If they've been in the industry that long, they at least know command prompts and batch files. Seems like those skills can most easily be transferred to Linux or Mac CLI and scripting rather than anything else.
Anywhere else you can map analogs from Windows to the systems and applications that actually need support would be good candidates..
Why don't you work on the REAL problems with long distance transportation? Even if the flight takes just 30 minutes, it'll still take you 2 hours to check-in and get through security and another hour to claim your luggage.
Not exactly. The study in the article cites two previous studies that showed that identical pitches were more likely to get funding if they were made by men than if they were made by women. This study proceeded from the assumption that VCs were already biased in selecting all male teams because the previous studies had already demonstrated the pitch bias. This study was looking at the outcomes regardless of how the pitch was given.
There's still the possibility of flaws in the previous studies, nobody on this thread has dug down to level 3 on either side of this debate.
There are also at least three scientific studies referenced in this thread that support that position. The main one in the article and two cited in the main study that have been referenced here.
I have yet to see anyone in this thread cite a study that supports the position that the apparent bias is caused by factors other than perceived gender.
You're assuming that the cross-dressers were detected as such by the VCs. The whole point of the study would have been to make the cross-dressing indetectable. I would also expect some "Pat" or "Chris" characters that were dressed ambiguously to serve as a control.
This second one is interesting, as it implies there was cross-dressing involved so that males were perceived as women and vice versa. Either that or I don't understand the difference between sex and gender as sociological terms. "More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"
The difference between the scientists and most folks on this thread is that they're willing to develop new studies that test the alternative hypotheses proposed in opposition to their own conclusions. There's still the possibility of selection bias in promotion and media coverage where studies that confirm desired outcomes are touted while others are quietly shelved. If the pharmaceutical industry can do that, no reason sociologists can't. But eventually you reach a point where studies build on each other in ways that address all the alternatives and what you're left with is causation or at least high probability of causation vs. a small set of significantly less likely explanations.
This at least is a slightly more plausible version of the hypothesis than originally stated, but it boils down to "VCs are more attuned to funding aggressive business plans and presentations" and assuming that such business plans are more likely to come from all-male teams.
"women tend to value work-life balance, and men are more likely to value 'providing for the family' and put in extra hours to get that promotion" - this runs completely counter to your assumption that the management teams on startups represent the top 1% of business people in the area.
You can't make an assumption that the top tier people (male or female) are different from average people and then explain away a data bias by using generalizations that apply to average people. You use the example that the top male may be more different from average men and women than the average men and women are from each other, but there is no corollary that the top men and top women are that much different or that the top women are less different from the average than the top men. (Note to all: I am using bias in a statistical sense of a data correlation that is skewed toward a particular subset not in the sense of a conscious or unconscious discrimination)
"Fact: women present a higher risk to VC funding than men.
Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home)."
You are conflating work/personal issues suffered by the workforce at large with issues suffered by female executives. 1) Female entrepreneurs generally can afford a nanny. 2) If a female entrepreneur is on a startup's management team, don't you think there's an internal commitment to see it through? 3) Men may not have family life commitments (which is a statement I firmly disagree with, but I am accepting as a premise for this debate), but they have their own risks. They are far more likely to jump to a competitor for a bump in salary and/or control. This can be a risk on both ends of the jump. See recent lawsuits involving Oculus and Facebook/Zenimax.
Actually...VCs typically are mingling money from other investors with their own. So if the VCs are ignoring potential opportunities for a reason unrelated to the sales pitch, they are potentially leaving money on the table and costing their investors.
Correlation is not causation, and I'm sure this isn't a conscious discrimination in nearly all cases, but do any of you really believe that women are 75% less effective at developing any component of a business model than men? Financially? In HR? Marketing?
More accurately, as we increase our use of renewables, this will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption. And as other posters have indicated, traditional methods of treating sewage release lots of greenhouse gases anyway. I do have to question how much energy comes out of this vs. all the energy that gets put in by both the conversion process and the refining process.
Maybe this will satisfy the needs for petroleum-based lubricants when most of our fuel needs are met by other methods.
One would think that Attorneys General are good enough lawyers to understand the concepts of legal standing and tangible harm. But if they had they wouldn't have wasted taxpayer dollars filing suit on these grounds. Politics as usual in the good old USA.
Well the flip side of "you didn't pay us to do x" is that government contracts don't allow substitutions and providing services free of charge can be viewed as a form of "false statement" or even bribery -- you're supposed to document the exact work you perform and bill for it accordingly.
