> Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.
How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?
* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.
* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.
* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.
* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)
Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.
> I have found that more likely than not, nobody actually notices that you aren't working as hard as all the 10x developers that have no life and the people who imitate them.
In my experience, people do notice, but there's nothing to be done about it. Companies, unless they pay top dollar, can't expect 10x performance out of their developers (because 10x devs are so rare) - they expect and are fine with just 1x, and anyone delivering 10x is a nice bonus for them. In other words, managers are realistic and know what the money they spend on workforce can buy them.
> Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD
I'm not convinced it works like that. When a foreign country buys something from another foreign country using USD, the seller country then receives that USD. The seller country then use those dollars do buy something else from a third country - unless they have imbalanced trade and keep accumulating the dollars, like China does. But, in general case, there's only a need for a limited number of USD in circulation to serve as "working capital" for all foreign exchange. There's no need to keep getting new dollars, as the old ones get recirculated.
Until now, EU countries saw US as alligned with them, so saw no need to wall off US social media and start their own, with their own propaganda, like Russia and China did.
There are plenty of things to invent still, but perhaps no longer in software. Every other field - mining, railroads, car making, chemistry etc. had its huge boom period sparkled by breakthrough innovations, and later settled into a mature field where not as much is happening. Perhaps it's software industry's time for that.
Software is not, itself, an industry, it is a layer on top of other industries, many of which still use outdated processes and paradigms. It's just that software engineers build what they know, mainly B2C and apps for other SWEs, not actually for these other industries.
It's like saying the "engineering industry" is maturing when in reality there's no such thing, there are engineers for every such industry, like mechanical, nuclear, etc.
How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?
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