They didn't pay for more bandwidth. You ALREADY paid for that bandwidth (say, 5mbit down). Comcast decided they didn't want to provide you 5mbit worth of Netflix, though, without Netflix ALSO paying, even though Netflix had already paid whoever they have as an ISP on their end.
This wasn't Netflix running out of bandwidth and having to increase their uplink speed, and it wasn't the consumer running out of bandwidth and having to pay to increase their download speed. This was Comcast deciding that Netflix was causing you (and your peers) to use too much of your already-paid for bandwidth. Comcast couldn't keep up with the consistent and simultaneous demand on what you supposedly had access to. So, instead, it throttled Netflix (which users saw as being Netflix's problem - hey, Netflix can't keep up!) and then charged Netflix to unthrottle (which users saw as Netflix "buying more bandwidth" so Netflix could keep up). In reality, it was Comcast that essentially oversold their bandwidth (you can have 5mbit down! oh, wait, nevermind, we can't supply all this bandwidth all at once; hey, a lot of it is being used by Netflix, maybe we could get them to pay more so it doesn't look like we were unprepared for demand on services we sold!)
This isn't unlike an airline overselling their flights. The difference is that when a flight fills up and customers who already paid for their tickets can't actually fit on the plane anymore, the airline doesn't start charging the destination more because the destination is using too much space on their plane. They give the customers who can't get on the plane at the very least a free transfer, and I think they get a free future lfight or something, too? Or a refund + flight? Something like that. In other words, the airliner realizes that part of overselling means that you have to deal with the consequences that occasionally come up with overselling... and "deal with" doesn't mean "charge someone else for your own lack of space that you sold as though you had more space than you actually did."
TL;DR: Comcast oversold their bandwidth and decided to make Netflix pay for it.
Is that really the case? I kept Vista up to date, but it never worked as well as Windows 7 on the same hardware. Even something as simple as file transferring was clunky on Vista, or hung, or was crazy slow. Boot times were different between Vista and 7...
I don't actually know about the internals of what changed, and I realize it was 6.0 to 6.1 (right? I think...), but it certainly seemed a lot different than a "rebranding."
If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it.
Quite true. The wikipedia entry on marriage licenses is quite an interesting read... e.g., "For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th-century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations."
Regardless though... religion is a pretty personal and, ah, religious institution, right? And yet, government's for all of history have made it their business to make laws about it.
the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians
This is true, but in a democracy, is it a problem for a group of people to try to democratically change the country to be what they consider to be right and recognize what they think is the right explanation of who/what a marriage is between?
the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.
I actually think the government shouldn't be in the business of "marriage" licenses, because I don't think the government has anything to do with what marriage really IS. I can see how a government might recognize a marriage as being automatically a civil union, and I can see how those who value a traditional view of marriage would want the government to encourage that view, and I think it's okay for said supporters to try to democratically effect that change. But, myself, I think it should be separated. Government is a civil thing and thus should be in the business of making civil unions. Marriage is a religious thing and should be a religious thing.
If you want to not serve people who have divorced unbiblically... I see no reason why you can't not serve those people.
I thought those arguing in favor of homosexual marriage bring up that there are financial benefits TO getting married?
Anyways, the main point is this: maybe there are discrepencies (I agree, there are) and problems with the way people are refused service (refuse service to open homosexuals, not refuse service to college students who openly sleep around, or whatever). Ok, so we've established inconsistencies. So that means that, since the beliefs are inconsistent, or perhaps more generally, just don't make sense to someone else... that you can simply say that those beliefs are therefore invalid and that individual can be forced to violate them?
Not forced to not violate other people's rights, but forced to violate your own beliefs. Forced, yes, to do something as simple as bake a cake for someone, take pictures at their wedding... or more non-simple things like officiate the wedding.
It wouldn't happen, but I can't imagine a minister of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thingy would particularly want to be forced to give Christian vows in a Christian ceremony to a Christian couple because somehow, the Christian couple has a "right" to THAT PERSON offciating their wedding. Because, you know, I have a right to make you do what I want you to do, even if you think it is wrong for you to do it?
Let's say I'm holding a pro-bombing rally. Let's say it's a pro-bomb-the-abortion-clinics rally (obviously, it's not explicitly that). And I want you to provide a meal for us. Should you be forced to do that, and not be able to say "No, I don't want to support bombing abortion clinics. I'm not going to provide food."
