If that's all the interview is, then the company doing the interview sucks at it and deserves what they get. If you're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive developers or software professionals, you'd think it would be a good idea to spend some effort on the process designed to help you choose those individuals to ensure that it's effective.
Gender dysphoria is still considered a mental illness. What they've done is to separate that from transsexuality. The argument is that once a person is receiving treatment with hormone replacement therapy and/or have had gender reassignment surgery, they no longer experience gender dysphoria, so its transsexuality which is no longer considered to be a mental illness.
Sure, some of that comes down to mincing words, but it's pretty clear that whatever it is that is being experienced is an illness or it wouldn't go away with treatment. From what I've read, it appears as though there is some region of the brain that is responsible for the self's perception of gender and that it is possible for problems during fetal development for the brain to develop in an atypical manner, possibly as a result of incorrect or untimely hormone exposure. Gender dysphoria also seems to have a high comorbidity with other mental disorders, so there could be other factors at play as well.
I think people are reluctant to accept some of this because a lot of the science is relatively new and goes against the idea that environment or upbringing is somehow responsible for this. There's also probably a lot of pushback because there seems to be a new fad surrounding gender and sexual identity with young people creating new genders that don't have any basis in science (or at least none of which I'm aware) and a lot of people are looking at that and lumping all transexuals in with that crowd which leads them to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense.
There's something to be said for that, though I would have used a different design with multiple concentric circles to maximize the effect, in that if you have a design like that, your can ensure that more rooms have a window. That not only cuts down on the amount of lighting needed, but does have nice effects on mood.
If you just build a big dense building, you naturally have a lot of internal rooms with no windows. I suppose there are some rooms where you wouldn't want external windows for any number of reasons, which is perfectly fine, but for offices, I'd want all of my workers to have a window.
No actor is perfectly rational, but a free market ensures that the most irrational actors are quickly eliminated. If you don't believe me take two sums of money and invest one with an investment group and the other yourself using a random number generator to determine investment decisions and see which works out better. The argument isn't that all actors are perfect, but that if you see these results there's likely a rational reason for them or in the event that there isn't one, these results will soon cease to exist now that there is wide awareness of them.
But if you truly believe that all of these irrational idiots are leaving money on the table, you can invest your money instead in which case you should stand to profit considerably.
I don't think they take that long to take effect. For instance, it didn't take long for large amounts of certain types of labor to move to China or other countries when it become more financially viable to locate them their. If women are identical to men for all purposes of return on investment for business ventures in technology, then this suggests (assuming the results of this study) that there is a huge amount of arbitrage to exploit. Financial blue bloods (or at least the successful ones) go around looking for this kind of thing so they can exploit it to their advantage. With the amount of money being invested in this sector, there would be a lot of eyeballs on this.
Other posters pointed out potential issues with the methodology of the study (only looking at companies which successfully received funding) and there's another big one as well. The number of women in technology (in general, let alone who are involved in startups which may be even lower) is lower than men, so given that you probably would expect this result even if the population is all equally talented.
As for your other conclusions, I don't know why you ignore or dismiss (a) when it is quite clearly true from scientific literature. Men and women are clearly not the same from a basic physical standpoint so even if you assumed that they had identical interests outside of that (they don't anyway, but you can assume it for the sake of argument) then there are already a large number of jobs that are going to be stacked with men due to physical requirements. That alone means that if you have 100% labor participation that there are naturally some fields that must have significantly more women than men simply because there are about the same number of men and women in most countries and you've already allocated a lot of men to certain fields.
I also think you have another part of your argument backwards. If you're a highly profitable company that means there's added incentive for other people to break into your market. You're the last company that can afford to be sexist, because if your sexism is leaving you with a competitive disadvantage, it makes it even easier to unseat you. It's the cut-throat low-margin companies that can be sexist, because who wants to break into a market with a 2% profit-margin? Unless you've got a monopoly, complete customer lock-in, or the barrier to entry is incredibly expensive other players are going to want to get in on the game, and if you're leaving additional value on the table (e.g. not hiring qualified Asian workers) that makes it even easier for the new entrants to get in. The software industry has few of those things as evidenced by the large number of start-up companies that becoming massive players in the industry on an ongoing basis.
