The only articles I've read claiming there isn't one have all been click bait pieces written by journos, not scientists or educators, and contain no data. Just wild ass speculation about the underlying causes of the pipeline problem.
Which, yeah. The pipeline problem has lots of causes. But saying "we don't have a pipeline problem because there are reasons women don't major in CS" makes no sebse. It's like saying the roof doesn't have a leaking problem because the real problem is that the gutters are clogged. I mean, sure, that's true, and we need to fix that to fix the roof. But the roof is still leaking...
The only real argument I've heard that isn't prime facie flawed in this way is the argument that you don't really need college educated computer scientists to fill your SWE roles. That may be true for some roles and some companies, but lots of positions (e.g. all the ones I hire for) do require a strong education in CS and math. PhDs in STEM fields that go on to good boot camps or masters programs in CS can be good fits, but those are even more rare.
And, again, even that argument has no data to back it in the articles I've read. It's just not prime facia illogical.
Part of the pipeline problem is that you're not winning over the most high achieving minority students to stem. I remember there was a Mexican American woman in one of my calc classes that was easily the best student and smoked everyone else (granted, it was at a second rate state school), but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist. People coming from underrepresented backgrounds don't want to spend 8 years doing a Phd, then a ML bootcamp, all so they can make low 6 figures at a job that could be outsourced or H1Bed at any minute when they could instead go to medical, dental, or law school and have a respected and well paid career.
> but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist.
Just guessing here, but there's probably a message board and clique of web blogs about dentistry full of people discussing the underrepresentation of minorities in their field and how they can fix their "pipeline problem".
Out of curiosity I just googled it, and yes, there is, and it's actually more serious than lack of diversity in adtech. If there aren't enough underrepresented minority applicants at Google, they will just have to hire an overrepresented minority to spy on you instead. But if the dental schools aren't producing enough minority dentists, those communities may not have access to quality dental care.
You shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to see doctors (and lawyers and plumbers etc) from their home country and speak their native language. Similarly, if you were living in a foreign country with a different national language, you'd likely prefer the same.
Just because someone is a different ethnicity doesn't mean we don't have a shared culture. Immigrants move to a country because they like the language/culture and want to be a part of it.
Immigrants move to a country to take advantage of the opportunities there and improve their standard of living. I have never met an immigrant that moved to a foreign country because they "liked the language/culture and want to be part of it".
Then maybe the incentives are wrong? If I ever move to another country, I'll pick the country based on the culture, not just on opportunity. It's too important not to think about.
depends on the (source:target) pair. People immigrating from India->US are coming from a vastly different background/goals/needs than those going US->India. Money probably dramatically beats out culture wants until you reach a certain point; those coming from a first-world country likely have lower monetary wants, and so culture has greater relative value.
Those coming from third-world to first-world are likely much more interested in money than culture, and I can't say for certain but my intuition is that the kinds of ethnic segregation (eg in NY/Chicago, where there's a whole array of little microtowns) that you see in the US are mostly generated by those poorer populations seeking wealth, not cultural value.
I imagine the equivalent American/European expat towns don't exist nearly as strongly/commonly in india/china, as the inverse exists in the US. (of course, you'd also expect less americans/europeans migrating to india/china, since the monetary difference isn't as strong).
What you are saying is true, which is why a single national language is important. People will naturally gravitate towards communities where their language is spoken, so we unify ourselves by ensuring that English is the common national language.
You find it difficult to believe that white dentists generally serve the communities they live in, which, by income squared with demographic data, tend to be overwhelmingly white?
To be honest, I'm just not used to living in a place with ethnic division along geographic boundaries. It may exist, but I've not personally seen it so yea, it's hard to imagine. Not saying it doesn't exist, but you asked the question to me personally.
Ah well, it’s a significant problem in many parts of America. Pretty much every metropolitan area has ethnic segregation to some extent among geological lines. This is due to a variety of factors- white flight, a long history of oppression and a fairly recent desegregation movement, towns where black people weren’t allowed to stay the night, generational discrepancies exaggerating existing effects, etc.
