Kansas is in a state of total collapse, including their education system. The entire state is in a freefall into the shitter, and it's been entirely run by conservative Republicans.
Daemonik gave Kansas as an example of a failing education system. I simply pointed out that in terms of student outcomes, Kansas is doing better than California and many other Democratic states. And I would respond to you that Kansas is also fiscally in much better condition than California.
Furthermore, pointing out that Democratic and progressive policies are utter failures doesn't translate into an endorsement of Republicans. In fact, partisan fools like you on both sides are responsible for the massive dysfunction of government.
As far as urban decay, guess where you'll find it? You'll find it in urban areas 100% of the time, per the very definition of "urban decay". [...] Kansas is a fairly deep red state, and right now Governor Brownback has a lower approval rating here than President Obama.
You're missing the point and thinking in false dichotomies. Democrats and progressives say that higher taxes, more spending, and more progressive policies improve the lives of people. Yet, they are in charge of large numbers of cities and states, and they are not doing well there, even when they have very large majorities and don't have to compromise with anybody, like in San Francisco and California. Pointing out that Democratic and progressive policies are a dismal failure isn't an endorsement of Republicans.
I also notice that when the conservative led state governments cut all the budgets, those cities crumble.
If that is true, it is because progressive state governments force rural communities to subsidize cities. It is a good thing to put a stop to that.
Yet our middle class is vanishing. Perhaps because the well paid manufacturing jobs that were shifted out to China were replaced with part time Wal-Mart jobs and public assistance.
The middle income group has shifted from about 61% in 1970 to about 50% of US households in 2015. That isn't exactly "vanishing". But what it means is that the income distribution is getting longer tailed, mostly towards higher incomes. That is, the middle class is shrinking because more people are getting wealthier. That is a good thing.
Kansas is bleeding teachers. They've had so many teachers move out of the state they can only keep schools open by hiring unlicensed teachers to fill the gaps. The Kansas Supreme Court found the state's funding of schools to be unconstitutional. If that's your metric for "pretty good", don't bother replying, you have nothing worth saying.
No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.
The metric you advocate, namely teacher credentials and increases in spending has nothing to do with student performance, and everything with the financial interests of powerful political groups like teachers' unions. Thanks for demonstrating how fucked up progressive priorities actually are.
Conservative economic voodoo policies have created the greatest wealth disparity this country has seen in it's entire history.
Good: it means more and more people are getting richer. And economics is not a zero-sum game; the fact that more people are getting richer and inequality is increasing doesn't hurt people at the bottom of the income scale.
Welcome to the Oligarchy you conservatives sold us into, but hey as long as we have cops doing genital checks outside public restrooms it was worth it for you I guess.
That "Oligarchy" is precisely what people like you are advocating, with your Keynesian stimulus programs, intrusive social justice programs, and massive support for police and teacher unions. Fiscal conservatives like myself would love to see federal spending massively cut back and control be returned to local government and the people.
Rest of us will be dealing with real life. You won't be missed.
San Francisco isn't "real life". It's an ultra-wealthy enclave that has chosen to turn itself into a filthy dystopia. It is San Francisco that is a "curated life", albeit the curators are doing a piss poor job. In real life, cities are neither as filthy as San Francisco, nor as wealthy.
Hmmm so 'liberals' are responsible for urban decay..
Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
it has nothing to do with conservative 'job creators' creating all those jobs in China that used to be here..
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Not to mention when I think of hellholes these days it's Kansas, Mississippi.. conservative led and falling apart because surprise surprise you can't cut taxes to nothing AND afford even minimal government. Let's not even talk about how they destroy their teachers.
Kansas is doing a lot better in terms of education than, say, California. And the high cost of living in places like California means that people tend be a lot better off elsewhere. For example, Alabama, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia come out ahead of California in terms of average salary once you adjust for cost of living.
It's people like you who simply don't want to face the facts about the failure of progressive and liberal economic policies and advocate more of doing something that keeps failing in practice.
These kinds of fusion reactors have been around for a long time. They are fun and not overly hard to build. They are effectively little more than a big vacuum tube. Here is a Makezine article on how to build one. Here is a Youtube video. They are used as neutron sources, but none of these designs has a prayer of generating more energy than it requires to run. It's certainly a nice science fair project, but it's not a groundbreaking novel discovery.
