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As an industry it is a really important issue that men are not going into teaching.

Disqualifying half the population will reduce the quality of the selection you can make.

The quality of teachers is of critical importance to the effectiveness of education. The effectiveness of education is critical to equality, social cohesion and economic growth.

Actual evidence of sexism in hiring is more persuasive of the presence of sexism, than the ratio of people employed. A standard way to study this is to send out a bunch or resumes in which only the gender changes.

I think there are sexist social pressures on men which reduce their desire to become nurses.

I flew less after 9/11 because it made rational sense to do so.

Before I could turn up at the airport 10 minutes before my plane took off and go the the gate and check in.

After 9/11 I was in a queue for ages and had to arrive really early. So it was quicker to just drive.

It is pragmatic to be dogmatic in a context where there is a a temptation to cut corners which will result in non-obvious, severe negative consequences.

Hard to know:

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=lion+stretching&hl=en...

I don't know what to make of the debate, but I do want one of those answering machines he linked:

http://ccdc11.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/durrell-bishops-marbl...

Not because it is a better UI, but just because it seems so cool.

Excel solves this right problem, and Erlang does not.

Erlang allows you to create concurrent programs, i.e.: programs where the result is schedule dependent.

One right problem is allowing people to write deterministic parallel programs. This gives you the speed (from parallel) with the reliability (from deterministic).

> "[A]t a time when the U.S. economy needs it most, our immigration policies are stifling innovation. The 2013 cap for the H-1B visas that allow foreign high skilled talent to work temporarily in the U.S. was exhausted by June 2012, preventing tech companies from recruiting some of the world's brightest minds."

I don't think anyone argues with this. Just set a lower limit of $200K per year and you can hire as many people as you want with no red tape and no limits.

> I think it would be nice if wages rose faster than inflation.

It is nice, and there is a history of this happening.

> There's nothing that special about labor markets that prices shouldn't be set by supply and demand.

0. There is a significant imbalance of market power between the buyers and sellers of labour.

1. At the low end the price for labour has important welfare implications.

2. It is hard to create transparency about high end jobs.

> If the government e.g. the Fed isn't smart enough to constantly set the price, how are they smart enough to set a rule that would be permanently right?

The Fed is already setting a price, the price of money (Interest Rates), in a way deliberately designed to manage a balance between unemployment and inflation. They are smart enough to do a respectable job of this, and have managed inflation well.

> I kind of think the minimum wage should be more like a labor protection, ie set it 10-20% below the bottom 10% of the wage distribution. Basically for those cases where a local employer is a price-setter, as opposed to a price-taker, or a worker really doesn't have much choice of employer for some reason, or is a really bad negotiator, the employer can't totally abuse it. Just like they can't make you use a chainsaw without protective eyewear.

I agree, this goal of minimum wage policy is the welfare of low paid workers.

> If it's OK to fix minimum prices for labor, why not for anything else?

I am in favour of a minimum price for alcoholic beverages. Perhaps by a tax based on $2 per standard drink.

> Indexing the minimum wage to inflation is a particularly bad idea, if there is ever a big supply shock and stagflation, you'll get a big increase in the minimum wage at the wrong time, when people and companies are struggling to avoid layoffs.

I assume you agree that in the long run the minimum wage should rise with something like inflation.

Put it in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Then can ensure it does not go up at the wrong times, and does go up the right amount over the long run.

I agree with you that the context sensitive grammar make this sentence hard to parse. However if you look at the clarifications of meaning they break things into bits.

In some languages (e.g.: Java without lambdas), you can't write a function without giving it a name. You have to break things into bits and give them names.

In the functional languages you can just create a lambda and use it.

In a functional style conditionals return values you can use directly. In languages like Java you end up having to assign to temporaries in the branches of the if.

Functional languages provide the ability to (promote?) write expressions that remind me of this sentence.

Just because you can do without temporaries does not mean you should.

Certainly information technology products are advancing faster than some others.

But in terms of health care, life expectancy is still increasing.

For diabetes, I think that blood glucose monitors are more easily available than they were in the past, and I suspect that an implant that regulates glucose better can't be far away.

