That's like saying that you can't reserve a table for a night out with the guys because the group is not diverse enough.

Exactly. It's enforced diversity, so that you can be Utopian and Progressive.

If you don't do that, you're morally wrong, and bad, and it's a defect of your character, and we want you out of our society.

There can be no "guy's nights" or all-white fraternities.

Everyone must be mixed.

Then we will finally have peace, love, harmony, compassion and progress.

Why wouldn't you agree to that?

Are you a bigot? There can be no other reason.

But if get a white guy, an black guy, and a white woman and an oriental guy who all use Ruby for developing web apps on Unix, that would be diversity. Is that correct?

United Colors of Benetton. U2 videos. President Clinton's biggest fans. Or perhaps one of the post-1990s sitcoms.

Yes, that's the dream, and we want to live the dream. That way we'll be just as amazing as the groovy-cool people we see on our TVs!

Tech jobs are low status jobs, and they are primarily done by men with manual technical skills instead of professionals with organizational ones.

This is interesting, because it conforms to what I think of as a great CEO: someone who can organize many different abilities into a team and get them to complete a task under imperfect circumstances, without being an unrealistic authoritarian.

Diversity means different viewpoints, different perspectives, different approaches. Diverse speakers will appeal to and engage a more diverse audience. Diversity is more interesting.

You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.

Just go find people with different approaches to life.

Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.

We're not. We are diverse as individuals. Quit trying to turn us into the Cosby Show or The Brady Bunch.

Enforced Diversity is NOT the opposite of Discrimination.

More accurately, it's a type of discrimination.

Being biased in favor of a mixed-racial group is racism against all who aren't mixed-racial.

Modern liberalism and subscribing to political correctness is a sign of mental disorder.

Conforming to the herd is always good, especially if you can insist you're not conforming. That is the ultimate "paradox" of liberalism: because it identifies with non-conformity, it can easily be a form of conformity and remain undetected by most.

In the meantime, those who are ahead of the curve are moving past liberalism. 1789 (the French Revolution) was a long time ago, and since then we've learned that what "sounds good" does not necessarily equal good results, and good results are all that matters.

The chattering classes and TV watchers haven't picked up on this yet, because they're subject to the the most powerful media machine ever created. It preaches at them what it thinks they want to hear.

This will change. In fact, it already has. We're just waiting to catch up with the curve.

If you want to have a real conference, you should be trying to develop a discussion which requires different perspectives.

Why do you assume that only people of other races can have different perspectives?

What exactly are these perspectives they bring to the picture?

This sounds like people who want "diversity" so they can have different ethnic foods to get at the drive-thru.

A happy society is one where people share an ideal of what should be, and thus they act toward similar goals without a police state enforcing rules on them

Diversity ruins this idea.

Diversity puts people in an ugly position: either disregard your native culture and become an anonymous person who gets his/her culture from shopping malls and TV, or keep your native culture and be an outsider.

Conventionally, criticism of diversity is labeled "racism," which is a logical fallacy that excludes the possibility that someone could criticize diversity for some reason other than racism.

The realistic view is that diversity of any form does not work. Racial, religious, ethnic, cultural, class and even values. Mix the different and you make them all opposites. They're different for a reason: over history, the human race has branched out into many unique tributaries.

However, it benefits our overlords to have a society that is not united. We fight among each other and ignore the long-term problems that our society is piling up by ignoring the obvious.

Diversity is thus, like many other gestures of dying societies, a surrogate and a substitute but not action that can actually save us from our own decay.

Like many others, I've watched Rome wind down and begin to burn and I realize that most people have a singular response to this, which is strong and violent denial. This is why they call you racist, crazy, etc. if you criticize diversity, the welfare state, democracy, consumerism, egalitarianism, police actions or any of the other fictions our society has come to depend on like crutches.

Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three. (Funny enough, it seems the owners profit gets better when it's priority three than when it's priority two)

If profit comes from the company, the health of the company needs to come before profit.

We have outsourced our own brains and the decisions normally made by cultural mores to ideology.

Ideology is a type of political theory that we assume is true, so we crusade toward it in the name of Progress and Utopia.

Naturally, because it is a theory, it's unstable. In fact, there is often proof against it. But its adherents cling to it even more, because it provides for them an identity separate from their real-world identity.

However, this instability leads to it having a need: as a symbol, it must prevail over other symbols. Thus it is intolerant of them, but in the name of tolerance itself.

The people benefiting from copyright law being where it is are the big media and entertainment types.

These give all of their money to Democrats.

The Republicans need to grow some balls and attack the media establishment. Their best move would be a high rate of tax and zero copyright protection, which would drive Hollyweird and big media into bankruptcy.

Yes, it would be an industry destroyed, but it's also clear that outside of Fox News, the media is almost uniformly pro-left and anti-right.

Any lessening of the power of media would be a strategic win for the Republicans.

Is the task really about quality, or quantity?

Most places I've worked, it has been about quantity. Number of reported bugs fixed. Number of lines of code.

These are metrics which can be shown to other people. That's how your manager gets promoted. How the shareholders are convinced that the product is doing well.

The people who are still around after 20 years of coding are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.

On the other hand, the younger workers are inexperienced, which means you can keep fooling them with the same gigs. Make them work for 24 hours straight, keep them in the office for 12-hour days with $5 of free soft drinks a week, promise them a great career someday. They're guileless and easy to manipulate, which is great if you want your metrics to look good but don't care about the quality of the final product.

Personally, I'd prefer to hire wizards and to shift the burnouts into doing something they might enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game.

But that won't impress my bosses or the shareholders.