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teractiveodular

Re:You Didn't Notice MP3 Is Now Free on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @09:59PM (#42958480)
They don't. You now subscribe to Copilot 365 or whatever the hell Office is called today for the low, low price of $12.99 per month for the rest of your life.
Re:Google Kills Diversity Hiring Targets on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @09:53PM (#42958447)
Here's a strawman: White people are more likely to diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). If people with ASD are more likely to opt for CS degrees, by induction we'll have more white people in CS.
Re:Google Kills Diversity Hiring Targets on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @07:36PM (#42957475)
Such as? If a specific culture puts women off studying CS, than that culture is sexist, no?
Re:The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @05:29PM (#42956251)
> In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate.

"Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?

Re:Google Kills Diversity Hiring Targets on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @05:26PM (#42956213)
You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
Re:Google Kills Diversity Hiring Targets on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @05:18PM (#42956108)
But what if the poor people have the wrong skin color?
Re:Google Kills Diversity Hiring Targets on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @05:17PM (#42956086)
The referenced Google diversity reports spell out the percentages of "Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, Native American+ and White+" (their terms).

https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2023/

Re:The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:54PM (#42954972)
Flights are operable by 1 person, and this is in fact the normal state of affairs in general aviation. The second person on commercial aircraft is there mostly for redundancy, although obviously having another pair of hands makes things easier.
Re:The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:49PM (#42954900)
It's not performative outrage, it's a statement of fact. You didn't merely widen the net, you spearfished candidates of the right race and ignored those of the wrong ones. Regardless of your intentions, how is that not racist?
Re:The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:46PM (#42954853)
The one positive "DEI" thing you can do without lowering the bar is to widen the net: look harder for qualified candidates in places where you didn't look before.
Re:The Full Story of the FAA's Hiring Scandal on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:30PM (#42954675)
This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
Re:Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @05:02AM (#42946366)
They wouldn't mind it, but Chinese EV & solar panel production volumes are already completely mind-boggling, they'll keep doing just fine without the US.
Re:Alphabet (GOOGL) reports earnings, stock drops on revenue miss on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @04:37AM (#42946162)
It's down 7% in after-hours trading as I type this.
Results: https://abc.xyz/assets/91/b3/3f9213d14ce3ae27e1038e01a0e0/20...

10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204424...

All the numbers look pretty good at first glance (revenues up 15% YoY from $70B to $81B, operating income up from $17B/25% margin to $25/32% margin), EPS up from $1.17 to $1.89), but obviously Wall Street expected even more so now the stock is tanking.

A couple of counterexamples from a declining demographic is not much to flatly deny the article's entire case.

There are vast teams of marketers and data scientists hard at work making things like food and social media more appealing and addictive. Of course more people are, on average, going to get more addicted to them, even if a few fish have the willpower to swim against the tide or the money to buy the chemicals to do it instead.

The CDC instruction applies only to researchers actually employed by the CDC (read: the government).

Again, I don't like this any more than you do, but your employer generally does get to dictate what you do and say at work.

Would you like to offer a substantive critique of any of the highlighted cases?

And for what it's worth, here's a later highlighted case where FIRE defended a professor who had been told to stop teaching, and I quote, "woke shit" like gender studies at a state university.

https://www.thefire.org/cases/valdosta-state-university-prof...

(deleted incorrect claim)
Re:A new supergiant Bathynomus species discovered in Vietnam on Saturday February 01, 2025 @06:47PM (#42903809)
As you can tell from the price, these are a very expensive luxury item. The legal minimum wage is VND 1.800,000/month, meaning a kilo at even the lowest wholesale price of "only" 680,000 is over a week's income. At retail, I recall them going for several million dong/kilo a few years back in Danang.
Hoo boy, transsexual Bay Area vegan rationalists on a killing spree. Fox News & co are going to have a field day with this one.
Early indications are that the airliner and ATC were operating as planned, and the immediate cause of the crash was the military helicopter.
To put this in perspective, this is the first fatal crash of a US commercial airliner in 16 years (Colgan Air Flight 3407 on February 12, 2009) and the first fatal commercial airliner crash in the United States in 12 years (since Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on July 6, 2013).

We like to throw shade at Boeing, the FAA etc, but this is still an incredible accomplishment, especially given the explosive growth of traffic over those years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were far fewer flights but multiple crashes every year was the norm.

Re:The 'no. 8 wire' tradition in New Zealand on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @08:58PM (#42873895)
Nah yeah nah mate
DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a "foreign nation-state backed organization". They were forced to pivot to AI when their original business model (quant hedge fund) was stomped on by the Chinese government.

Of course this is China so the government can and does intervene at will, but alleging that this required CIA level state espionage to pull off is alien crash levels of implausible. They open sourced the entire thing and published incredibly detailed papers on how they did it!

Re:XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video] on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @04:28PM (#42858279)
Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).
Re:XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video] on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @04:26PM (#42858253)
The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.

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