I think it really depends upon which intelligence agency we're talking about. There's probably your rank and file bottom feeders that couldn't find their ass with a map and a flashlight, but that's true of any organization and I'm pretty sure that anyone working in the private sector can point to several pristine examples of such individuals. However, there are also some government types that create things like Stuxnet and do some other nasty bits of work that the public will never hear about, so there are clearly a few competent individuals working for the government.
I don't think government intelligence agencies would be a complete replacement for private sector companies, but there are clearly cases where the government is contracting with some private company or has legislated that citizens are required to use some service provided by a third party. The government should certainly work to ensure that those organizations don't have any glaring security holes.
A government that worked for its people would be helping companies like Apple, Google, etc. to harden their security systems instead of trying to pry into them. That may make it more difficult for law enforcement to arrest or convict a few people, but it does significantly more to protect citizens from scammers and other threats.
I'd like to think that if the intelligence agencies devoted their time and effort to helping companies identify security weaknesses and shore them up, we wouldn't be seeing massive data breaches every few months.
It really doesn't matter what those governments do because criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme to use in order to separate fools from their money. Defenses from the government only come after the thieves are out of the barn. That we see crytpocurrencies being used as such a vehicle is a matter of coincidence and not such much as something inherent to them. They are only useful in scams because they have shown extraordinary growth that gets everyone salivating at the thought of how much money they could make and also happen to be terribly misunderstood (if understood at all) by a majority of people.
I'm not even sure how a government could go about regulating a cryptocurrency like bitcoin outside of controlling a majority of the network. Otherwise there's little they can do outside of just banning it outright, but as we've seen with drugs that's not really going to deter anyone. I suspect that they could regulate ICOs which is where most of the scams seem to operate, but that's entirely different from regulating a cryptocurrency itself which can exist outside of an ICO.
I think that most of this is pointless saber rattling as no one in government has any better understanding of cryptocurrency than your average person on the street, but I expect we'll see plenty of comments from representatives with a "series of tubes" level of understanding.
But the congestion is also tied to the throughput. If a user can transmit more data in a given time slice they can finish sooner (or require fewer time slices to get their data) which makes it faster for the next person to get what they want and they're able to get that a little bit faster as well. The faster you can clear out someone waiting, the more it keeps people from piling up.
However, this assumes that data use is fixed and we know from history that as more bandwidth becomes available, consumption increases as well. Eventually though we're likely to reach a point where demand for more data doesn't scale in step with availability, but I think that this will help out considerably until people find new ways to consume mobile data.
Indeed. Data caps need to increase significantly, or having a 5G connection will be as pointless as owning a Lamborghini that can only be driven on a 300 meter test track enclosed by brick walls.
The true status symbol is the lackey walking behind you, carrying your phone and helping you hold it to make a call.
Maybe if you're a peasant.
Unless you've got at least four lackeys carrying your giant phone around in a palanquin everyone is going to know you're a nobody. You'll probably want another lackey or two spreading rose pedals for good measure.
Is it really that surprising to see these kind of results? You have something that has both seen incredible growth in terms of raw percentage increases and is ill-understood at best by most people. This makes it an incredibly good target for Ponzi schemes and other common financial scams because people see the big returns and get greedy and have no idea if they're being fed a line of complete bullshit when it comes to the technology itself.
Even my father has heard about crytocurrencies and has asked me questions about them and he's generally not interested in technology in the slightest. I'm reminded of the old quote about someone realizing they needed to get out of the market when their shoeshiner was giving out stock tips.
Let's let the consumers be the judge of what's a danger to themselves. People who try to go around making laws and rules for someone else's good tend to do a spectacularly poor job of it and generally cause just as much harm as good, even in the case where they're well-meaning instead of clearly under some ulterior motives as is the case here.
If people want to accept some increased risk (which I don't believe exists) by using third party repair services, that's on them. If a company wants to warn their customers about the possibility of danger, that's as far as they should go.
Gawker's mistake was not knowing Thiel was gunning for them.
Or you could say that their mistake was refusing to take down a sex tape after being ordered to by the court. It doesn't matter how much someone is gunning for you if you don't do stupid shit to piss off a judge.
