You have absolutely zero evidence or basis for your assumption. The truth is that nobody has any idea what people's motivations were for upvoting it, but it deserved to be upvoted. The only person who has made this conversation sexist is you and those who brought the topic up.
I have plenty of evidence and basis in experience, and anyone can see exactly what I mean by following what I mentioned above.
>The only person who has made this conversation sexist is you and those who brought the topic up.
Ah yes, the same thing that anyone steeped in unchecked privilege says when they've got nothing left to argue. Black people are racist for complaining about discrimination, feminists are sexist for pointing out objectification, blah blah blah. Bored now.
Ah yes, pre emptively insulting anyone that disagrees with you. A fine debate tactic if there ever was one.
Look, we really really don't need every single Goddamn topic that involves females to turn into an ultrafeminist soapbox. At the very least it seems to attract a certain amount of crazy negativity (see SRS on Reddit), at best it's highly offtopic. This is Hacker News, not Feminist News.
Here you're judged by the coolness of what you do, not your gender.
The problem with your argument at the bottom is that black people actually are at a disadvantage because of discrimination. Whereas society treats men poorly in some areas and women poorly in others.
He learned new market information, negotiated the cost of his services (not re-negging because it's at-will employment), and when he couldn't strike a deal, he did so with another party. This is the free-market at work, while you are going on a non-sequitur political rant that doesn't make any sense since what he did is pretty much the opposite of unionizing.
The piece is at its core a whiny complaint, complaining of grievous injustice. That you try to explain it away as simple market forces is truly laughable. Yes, the attitude expressed in the piece is the foundation of unionization.
Many people actually really enjoy playing slots. It's fun to win money, and it's fun to enjoy the dramatic moment before you know if you've won money. Some people get addicted to it, just like some people have gotten addicted to immersive PC games or really anything enjoyable. The distinction you're trying to draw is basically non-existent, except perhaps that social games and slots are simpler and revolve entirely around the unknown-reward mechanic.
That you can't perceive a distinction does not mean that it doesn't exist. People don't get addicted to everything fun in equal measure; some things are more compelling than others.
And seriously, go to Vegas and spend a couple of hours watching people play slots. Craps players are visibly having fun. The people who spend hours at the slot machines visibly aren't.
Craps, and to a lesser extent Blackjack, have some shared experiences between the players. In craps, many of the players will be betting the same, or at least very similar, way. Since there is only one dice roll for the entire table, there is a lot of shared excitement. With Blackjack, say the dealer is showing a 6, it's most likely that nobody on the table will bust, so if the dealer busts, everyone is excited. A slot machine, on the other hand, is an entirely solo experience.
I rarely play any floor games, but one time I was waiting for some friends to wake up and I wandered down to the casino to play some video poker. I ended up winning $1500 on a royal flush at a nickel machine. What am I supposed to do, start running around the casino in excitement? It was around 8:30 in the morning and the places was pretty quite. Had my friends been there, I'm sure we would have had some hi-fives or something like that, but if I'm just sitting there playing by myself, I'm not going to have any sort of substantial showcase of emotion.
I think you're correct in that a lot of people sit at the slot machines for hours, losing their paychecks in the process, and it's destructive for them. They may be looking miserable at the machines. The people playing craps who are in the process of losing their paychecks are equally as miserable, they're just showing different outward emotions. The addiction isn't any healthier because the person appears to be having fun.
I agree with this, but I'm not sure what your point is relative to the rest of the discussion. I'm pointing out that "fun" and "compelling" are distinct. You can engineer for either, or both. If you watch people playing slots, it's pretty obvious that most people who play slots for a long time are not having fun.
Based on my extra-curricular time learning Portuguese for the last year, I think Skype and Google Translate (as a slightly more useful dictionary) are a thousand times the transformational language learning tool than any of these apps are. No app or comprehensive program really impresses me too much (and I've tried most, including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur) because most are boring, inhuman, and lack enough content. The most useful app I've used is Anki, but that's just a general purposes SRS rote learning tool for drilling.
