From a CNN special report:
It's not clear why Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, gets special treatment. Big campaign donations? Or a genuine fear of killing the goose that lays the golden egg?
Anyway, I thought Diversity Is Our Strength ... so, how come the celebrated supermen of Silicon Valley, like the late Steve Jobs, don't agree? Do they know something we don't know?
How diverse is Silicon Valley? Most tech companies really, really don't want you to know, and the U.S. government isn't helping shed any light on the issue.
In an investigation that began in August 2011, CNNMoney probed 20 of the most influential U.S. technology companies, the Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filing two Freedom of Information Act requests for workforce diversity data.
A year and a half, a pile of paperwork, and dozens of interviews later, we have a little more insight -- but not much.
Most of the companies stonewalled us, but the data we were able to get showed what one might expect: Ethnic minorities and women are generally underrepresented, sometimes severely so -- particularly in management roles.
White and Asian males often dominate their fields.
Our investigation demonstrated how difficult -- and sometimes impossible -- gaining any insight into Silicon Valley's employee diversity can be. It shows a general lack of transparency in an industry known for its openness.
It's not clear why Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, gets special treatment. Big campaign donations? Or a genuine fear of killing the goose that lays the golden egg?
Anyway, I thought Diversity Is Our Strength ... so, how come the celebrated supermen of Silicon Valley, like the late Steve Jobs, don't agree? Do they know something we don't know?
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65 comments:
Since it is one of the few remaining successful industries we've got, we must get busy and destroy it!
OT but very iSteve-y: Songwriters ratings as they age. http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/SongwritersbyDecadeLarge/Dash-Gray?:embed=y&:display_count=no
I would love to hear the people working on that report explain why White nerds are cool with Asian guys and nobody else.
Also, I would love to have them interview a bunch of Asian people and talk about if they have experienced racial prejudice.
I'm at the HQ of one of the top companies in Silicon Valley.
In engineering, at our HQ:
Roughly 50% Indian.
Maybe 30% Chinese.
About half of the rest immigrants from elsewhere on H1B (or similar).
0% African American
~5% female. (2 in a group of 100 is about right, when we lose one, we get another)
Roughly twice as many actual Americans as females.
This is in engineering, Marketing/HR/Facilities are probably different, but I don't interact with them, so I'm not sure.
If CNN really wanted to know, they could just go to the parking lots of some of the companies and count.
Isn't it simply a matter of how the liberal arts-educated elite classes stereotype various professions?
Putting out fires is considered blue collar and "easy", so the rules should be altered to allow more NAMs to do that.
IT is considered "hard" and even kind of imposing, so they'd rather not fuck around with that field.
I await CNN's insightful reporting on the disproportionate employment of Jews in the financial sector, the disproportionate employment of Blacks in all forms of Basketball and the disproportionate number of gay males in theatrical productions.
My guess is it is cronyism -- Silicon Valley and Hollywood have significant players rotating in and out of Democratic Circles, both government and party, and remain major fundraisers.
Oil and Gas exploration and development dwarf the money flows, cash, employment base, and wealth generation of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley together, but get hammered constantly.
Because oil and gas execs don't donate to Dems, form Dem political and goverment benches, and share Dem values on "gentry liberalism" which is blue state wealth closed enclave snobbery. The way Steve Jobs shared say, Steve Spielberg's notions of what is "correct" and hate hate hate of ordinary people. What flies in Malibu and San Jose also flies in Georgetown and the Upper East Side, but not in Oklahoma or South Dakota.
Wall Street is pretty much exempt from quotas as well, as is the hedge fund industry. As a hedge fund research director, I recently attended fixed income investment conferences put on by Citi, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase (attendance is free, but you have to be an institutional investor who does business with these bond dealers to be invited). Attendance at all three appeared to 98% white and Asian, though white and Asian women accounted for perhaps 20% of attendees. NAMs accounted for at most 2% of attendees.
I suspect campaign contributions are a big part of being left alone by the civil rights enforcers.
This is a great opportunity for Republicans. First, they pretend that they're really, really concerned about diversity in SV. Then they team up with Dems to demand more diversity. Then SV comes begging and screaming for a little relief, whatever it takes, and Republicans turn around and start defending freedom. I mean, if SV is going to vote 98% for Obama and shovel tons of cash at Democrats, they should be made to pay the price.
