Women's Sports Debate, Redux

Amanda writes about some of the pejorative things one often hears when it comes to women's team sports, and notes that those things have been less heard in the context of the Women's World Cup in soccer.  You know, the kind of stuff about girls not being able to throw a ball or how watching women's games is about as interesting as watching paint dry and so on.

In my opinion,  beach volleyball outfits or the statements of some about how female soccer players have gotten better because they now wear makeup are part and parcel of the same criticism, albeit in disguise.  How to get men to watch women's sports if too many think women aren't athletic enough to be worth watching?   Give us more tits and butts and pretty faces!

Problem solved.

Which it isn't of course, and in any case we need to have both men and women to watch women's sports if those sports are to get commercial sponsors. 

Similar opinions about the weakness of women were expressed in the comments to this article about a WNBA player reading some mean tweets aloud.  Last night when I checked the comments (won't go there again, though many also defended the female players), several pointed out that women are inferior athletes and watching women's games is boring.

I have three quick thoughts about all that:

First, most women's "professional" team sports are really recent.  Little girls have not played soccer or ice-hockey or basket ball in large numbers until quite recently.  What that means is that the foundation of some of those sports is still wobbly, especially in some other countries than the US, and that we shouldn't compare, say, women's soccer on the global level with men's soccer on the global level, given the much longer history, support and base of the latter.

Women's sports are likely to improve a lot in the very near future, and they have already improved a lot.  One coach of women's soccer pointed out that none of the medal-winning teams of the 2007 World Cup could have placed in this year's Cup, assuming that they had paid the 2007 game now.

Second,  the idea that women are inferior athletes uses an odd definition of an athlete, one which assumes that the basis one starts from (bone structure, testosterone levels etc) is what the word "athlete" means.  I have always interpreted "an athlete" to mean not only the genetic talents a person has but also the amount of work and training the person has invested in the sport.

If we used that odd definition of what makes a superior or inferior athlete, then we shouldn't have weight classes in boxing or wrestling, because clearly the heavier boxers are the better hitters.  They hit harder.

Third,  as several people have pointed out elsewhere, why is it so important to compare men's team sports to women's team sports in the first place?  Why not enjoy the good soccer or good ice-hockey in men's games and also in women's games?  My guess* is that this need for comparisons comes from us being used to watching the men's games, so those become the obvious comparison point.  But surely it's possible to get past that point.

----
*Excepting those who oppose women's sports because they believe women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom and by the vacuum cleaner only.

The Peas-In-Guacamole Debacle

Humans are utterly astonishing!  I often feel like an observer at the far edges of this alien life (don't eat guacamole, love peas).  The Twitter abuzz about peas in guacamole!  At least it provides relief from the Twitter fights.

So what is your opinion on this life-changing question?  Can peas and guacamole marry or not?

Short Posts 6/30/15. On Growing Income Inequality in the US, Fifty Shades of Gray and the Way To Write About Violence Against Women

1.  This article about British convictions in violent crimes against women is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but what struck me most was the way the piece uses "people" for the offenders and "women and girls" for the victims.  For example:

There were increases in the number of successful prosecutions for sexual offences, child sex abuse, domestic violence cases and honour-based violence, while more people were charged with rape than ever before in the past year.

The bolds are mine.

2.  E.L. James, the writer of the Fifty Shades of Gray, held a Twitter Q&A session.  According to this BuzzFeed article it went horribly wrong.  From another angle it went pretty much as one would expect it to.

3.  Income inequality in the US continues to grow after the most recent recession:

The rich did far better, however. The top 10 percent of American earners, or those making more than $121,000 a year, got an even larger slice of the economic pie in 2014, capturing 49.9 percent of total income. That represents the highest share they’ve ever gained except for 2012. The top 1 percent of earners also got a boost, netting 21.2 percent of the country’s income, up from 20.1 percent in 2013. While most Americans saw income growth of 3.3 percent, incomes for the richest 1 percent grew by 10.8 percent.

When did the most recent trend in increasing income inequality begin?  The linked article suggest this happened in the 1980s and escalated during the 1990s.

