knowitall

What would you say does "I want to be a woman" mean? I doubt it is as simply as "I want to play with dolls and use lipstick".

Through this discussion I wonder if it is more about how you are being valued in society. For example nail polish and lipstick are used to enhance sexual attraction. So maybe it is a desire to be valued for sexual attractivity, rather than actions, power or wealth (or whatever, men are valued for different things in different environments, I suppose).

Well there is the case of ducklings, who think the first thing they see after leaving the egg shell is their mother. So if you are there instead of their real mother, they'll follow you around until they become independent.

Just to show an example where some preference is not genetic, but there is a mechanism to pretty much hardwire it shortly after birth.

Help me out then, because I don't see it? A fall is deadly, whether you fall from a skyscraper or a tree.

You mean there might have been something else like nail polish, and people evolved a preference for that? But what would that have been? Some meshed up leaves people put on their finger nails?

Apparently there is something like a preference for being a woman, and using nail polish can be a proxy for that. But my point is that it is most likely learned that nail polish has something to do with being a woman. And the mechanism is not "I wish I was a woman so that I could use nail polish", it is more likely "I wish I could be a woman, and nail polish makes me feel like one".

Nevertheless, I am also not a biologist, just making things up. But I think some basic logic can be applied by everyone.

Maybe, but my point is that lipstick and nail polish are very likely learned preferences. Perhaps there is some mechanism by which a child picks the people it learns it's preferences from.

I've read for example that kids learn their beauty ideals from the people that surround them, but there is also a taboo to not fall in love with closely related people. For example researchers looked at people living in a Kibuz and found that there were hardly any love affairs among them.

Seriously? Monkeys live on trees... Mountains exist for longer than humans.

I don't know, and certainly the brain seems to be very amendable (ie taxi drivers have enlarged regions for dealing with maps).

However, I'd like to point out that there apparently is a genetic difference in male and female bodies. While women can become very strong and develop "body builder" physiques, it's certainly not the norm (also not sure how much hormone pills play a role in the women who turn out like that).

Of course from that it doesn't follow that differences in the brain are genetic, but imo it makes it seem possible. Clearly the physique is optimized for different ways of living, so why not the brain.

I seriously doubt preferences for lipstick and nail polish are genetic. For most of human evolution, there were no such things around.

water/dust: presumably the devices I want to connect to the internet won't be happy with that either, so I have to avoid those anyway.

Charging: not sure about that one either. Either there is a power source or there isn't?

So what is the special technology it provides, perhaps you could give us a quick summary? Any advantage to using my phone as an access point?

Are most languages really a big loss? I suppose there are some interesting variations in grammar, but what else? What can we learn from some obscure languages?

Why not move the domain?

Actually society adores and idolizes women. I suppose you had some unfortunate personal experiences that made you believe otherwise.

Of course - the reverted commit seems to be much more likely the result of personal differences rather than sexism. At least to me.

So it would be a reverse pump and dump - sell a lot, count on falling prices, then buy again?

How so? As a noob in trading, I find it fun to ponder all the psychological factors. People buying fuels mania leading to more people buying fueling more mania. Until some turining point when too many people start to sell fueling a depression making more people sell fueling more of a depression...

Obviously people with enough money can try to artificial trigger those processes, but what are the conditions for that to work? Maybe the overall trade volume needs to be small enough?

How does an artificially triggered cycle look different from a "normal" cycle?

I suspect going from 100$/BTC to 1000$/BTC as a "pump and dump" would have required a lot of money for pumping?

I've read lots of papers explaining the wage gap. The wikipedia article is too long for me to read right now, but thanks for pointing it out. I may update it if applicable.

Also what you don't take into account is that "wage gap" is not an arbitrary measurement. It is picked specifically to make women look like victims. You could also measure "time spent with friends and family instead of working" or "life expectancy" or "probability to die on the job" instead and men would look like the victims.

Another thing I wonder is how many of the wage gap studies take into account that typically income in a marriage is split equally. So a woman's wage in a job might be less than her husbands, but her effective income is the same.

Furthermore, might it be a privilege that women don't need to worry about money as much as men.

Just a few things to think about. Actually I think statistics like the wage gap are interesting. Something is going on, but it is probably not what feminists think. It's worthy of study, but feminism is not open to study or science - the only allowed result is "women are the victims". Typically the wage gap papers stop when they have identified the wage gap. Then they blurt out "see, it's discrimination" and no further investigation is attempted.

