I have no idea what Twitter does internally, but we do know what they *should* do. There should be an audit log with tamper protection which means that employees who have reason to access data can do so, but they know that their actions are logged and if the access is improper they will be terminated. This means somebody has to monitor the logs and they have to have actual policy enforcement. If they are lax in any of these areas than there very well may be the equivalent of unfettered access.
The gas purchase is also useful because you can test whether the card is valid or not with a very low risk. I've never seen a gas station attendant come running out if somebody uses a card and it gets declined.
This simply isn't true. When you buy gas at a gas pump, the ZIP is submitted along with the mag stripe data and, if it doesn't match, the transaction is declined. I can speak to this first hand as we recently moved and I accidentally (due to habit) entered my old zip code and wasn't able to get the pump to activate until I entered the correct ZIP.
Who says that there isn't a focus on male teachers. Maybe it doesn't make the front page of/. but there are plenty of people focused on it. I don't know what schools and school districts do to try to increase diversity and get more male teachers since I don't work in education and have never participated in hiring educators. Do you have some data that STEM companies focus on diversity more than employers in the education industry?
I don't know why *you* would care as I know nothing other than your/. handle. But the reason Google (and other employers care) is because there is a structural shortage of tech workers that isn't going to get better short of an economic calamity. We have a saying. "Reqs are easy. Hiring is hard." Many businesses are having a difficult time because there just aren't enough people to hire.
Whey an individual should care (even if they don't participate in hiring) is that the current situation may (or may not) be the result of some systemic problem that we (as a society) ought to solve.
Nobody is suggesting that there is bias in the hiring process. Well a few nut jobs are claiming some fantasy they call "reverse discrimination." What is being claimed is that the current situation is untenable.
I don't think we are in much disagreement here. If you are in a position of hiring, you should first ask "why do only white males get hired" since that's the problem as it is presented to you. The answer *may* be "only white males enter this job segment." That then brings up the follow-up question of "why do only white males enter this job segment." Of course I cannot make food appealing to every *person* but I can make food that is equally appealing across various demographics. If I'm a large food manufacturer, I can offer vegetarian and gluten-free versions of my products.
A *small* employer would ask your first question, conclude that "only white males enter this job segment" and stop there because they simply don't have the resources to address any answer that they might find to the second question. A *large* employer will go on to ask the second question and, depending on the answer, they *may* be able to do something about it.
I have one customer who implemented a program where they offered free training to anybody who wanted to sign up. Didn't matter if you had an advanced degree in computer science or were the cashier at Food Lion ( a real example of somebody who showed up ). Based on how well you learned the material they would hire people. They got a lot of good vitality hires this way. Obviously only a small percentage completed but they were well worth bringing on board.
I don't know what they did with that program in terms of diversity efforts but it's a great example of where being smart would really pay off. If you emailed all of your employees and said "tell your friends and neighbors" you would end up with a pool similar in demographics to your existing workforce. So what you *should* do is pay specific attention other demographics when advertising the program. (i.e. market specifically to females and minorities) Facebook used to have tools available to do this. But sadly they got used mostly to market real estate only to white people which really is a shame.
As a similar analogy, if the owner of an apartment complex wants to reduce crime, they only thing they can really do is install security measures like fences, cameras, and guards. If a *city* wants to reduce crime they can implement programs like free addiction treatment.
I have no idea why somebody would not applaud the efforts of Gogole and others to think long-term and try to get more than white males interested in STEM and into jobs in our industry. If what we are doing really makes the world better than having more people involved will only produce more good.
I don't think that anybody would argue with your point. However, if you find that the people who are the "right fit" are all white and male, it's indicative of some sort of problem. Hiring "diverse" candidates who aren't the "right fit" isn't a solution because you are taking an action that (at best, barely) treats a symptom. In the US, white males are 31% of the population. There's nothing about the other 69% of people that would make the unqualified. If you're genuinely looking for the "right fit" but only seem to be able to hire from 31% of the population, it makes sense to take a good hard look at the reasons.
An easier analogy is to imagine that you are selling a food item that only appeals to 31% of the population and you want to grow revenue. Well, if you could make it appealing for 100% of the population, that may be easier than trying to win market share among the 31%.
This was true historically and net neutrality rules kind of mandated that it stay this way. But now there are new pricing possibilities. It seems that the last mile is the most expensive part and that whatever is in the actual data center is so cheap by comparison that this wouldn't make sense. This is most likely to be used by the current cable providers to force you to pay for their TV service and I think the net neutrality rules were a good idea. Video streaming is high bandwidth though and watching the latest Hollywood movie doesn't seem to be a basic right. And we have libraries and such. So although I don't like the OPs proposal I think it's a bit extreme to call somebody an idiot for trying to analyze a situation.
