yalurker

As long as we're talking incentives, your plan gives a huge incentive to fire someone just before the end of their first year of employment. At the end of the year you're faced with paying a recruiter 2 years of salary, but if you fire them you just got a year of work for free.

The article mentions "arrested for a felony" not "convicted". Obviously these are very different things, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people have a problem with people found innocent still having their privacy invaded, not to mention the incentives it gives authorities to arrest more people. It almost encourages 'fishing' by arresting people with little to no evidence (or on unrelated charges) to get the DNA sample, and then releasing them without pressing charges. Groups that already feel targetted by the police might be wary of policies which give incentives for making questionable or spurious felony arrests in order to get data for investigations into future or previous crimes.

"weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school."

Wow. Since the rest of your post seems to equate "top-tier school" with the Ivy's (plus maybe MIT/stanford or whatever) this is just amazingly wrong to the point of being offensive.

There are tons of smart, driven and dedicated high school students in America who have no chance of getting into Ivy League schools. If you're lucky enough to be born into the right family so that you can go to the right private jewish prep school in one of a handful of posh suburbs, then being smart, driven and dedicated means you can probably get into one of the Ivy schools.

For every kid going to a public school in the midwest, who has to check the "will need financial assistance" checkbox (if the application fee alone didn't make them skip applying) and doesn't have any legacy or connections, then applying to Harvard is a lottery ticket even with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a long resume of extra-curriculars.

There are plenty of smart, driven and dedicated 18 year olds who won't be heading to Harvard or Yale next fall. Admittance to one of those schools correlates more with growing up privileged than it does about intelligence.

I'd be more excited if they gave me the option to disable the annoying "spin the map when you try to pinch-zoom" feature. I've never wanted my phone to give me a map where north is some arbitrary direction spun with my fingers and it's difficult to zoom without accidentally rotating the map.

// I know it's off topic, but it makes the map barely usable and I can dream that some google engineer will see my plea and consider it.

Account created 45 minutes ago, to post a wildly unlikely and almost certainly embellished if not entirely fictitious anecdote.

What is it about sexism on HN that brings out every troll, sock puppet, white knight, astroturfer, and any other internet message board cliche?

The most sexist thing I've ever heard in a decade of real world work and interactions in the software industry can't hold a candle to what anonymous internet posters apparently see on a daily basis.

How? Because parents, teachers and mass media said to 'do what you love and the money will follow' or some variant, so kids picked majors with no demand in the labor market.

Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.

Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.

To play devil's advocate, the moment the government gets involved, so do politics.

Contraception and sexually transmitted diseases - will the religious right / moral majority voters turn against a representative who supports medical research for these?

What about diseases associated with lifestyle - smoking, alcohol, obesity. Will a parent group ask why X million is going to emphysema research when it could have gone to childhood cancer research instead? What about the anti-vaccine groups? Vegan/Vegetarian groups? Whatever other special interest group or political viewpoint?

I really don't want to see Bill O'Reilly or Rosie O'Donnell on tv expressing their outrage at why funding is going to curing the wrong diseases/disorders.

Does anyone have experience with cost of living in the bay area vs Austin, TX? According to the cost of living calculator on CNN Money, $120,000 in San Francisco is equivalent to $70,000 in Austin.

Has anyone here moved from Austin to Silicon Valley or vice versa? How accurate are the online cost of living calculators to what you experienced in person?

Google says the group of major players colluding together in a joint bid for patents is anti-competitive. Google did not want to join this anti-competitive collusion. How is this inconsistent, shocking, or bad?

Couldn't the simple explanation be "If we join forces with Microsoft and Apple to jointly buy these patents, the DoJ is going to come down on all of us for illegal anti-competitive behavior"? Why are people acting like Google did something wrong by not wanting to join the cartel that they are now publicly saying is anti-competitive and that the DoJ should impose limits on?

There is 'general public' and there is 'tech-savvy android users'. The former you have probably characterized correctly, but I suspect you are underestimating the size of the latter. As the grandparent mentions, if people are posting on forums to help support the devs, then at least some people are being persuaded to use the service because they believe they're helping the developers.

Many people do go out of their way to support independent musicians or indie game makers. It's not unreasonable to believe that there are people who want to help support small mobile development shops.

I down-modded this comment, but since the user probably made it in good-faith I'm going to explain why.

This would be a good comment on reddit - short, opinionated and easy for people who share the sentiment to upvote to show their agreement.

However, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It's not insightful or relevant, it just adds noise to the discussion. The community here generally tends to try to keep the discussion more thoughtful with less short, funny quips, and following that ideal this comment does not belong.

I'll reply here though it's more of a general response to all the people who replied. First, I'm not sure why I got so many downvotes, I believe my response was quite civil and appropriate, my intention was to be helpful.

Clearly many people here do not view "USAian" as an offensive or derogatory term. I'll try to explain why I believe it to be inappropriate and hope I can do so in a polite and effective enough manner to avoid more downvotes.

"USAian" reads to me as someone who, under the guise of disambiguation, is intentionally being diminutive. Very rarely does a situation occur in which "American" as a term for the people from the US actually result in confusion versus the entire continent. It seems most likely that the speaker is using it to intentionally point out the unimportance of the USA to counter an implied American self-importance.

You're using a term for a group of people that they would never use for themselves, which is a strong indicator it may not be a desirable label. Further, given common themes in current global culture, it is very easy for the term to be taken as an intentional insult, as if the speaker is "putting them in their place".

Whenever I see something like "USAian" I assume the speaker views Americans as self-centered, imperialistic, unworldly or similar and is using the term to intentionally remind the reader of the significance of the rest of the Americas, with the implication they need this reminding.

But, based on the responses, maybe I'm an outlier. Hopefully the above clarified my original response.

As an aside, using "USAians" in your writing is probably not what you want here. Intentionally mangling the name of a group/nationality because you don't like the standard naming convention or because you want to get a little jab in to show your distaste for the group just undermines your credibility.

If I were to write a valid political commentary but use "Dumbocrats" for Democrats or "Republitards" for Republicans it would be hard to take me seriously, right? When someone online writes "USAians" it's very difficult to regard the rest of their writing as legitimate and not trolling or intentionally smug/antagonistic.

The opportunity is that they could have more customers. Many people are canceling their cable subscriptions because the price is too high for the value it offers. If cable companies allowed customers to have only a few channels that they cared about for a lower fee, many of these people would keep some level of cable subscription.

This comment is so absurdly wrong and offensive I had to read it several times fearing I was missing some sarcasm or satire. I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, so here is some information from someone who went to school in the midwest.

Schools in the midwest do not focus on "skills associated with living on a farm". Even in agriculture-centric Iowa farm labor is about 8% of the population, the other 92% of people are employed in offices/stores/factories/etc. For comparison, 5% of workers in California are employed as farm laborers for some part of the year.

The schools entire focus is on university preparation (often to a fault, many students would probably be better suited by a more vocational focus). No public school is teaching anyone to read the bible, and to my knowledge private Catholic or other religious schools are no more common in the midwest than in New York or California.

Ignorant stereotypes based on state/region are just as foolish as any other ignorant stereotype.