The article doesn't touch upon education much at all, which I believe is a central part of social (im)mobility. Problems arising in society later on will simply stem from the early life of members of society, not afterwards. It's a common principle that education is the key to societal equality, in some way.
All I can offer is my story on this. I've lived in the UK all my life in all sorts of regions from those of lower working class (my hometown) to my recent years where I've lived in rather upper-class "lawyer-doctor-business owner" regions. The difference in education between the lower and upper classes is stark. Let me explain.
Upper-class children are enrolled in schools of like-minded high-achievers full of entrance exams and interviews (provides a non-zero floor to student "intelligence/quality" at the school), and strict rules/discipline. They are further pushed towards degrees leading to higher paying careers - Finance, Medicine, Law, by their families and the schools themselves. Their families purchase extra tutoring, they have smarter parents (this is a positive feedback loop across generations!) to guide them, and so on...
Compare this to lower-class children, who, in the UK (and i'm pretty sure everywhere else essentially) are enrolled in "state schools" (free). These schools have no entrance requirements (there is zero floor for student quality), the families almost never purchase extra tutoring, and are much less pushed towards "meaningful" degrees. The schools offer equal environments to the best and the worst of students.
This imbalance in education (and by extension upbringing in general) is what seeds everything else. And indeed, in the past few years the UK government has recognized all the above. How they plan of solving it? The reintroduction of "Grammer Schools"! These are state schools (still), but _do_ have enterance requirements, thereby allowing lower-class students of high intelligence/quality a chance to separate from the worst students in state schools and enroll in a more challenging education. There is much debate in the UK whether this will work, or will simply just allow children of rich families to more-often/further separate themselves from poor families. Time will tell.
If grammar (you spelt this incorrectly) schools were effective at improving society as a whole, you'd be able to measure an effect in the places in the UK where they were retained. Especially Northern Ireland.
Instead you have to address what happens to the 50% of people who don't get into the selective schools. You can't improve overall quality through rejecting students, because there's no "away" to reject them to!
People who are actually involved in education are more likely to tell you that the key factor for most of the lower-achieving students is obstacles, especially out of school; are they getting enough sleep and 3 square meals a day? Do they have at least one parent around who's engaged in their education? What obstacles does that parent face? Is the child being bullied at school or home? etc.
you'd be able to measure an effect in the places in the UK where they were retained.
I live in a very rural area where a grammar school has been maintained (which my wife attended) and most of the people who go there end up at good universities and then move away for good careers in distant cities. Meanwhile, the people at the comprehensives usually end up staying in our area on lower paid jobs.
Does this lead to be a better society? It certainly provides a way for poorer but smarter people to find a way 'out' of a humdrum rural location, but I don't think it makes our area any better in and of itself.
I find it interesting that the non-Grammar "comprehensive/secondary modern" schools in areas with Grammar Schools actually perform better than Comprehensive schools (such as the one I attended) in areas where Grammar Schools have been abolished.
Does this mean that such schools apply more focus to issues such as the ones you list in order to better compete?
Possibly. The key issue is the politics; selective public schooling allows the schools to be treated unequally by the resource allocation system, where the one with the worse performing pupils gets less resources and is less preferred by staff, reinforcing the cycle.
I'm not sure where you get your experience of state education, but with two kids in state primary and now a comprehensive in working class East London, that's been far from my experience. Yes these schools are non-selective, but do excellent work with differentiated curriculum to ensure that children of all levels are pushed. When it came to choosing GCSE's there was explicit guidance as to which mixture of courses would be most attractive to "Russell Group" universities.
I have friends who moved down to Kent so that they could get their kids into selective grammar schools. There's little evidence that these schools provide better educational outcomes in terms of progress. They skim the most able from the system at the beginning of the secondary school process and at the end, they are still the most able, though not measurably better educated than the most able who go to non-selective comprehensive schools.
