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Submission + - With Miami Move, Jeff Bezos Proves Zip Codes Do Matter

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Our goal," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained in a Feb. 2021 Instagram post announcing the location of a second tuition-free @BezosAcademy preschool in Tacoma, WA, "is to unlock the potential in kids to become creative leaders, original thinkers, and lifelong learners — regardless of their zip code."

Three years later, a new Amazon SEC filing reveals how much zip codes can matter, even to Bezos, the third richest person in the world. GeekWire reports: "A new Amazon [SEC] filing, detailing Jeff Bezos' plan to sell a slice of his stake in the company, sheds fresh light on his move from Seattle to Miami — and his ability to avoid Washington state's capital gains tax [ironically, earmarked to be funneled into early-childhood education programs and school construction] in the process. The filing reveals that the Amazon founder and executive chairman adopted a trading plan Nov. 8 to sell up to 50 million Amazon shares during a period ending in January 2025. It would be the first time he has sold Amazon stock since 2021. The plan was adopted less than a week after Bezos announced on Instagram, on Nov. 2, that he was leaving his longtime home of Seattle for sunnier skies in Miami. In his Instagram post, Bezos said he wanted to be closer to his parents and Blue Origin space venture in Florida. He did not mention taxes."

"Given Bezos' recent move out of Washington — where he founded and built Amazon into a global behemoth — he will also be saving around $600 million in tax expense if he ends up selling the maximum of 50 million shares under the plan, based on the company's current stock price. That's around $600 million in what would have otherwise been tax revenue for his former home state, as The Center Square reported Monday. The capital gains tax, passed in 2021, imposes a 7% tax on any gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, with some exceptions. It was challenged in court but ultimately ruled constitutional by the state Supreme Court last year. The tax brought in nearly $900 million in its first year of collection. Revenue goes toward early education and childcare programs, as well as school construction projects."

It's of course no secret that Bezos is no fan of taxes — he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation near San Francisco to avoid taxes, ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax aimed at improving WA state public education (joined in the fight by Microsoft and Steve Ballmer), characterized as unconstitutional attempts to make Amazon collect and pay sales taxes, and came under fire by ProPublica for paying no income tax in some years.

Submission + - SPAM: Unlike Poor Kids, Jeff Bezos is Not Going to Let Zip Code Determine His Future

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Our goal," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained in a Feb. 2021 Instagram post announcing the location of a second tuition-free @BezosAcademy preschool in Tacoma, WA, "is to unlock the potential in kids to become creative leaders, original thinkers, and lifelong learners — regardless of their zip code."

Three years later, GeekWire reports: "A new Amazon [SEC] filing, detailing Jeff Bezos’ plan to sell a slice of his stake in the company, sheds fresh light on his move from Seattle to Miami — and his ability to avoid Washington state’s capital gains tax in the process. The filing reveals that the Amazon founder and executive chairman adopted a trading plan Nov. 8 to sell up to 50 million Amazon shares during a period ending in January 2025. It would be the first time he has sold Amazon stock since 2021. The plan was adopted less than a week after Bezos announced on Instagram, on Nov. 2, that he was leaving his longtime home of Seattle for sunnier skies in Miami. In his Instagram post, Bezos said he wanted to be closer to his parents and Blue Origin space venture in Florida. He did not mention taxes."

"Given Bezos’ recent move out of Washington — where he founded and built Amazon into a global behemoth — he will also be saving around $600 million in tax expense if he ends up selling the maximum of 50 million shares under the plan, based on the company’s current stock price. That’s around $600 million in what would have otherwise been tax revenue for his former home state, as The Center Square reported Monday. The capital gains tax, passed in 2021, imposes a 7% tax on any gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, with some exceptions. It was challenged in court but ultimately ruled constitutional by the state Supreme Court last year. The tax brought in nearly $900 million in its first year of collection. Revenue goes toward early education and childcare programs, as well as school construction projects." To be fair to Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dumped half his Microsoft stock (yielding more than $285M) just weeks before Washington implemented the capital gains tax in 2021.

