I just price checked a 7pm Blade Runner IMAX at my local theater and it is $18.34 per ticket. Then there is a $4.00 convenience fee for buying online, but since they allow reserved seating now you definitely don't want to wait until you are there in person because all the best seats are gone. So basically that is $40.68 before popcorn.
Most of the time I only go to the theater for movies I want to be able to talk about with friends and coworkers after opening weekend. If I can wait a week or two until things have died down, I can just wait until the DVD release.
Moviegoers have plenty of things to do with their time and many of them don't want to waste their time on crappy movies. For me nearly every movie with a very bad rotten tomato score (below 30%) is not worth going to the theater. I may rent it later but it isn't going to get $30-$40 from me. On top of that, there are plenty of movies which could be interesting but I'll wait for the reviews before going to the theater. Right now movies like Jumanji, Blade Runner, and Ready Player One are in that category for me. If they can get 70%+ scores I'll take another look, but otherwise I'll wait for the rental.
Bad rotten tomato scores are kind of like a resume with a lot of misspelled words when you have 1000 resumes to go through. It's a good initial filter criteria.
Dont expected any electric Innovations from Euro Car companies. They hate batteries.
That is exactly why I am looking forward to getting an all electric BMW / Audi / etc. in 3-5 years when they are among the few manufacturers which still qualify for the $7500 tax credit in the US. The innovative companies will have already exceeded 200,000 US deliveries (with Tesla hitting that figure in 2018).
I completely agree with your sentiment, but considering the number of iPhones purchased they are far more similar to a BMW or Lexus in your analogy than a Bugatti.
I have a 2015 BMW 435i and a Samsung S8+, and I certainly know there are more affordable options for both which would provide almost the same utility. But the "almost" part of that statement is why I payed a 100% premium for both of these luxury items over what I could have purchased if I was more price conscious. I simply feel the extra $5k per year I pay for my car (in total cost of ownership) and $250 extra per year I pay for my phone provide more utility to my life than what I would otherwise have spent the money on (extra vacations, more steak house dinners, etc).
If I wasn't able to max out my 401k contributions, save for my kid's college funds, etc. then both of these purchase decisions would be concerning, but once basic needs and even most high end needs are met then why not splurge on some fun toys?
If I say "A = B + C", the fact that the computer is doing all kinds of electrical magic behind the scene is independent of what we're trying to do. There is nothing abstract about that statement. If I did something like "account.CalculateBalance()", that is abstracting away the problem. It is hiding the details required to represent the solution to the problem.
If you say A=B+C, you have abstracted away the data type, units of measurement, number of bits required to store the values, etc. All of those can be very relevant to the problem you are solving, and each of the considerations I listed are significant causes of bugs in real software. In financial software I have written, knowing how many digits to track when performing financial calculations is just as important as the logic used to calculate those balances. A=B+C is absolutely a very abstract statement.
"account.CalculateBalance()" may or may not be abstracting away the problem you are trying to solve. It certainly uses abstraction, like A=B+C or any other software solution for that matter, but it may or may not be related to your work. Just like knowing the data types of your addition operation may or may not be relevant to your work.
Any experienced programmer will know very well that abstraction does not always make better solutions. The sad truth is that complex problems usually require complex solutions.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. Obviously even the worst programmer will likely know that abstraction will not always make a better solution. Nothing always makes a better solution. But nearly 100% of code (likely at least 99.999999%) has significant abstractions. You probably cannot even use modern processors without numerous abstractions within the processor itself which you cannot control or even see in the documentation. Even when they do have complete control they probably aren't spending much time thinking about the actual movement of the electrons in those processors, but instead enjoy using a different level of abstraction.
Abstractions can cause problems, but on average I'd guess they solve trillions of potential problems for every problem they cause.
I would change what you said to: Experienced programmers will generally know what abstraction level they should be working at when designing and implementing their solutions. They will also be better than most at determining when they were wrong and need to start investigating in a different level of abstraction.