More surprising is that the oil and gas industry doesn't get more grief over its lack of diversity (At least in terms of blacks, Hispanics and women), given its role as Public Industry Enemy #1.
Of course, the oil industry is every bit as much the "technology industry" as Silicon Valley, but I suspect media types are too shallow to pick up on that.
Maybe it's because the media would then have to portray oil and gas workers as a real part of the American economy and not just a handful of evil CEO's plotting to destroy the planet.
Are you following the latest controversy over the two guys at a tech conference making Beavis and Butt-head level jokes, getting overheard by a black lady, then publicly shamed on Twitter in a way that got one of them fired?
Crazy stuff. Lucky for Hollywood people that the "Friends" lawsuit established that we can be as filthy as we want to be in the writers' room without legal consequence.
B-b-b-but . . . diversity is the key to our strength, isn't it? I mean, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can't both be wrong, can they?
I walk by the grad engineering student face directory every day on the way to my office: 50% Chinese, 20% Indian, 30% white.
In the sciences minority students are easier to graduate because they can be helped extensively on their theses, then hired into large research groups where they can be coauthors without having to accomplish much. Engineering is harder. You need to do digital design and coding pretty much in isolation, and if you work too slow or if you make too many errors, you're fired.
"Most of the companies stonewalled us, but the data we were able to get showed what one might expect: Ethnic minorities and women are generally underrepresented, sometimes severely so -- particularly in management roles.
White and Asian males often dominate their fields."
Ethnic minorities are vastly overrepresented in Silicon Valley, unless you just don't count South and Northeast Asian people as ethnic minorities. They clearly don't here.
How many Mexers in the NBA?
How diverse is the upper echelons of Mass Media or Hollywood?
In all endeavors, upper echelons are mostly made up of smart Jewish, gay, and whites.
But the problem for Silicon Valley is it's an industry that has use only for smart people.
Other industries are different. Hollywood and MSM are run by smart whites, Jews, and gays at the top, but it can still hire and use less intelligent people at the bottom. So, even if a black person lacks the brains to run a media company, he or she has brains enough to read the news.
Same in Hollywood. Tom Cruise, Halle Berry, Will Smith, and Travolta and others aren't so bright but still talented enough to star in movies.
But Silicon Valley is only about brains. It lacks a 'front' that can showcase a diverse bunch of less intelligent people.
Maybe what Silicon Valley should do is create a kind of disneyland mirror version of itself for visitors. It will have rides and all sorts of fun stuff, and it will hire non-whites and non-Jews to play smart computer geeks. So, even if google is mostly smart Jews, googleland will have a black guy playing sergey brin. Just like Hollywood. Problem solved.
Don't Asian-Indians count as 'diverse'?
They have to produce results and maker a profit, unlike private schools and government agencies. That's true in finance, too, where minorities are thin on the ground.
Huh?
It is my contention that Silicon Valley is covering up race stats not because they're trying to cover up the paucity of "diversity" in its managerial ranks, but because they're trying to cover up the glut of diversity (H-1B Asians) in its employee base. They don't want native born white Americans outraged.
>>It's not clear why Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, gets special treatment? Big campaign donations? Or a genuine fear of killing the goose the lays the golden egg?
I say that it is for both reasons. Add Wall Street to that list too. How many blacks or latinos hold prestige/money positions on Wall street? Very few. Should be scandalous when you consider that so many of the jobs are concentrated in urban regions where blacks and latinos are the majority.
I guess life consists of getting a line of work that is important enough to avoid the attention of the diversity/pc crowd; or gaining enough political/economic power that the "rules" don't apply to you; or becoming an approved group that can avoid the "rules". I think I'll become an Indian tribe.
Silicon Valley is about as diverse as the NBA. Neither seems to get into any trouble for it. Mystifying...
If there were genuine reluctance to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, then the software patent situation would have been solved years ago. And by solved, I mean that software would be excluded from patenting entirely. As that snarl increases exponentially, innovation is headed offshore.
Silicon Valley will also tell you that the difficulty of dealing with the high skilled immigrant system is a giant nasty Washington roadblock for the industry. They'd like a system where the visas would be auctioned so companies that can really use them can get them instead of big companies with insider connections wanting cheap labor. That has become so far out of bounds due to Republican big business opposition that they usually just ask for a higher total number of immigrants. Democrats block that to hold it hostage to their agenda of higher numbers of low-skilled immigrants.