I'm a Christian, and I think someone should be able to refuse me service because you think my views are harmful. I don't think the government should be allowed to... but that's a different story... and yes, I do support separating legal and religious "marriage" things... i.e., you want to have a civil union for the legal benefits, fine. Pastors do religious ceremonies. Civil servants to civil ceremonies. I would view myself as "married" even if my state and/or country didn't think I was.
I'm pretty sure Windows 7 was not really just "rebranded Vista." Having used both Vista and Windows 7, it certainly seems like they fixed a whole lot of issues in Vista. Sure, it looks sorta similar more or less continued the Vista-esque GUI/frontend look and feel... but if we're just basing it on the frontend look and feel, then we may as well be comparing Windows to Gnome and KDE...:P
This is interesting to me, I've never heard this. Are you saying that parted, as in the Linux partitioning tool, uses the Microsoft partition type GUID incorrectly... and that is what Windows is reading, and thus sees it as not being formatted correctly?
Aren't they trying to get users to use Office365 now, though? Subscriptoin based service and all that? So maybe interoperability with file formats is now to their benefit, just as making things like OneDrive or Outlook.com work better on multiple mobile device OSes.
I'm not a fan of the metro stuff and start screen on 8, though at least 8.1 half fixed metro apps by letting you close them. Windows 10 is supposed to run metro apps in a window on the desktop. But, all that said - I have to say that if I had a tablet, the new Start screen thing and metro apps... would be totally fine. That seems to be what it was designed for. And being able to switch between those two contexts is even better (as 10 can do, I believe... manually, or based on screen size). I'm assuming it was the metro stuff that you meant was a dealbreaker. I've heard good things about it on Windows phones (I don't own own)
This comes from someone running RHEL on his work laptop, Windows 8.1 on his desktop, and Android on all his mobile/tablet devices. And I work with several versions of unix, linux, and windows for a living... I'm no Windows fanboy.:) But Windows 7 was good, Windows 8 was better aside from the badly implemented UI changes, 8.1 improved somewhat [I installed a third party start button modification thingy], and it looks like Windows 10 will actually be pretty good, from what I've seen [I have not actually run it]. It seems that Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself somewhat, moving to a make-money-with-services idea... more platform agnostic. Which is awesome; Google and Apple could use some competition, and Amazon could, too, in the cloud arena... specifically, making things more widely compatible (seriously, why isn't there a google music roku app?).
I didn't mean to imply it was all learned... though I was actually refering more to what is considered "acceptable behavior" vs. what they are actually interested in. e.g., learning that flowers are okay to like as a girl but not as a boy, or that building stuff is a boy thing and not a girl thing.
That said, I agree that people are inherently and intrinsically different, not simply products of society/social pressures/whatever. But views of what is "normal" behavior for a girl or boy certainly is something that is significantly learned from surroundings/society, isn't it? And that can certainly serve to form or at least encourage development or non-development of interests. If I thought programming was something that "real boys" don't do, I might not have been so inclined to do it, even though I was inherently interested in it.
There are lots of different good responses to this... based on what the relationship of the one responding is - parents, schools, peers, friends, society, government, etc. My response as a parent will be different than what I want society, friends, schools, or the government to do. e.g., I would like society to accept female engineers just as readily as male engineers, but not push my daughter to be an engineer or to somehow imply that to be an empowered woman, she HAS to do things that used to be considered "man stuff." However, as a parent, I want to encourage interests and let them explore and find out what they like, get them to try things they don't want to because of various reasons (fear, social pressures, advertising, whatever it is) but let them not continue if they don't like it, etc.
But pushing society towards equally accepting an engineer, a mother, a secretary, and an athlete as a "real woman" is important, I think. It seems similar to pushing society to accept a both blacks and whites as equally human. Yes, I can deal with that as a parent, but I think we should deal with it as a society, too.
I responded to you in another thread. I am not stalking you.;) I would venture to say that it seems like we actually seem to agree pretty much, but may have seen different experiences and are approaching it from two different perspectives. I apparently have seen the problem of ignoring the societal pressure issue more and you seem to have seen the ignoring genuine interest differences more.
I agree, the generalization that all male/female differences are due to societal pressures is stupid. I DO think generalizations can be made about males or females as a whole, and thus I would expect certain fields/careers to be more women than men. But I don't expect every given woman to conform, nor do I think it's weird if they don't.
