Correct me if I am wrong, but do they not get to deduct the cost of running the business from taxable income? So, they receive $100k a year in revenue from business operations, and it costs $20k a year for their car (used for business), then they only pay tax on the $80k.

I dunno about you, but my car, that I use exclusively in getting a salary, is not tax deductible. Hence, I do not feel that it is wrong to say that sole proprietorships get tax breaks that I do not get, even though I have to expend costs in bringing in revenue.

While I do broadly agree with you, I have to emphasise that when you are a business, and get all the tax breaks for your costs in running that business, then you should also deal with all the crap (no exclusivity in who buys your product/service) that comes with those advantages.

As to your muslim example, if he operates a business selling hardware he will experience legal trouble if he refuses to deal with people who want to buy hardware for use in a non-halaal butchery.

The other side of the coin, however, is work-to-order. Should a muslim/xtian/jew photographer experience legal troubles in advertising "I choose what work I will take on"?

These days it might just be for most use-cases. For example the "research" above show this - the time consumed in 1 million inefficient string concatenations is what... less than 5 minutes? If you only perform a few hundred string concats at a time the program's user won't even notice the delay. If, like most use cases, you only concat a few strings at a time (say, a few tens) the user *certainly* won't notice. Not that I agree with such inefficiencies[1], but I *do* see the "why optimise" PoV.

There are only two rules for optimisation:
1. Don't optimise.
2. (For experts only) Don't optimise yet!

[1]One of my tasks in my first year of employment was to take a TCP stack and port to a different micro. My second task was given when the code was going through tests - I had to speed it up by a factor of two. I understand optimisation, and the important thing that I understand is that I do not have to do it much anymore!

Yeah, but at least then they'd have to actually *write the inefficient code out*, thereby learning why it is inefficient. With Java and Python the novice does not know about the inefficiency because it is hidden behind a "+" operator. This is why OP said to teach in C - you have to implement the concatenation yourself and in the process you learn how not to do it.

Then they shouldn't get the tax relaxations that businesses get. If they want to call themselves a business to get the advantages that come with being a business, then they must take the disadvantages as well. They don't get to choose which rules apply to them as a business and which don't because they are not a business. If they call themselves a business then they most certainly are.

Doesn't mean anything - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". The last ten years having been good for Apple is no indicator of the next ten years (or even the next ten months). The market may, after all, have been irrational for the last ten years.

Your experience suggests a good starting point for further research. Anyway, a few more questions if you do not mind them.
1. Why do you not miss the male privileges? Do those items you listed not matter to you, or do they not matter enough to make a big deal out of it (Pick your fights, that sort of thing).
2. Can you say anything about your general motivation and goals that you had prior to the changeover and post-change? Have your life goals changed significantly, or not at all, or something in between?
3. Any changes in habits? (Eating, sleeping, etc).

Like I said, this prof is a great deal more respected and a good deal more well-read in the field than the authors of the PNAS paper. You are also making the supposition that he doesn't know about that paper, but in fact in a recent paper he goes so far as to cite it.

You are pitting recent findings from a small, limited, non-blind and uncontrolled study against this professor AND his peers' decades of peer-reviewed, blind and controlled studies. It is way too soon to invoke as-yet-to-be-determined factors as an explanation over existing explanations that have been the results of decades of study and research.

The PNAS study shows one thing for certain - bias in this particular field did not lead to the female under-representation at the level we see in information technology fields. The PNAS study serves as a good control for future studies of this sort, but in no way does it actually present any conclusions due to the lack of a control itself.

Many of "problems" that are being highlighted by sociology studies are due to the current crop of unemployable sociologists not having sufficient training in critical reasoning and/or statistics.

I've now got two prosthetic discs in my back; prior to the disc replacement I could not move head, arms, torso or legs without pain. I could not turn/twist my neck, wrists or torso. I could not not even take in huge breaths (increased the pressure in my chest and caused pain that made me pass out). Merely making a fist was painful.

And that was only two discs; someone else in the ward with me in hospital was there to get four discs replaced. Do not underestimate how even a small wound to the back prevents all your limbs from working.

I don't see unicorns either - doesn't mean I should waste my time looking for them.

Have you considered that you may not be missing the loss of male privilege because, on average, there wasn't that much to start with?

Yes yes, we have had our contentious discussions in the past but we tend to agree at least 50% of the time. Or maybe 25%. Well, sometimes :-), so I'm asking you to carefully step back and consider all the doors that were open to you before because you were male that are now closed to you because you are female. You are in a unique position to actually list those privileges (that you actually don't miss or care about) that you, personally, had before that you personally, do not have now.

He didn't say that his team was broken. He said it fails the test. Failing the test is no indication of a broken team. What would be interesting is comparing the performance of projects that pass the test and projects that fail the test.

Well, do you have any evidence that it is due to $SOC rather than $BIO?

You need to read more research papers by real scientists and not sociology grads. Start with this - a talk given by a real scientist who did actual peer-reviewed double-blind controlled studies for decades. I'll take his conclusions over your skepticism; most ofwhat we do is driven by instincts honed by evolution over thousands of years. Those who did things differently didn't have any progeny and so their instincts aren't around anymore.

So, now you've seen the argument, peer-reviewed and backed by controlled studies, supported by the most respected academics in the field. You are not going to be able to say "I've not seen that argument before" when you see this argument again.

You seem to be implying that it is all learned. You know, experiments with male and female monkeys show the different genders preferring different activities on average. It is not all learned, it is /mostly/ (but not all) hardwired.

Well, all the activists have yet to produce any evidence for me to accept - you can't very well ask me to accept that there is institutionalised misogyny without providing any evidence; after all, you are the one making the claim so you are the one who should be bringing the evidence.