jtbigwoo

I worked for a company that ran a pretty big, high-security data center--75,000 square feet serving thousands of customers. There was a team of 6-8 technicians and a couple dozen security guards. None of them were particularly great or high-paying jobs.

We, as a society, set up rules to allow the people to have a voice in decisions via various means including public meetings and various review procedures. There is a cost to these rules, but the alternative you're describing is a system where rules and laws don't matter and anyone with the ear of a few influential people can do whatever they want.

Just as an example, there's a data center in the early stages about 10 miles from my house. The land developer spent a year shopping for a city council that would skip the hearings required by state law and finally found a small exurb willing to break the law. Now the developer is racing to break ground before the lawsuits and restraining orders hit. This isn't the way that a logical society should work.

I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after a few years because the first year failure rate was almost 15%. However, the folks that had the good ones often kept them for 5 years or more.

As someone who about programming and electronics, but knows very little about parallel computing, is this a good place to start? Does anybody have other resources or projects to recommend?

I help to run a once-a-week STEAM program for kids. Here's what we've found about cheap tools.

+ When they are new to a program, kids and parents care about how tools look. We have a nicely organized wall of tools and six identical work tables. It helps get participants excited and helps convince parents that the program is legitimate.

+ Once they buy in, kids don't care about how a tool or project looks. Some of our most popular projects are built from scrap wood or cardboard.

+ Even after they buy in, kids get easily frustrated when a tool doesn't work.

I think it makes perfect sense for the Titan team (or anyone without a pre-existing relationship to a group) to make everything nice-looking since it helps to establish credibility. If you're making something at home or you've already established credibility, you could absolutely cut some corners by using cheaper parts or making parts yourself. Make sure to use quality parts, though. If you rig something that constantly requires little fixes or nudges to stay running, your audience is going to quickly lose interest.

>> I bet their accounting practices are just as screwed up.

The difference is that proper accounting has laws behind it. If your accounting practices are crooked enough, executives can go to jail and/or be personally liable for losses. If there were similar information security laws, I suspect we'd have far fewer breaches like this.

I did a fair amount of volunteering in my kids' school. There is a huuuuge difference between the effective teachers and the teachers that parents like. The school is a public school that uses a lottery to determine admission because 200-250 kids apply for 100 spots each year. Because of this, parent involvement is considerably higher than an ordinary school. You’d expect that this would be the kind of school that would embrace great teachers.

There are a few terrible teachers at the school but they aren't the ones that the parents complain about. As long as a teacher is nice and most kids get good grades, nobody complains. The most hated teachers are the ones who actually try to get kids to behave better and learn more. This is because most parents look at test scores when choosing a school, but they don’t really care about their kid’s score. (It’s easy to rationalize a poor test score--"The test doesn’t measure what’s wonderful about Taylor.") Instead, parents mostly want their kids to be happy and stay out of trouble. A teacher that doesn’t make her students work very hard and doesn’t demand good behavior meets those criteria perfectly.

I volunteer with two organizations--one group serves mostly privileged high achievers (kids on track to be lawyers, architects, etc.) while the other is made up of kids who are probably only 50/50 to graduate high school. In both groups, most of the kids are TERRIBLE writers. Their vocabulary is usually fairly limited and their writing is stilted and repetitive.

Being a good writer generally doesn't matter in high school. Most classes don't require much writing and for those that do, they just require students to convey the right number of facts and avoid most grammar mistakes.

Kids also engage in far more code-switching than adults, I think. When asked for a recommendation, It's possible that this particular kid just dashed off a quick email rather than really sit down to write something engaging.

I think the point of most pump and dump schemes is getting someone else to buy so that you can sell and leave others holding the bag.

Other scams are probably more like MtGox where the coins don't exist or are routinely stolen.

>> I'll defend the parent comment by observing that we can reproduce this effect with non-judicial metrics, like "murder rate in majority foo-race communities". Assuming the reporting rate for murders is very high across the board, this escapes bias in both policing and conviction rates, and sends us back to other explanations.

A community has a fair amount of power in deciding where crime happens. The police (by policy or culture) can choose to push illegal activity to certain neighborhoods. If the police come down hard on drugs, prostitution, etc. in white neighborhoods, then that activity will move to non-white neighborhoods. The problems that come along with increased illegal activity, including higher murder rates, will be concentrated in non-white neighborhoods.

Auto and life insurance are usually more expensive for men, but health insurance is usually more expensive for women. It would be interesting to see who comes out ahead overall.

Since the 80's, the state of Montana has banned insurance underwriting based on gender. There have been attempts to reverse that law, but none have passed.

My male Montana cousins always had slightly cheaper insurance than I did, but my female Montana cousins more than made up for it.

Fun fact: The rules on coworker dating in the post-WWII era were originally intended to get the woman to quit.

Here's how it worked:

A company would hire a bunch of high school or college grads. Young women would get hired as secretaries at a salary of $X. Young men would get hired as salesmen, clerks, etc. at a salary of $X+Y. There would be plenty of time to socialize at the company cafeteria, office parties, and happy hour. Naturally, many of the young men and women would start dating. When they announced they were getting married, they'd get hauled in to the boss's office and told that one of them had to quit. It was then strongly implied that it should be the woman since her salary wasn't going to support both of them and she didn't have much upward mobility. This created openings so you could hire a new crop of young women ready to be paid poorly and marry the next crop of young men.

My mother-in-law has a cabin in northern Minnesota. It's three miles outside a town of 150 people. Her utility lines are buried. Meanwhile, I live four miles from the center of a metro area of three million and everything in my neighborhood is above ground.

