It appears that you have committed the fallacy of composition here. The claim that Jobs and Stallaman have some similar characteristics is not the same as saying that they are the same.
For example, you can objectively say that Hitler was an influential head of state (e.g. starting WW II) and FDR was an influential head of state. These are both true statements, while at the same time, these were two very different men.
But, if, for each class of worker, there is income equalization, you will find that large companies tend to have an equalizing affect rather than an unequalizing affect. In this example, it's not interesting that bosses get paid more than workers, it is interesting that all bosses tend to get paid the same amount.
I think the argument is that technology is great for the people who use technology.
If every programmer and engineer got paid $500,000/yr, that would be great...for ever programmer or engineer, it wouldn't matter much for others.
I do tech support for a web hosting company and I've definitely seen people with low incomes who don't and don't want to use technology, they are falling behind.
Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma.
As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.
If the rich didn't actually pay the percentage in taxes as given by their tax bracket, then their tax bracket isn't relevant because it isn't something that was actually followed in practice.
Also, capital gains tax is really. You'd have to make less than $8,500/yr to be in a lower income tax bracket. This hasn't always been the case. So, one easy, legal way to pay less in taxes is to get paid via capital gains.
It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma.
Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems.
As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
Indeed. I don't recall the exact numbers, though I've heard both Linux and RoR numbers, I think that Linux has factors more developers committing to it than RoR.
Linux is, perhaps, the most rapidly changing piece of software in existence
Making a general statement about American culture, which I did, doesn't, necessarily, say anything about the details of the culture. As you suggest, and as I've also generally observed, among the Asian Americans that I've met, they tend to retain a culture that's more interested in academics than what is generally found in the American culture.
I think you allude to a good point that I would like to restate.
In this study, and in others like it, the blame seems to be put on the educational institution. But, it's not hard to see places where success is gotten independent of the institution (like, for your example, Asian Americans). So, it seems wrong to put all your faith in and all the blame on the institution.
I've tutored 100s of people and I've done lots of independent learning and, based on my interactions, I think I can say that the schools could be changed however you want and they won't fix the problem in America. See, the students that I've tutored didn't mainly have a problem in understanding the material, as far as I could tell, they had a problem in not wanted to learn. And, if I can teach myself calculus, physics and programming, you don't need schools to learn things.
As far as I can tell, one large problem is that, in America, it's more prestigious to be a manager, lawyer or securities trader than it is to be an engineer or scientist. Engineering and science is associated with curiosity and learning (things good schools should have), the other disciplines are more associated with prestigious and financial comfort and generally are not as socially or economically valuable. There's an interested piece in the New York Times on this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598158).
I have never read, heard or observed that any race is, intrinsically, intellectually superior to another. Give this, your comment isn't interesting.
Now, I have read, heard and observed that Asians tend to have a different cultural emphasis on academics. Given this, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that the problem in the US is that the culture doesn't value learning.
I definitely found reading posts in this thread rather bizarre. This has become more of a spectacle than an event that happened to an actual human being.
Discriminate involves distinction or differentiation. Given this, whenever an uneven distribution exists, some kind of discrimination or bias has occurred. Of course this does not demand that the discrimination was bad, it's just the definition of words. For example, the discrimination done by the semipermeable membrane in your cells is a very good.
So there is not actually a question of whether or not gender discrimination is occurring in technology at a large scale, it certainly is, by about 3 to 1, I think. The question is rather, who is doing the discrimination and why are they doing it. From briefly looking at this thread, I see that at least 3 cases involved sexual objectification by men, and I would venture to guess that this has happen to more than 3 women. I don't think there is enough evidence to suppose that this is the most prevalent form of discrimination, at least I've never heard of it when reading about the gender disparity; though it would certainly be interesting to learn what affect stories like this have on dissuading woman from entering male dominated fields.
I'm not sure how long the study has been out, but I recently became aware of an investigation regarding the disparity of women in professorships. This was actually kind of humorous to me. For some time, it had been assumed that this disparity was related to discriminatory practices by those doing the hiring. But, the investigation didn't find any significant evidence of this, instead, they found that it was the women who were making the distinction; working 70 or 80hrs/week isn't very practical if you want to start a family. Maybe academia is broken, I have no idea, but at least it isn't malicious and yet there is still discrimination.
