Ethnic and gender ‘diversity’ in Silicon Valley

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From today’s New York Times:

When Facebook released its workplace diversity numbers on Thursday, the company included a somewhat heartening message.

“It’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be,” Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global head of diversity, wrote. “There’s more work to do.”

But it was almost exactly the same thing Ms. Williams said a year ago. “We have more work to do — a lot more,” she wrote in 2014.

Facebook’s tone is hardly singular. “Like our peers, we have a lot of work to do,” Twitter said in a diversity report it posted last year. Pinterest has said, “We’re not close to where we want to be, but we’re working on it.”

Google’s 2014 statement, which came before those of other companies, seems to have been the template. “Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” Laszlo Bock, its senior vice president for people operations, wrote at the time.

It is as if these large tech companies are all reading from the same public relations playbook, delivering slight variations on the same self-effacing message. But while they all seem to acknowledge that there is much improvement to be made, the repetition of the statements like Facebook’s last week provides a reminder that there has been little progress so far.

Well, well.

Technological hubris

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Tech_hubris

Note this schmuck’s claim to be creating “a history of the world” at a time when nobody has yet preserved digital material for more than, say, 70 years. The truth is more likely to be that most of the public record for our time — or at any rate the part of it that is digitally encoded — is likely to vanish into a black hole.

Quote of the Day

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Thomas Piketty on the cynicism implicit in neoliberal dismissal of the capabilities of the state:

“We are told constantly that states can’t do anything, that it’s impossible to regulate the Cayman islands and the other tax havens because they are too powerful, and all of a sudden we send a million soldiers 10,000km from home to allow the emir of Kuwait to keep his oil.”

Financial Times, 27/28 June, 2015.

So why are Internet users resigned to being surveilled?

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This morning’s Observer column:

It would be patronising to assume that every internet user – except for the occasional geek – is a mug. Some people do read the terms and conditions to which they have to agree when signing up to use “free” internet services. They fully realise that “if the service is free then you are the product”. And yet they persist in using it. Why?

One possible reason is that they place a value on those “free” services. Various studies have tried to estimate what that value might be. A study by the consultancy company McKinsey, for example, asked 3,360 consumers in six countries what they would pay for 16 internet services that are now largely financed by ads. The conclusion was that households would pay €38 (£27) a month on average for those services. From this, McKinsey estimated that “free” internet services generate €32bn of consumer surplus in America and €69bn in Europe.

These calculations are music to the ears of Facebook and Google executives, who interpret them as proof that consumer tolerance of corporate surveillance is really evidence of “rational” economic behaviour. People put up with companies spying on them because they get a good deal out of it.

Into this comforting ointment, three academics have just implanted a number of flies…

Read on

Obamacare works — which is why the Republicans are mad as hell

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Nice column by Krugman.

Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.

Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.

That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Yep.

Learning to read

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Today’s Observer column:

I never thought I’d find myself writing this, but the Daily Mail has finally done something useful for society. Mind you, it’s done it unintentionally: it didn’t know it was doing good. But still… It would be churlish not to acknowledge its achievement…

Sounds improbable? I know. But read on