The issue (if it is one at all as you'd want to look for confounding factors to control for before leaping to a judgement) should be self-correcting. Assume for the sake of argument that all ventures are equally good regardless of the sexes of the team or that from a funding perspective they all have equally good returns. Investors who don't discriminate on sex would be able to get greater returns because there are fewer other VCs that want to invest so they can negotiate a better deal. Since the returns are just as good, those investors make more money and other investors start to adopt their investment strategy.
It really only takes one to figure that out and the market corrects. Of course not all projects are equal, so there is a question as to whether or not women are more disposed to be parts of projects that don't have as good of return potential as men.
I suppose I could read the study myself to see if this was done or attempted.
India has rampant wealth inequality and absolutely no system in place to redistribute that wealth.
Rampant wealth inequality is a fact of life. People are not all equally capable of generating wealth or intelligent with their dispensation of acquired wealth so no matter what system you try to use, some will end up having more or less. Even the various communist governments of the world had or have wealth inequality to similar extents as the various capitalist western democracies. Wealth redistribution systems that arbitrarily take from those who are successful to give to those who are not tend to fall apart over time. Some transition peacefully towards more capitalist systems like Vietnam and China and others collapse into failed states like Somalia that are plagued by civil war.
Can somebody can tell me how to pry the 1% away from their wealth, especially in a post automation economy when they don't even need workers to buy their goods anymore because who need to sell things when you already own everything?
Provide them a good or a service that they want to purchase? That's typically how I get people wealthier than I am to part with some of their money.
To your other point though, If the wealthy already have everything you want, what is the point of having wealth at that point? If having an automated worker is sufficient to provide you with everything you need, what's to stop someone who has automated works from building more automated workers and giving them to the people who don't already have them? I suppose you could say power and control, but what's the point of having either if they can't get you anything for having them?
All that aside, inheritance taxes with a reasonable exemption threshold to allow for small family businesses are a possibility if you grant that in return income taxes would be reduced. I generally think it's a better setup in that it allows people who generate wealth to keep it, but doesn't allow for vast family fortunes where people of no particular skill are wealthy simply by virtue of being born into that wealth. It might sound good on paper, but in practice I expect it would just result in more people setting up their own foundations, charitable enterprises, etc. as most people who manage to accumulate vast sums of wealth in their own life probably wouldn't trust the government to manage it.
There's always some kind of Brave New World setup where humans are manufactured, at which point why make incapable people. That story didn't have robotic laborers, but assuming there were, you'd really only care to have Alphas and perhaps Betas.
Under that standard no product would ever be released. There are still hundreds to thousands of severe injuries or deaths every year from user stupidity. There's nothing manufacturers could possibly do to prevent end users from installing dodgy third party replacement hardware with their devices or monkeying with it themselves.
It's here because it will get gobs of page views. This really is in no way related to technology at all though and is particularly egregious even by modern/. standards. I can see big political or world events getting reported on, or finding the tech connection, but tying this to technology or nerdy things requires the kind of stretch found only in advanced yoga.
The CPU implements the ARM instruction set, but Apple's A-series SoCs have been custom designs for years now. The cellular baseband comes from Intel (they did acquire it from Taiwanese Via Telecom, although Via was originally founded in the U.S.) but they may have the design team for that in the U.S. as well. The audio codec is from Cirrus Logic according to iFixit, and they're headquartered in Texas. Of course there are dozens of other various chips and components that go into an iPhone, some likely from other U.S. companies (e.g. Texas Instruments), others from various global entities. I know off-hand that the camera is from Sony.
That and most people in the software industry (and I imagine many other fields) switch jobs for a pay raise. Even that alone is enough to justify asking for more than your previous salary. The fairest way to do it would do a non-compete would be for the previous company to have an option to pay whatever your next employer is offering (or something close to 100% of that amount) to not work for them for some period of time.
