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Comment Re:Look To History (Score 3, Insightful) 479

Possibly not. Back in the 70s, if you remember that (I do), there was a significant lack of women in the workplace, as a good portion chose to be home makers. That skewed all the demographics. Nowadays, things have changed a whole lot, where women actually outnumber men in university graduation numbers, and there's the expectation that both partners now work in the majority of cases (men are still underrepresented in the homemaker side). We've reached the point where men and women have chosen their paths, and a huge amount of women choose not to do math, physics, chemistry and computing. They do chose law, medicine, and biological science, and are often overrepresented in these areas. And they're happy doing what they do..

Comment Re:Hire the best person (Score 1) 341

Hurrah. That would be great. Except when you take a single subject and cherry pick it (i.e. "Women are underrepresented in high earning tech" and allocating money to fix that, while ignoring "Women are overrepresented in Vetinary Science and a good many high paying biological science roles" simply means that you're essentially setting up for a scenario where you will actually put money in to ensure "Women are the best people for the job via education" for all the high paying areas, ensuring men are actively discriminated against, and end up overrepresented in low paying jobs.). What should be concentrated on is: Educate every person to the best standard you can in the field they have the most affinity and enthusiasm for. That will determine who is the best person for the job irrespective of gender and race, which is the way it's meant to be.

Comment Re:discrimination in reverse (Score 1) 341

Your logic is distinctly faulty. It probably means 1 and 2 being true, then you've found an edge case where the race/sex matched the generalisations of another set. What you've effectively said is that if all things are equal, then you discriminate against the while male for no other reason than "why not" (your given reasons of hardship etc. carry no real weight; all backgrounds can, and do have hardships they've overcome).. If you want to do it, fine by me, but don't kid yourself that this is ethically superior reasoning.

Comment Re:Waste of money (Score 5, Insightful) 341

Ok, and let's get equal leave for paternity, money spent getting males into Vetinary sciences etc. where they're underrepresented, and a whole host of things that are directed at women. Plus, the same chance of being the stay at home partner when children arrive (males are vastly under represented here. Oh, and compulsory genetic testing at childbirth (so every male will have the same knowledge that the child is theirs as the mother has), so on, so forth.. But you know what, a male will never have the same bond with a child as the mother, because that's biologically impossible. What's the big picture here? The sexes aren't equal in all things; one sex has advantages in some areas. People make their own choices along the way. This insistence that there must be equal everything at each step, and that the company must have x people in post to match a general demographic of population by discriminating based on sex or skin colour is atrocious. I'm all for meritocracy (hell, my hiring practices of the past decade have had me hiring in approximately 50% ethnic minorities, as they were flat out the best candidates for the job that presented at interviews). This "discriminate against one group so we can get a demographic match up" is just plain silly.

Comment Interesting.. (Score 1) 38

Though I prefer Diving Log, which has a client for phone and desktop. I use the phone in surface intervals to chuck in notes about the dive, and put heavier typing and such in on the desktop, when I synchronise the phone across.. Works nicely for me.

Comment Re:It's so important.. (Score 1) 360

It's not people finding him tasteless that caused this.. It's the guy who wrote it turning himself into the cops under the law that's there to protect from cyber bullying and trolling.. Sounds like he did it to protect himself from equally (or more) tasteless and irresponsible trolling.. All silliness that's got out of hand..

Comment Re:WTF UK? (Score 5, Informative) 360

From the article, the guy turned himself in, from the sound of it, most likely because he had threats against himself. It's unlikely the police would have even heard of this if he hadn't gone to the station and said he'd done something stupid. It had the benefit (to him) of exposing the threats against himself, which also fall under the anti-troll and cyber bullying laws, so the people who'd threatened him will also be lined up for a big slap on the wrist.

If this had been randomly picked up by a police trawl, I'd have been worried.. As it stands (someone turning himself in and admitting he'd be stupid, and asking for protection), it's looking like far less.. Good tabloid fodder.

Comment Re:Gendered Bigotry (Score 2) 834

Ok, so native Americans taking back America by armed force would be ok? Or areas of the world suddenly taking up arms and taking back areas around their border is suddenly ok (that's about the beginnings of world war 1 and 2).
The Falklands have been British for many generations (they've been British since 1833). The occupants are all British, and identify as being British. In votes, they chose to remain British, and actively oppose any attempt to make it otherwise. The UK was involved in negotiations to transfer the islands at Governmental level, but the now many-generations-established populace applied pressure to not allow this to happen.
The history is far more nebulous than "being owned by Argentina". If you apply proximity rules, then by your logic, Ireland should definitely be owned by England.

So, what you term "Evil" is actually supporting the wishes of a population that is well established (many generations over almost 200 years) who have lobbied hard to have their voices heard. These established occupants made it impossible to negotiate a transfer, so the only way to do it would be to evict them and force them off (which means you're pro forced resettlement of a population, which is really not a good thing).
The legal measures failed because the population of the affected area spoke their wishes.

So, not abiding by the established population's wishes, Argentina fell back to force, and sent in military to force the populace at gunpoint to claim what once was an unpopulated island (prior to England and France populating it back in the 1600's).

Have a good read of the history, and it turns out that Argentina has only very tenuous claim to the Islands.
Now, England has been allowing Ireland, Scotland and Wales to secede if they wish (i.e. the recent Scottish independence referendum). This is seen as a progressive measure.
If Argentina were to establish a claim on the Falklands, do you think they'd allow it to secede, despite the entirity of the population voting to leave? Would they hell. If they did, Falklands would secede at the first vote (they've made that plain), and would likely choose to join either England again as they historically have chosen to, or perhaps the EU.

So, no. What MT did in 1982 was exactly what she was supposed to do. Protiect British Citizens from invasion by foreigh force. Exactly what the island owners (the Falklanders, not Argentina) wished.

Comment Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? (Score 1) 786

Just like teaching is systematically female. As is Nursing, and a whole load of other fields. When they put extra funding towards getting more men in teaching (especially primary), I'd say fair game for allowing targetting of women to male dominated fields. Lets start off with road construction gangs, sewer workers and general construction, where the female count is incredibly small (the most underrepresented fields).. Where are the cries that more women need to be in those fields?

Comment Re:So we can't call anyone stupid anymore (Score 2) 622

No, people try very hard to make a better world. Simply admitting we're not in a perfect one isn't shrugging and doing nothing. We know there are bad people and sick people out there. Pretending otherwise is not a survival trait. Fear of everything is also not a great trait; there's a definite balance, and that's variable on location and company.

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