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This is the only thing that makes junior programmers worthwhile. Any task will take longer and probably be more work for me if I give it to a junior programmer vs just doing it myself. The reason I give tasks to junior programmers is so that they eventually become less junior, and can actually be useful.

Having a junior programmer assistant who never gets better sounds like hell.

If the problem is that not many people read SF, how can popular SF books be part of the problem? Are you supposing that if not for popular books like Dune, people would read a wider variety of other SF works? I don't think that's how it works.

I think popular SF books are important for bringing the genre to a wider audience. Someone who is not familiar with the genre might pick up Dune because of the films, and sure, maybe that's all they'll read, but maybe they'll enjoy it and pick up some more.

I'm guessing you didn't actually read the article, just commented from the headline, because I think disability is a pretty good excuse to use pre-prepared ingredients.

Changing your mind is not hypocrisy. Look it up.

I grew up in Suffolk, where I knew of several examples, and I never realised that they were a particularly Suffolk-specific thing: according to the article, twice as many in the county as the rest of the UK. I would be interested to know why.

To be clear, by lower status (and I said "lower", not "low", very specifically) I was not saying anything negative about those professions or the people who work in them. I was only referring to their status within society at the moment, in that they are not accorded great power or influence, or feted in the same way as e.g. tech entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers are. I think that nursing and teaching should be much higher status jobs than they currently are and I think their importance is undervalued, which frequently tends to be the case for professions dominated by women.

You mention college professor as a high status position, which I think supports the point I was making, as whilst the majority of school teachers are women, the majority of professors are men.

As to people gravitating towards careers that interest them, I think that is begging the question a bit, as it avoids considering why people gravitate towards the positions that they do. Are women more likely to go into nursing than into tech because of some intrinsic preference, or because nursing is much more frequently presented as an appropriate career path for them than tech, and they can currently see a lot more women doing that than applying to YC or whatever? I would suspect the latter.

Yes, it is indicative of societal issues that women outnumber men in lower pay, lower status careers like teaching and nursing whereas men outnumber women in higher pay, higher status careers like tech.

I think the reason that solely skills-based institutions never flourished is due to the kind of cronyism and old boy networks that the article strangely seems to see as one aspect of the current system that is worth preserving.

The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.

That is hilarious.

"A review might consider whether it is befitting for the world's sixth largest economy to manage critical national infrastructure via a Yahoo group but we would hope that is obvious."

Anti-semitism (and prejudice in general) exists on a much wider spectrum than just "burning hatred", and it is entirely possible to be friendly with members of a group that you are prejudiced against. If, perhaps, you believe that Jewish people do not integrate fully and are not "properly British", it does not prevent you from also getting on perfectly well with your Jewish next door neighbour, but you're still anti-semitic.

And just as a tip, claiming that accusations of anti-semitism are a Zionist conspiracy is somewhat self-defeating.

The article says Labour doesn't have an anti-semitism problem and therefore it doesn't?

And yes, I checked the references, and they are not wholly convincing. A statement that only 0.06% of the Labour membership have been investigated for anti-semitism (which firstly still seems kind of high to me, and secondly obviously not being investigated for anti-semitism does not mean one is not anti-semitic) and an independent inquiry by the person who was subsequently made Labour's shadow attorney general?

I'm not saying Labour is overrun by anti-semitism but let's try not to just believe the last thing we read, ok?

What's wrong with someone caring about my involvement only superficially? It doesn't mean I don't want to be involved. Let's talk parties: sure, if a friend I see regularly is having a party, I'll get invited whether I'm on Facebook or not. If it's a more tangential connection I don't see very often just spam inviting their friends list, they might not even have other contact details for me, but it'll still probably be a fun event that I'd like to go to, and if I'm not on FB then I miss out.

Due to the gradual nature of the change to the climate in comparison to the average human lifetime and the shifting baseline of people's perceptions, many people will never acknowledge that there has been a dramatic impact.

I don't think it's anyone else's responsibility to convince you of anything. If you want to take part in this conversation, how about you explain the reasons for your position instead?