"Urban" means "urban culture". I don't know where you're getting the whole race thing. That's your thing. Last I checked, "urban culture" doesn't have anything to do with race... it has to do with social and economic class."
Why indeed - "urban culture" merely correlates extremely highly with race by... wait for it... complete accident! That's the ticket! On a completely different note, where did you get those ideological blinders of yours? I'd like a couple for some friends.
People appear to make Lay out as a "monster" for - hold on - obfuscating the company balance sheet to hide its failure. Geez. If that's all what it takes to be a monster these days standards must have slipped.
Of course, he defrauded some investors of their cash, benefiting others (in a supposedly mostly random pattern - those who sold stock before the crash won, those who bought lost out), while (to the extent Enron issued more stock while on the ropes) giving the Enron Corporation more cash to burn. Still, my heart has a hard time bleeding for wall-street investors. To the extent the common man lost out, it was most likely through mutual funds or pension funds, and through diversification the loss was managable.
Also note that this led to Enron employees benefiting, not losing out, as the fraud was not what caused the company to collapse. On the contrary, the fraud allowed the employees to collect their paycheck for a longer period of time. (It did distort their investment decisions of course) Lay benefitted by the same mechanism (CEO:s are employees, after all - and in the case of Lay very well paid employees).
Now, as an aside, how exactly did he shaft the employees? His crime was concealing the fact that the company was tanking, thus screwing (some) investors. The company would have tanked even faster if not for the criminality of Lay - hence, the net effect on the employees was that they recieved wages for a longer period of time than had been the case if Lay & co had stayed within the law.
Of course, lots of employees had their careers screwed over and their stock options and stock made worthless by the bankruptcy, but that would have come to pass even faster if not for the fraud. (This was not a case of Lay stealing company cash and spending it on booze and hookers, after all.)
"See how the argument about 'biological differences' looks in a decade or two when women have finally had a chance to catch up."
Well, yes - that will be very interesting. But frankly, just extrapolating some past and current trends, mixed with non-trends isn't really a great argument.
English used to be a heavily male-dominated academic field. When formal discrimination was dropped, females quickly filed in and estabished themselves in large numbers, at most stages of the academic ladder. The same goes for many fields - females are now heavily represented in much of academia. It is very hard to argue for a general academic anti-female bias.
Contrary to what one might expect from your discrimination hypothesis though, females have had the greatest success in the least meritocratic, "fuzzy" fields of social studies and language, while the fields with the most rigorous standards such as mathematics and physics are still heavily male-dominated. There isn't a large diaspora of female mathematicians or coders toiling away at home, shut out from university by extremely stealthy sex discrimination.
Also, male and female behavioral differances is not a localized phenomenon to a certain human society or point in time. Rather, they are broadly similar across virtually all societies and eras.
When a taboo is present, the watchers of the taboo take any sign of questioning as heresy. They (correctly) anticipate that people who in any way question the taboo, while not directly challenging it, are most likely attempting to shield themselves from reprisal. This in turn leads to the taboo watchers acting in a very touchy fashion. Game theory.
In short: (Taboo -> People cloak their opinions - > Taboo guardians have to be more sensitive in order to penetrate the cloaking efforts of dissenters - > and so on)
It is not "male supremacism" that keep women out of engineering and IT. There isn't any female subculture of "outsider nerds" out there, shut out from the IT world. Indeed, even in nearly completely non-social fields such as hacking (or open-source), where formal credentials often mean squat, male predominance is even more overwhelming.
In real cases of supremacism at work, such as anti-jewish university quotas in the US, there formed an outside diaspora (for instance City University in New York), and when discrimination was lifted there was a huge jewish influx into the university system.
In the case of females, there is also hardly the same social cost to bear as with, say, nursing and men. Women who go into IT do not risk their reproductive or social success (hardly, there is a large supply of potential mates, albeit of second-tier attractivity). Rather, it is just a fact of life that women aren't that nerdy on average. Live with it.
