The non-union version would be a little different, though. Employers would have to pay their underpaid good performers more, and if budget started to get tight as salaries normalized, they'd have to get rid of the drooling idiot who wasn't earning his keep. In the union version, it's hard to get rid of the unproductive idiot for anything short of murder. In a competitive workplace, it's just a question of total salary budget.

That's a problem with management giving realistic assessments and comparisons to their employees, though. If you think you're above average and you're not, your manager should be able to give you a good reason why you're not. Ultimately after the initial shake up (even if it involves people moving to other companies where they'll *still* likely be rated as below average), people will settle into reality. The thought experiments people do about this stuff seems to conflict with real experiments. The NBA doesn't collapse into chaos because the news reports it whenever LeBron James gets a new contract. Other players know that they're making less than he is and they probably generally know why. It's just part of the culture, and the equilbrium dosn't seem to be any differnt from a workplace where salaries are kept a closely guarded secret. It would just take time for our culture to shift.

It doesn't "have" to be perfect to be a working market. It just has to be perfect in order to be a completely idealized perfectly competitive free market on paper. No markets live up to the perfectly idealized theory, but they generally work. They just work less well as you move away from that ideal state. "I don't know what my competitor whill charge tomorrow" is a slight deviation from perfect information, but it's not really a big deal. "Nobody knows what anybody else is charging," is a major deviation that causes real problems.

It's a problem that applies really well to the medical market as well: You don't know nearly as well as your doctor what the actual value of his services are. You also often don't know what he'll charge you until after you've "bought" his services. And you sure as hell don't have a list of what other doctors would charge you. The end result is that the market is a total mess. Every step away from that problem and toward more perfect information (clearly published prices, more educated consumers, etc.) will improve outcomes, even if we never get to true "perfect information."

That could be read one of two ways:

1) Different students might need to be taught in different ways to learn the same set of skills.
2) Different students should come out of school with very different sets of skills.

I'm totally onboard with (1), but not so much with (2). "He can't add, but boy can he write!" Everybody is going to have natural aptitudes for certain things, but there's a basic level of core competence that everybody should be able to hit.

Since non-GMO foods have been consumed over many lifetimes of consumption, their safety or lack thereof has been pretty well established.

We're constantly hybridizing and producing all manner of crazy new plants where God knows how many genes are combined in totally new ways. There are tons of hybrids we're eating right now that have nowhere near "many lifetimes" worth of consumption, and there's no good reason to think that we'll do a better job of predicting all of their subtle properties (especially "long term" safety) any better than if we take a known organism and add one carefully selected gene to it.

I'm in favor of good information on food labels, but I also see the complaint from the GMO producers. I think they're worried about something like this:

GMO company: There's no need to label these things. They're perfectly safe.
Anti-GMO activist: Why do you hate transparency? If it's perfectly safe, there's no reason not to label them.

[Time passes. Labels mandated.]

Anti-GMO activist: If GMOs are so safe, why is labeling them mandatory?
Consumers: Hey! That's a good point!

Same here. We think and solve problems similarly, so there isn't much "talking past each other" when we disagree. If a problem can be reasoned through, we usually come to agreement. If it's squishier, we both sort of recognize that it's probably not worth fighting to the death over. Money and worry about unemployment is never a problem, so we don't fight over it or nitpick how it's spent (in fact, we each have a mix of private and shared accounts after 10 years of marriage, and we each handle a subset of the household financees without much oversight from the other). Beyond that I suppose everything else is pretty normal, but those are two big issues that cause a lot of relationship trouble that work out to a pretty strong built-in advantage for us.

We're both pretty mellow people who don't usually get wound up about stuff that's not really important, but I'm not sure if that's just who we are or if it's associated with how we were educated and how we work. There seem to be certain types of people who genuinely get bored and need a certain amount of drama in their human interactions and will create it if it's not there. Those people seem to be less common in engineering, although I don't have a lot to quantify or support that. Those people are usually not fun to be around and seem like they'd be a nightmare to be married to.

I'm all for a massive reduction in police militarization and very nearly eliminating SWAT teams given how rarely they're used for what they were originally intended for. That being said, the problem with using this issue as a lever is that there will always be some fringe situation that calls for a swift armed reaction of some sort. These kids can literally say whatever they want, so there's always going to be a way to provoke a dangerous response as long as there's any conceivable situation that warrants that response. This is just one of those cases where there should be a panic button. It should be really difficult to hit and you should punish the living shit out of people who treat the panic button like it's a toy.

