Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

How Long Employees Stay at Tech Companies

This shows <a href = “http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-tech-companies-2017-8”>how long employees stay at major tech companies</a>: Not having worked for a tech company, I found these tenures to be pretty short.  I Googled retention at Google (I’m trying to stay on their good side) and found an article suggesting the median tenure at Google is 1.1 years. I imagine […]

Homicides Over Time, Plus a Question About Drugs

I was looking for information on drug related murders and inadvertently stumbled on this old Bureau of Justice of Statistics report. There’s a lot of interesting information in it. One fascinating table is this: For context, here is the population breakdown over a period that includes the timespan in the table. I’m not sure this […]

The United Nations Peddling Racism and Sexism

The United Nations peddles garden variety sexism and racism disguised as data. Case in point is the the 2014 United Nations Global Homicide Book. Figure 1.3 and Map 1.2 (which promote racism), or Figure 5.6 (which perpetuates sexist notions) are particularly problematic. I for one refudiate the report.

Symbols of Oppression Being Ignored

The Confederacy stood for the forcible subjugation of other people. If there is a benefit to honoring the concept of or symbols for the Confederacy I don’t see it. Taking these symbols out of the public sphere is a net positive, even if some people are able to simultaneously a) disassociate those symbols from the […]

More on the Gender Gap in STEM

I found a piece from two years ago on the notoriously far right, alt-right Public Broadcasting Service website entitled Column: Why the STEM gender gap is overblown by Denise Cummins, a research psychologist. She begins by noting that men don’t outnumber women in all areas of STEM, and she provides this graph:

Meanwhile, In Australia

Meanwhile, in Australia: A LOCAL council has banned the construction of a synagogue in Bondi because it could be a terrorist target, in a shock move that religious leaders say has caved in to Islamic extremism and created a dangerous precedent. The decision, which has rocked the longstanding Jewish community in the iconic suburb, was […]