batista

And maybe force them to like programming. Slap them if they don't use a computer for hours every day.

Sorry, but the idea that we should artificially excite girls about programming is silly to me. If they are interested, fine, if not, so be it. The very first programmer was a woman (Ada Lovelace) and she didn't have Legos or prep talks.

Why start from the premise that there _should_ be 50%-50% men and women programmers and try to force that, instead of watching what girls and boys actually like, and of course help any girl that _actually_ wants to go into programming?

We don't force young boys to go into ballet dancing, or even think that there is a problem because the genders there are not 50%-50%. And we don't give benzedrine, beers and toy trucks to girls to make them go into truck driving, which is also a profession with a gender imbalance.

Oh, and what about professional basketball and football? Should we force girls to be into it more, and force people to watch them play professionally? Because men's basketball and men's football currently dominate.

>I think you're conflating "people who work on Wall Street" with economists. Most of the "dirtiest" of the loan originators were people with no financial education whatsoever; salesmen, and nothing more.

And I think you're conflating economists with people that didn't influence policy at the top level to enable those "salesmen" to do what they did, people that didn't hum along while the salesmen were doing it, people that didn't praise this thing happening, and people that didn't ensure the public that everything was perfectly OK before the crash.

Because economists, and top level ones at that, with Ivy League PhDs and all, did all of the above.

Case in point:

"""The former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has conceded that the global financial crisis has exposed a "mistake" in the free market ideology which guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy. A long-time cheerleader for deregulation, Greenspan admitted to a congressional committee yesterday that he had been "partially wrong" in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry and that the credit crunch had left him in a state of shocked disbelief. "I have found a flaw," said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy."""

But all other top dog economists policy influences were doing the same things, and praising the same "throw caution to the wind" attitude towards the "free market" and unsupervised banking...

>Meanwhile, an enterprise with hundreds of trained economists (read: The Fed) used this magical unicorn training and prevented the Great Recesession from becoming the Great Depression II.

Really? So where were these "hundreds of trained economists" when the Great Recession came about? Out there, causing it.

As for "being saved from becoming Great Depression II", well, let's wait and see.

>You really need to go learn some economics.

I'm talking about the assumptions about market efficiency and the supposed superiority of the mythical "free market" here.

Hayek, since you mentioned it, was a western "free market" lackey, imposing his dogmas on the Chilean people --and lots of others-- (and through a dictator at that), with dire consequences. This kind of "policy advice" is 80% percent catering to interests and 20% ideology. No more scientific than Stalinist economics.

A science doesn't need a dictator (or an elected official) to enforce that "earth is round" or "water will boil at 100 degrees under the right conditions".

Heck, even hard science fails when there are economic interests (e.g big pharma, releasing BS half-baked drugs, or physicists making big BS claims to get funding).

Economy is all, and solely, about economic interests, so all public (non academic) use and discourse of it is inextricably tied to those.

As for the "popular topics to study today", those, while interesting from a math/game theory standpoint, are turned to shit as soon as they enter the political / economic policy field.

On my 25 years of following the stuff, I've haven't seen anything but BS, special interests, spin, greed, failed predictions and bad advice on all fronts. Which is always touted as "scientific" and "based on state of the art models" by the policy advisors.

If you take out the "cater to special interests" bias factor, the rest of economists performance can be had with any random walk methodology.

>Economists rarely make predictions. Predicting stuff is hard.

Oh, they do it all the time, to give "policy advice".

>"Every mechanical compass I've used has two points."

And the pedantic-bs-to-save-some-face-of-the-day award, goes to...

He also gives me that impression when I see him on Keynotes, one of a power grabbing, back-stabbing kind of guy. Which could or could not be true, I'm talking purely from a "face-reading" standpoint.

The exact opposite of that would be Bob Mansfield.

Few core developers (mainly, one, Armin) that couldn't be bothered enough. It's a volunteer project after all.

He did write about the unicode problems with the Python 3 changes and the need for an improved WSGI spec (heck, he even co-wrote the unicode literal change PEP).

But after the new WSGI spec was out, and the u thing was already implemented in 3.3 pre-release, there was no much motion in Flask, whereas Pyramid, Django and others have already started work.

Even the "When will Flask support Python 3" document has not updated and is 2 years out of date in it's contents.

>but the majority of economists make a living on the fact that the market is not efficient.

Actually they make a killing on the fact that their are interests and money to be made based on their BS advice and predictions.

>No, it's based on them being true enough that other approximations are less useful models.

That is, in wishful thinking.

No other field has a worse prediction track record that economics.