I absolutely agree with your call-out. If a company has to have a "good culture" to attract talent, then so does a county, city, or state. Since I no longer have to live in a state that fights against my rights, I may very well choose to live (and therefore work) in other states for the rest of my life.
However, I do wonder if we are over-conflating "rural" with "conservative." Certainly, they are correlated, but I can imagine it's a lot different to live a rural life in California versus Mississippi.
The big differences between rural California and Rural Mississippi from my experience:
1. Rural California has way fewer black people.
2. Rural California is more geographically wealth-segregated. (The probability that a larger acreage and higher-owner-income rural property is adjacent to trailers is greater in Mississippi than California.)
In rural Mississippi people pretend their black neighbors don't exist unless they need "help." In rural California people just don't have black neighbors.
In general rural California is probably much more like Mississippi than you'd think.
But there is one key difference: in a rural area in a blue state, you at least have the protection of state law. If you get discriminated against for being gay, you can sue. You don't have to jump through hoops for birth control or abortion. You don't need an ID to vote.
Yeah, sure, your neighbors might be hostile to you, but having the state government behind your back helps immensely.
Sure, but at least you won't find statues of traitorous, racist war criminals lording over you when you go to file paperwork at your local county seat, or Confederate flags proudly displayed at your local state parks.
There's something different about it when it's government sanctioned.
I agree. And its not like im here to bash conservatives, its just looking at all these super tech companies like google and apple, its hard to imagine Tim Cook seriously considering locating his business in a state where his ER surgeon could refuse service to him because he is gay. most of our effort to get into the fast lane of "silicon valley" has been a thinly-veiled attempt at doing something, anything, to reduce crime, Fentanyl overdose, and systemic unemployment thats plagued our region since 2008.
The people who are pushing silicon valley just want the money. They dont understand that its more than money and training.
In one case, a 39-year old teacher allegedly died after not getting appropriate medical care due to her
sexual orientation.9
According to a lawsuit filed by her brother, the teacher’s medical condition was not
taken seriously by the EMTs who responded to her 911 call after they “‘became immediately aware’” she
was a lesbian. She was abandoned for over an hour after being admitted to the hospital – in violation of
protocol – and while unattended, she fell into a coma.10 She died several days later.1
That's a great narrative for a lawsuit, but I'm skeptical it's true. It's possible they were negligent (it happens to straight people too wouldn't you know it!), but it's also equally possible they were making every effort and they're still getting sued because our system has enormous financial rewards available to those who win successful lawsuits, even if they are disproportionate in many cases.
At any rate, no, there is not some systemic bias against any class of people in our medical system. ERs take care of anyone, medical insurance or not. Our medical professionals are highly trained, EMTs, paramedics, firefighters, nurses and doctors are by and large good at what they do. The existence of exceptions does not discount the rule.
so your second paragraph is justified by the completely baseless speculation in the first? if you actually had read the pdf I linked you would have seen the multitude of other examples of medical discrimination against queer people in it. im queer and have experienced medical discrimination. my queer friends have experienced medical discrimination, in washington state, not even a conservative state. intersex babies still routinely have non-consensual genital reassignment surgery performed, sometimes without their parent's knowledge.
yes, cishet people experience medical malpractice as well. but individual bad experiences is not the same as systemic discrimination. systematic discrimination against queer and intersex people goes on every day in our medical system, as much as people like to pretend it doesn't.
> "It seems some people believe that you get a name and it never changes. Not so, even in Western countries, where a person may change their name when they marry."
Since it is traditionally /women/ who change their names when married, this blind spot does not surprise me.
In common-law countries, you could also change your name just by using the new name. You could stand in the town square and announce, "I'm Max Power now, everybody. Stop calling me Doug Putz. New name: Max Power." And that would be it.
Or you go up on stage and say "I'm not just 'Gordon' any more. Call me 'Sting'." And everybody rolls with it, because no one cares about a bass player named Gordon, but a guy named Sting has to be cool. And then he actually has two completely separate names, that both refer to the same person.
In modern times, governments make you fill out a form and pay a fee, because now people need to know people that don't all live inside an hour-long trip radius by horse. And publishing a name change to hundreds of millions of people that may want to know about it cannot be done by soapbox and megaphone.
And those forms cause all kinds of problems. All the information on it has to fit inside the boxes, you see.
I don't think you need to reach for sexism as an explanation there. Name changes are sufficiently rare that building the flows to support it will usually only become an issue in mature production software where accurate names are extremely important, and where preserving long term records is equally important. That's not most systems. And that's before you get into cases where names are primary keys like usernames.
The business case for supporting such changes can be pretty weak relative to other features.
In recent decades, about 80 percent of brides choose to change their names after the wedding, both professionally and legally. [1] Most people marry at least once. [2] Women are half the population.
That being said, I do agree that in many systems, supporting name changes is not an immediate priority.
