Thursday, May 28, 2015

5/28/15 Today's Inquiries

Shh! I'm posting from work.


The Links:

Bernie Sanders throws bomb at Hillary Clinton:
"I'm not going to condemn Hillary and Bill Clinton because they've made a lot of money. [But] that type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world."
Rick Santorum comes tumbling out of the clown car.

More on the effects of Fox News on American politics. This time it's confirmation bias.

Based on when you were born, this handy chart will tell you how much of your life we've been at war. Didn't Foucalt say something about normalizing a state of war?

23 states saw unemployment rates decrease in April.

Are we seeing the start of a rebellion against longer and longer work hours?
new paper, from two economists at Monash Business School, suggests that the tide may be turning. Using relatively recent data on workers in Australia's six states and two territories, it finds the opposite. As income inequality rose, it finds, Australians decided to work fewer hours. A 1% rise in the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, ends up resulting in a 0.2% decline in working hours.
Solar power is growing so fast that it is beginning to rival the shale gas boom.

Online courses at community colleges are not going well. It's almost as if they need structured personal interaction with an educator in order to succeed! Follow up here.
[H]ere’s an unusual case where scholarly research is producing a clear conclusion: online instruction at community colleges isn’t working. Yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them.
Would graduating more people from college actually reduce inequality?
All of these phenomena suggest that the labor market isn’t working for most employees—problems that aren’t confined to those without a college education—and that suggests the problem isn’t that too few people have college degrees. Rather than focus on education attainment as the solution to inequality, it’s time for policy-makers to move on from the race between education and technology and focus on our stagnant labor market. As Summers said, “the core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs.” The key to reducing inequality is more jobs and a higher demand for labor. In the absence of more jobs, heroic assumptions about educational improvement are likely to deliver only modest economic benefits.

Is there finally real evidence about aid helping the global poor?
A vast randomized trial — the gold standard of evidence — involving 21,000 people in six countries suggests that a particular aid package called the graduation program (because it aims to graduate people from poverty) gives very poor families a significant boost that continues after the program ends. Indeed, it’s an investment. In India, the economic return was a remarkable 433 percent.
What should you study in college to stay ahead of computers?

Here's the impact of the "On Demand" economy.

The Geek Heretic. I need to read the book discussed here:
For twelve years I worked at Microsoft, where, like every other gizmo-happy technologist, I unconsciously embraced a peculiar paradox. It revealed itself in the most innocuous things that the company said. At corporate gatherings, executives would tell us, “You are our greatest asset!” But in their marketing, they would tell customers, “Our technology is your greatest asset!” In other words, what matters most to the company is capable people, but what should matter to the rest of the world is new technology. Somehow what was best for us and what was best for others were two different things.
I had a clutle column at WIRED and then I didn't. More from the front lines of women in tech and tech media. I thought this was especially incisive:
So as far as I can tell, they don’t cover the future. They produce a white male fantasy of the future.
The dehumanizing myth of meritocracy. Meritocracy dehumanizing? I'm surprised I never thought of it in that way before. Obviously we're reducing people down to a very specific set of traits, namely work and income, rather than valuing their humanity. This longform piece looks at the myth of meritocracy in open source coding.

Fertility rates are rising for educated women. I have seen it argued that having children is becoming something only wealthy white americans do.

John Nash passed away suddenly this past week. Here's a great, although long, discussion of his impact on Game Theory.

A chart of the death toll from Qatar's World Cup construction efforts.


How does Star Wars illuminate constitutional law?

I think this is merely evidence of New Jerseyians being more flammable than people from other states.  I mean, what else could it be?

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

We need to talk about Elite: Dangerous, again.

Hi everyone, I swear that playing Elite isn't the only thing I've been doing in the past 2 weeks since last posting links. However, when I've found myself not at work and not doing other productive activities, I've been playing Elite. You may recall I mentioned how much I loved this game back in January and I'm here to report that I enjoy it today even more. Rather than babble on about the game, I'll give you a quick screen-cap essay of my latest in-game hobby: Exploration. Do click the images in "embiggen" and enjoy the beauty of E:D. I apologize that the captions don't appear in the slide show.

