Simple answer: don't incorporate in California and if they try to extend this to any business doing business in California, stop doing business in California.
The answer is to Go Galt!
California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
171–180 of 208 posts
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They aren't saying, "you have to hire this person". They're saying you can't hire exclusively this type of person that currently dominates the top of society. No, that's not what Federal anti-discrimination law says. It only says you can't refuse to hire certain people on the basis of a protected characteristic (of which race is one, but not the only one). It says nothing about refusing to hire certain people for o…
> No, that's not what Federal anti-discrimination law says. I wasn't referring to Fed Discrimination Laws. I was referring to the California law. Sorry if that wasn't clear. > The people who are attracted to government jobs where they get to tell other people what to do aren't benevolent helpers; they're people who like power. All history shows that such people are precisely the people you don't want telling other pe…
> I wasn't referring to Fed Discrimination Laws. I was referring to the California law. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
It wasn't since you explicitly said "Federal government" in your previous post. I agree that state laws can say different things.
> Why do you think that's not already the world we live in?
I didn't say it wasn't. If you already agree that what I said is the case, then you should be all the more opposed to more of the same.
> I'm just not convinced things get much worse with this.
Any extension of government power makes things worse. If the increment of "worse" seems small with some particular change, well, the phrase "frog-boiling" wasn't coined for nothing.
> One is completely excluding a group from the table. The other is ensuring that a group has a spot at the table.
You are misunderstanding my point. The current state, where many corporate boards are all of one race and one gender, is not a product of government fiat; it's a product of private decisions. But there have been cases in the past where similar states were products of government fiat. Those past government fiats are now pretty much universally agreed to have been very bad things. My point is simply that this is the same kind of thing, and should be considered bad for the same reasons. The issue is not "spots at the table". The issue is government fiat.
> In order to do that you have to fix a bunch of other stuff in society as well.
Like what? If you mean, like certain corporations having huge advantages because they have privileged access to things like loans with government printed money, lobbyists with the ear of government officials, and so on, yes, I agree all those things need to be fixed--and they're all just more examples of government power being misused. As the saying goes, the root problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. That is what needs to be fixed.
> Companies don't live in a meritocratic bubble.
In a free market, where the government did not play favorites at all, they would--they would either have to make and sell something people want to buy, or go out of business. That's the only kind of "merit" that matters to us as consumers. But we can't exercise that ultimate control if the government keeps getting in the way.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#173The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and s…
Is a non-American European counted as white in this? Or are we pretending that the various different non-Anglo/WASPy "whites" in Europe have the exact same cultural & socio-economic headstart in the US as the US whites? It's a stupid rule. > are quite shocking Sheesh, your hyperbole is showing.
Even within a single country, I imagine the rural Alabama white is quite different from the rich, privately educated executive board member.
I was born and raised in a poor, rural town with a high crime rate. Neither of my parents had a trade nor a university education. It is very obvious to me that I am culturally different from a lot of other educated people in tech. Hell, the military even covered my education. I don't hold the same values or interests as my peers, but I'm a white male so I get lumped into a "homogenous" group.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly there is not right angle to race. Saying "black people cant be at the board of companies" is just as wrong as saying "some black people have to belong to it". That being said, when only white people are at the board of companies without that being a calculated strategy, there is also a problem. If only white people come out on top where - allegedly - the smartest people belong, wouldn’t it be the place of th…
The problem is that the only real solution is a lot more extreme. I think once women are pregnant they go into managed care and babies are immediately taken at birth into academies (with no knowledge of parents) until adulthood. But that will never happen. Unfortunately short of that we’re likely to never have real equality.
> I think once women are pregnant they go into managed care and babies are immediately taken at birth into academies (with no knowledge of parents) until adulthood.
In other words, you've just reinvented Plato's Republic. Historically, the closest things to this have been societies like the Puritans or Geneva under John Calvin, or in the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. How well did those experiments in "managed care" work out?
The closest thing to it in today's world is probably China or North Korea. If you think that's a good idea, you're welcome to go live in one of those countries.
> Unfortunately short of that we’re likely to never have real equality.
We won't have "real equality" even with such a draconian plan, because the inconvenient truth is that every human being is a unique individual. There is no such thing as "real equality" because human beings are all different. You can't pigeonhole human beings into boxes. You can't "manage" their care so they fit into whatever preconceived utopian fantasy you happen to have. Human beings are free individuals and we all have to figure out for ourselves how best to use whatever we have been given. And since we all get given different things, we are going to end up wanting different things, needing different things, and making different choices. No central planner can possibly comprehend all that. And every time it has been tried, it has ended up costing a lot of lives and a lot of misery even for those who managed not to be killed outright.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s some pretty extreme all-or-nothing thinking. Why do you believe this is the only solution?
How else do you remedy the compounding advantage throughout various parts of the society?
You don't. "Compounding advantage" is a fact of life. Historically, the societies that have dealt with this unpleasant fact of life the best have been those that had some concept of "noblesse oblige"--if you are one of the fortunate ones with "compounding advantage" on your side, you have an obligation to use those gifts to help others less fortunate than you. But trying to erase the advantage doesn't work; every time it has been tried, it has just ended up causing even more misery (and in many cases lots of deaths).
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#176The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and s…
While we are at it, just off the top of my head, lets make it required to include at least one bald person, at least one person with blood type AB, and at least one person with freckles. We shouldnt descriminate against them should we?
Are these groups of people under represented in company leadership?
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#177The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and s…
I agree with you, about HN's audience, which is I guess what "bro culture" devolves into, and that the idea isn't crazy. Board room implies scale. If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway. So many knee jerk reactions are a sad reflection of this community, though.
> "If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway."
If that were true, none of the tech giants in the US in the white male dominated '50s-'80s would have existed: IBM, AT&T + Bell Labs, Xerox + PARC, Digital Equipment Corporation, etc.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#178The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and s…
I want to redistribute more wealth to poor people, and I don't give a damn what colour the rich people sitting on corporate boards are. Americans have a myopic obsession with the race and gender of their rulers, but are willing to let the crippling poverty and poor working conditions of their neighbours slide. Progressivism sometimes takes time and energy that previously went to helping the working and middle classes…
This is actually core liberalism. Nancy Pelosi is probably very much on board with this law.
Get left enough and universal healthcare, universal college and universal child care become a lot more important than equality of CEOs.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to 2021 when people think openly disparaging people on the basis of their race is ok.
So that's your counter? Nothing against the actual merit of the statement? White people don't naturally assume they have their positions on merit? How many whites actually think, "Maybe I shouldn't have this position because of the advantage I've been given being white"? Seriously. How often do white males seriously ponder this?
You don't solve racism by tearing down people, regardless of their color or privilege. You solve it by lifting up those who are disadvantaged.
Re: California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
#180The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and s…
I'm not sure why you think that. Hacker News is amazingly conservative, not in the "God and guns" sense, but in the "please don't change anything ever" sense. I'm not even going to pretend that doesn't apply to me, too. Hate crypto, short AI hype, can't stand Electron apps, refuse to touch anything written in JavaScript, wish code would get out of my damn browser and into compiled executables I can keep on my local f…
> There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries.
It’s the long pipeline. Bias from 30 or 40 years ago determined who got a chance to earn executive experience and build connections to become qualified to hold a board seat today.
We should expect effectiveness, not fairness, from meritocracy, because merit was often not fostered fairly and much potential went undeveloped.