This, of course, it pretty much the way it ought to be, at least for current employees: Retirement benefits fully funded, instead of vague promises.
Of course, since this money is paid to the government, instead of being put in an independent fund, the government will just steal it and replace it with IOUs
In order to really be useful, Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power. This huge solar peak they have during the daytime needs to be distributed at least into the evening hours, and ideally into the morning of the following day.
Distributed solar makes sense, at least partically because the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses.
Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense. Charging and discharging batteries is - depending on the situation - somewhere between 60% and 80% efficient, dropping as the batteries age. The batteries will have to be replaced every few years, which further decreases the efficiency. Gigawatt-hours of batteries - we are talking - rough estimate - around 20,000 tons of batteries per GWh. That a lot of nasty chemical, not to mention manufacturing and recycling costs.
Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full, and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.
How do you figure that a college education is a good bargain? Tuition prices have vastly outpaced inflation, mainly due to permissive government loan programs (throw money into a system, watch prices rise, economics at work). Meanwhile, because a college degree is the new high school diploma, the college offerings in - let's be blunt - useless fields have expanded. Here is some data from DOE:
Degrees with, um, limited employment prospects, change since 1985 - Visual and performing arts: up 150% - Interdisciplinary studies: up 175% - Recreation, leisure, fitness: up 620% - Liberal arts, general studies: up 120% - Family science (wtf?): up 50% - Social science & history: up 80%
Meanwhile, technical degrees with good employment prospects, again since 1985 - Mathematics: no change - Engineering: down 5% - Computer science: down 5%
The only real exception seems to be in medicine and healthcare, which is eminently employable and is also up quite a lot. Otherwise, our colleges seem to be producing more and more well-qualified hamburger flippers.
p.s. I didn't mention business, although that is the most popular degree by far. Up 50%, whichever category you care to place it in.
There are two groups arguing here - I think both may be missing the point.
Group 1: The passwords belong to your employer, turn them over. It's his fault, because he refused.
Group 2: He may have been paranoid, but he was really just following policy: don't give passwords to unauthorized people.
Regardless of which side you are on, ask yourself this: How would this scenario have played out if he worked for a private company? Consider that, in the end, he *did* hand over the passwords to the mayor, i.e., the "big boss". What would a private company have done?
- They wouldn't be claiming $1.5 million in damages - an absurd figure.
- They wouldn't try to prosecute him and throw him in jail. Bitter firings happen, life goes on.
- The *only* likely retribution would be: "don't use us as a reference".
Sending the guy to jail and suing him for more than his net worth? It takes a government to waste resources on that sort of idiotic vengeance.
TSA has been looking for an excuse to arm it's people. Watch them try to turn this incident into that excuse. Mind you, arming ex-hamburger flippers will endanger the public more than protect it, but arming TSA goons would be a huge step in proper bureaucratic empire building.
Want protection from nutcases? Sorry, that's not gonna happen - in a nation of more than 300 million people, there will always be nutcases.
Want to reduce the target-rich environment that is the TSA checkpoint? That's easy, get rid of TSA and let the airports and airlines deal with security.
Who said I liked Bush? When the Shrub started trying to sell an invasion of Iraq, I distinctly recall calling for his impeachment.
This isn't Democrats vs. Republicans - the two parties are two sides of the same clipped coin. They're all members of a particular "elite" group that needs to be run out of town on a rail.
Like a spoiled kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Obama needs a good spanking. Amongst genuine "small government" and "limited government" types, this just leads to feelings of frustration and despair. The Tea Party movement seemed promising, until it was hijacked by the religious right. What other chance is there, really, to reign in the US government? It's no wonder that talks about secession and revolution are kicking up again.
As pointed out elsewhere, Facebook has the same odd puritanical streak as found throughout the USA. You can watch people being beheaded, but they still firmly forbid pictures of breastfeeding moms. The sight of a female breast might excite prurient passions, whereas watching a murder is just spiffy.
I was under the impression that most type 1 diabetes was cause by genetics. The brief article doesn't mention this at all. Does it then take both - genetic predisposition plus a virus? Or are these two entirely separate causes?
"Granted, I do not know of a superior way to track people"
How about this for an idea: don't track them.
Let's be real: These credit reporting agencies bring zero added value to the system. If you want a loan, go to the bank, show them certified copies of your pay statements, sign a legal document listing your other debts (or whatever other information the bank needs for a decision), and that ought to be it. There is zero need for anyone to know that you were three days late on a credit card payment in March of 2007.