So, just as assuming that all male/female differences are due to socieal pressures is stupid, I would argue that so is assuming that it's all because of different generalized interests. Or "genderalized":)
Yeah, I agree it's hard to tell if it's what they actually like or if it's "conforming." And conforming isn't always bad, I suppose. Seems societies cycle from wanting to conform to everything to wanting to be non-conforming to everything, ha.:)
That said, I know women (e.g., my wife) who don't like the "girly stereotype" for a variety of reasons (like the annoying useless small talk that neither of us are good at), but do like what is stereotyped as "girly" - flowers, pink, cute things, dresses, etc.
I guess... people are complex, we have lots of varying interests, and the "pink vs. blue"/"girl vs. boy" interests stuff is often just silly and such a vast over-generalization, and yet seems to be very prevalent. Cynicism coming out here: it does make a lot of money for retailers of "his and her" sorts of stuff, though.
I have to say that in my particular large, very distributed and varied corporate tech workplace, I've not really encounterd any sexism nor racism.
Have you considered that there's also societal pressures against men who are nerdy programmers ? Or against men wanting to become fashion designers ? Still, if you have a passion, you're not going to let society stop you.
Yes. In limited ways, I experienced some of it. But that said, I think there's more pressure on women to conform than men. And regardless of who has more or less pressures, the point is that it's worth it to try to point out that those pressures should at the very least be made known, if not corrected. For guys as well as girls, yes... though, like I said, I observe it to be a more significant problem for women than men.
I have a son and a daughter, and we had boxes of legos, cars, dolls, and various other toys all in the living room where both could play with anything they wanted. And from the beginning it was very clear that they had their own interests. Even if they were both playing with the legos, my son was always building cars and bridges with them. My daughter was building houses and people.
I jumped to conclusions about you, my apologies for that. And this is what we want to do as well.
Yeah, I think this is the case with some of the other cartoons that I watched as a kid - which would have been in the 90s:) - like Bugs Bunny. Both old ones and the newer ones from the 80s/90s.
I do like the humor of Rocky and Bullwinkle though... I think a lot of it would have made no sense to me as a kid, probably just the more slapstick type elements would have been funny at that time. Maybe a couple of the jokes... but not a lot of the stereotyping and cold-war era humor and wordplay and all that.
The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.
So for those 20% that are men - is it difficult for them to succeed as vets? Is it viewed as somewhat non-masculine behavior? Is it actually viewed as uncommon as in "so what do you do? A what? A vet? Wow, are there many men that are vets?"
stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.
I totally agree with that... though I think we also need to consciously try to encourage people to think this way, as I don't think it comes naturally. People naturally think certain careers are manly and certain careers are womanly, and it seems hard for people to change that thinking.
I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't love to talk about relationships with other women.
I have met many. I've also met women who would prefer to talk about physics rather than celebrities. And many men that don't talk about other women as though it was their favorite hobby.
I agree, insulting what they MIGHT find to be important to them is bad (you left out "might" so I FTFY..;) ). And making sure that they are accepted even if they are interested in "tomboy" things is important, too... in other words, we shouldn't call them tomboys for liking things that are more commonly liked by men.
But, we do. Having a daughter, now - even as young as she is, under a year old - I'm very aware of how different things get interpreted based on whether a boy or girl does it. If our daughter "talks" (baby talk) a lot, it's because she's a girl. If a boy "talks" a lot, it's strage. If a "girl" likes building things or running around outside when they're older, they are a "tomboy." If a boy likes staying inside reading and cooking, well that's a bit odd - why isn't he outside pretending to beat up bandits? etc...
And at such a young, impressionable age... you think perhaps what they learn is the "accepted behavior" during their first 5 years of life might carry through for quite a while, and be hard to fix? On both sides, too; not just women deciding they want to go into physics, but men deciding that they are capable. And that it shouldn't be weird.
Have you considered that there may be societal pressures about what a woman is supposed to be, and a nerdy programmer doesn't fit that?
It's the same pressure that makes guys think that liking "pink" is bad, or liking flowers is girly, or liking babies is something for women, and that fighting/violence is masculine.
To assume that women have no interest in something and thus that interest MUST be inherent and not because of various societal pressure about what it means to be a "woman" seems a bit short-sighted. Are there similar pressures for men? Sure. But overall, it seems men have much greater freedom - and, historically, have had more or less the same freedoms whereas women have had even fewer - about their career and interest choices.
