Re:Just a proposal, hopefully...
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I just wanna point this out, 'cos I think many will not have noticed this explicitly: in the US, content sellers (like disney) have been buying legislation. The odd thing is that this industry, while being a multi-billion dollar industry, is factors smaller (in revenue, fedral income from taxes and employment) than the hardware industry...and still they get legislation which favours their small (relative to the hardware industry) segment of market.
So whilst the conspiracy theory might not make sense...it is one which is correct (just ask senator disney or the **AA).
Just to make thi clear: the tax levied on cd/dvd's in the Netherlands is not done on those media specifically meant for data storage.
It breaks down like this: in stores there are two classes of cd/dvd. One is labeled 'audio', the other is labeled 'data'. The former has an extra levy, the latter is not. For the rest the two are exactly the same media. Guess which gets sold more?
Like the AC says: the run Han talks about is littered with black holes: getting the shortest distance through that gauntlet means you're a good astrogator...shortest distance also means shortest runthroughtime (we can assume).
I think your accent issue is at teh very least hypocritical: it didn't bother you that the rebels had american accents and the empire was british? No: it was a cool differentiation technique...so wtf is wrong/racist about broadening that concept? Especially when it is quite a broadly carried concept that the Japanese have perfected the idea that economy is Sun Tzu's 'winning without fighting is best'.
You're absolutelky right, but that's not what I claim. Yes, military advancement does change the face of warfare. But look at what you quote: I state that the military application of science is not something which has been pushed as a way of thought in education, and it's only since the first world war that the military application of science has been a goal in and of itself, instead of something which has occured incidentally. I even mention Leonardo da Vinci, who actually did apply science to military application, (and could even list quite a few Greeks and many others who did this), but it has been mostly incidental, not directly funded by DARPA-alikes or pushed on schoolkids...that is a modern devellopment.
Dude, read my post, and you'll note that what you quote isn't what I say drives evolution (and, 'cos you're such a pedant, I'll qualify that by admitting that evolution is a name we gave to something we've observed, an emergent quality, rather than a process which is 'driven', as such).
Read further and you'll note that I specified agression and then status as mayor factors for male genetic proagation (and haven't limited it to those two alone, for there are many more).
I'd go one further than the AC who replied: a mayor reason for lack of innovation (in the 'direct application of science' meaning of the word) was slave labour. When you have a large source of cheap, expendable labour, you don't need technology. Remember, the greeks (with their amber and glass rods) had a basic understanding of electricity...they just had no reason to apply it. It's no surprise that the industrial revolution happenen when it did: people started to think that ownership of another person was wrong.
As for Q1 and 2: take a look at the (overly long) intro to '2001: A space Oddesy':)
This is meant as a polite reply, but it will seem harsh. My appologies, but nonetheless:
Read my post. Read up on evolution. I've already agreed with you that agression has been a force in evolution, and in certain parts of the world (large tracts of africa, wherever there is conflict) it still is. In develloped countries it is actually a negative: the violent and aggressive get locked up (and don't make enough money to pay for surgery and other medical attention, further limiting the spread of his genetic heretige).
The guy who invents military applications recieves a steady paycheck, which grants him a small amount of status. The guy who owns the company who employs the aforementioned guy gets all the status, gets to fuck around with a large number of nubile women, and spreads his genetic seed the widest. Same goes for rockstars or rich people. Cynical? Yup....but too true. Geeks do not breed well. We don't contribute too heavily to the genetic pool. There is a big difference between agrression and the capability to think up new means to commit larger forms of aggression. Just look at Bush. He can be aggressive (as long as it isn't physical), but do you see him thinking up a new weapon system? But I bet he could have any Whitehouse intern he wanted.
I have to say I kinda agree with a lot of your post, but I remain convinced that Darwin and Gould will back me up on the way evolution works: it does not promote thinking of science as applied to military application, even though it might select towards application of military force (which is a totally different thing entirely). Thus forcing kids to think of military applications is an entirely forced-from-above thing to do, not something which is somehow 'genetically enforced'. And it's still a horrible thing to force kids to do, IMNSHO, as it directly canals a childs thought processes into applications of agression./ditto, but it's still an interesting aside nontheless:).
But what happens if they scale it up? You would get more massive temperatures, I'd recon.