A fun homework for you is to figure out what else might have changed around then, both internationally (such as the fall of the Berlin wall which reduced resistance to unbridled capitalism in international politics) and inside US politics (the push for globalism, the changes in laws which led to lowered taxes for the top 1%, the "liberation of financial markets").   This Wikipedia article (which may not be completely unbiased) suggests some additional ideas.

What I had in mind for that homework is not the details of what has happened but the wider trends:  the death of unionization (unions benefit lower income workers more, including women earning lower incomes), the "capture" of the legislative branch by the richest among us, partly because of no proper campaign financing laws, and then the fact that as income inequality increases greater differences are created among the goals and concerns of those who have lots of money and those who have less.  If the wealthier have more say in politics, through that one-dollar-one-vote, there will be further laws which tilt the playing fields towards greater inequality.

On Diversity Among Facebook Employees

Those of you who have read my opinions before might remember that I don't like the term "diversity" in hiring.  For example, it allows a big blond wheat cake to be peppered with a few specks of cardamom and a few peppers, and then we have a cake full of diversity!  At the other extreme the term tends to make a total mess of what happens when we ignore the actual population percentages of various groups.

To give you an example of the latter problem, suppose that some country has 90% of purple people and 10% of green people, and that initially 100% of all the good jobs are held by purple people and 0% are held by green people, even though green and purple people are, on average, equally good at those jobs and want them as much.

Then we get a diversity effort, and the jobs start shifting, so that at one point 95% are held by purple people and 5% by green people.  That's progress right?  But is it still progress if at a later point 80% of the jobs are held by purple people and 20% by green people?  Should more jobs shift towards the green people?

I don't think so.  Assuming that purple and green people are equally interested in the jobs and equally good at them, then the percentages should reflect the population percentages, that is 90% for the purple folks and 10% for the green folks.

Same Sex Marriage Legal In All Fifty States

The decision came after my Friday post was published.  I have nothing useful to say about it, except that it's worth watching this Colbert snippet as a summary of the majority opinion and various dissents:



As an aside, is Colbert using the term "gay" to refer to all who might consider same sex marriage (that is, gays and Lesbians and bisexuals)?  Or is this just a term for the guys?  I suspect the former, so we have the same setting as we used to have (or still have?) when using the terms "man" or "mankind"  Women are assumed to be included except when they are not.

Those usages are confusing, because you get two different messages inside your brain when only one message is being sent.

Anyway, the Supreme Court must have been taken over by aliens from outer space during the last few weeks.  That's the only way to interpret so many astonishingly reasonable and good decisions.   Well, it's really Justice Kennedy that's making the difference.  Perhaps he has been taken over by the aliens.

What I Did Over The Weekend

Got my passport renewed, and came across that dratted old problem that I don't really have fingerprints.  Whenever I have to get them taken the print-taker agonizes and agonizes and finally accepts some smudge or other.

How about that?  You could argue that snakes don't have fingers, naturally.  But I have fingers, not just fingerprints.  It's unlikely that I have adermatoglyphia (though my mom has no fingerprints at all) , because it looks like something called "damaged fingerprints."  They try to be real fingerprint whorls but fail miserably.  Sigh.  That's the story of my life.

I was once told that my prints are worn down from all that housework!  People are so funny.

Short Posts, 6/25/15: A Response To Tim Hunt, Women in Iran and KIng v. Burwell

1.  This is a hilarious response to Tim Hunt's concerns about women in STEM laboratories (see here for my earlier take on what he said).

2.  Meet Nasrin Sotoudeh, a very brave female activist in Iran.  From the files of sexism in sports, Iran has also decided not to let women watch men's volleyball games:

According to women inside Iran who are campaigning to attend the matches as spectators, Iranian authorities reneged on promises that they could attend and restricted ticket sales to men three days before the opening match on Friday, June 19. Security forces took up positions around the stadium, inspected approaching cars at checkpoints, and diverted women away. In flyers, political hardliners compared women spectators in stadiums to “prostitutes.”

Iranian authorities have banned women and girls from stadiums hosting football matches for decades, but only recently extended the ban to volleyball—in flagrant violation of the principle of gender non-discrimination in sports.