It’s fairly normal for there to be a wide variety of reasons why specific areas are predominantly one or another ethnicity.
Once you're qualified, it's natural to go off and place yourself where you can make money.
As an anecdotal example, in my local practice, there are a lot of Eastern-European and now Greek dentists. They're excellent and came here to make more than they would at home (and prop up the NHS whilst they're at it) - I do have a concern that there's likely to be an impact on dental care in their country of origin though. I know precisely that has happened with nursing.
> don't want to spend 8 years doing a Phd, then a ML bootcamp, all so they can make low 6 figures at a job that could be outsourced or H1Bed at any minute
Just wow. You are saying people with ML expertise and PhD can be replaced any minute! It just shows your own bias against certain people. I have never seen or heard anyone who brings certain deep technical expertise replaced in a minute. Hiring people is _really_ hard and hiring people with deeper technical expertise is even harder.
And whats up with 6 figure number? 6 figures go as high as 100,000-999,999USD and I am not sure if being somewhere in median of it (say $200K) will be considered low income?
The difference is that a premiere machine learning specialist from outside the country can work in the country immediately once immigration issues are taken care of. A premiere medical professional would still need to pass additional exams or certifications before they can work. Thus all things being equal, it is easier to replace a technologist from overseas than a medical professional.
Your talented classmate chose a good high-paying profession - what's the problem with being a dentist exactly?
> People coming from underrepresented backgrounds don't want to spend 8 years doing a Phd, then a ML bootcamp, all so they can make low 6 figures at a job that could be outsourced or H1Bed at any minute when they could instead go to medical, dental, or law school and have a respected and well paid career.
OK. So what? I think it's reasonable for people to decide they don't want to spend years in a PhD program.
I'm having trouble parsing your argument. Are you saying the pipeline problem is due to minority students choosing other more lucrative professions? Good! What's wrong with that?
you don't need a phd to be a very successful software engineer. a bs is plenty of education. and if you get replaced, at the very worst move to one of the job creating hubs like seattle where amazon alone wants to hire over 10,000 software engineers. There's certainly about 10k jobs in other companies here as a dev.
WeWork presents itself as tech startup and is often presented that way. They are really more a real estate business, but in this context their self perception is the only relevant view
> "Piercing the corporate veil" refers to a situation in which courts put aside limited liability and hold a corporation's shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation’s actions or debts.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Shuffling assets and liabilities to protect from bankruptcy proceedings is a common crime and happens every day to companies large and small. The veil can be pierced if it can be established that key people were aware of the situation. Unfortunately it just means this process will be dragged on for years and it is unlikely to recover much from the Sacklers
sorry have non-managing owners ever been targeted for crimes committed by their PtLds? nope they have not. and how about "personal business", yes, they are always targeted.
this is a big differences... I think tomp is explaining this difference somewhere in this thread.
>(Under capitalism) many costs of having PtLds are externalized.
I'd wager that at a societal level we roughly break even +/- a little bit in either direction. For every mega-corp abusing their legal status there's a few thousand small and medium businesses that do not have to worry (as much) about being sued into oblivion by some ambulance chaser over something that is not the result of malice. (I'm speaking about various private liability limiting corporate structures in general here.)
So you think the climate going to shits is "roughly break even". Some have benefitted a lot from externalized costs wrt climate impact (made billions). And some have benefitted a little (fast transport modes becoming afordable for personal enjoyment).
is that inherent? i haven't read Capital, but this doesn't seem so much of an inherent problem with capitalism than it seems like a very dumb implementation liability protection.
what capital says is that under capitalism, the ruling class will continually set up dumb rules, such as this one, in their favor, and they have a structural advantage in doing so, so are increasingly successful at it until it provokes revolt.
