In times past, yes. Nowadays however gun-rights activists indeed are heavily recruiting minorities to try and appeal to them. The NRA brought on Colion Noir (a black gun owner/vlogger) as a spokesperson, and they were very quick to jump to Shaneen Allen's defense when she (a black woman) was arrested in New Jersey for accidentally violating one of their draconian gun laws.
Simply put - trying to paint the NRA or gun rights activists as racist is a trick that simply doesn't work anymore. 40-50 years ago it was true, but back then half the country was racist. The whole country - including the gun rights movement - has come a long way.
No. Even today, gun laws are enforced disproportionately against blacks.
Best evidence of that is New York's stop and frisk laws. That was basically an experimental suppression of the 4th Amendment. They arrested people mostly for drugs and secondarily for guns. There was lots of court testimony to show that the stops were disproportionately used against blacks.
The overall result was to take guns away from blacks. A lot of black people said they didn't carry guns because they were afraid of stop and frisk. White people didn't have to worry.
Whatever. Here's an idea, either respect the Constitution and its underlying values, or focus on repealing the Second Amendment using the process provided for doing so.
Legislative end runs around the founders' clearly expressed intents are not acceptable. Why not? Because they'll come for your favorite amendment next.
You don't know what the founder's expressed intention was. What's clear to you isn't clear to a lot of other people. In practice, the Supreme Court decides. Whoever gets a majority in the Supreme Court wins.
I can guarantee you that the Supreme Court will never decide that the Second Amendment allows you to carry a gun into their courtroom.
The Constitution allowed slavery, for instance, and no vote for women.
It did no such thing, it simply reserved such matters to the States, per the 10th Amendment. The 14th and 19th Amendments changed that of course.
The way I read English, when the Constitution doesn't prohibit slavery, and leaves it to the states, it allows slavery.
Incidentally, the established process of amending the Constitution (Article V) is available for gun control proponents to take advantage of if they think they can actually win a debate on the merits of the issue. All you need to do is convince 2/3rd's of Congress and 3/4ths of the State Legislatures to sign off on a repeal or amendment of the 2nd Amendment. Best of luck with that.:)
Unfortunately, a small, aggressive, well-funded minority can always subvert the democratic process.
Yes I love how in the 1860s in the US an armed citizenry overthrew a corrupt goverment that allowed the enslavement of its citizens - oh wait, that didn't happen, the armed citizens were there to suppress slave revolts on the south, which was the original purpose of the second amendment - not to overthrow a tyrannical goverment, it was to preserve a tryranical government which allowed slavery - i.e. to allow (white) people to carry guns to suppress local slave revolts - duh, you can't really keep slaves without guns to keep them in line. The freedom loving patriots in the south never rose up to free the black slaves - that took a fucking government army.
The fastest way to get gun control is to have black people carry guns.
In California, as soon as the Black Panther Party started to carry guns, the California legislature passed gun control laws, which Ronald Reagan signed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Do you know where the old gun control laws in this country came from? In 1966, the Black Panthers started carrying guns in public. In 1967, the California legislature passed a law against carrying guns in public, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The fastest way to get gun control today would be for the black demonstrators to carry guns every time a black man gets shot by a cop.
This White House event was run by people who either don't understand science or don't care about it.
Hypocrisy check:
Now teachers can get fired when their kids don't score high enough in high-stakes testing. That makes it a lot harder for them to spend time on maker-style projects and science fairs.
I once read a study of the economics of the light bulb industry ("lamps" in the jargon of the trade).
Light bulbs were made by "ribbon machines," which had enormous economies of scale. They were very expensive to built, but once you had a ribbon machine, it could turn out light bulbs at high volume very cheaply. One ribbon machine could handle the needs of the entire U.S. This made it inefficient for competitors to challenge them, so light bulbs were a "natural monopoly." GE had the monopoly in the U.S., although I recall they had a small competitor.
Another reason is that light bulbs were fragile, and didn't travel well. They required a distribution system that could handle them without breaking them. So it would have been hard for one country's light bulb manufacturers to invade another country's market.
The Soviets loved economies of scale, so this came naturally to them. They built one ribbon machine in Hungary, as I recall, and this produced enough light bulbs for the entire Soviet bloc. I remember seeing cheap Hungarian bulbs in discount stores, but they never took off.