So Silicon Valley's survival is of no importance to Washington.
Why does the cathedral not care about gender and race imbalance in tech? It's because the politicians, glad-handlers, academics, and intellectuals that run our society don't like scientists and engineers as a class. They don't like the white ones, they don't like the asian ones, they don't like the male ones, and they don't like the favored class ones either. Why go out of your way for someone you don't like?
Outrageous! Don't they know how much talent they're squandering? Everyone knows great computer hackers look less like Rick Moranis and more like Ving Rhames and Aldis Hodge these days.
"Ethnic minorities ... underrepresented
... Asian males often dominate"
Asians aren't minorities anymore?
We need a new term. Whasians.
You can't win.
The industry used to be all white, but now we have a lot of asians, so now we're diverse.
Doesn't count, you dont have any non-asian majorities.
Ok, now we have a bunch of blacks, now we are diverse.
Doesn't count, you dont have any hispanics.
Ok, now we have a bunch of hispanics, now we are diverse.
Doesn't count, you dont have any women.
Ok, now we have a bunch of women, now we are diverse.
Doesn't count, you dont have any LSTBBQ's.
etc...
Or a genuine fear of killing the goose the lays the golden egg?
Does tech in fact lay golden eggs for American jobs and income? Even the big ones employ relatively few people, and, of those few, many are immigrants or offspring of immigrants.
Or is the benefit mainly just a source of misplaced identity pride, that such a company happens to be "incorporated" in a U.S. jurisdiction?
Ethnic minorities and women are generally underrepresented, sometimes severely so -- particularly in management roles. White and Asian males often dominate their fields.
Note the wording with regard to ethnic minorities vs. white and Asian males. Could we be reaching a point where mainstream media outlets subtly cease associating Asian males with other minorities? What a damning blow that could be for the Democrat's coalition. If you acknowledge that one minority is really getting along quite fine in America, that's a crack in the dam.
Looks like KKKrazy Glue is needed in Silicon Valley. Some noble soul should don the bedsheets and go boldly into Google's HQ demanding white empowerment.
Most of the companies stonewalled us, but the data we were able to get showed what one might expect
Why would one "expect" this? I mean, I know why I would expect it, but why would a CNN writer expect it? It can't be because NAMs are less capable of doing tech work, so what's left? Silicon Valley is that much more racist than any other corner of the workforce? Why, and why is that expected?
As for why they haven't been pressured, it's not big campaign donations. There are some, but tech people tend to be libertarian or apolitical, so sending checks to politicians comes about as naturally to them as dating. When the feds went after Microsoft, some speculated it was to punish them for their lack of donations. Gates had made some insultingly tiny ones, considering his wealth, and mostly to local pols. (They learned their lesson.)
So I'd guess it's the second thing: not wanting to kill the golden goose. As long as the nerds kept turning out new toys and making life easier, they were left alone. (If not for the Internet/tech boom, I think the current recession would have come a decade earlier.) It's not like non-nerds want to work with nerds anyway. Maybe this is a sign that people are starting to take all that tech stuff for granted, so now tech companies will get the same shakedowns that others have gotten.
Neither of those, Steve. The powers that be are simply aware that there isn't enough cognitive firepower amongst NAMs to make any headway into increasing diversity in Silicon Valley. Attempting to force diversity in that field would be a colossally embarrassing failure and might even lead a few people to question ethnic cognitive equality, the worst of mankind's sins.
Neither of those, Steve. The powers that be are simply aware that there isn't enough cognitive firepower amongst NAMs to make any headway into increasing diversity in Silicon Valley. Attempting to force diversity in that field would be a colossally embarrassing failure and might even lead a few people to question ethnic cognitive equality, the worst of mankind's sins.
This could be another case of "for thee, but not for me", but I suspect that HR tries their hardest to hire NAM talent, but there just isn't that much of it to go around. If they need to get around this dilemma they hire a bunch of even tempered people of color who fit in with the company culture but have busy work jobs to fill up cubicle space with important sounding job titles. My guess is that they were stonewalling CNN until they could figure out a way to make themselves look more diverse.
