2,805 karma · joined May 1, 2017
There are other abuses that we have concrete evidence of. E.g., refusing the cooperate with the FBI. (https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/laws...).
Hell, up until 2005, the TSA used CREDIT SCORES as a component in deciding who should be on no-fly lists...
From the article:
> People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.
The US may ban you from flying if you are politically controversial [1]+, get kicked off a flight [2, edit: 4], or sneak onto planes without a ticket [3].
Likewise, people who trespass on public transit are often barred from its use. And of course people who break traffic laws are (eventually) kicked off the roads.
I won't comment on whether the Chinese government's characterization of its laws is accurate or not (I don't speak any relevant language and don't know much about the culture, so all I have to go off of is western media). But at least according to the Chinese government, these rules are mostly in-line with how things often work in the US.
[1] https://theintercept.com/document/2014/07/23/march-2013-watc... (edit: changed from http://mentalfloss.com/article/68073/8-ways-you-can-end-no-f...)
[2] https://thepointsguy.com/2017/07/getting-banned-from-an-airl...
[3] e.g., http://wqad.com/2018/02/21/illinois-stowaway-woman-pleads-no...
[4] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39919229/ns/travel-news/t/can-bad-...
+ The "predictive assessments" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-li...) used for putting people on the no-fly list are not very transparent and, IMO, reminiscent of a social credit system. It's extremely hard to imagine such a system that doesn't harshly penalize certain constitutionally protected speech (e.g., about Islam and US foreign policy in the ME).
I think this sentence is accurate: If you are suspected of drug dealing, any asset that you can't prove you received through other legal means is likely to be subject to seizure.
I think this sentence is accurate: any asset that you can't prove you received through other legal means MAY be subject to seizure.
I think this one isn't accurate, though: any asset that you can't prove you received through other legal means is likely to be subject to seizure.
Maybe I'm just surrounded by extremely lucky people, but none of the people around me (all of whom aren't partaking in illegal behavior / have never been suspected of illegal behavior) have had the police show up and randomly take their stuff.
Oh, I didn't intend that as a defense of Theranos. I intended that as a justification for punishing Shkreli.
> the important thing is, as you seem to sort of agree, to deter bad actors and encourage good ones.
I think punishment has many societal functions, some of them more rational than others, but all legitimate in their own way.
1. Holmes is not out of the hot water yet. DOJ could still press charges and seek jail time.
2. What makes you think Theranos is paying her fine?
3. Holmes also loses 18.9 million (probably worthless) shares.
> Meanwhile Shkreli - who's "victims" lost zero money - is going to spend 7 years in jail and has lost at least $10 million because the government decided to take it over.
1. "no one was hurt" is never a valid legal defense. Not if you break into a company's networks. Not if you break into someone's house. Not if you sell drugs. And not if you commit fraud. In the case of fraud laws, the reason for this is actually obvious and rational: deterrence. No one ever thinks they're going to lose it all. If we only punished fraud that didn't work out in the end, the law would not have its intended deterrent effect.
However, "no one was hurt" can act as a mitigating factor in sentencing! However...
2. Character and remorse also matter in sentencing. As does settling. Who knows how much lighter Shkreli's sentence could've been if he settled. Or at least managed to just go home and shut up during sentencing.
Some of these observations might be troubling (e.g., being punished for exercising your right to a trial; going to jail for an extra year because you're an asshole in public) but they aren't gender issues.
> I would love to see people complaining about gender gaps addressing the huge gender gap in our justice system, because cases like this are a slap in the face.
This is a real problem [1]. But if you want to push the dial on this, maybe find someone other than Shkreli as your victim figure? (Also, the best way of closing this gap is probably less time for men, not more time for women.)
[1] https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...
Changing that "likely to be" into a "may be" would make the statement true(r) without the if-clause.
Also if the if-clause stated "suspected of" rather than "convicted of", then the "is likely to be" part would be true in general.
IDK, I feel like that's a sweet spot most people hit at the end of a PhD. Enough confidence in yourself that you can expend lots of resources trying hard things.
Enough humility to recognize that you'll probably fail at most of those things.
And most importantly, the project management, risk management, and communication skills to hedge your big bets.
Enough experience working with top-tier people to know that all of these things are learnable skills that other successful folks are using (including fields medalists and including high-school dropouts).
Maybe there's a difference between the "informed arrogance" of a researcher working on an open problem in their field (or a serial entrepreneur trying to disrupt a huge industry) and the "uninformed arrogance" of a charlatan, hack, or (in this case) fraudster?
All of the industry AI labs follow the same pattern, even (perhaps especially) the en vogue ones (well, I guess depending on wtf "solve intelligence" is supposed to mean...). Watson is just old enough that it's now obvious the advertising agency was given too much leash.