It's very interesting to me that "interior design" and "fashion" were mentioned earlier in this thread. You may as well have thrown in "cooking" and "secretary-ing" (is there a verb form of that? ha) and covered almost all of the "typical woman" jobs. Strange that there are so few and they are so un-technical.
I have a daughter now, and am more aware of how society... treats women, so to speak... from a young age. When's the last time you gave a lego set to a girl? or gave them a book about planes or tractors or cars? It's *hard* to, because all of the advertising for "girl's" stuff is pink, fluffy, princess, dolls, flowers, and the like. Try finding an ad - or an example of a gift - for somehing more technical than Barbie that is "meant" for a girl. Or try giving a young girl a lego set for her birthday and see what the other adults think.
It seems this is changing somewhat again, and for good reason. We will be doing our best to give our daughter what she appears to be interested in by herself, and not try to make her conform to what society thinks she SHOULD be interested in - talking on the phone, makeup, boys, interior decorating, and baking. She'll have access and support if she wants to do math, science, computers, software, programming, animals, medicine, vet medicine, physics, geology, politics, cooking... or, yes, if she decides that what she wants most in life is to be a wife and mother. And if she doesn't like pink - that's fine, too. And we won't call her a "tomboy" and won't let others call her a "tomboy" in our presence if she just happens to like things that "traditionally" are boy things - like, uh, running around outside... because, clearly, that's only for boys.
(for the record, I hold other beliefs that would make "feminists" quite annoyed. I am no SJW; I just happen to think that women have long been thought of as inferior in intellect, among other things, and pressured to be what men want them to be - pretty things to look at.)
Yes. Ugly policy decisions is exactly what I was going for, in fact. It's not as simple as "ugh, stupid anti-vaxxers, we need to mandate vaccines" as some seem to think it is. There are some of us who are cool with vaccines... the ones that make sense. And leery about spending the money (government) and risk (yes, the rather small but real, especially with new-ish and thus much less understood vaccines, it seems) for the ones that don't.
And of course, there's the question of the efficacy of the different types (e.g., acellular pertussis) and the different schedules and whether it's good to throw them into kids all at once or spread them out and.... etc. Doctors don't seem to agree completely (not with vaccination in general, but when, how many, which ones, etc.), countries don't agree, studies don't agree, yet we expect the government to mandate something... that seems iffy to me.
Whoever chooses wields an awful lot of power. Including monetarily. I'm sure the vaccine makers would have input on which ones and how often.:) Good thing we don't let corporations influence political decisions.
I think you missed the point. How is it I am doing anyone harm by not being vaccinated for something I am not going to spread since it's an STD and I only have sex with one other person?
So at what point does the liability stop? If I allow my kids to play on sleds or go skiing and they get hurt or killed or maimed... should I go to jail for child endangerment for allowing them to be in such danger?
I am NOT arguing that all vaccines are junk and we should all not vaccinate. I AM arguing that we need to think through the ramifications of this pretty seriously. It's not exactly a slippery *slope* argument as much as.... an ice rink argument. I am not saying that "if we mandate vaccines, we're going to mandate carrots and spinach next" as though one is worse than the other... I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to mandate vaccines in because of child endangerment if we don't also start curbing all these other dangerous behaviors that kid's do. Like playing in the dirt, riding horses, riding bikes, taking walks where there may be drunk drivers without putting them in helmets... or whatever.
Furthermore, WHAT vaccines? And how often? I got one MMR vaccine I believe, but it's since been raised to two. Ought I to be mandated to get another one? What about the flu vaccine? What about STDs which I highly doubt my 8 month old will be contracting anytime soon?
Things like MMR and Polio make sense (though I am still unsure about mandating), but I don't know about some of the others... so I am leery about having random people in D.C. choosing these things for me based on who knows what.
I'm trying to be good and avoid the vaccine manufacturer profit arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't pay for more bandwidth. You ALREADY paid for that bandwidth (say, 5mbit down). Comcast decided they didn't want to provide you 5mbit worth of Netflix, though, without Netflix ALSO paying, even though Netflix had already paid whoever they have as an ISP on their end.