Congratulations, your compensation package is better than most tech workers at Fortune 500 companies. You are the exception, not the rule.
$120k may be better than the average compensation package for tech workers at Fortune 500 companies, but it isn't much higher. If I go to a recruiter trying to find a quality developer with 10 years of experience in the Chicago suburbs, I am not going to get any quality applicants offering less than six figures. One of our software dev VPs was recently nearly fired because he had an open position for six months when the CTO found out he was only offering $80k for the role. You can get a decent college grad around here for that amount, but this role required the person to have a significant amount of industry knowledge.
Lifespan year> awake years. Opportunities like seeing the next president or your great-grandchildren.
Agreed, but is 1 lifespan year > 10 awake years? I would say no, but couldn't tell you what I think the actual ratio is. And it would be different to different people. Some may say 1 lifespan year 1 awake year since they feel they will enjoy that year more in their 30's than they will in their 80's. I personally think I would take 1 awake year in my 30's over a decade of lifespan years after senility sets in (if ever).
the White House later today that tasks the Department of Education to devote at least $200 million of its grant funds each year to so-called STEM fields
So how much does the Department of Education (DoE) currently devote to STEM field grants? You are looking at around a $70 billion budget, with tens of billions already going to various grants. What is even the point of releasing this kind of news if no one can even tell if it is an improvement on what we already do?
Another [question] would be the degree to which 8 hours vs 6 improves your quality of life during your waking hours. I'm in a better mood all day if I get 8 instead of 6. At 3 or 4, I spend the day miserable and would gladly trade a couple of waking hours for sleeping ones.
That is certainly another important question when determining how much you should sleep. My wife really needs 7-8 hours to be happy, while I don't see any noticeable benefits with more than 6 hours. So she ends up getting an hour or two of extra sleep than I do each night. But considering I just went on blood pressure medication last week it's likely that reduced sleep does have some adverse affects. Then again my father and grandfather had heart attacks, my stressful work schedule has been messing with my workouts and diet over the last six months, and I'm nearly 40 now, so who know how much of a factor sleep is in my current health issues.
But while your question is important for someone to make a decision about their sleep schedule, it is not a question which is relevant to discussions about this article since it isn't related to their findings.
You are assigned a certain amount of sleep at birth. If you don't use it all up, it's added to the start of your dirt nap.
I thought TFA might work out to that, but it turns out it doesn't - greatly increased risks of many diseases that'll take you out way sooner.
But it would still be simple for the study to say "adults sleeping 6 hours per night lose a median of X years off their life." They don't say anything like that, so it is impossible to know if you are likely to lose more waking hours in your life than you gain by 40 waking days worth of time you gain each year by sleeping two hours less. If you sleep 6 hours instead of 8 each day for 40 years, you have gained just over 4 years of time. So the question is whether the health problems they studied are likely to reduce your life by more than 4 years on average.
The study also keeps throwing in statements such as "predicted to live only to their early 60s without medical intervention." But they don't state what medical intervention means here. Many of the problems mentioned in the study are caused by rising blood pressure. Does this mean that with blood pressure medication these adverse effects of sleep deprevation go away? And if they don't go away, are the effects diminished?
Considering there are real benefits of sleeping a little less (more hours in each day), you need to be very specific when describing the downsides. Worthless statements such as "twice as likely to have a heart attack" are meaningless without knowing whether medication affects that increase, what are the chances of surviving that heart attack, etc.
Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.
This is nonsense. IT workers, and software developers especially, are among the highest paid professions in the US. There are some professions where a small subset of elite practitioners make more (specialists doctors, highly successful lawyers and finance professions), but software development is still a very lucrative career. For an "average" person, IT is probably the most realistically lucrative career on average in the US. And anyone who is capable of becoming a successful lawyer or high paid medical specialist is likely capable of pulling in a $200k+ salary as a software engineer, so those professions don't really make more than comparable IT professionals.
It's why she lost. She didn't campaign in the rust belt swing states.