The ability to get on Skype with someone from another country though is really a game changer, because there is no app that comes close to the ability to communicate with another human being, which is ultimately what language learning is about. There seems to be a fight or flight mechanism that forces you to adapt and try your best to understand the bare minimum of what the person's saying that just isn't there with software. I started Skyping with people from sharedtalk (based on a comment here) knowing very little Portuguese but just memorizing "can you type that?" and "can you repeat that?" and I felt I moved a lot more quickly than I did with Rosetta Stone. It did help that many Brazilians are eager for an English practice partner.
While I try to combine a wide variety of learning techniques, my experience and the experience of various other's that I've read is that "apps" to teach you a language are a lot less useful than books, native podcasts, TV shows, music, and Skype. So while I think that the internet has totally transformed language learning, I'm less convinced that any software explicitly for that purpose has.
As someone who taught himself Brazilian Portuguese without apps or classes, I have to agree with you. It's all about the variety of approaches and the consistency with which you teach yourself.
As for the parent, if people aren't already learning via other existing media and/or methods, I highly doubt they will all of a sudden start, given the advent of apps. Mobile learning is the future because it's ubiquitous, not because it's game-changing.
Men are as likely to be raped, but their (prison) rapes are considered funny in our society, whereas female rapes are considered a grave crime. Men are generally considered more disposable in dangerous situations ("let the women and children go"). Stereotypes and gender roles regarding men are much more rigid, and challenging them has much less cultural buy-in than challenging gender roles with women. Men are much more likely to be assaulted. I told my very feminist sister a story about a guy who punched another guy that his girlfriend was cheating on him with. At first she misheard me and thought he punched the girl, which was considered horrible. When I clarified that it was the guy he hit, she immediately made a comment that indicating that it was less serious. She has internalized the sexism that it's much less serious to assault a male.
I could go on and on, but you're so brainwashed by a movement that has overall very good intentions (empower women in a society that disempowers them) that you have internalized it and don't even see the blatant sexism on the other side of the coin. Even this piece contains so many generalizations about men, geeks, tech workplaces that are blatantly unfair.
It's so ironic that so many feminists/liberals are so guilty of what they accuse others of - being unaware of their own prejudices.
What's your source for the first claim? I've never heard it before - Wikipedia cites[0] a 2006 investigation that found 2,205 allegations, 262 of which were substantiated. The FBI collected[1] 92,455 allegations of forcible rape - i.e. excluding other kinds of rape - in the same year - even if just 1% of those were proved, that's still nearly an order of magnitude disparity.
(Please don't take my comment as dismissing your other points - sexism hurts men and women. I'm just curious about that specific claim.)
Men are as likely to be raped, but their (prison) rapes are considered funny in our society, whereas female rapes are considered a grave crime. Men are generally considered more disposable in dangerous situations ("let the women and children go"). Stereotypes and gender roles regarding men are much more rigid, and challenging them has much less cultural buy-in than challenging gender roles with women. Men are much more likely to be assaulted. I told my very feminist sister a story about a guy who punched the guy his girlfriend was cheating on him with. At first she misheard me and thought he punched the girl, which was considered horrible. When I clarified that it was the guy, she immediately made a comment that it was less serious. She has internalized the sexism that it's much less serious to assault a male.
I could go on and on, but you're so brainwashed by the feminist agenda that you have internalized it and don't even see the blatant sexism in our society. It's so ironic that so many feminists/liberals are so guilty of what they accuse others of - being unaware of their own prejudices.
Yes you're right. These are all terrible things. It's terrible that rape of men is used as jokes, or even by police as threat to encourage people to confess.
There are a lot of strict gender roles for men, men are laughed at if they want to wear a dress, but a woman can wear a trousers without any problem. Being the receptive sexual partner is viewed as OK for women, but shameful or wrong for men. It's not fair and it's not right.
There are a lot of issues at play. There are a lot of things wrong with gender, and there's people who've been fighting for gender equality for a long time. We're all on the same side here.
I agree with everything you said but the liberals part...
