I can tell you this: anyone who thinks that artificially shrinking the pool of experts which you can pick to speak at a conference won't affect the quality of the presentations is deluding themselves.
Whether this is true or not, the parent commenter is right - quotas seem to be the direction that Westernized societies are heading for in the 21st century. I remember last year reading that the European Commission put forth a proposal requiring that publicly traded companies must have 40% of their non-executive board posts filled by women by 2020 [1]. Whether that ends up getting approved or not, it seems like a bellwether for how these issues are going to be framed.
IMO, legal risk surrounding hiring is THE reason consulting is growing so huge, so fast (in the U.S. at least). Even if the government were to foist quotas on everyone, hiring consultants instead of employees provides a way around it.
This is the sort of approach that the 'Understanding Unix/Linux Programming' [1] book takes - building common unix utilities in order to introduce systems programming concepts. IMO, it's a good starter for meatier material in Richard Stevens books.
For those interested in this sort of thing, Harvard Extension School offers a course based off of the 'Understanding Unix/Linux Programming' text taught by the author (http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lib215/). I took it a few years ago and found it worthwhile...
It is apparent from the comments here that many don`t realize that the author is being sarcastic.
From Wikipedia's page on Asperger Syndrome, under Speech and Language: traits include "literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance". Makes me wonder when I see threads like this...
Interesting, I remember reading that the hacker (jsz) who helped Kevin Mitnick back in the day with the IP spoofing attack against Shimomura's computer was from Israel as well.
And where the money to pay for that will come from?
Apparently corporations will be subsidizing this:
"How would we pay for it? We could start by getting
corporations to pay their taxes. As I mentioned above,
corporate profit margins have hit an all time high, and
that money will circulate far faster if it’s placed in the
hands of consumers."
As someone born in the 70s it's ironic to think that we now talk about "sending people to Gitmo" the way we used to joke as kids about people being "sent to Siberia" back when Russia was the bad guy. Funny how much things can change in your own country.
Well if it makes you feel any better, here's a quote from Mayer herself that seems to echo some of the sentiments you've expressed:
I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that, I certainly believe in equal rights. I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so, in a lot of different dimensions. But I don’t, I think, have sort of the militant drive and sort of the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that. And I think it’s too bad, but I do think feminism has become, in many ways, a more negative word. [1]
I thought this was ironic too. This assumption that only a man would be interested in football, is like a woman going to buy a car and only being shown the vanity mirror, because clearly only a man would interested in the rest of car.
Imagine you're the CEO of a tech startup, in a meeting with some Wall Street people. You look like Mark Zuckerberg, they're the "captain of the crew team" type Wall Street likes to hire. They ask you: so, what sport did you play in college?
Sometimes questions like that are an attempt at signaling exclusion. The purpose is to remind you that you're different from the group. It's really irrelevant to the quality of the question whether you were actually the school's star track athlete, or instead spent all your time hacking on your computer. It's even irrelevant whether the stereotype is actually true (I don't know if people at tech startups are less likely to have played sports in college than people at investment banks). All that needs to exist is a clear stereotype and for both sides to be aware of the appeal to that stereotype.
I did not have a clue, so I searched on Google... It is apparently the politically or academically correct way to refer to a male who identifies with the male gender identity; see 'cisgender'.
It tends to be used as a way to describe what is considered the most privileged group of people by certain rights activists groups (and also a few bigots, as with every group, there are bad eggs.) White people are considered more privileged than say, black people, because of studies showing that more black people tend to be brought up in poverty or that Mexican people tend to be brought up in worse neighbourhoods. (These are generalizations which I don't support by the way, I'm describing an external viewpoint, not my own.)
Uh, no, it's not used to describe what is considered the most privileged group, nor does it have anything to do with being white; if it did, the common expression "white cis male" would be redundant.
Cis is the antonym of trans, so cisgender is a term to refer to non-transgender people.
I've seen this come up before and I wonder, why do lifestyle businesses have such a negative connotation? It seems like building these sort of sustainable businesses would be a lot more appealing to most people (or at least to me) rather than the VC-funded/start-up lottery approach you refer to in the US.
For some people, working at a startup is synonymous to working crazy hours for a few years and getting a big payout in the end. This is the compressed schedule that PG talks about in his essay. In such startups, there are multiple people (including non-founders) who take part in reaping the benefits of the startup's exit. Because everyone gets some benefit, you have the ability to attract better quality talent.
In a lifestyle business, there is the viewpoint where a non-founder is effectively working to support a founder's lifestyle. There is no promise of a good payout and at best, only a steady income with a predictable workload. For some individuals, this feels undesirable since you may end up with a less passionate, lower talent workforce due to the incentives you are offering. Also if the market opportunity grows at any point, you aren't well equipped to take advantage and you can easily get overtaken by a more mobilized, funded competitor.
Whether this is true or not, the parent commenter is right - quotas seem to be the direction that Westernized societies are heading for in the 21st century. I remember last year reading that the European Commission put forth a proposal requiring that publicly traded companies must have 40% of their non-executive board posts filled by women by 2020 [1]. Whether that ends up getting approved or not, it seems like a bellwether for how these issues are going to be framed.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/european-commissi...