Hardly. AirBnb and PayPal are both good examples of this sort of thing. PayPal got raided a lot and got sent C&D letters by various state regulators when they were rolling out across the USA. Eventually they had to sell to eBay (their primary competitor) to get enough money and political immunity to survive. There's a book about it called the PayPal Wars that goes into more detail on this.

Courts are useless here. They routinely let governments use secret definitions and secret evidence. You have no chance.

lol. This is an administration that defines the word "militant" as meaning any male that isn't a child or pensioner. "Material support for terrorism" doesn't mean anything at all, given that the last 15 years have shown governments will happily label anything they don't like as terrorism. Bear in mind the primary roadblock that prevents the UN agreeing on a definition of terrorism is western nations (i.e. America's) insistence that people who resist foreign occupation of their countries must be considered terrorists, and Arab nations insistence that they mustn't.

No they have not.

What's the point of the external marker? I never had issues identifying an Uber vehicle when it was coming to pick me up. External markers are obviously needed when you're hailing vehicles on the street, but they don't do that.

The hostile environment is sometimes present in subtle ways, such as important discussions that occur spontaneously in the men's restroom

Look, if you find your work environment to be hostile then that's entirely your opinion and none of us here can really judge except through what you just wrote.

That said, what you just wrote makes me wonder if I woke up this morning in a parallel universe. Important discussions happening spontaneously in the men's restroom? Seriously?

I have spent my entire life being a man. In this time I can remember exactly zero conversations that took place in the bathroom at work. I have never taken part in one, I have never overheard one happening whilst I've been doing my business there. I do not believe this is some bizarre fluke - there's a strong social convention amongst men that nobody interacts with each other in the restroom. This social convention is only slightly less strong outside the workplace: it's extremely rare for men, even friends, to dawdle or hold a conversation longer than a few sentences in the bathroom. This is one reason why men's bathrooms tend not to have long queues outside them.

In contrast if I had a pound for every time I've been out with a bunch of women and one stood up to say, "I'm going to the bathroom" and suddenly the others all decided they needed to go right at the same time ...... well, I'd be a rich man. The amount of girls-only gossiping that goes in female bathrooms is ridiculous.

If you seriously believe that men are frequently having important business conversations in toilets then I don't know what to say to you. You either work in an extremely weird office, or you live in a country with radically different social norms, or no such conversations are actually happening but you've already decided you're being excluded somehow and can't figure out how or when, so decided to blame potty breaks. In which case you're just paranoid.

Yes they are making an argument. The author of the article explicitly says:

What does all this show? It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important. It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all

i.e. engineering that is "socially meaningful" is "better engineering" and by logical implication, the reason women were not signing up before is because engineering had no positive social impact and was somehow not good enough.

This is a load of crap that's highly insulting to men, of course. They're seeing what they want to see in this data: that the reasons women don't do high paid engineering work is because of a fault with engineering rather than because of the choices of women. It's a fundamentally biased, feminist perspective.

By the way, despite the name this "Development Engineering" course does not have any prerequisites, like actual training in engineering. Their website says students from any department can apply. So it sounds a lot like they've invented some entirely new course from scratch, called it engineering and are now marketing this as a success for getting women to study tough, high earning subjects. But I see no reason why an employer would desire people with such a qualification.

So here's a different theory: it's just another example of men choosing higher paid work than women. Instead of studying an entirely new subject (specific to one university) which only focuses on very poor parts of the world and thus is likely to have far more constrained earning potential, men choose to do a PhD that has a better chance of letting them pay off their student debt faster (like an actual pure engineering PhD). With fewer men choosing to do the course, the proportion of women rises.

There have been multiple leakers from the various US national security industrial complexes since Snowden. It's hard to spot unless you're really paying attention, but it's clear that it's happened several times now - I think we're up to at least three other leakers, all of whom are anonymous. You can tell because the info comes from non-NSA agencies, or the material is dated after Snowden left, or (most subtly of all) the articles don't attribute the source of the leak to Snowden.

So it's not obviously useless. There are people leaking anonymously. Though for obvious reasons they don't tend to shout from the hills about it.

For context, I develop complex scientific software. We use the browser (desktop) as our client and push the limits of what you can do there.

That's the problem with web development. People are always pushing the limits of browsers. Nobody used to talk about "pushing the limits of the Windows API" back when I used to write desktop apps in Delphi, because it hardly limited you.

At some point our industry has to get past this collective web fetish. The browser was never intended to run apps. Trying to use it as an app platform results in stuff that's horribly bloated and bug ridden, with decades of accumulated experience in how to write good software just thrown down the toilet because HTML5 got fashionable. When was the last time a mobile or desktop app had an XSS exploit?

Back when I was a lad, we knew that an "email address" was like a physical address - useless unless people know it. People even made them publicly available on the web!

Yes, spammers abused this. But hiding addresses hardly helped. So many addresses have been dumped or dictionary brute forced by now it's hardly a big deal if your email address appears in one more place.

So colour me unexcited by this terrible misstep.

That's like the opposite of what happened.

Pakistan does not exist because of the machinations of the British. Rather, Pakistan came into existence due to the withdrawal and general shutdown of the British Empire, which like many occupations was suppressing tribal and ethnic dissent in order to keep their territories together. The moment the Empire (which was weak and failing at this point in time anyway) released its hold on the country there was a huge bloody massacre and a civil war ("The Partition") which resulted in the creation of Pakistan.

So it's not like the British stood around and encouraged Muslims and Hindus to fight each other. They did that all on their own.

I suspect they could have saved themselves a lot of coding by simply randomly linking to real startup web sites. It'd look no less ridiculous.

The context is US employees. The majority of employees are in the US

No it's not and no they aren't. Most Google employees and most Google revenues are outside the USA.

Name your country with a significant number of Google employees in which Google routinely hires people who do not speak an official language of that country, please.

Switzerland, as just one example.

Young people are working long hours, as you said yourself. Those young people are not staying, as the data confirms

Jesus christ, you're bad at this. The data doesn't say that. Google has very low attrition rates and always has. If all the young people were burning out and leaving the average age would be higher than it is, wouldn't it?

Google are low on gender, age, and race diversity compared to nearly every other tech company

You haven't shown that, or even begun to lay the groundwork for that. The demographics of Google engineering are pretty similar to the demographics of people taking CS courses at universities, which should not be surprising to anyone.

Like a few of my friends who walked away from the Google interview process, the moment I started hearing discussions of fitting into the "culture", I saw that it was a business comprised of smart but narrowminded techs who did not really know any better

All organisations have cultures, it's inherent to any group of people that's allowed to be selective. If you don't believe this then all that suggests to me is you work at a place where you fit in well enough that you don't recognise that there is a culture at all.

Who said anything about the USA? You realise Google has offices all over the world, right?

And who said anything about burning out? You're the one who decided that must happen. I've not seen any burned out young people at Google. The only burnout I knew there was a guy in his 50s.

And the only "evidence" of discrimination in hiring comes from this article, which is deeply questionable. Amongst other things it assumes every employee at Google does software development, which is very far from true (there is a massive sales division that skews young for the same reason bar staff do - it's not a very appealing long term job).

Yes, you're right, in America that must definitely be a component of it. I'm from the UK where political parties get a lot of public funding so the influence of money is less overt (it still happens).