Keep in mind: small to medium companies are also terrible at maintaining security patch levels. This isn't just an issue with government contracts and fortune 500 companies. If you look at the headline breaches and vulnerability disclosures over the past few years, most of those were under internal IT departments even if the breach came in from another source. And how does a corporate IT department/contractor fix a vulnerability on a device where the manufacturer hasn't issued a patch and all comparable products have similar issues? Think security cameras for example.
Regarding government contractors, my theory is that all of the contractors are equally bad. You can get horror stories about IBM, Accenture, CSC, and all of them.
The other factor is the state budgeting and hiring processes are not geared toward hiring large IT departments..No state has a large internal IT department to serve the entire state. Each administrative area has its own IT department. The same applies at the federal level. These agency IT departments could be permanently staffed for maintenance, but no legislature is going to fund enough IT personnel on a permanent basis for project work -- once a project is done you have all these extra employees sitting around, and they can't be fired except for cause.
Two ways out of this: Modify state hiring laws to allow term contracts of x months or y years so that government IT departments can directly handle project work with temporary hires. Also consolidate agency IT departments to a statewide department of IT services. That would give many of the benefits of contracting and centralized management, without the overhead of procurement, corporate profits etc.
The difficulty is that there are many interest groups who would oppose both of these initiatives. Government workers would oppose the term hiring provisions and agency heads would oppose having their IT departments pulled from their direct administration.
Well the Republicans do have a history of this. The reason almost all scandals nowadays have "-gate" appended to them (for example Deflate-gate) is because of the original Watergate scandal. That's when staffers in the Nixon Whitehouse hired burglars to break into the DNC offices in the Watergate office complex during the 1972 presidential campaign.
Ironically, many of the other activities considered.scandalous at the time now seem routine: the use of the FBI and IRS to harass or entrap political dissidents was a big deal back then during the investigation.
Flip the question around: Is it ok to lay people off without paying severance? (Or by playing games like low-ball job "offers" that force you to quit and lose severance.)
Considering the games that HR departments play, costing workers millions of dollars in compensation, quitting without notice is trivial by comparison.
From where I stand, paying 6-7% on everything I buy constitutes "paying taxes". So I'm not sure where you get the idea that the poor don't pay taxes.
The power to define the tax rules is vested in Congress, so government can put whatever conditions it wants on benefits to the poor, AND it can put whatever conditions it wants on tax deductions. It could even put the SAME conditions on benefits and tax deductions. It's all a question of what congress is willing to enact. Fortunately for all of the folks who think a drug-testing requirement for tax deductions is government overreach, a majority in Congress feels the same way.
Equality of opportunity cannot exist without redistributing wealth. Equality of opportunity is basically a meritocracy - people advance according to their own skills and ability. But it has already been demonstrated that Meritocracy inevitably devolves into oligarchy -- people rise to power, wealth and/or fame based on their merits, but unless you redistribute that wealth, power, or fame, their children have a disruptive advantage. This is plainly seen in the way we talk about the Kennedys the Bushes and the Clintons as "dynasties". Do you think the more recent generations of Kennedys and Bushes would have attained office and name recognition without the power built up by their parents and grandparents? And once attaining power, people use that power to reduce equality of opportunity. In court, the person who can afford the best lawyer (or the most lawyers) is much more likely to win, regardless of the merits. Rich donors get personal appointments with government officials, Joe Blow gets a glimpse of Donald or Hillary at a political rally.
These advantages extend to the corporate world as well. The reason Comcast and AT&T are able to succeed despite their crappy service and high cost structure is because they've used their wealth and power to establish a regulatory climate where opportunity is NOT equal in the ISP market.
Deductions aren't gifts... correct. They are money you never owed...incorrect. They are adjustments the government allows you to make to your taxable income based on certain qualifying conditions. One reason the tax code is so complicated is that many deductions have really arcane formulas for the qualifying conditions.
So the bottom line is that the government can apply any condition it wants for eligibility for a deduction, just as it can apply any condition it wants to be eligible for benefit. There is nothing unfair about it. The rules for the deductions have to be approved by congress. If they want a deduction to only apply to rat-catchers in cities with 50,000 population, that can be a rule.. . . Or a "clean living" requirement for certain deductions that says you only get them if you haven't been convicted of a felony and can pass a drug test.
Rather than make this a class war, a smart way to do it would just be to say you don't qualify for any itemized deductions regardless of income level if you don't pass the "clean living" standard. You can still take the standard deduction for yourself and dependents, and maybe the child tax credit, but that would be it.