I think that alone makes it a fair compensation and there's nothing stopping a person from updating their skill set while they wait for the non-compete clause to expire. If you want to stay sharp, there're are plenty of open source projects to get involved in and there are plenty that are using new languages, technology, etc.
On the other hand, digital content being impossibly cheap to reproduce also opens producers up to the risk that no one actually buys or pays them for it because it can be had less expensively from other sources. Whereas physical goods always need someone to actually produce them from raw materials which have their own cost, so unless you can source and create it yourself, you'll have to purchase from them again if you need a replacement or want a newer model of whatever it is you bought.
I can understand that thinking behind those companies that push for indefinite copyright, but I don't think it's necessary. There are very few works that are still regularly consumed after 25 years. Even important works that are deemed highly important or superlative examples of their craft (at the time or beyond it) aren't viewed by the population at large to the extend that modern productions are. Citizen Kane is still regarded by critics as one of the best films ever made, but outside of film schools, how many people under 30 have actually watched it?
I suspect that as technology continues to drive down costs, patronage models will become more viable which will still allow for new content to be made. Patreon has stated they've paid out over $100 million so far and that's one site in market of other similar options like Kickstarter. People might be cutting the cord, but they're still hungry for new content and willing to pay for it. Sure the money that goes through those sites to producing new art is small potatoes compared to traditional media companies, but it's something that didn't exist to anywhere near the current scale a decade ago.
Well the alternatives are sitting on the cash under the assumption that they will somehow be able to invest it more wisely in growing the business in the future or returning the additional money to shareholders under the assumption that Netflix can't invest the money better than the shareholders would be able to do so.
Unless you have a really good reason for the first (e.g. key talent viewed as valuable currently being tied up in other projects for a short term basis, etc.) there isn't any good reason for a company to sit on huge piles of cash. If they really don't want to hand it over to shareholders, the company can just invest it in other companies or investment vehicles, but that's also essentially admitting that the company can't put the money to good use itself.
Netflix has a pretty good track record, so unless the CEO is spouting some off-the-rails crap, I'll assume that they have a good plan in place. That's probably not something they're going to fully expound upon in detail in a shareholder meeting, so the CEO just makes some terse comments to assure shareholders that the company is taking the best course of action.
Seems like UBI is one of those ways that people are trying adapt. If someone is completely incapable of working or contributing economically, it makes far more sense to give them a subsistence wage so they stay home instead of resorting to crime. Increasing productivity through automation results in more overall wealth, probably to the point where a UBI becomes possible because the cost becomes more and more insignificant.
Look at the world we live in today where a large and growing part of society isn't working and not by and large starving in the streets for it. Productivity increases have made that possible whereas historically most countries practiced slavery because productivity was so low that paying wages to all laborers wasn't feasible and few would be willing to freely perform that labor for what would be given as wages.
If you think people need to be employed or engaged in some type of work, just have people getting the UBI who aren't employed (or somehow paying in to the system) do community service. Ten hours a week or keeping parks clean, etc. isn't a hard ask if it lets a person continue living.
That's the first I've heard of Mercedes and parts being too reliable. He probably went out of business because most people will find its just cheaper to buy a new Benz than to start getting one repaired because that's a damned money pit.
A lot of companies go through a cycle of allowing or prohibiting work at home. I think that the only real reason they do it is so they can get people to quit so they don't need to fire them and pay any severance. If you eventually need to downsize a division, institute a work from home and then retract it in two years and you'll probably get at least a third to leave since they've built their life around working from home and don't want to change.
If you're feeding in bad data (e.g., only giving true positives for training data) then you're going to get garbage out regardless of what you're looking at. If you think there's some bias in the data that was collected, exclude race from that information and the AI cannot possibly take it into account for its calculations. If you give it the full data set which includes stops that didn't result in arrests, the AI would probably be able to key into whether or not minority populations are stopped more and avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions without considering that information.