I'd hazard to guess that cold fusion is a misnomer anyway...fusion requiring high temperatures anyway (or at least high energy input). The only really usefull distinctions would be large/small and exothermic/endothermic selfsustaining fusion, as I see it.
This post shows a missunderstanding towards the theory of evolution which does not surprise me considering the creationism/evolution debacle as it stands in US education.
To put it bluntly, what has allowed us to become what we are today has much more to do with hygene. Just look at third world countries, their hygene level and child mortality.
Now I won't begrudge you that aggression features largely in the human male psyche, and that that has had an evolutionary effect. However, the way evolution works means that a single individual who comes up with military or hygenic applications does not mean that they have a larger chance of procreation: what matters to women is status, what matters to men is nubility. So it is the women who look like they can bear lotsa children and the men who have status (which is more usually the people who control the people who think up military/agricultural/hygenic applications, not the people who actually think up that stuff!) who contribute to the gene pool.
"I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses"
I do, very much. It's actually only since the first world war that military application of science has been pushed by those in power. Sure, you have Leonardo da Vinci et al, but usually in schooling the military was tactics etc, not application of science. But now we get grade shcool kids being pushed into a military mindset by the powers that be in the US. 'Cause this sure aint happening in the Netherlands, and I would almost say in Europe as a whole.
When grandparent mentioned this was happening in school, of all places, it did make a lot of recent history make sense...in a very scary way. 'cos it isn't military power which is gonna bring peace to the world: it's people all over the world having a comfortable standard of living which is gonna do that.
What about the fact that including this level of error reporting opens a huge security concern? Adding a system of this type automatically adds the problem of people hacking the system to gain access to infromation. Better to not have a system in place which can read document data (which is of no use in error handling anyway) in the first place.
Thing is, I have no issue with this IF it's solley used as agregate data. But as soon as they tie this with my IP-adress, then there is a huge privacy concern.
But what I don't think is even neccessary is the contents of the document I'm working on: that has no place whatsoever being sent to MS. But, hell, let MS do that: it means instantly that governments and corporations will not adopt that version of windows for reasons of due dilligence and privacy. Hell, as someone posted before, hospitals etc will be legally bound not to use any OS which could potentially send confidential client information in this way.
"The government has no constitional authority to have any role whatsoever in education, the environment, or television."
Bullshit: taxes are raised for expenditure on matters of public neccessity, like infrastructure. This includes the educational infrastructure, or any other aspect which can suffer from a 'tragedy of the commons'. Whilst you could make the argument that a tv infrastructure is neccessary and needs government funding, a) you'd be wrong (:P), b) it is not something which has a 'tragedy of the commons' effect, and c) even if you where right, there already is a broadcasting infrastructure with 'good enough' quality for use in emergencies (which thanks to even more ubiquitous radio service is actually redundant), so there is no neccessity to expend more money to upgrade picture quality.
As for education and environment being my pet issues...nice ad hominem, but very lacking. Especially since education is the basis of every other issue: no defense without education, no technologgy without education, no propper reasoning powers to decide what to spend the budget on without education, etc etc etc.
Look, whilst I am against the contravention of the geneva conventions etc etc etc, the/. article was about tv. So obviously I'm gonna talk about that in my post, and not the fact that a president who lied about WMD doesn't even get a wrist slap. So screw your marxist quote (which I actually beleive is true) and get back on topic.
I'm sorry, but are you advocating that a government subsidise a technological swith concerning/a television technology/? Come on! Of all the things a government should spebd money on,/this is not it!/
A government should spend money on education or the environment...not on the quality of your tv picture!
"...are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text."
Come on! It already/is/ as easy as 'publishing txt'! Get some ftp space, and you are done. Maybe even put up a simple page with a hyperlink, if you want to get fancy. The only problem is bandwidth (or more accurately, down-/upload limits).
So, big whoop that all these sites are getting 'in on teh action', but it's not like we're talking about anything new here, unless we're talking contextual search of video, direct from the source (ie programmatically searching an.mpg as opposed to lots of manually added keywords [maybe timestamped]).
Damn! Wish I'd read the article sooner...
on
Paul Graham on PR
·
· Score: 1
'cos now I'm on the bottom of 320 comments:)
Anyway, I'd like to offer a nice little caveat to this story. It's just today that I saw an intro on CNN about 'blog-ads'...paid for blogging.