I was surprised in that article to read that small manufacturers would produce bulbs in Japan. I wonder what their production facilities looked like. They couldn't compete with the ribbon machine, so they must have been very inefficient.
I've been waiting 30 years to find an audience nerdy enough that they might be interested in this story.
We wouldn't have this problem if we filed our taxes online. Turbotax has prevented that, because they want to charge us for doing what the government could do free, as it does in less corrupt countries.
I have filed my fiance's parents' taxes for free for the past three years, so I don't know what you're on about.
I filed for free too, but that's a link to private services, like Turbotax, which are only free for people with $58,000 or less income (and/or certain other complicated restrictions), and the services are restricted.
Significantly, if you had a problem, for example because the instructions were ambiguous, the IRS help line wasn't allowed to help you, and the third-party providers didn't provide any help.
As I recall, it didn't do my actual calculations. I had to do most of the calculations by hand, with my TI pocket calculator. It was set up to do standard calculations, but wouldn't handle the common exceptions.
I was also annoyed at the inefficiency of it -- I had to go through the calculations, TurboTax had to go through the same calculations, and the IRS had to go through the same calculations again to check my return.
The full discussion of the problems is in the articles I linked to.
We wouldn't have this problem if we filed our taxes online. Turbotax has prevented that, because they want to charge us for doing what the government could do free, as it does in less corrupt countries.
We've discussed this on Slashdot before. It's like keeping marijuana illegal because the prison guards' unions want to keep their jobs.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon... The Sleazy PR Campaign to Prevent the IRS From Making Your Taxes Simpler By Jordan Weissmann Slate April 14 2014 3:41 PM
Theoretically, it should be far easier for Americans with simple finances to file their tax returns. Instead of making tax filers putz around W-2s and tax prep software, the IRS could electronically prepopulate their paperwork with the information it already receives from banks and employers, and tell filers how much they owe. If the final figure looked about right, you’d have the option to file. As Matt Yglesias wrote here last year, the whole process could be a five-minute snap.
Theoretically. But for years now, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has fought tooth and nail to prevent automatic tax filing from becoming a reality, lobbying against bipartisan legislation to introduce it with the help of a powerful tech industry trade group and conservative anti-taxers like Grover Norquist. Intuit and its competitors in online tax prep don’t want the government cutting its market share. The tax-crusaders want to ensure that paying the government remains as much of a painful, resentment-generating slog as ever. And thus a potent alliance has been born.
http://www.propublica.org/arti... How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing by Liz Day ProPublica, March 26, 2013, 5 a.m.
So why hasn't it become a reality?
Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing.
Intuit has spent about $11.5 million on federal lobbying in the past five years — more than Apple or Amazon. Although the lobbying spans a range of issues, Intuit's disclosures pointedly note that the company "opposes IRS government tax preparation."
The disclosures show that Intuit as recently as 2011 lobbied on two bills, both of which died, that would have allowed many taxpayers to file pre-filled returns for free. The company also lobbied on bills in 2007 and 2011 that would have barred the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, from initiating return-free filing.
Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money. It is also a member of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which sponsors a "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program."
He's most certainly a liberal in the sense that he says that you should have the freedom to choose. That's a bad thing?
When the Democratic party leadership decided against single payer, Ezekiel Emanuel was one of the lead hit men making the case against it (including a lot of falsehoods and misinformation), along with his brother Rahm, who provided the political muscle.
Thanks to the Emanuels, you have to buy Obamacare from your insurance company.
Here's what that means: If you have a chronic disease, like inflammatory bowel disease, you will have to pay $8,500 a year in total health care costs. In Canada, the comparable costs through taxes would be about $4,000 a year. And also, people tell me that they can't keep their doctors. One student with IBD was seeing a gastroenterologist at a major academic medical center. The plans under Obamacare would have forced her to see a neighborhood gastroenterologist who's willing to take Medicaid. That's a pretty important difference when you're taking biological modifier drugs like rituximab that kill people when they're given by a doctor who's not familiar with them.
Ezekiel (like his brother, the mayor of Chicago) is from a family with a history of liberal political activism. In a very direct way he was raised with liberal, and arguably progressive leanings. His formative years (the dying of his wool) developed the philosophies he now holds as a mature adult.
In Israel, his father a member of the Irgun, a terrorist organization responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel and the Deir Yassin massacre. I don't think Ezekiel disagrees significantly with AIPAC.
His mother supported the civil rights movement, but I don't know of any other way in which I would consider him liberal.