Even if you do have a true fact that some population group (whether based on gender, race, handedness, etc.) has some characteristic in larger or smaller amounts than the rest of the population, you still want the AI to be able to effectively discriminate within that sub-group. Then you don't get lazy inferences like "blacks re-offend more" and instead something more like "women who meet the following characteristics are far less likely to default on loans than women who don't" which is actually useful information.
AI is going to worlds better than any human, but if you expect it to be something that creates a perfectly equitable outcome, then you'll only be disappointed.
Or the bias lies with the notion that everyone should come out to be exactly the same. If you have an AI that doesn't even consider race, gender, age, etc. but still produces results that have an uneven distribution, then it's pretty likely that age, race, gender, or any other characteristics we could care to measure are not meaningless descriptors and are correlated with other factors whether we like to admit it or not.
If an AI program says someone is a bad financial risk without any knowledge of their race, gender, age, etc. then it's because the person is a bad financial risk based on the factors it was given to consider not that the AI is discriminatory. The AI is going to be the least discriminatory thing possible, because it is incapable of having human-styled prejudices unless explicitly programmed to.
I recall reading a paper once that mapped how novice programmers read and understand code onto a mapping to express their level of development as programmers. The most basic level was a verbose restatement of the code in English, without grasping what the code did as a whole, whereas the highest level was a high-level description of what it accomplished, typically in as few words as possible.
Also, "plus-plus variable" seems like a bad way to word it internally even if you're breaking it down to the most basic level. "Pre-increment variable" seems like a much better way to think about it, especially if it's being used as an index into an array or anywhere outside of a standalone statement .
Russia came out about in the middle (albeit maybe on the low-middle side) as far as former communist states went. Look at some of the ones that collapsed into civil war like Somalia and/or became theocracies run by religious hardliners like Afghanistan to see how much worse it could have been.
All of those things you've listed (and many you haven't) might connect to a database, but they're not always running on the same system or even the same hardware as the database. Pick Intel where it makes the most sense based on performance and choose AMD when they're better suited to the task. The only difference is that AMD hasn't had a server chip suited to any task beyond space heater for over half a decade, whereas now there's a compelling reason to buy AMD for some workloads.
Now we just get fanbois droning on endlessly about how awesome it is that AMD's next generation will be slower but cheaper than Intel's latest offering.
Actually, AMDs newest chip is pretty good. Earlier today, Anandtechan article comparing Intel and AMDs latest offerings, and puts the 8176 up against AMDs best CPU. The overall takeaway is that the AMD system is faster in a lot of workloads (databases being the one big notable area where it loses badly) than the Intel system and at a much lower cost. It isn't a complete ass-whooping to the degree it was in the Opteron days, but now AMD actually has a product that won't be relegated to the bargain bin.
Probably through a similar process that most people have to use to figure out who are the good and bad people in their lives: reputation, reporting, and results. I'm not saying that people are generally good at this process (they're probably not which explains a lot of life's problems for many people) but the average person isn't going to suffer too many ill effects if they can't tell good academics from bad and there probably isn't enough time in their day to even start.
Other academics might have an interest in some self-policing activities and trying to oust the frauds, so if your layman has enough sense or reason to decide correctly there, they don't need to be overly concerned. I think academics would do far better in terms of trust if they avoid politicization of their work (it's going to happen anyways, but just stay away from it and the people who do it.) or trying to shove solutions down people's throats. Even if academics are right nine times out of ten when doing this, people won't forget the one time the academics got it wrong.
I think there's also a basic misconception that most people have towards science. They view it a bit like religious dogma where it is supposed to be the whole and complete truth. Outside of the more mathematical fields or aspects of various fields, science is best understood as the best guidelines we have for how the world works and they're probably incomplete and missing a few key pieces. Science is a process to find better answers, not all of the answers themselves.
Based on our current understanding of how the universe works, with "real" teleportation (or how we expect it to work based on our models of quantum physics) matter isn't moved between the two points either. Whatever you teleport gets reassembled at the other end from particles that weren't a part of the original and whatever was sent is now a rearranged mess. This implies that the person being beamed somewhere else dies, but the new version of them assembled at the other end has their same state so just goes on thinking they're still the original person.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's all the interview is, then the company doing the interview sucks at it and deserves what they get. If you're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive developers or software professionals, you'd think it would be a good idea to spend some effort on the process designed to help you choose those individuals to ensure that it's effective.
