Hang on though, what are "real goods"? A teacher doesn't provide any real physical goods, nor does a care giver. Do you count an airline pilot only if the work of creating a good meant that someone had to travel, not to visit their mum and dad?

What's wrong with the L1 system, out of interest? I'm on an L1 visa. The foreign company I worked for was bought out. It seems like a reasonable proposition to bring over the technical team, knowledge transfer into the US and so forth.

I find this somewhat puzzling. I'm in the bay area, on an L1 visa. There seems to be a shortage of engineers, not jobs. I've only got anecdotal evidence of course, but the company I work for has struggled to hire good engineers. We might offer a crap wage or something (although I've come to the opinion we don't get many applicants, especially Americans, because we're not "hip"). But I was talking to another dad at my son's school today who mentioned his company is hiring, has the same problems, was I thinking of moving etc.

I'm intending to leave the area anyway. It's ok, but not as great as people gush about it. If you like rain, it's not really the place for you (I like rain). I can work remotely, so it's a chance to check out some other parts of the USA.

Another complexity to administrate.

No, it will hit the poor harder. It doesn't matter the amount of money, it matters the proportion. If a less well off person spends 100% of their earnings on rent, food, water, etc. then they'll be taxed the full amount, and for the basics they have no choice. A very well off person won't be spending 100% of their income even if they buy that luxury yacht, and they don't even need that yacht so they could choose not to make the purchase and invest instead.

The problem with sales tax (VAT) is that it taxes the poor more than the rich because the poor tend to spend a greater proportion of their income. It is also quite a burden to administer for companies and government. It is also an inefficient tax for states with welfare - government gives you money and then you give a large portion of it back again.

I don't have a solution though, even though it is something I think about often. But it seems to me that what we really need is for some way to experiment with widely different tax regimes. But what country is going to be willing to suffer negative consequences of doing so?

You're right to question where I got them from, I just searched google and read the first link that came up. Anecdotally I had plenty of female friends in school who had the intelligence and aptitude for programming, and they did other science like degrees but not CS. Can't help thinking that's because the CS classes at the time I went were all guys, and so it was a self-perpetuating bias.

Africa isn't a country, fucking or otherwise. Sorry.

Our grandmothers were programmers, that doesn't really seem to have made a difference.

I'm not sure how you can point to that as showing that statement wrong. All it shows is that there have been many studies, and they disagree and are inconclusive.

It'd be interesting to find out what is best, to measure it. Is it best to have a team where all the programmers are at a very senior level. Probably not, in my experience, too many opinions and directions. I'm pretty sure a spread of junior to senior is better.

Next, would a team work better if it were mixed gender? What if you have 2 teams, one all male and one all female. How does that then compare to two mixed teams? Now ask the same questions with ethnicity and age.

What I'm getting at is that the best candidate for the job might not be the best worker or the favourite choice of the team in question. And it sounds like an expensive experiment.

How about a maths degree (47% women) or physics (40%)?

Granted that might be the strategy, but it'll surely fail if both are doing it... nobody (I'm probably wrong) would base the purchase of an iPad on the basis of a specific casual game.

Ok I sort of understand why, but mobile phones are such a different type of purchase than games consoles. If I was looking for a console I might inspect the available games, and I wouldn't care what it looked like in my living room, or how it performed (assuming that it runs the games I want).

But mobile phones - if you're looking at top end phones I highly doubt anyone thinks that deeply about the available games these days (now that Android is nearly equivalent for apps). They'll be looking at specs, look and feel, etc. And if they're buying a low end phone then it'll be an Android anyway.

Yeah I don't think the East is any better than West in this area. Communism focuses on the big picture and community? What, by pretending problems don't exist, denying they exist, waiting for a catastrophe and then accepting the blame, but oh well it's too late, and by the way we're the all powerful communist party, don't even think about criticizing us?