This isn't entirely a trivial absurdity. One of the biggest things I hear about traveling in China (and Japan) is that you're expected to carry your own toilet paper everywhere.
An analogy would be – someone from a non-tipping country complains about the fact that some restaurants in the US have a "compulsory gratuity" of 20% for larger parties. Sure, somewhat outrageous, but less so if you consider that tipping 15-20% is the norm in the US anyway.
I can't even pass as white, and I'm still excluded from most diversity programs because my race (South Asian) is overrepresented in tech.
However, overrepresentation in tech in Silicon Valley does not necessary translate into societal privilege, or even extend to all places in the US. Like sure, Google's CEO is Indian, but the entire upper layer of management at the company I work at (and a lot of other companies in Middle America) is 100% golf-playing white males with no way to break in. So I'm kinda SOL both in the diversity programs in Silicon Valley / more progressive tech places as well as the golf-and-whisky club at work.
Would like to hear solutions or experiences from other brown South Asians working outside Silicon Valley.
Blockbuster and Netflix did not sell perishable goods.
Now I could buy the argument that the supermarket chains just won't be able to attract the appropriate talent to deliver an experience rivaling that of Blue Apron (or Amazon, if they decided to get into this market tomorrow via Whole Foods).
> I would happily pay 80% taxes if I knew that when I needed it most the welfare state would have my back, but I know that it won't.
This crucial point of yours seems to have been missed by the author of the article. I wonder if that has something to do with them being from the UK, which has nationalized healthcare and some sort of a welfare state.
Also these places aren't good at the things they (sometimes) claim to specialize in. The wings at Buffalo Wild Wings are not better than the wings at a random bar.
Maybe millenials care about these things because we want value for our money and don't want to spend it solely on the basis of Super Bowl advertisements?
EDIT: My comment completely missed that there were 100 lines of identical code noticed as well. Leaving below for context.
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Does anyone else find the example cited in the article rather flimsy? Out of 450, two students incorrectly used the inverse of a Boolean for a conditional – an error I have seen tens, if not hundreds of times.
Perhaps they used better ways of detecting cheating (some are covered later in the article) for uncovering the collusion in this specific case. If not, this “veteran computer science professor” is going on unnecessary witch hunts.
> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests.
This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenarios that will be used in real life.
SF-isms (I understand NIMBY is also used outside SF) don't map perfectly across oceans.
Suffice it to say that people living in slums in India can have a lot of political clout. For example, once a large slum pops up in an urban area, literally no one dares to lawfully remove it, for fear of losing the next local election.
> Hospitals have to work with proprietary devices -- for example, retinal scanners etc, many of which only have Windows drivers.
Then the tenders for buying those devices should state "Devices that work with $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO will be given preference.". If it's a reasonable one, they will make a driver for it. Customer demand always generates product; and the NHS is about the biggest customer there is.
This. While I have come around to the concept of "It's probably better if more people learn to code", I rarely see other parts of the company so eager to share their knowledge.
In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.
> take home homework and other things that blow up the 2.5-hour mark
I would think "take home" implies you take it home, i.e. do it in your own time. I don't know what your undefined "other things" are.
> The 2.5 hours will also scale up with the number of participants, 20 employees who are committing 2.5 each week (at very, very minimum) is a loss of 50 hours per week.
It is this sort of thinking that is super counterproductive. Even if one of those employees learns something simple, like how to programmatically create CSV files and import them into Excel, they will have saved thousands of man-hours.
You can't nickel-and-dime people's time like this. Philosophies like yours tend to end up with timing people's bathroom breaks and scathing articles in the newspaper; rarely successful companies.
I will bet that most of the comments in this thread are from people who have never lived in rural India.
I have, and will tell you the real reason. It has little to do with literacy or education. It is because (warning, this is going ironic) Indian people are incredibly disgusted about shit and want to not think about dealing with it.
I'm Indian myself. For example, we think toilet paper is a horrible idea. You just clean your shit with...paper...and just leave it like that? That would not fly, even in any of the villages you mention. They have to have water to clean their shit, usually supplied in a small bucket or vessel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lota_(vessel)
Now think about temperatures. The current temperature at many places in India is more than a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Your average restroom or shovel pit or whatever is going to smell incredibly bad and be full of flies and a horrible smell. That is why some people prefer the river, and don't use the toilets that are built for them (links elsewhere in this thread).
Solutions? It's a usability problem. Bidets for poop washing that can be filled up instead of using piped water, super hydrophobic coatings, really large pits (so you don't smell the waste) –- things like that are going to be the solution. Unfortunately, no one approaches it in that way, and prefers to go the route of "Let's teach these uneducated savages not to shit where they eat." This is very unfortunate and I hope it will change in the future.
> The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows remote" as part of their package.
This question goes for the original post too -- but how many of these are truly remote? i.e. I can work for the majority of the year remotely, with maybe one or two visits to the company main office, if that.
Asking because I see far too many companies these days trying to brand themselves as remote-friendly, when they really mean something with far less freedom, like “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five”.
> How do you impose a "robot" tax? Do I get taxed every time a neural net tarts up a photo on my Nexus?
It would have to be a balancing act. My guess is "probably not", because mass-producing modified photos wasn't a big source of jobs done by humans in the past.
Manufacturing industries where you could show a direct "1 robot replaced these 200 humans" causal relationship would (hypothetically) be the ones to be taxed.
Once you have a bidet, your regular TP is equivalent to a wet wipe.
If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable": https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/are-flushable-w...