Then in this piece there's a sweet little passage about 'I wonder how PR will mutate due to blogs?'.
Mix'n'match with his statement about how good PR firms always start with the truth....
Then do some thinking: mainstream news is afraid of blogs. Blogs/the internet is sucking viewers aways from traditional print and tv. So wouldn't you want to cast a little FUD on those crazy, paidfor ad-blogs infested by the big bad PR firms?
I guess this would be a bit of a conspiracy-minded rant...but my guess is that we'll see traditional media blackballing blogs more and more in the future.
The most horrendous thing is that the patent on 'wireless delivery of content to the brain' is not based on anything! No product, prototype or even research! The patent-office has effectively granted a patent on a work of science fiction: the patent was granted on something which some guy at Sony thought would be a likely development in the future, but Sony has done no research or experimenting in that direction!
If this doesn't show how broken the patent office is, I don't know what will.
PS: I'm off to patent 'a method of high speed travel which uses the distortiuon of space time'; that'll be a great money maker for my grand-children (if they keep up the payments)!
But remember that the first astronauts where rats, chimps and dogs...
Hmmm...I actually meant that as a remark on what it is an astonaut actually does in space (ie be an odd-jobs-man), not to comment on the worth of lives. Still, I do agree with the poster who said that to achieve great things, risk is an acceptable by-product. To continue the airline analogy: just remember how many lives where lost in the infancy of terrestial flight.
Then you'll like this one: go find some 16th century paintings of Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets with the commandments on them. Then look at his head. Then stare at the little horns on his head!
What happenend was a little translation error: the text translated from said something along the lines of '...and Moses came down the mountain with fury...' because he saw that his people where worshipping golden idols. But in hebrew, the word fury [or 'scorn'...I don't remember the exact word] and horns look very similar. Thus a translating error led the best artists of the generation to depict Moses with little horns on his head:)
Makes you wonder what other crucial information has been missed out on...
The only thing that I find is a shame is that this attitude is not nearly as wide-spread as it should be (or even half as widespread as you make it seem [not a dig, per se, just thinking we aren't there by a long shot]).
No problem...don't forget discussion is a good thing. Keeping that in mind:
I'm a pragmatists. I see differences, and say so. That makes me a realist, not a sexist, tthe latter which implies that I have a bias for one sex over another (which I only have in very specific instances, like choosing someone for a specific job [after applying knowledge of the specifc persons involved] or as a sexual partner). To deny those differences seems to be a PC mentality which litteraly pervades the US (I'm making that assumption here, but I bet you do live there:)).
Problem is: men and women are different. For chistsakes, men have penises, women have breasts and vagina's! This automatically also entails (documented!) differences in brainstructure. Being pregnant for nine months, ditto. It has come to amaze me that the US PC culture has lead to the belief that men and women are the same (just look at the mess that university president got in). Especially since that is just not true. Not just not true, but demonstrably false! The differences in brain structure don't just cover the use of bits of anatomy, or only behaviour during pregnancy, but a much larger scala of emotional responses. This has been proven beyond a doubt, not just by brain scans (ask a neurologist for the [few] structures we know about), but also in countless behavioural studies. Men and women have (sometimes vastly) different attitudes, ways of thinking, ways of problem solving, ways of interacting. And the funny thing is that most people realise this instantly (hey, that's what all that wierd stuff during puberty taught us, and why a book like 'women from venus, men from mars' sells so well). What is so odd is that people thne don't draw the obvious conclusion, which is that (as a sweeping generalisation) men and women are more suited for different jobs (of course, with a huge amount of overlap and cases of exceptions proving the rule).
Furthermore: my analysis absolutely doesn't support the grandparent in terms of productivity: the exact opposite: I even stated that more women in the workforce at google would actually increase the amount of usable products that it could offer! Which leads to...mo' money.
My conclusion: men and women are different, deal with it. This isn't a case of "women offer something special that men dont": they do! And visa versa! It's a case of people having to realise (sooner or later) that men and women offer different things, that they complement each other, and thus that they are worth the exact same. It's not sexist (as you imply that it is I'm implying:P), it's just the way the world is.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wanna point this out, 'cos I think many will not have noticed this explicitly: in the US, content sellers (like disney) have been buying legislation. The odd thing is that this industry, while being a multi-billion dollar industry, is factors smaller (in revenue, fedral income from taxes and employment) than the hardware industry...and still they get legislation which favours their small (relative to the hardware industry) segment of market.
