From what I've read, the Hugos, the SFWA, etc. have all been slowly taken over by SJWs in the past 10-15 years. Certainly, I once used the Hugos as a way of finding interesting new authors - but this hasn't been possible for several years, unless you are looking for a social-justice tract. Certainly "hard" SF has been scarce for a long time.

The "sad puppies" group is drumming up support for good writing that wouldn't otherwise get nominated, because it doesn't meet the SJW criteria. If the "sad puppies" have a political center, then it will obviously be a bit on the right, just because they by definition disagree with the SJW crowd. However, politics isn't supposed to be the point - if anything, it is (hopefully!) about removing, or at least counteracting the political filtering from the works nominated for the Hugo awards.

Some of the authors supporting the sad-puppy movement include:

• Larry Correia
• Vox Day
• Peter Grant
• Sarah Hoyt
• Brad Torgerson
• Michael Z. Williamson
• John C. Wright

Other commenters point out that instructors and TAs may be overwhelmed by the large number of students. Which begs the question: if you have more students, why isn't the tuition used to hire more teaching staff?

The answer is to be found in bloated administration. For most colleges and universities, there is kind of a "magic number" of 1, that being the maximum acceptable ratios of administrative staff to teaching staff. Colleges and universities with more administrators than teachers have "jumped the shark". Those with less are still focused on actually providing an education.

Stanford goes one farther. I actually downloaded and read through their latest annual report. It is impossible to determine the faculty/staff ratio from the information given. However, according to this overview of the growth of admistrative/professional staff at colleges, Stanford has seen an increase of 125% in administrators and 405% in professional (non-teaching) staff during the time that student numbers have increased by 27%. Even among US institutions that is remarkable.

Fire 4/5 of the "professional staff" and half of the "administrators" and you might be able to afford a few more professors to teach the students. What a concept!

This is the country that has age control on alcohol-related websites. It's worse than useless. Go to any alcohol-related site in the UK, for example the Highland Park website, and you have to enter your birth date. Wow, I'll bet no 13-year-old ever thought about adding 10 years to his/her age.

All this does is annoy the actual customers; it's not actually useful. Anyway, come to think of it, isn't the government's job at all. I kind of thought (speaking as a parent) that it was the parents' job to know what the kids are doing.

The AC who said "more money"? I don't want to work with people like that. Sure, money is important, but it doesn't make the work environment pleasant, it just motivates you to not dropkick the job out the window. I've known some very well-paid people who were profoundly unhappy with their jobs.

Assuming you have decent, halfway qualified people, the best thing you can do is respect their skills. Don't micromanage them: make sure they know what their tasks are, protect them from outside disturbances (make sure that task priorities come through you, not through some idiot stopping your people in the hallway), and let them get on with their jobs. Give good feedback, and don't forget the praise when they do something well.

I read TFA, and looked as some of the links. I have no idea what the overall situation is, and these sites certainly do not provide the information. Just as an example, I found various maps that document forest losses. Areas of the world where forest cover is increasing (most of Europe, for example) are simply shown as "no losses". In other words, they show forests that were cut down, or that burned, but they do not show newly forested areas, or forests that have recovered from burning.

With this kid of biased data, we have no idea what the overall global balance is.

Finding unbiased data turns out to be really difficult, at least, after 20 minutes or so I hadn't found anything I trusted. There were some national agencies where you could download raw data. But every organization that has put data together into some sort of overview is an organization that has a political point to make. Greenpeace always cooks the numbers to make their point. The same for logging industry sites, only they cook the numbers in the opposite direction.

The best site I found is from the World Bank, but it only goes through 2012, and doesn't provide much detail. According to the summary graph, 31.0% of the total land area of the planet was covered by forest in 2010, 30.9% in 2011, and then back up to 31.0% in 2012. Another presumably neutral site is from the UN, but their data only goes through 2010.

Does anyone have a better source that provides halfway objective information on this stuff?

Even TFA says it very clearly: they find a correlation. However, the title and introduction desperately want to imply causation. However, the causation can run all sorts of ways - and the study itself does not (and, indeed, cannot) say which of these is correct. Just to name three possibilities:

- Poverty hinders brain development (what the SJWs want to hear)

- People with a genetic predisposition for poor brain development tend to be poor (definitely not what the SJWs want to hear)

- Poverty correlates to certain activities (or lack thereof, for example, little reading). The lack of those activities hinders brain development. This can mimic genetics to an extent, since behavior is passed along from parents to children. (Complicated, not news worthy, and therefore likely to be closer to the truth).

So, erase the provocative title, ignore the introduction (that tries to inspire the SJW in all of us), and the study itself is interesting. However, actually determining the causation is the critical part, and that's not done yet...

Beautiful - take an organization that processes billions of dollars of other people's money, and add security not much better than any random web shop. I just went through the process - they ask for only one single piece of information that isn't easily available: the filing status on your last return. Of course, there aren't many choices, and you can try as many times as you want, so there's no penalty for guessing.

For laughs, they think your SSN is super secret, because the first two parts are in a password field (***-**-1234), and erase whenever there's an error. Like your SSN isn't plastered all over every document you get.

In any case, I couldn't get it to work. I file a 1040NR, and the filing status choices are slightly different - likely, that's where the problem is. Anyone with a normal 1040 manage the registration?

