Thanks for the word salad.

If the bill said "Here's more money for you to keep doing the science that you're doing," I'd be perfectly happy with that. If it said "here's money to study only the anthropogenic portion of climate change," I would find that as idiotic as what they did. Any presumption of the conclusion, or restriction on the funding based on their faulty understanding of the field, is idiotic and political.

That said, this particular case has an extra layer of idiocy because the legislature isn't just trying to fund a study to come to its pet conclusion, it's trying to fund a study to come to a rejected minority viewpoint. It's an attack on science itself, trying to force scientists in a particular field to deny their own conclusions because those conclusions are politically troublesome to a certain segment.

To paraphrase you: you "should be taken out and shot". They're already studying "cyclical" climate events as a normal part of studying climate change. They're not ignoring anything. The fact that a legislative body is trying to force them to study something that they're already studying, under a label so hilariously inaccurate as to be useless, is evidence of just two things: 1) they have no fucking clue what they're talking/legislating about; 2) they want "science" backing up the conclusion with which they started.

And 3) you're a useful idiot for them.

The games industry continues to be a shitshow of project management incompetence. Unrealistic deadlines, budgets blown, line workers (i.e., devs in their twenties) death marched... it's like after three decades, they still haven't figured out how to actually make what they make.

What always surprises me is that a very similar model for producing creative content already exists and works really, really well, for the most part. Movies and TV shows deal with comparably large budgets, multiple different yet co-ordinated creative teams, and go through a similar lifecyle of design, execution, post-production, and release. You hear about film productions that go bad largely because it's uncommon for them to do so, and that's virtually always driven by a single figure with excessive influence (e.g., Michael Cimino on Heaven's Gate, Kevin Costner on Waterworld). For the most part, films and TV get made profitably, people get paid, and this is all with a bunch of union labour too. Roles and responsibilities are well-defined; financing models well worked out. They even know how to integrate IP franchises to everyone's benefit.

Why don't Hollywood producers move over to videogames and explain how it works?

Most loss in retail is employee theft. When I worked at a department store, the loss prevention guys were at the doors at closing, letting employees out and checking their bags. When they were patrolling the floor during business hours, they kept a closer eye on employees than on customers. That's just a fact of life no matter what your retail segment is. In fact, I'd bet it's worse for Apple stores because their products are small, easily stolen, and fetch much higher prices than razor blades.

2/3rds of loss in retail is from employee theft. At a place like Apple outlets, where the products are small, expensive, and easily turned over for cash to friends or pawn shops, I'd imagine it's even higher. Not that this fact excuses forcing unpaid overtime on your workers, but I'm not surprised they're doing bag checks.

The sense of adventure in climbing Everest was wounded when they started having traffic jams on the way to the summit, and finally killed when an 80 year old man summited, while being chased by his 81 year old rival. It's a fucking tourist destination now, albeit one that periodically suffers mass casualty events.

Actually, in the '00s, Bush tore up the Agreed Framework negotiated by Carter, under which NK received regular food and fuel aid in exchange for placing their nuclear weapons program under international inspection. "Axis of Evil", he said. "No more blackmail", he said. So NK ripped the UN inspector's seals of their uranium, built a nuke, and detonated it. Bush came running back, and now the crazy Norks are still demanding food and fuel aid while rattling their sabres, but their sabre is nuclear.

Heckuvajob, Bushie!

He does not want to sell it for Bitcoins, he wants a viral story to advertise his house for sale.

I thought the bag had only sentimental value. When Denise and I are finally together, I'll learn the truth!

Ad D&D tells us, Intelligence and Wisdom are two separate stats.

Hans Reiser is the template for this sort of thing. His basic flaw is narcissism, which makes him a perfect dupe. He's genuinely unsurprised that a supermodel would want to make babies with him, a distinguished physics professor in line for a Nobel. And just like Reiser, he's genuinely shocked that the court didn't believe his "I'm aspie!" defence in court that he was just joking about those tweets.

In other words, "If we don't talk about it, it will go away".

This is a hostile mischaracterization of my argument for the purpose of setting up the straw man you argue against below. Your interest in rigour does not, it seems, extend to avoiding fallacies on your part.

Who are in no way required to be present at talks that make them uncomfortable.

