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In a stunning example of failure to understand the meaning of the word equality, Github's "social impact team" is now actively discriminating against people based on gender and skin color; white women in particular:
One insider criticized GitHub's "social impact team," which is in charge of figuring out how to use the product to tackle social issues, including diversity within the company itself. It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact, who joined GitHub in May after working as a diversity consultant.
While people inside the company approve of the goal to hire a more diverse workforce, some think the team is contributing to the internal cultural battle.
"They are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging," this person said.
Sanchez is known for some strong views about diversity. She wrote an article for USA Today shortly before she joined GitHub titled, "More white women does not equal tech diversity."
At one diversity training talk held at a different company and geared toward people of color, she came on a bit stronger with a point that says, "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women."
From a site policy standpoint, this really makes me want to argue for finding another host for our rehash repository, enormous pain in the ass though that would be.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:32AM
All involuntary taxation, yes. There are plenty of ways to raise money without stealing it, even for governments.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:34PM
So you expect to run a country off donations? Or do you have something in mind that would actually work in the real world?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:48PM
Bonds would work nicely if you could count on the government to reliably stick within its budget so they wouldn't lose value to a tanking dollar faster than they gained it off interest. Lottery is also an option that works well for many states and Indian tribes. Those are already implemented and proven methods. I'm sure we could come up with plenty more given the need.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday February 10 2016, @06:02PM
Well, that's the first actually interesting idea you've proposed. It took me quite some time to ponder it, because although I'm forced to conclude it's unworkable, it is at least a good idea to have had. It's the kind of idea that shouldn't have been discarded without lengthy consideration... so I considered it at length. (If any economist somehow reads this, please note that I'm not a trained economist, so I may be misusing terminology or expressing my ideas wrongly, but I am fairly confident my ideas are correct).
Bonds are not sustainable without some other form of government income, because they necessarily cost more in the long run than they bring in, except in very devolved scenarios. Consider by example:
Let us assume that we can trim the entire government budget down to $1T, to make the math easy. And let's also assume that this is fixed - we have no rise in actual expenses, as you helpfully specified. And let's assume we have no other income for the government - your proposal includes a lottery, but I'll explain later why that's small enough to be ignored.
So year one, the government issues $1T in bonds. (For more simplicity, let's make them mature in 10 years for double the value, much like current T-bills).
Years two through nine look much the same as year one. However, when we reach year ten, the payout for the first year's bonds is coming up, so now we need to issue $3T, not $1T, in bonds. Years eleven through eighteen then look much the same as year ten.
Then we hit year nineteen, and now $3T is coming due, not $1T, so we need to issue $7T ($6T to cover the bonds, and $1T for actual expenses). And so on ad infinitum. Every decade, the fraction of income devoted to paying off former debt increased, asymptotically approaching 100%.
But that is without inflation. As a first-order approximation over the long term, we can calculate 100% inflation per decade - so the effective value of the bonds is zero, it's just storing actual value. Were this the only source of inflation, we'd be overestimating it, but there *are* other causes of inflation so we can just skip recursive analysis.
However, that changes our previous budget estimates. Year 10 needs nominal $2T in actual-spending (equal in value to $1T in Y1 dollars), and $2T in paying off bonds. Then year 20 needs nominal $4T in actual-spending and $4T in paying off bonds. So we've hit exponential growth of the budget.
So what is 100% inflation per decade? A bit over 7% per year. That's actually not quite as impossible as I was expecting, it's within the realm of possible with sustained economic growth, but it's going to require extreme handholding of the economy, which I suspect you're opposed to on principle. Even the current US government considers 7% too high to be managed, so we'd need almost Chinese-style central planning, which even I consider too much. And even if we were willing to tolerate 7% inflation per year, and the massive central planning necessary to make it work, it would *still* be a bad idea because even a small spike in inflation from other sources causes a complete collapse of the government's budget. One failure and it's a default. So then next year you must cover two year's bonds being paid off, and who would buy bonds from a government that failed just last year to repay their debt?
I did say I would come back to the lottery thing, and so I will. Both bonds and the lottery work by offering a potential value in excess of their cost. However, with lottery tickets, the expected value is almost always lower than the face cost, while bonds are essentially a gamble that the yield will be greater than inflation (which is why our first-order estimate was yield=inflation, because if it were consistently lower, nobody would buy them).
Therefore, bonds appeal to sane actors, and thus can be managed by simple economic models. Lotteries simply would not function if everyone acted in their economic best interest - and I think basing the operations of your entire system of government on people acting irrationally is a poor idea. Governments should never have an incentive to make their population stupid.
But more to the point, while both lotteries and bonds have an upper limit based on how many people are willing to participate, lotteries will hit that limit first because, because "people who are bad with money" have far less money (both individually and collectively) than "people who are good with money". In an ideal future where the government (either through positive action or simply by stepping out of the way) raises the average intelligence continually, the funding that can be gained from a lottery will approach and eventually pass zero. Since we're looking for steady-state behavior, we can thus safely treat it as zero.
I'm also not sure what the actual difference is from taxation. Economics, like thermodynamics, has conservation laws. Value cannot be created, only transformed. I'm a bit shaky on economics at this level, but I suspect this plan has the same effect as a fixed-percentage income tax, with the "value" being taken from all people (not just those who buy bonds) via the artificial increase in inflation.
The difference, of course, being that an income tax is relatively stable, whereas your bonds plan will plunge us into anarchy at the first hint of a recession.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 10 2016, @07:20PM
Which is why bonds and a lottery would only be pieces of a solution, not a solution in and of themselves. There's also the option of allowing the federal government to practice limited amounts of competing against private industry. Infrastructure building for instance. They'd have a very strong incentive to build the hell out of infrastructure and sell/lease it for profit. There are sales taxes on non-necessities where the purchasing thereof and thus paying of the tax is still voluntary. That's just off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly other ways that intelligent people can come up with short of outright theft.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Wednesday February 10 2016, @07:34PM
I think that's much more dangerous than just using taxes. It gives the government a STRONG incentive to impede private industry - which I'm pretty sure we can both agree is a Bad Thing.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 10 2016, @11:19PM
Indeed but in the infrastructure, and probably a very few limited other areas, it would most definitely be some welcome competition. At the very least someone would be laying fiber.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.