"Does tech in fact lay golden eggs for American jobs and income? Even the big ones employ relatively few people, and, of those few, many are immigrants or offspring of immigrants."
Lays golden eggs for the global elites.
"What a damning blow that could be for the Democrat's coalition. If you acknowledge that one minority is really getting along quite fine in America"
Asians are more 'white' than Whites. They are mainly socialists who are a coalition of the bottam half of humanity against the top half. Asians are in the top half, as are conservative blacks, who are said to be 'acting white', 'uncle toms', 'oreos', Clarence thomas.
Though there are many reasons--biological, cultural, historical, etc.--as to why blacks and Mexicans lag in academic and intellectual achievement, the progos prolly made it worse with victimology.
There's this idea among many non-whites that if you get rid of 'oppressive whites', everything will magically work out. It's like thinking you're poor cuz there are rich people. Get rid of rich people and you will be rich. But reality isn't like that. If you're poor, you're not gonna be rich because all pre-existing rich people have been gotten rid of. That's like Zimbabwean-thinking. Get rich of rich whites and problem of black poverty will go away.
Even if rich whites were indeed evil and parasitic, poor people still won't get rich by getting rid of evil rich white people. Even after evil rich white people are gotten rid of, non-white poor folks still have to create wealth. They gotta strive and achieve.
But progos filled minds of blacks and browns that they ONLY reason they are poor is because there are rich white people. So, blacks and browns just sit on their butts and hope for the day when white people aren't rich no more, as if that's gonna make them rich.
So, instead of trying to do something, all they think about is undoing white people as if that's gonna fix the problem.
Also, when will progos see that pop culture and single mothers are bad for blacks and browns? If knowledge is like water, you can fill it unless there's a firm vessel to hold it. Firm vessel is discipline and respect, but such values don't exist among a lot of blacks and some browns. So, the water of knowledge just spills all over and goes to waste. Single mothers are poor disciplinarians and pop culture teaches kids to act like apes.
My guess is over 100% of STEM types of non Asian or European decent are employed, so there is no law suit available. I say over 100% as they will hunt down talent in other countries. Most affirmative action is for government jobs since they are the most valuable jobs.
Outside of entertainment and sports, I'd say one almost defining feature of elite occupations is that they have relatively few NAMs and lots of whites and Asians, and somewhat segregated workplaces. And within demanding fields, my impression is that the racial mix shifts white and Asian as you go up in prestige and accomplishment.
So silicon valley may seem weird to most elites in that it's more Asian and male and less Jewish and female than media or finance or top level politics, but it's not going to seem weird that NAMs are massively underrepresented in sillicon valley. That's what their whoe world looks like.
Looks like micro-aggressions are rocking the tech world: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled-way-out-of-control/
The question lady in question has had enough of invisible knapsacks and the white oppressor
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/298952248510251008
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858
"Disparate Impact Realism"
"How the Asians Became White"
"Most of the companies stonewalled us, but the data we were able to get showed what one might expect: Ethnic minorities and women are generally underrepresented, sometimes severely so -- particularly in management roles."
Asians and Jews are ethnic minorities, or not, based on whatever interpretation is convenient at the time.
Emphasize the number of (Asian) immigrants in Silicon Valley, when discussing how important it is that we grant amnesty to 11 million illegal, illiterate peasants. Downplay the Asian-ness of Silicon Valley when we're trying to prove how racist Silicon Valley is because it will only hire persons of pallor.
Of course Jews aren't ethnic minorities when trying to prove how un-diverse and racist Silicon Valley is. They are ethnic minorities when questioning why we should add yet a third Jew to the Supreme Court - because she's an ethnic minority, and is totally in sync with the needs, experiences, and desires of other ethnic minorities, like Consuela from Juarez who works in a slaughterhous.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/21/the-blob-an-american-horror-story/
This is what kills me about libertarian thinking:
"They hold power because the government’s monopoly on K-12 education eliminates most competition."
If the liberal delusion is that all kids are innately smart and can learn just about anything if we spend more money on education...
the libertarian delusion is the notion that everyone is an innate-Ayn-Randian who is filled with competitive and enterprising spirit and just happens to be stifled by bureaucrats.
So, every black or brown kid is just dying to learn and compete but is being held back by government monopoly.
