I don't think the grading itself is biased, but I do think that female teachers like to throw their female students these "girl projects" that are definitely skewed to female-oriented skill sets.

Maybe this means most education tasks suffer from a male bias, but we're talking classes like Social Students and English where it's reading, writing, class discussion, fairly neutral things that ought not have much gender bias.

I know what you mean, but there's a whole class of left wing people in senior managerial roles, in addition to the legal and other professional fields.

I have two good friends (a couple), one works as a business consultant and one has senior job with a healthcare company. They both of MBAs, live in an upscale suburb in a house with an in-ground swimming pool. And they are both liberal as hell.

I think it's super ironic to sit in their in-ground pool with them, drinking top shelf liquor, and listen to them talk about how great the Democrats/Hillary/Bernie are. They are not bullshitting, either, they really believe it.

I mean, they are not "in control" like some CEO or something, but they are the kind of people who can call politicians and get answers and their money == influence at some level, yet the hew to serious far-left ideas and causes despite a lifestyle that it definitely not left wing.

This makes me wonder what would happen if there were no rules about fraudulent claims.

Wouldn't that result in basically all claims being thought of as fraudulent until they were proven otherwise? Companies with a track record of consistently telling the truth over the long haul might gain some credibility, but everyone else is the liar that they are now.

The idea that companies are honest now because they skate on the edges of the rules is laughable.

That's just it, nobody agrees your rules are legal. Since we have to refer to the law to establish the legitimacy of your rules, now we're back to political in some sense.

Hell, establishing that you own your business may be a matter of SEC regulation regarding stock ownership or a question of contract law.

It strikes me that any code of conduct sufficiently well defined to be useful will carry the biases and values of those who craft the code of conduct. Those biases and values can certainly be judged to be "political agendas" by people opposed to them.

I'm probably mis-paraphrasing it, but there's some kind of statement about "all laws are political" because they arise from a political process. Some laws, like those prohibiting murder, seem apolitical but my guess is this is just because murder is widely accepted as unacceptable.

My guess is a code of conduct made up of purely shared values which have wide agreement would be as free as possible of agendas, but it would probably also not be very useful since it would only cover small amounts of conduct on which there was wide agreement.

I bought a Volvo with blindspot warnings about 10 years ago. I've never found it helpful mostly because I spent 25 or so years driving cars without blindspot avoidance. I've basically ingrained blindspot checking into my driving behavior and retraining myself to rely on the technology and drop manual checks seems hard, and by itself it doesn't add much to manual blindspot checking.

It could also be a function of the implementation. Mine uses orange lights in the car near the region where you look at side mirrors. Despite being more or less in your field of vision, they're not easy to "see". My wife's 2015 Acura uses an audible system with dash display (combined with the turn signal being turned on? I don't drive it enough) but the audible alert seems more beneficial than needing visual indicators. I've also driven rentals with the alerts embedded in the side mirrors which makes it hard to avoid.

Overall though, if you've learned to drive safely and deal with blind spots manually a new technology really doesn't appear to add much value and can be a distraction.

Collision avoidance has been great, though, I'm pretty sure it's saved me once or twice. Distance sensing cruise control I think would benefit all drivers and might even be useful as an automatic function because it maintains a constant speed and constant distance.

I can't help but wonder if part of the success of unions was union leaders willing to play dirty themselves.

Unions often seem portrayed in history texts as performing a Ghandi/MLK like non-violent protests; pickets, sit-downs, etc, as if that's what swayed management at many companies.

I wonder if what really swayed management was getting their delivery fleet firebombed while they had their workers locked out or their scabs beat to a pulp.

Minneapolis had a huge trucker's strike in the 1930s. The union side decided nothing moved, so they started stopping and hijacking trucks trying to break the strike. They fought company goons and the police with axe handles. Even though strikers got fired on, the violence against police/management forces got extreme enough that they finally had a to call out the National Guard and the Governor ended up forcing a compromise that was basically a union organizing victory, breaking the anti-union cartel.

The union only succeeded to the extent they were willing to use some kind of force to achieve their goals. It seems like many turning points in labor relations hinged on how willing the union backers were literally willing to meet force with force, even if they technically didn't win any specific street battle. There's a point at which the political system is only so willing to engage in small-scale urban warfare for the benefit of the capitalists.

Modern hypervisors can do copy on write memory sharing between VMs.

I've been running a POC for VMware's Horizon View VDI system and with 10 test users logged in we see something like ~30 GB memory shared.

IMHO, the problem Microsoft never managed to get right was user profiles. They're too clunky, which is why you seldom see roaming profiles in use.

You laugh, but we complain about this a lot.

Up through middle school we would get project assignments from non-art teachers that involved what amounted to an arts and crafts project (eg, a history assignment that was a diorama about Lincoln or something).

My son always got bad grades on those projects despite having a B+ or an A in the class generally because art wasn't his thing, and the grading on the project was biased towards its artistic content. I would inevitably go in to gripe about the grade he got and I would see the high-scoring projects were nearly all by girls, many of whom seem to be into "coloring".

And nearly all these projects were assigned by female teachers. Their responses were really frustrating, a lot of bullshit about the importance of presentation quality of submitted work, etc. "What about their actual knowledge of the subject?" and the teachers would kind of blanch and not want to say anymore.

