It's not just the marketing department. The underlying problem is the inherent "you don't need to do much but you do need to stay alert and attentive just in case so you can leap into action". Very few people can actually do that: most of us lose focus and mentally wander off if we are not engaged in the action in some way. Only a small fraction of people are wired to be alert without something happening to keep their attention. No-one in the driver's seat meant they didn't give themselves a chance - but you can bet your boots the owner was overly-used to not paying attention in the first place.

Republicans are a already signaling that Biden will face opposition even in appointing his cabinet. That's not useful - especially when you consider the destructive, ill-qualified appointments Trump made.

Thinking of R as a language sort of gets in the way. To me, it's a collection of tools that does a specific job - understanding data - well. It especially does plots better than Python, although the libraries are slowly getting ported. If I have a bit of data that I want to visualize and do some reproducible research on, I will still pick R every time. For the record, I do like Python.

Facts are not discriminatory, but Damore is. He makes it clear that if he sees someone that he would consider a diversity hire, then he would think they aren't as good. Damore complains about:

Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

You get a lack of diversity when people who do not look like what the hiring manager envisions are not even considered for the job even when they may be better qualified. A real-life example being female musicians for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

This stuff is pervasive, it's toxic to a workplace, and a female engineer like me has seen it all a thousand times. So many guys refuse to believe that I even know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver, or that I know my way around a computer, or that, shock horror, I might actually know a thing or two about my field of expertise.

Working with Damore would be the pits.

Reneging on an international agreement is bad for America - worse than supporting it would have been.

Cat-calling is a power play. Attractiveness is not a prerequisite.

Wish I had the mod points to mod you up.

I don't like being groped.
I don't like people assuming credit for my work.
I don't like having pornography shoved in my face.
I don't like the automatic assumption that I'm not an engineer.

You have a problem with that?

It may not be obvious from the AC comment above, but Shakey was a SV robot, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Centre at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute).

No, that was not "ad hominem" argumentation, which is attacking the speaker instead of the argument. The argument was clearly centred on the misuse of data. The cursing was extra to the argument, an expression of exasperation. Quite justified in my view. Do you really prefer rubbish dressed up in nice words?