> Insofar as Bitcoin represents a single world currency, the problem is that on a macro level this isn't a good idea.
I don't think a scenario in which bitcoin became the single currency that the world used is very likely to happen.
I suspect what is going to happen is that bitcoin is going to be the world's first Electronically Tradable Liquid Asset (ETLA) that is frictionless and uncensorable. Its going to legitimize the concept of a much wider class of ETLAs being acceptable as money. Any company stock that has high price stability could function as money if we had a platform whereby people could trade fractional shares of stock at low fees.
This is going to take away the ability of central banks to manipulate the money supply. If a given country's CB tried to print money to cause inflation, the population would figure it out quickly and the price of ETLAs in that currency would immediately rise.
Men are less likely to report sexual assault and rape against them than women are, for a number of reasons. One being that rape is defined as being penetrated against your will, and not being made to penetrate against your will.
Any study that counts convictions, or even complaints, it going to underestimate male victimhood.
You need to look at victim surveys to have any hope of estimating how many man are raped, and how many women rape.
See my other post in this thread for details on that.
Women are 50% of rape victims, and 40% of rapists. That is in the general population and excludes prison rape. If you included that, men would be the majority of victims.
These figures are from the CDC's 2010 NISVS (National Intimiate Partner Sexual Violence Survey), although you won't find it in the executive summary. You have to look at the data tables. Here is a link to the NISVS: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/specialreports.h...
The executive summary tells the usual story of rape being a male on female crime. There are 2 problems here. One is that they define rape as being penetrated against your will, and not being forced to penetrate (what a female rapist would do to a man). This erases female on male rape.
However, they did ask men if they had been forced to penetrate in the prior 12 months, and 1.1% of men surveyed reported that they had, and 80% of those had been attacked by a woman. 1.1% of women reported that they had been penetrated against their will in the prior 12 months, and 98% of those reported a male attacker.
So we have 50% of victims are male and 50% female. Of the 50% of male victims, 80%, or 40% of total victims, were raped by a woman.
So women are 40% of rapists. Here is a image of the data tables from the NISVS, with the relevant figured circled: http://imgur.com/a/aw0eU
Earlier I said there were 2 problems with the executive summary. The second one is that the CDC looked at lifetime victimization, and prior 12 months victimization. Their figures for men as victims of rape (when you include being made to penetrate) are much lower than for women. In the executive summary, they use the lifetime stats to show women as the overwhelming majority of victims, and don't mention the prior 12 month numbers.
Why the disparity between lifetime victimization and prior 12 month? Lifetime stats will tend to underestimate the problem, because, over time, people tend to erase their memory of traumatic events as a survival mechanism.
From the analysis I linked above:
>Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.
> For men this effect is even more pronounced.
>
> 16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).
>
>Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women.
>
>That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men.
>
>Is it any wonder that the CDC’s 2010 survey (correcting for their mis-categorization of female-on-male rape) found that 18.3% of women and 6.2% of men were victimized over their lifetimes?
>Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".
all the while supposing that there is a consipracy among men to make women feel uncomfortable at tech conferences.
If irony had mass, this thread would undergo gravitational collapse and form a singularity.
> but in the case of the tech industry, most programmers (most people at all levels) are male. we simply dominate - we are a clear majority. so it's not about bias from extremes. we dominate even in the middle.
I don't get how dominating the tech sector translates into a general dominance of the society, whereby a woman's sexist remark against a man can be thought less damaging than a man's sexist remark against a woman.
>which is why these kinds of arguments are popular only in fringe anti-feminist groups)
I think feminists have a long and proud tradition of employing the apex fallacy, whereby they argue that men have all the power worth talking about because of their representation at the top (CEOs, high government posts, ...) and ignore their over-representation at the bottom (prison, homeless, suicides (3x), high school and college drop outs, lower educational attainment (college enrollement and graduation is skewed 60/40 in favor of women now)).
Which anti-feminist apex fallacy arguments have you run into?
Can the average man expect to marry a woman with a higher educational attainment than him, who will bear more of the load of providing for the family so he can spend more time with the children? Does a man have an equal chance of getting a college degree (college enrollment and graduation now favors women by 60 to 40 percent)? When a man's wife beats him up and the police not only refuse to take him seriously, but arrest him instead (the primary aggressor doctrine) how does that make him more powerful than the average woman?
