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I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter.

The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.

Move fast and break things™️.

To whom shall I address the invoice for my time though?

I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.

I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.

Come to Canada, you will be penalized so hard you'll wish the public health care system covered pre-crisis mental health.

The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.

> were themselves free of bias.

At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.

Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?

Because not all societies enshrine individual freedom as their primary value. China has historically valued orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice. This sucks from a Western perspective, but it also means that a great many of the problems the West faces will never manifest in China.

There are very few absolute wrongs in the world and it's not clear that this would be one of them.

There seem to be many unique things to this year though:

* Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

* Orders have been cut not once, but twice.

* Suppliers have been slaughtered in earnings reports.

* Suppliers have cut staff and are trying to control costs.

I agree there is a "cry wolf" element to this, but sometimes the wolf really does show up.

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that Nature would public this given that they recently tweeted:

> Editorial: The US Department of Health and Human Services proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based on the genitals they are born with. This proposal has no foundation in science and should be abandoned. [1]

That last sentence just absolutely boggles the mind and I'm not entirely sure how this journal retains any semblance of reputation when its editorial board is so clearly willing to put ideology over science.

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[1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/1064694083090812928

I think the media and social justice movement also played a role. I distinctly remember people with very relevant credentials stating that it was impossible to obtain accurate clinical result from such tiny amounts of blood.

The mainstream media and social media mobs (even here to some degree), immediately chided them as sexist basement-dwelling neckbeards, envious that this young female Steve Jobs of science was showing that the evil patriarchy no longer had power to keep women out of STEM. Of course, not a single apology or retraction was ever issued.

> kill one journalist and the western world loses their shit.

I would argue that the Western world largely didn't care, but the journalistic class which controls a large chunk of what people think is happening had a tantrum. This was not a "look at what Trump did this week" tantrum, but rather a "these guys just killed one of us, YOU HAVE TO CARE" tantrum.

You can tell it's this because the journalists themselves don't really care that he died trying to expose what is happening in Yemen - they only care that a fellow journalist died a fairly gruesome death.

> Until we pay the most talented researchers

It's not even that. One of the contributing factors is that we are no longer hiring for talent or merit. If you're a male child interested in science and in high school right now you've been through 8 years telling you that you should not go into science because they need more women of colour who follow the right religions and have the right sexual orientation. You're constantly bombarded with "SCIENCE DOES NOT WANT MEN".

And sure, we can say "well if he had the necessary grit, this would not discourage him". No. No amount of grit will get you in when governments are shaping science funding to punish having male staff. No amount of grit will get you in when indoctrination training is mandatory for the selection committees. No amount of grit will get you in when the first filter in a hiring process is to remove all males applicants.

I'm sorry but science has to go through a decline in the West for a bit. We still have some remnants to be worked through the system, but the next couple generations of Western scientists are going to be generally pretty low quality. On the bright side, science is not exclusively a Western tradition at this point. Other cultures that at least pretend to still focus on merit and talent will carry the scientific tradition forward.

I just hope the EU has the foresight to make the legislation enforceable in a post-EU European legal environment.

It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses.

Just look at them!

They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take.

They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)?

They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring.

They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.

They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?

It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!

Yes, the 2018 MBPs with "fixed" keyboards still fail. Slightly less than pre-"fix", but still exponentially more than pre-2016 MBPs. If you get one, you really want to have an external keyboard around because it will fail at the worst possible moment.

This sums it up. Apple has built up a lot of good will over the last decade or so. It will take a while for current Apple to burn through it.

The Jesuit approach was to teach people about Catholicism through all aspects of life, not just reading the Bible. Plays, music, and almost anything you could imagine would be created in order to teach people about Christ [1]. The end result is that the Jesuit order developed an incredibly strong academic tradition in basically every field.

The Jesuits, especially around the 1600s emphasized adopting some customs of the local culture in order to spread Christianity, so you see Jesuits arriving in China and Japan learning the local language, dressing in local clothing, and even emulating some of the local traditions. Then they would use their advanced knowledge and willingness to provide education as a means of spreading Catholicism.

For example, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China impressed the Chinese so thoroughly that he was the first European ever invited to the Forbidden City. In the early 1600s, He was hugely influential in spreading more modern astronomical findings to China and he also provided the Chinese with the first modern (as in complete) map of the world. He was even nice enough to label it in Mandarin.

The Jesuits were extremely thorough at documenting their efforts so they were able to discern what worked from what didn't. Language became a very obvious barrier, namely that it was quite hard to translate some Catholic theological concepts (e.g. a Trinitarian God) into some languages. This meant that they emphasized learning the local language even more, but also would devote some effort to teaching locals Latin or some other suitable Romantic language - usually the one attached to the European power in control of the area. The effectiveness of temporary missions also proved to be problematic: converted locals "unconverted" after the missions left, so missions became more permanent and there was a focus on becoming a part of the local community. In practice, this meant constructing permanent locals for the missions (which usually had schools or universities attached).