One way of avoiding any exams or interviews is to have your child start at a private school at nursery level - it's only if you transfer in later that they do the interviews/exams (NB not all public schools work like that though).
Mind you my son transferred between private schools at age 16 and the interview was mainly about rugby...
[NB Both my wife and I went to very humble state schools but we could afford private schools and, to be honest, the quality of teaching and facilities at private schools is vastly better to state schools so I've never regretted it].
Your own experience may be of better quality teaching in the private schools but that's not borne out by the evidence, what little there is. For reference, there's the recent publication of "Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain" by Robert Verkaik, which explicitly states there is no demonstrably better teaching.
My own personal experience is of State, Grammar (selective) and Private. It's all about the intake, I feel. The quality of teaching isn't really different. If anything the Private school teachers are lazier because they don't have to try as hard. They also seemed more arrogant to me.
Intake is key. I positively hated school through to 16 when I then went to a separate Sixth Form College to do my A-Levels - and suddenly all the knobheads were gone and I could actually enjoy myself for the first time.
You always get knobheads, no matter the intake. If 3% of people are knobheads, with a class of 30 there's a 60% chance of having at least one knobhead. With a class of 20 it's 46%, with a class of 15 it's 37%.
You seem to be assuming that admissions is based on a lottery and expulsion cannot occur.
You might note that at what are considered "good schools", not only are neither of those things true, but trying to implement either would cause the school to be quickly abandoned.
One thing that stood out to me, I went from a private school with a class of 16 to a state (grammar) school with a class of 28. That does have an affect on teaching.
However also anecdotally a friend taught at a private school for a couple of years. Parents made it quite clear that it was his responsibility to ensure their angels passed the exams, no matter how thick they were. He didn't stay for long due to that attitude.
From available data it is not possible to show that education has any positive influence on economical growth. What it seems happens is that economical growth bring prosperty that allows parents to send their children to high schools and universities. The book [1] shows that very convincing.
Moreover, as money spend on high education in many cases is essentially unproductive tax, sending more people to universities may even harm the growth.
It’s also worth mentioning “selection by postcode”. My daughter goes to a state school but our area is comparatively wealthy, so the intake is biased towards wealthy families.
Being serious here: What exactly is a "fintech" company? Every financial company on earth that isn't in someone's backyard is at-heart now purely technological (computers, algos, tracking, databases, etc.). So what makes a "fintech" company? Is it a super _ultra_ technological bank?
In summary, what are fintech companies exactly doing?
Part of me believes it's the new version of "crypto-", but i will hold my breath.
I'd say that "fintech" companies are the union of financial companies that are aggressively becoming "tech" companies and the tech companies that have enough funding, patience, and grit to deal with regulatory and various other challenges for a financial entity (though the definition of a "financial entity" varies from country to country)
It's not the new version of "crypto-" (if anything it's the old version as they've been around a while), but it can indeed just be a hypeword
The distinction is pretty much the same as the distinction between "tech" and "other" companies in other fields
Technology is more fundamental to how a company aims to be better than the competition (or at least how it markets itself as better than the competition). Which in practice often means having software doing exactly the same thing as software in other companies, but less bricks and mortar, customer service and established reputation.
Everything Morgan Stanley or HSBC does depends on computers and their bottom line is hugely affected by the quality of things like their trading algorithms, but "better software" is less intrinsic to why people would consider using them than, say a "Fintech" oriented challenger bank, or a HFT fund, or a stock recommendation report marketing itself as being purely "Big Data" driven.
Having worked in traditional fintech firms like trading platforms, exchanges, algo traders etc for last 15 years, I feel many of the new gen companies are just trying to be cool by calling them fintech.
I have a friend who started a company which manages travel rewards and was pitching his startup as 'disruptive fintech'.
I mean, I'd classify my startup as a fintech company (at least from the outside):
Https://projectpiglet.com
I'll tell that to investors, people who click the link, etc. That's because it describes that I'm working with / in the financials space (aka financial statistics, and investing as it relates to assets of some kind).
