Maybe if the trees are planted correctly and are still alive, the government would requires the farmers to water them or face punishment, leaving no water for the crops.
The median income for a man in 1940 was $956. In 2010, the median income was $33,276. Women in 1940 earned 62 cents for every dollar a man earned. In 2010, women earned 74 cents for every dollar a man earned. In 2019 the income numbers probably has grown by another 20% just because of inflation.
So basically education cost grows only slightly faster than median income. Given the biggest portion of the cost is human capital, this makes economical sense.
I don't think not using their products is a solution. Even if you don't use facebook, your friends and colleagues have your name and phone number on their phone, and your friends upload photos with your face in them. You may also share the wifi with family members so facebook knows where you are indirectly.
As we are all parts of the society that we can't escape from, regulation matters a lot to everybody who may or may not use facebook products.
95% false positive rate is extremely good for surveillance, as the cost of false positive is low (wasted efforts by the police). That means for every 20 people the police investigate, one is a target.
Algorithmic traders focus on short-term market movements. The investment decisions described in the study are about long-term foundamental of companies. As long as enough investors prefer cash flow to capital reinvestment on the earning report, the strategy will continue to work.
Cutting costs and investments can easily dress up short-term financial performance at the cost of long-term productivity. But it will look good for investors who don't understand the underlying matter and rely on simplistic metrics to make investment decisions.
I remember back in college when I applied for a job in a multi-national company, I didn't get a math screening quiz that applicants from outside of United States had to take. The quiz was pretty easy middle school math that would take 15 minutes to complete.
It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing. If the quiz were carried out in US, the company would need to prepare some report stating that math is essential to the job, which would be very cumbersome and costly to do scientifically.
I found it ridiculous as the position clearly needed math and I believe basic arithmatic is a valuable skill to ask for majority of the jobs, even for low-skill positions like cashier at Walmart. While eliminating discrimination is a great cause, all the band-aids to make the issue look less bad is shameful. Instead of improving basic education for minority communities (which costs some money now with high return from enhanced labor productivity and less welfare), our governments/society artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
I'm not a lawyer either. But I remember that explicit racial quota are illegal.But in another precedence, diversity is considered a valid objective. So having preference that favor minority for the sake of diversity is OK. That is the case for a lot of hiring and admission processes now: No explicit quota, but a soft preference towards diversity, which usually means favoring under-represented racial and gender groups.
If I understand it correctly, it is only discrimination if employer cannot demonstrate the criteria are needed for work performance. Race and gender are not related to performance in most work categories. In the case of body types in sports, they are.