 I don't get the "prostitutes" argument.  Is the idea that the women will get all sexually excited from seeing semi-naked men playing volleyball?  Would male veiling help?  General modesty in male dress?  Or is modesty a one-sided game, where women are expected to always play defense and men offense?

3.  In a week of more good news than usual, this is probably the best news for Americans:

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell is not simply a victory for the Obama administration — and for the millions of Americans who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for their health coverage. It is a sweeping, crushing blow for conservatives who seek to use the courts to undo what President Obama and a Democratic Congress accomplished. “In a democracy,” Chief Justice John Roberts implicitly scolds the activists behind this litigation, “the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people.” He then offers a broad statement to future judges called upon to interpret the Affordable Care Act: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

Justice Scalia's dissent was withering.  He was vewwy, vewwy angwy.   SCOTUSCare, indeed.

The Invisible Elephants In Online Debates: Lack Of Nuance, Odd Couplings And The Impact of Online Propaganda

It's almost a truism that online debates (say, on Twitter) lack nuances, and usually I just accept that and slither on.  But on some days I get sick of it all.

Then I grumble, in my silent room, to an audience of zero, that it's not "both sides do it" if the number of those deeds is ten million on one side and ten on the other side.  Or rather, the "both sides do it" argument doesn't make the two sides equally at fault.

Neither is a mass murder equal to punching your neighbor in a quarrel over a tree on the border of your lots.  Yet if you take that parable to political writings you spot several examples where the difference in the severity of what has been done is utterly ignored. 

When I really get going in my sermon I point out to the interested walls that numbers do matter.  If some policy is going to hurt, say, half of all Americans, and another policy is going to hurt one American in every ten thousand, the two are not the same in their total numerical consequences.

A more nuanced conversation would allow that and would also look at the severity of the consequences for each individual, to come to a proper conclusion about how, for instance,  the resources of activist movements should be allocated.  At a minimum it would open the discussion to more relevant details.

Finally, after a sip of of water, I tell the empty room that it's a very good idea to ask this simple question:  Compared To What?, when people tell us about the high rates of something (criminality, illness etc.) for one group of individuals (check the rates for the other groups before getting all excited) or about the health risks of some treatment or non-treatment.  For an example of the latter, those who talk about the health dangers of the contraceptive pill or abortion usually don't tell us how high the dangers of getting pregnant and giving birth might be.

All those aspects are invisible elephants, stampeding over the logic of the debate.  But if you point them out you get stampeded!  It's not fun, even for someone who slithers fast.

Short Posts, 6/24/15: On Online Harassment of Women, Good News About Health Care Coverage And Good News About Repro Rights

1.  This video (at the link) by the comedian John Oliver on the online harassment of women is worth watching.

2.  Some very good news about the increased health insurance coverage of Americans since the introduction of the Affordable Care Act:

3.  And another bit of good news about reproductive rights:

Judge Jerry Smith is a deeply conservative judge. He once voted to allow a man to be executed despite the fact that the man’s lawyer slept through much of his trial. He’s a reliable vote against abortion rights. And he once described feminists as a “gaggle of outcasts, misfits and rejects.”
So when Judge Smith writes an opinion protecting women’s access to birth control, even when their employer objects to contraception on religious grounds, that’s a very big deal.

Read Ian's full story at the link.

Nigel Short: Men are Just Better At Chess And Driving.

Nigel Short is a chess champion.  That makes him an expert in most everything, certainly the person to argue that there are so few women in professional chess because men are simply better at chess.

An example of his arguments:

In April, Mr Short, originally from Leigh, near Wigan, but now living in Greece, told the magazine New in Chess that men were simply better at things like chess and driving, while acknowledging that his wife had “a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do”.

Ah, so sweet.  When Short makes equal allegations about chess and driving as things men simply do better he fails to look at the statistics on car accidents.  If I was as lazy about research as Nigel seems to be I'd point out that the only fair condensed interpretation of those statistics is that women are better drivers than men.

But because I'm not that lazy,  I'd have to point out that we need to control for lots of stuff when comparing female and male drivers, including the average number of miles driven per various time units and so on.