Now... I personally, classify the company is a "human analytics" company. The system learns about people. Off the platform I can build insider threat detection (if deployed within companies), I can build a search engine for experts / people, I have a way to track brand strength, sentiment around politians, create curated news updates provided via email, etc. Even track the "strength" of a mene
All those are already on the platform or are demos...
Is it a fintech company? Yes, to people looking for fintech, but is it also A, Y, and Z - sure. Defining what a company does is difficult in some cases; fintech is currently what is describing anything really working with money and / assets to make money.
The definition seems to be wide. My 'fintech' startup [0] focuses on automated bookkeeping, but depending on who you ask, automated bookkeeping is or is not regarded financial technology.
Nearly same boat here. We're based in Frankfurt where everyone is talking about FinTech so its natural to call our Accounting/Bookkeeping/Billing AI Startup [0] a Fintech, but to me initially the term was reserved for startups that process creditcards or do algotrading. I'm content now to use the term as long as its helpful.
This was a homegrown solution by a student that worked for us. It's not auto generated and quite frankly painful to maintain as it just generates this html in php via parsing xml files. We're looking for alternatives at the moment too.
I find it quite funny, rather intruiging, that we seem to have gone full circle on trusted sources of information. Historically, a face-to-face meeting was considered as the ultimate legitimate and trustworthy way. Not story or rumors or witnessing, since the courts say people can be "decieved", "traumatised", etc. Then came microphones, cameras, CCTV in the 20th century, and then they became the ultimate trusted sources of information.
And due to AI and it's rapidly increasing misuse by enormous conglomerates, it will be very soon when videos are never trusted but rather treated as comedic rumor and folklore, and we will go back again to how it always was.
...until replicants come.
I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad.
Your comment reminds me of a silly little graph I saw posted to reddit once, basically stating that the prevalence of things like miracles and witchcraft was high throughout human history until the development of the camera, where it stayed low until the development of Photoshop.
Depends on the community. People are gullible enough on Facebook. I think seeing friends and family like or share a thing tends towards herd behavior. Whereas on, say, 4Chan, where users are generally anonymous and usually have no repercussions for their posts, everything remotely worthy of skepticism is “shopped”.
> I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad.
Am sure the usual justification to apply salve to your conscience for this sort of activity is the trope that the 'bad guys' will do it anyway, so we need to do it before them to counter them and be the torch-bearer of liberty.
The atom bomb was developed upon that fear and pretext. Compared to that AI is a fairly mild thing.
Trope about bad guys? Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan worked hard to get the atom bomb. If the 'bad guys' had created it first, would the world be a better place?
The bad guys _did_ get it first. If Germany or Japan developed it first, they would be sure to go down as the "good guys" in the history textbooks, and you'd be on hackernews wondering how awful it would be if the demonic United States of America developed it first.
This comment shows either an incredible ignorance of history or a pathological view of right and wrong. Nazi Germany was exterminating whole races in the millions. Imperial Japan was doing the same, averaging 100,000 dead Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese PER MONTH for over 8 years. Tokyo newspapers regularly published head counts for officers who were in head chopping contests of villagers in areas where the population needed to be suppressed. They would roll into a village and just start lining up people to cut off their heads. The Rape of Nanking by itself stands out as one of the most brutal events of the war.
The US isn't perfect but to say it was the "bad guy" in the war isn't an argument supported by anyone's facts.
Crypto works for trust of computing systems - it can make some claims about the transformations of the captured data or about the integrity of the software handling these transformations, but it fundamentally can't make solid claims about reality that's supposedly being captured. You can't put crypto between reality and a sensor.
At best, crypto can give you a statement like "something possessing the particular secret X claims to have sensed this data at this point of time" combined with "there's a device with secret X that has it's software/firmware integrity verified and signed by entity Y". Crypto can't ensure that the secrets on the device aren't actually leaked by the manufacturer to enable "verifying" of arbitrary data outside of that device, and there's always the option to simply ensure that the sensor "sees" what you want; a camera and all the crypto on it can't tell whether it's pointed at a real event, at a staged event, or at a sophisticated optical device projecting arbitrary photoshopped data.