They'll do that under any system (you can find examples in basically all of recorded history). The people on top always try to use their power to put in rules to stay on top. I'm not convinced they somehow do it more or are more capable of doing it under capitalism than they were under the 18th century monarchies or socialism of the USSR and its satellite states or any of the other societal structures that have come and gone.
you're right that they will do it under any system of class society, with a minority expropriating class and a majority producing class, such as have existed since the invention of written history. that's why marx called for abolishing classes, absorbing everyone into the working class, replacing the structure with an egalitarian, democratic structure to decide how to invest all resources, as the only way out.
russia didn't have the economic basis to get rid of basic material scarcity in 1917, and also was constantly under attack by capitalism, and so it devolved into an undemocratic mess until it reverted (now everything is even worse there).
Sure, this would also have been true under feudalism.
The important thing to recognize is that the ruling class - whoever owns property and is able to use that to exploit workers - will control the government and make laws that benefit them.
It's a feature when it's good faith efforts. It's very clearly a bug when it's used to evade no end of abuse, illegality and fraud, or to avoid paying the pollution cleanup.
There probably needs to be some exceptional way in law to pierce the shell of limited liability and go after officers, perhaps even claw back from investors and shareholders.
Limited liability only protects the capital of the shareholders, it doesn't protect the management of the company against criminal prosecution.
(In practice, however, managers are only rarely put in jail, both because it's notoriously difficult to prove white-collar crime (except in few cases, like insider trading, which are the pursued with extra vigor), and because CEOs are generally rich and well connected... but the problem there is corruption, not some inherent feature/bug of the idea of limited liability company.)
Perhaps I could have expressed it better. I meant to go for the financials. There are countless cases where the factory or mine has declined and instead of cleaning it up, as promised, they shutter the company. Then there's the countless cases where the company is doing something illegal. Take the proceeds back.
We take money earned from theft and drug dealing, we take the stolen car from the person who innocently bought it. There's an offence of receiving stolen property. We don't take the millions from the execs who made millions pushing pharmaceuticals illegally, or the nuclear plant CEO and shareholder that has now, by dint of closure, given the job of decommissioning to the state - i.e. all of us. Once in a blue moon there's a criminal prosecution, but they just about always manage to stay wealthy.
We need to rethink the limits of limited liability as it's become a convenient shield to hide all sorts of unethical, shitty and outright illegal behaviour behind.
I have always thought there should be a law that funds for things like mine clearup and pensions should be paid as the debt is incurred, and locked up so there's no way for the company to get at it.
Comparing a PtLd to a "personal business" the PtLd shields the owners from criminal liability for crimes committed by the PtLd, while the "personal biz" provides no such protection.
> Limited liability only protects the capital of the shareholders,
No, it also protects shareholders from crimes the PtLd commits in order to "serve them". This is a main problem with PtLds imho.
i suggest that, when a PtLd or publicly traded company gets under criminal investigation, that all trade in shares gets suspended. when a fine/settlement is determined the trade is resumed but the fine is --for the part that cannot be paid in cash-- paid in equity while considering an adjusted valuation (post fine) of the company. This means the shareholders dilute to pay the fine/settlement.
1) the fine needs to be fair to the society (often we see these "slap on the wrist" fines for big corps, that's just disgusting and shows how much our democracies are disfunctional)
2) i suggest this because i want the shareholders to be pushing their companies to ethical behavior.
3) it is very important that companies are also held liable for unethical behavior in other countries, and/or even for unethical behavior of subsidiaries (the foxcons and the likes).
The company is going bankrupt, so the effective "fine" to the shareholders is 100% of their equity. That's the point - "limited liability" just means it can't be more than 100% of equity.
Then noone would invest. Don't forget that often "shareholders" are index funds, pensioners, school endowments...
No, the correct solution already exists - the criminal justice system going after criminals that did crime - it just doesn't work very well (especially when criminals are rich - e.g. Epstein - no need for "limited liability company").
there are so many ways a huge corp can commit crimes while individuals can all use the "plausible deniability" card. also often the crime is committed by the company as a whole, while no individual did something wrong.
