They had fewer choices then. They have more choices now, and they are exercising those choices and leaving the field. Since 1984 we've gotten less sexist, not more.

Regardless, that answer is just as valid as any you come up with.

WTF is wrong with you? I live here, I've suffered under white rule and my entire family was a struggle family so I've got no agenda. The fact is that this is a belief that is shared by many of the locals here :-( Why don't you believe what newspapers, researchers and people on the ground are telling you - these folk are still stuck in the stone age in many respects. Grab any local newspaper you want and see for yourself the pathetic beliefs these people have:

Virgin cure belief

Another one of many

Here's official african government admitting to the baby-rape problem

How about bullet-proof vaseline and other stupidities?

Results of the official inquiry into the massacre

Strikers use body parts from security gaurd for their muti

Cutting up a 6 year old girl for body parts for their muti before they even killed her.

In fact, there are too many stories in the courts to even list. You no longer have the assertions of a couple of anthropologist's, you have the statement of a born-and-bred african who is living here, you have official reports of cases in courts and you also have independent newspapers all verifying the same facts.

Maintaining your skepticism in the face of all this will just make you look foolish. These thugs from the above stories aren't ignorant; they've all completed high-school (equivalent to a US HS diploma) and many of them even have tertiary education. It has become abundantly clear that the problem cannot be solved by relieving these idiots of their ignorance with education; the problem is not ignorance, it's stupidity.

Why not? Is the reports by multiple newspapers not enough to convince you? How about a report from a local (me)? It's true, that they believe such crap is fact and is undisputed.

You're way off base there. Look up the Marikana massacre. The idiot miners, all well past high-school with extra vocational training, went to a witchdoctor who gave them a muti that they could rub all over their body that will make them immune to bullets. They not only believed it (because that particular belief is common in this country), they bought the stuff, smeared themselves with it and then performed an all-out balls-to-the-wall assault on some 200 armed police officers (who also believe in this shit).

The results were as bad as you would guess.

The problem is not one of ignorance - everyone goes through the school system, no exceptions. The problem is one of stupidity; even those locals with advanced degrees still believe in muti that makes one bulletproof, or the virgin cure for HIV. The locals here are just plain stupid and no amount of education over the past two decades has managed to shake them of their beliefs in bulletproof vaseline and/or virgin cures and/or anything else that is stupid.

Thankfully the situation in Africa is slowly improving, though I think the current generation in this locality is probably doomed to plod on in ignorance regardless.

Well, seeing as the vast majority of jailed-citizens, dangerous-get-killed-on-the-job-employees and violent-crime-victims are men, why do you believe that if there is widespread persecution, it is not against men?

Trouble is, people like you look up and see it is dominated by men and conclude that that it must be because of persecution. You never look down and see that that sphere also is widely dominated by males. You're ignoring that males dominate the extremes of every measurement that exists, both the top and the bottom.

Men dominate the geniuses while simultaneously dominating the darwin-award-winners; men are over represented in acts of valor while also being over-represented in acts of selfishness (embezzlement). Men are stray more than the median in both directions in measures of height, weight and shoe-size than women do. Doesn't mean anything.

I was told that by a Magistrate when I was representing myself in a violent crime case. I replied (much to the Magistrates enjoyment), "Anyone representing a lawyer has a fool for a client".

Why bring python programmers into it? :-)

I'm not responsible if you feel uncomfortable around me. Your feeling uncomfortable might be due to me actively working to make you uncomfortable, or it may just be you being paranoid.

Men evaluate their personal security around other men all the time. It's not sexist in any way if women do the same.

In online forums? All the time.

As a man, I face violent threats all the time online. This includes death threats.

Because most people understand that your "feels" may not actually be rooted in anything I did. If my wife "feels" neglected, it's not necessarily a fact that I neglect her. If my wife "feels" unloved, it is not necessarily a fact that I do not love her. If a woman I talk to at work "feels" harassed, it is not necessarily a fact that I harassed her.

The problem is that you are trying to make men responsible for the way women feel, and "feels" are an entirely subjective thing. When you can objectively measure on a proper granular scale how "loved", "creepy", etc a man is being (regardless of how the woman perceives it), then we can talk about whether it's a problem or not - until then it's all subjective and I see no reason for the female point of view into feelings to be more legitimate than the males point of view.

My claim was and still is that using cash eliminates many of the scams - your claim was that scamming was too infrequent to matter. I provided evidence that it was frequent enough that the marketplace warned you against handing over money via bank transfers (other than their own special bank transfer that still had no guarantees). Please read those links I posted - they actually specifically warn against bank transfers.