If you think computers are a dead-end career I'm not sure what you'd suggest going into. Computer programming and robotics engineering are the last jobs, because those are the fields that are trying to figure out how to replace every other field and eventually their own selves.
I wonder if it works the other way as well where when in a noisy environment you need to think "louder" to concentrate on your own thoughts. I'm reminded of the expression "It's so loud in here that I can hardly hear myself think" which may have more truth to it than originally thought.
Also, it's not a big problem from the consumers point of view. I actually like that there are dozens of companies trying to sell me what is essentially the same boring pair of blue jeans. It means that I've got options and none of them can really afford to try to gouge me too much on price.
Also, for a good number of things, wildly different or original don't necessarily mean a better product as far as I'm concerned. My morning oatmeal doesn't need to be a custom and unique experience. It's goddamn oatmeal.
I think we do strive to create value. As you point out, even when you aren't working you're doing chores to create value for your own life. If we plunked you down somewhere with absolutely nothing, you'd be striving to create some clothing, shelter, and food. All of those things are quite valuable to you. In the past, you might have had to do all of those things on your own and either learn yourself or perhaps have been taught how to do so by your tribe.
However, today if you want some clothing, a house, or some food you can just give others some funny little slips of paper. Creating value for yourself is a matter of finding someone who will give you those slips of paper in exchange for some of your labor. That they also might derive some value from the transaction is really inconsequential to you as long as you feel as though you're getting more value out of the transaction than you feel you put into it with your labor.
If you thought you could make your own clothes, build your own home, and grow your own food for less than you could pay others to do it, you'd do it yourself and create value that way. On the other hand, you probably can't as all of those are specialized skills that themselves require several specialized skills to contribute to the process of producing the end product so it's much easier to create value in other ways. You could probably pay someone else to mow your lawn as well, but you don't think what you'd have to pay is worth the value created.
I don't think it's as easy as breaking it down into go to work and do what you're told. Value is only created if someone else wants to purchase your labor, otherwise we could just give people jobs fashioning cow manure into giant busts of David Hasselhoff and there would never be unemployment. If you were to start your own lawn mowing business you would be your own boss and it would be hard to argue that you're not creating value. You'd only be doing the labor that plenty of other people value doing, but simply don't do themselves because they value their own labor and time more dearly. The same goes for building houses, growing food, etc.
I don't doubt that antidepressants work, or can work well for some individuals based on exactly what the drug does and what afflictions are being suffered, but I do wonder if we're going to run into a problem where we try to use them to treat symptoms rather than fixing underlying problems. I think that, much like obesity, a lot of the increase we're seeing in depression is related to changes in lifestyle. People don't get outdoors as much, eat as healthily, or get as much exercise and humans are still as much the animal as we've always been and subject to the consequences of that.
I'd like to think that they can be used appropriately to help people get out of a rut so that they can start fixing the underlying problems in their lives, and there are probably some people who are born with some condition that might necessitate using antidepressants their whole life much like some people need insulin, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in reality we'll just throw loads of pills at people with great abandon or no care to fix the underlying problems that would allow them to function without that medication. I think this is true for a lot of things, not just antidepressants.
The whole thing just seems likes like a sleazy way to collect contact information and other personal information about what kinds of petitions people are signing. Even if online petitions weren't useless as you suggest, I'd stay the hell away from any site that isn't dedicated to a single position and intent on dissolving itself after some point in the near future.
A quick Google search indicated that they (Change.org) have 300 employees, which at a very conservative estimate means $15,000,000 in worker salaries, never mind all of the other expenses. They are absolutely selling user data in order to pay the bills.
It seems like there's a lot of evidence pointing to it having some role. I think this makes it even easier than doing DNA testing and DNA-based diets as by restricting food intake of certain types you can "starve" undesirable gut bacteria and supplement with probiotics to get those types of desirable bacteria reintroduced if they're completely missing.
I suspect that part of the problem is that many people who are obese have shitty diets and that there's a strong tendency to cheat which lets the bad bacteria stick around. However, I haven't read any research that has done experiments on specific types of bacteria and their role in weight loss or prevention thereof.