You see folks, about 2 weeks back I crashed my primary ship in a very stupid way. I rammed the inside wall of a space station at full afterburn and let's just say Issac Newton is a cruel man.
F = MA. Rest in pieces. Small, small pieces. 
And with that it was time to put combat and trading on hold and step into the black. I used this star chart, initially compiled in 1888, to plot a few routes "local" to Earth. For example, I visited 50 Cassiopeiae using a star chart more than century old.
Here we see my exploration vessel, the good ship Gladwell, about to set off on my journey.
Every star chart humanity has ever made is represented accurately in game and real NASA and ESA data is used to procedurally generate the rest of the galaxy. 
Here's the Gladwell silhouetted against a Wolf-Rayet star

A lovely quarternary star system. 

Dropped out of hyperspace right next to this pair and got Gladwell a little cooked. 

You might notice that the top half of the image has fewer stars than the lower half. I plotted my trip 1000 light years above the galactic horizon hoping I'd find more previously unexplored systems. The sky really thinned out until I turned toward the galactic core. 

Visiting an ice planet with another lovely image of the galactic center. Still a good 20,000 light years away!

An especially black and white gas giant with rings. 

I found an odd blueish cloud and decided to make my way there. You can also see several nebulae. The galactic core is starting to loom larger. 

Inside the blue cloud I found this little baddie hiding. You can see the gravitational lens effects of the black hole very clearly. This is the first of many black holes I visited on this trip. 

A star is about to emerge from behind this gas giant. The rings are also thin enough to allow the galaxy to shine through. On the bottom right you can see our neighboring galaxy, The Magellanic Cloud. Even with in game FTL travel, I don't think it's a manageable distance to travel. 26,000 light years took about 30 hours of playtime for me and that's just one way!

Another black hole. I positioned it between myself and the core for a stunning lens effect.

Here I am exploring the rings of a Neptune-like gas giant with a dramatic nebula in the background. 

Inside the nebula, I decided to drop into orbit about this planet and enjoy the view for a while. 

Before long, I encountered another small cloud in the distance. I suppose these are the remnants of a supernova. I wrote down the name of the system and I'll have to look it up later to see if it is real. 

Sure enough, this green cloud contained another black hole. More importantly, it was previously undiscovered. I think I'll name it Hubert. 

After about 30,000 light years of meandering core-ward, I am finally making my last jump into the very center of the Milky Way Galaxy. 

And here she is, Sagittarius A Star, the supermassive black hole which inhabits the center of our galaxy. The lens effects are far more substantial than the smaller black holes I've encountered previously. You may notice the line of lights on the dorsal ridge of Gladwell, they're heat vents designed to radiate infrared and visible light to cool ship components. Normally they only deploy when jumping (as above) or flying close to a star. Supermassive black holes emit Hawking radiation which is causing the ship to heat up. I don't stick around too long. 

As I turned for the long journey back home, I encountered this star system about 2000 light years from Sag A*.  I guess Gladwell and I will have to investigate this Great Annihilator.

Anyway, thank you for indulging my gaming posts. I do very much like Elite: Dangerous and after this exploration trip I'm even more enthralled. Interstellar travel isn't something that will happen in my lifetime (or ever, perhaps) and having a game like E:D which seeks to accurately recreate our galaxy for my enjoyment is quite fun. 

Okay, back to business. I'll see about posting links later today/this week. 

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

5/12/15 Today's Inquiries

It's a sad day for me when the air conditioning isn't capable of cooling the home, even when set to 80!


The Links:

Elizabeth Warren writes an OpEd against the TPP. Dear Liz. Run for president. I will work for your campaign for free.
Most Americans don’t think of the minimum wage or antismoking regulations as trade barriers. But a foreign corporation has used ISDS to sue Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage. Phillip Morris has gone after Australia and Uruguay to stop them from implementing rules to cut smoking rates. Under the TPP, companies could use ISDS to challenge these kinds of government policy decisions — including food safety rules.
Canada and the UK have mandatory public savings accounts for their citizens. They've been doing pretty well. Let's compare that to the way public pensions and retirement funds function in the US. Not well. Why? Because the public pensions end up invested in high fee funds where the managers make money while the pensioners get almost nothing. For example: Rhode Island, CALPERS, Kentucky TRS, City of Chicago. It's hard for me to endorse such a plan here because there are likely to be similar shenanigans with a mandatory public savings plan.