Reality says different. A lot of kids love being lazy and don't wanna be competitive as it requires too much effort.
Increased freedom to compete works for those who wanna compete.
But it does nothing for those who don't wanna compete in the first place.
For a lot of kids, the real problem of education is that its rewards are not immediate. Studying takes away lots of fun time when one wants to just watch Tv, have fun, go to parties, and hang out with friends. Those are immediately gratifying. For education to pay off, it takes yrs and yrs.
Competitiveness in education might be more appealing to blacks and browns if the rewards were immediate. But they are not.
Also, a lot of white and Asian kids hit the books not so much out of 'competitive spirit' but because of the sense of obligation and self-worth that says ignorance and laziness are shameful in the eyes of parents, teachers, themselves, peers, and etc. It's not just about doing better than everyone else.
If a bunch of kids get A's in class, do they as individuals feel bad because he or she didn't out-A everyone else? No, he or she feels good because he or she just did the work and belongs to a community of 'serious' people even if he or she didn't prove himself/herself as the best.
So, the impetus for education is as communal as competitive. It's not just to beat everyone else but to belong to a community of fellow scholars.
There are quite a bit of NAM's at GOOG (their NYC office in Chelsea for sure)and MSFT. Not on engineering teams but in marketing, ad analytics, ad sales (remember google is pretty much an advertising company at the end of the day).
"Looks like micro-aggressions are rocking the tech world:"
From the tweet:
"Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles."
It looks like they really 'fsck'ed up. Moooove.
Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy
And how diverese are CNN's employees? Their on-air talent tends to be pretty pasty...
"Looks like micro-aggressions are rocking the tech world:"
microchip-on-their-shoulders
Ethnic minorities are vastly overrepresented in Silicon Valley, unless you just don't count South and Northeast Asian people as ethnic minorities. They clearly don't here.
Right. It's ridiculous. Of course, Whites are also ethnic minorites in California, so the whole premise is preposterous.
"How the Asians Became White"
How do Asians feel about this? Are they keeping mum about it because Asians simply aren't vocal about issues or do they prefer it this way?
Suppose Asians were distinguished as a yellow minority instead of being 'disappeared' as part of 'lily white' America.
Wouldn't the large number of successful yellows bring attention to 'yellow privilege'? Might it not lead to resentment from both blacks/browns and whites?
Whites might feel they have a real competitor in their midst--after all, there was some white fright about the Amy Chua tiger mother thing.
Might it also not lead to rage among blacks and browns who come to regard yellows as a traitor-minority that got ahead by playing flunky to whites?
According to prevailing PC, US is a white-privileged nation and it's very difficult for non-whites to do well. So, how do we explain many yellows doing pretty good, with some of them doing better than many whites?
Some might say it's because yellows just study/work harder, are smarter, or come from a more advanced culture.
But that is not the favored narrative of PC that says whites are favored by the System while non-whites are kept out by macro and micro means.
Since yellows like to conform to the System, they are in a conundrum. According to the System narrative, yellows should be where blacks and browns are at. But according to reality, many yellows are ahead of whites. So, what are Asians to do? Maybe they feel like Teddy in A.I. when it's called by both kids.
So, yellows prolly appreciate 'disappearing' into whiteness. They don't wanna be resented as 'competitive minority' by whites and don't wanna be hated as the 'traitor minority' by blacks and browns.
They've become the 'invisible' people. Ralph Ellison got it all wrong.
Jews also like to 'disappear' into whiteness when it comes to their great power and privilege. They don't want people to see it as JEWISH privilege but as 'white' privilege. That way, Jews get the prizes but the blame of privilege goes to whites.
Liberal white enclaves also seem to get a pass.
East and South Asians are not apart of the European dispersion. Silicon Vally is very diverse with East and South Asians and Jews. The secrecy in Silicon Vally is like that of elite American schools.
It is not a particularly well kept secret that Microsoft competitively sought IQ in its hiring practices, as does Google. There is no substitute for brains.
People who found successful tech startups have invariably studied what Microsoft and Google did, and they want success to a similar degree so they pursue IQ as well. Having numpties on the team just slows down work, gets you an inferior product and increases management overhead. In a race where network effect gives the winner the lion's share of the revenue, the company founder is foolish to pursue any other strategy.
