Klockan

> I didn't fail those portions. Actually did quite well on them. So did my friends.

Then I don't see your point, what are you saying caused you to fail? I have a physics degree from an unknown school, learned to code in my thirties and got a job at Google by just doing well at their algorithms and maths questions so it is definitely possible to get in without ticking any of the hip boxes.

> I've got a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, am very math heavy, created a number of algos for my work over the last 25+ years (in physics sim, bioinformatics, systems management/orchestration, etc.), run sessions at an ACM conference, yadda yadda yadda.

> Two google interviews, and nothing. From what I hear from other people I consider way smarter than I, they also got nothing.

Then you and your friends weren't fluent enough with algorithms. That is the point, they don't care about all of your degrees, years of experience, conferences etc, they care about your fluency with maths and algorithms. This means that even a person with a shitty background can get hired at Google while a person with a stellar background gets rejected. Should you have gotten hired? Probably, but their system lets them find a lot of diamonds in the rough who wouldn't get hired anywhere else which is why they use it.

That is the point, a person who is good at mathematics and algorithms will get hired at Google even if she doesn't have a cs degree.

It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.

I think that Google plus is too integrated in things like youtube to be killed.

What would sales do in a B2C shop? In my mind you just create a product people want, slap AdWords on it for revenue and add a marketing team for growth. I have a hard time imagining what for example Reddit would do with a sales team.

Edit: Apparently Reddit have a sales team since they have their own ads platform, they wouldn't need it if they used AdWords.

> In economic theory, rationality is defined only as: when faced with a decision over many choices, the actor always chooses the choice they value most, according to their own "utility function".

That definition is correct but it isn't useful which is why it is never used in models. In the end we need to assume that the actors values something and that assumption will have a huge impact for any mathematical model. So the point is that since our assumptions about what people value can have so large consequences the maths doesn't really matter, it all comes down to people choosing their assumptions such that the result verifies their own beliefs.

The main problem with economic theory is that people aren't rational economic actors.

A rational billionaire would realize that he have nothing to gain from more wealth and would live the rest of his life in lavish and luxury (while donating 99.9% of it if he cares about public opinion), aiming to spend all of it before he dies. So if billionaires were rational we wouldn't have such a large inequality.

Similarly if poor people were rational they would organize against rich people, forcing them to share their wealth in one way or another. This could either be via violence or they could democratically elect representatives who will distribute it for them or they could even unionize to gain power.

The question then isn't how we stop inequality when all actors are rational, but how we stop inequality when some people have irrational tendencies to hoard wealth while others irrationally prefers to vote for those who stands for some abstract ideals rather than those who would give them the most monetary rewards.

That's a part of step 2.

> Which can't be achieved in most OOP languages that I know of, except for Scala and that's because Scala has "implicit parameters" which are equivalent to Haskell's type classes.

C++ can do that with template specialization.

> As a manager, one of my main jobs is ensuring that the team's bus number is always above 1

Bus number of 1 would be nice to experience for once, I have yet to see a team with a bus number above 0...

Humans aren't magic but we don't start out from zero, we have a billion years of evolution behind us.