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The Google Heretic is the gift that keeps on giving for anyone publishing a blog.

The Heretic’s memo and firing wouldn’t have happened but for Google’s desire to have a workforce that is “representative” of the general population, i.e., roughly 50 percent women. Despite management’s noble sentiments and the preponderance of Hillary supporters within the company, Google failed at their stated goal. This led the former science grad student (and current heretic) to turn to his science journals while it led me to ask “Why not pay women more if you’re so keen on hiring them?”

Supposedly it is illegal to pay women more simply because they are women. I’m not sure if this is true in practice because we are told by various politicians that employers pay women less because they are women.

I’m wondering if the sex discrimination laws that were enacted to help women get higher pay are now working to reduce female pay below market-clearing levels.

BLS data show that male labor force participation rate for ages 25-54 was 88 percent in 2014. Female labor force participation rate the same age range only 74 percent. With approximately equal numbers of men and women in this age group, there will be 88 men for every 74 women in the labor force, right? If every employer wants to have a 50/50 gender ID distribution not all of them can succeed. In a market economy, the typical way in which a scarce resource is allocated is via pricing. Women should be worth more in the labor market than men and companies such as Google would have to outbid other firms that seek gender ID balance in order to achieve it.

Readers: What am I missing? Now that being seen as pro-women is a business necessity, given the relative scarcity of women in the American labor force, are laws requiring equal pay to men and women working against women?

Related:

• “Accenture Commits To Boosting Its Workforce To 50% Women By 2025”

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“Judge Drops Rape Case Against U.S.C. Student, Citing Video Evidence” (nytimes):

In the early hours of April 1, neither student at the University of Southern California knew what the other had had to drink. An Uber was called, and the male student was seen on video following the female student into her dorm, where they had sex.

The woman later told the police she did not remember the encounter, and in May, prosecutors charged the male student, Armaan Premjee, 20, with rape. But a California judge dismissed the case last week after reviewing security video from the Banditos nightclub in Los Angeles and the woman’s dorm.

The videos showed the woman leading Mr. Premjee from the club, taking his photograph, following him into an Uber and, at her dorm, swiping an access card and allowing him inside.

The judge said during a preliminary hearing last week that he believed that the sex was consensual and that the videos were a “very strong indication” the woman was the initiator, according to reports.

Employers Googling for background won’t find anything when the accuser (“the woman”) applies for a job, but for in any background check on Armaan Premjee, “a junior studying business administration,” it will be tough to miss this unfortunate incident.

Premjee isn’t in the clear yet:

A student misconduct investigation involving Mr. Premjee within the university’s Title IX office remains active.

But let’s assume that he does beat the rap. Who is going to hire him? What employer would take the risk of having an accused rapist as a business manager? Google won’t be hiring Mr. Premjee to replace James Damore, right?

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“Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart” (nytimes) shows that the highest-income Americans are also the ones with the “largest income growth.” I wonder if Thomas Piketty and friends followed individuals over time or just looked at brackets of income that contained different people from year to year. If they followed individuals then these data suggest that the most energetic and motivated Americans are the richest. Instead of slacking off and enjoying their yachts, Gulfstreams, and 7 luxury homes worldwide, they are doing something that gives them a 6% pay raise every year.

If they didn’t follow individuals, though, aren’t the stated conclusions wrong? Suppose that the income of rich people is highly variable, e.g., inflated one year due to selling a company and comparatively depressed the next year. In that case, from simple volatility and economic growth you might see that the high end of the income scale was doing well (how else did those people get to the high end of the scale?) but it wouldn’t be the same people year after year. Similarly, for those with low income, someone who goes onto a diet of SSDI and OxyContin might have the same income as last year’s consumer of SSDI/OxyContin.

[Separately, the chart note suggests that it includes “transfers and non-cash benefits” for the poor, but I wonder how that is possible. Ever since the Clinton-era “welfare reform,” simple cash transfers have been a small component of modern-day welfare in the U.S. The non-cash stuff is tough to track and value. When a new apartment building is constructed, for example, the developer may be required to hand over 10 percent of the units to a government housing ministry for distribution to the poor. The value of these units are not on the government’s books. And if real estate prices go up, does the person who lives in a free apartment in Manhattan experience a boost in income according to Piketty and friends? Collecting child support and alimony is a big part of the U.S. economy and there are no convenient authoritative sources for the total cashflow (generally from higher-income defendants to plaintiffs with lower wage income).]

The article came to me from a hedge fund manager friend:

First, there has always been a distribution of income and we know it is skewed right. It pretty much has to be, if income is bounded by 0 but not limited on the upside. Allowing for negative income tax rates (the earned income credit) creates some weird growth rates. Overall, growth rates are compressed for people receiving income-based transfers when those transfers are progressive.