They want to determine who I hire, or who I am attracted to (the subgroup of feminists who campaign against certain beauty ideals).

As for "the feminists", it's true that some people who haven't really given it much thought call themselves feminists (they think they fight for equality). I don't really blame them.

But I have followed feminism for a while now and I think there is a group you can call "the feminists". For starters, even the people you mention ("women deserve the same respect") tend work on the basic assumption that women get less respect and generally receive the shorter end of the stick in society (or in other, more common words, women are victims).

Never mind that "they" tend to generalize about men and "masculinity" in much the same way as you claim nobody should about feminists.

And why would anybody have to call themselves a feminist if they were merely for equality? It seems fair that if you call yourself a feminist, certain prejudice is applied to you.

The joker in me wonders if now would be an opportunity to become the biggest contributor to GitHub of all time by running a script that changes the pronouns on all repositories.

Nobody can afford to reject such a pull request now...

Or what would happen if we started pestering Linus about including a pronoun check in git by default?

It's not that surprising that the presence of a diverse mix of people makes it likely for imaginary people to be less stereotyped.

I must admit as a non-native speaker, I am still not quite sure how to properly use "they". I wasn't aware of the possibility before this discussion occurred.

In a way that is the essence of political correctness, it tries to establish a general law for your preferences. The article here is a case in point - it's not enough that everybody has their own list, now there has to be a public list, under control of the feminists.

Of course feminism has more aspects than that, I don't define feminism in that way.

It's all just about wanting power. Such a list would be a nifty device.

Edit (there was one upvote before I wrote this): Another issue: could such a list enable people to sue for getting a job, on the grounds that they had been discriminated against for being on the list?

Actually one reason I am opposed to feminism is that they seem to reject the notion that I should be able to decide who I like or not by myself (and it's not that I dislike people because of their gender or race - it's just a basic principle that I want to be in power of my own mind, thank you very much). Now they turn that on it's head - of course, not liking people is OK, if it's the feminists who do the not liking.

Edit 2: another thing, she should read some books by Dan Ariely. Turns out the "rational theory of crime" (claiming people commit crimes because they are unlikely to be caught or punished) does not explain things very well. Iirc people commit crimes because they can rationalize that they are still good people if they do so, for example they might feel they somehow deserve it, they see others doing it so they feel entitled to it, too, stuff like that.

I'm not a git expert. I wonder didn't the guy who accepted the commit kind of offend the guy who had already publicly said he wouldn't merge it? If so, reverting the commit would much likely be about something entirely different than pronouns.

Suppose the merger had merged the commit before the discussion, would it also have been reverted? I rather doubt it (not knowing any of the people involved, though).

So have you been using "they" in you comments from the very beginning, or have you used "she", or "he"?

How are you sure about that? For example I don't know if the people involved ever communicated before and how they relate to each other.

I'm not from the US. I wonder, isn't this overly dramatic? So it takes a while to fix the web site. People have presumably been waiting for health insurance for decades, what is one more month? Also, really, people get worked up about government processes that are difficult to use?

We never even heard the back story on that one...

I suspect it's not so much about the gender of pronouns as about being patronizing, which people tend to resent.

Perhaps Amazon could add a checkbox to the shopping cart: [] pay 10% more that will go directly into the pockets of the packers.

I wouldn't even mind a picture gallery of everybody who handled my package.

Did you invest 100000k $ in Bitcoin? I suggest investing 1k as an anti-black swan option. Or something like that. (If the economy crashes, BTC might be worth a lot. Or not. But the option doesn't cost much).

What are you even talking about? Buying bitcoins and mining are not the same thing.

Just keep the bitcoins you bought and thank HN in 10 years for making you rich.

Btw Bitcoin is also very interesting from a technical point of view.

I think the "deflation can't work" people are making the same mistake as the "interest can't work because one penny will eventually be worth as much as the weight of the earth in gold" crowd ("Joseph's Pfenning"). They interpolate incorrectly.

In the case of interest, some borrowers go bankrupt (which is fine, because the world needs risk taking). In the case of deflation, presumably at some point people will want to buy things. They can not hold on spending forever because they might starve.

In any case it seems obvious that the price of one Bitcoin can not go to infinity, because there is nothing of value "infinity" on earth. From that it follows that the deflationary dread scenario has to come to an end at some point, just like Joseph's penny can not accumulate interest long enough to be worth the earth in gold because all his lenders will go bankrupt before that.