A secondary effect of this is that while they want very high IQs, they also want them at the cheapest cost. This is why they want to plunder the rest of the world of its leadership and inventor class, without thought to the negative externalities of doing so.
The whole enterprise is so analytical and quantitatively driven in a very Aspie way that Microsoft actually needed to commission a study to find out why their best and brightest were leaving around age 40 after they were super-wealthy. Microsoft wondered how they could retain these very smart people who had enough money to do anything they wanted, and already had half of their working life sucked away to make more money for Microsoft at the expense of family and other interests. I guess Microsoft expected them to keep doing the same thing until they were 65.
"I guess Microsoft expected them to keep doing the same thing until they were 65."
A friend of mine worked 90 hours per week for Microsoft for a dozen years, rising to be head of the NYC office, then dying of cancer in his late 30s.
" Anonymous said...
In the sciences minority students are easier to graduate because they can be helped extensively on their theses, then hired into large research groups where they can be coauthors without having to accomplish much. Engineering is harder. You need to do digital design and coding pretty much in isolation, and if you work too slow or if you make too many errors, you're fired."
I don't know about that. Back when I was doing my PhD in Chemistry, it was true that advisors tended to hold the hand of NAM grad students more- gave them much more office time, helped them interpret results as well as with writing them up, and they were given more opportunities, better funding, etc. But in the end, passing the Prelim- which in my dept at that time at least, was still very heavy on meritocracy- you had to know your shit, had to demonstrate it, etc- was a killer for NAMs. MUCH higher culling off than for Whites and Asians. They'd still wind up walking away with a Master's but no PhD at least. Not sure if it still works that way, but I was pleased to see that at least at some level, sanity still reigned.
"OT but very iSteve-y: Songwriters ratings as they age."
It's very interesting to see some of the graphs. At least one did his best work on his debut album, which must be very frustrating. Most seem to take 3-5 years (or 3-6 albums) to produce their masterpiece.
I noticed this back when I was first exploring the Metallica discography - a steady rise until Master of Puppets and/or And Justice For All, after which a long, steady decline.
Brian Wilson's graph is interesting - an RPG-like* steady increase over numerous albums culminating in "Pet Sounds" (which I've never listened to, but googling it apparently it is number 1 or 2 all time).
This also mirrors writing to some extent - the masterpiece appearing fairly early in the writer's career. Stephen King writes about how frustrating it was for him that he could never write anything better than "The Stand", written 4 years after his first published book back in the 1970s.
*Speaking of RPGs, I note that a realistic aging and injury process is almost never implemented in favor of the more addicting, ever-upward levelling process. The only games I can remember this being done in is Pirates or Jagged Alliance. (The end result is a lot of save scumming, as players prevent injuries by avoiding errors after the fact.)
White nerds are not cool with Asian guys.
Only dumb white nerds are.
I used to work for one of these companies. The employees were all white, or Asian and the founders/management Asian. The honesty and candor that management exhibited was refreshing. We had no AA, no diversity training classes or the slightest pretense that anyone cared about diversity, balancing home/work life or any of that. We were there to build up the company fast and walk away with a ton of stock option money. 60 to 80 hour workweeks, including business travel was on weekends to save airfare and workday time, but after writing the six digit income tax checks I was still able to pay off a house in a top end neighborhood, buy a couple of German luxury cars and still had money left over. I would do it over again in a heartbeat
the american pornography industry is another one which receives no attention of this nature, indeed, almost no regulation or oversight of any kind. it is big enough to attract legal attention, being about 11 or 12 billion dollars a year in size.
perhaps it is considered too sordid to even bother litigating. but there are obvious, ahem, disparate impact lawsuits available here for various, er, underrepresented groups. this is aside from the fact that the language used in titles of the videos is so explicitly racist that were it used in any other context it would probably cause a big lawsuit by itself.
"How the Asians Became White" applies here as well. yellow females are generally counted as white in american pornography, and sex with them is almost universally not considered interracial sex. they only become yellow when they need to be counted as yellow for purposes of some, er, specific DVD title.
speaking of 12 billion dollar industries not really subject to these diversity lawsuits, the US small arms industry is that size these days, and it's staffed almost completely by white men, and conservative white men at that. there are some women and vibrant employees here and there in the factories but by and large it's overwhelmingly comprised of the people who modern american liberals hate the most.
especially at the executive level, it's almost 100% evil white conservative males at these companies. seems like a slam dunk lawsuit for the diversity lawyers.
somebody brought up the energy industry. well, duh. it's all conservative white guys too, but it should be obvious why they don't get sued. it would be a really, really bad idea to antagonize them that way.