I used to live in San Francisco, and it used to be tolerant, interesting, welcoming, and a live-and-let-live kind of place. These days, it's a dirty dump, full of intolerant people and massive social problems. Of course, the homeless and drug addicts in the street aren't the cause, they are merely the symptom of a broken political culture and corrupt political class and machinery, a toxic mix of nouveau riche techies, public sector unions, retirees, and "social justice" activists. San Francisco demographics are against it: SF has largely destroyed its middle class, leaving the city to young party goers and retirees, neither of which are the kind of people who care about the long term health of their community. Having left SF, I just hope I don't have to bail these people out with my tax dollars, because SF will get a lot worse before it gets better. So, my recommendation: don't try to fix SF, just leave it. Unless you are a 20-something who likes to party, in which case put up with the stink and dirt for a few more years and have fun before leaving.
Yet there are numerous laws that prohibit this and that in TOC.(e.g. warranty conditions in EU, see Apple's woes in Italy)
Yeah, and have you looked at the European economy, European customer service, or European innovation? They suck. And the more we adopt European style laws, the more the US will suck just like Europe. In the US, restrictions on the ability to enter contracts more freely already hurts people badly; we shouldn't let it get any worse.
And the VR headset is a simple illustration why: you will only get cheap, high quality VR if companies can record and collect this data. There is also no rational reason to keep them from doing so. Al Franken is at least as much of a big, fat idiot as Rush Limbaugh.
it's worth looking through the Terms of Service, because there are some worrisome things included
If you don't like the TOS, then don't buy the gadget! Geez, is that so hard?
This is kind of creepy! Given that Oculus can collect information about how you move and how you’re shaped. The Facebook-owned company can use your location and log your activity, and it can even do so automatically.
Every surveillance camera on the street or in a local mall "can collect information about how you move and how you're shaped", and the people behind those cameras don't just market to you, they can often throw you in jail.
A VR headset like Oculus needs to do this as part of its operations. If you don't like it, then don't buy the gadget. Even better, just stay in your basement and pick up basket weaving as a hobby.
Senator Al Franken, a politician and former comedian who has built his political career on spreading FUD and getting people riled up over nothing
The Snopes article mentions the damages, which are explicitly not fines, but doesn't go into the harassment that resulted from the bakery's going public.
As Snopes says, the $135000 were imposed by BOLI for the act of discrimination alone, contradicting your claims that the high fines were for subsequent abusive conduct.
I believe that a business that serves the public should serve the public, and that discrimination against disliked minorities should be illegal. Such discrimination can continue for a long time, and is harmful.
And as an actual member of such a "disliked minority", I'm telling you that you are full of shit. Gays and lesbians achieved widespread acceptance without such laws; passing them now is just political opportunism.
And do such laws actually help? Of course not. Instead of my employer telling me outright that they are firing me for being gay, they will cook up some other lame excuse. Instead of a baker just telling me that they don't want to bake a cake for my wedding, they are just going to spit into it. And instead of being able to take my business elsewhere, these moronic laws take away my ability to identify homophobic businesses and employers and my choice not to give them my money.
Opposition to drug legalization or decriminalization is strongest from drug companies, police unions, and possibly drug dealers, none of which are obviously leftist.
These organizations are in bed with Democrats.
Where did you get the idea that leftists want to micromanage sexual relations.
Obviously, you haven't been paying attention to critical theory and modern feminism.
I have no idea why you think that leftists in general would want you guys discriminated against.
Of course not! Leftists and progressives always have the best of intentions! They simply don't care who they trample on with their jackboots in the process!
I know who was for and who was against legalizing same-sex marriage in Minnesota, and if you were to get married here you'd primarily (but not exclusively) have leftists to thank for the ability.
Oh goodie! I can have state sanctioned marriage and all the legal and social bullshit that goes along with it! Thanks, but no thanks. State-sanctioned marriage should be abolished altogether, for everybody.
Title IX prosecutions wreck lives? How do they do that, criminal prosecutions?
People get kicked out of college and have the reasons marked in their transcript.
Large fines for refusing to bake a cake? You need to read up on that. The bakers got a small fine for violating the law
The Oregon bakers were fined $135000 by the Oregon Labor Commissioner, as Snopes itself explains. Are you illiterate or are you a liar?