Not campaigning in a state is not the same as forgetting about them. It is bad strategy, for sure, but I doubt Hillary did much campaigning in California or Illinois either and it didn't have anything to do with forgetting them either.
No one forgot about them. Some people acknowledge it is a difficult problem and try to enact progressive solutions, and some people placate these people with false promises while enacting regressive policies to hurt them further. The latter approach works to get elected, but not to benefit anyone but the wealthy who benefit from regressive policies.
It is wrong for someone to say BG's success is impossible to replicate. It would be more accurate to say there are no actions you can take which will even give you a 1% chance of replicating BG's success. Probably not even a 0.01% chance. There are only a few people living in the US with BG's level of success, and probably hundreds of thousands of people who worked just as hard and just as smart as him.
There are plenty of things you can do to give yourself a good chance of reaching a $10+ million net worth, but trying to reach a BG level of success is a fool's errand. Luckily the early steps you do to reach $10 million in wealth are nearly identical if not actually identical to the things you do to reach $10 billion in wealth. The only difference between these two levels of wealth is basically just luck. So there is always that small chance you are one of the lucky ones if you shoot for it.
Your reply attacks the AC with false accusations of "hate speech".
Based on the AC's comments, it's hard to make any conclusion other than he is supporting hate speech. He discusses domain name registration cancellations, and the only high profile examples of this recently were the cancellation of Neo-nazi websites. Without examples of what else he is talking about, it is reasonable to assume he is complaining about the liberal attempts to limit hate speech.
Anyone claiming liberals are against free speech is very hard to take seriously. When leftist organizations such as the ACLU defend Unite the Right organizers in court, it is hard to make a case where the left only defends speech it agrees with.
The general complaint made against the left's handling of free speech is that liberals don't treat opinions built upon incorrect beliefs as equal to more defensible opinions and facts. When liberals say "your opinions are not as valid as my facts" that is not an attack on free speech, it is an attack on invalid arguments. Unless the AC takes the time to point out actual examples of free speech attacks which are condoned by liberals at large, it is only reasonable to believe he is indeed a shill who doesn't like being called out on his hate speech and/or ridiculous opinions.
Her own description of the issue sounds more like the Internet has finished growing up, not that it has entered some kind of mid life crisis. It has gone from some kind of playground to a place where real work is being done, kind of like how my computing experience has changed from high school to my current role as a senior software engineer in my 30's. I may still have the desire to play around with new technologies, but most of my time is spent integrating various software packages for the financial industry so I can afford a home in the pricey suburbs.
The midlife crisis is when there is a new younger competitor to the Internet comes along and the Internet needs to feel cool again. Maybe you could say the desktop browsing experience is in a midlife crisis as it competes with the mobile experience. Reactive design is the corvette in this analogy.
It's not just less useful than I was hoping, it is essentially a useless tool. The number of roles are limited, the number of locations are limited, it only uses years of experience as a proxy for job responsibility, and it thinks a list of technologies is a good way to determine pay. I'm not even sure why they would spend time to create this tool.
Too many sites care too much about languages and frameworks when calculating salary. There are a few niches which command very high salaries relative to responsibility / years of experience, but they are rare. And they are usually very specific. Level of responsibility is a much better criteria than technologies known, and it isn't even included in this calculator.
Salary.com does a much better job because they look at what is important. First off the job titles are given ranks such as Software Engineer I through Software Engineer V. This is much better because each of those match up with increasing levels of responsibility, which is what mostly drives salary. Then it adds in criteria such as number of direct reports, size of company, who you report to, etc.
Honestly if your tool cannot beat the usefulness of a general tool such as Salary.com's salary report then it doesn't need to exist.
Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.
Evidently you aren't aware that 95.7% of surviving an accident in a plane.
What part of my post makes you think I'm not aware how safe plan travel is? I said the worst case scenario is everyone dies, which is absolutely true of plane crashes. I also went on to say that planes have plenty of fail safes which allow for managed failures. Did you read my whole post? The entire point was that planes are just as inherently dangerous as the Hyperloop but don't end up being very dangerous in practice because of good engineering and operations.