Gender dysphoria is still considered a mental illness. What they've done is to separate that from transsexuality. The argument is that once a person is receiving treatment with hormone replacement therapy and/or have had gender reassignment surgery, they no longer experience gender dysphoria, so its transsexuality which is no longer considered to be a mental illness.
Sure, some of that comes down to mincing words, but it's pretty clear that whatever it is that is being experienced is an illness or it wouldn't go away with treatment. From what I've read, it appears as though there is some region of the brain that is responsible for the self's perception of gender and that it is possible for problems during fetal development for the brain to develop in an atypical manner, possibly as a result of incorrect or untimely hormone exposure. Gender dysphoria also seems to have a high comorbidity with other mental disorders, so there could be other factors at play as well.
I think people are reluctant to accept some of this because a lot of the science is relatively new and goes against the idea that environment or upbringing is somehow responsible for this. There's also probably a lot of pushback because there seems to be a new fad surrounding gender and sexual identity with young people creating new genders that don't have any basis in science (or at least none of which I'm aware) and a lot of people are looking at that and lumping all transexuals in with that crowd which leads them to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense.
There's something to be said for that, though I would have used a different design with multiple concentric circles to maximize the effect, in that if you have a design like that, your can ensure that more rooms have a window. That not only cuts down on the amount of lighting needed, but does have nice effects on mood.
If you just build a big dense building, you naturally have a lot of internal rooms with no windows. I suppose there are some rooms where you wouldn't want external windows for any number of reasons, which is perfectly fine, but for offices, I'd want all of my workers to have a window.
No actor is perfectly rational, but a free market ensures that the most irrational actors are quickly eliminated. If you don't believe me take two sums of money and invest one with an investment group and the other yourself using a random number generator to determine investment decisions and see which works out better. The argument isn't that all actors are perfect, but that if you see these results there's likely a rational reason for them or in the event that there isn't one, these results will soon cease to exist now that there is wide awareness of them.
But if you truly believe that all of these irrational idiots are leaving money on the table, you can invest your money instead in which case you should stand to profit considerably.
I don't think they take that long to take effect. For instance, it didn't take long for large amounts of certain types of labor to move to China or other countries when it become more financially viable to locate them their. If women are identical to men for all purposes of return on investment for business ventures in technology, then this suggests (assuming the results of this study) that there is a huge amount of arbitrage to exploit. Financial blue bloods (or at least the successful ones) go around looking for this kind of thing so they can exploit it to their advantage. With the amount of money being invested in this sector, there would be a lot of eyeballs on this.
Other posters pointed out potential issues with the methodology of the study (only looking at companies which successfully received funding) and there's another big one as well. The number of women in technology (in general, let alone who are involved in startups which may be even lower) is lower than men, so given that you probably would expect this result even if the population is all equally talented.
As for your other conclusions, I don't know why you ignore or dismiss (a) when it is quite clearly true from scientific literature. Men and women are clearly not the same from a basic physical standpoint so even if you assumed that they had identical interests outside of that (they don't anyway, but you can assume it for the sake of argument) then there are already a large number of jobs that are going to be stacked with men due to physical requirements. That alone means that if you have 100% labor participation that there are naturally some fields that must have significantly more women than men simply because there are about the same number of men and women in most countries and you've already allocated a lot of men to certain fields.
I also think you have another part of your argument backwards. If you're a highly profitable company that means there's added incentive for other people to break into your market. You're the last company that can afford to be sexist, because if your sexism is leaving you with a competitive disadvantage, it makes it even easier to unseat you. It's the cut-throat low-margin companies that can be sexist, because who wants to break into a market with a 2% profit-margin? Unless you've got a monopoly, complete customer lock-in, or the barrier to entry is incredibly expensive other players are going to want to get in on the game, and if you're leaving additional value on the table (e.g. not hiring qualified Asian workers) that makes it even easier for the new entrants to get in. The software industry has few of those things as evidenced by the large number of start-up companies that becoming massive players in the industry on an ongoing basis.