What did Jeb Bush learn from the Iraq war?
But Bush's answer to the question he thought he was being asked — would you have invaded Iraq if you only knew what was known then — is more telling, and confirms the worst fears some had about his candidacy. What he said, in effect, was that the Iraq War was a good idea that was undermined by bad intelligence. He said, in other words, that he thinks the basic concept of the Iraq War was right even if the specific case turned out to be wrong.
Scott Walker, leading presidential candidate in Iowa, promised 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin. How's that working out for him?
Since tax revenues have failed to surge as the Republicans had hoped, it is likely further spending cuts will be implemented. As I have observed in the past, spending cuts are likely to be contractionary in the short run, making it even less likely that employment will continue to grow rapidly.
Here's how Ben Carson's "biblical" flat tax would effect the poor.
One thing is indisputable: An unadulterated flat tax—which Carson may or may not favor—would raise taxes on the poor and reduce them on the rich.
Rules create inequality and rules can remedy it.
As we argue, inequality is not inevitable: it is a choice that we’ve made with the rules that structure our economy. Over the past 35 years, the rules, or the regulatory, legal and institutional frameworks, that make up the economy and condition the market have changed. These rules are a major driver of the income distribution we see, including runaway top incomes and weak or precarious income growth for most others.
Some thoughts on Privilege, a book about America's elite youth.
Instead of entitlement, I have found that St. Paul’s increasingly cultivates privilege. Whereas elites of the past were entitled—building their worlds around the “right” breeding, connections, and culture—new elites develop privilege: a sense of self and a mode of interaction that advantage them.
David Brooks endorses nepotism. You know, but only among the rich.

How Fox News changed American Media and Political Dynamics.
The creation of Fox News in 1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical importance. For the first time, there was a news source available virtually everywhere in the United States, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a conservative tilt. Finally, conservatives did not have to seek out bits of news favorable to their point of view in liberal publications or in small magazines and newsletters. Like someone dying of thirst in the desert, conservatives drank heavily from the Fox waters. Soon, it became the dominant – and in many cases, virtually the only – major news source for millions of Americans. This has had profound political implications that are only starting to be appreciated. Indeed, it can almost be called self-brainwashing – many conservatives now refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox, and to believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth.
Practical Ethics: If you're a conservative, I'm not your friend.
Conservative friends?
I’m not so sure. I am attracted by the view that we should all keep the debate open, discuss our political views, take other people’s views into account, and revise and improve our own as we all benefit from this dialogue. I’m attracted by the view that there is such a thing as progress in politics. But—depressingly—I’m far more sceptical than I was yesterday about how much of a difference we can make with political debate. There are several reasons for this.
Which social programs work? Which should we support?

A study on how to increase savings rates among the global poor.
  • First, we find that being paid on the account instead of in cash increases the account balance by around 110% (or almost 420 rupees) within three months of weekly payments.
  • Second, the effects are long lasting; five months after the last weekly payment, the balance of the treated is still twice the one of the control.
  • Third, the villagers that were paid in cash do not save more in other assets, such as cash at home. As a result, the treatment had a net positive impact on the respondent’s total savings.
  • Fourth, the villagers who were paid in cash increase expenditures on regular consumption, such as rice, vegetables, fuels, and soap with about 402 rupees, an increase that is remarkably similar to the increase in the savings of the villagers paid on the account.
Are we about to force ourselves into geoengineering our planet?
For me, the risks of any actual efforts at geoengineering seem too high at present. But of course, this is another way of saying that I think the risks of climate change are not immediate or severe enough to be worth the risks of geoengineering.  But as I noted at the start, if you believe that the risks of climate change are large and near-term--and moreover, if you have observed how difficult it seems to be for the world to take action to reduce carbon emissions substantially--then you should be looking at geoengineering very closely, even you hate the idea of needing to do so.
Super wonky finance stuff: The origins of tri-party repo. This is the first part of a two part series which will add a part about how the repo markets contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. I will be sure to post that when it appears.

Diary of a Guantanamo prisoner. With two select quotes and a link to a review.