It's no secret that Bezos is no fan of taxes — he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation near San Francisco to avoid taxes, ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax aimed at improving WA state public education (joined in the fight by Microsoft and Steve Ballmer), characterized as unconstitutional attempts to make Amazon collect and pay sales taxes, and came under fire by ProPublica for paying no income tax in some years ("he even claimed and received a $4,000 tax credit for his children" in 2011, "a year in which his wealth held roughly steady at $18 billion").

Comment Re:Code.org discriminates against boys (Score 2) 14

It seems the poster was referring to Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls, in which case 'penalized' or 'disincentivized' would be more appropriate word choices. Btw, the College Board continues to honor high schools where female AP CS students are disproportionately represented ("Schools receiving the AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award have achieved either 50% or higher female exam taker representation in one of or both AP computer science courses, or a percentage of female computer science exam takers that meets or exceeds that of the school's female population"), resulting in some remarkable winning streaks for all-girls high schools.

Submission + - Code.org Founders, Advisors, Donors Reaping the K-12 CS Students They Sowed

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Hi Neo family," begins the call for Neo Accelerator 2024 applicants. "Applications are open to Neo Accelerator, with new terms and unprecedented engagement by tech leaders who will look at submissions and invest alongside us. Work with world-class mentors, level up at a month-long Colorado bootcamp, get exclusive OpenAI & Microsoft access, and more." Neo, TechCrunch explained in 2018, "identifies awesome young engineers, includes them in a community of tech veterans, and invests in companies they start or join."

Eleven years ago, Neo Founder and CEO Ali Partovi together with twin brother Hadi (Code.org CEO and a Neo investor) publicly launched tech-backed and advised nonprofit Code.org. With the support of prominent tech giant leaders and their companies, Code.org pushed coding into K-12 classrooms (NYT, alt.) and now boasts that "591,636 teachers have signed up to teach our intro courses on Code Studio and 19,177,297 students are enrolled," helping to build a pipeline of 'college students who excel at CS' from which Neo and its Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Uber-tied tech leader investors — including Code.org boosters Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Wilke, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt — have tapped to place personal bets on. "I love meeting more and more @Neo founders and Neo scholar candidates who learned to code on Code.org," Neo CEO Ali Partovi tweeted last summer.

Submission + - New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Visual Studio Magazine reports on new research on the effect of AI-powered GitHub Copilot on software development which sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. Countering the positively-glowing findings of some other studies, the Coding on Copilot whitepaper from GitClear cites some adverse results.

"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability," explains the paper's abstract. "Code churn — the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored — is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited." The paper concludes, "How will Copilot transform what it means to be a developer? There's no question that, as AI has surged in popularity, we have entered an era where code lines are being added faster than ever before. The better question for 2024: who's on the hook to clean up the mess afterward?" Further complicating matters, Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI (Feb. 2024 CACM) notes that "generating and inserting large blocks of code may be counterproductive for users at all levels. This requires users to read through code they did not write, sometimes at a more sophisticated level than they are familiar with."

Interestingly, the AI-generated code maintenance worries are reminiscent of concerns cited in the past for 'Google programmers', Stack Overflow copy-and-pasters, and stitchers of not-quite-compatible libraries, as well as earlier iterations of code generators, including C++ and other 'Next-Next-Finish' code wizards of the 90's and COBOL and PL/I applications generators of the 80's. Everything old is new again, including code maintenance challenges.

Submission + - Amazon to Mississippi: You Give Us $259M, We Teach Your Kids to Code. Capiche?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: During a special session of the Mississippi Legislature, lawmakers on Thursday passed three bills outlining a $259 million incentive package for Amazon Web Services' $10 billion project to locate two new hyperscale data centers in Canton and Madison County. Explaining why what's good for Amazon is good for the State of Mississippi, Amazon noted in a Thursday news release, "74 Mississippi schools receive STEM education and career exploration courses through Amazon Future Engineer, our global philanthropic education initiative."