What is important to remember here is that, contrary to some beliefs, these tendencies are not arbitrary. They have a certain variability (as pointed out elsewhere, huge resources are devoted in various fields to chasing imbalances), but they are very predictable and constant in time and space. Short and rough guide:
Professions relating to gadgetry: Male-dominated.
Professions related to caring for children and the elderly: Female-dominated.
There are some professions where a mix of talents is beneficial - such as PR. Here, we see a mix of sexes. Also, this does not make social factors irrelevant - it just makes it very hard to eliminate them.
Open-source developers are not merely your average IT graduate (or student) - they are so passionately devoted to programming and IT that they are prepared to work for no wage.
That in turn makes the population from which candidates are selected even smaller, and further out to the right on the "nerdiness" bell curve. The resulting change in candidate population size as we move to the right, from "IT grad nerdy" to "Open source nerdy" is not proportional, rather it will always produce an extremely male-biased sample.
1. Your experience fits some of the evidence - women tend to be reasonably well represented in undergraduate courses in nerdy subjects, but they tend to drop off rapidly as you move higher up. There is large variance though.
2. Indeed, social factors are important (ask any female in Saudi, for instance...). However, that does not mean biological factors can be discounted automatically. Indeed, the extremely prevelant social differences between men and women (over time and space) by themselves point towards a biological underlying explanation. Social behavior is a direct function of human biology.
3. You mention only negative social factors - this is somewhat misleading. There is also a significant infrastructure present that is set up to push women into these subjects (math, science), as the current disparity is discomforting to those who subscribe to certain dominant ideologies.
Indeed - the jocks get on top of the dating game by their "respectfulness"... *giggle*
But yes, the dominance of (male) nerds and geeks is one factor that further drives women away from nerdy pursiuts - the problem is just that this pales in significance to the fact that female nerds is a terribly small group compared to the number of male nerds.
There is such research, of course, and it mostly falls into a few broad categories:
- Gender "science". Gender science presupposes biological factors are irrelevant as a matter of doctrine.
- Sociology of various stripes. Rarely uses biological controls of any kind. No standardized or generally accepted methodology exists.
In short, the research you are referring to is pretty close to worthless. It is also often obviously driven by a certain (egalitarian)utopian ideological mindset, that is aggressively intolerant of any dissent from the party line whatsoever.
Unfortunately for these "sciences", real science in the biological fields is constantly pushing back the veil of ignorance that psuedoscience has been hiding behind. There is a plentora of articles discussing the phonomena - here is one:
*puff* Yea man it's like USA PATRIOT act is checking all the libraries to see who borrowed "Stupid white men" and then they like disappear and stuff with the millions of innocent muslims to guantanamo where they force you to piss on a koran while kissing a statue of george bush *puff*
...and sometimes it's hard. For a Slashdot-related example of two market-dominant companies competing like there was no tomorrow you can look at Intel or AMD. Or the trio of Sony-Microsoft-Nintendo for that matter. They all own the market, yet compete heavily.
"The sinking roughly co-incided with the end of Sweden as a feared superpower, thought it was only one factor of many."
Given that the era of Sweden as a major power is usually given as between 1611 och 1718, and that the Vasa sank in 1628, that is hardly true. Agree with the rest of your post though.
Depends - a country really cannot function normally unless political violence (of which terror tactics against the general population is perhaps the most potent kind) is curtailed and kept at an absolute minimum. Having city centers and landmarks get blown up with any regularity is a no-no if you want a working country.
It really doesn't matter much that more people die from cardiovascular disease or similar causes compared to terrorism (the death rate is steady and holding at 100%, after all...). This is especially true after the advent of the mass media - terrorism is after all about terrorizing the enemy into submission.
Also, it is worth noting that most Slashdotters moaning over, say, the USA PATRIOT act couldn't tell us what is actually in the act if their life depended on it. Even if Terrorism can be considered an "inconsequential threat" by the standards used by its opponents, I am quite interested in hearing why Patriot should be considered a "consequential threat" by the same standard.