> Then noone would invest.
i disagree, you just only invest in ethically sound endeavours. and thats exactly what im trying to achieve by my suggestions. starve bad-business from investment and/or people willing to take ownership. and make investors also do dilligence on the ethical side, instead of only an assessment of books+team+product+market.
exactly. no boundless protection for your capital/investments. you can do all kinds of other investments! but this kind of structure pushes corps to become "walk over dead bodies" evil, and investors not giving a shit.
This is why that arguments holds out! They do not have duty to anyone else because of this. And I'm okay with that as long as the stockholders are punished (no silly slap on the wrist style punishments) for crimes of their PtLds, as then the owners will force toe PtLds to have serious ethical standards.
This is not true, the Sackler families have already put up $4 billion dollars of their own money as part of one settlement in this and they're still being sued by others not part of the settlement. There's also a criminal investigation into members of the Sackler family.
The Epstein affair was not just Epstein the single individual. He could not have operated alone all these years in the way that he did. He got lenient sentences whenever he was brought to justice. The people who supported him remain untouchable.
Ok, but he was rich. And he got "touched". Therefore the rich are not untouchable, which was the original point under discussion. Just like the Sackler family does not appear to be immune from prosecution and confiscation of their property.
We don't know that he got touched. We have a press story with some unlikely events that strongly suggests he got touched.
There's a between-the-wars novel by English author Evelyn Waugh called Decline and Fall. The main character gets involved in all kinds of unspeakable crimes, more out of naivety than inherent criminality, and at the end is "disappeared" out of jail and given a new identity.
Waugh was an Establishment insider and knew how the upper classes operated. It's a very interesting novel.
I'm not suggesting Epstein was naive - far from it.
But if you're in a position to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up murder-by-fake-suicide, I suspect it's not significantly harder or more expensive to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up an escape.
It's debatable if it would more expedient to remove the evidence permanently or have it moved to another location where some of its skills might continue to be useful. But I would be surprised if option 2 wasn't at least a possibility.
As for the Sacklers - we'll see if any of them do jail time.
> But if you're in a position to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up murder-by-fake-suicide, I suspect it's not significantly harder or more expensive to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up an escape.
> It's debatable if it would more expedient to remove the evidence permanently or have it moved to another location where some of its skills might continue to be useful. But I would be surprised if option 2 wasn't at least a possibility.
To think any of this is plausible given the context requires an unwell mind.
Yes. He involved a lot of other rich people in his crimes. This was OK as long as he kept it under wraps, but once people started really looking into his activities there was a major risk of the fallout affecting others.
Ok, but his crime was not hurting other rich people. He got in trouble because he did something that hurt non-rich people, and then other rich people got wrapped up in that. This is not an example of rich people only getting in trouble by hurting other rich people.
I'm suggesting we launch a mental warfare campaign on the guilty.
The system is bought by folks like these. If you think the system will punish them, then I suggest taking a look at precedence for folks like them. It's not in the favor of the general public.
Comparing philosophers with constitution writers is a bit difficult. Philosophizing and nation building are quite different from one another.
But, basically, the question we should ask:
"is there a direct connection between Heidegger's philosophical prescriptions and his fascism?"
If so, that suggests a pretty serious problem with his prescriptions -- that, in certain milieu -- his ideas comfortably co-exist with or perhaps even feed/justify a fascist mindset.
IMO that line was always kind of obvious, but in any case, Heidegger drew it directly for us in his Black Notebooks.
Especially in Heidegger's case -- because of the very broad nature of the prescriptions that follow from his work -- I think that's quite different from mere "guilt by association".
> Using the same analysis, in a democratic society, one vote has in theory more power than membership in a public sector unions, because with that vote you can decide more things than just wages of public employees.
...except when you can both be a member of a union and also exercise your vote.
I wasn't aware that in the USA joining a public sector union meant giving up your right to vote ;-)
No, the inequality always holds, your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.
I think it seems counter-intuitive to you but you cannot articulate why. I was also surprised when I realized it.