This wasn't Netflix running out of bandwidth and having to increase their uplink speed, and it wasn't the consumer running out of bandwidth and having to pay to increase their download speed. This was Comcast deciding that Netflix was causing you (and your peers) to use too much of your already-paid for bandwidth. Comcast couldn't keep up with the consistent and simultaneous demand on what you supposedly had access to. So, instead, it throttled Netflix (which users saw as being Netflix's problem - hey, Netflix can't keep up!) and then charged Netflix to unthrottle (which users saw as Netflix "buying more bandwidth" so Netflix could keep up). In reality, it was Comcast that essentially oversold their bandwidth (you can have 5mbit down! oh, wait, nevermind, we can't supply all this bandwidth all at once; hey, a lot of it is being used by Netflix, maybe we could get them to pay more so it doesn't look like we were unprepared for demand on services we sold!)
This isn't unlike an airline overselling their flights. The difference is that when a flight fills up and customers who already paid for their tickets can't actually fit on the plane anymore, the airline doesn't start charging the destination more because the destination is using too much space on their plane. They give the customers who can't get on the plane at the very least a free transfer, and I think they get a free future lfight or something, too? Or a refund + flight? Something like that. In other words, the airliner realizes that part of overselling means that you have to deal with the consequences that occasionally come up with overselling... and "deal with" doesn't mean "charge someone else for your own lack of space that you sold as though you had more space than you actually did."
TL;DR: Comcast oversold their bandwidth and decided to make Netflix pay for it.
Is that really the case? I kept Vista up to date, but it never worked as well as Windows 7 on the same hardware. Even something as simple as file transferring was clunky on Vista, or hung, or was crazy slow. Boot times were different between Vista and 7...
I don't actually know about the internals of what changed, and I realize it was 6.0 to 6.1 (right? I think...), but it certainly seemed a lot different than a "rebranding."
If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it.
Quite true. The wikipedia entry on marriage licenses is quite an interesting read... e.g., "For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th-century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations."
Regardless though... religion is a pretty personal and, ah, religious institution, right? And yet, government's for all of history have made it their business to make laws about it.
the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians
This is true, but in a democracy, is it a problem for a group of people to try to democratically change the country to be what they consider to be right and recognize what they think is the right explanation of who/what a marriage is between?
the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.
I actually think the government shouldn't be in the business of "marriage" licenses, because I don't think the government has anything to do with what marriage really IS. I can see how a government might recognize a marriage as being automatically a civil union, and I can see how those who value a traditional view of marriage would want the government to encourage that view, and I think it's okay for said supporters to try to democratically effect that change. But, myself, I think it should be separated. Government is a civil thing and thus should be in the business of making civil unions. Marriage is a religious thing and should be a religious thing.
If you want to not serve people who have divorced unbiblically... I see no reason why you can't not serve those people.
I thought those arguing in favor of homosexual marriage bring up that there are financial benefits TO getting married?
Anyways, the main point is this: maybe there are discrepencies (I agree, there are) and problems with the way people are refused service (refuse service to open homosexuals, not refuse service to college students who openly sleep around, or whatever). Ok, so we've established inconsistencies. So that means that, since the beliefs are inconsistent, or perhaps more generally, just don't make sense to someone else ... that you can simply say that those beliefs are therefore invalid and that individual can be forced to violate them?
Not forced to not violate other people's rights, but forced to violate your own beliefs. Forced, yes, to do something as simple as bake a cake for someone, take pictures at their wedding... or more non-simple things like officiate the wedding.
It wouldn't happen, but I can't imagine a minister of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thingy would particularly want to be forced to give Christian vows in a Christian ceremony to a Christian couple because somehow, the Christian couple has a "right" to THAT PERSON offciating their wedding. Because, you know, I have a right to make you do what I want you to do, even if you think it is wrong for you to do it?
Let's say I'm holding a pro-bombing rally. Let's say it's a pro-bomb-the-abortion-clinics rally (obviously, it's not explicitly that). And I want you to provide a meal for us. Should you be forced to do that, and not be able to say "No, I don't want to support bombing abortion clinics. I'm not going to provide food."
I'm a Christian, and I think someone should be able to refuse me service because you think my views are harmful. I don't think the government should be allowed to... but that's a different story... and yes, I do support separating legal and religious "marriage" things... i.e., you want to have a civil union for the legal benefits, fine. Pastors do religious ceremonies. Civil servants to civil ceremonies. I would view myself as "married" even if my state and/or country didn't think I was.