Seems somewhat similar to what Descartes Labs is doing - a "data refinery that combines data from diverse sources, cleans it up and makes it ready for modeling - and a platform to upon which to build living, learning models" [1]
I'm the CEO of Descartes Labs. It's indeed true that we've built a data refinery that ingests lots and lots of satellite data. The data refinery can be seen as a two-sided marketplace. On one side, we form partnerships with satellite and other geospatial data companies (in addition to open source data from NASA, ESA,and others) and pull in all of that data. On the other side, scientists can run computations over huge amounts of data from multiple datasets. For now, most of our business has been done on the scientist side. In principle, we could provide our infrastructure to satellite companies so they don't have to build out the software on their own. Most hardware companies suck at being software companies.
Amazon's offering is geared more towards ground stations, but they might move up the stack and start providing data refinery-type services on top of the ground station work.
Oh, our entire stack is built on Google Cloud Platform.
Can you give an example of "refined" data versus what one might get through the AWS product? ... in order to demonstrate the sort of tech skills and effort that differentiate the two. I'm basically hoping for some symbol grounding for "data refinery".
Also, what's the TAM in your specific market vs the AWS product's market? How has the TAM changed in the past 5 years?
Lastly, I heard your head of engineering brews better beer than any of your competitors. Is that true? Can be provide samples?
Refined data probably means getting insights from the vast amount of aerial imagery (and related like SAR or elevation model) data that has become available in recent years. Having access to the data is one thing (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel provided by Google, Amazon and other parties), but processing it efficiently is still non-trivial.
Examples include Land-Cover-Mapping (mapping pixels to classes like forests, urban areas, water, etc.) which can then further be used to do crop monitoring or land-use monitoring.
I guess this is different than the product AWS is offering here, which is more about getting the data from/to the satellite, but not about processing (at least for now).
Yeah these are classic examples of 'providing business value'. Want to be an agricultural tech company? Ingest some satellite data and calculate NDVI, boom you now know machine learning, data science, and have created a great business product that helps save the world by making farmers better.
Satellite data imo sucks, especially aerial imagery. Too many damn clouds to get anything useful in real time haha!
Interesting. At first I thought you meant Bentley Descartes, the CAD/BIM/GIS/photogrammetry reality modelling software. It's entirely different, though, and interesting that the two are sort of related and have the same name.
Labs looks very interesting, very lofty yet achievable goals.
> "This fixation on the spouse is kind of a modern oddity as well. In many societies past and present, your spouse, your parents, your kids, and maybe even your grandparents and grandkids are all of roughly equal importance."
Rather than "everyone is roughly equal" it's probably more accurate to say that the degree of power, dependence and investment between family members varies dramatically from culture to culture. The nuclear model is certainly widespread in modern times, but multi-generational models are still very common, especially in Asia.
The post-familial model, where Thanksgiving becomes Friendsgiving because you don't have any blood relatives you know and like, is surely the newest and rarest. I think having friends who are more important than extended family, let alone immediate family, is a pretty modern phenomenon.
> Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back.
Can you give the name of this company / case? I can't find anything in English news of Denmark.
The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys.
It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.
I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money.
They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff.
I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that.
You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range.
The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.
Oh yeah, companies of substantial size have large/meaningless overheads too. That's the unfortunate consequence of having a lot of people work together with varying opinions/motivations.
They also have to spend a lot on warm bodies/lobbying to get those contracts in the first place.
I'm not letting the enterprise providers off the hook. Just pointing out (as you note) that true responsibility lies with the project managers. Ineffectual project managers mean overblown budgets and undercooked results.
> You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders.
Yeah don't blame the exploiter, blame the victim!
I am sickened by this philosophy. Why do we let people get away with doing horrible things because "they're just doing their job". This sort of thinking breeds more immoral actions that are easily excused.
I’d start with sites that don’t rely on advertising revenue to stay afloat. So probably subscription sites like the Economist and Wall Street Journal, and public news sources like NPR and PBS. Though for the latter there is the pressure of government to consider.
Both of the subscription sites you mention have ads in both their paper and electronic editions. They receive a significant proportion of their revenues from advertisers. They don't have high net profit margins.
What makes you think they don't rely on advertising revenue to stay afloat?
I was curious about the details, so I looked up The Economist's 2018 annual report. They get 17% of revenue from advertisements, while 60% of revenue comes from subscriptions. Their operating profit is 13% of revenue.
Right, but of course without ads they would save some cost as they wouldn't need people to sell ads, they could get rid of a bunch of ads-related overhead costs etc.
If the operating margin on the ads part of the business is less than ~25%, then they could break even without ads. Of course, breaking even is worse than making 35MM profit each year.
I often browse the Australian ABC news site and have definitely noted a government influence on it, mostly the anti-China bent of many of the opinion and essay style articles. Interestingly, whenever censorship of the ABC comes up, the ABC is often the most reliable and up to date source of current events. It gives me a little faith in my country's democracy.
That's an interesting take, as often the ABC is accused of pandering to the left and being anti-government. Living outside of Australia I rely almost exclusively on the ABC website for news about Australia, and IMO most of the time it presents quite a balanced perspective.
I would be more suspicious of the article as a long winded advertisement if he had mentioned the sites :)
But to answer your question, I'd say the best bet is to follow the money. Sites that rely on subscriber revenue are more likely to have good journalism standards than sites based on ad revenue.
However, I do wonder if we are over-conflating "rural" with "conservative." Certainly, they are correlated, but I can imagine it's a lot different to live a rural life in California versus Mississippi.