*Speaking of RPGs, I note that a realistic aging and injury process is almost never implemented in favor of the more addicting, ever-upward levelling process.
Traveler.
But Silicon Valley is only about brains. It lacks a 'front' that can showcase a diverse bunch of less intelligent people.
Maybe what Silicon Valley should do is create a kind of disneyland mirror version of itself for visitors. It will have rides and all sorts of fun stuff, and it will hire non-whites and non-Jews to play smart computer geeks. So, even if google is mostly smart Jews, googleland will have a black guy playing sergey brin. Just like Hollywood. Problem solved.
Now that was genuinely funny. :)
They don't want native born white Americans outraged.
What is this "native born white American outrage," and how is it invoked? Without involving Israel, I mean.
Anyway, I thought Diversity Is Our Strength ... so, how come the celebrated supermen of Silicon Valley, like the late Steve Jobs, don't agree? Do they know something we don't know?
I'd love to imagine a white liberal reading that and choking with anger, but those people are such practiced mental compartmentalizers (when they're not outright liars) I suppose it's like water off a duck's back for them.
Check out Big Brother editing over at Wikipedia on Steve Jobs's page. On October 11th, 2011, I read this: "Simpson is the biological sister of the late Steve Jobs. Jobs, the elder sibling, was placed for adoption in 1955 by her then-unmarried mother because Joanne's father reportedly opposed her marriage to a Syrian. Their parents married ten months later, after the death of Joanne's father.[6] Simpson's 1987 novel, Anywhere But Here, is dedicated to her mother and "my brother Steve."[6] She first met Jobs in 1984 and they kept their relationship a secret until 1986 when she invited him to a party promoting Anywhere But Here where she revealed that they were siblings; Jobs was 32.[14] The two of them forged a relationship where he regularly visited her in Manhattan. Simpson said "My brother and I are very close, I admire him enormously." Jobs said "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days."[15] The interactions between Simpson and Jobs, and learning how similar they were, had a major effect on Jobs. Steve Lohr of The New York Times wrote "The effect of all this on Jobs seems to be a certain sense of calming fatalism — less urgency to control his immediate environment and a greater trust that life’s outcomes are, to a certain degree, wired in the genes";[14] as conversely, a few years earlier, Jobs had been staunch on most of his character having been formed from his experiences, and not his birth parents or genetics (Jobs frequently referred to his adoptive parents as "the only real parents" that he ever had).[15] From Simpson, Jobs would learn more details about their parents, and he invited his birth mother Joanne Simpson to a few events.[16]"
The quotes above comes from an NYT article in 1997: "His adulthood discovery of his sister forced Jobs to rethink why people's lives turn out as they do. For years, he considered himself ''an environmentalist,'' believing that a person's success or failure is largely governed by circumstance, upbringing, timing and luck. As a world view, it seemed logical enough to the young Steve Jobs. He happened to grow up in Silicon Valley at a time when the ingredients of the personal computer industry came together. As a 12-year-old, on a whim -- and with an early display of characteristic chutzpah -- Jobs called William Hewlett, then president of Hewlett-Packard, at his home in Palo Alto. Jobs was building a frequency counter and needed some parts. Hewlett chatted with Jobs for 20 minutes, agreed to send him the parts and gave him a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, the company regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. About the same time, Jobs met Stephen Wozniak, a gifted young engineer, and a decade later they started Apple in the Jobs family garage.
When he found Mona Simpson, who had grown up in entirely different circumstances, Jobs felt as if they had been part of some genetics experiment. He was struck by the similarity in their intensity, traits and appearance. As he was growing close to Simpson, he was also getting to know his daughter Lisa, whose early years were spent apart from Jobs, and watching his two younger children grow up. ''I used to be way over on the nurture side, but I've swung way over to the nature side,'' he says. ''And it's because of Mona and having kids. My daughter is 14 months old, and it's already pretty clear what her personality is.''
The effect of all this on Jobs seems to be a certain sense of calming fatalism -- less urgency to control his immediate environment and a greater trust that life's outcomes are, to a certain degree, wired in the genes."
