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L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

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Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#141
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the nature of worker owned cooperatives means they exclude potential equity investors from providing the capital? You understand that you're complaining about the fact that non-workers can't own a cooperative and as such they will not invest in them, right? You're literally complaining about what you don't want to happen not happening...

Allocating capital through the whims of equity investors is inherently undemocratic.

So let me get this straight, you want me to give you money so that you can build and run a business, and you also want me to have no control over how that money is used, and for me to get no benefit from the whole thing?

Why would I give you my money?

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#143
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it’s us mathematically minded people here, it’s worth pointing out that these studies don’t establish causation. You’d probably find a strong correlation between financial performance of firms and investment into other social initiatives, such as corporate philanthropy or environmental causes. It’s possible that wealthier and more successful firms are simply better able to afford such investments than less succ…

Exactly: Most studies that I've been referred to are shiny McKinsey pages that boil down to big companies having more diverse boards on average. Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for Multinational MegaCorp Inc. to have a multi-ethnic board after a few international mergers. And then there are very opinionated shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, which receive voting rig…

I’ve done some work adjacent to those shiny mckinsey pages. The mergers wouldn’t explain it. It’s not looking at size, it’s looking at growth and success relative to where they were some period of time ago.

It’s probably a bit tautological. The only effective way to make your company more diverse is to grow and hire diverse candidates. This is not the case for top level leadership though. Boards as well. Growing companies want to invest in their people and that tends to result in some more attention to diversity. Conversely dusty old companies that are having their lunch eaten by tech enabled competitors do tend to be very non diverse because that’s they way it is and it’s not an environment that diverse candidates want to join. Also self fulfilling.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#144
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the nature of worker owned cooperatives means they exclude potential equity investors from providing the capital? You understand that you're complaining about the fact that non-workers can't own a cooperative and as such they will not invest in them, right? You're literally complaining about what you don't want to happen not happening...

Allocating capital through the whims of equity investors is inherently undemocratic.

Democracy means representing the will of the people. Do democratic processes produce better outcomes? Because the last 10 years of America would seem to indicate polling for the collective will is no promise of good outcomes.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#145
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming discrimination exists in order to justify discriminatory policies in response is a doozy of a begging the question fallacy. > What argument is there to explain the underrepresentation that doesn't ultimately confirm that it is actually discrimination? There are myriad reasons applicable to different groups. Age and immigration status are big ones. Almost all of the so-called “bamboo ceiling” (the theory that…

Those arguments don't really work for gender discrimination or discrimination against African-Americans. It's not as if women or black people only just got here.

The law that was struck down lumps everyone who isn’t a straight white male into the same category. At least as to race, the majority of non-whites are immigrants or children of immigrants, so immigration recency is an important factor that laws like this fail to consider.

Moreover, the category of “white” is deceptive. I suspect that corporate boards have few people of Appalachian descent, and many people of New England Puritan descent. Understanding what causes that disparity would probably reveal structural mechanisms that affect other groups as well.

At bottom, this law suffers from the same defect identified by Judge Thapar in striking down racial preferences for SBA loans: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/21a0120p-06.pd.... Maybe there is a kernel to this law that passes Constitutional muster because it addresses concrete harms to specific groups that can’t be remediated in a less discriminatory way. But the intersectionality approach of lumping everyone from ADOS to immigrants to LGBT people into one category for favorable treatment isn’t going to fly under civil rights laws.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#146

Basically the argument that there is no such thing as systemic discrimination and the only things that matter are micro-decisions, which are essentially impossible to prove discrimination.

Those seem like fair arguments to be made, although so do the counterpoints.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to attribute different outcomes to differences in behavior by race? In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones? Which other racial disparities do you attribute to differences in behavior?

As a sibling reply said, I'm not making an argument. I'm asking for the relevance of your reply to the statement you replied to. I think there are a lot of confounding factors to the data you presented, so personally consider it to hold very little value on its own. You're the one who seems to draw meaning from it. So, what meaning do you draw from it? What explanation do you have for these discrepancies? How do they…

Don't be deliberately obtuse. Of course you were making an argument. You were making it sarcastically, to be sure, but it was still an argument dismissing the data presented as irrelevant because it doesn't purport to show the level of effort from the groups involved. And it's a spurious argument in any case, because the data presented still shows a major issue in the initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League, unless you happen to believe that (non-Jewish) white students for whatever reason expend much, much less effort than other demographics to join. If you think other factors are the cause of that, state them; don't just off-handedly and rudely dismiss people presenting valid contrary data.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#148
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pro-semantics. I’d rather not play word games. If you’re pro-choice you are pro-abortion

It's not word games. It is quite possible to believe that something is wrong and people should not do it while at the same time believing that whether or not people do that wrong thing should be their decision.

On the other hand

- that is semantics (if you want the choice to exist, you're pro-abortion, existentially speaking)

- everyone knew what the poster meant

- this is the least interesting conversation derailment folks could choose. Maybe instead go to bat against the raging anti-trans statement included for some reason?

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#149

Why are these push backs always associated with Republicans? Only 40% of CA democrats voted for Prop 16, for example, which would have reinstated affirmative action in CA public schools (it's currently prohibited in California, as decided by vote). That's a large percentage of Democrats against non-merit-based college admissions.

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