We don't know what will happen because it hasn't been engineered and built yet. Determining how it handles various types of failures will certainly be part of the engineering process. Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash. But just like with a plane, plenty of fail safes will be there to allow for managed failures. Most catastrophic failures will probably just cause the train to come to a gradual halt.
If they go to trial and fight this aggressively, they be exposed for hypocrisy
No need to worry about hypocrisy. You can both acknowledge the cultural influences on the pay gap which have nothing to do with corporate malfeasance, and work as a company to improve the industry's imbalance which is caused by them. Every large tech company will continue to have a large pay gap until cultural differences which start at infancy are dealt with, and Google certainly cannot be blamed for that.
That's quite the socialist slant. The public/private net worth of California against the state government's debt equals $10 trillion dollars? That is one hell of a spin.
How else would you measure the wealth of a state? You take the public and private assets minus the public and private debts. There is no spin there, just basic accounting.
Also, fueling a growing economy with debt/credit is not sustainable.
Depends on how long you expect it to be sustainable. Sure it may not be sustainable for centuries, but it could be sustainable for decades. And if the economy grew faster than the total debt, they will be in a much better place. I was a drain on my parents' and eventually my own finances for about three decades, but I built up enough human capital to grow a very significant net worth. It can work the same way for governments and companies as well.
Money? What money? Last time I checked, California was riddled with a fucking obscene amount of debt.
California is not in debt. It is hard to pin down the actual net worth of California as a whole, but if its share of the total US net worth is proportionate with its share of the total US GDP, then California's net worth would be just over $10 trillion after subtracting state and local debt. There are probably only 5 countries other than the US with total wealth greater than the state of California (Italy is close, so maybe 6 countries).
California's government may be in debt, but that is only one small part of the state's entire balance sheet.
Slashdot Mirror
I just price checked a 7pm Blade Runner IMAX at my local theater and it is $18.34 per ticket. Then there is a $4.00 convenience fee for buying online, but since they allow reserved seating now you definitely don't want to wait until you are there in person because all the best seats are gone. So basically that is $40.68 before popcorn.
Most of the time I only go to the theater for movies I want to be able to talk about with friends and coworkers after opening weekend. If I can wait a week or two until things have died down, I can just wait until the DVD release.
Moviegoers have plenty of things to do with their time and many of them don't want to waste their time on crappy movies. For me nearly every movie with a very bad rotten tomato score (below 30%) is not worth going to the theater. I may rent it later but it isn't going to get $30-$40 from me. On top of that, there are plenty of movies which could be interesting but I'll wait for the reviews before going to the theater. Right now movies like Jumanji, Blade Runner, and Ready Player One are in that category for me. If they can get 70%+ scores I'll take another look, but otherwise I'll wait for the rental.
Bad rotten tomato scores are kind of like a resume with a lot of misspelled words when you have 1000 resumes to go through. It's a good initial filter criteria.
Dont expected any electric Innovations from Euro Car companies. They hate batteries.
That is exactly why I am looking forward to getting an all electric BMW / Audi / etc. in 3-5 years when they are among the few manufacturers which still qualify for the $7500 tax credit in the US. The innovative companies will have already exceeded 200,000 US deliveries (with Tesla hitting that figure in 2018).
You can already buy a sub-$1K electric car today.
But my kids' Power Wheels have trouble reaching highways speeds.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but considering the number of iPhones purchased they are far more similar to a BMW or Lexus in your analogy than a Bugatti.
I have a 2015 BMW 435i and a Samsung S8+, and I certainly know there are more affordable options for both which would provide almost the same utility. But the "almost" part of that statement is why I payed a 100% premium for both of these luxury items over what I could have purchased if I was more price conscious. I simply feel the extra $5k per year I pay for my car (in total cost of ownership) and $250 extra per year I pay for my phone provide more utility to my life than what I would otherwise have spent the money on (extra vacations, more steak house dinners, etc).