I think we should be careful to assume that all liberals are feminists. This can turn off the liberals that have noticed the misandry in feminism and are trying to learn more.
The primary people fighting prison rape is feminists (and both prison rape and rape of drunk girls are treated as jokes in our culture). The primary people fighting stereotypes and gender roles, supporting stay-at-home fathers, supporting the importance of gender-flexibility for men, are feminists. The primary people fighting men's violence directed at each other are feminists. Feminists fought the draft and continue to protest wars around the world.
Your examples are feminist. You are a feminist, whether you choose to use the label or not. The only question is whether you realize this is a loose-loose situation and support other feminists as well as those focusing on your issues.
I didn't downvote you, but you're wrong for a huge variety of reasons.
Firstly and most importantly, the stock market is not zero-sum.I don't know why you think it is.Equities in companies ideally (and historically) grow in real value.This is basic common sense.If your friend sells you a stake in his company, you have an ad-hoc stock market (a buyer and a seller for company equity). Is one of you destined to lose in this deal? Or can the company do well and you both succeed?
What's going on with HFT is not a novel way to exploit the system. Financial pros will always get the information sooner and be able to act on it more quickly/efficiently than retail investors. People who suggest otherwise are deluding people for political purposes. Before computers existed, people on Wall Street still got the information first and acted on it first.
What computers have done is made the whole thing quicker and more convenient. If you want to fill an order you are much more likely to be able to. Those advanced algorithms help make sure things are correctly priced which is good for buyers and sellers. The companies looking for investment benefit from this. The smaller investors aren't hurt by this at all from this, assuming they are trying to invest in value and not take advantage of arbitrage opportunity.
Contributing liquidity and pricing information to the market is valuable. Some people do it faster and better than others and so they profit from it. It's unclear to me why they need to do a worse job of it so that other people can share in this value. Should Google be limited to only providing so many search results a day so that other small(er) search engines can get some of the wealth too? What exactly is the problem, besides the general popularity of banking fear-mongering recently?
"Firstly and most importantly, the stock market is not zero-sum."
It is, unless you have another definition of zero-sum. The talk about companies "growing in value" ignores the fact that the "value" is purely what the market will pay for those companies. If the market is a closed system, i.e. companies are not being listed or delisted, then the net profit made by buyers & sellers if all transactions were to be closed out is zero, by simple summation. (Actually, it's negative, because of significant transaction fees.)
"If your friend sells you a stake in his company, you have an ad-hoc stock market (a buyer and a seller for company equity). Is one of you destined to lose in this deal? Or can the company do well and you both succeed?"
If the company does well and you sell the stake to a third person (C), then you've profited and C is left holding the bag. Every single trade that is closed out results in either a profit or loss to its participant, and it's only the fact that the more money is put into the stock market over time that obscures the fact that, if all extant trades were to be closed out at one point in time (i.e. everyone cashed out), the net profit of everyone involved would be zero.
The market keeps growing because new money and participants are flowing in, but if this stops (say, due to foreign investors wanting to put their money elsewhere, or a shrinking investor population, or a recession), then all you have is a moribund market into which existing investors dare not put more money. The average profit for trades goes to zero because the average stock price is not moving up or down.
This is practically illustrated whenever a bubble bursts and money leaves the market: many participants start taking the losses that had been hidden by the previously rallying prices. The winners are the ones who got out first and took profits from those inflated prices.
I argued this point with two friends of mine, one who was an investment advisor, and another who was an oil trader. The advisor said that it wasn't zero sum and the market was always expanding, but after a bit of discussion and graph-sketching, he came to see that it was zero-sum after all. The oil trader (a pretty savvy chap) said, "Yeah, that's obvious. That's the game I play every day."
(I think this can be extended further to encompass the various financial markets as alternative sectors of a giant investment market offering various classes of product. In the end, each market is zero-sum, and so the overall investment market is zero-sum, which is obscured by the increase in production as technology advances. But this part is more speculative so I won't push it.)
I'm a bit occupied atm so I'll reply to the rest of your message if there's still interest later.
