parennoob

This isn't entirely a trivial absurdity. One of the biggest things I hear about traveling in China (and Japan) is that you're expected to carry your own toilet paper everywhere.

An analogy would be – someone from a non-tipping country complains about the fact that some restaurants in the US have a "compulsory gratuity" of 20% for larger parties. Sure, somewhat outrageous, but less so if you consider that tipping 15-20% is the norm in the US anyway.

As an aside: Toilet paper is an ancient, inefficient, and doubtfully hygienic way of cleaning your backside in the modern world.

Start using bidets instead of this nonsense. The TP can still be used for drying purposes.

I can't even pass as white, and I'm still excluded from most diversity programs because my race (South Asian) is overrepresented in tech.

However, overrepresentation in tech in Silicon Valley does not necessary translate into societal privilege, or even extend to all places in the US. Like sure, Google's CEO is Indian, but the entire upper layer of management at the company I work at (and a lot of other companies in Middle America) is 100% golf-playing white males with no way to break in. So I'm kinda SOL both in the diversity programs in Silicon Valley / more progressive tech places as well as the golf-and-whisky club at work.

Would like to hear solutions or experiences from other brown South Asians working outside Silicon Valley.

Blockbuster and Netflix did not sell perishable goods.

Now I could buy the argument that the supermarket chains just won't be able to attract the appropriate talent to deliver an experience rivaling that of Blue Apron (or Amazon, if they decided to get into this market tomorrow via Whole Foods).

> I would happily pay 80% taxes if I knew that when I needed it most the welfare state would have my back, but I know that it won't.

This crucial point of yours seems to have been missed by the author of the article. I wonder if that has something to do with them being from the UK, which has nationalized healthcare and some sort of a welfare state.

Also these places aren't good at the things they (sometimes) claim to specialize in. The wings at Buffalo Wild Wings are not better than the wings at a random bar.

Maybe millenials care about these things because we want value for our money and don't want to spend it solely on the basis of Super Bowl advertisements?

Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.

EDIT: My comment completely missed that there were 100 lines of identical code noticed as well. Leaving below for context.

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Does anyone else find the example cited in the article rather flimsy? Out of 450, two students incorrectly used the inverse of a Boolean for a conditional – an error I have seen tens, if not hundreds of times.

Perhaps they used better ways of detecting cheating (some are covered later in the article) for uncovering the collusion in this specific case. If not, this “veteran computer science professor” is going on unnecessary witch hunts.

> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests.

This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenarios that will be used in real life.