So whilst the conspiracy theory might not make sense...it is one which is correct (just ask senator disney or the **AA).
Just to make thi clear: the tax levied on cd/dvd's in the Netherlands is not done on those media specifically meant for data storage.
It breaks down like this: in stores there are two classes of cd/dvd. One is labeled 'audio', the other is labeled 'data'. The former has an extra levy, the latter is not. For the rest the two are exactly the same media. Guess which gets sold more?
Like the AC says: the run Han talks about is littered with black holes: getting the shortest distance through that gauntlet means you're a good astrogator...shortest distance also means shortest runthroughtime (we can assume).
I think your accent issue is at teh very least hypocritical: it didn't bother you that the rebels had american accents and the empire was british? No: it was a cool differentiation technique...so wtf is wrong/racist about broadening that concept? Especially when it is quite a broadly carried concept that the Japanese have perfected the idea that economy is Sun Tzu's 'winning without fighting is best'.
You're absolutelky right, but that's not what I claim. Yes, military advancement does change the face of warfare. But look at what you quote: I state that the military application of science is not something which has been pushed as a way of thought in education, and it's only since the first world war that the military application of science has been a goal in and of itself, instead of something which has occured incidentally. I even mention Leonardo da Vinci, who actually did apply science to military application, (and could even list quite a few Greeks and many others who did this), but it has been mostly incidental, not directly funded by DARPA-alikes or pushed on schoolkids...that is a modern devellopment.
"humans are the only known species to figure out reasons not to have kids."
Not true: as a response to over-population, animals have many self-limiting strategies including, for a nice non-PC example, homosexuality.
Dude, read my post, and you'll note that what you quote isn't what I say drives evolution (and, 'cos you're such a pedant, I'll qualify that by admitting that evolution is a name we gave to something we've observed, an emergent quality, rather than a process which is 'driven', as such).
Read further and you'll note that I specified agression and then status as mayor factors for male genetic proagation (and haven't limited it to those two alone, for there are many more).
Happy now?
I'd go one further than the AC who replied: a mayor reason for lack of innovation (in the 'direct application of science' meaning of the word) was slave labour. When you have a large source of cheap, expendable labour, you don't need technology. Remember, the greeks (with their amber and glass rods) had a basic understanding of electricity...they just had no reason to apply it. It's no surprise that the industrial revolution happenen when it did: people started to think that ownership of another person was wrong.
:)
As for Q1 and 2: take a look at the (overly long) intro to '2001: A space Oddesy'
This is meant as a polite reply, but it will seem harsh. My appologies, but nonetheless:
/ditto, but it's still an interesting aside nontheless :).
Read my post. Read up on evolution. I've already agreed with you that agression has been a force in evolution, and in certain parts of the world (large tracts of africa, wherever there is conflict) it still is. In develloped countries it is actually a negative: the violent and aggressive get locked up (and don't make enough money to pay for surgery and other medical attention, further limiting the spread of his genetic heretige).
The guy who invents military applications recieves a steady paycheck, which grants him a small amount of status. The guy who owns the company who employs the aforementioned guy gets all the status, gets to fuck around with a large number of nubile women, and spreads his genetic seed the widest. Same goes for rockstars or rich people. Cynical? Yup....but too true. Geeks do not breed well. We don't contribute too heavily to the genetic pool. There is a big difference between agrression and the capability to think up new means to commit larger forms of aggression. Just look at Bush. He can be aggressive (as long as it isn't physical), but do you see him thinking up a new weapon system? But I bet he could have any Whitehouse intern he wanted.
I have to say I kinda agree with a lot of your post, but I remain convinced that Darwin and Gould will back me up on the way evolution works: it does not promote thinking of science as applied to military application, even though it might select towards application of military force (which is a totally different thing entirely).
Thus forcing kids to think of military applications is an entirely forced-from-above thing to do, not something which is somehow 'genetically enforced'. And it's still a horrible thing to force kids to do, IMNSHO, as it directly canals a childs thought processes into applications of agression.
I go one step further: even failed experiments have a lot of use, if only to say 'this aproach didn't work, and this is what happened'.