Even if I were looking to replace my current phone, I'm generally a little leery about getting the first generation of any new Apple products these days. They've lost a bit of their typical polish over the years and typically don't get all of the kinks or bugs worked out until the second or third generation.
Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government. I wonder if Venezuela will devolve into North Korea levels of destitution.
At least people have been relatively free to flee into neighboring countries, but neighboring countries are starting to clamp down on that because it's becoming unmanageable. Colombia is reported to have had 300,000 migrants in the last 6 months on top of those who fled previously. Brazil has probably seen similar numbers.
Probably also illegal. Just because someone has done something illegal, doesn't give you the right to do something illegal yourself in response.
I think the best anti-piracy measure that I've heard anyone take was a simulation game about video game development. If you were playing on a pirate copy, eventually sales for the virtual games you were developing as part of the sim would tank because of virtual in-game pirates not paying for copies. It was especially hilarious because people would complain about it on the developer forums and then have it explained to them. Utterly harmless (well outside of social embarrassment) and perhaps even effective at getting people to buy the game since they might have been able to play enough of it to decide if they'd like to spend money on it.
The Soviet Union fell apart, both China and Vietnam implemented reforms that brought market economies into play, and Venezuela is on the brink of civil war. I'd have to say that from current and historical evidence, that non-market economies based around central planning, nationalization of industries, or other communist policies tend to perform poorly.
Indeed. I think more people will be surprised that Windows Phone is still around than anything else. I actually do have an old Nokia with Windows Phone 8 on it from years ago when I needed a phone while traveling to a place where my existing phone wouldn't work due to different cellular bands being used, but I'm honestly more surprised than anything that it would still be getting updates this long after the fact.
Unfortunately he got it so catastrophically wrong that he actually put women off working for Google. Check the Labour Board investigation of the issue, at least two women dropped out of the recruitment process citing his memo as the reason.
Despite what you and other people who share your beliefs try to purport, he actually got it reasonably correct. Just because you don't want to believe that there are biological differences between men and women that lead them to make different decisions related to careers, doesn't mean that they don't exist in much the same way that someone who chooses to ignore science related to the effects of carbon dioxide or methane on climate does not stop them from occurring.
Also, anyone so emotionally fragile that has to drop out of a recruiting process after a company not only fires, but goes out of their way to publicly rebuke the cause probably needs therapy. It sounds like Google probably dodged a bullet with those particular individuals.
It's legally problematic in the UK as well, but of course difficult to prove and often not enforced. In any case, an employer doesn't necessarily need to ask, they can just throw any application from a woman under the age of 45 in the bin.
The legal headache from even being accused is probably enough to get the hiring personnel or manager fired. I suppose you can't stop one person from throwing away applications, but any large company doing that is going to have a paper trail if someone were to actually request it. Also, if you wanted to ensure that your recruitment isn't biased, you would remove that kind of information from an application to start with and only know if a candidate is female when doing an interview. Doing that essentially prevents anyone in HR with some kind of secret axe to grind from causing problems as well.
If someone really wants to be that biased that they turn away potential talent, then they do so to their own detriment. I can't imagine the shareholders being too happy with that unless their own personal biases somehow align and are greater than their own greed. History tends to show that people in large care more about money than anything else.
Sometimes it can even get problematic, like when they can't hide their concern that I might be a Muslim. I can't imagine what replying "yes" would be like, but I'm tempted to try it.
Have you considered that they may want to know something like that so as no to offend you in some way related to your religion. If I know that someone is a Muslim, I'm probably less inclined to ask them out for drinks after work and if I have them over for dinner, I'd probably want to take their dietary restrictions into consideration. I think you might just have too much of a chip on your shoulder where you're mistaking people's curiosity or desire to know a little more about you for something more sinister or malicious. I don't really think that has anything to do with skin color as it just sounds like a common case of tech geeks being bad at reading people and social situations. Perhaps that's all a bit presumptuous of me, but take it as food for thought instead of something to get incensed about.
Unrelated to the real world.
I'm not sure how companies ignoring things which are profitable is unrelated to the real world. That's all that matters. Companies that refuse to update their business models fail. Companies that refused to off shore labor and to take advantage of lower costs in China or other developing countries failed. Any company that's living with some 1950's mentality that women belong at home and in the kitchen that hasn't already failed is on their way there.