Let me step back a bit and rephrase my earlier question. There are two key price points: There's the upper limit, which is the amount of money you make for your employer. They wouldn't pay you a dollar more than that because they'd just be losing a dollar on the net, and they'd be indifferent between hiring you and not hiring you if it equals that amount because the net value to them is $0. Then there's the minimum amount you'd work for. You wouldn't work for less than that, by definition. So now there's a big range between those two numbers.

The salary you land on in that range reflects a split of that surplus value between you and your employer. You seem to think that you getting some of it while your employer keeps some of it is reasonable. You also seem to think that you getting none of it while your employer keeps all of it is reasonable. But somewhere along the line, you seem to think that you taking "too much" of it becomes unreasonable. I'm wondering what you're basing that on and how you decide when "too much" has happened. Why the asymmetry in favor of the employer, and why the certainty that Shearer crossed it somewhere between $300K and $450K per episode?

So if your employer cut you back to that base requirement, you wouldn't consider leaving and using your time some other way? Or at least work fewer hours?

Imagine you had enough money to live your current standard of living forever without working any more. Would that change your base requirement? You have a set of choices with respect to what to do with your time. One option would be not to work at all and to spend time with friends and family and enriching hobbies. Assuming that was an option to you, would the base pay requirement to get you to give that time up and go to work every day go up, or would it stay the same regardless of whether you needed the money or not?

I ask because Shearer has tons of money. A paycheck that would rent him a cheap apartment and a daily ration of Top Ramen would not affect his standard of living at all. He wouldn't notice either way. So given that he's probably a normal person with friends and family and hobbies, he'd be crazy to go to work at a job that only pays enough for a cheap apartment and a daily ration of Top Ramen. He's better off enjoying the days he has left doing something more enriching. Being "grateful" that an employer offered him a subsistence wage in exchange for losing that time wouldn't be rational at all.

If you had gotten paid a larger chunk of that money, would it have been morally wrong somehow?

Are you sure you deserved your whole salary as a software developer? I bet you'd have done it for less than you were paid, so why did you take that money? What are you really worth, and how do you know?

Perhaps you could explain how such a salary is justified? Without resorting to "well the Market says..."?

Becuse he's earning his employers shittons more than $6M per year by doing that work? Would the morally correct outcome be for him to cut his salary by, say, $3M so the owners of the company can pocket $3M more?

Monopoly or not, companies set their prices at the spot that they think maximizes their profits. They can't "pass on" 100% of a new cost by changing the price because that knocks them off of the spot they optimized for. They do lose something in the process. If all it took for them to grab an extra $229K in profits was to raise their prices, they'd have done it already.

One could point out that there are fewer instances of white males being miscategorized.

White males are just about the easiest faces to categorize. They tend to have short hair that doesn't obscure facial features or create oddball shapes that confuse the classifiers. Their skin tone makes photographing them and finding edges extracting features easier than it is with darker skinned people. White people have a greater variety of eye colors that can be used to distinguish among them. "White guy face" is just about the optimal case for this problem. If I had to come up with a worst case that was also a photo of a fairly "common" person, I'd go with "dark skinned, brown eyed person wtih long hair and facial hair." That's a pretty clean sweep of all of the variables that make this a hard problem.

Good decisions? Sorry, but releasing poorly tested software like this was obviously a bad decision. The bad outcomes were a direct result of their poor decision making.

How good does the cutting edge of object recognition need to be before it's not "poorly tested" anymore, especially when it's for a silly photo app and not a medical or military application? I never hear this type of thing from people who have actually had to solve these types of problems. The reality is that objects are going to be confused with other objects. Lots of them, once we're talking about hundreds of millions or billions of samples. Some cases will fail with great regularity and patterns. The unfortunate fact here was that the pattern happened to coincidentally have really embarrassing cultural connotations.

This is one of the things I don't miss about working in machine vision. We'd run our algorithm over a zillion images and it would correctly handle all of them save a small handful and that small handful would be filed as bugs. OK, maybe we'll be able to handle that small handful at the expense of a smaller handful next time around. But the pass/fail criteria for the tool is in its overall results, not in the outliers.