I was in part responding to the idea that women get to choose to work lesser hours therefore it's fair they get paid less. Many women don't work lesser hours and the roles they more frequently work in are often lower paid per hour.

The reasons for this are varied and complex, but a significant part of that is the 'higher paid' STEM roles are seen as unattainable for women more than for men - even given a broad background of socio-economic factors.

Women are more likely to be channeled into nurturing or service roles such as teaching, nursing, childcare or aged care, rather than more lucrative roles such as sales or STEM roles. At the lower end of the economy, they are more likely to be a waitress than a construction worker - guess what pays more. Yes being a construction worker may be more physically demanding - but being on your feet all day waiting tables isn't being slack either. In Australia, tradesmen are some of the best paid people, I can assure you that the 'professions' for working class women are not paid nearly as well, they are likely to be a hairdresser or beauty therapist or a masseuse.

And you can bet that the construction industry is unwelcoming to women in very similar ways that IT is. I can tell you I've experienced both first hand having started in Architecture and worked directly on building sites as well as moving into IT and working directly with programmers and other IT types from the position of doing both Tech Support and now as a Systems Analyst.

You say that programming jobs aren't lucrative - that is a relative term. They may not be paid as well as a top performing sales person or someone in finance or banking - but they generally pay better than nursing or teaching or any of the personal care professions women tend to get pushed towards.

It has been shown in many developing countries that the best way to improve your economy is to give women more money. Here's a couple of studies to get you started. It makes no sense to keep 50% of the population explicitly in underpaid roles.

Acknowledging that this is totally a 'devil's advocate' type statement, but I suspect you would find there are plenty of women, particularly single mothers from lower income households, that work more than one lower paid job that total in excess of 40 hours (and some in excess of 60 hours) just to make ends meet.

Many of these women come from backgrounds that don't value education and are not equipped for higher paid roles that would enable them to work more manageable hours at a single job rather than terrible hours at more than one job.

This is not to say there aren't guys who work terrible hours, some in more than one job. But choosing to ONLY work 40 hours is sometimes a luxury afforded to people to can afford to do so, either because the job they have is sufficiently well paid or they have someone else supporting them.

Women also frequently are expected to be the primary partner responsible for child care, to be at home and available when the kids aren't at school, 'allowing' the male partner to put in the extra hours for the greater responsibility and career opportunities that equate to higher incomes.

Much of the push these sort of initiatives promote is not about mandatory quotas when hiring but about providing equal opportunities. Currently the opportunities are not equal, women are still actively discouraged from pursuing STEM jobs and encouraged to work in lower paid, lower status, nurturing based roles. If you want to see men becoming teachers or nurses or aged care - make changes so that the roles are perceived to be as valuable to the community and the bank account as programming or sales or working on an oil rig.

Marriages are fucking contracts.

Actually, in most states a fucking contract can get you jailed.

When the government is telling you who you must do business with, the government is, by definition, fascist.

Do you need to know how fast you're going? Yes.

Do you need to know how your car is performing? Yes.

Do you need to know where you are and where you're going? Yes.

We already have head-up displays that show car parameters, as well as navigation systems that help you get where you're going. This could be incorporated in to an HUD ("turn here ->").

Anything more would be information overload. I do not need ads to tell me how cool the store I'm driving by is (i.e. how much they paid for the ad), nor do I need neat pictures other people have taken in the vicinity.

Look at how they do it in airplanes: the pilots have the essential information in front of them, but can access other information as needed.

...laura

From your criticism of local standards I can't tell if you're supporting national/international standards or individual standards, so I'll point out the flaws in both. In the sense of a standard meaning a criterion the same for everyone, "individual standard" is an oxymoron. National education standards ends up with the censorship of history so common in totalitarian governments.

The standards of education need to be appropriate for the community. It's pointless to teach Eskimos to surf or Hawaiians to build igloos. At the other extreme, not every parent is capable of defining educational goals for their children; illiterates can't be allowed to prevent their children from reading.

There's hardly a single item of truth in your post, but I'll expose just one flaw. Political and philosophic movements seldom have names that agree with their policies. There's nothing progressive about progressivism. Originally liberalism referred to a freedom-based ideology somewhat like today's libertarianism, but modern American liberalism is an alternate name for progressivism. American conservatism doesn't mean maintenance of the status quo, it means conserving the principles of the government established 1776-1787.

I'll never forgive my mother for making me give away some of my more valued toys. I still have stuff from 50 years ago, and I dearly miss a few cherished things that her religious beliefs caused me to lose.

Bill Murray has been a "big famous actor" since 1977 when he replaced Chevy Chase in Saturday Night Live. Ghostbusters is a young man's movie, and Murray looks older than Gene Hackman on a bad day. They'd have to apply makeup with a trowel.

And grouping "white, male, racist, asshole" together is a standard leftist lie.

I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11, one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip for mobile devices. It seems so obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.

In one of the later scenes in Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.

...laura

A friend of mine went to school with him and was reasonably close with him growing up. He has characterised Assange as sociopathic, largely as a result of his upbringing. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

Small New Hampshire town here. Many local officials aren't even paid, yet they're elective offices. There isn't much leeway for waste when the government is paid for out of a population of 2000.

10,000 pages is about 30 to 45 books. No need to leave the house, that's $250 to $370 from Amazon, delivered to your door. Less than cable TV.

Actually, $2 billion profit on $64 billion revenue is very poor profit margin for anything but static industries. 3% leaves too little tolerance for mistakes.