Amazon, which was recently accused of employing quid-pro-quo philanthropy tactics by the Los Angeles Times, similarly reminded New York City residents in 2019 that Amazon Future Engineer was providing their children's schools with free K-12 CS curriculum as it fought blowback that derailed the NYC Amazon HQ2 deal that included up to $3 billion in state and city incentives.

In addition to Amazon, tying announcements of data centers — which often bring tax breaks and other incentives — to reminders of their companies' K-12 CS education philanthropy (e.g., Microsoft presentation) is also part of the playbook at tech giants Google ("Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was in Oklahoma to announce a $600 million investment to expand our data center in Mayes County, as well as our biggest computer science education grant in Google.org’s history.") and Microsoft ("Today, I’m thrilled to share that we are announcing the launch of two new Microsoft datacenters in Cheyenne, Wyoming [...] We’ve partnered with the Wyoming Department of Education to host ongoing computer science training for more than 30 school districts across the state, impacting more than 60,000 K-12 students.").

Submission + - Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "IBM mainframes were the original onsite private cloud," begins Billy Newport in Is Cloud the New Mainframe? And while there were many things to like about the mainframe (including "crazy high availability numbers which today's cloud vendors can only dream of"), cost was not one of them. "As the application usage grows," Newport explains, "the bill grows and the control of the bill is largely in IBM’s hands. You use more, you pay more [...] Unfortunately, while compute is elastic, budgets are not [...] Inevitably, customers try to migrate workloads from the mainframe to 'cheaper' platforms but these projects can be very expensive to do and they do fail more often than people realize."

"Today's Cloud kind of looks exactly the same as the mainframe scenario," Newport warns. "Companies have rushed to get on the cloud with the cool kids. I predict many companies will try to rush to reduce cloud expenditure and will find migrating onsite to be an expensive proposition if it’s even possible."

Submission + - OpenAI Suspends Developer Behind Dean Phillips Bot

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: OpenAI has banned the developer of a bot that mimicked Democratic White House hopeful Rep. Dean Phillips, the first known instance where the maker of ChatGPT has restricted the use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns. OpenAI suspended the account of the start-up Delphi, which had been contracted to build Dean.Bot, which could talk to voters in real-time via a website.

"Anyone who builds with our tools must follow our usage policies," a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement shared with Axios on Sunday. "We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent." OpenAI apparently is not a fan of Richard Stallman's 'freedom 0' tenet, which argues software users should have the freedom to run programs as they wish, in order to do what they wish (Stallman is careful to note this freedom doesn't make one exempt from laws).

The suspension and subsequent bot removal occurred ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, where Phillips continues his long-shot presidential bid against President Biden.

Submission + - Amazon, CSTA Aim to Make Amazon the Career Counselor for Schoolkids Aged 5-18

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Last month, on the same day the Los Angeles Times was sounding the alarm on Amazon's self-serving philanthropy, the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) held a White House-hosted event on K-12 AI+CS education, at which it was announced the nonprofit Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) had received a $1.5 million donation from Amazon. "Amazon’s donation will enable CSTA to develop, launch and advise on career exploration programming to help educators prepare students [in grades K-12] for future workforce demands," explained CSTA in a press release.

One month later, what that may look like in practice is hinted at in a new CSTA job listing for a Professional Learning Manager who will "collaborate directly with Amazon Future Engineer to build a collective career exploration vision (based on Amazon Future Engineer + Gallup’s Careers of the Future Research) that can be scaled across industries, organizations, and educational institutions." The job listing adds, "Amazon Future Engineer currently runs a virtual field trip program called Career Tours that aims to expose students to the diversity of careers and people working in technology. Over the next three years, CSTA and Amazon will partner to improve and scale Career Tours to reach millions of students around the globe. In this role, you will serve as the lead consultant for this partnership."