If you include talks that make a significant number of conference participants uncomfortable, this is counterproductive if your larger goal is to get more of those kind of participants.

whenever there are unattached men of child rearing age the environment will be sexualized.

Only if the men are immature twits incapable of taking their hands off their cocks for a couple days. Which is basically the problem in the geek community, for self-perceived reasons you articulate below.

Men are not going to stop hitting on women at conferences.

Agreed, but whether they do so in a way that respects women at conferences is the issue. And a big part of that is whether the women perceive that the men think, as you seem to below, that the women are there just so geeks can procreate. And whether or not they feel that way depends, in part, on whether the tone of the conference is sexualized. Have talks on using a rape drug as part of sex, and having booth babes and Slave Leias wandering around? They're going to feel like they're there so you can meet someone, not so a bunch of people interested in hacking can discuss hacking.

We have a biological imperitive to procreate.

My urge to procreate does not prevent me from not acting like I'm trying to procreate all the time. I'm an adult. I'm capable of having extended conversations or even work relationships with women that do not involve me trying to procreate with them. I have self-control.

Expecting us to sit on our hands at a con only means we'll be missing out on opportunities to meet women with similar interests.

So the cons are for you to meet someone. When you see women at cons, you're looking at them as targets, not as fellow geeks.

If you don't tell us that, it's not our fault if we accidentally creep out some female attendees.

Geeks wilfully ignore or argue with people trying to tell them how not to creep out women at conferences. Witness our discussion. At this point, more than enough bits have been spilled trying to explain to geeks why their community has absurdly low female participation, and your response is...

sex is a huge motivator for us, and that there is nothing wrong with that. And denying that females enjoy sexual attention from males isn't very respectful towards them either.

To borrow your tactic, in other words, "we're boys, we can't help ourselves, and you want it from us anyway".

I'm actually really offended by your argument, because it denigrates men. It's the old stereotype about how boys will be boys, and we're dominated by our balls. It's the old Victorian characterization of men as barely-contained cauldrons of lust, and women as pure asexual representations of goodness. It's bullshit. Men can have self-control, and women can fail to have self control and treat everyone else as sexual objects for their gratification.

Is there actually more to this argument than "If we don't talk about it, it will go away"?

That was never the argument. The argument is still that we don't need to sexualize everything, that we're adults and have self-control and are more than capable, as is demonstrated by mature men everywhere, of treating women as equal participants in what we do, rather than as receptacles for our urge to procreate. And when we succeed at that, that's when the women start coming around in decent numbers.

Man, are you ever a fucking piece of shit.

If you don't, I have to assume you can't.

You don't have to assume anything, and in fact you'd be wrong to assume that.

To the list of facts that you agree is true, let's make it more explicit by adding some more postulates:

1. Women do well, on par with men, in professions and communities where they are treated as equal participants. This has been demonstrated in a positive sense by things like GoGaRuCo, the Ruby conference where their call for submissions is evangelized heavily amongst female and minority Ruby communities, so that the submissions pool has sufficient diversity; when blind judging is applied to that submissions pool, then, the resulting mix of speakers shows the same diversity. In other words, when sexism is successfully filtered out of the process, gender becomes irrelevant.

2. Adding a sex talk to a conference at which sex is not a normal topic, among a community that historically has demonstrated that it's bad at treating women as equal participants, will tend to sexualize the atmosphere of the conference and will highlight, rather than diminish, gender issues. In other words, the few women present will tend to feel more scrutinized and on guard than usual, when they're already on guard because of how geek conferences typically go. They'll be treated less as equal participants, rather than more. They'll be tokenized. Instead of small talk about using arduinos, men will be talking to them about using GHB during sex or asking if they've ever fucked while high on coke.

3. In this specific case, the talk contained material that could trigger rape survivors, of which, statistically, there's likely to more than a few at the conference, even in their diminished numbers.

4. We don't need to sexualize every environment. Refraining from doing so has important benefits.

The shorter version of the Ada Initiative's position is this: technology is not essentially gendered or sexualized, and when you manage to treat women as equals by de-sexualizing things at conferences and in workplaces, women participate as equals. This has the effect of increasing female participation to where it would be, absent historical systemic sexism, and that's a worthy goal. I think they handled this particular situation badly, though not necessarily, but their overall program is worthwhile.