I suspect the major difference is that the power and phone companies in the little town are customer-owned coops while the utilities in my metro area are huge conglomerates.

So let's put together some assumptions:

1. Company X is smart enough to never record this illegal policy in documents/email/etc.

2. The policy is verbally communicated to all recruiters and many upper managers.

3. Company X is growing and employs hundreds of recruiters.

If the recruiter turn-over at company X is similar to other companies (i.e. it's pretty high), it's only a matter of time before a recently fired recruiter talks to a lawyer or the press.

The simpler thing to do is only advertise very low-level positions and pay new hires poorly enough that only new grads will apply in the first place. Of course, then you've got to develop the folks that you hire or have a model that is predicated on just throwing large numbers of people at problems.

It's not clear from the articles I've read. Here's one that references some of the research:

http://educationnext.org/all-together-now/

A minor quibble: The state subsidizes all public colleges, most likely including your community college. Where I live (Minnesota) that subsidy accounts somewhere around half of the total cost. So community college probably costs about the same as high school.

It turns out to be more complicated than you're thinking. Lower- and average-performing kids get a greater benefit from mixed classes than higher performers. However, high performers with some interaction with average performers do better than high performers with no interaction outside their ability group.

>> The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.

This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.

Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.

>> There is an argument to be made for not having corporate tax. Corporations are just collections of people, owners and employees.

Forming a corporation allows me to gain benefits that would be difficult or impossible to obtain as an ordinary person. (e.g. limited liability, special tax treatment) It's not unreasonable that a corporation's owners pay additional taxes.

So many fascinating possibilities to this data.

It would be interesting to see the next hundred schools. Places like Michigan State or Minnesota have so many students that it'd be interesting to see how many congress members they've produced.

It would also be interesting to see trends over time as well. Congress is more heavily tilted toward lawyers than it used to be 100 years ago. I wonder if that's part of the reason why the ivy league schools seem over-represented.

They absolutely did. Look up the origins of the Chicago Teachers' Union or the fire fighter's union in Pittsburgh.

Even today, government employee unions face serious challenges to their existence. If Scott Walker doesn't count as management, who does?

You want to hear an insane story about why we need teachers' unions?

This neighbor of mine was a teacher for 45 years, starting back in the 1940's. She found her first job in a little town and found a nice apartment for $45/month. The school superintendent heard about it. He called her and told her she had to rent an attic with another new teacher because there's a widow in town whose only source of income was renting to teachers. If she refused to live there, they'd fire her. The attic cost $100/month ($50 each) even though it was smaller than the apartment.

I took a couple labor management courses in college. One of the things the professor said has always stuck with me:

"Management gets the union it asks for."

Almost every union in the US and the UK was formed in the face of withering hostility from management. It's not surprising that the union would be antagonistic in response.

EDIT: typo

> The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens.

I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older.

Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.

Agreed. I know anecdotes aren’t data, but here are some of the workplace injuries I witnessed before I got a white collar job:

Hardees - frier accident=third degree burn. Management told her to finish the dinner rush. Two days later when her leg wasn't healing she went to the doctor. The owners never paid for the doctor, fought her workers comp claim, and fired her a few weeks after she came back to work.

Little Caesar's - cook slipped and got a deep cut on his arm. The manager tried to keep him at work until he ruined a couple pizzas by bleeding on them. He drove himself to the emergency room. He quit the next month when the owners refused to pay for the emergency room bill.

UPS - When I worked at a bookstore, the UPS guy who delivered to our mall came in with a terrible limp. A stack of boxes had fallen on him as they were loading the truck. His manager told him to complete his shift since they didn’t have any other drivers. He ended up needing knee surgery and having to fight the company for months for workers comp. To UPS’s credit, they didn’t fire him and he was still working for UPS when I quit the bookstore job. (I lived in a right-to-work state, so I don’t think the UPS drivers were unionized.)

Just speculating, but it could be a couple things:

Providing more choices can often result in consumers simply giving up. At a former job we did an A/B test where we showed some visitors two options to buy our product and added a third option for other visitors. In the three option scenario, the bounce rate was about 10% higher.

Or, it could be that there are folks for whom bitcoin is linked with drugs, gambling, piracy, etc. Maybe seeing a bitcoin option makes the site look less reputable.

>> Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.

That's why I'm skeptical of self-driving cars becoming widespread in the U.S. in the next decade. Driving in an unknown environment over millions of miles of roads is going to be a huge challenge if the infrastructure doesn't change, but I can't figure out which political party is going to support the massive infrastructure project. The early adopters of this technology are probably going to be transportation companies. Democrats are going to have a hard time advocating for spending money that throws truck and taxi drivers out of work. And good luck getting Republicans to spend additional money on anything.

I hope that google and/or the car companies pull it off, but I don't think that we should hold our breath waiting for the world to adjust to self-driving cars. The hardware and software will have to do 99% of the work.

Cities in North and South Dakota are so small, though. I don't see how you could include Sioux Falls or Fargo in a map like this. You'd have to include about twenty cities in Texas. (Des Moines's inclusion is suprising to me, but the Des Moines area has almost as many people as all of North Dakota.)

When you're talking about any sort of economic or tax impact, cities of around 100,000 people are barely a suburb on a map like this. Hell, even after the super-charged growth of the last decade, the combined GDP of North and South Dakota is less than $100 billion. The Minneapolis metro area's GDP is over twice that.

I think the guy felt bad that there weren't any big cities in the northern half of the great plains, so he bent the border to get Minneapolis in there.