Someguywhatever

I think in China you can say whatever you want about anything, you just can't criticize the government. In the US you can criticize the government but can't say whatever you want about anything else without blowback. In China the government persecutes you, in the US it's your fellow citizens.

Apple is only a couple of Bad iPhone designs away from being irrelevant. Everything you are saying is from a shareholder perspective, Apple does not have a monopoly like Google does. So what if they have a lot of money? Wait for a downturn and all the Apple investors who've been getting dividends DON'T get a dividend for once, it wont be pretty. Google on the other hand doesn't have as much money and isn't as "valuable" on paper only. The reality is far different. Google has infinite money but not as much money in the bank right now. Apple makes iPhone and is irrelevant outside of making iPhones. If some other companies phone becomes the "iPhone" then Apple is dead.

That's true, but I don't think Apple has "Fuck you" money. Google definitely has that type of cash. It has near infinite recurring revenue. They don't even need to do anything with their current technology to maintain this, just simply don't make any mistakes and their magical search goose will keep laying those golden eggs.

Because google is essentially a monopoly. Almost nobody uses anything else. Because of this monopoly and all the advertising revenue, Google effectively has "infinite money" and uses it to metastasize into other areas such as maps, self driving cars etc. Nobody else can do this because nobody else has "infinite money", Google is losing money hand over fist in self driving cars, I seriously doubt that maps comes anywhere close to breaking even. It's all funded by the bottomless pool of advertising money.

US is not a democracy, it's a republic AFAIK. The design philosophy behind the architechture of US Government is explicitly that it is not a democracy.

I think they are also popular in Canada. You can get various versions of the Huawei P20 through carriers here. I don't regard them as spy devices. I think it's mostly a US thing.

>They treat it as the front page of Facebook.

yes, well said. I find this especially annoying. They also nag me to install or try something, and the only thing that the nag messages are achieving is making me start to hate windows....

I don't doubt that this would eventually be the case, people always learn to game the system eventually.

If this means I don't have to sit through annoying whiteboard interviews, or talk to HR bots, and all i have to do is just send them a link to my brainscan on linked in. Nice!

I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.

I don't think the poster you're replying to had that in mind. I think it was more a case of 'you catch more bees with honey' rather than draw the guy's ire unnecessarily, just make a law that does X to help people rather than call it the "F* BEZOS law that also helps people".

Why is the democratic decision to leave not an "adult" decision?

To conduct the referendum and then not abide by the result would absolutely be undemocratic. The UK is already dragging it's heels on taking action WRT Brexit IMO. I think that they will drag it out so long that they say the mandate of the referendum has expired, and then re-rerun the referendum. They will rinse and repeat until they get the result they want.

As an example Ireland voted not to join the EU the first time they did a referendum, they simply had more referendums until they got a yes.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/13/eu-ire...

This is me with my tinfoil hat on, but I think the real reason behind the push to get women into tech is to drive down wages by growing the labor pool. That's the real reason IMO that big companies and others are pushing so hard for women to code and to get into STEM. I don't think that these big companies really care about women or anything, but doubling the labor pool and thus driving down wages, now that's something I can really see big corps getting on board with.

>one of the women in the article referenced a boss commenting about her breasts

This is not a problem that's unique to STEM or CS or anything like that though.

>another talked about being encouraged to drop out so a more deserving man could take her place... that's not lack of interest, that's actively discouraging those who want to be here

Again, I don't see that as a problem thats particularly tied to CS or programming or STEM or whatever. I'm not saying its not a problem but thats simply a general problem. I mean a woman could literally name any field and state those reasons and it would have the same impact, and be equally as bad, but those aren't problems specific to the field of STEM or CS or programming or whatever.

>I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers

I've literally been in the room when my boss made weird sexual comments to a female coworker. We looked at each other wide-eyed like neither of us could believe this was really happening, and it was like something out of a training video it was so stereotypical. She thought it was weird but it didn't really phase her, she just let it pass and didn't call him out on it. I think he was just socially weird and didn't realize how his comment would be received until he saw our faces. Nobody said anything and we just carried on with our meeting. She seemed to just take it as "this happens occasionally" almost like encountering road rage on the highway, like I'm not going to give up driving because some people are annoying. I think she took this type of attitude.

These things happen and the level of behavior control/policing that would be required to eliminate such occurrences would be onerous. The cure would be worse than the disease in my opinion. Particularly heinous harrasment can already be dealt with in the legal sphere. I don't want to hand wave it away but, I don't think it can be eliminated in a practical way TBH.

I don't think you can honestly argue that there is as significant an effort to get men into Nursing as there is to get women into programming.