But the system still works. You haven't provided any evidence that it doesn't. You haven't even provided evidence that the incidence of fraud is higher with direct bank transfers.

I don't need to provide evidence that it doesn't work because I never made the claim that it does not work. I claimed that untrusted transactions are best with payment and possession taking place at the same time, hence cash works best for this. The sites you pointed me to warn specifically about doing bank transfers.

From the trademe site, they warn about this specifically: http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust... So, they themselves think that if you hand over money you could lose it. Let me emphasise that for you: Trademe themselves think that you should use any protection you can when paying money and you should not rely on trust!

So the trust issue is not an insignificant problem, but it is one that is painlessly solved by using cash.

I refer you to the trademe trust and safety blog (yes, it really is called that): http://www.trademe.co.nz/trust...

You're claiming "It works, because there are no scams", and I'm telling you, right now and right here, there are scams in all the classifieds. You're relying on the fact that people are honest; I'm comfortable being skeptical. You're asking me to trust "because it doesn't happen", and I'm saying that over here it's a daily occurrence. I actually don't know how to make it any clearer - if you're buying something off of craigslist, or whichever classifieds, the damn site itself warns you to be skeptical! Even the marketplace itself is telling you that there are scammers out there!

True, but if you're going to mug someone, why post on the classifieds first? You're just as likely to be mugged leaving a bank after all.

In 30cm pieces? Taking 12 hours for enough to do a single room?

Yes, you can save $0.5 USD just by waiting an hour.

No such thing - a variety of elbows, t-pieces and such are available to fit any sort of plumbing the average house has, which leaves us to the only legitimate use ...

And this is the option that requires the owner to be proficient enough to design his own stuff in the first place, which may take (from my experience) anything from 2 hours to twenty hours. If he is downloading a design off of the net, then it's not unique, is it?

I do lots of DIY. Really lots. I've refloored my house with three different types of flooring (wood, carpets and tiles), rebuilt walls, built a pond, welded up 30m of palisade fencing. I've built tiny once-off tools for specialised purposes (especially when repairing newer models of cars). I've reroofed my garage, installed ceilings, rewired entire buildings. I've done the plumbing and cabling for much of my house. I've built cupboards, and constructed various sheet metal projects. I'm okay with electronics as well, having had a career in the embedded world.

And with all that experience of rolling my own, I can tell you one thing for certain - there is no decent ROI in any of the current consumer 3d printers (I've got unlimited access to one at work). You cannot print anything other than cosmetic items due to the lack of strength or rigidity. The pipes you think you will print? Maybe it will work as a straight length - a single bend is going to cause unpredictable rigidity. It will also still have to be milled/finished to fit into the other fittings. Or perhaps you want to print out enclosures for your rasberry pi/arduino projects? Rather than get an ugly plastic case with lines all over it, you can construct one from aluminium sheets in about ten minutes with a jigsaw and a $20 home-made brake.

I doubt it - you can't even print a spanner that will work more than once. Or anything that is supposed to look good.

What are you talking about? What's not a reality?

Once again it comes down to trust - you trust that the marketplace has identified the scammer. What if you're the first person to respond to the ad? Regardless, you're still asking two parties who are unknown to each other to trust each other with no real evidence that the trust is warranted. My point still stands in this reality - transactions need to be completed when there is a lack of trust. Cash works for this. Waiting doesn't (hence the reason bitcoin is still less traded than actual toy money).

You realise you're pointing out examples of doing transactions there are all trust based - even if you had no reason to trust that the seller would not disappear with the money, you still trusted that he would send the goods. If you trust that the seller would send the goods or that the payment would clear, then that is outside the scope of this discussion, which is "how to do EFT transactions with people you don't trust". The answer is not "trust them first, then do the transaction".

I don't trust what the seller says about a car's mileage, I check it out myself (last car I purchased went for and passed a full AA test before I parted with my money). The majority of the worlds population does untrusted transactions in person every day due to the ability of instant payment with cash and instant completion of sale. You're asking all these people that they should just trust other parties more?

So? This is a total non sequitor to what I said above: when you need to do a transaction where both parties have no reason to trust each other the only option is payment and possession at time of sale.

And then you have scams arising where you pay your money and the "seller" vanishes. The only safe way to deal with a potential scam when trading through the classifieds is to hand over payment and take possession of the item at the same time. Not possible if one party has to wait to verify payment.