Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Accuweather

7 Comments

Don’t use their app.

Still installing stuff on my new phone, but very carefully. I just started installing a voice recorder, but it insisted on having access to my pictures, the Internet, my location. Why? Nope.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems sort of related: A statistics professor was banned from Google. It is looking more and more like the old libertarian argument that we have less to concern with private companies than government is getting a little threadbare when it comes to concentrations of power like this.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hill Republicans To Trump

17 Comments

Butt out of tax reform:

“It’s just frustrating to be constantly reacting to his sh*t,” a GOP Senate aide explained.

And growing discord between the White House and Capitol Hill won’t prove helpful when lawmakers return in September with a lengthy to-do list.

“The president has torched whatever political capital or moral authority he ever had,” a GOP aide told IJR. “He is uniquely incapable of political leadership. If we get tax reform done, it won’t be with his help. It’ll be in spite of him and his vortex of incompetence and destruction.”

“The more distracted [Trump] is tweeting about Mika [Brzezinski] or his historic victory or the 4 million illegal votes, the better the odds are that we get tax reform. If he gets interested in tax reform, it will probably die just like everything else he touches,” he added.

When it comes to legislation, like Obama, he has the reverse Midas touch.

Business, Economics, Health, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Beware

11 Comments

…the ObamaCare Industrial Complex:

You can call this a bailout or just a swindle of taxpayers who were fed a litany of lies about Obamacare’s virtues from the very start. Either way taxpayers get shafted (again) and the Obamacare industrial complex gets fat and happy. If Republicans are partners to this fiscal crime, they are as culpable as the Democrats who passed this turkey in the first place and they certainly don’t deserve to be the governing party.

John McCain can rot in Hell.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Google Can’t Seem To Tolerate Diversity

36 Comments

This is not a new problem. It goes back to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and (as she mentions) the mau mauing of Larry Summers out of Harvard when he had the temerity to suggest that math ability in men may have longer statistical tails than in women.

In reading commentary on Twitter, I see a lot of straw-man misrepresentation of what Damore allegedly wrote (I haven’t read it yet). For instance:

But this is what one would expect from people who view everything through a lens of racism, sexism, genderism, otherism. All that matter to them is what group you’re a member of, and the notion of treating people as individuals is anathema to them, because individualism itself is anathema to them (it’s selfish donchaknow). So when someone makes a statistical statement about a group (valid or not), they must take it as an insult to every member of that group. (Note, this isn’t the same as things like talking about “rape culture,” which in fact does implicitly accuse every man of wanting to and finding it acceptable to rape, which is where the #NotAllMen hashtag came from).

Of course many women face sexism, and of course many women have been discouraged as individuals to go into STEM for no reasons other than they’re women, and that’s terrible. And everywhere it occurs, it should be fought and women who want to and are capable of advancing in those fields should be instead encouraged. But it would be utterly illogical for any woman to be discouraged by a simple statistical reality, because no woman is a statistic.

But the notion that every group should be represented in every endeavor in exact proportion to their representation in society at large is…insane. Men and women really are different, and they are statistically likely to be more interested in, and better at, different things. So if there really is a goal that we are going to get as many percentage of women into STEM as there are in the population, it is either doomed to failure, or it will doom whatever organization that attempts to do it, in terms of having to compete with other organizations that make technical excellence their priority instead.

And if Google becomes Mozilla, I won’t weep for it. And after this incident, I will be even more adamant in not trusting them with my data. Because I’m sure I’d be at the top of one of their blacklists.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s ironic to note 1) That these women who claim to be so great at STEM who are upset at this are apparently unable to deal with statistics and
2) That when Larry Summers said what he said, he was actually claiming that women are on average better than men at math, because the tail goes both ways.

But apparently “average” is an alien concept to them. Perhaps they think that everyone should be above it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some sane thoughts from Julia Galef:

…as far as I can see, there are only two intellectually honest ways to respond to the memo:

1. Acknowledge gender differences may play some role, but point out other flaws in his argument (my preference)

2. Say “This topic is harmful to people and we shouldn’t discuss it” (a little draconian maybe, but at least intellectually honest)

Unfortunately most people have taken option 3, “Pretend there is no evidence of gender differences relevant to tech and only a sexist could believe otherwise.”

I’m going to try to cite only women in this post, just because, even though it’s sexist.

[Update early evening]

Many (but surely not all–there will be many more to come) of the lies that the media has told about the memo have been collected. By a woman.

[Wednesday update]

Kirsten Powers and other women are amazed at the lying and hysteria over this.