I would call Ezekiel and Rahm neoliberals. I don't consider them liberals, and they certainly aren't progressives.
Most significantly, they both opposed single payer health care, and instead gave the health care industry over to the insurance industry. That basically followed the Heritage Foundation recommendations, although once Obama adopted it, the Heritage Foundation disowned it.
Rahm also supported the Iraq war (which is not surprising, since Israel supported it).
Yeah, if he's stuck in a state of decline, he can still contribute.
During his career as an ethicist, Ezekiel Emanuel did more harm than good, in my opinion.
He and his brother Rahm may have done more to sabotage single payer health care than any other American in modern history.
Totally moral and ethical fail from this so-called "bioethicist."
I have dealt professionally with a lot of medical ethicists. It took me a while to figure out that they're not telling people how to be ethical, they're telling people how to get away with being unethical.
For example, a drug company will run an unethical drug study. They'll hire ethicists for their ethics panel, who will review the study and give it their rubber-stamp of approval. Then when the drug company gets caught, they can say, "But our ethics panel approved it!"
The other thing I noticed was that the doctors who take the biggest payoffs from the drug companies wind up on their institution's ethics panel.
Einstein had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The first time, they treated him by wrapping cellophane around his aorta. The second time, he said he didn't want to go through that again.
If you think of how the aorta goes down the torso next to the spine, and how they had to push everything else out of the way to get to it, you can imagine what major surgery it was. Even today, they destroy a lot of nerves in the process. People can be left impotent, incontinent, unable to walk, etc. And you've got a huge wound across your abdomen. That's when you start wondering whether it's worth it to continue.
My biggest problem is that 75 is such an arbitrary number.
That's the most obvious flaw in his argument. Some people are pretty healthy at 75. Others start deteriorating in their 60s.
I know people who led a fairly active life up to their 90s and died recently, relatively quickly and without much suffering. They had a pretty good life for the last 20 years, and they told me a lot of good stories. One woman wound up in a wheelchair, with an attendant, but she wasn't asking anybody to put her out of her misery.
In fact, most elderly people don't want to die. Emanuel's father didn't. This essay ignores reality.
Yeah, it's bad when somebody who managed to make a lot of money once decides that makes him competent to run areas of society that they know nothing about, like education.
The other problem is that, in addition to spending things that are in their own interest, they can spend things on sheer whim.
Bill Gates listened to a few glib educational theorists and bought the idea of destroying the public education system and replacing them with private charter schools.
He and his billionaire friends funded a movement that is wrecking the educational system, and running everything by high-stakes testing that has never been validated and has been proven to be invalid. They're lowering teacher salaries, and humiliating teachers.
"The female gender as a whole is getting preferential treatment"
You can tell by how much they rule the world. All those women presidents, senators, prime ministers... You can tell by their presence in the board rooms too. Ass. Correcting a wrong isn't a bad thing. Stop trying to pretend you're a victim because we're helping someone who isn't you....
When I was studying accounting I collected annual reports and 10-K financial statements of corporations. For example, I got the annual reports of media companies. For the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and McGraw-Hill, the controlling stock was owned by women.
The reason was simple: most wealth in America is inherited family wealth. Men usually die before their wives, so their wives inherit their wealth and have control over it. So it was the family matriarchs that wound up owning the Post, Times, WSJ and M-H. And they usually managed the companies to some degree. Katherine Graham was a hands-on publisher, but even at the others, a woman usually made fundamental decisions such as hiring (or firing) a publisher and top executives.
If there weren't enough women at the executive levels of those corporations, it was because Katherine Graham, Iphigenea Ochs Sulzberger, etc., didn't appoint them.
When you talk about presidents, senators, prime ministers, and corporate board members, you're talking about the 1%. Almost any woman among them is more powerful than almost any man in the bottom 99%.
Slashdot Mirror
In times past, yes. Nowadays however gun-rights activists indeed are heavily recruiting minorities to try and appeal to them. The NRA brought on Colion Noir (a black gun owner/vlogger) as a spokesperson, and they were very quick to jump to Shaneen Allen's defense when she (a black woman) was arrested in New Jersey for accidentally violating one of their draconian gun laws.
Simply put - trying to paint the NRA or gun rights activists as racist is a trick that simply doesn't work anymore. 40-50 years ago it was true, but back then half the country was racist. The whole country - including the gun rights movement - has come a long way.