Short doesn't do any of that thinking for driving (where he ignores the actual evidence and goes by his prejudice) or for playing chess (where he ignores all the myriad reasons  which exist to explain why fewer women than men play chess or why fewer women than men play professional chess, except for the one that men might simply be innately better at chess).

On The Aftermath of the Charleston Massacre

Reading about the massacre of nine innocent people in Emanuel AME Church, Charleston,  last week,  made me physically too sick to write about it (given that I was already feeling poorly), but I followed the coverage, both in the official media and on Twitter.  And fierce coverage it has been, with many beautiful and important articles.

Attempts, mostly by Republican politicians,  to make the actions of the killer be about something else than the hatred of black people, failed miserably.  Dylann Storm Roof's  motivation was clearly what he himself reputedly told his victims*: 

"you rape our women and you’re taking over our country"

 He has been quoted as stating that he wanted to start a race war.

All that should be in the foreground of the discussion, just as misogyny should have been kept (and perhaps was kept) in the foreground in the Eliot Rodger case.

But both cases also shared other aspects:  Easy access to guns made the numbers of dead people much greater, the online hate sites helped in the radicalization of both killers and the acts also shared a flavor of terrorism, depending on how terrorism is defined.

Not Feeling Well

Which is an explanation for the quiet week on the blog.  I need snoozes like these two are having:

On Sexbots

The New York Times had a story about Matt McMullen, the creator of female robots for sex.  The story in the NYT, and an earlier story about McMullen's work in Vanity Fair, pretty much glide over the fact that these sex dolls are physically meant to be female.  So the story isn't about sex robots for everybody.  The story is about female sex dolls for people who want them female.

That doesn't matter too much, I guess, except in the sense that we have all been trained to not notice the lack of male-looking sex dolls in stories of this type.  That means we can leap into discussing other types of topics about sex robots:  How human they should seem, whether they should talk back, whether they should be made to make sounds as if they are enjoying what's going on.

As an aside, I wonder why robots should be made to look human in the first place.  Does it then follow that we are going to recreate all the power relationships of the human societies inside the world of robots?  The cleaning robot will look female and will act humbly and so on?

But the obvious point of these articles isn't that.  It's the idea of the sexbot as a replacement for having a relationship with a woman made out of meat etc.  McMullen himself states:

“Not everybody wants to be in a relationship, especially an emotionally draining, costly, anxiety-filled one. If a man says, ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship,’ most of the time that’s probably a fucking good decision! And he can order a RealDoll, which will end up being a helluva lot cheaper than the women he was dating! If a man has a hundred or no girlfriends, RealDolls are a good option no matter what.”
A hovering waitress says, “Last call.” Mills orders a beer and returns to a pet peeve. “Women have enjoyed sex toys for 50 years, probably 5,000 years, if the truth be known, but men are still stigmatized! We have to correct that! I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls! Men are not going to sit in the back of the bus anymore!”

Bolds are mine.

I was giggling about that last paragraph, trying to imagine in what sense a dildo, say, is exactly the same as a sexbot which speaks and pretends to orgasm, whatever its user does.  Perhaps we are going to have speaking dildos!  Where's the mouth going to be?

Never mind.  Let's not go there.  As far as I know,  there have been various sex toys for heterosexual men for some time, right?  Not that I'm an expert in the area of sex toys, but creating a life-sized doll which speaks etc. seems a bit different from something you can hold in your hand.

The part I bolded in the first paragraph of the above quote is very informative.  It's the idea that women are expensive sex partners and that they will demand stuff and so on.  A sexbot will do whatever you want and the cost will only be the enormous sum McMullen charges.

This is one of those cases where a gender reversal is useful.  Suppose that the same story was written, but the creator of the dolls was Martha McMullen (with dark-framed angry-looking spectacles), and that all the sex dolls shown in the background looked like men in skimpy underwear or naked, some with beards, some with not and so on.  Suppose Martha made a statement about men being such difficult  sex partners etc., always arguing and pushing their own agendas.  How would various types of readers have reacted to the otherwise same stories then?

