It's also common in the software development industry, at least in bigger companies where waste and inefficiency are absorbed and become partly invisible. Very few people will be promoted for simplifying or deleting things, so instead there's a tendency to focus on introducing more and more needless complexity and new systems, to stamp your name on them and be recognised and promoted.

"Private company, they can do what they want." No they can't. They're bound by laws which safeguard basic rights, including the right to push for better working conditions, regardless of whether it annoys you. If everyone shared your attitude, we'd still be sending 10 year old boys down into the coalmines. Thankfully others have the courage to stand up and maker the world a better place.

After years of hearing smug assertions by iPhone owners that they are safe from malicious apps, while Android users battle it out in a hellish Thunderdome of spyware etc... At least this serves as a useful counterexample.

Almost every part of that post appears to be made up technobabble.

I've been saying for years that the concept of having special awards and conferences for women in tech and business seems extremely demeaning and insulting -- like it's an extra special achievement that they were able to do something cool despite being female. The constant, breathless, fawning celebration of these achievements only perpetuates old-fashioned assumptions about men and women's inherent capabilities.

However, the fact that I'm a man apparently reduces the value of my opinion on this topic significantly, because reasons. I've worked with a few women who felt similarly about this, but just didn't want to get involved in public debates about it. Which is fair enough given the amount of vitriolic shouty people out there. So I'm glad to see a woman with a high profile saying it publicly.

Hopefully this might help to normalise the idea that women are just people.

Indeed, I don't think Facebook has a legal duty to either censor or not censor. However, when it comes to government placing direct or even indirect pressure on Facebook to censor more speech, that's where the problem lies. Consider that Facebook and Twitter execs have been summoned and questioned several times about their lack of progress in "fighting misinformation". This could be construed as indirect pressure to censor free speech.

As someone who has been through that grinder, I'd guess: probably the vast majority of PhD students. Most students I knew, including myself, had a mess of papers strewn on their desk and multiple versions of experiment data, source code and half-written documents stored on their computers.

I almost lost months of work when my PC's spinning-rust hard drive died (literally when I was halfway through the writeup stage). Luckily I had been storing the most important stuff on Dropbox and emailing bits and pieces to my supervisor etc. I'd also started using Git to store the thesis itself (it was just LyX files + bibtex + a ton of images and graphs).
One of the IT desk guys gave me a new hard drive AND an external eSATA interface to try recovering data from the old disk, which turned out to be a winner -- I was able to get back nearly all of the most important files. I've known a few people who were not so lucky and actually did lose months of work in similar situations. One guy in our lab lost over a year of work and quit his PhD (I know -- how?? -- but...).

So... yeah, PhD students, and possibly even moreso faculty, aren't known for their careful organisation and backup habits.

Periodically using your gas pedal can actually can be more efficient than a constant flow. Some hypermilers use a technique called "pulse and glide", which involves accelerating up to a certain speed (the "pulse"), then coasting until you've slowed to some threshold (the "glide"), then repeating the cycle. According to the hypermiling techniques article on Wikipedia:

I don't think that's really the issue. Going back to your nickels and dimes analogy, those physical machines for selling chewing gum, toys etc, had much worse overheads than 30%. In fact, when Apple came out with the App Store initially and announced they were "only" taking 30%, the general reception was quite positive since access to the marketplace, as well as the complexities of payment and updates, are usually worth that cut. I'm not an Apple fan, but I can't deny the commercial benefits of the App Store approach, especially for small businesses.

You're right that micro-transactions can be used for both good and evil, when they manipulate people's tendency toward gambling-type addictive behaviour. I'm not sure if there's a general technical solution to this -- instead, we need to keep calling out abusive companies (NerdCubed did a good job at this when it came to mobile re-releases of Rollercoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper) and perhaps have tougher review criteria on the Apple and Android app stores.

"People who fall for QAnon's conspiracy theories more likely to lie about having a degree"

Although I'd agree with you that it's a good idea to work for a company whose values you agree with, I think many of the examples we're seeing of people being forced out of their jobs are absolutely not in the level of value conflict you mentioned.

For example, according to an article on Reuters about the aftermath of the Capitol storming:

I dislike these people and what they stand for, but at the same time I don't see how those who participated only in the peaceful protest part were justifiably fired by their employers. At least, those two examples don't seem like Holocaust-advocators being fired from a Kosher deli, but rather, cowardly employers throwing their staff under the bus immediately to appease a Twitter mob who disliked their politics. We're seeing articles of "Twitter sleuths" trying to doxx people based on photos from outside the Capitol, and I don't think that's cool... but they have a right to free speech, including their demands that people be fired for having opinions they dislike. The blame doesn't really lie with them, but rather with the employers who accede to their demands just to avoid bad PR, often breaking employment law in the process.

In other words, what we need is a completely authoritarian system of censorship and punishment for people publicly expressing ideas we find disagreeable. Interesting.

Lockdowns and related regulations were never intended to completely, permanently eliminate the risk of people being infected. They were initially intended to stem the tide of infections all happening at once -- remember everyone using the phrase "flattening the curve"? We passed that point, and governments followed different approaches -- some with very few restrictions (leading to mass infections like in the US), others with extremely harsh restrictions to try to "stamp out" infections completely (for a while at least), and others with moderate restrictions to just keep the pandemic under some sort of control until a vaccine arrives.

Your attempt to connect the dots from lockdown restrictions to "going shopping while unvaccinated == gross negligence" is entirely absurd. By that point almost everyone who wants a vaccine will have gotten one (otherwise, it'd obviously be completely unreasonable to accuse unvaccinated shoppers of negligence). So who exactly is being put at risk, apart from other anti-vaxxers -- the people you're already accusing of gross negligence? Are you saying anti-vaxxers should be prosecuted or imprisoned for putting other anti-vaxxers at risk?

How can anti-vaxxers be putting vaxxers' lives at risk? They can only endanger OTHER ANTI-VAXXERS, who have made a free and conscious decision not to be vaccinated. Now, you may think they're making a stupid decision, and I would agree, but you can't put them in the same category as drunk drivers.

Honestly, I think you're trading away an insane amount of individual freedom for a very small increase in safety in a very small proportion of the population. I'm amazed at how tolerant people have become of increasingly authoritarian scenarios.

I'll be taking the vaccine because it makes sense to me, but your position is entirely ludicrous. Why on earth do you think airlines and concert organisers should expect to know people's medical history?

Also ludicrous. If "other members of your society" means people who are not anti-vaxxers, then what exactly is the problem? They'll be taking the vaccine so they're not going to be affected much by the anti-vaxxers' choice not to take the vaccine. The only possible injury to "other members" of society is the added burden on the medical system. But in that case you could make the same argument about smoking, drinking, eating unhealthily etc.

The only people who are likely to suffer due to anti-vaxxers' choices are other anti-vaxxers. But they're making a free choice, so why not leave them alone instead of calling for a completely draconian invasion of people's medical history by all elements of society? Do you want to live in an Orwellian nightmare of authoritarianism? Because I don't.