You are being very stupid. Your basic mistake is in assuming that the free market is 100% efficient and free of prejudice. What on earth gives you that impression? Hiring and firing responds to the trends of the day. Why do you think the participation of women in the economy has been changing over time? Why do you think the wage-gap has been changing? Why is the level of the pay gap perfect and just today, of all days, when it wasn't back in the 90s, the 80s, the 70s or the 1840s?

The fact is, prejudice exists despite the fact that it creates inefficiencies and makes more prejudiced people and companies perform worse. Because prejudice takes time to work itself out of the system! The Nazis refused to allow women into their munitions factories all the way until the end, even though this terrible decision contributed to their defeat to the Soviets who did so, and even put women into the front lines. If your argument was correct, the Nazis would never have done so, they would have seen the effects of their prejudices coming a long way off. But they didn't because they were idiots and in the real world there are a lot of idiots.

Ellen Pao's experiment, whether it works or not, is part of the process whereby inefficiencies are removed from the system. To do so, after all, people need to try different things. People like you, who think the status quo is perfect already, have always existed, and have successively been proven wrong again and again throughout history.

I think there are a lot of definitions of 'good' negotiators in play here. Like, a 'good' negotiator in a pay negotiation might be someone who opts for a lower salary because they understand the pressures the business is under and do not want to earn more than their colleagues doing equivalent quality work. Such a person, willing to sacrifice for the greater good, would be a good asset to the company. However in the context, a 'good' negotiator is a person that is simply better at extracting more money from the company for their personal enrichment, at the detriment of everyone else, by refusing to compromise.

Why should that be rewarded with higher pay? Why is that good in a team member?

If they make the "best offer" and the pay gap disappears, then what? Will *you* go nuts?

I also don't believe that ending negotiations would result in decreased salaries on average - it could well result in increased salaries, since the default salaries can be set to be higher because there is less need of an allowance for unexpected changes due to negotiations. From a management perspective, that increased certainty would be worth paying a little bit more. Ending haggling in retail, for example, has enabled shops to offer on average better deals than previously.

It seems like a worthy experiment, in general.

For instance, their paper says that concatenating a million one byte strings into a single million byte string takes 274 seconds. That should take much less than one second

wtf. The only way it could take that long would be if they were concatenating them as immutable strings and had to copy the result repeatedly.

1984 was not a warning *or* a how to manual. It was a novel.

It was one guy, George Orwell's imagination, mainly commenting on Stalinist Russia, as part of the wider movement of the western Left's dissatisfaction and sense of betrayal over developments in the USSR. The Cold War drove the popularity of 1984 and its sister work, Animal Farm, because they could be used in the wider struggle against Communism.

Things that are slightly like what is depicted in 1984 are not automatically bad, nor are things not in 1984 automatically okay.

Yeah. There's no evidence presented to back up the claim that criminals just do crime elsewhere or elsewhen. Obviously any law enforcement measure isn't perfect, but thus far all the data shows this thing works. Professor Geoffrey Alpert is just mouthing off.

It seems counter-intuitive, but maybe electronic transmission of data is actually more secure than physical transport? Wipe all devices before crossing borders with them, then pull the backup over the internet (through a properly secured connection, of course).

BitCoins are too much in use to ever really go down in value for any length of time now that China is in the game.

They've dropped steadily for most of 2014, though. One could argue that that all of that was still correcting the bubble in late 2013, but that correction has lasted well over a year now. There hasn't really been a good time to hold on to Bitcoin since then, with a few short-term exceptions.

Yeah, Ukraine would never trade Snowden to the US for military aid against Russia.

Well, if the US were willing to risk an armed conflict with Russia in order to get their hands on Snowden, they don't need to wait...

I'd trust an AI over any incompetent human operator in that respect.

like, eg., Predator drones?

The move from that to autonomy is mostly software...

> What a fucking babby.

how is linus formed

Also, most places that do use them internally (eg. the apt repositories) seem to only use the adjective and ditch the animal.

acting with such impunity, you can get in trouble with the law

... um, acting with impunity means not getting in trouble with the law. That's why it's called impunity.

...