The only "right" that a city has is whatever right the state grants to it. That's the point. A city is not a real entity. It's just how the state chooses to organize its affairs. The state could decide tomorrow not to have cities, not to have local school boards, et cetera. This is like saying that the janitorial department of a company should have the right to do whatever it wants. It can do whatever the owners of the company say it can do. And the fact that its a corporation owned by a city (which really means owned by the state) doesn't change anything. A government entity can't use a corporate structure to do something that the government entity otherwise couldn't do. Now some states may have state constitutions that enshrine rights to the cities. And in those cases, there may be a need for a state constitution change to accomplish certain things. But a city still have no sovereignty.
Maybe. But to *many* consumers it's just a means of getting Netflix and Facebook. The OPs point is that they should have the option to do this if they want to. Most people hate the forced bundling of ESPN with basic cable for similar reasons. Why do I have to have an internet connection that is capable of delivering Hulu at high speeds when I would rather have a cheaper Netflix-only one.
The thing to remember in the US is that we have a dual-sovereign system of state and federal governments. However, cities are *not* sovereign. They exist completely at the whim of state governments and the state government can organize its cities however it wants. Some states empower cities more than others. Apparently cities in TN don't have much authority and this fight will have to happen at the state level.
Unfortunately many cities are islands of smart policies based on critical thinking surrounded by a sea of backward-stupidity. So until the cities get large enough to dominate state politics, they are left struggling at the whims of their incompetent state-level overlords.
I guess you can get modded to +4 just by including a Wikipedia link. Even if what you said was true (it's not), the net result is that Google is a mostly white, mostly male company in the end as are most tech companies. Even if you had a policy to hire every minority/female candidate whose resume got past HR screening, you would still end up with a white male company. I participate in my current employers hiring process. I don't interview candidates until they have gotten past HR but the pool is mostly white and mostly male. We have hired every female and minority candidate who I've interviewed over eleven years. We don't have much attrition but the reality is that I don't think we've ever had more than one female and one black person on the team at once. I've never even interviewed a black female.
This is a problem for us both for philosophical reasons (we want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem) as well as practical. We simply can't fill open requisitions with qualified candidates. Our end customers are not individuals but rather other companies. If you're somebody like Google, you have a third challenge. If you have certain customer groups terribly under-represented on staff, you have a very difficult time being sure that your products will appeal to that demographic so it hurts you twice.
It's not infeasible that a company could go overboard on diversity hiring to a point where they actually are reducing the overall quality of that workforce. But in order for this to happen, they would have to actually have some success hiring diverse candidates. Since this has happened exactly nowhere, it's fair to say that "reverse discrimination" effects are nothing more than angry gray-haired white-men conjecture.
What our technology industry desperately needs is a better primary and secondary education system that lets minority and female candidates realize their full potential so that they can play a bigger part in our workforce expanding the total number of viable candidates and allowing for the developed products to better meet those groups' needs. We're so far away from that right now that talking about any adverse side-effects is nothing more than a weird form of a circle-jerk.
I am not a lawyer, and the standard disclaimer about legal advice applies. Political discrimination, even in housing ads, appears to be legal. You can't list your house for rent and say no children or no Asians or whatever, but you certainly can so no Republicans.
The *mechanics* of that type of discrimination are pretty easy. But if you look in the tech space, doing this would mean you have almost nobody left to hire and wouldn't have a business. In that sense it is quite hard to do. It might be easy to do that in a space where you have a huge surplus of labor (retail as an example). But it would be infeasible in software development.
I pointed out in a sibling post that you need to add another two orders of magnitude to Visas capacity so it's really 4 orders of magnitude. But more importantly, Visa has plans to increase capacity. Bitcoin has architectural issues that make that impossible.
Well in order to be a (useful) currency, there needs to be certain properties, none of which Bitcoin has. The *most* important characteristic of a currency is that there is a stable, effective government that collects taxes in that currency. Until you have a nation-state that mandates use for tax payments, you can have all kinds of things, but you can't have a currency.
That's because the figure appears to be wrong. Visa claims they can do 65k/second as of August 2016 ( https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/... ) or about one per living person per day. And they can grow that number larger if they ever get even close to capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea what Twitter does internally, but we do know what they *should* do. There should be an audit log with tamper protection which means that employees who have reason to access data can do so, but they know that their actions are logged and if the access is improper they will be terminated. This means somebody has to monitor the logs and they have to have actual policy enforcement. If they are lax in any of these areas than there very well may be the equivalent of unfettered access.
So its a two hour boarding process for a one hour and a half hour flight? I would hate to have to board such a large plane for a puddle jump.