Wall street analysts aren't looking for companies with high growth potential - if that potential is currently estimated accurately, the stock price already reflects expectations of high growth*, and the share price won't budge even if the company and its profits grow by leaps and bounds.
Rather, what they want are dark horses that other analysts have misjudged and under / overvalued. Of course, expectations of future growth are more uncertain (as a rule) than expectations of constant or no growth, so for those who want the extra interest from gambling a bit, going for quick-growth stocks might be more attractive.
* Also, analysts and investors are as prone to stampedes and collective lapses of judgement as the rest of us (if not more so) - hence, you can get collective hysteria when eveyone thinks that all stocks in a "growth sector" are somehow all undervalued at once! (Or rather, rising stock prices create expectations of higher stock prices that cause people to buy stocks... etc. - of course, those kinds of bubbles tend to burst.)
Just drag the app off the virtual drive into the "programs" folder. (or some other place where you want the App to be). Presto. (Sure, non-obvious - Macs aren't *that* user friendly in all respects, but I prefer this to the Windows modus operandi)
Out-of-uniform enemy combattants have never had much protection, for the simple reason that protecting them would be stupid, in giving a huge advantage to those willing to flout the rules.
If the new NGO-driven interpretations of Geneva would force the US to recognize out-of-uniform combattants, the US would be better of just withdrawing from the treaty.
This assertion is of course also BS. No society in existance maximizes individual liberty while completely foregoing public safety and security. It's often a tradeoff, and most societies settle on a balance dictated by the circumstances. Those who say otherwise are just sloganeering.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I can guarantee you that life in Victorian times would have been even shittier if they would have dropped their "common decency", etc.
"There are millions of us white people here, being New Yorkers and acting all urban on yo' ass. Deal with it."
Alternatively, you could just say "trying to act all black on yo' ass" and save a few euphemism points for something more worthwhile.
"Urban" means "urban culture". I don't know where you're getting the whole race thing. That's your thing. Last I checked, "urban culture" doesn't have anything to do with race... it has to do with social and economic class."
Why indeed - "urban culture" merely correlates extremely highly with race by... wait for it... complete accident! That's the ticket! On a completely different note, where did you get those ideological blinders of yours? I'd like a couple for some friends.
People appear to make Lay out as a "monster" for - hold on - obfuscating the company balance sheet to hide its failure. Geez. If that's all what it takes to be a monster these days standards must have slipped.
Of course, he defrauded some investors of their cash, benefiting others (in a supposedly mostly random pattern - those who sold stock before the crash won, those who bought lost out), while (to the extent Enron issued more stock while on the ropes) giving the Enron Corporation more cash to burn. Still, my heart has a hard time bleeding for wall-street investors. To the extent the common man lost out, it was most likely through mutual funds or pension funds, and through diversification the loss was managable.
Also note that this led to Enron employees benefiting, not losing out, as the fraud was not what caused the company to collapse. On the contrary, the fraud allowed the employees to collect their paycheck for a longer period of time. (It did distort their investment decisions of course) Lay benefitted by the same mechanism (CEO:s are employees, after all - and in the case of Lay very well paid employees).
"shafting... the employees..."
Now, as an aside, how exactly did he shaft the employees? His crime was concealing the fact that the company was tanking, thus screwing (some) investors. The company would have tanked even faster if not for the criminality of Lay - hence, the net effect on the employees was that they recieved wages for a longer period of time than had been the case if Lay & co had stayed within the law.
Of course, lots of employees had their careers screwed over and their stock options and stock made worthless by the bankruptcy, but that would have come to pass even faster if not for the fraud. (This was not a case of Lay stealing company cash and spending it on booze and hookers, after all.)
"See how the argument about 'biological differences' looks in a decade or two when women have finally had a chance to catch up."
9 D-879D-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF
Well, yes - that will be very interesting. But frankly, just extrapolating some past and current trends, mixed with non-trends isn't really a great argument.