These agencies are a blight. They are in the same category as Facebook: you are not the customer, your personal data is a product that they sell to anyone that will pay for it.
Credit reporting ought to have everyone up in arms anyway. Every company an American does business with sends personal, financial details to these agencies. No permission required. The agencies themselves have a shared monopoly, but the size of their market is static. So they are always looking for quasi-legal ways to make even more money by selling your personal data. Sometimes quasi-illegal.
The whole system stinks. Americans need to get themselves some privacy rights...
As Curunir_wolf points out, the House is acting entirely within the Constitution. That's where funding bills must start, and if they refuse to fund the government, well, the government has no money to spend.
I also find your comment "That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down" rather strange. In fact, many of the agencies shutting down are, in fact, wastes of money. Closing the agencies permanently would be a very good thing; perhaps the furlough of the employees could be the first step.
Is this a bad thing for the individuals involved? Sure, losing your job always sucks for the individual. The big picture is different: getting nearly a million federal employees off the public teat would be a tremendous first step. Follow it up with a couple million government contract positions, plus the complete elimination of the above-mentioned federal agencies.
This was an FBI interview. The only record allowed at an FBI interview are the FBI's notes. You are not allowed any other record. So the record can say whatever they want it to say after the fact.
The fed's started this high profile case against her, for whatever reason, and made a huge media splash. When it turned out that she hadn't actually done anything wrong, they were about to be left looking stupid. Can't have that, can we? So they nailed her on this completely irrelevant charge of having said something incorrect, during an interview where the only record was the set of notes taken by the people interviewing her.
Even if the notes are accurate, what's with prosecuting someone for saying something incorrect? It may be a lie, it may be merely a mistake. You are not under oath, often the FBI intimidates people into giving interviews without their lawyers present. It's a sick business.
Just how this happened, and why people put up with it, is something I cannot explain. Sure, Texas has it's share of religious whack jobs, but really no more than (and possibly fewer than) many other states a bit farther to the north and east.
What's worse is that Texas has also become the state that many other states look to, to set a baseline for what textbooks their schools will use.
Art makes a great hobby - zillions of people play music, write short stories, act in amateur theater groups, whatever. This is wonderful for culture. Frankly I often prefer a heartfelt amateur performance to an overly-polished professional group going through the motions of the same damn thing for the thousandth time.
My heart does not bleed for professional artists. Most of them need to get a real job to support their hobby, the same as the rest of us...
You make a really excellent point. Sadly, we can only react at this point. It seems to me that there are three useful reactions:
- Keep up the political and media pressure. Don't let this issue die in the news cycle. Americans can apply internal pressure; those of us elsewhere can do our bits to keep up international pressure. For example: I will be integrating the NSA as part of a larger Internet security discussion in at least two of my university lectures in the coming semester.
- Promote open-source software for all security purposes. While not everyone can audit the software, there are enough people out there who can and will. The NSA cannot predict who will do so, and hence cannot have them all in its pay.
- Refuse to use any American IT services where security is important. This is not only sensible, it also applies economic pressure to companies that can lobby in Washington.
- Most other first-world countries have actual privacy laws. Which are actually enforced. The US is unusual in having no such laws. The fourth amendment is supposed to restrain at least the government, but lack of enforcement makes it pretty meaningless.
- If you go outside of first world countries, with the possible exceptions of China and Russia, the governments simply do not have the resources to spy on their entire population.
So the US is unique: A lack of effective privacy legislation combined with a government that does have the resources to monitor essentially everyone.
Which is exactly backwards, at least above the primary school level. Want to teach math? You ought to have a degree in math. Physics? Degree in physics. The pedagogical stuff can be picked up on the side and checked with a specialist exam.
At 6th grade and above, teachers who have not actually studied in the area of teaching will be outpaced and embarrassed by the more gifted students in their class. I had a teacher like that - I was so f***ing bored in her class (as was a friend of mine) that (in order to avoid falling asleep) we sat quietly in the back and wrote notes to each other. The fact that we could always answer the questions she randomly threw at us during class infuriated her, so she seated us on opposite sides of a tall cabinet. We responded as maturely as our ages (12 or so) by throwing notes over the cabinet.
Had the teacher actually known and cared about math, she would have given us some sort of challenge - we'd have dug in and been quiet. Since she quite clearly did not even particularly like math, well...