Longform coverage of unnecessary medical care. And, an article about a database tracking patient's prescription drug usage.

Vox tried soylent, prayers not answered.

+Jason Jones just watched the new Avengers movie. And Noah.


Trailers:


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Thursday, May 7, 2015

5/7/15 Today's Inquiries

Nothing to report today. Umm, I dunno, allergy season?



The Links:

MIT thinks the government should pour money into current solar technology and implement solar power widely across the US ASAP rather than continue to fund long term R&D projects. Yeah, look at Germany, they've had several days this past year where they were 60-70% renewables. Factor in things like Musk's battery and we've got a chance here.

Or is Tesla's Powerwall battery basically worthless?
But if its sole purpose is to provide backup power to a home, the juice it offers is but a sip. The model puts out just 2 kilowatts of continuous power, which could be pretty much maxed out by a single vacuum cleaner, hair drier, microwave oven or a clothes iron. The battery isn’t powerful enough to operate a pair of space heaters; an entire home facing a winter power outage would need much more. In sunnier climes, meanwhile, it provides just enough energy to run one or two small window A/C units. 
Swarthmore College, meanwhile, is not going to divest its $1.8 billion endowment from fossil fuel.

And science takes it on the jaw in the House Space Science and Technology committee. I am not a scientist and neither can you!

Huckabee tumbled out of the clown car this week, here's why he will fail terribly.
Evidently aware that he can no longer count on fundraising in sanctuaries, Huckabee has turned to shilling for bullshit diabetes cures on internet infomercials to bring in cash. This, too, is an old trick in the celebrity evangelical book: After notorious televangelist Jim Bakker was jailed for multiple counts of fraud, he returned to the airwives to hawk survivalist food kits for the apocalyptically minded. Celebrity evangelicals have always been good at making money, in part because of what they're willing to do for it. But the age of their outsized political influence seems to have ended.
On the ground in Iowa.
Walker @ 21%, Paul and Rubio @ 13, Cruz @ 12, Huckabee @ 11, Carson @ 7 and Bush @ 5.

The fall and rise of income inequality. 2 useful graphs.

Thinking outside the box on inequality. Preach:
Over the last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.
Over that same period, the earnings of workers in the bottom half of the income pile have progressed little. American society has buckled under the strain.
The actual size of government? Measured by the taxes we pay, it was about 25 percent of our gross national product in 1970.It is still about 25 percent of our G.D.P. today. And the share of our wealth spent on the poor, apart from money devoted to the rising cost of health care, has not changed very much, either.
And yet there are other tools. In the furious partisan bickering, the debate has bypassed all the other ways the government affects the distribution of the nation’s prosperity, selectively placing its thumb on the scales.
Want your dream job out of college? Just be born rich.