English used to be a heavily male-dominated academic field. When formal discrimination was dropped, females quickly filed in and estabished themselves in large numbers, at most stages of the academic ladder. The same goes for many fields - females are now heavily represented in much of academia. It is very hard to argue for a general academic anti-female bias.
Contrary to what one might expect from your discrimination hypothesis though, females have had the greatest success in the least meritocratic, "fuzzy" fields of social studies and language, while the fields with the most rigorous standards such as mathematics and physics are still heavily male-dominated. There isn't a large diaspora of female mathematicians or coders toiling away at home, shut out from university by extremely stealthy sex discrimination.
Also, male and female behavioral differances is not a localized phenomenon to a certain human society or point in time. Rather, they are broadly similar across virtually all societies and eras.
As for male and female brains being different, that is not really an object of discussion - here is an old-ish article discussing the issue: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E
When a taboo is present, the watchers of the taboo take any sign of questioning as heresy. They (correctly) anticipate that people who in any way question the taboo, while not directly challenging it, are most likely attempting to shield themselves from reprisal. This in turn leads to the taboo watchers acting in a very touchy fashion. Game theory.
In short: (Taboo -> People cloak their opinions - > Taboo guardians have to be more sensitive in order to penetrate the cloaking efforts of dissenters - > and so on)
It is not "male supremacism" that keep women out of engineering and IT. There isn't any female subculture of "outsider nerds" out there, shut out from the IT world. Indeed, even in nearly completely non-social fields such as hacking (or open-source), where formal credentials often mean squat, male predominance is even more overwhelming.
In real cases of supremacism at work, such as anti-jewish university quotas in the US, there formed an outside diaspora (for instance City University in New York), and when discrimination was lifted there was a huge jewish influx into the university system.
In the case of females, there is also hardly the same social cost to bear as with, say, nursing and men. Women who go into IT do not risk their reproductive or social success (hardly, there is a large supply of potential mates, albeit of second-tier attractivity). Rather, it is just a fact of life that women aren't that nerdy on average. Live with it.
What is important to remember here is that, contrary to some beliefs, these tendencies are not arbitrary. They have a certain variability (as pointed out elsewhere, huge resources are devoted in various fields to chasing imbalances), but they are very predictable and constant in time and space. Short and rough guide:
Professions relating to gadgetry: Male-dominated.
Professions related to caring for children and the elderly: Female-dominated.
There are some professions where a mix of talents is beneficial - such as PR. Here, we see a mix of sexes. Also, this does not make social factors irrelevant - it just makes it very hard to eliminate them.
Open-source developers are not merely your average IT graduate (or student) - they are so passionately devoted to programming and IT that they are prepared to work for no wage.
That in turn makes the population from which candidates are selected even smaller, and further out to the right on the "nerdiness" bell curve. The resulting change in candidate population size as we move to the right, from "IT grad nerdy" to "Open source nerdy" is not proportional, rather it will always produce an extremely male-biased sample.
1. Your experience fits some of the evidence - women tend to be reasonably well represented in undergraduate courses in nerdy subjects, but they tend to drop off rapidly as you move higher up. There is large variance though.
2. Indeed, social factors are important (ask any female in Saudi, for instance...). However, that does not mean biological factors can be discounted automatically. Indeed, the extremely prevelant social differences between men and women (over time and space) by themselves point towards a biological underlying explanation. Social behavior is a direct function of human biology.
3. You mention only negative social factors - this is somewhat misleading. There is also a significant infrastructure present that is set up to push women into these subjects (math, science), as the current disparity is discomforting to those who subscribe to certain dominant ideologies.
Indeed - the jocks get on top of the dating game by their "respectfulness"... *giggle*
But yes, the dominance of (male) nerds and geeks is one factor that further drives women away from nerdy pursiuts - the problem is just that this pales in significance to the fact that female nerds is a terribly small group compared to the number of male nerds.
...and your reference is?
9 D-879D-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF
There is such research, of course, and it mostly falls into a few broad categories:
- Gender "science". Gender science presupposes biological factors are irrelevant as a matter of doctrine.