2 members of my family both had cancer and don't have it anymore due to medical intervention.

I think transport is the one to pick on more.

If those are the metrics you care about, then I think you should go with PHP.

Domino's artificially keep the price of their Pizza constant against the US dollar for long periods. This is common and useful.

There are a group of people who think that currencies should be connected to the value of gold.

But if you work out the price of currencies in say oil, or shares, then no currency maintains a single price for 24 hours.

> while solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper

This is different from the impression I previously had, which was more along these lines:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-c...

Where do you get your impression from?

I change one line of C# in a unit test, and ask VS to run the unit test.

It then spends 30 seconds building.

This kills TDD and many other ways of exploratory development.

This is not the case in any Java or Python IDE.

If the market is efficient, then the correct investment is market weighted.

You are missing the rest of the world and smaller stocks. This implies that you are missing some diversification that would reduce your risk.

In Australia married couples file their own tax separately.

One income supports 5 people in my case, but I am taxed the same way as if that income supported one person.

No system is perfect. The US system much better recognizes capacity to contribute taxation.

One counter example is Java and Python. In Java this is allowed and the result requires knowledge of detailed rules:

    int i = 10;
    int j = 20;
    String s = "Test " + i + j;

In Python the equivalent is an error.

The 'in your face' difference between a statically typed language and dynamic one is the time difference between the compilation error and an execution error. One tool for working effectively with dynamically typed languages is to keep that time difference short with tools like unit tests.

> Really, we don’t know how to write and maintain software, let alone reliable software, without throwing vast amounts of time or money at the problem. when we come up short we’re left with the inevitably bug-ridden fruit of our labours.

The way to write software efficiently is to have a small team of skilled, experienced and motivated people deliver it incrementally.

The space shuttle team developed a process to deliver software that was not bug-ridden. This was costly.

And there are collections of patterns to improve robustness of systems that are discussed in books about Erlang.

You can question whether the perverse incentive will be exploited.

For example lets say the rule is that "C# code must be compiled before it is run." The incentives are to declare code compiled when it is not, to declare that you are not running code when you are, and to declare code to not be written in C#.

What does "growth" measure?

If we buy a $7 kindle book rather than a $16 paper back does that halve GDP?

We have improved medical care that costs the same does that imply no growth?

If twice as many people use air travel, but it costs half as much does that mean there is no growth?

Does anyone know what the story with file systems and SSD's is?

Google did made it clear that some tuning makes sense for SSD's, but did not make it clear whether the various file systems are more or less suited to SSD's.

There are numerous attempts to measure marginal propensity to spend.

They agree that people on lower incomes have a high marginal propensity to spend, and a lower marginal propensity to save.

In the US companies generally arrange to pay their shareholders with capital gains through a combination of share buy backs and stock splits.

This enables investors to take income when they want to in a very tax concessional way.

I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_for_Brontosaurus

> However, not using strictly defined self-contained data types for a large project is also recipe for confusion and pain.

Not using well defined data types for in a widely exposed interface in a large project is suboptimal.

Overly formalizing data types for entities of limited scope is suboptimal on small and large projects.

We need to be careful about adding unnecessary weight to large projects, because it costs more there.

> in many languages arrays are objects, dictionaries are objects, and tuples are objects

I am not aware of a canonical definition of object. One thing that is commonly included is the idea that objects have identity. So "two" arrays with the same values are distinguished in the object world. This is not what people mean if they create an RGB from an array (or dictionary).

The default in the intellectual property world should be that there is no protection.

Perhaps the manufacturing process by which the device can be made so thin is original.

The physical design of the iPad is not original enough to justify any patent protection, i.e.: none is in the interests of consumers.

It is quite plain, and quite similar to other devices.

There are many examples of a division of labor between companies without intellectual property protection being involved. I have worked on many consulting projects where intellectual property protection of the results was not significant.

So for example MIPS could become a CPU design consulting company to fab companies that want to produce chips. It seems to me that this would reduce barriers to entry and improve allocation of resources.

Another difference suggested by Stallman is that there is no legal definition of non-software patent, and software patent.