Alternative schedules is one thing, but unhealthy focus on work is another. Everyone I know who consistently works more than 40 hour weeks without alternate time compensation (10 on 5 off, long breaks, etc.) seriously compromises the quality and productivity of their work. And most don't realize it. There's only marginal gains traded for some serious psychological harms.

Yes, Americans have longer work weeks and get very little time off compared to most other developed countries. And that's not a good thing.

Alphazero might be more general than human-tuned algorithms for specific games, but it is still very much restricted to finite games (or games where the infinite component can be ignored), and relies heavily on the expert encoding of the rules to aid learning. The rules are not simply "read" by alphazero, the boardspace and legal moves are built into the network in a very specific way to facilitate learning. Then it requires truly massive computing power to train to a *specific* game, and additional massive power to play against outside opponents, during which it is no longer learning. Alphazero is an impressive feat, but more as a technological step showing that hefty computing power can allow more generalized neural networks can be used to produce good results in these sorts of finite games. It's definitely not crossing any AI thresholds.

But cars are always safety critical systems, regardless of whether computers and software are involved. I wouldn't want to drive a car that wasn't treated as a safety critical system.

Circumstances are very different.

That's not right. If you drilled a bunch of holes in the table, the paper would indeed fly up and you wouldn't break the ruler. The airspace between the paper and table is clearly an integral component of the phenomenon.

Native Americans living in the Rocky Mountain area was primarily nomadic prior to the arrival of Columbus, but most other areas of the US were primarily populated by agrarian tribes (though hunter-gatherer cultures were interspersed). Many previously agrarian tribes moved to a more nomadic lifestyle after the arrival of Columbus; the nomadic lifestyle was made more attractive by the combination of civilization collapse due to depopulation by western diseases (which killed upwards of 50-80% of the peoples of North America even prior to Jamestown and Plymouth), the boom of many animal species such as buffalo and passenger pigeons after the depopulation, and the introduction of domestic horses.

As well as being irrelevant, it's actually totally false. Only a small fraction of pre-contact Native American cultures were primarily nomadic.

It's for their own good, right? Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to put up with all these "used" women and sloppy seconds?

The lawsuit makes no claims about percentages by race in relation to the larger population (as you seem to imply), but only to percentage in reference to the qualified applications. 95 of the qualified applicants for those 21 QA engineering intern positions were asian, and only 35 were non-Asian. But half of the non-Asian applicants were hired while only 5% of the Asian applicants were hired, indicating differential hiring from the applicant pool.

I'm not sure exactly which method they've used, but here's one simple option: Assuming equivalent merit of applicants, "random chance" means choosing 21 applicants randomly from the applicant pool of 95 Asian and 35 non-Asian applicants. We want to compute the probability that only 4 or less of those 21 selected applicants are Asian. The number of Asian applicants selected follow a hypergeometric distribution. This distribution doesn't have a simple formula computing tail probabilities (your welcome to look it up), but many statistics packages will do it. This methods gives us a roughly 1 in 60 million probability of 4 or less Asian hires due to random chance. Not 1 in a billion, but I suspect that the Department of Labor's analysis incorporated additional information. And 1 in 60 million is still low enough to suggest that something is going on.

And this is likely (at least part) of what's going on. Employee referral programs are definitely not "by random chance".

Employee referral programs can exacerbate existing demographic imbalances, and cause members of certain demographics to have a much more difficult time getting hired at your company. Just because the discrimination is structurally propagated does not get the company off the hook. Large companies that want to avoid exactly this situation closely monitor their key demographics and balance their use of employee referrals to ensure diversity.

It's worse than that (or better, depending on perspective). So far as I can tell, Alibaba decided to sell a limited number of leftover boxes at cost through their internal sales system. Apparently the system was immediately overloaded, so employees weren't able actually purchase the boxes by clicking the "buy" button. A few employees whipped up a script to click the button faster to try to get orders through, and ended up buying 124 boxes between them. Alibaba called this a "hack" and fired them 2 hours later. If that's actually how it went down, it sounds pretty damn stupid on Alibaba's part. Maybe there's some cultural differences, but a) selling something through a computer system where demand far outstrips supply is stupid to begin with - just do a lottery for purchase rights; b) restrict the number of boxes an individual can buy; c) maybe just retroactively restrict their purchases to certain # of boxes rather than firing them? Sounds like power-tripping managers who don't know what a hack is and think that throwing a limited number of (apparently highly desirable) items out to a large mass of employees first-come-first-serve is a hilarious fucking game.

So state's are small and homogeneous enough that it's totally okay for them to pass such regulations? It's just the bigwigs in Washington that you want out, but the bigwigs in Sacremento/Albany/Juneau/whatever are totally fine?

Ha ha ha ha "more reliable" ha ha ha ha. What on earth makes you think that reliability is the reason that companies put no-third-party-repair clauses in their contracts?

Yeah, no. "Making the world more fair" is ideally the whole point of government, no matter where you sit. Protecting individual freedoms is one of the mandates of government. Take away as much government as you seem to want to, and you'll find yourself with less freedoms, not more. And those marginalized individuals that you are so quick to throw under the bus? Their individual freedoms are infringed all the time!

Well, it's not a simulator for one. You're flying the drone just as much as you would fly a plane. Hell, it's probably harder if you're not getting tactile feedback. Who cares where your ass is sitting?