Three years later, I was in the "slow" math class because I had phased out. However, my parents had moved me to a private school, and that teacher was a mathematician. I saw some stupid typo he made on the blackboard, corrected it probably as snarkily as you would expect. He immediately realized what was going on, and sent me to the advanced class down the hall. Man, the teachers all knew their stuff, and really enjoyed teaching it. What a revelation!
Above primary school, education degrees are irrelevant. A couple of classes in child psychology and teaching techniques will do. Training in, and a love of the subject you are teaching is all that should matter. Which is one of the biggest reasons that most American public schools suck.
Seriously. If they want to be taken seriously as offering a service proof against the NSA, they need to not be an American company and to not have any physical US operations. Otherwise a secret FISA order (e.g., issue a client update that sends the encryption keys along with the next batch of data), and their customers are screwed.
No cloud service (or any other service) in the US can be trusted.
Put them on trial? You just said that they have not violated any laws, so, what is a "war crime"?
Seriously, war crimes trials reek of vengeance and have nothing whatsoever to do with justice. Take the loser of some conflict or other, accuse them of "crimes" (even though they violated no law), drag them through a court process and sentence them. Generally speaking, this is simply revenge by the winner on the loser.
Otherwise, we should prosecute pretty much the entire American government, top level military and SES staff for war crimes. Complicity in torture, in unprovoked attacks on sovereign nations, on detaining prisoners indefinitely, etc, etc..
To the contrary, once permanent colonies are established, people will adapt. Just look at the extreme environments that people inhabit on earth, from Sahara to the Arctic.
It's past time for humans to be out there, exploring and exploiting the resources of the solar system.
There is actually very little discrepancy between the pay of men and women - if you do the study correctly. The problem is: This is very non-PC to say. Heck, read the (purely PC) Wikipedia entry. One sentence: "In the United States, the gender pay gap is measured as the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers." Note that there is absolutely no mention of comparing years of experience, or choice of job, or anything else. It's just a raw "who makes more" without accounting for lifestyle choices.
There are two reasons for the gender pay gap: First, women pursuing careers tend (more often than men) to interrupt these careers for child-raising. Second, also for child-raising, more women take jobs that have little or no career potential (secretary, receptionist, etc.). The few studies that try to account for this show little or no difference in pay.
Take a hypothetical example: Jane and Joe both graduate from college and start working as programmers. Jane has two children, take maternity leave both times, and works part-time until both children are in school. Joe doesn't, because his wife has taken the brunt of the child-raising. In total, Joe may well have a solid five years more experience than Jane. On top of that, his company will have been able to use him for whatever projects came up, whereas Jane's possibilities will have been limited because of her part-time status and inability to travel.
Now fast forward to when both of them are 40 years old. Jane will, on average, make less than Joe. However, it turns out that she probably makes about what Joe did five years ago - i.e., the earning difference pretty much accounts for the experience difference. On top of that, Jane's may well have missed some opportunities entirely - she may well hit a "glass ceiling", because she wasn't available for some of those critical projects.
I have a friend (a guy) who decided to raise his children while his wife worked. He also never had much of a career. Life is about choices, and guess what: you can't have it all.
What I find irritating: We don't have to change the gender distribution in fields where women dominate (nursing, teaching, etc.). The only pressure is to change the gender distribution in careers where women are underrepresented. As near as I can tell, this is driven by people who have zero clue about the tech field.
I'm involved in a project just now where both programmers are women. That's great and I'm happy to work with them. Back in the office where I do most of my work, all of the programmers - every single one of them - is a guy. That's great and I'm happy to work with them.
I keep hearing claims of misogyny and sexual harassment. I've been in the tech field for more than 30 years, and I'm just not seeing it. Sure there are idiots out there, but I see no evidence that this is a mainstream problem. What I do see are general differences in technical affinity. Just like more men than women enjoy working on the guts of cars, it's also the case that more men than women like working on the guts of computers. Probably evolutionary, possibly cultural - either way, why is it a problem?
TL;DR - When it comes to professional relationships, can we just judge people as individuals, and forget about their gender?
Guys, lots of other countries use incinerators for non-recyclable stuff. You get rid of it, and get electricity and heat as a bonus. Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
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This, of course, it pretty much the way it ought to be, at least for current employees: Retirement benefits fully funded, instead of vague promises.