If I wasn't able to max out my 401k contributions, save for my kid's college funds, etc. then both of these purchase decisions would be concerning, but once basic needs and even most high end needs are met then why not splurge on some fun toys?
If I say "A = B + C", the fact that the computer is doing all kinds of electrical magic behind the scene is independent of what we're trying to do. There is nothing abstract about that statement. If I did something like "account.CalculateBalance()", that is abstracting away the problem. It is hiding the details required to represent the solution to the problem.
If you say A=B+C, you have abstracted away the data type, units of measurement, number of bits required to store the values, etc. All of those can be very relevant to the problem you are solving, and each of the considerations I listed are significant causes of bugs in real software. In financial software I have written, knowing how many digits to track when performing financial calculations is just as important as the logic used to calculate those balances. A=B+C is absolutely a very abstract statement.
"account.CalculateBalance()" may or may not be abstracting away the problem you are trying to solve. It certainly uses abstraction, like A=B+C or any other software solution for that matter, but it may or may not be related to your work. Just like knowing the data types of your addition operation may or may not be relevant to your work.
Any experienced programmer will know very well that abstraction does not always make better solutions. The sad truth is that complex problems usually require complex solutions.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. Obviously even the worst programmer will likely know that abstraction will not always make a better solution. Nothing always makes a better solution. But nearly 100% of code (likely at least 99.999999%) has significant abstractions. You probably cannot even use modern processors without numerous abstractions within the processor itself which you cannot control or even see in the documentation. Even when they do have complete control they probably aren't spending much time thinking about the actual movement of the electrons in those processors, but instead enjoy using a different level of abstraction.
Abstractions can cause problems, but on average I'd guess they solve trillions of potential problems for every problem they cause.
I would change what you said to: Experienced programmers will generally know what abstraction level they should be working at when designing and implementing their solutions. They will also be better than most at determining when they were wrong and need to start investigating in a different level of abstraction.
Congratulations, your compensation package is better than most tech workers at Fortune 500 companies. You are the exception, not the rule.
$120k may be better than the average compensation package for tech workers at Fortune 500 companies, but it isn't much higher. If I go to a recruiter trying to find a quality developer with 10 years of experience in the Chicago suburbs, I am not going to get any quality applicants offering less than six figures. One of our software dev VPs was recently nearly fired because he had an open position for six months when the CTO found out he was only offering $80k for the role. You can get a decent college grad around here for that amount, but this role required the person to have a significant amount of industry knowledge.
Lifespan year> awake years. Opportunities like seeing the next president or your great-grandchildren.
Agreed, but is 1 lifespan year > 10 awake years? I would say no, but couldn't tell you what I think the actual ratio is. And it would be different to different people. Some may say 1 lifespan year 1 awake year since they feel they will enjoy that year more in their 30's than they will in their 80's. I personally think I would take 1 awake year in my 30's over a decade of lifespan years after senility sets in (if ever).
the White House later today that tasks the Department of Education to devote at least $200 million of its grant funds each year to so-called STEM fields
So how much does the Department of Education (DoE) currently devote to STEM field grants? You are looking at around a $70 billion budget, with tens of billions already going to various grants. What is even the point of releasing this kind of news if no one can even tell if it is an improvement on what we already do?
Another [question] would be the degree to which 8 hours vs 6 improves your quality of life during your waking hours. I'm in a better mood all day if I get 8 instead of 6. At 3 or 4, I spend the day miserable and would gladly trade a couple of waking hours for sleeping ones.
That is certainly another important question when determining how much you should sleep. My wife really needs 7-8 hours to be happy, while I don't see any noticeable benefits with more than 6 hours. So she ends up getting an hour or two of extra sleep than I do each night. But considering I just went on blood pressure medication last week it's likely that reduced sleep does have some adverse affects. Then again my father and grandfather had heart attacks, my stressful work schedule has been messing with my workouts and diet over the last six months, and I'm nearly 40 now, so who know how much of a factor sleep is in my current health issues.
