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[Max™]

Fuck that, I want to be able to sprinkle some powder in a fabber and have it spit out a chunk of filet mignon!

[Reelya]

Actually there is a sound economic basis for welfare, you can derive it from what's called fiscal multipliers. e.g. a dollar spent on any particular thing is going to stimulate the economy to some degree, and that's different depending on what you spend it on.

For example, tax breaks for millionaires produce 30 cents of GDP for every dollar returned. So if you tax a millionaire $1 extra, you lose 30 cents in GDP, and if you give back $1 you gain 30 cents in GDP.

However ... food stamps produce about $1.70 in GDP for every dollar spent. That's because that dollar goes through the most possible people's hands before it's saved in a bank account somewhere. So, a millionaire's big fat bank account isn't actually a very efficient form of economic stimulus. If you take a dollar from him and give it to some poor person, the overall national GDP will rise by almost $1.50.

So there's nothing fucking magical about tax breaks that makes more GDP happen. If you give back $1 in taxes, we already know how much GDP is going to be impacted by that, we have the data on that. Taxes are just negative spending and spending is just negative taxes.

The apologists for the rich like to talk about the economy like it's a zero-sum game, as if, if we stop feeding the poor then the middle class will "get their taxes back" but this is bullshit. A starving underclass is going to drive down your wages through wage competition, probably losing you more wealth than any theoretical saving. Meanwhile, crime will skyrocket due to deprivation and hunger, and they'll spend 50 times as much as welfare ever cost, locking up the starving peasants in prison.

[martinuzz]

Aaaaand... another Uber top man is forced to resign.
74-year old billionaire and board member David Bonderman is forced to resign, after making a sexist joke on a board meeting on how to combat the sexism within Uber's culture.

When fellow board member Arianna Huffington said that having one female board member increases the chance of getting another female board member, Bonderman replied that "the only chance that increases is the chance for more bullocks".

[Sheb]

[/b]When fellow board member Arianna Huffington said that having one female board member increases the chance of getting another female board member, Bonderman replied that "the only chance that increases is the chance for more bullocks".

How can you be that bad at anatomy?

[Tack]

When he says 'Bullocks' does he mean young male cattle?
Because that sounds like reverse sexism.

So there's nothing fucking magical about tax breaks that makes more GDP happen.

On the one hand that's really interesting stuff, and on the other hand, the whole 'More poor people spending more poordollars on their little necessities is good for the economy' thing makes me feel even more depressed.

[Reelya]

The traditional meaning of bullock is a castrated male bull. The guy's pretty old so my guess is that he meant that deliberately, i.e. women board members would "castrate" the men, turning them into girly men instead of cigar smoking, whisky-chugging men's men.

[Tack]

Bullock may refer to:

    Bullock (in British English), a castrated male bovine animal of any age
    Bullock (in North America), a young bull (an uncastrated male bovine animal)
    Bullock (in Australia and New Zealand), an ox, an adult bovine animal used for draught (usually but not always a castrated male)

UBER is an American company yeah?

My guess was 'Having a woman on the board will attract a bunch of young blood'.

[Egan_BW]

wtf that's the opposite meaning between ameringlish and bringlish.

[Reelya]

The guy is 74 years old, my guess is that his use of the language could be a little different. "Bullock" isn't a term that comes up in general conversation, like at all. So I think saying that he must be for sure be using one dictionary meaning over the other since he's an American isn't actually much of a sure thing.

I think it's clear that "attracting young blood" to the company wasn't the meaning. Maybe he meant that having women around would turn the guys into horny animals instead.

Or ... he could have meant bollocks / bullshit but it's been reported as "bullocks" because the US press doesn't know the slang.

[alway]

... Has no one here ever heard or used bollocks in a sentence before? A load of bollocks? That's bollocks? You've bollocksed it up?
The former two uses, as a noun, are synonyms of 'nonsense.' As a verb, is 'to make a mess of things.' With testicular overtones to give it the quality of a swear word. They're certainly not using some technical farming term; the only time a bunch of rich execs have even seen a farm in person was probably when their private $15k a year elementary school took them on a field trip to one. They're saying 'more women = more problematic messes with sexism like the ones we currently have.' A fairly common justification at terrible tech workplaces which constantly get sued for repeatedly failing to deal with their company's internal sexism and sexual harassment problems.

[Tack]

Damn. Probably right. For some reason I thought old fashioned Texan rancher.

[Reelya]

Actually, I'm having trouble finding any reference that has Martinuz's wording in it. Martinuz provided the reference in quotations so it would look like a quote, but searching for that quote (or the word bullock in this context) doesn't bring up any references. So perhaps Martinuz got this from the Dutch press and there's been some sort of comminucations failure one way or the other?

[Tack]

And yet he's being asked to resign.

[martinuzz]

Alway, he said "Bullock", so unless it's a misspelling, then it's not "bollocks"

I probably misspelled it. I am not sure if he actually said bollocks, I translated it back from dutch from being translated from english. He said something along the line of 'bollocks, drivel, tattle, twaddle, etc.'

[wierd]

My guess is that it was "Balls in the room", referring to the conception that this woman had a pair by making such a statement (more women needed) at the board meeting.