Really, it would be funny if it weren't so sad. All of the SJWs are condemning the Indiana law, because they disapprove of the motivation behind it. However, it is nearly identical to the federal law that the SJWs applauded. The only differences are theoretical motivations behind the laws. The federal law was justified, in part, on the freedom of Native Americans to practice their religion. The Indiana law is justified, in part, on the right of businesses to refuse service when doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

The actual or hypothetical motivations behind the laws are, in the end, completely irrelevant. In practice, the law can be invoked by anyone who feels that their religious freedom is being curtailed. What's important is the content, so let's look at the laws:

The federal law, enthusiastically supported by SJWs, states: “Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

The Indiana law, vehemently condemned by SJWs, states: “A governmental entity may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if the governmental entity demonstrates that application of the burden to the person: (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

There is no significant difference between the two. What the SJWs are objecting to are the purported motivations of the people passing the law. In short: "it's good if we do it, but bad if you do it". Pretty much textbook hypocrisy.

p.s. For those wondering why the States need their own laws, when a federal law exists: Some court case or other led to a decision that the federal law was not binding on State and local governments. This is mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the federal law.

My son is applying for a computer science program at a fairly prestigious university. If you try to follow the links that ought to lead to the online application process, at least one of them is broken - it links to an internal server instead of to the public website. You can look at the URL and figure out what it ought to have been, based on other URLs on the site. Accident? Or pre-filtering their applicants?

But require IE? Worse, a Firefox emulation of IE? No, that's a different message. That's telling good applicants "you do not want to work here"...

The lack of evidence for dark matter is becoming kind of embarrassing to the theory. Anything that should provide direct evidence doesn't - dark matter is seemingly only necessary to explain large-scale gravitational behavior, but is not otherwise in evidence.

For me, as a layman, dark matter was never persuasive: "there's this stuff that only has an effect way out there where we need it, but has no local effect where it would screw up our nice models". Sure there is. There are other theories that seem to be at least as reasonable. For example, what if the speed of light is not a constant across all time and space? This could dramatically change the behavior of the universe on large scales. I'm no cosmologist, but I understand that there are other theories as well.

I teach computer science. No one will be surprised to hear that most of our students are men. This is a problem, at least, we are continually told that it is.

The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.

My son works in professional child care, where women are something like 95% of the workforce. No one seems terribly concerned by this, even though the lack of male role models for young boys is arguably an actual, genuine problem.

Personally, I am very tired of articles like this. Why the continual one-way focus on women? Why can't we just let individuals be individuals, and do whatever they want? Ensure that there are no artificial barriers due to gender (or skin color, or hair color, or whatever), stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.

The whole world has come to worship at the OO alter, and it's fine for many problems, but too many school graduates don't know anything else. OO does at least encourage mediocre programmers to think about their data representation before they start coding. Of course, they get it wrong anyway.

Just look at the database schemas used by software systems in the wild. I ran across one last year where everything (and I do mean everything) was a string, and there wasn't a single foreign-key constraint in the whole database. A system before that couldn't be bothered even with first normal form - it truly stored multiple values in single database fields and parsed them out on demand. In both cases, the code was as bad as the database. I'm not sure the programmers had a paradigm. Maybe "random chaos"? Amazingly, both of those systems worked, more or less...

Given a good programmer, the paradigm doesn't much matter. Given a bad programmer, the paradigm isn't going help.

the majority of Swiss GDP is bank fees on off shore accounts

Nice stereotype you have there, but it doesn't have a lot to do with reality.

The Swiss financial sector in total is around 11% of our GDP; of that, banks are a bit more than half. Take out domestic banking services, and offshore banking is well under 5% of our GDP. Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical devices are far more important, as are other industry sectors.

Writing as a Swiss, in my view there are two parts to the Swiss watch market. Apple doesn't threaten either one of them.

First, we have the market where Swatch succeeded: the inexpensive fashion accessory. $30 bucks and you had something cool to wear. Apple's products are a hell of a lot more expensive, so they aren't addressing this market.

Second, we have the really expensive Swiss watches. They are also fashion accessories, but they are almost exclusively mechanical watches. I don't see a digital watch gaining any traction among people who spend thousands and sometimes millions for what is essentially mechanical artwork.

Where Apply may succeed is among young professionals: people far enough along to have some disposable income - past the Swatch age - but not in the market to spend crazy amounts of money for a status symbol. The thing is: people in this market have already stopped wearing watches, because their smart phones show the time. Maybe Apple will get them to wear a fancy bracelet again - and maybe not. Either way, it's pretty irrelevant to the watch manufacturers.

Of course, I never have understood the Apple Koolaid. Slick marketing gets people to buy overpriced products that don't work any better than those of the competition. Why?

Desired feature for any browser, failing that a plugin: Something that really restricts the information the browser sends to the server, to prevent fingerprinting. There are UI switchers and the like, but I have yet to find one that just bloody stops the browser from sending identifying information.

A website that isn't trying to be bleeding edge has no need to know my OS, my browser version, what plugins I have installed, what fonts are on my system, or indeed anything at all about my system and setup. Send me standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and let my browser worry about the representation.

It seems to me that this should be a standard setting, right next to "prohibit 3rd party cookies". Why isn't it available in (afaik) any browser at all?