Graphs about quantitative easing. With commentary from Brad DeLong.
  1. American financial markets did not expect QE to do much.
  2. Nevertheless, QE had substantial effects: whenever the Federal Reserve went on a long-bond buying spree, those who had sold the bonds took a nontrivial share of their cash and piled into stocks.
  3. That is the way it is supposed to work for QE to be effective.
The housing crisis which begot the Great Recession caused a miniature Great Migration.
We knew that poor neighborhoods in Cleveland or Jacksonville would suddenly have loan brokers going door to door, usually to houses where the resident had equity, on a quest to steal it. They saddled them with high-cost mortgages or home equity lines of credit, and when everything crashed the lenders provided little to no relief, to say nothing of the government. I remember stories around the 2010 election of candidates sending out volunteers to walk precincts, and they would only find one or two occupied homes on a street. There are parts of this country that looked like ghost towns. And the burden wore heavily on people of color.
Here's a pair of posts about our improving demographics. I think this is one of the most positive and ignored stories of the past 2 years. A population with moderate growth rates is essential to long term economic success. Moreover, it makes liberal welfare-state programs far more solvent. 2nd article here.
Changes in demographics are an important determinant of economic growth, and although most people focus on the aging of the "baby boomer" generation, the movement of younger cohorts into the prime working age is another key story in coming years. 
Two posts about our the continuing drama in Baltimore. First we have The Long, Painful, and Repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore. Basically, for African Americans the US is a failed state.
These shocks happened, at least 80 years of them, to the same communities in Baltimore, as they did in cities across the country. Neighborhoods weakened by mass incarceration were the same ones divided by highways. Families cornered into subprime loans descended from the same families who'd been denied homeownership — and the chance to build wealth — two generations earlier. People displaced today by new development come from the same communities that were scattered before in the name of "slum clearance" and the progress brought by Interstate highways.
Second is a reconsideration of The Wire under our present context. Well worth reading though I will excerpt sections below.
The connective thread of every Wire season, as described by show co-creator David Simon was that when individuals, no matter how heroic, fight to change entrenched power structures and bureaucracies—whether in the form of City Hall politics, police, or organized crime—the individual is going to lose...
That David Simon could tell people with bricks in their hand to "go home," and have no direct words of condemnation for the violence displayed by the police made me remember my friend Dashon—from Baltimore—who told me he would never watch The Wire because he believed it to be "copaganda," since it was created not only by Simon but by longtime Baltimore police officer Ed Burns... 
Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people's ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I've met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday's march? In the season about the drug war and "Hamsterdam," where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity—and frankly the luxury—of David Simon's pessimism. Perhaps this pessimism, alongside the adrenalizing violence, created, as Jamilah Lemieux put it in Ebony, a show steeped in the voyeurism of "Black pain and death" for a liberal white audience that "cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray."
A bonus article:
Baltimore’s innovation was the use of government legislation to achieve systematic, citywide race separation.  “Nothing like it can be found in any statute book or ordinance record of this country,” the New York Times wrote.  “It is unique in legislation, Federal, State, or municipal — an ordinance so far-reaching in the logical sequence that must result from its enforcement that it may be said to mark a new era in social legislation.”  Baltimore thus became a national leader in residential segregation.
Police, our civic guardians, have killed 1500 people in the past 16 months.


I had no idea this was a thing:
Most commentary about Citizens United has focused on the new leeway it grants corporations to spend on elections. However, Citizens United also makes it legal for corporate managers to campaign for their preferred political candidates in the workplace. Businesses can even go so far as to mandate that their workers participate in politics in certain ways – such as attending a rally for a favored politician. That happened during the 2012 election, when an Ohio coal mine required its workers to attend a rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Miners were not paid for their time, but some said they were afraid they could lose their jobs if they did not participate in the rally. 
A breakdown of corporate profits.
Although the US corporate income tax is an almost continual subject of dispute, most people don't know any details about what kinds of corporations that earn the profits. For example, are the companies earning profits disproportionately large or small? What industries earn the most in profits? How much corporate profit falls outside the corporate income tax, because it is earned by "Schedule S" corporations which distribute profits to their owners, instead?

War, war never changes.
Horton's experience is a telling example of the many ways moral injuries can affect veterans. 
Stephen Colbert is donating $800,000 to South Carolina teachers.
Comedian Stephen Colbert announced Thursday that he would fund every existing grant request South Carolina public school teachers have made on the education crowdfunding websiteDonorsChoose.org.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

5/5/15 Today's Inquiries

Get off at midnight, be back at work at 7. Sure, why not.


The Links:

I present this article as a microcosm of everything wrong with education reform in America. So TFA is getting into the online learning racket?
The San Francisco Bay area region of Teach For America will place its 120 new recruits in a training program run by the Summit Public Schools, a charter school network with a national reputation for its pioneering use of blended learning, which combines teacher-led instruction and self-paced student learning online.
No, the Laffer curve doesn't work at the state level.Okay you dummies, repeat after me, the Laffer curve was never about government finances. It was about developing a lie to cover the truth that the government needs to be a resource for the richest Americans to use to their benefit. It's the same thing in Kansas.

A case study of fast food workers in NJ who got a minimum wage bump.
Our empirical findings challenge the prediction that a rise in the minimum reduces employment.
New research on economic mobility and its relationship to social mobility. Lots of interesting information and interactive data/graphics.

Surveys of bank lending indicate loan standards are finally loosening. Hopefully the consumer credit squeeze is finally coming to an end.

Fewer homes are underwater and fewer are in foreclosure than in recent years. Turnaround? Reinflate the bubble?

