Standardized tests can benefit minorities.

One of my online friends is non-white and immigrated to Australia as a child. She had a thick accent and racist teachers labeled her stupid.

Then one day she had the chance to take a standardized test. Her very high intelligence showed, and she got tracked into a selective school and moved into a high-paying career.

Yeah, because THE GOVERNMENT BUILT THOSE HOMES.

The Canadian government used to build housing because of COURSE builders want to make a profit, and there's no profit in providing homes for the poor. When the austerity budgets hit in the 90s, the funding to build those homes went away. The responsibility for building homes has been pushed off onto provincial and municipal governments. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunda...

Stop giving the capitalists more money to do this stuff. They never will. They don't want to. If it's profitable for people to be homeless (and it is; our current system requires the constant reminder that you could be homeless to scare you into accepting even the worst jobs) then it doesn't matter if the regulations are relaxed or there's innovation funds. None of those homes go to the poor.

Even when you put conditions on a development--like the developer has to build some low-cost housing as well--they'll build the luxury condos first, then sell the part of the development that was supposed to go to low cost housing and it never gets built.

That, and the compiler really is slow. Understandable given the extra work it does, but I am imagining this as a productivity effect: https://xkcd.com/303/

Which have you found missing? So far everything I've looked for has had a crate for it, though of course not things with the breadth of Boost or the depth of Eigen.

I half agree with you, and I fully agree with you for all of the part where you're saying that Musk is just a billionaire that's playing us.

But EVs now will get better. The batteries will get lighter and cheaper and there are places where the grid is shit but everyone has started installing solar and batteries at home because it means more stability. But BE cars and trucks are hugely heavy, destroy the roads, and require an upgrade in DRIVING infrastructure. Turns out a 9000lbs BE Hummer is too heavy to be stopped by conventional guardrails at 100km/hr. Forget about the cost to upgrade the grid, we're already so far behind on keeping the roads in good repair and BEVs are NOT helping.

Honestly, the best solution for the environment will be electric bicycles. I've seen a couple analyses done, and you can make a good argument that the lifetime emissions of an electric bike are LESS than those for a conventional bicycle when you take into account the diet of the rider. Turns out electric motors are so good for that sort of thing that you have to be a very small vegan to have any chance of out-performing the electric bike.

And at that point, the stability of the grid will be even less of a concern. Electric vehicles are the future, I just hope it's mostly bikes.

Yes. I never liked that line of criticism. The important thing is the lack of evidence that it helps with COVID. But it's on the WHO list of essential medications for humans.

Actual morality, across many belief systems, includes something like the Golden Rule.

I would not want to be exposed to something that made me feel unwelcome especially if there were many alternatives. So I won't do it to others.

And if a colleague tells me that something is making her feel unwelcome, my prior is that she's sincere and an alternative should be found to the something.

Not original with me.

Any image in a paper can be reduced to one bit by Huffman coding starting with "Is it Lena?".

I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.

I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)

No parole, but a common thing in Federal is to follow a prison sentence with a term of "supervised release", which has key features in common with parole. If that was included in the SBF sentence, he'd have a badly limited life.

Even that is only if the prisoner can avoid chickenshit or dishonest disciplinary actions.

Nothing by our standards, but one thing the BOP does right is electronic messaging kiosks. Google Corrlinks, I think it is. Plain text and limited length, billed per minute.

There are bigger issues. People getting out of Rip van Winkle sentences don't know how you apply for a job now. We need much better re-entry preparation.

Look at the salaries for generally competent software developers of any experience level in the UK. Now look in the US. It's not hard to see why our industry lags in the UK.

Look at the tax system that applies to employees in the UK. The scale in effect has massive increases in marginal tax rates part way along the curve that mean it's not a progressive system, for no sensible reason. It's even worse if you have kids, when at some points on the curve a huge proportion of any pay rise never actually reaches you in practice, or in extreme cases you can even be worse off after a pay rise, because of the strange ways that various allowances work.

Now look at the massive increases in effective taxation that have been applied to founders and owner-operators of small businesses in recent years. We're talking about 10-20% more of your revenues getting eaten by taxes before you get to keep any profits. In many cases you can now give up all the security and benefits of full-time employment (which are much better in the UK than the US, remember) and potentially invest your own money into bootstrapping your business, but then even if it works out modestly successful you end up paying higher tax rates than someone else taking a salary. Again, not hard to see why we're lacking in entrepreneurs.

Look at the flexible workforce. Contractors and freelancers in the UK live under a perpetual sword of Damocles called IR35 that has all but killed off the real flexible labour market in recent years and means even "contractors" are really being treated as disguised employees by default and again would probably be better off taking a permanent salaried position to get the extra job security and benefits. And given the difference in salaries as mentioned above, obviously some of the good people are then going to take their skills elsewhere.

None of this is news but successive governments have just stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the problems affecting smaller businesses, not just in tech but across other industries from healthcare to logistics as well. It's like they haven't noticed that there are 1,000 SMEs for every enterprise giant and collectively the SMEs create more jobs, pay more taxes, make more useful products... And then someone in government acts all surprised that our tech industry is lagging. Well, duh.