What side benefit? Black lung disease? Saves us the cost of providing health care to retired coal miners since they don't live long enough to retire?
The gas purchase is also useful because you can test whether the card is valid or not with a very low risk. I've never seen a gas station attendant come running out if somebody uses a card and it gets declined.
This is true just about everywhere in the world. I have a US card and, when I go to Canada, I simply can't pay at the pump.
This simply isn't true. When you buy gas at a gas pump, the ZIP is submitted along with the mag stripe data and, if it doesn't match, the transaction is declined. I can speak to this first hand as we recently moved and I accidentally (due to habit) entered my old zip code and wasn't able to get the pump to activate until I entered the correct ZIP.
And I could probably convince you that it's good for your health if I gave it a fancy name like "parfait" even if it was mostly just sugar.
Who says that there isn't a focus on male teachers. Maybe it doesn't make the front page of /. but there are plenty of people focused on it. I don't know what schools and school districts do to try to increase diversity and get more male teachers since I don't work in education and have never participated in hiring educators. Do you have some data that STEM companies focus on diversity more than employers in the education industry?
I don't know why *you* would care as I know nothing other than your /. handle. But the reason Google (and other employers care) is because there is a structural shortage of tech workers that isn't going to get better short of an economic calamity. We have a saying. "Reqs are easy. Hiring is hard." Many businesses are having a difficult time because there just aren't enough people to hire.
Whey an individual should care (even if they don't participate in hiring) is that the current situation may (or may not) be the result of some systemic problem that we (as a society) ought to solve.
Nobody is suggesting that there is bias in the hiring process. Well a few nut jobs are claiming some fantasy they call "reverse discrimination." What is being claimed is that the current situation is untenable.
I don't think we are in much disagreement here. If you are in a position of hiring, you should first ask "why do only white males get hired" since that's the problem as it is presented to you. The answer *may* be "only white males enter this job segment." That then brings up the follow-up question of "why do only white males enter this job segment." Of course I cannot make food appealing to every *person* but I can make food that is equally appealing across various demographics. If I'm a large food manufacturer, I can offer vegetarian and gluten-free versions of my products. A *small* employer would ask your first question, conclude that "only white males enter this job segment" and stop there because they simply don't have the resources to address any answer that they might find to the second question. A *large* employer will go on to ask the second question and, depending on the answer, they *may* be able to do something about it. I have one customer who implemented a program where they offered free training to anybody who wanted to sign up. Didn't matter if you had an advanced degree in computer science or were the cashier at Food Lion ( a real example of somebody who showed up ). Based on how well you learned the material they would hire people. They got a lot of good vitality hires this way. Obviously only a small percentage completed but they were well worth bringing on board. I don't know what they did with that program in terms of diversity efforts but it's a great example of where being smart would really pay off. If you emailed all of your employees and said "tell your friends and neighbors" you would end up with a pool similar in demographics to your existing workforce. So what you *should* do is pay specific attention other demographics when advertising the program. (i.e. market specifically to females and minorities) Facebook used to have tools available to do this. But sadly they got used mostly to market real estate only to white people which really is a shame. As a similar analogy, if the owner of an apartment complex wants to reduce crime, they only thing they can really do is install security measures like fences, cameras, and guards. If a *city* wants to reduce crime they can implement programs like free addiction treatment. I have no idea why somebody would not applaud the efforts of Gogole and others to think long-term and try to get more than white males interested in STEM and into jobs in our industry. If what we are doing really makes the world better than having more people involved will only produce more good.
I don't think that anybody would argue with your point. However, if you find that the people who are the "right fit" are all white and male, it's indicative of some sort of problem. Hiring "diverse" candidates who aren't the "right fit" isn't a solution because you are taking an action that (at best, barely) treats a symptom. In the US, white males are 31% of the population. There's nothing about the other 69% of people that would make the unqualified. If you're genuinely looking for the "right fit" but only seem to be able to hire from 31% of the population, it makes sense to take a good hard look at the reasons. An easier analogy is to imagine that you are selling a food item that only appeals to 31% of the population and you want to grow revenue. Well, if you could make it appealing for 100% of the population, that may be easier than trying to win market share among the 31%.
The late night comedy shows often have more actual news content than some programs that purport to be news.
They can delete up on being served a warrant. They absolutely cannot upon being given a subpoena.
This was true historically and net neutrality rules kind of mandated that it stay this way. But now there are new pricing possibilities. It seems that the last mile is the most expensive part and that whatever is in the actual data center is so cheap by comparison that this wouldn't make sense. This is most likely to be used by the current cable providers to force you to pay for their TV service and I think the net neutrality rules were a good idea. Video streaming is high bandwidth though and watching the latest Hollywood movie doesn't seem to be a basic right. And we have libraries and such. So although I don't like the OPs proposal I think it's a bit extreme to call somebody an idiot for trying to analyze a situation.