The issue (if it is one at all as you'd want to look for confounding factors to control for before leaping to a judgement) should be self-correcting. Assume for the sake of argument that all ventures are equally good regardless of the sexes of the team or that from a funding perspective they all have equally good returns. Investors who don't discriminate on sex would be able to get greater returns because there are fewer other VCs that want to invest so they can negotiate a better deal. Since the returns are just as good, those investors make more money and other investors start to adopt their investment strategy.
It really only takes one to figure that out and the market corrects. Of course not all projects are equal, so there is a question as to whether or not women are more disposed to be parts of projects that don't have as good of return potential as men.
I suppose I could read the study myself to see if this was done or attempted.
India has rampant wealth inequality and absolutely no system in place to redistribute that wealth.
Rampant wealth inequality is a fact of life. People are not all equally capable of generating wealth or intelligent with their dispensation of acquired wealth so no matter what system you try to use, some will end up having more or less. Even the various communist governments of the world had or have wealth inequality to similar extents as the various capitalist western democracies. Wealth redistribution systems that arbitrarily take from those who are successful to give to those who are not tend to fall apart over time. Some transition peacefully towards more capitalist systems like Vietnam and China and others collapse into failed states like Somalia that are plagued by civil war.
Can somebody can tell me how to pry the 1% away from their wealth, especially in a post automation economy when they don't even need workers to buy their goods anymore because who need to sell things when you already own everything?
Provide them a good or a service that they want to purchase? That's typically how I get people wealthier than I am to part with some of their money.
To your other point though, If the wealthy already have everything you want, what is the point of having wealth at that point? If having an automated worker is sufficient to provide you with everything you need, what's to stop someone who has automated works from building more automated workers and giving them to the people who don't already have them? I suppose you could say power and control, but what's the point of having either if they can't get you anything for having them?
All that aside, inheritance taxes with a reasonable exemption threshold to allow for small family businesses are a possibility if you grant that in return income taxes would be reduced. I generally think it's a better setup in that it allows people who generate wealth to keep it, but doesn't allow for vast family fortunes where people of no particular skill are wealthy simply by virtue of being born into that wealth. It might sound good on paper, but in practice I expect it would just result in more people setting up their own foundations, charitable enterprises, etc. as most people who manage to accumulate vast sums of wealth in their own life probably wouldn't trust the government to manage it.
There's always some kind of Brave New World setup where humans are manufactured, at which point why make incapable people. That story didn't have robotic laborers, but assuming there were, you'd really only care to have Alphas and perhaps Betas.
Under that standard no product would ever be released. There are still hundreds to thousands of severe injuries or deaths every year from user stupidity. There's nothing manufacturers could possibly do to prevent end users from installing dodgy third party replacement hardware with their devices or monkeying with it themselves.
It's here because it will get gobs of page views. This really is in no way related to technology at all though and is particularly egregious even by modern /. standards. I can see big political or world events getting reported on, or finding the tech connection, but tying this to technology or nerdy things requires the kind of stretch found only in advanced yoga.
The CPU implements the ARM instruction set, but Apple's A-series SoCs have been custom designs for years now. The cellular baseband comes from Intel (they did acquire it from Taiwanese Via Telecom, although Via was originally founded in the U.S.) but they may have the design team for that in the U.S. as well. The audio codec is from Cirrus Logic according to iFixit, and they're headquartered in Texas. Of course there are dozens of other various chips and components that go into an iPhone, some likely from other U.S. companies (e.g. Texas Instruments), others from various global entities. I know off-hand that the camera is from Sony.
That and most people in the software industry (and I imagine many other fields) switch jobs for a pay raise. Even that alone is enough to justify asking for more than your previous salary. The fairest way to do it would do a non-compete would be for the previous company to have an option to pay whatever your next employer is offering (or something close to 100% of that amount) to not work for them for some period of time.