Pink Thoughts. Or The Weak Version of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

I've never liked pink.  I associate the color with lingonberry porridge which I hated as  a child, because I hate the sour taste of lingonberries.

In Finnish, the way I learned the language, the term for pink was "light red".  Just as there was a "light blue," there was a "light red."  In my mind the two concepts stood in exactly the same relationship to their "master" colors, red and blue:  They were lighter forms of those colors.  They were NOT colors on their own, just as "dark blue" is not a color on its own*.

So what difference does it make if our brains learn the concept of "pink," as a color in its own right or at least with its own clear name, or if our brains learn the concept of "vaaleanpunainen" or "light red?" 

And what happens when the latter case is complicated by the addition of a term deriving from the English pink (pinkki), which the above-linked website states as being only one of the many possible tones of "vaaleanpunainen," even though people colloquially use it to refer to all those tones?

Could it be that pink, as in "pinkki," now rises to a different type of prominence?  Above its previous mate "light blue?"

This is all both idle speculation and great fun.  I should add that I'm not a linguist and that my knowledge of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is negligible.  Still, all this may have implications in more serious matters, even political ones.

-----
* That's probably a very subjective way of trying to define the feeling I have about pink as a color:  That in English it's on the same level as blue or lavender etc., whereas light blue is not on that level.

Why Women Don't Code. Echidne Answering Comments From Another Reality.

I don't usually write blog posts about anonymous comments elsewhere, but these particular ones are too juicy to miss, because they give us the condensed arguments from anti-feminists as to the reasons why coding is so male-dominated, and thus offer me a chance to respond to those arguments.

The first common argument is that girls just don't like to code.  Here's the current version of it, from Eschaton comments:

Are we really going to pretend that as many women as men want to code? For fuck's sake.

That's worth pondering about.  Note, first, that there was this magical era, about thirty years ago, when computer science students were almost equally likely to be men or women.  Then something changed, and in a fairly short time the field was one for the bros.  This post goes into much more detail about it.

So in a sense it might be true that women don't want to code now, given the work environment they'd meet (with people like the one I quote above probably working there)*.  But there's no evidence that a dislike of coding would somehow be an inherent female characteristic.   If it were, it would have been operating in the early 1980s, too, and I personally suspect that not as many women would be in accounting, say, if the idea of sitting still and staring at numbers or letters wouldn't at all apply to women.

The second common argument is that girls just can't code.  Or:

Right, male and female brains are exactly the same.
Did you know that male and female IQs are the same on average, but that males have more representation on both tails of the bell curve?
Have you considered the implications of this?

This is a bit hilarious, because the extreme upper tail in the IQ distribution seems to be equated with being a coder!  I doubt that, to be honest.  We in the extreme upper tail are not many enough to fill that occupation.

This commentator is saying that guys are smarter (and also more stupid, but that's the other guys, the losers), based on the peculiarity that the results from IQ tests on men show greater variance than the results from IQ tests on women.

I have written about various aspects of the "extreme tail" theory about gender and intelligence many times before. This post summarizes several of the issues:  The gender differences in the extreme tails are getting smaller over time (which suggests that we are not looking at something innate), gender differences in attitudes towards risk (such as likelihood of guessing when the answer is unknown) could create the observed results if men were less risk-averse than women (or played the testing game that way), even if there was no underlying average gender difference in the characteristic under study and so on.

Third, sooner or later this particular conversation turns into a wider one about women and men being innately different In Ways Which Matter (no, men don't have wings and fly and women don't have fins and swim; we are supposed to regard small differences as humongous for the purposes of allocating societal power; and no, differences in aggression etc. do not matter).  This time we get:

OK, let's play make pretend. Yes, women on average are interested in heavy tech, coding, data...
Male and female brains are exactly the same. Oh, except when someone is transgender, then male and female brains are different...

There you go.  As a bonus we get one of the reasons for some trouble between certain feminist strains of thought and certain strains of trans thought.

The research into gender differences in brainz is pretty difficult to do, especially if someone wishes to argue that those differences are both innate and not subject to change.  I've written loads and loads on various studies (start here and here, say), but even if one accepted innately different brains by biological sex (or by gender identity???), that acceptance would not tell us that women can't code or don't want to code.