There is a tautological aspect to the results. People whose income rose the fastest (e.g. Steve Jobs) ended up in the 1% or the 0.1% because of that growth. So it shouldn’t be surprising that people who now have the highest incomes also had faster rates of growth in that income. That is how they got into the right tail. Few people complain when Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg leapfrogs into the high income brackets but it really bothers economists like Thomas Piketty that the averages behave different from the averages of other income brackets. Remember, we are measuring how fast the average moved, not how fast the income of a third-generation trust baby’s income rose over that period. Their income may have determined the average in 1980 but they are not part of the tiny super-high income brackets any more. Those brackets are reserved for people who grabbed the brass ring and held on for a meteoric rise in pay.

Related:

• Book review: Piketty’s Capital

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“Google cancels all-hands diversity meeting over safety concerns: Google feared questioners would face threats if their names leaked online.” (ArsTechnica) is disappointing to any Lisp or SQL programmer because it was a missed opportunity to use the headline “Group of C programmers say that they feel unsafe.”

Apparently the issue is that adherents can’t anonymously suggest or vote on questions for the high priests. If done with Google’s existing discussion infrastructure, real employee names are attached to postings.

What if Google told everyone who wanted to participate in this process to sign up to AOL and get a username such as “SupportDiversity2017”? Then they could use AOL’s infrastructure to gather questions, vote questions up/down, etc.

Related:

• Casting out the heretic at Google
• Google is replacing Uber, but not quite the way that I predicted
• Google Heretic sparks interest in the history of Computer Science

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“Australia’s Desperate Refugee Obstinacy” shows that Roger Cohen and his colleagues are brave enough to sit in the Manhattan offices of the New York Times and denounce the hard-heartedness of people on the other side of the planet. What’s interesting, though, is the Readers’ Picks section among the comments. It seems that even the loyal Hillary supporters who read the New York Times aren’t supportive of taking in these “asylum-seekers and refugees.” (I put in my own comment, making my standard offer:

If Mr. Cohen would like to house one of these families in his apartment or house for at least one year, I’ll be happy to pay for the airfare from Nauru.

So far Roger Cohen hasn’t emailed to accept.)

The top pick:

I believe these refugees are predominantly from the Middle East, hence they had to travel through SE Asia, eventually to Indonesia, in order to board the rickety boat that people smugglers are using.

I know people here won’t like me for asking this, but I genuinely wonder if they couldn’t stay and feel safe in any of the countries they passed through, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or Brunei? If your only concern is flight from danger present in your native land, then any of these countries would have been enough to provide that sanctuary until events settled back home. But they had to come to Australia, after paying close to $10,000 to people smugglers. I genuinely wonder, if their motive wasn’t to improve their lot in life by coming to a wealthy democracy, why do they do this?

Another highly voted one:

Iran is not at war, and these people are not escaping persecution. They just want a better standard of living, but couldn’t get to Australia by legal channels. Why should Australians let them in, just because they tried to sneak in through the back door? How is this fair to people who emigrate legally? Pushing to the front of the queue should not be rewarded.

Separately, I wonder if the Great Migration of the 21st Century is going to relieve some of the media pressure on Israel. If scolding other countries for their resistance to immigration consumes the average journalist’s sanctimony budget, how much will be left over to complain about what Jews in Israel are doing?

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More confusing to me than quantum chromodynamics has been why Google, which knows where most of us are and already has most of us registered as customers, doesn’t replace Uber in the matching-of-riders-and-drivers business.

Year after year I have been waiting for this to happen and have been proven wrong. Maybe this is my year?

“More than 60 women consider suing Google, claiming sexism and a pay gap” (Guardian) suggests that the Google is, in fact, replacing Uber:

The manager said that dealing with frequent sexism in the workplace and helping other women navigate the discrimination they were facing took a toll on her and contributed to her decision to quit. “After a while, it just became exhausting,” she said. “It takes emotional energy that builds up over time.”

“I felt like I wasn’t playing the game in the ‘boys club’ environment,” said another woman who worked for two years as a user experience designer and recently left Google. She said she regularly dealt with sexist remarks, such as comments about her looks, and that she felt it was discriminatory when she was denied a promotion despite her achievements and large workload.

The women’s stories bolster the claims of labor department officials, who have said that a preliminary analysis found that women face “extreme” pay discrimination across the company …

Separately, do people working at Google need to engage in some exciting mental gymnastics? Consider the following:

• Correct thinkers at Google say that a diverse workforce in every functional category is critical to success because white, black, Latino, male, and female brains operate differently and therefore have different strengths to bring. (I left out Asians because apparently nobody in the diversity industry cares about them)
• Correct thinkers at Google say that their heretic is scientifically wrong to have asserted that male and female brains exhibit different distributions for level of interest in programming.

Naively these appear to be contradictory beliefs. (Note that the beliefs above are independent of whether you think the brains got to be the way that they are via genetics or environmental influences.)

Another apparent logical contradiction:

• The heretic is a pinhead for interpreting the research literature to suggest that women, on average, are more delicate emotionally than men
• Our female employees are delicate snowflakes who won’t be able to get any work done if they become aware of a leaf-node coder with heretical thoughts about men and women tending to be biologically different. (This is illustrated by the CEOs response: “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our [female] co-workers shouldn’t have to worry …”)

A final one, from a New York Times reader:

If Google is so gung-ho about defending women in their workplace, how come there are not more of them working at Google in the capacity of leadership and engineering?