Of course, since this money is paid to the government, instead of being put in an independent fund, the government will just steal it and replace it with IOUs
In order to really be useful, Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power. This huge solar peak they have during the daytime needs to be distributed at least into the evening hours, and ideally into the morning of the following day.
Distributed solar makes sense, at least partically because the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses.
Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense. Charging and discharging batteries is - depending on the situation - somewhere between 60% and 80% efficient, dropping as the batteries age. The batteries will have to be replaced every few years, which further decreases the efficiency. Gigawatt-hours of batteries - we are talking - rough estimate - around 20,000 tons of batteries per GWh. That a lot of nasty chemical, not to mention manufacturing and recycling costs.
Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full, and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.
How do you figure that a college education is a good bargain? Tuition prices have vastly outpaced inflation, mainly due to permissive government loan programs (throw money into a system, watch prices rise, economics at work). Meanwhile, because a college degree is the new high school diploma, the college offerings in - let's be blunt - useless fields have expanded. Here is some data from DOE:
Degrees with, um, limited employment prospects, change since 1985
- Visual and performing arts: up 150%
- Interdisciplinary studies: up 175%
- Recreation, leisure, fitness: up 620%
- Liberal arts, general studies: up 120%
- Family science (wtf?): up 50%
- Social science & history: up 80%
Meanwhile, technical degrees with good employment prospects, again since 1985
- Mathematics: no change
- Engineering: down 5%
- Computer science: down 5%
The only real exception seems to be in medicine and healthcare, which is eminently employable and is also up quite a lot. Otherwise, our colleges seem to be producing more and more well-qualified hamburger flippers.
p.s. I didn't mention business, although that is the most popular degree by far. Up 50%, whichever category you care to place it in.
There are two groups arguing here - I think both may be missing the point.
Group 1: The passwords belong to your employer, turn them over. It's his fault, because he refused.
Group 2: He may have been paranoid, but he was really just following policy: don't give passwords to unauthorized people.
Regardless of which side you are on, ask yourself this: How would this scenario have played out if he worked for a private company? Consider that, in the end, he *did* hand over the passwords to the mayor, i.e., the "big boss". What would a private company have done?
- They wouldn't be claiming $1.5 million in damages - an absurd figure.
- They wouldn't try to prosecute him and throw him in jail. Bitter firings happen, life goes on.
- The *only* likely retribution would be: "don't use us as a reference".
Sending the guy to jail and suing him for more than his net worth? It takes a government to waste resources on that sort of idiotic vengeance.
TSA has been looking for an excuse to arm it's people. Watch them try to turn this incident into that excuse. Mind you, arming ex-hamburger flippers will endanger the public more than protect it, but arming TSA goons would be a huge step in proper bureaucratic empire building.
Want protection from nutcases? Sorry, that's not gonna happen - in a nation of more than 300 million people, there will always be nutcases.
Want to reduce the target-rich environment that is the TSA checkpoint? That's easy, get rid of TSA and let the airports and airlines deal with security.
Who said I liked Bush? When the Shrub started trying to sell an invasion of Iraq, I distinctly recall calling for his impeachment.
This isn't Democrats vs. Republicans - the two parties are two sides of the same clipped coin. They're all members of a particular "elite" group that needs to be run out of town on a rail.
...but I repeat myself.
Like a spoiled kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Obama needs a good spanking. Amongst genuine "small government" and "limited government" types, this just leads to feelings of frustration and despair. The Tea Party movement seemed promising, until it was hijacked by the religious right. What other chance is there, really, to reign in the US government? It's no wonder that talks about secession and revolution are kicking up again.
As pointed out elsewhere, Facebook has the same odd puritanical streak as found throughout the USA. You can watch people being beheaded, but they still firmly forbid pictures of breastfeeding moms. The sight of a female breast might excite prurient passions, whereas watching a murder is just spiffy.
I was under the impression that most type 1 diabetes was cause by genetics. The brief article doesn't mention this at all. Does it then take both - genetic predisposition plus a virus? Or are these two entirely separate causes?
"Granted, I do not know of a superior way to track people"
How about this for an idea: don't track them.
Let's be real: These credit reporting agencies bring zero added value to the system. If you want a loan, go to the bank, show them certified copies of your pay statements, sign a legal document listing your other debts (or whatever other information the bank needs for a decision), and that ought to be it. There is zero need for anyone to know that you were three days late on a credit card payment in March of 2007.