But while your question is important for someone to make a decision about their sleep schedule, it is not a question which is relevant to discussions about this article since it isn't related to their findings.
You are assigned a certain amount of sleep at birth. If you don't use it all up, it's added to the start of your dirt nap.
I thought TFA might work out to that, but it turns out it doesn't - greatly increased risks of many diseases that'll take you out way sooner.
But it would still be simple for the study to say "adults sleeping 6 hours per night lose a median of X years off their life." They don't say anything like that, so it is impossible to know if you are likely to lose more waking hours in your life than you gain by 40 waking days worth of time you gain each year by sleeping two hours less. If you sleep 6 hours instead of 8 each day for 40 years, you have gained just over 4 years of time. So the question is whether the health problems they studied are likely to reduce your life by more than 4 years on average.
The study also keeps throwing in statements such as "predicted to live only to their early 60s without medical intervention." But they don't state what medical intervention means here. Many of the problems mentioned in the study are caused by rising blood pressure. Does this mean that with blood pressure medication these adverse effects of sleep deprevation go away? And if they don't go away, are the effects diminished?
Considering there are real benefits of sleeping a little less (more hours in each day), you need to be very specific when describing the downsides. Worthless statements such as "twice as likely to have a heart attack" are meaningless without knowing whether medication affects that increase, what are the chances of surviving that heart attack, etc.
Yeah, anytime an organization says, "Not enough employees", they leave off, "at the low wages and in the circumstances we're dictating". Want more employees? Up the pay and train them. Stop making them work in really shitty conditions. The US has plenty of people not working or in dead end jobs wanting more. Invest in them instead of investing in India.
This is nonsense. IT workers, and software developers especially, are among the highest paid professions in the US. There are some professions where a small subset of elite practitioners make more (specialists doctors, highly successful lawyers and finance professions), but software development is still a very lucrative career. For an "average" person, IT is probably the most realistically lucrative career on average in the US. And anyone who is capable of becoming a successful lawyer or high paid medical specialist is likely capable of pulling in a $200k+ salary as a software engineer, so those professions don't really make more than comparable IT professionals.
It's why she lost. She didn't campaign in the rust belt swing states.
Not campaigning in a state is not the same as forgetting about them. It is bad strategy, for sure, but I doubt Hillary did much campaigning in California or Illinois either and it didn't have anything to do with forgetting them either.
No one forgot about them. Some people acknowledge it is a difficult problem and try to enact progressive solutions, and some people placate these people with false promises while enacting regressive policies to hurt them further. The latter approach works to get elected, but not to benefit anyone but the wealthy who benefit from regressive policies.
It is wrong for someone to say BG's success is impossible to replicate. It would be more accurate to say there are no actions you can take which will even give you a 1% chance of replicating BG's success. Probably not even a 0.01% chance. There are only a few people living in the US with BG's level of success, and probably hundreds of thousands of people who worked just as hard and just as smart as him.
There are plenty of things you can do to give yourself a good chance of reaching a $10+ million net worth, but trying to reach a BG level of success is a fool's errand. Luckily the early steps you do to reach $10 million in wealth are nearly identical if not actually identical to the things you do to reach $10 billion in wealth. The only difference between these two levels of wealth is basically just luck. So there is always that small chance you are one of the lucky ones if you shoot for it.
Your reply attacks the AC with false accusations of "hate speech".
Based on the AC's comments, it's hard to make any conclusion other than he is supporting hate speech. He discusses domain name registration cancellations, and the only high profile examples of this recently were the cancellation of Neo-nazi websites. Without examples of what else he is talking about, it is reasonable to assume he is complaining about the liberal attempts to limit hate speech.
Anyone claiming liberals are against free speech is very hard to take seriously. When leftist organizations such as the ACLU defend Unite the Right organizers in court, it is hard to make a case where the left only defends speech it agrees with.