No. Even today, gun laws are enforced disproportionately against blacks.
Best evidence of that is New York's stop and frisk laws. That was basically an experimental suppression of the 4th Amendment. They arrested people mostly for drugs and secondarily for guns. There was lots of court testimony to show that the stops were disproportionately used against blacks.
The overall result was to take guns away from blacks. A lot of black people said they didn't carry guns because they were afraid of stop and frisk. White people didn't have to worry.
you are a tool of the political machine...a "useful idiot" in Marx's terms.
Where in the works of Marx did he say "useful idiot"?
Whatever. Here's an idea, either respect the Constitution and its underlying values, or focus on repealing the Second Amendment using the process provided for doing so.
Legislative end runs around the founders' clearly expressed intents are not acceptable. Why not? Because they'll come for your favorite amendment next.
You don't know what the founder's expressed intention was. What's clear to you isn't clear to a lot of other people. In practice, the Supreme Court decides. Whoever gets a majority in the Supreme Court wins.
I can guarantee you that the Supreme Court will never decide that the Second Amendment allows you to carry a gun into their courtroom.
Everyone who isn't an American often finds themselves wondering at your fascination with weapons.
Well, think about it. Watch some Sam Peckinpah and Rambo movies, and ask yourself, "What kind of country would produce this?"
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the benefits of having a populace that is armed enough to challenge a repressive government.
We should all be fortunate enough to live in freedom-loving Afghanistan.
The Constitution allowed slavery, for instance, and no vote for women.
It did no such thing, it simply reserved such matters to the States, per the 10th Amendment. The 14th and 19th Amendments changed that of course.
The way I read English, when the Constitution doesn't prohibit slavery, and leaves it to the states, it allows slavery.
Incidentally, the established process of amending the Constitution (Article V) is available for gun control proponents to take advantage of if they think they can actually win a debate on the merits of the issue. All you need to do is convince 2/3rd's of Congress and 3/4ths of the State Legislatures to sign off on a repeal or amendment of the 2nd Amendment. Best of luck with that. :)
Unfortunately, a small, aggressive, well-funded minority can always subvert the democratic process.
Yes I love how in the 1860s in the US an armed citizenry overthrew a corrupt goverment that allowed the enslavement of its citizens - oh wait, that didn't happen, the armed citizens were there to suppress slave revolts on the south, which was the original purpose of the second amendment - not to overthrow a tyrannical goverment, it was to preserve a tryranical government which allowed slavery - i.e. to allow (white) people to carry guns to suppress local slave revolts - duh, you can't really keep slaves without guns to keep them in line. The freedom loving patriots in the south never rose up to free the black slaves - that took a fucking government army.
The fastest way to get gun control is to have black people carry guns.
In California, as soon as the Black Panther Party started to carry guns, the California legislature passed gun control laws, which Ronald Reagan signed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is about race.
Do you know where the old gun control laws in this country came from? In 1966, the Black Panthers started carrying guns in public. In 1967, the California legislature passed a law against carrying guns in public, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The fastest way to get gun control today would be for the black demonstrators to carry guns every time a black man gets shot by a cop.
This White House event was run by people who either don't understand science or don't care about it.
Hypocrisy check:
Now teachers can get fired when their kids don't score high enough in high-stakes testing. That makes it a lot harder for them to spend time on maker-style projects and science fairs.
Not many high school kids get invited to White House science fairs and demonstrate their air cannons to the president.
I once read a study of the economics of the light bulb industry ("lamps" in the jargon of the trade).
Light bulbs were made by "ribbon machines," which had enormous economies of scale. They were very expensive to built, but once you had a ribbon machine, it could turn out light bulbs at high volume very cheaply. One ribbon machine could handle the needs of the entire U.S. This made it inefficient for competitors to challenge them, so light bulbs were a "natural monopoly." GE had the monopoly in the U.S., although I recall they had a small competitor.
Another reason is that light bulbs were fragile, and didn't travel well. They required a distribution system that could handle them without breaking them. So it would have been hard for one country's light bulb manufacturers to invade another country's market.
The Soviets loved economies of scale, so this came naturally to them. They built one ribbon machine in Hungary, as I recall, and this produced enough light bulbs for the entire Soviet bloc. I remember seeing cheap Hungarian bulbs in discount stores, but they never took off.