These efforts, CSTA explains, will further Amazon Future Engineer's aim "to develop products/programs that allow students to 'explore what professionals in the careers of the future do' and foster students' belief that 'these careers are for me.'" Once again, life imitates The Simpsons!

Submission + - MLK Day Brings Doodle, Not CBC's Requested EEOC Workforce Numbers, to Google.com

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Having unpleasantly learned that what Google says and does when it comes to hiring can be two different things, it wasn't too surprising to see the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) take a trust-but-verify approach to Google CEO Sundar Pichai's assurances of the company's commitments to racial equity in light of continuing widespread layoffs within the tech industry.

To evaluate if the massive tech layoffs have had a disparate impact, members of the CBC in December sent a letter to the Dept. of Labor and Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requesting "a current breakdown of current gender, racial, and ethnic demographics in the tech industry disaggregated by job category and leadership role," not unlike the 'raw' workforce numbers companies must provide to the EEOC in their EEO-1 reports. Back in the day, tech companies came under fire for hiding their EEO-1 data behind a claim of trade secrets, but increasing pressure eventually prompted them to disclose this data and promise greater transparency in the future. However, the tech giants have been guilty of foot-dragging on their promised EEO-1 workforce data disclosures, forcing the CBC to ask the EEOC for up-to-date data. Pichai, for example, points Google.com visitors to the company's 2023 Diversity Report, which only provides a URL with a broken link for its stale 2021 EEO-1 workforce numbers. Google encourages visitors to ignore the 'raw' EEO-1 numbers and instead rely on its own self-categorized metrics (which are only presented as percentages), as do Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, who were similarly still pointing website visitors to 2021 EEO-1 workforce data in 2024.

While CBC members won't find the current workforce numbers they're seeking on Google.com, they will find a new Martin Luther King Jr. Day Doodle there today. So, is let-them-eat-doodles the new-let-them-eat-cake?

Submission + - Will Chatbots Teach Your Children? Khan Academy and Bill Gates Are Working on It

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, predicted last year that AI tutoring bots would soon revolutionize education. His vision of tutoring bots tapped into a decades-old Silicon Valley dream: automated teaching platforms that instantly customize lessons for each student (NYT, alt. source). Proponents argue that developing such systems would help close achievement gaps in schools by delivering relevant, individualized instruction to children faster and more efficiently than human teachers ever could. But some education researchers say schools should be wary of the hype around AI-assisted instruction, warning that generative AI tools may turn out to have harmful or "degenerative" effects on student learning.

Khan is one of the most visible proponents of tutoring bots. His Khan Academy introduced a ChatGPT-powered AI chatbot named Khanmigo last year specifically for school use that's been touted by Bill Gates. Gates, who has predicted AI will be 'as good a tutor as any human', explained that his AI 'Aha!' moment came as GPT-4 was first unveiled at a dinner party at his house for 30 invitees, including CEO-led contingents from Gates-advised OpenAI and Microsoft. Trained by OpenAI on Khan Academy course materials in response to an earlier challenge from Gates, OpenAI was able to ace the AP Biology exam in what Gates called a 'mind blowing' demo (Khan recalled in August how OpenAI reached out to him to help them dazzle Gates, as well as efforts to improve ChatGPT's math proficiency, another Gates concern). Microsoft subsequently upped its bet on AI, including an additional $10B for OpenAI, which has been credited for helping boost Microsoft's market cap over Apple.

Gates is also one of Khan Academy's biggest backers — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has provided the nonprofit with nearly $40 million in grants since 2010. And in November, the Gates Foundation committed $4.5 million to Khan Academy Districts "to become the leading Math supplemental curriculum solution in the US to improve engagement, and persistence leading to enhanced Math outcomes for priority students." That grant — and another $1.1 million grant made in November to [Khan Academy TeachAI partner] Code.org "to establish a coalition that develops updated curriculum standards, courses, tools, and assessments to prepare students safely and equitably for an age of Artificial Intelligence" — jibes nicely with dozens of $100K grants the Gates Foundation made in the preceding months to K-12 organizations, including the New York City and Chicago public schools, "to leverage artificial intelligence in conducting research and development in support of math outcomes for students who are Black, Latino, and/or from low-income backgrounds."