I think that alone makes it a fair compensation and there's nothing stopping a person from updating their skill set while they wait for the non-compete clause to expire. If you want to stay sharp, there're are plenty of open source projects to get involved in and there are plenty that are using new languages, technology, etc.
On the other hand, digital content being impossibly cheap to reproduce also opens producers up to the risk that no one actually buys or pays them for it because it can be had less expensively from other sources. Whereas physical goods always need someone to actually produce them from raw materials which have their own cost, so unless you can source and create it yourself, you'll have to purchase from them again if you need a replacement or want a newer model of whatever it is you bought.
I can understand that thinking behind those companies that push for indefinite copyright, but I don't think it's necessary. There are very few works that are still regularly consumed after 25 years. Even important works that are deemed highly important or superlative examples of their craft (at the time or beyond it) aren't viewed by the population at large to the extend that modern productions are. Citizen Kane is still regarded by critics as one of the best films ever made, but outside of film schools, how many people under 30 have actually watched it?
I suspect that as technology continues to drive down costs, patronage models will become more viable which will still allow for new content to be made. Patreon has stated they've paid out over $100 million so far and that's one site in market of other similar options like Kickstarter. People might be cutting the cord, but they're still hungry for new content and willing to pay for it. Sure the money that goes through those sites to producing new art is small potatoes compared to traditional media companies, but it's something that didn't exist to anywhere near the current scale a decade ago.
Well the alternatives are sitting on the cash under the assumption that they will somehow be able to invest it more wisely in growing the business in the future or returning the additional money to shareholders under the assumption that Netflix can't invest the money better than the shareholders would be able to do so.
Unless you have a really good reason for the first (e.g. key talent viewed as valuable currently being tied up in other projects for a short term basis, etc.) there isn't any good reason for a company to sit on huge piles of cash. If they really don't want to hand it over to shareholders, the company can just invest it in other companies or investment vehicles, but that's also essentially admitting that the company can't put the money to good use itself.
Netflix has a pretty good track record, so unless the CEO is spouting some off-the-rails crap, I'll assume that they have a good plan in place. That's probably not something they're going to fully expound upon in detail in a shareholder meeting, so the CEO just makes some terse comments to assure shareholders that the company is taking the best course of action.
Seems like UBI is one of those ways that people are trying adapt. If someone is completely incapable of working or contributing economically, it makes far more sense to give them a subsistence wage so they stay home instead of resorting to crime. Increasing productivity through automation results in more overall wealth, probably to the point where a UBI becomes possible because the cost becomes more and more insignificant.
Look at the world we live in today where a large and growing part of society isn't working and not by and large starving in the streets for it. Productivity increases have made that possible whereas historically most countries practiced slavery because productivity was so low that paying wages to all laborers wasn't feasible and few would be willing to freely perform that labor for what would be given as wages.
If you think people need to be employed or engaged in some type of work, just have people getting the UBI who aren't employed (or somehow paying in to the system) do community service. Ten hours a week or keeping parks clean, etc. isn't a hard ask if it lets a person continue living.
That's the first I've heard of Mercedes and parts being too reliable. He probably went out of business because most people will find its just cheaper to buy a new Benz than to start getting one repaired because that's a damned money pit.
A lot of companies go through a cycle of allowing or prohibiting work at home. I think that the only real reason they do it is so they can get people to quit so they don't need to fire them and pay any severance. If you eventually need to downsize a division, institute a work from home and then retract it in two years and you'll probably get at least a third to leave since they've built their life around working from home and don't want to change.
If you're feeding in bad data (e.g., only giving true positives for training data) then you're going to get garbage out regardless of what you're looking at. If you think there's some bias in the data that was collected, exclude race from that information and the AI cannot possibly take it into account for its calculations. If you give it the full data set which includes stops that didn't result in arrests, the AI would probably be able to key into whether or not minority populations are stopped more and avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions without considering that information.
Even if you do have a true fact that some population group (whether based on gender, race, handedness, etc.) has some characteristic in larger or smaller amounts than the rest of the population, you still want the AI to be able to effectively discriminate within that sub-group. Then you don't get lazy inferences like "blacks re-offend more" and instead something more like "women who meet the following characteristics are far less likely to default on loans than women who don't" which is actually useful information.
