar numbers of accounts, requests made through search warrants or subpoenas.
NSLs get highlighted because, unlike the other instruments to compel information, can be issued without judicial oversight and are kept secret.
Either that or the FBI got a warrant or you were a foreigner or they did PAY for the information, like everyone else ;).
Warrants or other appropriate legal documentation is required for foreigners as well. And Google doesn't sell user information, so trying to pay wouldn't help.
Hmm.. Fascinating stuff, I guess. But I'm not sure I would have chose the word "broad" to describe the level of information requested by at least some of these NSL's. I looked at a few, two of them simply wanted name, address and length of service, nothing else. Another asked for that, and a history of communication transactions, even goes out of the way to say 'don't give us subject lines, or content, we can't look at that," and for a very specific datetime window.
The laws that created the concept of a National Security Letter and authorize its use specifically limit the scope of NSLs to metadata only. So NSLs really can't be used for what most people would think of as "broad access".
Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.
Um, I have a very good understanding of what SWE salaries are, thank you very much for the condescension, and my IBM salary wasn't bad at all. I was making $140K, in Utah, almost six years ago. When I joined Google I had to move to Colorado, which has a comparable cost of living. Then later the bonus and stock grants started to kick in and it got really nice. Even in Silicon Valley my salary would be perfectly adequate to raise a family, though I'd probably have to live 40 minutes' bus ride from the office, which is exactly what all of my colleagues with families who work in Mountain View do.
However, my colleagues in Mountain View make more money than I do, though, all things being equal. If I were to move to MTV I'd get a bump to compensate for the increased cost of living.
There are most definitely divisions where anyone over 35 need not apply.
Obviously they don't say this, but you get the hint when you see the team comps.
Not in software engineering.
Really? What "actions" are there besides reducing CO2 and methane emissions?
Reducing insolation is probably the biggest one. There are lots of options for that, ranging from space-based shades to attempting to adjust the albedo of large regions, plus I'm sure many others I haven't considered. Simply reducing insolation won't fix ocean acidity levels, so some other action may be required there. There are also schemes for large-scale carbon sequestration, drawing the CO2 from the atmosphere.
In a phrase: planetary climate engineering. Note that right now we need to cool the planet, but it's also possible that in the future we'll need to warm it up, so we should learn how to do that, too.
bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination
Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.
My own compensation begs to differ. When I was hired as a SWE with 20+ years of industry experience, from another large enterprise company with a national pay scale (IBM), I got a 20% raise, and I was pretty well-compensated before. That's base salary only. My total compensation package is more than double what I was making at IBM... and I'm not in a particularly senior position. I was hired as level 4, which means "competent individual contributor", and have seen been promoted to level 5 which means "expert individual contributor or small team lead". Level 3 is "new grad".
interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.
When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had.
It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers. Sorry, that happens, but it doesn't represent the norm.
the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down
This doesn't match my experience at all.
The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off.
That sounds like a completely different company than the Google I'm familiar with. <shrug/>
What happened to "do no evil"?
I'm pretty sure that it was reported upon and in fact even re-posted here on Slashdot when it was noticed publicly that they had removed it from their company charter. It's worth noting though that it was never any sort of official, legally-binding commitment. More just an idea about a statement of purpose that they have since apparently changed their minds about.
Sigh.
1. The motto is "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". The latter is impossible for anyone to accomplish, the law of unintended consequences -- among other issues -- guarantees that. The former makes clear that the goal is to avoid systematically doing evil, which is achievable.
2. It was never part of any company charter. It was an important internal guideline.
3. Google has never "changed their minds" about the motto. It remains an important internal guideline. I can vouch for the fact that it still gets employed in internal decisionmaking meetings to shoot down ideas that mistreat users or have big potential social/cultural negative implications.
4. I don't really see how providing anyone with better Internet service could be evil. In particular in this case it sounds like the plan is to deploy Google's content distribution network (CDN) to Cuba. That mostly means caching YouTube videos on local servers so they load faster. Oh noes! Rich/powerful Cubans (and tourists at fancy hotels) will have quick-loading cat videos!
5. Google is clearly hoping that the many changes going on in Cuba and in its relations with the United States will begin to make Internet service more broadly available to the Cuban populace, which will make this CDN infrastructure more valuable over time.
Disclaimer: In case it's not obvious, I work for Google but I am not speaking for Google. The above represents my personal opinions and observations, not official company policy. Oh, and I don't know anything about this Cuban deployment except what I read in the public news.
And CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because we keep hiring more scientists that keep telling us the same thing over and over again. We don't need thousands of researchers researching something on which there is basically broad consensus.
Where there isn't broad consensus is what to do about it. That's a tradeoff between economic growth and carbon emissions. Climate scientists are not qualified to speak to that, and their beliefs, opinions, or research results are irrelevant to that question.
Figuring out what to do about it requires climate research. We need to understand the mechanisms in much greater detail, to be able to predict the effects of various actions, and to figure out just how bad the problems are going to be so we know what kind of actions make sense.
They really do seem to love the concept of getting "hot shots". They once tried to headhunt me after I won the Underhanded C contest one year. Um... that contest is about doing malicious things in the middle of tasks you were assigned to do and getting away with it - is that really a skill you want in your programmers?
Makes perfect sense to me. No, that's not a skill Google is looking for, but it's evidence of cleverness and deep knowledge of C programming and programmers. You'll note that winning the contest got you an opportunity for an interview, it didn't get you a job offer.
Google abandoned a project?! No!
Google isn't abandoning the project, they're just going to sell systems to carmakers rather than becoming a carmaker.
I worked for them for three years.
I'll have my six-year anniversary as a Google Software Engineer in February.
their age discrimination practices prevent them from finding anyone who comprehends what that entails.
I could debate the rest of this post, but I'm replying just to pick on this point. I see absolutely no indication of age discrimination at Google. I'm nearly 50 myself, and not the oldest person on my team. My previous team included several engineers in their 60s and one guy in his early 70s (former Bell Labs guy; crazy smart and achieved independent wealth decades earlier but enjoyed working).
About the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination is that the interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc. That stuff is clearly top of mind for new CS grads, not so much for professionals who've been in the field a few years.
However, professionals who know this and take a little time to brush up before going into the interview do fine. Recruiters point this out to candidates and are willing to delay scheduling the interviews if needed. I asked the recruiter to wait a couple of weeks so I could brush up and I was hired. On the occasions when I interview someone who seems pretty sharp but struggles because they're rusty I strongly encourage them to go refresh their memory and try again.
Thus the conclusion is that methane emissions will not cause runaway warming.
I don't think anyone who knows anything is seriously concerned about runaway warming. The concern is about global temperatures rising a few degees and causing large shifts in local climates around the world and raising sea levels. If the planet were prone to runaway warming, it would have happened regularly and scoured life from the planet (all but perhaps some extremophiles). Still, non-runaway but significant warming could have major repercussions on humanity, forcing us to spend tremendous amounts of resources on relocating populations, etc.
For our own comfort and allowing us to continue spending our productivity on making our lives better, rather than mere survival, we need to both curb greenhouse gas emissions and start investing in geoengineering research. In the long run (thousands to millions of years), we know the planet will be both much hotter and much colder than it is now, so we need to learn how to stabilize it, and this seems like a very good time to start.
"Non-breeders needn't look at this as discrimination."
But they should, after all that's EXACTLY what it is.
It's exactly the same sort of discrimination as non-breeders having to pay taxes to support schools.
Kids weren't neglected when this wasn't available.
This clearly enables parents to take the time to bond more strongly with their young children, and that pays dividends later. Can that be done without? Sure. We also used to have our kids breathe lead fume-filled air and society got by... but had a significantly higher violent crime rate. Stronger, more stable families benefit everyone, including those who don't have kids.
Does the earth care where the population growth is?
Doesn't matter. Population growth is not a problem. The developed world is already at negative population growth overall and the whole world is already at negative growth in annual births, which means that all of the net population growth worldwide is due to filling out of the age categories. That in turn means that, barring significant increases in lifespans, as soon as those are all filled out worldwide population growth will go negative as well. It appears we'll hit that peak population point in the 2050s, at around 10B people.
... maybe the employee in question is just very tight-fisted
Wait, this is Scotland, right? Why the maybe?
The employee may not be a true Scotsman.
almost as if there were a House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. They do a much better job than you're willing to accept, because you want to believe that the republicans are evil, the progressives are good, and that the world is a nice place full of nice people.
I don't believe any of those things... and yet it's clear that the oversight committees have not been doing a good job.
Commuting cost is because Amazon shuttle is expensive.
We don't know that. We know that one employee preferred not to pay it. Maybe it is expensive, maybe the employee in question is just very tight-fisted. Some numbers would be nice.