Beware of using biology to explain behaviours when those behaviours re-enforce the status quo. Evolutionary psychology is struggling to seem legit and using it to make 'that's just how things are' statements sound scientific is not helping at all.
> And large urban centers like NYC, SF, and Boston aren't driven by development companies with profit motives?
They also have to contend with larger local populations, often with a stronger political voice. It's also more capital-intensive and planning-intensive to build in a city than to plop down the same McMansions on cul-de-sacs outside of town, so there's a lot less uniformity. So the answer to your rhetorical question is no, not like suburbia is.
Evolution takes care of itself. We've evolved a society where the majority of our children survive to adulthood, so now it's expected that there will be people who don't care to have children of their own and the tribe will survive.
> pulling out a checkbook will reverse people's party alliances in an instant
A team of dedicated startup employees who really believe in what they're working on vs. throwing money at consultants 9-to-5er programmers? Pardon me while I place a few long bets.
That can certainly be their goal, but finding sponsors for a conference that is seen as exclusionary is going to be tougher. Another insiders club meeting isn't something I'd want to sponsor, with or without the bad press.
I think the opportunity Twitter is leaving behind won't pay off for Twitter's investors, but it is enough to be worth Dalton's time and effort to scoop up in Twitter's wake.
> It is racist by the fact that it is based on race.
Your definition is too simplistic. Racism isn't just prejudice based on race. Racism requires a power imbalance. Acting to counteract an institutional imbalance caused by racism is not "just anotehr kind of racism."
I believe this is deliberate - giving a user a sense of what they did which results in the next action. This is especially important if the button you've pressed takes you to another screen.
The original MacOS design wasn't 'perfect' but it was very, very good. And Apple messed with it at their peril. They gave themselves a similar bar with iOS 1.0 - they know a lot about interaction design, and how to make a UI feel smooth and intuitive, and they aren't going to scrap all of those good decisions for the sake of looking new.
By contrast Microsoft have some interesting design ideas but they abandon them in the very next major version in favour of trying something else, which is jarring for users and doesn't inspire trust.
And remember that a solution that requires building big BART-like stations to prevent you from just walking away without going through a gate would be a terrible solution to a nearly non-problem.
No need for scare quotes around "privilege" and "over-represented". These are real things that you can't hand-wave away for the sake of your theoretical exception.
"The right environment" is key to your statement above. A slightly different environment, one that tolerates and is aware of the effects, both beneficial and otherwise, of stimulant and opioid use, would produce some number of people who's enjoyment of life, work productivity and effect on the world will be better when they abstain entirely - but others will have lives that are better when they consume some mind altering drugs some of the time. I imagine the number of people who become cripplingly addicted to a substance would be similar to the rate of severe alcoholics in society today. And we might decide as a society that this is an acceptable rate, and provide addiction care for those who are susceptible instead of forcing them to the margins of society.
Unions in Hollywood have made it so that an actor can get non-leading roles semi-regularly and still be able to make an OK living. The adjunct and post-doc system in academia is exploiting the hopes that an ever-shrinking pool of tenure track positions are still in your future so you should keep working away for less than you're worth to stay in the running.
Hollywood is still largely an exploitative, winner-take-all system but there are some built-in protections in the system to make it more sustainable. Academia seems to be on the verge of coming undone if they don't do something to keep the exploited class from revolting or just quitting en-masse.
Performers now know that they lose good will when a fan has to pay a scalper to see them. Louis C.K. is earning tons of good will by doing this, and the only person who loses out is the scalper. Wealthier fans have always been able to work the system to get extra tickets, back stage access, etc.
Most PHP developers don't start their first programming project from scratch using PHP to write their first web app. It's far more common to start because you are running a blog on WordPress and you want to make some small change. Then you make another and another, then you're writing plugins and suddenly you're a programmer and PHP is your language.
So to encourage developers to start with something other than PHP you'll need to lower the barrier to entry to modifying existing software, and also make something as popular and widely useful as WordPress and MediaWiki.
The only time that a "single boss" would know better than the team would be if the single boss was as knowledgeable about the development process as the team was, and knew that the team was, for some reason, cooking up a conspiracy to fire a certain employee who didn't deserve it. Probably pretty rare, especially compared to the number of people who get let go because they just didn't click with their supervisor.
But the difference is that in a structure like Valves the inertia of those structures is much lower. So institutions don't stagnate into structures concerned with preserving their internal structure. Some unit starts to become irrelevant exactly when the people who are the top producers turn their attention elsewhere. The dead weight doesn't exert power to keep itself afloat.
Not holding my breath. Cash-strapped transit authorities are not going to be able to drive innovation here and losing the integration with maps will mean you'll have to know ahead of time that a transit route is available on your journey.
Whoever was speaking at the time (Forstall?) mentioned that they would showcase existing 3rd-party transit apps. Taking a look at the sketchy VTA, BART and CalTrain apps I've tried this is not an adequate replacement. Hopefully there'll be a way to access Google's maps through the web or a Google app.