Ditto for self-driving.
Ditto, in fact, for basically any basic or applied research happening in the research arm of any for-profit organization. And at a lot of universities besides! In fact, as far as I can tell, positive PR is some non-trivial aspect of the ROI for industry research labs.
BUT... there's a HUGE GAAP ( ;-) ) between marketing hype and lying in financial disclosures. One is eye-rolly and should be called out on internet message boards and during sales pitches. The other is criminal.
>> the current US patent system is quite a ways off from a reasonable definition.
But the road to effective IP law in the United States starts with understanding how invention happens. And "all useful inventions are VC-backed product-oriented B2C internet companies" is not a good model for how invention happens for the vast majority of useful inventions. Even in the past decade.
Patents are a mechanism for rewarding useful inventions.
The definition of "useful invention" is difficult to get right, and the current US patent system is quite a ways off from a reasonable definition.
However, I'm pretty sure the most societally beneficial definition of "useful invention" is not "perfect fodder for the ideal VC-funded startup" (aka fixed costs with exponential user base growth).
The author is correct that if an invention is perfect VC fodder, then patents aren't necessary. But the author is incorrect in the implicit assumption that any "useful invention" is necessarily perfect VC fodder.
https://qz.com/1171391/the-intel-intc-meltdown-bug-is-hittin...
I think all educational outcomes should be measured with respect to the answers to these two questions.
K12 schools in extremely wealthy areas can compare themselves to like peers, but comparing themselves to high-poverty areas is a useless comparison. Neither institution would do well under the other's constraints.
For-profit higher ed is definitely the same way.
Well, just look up active research labs at any top-tier university. Or peruse the work that's happening in top industry labs. And then realize that there are lots of groups within companies working on similar types of problems.
And then a lot of stuff that's not "research" but still demands lots of background in some field of science/engineering in order to avoid Bad Things. Designing the control software for a new power plant, for example.
> So do we agree that software development is, on average, mid-tech?
I'm not sure the question is even well-formed. It's like asking if "health-care" is mid-tech. Well, certain nurses certainly are. Neurosurgeons certainly aren't.
> The software I was building in that after-school job in high school isn't a whole lot different to the dominant types of projects I see out there today
TBF maybe you shouldn't have been building that software without a lot more training? Maybe the lack of seriousness in the software industry is fundamentally unethical. See Equifax.
As a high schooler I built software that interfaced with a database containing a shitload of social security numbers/dobs/names/addresses. I should not have been allowed to build public-facing interfaces to that database without oversight from a practiced software engineer.
> But this is not the typical case that the BLS is drawing their conclusions from. They are looking at the entire industry as a whole.
Well, yes, that's been exactly my point since the first post...
Oh yes, it's a whole big thing! See: https://www.fcc.gov/international
Which you can read either way (oy, I must have karma to burn?). On the one hand, the anti-capitalist left in the US has historically had a contingent with racial undertones. On the other hand, literally every other group's station was improved at least in part through government mechanisms (equal protection under law, civil rights, etc.) rather than market mechanisms.
I'd not do SFBA, but other coastal cities with less severe CoL differences pay substantially better than the midwest. You won't be house rich, but you'll be actually rich. And that equals retirement.
We totally agree here -- these are two different jobs.
My point is that you can't tell that from the job title.
> And can we really classify a job where you literally spend most of your time learning how to do a job a "degree required" job?
Yes. There's a quantum leap between jobs where you're "learning on the job" trivial perturbations to things that hundreds of millions of other people already know and jobs where you're "learning on the job" stuff that no one / 10 other people know.
ALL jobs require learning on the job. Some jobs require you to learn stuff that's not possible to learn without already having a degree or two's worth of background knowledge. Some jobs require you to learn stuff any high schooler can learn. That is the difference between mid-tech and high-tech!
> There are always outliers. We have to be observing the typical or average case for this discussion to have any meaning.
Yes. And I'm pointing out that understanding that typical/average case is difficult for "Software Development" because the job title encompasses so many different types of jobs.
Look at the first destinations reports for those CS programs and you'll see what happens. People leave the region after getting the degree. In droves.
The job title "software developer" is almost meaningless in the context of this conversation given the extraordinarily high variance in what that job title actually entails.
The software development job I had in high school required knowing what for loops are and knowing how to google web shit. The technical content was almost non-existent. The difficult part of that type of job is managing relationships with customers, knowing how to estimate deadlines and working in a team. I would consider most web development a mid-tech job.
At my last software job, I used graduate-level mathematics almost every day. The "at my desk" hours of the day were 60% reading mathematics papers and 40% implementing that stuff. Along with all the soft skills, of course. 100% of the technical problems I faced were not a Google search away, because I was the first person solving those problems.