The general complaint made against the left's handling of free speech is that liberals don't treat opinions built upon incorrect beliefs as equal to more defensible opinions and facts. When liberals say "your opinions are not as valid as my facts" that is not an attack on free speech, it is an attack on invalid arguments. Unless the AC takes the time to point out actual examples of free speech attacks which are condoned by liberals at large, it is only reasonable to believe he is indeed a shill who doesn't like being called out on his hate speech and/or ridiculous opinions.
Her own description of the issue sounds more like the Internet has finished growing up, not that it has entered some kind of mid life crisis. It has gone from some kind of playground to a place where real work is being done, kind of like how my computing experience has changed from high school to my current role as a senior software engineer in my 30's. I may still have the desire to play around with new technologies, but most of my time is spent integrating various software packages for the financial industry so I can afford a home in the pricey suburbs.
The midlife crisis is when there is a new younger competitor to the Internet comes along and the Internet needs to feel cool again. Maybe you could say the desktop browsing experience is in a midlife crisis as it competes with the mobile experience. Reactive design is the corvette in this analogy.
It's not just less useful than I was hoping, it is essentially a useless tool. The number of roles are limited, the number of locations are limited, it only uses years of experience as a proxy for job responsibility, and it thinks a list of technologies is a good way to determine pay. I'm not even sure why they would spend time to create this tool.
Too many sites care too much about languages and frameworks when calculating salary. There are a few niches which command very high salaries relative to responsibility / years of experience, but they are rare. And they are usually very specific. Level of responsibility is a much better criteria than technologies known, and it isn't even included in this calculator.
Salary.com does a much better job because they look at what is important. First off the job titles are given ranks such as Software Engineer I through Software Engineer V. This is much better because each of those match up with increasing levels of responsibility, which is what mostly drives salary. Then it adds in criteria such as number of direct reports, size of company, who you report to, etc.
Honestly if your tool cannot beat the usefulness of a general tool such as Salary.com's salary report then it doesn't need to exist.
Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.
Evidently you aren't aware that 95.7% of surviving an accident in a plane.
What part of my post makes you think I'm not aware how safe plan travel is? I said the worst case scenario is everyone dies, which is absolutely true of plane crashes. I also went on to say that planes have plenty of fail safes which allow for managed failures. Did you read my whole post? The entire point was that planes are just as inherently dangerous as the Hyperloop but don't end up being very dangerous in practice because of good engineering and operations.
We don't know what will happen because it hasn't been engineered and built yet. Determining how it handles various types of failures will certainly be part of the engineering process. Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash. But just like with a plane, plenty of fail safes will be there to allow for managed failures. Most catastrophic failures will probably just cause the train to come to a gradual halt.
If they go to trial and fight this aggressively, they be exposed for hypocrisy
No need to worry about hypocrisy. You can both acknowledge the cultural influences on the pay gap which have nothing to do with corporate malfeasance, and work as a company to improve the industry's imbalance which is caused by them. Every large tech company will continue to have a large pay gap until cultural differences which start at infancy are dealt with, and Google certainly cannot be blamed for that.
That's quite the socialist slant. The public/private net worth of California against the state government's debt equals $10 trillion dollars? That is one hell of a spin.
How else would you measure the wealth of a state? You take the public and private assets minus the public and private debts. There is no spin there, just basic accounting.
Also, fueling a growing economy with debt/credit is not sustainable.
Depends on how long you expect it to be sustainable. Sure it may not be sustainable for centuries, but it could be sustainable for decades. And if the economy grew faster than the total debt, they will be in a much better place. I was a drain on my parents' and eventually my own finances for about three decades, but I built up enough human capital to grow a very significant net worth. It can work the same way for governments and companies as well.
Money? What money? Last time I checked, California was riddled with a fucking obscene amount of debt.
California is not in debt. It is hard to pin down the actual net worth of California as a whole, but if its share of the total US net worth is proportionate with its share of the total US GDP, then California's net worth would be just over $10 trillion after subtracting state and local debt. There are probably only 5 countries other than the US with total wealth greater than the state of California (Italy is close, so maybe 6 countries).
California's government may be in debt, but that is only one small part of the state's entire balance sheet.