This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all.
Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases).
There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.
About the article specifically, it's rather insubstantial and doesn't provide any more insight into company dynamics other than heartfelt paragraphs. Still a healthy reminder though.
But anyway, about the subject matter, from the several tech companies I've been at now I can see that this kind of "exec brainwashing" does happen, and it always seems rather on-the-nose in it's indifference and facelessness. Where I work currently we even have paragraphs like these on our toilet doors! The thing is, people work better when it's "for" something. Something bigger than themselves, such as the "family" or "team" (it's probably something to do with our hunter-gatherer evolutionary genes). Execs, or rather HR and "Worker Performance Consultants" know this, and they (ab)use it to make workers produce more wealth for the company.
I think however that both companies and workers are to blame for past-shift hours, pressures to finish, and such, and both maybe partially for the same reason - a race to the bottom. In terms of companies, this can be for example when company X pushes their workers harder than company Y to undercut their prices. You definitely see this in things like ~[UK reference warning]~ Sports Direct International Ltd, which treats workers rather poorly [1][2][3], just to make their shoes a bit cheaper than that fancy hipster shop down the road who's staff work only their shift hours. In terms of workers, you see the exact same thing, where worker X will over-propose on project A to undercut Worker Y's realistically-proposed project A. So you see that if you don't work crazy hours to finish that big project, then you can definitely bet on somebody else doing it.
In the end it's not always "the evil company and their grubby execs" who are asking too much of their workers to get that good quarter result, but workers themselves asking too much of themselves to get that freelance project, job, promotion, raise, good reference, or whatever, over their job-market or worker peers.
I think maybe the little post misses a few parts of the picture, but like I said, a good reminder of the topic.
I have a little story about this kind of thing, where doing something rather simple and low-skill can make an absolute fortune.
One night I was talking to an older friend of a friend, 50+, around a year ago now. We were talking about what we did for a living and what we got paid. We started off with what he did: He's a bricklayer, nothing more, and told me that they get paid per brick they lay. It's something like £4 per brick. What shocked me was an experienced bricklayer like him usually lays enough bricks to make around £400/day.
"That's almost £150,000/year!" I said, trying to not sound too envious or anything (spoiler: I failed). And this doesn't include the one-off jobs they get every weekend from rich foreigners who have extravagant houses built in the UK all the time. All in all it can amount to some very large amounts of zeros in your bank. In a few years he became a millionaire from bricklaying. I have since then talked to a few others who are in that trade and it all (anecdotally) corroborates, approximately (the older you are the more you get picked for "specialist" properties that involve very rich Chinese and Arabians apparently, which can make you ~£1,000 in one weekend).
I asked, as any sane person would, something along the lines of "why isn't everyone and his dog laying bricks?". And the reply was very intriguing. He said essentially that younger people these days (my age) don't want to lay bricks every day now, or don't have the stamina. They want to go on their phones and become world-famous and important and work on new gizmos and apps every day and be looked at by everyone and be payed attention to, etc, etc.
Since then I've not really been able to get my head around it all. It seems like although we talk about automation stealing jobs and everybody will have to be a "techie" to make any sort of decent living, there is definitely a small "elite" minority doing these very old-fashioned jobs that no-one wants or can do anymore. I fear sometimes that we (the younger generation) are slowly going mad with technology, and forgetting about the practical skills. What our own two hands were made to do so to speak.
We never got on to what I do in the end funnily enough.
Anyway, more relevantly, this lumberyard article is just a (slightly Americanised) theme of the above. It's these jobs that were done for a pittance in the past (sometimes even by slaves and prisoners), and now are these trades that sometimes are paying exorbitant salaries, just simply because nobody wants to do it, because no-one can be bothered anymore.