Explaining his AI vision in November, Gates wrote, "If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes [Microsoft] Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors." The NY Times article notes that similar enthusiasm greeted automated teaching tools in the 1960s, but predictions that that the mechanical and electronic "teaching machines' — which were programmed to ask students questions on topics like spelling or math — would revolutionize education didn't pan out. So, is this time different?

Submission + - Communications of the ACM: Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands! 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In the January 2024 Communications of the ACM, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi minces no words in Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!, noting that the unintended consequences of the rise of social media and mobile computing include hate mongering on a global scale and a worldwide youth mental health crisis.

"How did the technology that we considered 'cool' just a decade ago become an assault weapon used to hurt, traumatize, and even kill vulnerable people?" Vardi asks. "Looking back at my past columns, one can see the forewarnings. Our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. In the name of efficiency, we aimed at eliminating all friction. In the name of efficiency, it became desirable to move fast and break things, and we allowed the technology industry to become dominated by a very small number of mega corporations. It is time for all computing professionals to accept responsibility for computing's current state. To use Star Wars metaphors, we once considered computing as the 'Rebels,' but it turns out that computing is the 'Empire.' Admitting we have a problem is a necessary first step toward addressing the problems computing has created."

So, how did academic and business readers of the prestigious flagship magazine of the ACM respond to Vardi's call-to-action? Crickets.

Submission + - Congressional Black Caucus Asks EEOC for Workforce Data Tech Promised to Provide

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: To assess any disparate impact of 2023's massive tech layoffs, members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in December sent a letter to the Dept. of Labor and Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requesting "a current breakdown of current gender, racial, and ethnic demographics in the tech industry disaggregated by job category and leadership role."

Interestingly, the plea for transparency around tech's workforce numbers came as Microsoft publicly celebrated "a decade of transparency," proclaiming itself "one of the most transparent companies of our size when it comes to the diversity and inclusion data we share." In its 2023 Proxy Statement it recently filed with the SEC, Microsoft boasted it's "continued to provide transparency in its progress...towards advancing diversity and inclusion across our workforce," referring readers to Microsoft's 2023 Diversity & Inclusion Report as evidence of its successful progress. While the D&I report is chock full of upbeat fuzzy percentage-based metrics spun from Microsoft's workforce data, Microsoft does not include the 'raw' workforce numbers they are required to report to the EEOC in EEO-1 filings. The most recent EEO-1 numbers Microsoft links to on its Reports Hub are for its Nov. 2021 workforce, which sheds no light on the effects of the reported 240,000 tech layoffs in 2023 that the CBC seeks to investigate. Amazon, Facebook/Meta, and Google all provide links to 'stale' EEO-1 data reflecting their pre-layoff 2021 workforce in their most recent Diversity Reports. While one might be tempted to give Apple kudos for linking to EEO-1 data that's a little less-stale (2022 workforce) than the others, consider that Apple paid a record $25M to the EEOC in 2023 to settle allegations of hiring and recruitment discrimination violations (besting Facebook's $9.5M EEOC settlement to settle similar allegations in 2021).

Back in the day, the tech giants came under fire for hiding their EEO-1 workforce numbers behind a claim of trade secrets until increasing pressure eventually led them to fess up and promise more transparency and timeliness in the future. "I think that this push to get our EEO-1 data out is a good one," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Rev. Jesse Jackson at Microsoft's Dec. 2014 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. "So I want us to take action. By end of this month, we will get it done. And so that's one that you can consider it done by the end of this month."

As last year drew to a close, CNBC and others reported that 2023 was a year of broken DEI promises in the tech industry.

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