It's not really an admission, because it requires you to assume that I think all diversity efforts are automatically good and there can be no incompetency. I think you have to admit that would be a rather strange assumption.
I think the $600 million is so Microsoft just rolls over and gives him a Windows 7 key. As easy as this would be to defend in court, I have a feeling that the lawyers would love nothing more than to drag it out long enough to bill at least a reasonable fraction of that $600 million for their own efforts.
Data out today [equalityhumanrights.com] shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
It's funny because Damore made exactly the same observations about Google's workplace being unfavorable to women and how to improve it to better retain women in his memo, but for whatever reason you seemed to want to rake him over the coals for it. I'm also not sure that the article you cite applies in the U.S. as it's illegal to ask if someone has children or even if they're married. The same holds true for "where are you from" questions as well. I'm rather surprised that the UK apparently doesn't have such laws. Alternatively I would think that they do and that they just need to be enforced.
Also, I remember when microaggressions used to be called pet peeves, with the implication being that they were rather silly things to get upset about. I've had people ask about my ancestry before based on my last name. It's not really difficult to tell someone that "I grew up a few states over, but that my grandparents came over from Poland" or that "I'm from Birmingham, but my father is Iranian" or whatever the case may be. Maybe it's another British thing where people are sensitive about it for some reason, whereas in the U.S. almost everyone is from somewhere else ancestrally.
However, I still don't see this potential for huge profits as people who are being spurned from one company are being hired at another. If everyone were recruiting purely based on talent with no biases at all, then some companies that are doing a better job would actually be worse off since their competition isn't ignoring candidates any more and they can't get as good of a deal. Similarly, companies who ignore that which is profitable for too long tend to be out of business quickly.
I think that you also have to admit that diversity efforts can go too far in the other direction when quotas get imposed which are almost a guarantee that there's a smaller pool of available talent to draw on or that in order to maintain the same level of quality it would be necessary to pay more to only hire the absolute best individuals from some category while hitting some quota.
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I think it really depends upon which intelligence agency we're talking about. There's probably your rank and file bottom feeders that couldn't find their ass with a map and a flashlight, but that's true of any organization and I'm pretty sure that anyone working in the private sector can point to several pristine examples of such individuals. However, there are also some government types that create things like Stuxnet and do some other nasty bits of work that the public will never hear about, so there are clearly a few competent individuals working for the government.
I don't think government intelligence agencies would be a complete replacement for private sector companies, but there are clearly cases where the government is contracting with some private company or has legislated that citizens are required to use some service provided by a third party. The government should certainly work to ensure that those organizations don't have any glaring security holes.
Yeah, but why buy the cow when you can get the hammer for free?
A government that worked for its people would be helping companies like Apple, Google, etc. to harden their security systems instead of trying to pry into them. That may make it more difficult for law enforcement to arrest or convict a few people, but it does significantly more to protect citizens from scammers and other threats.
I'd like to think that if the intelligence agencies devoted their time and effort to helping companies identify security weaknesses and shore them up, we wouldn't be seeing massive data breaches every few months.
It really doesn't matter what those governments do because criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme to use in order to separate fools from their money. Defenses from the government only come after the thieves are out of the barn. That we see crytpocurrencies being used as such a vehicle is a matter of coincidence and not such much as something inherent to them. They are only useful in scams because they have shown extraordinary growth that gets everyone salivating at the thought of how much money they could make and also happen to be terribly misunderstood (if understood at all) by a majority of people.
I'm not even sure how a government could go about regulating a cryptocurrency like bitcoin outside of controlling a majority of the network. Otherwise there's little they can do outside of just banning it outright, but as we've seen with drugs that's not really going to deter anyone. I suspect that they could regulate ICOs which is where most of the scams seem to operate, but that's entirely different from regulating a cryptocurrency itself which can exist outside of an ICO.
I think that most of this is pointless saber rattling as no one in government has any better understanding of cryptocurrency than your average person on the street, but I expect we'll see plenty of comments from representatives with a "series of tubes" level of understanding.