Apologies if this was long and off-topic, but I hope it's left some kind of thought somewhere.
I've a similar story, but about my father in the 1980s. He worked in London as a shop fitter and then carpenter/kitchen fitter locally in the Midlands when not doing those jobs. It's a skilled job, requiring years to become good at it, but it's still manual work. I used to be a bit embarrassed by what my dad did in comparison to some of my friends. When I was a little older I worked with him and saw the way that some private clients looked down on him. It angered me at the time and I was at university and working for him during the holidays. One day I snapped at these people and explained about the house my father has built for us, complete with indoor swimming pool - far far better and more expensive than the house we were working. These professional people changed their tune towards him then. My dad explained that I shouldn't have said anything to them and to be more humble. Let them have their ignorance. My dad, and bear in mind this is the UK in the late 1980s was earning around $2k/week minimum and some weeks a lot more. Far more than most of the professionals he worked for. I always show respect to people who do work for me on my homes.
Usually you'll find a large moat of permission-seeking around professions such as this in the form of state licensing, required apprenticeships, insurance/bonding etc. This lets those that have run the gauntlet charge quite a bit.
You should see what it takes to be allowed to spread stucco on a wall here.
> I asked, as any sane person would, something along the lines of "why isn't everyone and his dog laying bricks?". And the reply was very intriguing. He said essentially that younger people these days (my age) don't want to lay bricks every day now, or don't have the stamina. They want to go on their phones and become world-famous and important and work on new gizmos and apps every day and be looked at by everyone and be payed attention to, etc, etc.
This sounds too familiar, like an employer talking about how they can't find anyone while plenty of unemployed or underemployed workers are willing to do the job.
There are plenty of people out there willing to this type of work, especially if the pay is that good.
It's about willing to do the job good, and not just for the money I think.
But anyway, I think that maybe my above story is all just gobblewash. Overnight, I was thinking about how all these jobs that pay a lot for rather low-skill labour are all related to real-estate. Wood and bricks are what makes houses. I wonder if the good pay comes from that, rather than not many people wanting to do it.
Regardless, it's the opinion now quite a few of these labourers hold now - that the younger generation aren't able to do what they do. Maybe that's a little short-sighted, maybe it's on to something wrong with the future generations, maybe it's just wrong. Who knows.
Not having the same code on paper and on machine so to speak does make debugging typescript a little hard. It's a little bit of a black-box.
I code typescript for Angular 2/4, and although yeah, the aforementioned debugging pains are annoying, the time saved on having types to enable linting and strong predictable variable comparisons, is much greater.
Also, needing console.logs everywhere should be discouraged. Your code should be clear enough that you don't need a console.log debug line to print the boolean result of a comparison, for example. This is the whole point of typescript like I said, to make variable comparision and management easier so that you don't need that console.log line...
I don't mean leaving console.log everywhere, just when debugging, when you want to check the value of a specific variable quickly without having to click around in the debugger.
Developers from statically typed backgrounds just don't seem to understand this use case. It's the quickest way to find an issue when you have a good idea of where the problem might be.
I suppose. I come from the C and C++ world, before I moved onto webdev (quite rare for a young millennial like me to be dinkling around with static C-related languages, I've been told by older colleagues), so I guess that I don't see it from the most understanding point of view.
I also used a fair bit of C/C++ in the past, the debugging process feels very different to me. It's definitely much slower but in that case it's worth it because of the flexibility you get out of it.
When you use Javascript for a few years, your habits change and you get used to really quick debug iterations. With Typescript, you get slower debug iterations but you don't get any extra flexibility beyond what Javascript itself offers. No pointers, no threads, no low-level access to system calls, no custom memory allocation, no performance gains... It doesn't have any of the features that make C/C++ an awesome language.
It's certainly a phenomenon that exists, we've all seen and heard of false accusations to damage people's reputation, business, and such. "Scandals" have been around since humans have, it's gossip, it's libel, it's whatever you call it.
