Two otherwise-identical people of different genders doing the same job are paid almost exactly the same, at least on a population level and with moderate-size or larger companies. To do otherwise is super-dangerous because it is an open-and-shut lawsuit and the information is all discoverable. (Of course individuals may have minor differences due to experience or negotiation at hiring, which generally goes away with tenure - if the company is smart.) You can look at any of the company stats of salaries for like-for-like positions and they're incredibly close to 100%.

This is a fact and is true today. Look at it another way - if a company could get the same work for 77% of what they pay a man, wouldn't they far prefer to hire women? People in companies could be wildly sexist, but they'd fail - that's just too much money left on the table! The 77-cents-on-the-dollar thing is an absolute lie. I'd link to actual articles, but there's too many. It makes me so angry to hear otherwise-intelligent people (like the President!) repeat it - are they that cynical, or do they really not get it? (It's got to be the former - when someone pulled up the WH workforce stats, they were quick to reply that it wasn't fair to compare across titles and experience, which is exactly how the 77c number was fabricated.)

So what's going on? Well, there is undoubtedly a motherhood gap, because mothers generally take time off to be with the new child, which puts them behind their non-childbearing peers of any gender. Some women, of course, don't ever come back, but are still included in the stats. Of those that do, well in some industries it's particularly difficult to take a leave of absence (for any reason) - academia and tech are prominent examples. If I as a man took 6+ months off to go hiking in Asia, I'd be in the same boat.

This isn't that complicated. The question is, what do we want to do about it? Well, it's an unavoidable fact of taking time off. We can incentivize anybody who take time off for any reason by negating the setback with an opposite incentive - this seems highly risky and undesirable. Alternatively, because procreation is a societal good, we can incentivize specifically mothers in this fashion. I trust that women wouldn't just have kids to get this benefit, and who pays for it is an open question, but it still seems like a perverse incentive - and in any case it may not be legal to do this. Regardless, such a change should be an open debate - but trying to fix it by erasing the symptom of the 77c lie would just be sneaking through the back door.

The only alternative I see is to accept that having kids is a life choice like any other, and it has downsides and upsides. The downsides are easier to measure, but maybe not important. I personally don't know many women, including my own very successful mother, whose joy about being a mother is tempered by "but it has reduced my lifetime earning potential by X%". People do things for reasons other than money.

This whole thing smacks of the nasty phase of old-style feminism where women berated mothers for being unenlightened and choosing to have kids. I thought we were past that...

People didn't used to go around talking about it. It didn't matter, your "name" was cpphead24 or whatever. People formed real identities and had real interpersonal relationships with other people without ever knowing more than their username. Race, religion, sexuality, age, and - yes - gender just didn't come up - a/s/l was a bit creepy, etc. I'm not that old - it wasn't *that* long ago...

This of course was back during the time where the generally accepted advice was to not reveal anything of their real life online. Parents taught their kids this - I remember when I signed up for Facebook in 2007, I was pretty freaked out by the whole "real names" thing. I think it was the first time I'd ever used my full name online, and I don't think I was uncommon.

I wonder if we should go back to that.

The problem stems from the currency. The EU consists of sovereign states that are not bound together as tightly as states in the U.S., but their economies are now coupled by the Euro.

Can you imagine if places like South Carolina and Mississippi had to pay California back all the money they receive in federal funding from California taxpayers? They'd have to throw up their hands and start using Confederate dollars again.

Figures; in the U.S., party affiliation is the most reliable predictor of one's opinion about global warming, but if you dare suggest around here that someone's opinion is influenced by politics, you get modded to hell.

And just as I predicted (and got troll-modded for saying), conservatives are already pretending this paper says something it doesn't, and spinning a new zombie lie:

NewsMax: Researchers: Earth Facing Imminent Ice Age

It's a pretty bold assertion to claim that increasing the concentration of one of the atmosphere's most optically active constituents by 30% won't have any significant consequences on temperature.

Do you have anything to back that up, other than your political leanings? What makes you believe that rising CO2 is not a significant problem, and what is it that you understand about CO2 and the history of climate on planet Earth that physicists and climatologists don't?

I had occipital lobe epilepsy (i.e. in the visual cortex), and while seizures began with visual hallucinations, I was never susceptible to flashing lights. There was no response to them even on an EEG.

The strangest case of a trigger I ever heard was the woman who had seizures every time she heard the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Uh, your very argument is a prime example of how modern politics seems to be working.

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-

1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Of course it was. It was posted by timothy.

Water may blunt the physical shocks, but it isn't stable under water- it has to remain under an ammonia solution. I suspect it forms some sort of NI3-NH3 complex. Pure water will abscond with most of the ammonia. When it dries out on a paper towel, I think it's the ammonia evaporating that causes the sensitivity, not the water. (Like I said, good information on this crap is hard to find... most of the research on it is done by teenagers, not chemists.)

No kidding. What party was Strom Thurmond in (until 1964), exactly? And which party was "the party of Lincoln"? One would have to be tremendously ignorant of history to confuse Democrat with liberal.

It seems pretty stable if you keep it under ammonia. In fact I had some in a bottle of ammonia for a few weeks. I uncovered it later and was really surprised- the black powder had undergone some sort of metamorphosis into these large bright orange opaque crystals, kind of pretty looking actually. I still don't know what that stuff was; and never found any information ever since. I guess people don't do much research into nitrogen triiodide.

Vitamin C is a reducing agent and makes a pretty good explosive if you have an oxidizer, even a mild one like a nitrate salt. It has an electron pair that it's dying to get rid of.
I used to make nitrogen triiodide out of iodine and ammonia. In an excess of ammonia it seemed pretty stable, but once the stuff dries out, a feather can make it detonate. I'd leave a soaked paper towel in front of some other kid's house, run off, and once it dried... kaboom! So of course, I spilled it on my shirt once, and the crystals were already going snap-crackle-pop before I could take it off. I remember my mother asking why my shirt was making such a racket.