Yeah, if nothing else, the automation of McDonald's may serve to properly change the focus from "foreign workers are stealing our jobs" to "robots are taking our jobs". The historic arguments that new jobs will come along may not be relevant. Yes some new jobs like robot tech will be created, but either the job will be so simple that another robot can do it, or it will be so complex that entry level workers and long-term unskilled workers won't be able to perform the work. The key difference now is that the robots are reaching the point where they can permanently displace many or even most forms of unskilled labor and there is a large portion of the unskilled labor class that simply don't have the learning capacity to progress out of that trap.
A basic income law would be one answer - it would allow unskilled labor to survive while retraining full time or just to survive in the face of inability to learn new skills. But if you look at the historic antipathy in the U.S. to any kind of a taxpayer-funded handout even with stringent eligibility requirements, you can see that a basic income is going to be a loooonng, 20-30 year debate with the laissez-faire capitalists and IP rent-seekers screaming "illegal taking" every step of the way.
And then there's the question of how to fund such a program. A tax, or elimination of depreciation, on robots and other autonomous capital equipment might help, but probably wouldn't cover. It would also probably spark a move toward leasing robots.
Eventually, we'll reach a point where the social costs of a large "unproductive" and "unemployable" class will force some really hard decisions. I think that very long-term, either the US socio-economic system will be forced into democratic socialism with state ownership of sufficient property and industry to fund basic income or pseudo-productive employment, or there will be a violent revolution to outlaw AI in all forms, as in the Butlerian Jihad back-story of "Dune". (And yes, all you surveilling governments out there, this is how you use "jihad" in a sentence without being a terrorist.)
Katamari Damacy...Sounds like prior art to me...call the lawyers!
And if not Katamari, I'm pretty sure Tom & Jerry cartoons portrayed the concept of plastering pedestrians to the hood of your car decades ago.
On a more practical note, how does the coating distinguish between pedestrians and road dirt? Or is there a hidden "razor blade" cost here that you have to refresh the coating every month or so? Additional accident liability if you didn't wash your car and the pedestrian failed to stick?
Wouldn't that be the wheel? Or if it has to be something that is used standalone, one of the other simple machines invented in ancient times: the inclined plane (including screws) or the lever (mostly construction and cargo cranes in modern times).
Slashdot Mirror
Which explains why people are getting so obese. They're eating at Panera more and more often...It will only get worse as McD's automates.
If they've been in the industry that long, they at least know command prompts and batch files. Seems like those skills can most easily be transferred to Linux or Mac CLI and scripting rather than anything else.
Anywhere else you can map analogs from Windows to the systems and applications that actually need support would be good candidates..
Why don't you work on the REAL problems with long distance transportation? Even if the flight takes just 30 minutes, it'll still take you 2 hours to check-in and get through security and another hour to claim your luggage.
Not exactly. The study in the article cites two previous studies that showed that identical pitches were more likely to get funding if they were made by men than if they were made by women. This study proceeded from the assumption that VCs were already biased in selecting all male teams because the previous studies had already demonstrated the pitch bias. This study was looking at the outcomes regardless of how the pitch was given.
There's still the possibility of flaws in the previous studies, nobody on this thread has dug down to level 3 on either side of this debate.
There are also at least three scientific studies referenced in this thread that support that position. The main one in the article and two cited in the main study that have been referenced here.
I have yet to see anyone in this thread cite a study that supports the position that the apparent bias is caused by factors other than perceived gender.
You're assuming that the cross-dressers were detected as such by the VCs. The whole point of the study would have been to make the cross-dressing indetectable. I would also expect some "Pat" or "Chris" characters that were dressed ambiguously to serve as a control.
This second one is interesting, as it implies there was cross-dressing involved so that males were perceived as women and vice versa. Either that or I don't understand the difference between sex and gender as sociological terms.
"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"
The difference between the scientists and most folks on this thread is that they're willing to develop new studies that test the alternative hypotheses proposed in opposition to their own conclusions. There's still the possibility of selection bias in promotion and media coverage where studies that confirm desired outcomes are touted while others are quietly shelved. If the pharmaceutical industry can do that, no reason sociologists can't. But eventually you reach a point where studies build on each other in ways that address all the alternatives and what you're left with is causation or at least high probability of causation vs. a small set of significantly less likely explanations.
This at least is a slightly more plausible version of the hypothesis than originally stated, but it boils down to "VCs are more attuned to funding aggressive business plans and presentations" and assuming that such business plans are more likely to come from all-male teams.
"women tend to value work-life balance, and men are more likely to value 'providing for the family' and put in extra hours to get that promotion" - this runs completely counter to your assumption that the management teams on startups represent the top 1% of business people in the area.
