First, let me say it sounds like a shitty situation you're in, and you sound really frustrated (and rightfully so) about it. I've known a few trans-folk (men and women) and it just sounds like a totally raw deal any way you slice it. All the negatives of either gender, none of the positives, with a healthy heaping of irrational hatred on top, when it comes to how society treats you. For what it's worth, you tell me you're a woman, and that's good enough for me, because I really don't give a damn about what you've got in your undies.

Second, there's no way I can answer your question about how you should deal with this. You're asking me to explain, in some way, the behaviors and beliefs of people who are not me, and then how you should handle that. The best I can do is say "well, some people are assholes and if they're assholes to you it's probably better to not put too much stock in what they say" but that kind of doesn't really mean a whole hell of a lot since it's pretty much a platitude.

The only thing I can tell you is that you would probably benefit from finding some way to let go of your (certainly justified) anger. It doesn't seem to be doing you much good, and frankly seems like it would just alienate many people who might otherwise be allies or at least not assholes like the people you described.

I consider myself to be a feminist - actually, rather, a humanist. I think you're probably using the term "feminist" to mean something more akin to "feminazi" or "people who use the term feminist in order to justify treating men like shit."

I don't treat men like shit, nor do I think all men are rapists, so I can't answer to your statements of "feminists do this" because, in my experience, they do not, and I certainly don't.

Think about it in reverse - if I were to say "you're just like every other guy out there, you think all feminists are bad people blah blah blah" it would be stupid, right? Because not ALL guys make blanket statements about feminists like you just did. I can say YOU are making a poor argument because of your blanket statements, but it would be completely unfair of me to say that ALL of whatever term I want to apply to you (men's rights activist? I dunno) aren't capable of making a reasonable argument.

Personally, I think it sucks that ANYONE has to live in fear of another person being an asshole (and, you're really describing "assholes who happen to identify as feminists" rather than feminists), and I wish it were different, but alas, we live in this world, not fantasy land.

The thing is, I totally get the sense of humor thing - but not in the guise of "we had a woman, she didn't have a sense of humor, so we're asking you this because she didn't." It would be no different than saying "we had a (insert whatever irrelevant demographic category), they didn't work out, you must answer for something you had nothing to do with."

When I said we discussed the culture during my interview with the place I ultimately went with, I mean we talked about exactly the kind of things like toasting marshmallows etc. We talked about our personal programming projects, home network set-ups, random geeky shit that lets you get a feel for if someone is really interested and driven or just doing it for the $$$. We also talked about how people in the office generally comport themselves - including having a sense of humor/sense of perspective about things. But the point here is that at no time did I feel like I was being presumed to be lacking just because someone else in a similar demographic bucket to me was lacking.

But it actually reinforces my point: I literally cannot tell AC's apart so they may well be the same person. One IS capable of telling two different human beings one runs across on the job apart, and so should treat them as individuals.

For me it was being encouraged to ask not just why but how. Why do magnets attract/repel and how can I make it happen, for example.

Even with 'girly' things I was given (an e-z bake oven for example) I was encouraged to think about how it worked and what that meant.

The other part of it was, I think, that my mom was raised hyper-traditionally, rebelled against it, and would be damned if any child of hers would grow up thinking anything was off limits just because of their gender. Whenever I experienced someone saying x was for girls or y was for boys, I also experienced my mom saying that was horseshit, so I guess I internalized it.

I'm a woman and I was recently doing a job search and interviewed at a dozen places before settling on one that I liked (and have since come to love).

It was, overall, a very uncomfortable experience for me. I was, at many of the places, subjected to comments along the lines of "I've worked with a female developer before, and it was really difficult because she didn't have a sense of humor/couldn't take a joke/made us feel like we had to be on our best behavior - would you be like that?" Seriously. I was repeatedly told that one concern was the rest of the team feeling like they might have to walk on eggshells around me.

When I heard these things I essentially shut down the interview and let them know I would not be interested. I explained that I appreciated their honesty, but the fact that they had concerns along those lines made me know it wasn't the place for me, and I thanked them for their time.

It isn't that I don't have a sense of humor, or that I'm easily offended - it's that I really don't want to have to be responsible for all women ever, and I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with. And despite my shutting it down, I was *still* offered jobs at half the places.

The place that I liked - and have come to love - gender never came up during the interview. We talked about the tech, we talked about the work, we talked about the long term goals for the position, and we talked about the culture. The only time gender has come up was when one of my co-workers, who has a daughter, asked me how I came to get so interested in technology and science because he wanted to encourage his daughter as much as possible without pushing her.

Looking at the comments here, there's a whole lot of "othering" going on. A lot of comments that seem to treat women as members of some kind of hive mind wherein certain behaviors are just expected. This is completely unfair - it would be as unfair as me treating all men like rapists just because some men are. There's also a lot of anger I'm sensing from a lot of the guys - feeling like they're being discriminated against in some cases by quotas (real or imagined) or whatever. You guys are certainly entitled to your anger, just like I'm entitled to be bugged when idiots can't distinguish me from some other woman despite us being entirely different people.