The only "right" that a city has is whatever right the state grants to it. That's the point. A city is not a real entity. It's just how the state chooses to organize its affairs. The state could decide tomorrow not to have cities, not to have local school boards, et cetera. This is like saying that the janitorial department of a company should have the right to do whatever it wants. It can do whatever the owners of the company say it can do. And the fact that its a corporation owned by a city (which really means owned by the state) doesn't change anything. A government entity can't use a corporate structure to do something that the government entity otherwise couldn't do. Now some states may have state constitutions that enshrine rights to the cities. And in those cases, there may be a need for a state constitution change to accomplish certain things. But a city still have no sovereignty.
Maybe. But to *many* consumers it's just a means of getting Netflix and Facebook. The OPs point is that they should have the option to do this if they want to. Most people hate the forced bundling of ESPN with basic cable for similar reasons. Why do I have to have an internet connection that is capable of delivering Hulu at high speeds when I would rather have a cheaper Netflix-only one.
The thing to remember in the US is that we have a dual-sovereign system of state and federal governments. However, cities are *not* sovereign. They exist completely at the whim of state governments and the state government can organize its cities however it wants. Some states empower cities more than others. Apparently cities in TN don't have much authority and this fight will have to happen at the state level. Unfortunately many cities are islands of smart policies based on critical thinking surrounded by a sea of backward-stupidity. So until the cities get large enough to dominate state politics, they are left struggling at the whims of their incompetent state-level overlords.
I guess you can get modded to +4 just by including a Wikipedia link. Even if what you said was true (it's not), the net result is that Google is a mostly white, mostly male company in the end as are most tech companies. Even if you had a policy to hire every minority/female candidate whose resume got past HR screening, you would still end up with a white male company. I participate in my current employers hiring process. I don't interview candidates until they have gotten past HR but the pool is mostly white and mostly male. We have hired every female and minority candidate who I've interviewed over eleven years. We don't have much attrition but the reality is that I don't think we've ever had more than one female and one black person on the team at once. I've never even interviewed a black female. This is a problem for us both for philosophical reasons (we want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem) as well as practical. We simply can't fill open requisitions with qualified candidates. Our end customers are not individuals but rather other companies. If you're somebody like Google, you have a third challenge. If you have certain customer groups terribly under-represented on staff, you have a very difficult time being sure that your products will appeal to that demographic so it hurts you twice. It's not infeasible that a company could go overboard on diversity hiring to a point where they actually are reducing the overall quality of that workforce. But in order for this to happen, they would have to actually have some success hiring diverse candidates. Since this has happened exactly nowhere, it's fair to say that "reverse discrimination" effects are nothing more than angry gray-haired white-men conjecture. What our technology industry desperately needs is a better primary and secondary education system that lets minority and female candidates realize their full potential so that they can play a bigger part in our workforce expanding the total number of viable candidates and allowing for the developed products to better meet those groups' needs. We're so far away from that right now that talking about any adverse side-effects is nothing more than a weird form of a circle-jerk.
Condoms are not free. But if you recall, one of the mandates of the Patient Protection and Affordable care act was contraceptive coverage.
I am not a lawyer, and the standard disclaimer about legal advice applies. Political discrimination, even in housing ads, appears to be legal. You can't list your house for rent and say no children or no Asians or whatever, but you certainly can so no Republicans.
The *mechanics* of that type of discrimination are pretty easy. But if you look in the tech space, doing this would mean you have almost nobody left to hire and wouldn't have a business. In that sense it is quite hard to do. It might be easy to do that in a space where you have a huge surplus of labor (retail as an example). But it would be infeasible in software development.
I pointed out in a sibling post that you need to add another two orders of magnitude to Visas capacity so it's really 4 orders of magnitude. But more importantly, Visa has plans to increase capacity. Bitcoin has architectural issues that make that impossible.
Except that, if you do this, nobody will pay in the crypto currency since they can get a 50% discount just by using their Visa card!
Well in order to be a (useful) currency, there needs to be certain properties, none of which Bitcoin has. The *most* important characteristic of a currency is that there is a stable, effective government that collects taxes in that currency. Until you have a nation-state that mandates use for tax payments, you can have all kinds of things, but you can't have a currency.
That's because the figure appears to be wrong. Visa claims they can do 65k/second as of August 2016 ( https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/... ) or about one per living person per day. And they can grow that number larger if they ever get even close to capacity.