But the whole quote is gone now. The word 'gene' does not even appear in the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
Tech's exemption comes from the exemption that the power elite wrote for themselves. It was mostly a lucky coincidence I'd say, but if they go after that they have to risk their own sacred cows getting gored.
I've really wondered why the Republican national party doesn't just go full-blown Machiavellian in their strategy. Pick the states that are reliable now or can be made to be reliable and keep business as usual going there. Pick the states that are on the fence and make them the recipients of goodies but make it extremely clear which party gave it to them. Then pick the ones like New York and California that are unlikely to ever be reliable, and set about crucifying them. In the course of crucifying them, crucify their top industries as well because those tend to be very disproportionately Democrat. Think media, finance, tech, law, things like that.
They want high taxes? Punish them with those taxes. They want lots of social programs for illegal immigrants? Make their states illegal immigrant paradises and draw them away from places like Texas. They want enforced diversity in hiring? Slap their companies with diversity lawsuits. They want onerous environmental regs? Jack up their cost of living. Affordable housing? Drop housing projects in their whitopias. Anything you can do to make their lives worse, do it worse than the Democrats would do it. The plan here? Punish those who won't vote for you and force cracks in the Democrat rainbow coalition.
"Neither of those, Steve. The powers that be are simply aware that there isn't enough cognitive firepower amongst NAMs to make any headway into increasing diversity in Silicon Valley. Attempting to force diversity in that field would be a colossally embarrassing failure and might even lead a few people to question ethnic cognitive equality, the worst of mankind's sins."
Bingo.
You could get a clue of minority percentage for any occupation by going to a college campus and looking in a classroom. When I walked into an intermediate accounting class I signed up for on the first day, I was surprised that there were 60 white students and only 2 black students. Now that I'm in the field, I find that's representative.
Surely the ends of "diversity" are served by having a diverse range of company hiring policies, all the way from the extremely diveree at one end of the scale to not at all diverse at the other. Meta-diversity!
Silicon Valley engineer here. It's not true that engineering jobs, software engineering at least, require very high intelligence. True, some very smart people write software, but the average employed programmer isn't all that impressive.
The average employed Indian or Chinese software engineer correspondingly falls far short of the pretense behind the H1B program, i.e. that these people are doing jobs that existing Americans can't be found to do. Yep, it's of a piece with the rest of the "jobs Americans won't do" propaganda.
The thing with computer programming is that it's not constrained by physical principles the way electrical, chemical, mechanical and civil engineering are. When it comes to (most) software, you can get away with doing things in all kinds of ass-backward inefficient ways, the equivalents to an upside-down bridge with large rubber bands to hold down the cars and maybe lots of little men with pails to keep the water out. (That's not true if you are working close to the hardware or your program's requirements in terms of storage and performance are close to the physical capabilities of the machine it runs on, but that applies to a vanishingly small fraction of the software that's being written.) For more on this, look up Norman Matloff.
You can't be total dunce, but you can make a good living here if you're, oh, maybe IQ 115 and it helps if you have a good memory for detail. If that describes you, then to be sure you aren't going to be given the cutting-edge stuff. But a typical commercial software product, however cutting-edge, typically contains a small core of cleverness that's wrapped up in much, much more fairly boring and straightforward code to make the product easy to use and install, configurable, superficially attractive (a nice web interface that is), and so forth. All of which, by the way, can be written really well, if handed to the right person, but plodding along with inefficient but well-debugged code does the job too.
And not everyone who's called a "software engineer" even programs. We have our quality assurance people (lots of them) who can be (and often are) quite average. And there are the system and network administrators, who are basically doing blue-collar work that just doesn't get your hands dirty.
Now, coming back to the "diversity" angle, even if the intelligence requirements in this business aren't all that high, they are high enough that any African-American capable of succeeding as a programmer is smart enough to get an Affirmative Action job doing something way better paid and way more prestigious. Like investment banking, management consulting, partner at Big Law, etc. Because face it (we sure do in the industry), being a "software engineer" doesn't exactly have the girls begging you to take them. (Not true of the immigrant Indians though; for them, this is a high prestige job. Which is why they're all married by age 28, where most of the white programmers remain unmarried, it seems, for ever.)
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