But what happens if they scale it up? You would get more massive temperatures, I'd recon.
I'd hazard to guess that cold fusion is a misnomer anyway...fusion requiring high temperatures anyway (or at least high energy input). The only really usefull distinctions would be large/small and exothermic/endothermic selfsustaining fusion, as I see it.
This post shows a missunderstanding towards the theory of evolution which does not surprise me considering the creationism/evolution debacle as it stands in US education.
To put it bluntly, what has allowed us to become what we are today has much more to do with hygene. Just look at third world countries, their hygene level and child mortality.
Now I won't begrudge you that aggression features largely in the human male psyche, and that that has had an evolutionary effect. However, the way evolution works means that a single individual who comes up with military or hygenic applications does not mean that they have a larger chance of procreation: what matters to women is status, what matters to men is nubility. So it is the women who look like they can bear lotsa children and the men who have status (which is more usually the people who control the people who think up military/agricultural/hygenic applications, not the people who actually think up that stuff!) who contribute to the gene pool.
"I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses"
I do, very much. It's actually only since the first world war that military application of science has been pushed by those in power. Sure, you have Leonardo da Vinci et al, but usually in schooling the military was tactics etc, not application of science. But now we get grade shcool kids being pushed into a military mindset by the powers that be in the US. 'Cause this sure aint happening in the Netherlands, and I would almost say in Europe as a whole.
When grandparent mentioned this was happening in school, of all places, it did make a lot of recent history make sense...in a very scary way. 'cos it isn't military power which is gonna bring peace to the world: it's people all over the world having a comfortable standard of living which is gonna do that.
What about the fact that including this level of error reporting opens a huge security concern? Adding a system of this type automatically adds the problem of people hacking the system to gain access to infromation. Better to not have a system in place which can read document data (which is of no use in error handling anyway) in the first place.
Thing is, I have no issue with this IF it's solley used as agregate data. But as soon as they tie this with my IP-adress, then there is a huge privacy concern.
But what I don't think is even neccessary is the contents of the document I'm working on: that has no place whatsoever being sent to MS. But, hell, let MS do that: it means instantly that governments and corporations will not adopt that version of windows for reasons of due dilligence and privacy. Hell, as someone posted before, hospitals etc will be legally bound not to use any OS which could potentially send confidential client information in this way.
"The government has no constitional authority to have any role whatsoever in education, the environment, or television."
Bullshit: taxes are raised for expenditure on matters of public neccessity, like infrastructure. This includes the educational infrastructure, or any other aspect which can suffer from a 'tragedy of the commons'. Whilst you could make the argument that a tv infrastructure is neccessary and needs government funding, a) you'd be wrong (:P), b) it is not something which has a 'tragedy of the commons' effect, and c) even if you where right, there already is a broadcasting infrastructure with 'good enough' quality for use in emergencies (which thanks to even more ubiquitous radio service is actually redundant), so there is no neccessity to expend more money to upgrade picture quality.
As for education and environment being my pet issues...nice ad hominem, but very lacking. Especially since education is the basis of every other issue: no defense without education, no technologgy without education, no propper reasoning powers to decide what to spend the budget on without education, etc etc etc.
Look, whilst I am against the contravention of the geneva conventions etc etc etc, the /. article was about tv. So obviously I'm gonna talk about that in my post, and not the fact that a president who lied about WMD doesn't even get a wrist slap. So screw your marxist quote (which I actually beleive is true) and get back on topic.
I'm sorry, but are you advocating that a government subsidise a technological swith concerning /a television technology/? Come on! Of all the things a government should spebd money on, /this is not it!/
A government should spend money on education or the environment...not on the quality of your tv picture!
"...are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text."
/is/ as easy as 'publishing txt'! Get some ftp space, and you are done. Maybe even put up a simple page with a hyperlink, if you want to get fancy. The only problem is bandwidth (or more accurately, down-/upload limits).
.mpg as opposed to lots of manually added keywords [maybe timestamped]).
Come on! It already
So, big whoop that all these sites are getting 'in on teh action', but it's not like we're talking about anything new here, unless we're talking contextual search of video, direct from the source (ie programmatically searching an
'cos now I'm on the bottom of 320 comments :)
Anyway, I'd like to offer a nice little caveat to this story. It's just today that I saw an intro on CNN about 'blog-ads'...paid for blogging.
