Ah, ISWYM. Sorry, Slashdot threading always makes it tricky to figure context :/

Now I see the context, I agree with you, and nothing in the debate seems to have suggested that's his position.

He contributed to the campaign for Proposition 8. The text of Proposition 8 was this:

"Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

The state of affairs prior to Prop 8 was that the state supreme court had determined that marriage between two partners of the same sex was valid and recognized in California. Thus Prop 8 was, very clearly, precisely and inarguably, a measure that specifically abolished marriage for people of the same-sex.

Marriage is not a right, no. But the right not to be discriminated against by the state *is* a right.

No-one has a right to demand that the state (federal government, state government) be in the business of defining marriage and granting particular privileges to people it considers to be 'married' at all. It wouldn't be a violation of anyone's constitutional rights if the federal government, or a particular state government, just got out of the business of marriage entirely.

But as long as governments choose to recognize a state called 'marriage' and grant particular benefits to people they consider to be 'married', people absolutely *do* have a right for that to be implemented in a non-discriminatory way.

It has been pointed out in other sub-threads, but not this one: this is not a question of personal beliefs, but financial support of active legal discrimination.

"I think it's wrong for two people of the same sex to get married" is a personal belief.
Contributing to a campaign to pass a law to have that belief enforced by the state is not a personal belief.

"Look for real companies designing and building real products for proper customers."

Specifically, if you're an older programmer, look for very large companies with very old products that are so mission-critical they cannot be redeveloped. Or find a good recruiter who does.

My father spent the last ten years or so of his career contracting out at obscene per-hour rates to shops which needed people who could write COBOL to maintain silly little things like, you know, nuclear power plants and the back ends for national banks. Not *important* stuff like apps for ordering coffee, but it pays a living.

He was still getting pleading emails from recruiters two years after he retired.

I'm assuming the OP is Canadian. I doubt many Americans would manage the "Tie Domi doing figure skating" reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(basically, it's Dancing with the Stars...ON ICE!)

What exactly are we building those absurd arctic "patrol ships" for, do you think? Patrolling? For...polar bear poachers?

Canada produces plenty of copyrighted works, sure. We don't exactly *export* a lot of them, though. I'm not sure how much demand there is in South Korea for episodes of Trailer Park Boys, Murdoch Mysteries or Corner Gas, and those are some of Canadian TV's success stories. :)

Compare and contrast with the other AC whining about evolution below.

When you're being accused by nutters from both sides of being biased towards the other side, I'd say you're doing a reasonable job of being neutral. See also: the BBC.

From summary (and presumably TFA):

"one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy"

but...that's not what NPOV is about. NPOV isn't a conflict-of-interest policy. It doesn't say anything about editing articles for pay.

The video that forms part of a series from these lunatics?

http://www.mgtow.com/

Yeah, i'll pass.

"So really the article is bogus as they are two different things"

Nope, your understanding is bogus.

It's not important whether the test is technically math or arithmetic: what's important is whether *those being studied* consider it to be math. Follow it through. The test demonstrates quite strongly that both women and men acting as 'hiring managers' tend to believe men will be better than women at this arithmetical task, even though it is known that in fact the two perform equally. (This is why the test designers chose the simple arithmetical task: because we know that *in truth*, women and men do it equally well).

The key question is this: do you really think they'd be biased when they assess the ability of men and women to perform a simple arithmetical task, but *not* be biased when assessing their ability to perform a complex mathematical one? Unless you truly think the answer to that question is 'yes', which seems unlikely, then no, you haven't invalidated the test. If anything, I'd have expected that perhaps people wouldn't be biased against women when it came to something this simple (i.e. that if anything, the test had a chance of coming up 'negative' even though the bias does exist). The fact that people displayed such a strong bias *even when the task in question is very simple arithmetic which we know the sexes actually perform equally well*, if anything, makes the study more compelling.

*was about to complain about stereotyping, then realized he was listening to Rufus Wainwright covering Judy Garland*

"I could be that PERHAPS there IS a difference in some math skill between males and females?"

The test under discussion was specifically designed to use a 'mathematical' task that it is already established women and men perform equally well at. As the article states.

RTFA: this specific factor is mentioned, and was compensated for by giving different 'hiring managers' different levels of information about the applicant. Some got just a picture of the applicant. Some got a self-assessment by the applicant of how they thought they'd do on the test (and the authors note that, indeed, men tended to give over-optimistic self-assessments, and women over-pessimistic ones). Some got the applicants' actual results.

The bias persisted in every case, it appears.