Regarding technology, or, at least math specifically, there is some evidence that suggests that girls are involved in biasing other girls against it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573548). Also, there's evidence that suggests that the different genders respond better to different language (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571075), so if you have a field mostly dominated by men, it's not unreasonable to see why it would mostly attach men, all else being equal. Again, these aren't malicious and are probably, generally, not well known. But, I think that these sorts of things can be agreed upon by most people as not being good.
Also, regarding some malicious or ignorant discrimination, I think Dave Thomas makes some good points in his keynote during last year's RubyConf about 33mins in to his talk (http://confreaks.net/videos/368-rubyconf2010-keynote).
When the proportion of women in technology is similar to the proportion of women in the work place in general, you can probably say that the problem of discrimination is over blown. Until then, the situation at least looks a bit suspicious.
Mindful that not all discrimination is malicious or even conscious.
As far as I can tell, this is the problem with science eduction. People who become teachers or professors do so because they just love the subject. But, in general, whether you're talking about math or literature or foreign language, the people you encounter aren't going to love the subject, so saying you ought to do something out of love (or fun) isn't a selling point at all. And someone who loves something tends to make it more boring for those who don't, I think; for example, I took a class in complex analysis, which I'm not interested in and the instructor spent nearly all his time on proofs that he found excited which made it even less interesting to me.
I've tutored 100s of people in math and I think that I can say that the argument that math teaches you how to think better isn't practical, that is, people do not practice it. Of course math is very tight logical thinking and you can apply that way of doing things elsewhere in your life. But, to students, math, e.g algebra, is in the box of stuff they don't like and won't use, and they're probably right and they just throw it away when they're done; they don't use it and they don't learn how to think better.
I know for me, I had a lot of trouble with math until I found something that I liked that used it. It wasn't until there was a definite, concrete use for it that I took it up. Math seems kind of like shopping for hammers. If I need to build a house, then I'll go get a hammer, but if I don't, I'm not going to stand mesmerized on the hammer aisle.
Seeing all these types of articles as devaluing higher-education as a whole is going further than necessary and only considering phenomena such as Facebook, Microsoft or Apple (wildly successful software companies started by dropouts) is probably not going far enough.
As far as actual learning goes, educational institutions are great in cases where the knowledge is hard to access, expensive or dangerous. If you want to be a doctor, you can't just go to and get a cadaver or an MRI machine to practice on, these are expensive. If you want to learn how to run a nuclear power plant, you can't go buy radioactive material to learn with, there are national security concerns with that. Learning how to fly a plane is dangerous and planes are expensive. But educational institutions can address all of these issues.
Using the term bubble is perhaps an effort to sensationalize the issue, I'm not sure. In any case, I think it is certainly useful to look at fields where access to knowledge is easy, cheap and safe and ask if an institution is required for learning or if that's wrong thinking. It happens that writing computer programs is one of those cases. This is probably why all of these articles talk about software developers (them being posted on HN by programmings probably has something to do with it too :)).
Saying that a system produces useful results is not that same as saying that a system is optimal. Cars in the 1950s could get you places a lot faster than walking, but that doesn't mean they got the best possible gas mileage. Computers in the 1980s did amazing things, things that would be at least impractical without them, but 1980s computers could've been a lot better, orders of magnitude better. So, stating that educational institutions have useful results is not necessarily a counterargument to the deficiencies in educational institutions. In fact, I don't recall reading any article in this recent string of education articles that claims that the problem with the higher education system is that it doesn't produce useful results. In fact such a statement is easily and, probably, objectively, verifiably falsifiable. So this isn't a question of useful vs non-useful. This is a question of optimal vs non-optimal.
He doesn't necessarily miss the value of managers, in fact he says that he has managers, just not one person who's sole role is a manager, they rotate every week.
When you mention technical workers being suspicious of managers and managers believing that there job is more difficult than technical work, you're talking about the exact situation that Jason mentions trying to avoid. One way of being less suspicious of the value of someone is to do the work that they do. That's what he's talking about.