The ongoing rise in Temp work. I also thought this was an ominous point:
There is, though, another possibility; that the recent hints of a wages bump are largely an artefact of unexpectedly low inflation, and that the underlying wage stagnation continues. 
Is former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke setting a bad example by going to work at a big financial firm? Setting the example? No. Par for the course is more like it. The revolving door continues evolving.

When science fiction authors were grounded in reality.
Unfortunately, John Ringo's statement about Baen seeing a continual increase in sales compared to other publishing houses  which implies that no one is reading science fiction from any publishing house not called Baen  doesn't stand up to the facts.
A kickass Q&A from the year 1690.
Q: Is it proper for women to be learned?
A: All grant that they may have some learning, but the question is of what sort, and to what degree?

Sunday, May 3, 2015

5/3/15 Today's Inquiries

Finding good employees is apparently a difficult thing in rural Appalachia. I find this surprising given the high unemployment. 


The Links:

Let's start with a great discussion of the limits of technology in education. Specifically, I enjoyed this part as it echoes many of my own criticisms of NCLB/CC education:
I think one of the issues is we tend to think of education as being the content. We overemphasize the importance of content, as opposed to emphasizing the part that’s really difficult in any good education, which is adult-supervised motivation—the motivation of the child to learn something.
An analysis of City Year's efficacy. I find this program far more appealing than, say, Teach For America and it has far better outcomes. Plus, it doesn't displace teachers or school employees and adds resources to every district without cost to the schools. 

HVS estimates suggest that the trend toward more single-family units being rented rather than owned continued over the last year. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2005, HVS estimates suggest that the number of owner-occupied one-unit homes fell by about 1.969 million units, while the number of renter-occupied one-unit housing units increased by about 4.345 million units.

California's low-wage workers are older and better educated than in the past. So, I guess education isn't the only key to a good job?
California's low-wage workers are older and more educated than they were three decades ago — but they earn less, according to new research from UC Berkeley.
Of course if NYT columnists were expected to be accurate when they talked about government programs, Brooks would have been forced to tell readers that around 40 percent of these payments are Medicaid payments that go directly to doctors and other health care providers. We pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. We can think of these high health care costs as a generous payment to the poor, but what this actually means is that every time David Brooks' cardiologist neighbor raises his fees, David Brooks will complain about how we are being too generous to the poor.
The other point that an honest columnist would be forced to make is that the vast majority of these payments do not go to people who are below the poverty line and therefore don't count in the denominator for his "poor person" calculation. The cutoff for Medicaid is well above the poverty level in most states. The same is true for food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and most of the other programs that make up Brooks' $14,000 per person figure. In other words, he has taken the spending that goes to a much larger population and divided it by the number of people who are classified as poor.


In many professional jobs, expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread. We often think of problems with these expectations as women’s problems. But men too may struggle with them: my research at a top strategy consulting firm, first published in Organization Science, revealed that many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful...
 some men made small, under-the-radar changes to their work that allowed them to pull back, while still “passing” as the work-devoted superheroes the firm valued. Others were more transparent about their difficulties, and asked the firm for help in pulling back. Their efforts resulted in harsh penalties and marginalization...
Thus, like women, many men in professional jobs also experience difficulties with demands that they be ideal workers, and like women, men who express these challenges and seek the firm’s help to redress them face resistance and penalties. What seems to differ is that many men are able to stray while passing as fully devoted. 
So I am crossing my fingers that we can find ways to shrink this divide. Boots and dresses, or neither, or anywhere in between. Girls should not feel that their taste in clothes/decorations/hobbies/accessories leaves them needing to defend either their intellect, their interest, or their legitimacy as a girl. More than asking boots and dresses to unite, maybe we can stop worrying about what people are wearing at all. A girl can dream.
The Police State is Already Here. Yeah, but only for black people. More here.

First, there is a strong sense that the hierarchical tradition of Republican presidential nominations may not apply in 2016...
Second, it is a sign that with our political process awash in money, the financial barriers for entry aren't really there anymore...
Third, this much interest reflects a perception that, despite the demographic challenges facing the Republican Party, this nomination is worth having—that there is a fair chance that one of these people will be the next president of the United States.