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[1] This is probably best summarized by the concept of "Opus Dei" (God's Work) and the universal call to holiness. The idea is that your daily work, regardless of profession, should be considered an offering to God. If your work is an offering to God, then it must be your best work so you should not be either mediocre or half-assed about it.

Also important: children became liabilities instead of being assets. Nearly all labour which a child could contribute to has been automated or reduced.

In countries where children can be trusted with the responsibility of doing something economically useful, birth rates continue to be high.

Other important factors:

* Diverse enough to extrapolate findings specific to other communities (e.g. the huge Chinese and South Indian population in urban Canada are still culturally very similar to China and India, despite being in Canada).

* Toothless privacy legislation and enforcement.

* A historic lack of global attention means they will bend over backwards to attract "prestige" projects (see: Sidewalk Labs)

> Plus, surface diversity is much easier to measure; and you optimize for your metrics.

I think this is key. Until "diversity" becomes so absolutely fragmented that you get back down to the level of the individual (e.g.you need a non-Hispanic Latino coder, who is Christian but not Catholic, was born poor but still got into an Ivy League, must be over 6 feet tall, and her name must begin with "A"), we will continue to burn resources, mental energy, and time on ensuring that we can't get sued.

Well you know, if perhaps HR reviewed it's practices and didn't make discriminating against men a point of pride, then perhaps there would be less "failure-to-launch".

Unfortunately those bureaucrats are actually doing work. A good chunk of it is around Title IX since the consequences were so severe if you didn't have enough bureaucrats to handle the extra-judicial pseudo-tribunals to handle any sex-related allegations. Jump forward to the woke 2018s and now you need even more bureaucrats because all of a sudden each group needs a bureaucrat from it's own race/gender/religion/disability. And now we need even more processes because #metoo and #believethesurvivors and how do you handle a scenario like Mattress Girl which is basically a Kobayashi Maru for a university? So now we also need a bigger legal department and consultants to help develop best practices when there is no clear innocence or guilt, but if you don't assume guilt it could go viral and your funding will get hit.

And then people wonder why education is more expensive despite teaching staff getting paid less and less.

It's funny how "the keyboard" actually identifies a number of issues, of which only one has been fixed:

1. The Memebar ("TouchBar") is thankfully gone.

2. If a single molecule of dust gets under a key, the key has a non-zero chance of no longer working.

3. The travel distance is basically non-existent, like typing on a squishier iPad.

Seeing them deal with 1 in at least some capacity gives me hope that they will deal with issue 2 by the third or fourth iteration of the keyboard. Unfortunately there is no chance of issue 3 being addressed.

> the socially anxious and introverted demographic with moderate to high levels of disposable income

I've began wondering if Silicon Valley is intentionally growing this demographic. If your customers need you because they are mentally unable to order food without you . . . well that's even better than a lifetime prescription of your medication or selling cigarettes.

It's twice as good if I can slowly train my customers to develop social anxiety by removing transactional interactions with minimum wage earners. That sort of interaction would traditionally service as a stepping stone in developing and maintaining social skills.

Add in social media which constantly has self-condemning memes about social anxiety, embarrassing moments, and so on; and you've got an extremely fertile ground for social anxiety.

I can't remember who made the point, but the friction stems from the current generation of Silicon Valley still thinking they are counterculture rebels from a decade ago. Nobody working at Wallstreet would dispute that Wallstreet is huge, capitalistic, and corporate. Silicon Valley is the same, but it's filled with people wearing metaphorical Che Guevara t-shirts, clutching onto their copies of Marx's Manifesto, dying their hair purple or blue, and smoking weed. They have largely become that which they claim to hate, but have not realized it.

Events like this are what we see and will continue to see as reality and self-image merge. The leadership is fine, but they are probably more cognizant of this fact than the rank and file. Their challenge is helping their employees make the transition without suffering an existential crisis.

Agree. A lot of the numbers seem suspicious as well, mostly in the expense around salaries. Time will tell if these are sustainable.

I'm amazed that there is no mention of the sheer repairability of these devices.

I don't think I will ever encounter a laptop line that is generally so user-accessible. A couple of regular screws and you pop the case. A few more and you can replace the entire keyboard. The hard drive was held in by a single screw in most models and you could easily swap it in without even popping the entire case. The RAM had it's own bay that you could access by removing a single crew. The Ultrabay mechanism was also a huge nod to the design philosophy of making the user feel like the hardware was his/hers to do with.

It's incredibly sad to me that we've abandoned that for the sake of "thinner". I wish I had a legitimate use for older hardware so I could justify picking up one of the IBM-era Thinkpads from eBay and just maintain it into perpetuity. Like the cars of yesteryear that you could mend with some string and a brick. Sure they're not "sexy" and it won't get me likes, but it's actually mine.

Can someone fill me in on why nationalism is being equated with a loss of cross-pollination, when the opposite end of the political spectrum is so strongly associated with the anti-cultural-appropriation movement?

It occurs to me that many of the most interesting cultures today exist almost exclusively because of they were nationalist and were not afraid to appropriate parts of other cultures into their own national identity.

Could say the same about most journalism today as well.