I'm pretty sure Windows 7 was not really just "rebranded Vista." Having used both Vista and Windows 7, it certainly seems like they fixed a whole lot of issues in Vista. Sure, it looks sorta similar more or less continued the Vista-esque GUI/frontend look and feel... but if we're just basing it on the frontend look and feel, then we may as well be comparing Windows to Gnome and KDE... :P
Even so, it looks like it's compatible with Chrome, Safari, FF, and IE... at least that seem to be what that wikipedia page indicates.
2. yet have it not work properly on any browser other than MSIE
What? My wife uses Firefox and Chrome with outlook.com every day. What doesn't work properly, exactly?
makes the installation process virtually impossible to automate.
Strange. We have been automating various installation package types on Windows for a while, now, usually with answer files... for test purposes.
This is interesting to me, I've never heard this. Are you saying that parted, as in the Linux partitioning tool, uses the Microsoft partition type GUID incorrectly... and that is what Windows is reading, and thus sees it as not being formatted correctly?
Aren't they trying to get users to use Office365 now, though? Subscriptoin based service and all that? So maybe interoperability with file formats is now to their benefit, just as making things like OneDrive or Outlook.com work better on multiple mobile device OSes.
Windows is a dealbreaker for me though.
I'm not a fan of the metro stuff and start screen on 8, though at least 8.1 half fixed metro apps by letting you close them. Windows 10 is supposed to run metro apps in a window on the desktop. But, all that said - I have to say that if I had a tablet, the new Start screen thing and metro apps ... would be totally fine. That seems to be what it was designed for. And being able to switch between those two contexts is even better (as 10 can do, I believe... manually, or based on screen size). I'm assuming it was the metro stuff that you meant was a dealbreaker. I've heard good things about it on Windows phones (I don't own own)
This comes from someone running RHEL on his work laptop, Windows 8.1 on his desktop, and Android on all his mobile/tablet devices. And I work with several versions of unix, linux, and windows for a living... I'm no Windows fanboy. :) But Windows 7 was good, Windows 8 was better aside from the badly implemented UI changes, 8.1 improved somewhat [I installed a third party start button modification thingy], and it looks like Windows 10 will actually be pretty good, from what I've seen [I have not actually run it]. It seems that Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself somewhat, moving to a make-money-with-services idea... more platform agnostic. Which is awesome; Google and Apple could use some competition, and Amazon could, too, in the cloud arena ... specifically, making things more widely compatible (seriously, why isn't there a google music roku app?).
Unintended? I doubt it. :)
I didn't mean to imply it was all learned... though I was actually refering more to what is considered "acceptable behavior" vs. what they are actually interested in. e.g., learning that flowers are okay to like as a girl but not as a boy, or that building stuff is a boy thing and not a girl thing.
That said, I agree that people are inherently and intrinsically different, not simply products of society/social pressures/whatever. But views of what is "normal" behavior for a girl or boy certainly is something that is significantly learned from surroundings/society, isn't it? And that can certainly serve to form or at least encourage development or non-development of interests. If I thought programming was something that "real boys" don't do, I might not have been so inclined to do it, even though I was inherently interested in it.
There are lots of different good responses to this ... based on what the relationship of the one responding is - parents, schools, peers, friends, society, government, etc. My response as a parent will be different than what I want society, friends, schools, or the government to do. e.g., I would like society to accept female engineers just as readily as male engineers, but not push my daughter to be an engineer or to somehow imply that to be an empowered woman, she HAS to do things that used to be considered "man stuff." However, as a parent, I want to encourage interests and let them explore and find out what they like, get them to try things they don't want to because of various reasons (fear, social pressures, advertising, whatever it is) but let them not continue if they don't like it, etc.
But pushing society towards equally accepting an engineer, a mother, a secretary, and an athlete as a "real woman" is important, I think. It seems similar to pushing society to accept a both blacks and whites as equally human. Yes, I can deal with that as a parent, but I think we should deal with it as a society, too.
I responded to you in another thread. I am not stalking you. ;) I would venture to say that it seems like we actually seem to agree pretty much, but may have seen different experiences and are approaching it from two different perspectives. I apparently have seen the problem of ignoring the societal pressure issue more and you seem to have seen the ignoring genuine interest differences more.