The thing I would recommend to people - all people - is to take everyone you will be dealing with as an individual AS an individual. Just as you wouldn't want to be held responsible for things you had nothing to do with, so, too, other people don't want to be made responsible for everyone who shares their gender, race, ethnicity, or other arbitrary trait.

For the record, I think hiring quotas are stupid. Affirmative action is "good intention, wretched implementation." That said, the people saying they've been turned down for developer/in demand jobs because they are white/male/other majority class must be incredibly unimpressive candidates. If you were such hot shit that you "deserved" the job, you would have gotten the job. Businesses are in business to make MONEY, they will hire whomever will make them MONEY, and if you couldn't make it clear you would make them more MONEY than some other random person, that's on you.

For elementary and early high school, this would be a useful tool, since the content isn't as important as learning the basic forms.

Even so, it would still need to be just a part of the toolkit - have the machine grade the grammar, have the teacher then read through and judge the content without wasting time proof reading or spell checking.

You use this one woman's behavior to say that you will worry about ALL women, yet you aren't remotely worried (or at least, if you are you don't mention it) that THOUSANDS of men made rape and death threats to her over this.

Your comment isn't insightful - it's stupid. It's just as stupid as if I said that all men are essentially rapists and murderers (or would be if given half a chance) because some men reacted like assholes over a stupid issue.

Why are you judging ALL women by the behavior of this ONE woman, but not doing the same to ALL men because of the behavior of THOUSANDS of men? That seems a little weird, no?

Of course, ideally you shouldn't judge members of a group by the behavior of one, or even many, members of that group, and rather take each individual as they come, regardless of what categories you imagine they fit in.

Also of course, this whole thing is fucking stupid. The guys were being somewhat dumb making jokes like that in a space where they could be overheard, A was really fucking stupid for bothering to be bothered by it, let alone tweeting it. What was actually monstrous - and what people SHOULD be bothered by - is the thousands of people making threats as a result. I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised, that people are ignoring that and instead choosing to vilify one idiot who overreacted, since she isn't anonymous and can be lashed out at easily.

Or they know something about your marriage that you don't... Does your spouse use Facebook also?

Yep.

Any well designed social psych/sociology research project will have tons of ways to check for validity and consistency of data, and the more clever ones will even have ways of identifying the particular ways people will fuck with data and developing a partial profile there, too.

The vast majority of the data will be a fairly accurate representation - the user base is so large that a few "clever" people trying to piss in the well won't have any effect - they aren't even a blip - while the rest of the userbase doesn't see much point in liking random things or going against the established function of the systems.

As to the study itself - I think it will be interesting to see how the profile for any given demographic shifts over time as various things become more or less mainstream and more or less strongly associated with various demographic buckets.

In an ideal world, where there is no issue of supporting the art supporting the artist, you would be right.

But if I pay for a book by Card, I'm supporting him and his views, and I won't do that.

He's perfectly free to believe whatever he likes, and to yammer away at anyone who will listen to him. And other people are perfectly free to boycott his work and refuse to support him or those who do business with him. Card decided speaking his mind and airing his bigoted views was more important than possibly alienating a lot of people who disagree with him, and this situation is a natural consequence of his choices.

What people say and do has consequences. Card chose to be an outspoken bigot and the consequences for this seem to be that a lot of people don't want to buy his stuff. He can either put on his big boy pants and deal with it, or not. It appears he is choosing "not."

We can fix those programs so easily, if only people would get the fuck over themselves.

Social security: No cap on earnings that pay into it, but keep a cap on benefits paid out. If you're making enough money for the elimination of the cap to be a factor for you, you're making enough money for a smallish extra tax to not be a problem. Suck it up and be happy that you're doing well enough for it to be an issue. Second, raise retirement age to 70 to reflect the fact that people are living much longer.

Medicare: Public option for healthcare. Promote preventative medicine, healthier choices. We would save so much money each year if people would just get an annual physical because some illnesses that become staggeringly expensive down the road would be nipped in the bud when they are caught at the point it's cheapest to treat. With better preventative/health promotion, we would avoid a lot of expenses outright because many health problems simply wouldn't develop. That is one of the reason other countries can spend so much less on healthcare than we do, per capita, and yet have better median health.

The thing is, those are all bad because socialism, death panels, and how easy it is to get uneducated and terrified people to vote against their interests in this country.

I can understand it, but I think a much better strategy, instead of being fragile, is to accept that it will only get more and more difficult to avoid exposure othe future and to instead cope with reality.

It sucks that some people are abused etc., but even those people must face the reality that it is extremely likely that in the not too distant future it will be absolutely trivial for people to find out anything they care to know.

Given the choice between fighting a losing battle and developing coping skills to handle the new reality, I pick ladaptation.

The retina MBP is $200 more and has much better specs and isn't tricky to get running any other OS you want to put on it.

The only way the chrome book is a cheap alternative is if you don't value any of that.

It isn't always because of prestige. Many people equate higher prices with higher quality, the assumption being that the product has to be worth it because how else could they sell it for more?

It isn't he worst metric to use, either, even if it isn't always true.