No, your friend is not left holding the bag. He's left holding the money you paid him for the equity. You were the one in the red at first, but since the value of your stake could grow and pay you in dividends you overcame that loss. Both of you gained money - that's the point. He didn't even lose the opportunity for more money, because he needed the initial investment to even grow the company in the first place.
Here's the key point you're missing. In order for it to be zero sum, if you make a million dollars off of this company, he needs to LOSE a million dollars. Not the opportunity to make a million dollars, an actual million dollars. Clearly this does not happen. You are totally and entirely wrong here.
The market doesn't grow because new money flows in. This is mercantalism and your understanding of economics is hundreds of years old. The market grows because companies create REAL (not nominal) value that didn't exist before. I can explain this in more depth, clearly your financial friends aren't very good at their jobs (it's quite common).
The reason your oil trader friend agrees it's zero sum is because the futures market is zero sum. The stock market is not.
Okay, I accept that I could be entirely wrong. I had forgotten about the role of dividends in determining the value of a company, and that companies definitely do appreciate in real value on average. (I should also have clarified I was thinking only about a closed secondary market, as opposed to the primary market where funds flow into companies.)
What I'd like to understand is this: if the total real value of companies is expanding in the long term, then isn't the stock-trading/investment game about who manages to pick the fastest-growing stocks and capture the most price appreciation? The net gain in value would exist as long as people had invested in the first place, but its distribution is zero-sum in that the net gain in value is captured by someone or other. I guess this is what I was thinking of when I talked in earlier posts about "closing out" all trades - if all trades are closed out at one point in time, then all value in the market is captured by one player or another, and the result is zero-sum.
If the total gains in real company value are influenced by the trading game in the secondary market (e.g. total gains depend on the volume of trading in the secondary market, perhaps through new stock issues), then the question does seem a little more complicated.
Glad to have had this discussion. I guess I need to read up on economics more, although googling didn't turn up a lot of actual literature on stock markets and value-creation right away.
You argue that intelligence and tenacity are more important than luck, but then it follows that since China and India have the most entrants, the only explanation for their lack of proportional success is lack of intellence and tenacity relative to Americans(I'm not saying you think this, I'm just noting it follows from your argument).
I would argue luck does play a big role, and that they weren't lucky enough to be born into a country with the standard of living, educational resources, and number of tech jobs that Americans have is the major differentiating factor.
I didn't mean to provide an exhaustive list successful characteristics.
Also it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say just because luck is not the main factor in success that being unsuccessful means you are lazy or dumb rather than unlucky.
You can take the luck argument too far though. You were lucky to be born as the you that you know because there were millions of other sperm competing to fertilize your mother's egg.
You can take it too far, but I think at a macro-level "luck", by which I mean random factors beyond your control, is by far the dominant factor. I do fairly well for myself, among the top 0.5% by world income, but I'm quite sure this is not because I am among the top 0.5% in world intelligence+tenacity. I like to think I'm fairly smart, especially when it comes to reading widely, in an interdisciplinary way, and making unexpected connections between different domains.
But honestly, I came pretty close to "winning" by the time I was 10 years old. I was born in one of the richest countries of the world, to well-off parents who were science/technology-minded, attending a good school district, etc. I also happen to have computer science as one of my strengths from a young age, partly due to foresighted parents who sent me to an after-school Logo program, and partly due to what feels like natural affinity. That pays well, while I could just as easily imagine being gifted in something less-lucrative, like music or history (I'm personally completely in awe of people who have perfect pitch and what seems like an innate sense of rhythm). I had to do relatively little on top of all that to succeed, at least compared to what other people would've had to do to succeed similarly. Basically had to not completely fuck it up. (And I assure you I am lazy as shit compared to a lot of people doing less well.)
I'm sure they will do fine, but are we maximizing their potential? I don't think I was especially gifted, but I did feel like my school pandered overwhelmingly to the worst students. I had an interest in programming and made some QBasic games, but got stuck while transitioning to C and I lost interest until college where I got the mentorship I needed. My school's only computer class taught Microsoft Word. In college, I met people who had family in software or better schools and I can see how it helped them develop their interest better.
