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I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter.

The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.

Move fast and break things™️.

To whom shall I address the invoice for my time though?

I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.

I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.

Come to Canada, you will be penalized so hard you'll wish the public health care system covered pre-crisis mental health.

The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.

> were themselves free of bias.

At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.

Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?

Because not all societies enshrine individual freedom as their primary value. China has historically valued orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice. This sucks from a Western perspective, but it also means that a great many of the problems the West faces will never manifest in China.

There are very few absolute wrongs in the world and it's not clear that this would be one of them.

There seem to be many unique things to this year though:

* Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

* Orders have been cut not once, but twice.

* Suppliers have been slaughtered in earnings reports.

* Suppliers have cut staff and are trying to control costs.

I agree there is a "cry wolf" element to this, but sometimes the wolf really does show up.

I think the media and social justice movement also played a role. I distinctly remember people with very relevant credentials stating that it was impossible to obtain accurate clinical result from such tiny amounts of blood.

The mainstream media and social media mobs (even here to some degree), immediately chided them as sexist basement-dwelling neckbeards, envious that this young female Steve Jobs of science was showing that the evil patriarchy no longer had power to keep women out of STEM. Of course, not a single apology or retraction was ever issued.

> kill one journalist and the western world loses their shit.

I would argue that the Western world largely didn't care, but the journalistic class which controls a large chunk of what people think is happening had a tantrum. This was not a "look at what Trump did this week" tantrum, but rather a "these guys just killed one of us, YOU HAVE TO CARE" tantrum.

You can tell it's this because the journalists themselves don't really care that he died trying to expose what is happening in Yemen - they only care that a fellow journalist died a fairly gruesome death.

> Until we pay the most talented researchers

It's not even that. One of the contributing factors is that we are no longer hiring for talent or merit. If you're a male child interested in science and in high school right now you've been through 8 years telling you that you should not go into science because they need more women of colour who follow the right religions and have the right sexual orientation. You're constantly bombarded with "SCIENCE DOES NOT WANT MEN".

And sure, we can say "well if he had the necessary grit, this would not discourage him". No. No amount of grit will get you in when governments are shaping science funding to punish having male staff. No amount of grit will get you in when indoctrination training is mandatory for the selection committees. No amount of grit will get you in when the first filter in a hiring process is to remove all males applicants.

I'm sorry but science has to go through a decline in the West for a bit. We still have some remnants to be worked through the system, but the next couple generations of Western scientists are going to be generally pretty low quality. On the bright side, science is not exclusively a Western tradition at this point. Other cultures that at least pretend to still focus on merit and talent will carry the scientific tradition forward.

I just hope the EU has the foresight to make the legislation enforceable in a post-EU European legal environment.

It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses.

Just look at them!

They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take.

They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)?

They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring.

They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.

They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?

It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!