Then in this piece there's a sweet little passage about 'I wonder how PR will mutate due to blogs?'.
Mix'n'match with his statement about how good PR firms always start with the truth....
Then do some thinking: mainstream news is afraid of blogs. Blogs/the internet is sucking viewers aways from traditional print and tv. So wouldn't you want to cast a little FUD on those crazy, paidfor ad-blogs infested by the big bad PR firms?
I guess this would be a bit of a conspiracy-minded rant...but my guess is that we'll see traditional media blackballing blogs more and more in the future.
The most horrendous thing is that the patent on 'wireless delivery of content to the brain' is not based on anything! No product, prototype or even research! The patent-office has effectively granted a patent on a work of science fiction: the patent was granted on something which some guy at Sony thought would be a likely development in the future, but Sony has done no research or experimenting in that direction!
If this doesn't show how broken the patent office is, I don't know what will.
PS: I'm off to patent 'a method of high speed travel which uses the distortiuon of space time'; that'll be a great money maker for my grand-children (if they keep up the payments)!
But remember that the first astronauts where rats, chimps and dogs...
Hmmm...I actually meant that as a remark on what it is an astonaut actually does in space (ie be an odd-jobs-man), not to comment on the worth of lives. Still, I do agree with the poster who said that to achieve great things, risk is an acceptable by-product. To continue the airline analogy: just remember how many lives where lost in the infancy of terrestial flight.
Then you'll like this one: go find some 16th century paintings of Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets with the commandments on them. Then look at his head. Then stare at the little horns on his head!
:)
What happenend was a little translation error: the text translated from said something along the lines of '...and Moses came down the mountain with fury...' because he saw that his people where worshipping golden idols. But in hebrew, the word fury [or 'scorn'...I don't remember the exact word] and horns look very similar. Thus a translating error led the best artists of the generation to depict Moses with little horns on his head
Makes you wonder what other crucial information has been missed out on...
I guess it says something about me that the first thing I thought was 'how the fsck did a druggie make it past the physicals?'...
Hear, hear!
The only thing that I find is a shame is that this attitude is not nearly as wide-spread as it should be (or even half as widespread as you make it seem [not a dig, per se, just thinking we aren't there by a long shot]).
No problem...don't forget discussion is a good thing. Keeping that in mind:
:)).
:P), it's just the way the world is.
I'm a pragmatists. I see differences, and say so. That makes me a realist, not a sexist, tthe latter which implies that I have a bias for one sex over another (which I only have in very specific instances, like choosing someone for a specific job [after applying knowledge of the specifc persons involved] or as a sexual partner). To deny those differences seems to be a PC mentality which litteraly pervades the US (I'm making that assumption here, but I bet you do live there
Problem is: men and women are different. For chistsakes, men have penises, women have breasts and vagina's! This automatically also entails (documented!) differences in brainstructure. Being pregnant for nine months, ditto.
It has come to amaze me that the US PC culture has lead to the belief that men and women are the same (just look at the mess that university president got in). Especially since that is just not true. Not just not true, but demonstrably false! The differences in brain structure don't just cover the use of bits of anatomy, or only behaviour during pregnancy, but a much larger scala of emotional responses. This has been proven beyond a doubt, not just by brain scans (ask a neurologist for the [few] structures we know about), but also in countless behavioural studies. Men and women have (sometimes vastly) different attitudes, ways of thinking, ways of problem solving, ways of interacting. And the funny thing is that most people realise this instantly (hey, that's what all that wierd stuff during puberty taught us, and why a book like 'women from venus, men from mars' sells so well). What is so odd is that people thne don't draw the obvious conclusion, which is that (as a sweeping generalisation) men and women are more suited for different jobs (of course, with a huge amount of overlap and cases of exceptions proving the rule).
Furthermore: my analysis absolutely doesn't support the grandparent in terms of productivity: the exact opposite: I even stated that more women in the workforce at google would actually increase the amount of usable products that it could offer! Which leads to...mo' money.
My conclusion: men and women are different, deal with it. This isn't a case of "women offer something special that men dont": they do! And visa versa! It's a case of people having to realise (sooner or later) that men and women offer different things, that they complement each other, and thus that they are worth the exact same. It's not sexist (as you imply that it is I'm implying