You can't make an assumption that the top tier people (male or female) are different from average people and then explain away a data bias by using generalizations that apply to average people. You use the example that the top male may be more different from average men and women than the average men and women are from each other, but there is no corollary that the top men and top women are that much different or that the top women are less different from the average than the top men. (Note to all: I am using bias in a statistical sense of a data correlation that is skewed toward a particular subset not in the sense of a conscious or unconscious discrimination)
"Fact: women present a higher risk to VC funding than men.
Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home)."
You are conflating work/personal issues suffered by the workforce at large with issues suffered by female executives.
1) Female entrepreneurs generally can afford a nanny.
2) If a female entrepreneur is on a startup's management team, don't you think there's an internal commitment to see it through?
3) Men may not have family life commitments (which is a statement I firmly disagree with, but I am accepting as a premise for this debate), but they have their own risks. They are far more likely to jump to a competitor for a bump in salary and/or control. This can be a risk on both ends of the jump. See recent lawsuits involving Oculus and Facebook/Zenimax.
Actually...VCs typically are mingling money from other investors with their own. So if the VCs are ignoring potential opportunities for a reason unrelated to the sales pitch, they are potentially leaving money on the table and costing their investors.
Correlation is not causation, and I'm sure this isn't a conscious discrimination in nearly all cases, but do any of you really believe that women are 75% less effective at developing any component of a business model than men? Financially? In HR? Marketing?
More accurately, as we increase our use of renewables, this will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption. And as other posters have indicated, traditional methods of treating sewage release lots of greenhouse gases anyway. I do have to question how much energy comes out of this vs. all the energy that gets put in by both the conversion process and the refining process.
Maybe this will satisfy the needs for petroleum-based lubricants when most of our fuel needs are met by other methods.
One would think that Attorneys General are good enough lawyers to understand the concepts of legal standing and tangible harm. But if they had they wouldn't have wasted taxpayer dollars filing suit on these grounds. Politics as usual in the good old USA.
Now I know why so there are so many expat gamers from the UK in the US and various countries in the EU.
Well the flip side of "you didn't pay us to do x" is that government contracts don't allow substitutions and providing services free of charge can be viewed as a form of "false statement" or even bribery -- you're supposed to document the exact work you perform and bill for it accordingly.
Keep in mind: small to medium companies are also terrible at maintaining security patch levels. This isn't just an issue with government contracts and fortune 500 companies. If you look at the headline breaches and vulnerability disclosures over the past few years, most of those were under internal IT departments even if the breach came in from another source. And how does a corporate IT department/contractor fix a vulnerability on a device where the manufacturer hasn't issued a patch and all comparable products have similar issues? Think security cameras for example.
Regarding government contractors, my theory is that all of the contractors are equally bad. You can get horror stories about IBM, Accenture, CSC, and all of them.
The other factor is the state budgeting and hiring processes are not geared toward hiring large IT departments..No state has a large internal IT department to serve the entire state. Each administrative area has its own IT department. The same applies at the federal level. These agency IT departments could be permanently staffed for maintenance, but no legislature is going to fund enough IT personnel on a permanent basis for project work -- once a project is done you have all these extra employees sitting around, and they can't be fired except for cause.
Two ways out of this: Modify state hiring laws to allow term contracts of x months or y years so that government IT departments can directly handle project work with temporary hires. Also consolidate agency IT departments to a statewide department of IT services. That would give many of the benefits of contracting and centralized management, without the overhead of procurement, corporate profits etc.
The difficulty is that there are many interest groups who would oppose both of these initiatives. Government workers would oppose the term hiring provisions and agency heads would oppose having their IT departments pulled from their direct administration.
Well the Republicans do have a history of this. The reason almost all scandals nowadays have "-gate" appended to them (for example Deflate-gate) is because of the original Watergate scandal. That's when staffers in the Nixon Whitehouse hired burglars to break into the DNC offices in the Watergate office complex during the 1972 presidential campaign.
Ironically, many of the other activities considered.scandalous at the time now seem routine: the use of the FBI and IRS to harass or entrap political dissidents was a big deal back then during the investigation.
I don't think Vlad P is _that_ invested in having Trump win. If he is, Trump's ties to him go deeper than mere admiration.
More likely is that someone else has hired the hackers. Those super PACs need to spend their money somewhere.
But I'd say the most likely scenario is that the Republicans have been hacked too, but their security is so crap they haven't even realized it.
Flip the question around: Is it ok to lay people off without paying severance? (Or by playing games like low-ball job "offers" that force you to quit and lose severance.)
Considering the games that HR departments play, costing workers millions of dollars in compensation, quitting without notice is trivial by comparison.
From where I stand, paying 6-7% on everything I buy constitutes "paying taxes". So I'm not sure where you get the idea that the poor don't pay taxes.