I agree, the generalization that all male/female differences are due to societal pressures is stupid. I DO think generalizations can be made about males or females as a whole, and thus I would expect certain fields/careers to be more women than men. But I don't expect every given woman to conform, nor do I think it's weird if they don't.
So, just as assuming that all male/female differences are due to socieal pressures is stupid, I would argue that so is assuming that it's all because of different generalized interests. Or "genderalized" :)
Yeah, I agree it's hard to tell if it's what they actually like or if it's "conforming." And conforming isn't always bad, I suppose. Seems societies cycle from wanting to conform to everything to wanting to be non-conforming to everything, ha. :)
That said, I know women (e.g., my wife) who don't like the "girly stereotype" for a variety of reasons (like the annoying useless small talk that neither of us are good at), but do like what is stereotyped as "girly" - flowers, pink, cute things, dresses, etc.
I guess... people are complex, we have lots of varying interests, and the "pink vs. blue"/"girl vs. boy" interests stuff is often just silly and such a vast over-generalization, and yet seems to be very prevalent. Cynicism coming out here: it does make a lot of money for retailers of "his and her" sorts of stuff, though.
I have to say that in my particular large, very distributed and varied corporate tech workplace, I've not really encounterd any sexism nor racism.
Have you considered that there's also societal pressures against men who are nerdy programmers ? Or against men wanting to become fashion designers ? Still, if you have a passion, you're not going to let society stop you.
Yes. In limited ways, I experienced some of it. But that said, I think there's more pressure on women to conform than men. And regardless of who has more or less pressures, the point is that it's worth it to try to point out that those pressures should at the very least be made known, if not corrected. For guys as well as girls, yes... though, like I said, I observe it to be a more significant problem for women than men.
I have a son and a daughter, and we had boxes of legos, cars, dolls, and various other toys all in the living room where both could play with anything they wanted. And from the beginning it was very clear that they had their own interests. Even if they were both playing with the legos, my son was always building cars and bridges with them. My daughter was building houses and people.
I jumped to conclusions about you, my apologies for that. And this is what we want to do as well.
Yeah, I think this is the case with some of the other cartoons that I watched as a kid - which would have been in the 90s :) - like Bugs Bunny. Both old ones and the newer ones from the 80s/90s.
I do like the humor of Rocky and Bullwinkle though... I think a lot of it would have made no sense to me as a kid, probably just the more slapstick type elements would have been funny at that time. Maybe a couple of the jokes... but not a lot of the stereotyping and cold-war era humor and wordplay and all that.
The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.
So for those 20% that are men - is it difficult for them to succeed as vets? Is it viewed as somewhat non-masculine behavior? Is it actually viewed as uncommon as in "so what do you do? A what? A vet? Wow, are there many men that are vets?"
stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.
I totally agree with that... though I think we also need to consciously try to encourage people to think this way, as I don't think it comes naturally. People naturally think certain careers are manly and certain careers are womanly, and it seems hard for people to change that thinking.
I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't love to talk about relationships with other women.
I have met many. I've also met women who would prefer to talk about physics rather than celebrities. And many men that don't talk about other women as though it was their favorite hobby.
I agree, insulting what they MIGHT find to be important to them is bad (you left out "might" so I FTFY .. ;) ). And making sure that they are accepted even if they are interested in "tomboy" things is important, too... in other words, we shouldn't call them tomboys for liking things that are more commonly liked by men.
But, we do. Having a daughter, now - even as young as she is, under a year old - I'm very aware of how different things get interpreted based on whether a boy or girl does it. If our daughter "talks" (baby talk) a lot, it's because she's a girl. If a boy "talks" a lot, it's strage. If a "girl" likes building things or running around outside when they're older, they are a "tomboy." If a boy likes staying inside reading and cooking, well that's a bit odd - why isn't he outside pretending to beat up bandits? etc...
And at such a young, impressionable age ... you think perhaps what they learn is the "accepted behavior" during their first 5 years of life might carry through for quite a while, and be hard to fix? On both sides, too; not just women deciding they want to go into physics, but men deciding that they are capable. And that it shouldn't be weird.
Have you considered that there may be societal pressures about what a woman is supposed to be, and a nerdy programmer doesn't fit that?
It's the same pressure that makes guys think that liking "pink" is bad, or liking flowers is girly, or liking babies is something for women, and that fighting/violence is masculine.