I was surprised in that article to read that small manufacturers would produce bulbs in Japan. I wonder what their production facilities looked like. They couldn't compete with the ribbon machine, so they must have been very inefficient.
I've been waiting 30 years to find an audience nerdy enough that they might be interested in this story.
We wouldn't have this problem if we filed our taxes online. Turbotax has prevented that, because they want to charge us for doing what the government could do free, as it does in less corrupt countries.
I have filed my fiance's parents' taxes for free for the past three years, so I don't know what you're on about.
I filed for free too, but that's a link to private services, like Turbotax, which are only free for people with $58,000 or less income (and/or certain other complicated restrictions), and the services are restricted.
Significantly, if you had a problem, for example because the instructions were ambiguous, the IRS help line wasn't allowed to help you, and the third-party providers didn't provide any help.
As I recall, it didn't do my actual calculations. I had to do most of the calculations by hand, with my TI pocket calculator. It was set up to do standard calculations, but wouldn't handle the common exceptions.
I was also annoyed at the inefficiency of it -- I had to go through the calculations, TurboTax had to go through the same calculations, and the IRS had to go through the same calculations again to check my return.
The full discussion of the problems is in the articles I linked to.
Tibetan monastery.
We wouldn't have this problem if we filed our taxes online. Turbotax has prevented that, because they want to charge us for doing what the government could do free, as it does in less corrupt countries.
We've discussed this on Slashdot before. It's like keeping marijuana illegal because the prison guards' unions want to keep their jobs.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...
The Sleazy PR Campaign to Prevent the IRS From Making Your Taxes Simpler
By Jordan Weissmann
Slate
April 14 2014 3:41 PM
Theoretically, it should be far easier for Americans with simple finances to file their tax returns. Instead of making tax filers putz around W-2s and tax prep software, the IRS could electronically prepopulate their paperwork with the information it already receives from banks and employers, and tell filers how much they owe. If the final figure looked about right, you’d have the option to file. As Matt Yglesias wrote here last year, the whole process could be a five-minute snap.
Theoretically. But for years now, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has fought tooth and nail to prevent automatic tax filing from becoming a reality, lobbying against bipartisan legislation to introduce it with the help of a powerful tech industry trade group and conservative anti-taxers like Grover Norquist. Intuit and its competitors in online tax prep don’t want the government cutting its market share. The tax-crusaders want to ensure that paying the government remains as much of a painful, resentment-generating slog as ever. And thus a potent alliance has been born.
http://www.propublica.org/arti...
How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing
by Liz Day
ProPublica, March 26, 2013, 5 a.m.
So why hasn't it become a reality?
Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing.
Intuit has spent about $11.5 million on federal lobbying in the past five years — more than Apple or Amazon. Although the lobbying spans a range of issues, Intuit's disclosures pointedly note that the company "opposes IRS government tax preparation."
The disclosures show that Intuit as recently as 2011 lobbied on two bills, both of which died, that would have allowed many taxpayers to file pre-filled returns for free. The company also lobbied on bills in 2007 and 2011 that would have barred the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, from initiating return-free filing.
Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money. It is also a member of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which sponsors a "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program."
He's most certainly a liberal in the sense that he says that you should have the freedom to choose. That's a bad thing?
When the Democratic party leadership decided against single payer, Ezekiel Emanuel was one of the lead hit men making the case against it (including a lot of falsehoods and misinformation), along with his brother Rahm, who provided the political muscle.
Thanks to the Emanuels, you have to buy Obamacare from your insurance company.
Here's what that means: If you have a chronic disease, like inflammatory bowel disease, you will have to pay $8,500 a year in total health care costs. In Canada, the comparable costs through taxes would be about $4,000 a year. And also, people tell me that they can't keep their doctors. One student with IBD was seeing a gastroenterologist at a major academic medical center. The plans under Obamacare would have forced her to see a neighborhood gastroenterologist who's willing to take Medicaid. That's a pretty important difference when you're taking biological modifier drugs like rituximab that kill people when they're given by a doctor who's not familiar with them.
Ezekiel (like his brother, the mayor of Chicago) is from a family with a history of liberal political activism. In a very direct way he was raised with liberal, and arguably progressive leanings. His formative years (the dying of his wool) developed the philosophies he now holds as a mature adult.
In Israel, his father a member of the Irgun, a terrorist organization responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel and the Deir Yassin massacre. I don't think Ezekiel disagrees significantly with AIPAC.