Now, I'm a professional programmer so of course I'm just fine. But I think I might be even more accomplished if I had a little more help in high school (today's internet might have also sufficed). I think the real super geniuses might not be held back, but I think there are lot of cases like me where you have less than genius but above average intelligence that could accomplish a lot more if challenged a little more.
The description you give of yourself is by most common educational definitions not "gifted" (135 IQ or top 2% on standardized tests), so we are back to the point that "gifted" kids find their success just fine.
Everyone could achieve more with more investment. So, now what? Should gifted, advanced, mainstream, and disabled fight each other for funding, or maybe fight pure waste like Iraq War for funding?
I think your attitude highlights a big part of the problem nicely as well. Whether or not women are more, less, or as interested in tech on average than men due to biological predisposition should be treated as a scientific question, not outright rejected as absurd because it could hurt someone's feelings. Maybe it's not a worthwhile question to examine, but to say it's wrong because it's offensive is incredibly unscientific, and geeks often are more interested in truth than getting along.
This attitude is totally different than harassing people, being disrespectful towards people, or discriminating against an individual. But when advocates of women's rights or whatever cause group these two separate attitudes as the same, there will be backlash from would-be sympathizers.
People have historically used "scientific" evidence to prop up spurious claims that women and blacks were inferior to white men. [1] OP is probably reacting to that whenever people try to bring in biological explanations for gender gaps. If you want her to be more understanding to your hopefully pure motivations in seeking truth, you should also be more understanding of her recognition that people often hide bigotry behind science.
[1] See "The Mismeasure of Man," by Stephen J. Gould. Broca, a pioneering scientist into brain research, devoted a lot of effort to measuring brain capacity in skulls and thereby "proving" that women and blacks would never achieve as much as white men could.
Go read the article "The Mismeasure of Science", by Jason Lewis et al. It's a fairly detailed analysis which shows that Stephen J. Gould was simply wrong about skull measurements (which were accurate).
From the abstract:
...We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton's skulls and reexamining both Morton's and Gould's analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould. In fact, the Morton case provides an example of how the scientific method can shield results from cultural biases.
It's a perfectly fine example. If you read the book, Gould is accurate in reporting that Broca genuinely thought differences in cranial capacity and the racial variations thereof meant differences in achievement. That your abstract reports that Morton's skull measurements were actually accurate actually just reinforces my point.
There is - and probably never will be - a scientific answer to this particular question, as establishing such an answer would involve taking a few thousand kids and raising them in isolation.
The offending statement is thus nothing more than unfounded gender-based stereotyping, which I consider sexist.
Personally, I suspect that social norms play a more important role here than genetics, so it's as ridiculous as the claim that because few people of Amish heritage hold tech jobs, people of Amish heritage are genetically less likely to want to do tech.
A lot of differences between men and women are measured in adulthood and just presumed natural, though a lot if it can be understood as the result of kid being shaped up by cultural expectations.
Since before my daughter was born, whenever I entered a baby store there was a drive from the salesperson to separate the stuff for girls and for boys. Well, should my daughter wear only stuff in the purple-pink palette? No thanks, but I got more than a couple askew looks from people when I got clothes, or socks "for boys".
Add that up 10 years of girls getting easy-bake ovens from relatives and boys getting firetrucks and you'll wonder why women tend towards humanities and men towards technical.
Add that up 20 years in life and what you'll have are very strong differences between men and women. Are they biological? Could they be the result of a sexist culture?
but asserting that it is true without scientific evidence is also unscientific. It's slightly better than classic Flying Spaghetti Monster territory (or Russell's teapot, if that's more your style), in that the question is presumably falsifiable, but without evidence we're clearly in ideology land.
Considering that they chose this baseless assertion (and not, say, that His noodly appendage prevents women from entering tech, or that sunspots on Betelgeuse are somehow involved, or any of the infinite other possible falsifiable statements), we clearly are in harassment territory, and "would-be sympathizers" are hiding behind crap logic.