Or think about it this way: All citizens in democratic society are free to enter any number of associations that advocate for their interests. For example, unions. But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power, in particular, it doesn't affect the "one person, one vote" principle of democratic elections.
I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make here :(
> your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.
Yes, but the next step in your logical deduction is flawed because union membership does not necessarily dilute the power of your vote to signal other preferences (at least in countries with secret ballots and no proxy voting).
You're comparing these two things as if there's some sort of trade-off or mutual exclusivity. There isn't, especially in countries where politics is dominated by two parties such as the USA.
Here's how those mechanics tend to play out in the USA. A union voter leverages their union membership to make kings in the primaries. Then, after winnowing the field to a list of candidates who exclusively support their union's major priorities, union members are free to use their vote to exercise preference on other issues. That's not hypothetical -- it's exactly what happens in most US states with strong public sector LEO unions.
> But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power
But this is obviously false when broadened to include all associations.
Politics in literally every modern democracy is dominated by associations called political parties. That's not an accident, and it's not like that status quo happened without opposition. A lot of politicians in the history of democracy have attempted to limit the role of associations in democratic processes, and they mostly failed.
I don't really understand the argument you're making. Maybe your logical deductions are bulletproof, but in that case, there must be something wrong with your premises. Because hundreds of years of extraordinarily compelling empirical evidence contradict your final conclusion.
Large associations of voters really do have more power than the sum of their votes. Maybe not "theoretically", but certainly "actually" and "empirically".
I interpret the effect you mention differently, that there is simply not enough democracy.
If the government takes more input from associations than from voting, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. (See also my comment about tripartism above.)
But what seems to me closer to the truth is that people simply heavily underestimate the power of their vote.
> I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity, there's no shortage of work for the prison guards anyway.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that, or how it's at all relevant.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that because "over capacity" != "will build new prisons / hire new guards". I.e., it's not at all impossible for there to be prisons that are over-capacity and also a decline in the number of prison guard jobs.
It's not relevant because the entire point of unions is to counter-act the effect of supply/demand dynamics on labor (see: "there's always another scab"). Just because there's "no shortage of work for the prison guards" doesn't mean they will lobby against changes to laws that might one day create such a shortage.
Or they could just work towards better working conditions? Unions dont really have the growth incentive private entities do. Prison guards are extremely far from running out of work, quite the opposite is true and their members also suffer under the poor working conditions of an chronically understaffed and underpaid sector. They are risking their life because politicians think overcrowding prisons isnt a problem.
I mean I get the initial point, some police unions are an especially vile proponents of an expansion into a police state, its just not really about working conditions. Its political lobbying. In Germany you can see it every time more competences for the police are discussed in parliament. You have some police unions giving legit feedback if someone bothers to ask them, how those competences are a bad idea and are not needed. And then you have speakers for other police union (with a catchy union name to seem more important) where you can see they have the right party membership and are looking for a career in politics. As a result you can see them in every news report that wants to bring across a certain message.
> but prosecutors play a large part in our national incarceration problems
The problem is pro-punishment politicians. Singling out any particular office/position misses the point.
Even when judges practice discretion, pro-punishment legislators step in and introduce mandatory minimums.
And even when prosecutors practice discretion, pro-punishment judges will step in and force them to prosecute cases that the prosecutors don't want to prosecute [1].
Pfaff has pretty good data to back up his claim. He looks at legislation. He looks at mandatory minimums. Everyone plays their part, but prosecutors have a lot of power over sentencing. Plea deals play a role here.
And in many places prosecutors are politicians in a sense, because they are elected. One recommendation is to go back to appointing prosecutors rather than electing them.
So no, singling out prosecutors doesn't miss the point. It is an important point.
Yes, but it's become in the past couple years an out dated point in major cities (Boston, Philly, LA) where activist prosecutors attempting to prosecute fewer crimes and hand out lighter sentences are now being stymied by (appointed!) judges.
The problem with focusing on any particular role is that the other parts of the system will step in to force punishment.