To assume that women have no interest in something and thus that interest MUST be inherent and not because of various societal pressure about what it means to be a "woman" seems a bit short-sighted. Are there similar pressures for men? Sure. But overall, it seems men have much greater freedom - and, historically, have had more or less the same freedoms whereas women have had even fewer - about their career and interest choices.
It's very interesting to me that "interior design" and "fashion" were mentioned earlier in this thread. You may as well have thrown in "cooking" and "secretary-ing" (is there a verb form of that? ha) and covered almost all of the "typical woman" jobs. Strange that there are so few and they are so un-technical.
I have a daughter now, and am more aware of how society ... treats women, so to speak ... from a young age. When's the last time you gave a lego set to a girl? or gave them a book about planes or tractors or cars? It's *hard* to, because all of the advertising for "girl's" stuff is pink, fluffy, princess, dolls, flowers, and the like. Try finding an ad - or an example of a gift - for somehing more technical than Barbie that is "meant" for a girl. Or try giving a young girl a lego set for her birthday and see what the other adults think.
It seems this is changing somewhat again, and for good reason. We will be doing our best to give our daughter what she appears to be interested in by herself, and not try to make her conform to what society thinks she SHOULD be interested in - talking on the phone, makeup, boys, interior decorating, and baking. She'll have access and support if she wants to do math, science, computers, software, programming, animals, medicine, vet medicine, physics, geology, politics, cooking... or, yes, if she decides that what she wants most in life is to be a wife and mother. And if she doesn't like pink - that's fine, too. And we won't call her a "tomboy" and won't let others call her a "tomboy" in our presence if she just happens to like things that "traditionally" are boy things - like, uh, running around outside... because, clearly, that's only for boys.
(for the record, I hold other beliefs that would make "feminists" quite annoyed. I am no SJW; I just happen to think that women have long been thought of as inferior in intellect, among other things, and pressured to be what men want them to be - pretty things to look at.)
Some younger folks like me know about this, too... and have watched many of the old episodes, even hosting parties to watch a couple hours of them ;)
2016 to 2017. Sure, it's not much, but it's an incremental change in an upwards direction.
Yes. Ugly policy decisions is exactly what I was going for, in fact. It's not as simple as "ugh, stupid anti-vaxxers, we need to mandate vaccines" as some seem to think it is. There are some of us who are cool with vaccines ... the ones that make sense. And leery about spending the money (government) and risk (yes, the rather small but real, especially with new-ish and thus much less understood vaccines, it seems) for the ones that don't.
And of course, there's the question of the efficacy of the different types (e.g., acellular pertussis) and the different schedules and whether it's good to throw them into kids all at once or spread them out and .... etc. Doctors don't seem to agree completely (not with vaccination in general, but when, how many, which ones, etc.), countries don't agree, studies don't agree, yet we expect the government to mandate something... that seems iffy to me.
Whoever chooses wields an awful lot of power. Including monetarily. I'm sure the vaccine makers would have input on which ones and how often. :) Good thing we don't let corporations influence political decisions.
I think you missed the point. How is it I am doing anyone harm by not being vaccinated for something I am not going to spread since it's an STD and I only have sex with one other person?
So at what point does the liability stop? If I allow my kids to play on sleds or go skiing and they get hurt or killed or maimed ... should I go to jail for child endangerment for allowing them to be in such danger?
I am NOT arguing that all vaccines are junk and we should all not vaccinate. I AM arguing that we need to think through the ramifications of this pretty seriously. It's not exactly a slippery *slope* argument as much as .... an ice rink argument. I am not saying that "if we mandate vaccines, we're going to mandate carrots and spinach next" as though one is worse than the other... I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to mandate vaccines in because of child endangerment if we don't also start curbing all these other dangerous behaviors that kid's do. Like playing in the dirt, riding horses, riding bikes, taking walks where there may be drunk drivers without putting them in helmets ... or whatever.
Furthermore, WHAT vaccines? And how often? I got one MMR vaccine I believe, but it's since been raised to two. Ought I to be mandated to get another one? What about the flu vaccine? What about STDs which I highly doubt my 8 month old will be contracting anytime soon?
Things like MMR and Polio make sense (though I am still unsure about mandating), but I don't know about some of the others... so I am leery about having random people in D.C. choosing these things for me based on who knows what.
I'm trying to be good and avoid the vaccine manufacturer profit arguments.