Why did they spend money on the campaigns of candidates who were already quite likely to win? That seems like a suboptimal way to spend the funds at their disposal. Spend it exclusively on races where it might make a difference.

Matter of degree, but yeah.

I will if you will. Deal?

Yes, it's true. We are currently producing more oil than Saudi Arabia! But we are far from being independent.

Short of state ownership of the oil production industry and/or draconian restrictions on exports and imports the U.S. won't ever be "independent" in the sense that it is unaffected by the global price of petroleum. And that price is only influenced to a small degree by U.S. production.

1. Set standards on gasoline, there are way too many formulas that vary state to state 2. Determine how many refineries we need (haven't built any new refineries for 30+ years). 3. Determine the best locations for the refineries (logistics of incoming raw crude and outgoing fuels)

These sound like tasks best suited to a China-style command economy. You strike me as the sort of person who would find that abhorrent.

You're charging you car using energy from coal so you ain't doing any favors using a toy battery car.

Unless you live in Washington state, where roughly 6.5% of electricity comes from coal. Or Oregon, where that figure is roughly the same. Etc.

...whether you notice changes in the price of gasoline without being notified by the media. If you do then you satisfy a fairly broad definition of "middle class".

If you're too poor to own a car and, hence, don't care about gas prices, then you're not middle class. If you're someone to whom a $1/gal delta in the price of gas is more-or-less meaningless then you're not middle class. If you're someone who lives in a dense, urban environment and doesn't own a car by choice then you're probably also not "middle class".

Well, yeah. The company could be more profitable than it is now if it had better employees. My point was just that they don't seem to compensate by the lack of quality by attempting to force people to work longer hours. They just hire more bodies to pick up the slack.

I, personally, don't work any extra hours. I get my stuff done and. If someone else doesn't and the project suffers then that's on them. At least one of my (competent) peers does work longer hours, but she's the outlier, and I think she's starting to realize it's not worth it. And, no, I'm not willing to say where I work. It's just a small 50-60 person start-up you've never heard of.

Someone really knows how to troll slashdot.

The company where I work has grown from about 15 when I started to around 50. Not everyone is technical, of course, but the technical staff has grown from maybe 5 to 15, give or take. The company's interviewing strategy is terrible in terms of accurately gauging ability and talent. Consequently, the quality of technical employees has been hit or miss. There are a few very competent people and a few that absolutely should never have been hired. The company pays roughly industry standard for its geography. Given that it absolutely had to hire technical staff, had the interviewing process had been effective at weeding out sub-standard candidates then the company would likely have been forced to offer above-market compensation in order to increase head count while maintaining a reasonable level of competence.

There's may not be a shortage of candidates per se, but there's a shortage of competent candidates and a shortage of wisdom (on the part of employers) in how they choose whom to hire.

I suspect a small company that did a top-notch job of screening candidates would enjoy a significant advantage over its competition.

who cares?

According to Tim Cook, a gay person who is "struggling to come to terms with who he or she is" or who feels alone.

Interesting. At the university I attended, a top 25 state school, the College of Engineering school was much harder to get into (and stay in) than the College of Natural Sciences, i.e. where you'd be if you were pre-med, or the Business School, i.e. where you'd be if you were studying finance. In terms of post-university "prestige", though, "Doctor" and "Investment Banker" both beat "Civil Engineer".

Yeah, my guess is that most high ability female high school graduates with C.S./Calculus exposure who don't eventually get a degree in C.S./Math/Engineering/Physics end up in finance or pre-med.

That said, given your wife hated programming, why did she gravitate toward pre-med (and then finance) instead of, say, Mathematics or Physics? Or one of the non-programmy engineering disciplines, e.g. Civil? Was it mainly about the money, with medical and finance careers likely to have a higher payout for someone of your wife's ability level? Or was there something about "doing medicine" and/or "doing finance" that was more intellectual interesting than "doing Computer Science", "doing Math", "doing Physics" or "doing Engineering"?

I obviously don't know your wife, but it sounds like she wasn't interested in academia, which is going to be the end-game for many Math and Physics graduates who don't eventually end up doing some sort of coding. Given that, I can see why she avoided Math, Physics and C.S. But the non-coding Engineering professions seem like they might have been a viable option. Again, though, money's better in medicine and finance.

Here's what I would love to see. Take the set of graduates in a given year from some set of universities. Say, AAU member universities. Identify the graduates who, as high school seniors, met a certain SAT/ACT threshold, with a higher threshold in math, and who also took at least one C.S. or Calculus course in high school. Let's call this set "students who, upon graduating high school, were potential C.S. majors".

First question: what percentage of this set are women? Probably less than 50% given the way it was constructed, but probably higher than 18%, which is percentage of women earning C.S. degrees. Now, take the subset of the women from this set who did not earn a C.S., Math, Engineering or Physics degree, and ask them why they didn't pursue one of those fields. I suspect their answers might be interesting. This a group that, on paper, was not disadvantaged either in ability or exposure to C.S./Math. In fact, it's a set whose interest in C.S./Math is likely to be higher than average since C.S./Calculus are almost never required to graduate high school. So, in high school at least, the members of this set showed some interest in C.S./Math. Why, then, did they choose not to pursue either at university? On an aggregate level, what did they pursue instead?

Another interesting avenue of research might be to look at those silly Myers-Briggs personality types. Come up with an expected % of C.S./Math/Engineering/Physics for each type based on actual real-world data. Then examine whether certain types that produce a disproportionate number of workers in those fields are overrepresented among male high school seniors vs. female high school seniors. I'm guessing this would explain some (but not all) of the gender gap in C.S./Math/Engineering/Physics. As an example, maybe it's the case that there are just way more male INTPs than female INTPs and the INTP type tends to disproportionately favor those fields.