State of the Union

Hoss: First of all the treaty only 'encourages' that registry for TRANSFER ACROSS NATIONAL BORDERS - if a weapon is never leaving the national borders IT IS EXEMPT. So, yea - there's nothing to do with a NATIONAL GUN REGISTRY except for a corner case of people that travel internationally to hunt or otherwise WITH A WEAPON. (And frankly, for the few international hunters I know [yes, I know a few people that do African hunting safaris - well, one person now that his parents have passed technically - but did know a trio] they rented their guns with the safari anyhow because guns and customs were already obnoxious - even mercenary groups that I'm aware of I've heard that they almost always keep caches of weapons in each nation of operation rather than dealing with customs every action they need to take)

And additionally, the "encouraged" thing is the only way the UN works anyhow - you know that whole thing with how a decade or so ago the Republicans were ranting about the UN being worthless and it doing nothing because it was toothless during the Presidential debates and the like? It's rather amusing how people like you just a few years ago would talk about how the UN has no power to do anything even when they want to (i.e. why we had to invade Iraq) now they're apparently all powerful overlords moving chess pieces around that make huge parts of society change with a whim.

PS - "Human sex trafficking" and "Mercenaries" have been banned by the UN funny how common both still are. [And of course if we're worried about "slippery slope" bullshit - HST could be taken to an extreme where people could outlaw all sex outside of state sanctioned criteria! And Merc bans could be taken to a ridiculous extreme where you couldn't mobilize a military since the definition of "mercenary" is so tenuous (in fact the wording to the ban is pretty darn close to the wording to the treaty we forced on the Japanese after WW2 - wonder how big their military is...)

It's pretty odd condemning yourself in the third person. Because there's no 'reading I want to read' going on here - facts on the page are X, yours involves ratifying it, full support to enforce it and expansion of its intent and scope.

Glenn Becks book on the subject is put under the category of FICTION every library I've seen for that very reason. But please tell us more of what TheBlaze.com thinks of things.

Shit, even the discussion on the subject before it was voted on made it clear it was to prevent arming dissidents, guerillas, and terrorists.

But I guess you support selling guns to all 3.

Vaclav_sl said:

Shit, even the discussion on the subject before it was voted on made it clear it was to prevent arming dissidents, guerillas, and terrorists.

But I guess you support selling guns to all 3.

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Well them fuckers sure do love them some Reagan so why the fuck wouldn't he support all 3, Reagan didn't mind at all.

Vaclav_sl said:

BLS figures are going to be the ones with the least spin since they've been controlled by both sides removing the spin from the others side into something both agree upon and have agreed upon for around 40 years. New formulae adding in or removing extra factors are going to be suspect. (i.e. Obama's 23% is a bit suspect being 5% off the BLS's and these lunatics quoting 5% are even more suspect)

Additionally when you factor in things like "tenure" you almost entirely ignore the "glass ceiling" effect which is well documented to still be commonplace - even though in many recent years there's been nearly as many MBAs and the like going to women in many schools. (I'm not sure if they overtook or not, it was close when I last heard it quoted and they were "on track to pass men" if the trend continued)

Also these days as your article quotes women tend to be educating MORE THAN MEN - more educated should at least counterbalance things to be even if it was just a "small deficit" shouldn't it? Does more educated earning less make much sense to you?

Incoming retarded "logic" and/or a gish-gallop of irrelevant or poorly sourced links.

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I know the main thrust of your post was that we'd need to compare BLS to BLS in order to get accurate trends; and I agree. But I wanted to talk about why the BLS figures are just bad for any real academic talk, because they have tons uncontrolled parameters even within their most specific groupings. They are only good as a starting point to extrapolate the more specific data. Which is where a lot of those lower numbers, the figures between 5-10%, come from (IE more specific data).