The BOLI Final Order awards $60,000 in damages to Laurel Bowman-Cryer and $75,000 in damages to Rachel Bowman-Cryer for emotional suffering stemming directly from unlawful discrimination. The amounts are damages related to the harm suffered by the Complainants, not fines or civil penalties which are punitive in nature.
In many states, I believe over half, it's legal to discriminate against someone based on sexual orientation.
Good! I hope we can make it legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians in all states again. And I say that as a gay man. These laws are useless and harmful to the very people they ostensibly protect. They amount to politicians and straight progressives taking credit for things that gay men and women fought hard for themselves without any help from the people who now pretend to stand up for us. People like the Clintons and Obama only "evolved" once it served their purposes, and make no mistake about it: when it serves their purposes, they would send us back to psychiatric institutions, labor camps, or prisons, just like progressives and socialists did throughout much of the 20th century. Fuck these hypocrites.
I'd call the War on Drugs to be the biggest unnecessary life-wrecker, and that's something your typical liberal or progressive would like to see go away.
These are people who want to tax sugar, tightly regulate everything from food to taxis, and micromanage sexual relationships, yet somehow you think that they are going to "legalize drugs"? And what exactly have liberal and progressive politicians actually done on drug legalization? Next to nothing, not just because they like to control everybody's lives, but also because they are in bed with lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and police unions. Liberals and progressives are as inconsistent and hypocritical on the War on Drugs as they are on anything else: they claim they favor beneficial and just outcomes, but the policies they actually support and implement cause harm and promote injustice.
Alternately, look at Christians claiming they're being discriminated against or that there's a war against Christmas.
That's comparing apples and oranges. Christians claiming that they are being discriminated against doesn't hurt anybody. Title IX prosecutions and $100000 fines for refusing to bake a cake wreck lives. People legally not getting hired because they are being accused of being racists and homophobic merely for disagreeing with progressive politics, that wrecks lives.
From what I understand, the current definition of a black hole is not an object with a singularity, but a region of space surrounded by an event horizon.
If that is the definition you use, then you can't talk about "our theory" or "a theory that matches observations better", because there is no single theory of "regions of space surrounded by an event horizon". The theory people use to make predictions about black holes is general relativity, and it is important to remember that (1) there are many other possible theories that have event horizons and are indistinguishable from it using current observations, and (2) general relativity can at best be an imperfect, incomplete approximation to a correct theory of gravitation.
When people say that "black holes don't exist", that is basically just a shorthand for saying "black holes as described by general relativity don't exist", and that is a reasonable position to take given all available data.
but..I'm not sure what they are doing here is illegal?
Almost nothing the FBI or the government does is "illegal". We can still discuss whether these activities are wise or whether we should limit them.
How is this any different?
It may not be any different: the FBI shouldn't "circle cities" and collect data on millions of innocent people that way either.
More importantly, any such programs should be out in the open: that is, the FBI should be required to detail what exactly they were doing, why, and how. They should explain what data they collected, and they should have strict criteria for what to retain and what to delete.
Does it matter if you are doing it with a plane or 150 police in unmarked cars? Observing public spaces, even if from altitude, generally has been considered quite okay with the courts.
It should be OK for private citizens. But many actions that are legitimate for private citizens are not legitimate for government.
We are actually paying for this crap? We are paying for thousands of pilots and operators to fly around all day doing nothing? With no measurable results?
Some nice theories here but I'm sticking with my own pet theory: our observable universe exists entirely inside a black hole, slowly being compressed at the center across time.... But since this is all happening simultaneously, even our own instruments and myriad points of reference for myriad "constants" are also being compressed, which means it completely goes over our heads and the ruler we think we're holding is much shorter than it actually is.
That doesn't fit observations or models of black holes. Falling towards a singularity, physical constants and dimensions aren't expected to behave that way.
Black holes is a prediction of our theory which matches observations so far. A recent example is the black hole merger causing the gravitational waves detected at LIGO. Unless we find a different theory which matches observations better and which says that black holes are in fact not black holes but something else, we will think of these objects as black holes.
