Blog/August 2018/Aug 31st

August 31st

We were busy as usual: working, working, and trying to get ready for the upcoming “Days of Awe” (that refers to the Jewish “High Holidays”, not some local fair…). Neither Esther nor I seem to have a lot of spare energy these days.

In any event, we blunder on.

This week as I was doing due diligence on “LinkedIn”, I encountered two oddities. First, a person listed their skills. Do you see anything odd here?. Far be it for me to judge, but I don’t think that’s a “skill”.

Second, a somewhat prominent woman posted an article in an Israeli business journal, with the headline, “In Israel, only one woman may be found for every 10 entrepreneurs who get funded”. If you only read that far, you might think that women in Israel are being discriminated against. But then you read on that “fewer than 3% of the entrepreneurs in Israel are women”. So wait a minute: 3% of the business owners receive 10% of the funding. In other words, female entrepreneurs are 3 times more likely to get funded, in Israel. Doesn’t sound like anti-female discrimination to me, quite the opposite in fact. But you wouldn’t have understood that from the title.

If her numbers are correct, it would be interesting to know why the women are more successful than the men at getting funding. It could be because women have higher credit scores, or have better business plans, or are more risk-averse than men and thus the lenders are more likely to recover. Or it might be something more banal. Are female lenders inclined differently to male lenders? It would be a worthwhile research project to find out, I think.

She goes on to whine about “how difficult it is” for a woman to get funding in a mostly male-dominated financial market, and “there is no doubt that there is a greater difficulty in being an entrepreneurial woman”. Really? She didn’t read her own statistics? Pah!

I couldn’t control myself, and called her on it on her LinkedIn post. My comment was the only one dealing with the facts she posited; the other posts were all like, “You go, girl!” and “You’re awesome!”. Double pah!! People are the problem!

Some things of note:

• The TSA is tracking ordinary US citizens. Because Big Brother must watch you!
• Identifying people by their metadata.
• Google confirms it tracks user location even when location history is disabled. As per their former company motto, “Don’t be evil”!
• The vegetarians in charge flex their limp muscles.
• The Racism Simulator
• “Barnum’s Animals” crackers criticized for not dismantling capitalism. Yeah, really.

I’m now working on final bug-fixes and some features for the next release of 8th. I’m planning the release for late next week, before the onset of all the holidays. Fortunately, at the moment, I’m able to give it almost all my attention — so good things are coming soon!

The weather this week was fine, but now we’re in for a heat-wave (though not too extreme). A/C to the rescue!

No guests this shabbat. Esther’s out doing stuff, so I’m cooking:
ḥalla, turkey “shewarma”, plain old white rice, slow-barbecued ribs, tuna salad, egg salad, various salatim, and fruit crumble.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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