But the congestion is also tied to the throughput. If a user can transmit more data in a given time slice they can finish sooner (or require fewer time slices to get their data) which makes it faster for the next person to get what they want and they're able to get that a little bit faster as well. The faster you can clear out someone waiting, the more it keeps people from piling up.
However, this assumes that data use is fixed and we know from history that as more bandwidth becomes available, consumption increases as well. Eventually though we're likely to reach a point where demand for more data doesn't scale in step with availability, but I think that this will help out considerably until people find new ways to consume mobile data.
Indeed. Data caps need to increase significantly, or having a 5G connection will be as pointless as owning a Lamborghini that can only be driven on a 300 meter test track enclosed by brick walls.
The true status symbol is the lackey walking behind you, carrying your phone and helping you hold it to make a call.
Maybe if you're a peasant.
Unless you've got at least four lackeys carrying your giant phone around in a palanquin everyone is going to know you're a nobody. You'll probably want another lackey or two spreading rose pedals for good measure.
Is it really that surprising to see these kind of results? You have something that has both seen incredible growth in terms of raw percentage increases and is ill-understood at best by most people. This makes it an incredibly good target for Ponzi schemes and other common financial scams because people see the big returns and get greedy and have no idea if they're being fed a line of complete bullshit when it comes to the technology itself.
Even my father has heard about crytocurrencies and has asked me questions about them and he's generally not interested in technology in the slightest. I'm reminded of the old quote about someone realizing they needed to get out of the market when their shoeshiner was giving out stock tips.
Let's let the consumers be the judge of what's a danger to themselves. People who try to go around making laws and rules for someone else's good tend to do a spectacularly poor job of it and generally cause just as much harm as good, even in the case where they're well-meaning instead of clearly under some ulterior motives as is the case here.
If people want to accept some increased risk (which I don't believe exists) by using third party repair services, that's on them. If a company wants to warn their customers about the possibility of danger, that's as far as they should go.
Gawker's mistake was not knowing Thiel was gunning for them.
Or you could say that their mistake was refusing to take down a sex tape after being ordered to by the court. It doesn't matter how much someone is gunning for you if you don't do stupid shit to piss off a judge.
If you think computers are a dead-end career I'm not sure what you'd suggest going into. Computer programming and robotics engineering are the last jobs, because those are the fields that are trying to figure out how to replace every other field and eventually their own selves.
I wonder if it works the other way as well where when in a noisy environment you need to think "louder" to concentrate on your own thoughts. I'm reminded of the expression "It's so loud in here that I can hardly hear myself think" which may have more truth to it than originally thought.
Also, it's not a big problem from the consumers point of view. I actually like that there are dozens of companies trying to sell me what is essentially the same boring pair of blue jeans. It means that I've got options and none of them can really afford to try to gouge me too much on price.
Also, for a good number of things, wildly different or original don't necessarily mean a better product as far as I'm concerned. My morning oatmeal doesn't need to be a custom and unique experience. It's goddamn oatmeal.
I think we do strive to create value. As you point out, even when you aren't working you're doing chores to create value for your own life. If we plunked you down somewhere with absolutely nothing, you'd be striving to create some clothing, shelter, and food. All of those things are quite valuable to you. In the past, you might have had to do all of those things on your own and either learn yourself or perhaps have been taught how to do so by your tribe.
However, today if you want some clothing, a house, or some food you can just give others some funny little slips of paper. Creating value for yourself is a matter of finding someone who will give you those slips of paper in exchange for some of your labor. That they also might derive some value from the transaction is really inconsequential to you as long as you feel as though you're getting more value out of the transaction than you feel you put into it with your labor.
If you thought you could make your own clothes, build your own home, and grow your own food for less than you could pay others to do it, you'd do it yourself and create value that way. On the other hand, you probably can't as all of those are specialized skills that themselves require several specialized skills to contribute to the process of producing the end product so it's much easier to create value in other ways. You could probably pay someone else to mow your lawn as well, but you don't think what you'd have to pay is worth the value created.