My take is there is some kind of low-level bias going on here, the teachers see the girls being less interested in the subject matter and toss them an easy one to boost their grades. Last year we only had two, and my *wife* actually did the artistic part of the work herself on one of them -- still only a C+!! My wife was super pissed and thought that it was a definite sign that the grade was being issued based on gender, not on content, because from a production value perspective it was like business-meeting quality.

This year during the fall "curriculum night" I actually asked all the teachers how many "coloring assignments" there would be. Most didn't understand and I explained, "You know, those assignments where we do something artistic that has nothing to do with the content of the curriculum and is judged on artistic merit". To a person, all the female teachers looked pissed that I asked that. Totally busted.

Google and all the other web-tracking companies seem to do so much tracking.

I'm imagining a big argument against better web privacy is fundamentally economics -- tracking, etc, makes business so much more efficient that eliminating it would essentially wind up raising prices as marketers would wind up back in the old days of educated guesses that their ads or messaging was directed at the right people.

My question is -- if you're a marketer, is all this new intelligence and tracking actually making marketing/selling better for the people doing the marketing and selling? Do they have any data to show its better?

My hunch is "not really" and most of the complaining about enhanced privacy will be driven by people collecting/selling this information who are now out a source of revenue or forced to try to sell a much less useful product. I would also expect some kind of complaining by buyers of this information, maybe not because they really know the information makes them more effective but because they just think it does.

It also makes me wonder if tracking-type info is a kind of market in false goods -- lots of money being spent and made trading the information, but its not really useful. It persists because the market is so huge and generates so much profit, but if at the end of the day it went away the only actual loss would be the economic exchange associated with buying and selling information.

I've lived in the same house for 20 years. Until the last 5 years, we NEVER had a problem with wasps. In the last 5 years it's been a real annoyance. We have to do a weekly wasp patrol and the odds are about 50-50 we find a starter nest of 5-10 "cells". We've been going through 1-2 full cans of wasp spray per summer, and I think we might have gone through 1 can in the previous 15 years.

One of my clients is a country club and I asked the maintenance guys about wasps. They told me they normally go through 3-4 cans of wasp spray a year, last summer they said it was 2 cases of wasp spray.

I wonder if there is some kind of long-term wasp population cycle.

I guess I don't understand. I'm mostly responding to the rhetoric of "enforced housing shortages" that principally blames single family homeowners for backing zoning restrictions that limit the construction of multi-family housing in traditionally single family neighborhoods. The crux of the argument is that people aren't interested in protecting quality of life, etc, they are just protecting their housing value as an investment.

To me the hole in that argument is that a house isn't a very good financial investment in terms of profit, nobody is really making much of a profit off their houses around here based on what I see for sale prices and what's actually paid to buy and own the house.

It may be true if you live in some parts of the country or even very specific neighborhoods here locally. My dad had a neighbor in Arizona who had moved from LA, two retired cops that sold their house in LA and bought a ranch in Arizona. The way my dad described it, their house sold for like 3-4x what they paid for it and in a fairly short amount of time (the cops basically retired when they hit pension minimum years).

The real value (or utility proposition) of owning a house seems to be you get a place to live for 30 years *and* a big check at the end. The big check *feels like* a profit thanks to the nominal distortion of inflation, but $revenue - $expenses, it's often a break-even perspective. The bonus is you lived someplace for 30 years and still get a bunch of money.

I think there's a whole weird world of Facebook that ordinary people who have friend lists that mostly mirror their real lives never see.

My guess is its comprised of people making low-end money pushing scams and social-media-as-a-career, various swaths of low-income populations, bored and lonely shut-ins who will friend/like anything and have zero privacy settings, and then the truly weird and crazy bottom end of the population.

Plus, it's an international system. You can participate in high weirdness outside your geography.

I've been in lots of bars, but I've never seen a bar fight, gang rape or other type of horrible thing in a bar. I think it mostly just means I don't associate with those kinds of people or go to those kinds of bars, not that they don't exist.

This artificial scarcity of housing thing gets brought up here, mostly blaming owners of single family homes for engaging in zoning restrictions so they can get rich on housing price increases.

I watch the sale prices for houses in my neighborhood and if I extrapolate those prices out 10 years when my mortgage is paid off and I sell, the price I will get for my house isn't even a profit compared to what I paid in principal, interest, taxes and insurance and maintenance costs.

It's feels like a windfall because it's a giant lump sum run up by inflation, but it's more or less break even at best. I literally would have been much better off had I rented cheap suburban apartments and put the difference in some stock index fund.

I think the complaints about artificial scarcity are kind of accident-of-history. Up until not that long ago, most people didn't *want* to live in the city. Old housing stock, bad schools, crime, high taxes. The US spent decades migrating to the suburbs. In the last 20-some years, many cities have seen a renaissance, including suburban boomers retiring and moving back into core cities.

Since so much development focus at a macroeconomic level was focused on the suburbs, the cities were underdeveloped. Now that everybody wants to live there -- young people, retirees, etc, the housing growth is lagging the demand, and the demand is driving prices way up.

Uber may be a horrible company, but the taxi system here was borderline unusable unless you were at the airport or had an hour to burn waiting for one at your house.

The convenience of Uber/Lyft is astonishing. You can actually get a ride nearly anywhere in very short order. It's hard not to believe their success isn't a function of breaking all the rules but because they actually provide a really good service compared to taxis.