neoburkian

The work Tyler cites demonstrates that inequality in the US is almost entirely a function of real estate. Let that sink in. This implies that the vast majority of inequality comes from owning land.

Big Tech companies are not a real estate business. To believe that they are indicates extreme confusion about what a company like Netflix does. To shoehorn them into culpability for rent seeking in the housing market is to substantially miss the point.

Your analogy implies that inequality creates poverty or that there is some casual relationship. This is what many people intuitively believe. It is not true.

As a rule, when people try to remove inequality everybody gets poorer, not richer. Countries are more successful at reducing poverty when they focus on lifting all boats. India and China were communist countries in the mid 20th century. As a result of them abandoning that approach, we have seen the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Check the GINI coefficients of those countries, it isn't great. Ask Chinese/Indian citizens if they are wealthier now than 60 years ago and its not even a question.

Except for Linux actively running on 99% of all servers on the planet. Vulnerabilities in Linux can literally kill people, open holes for hackers, spies, etc.

Submitting a fake paper to a journal read by a few dozen academics is a threat to someones ego. It is not in the same ballpark as a threat to IT infrastructure everywhere.

Just because someone meets the "X years doing Y at Z" criteria doesn't mean that they are great hires. I've met PhDs in computer science that could barely write python.

Resumes or similar self-marketing says a lot less than we would like. If there were good signals here, hiring would be a solved problem.

Skeptical. Remote work increases the supply of available technologists across the board. That means more competition at every level - 10x or otherwise. If your whole team is remote, what exactly is the difference between someone in California and Chile?

Another thing not mentioned here is that employee productivity is a variable that is almost always invisible before the hire happens. Leonardo DiCaprio can command a premium because he is identified with the work he does. This is not the case for tech workers who's work is typically invisible. Suppose you are a 10x DevOps sorcerer. None of your potential employers will know that in advance, so they are all only willing to pay 1x salaries.

FAANG companies pay higher across the board, not because they want to, but in the hope that by overpaying 90% of their employees (relative to market) they will be able to attract top 10% candidates whose skills are hidden until after the hire happens. If they could price discriminate in advance they would.

I'd like some more specificity on how exactly this is supposed to work. Ok, you are going to build a webserver, now what? I draw a bunch of flowcharts describing the code that doesn't exist yet?

If the situation is not novel, then this step is only useful for documentation. If this is uncharted territory, any spec with this level of specificity will be thrown out in seconds.

While plausible, there are a lot of 'if's that underpin this scenario. In particular, you need people to not notice that the conviction rate is 50% for both odd and even numbered households.

> think of the innocent immigrant

A model that does not incorporate all the relevant information will have more false positives. The practical consequence of doing what you suggest is, cetaris-paribus, that you will incorrectly penalize more people.

> There might be a correlation in aggregate data but in any individual case we can only look at the relevant facts.

Definitely. Thats where courts and human review come in. The mistake the Dutch made here was not the variables in the model, but that they had limited human review of a model with (I'm assuming) low predictive power.

> Our justice system is supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty”, not “innocent until Bayesian inference suggests high enough probability.”

"Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" (or whatever the Dutch equivalent is) implies exactly the Bayesian calculation you are rejecting. That said, I agree that a machine learning model with limited inputs is not sufficient to determine guilt.

Stuff like this is everywhere. I used to work for a company that had millions of credit profiles. We had the chief of IT spending enormous amounts of time to make things "secure," but in the meantime junior PMs (and pretty much everyone else too) had access to a web portal where they could decrypt and inspect anyones credit information, address, name, etc. Inspecting the personal financial details of people in our system was something employees would do on a lark. We had a horrible password manager that nobody used, so the passwords that were employed to validate logins to this portal were literally the names of the employees with one or two extra characters. No 2FA, no IP address restriction, nothing.

We would deploy enormous resources to protect something if IT believed that had a legal requirement to do so (and make a lot of noise about how "secure" we were), but we would leave treasure chests of information sitting around in the open if there wasn't a box they needed to check saying "don't leave unattended treasure chests of private data in the open."

If anything this convinced me that the regulations surrounding this sort of thing are a joke. We don't need rules about security or how to build X - IT will just see a list of boxes, check them, and then ignore everything not specifically enumerated. We need a white hat law for certifying hacking teams that can legally try to crack corporations with sensitive data. If they succeed, the company has to pay enormous fines _to the team that hacked them_ and solve the problem or get their certifications/contracts revoked.

A society where everyone is poor is worse than a society where some are rich but most are poor. It is worse that everyone be in crushing poverty forever, than to have unequal distribution of wealth.

“Growth is only good if widely shared” is a meme that has led to immiseration every time it is implemented. If capitalism has to own child labor, then redistributionists have to own the violent mass scale enslavement of the peasants under Mao/Stalin.

Because thats fundamentally not the problem. At every company I've worked at, the senior engineers could tell you exactly how they were skimping on security, why its bad, and how to fix it.

The problem isn't lack of knowledge or skill, it is that management refuses to commit the resources necessary to build secure products. When the difference between building secure X and not-secure X is often 2-3 times the effort and time commitment, managers will almost always pick not-secure X and roll the dice on nothing going wrong.

From their point of view, adding security does nothing for the product. The customers are paying for the value-prop and marginal improvements on it, not the integrity of the backend.

If you want to solve the problem of lax security, you need to make security breaches a buisness-ending proposition. You also need to increase the likelyhood of being compromised so that people aren't tempted to roll the dice. If you want regulation, I would support some kind of white hat law that says if you compromise sensitive company data, the corporation has to (1) pay an amazon-bankrupting amount of money and (2) they have to give 20% of it to the team that broke them.