AI is going to worlds better than any human, but if you expect it to be something that creates a perfectly equitable outcome, then you'll only be disappointed.
Or the bias lies with the notion that everyone should come out to be exactly the same. If you have an AI that doesn't even consider race, gender, age, etc. but still produces results that have an uneven distribution, then it's pretty likely that age, race, gender, or any other characteristics we could care to measure are not meaningless descriptors and are correlated with other factors whether we like to admit it or not.
If an AI program says someone is a bad financial risk without any knowledge of their race, gender, age, etc. then it's because the person is a bad financial risk based on the factors it was given to consider not that the AI is discriminatory. The AI is going to be the least discriminatory thing possible, because it is incapable of having human-styled prejudices unless explicitly programmed to.
I recall reading a paper once that mapped how novice programmers read and understand code onto a mapping to express their level of development as programmers. The most basic level was a verbose restatement of the code in English, without grasping what the code did as a whole, whereas the highest level was a high-level description of what it accomplished, typically in as few words as possible.
Also, "plus-plus variable" seems like a bad way to word it internally even if you're breaking it down to the most basic level. "Pre-increment variable" seems like a much better way to think about it, especially if it's being used as an index into an array or anywhere outside of a standalone statement .
I just program in write only languages like Perl so I never have to worry about this problem.
Russia came out about in the middle (albeit maybe on the low-middle side) as far as former communist states went. Look at some of the ones that collapsed into civil war like Somalia and/or became theocracies run by religious hardliners like Afghanistan to see how much worse it could have been.
All of those things you've listed (and many you haven't) might connect to a database, but they're not always running on the same system or even the same hardware as the database. Pick Intel where it makes the most sense based on performance and choose AMD when they're better suited to the task. The only difference is that AMD hasn't had a server chip suited to any task beyond space heater for over half a decade, whereas now there's a compelling reason to buy AMD for some workloads.
Now we just get fanbois droning on endlessly about how awesome it is that AMD's next generation will be slower but cheaper than Intel's latest offering.
Actually, AMDs newest chip is pretty good. Earlier today, Anandtechan article comparing Intel and AMDs latest offerings, and puts the 8176 up against AMDs best CPU. The overall takeaway is that the AMD system is faster in a lot of workloads (databases being the one big notable area where it loses badly) than the Intel system and at a much lower cost. It isn't a complete ass-whooping to the degree it was in the Opteron days, but now AMD actually has a product that won't be relegated to the bargain bin.
Probably through a similar process that most people have to use to figure out who are the good and bad people in their lives: reputation, reporting, and results. I'm not saying that people are generally good at this process (they're probably not which explains a lot of life's problems for many people) but the average person isn't going to suffer too many ill effects if they can't tell good academics from bad and there probably isn't enough time in their day to even start.
Other academics might have an interest in some self-policing activities and trying to oust the frauds, so if your layman has enough sense or reason to decide correctly there, they don't need to be overly concerned. I think academics would do far better in terms of trust if they avoid politicization of their work (it's going to happen anyways, but just stay away from it and the people who do it.) or trying to shove solutions down people's throats. Even if academics are right nine times out of ten when doing this, people won't forget the one time the academics got it wrong.
I think there's also a basic misconception that most people have towards science. They view it a bit like religious dogma where it is supposed to be the whole and complete truth. Outside of the more mathematical fields or aspects of various fields, science is best understood as the best guidelines we have for how the world works and they're probably incomplete and missing a few key pieces. Science is a process to find better answers, not all of the answers themselves.
Based on our current understanding of how the universe works, with "real" teleportation (or how we expect it to work based on our models of quantum physics) matter isn't moved between the two points either. Whatever you teleport gets reassembled at the other end from particles that weren't a part of the original and whatever was sent is now a rearranged mess. This implies that the person being beamed somewhere else dies, but the new version of them assembled at the other end has their same state so just goes on thinking they're still the original person.