- Sociology of various stripes. Rarely uses biological controls of any kind. No standardized or generally accepted methodology exists.
In short, the research you are referring to is pretty close to worthless. It is also often obviously driven by a certain (egalitarian)utopian ideological mindset, that is aggressively intolerant of any dissent from the party line whatsoever.
Unfortunately for these "sciences", real science in the biological fields is constantly pushing back the veil of ignorance that psuedoscience has been hiding behind. There is a plentora of articles discussing the phonomena - here is one:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E
A picture is often worth more than a thousand words, etc. - here is a piece of the puzzle:
p g
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/Brains_resize2.j
*puff* Yea man it's like USA PATRIOT act is checking all the libraries to see who borrowed "Stupid white men" and then they like disappear and stuff with the millions of innocent muslims to guantanamo where they force you to piss on a koran while kissing a statue of george bush *puff*
...and sometimes it's hard. For a Slashdot-related example of two market-dominant companies competing like there was no tomorrow you can look at Intel or AMD. Or the trio of Sony-Microsoft-Nintendo for that matter. They all own the market, yet compete heavily.
"The sinking roughly co-incided with the end of Sweden as a feared superpower, thought it was only one factor of many."
Given that the era of Sweden as a major power is usually given as between 1611 och 1718, and that the Vasa sank in 1628, that is hardly true. Agree with the rest of your post though.
"Terrorism is an inconsequential threat"
Depends - a country really cannot function normally unless political violence (of which terror tactics against the general population is perhaps the most potent kind) is curtailed and kept at an absolute minimum. Having city centers and landmarks get blown up with any regularity is a no-no if you want a working country.
It really doesn't matter much that more people die from cardiovascular disease or similar causes compared to terrorism (the death rate is steady and holding at 100%, after all...). This is especially true after the advent of the mass media - terrorism is after all about terrorizing the enemy into submission.
Also, it is worth noting that most Slashdotters moaning over, say, the USA PATRIOT act couldn't tell us what is actually in the act if their life depended on it. Even if Terrorism can be considered an "inconsequential threat" by the standards used by its opponents, I am quite interested in hearing why Patriot should be considered a "consequential threat" by the same standard.
Wall street analysts aren't looking for companies with high growth potential - if that potential is currently estimated accurately, the stock price already reflects expectations of high growth*, and the share price won't budge even if the company and its profits grow by leaps and bounds.
Rather, what they want are dark horses that other analysts have misjudged and under / overvalued. Of course, expectations of future growth are more uncertain (as a rule) than expectations of constant or no growth, so for those who want the extra interest from gambling a bit, going for quick-growth stocks might be more attractive.
* Also, analysts and investors are as prone to stampedes and collective lapses of judgement as the rest of us (if not more so) - hence, you can get collective hysteria when eveyone thinks that all stocks in a "growth sector" are somehow all undervalued at once! (Or rather, rising stock prices create expectations of higher stock prices that cause people to buy stocks... etc. - of course, those kinds of bubbles tend to burst.)
Just drag the app off the virtual drive into the "programs" folder. (or some other place where you want the App to be). Presto. (Sure, non-obvious - Macs aren't *that* user friendly in all respects, but I prefer this to the Windows modus operandi)
No, it's not - you reversed the dimensions and used the correct weights. I would say PWT sounds like a plausible diagnosis :)
"and basically how restricted life has become."
So, how has your life "become more restricted"?
Out-of-uniform enemy combattants have never had much protection, for the simple reason that protecting them would be stupid, in giving a huge advantage to those willing to flout the rules.
If the new NGO-driven interpretations of Geneva would force the US to recognize out-of-uniform combattants, the US would be better of just withdrawing from the treaty.
This assertion is of course also BS. No society in existance maximizes individual liberty while completely foregoing public safety and security. It's often a tradeoff, and most societies settle on a balance dictated by the circumstances. Those who say otherwise are just sloganeering.
ZOMG!!!11!! He's right!!!!11!! It's taking 98 % of my resources - I'm going to have to reboot!