But it's not the question whether women and men would be equally eager to code if the industry wasn't so broish (and if there was no steering of boys and girls into certain culturally accepted roles) that fascinates me here.  Who knows what would happen in that ideal world?  The point of those comments I analyze seems to be that what exists TODAY cannot be at all improved, because of that assumed innate stuff.  This means that whatever percentage women make out of all coders is the RIGHT percentage.

And just to make everything crystal-clear, the commentator also notes that if there are girls in the industry then they can be found in non-essential roles:

Well, research, data, technical project management are the roles that matter...
I'm sure women are represented in marketing, HR and PR, which are simply less important to the heavy tech companies.

I hope this post didn't infect you with a stereotype threat.


----
*See also this post about a study concerning the effect of gender stereotypes in getting access to math-heavy fields.

Lightning Posts, 6/11/15. On Caitlyn Jenner, Syrian Refugees and A Bro With No Ho

1.  These three articles on the sometimes troubled relationship between feminism and the trans movement look a bit like thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but I'm not intending that.  Still, it's best to read them in order, first this one, then this one and finally this one.  I picked these because they are more nuanced than the average diatribes in this area.  Notice the absence of similar debates about cis men and trans men.  Why they are missing isn't clear to me.

2.  Why does Saudi Arabia take no refugees from the war-torn countries of Iraq and Syria (or from Palestine)?  The same appears to be the case for other Gulf states?  I spent some time looking for the answer.  Sure, those countries provide funds, but as far as I can tell they don't offer any shelter for refugees, even though the cultural chasms to be bridged would be considerably smaller there than in, say, Sweden (which does take in a lot of refugees for its size).

3.   Then today's smart Republican comment from Mark Kirk:

During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, the Illinois senator was heard on the live microphone talking about the Republican presidential candidate.
"I've been joking with Lindsey," Kirk was overheard saying. "He's going to have a rotating first lady. He's a bro with no ho."

No comment on that, because I'm in a hurry to bang my head against the garage door.


  

Meet Tim Hunt, A Nobel-Winning Biologist With Opinions On Girls In Laboratories

I love these foot-deep-in-the-throat stories, especially from those people whom the world has coddled and revered to such an extent that they now believe their utterances about everything is of great value.  Not just their utterances about the area of their expertise, mind you, but about everything.  It's a bit like Echidne criticizing opera singers or explaining to you in excruciating detail how to make a perfect souffle.

In other words, a joke.  And Dr Hunt did tell us that he was joking when talking like this at the World Conference on Science Journalists in Korea:

In remarks yesterday before writers, scientists, and engineers attending the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, Hunt stood and after thanking the women journalists “for making lunch," and warning attendees that he had a reputation as a male chauvinist, offered up his groundbreaking ideas on women in the field.
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt said, according to science journalist Connie St Louis, who tweeted the most disgusting points in his unrecorded speech. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.” He continued that while he was in favor of single sex laboratories, he didn’t want to “stand in the way” of women.

Mmm.  I laughed, because the joke is so good.  Whether it's the joke Dr Hunt intended is an open question.  For instance, I immediately saw that to avoid those falling-in-love problems we need to separate not only women from men but gay men from all other men and lesbians from all other women.  Put the gay guys with the women and the lesbians with the men!

Sam Brownback's Utopian Experiment Looks To Be Over

Brownback is the fundamentalist Republican governor of Kansas who in 2012 went wild on those popular tax cuts, with the simple-and-flawed idea that if only most firms could avoid paying any state taxes on their profits the Kansas economy would boom*.

The obvious (and completely predictable) consequences were, well, obvious.  The state of Kansas couldn't make ends meet, because of a giant drop in tax revenues.  So what did our Sam do next to balance the shrinking state budget?  He cut expenses, naturally.

The tax cuts favor mostly people who earn more, the expense cuts hurt mostly people who earn less.  Internal income inequality in Kansas grew.  

But those rounds of cutting expenses were not enough to balance the state budget.