I don't think it's as easy as breaking it down into go to work and do what you're told. Value is only created if someone else wants to purchase your labor, otherwise we could just give people jobs fashioning cow manure into giant busts of David Hasselhoff and there would never be unemployment. If you were to start your own lawn mowing business you would be your own boss and it would be hard to argue that you're not creating value. You'd only be doing the labor that plenty of other people value doing, but simply don't do themselves because they value their own labor and time more dearly. The same goes for building houses, growing food, etc.
I don't doubt that antidepressants work, or can work well for some individuals based on exactly what the drug does and what afflictions are being suffered, but I do wonder if we're going to run into a problem where we try to use them to treat symptoms rather than fixing underlying problems. I think that, much like obesity, a lot of the increase we're seeing in depression is related to changes in lifestyle. People don't get outdoors as much, eat as healthily, or get as much exercise and humans are still as much the animal as we've always been and subject to the consequences of that.
I'd like to think that they can be used appropriately to help people get out of a rut so that they can start fixing the underlying problems in their lives, and there are probably some people who are born with some condition that might necessitate using antidepressants their whole life much like some people need insulin, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in reality we'll just throw loads of pills at people with great abandon or no care to fix the underlying problems that would allow them to function without that medication. I think this is true for a lot of things, not just antidepressants.
The whole thing just seems likes like a sleazy way to collect contact information and other personal information about what kinds of petitions people are signing. Even if online petitions weren't useless as you suggest, I'd stay the hell away from any site that isn't dedicated to a single position and intent on dissolving itself after some point in the near future.
A quick Google search indicated that they (Change.org) have 300 employees, which at a very conservative estimate means $15,000,000 in worker salaries, never mind all of the other expenses. They are absolutely selling user data in order to pay the bills.
It seems like there's a lot of evidence pointing to it having some role. I think this makes it even easier than doing DNA testing and DNA-based diets as by restricting food intake of certain types you can "starve" undesirable gut bacteria and supplement with probiotics to get those types of desirable bacteria reintroduced if they're completely missing.
I suspect that part of the problem is that many people who are obese have shitty diets and that there's a strong tendency to cheat which lets the bad bacteria stick around. However, I haven't read any research that has done experiments on specific types of bacteria and their role in weight loss or prevention thereof.
Even if I were looking to replace my current phone, I'm generally a little leery about getting the first generation of any new Apple products these days. They've lost a bit of their typical polish over the years and typically don't get all of the kinks or bugs worked out until the second or third generation.
Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government. I wonder if Venezuela will devolve into North Korea levels of destitution.
At least people have been relatively free to flee into neighboring countries, but neighboring countries are starting to clamp down on that because it's becoming unmanageable. Colombia is reported to have had 300,000 migrants in the last 6 months on top of those who fled previously. Brazil has probably seen similar numbers.
Probably also illegal. Just because someone has done something illegal, doesn't give you the right to do something illegal yourself in response.
I think the best anti-piracy measure that I've heard anyone take was a simulation game about video game development. If you were playing on a pirate copy, eventually sales for the virtual games you were developing as part of the sim would tank because of virtual in-game pirates not paying for copies. It was especially hilarious because people would complain about it on the developer forums and then have it explained to them. Utterly harmless (well outside of social embarrassment) and perhaps even effective at getting people to buy the game since they might have been able to play enough of it to decide if they'd like to spend money on it.
The Soviet Union fell apart, both China and Vietnam implemented reforms that brought market economies into play, and Venezuela is on the brink of civil war. I'd have to say that from current and historical evidence, that non-market economies based around central planning, nationalization of industries, or other communist policies tend to perform poorly.
Indeed. I think more people will be surprised that Windows Phone is still around than anything else. I actually do have an old Nokia with Windows Phone 8 on it from years ago when I needed a phone while traveling to a place where my existing phone wouldn't work due to different cellular bands being used, but I'm honestly more surprised than anything that it would still be getting updates this long after the fact.
Unfortunately he got it so catastrophically wrong that he actually put women off working for Google. Check the Labour Board investigation of the issue, at least two women dropped out of the recruitment process citing his memo as the reason.
Despite what you and other people who share your beliefs try to purport, he actually got it reasonably correct. Just because you don't want to believe that there are biological differences between men and women that lead them to make different decisions related to careers, doesn't mean that they don't exist in much the same way that someone who chooses to ignore science related to the effects of carbon dioxide or methane on climate does not stop them from occurring.