Related:

• Casting out the heretic at Google
• Will Uber do better or worse without its founder? Is it time for Google and Apple to swoop in?

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“The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894”:

By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”. In order for these cities to function, they were dependent on thousands of horses for the transport of both people and goods.

In 1900, there were over 11,000 hansom cabs on the streets of London alone. There were also several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses per day, making a staggering total of over 50,000 horses transporting people around the city each day.

This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

Recently pilots have been in the news for reasons other than screwing up: there aren’t enough pilots to meet expected global demand.

A 50-page report from UBS, however, says “UBS analysis of the Aerospace, Airlines and Logistics sectors suggests that reducing the intervention of human pilots on aircraft could bring material economic benefits and improve safety. Technically speaking, remotely controlled planes carrying passengers and cargo could appear by c2025.”

UBS acknowledges that what can be built by engineers might not be approved by government bureaucrats: “The regulatory framework will define the waves of technology advancements becoming reality and cargo will likely be at the forefront” and “The technology is there; two main obstacles are regulation and perception.”

Back in 2008, I wrote about a ground-based co-pilot who could bring airline safety to private operations. UBS talks about this too: “in the not-too-distant future, we would expect to see a situation where flights are pilotless or the number of pilots shrinks to one, with a remote pilot based on the ground and highly-secure ground-to-air communications.” This would dramatically cut the need for pilots per flight because a ground-based pilot could monitor 4-8 in-flight aircraft as long as they’re not all taking off or landing at once.

Readers: What do you think? Despite the current favorable outlook, will pilots circa 2030 actually find themselves in the same employment situation as draft horses circa 1920? (see unemployed = 21st century draft horse?)

Related:

• ADS-B, technically feasible in 1995 and we’re hoping to have it mostly implemented by 2020.

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James Damore, a.k.a. the Google Heretic, has spurred my Facebook friends to talk about the history of Computer Science. A sample illustrating how the early years of CS are now understood:

in the beginning computer science used to be almost entirely women.

It’s hard to find a profession less suited to illustrate women’s alleged biological unsuitability for certain vocations than computer science and specifically programming, given the history of the profession. … “Women aren’t good with computers”? They _were_ the original computers. (NASA article)

Piling abuse onto the already-cast-out heretic being a well-respected human endeavor, I responded with

So true. Church, Turing, von Neumann, and Emil Post all identified as women.

That’s why it is always “E.F. Codd” for the RDBMS pioneer. She didn’t want anyone calling her Edgar.

The non-nerds accepted these as legitimate responses. A couple of programmers, though, offered up Ada Lovelace.

When I asked for examples of what these folks thought of as early “computer science” it was setting up patch cords for the ENIAC.

It is kind of an interesting history. Women created computer science. After the excitement of the first few decades was gone, women wandered off into law, medicine, business, banking, politics, etc., and left working out the remaining dull details to colorless men.

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“Rich SF residents get a shock: Someone bought their street” is a reminder that “owning” property in the U.S. should really be called “renting it from the government by paying property taxes every year.”

Excerpts:

Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders.

Now they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street

Those residents value their privacy — and their exclusivity. Past homeowners have included Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her financier husband, Richard Blum; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; and the late Mayor Joseph Alioto. A guard is stationed round the clock at the stone-gate entrance to the street to keep the curious away.

The couple’s purchase appears to be the culmination of a comedy of errors involving a $14-a-year property tax bill that the homeowners association failed to pay for three decades

Two years ago, the city’s tax office put the property up for sale in an online auction, seeking to recover $994 in unpaid back taxes, penalties and interest.

He and his wife see plenty of financial opportunity — especially from the 120 parking spaces on the street that they now control.

“We could charge a reasonable rent on it,” Cheng said.

Lam and Cheng happen to be immigrants. How awesome would it have been to have been able to survey the rich people on this street, just before and just after learning about the new ownership structure, regarding their attitudes toward immigration?

Related:

• Sociology Masters Thesis Idea: Interview People in Traffic Jams Regarding Immigration

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Earlier I asked Who loves AmazonFresh? The answer turns out to be “not me.” On a Saturday I placed an order and picked the following Tuesday morning as the delivery slot. After I placed the order I realized that Wednesday morning would be better. This was just a few minutes later. It was possible to add stuff to the order, change the payment method, etc., but not to change the delivery date/time. It was easy to reach Amazon Fresh support via chat, but unfortunately the answer was “you have to cancel the order and start over.” I canceled my $14.99/month subscription instead.

The more I used AmazonFresh the less I liked it. Peapod is a subset of all of the most popular items you’d find at a regular grocery store. You can get produce, Windex, and packaged food all in one order. With AmazonFresh you are constantly guessing as to what they might have (strange considering that Amazon is “the everything store”; why does their delivery service actually have way less choice than 30-year-old Peapod?). The inflexible interface was the straw that broke the delivery camel’s back.

Amazon does get some credit for having good customer service people. I didn’t walk away from the experience saying “I don’t want to use other Amazon services.”

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