gridaphobe

You rightly point out that income disparity metrics can be manipulated, but changing the calculation (eg by ignoring Bezos) does nothing to change the actual disparity, it just makes it harder to detect... So what exactly is your point?

> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.

The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a non-issue.

> One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don’t. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been.

Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations could not have happened without strong IP protections, and I’ve never seen a compelling argument for this.

Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)?

What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools.

It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.

Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort.

This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

I see your point, but it seems to rest on the rest on the way we determine when capital gains are realized. Capital gains accumulate regularly just like other sources of income; in my mind the tax obligation is incurred at the time of the gain, just like the tax obligation on other income.

For practical reasons the state does not demand the tax until the accumulated gains have been realized by selling the asset. This makes sense for illiquid assets like stock in your private startup, but I don't think it should change the calculation of when the tax was incurred and how much. For liquid assets like shares in public companies, I think it would actually be perfectly reasonable to demand the tax on unrealized gains.

Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.

You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.

It’s standard to use the capital city to refer to the actions of a state. Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem.

One of my favorite quotes about Haskell is "We cannot afford QA teams, so we use a sadistic compiler".

That seems like more of an argument in favor of having all source code available (i.e. not using closed-source libraries) than an argument against OOP. The question of what code executes when you call `person.walk()` is no different than the question of what code executes when you call `(person :walk)`: it depends entirely on the value of `person`! This is the core of dynamic dispatch in OOP and higher-order functions in FP, they enable behavioral abstraction. You can impose restrictions on the behavior through types or contracts, but at the end of the day you can't know the precise behavior except in a specific call. And this is precisely where a live programming environment comes in handy.

Where are you studying? My undergrad (City College of New York) was mostly C++/Java with the exception of the PL course, which used Scheme. We also had an elective that taught x86 assembly.

I had to discover and learn Haskell on my own :)

C is a language I'd like to see make a reappearance in CS curricula. It's great that most programmers today don't have to deal with memory management and pointers, but I think a CS degree should leave the student with a basic grasp of the full stack of programming paradigms.

I think a nice approach would be to start off with a high-level, functional language like Haskell or Scheme, and then move down the ladder of abstraction in subsequent courses, culminating in a hardcore C (or maybe even assembly) course.