Skip to main content
Post a Comment

It’s Not Just the Tampon Tax: Why Periods Are Political - The New York Times

My response to It’s Not Just the Tampon Tax: Why Periods Are Political in the NY Times.

Primary Response
It is about so much more than menstruation. Given our sexist, inequitable society, women's concerns and human welfare are given short-shrift. Areas where women would be the most benefit, although maybe more so society at large would be helped, is with children and child-care, health and welfare concerns, reproductive health issues, violence and guns, education and jobs. The 'tampon tax' is simply emblematic of a large socio-political problem.
Secondary Response, to a sexist rant
@Jon F - People can argue the specifics, usually nitpicking each other's arguments, but the problem is larger than tampons and viagra. The issue is emblematic of other concerns of our society, whereby men make decisions that harm women or benefit men without realizing the result is a product of biases. Men are aware and sympathetic to items affecting men, but unaware and unsympathetic to concerns of women.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.
1 comment
Read more