As far as BLS is concerned, those are the same jobs. Clearly, they are at two extremes of the "skills" spectrum. And the compensation is wildly different. And the availability of talent for these jobs is radically different. But BLS doesn't see that because the job title is the same. Hmph.
> where there is no real pressure to hire people
Again, a HUGE "it depends"!
I worked a job like this in high school. Pretty sure I could've done it earlier, and learning the job was pretty easy. In contrast, I did some software work in high school as well and was out of my depth (thankfully it worked out).
> Does a job that does not require teaching (self or otherwise) even exist?
I guess it's a matter of degree.
I think this thread is confusing "degree or equivalent knowledge" with "no really honest to god you don't need a degree".
Mid-tech is the latter. Consider the examples given in the article: "...computer systems analyst, computer network architects, and support specialist..."
The Midwest is not replete with jobs held by self-taught software engineers. It's replete with jobs (dubbed mid-tech) that don't require the self-teaching in the first place.
My post was about the Midwest [1]. None of these are in the Midwest [2]. Except maybe Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is technically not Midwestern because it's slightly more than a commute away from Ohio. But it's also actually not Midwestern because it's not a good prototype for a typical Midwestern city.
"The Midwest" does not mean "not the coast".
Also, all three of these are in the "coastal states" I'm contrasting with the Midwest.
> the markets in SF have been stagnant for years now.
Yes, I repeated some rendition of "except SF, which is uniquely terrible even among coastal places" many times in my post. And the problem with SF isn't lack of predictable appreciation. The problem with SF is that you can't afford to make the investment in the first place.
[1] https://ces4thgradewiki.wikispaces.com/Midwest+Region+of+the...
[2] PA and NC are mid-Atlantic and Texas is most certainly in the South.
However, this apt observation is not what the article is actually about. Mid-tech jobs are things like "...computer systems analyst, computer network architects, and support specialist...", which are very different jobs from software engineering.
[1] As an aside, CoL adjustments between the Midwest and coastal-state cities are extremely favorable to the Midwest in cases where you can actually afford to buy a house (read: not SFBA). If you buy a house in the midwest, you usually have to be okay with treating it as "not an investment". Whereas a house in Portland, Seattle etc. function as both a place to live as well as an investment likely to appreciate handsomely. Personally, I'm OK treating CoL as a sunk cost and not engaging in real estate speculation during my non-work hours. But from an objective perspective, the CoL pay cut suffered in MW cities is often unjustified given the opportunity cost of not living in an area with more and more predictable real estate appreciation. Selfishly, I wish folks in the Midwest had more success convincing their employers that "cheap land" is not a good justification for severely underpaying their labor force.
The "main argument" of those posts -- i.e., the posts James is responding to, is not that "project-based learning... make[s] learning interesting".
That may be your main argument, but it's not the argument that the people who James is responding to are (mainly) making.
James already addresses this assertion in the very first sentence of the blog post. And the second sentence.
In the case of Berkeley and a few others, they are absolutely correct.
I've seen both sides of the unknown school / huge name brand divide.
It matters. A lot. It shouldn't, it's a shame, but it does.
In CS, you will turn out just fine either way. But it does matter.
These textbook prices do matter! If you're paying 1k in textbook fees and 8k-9k in tuition, then those books are eating up a significant percentage of your total burn.
9k is not a made-up number, by the way. Public colleges and universities without active research programs have tuition in the ~9k range [1]. Which is still a lot, but a student who works a part-time job and lives at home can get out with relatively little debt (or even no debt with a modest scholarship and impressive work ethic).
You don't have to go to Harvard or even the state flagship. And you definitely don't need to go to one of the many second-rate schools that charge Harvard prices for access to a much less prestigious network and in many cases inferior education.
If a student attends a school with an active research program and chooses not to leverage that expertise in order to level up their career prospects, then that student made a bad decision. Perhaps we should be doing more to shield people from bad life choices, or at least not enable those choices with easy access to huge piles of debt. But in most states, there do exist (more) reasonable options in the current market.
IMO we should be moving to self-published open source books, with hard copies sold in the 20-50 dollar price range and with all profits going to the actual author. The online auto-graded homework assignments are an unsolved problem for some courses, but that's nothing a sabbatical or two can't solve.
[1] https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/highlights
The "camera design" portion of kodak isn't where the primary bloodbath happened. The bloodbath happened when film died.
In other words, kodak the company may have thrived, but only by shedding huge portions of its workforce and retooling.
I guess if all you care about is stock value, then sure, Kodak could've pulled it off. But for the folks on the ground, the bloodbath would've happened either way.