To illustrate why the BLS figures aren't really a gold standard though; just take a look at the Forbes Article you linked and howwildlywrong her interpretation is because of the BLS controls are so damn broad, they are almost useless (I know you said you disagreed with her, heh, just using it as an example). She says the legal field has a 54.1% gap and, I quote,"These men and women, surely, achieved the same level of education, chose the same career path and dedicate similar full-time hours to their fields, don't they Sabrina?". The reason why this is so dumb it made my brain bleed is because of what constitutes the "legal field" by the BLS.Lawyers ; Judicial Law Clerks ; Administrative Law Judges, Adjudicators, and Hearing Officers ; Arbitrators, Mediators, and Conciliators ; Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates ; Paralegals and Legal Assistants ; Court Reporters ; Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers ; Legal Support Workers

So, lets be clear here. The Chief Justice of the United States and the highest paid attorneys in THE WORLD; according to this article, "chose the same level of education, career path and work the same hours as"Paralegals who do not even need a college education. This is why there is a huge difference in the "legal field", because the BLS includes HIGH amounts of variables in it's bulk statistics. So in this case you have a profession where the secretarial work is dominated by women, who don't need college educations, combined with legal professionals who are 70% men, who have typically gone through 7 years of school and then worked 75+ hours a week at whatever internship is paying off their loans. This is why the raw stats? Can beSOmisleading,even when you account for the same field, because the fields in the BLS are impossibly broad, even at their narrowest.

And then there areothervery large differences, too. Women often leave work earlier, take more breaks during work, take lower paying jobs within the same field (MIT engineering professor vs primary school teacher ect), choose disparate thresholds of difficulty in order to accommodate personal lives (And no,notjust for children. Though that is part of it). The statistics also don't often account for differentTYPESof education; many of the raw statistics referenced in news papers simply quantify college educated as anyone with a 4 year degree; they don't make a distinction between a liberal arts degree, and a degree in say, mechanical engineering. (Obviously you can see how the type of education is important). This is why the BLS being the "gold" standard has been infuriatingly bad from an economics perspective, because it's just bulk data. And the crappy analysis it provides due to it's nature inspires all kinds of agendas which don't really help women at all, because the actual nature of the problem isn't well understood.

There are a few reports that have that crazy low number, but I think the least bias is the one fromAAUW; it's a study done by women, with, as far as I know, generally pretty darn liberal views. The study Hoss used/uses are sound as well (The "5% lunatic figure you mention ), but they I know two were done by free market, conservative think tanks; so people get suspect whenever they are brought up. Anyway, the number falls around 7% when you compare a woman with the same experience, who works the same amount of time, who takes the same *exact* job and has the same *exact* education.

Now, I find 7% to be a somewhat troubling number. As it comes down to almost exclusively the (Sadly financially sound) thought that women will leave their careers earlier, or have to take breaks in them, in order to bear children; and so the investment of human capital a company provides them will provide less net revenue (I know you mentioned this). This is exacerbated in the U.S. because of our ad hoc maternity leave system (As far as I know, the numbers are lower in Sweden and other nations which give men half the time off in total for maternity leave AND make maternity leave mandatory). I think it's a productive point to talk about; honestly. Economically, children are very, very important, especially now; we at least need to keep the population stable.

Anyway, sorry to bring this old discussion up; I missed it. But wanted to link you the AAWU paper, it's actually a fascinating read, and really well done. I agree with you, there still needs to be some work done on the gender pay gap....but how we look at the problem has to be very specific; because the gap is not nearly as large as the people looking to score political points make it out to be. And frankly? A lot of that "broader" gap? Is straight up the fault of women at this point. As I said, many choose to go for lower paying but "more rewarding" careers that give them more personal time and are more extroverted in terms of personality needed for work, rather than allowing for someone who is introverted. (A few examples in the AAWU paper.).

The 7% gap? The one that is actually caused by fear of child care and other factors? That is what we need to focus on. Because that's an honest problem of opportunity; since continuing the species is kind of a needed thing. The rest of the gap though, is not a problem ofopportunity, but rather a result of choice; and I don't believe the government should ever try to "fix" choices. Their domain is ensuring opportunity. Choice is up to each individual person, even if those choices produce a result that isn't completely egalitarian in the end. (I don't see many women squawking that men die at like 100 times the rate because they take more dangerous jobs; for example. Should we force women into the logging industry, or fishing industry to get that number equal? No? heh, then I'm not going to fret over the portions of the pay gap that stem from women wanting to work in a job with lots of vacation time, or less hours per week or who retire early ect.)

I absolutely agree Lith - but we need a length of those other calculations to compare trends unfortunately. I'm not a BLS fan, but they've been the standard for years so they're what all figures are compared against even when they're not remotely comparable because of a new calculation method.