>to the difficulties they had getting/staying in the field despite having a strong desire to be there/here

Why isn't it ok that they just aren't interested in it? Women have agency and intelligence and if they want to do something then they can and will do it.

I find this whole obsession with "Women in X" to be suspicious because nobody is interested in gender disparities in other fields and starting up "Men in X". So it's not a generic effort to understand a gender disparity, it is a specific directed effort to force women (who have agency and freedom) to go into a field that they don't really seem that interested in. Blaming men for women not taking CS degrees either directly or indirectly IMO denies womens agency and is totally unnecessary.

I think women are doing what they want to do, and they largely don't want to take CS it seems. Maybe if society stopped nagging them about it the situation might change organically.

I think the main point is not to get bogged down in whether or not phone books are this or that, or how legacy media relates to the internet era etc.

The point i'm making is not : "Do you sympathize with 'bad guys'?"

it's more: "Would you want whats happening to 'bad guys' to happen to you?".

>People blocked on Twitter are free to host their own websites with their own speech.

On paper this is true, but network effects mean you won't be able to interact with the general public UNLESS the general public also moves to your platform as well, which is fairly unlikely.

Example: You can't shut off somebody's electricity or water because they are a bad person, or have expressed unorthodox opinions. But you can shut off their twitter, their email, their web search, their facebook, their linked-in, stop processing payments for them (potentially cutting them off from their livelihood). You can cut them off from their digital identity and shut them out of the digital "public" in a manner of speaking. When that happens right now today, people hand-wave it away because "X is a private company they can do what they want." Never minding the fact that X has become how almost everybody addresses/interacts with the rest of the public digitally, or how X has ALL their email data, and many important documents etc Getting locked out of these things is not life threatening in the way that no water is, but it can essentially delete somebody from the "public" with almost no recourse.

Probably because it helps people? If it is useful in helping people to not harm themselves and others then I don't see anything wrong with that.

I suppose the exception could be rare earth metals, asteroids which contain them in sufficient quantities might be worth going after.

This is when the government had a vision and the nation had a collective aspiration. Now we can't even imagine such a thing. Politicians have no vision and there is no collective aspiration or national goal. Politicians get elected so that they can be the ones who benefit from influence peddling and not somebody else. I can only imagine what we could accomplish today if there was a vision for doing so given todays technology.

Network effects really, that and name familiarity possibly?

Nobody would administer a loan for $500 though, the juice isn't worth the squeeze for financial institutions

The law is written assuming that it won't be abused even despite it being ripe for abuse.

Well you could make it a ratio of:

[your income]/[maxincome] * [MaxFinancialAid]

But then you would end up with situations where people can borrow $500 which is useless. So they just allow it up to 150k and then make it a hard cut off as they feel that anybody who makes that much should absolutely be able to pay, and the administration costs of loaning < 10k could be a waste of time lets say.

>That would be true for any company once their core set of products go out of trend without replacements.

Why would any company allow it's products and services to age out of the market? How would any other company survive such a thing?

If Google "loses" in the search engine space, it loses everything. Everything Google is and does, is financed by ad revenue from search. Without search, Google becomes a pauper.

To take this in the IBM direction: Assume they (GOOG) lose at search, all the devs abandon ship or are layed off, Google could still get business because it could coast on the street-cred it built back when it was successful. So as long as it has mind-share and the google brand does not get destroyed it could still persist on well after death, draining down it's resources and selling off subdivisions (essentially cannibalizing itself, much as IBM has done). Google could aggressively manage it's stock price to hide it's status from the plebs and milk government contracts (that other organizations can't even bid on) and cannibalizing itself and drawing down it's savings for many years. This is the story of IBM. Once the boomer generation is no longer in charge of anything then IBM will fully die, because they don't make anything or do anything that the average person cares about, so they're mindshare dies with the boomer generation.

Yes this is very true, and most people procuring IT services in Gov't probably don't understand what they're asking for. They think a static web page costs a lot of money or is difficult to implement because they're technologically illiterate. Meanwhile IBM implements that static web page for them for a million taxpayer dollars.....

IBM are really masters at managing their share price, with buybacks and strategic announcements (like Watson), ultimately they still only make mainframes and support legacy products mostly. Nobody really uses their second-rate cloud. So mainframes/services and dragging out government contracts are really where it's at for them.

No, they don't. The only reason they make money is that they have connections and in's at large organizations and access to lucrative government contracts. Many governments only deal with IBM scale organizations because for some reason they think that they can sue IBM if something goes wrong! (lololol) That idea is so ridiculous, IBM has some of the best lawyers around (and a literal army of them), there's NO WAY to sue IBM, it's not possible, and even doing so would be so costly and time consuming it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.