Author: Zubon

You may recall hearing that there is a wage gap, usually something around 27 cents on the dollar. That is the difference between median wage earners, not men and women with comparable qualifications working comparable jobs. Once you take into account things like education, experience, hours worked, and years of continuous work, the gap drops to a few cents (depending on your regression). The remaining difference is explained by the fact that men are stupid.

Men are more likely to sacrifice quality of life for a higher wage. Men take jobs with longer hours, in worse working conditions, and with a higher risk of being killed. Women tend to prefer flexible scheduling, comfort and convenience in the workplace, and fringe benefits. Ask 20 men and 20 women how much they would need to get paid for (1) an additional 5% risk of getting maimed this year and (2) to work without air conditioning, and see which sex comes back with the lower dollar amount. If you said, “My job doesn’t have air conditioning,” you are probably male, and you took the money.

Note which of those things above are taxable. Just one: money. You paid for your new video card with after-tax dollars; the hours you spent earning those, your female equivalent was already logged in and leveling her warlock, tax-free. She found some crafting components while leveling, which you bought at the auction house with gold you bought from a farmer. She won twice before you started playing.

Men are helpless slaves to the big number, the shiny object. You are grinding for hours until you cannot see, while your wife has a good time laughing with people at the tavern. When the raid starts, they will take her over you because she plays a healer. She won twice again.

: Zubon

I need to work around programmers or engineers so that I am no longer unofficial tech support for the office. I need co-workers who understand the power of right-clicking. I spent a while today explaining that you can have multiple folders with the same name, and if you save a file in the folder on your C: drive, it will not be in the folder of the same name on the shared drive. No, that is not a conflict between Word and your e-mail program.

At my next job, I am telling them I don’t know how to type. “The computer has speakers, why won’t it respond to voice commands?”

: Zubon

Via Jonas Lamis at the Singularity Institute blog, Adam Sarner issues some predictions on life going virtual and how your personal online agent will help you interact with a virtual world.

If you are not familiar with the idea of what he calls a “persona bot,” think of it as a virtual mini-you. You tell it what sort of filters to apply to the world, and it finds things that you want to see. You already have much of that functionality in parts: spam filters get rid of e-mail you do not want, ad blockers remove ads you do not want, feeds bring you blog messages you do want, Amazon recommends other books or movies you might like, Google Alerts runs searches for you automatically. There are dozens of competing sites that want to help you find the next thing that might interest you based on your current preferences. Combine all that into one virtual agent who gives you an info dump when you check in; if it makes mistakes, tell it what to do differently.

This sort of thing reminds me that everyone needs to read Permutation City, and I need to read more Greg Egan generally. If you have other citations to contemplations of our virtual future, comments are open.

: Zubon