Food for thought, something can be political without directly referencing domestic politics and political parties. Definition: "the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power."
Discussing structural inequality is inherently political because it is a discussion about power.
However, I disagree with parent. You cannot have a diverse workforce that numbers the thousands and expect there not to be a discussion about power structures and inequity. Imagine if you applied that lens of thinking to a company that employs both blacks and whites in the Jim Crow era-- who loses?
Where would we be today if people stayed silent about discrimination in the workplace and society at large (racial, gender, sexual orientation)? Silence is a privilege. Silence is what perpetuates power inequity.
Silence says to me: "My six figure paycheck is more important to me than having an opinion on something that is negatively impacting my colleague and their demographic."
Silence is something oppressed communities do not have the privilege of. Black people simply cannot be silent when they fear for their lives at every traffic stop. LGBTQ+ people cannot be silent when politicians are constantly trying to undermine their human rights in the name of religious freedom. Women cannot be silent when politicians do the same to their bodies, and the workplace constantly undermines their value.
One could easily argue that having the freedom to express an opinion on topics for which only one opinion is acceptable is much more privileged position to be in.
> so any bio-accumulation of heavy metals or similar should be minimal
What is "minimal"? Bioaccumulation isn't a magic meter that says "everyting below this trophic level is safe to eat." It depends on the persistent toxin ( I choose the word toxin because bioaccumulation can occur for chemicals beyond heavy metals, like organochlorine pesticides ) that you're looking at, and what is the safe dose for humans.
E.g. let's say you have pesticide A and pesticide B. Cattle eat a certain amount of feed per day. At time of slaughter, pesticide A and B have a certain amount of concentration in fat tissue. It doesn't matter which has the highest concentration, it matters which is less safe to humans and at what concentration it harms us when it accumulates in our own tissues.
You'll see a similar thing in branding and advertising. For all the new yorkers on here, have you all seen the consumer brand ads on the subway? Almost every brand looks the same.
I'm imagining it has to do with the way designers work. They generally have stakeholders moodboard (basically creating a pinterest board with inspiration from different brands), and then they create a similar "feeling".
As humans, we're kind of evolved to recognize patterns, so when we start seeing the same branding art direction it stands out to us and we may try to conflate some deeper meaning to it. But in reality, it's just a few brands that share the same branding art direction probably because some execs liked the way it looked and felt and asked their designers to do something similar.
Unless the original author doesn't want to endure going to court over this for a settlement check but still wants to try to invoke change by telling the world (or at least all Google employees) her story.
Even if we aren't irrigating crops directly with seawater, we may have to engineer crops to thrive on high saline irrigation anyways, as there is seawater leeching into aquifers in many agricultural centers around the world, including coastal California. As sea levels rise, we should expect this to be a larger problem and plan for it.
I work in the agtech space and the way we look at indoor farms are that for now they are only a solution for expensive speciality crops (leafy vegetables). There's a lot of value in improving the production of leafy greens near urban centers (where tech workers will pay $15 for a salad), and that's why all the VC money is pouring in.
But, indoor farming is not well suited for calorie-rich foods (think grains, corn, potatoes, etc). Many of those crops are not suited for hydroponics. They need soil and lots of sunlight. Corn roots grow down to almost 7 feet in the soil. Attempting to grow these crops out of soil and sunlight is incredibly inefficient and expensive.
In order for indoor farms to feed the majority of the world, we believe there needs to be more than one breakthrough than just the indoor farm system itself, including a breakthrough in the production of energy (enough to replace all the solar energy provided by the nuclear reactor in the sky that we use in agriculture today), a breakthrough in the production or collection of water that irrigates the millions of acres of land by rain clouds, and the biological breakthrough of high calorie foods that are adapted to grow hydroponically.
We also believe that the same money spent developing indoor farm systems is better spent developing better adapted crops and researching more efficient and sustainable agriculture practices.
What if Github was specifically optimizing for that end-goal though? It is hard to definite what productivity means unless you had inside knowledge of the goals of the business. Amazon took 14 years after their IPO to turn a profit, but that isn't to say that their employees were not productive. In the same vein, Github may have never turned a profit, but if that was not the goal, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.
>, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.
Yes, Github remote employees were productive in an absolute sense. The employees obviously created a usable website with enterprise customers before MS acquired them.
Instead of absolute productivity, the issue is if remote worker is more productive relative to office workers. (See the 3 repeated claims from the author I quoted in my first post.)
What we want is for Github's remote workforce to demonstrate such obvious superiority that it causes Bloomberg/WSJ/HBR to write articles explaining how business managers are incompetent idiots for not fully adopting remote work. But that didn't happen because Github wasn't successful enough to influence the business landscape like that.
In contrast, the business media has already written plenty of stories about Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity of workers. So far, influential business publications have not highlighted Github's remote culture as a competitive advantage.
> Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity
Out of curiosity, are there any actual documented improvements, or is it the same "this makes us more productive" that we're talking about the remote promoters spouting?
Discussing structural inequality is inherently political because it is a discussion about power.
However, I disagree with parent. You cannot have a diverse workforce that numbers the thousands and expect there not to be a discussion about power structures and inequity. Imagine if you applied that lens of thinking to a company that employs both blacks and whites in the Jim Crow era-- who loses?