His mother supported the civil rights movement, but I don't know of any other way in which I would consider him liberal.
I would call Ezekiel and Rahm neoliberals. I don't consider them liberals, and they certainly aren't progressives.
Most significantly, they both opposed single payer health care, and instead gave the health care industry over to the insurance industry. That basically followed the Heritage Foundation recommendations, although once Obama adopted it, the Heritage Foundation disowned it.
Rahm also supported the Iraq war (which is not surprising, since Israel supported it).
Yeah, if he's stuck in a state of decline, he can still contribute.
During his career as an ethicist, Ezekiel Emanuel did more harm than good, in my opinion.
He and his brother Rahm may have done more to sabotage single payer health care than any other American in modern history.
Totally moral and ethical fail from this so-called "bioethicist."
I have dealt professionally with a lot of medical ethicists. It took me a while to figure out that they're not telling people how to be ethical, they're telling people how to get away with being unethical.
For example, a drug company will run an unethical drug study. They'll hire ethicists for their ethics panel, who will review the study and give it their rubber-stamp of approval. Then when the drug company gets caught, they can say, "But our ethics panel approved it!"
The other thing I noticed was that the doctors who take the biggest payoffs from the drug companies wind up on their institution's ethics panel.
Einstein had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The first time, they treated him by wrapping cellophane around his aorta. The second time, he said he didn't want to go through that again.
If you think of how the aorta goes down the torso next to the spine, and how they had to push everything else out of the way to get to it, you can imagine what major surgery it was. Even today, they destroy a lot of nerves in the process. People can be left impotent, incontinent, unable to walk, etc. And you've got a huge wound across your abdomen. That's when you start wondering whether it's worth it to continue.
My biggest problem is that 75 is such an arbitrary number.
That's the most obvious flaw in his argument. Some people are pretty healthy at 75. Others start deteriorating in their 60s.
I know people who led a fairly active life up to their 90s and died recently, relatively quickly and without much suffering. They had a pretty good life for the last 20 years, and they told me a lot of good stories. One woman wound up in a wheelchair, with an attendant, but she wasn't asking anybody to put her out of her misery.
In fact, most elderly people don't want to die. Emanuel's father didn't. This essay ignores reality.
I heard that in a medical ethics class.
People are 25, and they say that if they couldn't run 10 miles every day, they wouldn't want to live.
They finally get to 50 and they feel differently.
Most women develop the social competence to deal with these situations by age 14.
Feel free to expose Microsoft and Apple.
Yeah, it's bad to have padrones run society.
Yeah, it's bad when somebody who managed to make a lot of money once decides that makes him competent to run areas of society that they know nothing about, like education.
The other problem is that, in addition to spending things that are in their own interest, they can spend things on sheer whim.
Bill Gates listened to a few glib educational theorists and bought the idea of destroying the public education system and replacing them with private charter schools.
He and his billionaire friends funded a movement that is wrecking the educational system, and running everything by high-stakes testing that has never been validated and has been proven to be invalid. They're lowering teacher salaries, and humiliating teachers.
"The female gender as a whole is getting preferential treatment"
You can tell by how much they rule the world. All those women presidents, senators, prime ministers... You can tell by their presence in the board rooms too. Ass. Correcting a wrong isn't a bad thing. Stop trying to pretend you're a victim because we're helping someone who isn't you....
When I was studying accounting I collected annual reports and 10-K financial statements of corporations. For example, I got the annual reports of media companies. For the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and McGraw-Hill, the controlling stock was owned by women.
The reason was simple: most wealth in America is inherited family wealth. Men usually die before their wives, so their wives inherit their wealth and have control over it. So it was the family matriarchs that wound up owning the Post, Times, WSJ and M-H. And they usually managed the companies to some degree. Katherine Graham was a hands-on publisher, but even at the others, a woman usually made fundamental decisions such as hiring (or firing) a publisher and top executives.
If there weren't enough women at the executive levels of those corporations, it was because Katherine Graham, Iphigenea Ochs Sulzberger, etc., didn't appoint them.
When you talk about presidents, senators, prime ministers, and corporate board members, you're talking about the 1%. Almost any woman among them is more powerful than almost any man in the bottom 99%.
Nancy Reagan: I'll have the meat loaf.
Waiter: And the vegetable?
Nancy Reagan: He'll have the meat loaf too.