Question: did they provide you with any substantial evidence?
Anyway, ultimately your case and many others is why the law is at it's very core based on an innocent until proven guilty paradigm. Once you take that principle away, you put all the power in the accuser and none in the accused, which is objectionably unjust.
I've recently seen a few very disturbing comments on HN and from similar people (above-average education, born into privileged conditions, politically left, etc.), who naively believe that this is a bad or somewhat ineffective paradigm, and that we should "just believe" rape accusations, because ???? shrug. It disheartens me that some people can be so blindly ignorant about the law and human nature. We only need to take a short walk down history lane to explicitly see that if you give one side of anything human-related an enormous amount of power (like in this case if accusers are believed before evidence), there will be many who abuse it. It is human nature, and the law prevents it from reining free and causing utter chaos.
In your case, by the sounds of it they did not present to you any form of evidence (right?) to show you your misconduct. No sexually harassing text transcripts, no internal email transcripts, no witnesses, nothing. What this is is chaos and injustice, under the guise of some very malformed concepts of "progressiveness", and it's unfortunately ever-more prevalent.
No substatial evidence was provided. After being told that I made a woman feel uncomfortable, I immediately apologized for any harm I would have caused. I then asked if its possible to know what I said or did that caused this discomfort to insure I do not repeat an offending action. Management said they could not divulge this information for privacy reasons. So at this point, I feel there is really no evidence other than the testimony of one person.
" I feel there is really no evidence other than the testimony of one person"
There is not even the testimony of that person. They don't told you what she say, they don't allow you to confront her.
For all that you know they could be making up all the thing. I don't think this is the case, but it's a possibility when everything is done in the dark.
Don't take this as advice, please, because I can't predict the results, but in your position I think I would feel compelled to confront them. Maybe with the help of some worker representative if that it's available to you. What I would avoid is to confront the woman, that could backfire very fast.
It happens all the time. I've been in a similar situation. Denied a promo because of anonymous feedback from someone who said I had "communication issues". Probably not sexual in that situation as I never hit on anyone at work or had any desire to, more likely I asked them to (re)do their work and they took it personally given the context at the time. Nobody would tell me what I'd said, or to who, or what I should do with such feedback.
My actual communication skills were not the issue, mind. The company frequently asked me to write and give presentations, either in public conferences or to the rest of the firm.
Anonymous accusations that sink careers are a plague of the modern workplace and are entirely due to a culture of "always believe the victim".
All I can offer is my story on this. I've lived in the UK all my life in all sorts of regions from those of lower working class (my hometown) to my recent years where I've lived in rather upper-class "lawyer-doctor-business owner" regions. The difference in education between the lower and upper classes is stark. Let me explain.
Upper-class children are enrolled in schools of like-minded high-achievers full of entrance exams and interviews (provides a non-zero floor to student "intelligence/quality" at the school), and strict rules/discipline. They are further pushed towards degrees leading to higher paying careers - Finance, Medicine, Law, by their families and the schools themselves. Their families purchase extra tutoring, they have smarter parents (this is a positive feedback loop across generations!) to guide them, and so on...
Compare this to lower-class children, who, in the UK (and i'm pretty sure everywhere else essentially) are enrolled in "state schools" (free). These schools have no entrance requirements (there is zero floor for student quality), the families almost never purchase extra tutoring, and are much less pushed towards "meaningful" degrees. The schools offer equal environments to the best and the worst of students.
This imbalance in education (and by extension upbringing in general) is what seeds everything else. And indeed, in the past few years the UK government has recognized all the above. How they plan of solving it? The reintroduction of "Grammer Schools"! These are state schools (still), but _do_ have enterance requirements, thereby allowing lower-class students of high intelligence/quality a chance to separate from the worst students in state schools and enroll in a more challenging education. There is much debate in the UK whether this will work, or will simply just allow children of rich families to more-often/further separate themselves from poor families. Time will tell.
That's my 0.02c anyway: Education.