These agencies are a blight. They are in the same category as Facebook: you are not the customer, your personal data is a product that they sell to anyone that will pay for it.
Credit reporting ought to have everyone up in arms anyway. Every company an American does business with sends personal, financial details to these agencies. No permission required. The agencies themselves have a shared monopoly, but the size of their market is static. So they are always looking for quasi-legal ways to make even more money by selling your personal data. Sometimes quasi-illegal.
The whole system stinks. Americans need to get themselves some privacy rights...
tl;dr - if you want to be a huge success in business, you need to be an a**hole
As Curunir_wolf points out, the House is acting entirely within the Constitution. That's where funding bills must start, and if they refuse to fund the government, well, the government has no money to spend.
I also find your comment "That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down" rather strange. In fact, many of the agencies shutting down are, in fact, wastes of money. Closing the agencies permanently would be a very good thing; perhaps the furlough of the employees could be the first step.
Is this a bad thing for the individuals involved? Sure, losing your job always sucks for the individual. The big picture is different: getting nearly a million federal employees off the public teat would be a tremendous first step. Follow it up with a couple million government contract positions, plus the complete elimination of the above-mentioned federal agencies.
"Lying" to a federal investigator. Right.
This was an FBI interview. The only record allowed at an FBI interview are the FBI's notes. You are not allowed any other record. So the record can say whatever they want it to say after the fact.
The fed's started this high profile case against her, for whatever reason, and made a huge media splash. When it turned out that she hadn't actually done anything wrong, they were about to be left looking stupid. Can't have that, can we? So they nailed her on this completely irrelevant charge of having said something incorrect, during an interview where the only record was the set of notes taken by the people interviewing her.
Even if the notes are accurate, what's with prosecuting someone for saying something incorrect? It may be a lie, it may be merely a mistake. You are not under oath, often the FBI intimidates people into giving interviews without their lawyers present. It's a sick business.
Ok, I haven't lived in Texas for 2 decades now, but I was also born there, went to college there, etc..
A relatively small group of religious conservatives have somehow taken over the Board of Education.
Just how this happened, and why people put up with it, is something I cannot explain. Sure, Texas has it's share of religious whack jobs, but really no more than (and possibly fewer than) many other states a bit farther to the north and east.
What's worse is that Texas has also become the state that many other states look to, to set a baseline for what textbooks their schools will use.
Art makes a great hobby - zillions of people play music, write short stories, act in amateur theater groups, whatever. This is wonderful for culture. Frankly I often prefer a heartfelt amateur performance to an overly-polished professional group going through the motions of the same damn thing for the thousandth time.
My heart does not bleed for professional artists. Most of them need to get a real job to support their hobby, the same as the rest of us...
You make a really excellent point. Sadly, we can only react at this point. It seems to me that there are three useful reactions:
- Keep up the political and media pressure. Don't let this issue die in the news cycle. Americans can apply internal pressure; those of us elsewhere can do our bits to keep up international pressure. For example: I will be integrating the NSA as part of a larger Internet security discussion in at least two of my university lectures in the coming semester.
- Promote open-source software for all security purposes. While not everyone can audit the software, there are enough people out there who can and will. The NSA cannot predict who will do so, and hence cannot have them all in its pay.
- Refuse to use any American IT services where security is important. This is not only sensible, it also applies economic pressure to companies that can lobby in Washington.
Two points:
- Most other first-world countries have actual privacy laws. Which are actually enforced. The US is unusual in having no such laws. The fourth amendment is supposed to restrain at least the government, but lack of enforcement makes it pretty meaningless.
- If you go outside of first world countries, with the possible exceptions of China and Russia, the governments simply do not have the resources to spy on their entire population.
So the US is unique: A lack of effective privacy legislation combined with a government that does have the resources to monitor essentially everyone.
Which is exactly backwards, at least above the primary school level. Want to teach math? You ought to have a degree in math. Physics? Degree in physics. The pedagogical stuff can be picked up on the side and checked with a specialist exam.
At 6th grade and above, teachers who have not actually studied in the area of teaching will be outpaced and embarrassed by the more gifted students in their class. I had a teacher like that - I was so f***ing bored in her class (as was a friend of mine) that (in order to avoid falling asleep) we sat quietly in the back and wrote notes to each other. The fact that we could always answer the questions she randomly threw at us during class infuriated her, so she seated us on opposite sides of a tall cabinet. We responded as maturely as our ages (12 or so) by throwing notes over the cabinet.