There are many possible models collapsed objects that match our observations so far. A "black hole" (i.e., an object with a singularity) is only one of many such models, but it happened to be one of the earliest ones, which is why the name stuck. In reality, we already know that black holes in the strict sense don't "match observations", in the sense that they are not compatible with quantum mechanics.
Sony also have a 680 x 400 screen which is.23" in diagonal. That comes in at "retina" level at under an inch.
The "Retina" display is a marketing gimmick and refers to the notion that at a certain resolution, when held at normal viewing distances, the human eye can't distinguish the pixels anymore. That limit is usually actually an optical limit, not a "retinal" limit.
Is it though? Do you really need a display where you are unable to determine the pixels?
You're right: you don't. Even a working 32x32 contact lens display would be incredibly useful. The problem is that any hardware producing images on the retina is orders of magnitude too big to go into a contact lens right now; it's not just the display hardware, it's the optics, power, and wiring.
That is still orders of magnitude away from what's required for a contact lens, plus whatever optics are needed to make it work, plus power supply, plus cooling.
That looks like another one of those patents like "wouldn't it be nice if we had...". The hard work is actually getting the display technology, camera, power, and computing sufficiently miniaturized.
It's your garden, so if you want to spray "weedicide", that's your business. Likewise, if companies only want to hire males (or only females, homosexuals, martians, or whoever), that ought to be their business. If there are a lot of good female developers and, oh, Facebook doesn't hire them, all the better for Microsoft, or smaller companies that get a windfall of potential good employees.
So, there may well be barriers, but kuzb doesn't care, I don't care, and many other people don't care either. It's just like you apparently don't seem to give a fuck why there aren't more men in biology, nursing, social work, counseling, or tax preparation.
The problem is not so much the default voice option but, the fact that these services don't have a general feedback/report issue function for the general population so it relies on the company techs to find and correct issues until something gets big enough that the media is contacting the companies.
Companies do detailed user studies before they make these choices. In addition, they have an excellent feedback mechanism, namely number of sales and number of users.
What you seem to be griping about is that they pay attention to such objective measures, instead of the activism of a bunch of social justice activists.
You are trying, but you are failing. The reason you are failing is that you assume that deviations from overall population statistics in subpopulations require explanations.
I don't know where the rage comes from exactly.
Because you stubbornly insist on promoting ignorant and bad policies that hurt people for nothing more than your own self-aggrandizement.
Slashdot Mirror
Daemonik gave Kansas as an example of a failing education system. I simply pointed out that in terms of student outcomes, Kansas is doing better than California and many other Democratic states. And I would respond to you that Kansas is also fiscally in much better condition than California.
Furthermore, pointing out that Democratic and progressive policies are utter failures doesn't translate into an endorsement of Republicans. In fact, partisan fools like you on both sides are responsible for the massive dysfunction of government.
You're missing the point and thinking in false dichotomies. Democrats and progressives say that higher taxes, more spending, and more progressive policies improve the lives of people. Yet, they are in charge of large numbers of cities and states, and they are not doing well there, even when they have very large majorities and don't have to compromise with anybody, like in San Francisco and California. Pointing out that Democratic and progressive policies are a dismal failure isn't an endorsement of Republicans.
If that is true, it is because progressive state governments force rural communities to subsidize cities. It is a good thing to put a stop to that.
The middle income group has shifted from about 61% in 1970 to about 50% of US households in 2015. That isn't exactly "vanishing". But what it means is that the income distribution is getting longer tailed, mostly towards higher incomes. That is, the middle class is shrinking because more people are getting wealthier. That is a good thing.
No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.
The metric you advocate, namely teacher credentials and increases in spending has nothing to do with student performance, and everything with the financial interests of powerful political groups like teachers' unions. Thanks for demonstrating how fucked up progressive priorities actually are.
Good: it means more and more people are getting richer. And economics is not a zero-sum game; the fact that more people are getting richer and inequality is increasing doesn't hurt people at the bottom of the income scale.
That "Oligarchy" is precisely what people like you are advocating, with your Keynesian stimulus programs, intrusive social justice programs, and massive support for police and teacher unions. Fiscal conservatives like myself would love to see federal spending massively cut back and control be returned to local government and the people.
San Francisco isn't "real life". It's an ultra-wealthy enclave that has chosen to turn itself into a filthy dystopia. It is San Francisco that is a "curated life", albeit the curators are doing a piss poor job. In real life, cities are neither as filthy as San Francisco, nor as wealthy.
Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Kansas is doing a lot better in terms of education than, say, California. And the high cost of living in places like California means that people tend be a lot better off elsewhere. For example, Alabama, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia come out ahead of California in terms of average salary once you adjust for cost of living.
It's people like you who simply don't want to face the facts about the failure of progressive and liberal economic policies and advocate more of doing something that keeps failing in practice.
These kinds of fusion reactors have been around for a long time. They are fun and not overly hard to build. They are effectively little more than a big vacuum tube. Here is a Makezine article on how to build one. Here is a Youtube video. They are used as neutron sources, but none of these designs has a prayer of generating more energy than it requires to run. It's certainly a nice science fair project, but it's not a groundbreaking novel discovery.
I used to live in San Francisco, and it used to be tolerant, interesting, welcoming, and a live-and-let-live kind of place. These days, it's a dirty dump, full of intolerant people and massive social problems. Of course, the homeless and drug addicts in the street aren't the cause, they are merely the symptom of a broken political culture and corrupt political class and machinery, a toxic mix of nouveau riche techies, public sector unions, retirees, and "social justice" activists. San Francisco demographics are against it: SF has largely destroyed its middle class, leaving the city to young party goers and retirees, neither of which are the kind of people who care about the long term health of their community. Having left SF, I just hope I don't have to bail these people out with my tax dollars, because SF will get a lot worse before it gets better. So, my recommendation: don't try to fix SF, just leave it. Unless you are a 20-something who likes to party, in which case put up with the stink and dirt for a few more years and have fun before leaving.
Yeah, and have you looked at the European economy, European customer service, or European innovation? They suck. And the more we adopt European style laws, the more the US will suck just like Europe. In the US, restrictions on the ability to enter contracts more freely already hurts people badly; we shouldn't let it get any worse.
And the VR headset is a simple illustration why: you will only get cheap, high quality VR if companies can record and collect this data. There is also no rational reason to keep them from doing so. Al Franken is at least as much of a big, fat idiot as Rush Limbaugh.
If you don't like the TOS, then don't buy the gadget! Geez, is that so hard?
Every surveillance camera on the street or in a local mall "can collect information about how you move and how you're shaped", and the people behind those cameras don't just market to you, they can often throw you in jail.
A VR headset like Oculus needs to do this as part of its operations. If you don't like it, then don't buy the gadget. Even better, just stay in your basement and pick up basket weaving as a hobby.
There, FTFY
As Snopes says, the $135000 were imposed by BOLI for the act of discrimination alone, contradicting your claims that the high fines were for subsequent abusive conduct.
And as an actual member of such a "disliked minority", I'm telling you that you are full of shit. Gays and lesbians achieved widespread acceptance without such laws; passing them now is just political opportunism.
And do such laws actually help? Of course not. Instead of my employer telling me outright that they are firing me for being gay, they will cook up some other lame excuse. Instead of a baker just telling me that they don't want to bake a cake for my wedding, they are just going to spit into it. And instead of being able to take my business elsewhere, these moronic laws take away my ability to identify homophobic businesses and employers and my choice not to give them my money.
These organizations are in bed with Democrats.
Obviously, you haven't been paying attention to critical theory and modern feminism.
Of course not! Leftists and progressives always have the best of intentions! They simply don't care who they trample on with their jackboots in the process!
Oh goodie! I can have state sanctioned marriage and all the legal and social bullshit that goes along with it! Thanks, but no thanks. State-sanctioned marriage should be abolished altogether, for everybody.
People get kicked out of college and have the reasons marked in their transcript.
The Oregon bakers were fined $135000 by the Oregon Labor Commissioner, as Snopes itself explains. Are you illiterate or are you a liar?
Good! I hope we can make it legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians in all states again. And I say that as a gay man. These laws are useless and harmful to the very people they ostensibly protect. They amount to politicians and straight progressives taking credit for things that gay men and women fought hard for themselves without any help from the people who now pretend to stand up for us. People like the Clintons and Obama only "evolved" once it served their purposes, and make no mistake about it: when it serves their purposes, they would send us back to psychiatric institutions, labor camps, or prisons, just like progressives and socialists did throughout much of the 20th century. Fuck these hypocrites.