The power to define the tax rules is vested in Congress, so government can put whatever conditions it wants on benefits to the poor, AND it can put whatever conditions it wants on tax deductions. It could even put the SAME conditions on benefits and tax deductions. It's all a question of what congress is willing to enact. Fortunately for all of the folks who think a drug-testing requirement for tax deductions is government overreach, a majority in Congress feels the same way.
Equality of opportunity cannot exist without redistributing wealth. Equality of opportunity is basically a meritocracy - people advance according to their own skills and ability. But it has already been demonstrated that Meritocracy inevitably devolves into oligarchy -- people rise to power, wealth and/or fame based on their merits, but unless you redistribute that wealth, power, or fame, their children have a disruptive advantage. This is plainly seen in the way we talk about the Kennedys the Bushes and the Clintons as "dynasties". Do you think the more recent generations of Kennedys and Bushes would have attained office and name recognition without the power built up by their parents and grandparents? And once attaining power, people use that power to reduce equality of opportunity. In court, the person who can afford the best lawyer (or the most lawyers) is much more likely to win, regardless of the merits. Rich donors get personal appointments with government officials, Joe Blow gets a glimpse of Donald or Hillary at a political rally.
These advantages extend to the corporate world as well. The reason Comcast and AT&T are able to succeed despite their crappy service and high cost structure is because they've used their wealth and power to establish a regulatory climate where opportunity is NOT equal in the ISP market.
Deductions aren't gifts... correct. They are money you never owed...incorrect. They are adjustments the government allows you to make to your taxable income based on certain qualifying conditions. One reason the tax code is so complicated is that many deductions have really arcane formulas for the qualifying conditions.
So the bottom line is that the government can apply any condition it wants for eligibility for a deduction, just as it can apply any condition it wants to be eligible for benefit. There is nothing unfair about it. The rules for the deductions have to be approved by congress. If they want a deduction to only apply to rat-catchers in cities with 50,000 population, that can be a rule.. . . Or a "clean living" requirement for certain deductions that says you only get them if you haven't been convicted of a felony and can pass a drug test.
Rather than make this a class war, a smart way to do it would just be to say you don't qualify for any itemized deductions regardless of income level if you don't pass the "clean living" standard. You can still take the standard deduction for yourself and dependents, and maybe the child tax credit, but that would be it.
Yeah, if nothing else, the automation of McDonald's may serve to properly change the focus from "foreign workers are stealing our jobs" to "robots are taking our jobs". The historic arguments that new jobs will come along may not be relevant. Yes some new jobs like robot tech will be created, but either the job will be so simple that another robot can do it, or it will be so complex that entry level workers and long-term unskilled workers won't be able to perform the work. The key difference now is that the robots are reaching the point where they can permanently displace many or even most forms of unskilled labor and there is a large portion of the unskilled labor class that simply don't have the learning capacity to progress out of that trap.
A basic income law would be one answer - it would allow unskilled labor to survive while retraining full time or just to survive in the face of inability to learn new skills. But if you look at the historic antipathy in the U.S. to any kind of a taxpayer-funded handout even with stringent eligibility requirements, you can see that a basic income is going to be a loooonng, 20-30 year debate with the laissez-faire capitalists and IP rent-seekers screaming "illegal taking" every step of the way.
And then there's the question of how to fund such a program. A tax, or elimination of depreciation, on robots and other autonomous capital equipment might help, but probably wouldn't cover. It would also probably spark a move toward leasing robots.
Eventually, we'll reach a point where the social costs of a large "unproductive" and "unemployable" class will force some really hard decisions. I think that very long-term, either the US socio-economic system will be forced into democratic socialism with state ownership of sufficient property and industry to fund basic income or pseudo-productive employment, or there will be a violent revolution to outlaw AI in all forms, as in the Butlerian Jihad back-story of "Dune". (And yes, all you surveilling governments out there, this is how you use "jihad" in a sentence without being a terrorist.)
Maybe it's more like Velcro than glue??? That would at least leave the option of something that can grab onto fabric but not skin or dust.
Katamari Damacy...Sounds like prior art to me...call the lawyers!
And if not Katamari, I'm pretty sure Tom & Jerry cartoons portrayed the concept of plastering pedestrians to the hood of your car decades ago.
On a more practical note, how does the coating distinguish between pedestrians and road dirt? Or is there a hidden "razor blade" cost here that you have to refresh the coating every month or so? Additional accident liability if you didn't wash your car and the pedestrian failed to stick?
Wouldn't that be the wheel? Or if it has to be something that is used standalone, one of the other simple machines invented in ancient times: the inclined plane (including screws) or the lever (mostly construction and cargo cranes in modern times).