If men as a group took advantage of women as a group, then why would men define rape to deny their own victimhood? That is not acting in the interests of men.
I agree that the narrative of men being strong serves the interests of the men at the top of the power structure, but that is a tiny percentage of all men.
The average man has no more power than the average woman.
Men and women commit rape and are raped in roughly equal numbers, and that is not including prison rape. When do include that, men are the majority of the victims.
The CDC's 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which looked at society at large and excluded the prison population, found that 1.1% of women and 1.1% or men surveyed were raped in the prior 12 months.
98% of women who had been raped identified a man as their attacker and 80% of the men who had been raped identified a woman as their attacker. This works out to men being 60% of rapists and women being 40% of rapists.
Now, the NISVS's executive summary does not tell this story. It tells the usual story of rape being something men overwhelmingly to do women. The way it does that is by defining rape to be 'being penetrated against your will', excluding 'being made to penetrate', which is what a female rapist would do to a man.
Nevertheless, the study does track how many men were made to penetrate (which it categorizes as 'other, sexual assault'), so it is possible to correct the definition of rape to one that doesn't erase female on male rape ('made to have sex against your will'), and when you do, rape ceases to be a gendered crime.
So yes, I can imagine what it would be like for men to be raped as often as women are. Now, can you imagine what it would be like if female rape victims, like male rape victims, were defined out of existence, and offered no recognition, or help?
Why is wondering aloud how sexist/creepy the bulk of male programmers are more acceptable than wondering aloud how untalented the bulk of female programmers are?
I think both behaviors are rather low shaming behaviors.
Pick a company like reddit, that provides a service using open source software, and submit a patch to a problem they care about. That would get the attention of the programming staff without going through HR.
When you are doing maintenance programming, where you only ever understand small pieces of the code at a time (the ones relevant to the project you are currently working on), bisecting the history of your commits is a very powerful way of doing business. In one of my feature branches, I wrote added some /* ... */ style comments to a mysql script and used apostrophe's in the text of my comment. This can confuse mysql when it executes the script. I was not deploying the new scripts into my test environment after every commit (I was mostly working on the python back-end, and only adding comments to the mysql scripts because they explained something that was happening in the python code). Several commits later, I do a full deploy and I have new symptoms. It was only by backing up through my commit history that I was able to find the commit that first introduced the symptom, and it was only the fact that I write small commits that allowed me to discover the problem with the apostrophe's.
Generalizing, whenever you are making incremental changes to a complex system where you don't understand all of the effects of your changes without lots of testing, it makes sense to write small commits so that you can backtrack to see when an unintended behavior first surfaced.
Maintenance programming is one field in which this approach is crucial.
I am guessing that a lot of data analysis talent that used to be uninterested in trying to understand the world economy will now be much more interested.
We've had cheap computers and cheap internet access for a while now, but we haven't had as many people burned by the mismanagement of the world economy.
As I hear people propose what went wrong, I keep thinking,"Can I turn that into a useful metric?"
For example, I have heard that banks make their money mostly on fees much more than they used to, because they have become so quick to grant loans and then sell them.
This leads to the question: at any given time, what are the various significant ways in which banks are making money, and what is the allocation of bank profits into each type?
Now watch those ratios for shifts (both sudden and gradual) and ask yourself what might be going on when you notice a shift.
Does the ability to draw graphs like that currently exist?
I don't think a scenario in which bitcoin became the single currency that the world used is very likely to happen.
I suspect what is going to happen is that bitcoin is going to be the world's first Electronically Tradable Liquid Asset (ETLA) that is frictionless and uncensorable. Its going to legitimize the concept of a much wider class of ETLAs being acceptable as money. Any company stock that has high price stability could function as money if we had a platform whereby people could trade fractional shares of stock at low fees.
This is going to take away the ability of central banks to manipulate the money supply. If a given country's CB tried to print money to cause inflation, the population would figure it out quickly and the price of ETLAs in that currency would immediately rise.