Now the Republicans in control of the state must face up to raising taxes, poor things.  For a financial conservative this is like having to pull your own milk teeth with pliers (done that, been there), so the debates are still largely about how to roll more of the tax load on the shoulders of the poorer people in the state.  Sales tax increases??  Grrreat idea, because those taxes tend to be regressive.  To cover that up, let's not tax food.

Of course raising the sales taxes will make purchases more expensive for the consumers in Kansas and that might make them buy less.  This, in turn, would drive many local firms' profits down, having a further negative effect on any remaining state taxes on corporate income and so on and so on.

The debates are still ongoing, but here are some of the proposed tax increases and other changes:

The Kansas Senate passed Sunday what would be the largest tax increase in the history of the state of Kansas.
The measure passed by a 21-17 margin. Kansas Sen. Julia Lynn, who represents Johnson County, Kan., was the deciding vote on the bill.
Details on the $471 million tax increase:
    •    The sales tax increases to 6.55 percent from 6.15 percent.
    •    The cigarette tax will go up by 50 cents each pack, bringing the total tax to $1.29.
    •    The food tax will drop on July 1, 2016. However, it will be 6.55 percent until that time.
    •    Most itemized deductions on state income taxes are repealed.
    •    Reduced deductions for property taxes, charitable contributions and mortgage interest.
    •    There's a property ta
    •    tax lid for cities and counties.
    •    A new school voucher program that will provide tax credits to those who donate funds for private and religious schools.
    •    $24 million on taxes for business owners.

Tax increases are supposed to mean rapid death for American politicians in power, and that is certainly the case in the Tea Party -wing of the Republican Party.  We shall see what happens.  But as I have written before, watching this Nutty Economists' Tax Experiment Gone Wild would be entertaining (beer and pop corn entertaining) if the pain wasn't affecting so many real people.

On the other hand, Brownback was re-elected after he wrecked the state.

------
*This is flawed mostly because it ignores the important question about the demand side:  What effect have Brownback's policies had on the aggregate demand by people in the state?  If demand is insufficient, giving more money to firms won't work to create a boom.

The Women's World Cup in Soccer. Sod It?

I'm exceeding myself in stupid headlines.  The reference to "sod" is meant to capture the flavor of a complaint from one player in the cup:

The Women’s World Cup got underway over the weekend and while excitement was high after host country Canada’s thrilling win over China in stoppage time, the start of play has renewed frustrations over the controversial decision to force the women to play on artificial turf in all six venues.
After Sunday’s Norway vs. Thailand game, Norway midfielder Lene Mykjåland voiced her discontent about the short, dry turf, which she said made it difficult for either team to “get a decent tempo and rhythm.” The playing surface was watered using two fire hoses instead of the standard sprinkler system.
When the tournament kicked off Saturday, the temperature of the playing surface was reportedly 120 degrees, despite the fact that it was a pleasant 75 degrees that day in Edmonton. That’s because artificial turf, a combination of rubber and plastic, gets a lot hotter than natural grass. Natural grass, on average, stays 20-30 degrees cooler than its artificial counterpart.

The linked article suggests that on Saturday the temperature of the turf in Edmonton was only a few degrees below the level regarded as unsafe for players, and anecdotal evidence hints that artificial turf makes the game less interesting to watch and possibly more dangerous for the players.  Not a welcoming mix to the participants in the women's World Cup,

Here's the interesting point:  This is the first soccer World Cup which is played on artificial turf.  Does this have any connection to the fact that it's women playing?

That's one of those questions which cannot be answered without detailed data on what went on when the decision was being made.  I think it's unlikely that anyone chose artificial turf to consciously make the women's games look less interesting. 

But that doesn't mean that the idea of saving money wouldn't have looked a lot more doable when the world cup was about women rather than about men.  Men would complain, their many, many fans would complain.  Perhaps the decision-makers were betting that us girls would not?

Today's Frustration

Do you know what is truly annoying?  To write not one but two posts on different topics and then to find out really recent news information (like an hour old) which makes them outdated.  Sure, you can go and edit, just as you can rip a sweater apart and try to patch it into a vest.  But that's agony.