These are people who want to tax sugar, tightly regulate everything from food to taxis, and micromanage sexual relationships, yet somehow you think that they are going to "legalize drugs"? And what exactly have liberal and progressive politicians actually done on drug legalization? Next to nothing, not just because they like to control everybody's lives, but also because they are in bed with lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and police unions. Liberals and progressives are as inconsistent and hypocritical on the War on Drugs as they are on anything else: they claim they favor beneficial and just outcomes, but the policies they actually support and implement cause harm and promote injustice.
That's comparing apples and oranges. Christians claiming that they are being discriminated against doesn't hurt anybody. Title IX prosecutions and $100000 fines for refusing to bake a cake wreck lives. People legally not getting hired because they are being accused of being racists and homophobic merely for disagreeing with progressive politics, that wrecks lives.
If that is the definition you use, then you can't talk about "our theory" or "a theory that matches observations better", because there is no single theory of "regions of space surrounded by an event horizon". The theory people use to make predictions about black holes is general relativity, and it is important to remember that (1) there are many other possible theories that have event horizons and are indistinguishable from it using current observations, and (2) general relativity can at best be an imperfect, incomplete approximation to a correct theory of gravitation.
When people say that "black holes don't exist", that is basically just a shorthand for saying "black holes as described by general relativity don't exist", and that is a reasonable position to take given all available data.
Almost nothing the FBI or the government does is "illegal". We can still discuss whether these activities are wise or whether we should limit them.
It may not be any different: the FBI shouldn't "circle cities" and collect data on millions of innocent people that way either.
More importantly, any such programs should be out in the open: that is, the FBI should be required to detail what exactly they were doing, why, and how. They should explain what data they collected, and they should have strict criteria for what to retain and what to delete.
It should be OK for private citizens. But many actions that are legitimate for private citizens are not legitimate for government.
We are actually paying for this crap? We are paying for thousands of pilots and operators to fly around all day doing nothing? With no measurable results?
That doesn't fit observations or models of black holes. Falling towards a singularity, physical constants and dimensions aren't expected to behave that way.
People have thought about existence inside a black hole, and it looks very different.
There are many possible models collapsed objects that match our observations so far. A "black hole" (i.e., an object with a singularity) is only one of many such models, but it happened to be one of the earliest ones, which is why the name stuck. In reality, we already know that black holes in the strict sense don't "match observations", in the sense that they are not compatible with quantum mechanics.
The "Retina" display is a marketing gimmick and refers to the notion that at a certain resolution, when held at normal viewing distances, the human eye can't distinguish the pixels anymore. That limit is usually actually an optical limit, not a "retinal" limit.
You're right: you don't. Even a working 32x32 contact lens display would be incredibly useful. The problem is that any hardware producing images on the retina is orders of magnitude too big to go into a contact lens right now; it's not just the display hardware, it's the optics, power, and wiring.
Here is a discussion of some of the issues:
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
You're making the incorrect assumption that a computer needs to experience emotions in order to elicit them in others.
That is still orders of magnitude away from what's required for a contact lens, plus whatever optics are needed to make it work, plus power supply, plus cooling.
That looks like another one of those patents like "wouldn't it be nice if we had...". The hard work is actually getting the display technology, camera, power, and computing sufficiently miniaturized.
It's your garden, so if you want to spray "weedicide", that's your business. Likewise, if companies only want to hire males (or only females, homosexuals, martians, or whoever), that ought to be their business. If there are a lot of good female developers and, oh, Facebook doesn't hire them, all the better for Microsoft, or smaller companies that get a windfall of potential good employees.
So, there may well be barriers, but kuzb doesn't care, I don't care, and many other people don't care either. It's just like you apparently don't seem to give a fuck why there aren't more men in biology, nursing, social work, counseling, or tax preparation.
Companies do detailed user studies before they make these choices. In addition, they have an excellent feedback mechanism, namely number of sales and number of users.
What you seem to be griping about is that they pay attention to such objective measures, instead of the activism of a bunch of social justice activists.
You are trying, but you are failing. The reason you are failing is that you assume that deviations from overall population statistics in subpopulations require explanations.
Because you stubbornly insist on promoting ignorant and bad policies that hurt people for nothing more than your own self-aggrandizement.