Also, anyone so emotionally fragile that has to drop out of a recruiting process after a company not only fires, but goes out of their way to publicly rebuke the cause probably needs therapy. It sounds like Google probably dodged a bullet with those particular individuals.
It's legally problematic in the UK as well, but of course difficult to prove and often not enforced. In any case, an employer doesn't necessarily need to ask, they can just throw any application from a woman under the age of 45 in the bin.
The legal headache from even being accused is probably enough to get the hiring personnel or manager fired. I suppose you can't stop one person from throwing away applications, but any large company doing that is going to have a paper trail if someone were to actually request it. Also, if you wanted to ensure that your recruitment isn't biased, you would remove that kind of information from an application to start with and only know if a candidate is female when doing an interview. Doing that essentially prevents anyone in HR with some kind of secret axe to grind from causing problems as well.
If someone really wants to be that biased that they turn away potential talent, then they do so to their own detriment. I can't imagine the shareholders being too happy with that unless their own personal biases somehow align and are greater than their own greed. History tends to show that people in large care more about money than anything else.
Sometimes it can even get problematic, like when they can't hide their concern that I might be a Muslim. I can't imagine what replying "yes" would be like, but I'm tempted to try it.
Have you considered that they may want to know something like that so as no to offend you in some way related to your religion. If I know that someone is a Muslim, I'm probably less inclined to ask them out for drinks after work and if I have them over for dinner, I'd probably want to take their dietary restrictions into consideration. I think you might just have too much of a chip on your shoulder where you're mistaking people's curiosity or desire to know a little more about you for something more sinister or malicious. I don't really think that has anything to do with skin color as it just sounds like a common case of tech geeks being bad at reading people and social situations. Perhaps that's all a bit presumptuous of me, but take it as food for thought instead of something to get incensed about.
Unrelated to the real world.
I'm not sure how companies ignoring things which are profitable is unrelated to the real world. That's all that matters. Companies that refuse to update their business models fail. Companies that refused to off shore labor and to take advantage of lower costs in China or other developing countries failed. Any company that's living with some 1950's mentality that women belong at home and in the kitchen that hasn't already failed is on their way there.
It's not really an admission, because it requires you to assume that I think all diversity efforts are automatically good and there can be no incompetency. I think you have to admit that would be a rather strange assumption.
I think the $600 million is so Microsoft just rolls over and gives him a Windows 7 key. As easy as this would be to defend in court, I have a feeling that the lawyers would love nothing more than to drag it out long enough to bill at least a reasonable fraction of that $600 million for their own efforts.
Data out today [equalityhumanrights.com] shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
It's funny because Damore made exactly the same observations about Google's workplace being unfavorable to women and how to improve it to better retain women in his memo, but for whatever reason you seemed to want to rake him over the coals for it. I'm also not sure that the article you cite applies in the U.S. as it's illegal to ask if someone has children or even if they're married. The same holds true for "where are you from" questions as well. I'm rather surprised that the UK apparently doesn't have such laws. Alternatively I would think that they do and that they just need to be enforced.
Also, I remember when microaggressions used to be called pet peeves, with the implication being that they were rather silly things to get upset about. I've had people ask about my ancestry before based on my last name. It's not really difficult to tell someone that "I grew up a few states over, but that my grandparents came over from Poland" or that "I'm from Birmingham, but my father is Iranian" or whatever the case may be. Maybe it's another British thing where people are sensitive about it for some reason, whereas in the U.S. almost everyone is from somewhere else ancestrally.
However, I still don't see this potential for huge profits as people who are being spurned from one company are being hired at another. If everyone were recruiting purely based on talent with no biases at all, then some companies that are doing a better job would actually be worse off since their competition isn't ignoring candidates any more and they can't get as good of a deal. Similarly, companies who ignore that which is profitable for too long tend to be out of business quickly.
I think that you also have to admit that diversity efforts can go too far in the other direction when quotas get imposed which are almost a guarantee that there's a smaller pool of available talent to draw on or that in order to maintain the same level of quality it would be necessary to pay more to only hire the absolute best individuals from some category while hitting some quota.