Had the teacher actually known and cared about math, she would have given us some sort of challenge - we'd have dug in and been quiet. Since she quite clearly did not even particularly like math, well...
Three years later, I was in the "slow" math class because I had phased out. However, my parents had moved me to a private school, and that teacher was a mathematician. I saw some stupid typo he made on the blackboard, corrected it probably as snarkily as you would expect. He immediately realized what was going on, and sent me to the advanced class down the hall. Man, the teachers all knew their stuff, and really enjoyed teaching it. What a revelation!
Above primary school, education degrees are irrelevant. A couple of classes in child psychology and teaching techniques will do. Training in, and a love of the subject you are teaching is all that should matter. Which is one of the biggest reasons that most American public schools suck.
Seriously. If they want to be taken seriously as offering a service proof against the NSA, they need to not be an American company and to not have any physical US operations. Otherwise a secret FISA order (e.g., issue a client update that sends the encryption keys along with the next batch of data), and their customers are screwed.
No cloud service (or any other service) in the US can be trusted.
Put them on trial? You just said that they have not violated any laws, so, what is a "war crime"?
Seriously, war crimes trials reek of vengeance and have nothing whatsoever to do with justice. Take the loser of some conflict or other, accuse them of "crimes" (even though they violated no law), drag them through a court process and sentence them. Generally speaking, this is simply revenge by the winner on the loser.
Otherwise, we should prosecute pretty much the entire American government, top level military and SES staff for war crimes. Complicity in torture, in unprovoked attacks on sovereign nations, on detaining prisoners indefinitely, etc, etc..
To the contrary, once permanent colonies are established, people will adapt. Just look at the extreme environments that people inhabit on earth, from Sahara to the Arctic.
It's past time for humans to be out there, exploring and exploiting the resources of the solar system.
There is actually very little discrepancy between the pay of men and women - if you do the study correctly. The problem is: This is very non-PC to say. Heck, read the (purely PC) Wikipedia entry. One sentence: "In the United States, the gender pay gap is measured as the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers." Note that there is absolutely no mention of comparing years of experience, or choice of job, or anything else. It's just a raw "who makes more" without accounting for lifestyle choices.
There are two reasons for the gender pay gap: First, women pursuing careers tend (more often than men) to interrupt these careers for child-raising. Second, also for child-raising, more women take jobs that have little or no career potential (secretary, receptionist, etc.). The few studies that try to account for this show little or no difference in pay.
Take a hypothetical example: Jane and Joe both graduate from college and start working as programmers. Jane has two children, take maternity leave both times, and works part-time until both children are in school. Joe doesn't, because his wife has taken the brunt of the child-raising. In total, Joe may well have a solid five years more experience than Jane. On top of that, his company will have been able to use him for whatever projects came up, whereas Jane's possibilities will have been limited because of her part-time status and inability to travel.
Now fast forward to when both of them are 40 years old. Jane will, on average, make less than Joe. However, it turns out that she probably makes about what Joe did five years ago - i.e., the earning difference pretty much accounts for the experience difference. On top of that, Jane's may well have missed some opportunities entirely - she may well hit a "glass ceiling", because she wasn't available for some of those critical projects.
I have a friend (a guy) who decided to raise his children while his wife worked. He also never had much of a career. Life is about choices, and guess what: you can't have it all.
What I find irritating: We don't have to change the gender distribution in fields where women dominate (nursing, teaching, etc.). The only pressure is to change the gender distribution in careers where women are underrepresented. As near as I can tell, this is driven by people who have zero clue about the tech field.
I'm involved in a project just now where both programmers are women. That's great and I'm happy to work with them. Back in the office where I do most of my work, all of the programmers - every single one of them - is a guy. That's great and I'm happy to work with them.
I keep hearing claims of misogyny and sexual harassment. I've been in the tech field for more than 30 years, and I'm just not seeing it. Sure there are idiots out there, but I see no evidence that this is a mainstream problem. What I do see are general differences in technical affinity. Just like more men than women enjoy working on the guts of cars, it's also the case that more men than women like working on the guts of computers. Probably evolutionary, possibly cultural - either way, why is it a problem?
TL;DR - When it comes to professional relationships, can we just judge people as individuals, and forget about their gender?
Guys, lots of other countries use incinerators for non-recyclable stuff. You get rid of it, and get electricity and heat as a bonus. Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?