Maskachusetts trip report

by philg

Here are some photos from my recent trip to Cambridge, Newton, and Wayland. The high school where the Tsarnaev brothers took Tolerance and Diversity classes features a “Black Lives Matter” banner in 4X the font size of the sign that describes the building’s secondary purpose (“school”):

(Where is their rainbow flag? And why not a banner to celebrate immigrants, who are roughly 27 percent of the city’s population?)

Traffic delays slowed all of my excursions around the Boston suburbs. The eight-lane I-95 ring highway was jammed at midday on Saturday. The main road that goes to Wayland would be four or six lanes in Florida, plus dedicated left and right turn lanes at intersections, but in Maskachusetts it is only two lanes and a single car wanting to turn left can create a mile-long backup. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to learn and improve when stopped at a light:

(The locals nearly all profess faith in population growth via mass low-skill immigration. Yet the transportation infrastructure of Boston plainly cannot support even the current population. The road network is jammed and the locals who eagerly cowered in place are unwilling to ride public transit due to COVID risk.)

The weather featured highs in the 30s, cloudy skies, and light rain or snow flurries, so it was perfect for ducking into the Harvard Bookstore to see what the nation’s smartest people are reading. Just a few steps from the front door, I learned a new vocabulary word: Filipinx. (Unclear why this title makes sense for a cookbook. It is not humans in a rainbow of gender IDs who are being cooked, I hope!)

Bernie and Cancel Culture got pride of place:

We know all about Bernie, I hope, but who is Ernest Owens, the promoter of cancel culture? The author’s bio at Amazon:

Ernest Owens (he/him) is an award-winning journalist and CEO of Ernest Media Empire, LLC. He is the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He hosts the hit podcast “Ernestly Speaking!” As an openly Black gay journalist, he has made headlines for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQ, and pop culture.

What if you were one of the engineers who toiled mightily on Xerox’s amazing print-shop-in-a-box machine? You’ve been canceled, as of spring 2022:

The bookstore keeps the Spirit of Fauci alive with this “please wear a cloth mask against an aerosol virus” sign:

Only about 20 percent of the people inside the store were complying with this request from Science. Although 0 percent of the customers appeared to identify as Black, the store has an ample supply of books on Blackness and at least one title on how to be white:

If you love empathy and Scientific management of the U.S. economy, this book about Janet Yellen is for you:

Ms. Yellen is certainly delivering on the promise to “spread prosperity to all” in that most Americans are on track to become millionaires. (Bad news: $1 million will also be the price of a used Honda Accord.) Who will keep ChatGPT from taking over before inflation has had enough time to deliver universal millionaire-hood? Harvard, of course! The AI Safety Team lives on Church St.:

How about the new higher minimum wage? Shake Shack in Harvard Square has responded by eliminating the order-taker jobs. You order and pay at a touchscreen. How’s the labor quality now that higher wages are being paid? Some of my fries were still frozen.

We went back the next night to the Harvard Coop. They’re heavily invested in the idea that some books are “banned” in states other than Maskachusetts.

Returning to Harvard Bookstore, we found that these are referred to as “challenged” rather than “banned” books:

In conversations with white native-born progressives, none seem to have adapted to the fact that 85 million Americans are either immigrants or children of immigrants. The dominant conflict between groups in the U.S. is white vs. Black and if this conflict can be solved, e.g., via reparations or Black Lives Matter banners, Americans will all live together in harmony. They can’t understand why recent immigrants from India, China, or Honduras don’t share their enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter, allocating places in colleges or in jobs to those who identify as Black, etc. At a dinner event where most of the guests were either from India or were children of Indian immigrants, the current American race-based system was decried. “We’re ‘brown’ if we try to get into country clubs,” one professor said, “but we’re considered ‘off-white’ when we apply for jobs or to college.”

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How did Jamaica get to be so dangerous?

by philg

I’ve been listening to Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica, in which the 1950s version of the island is described as a paradise to which film stars and billionaires (adjusted to post-Biden $$) seek to escape. A fabulous oceanfront estate could be purchased and/or built for thousands of British pounds. Fleming went there for two months every year, first to relax and then to write. Wikipedia:

When Jamaica gained independence in 1962, the murder rate was 3.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the world. In 2005, Jamaica had 1,674 murders, for a murder rate of 58 per 100,000 people, the highest murder rate in the world.

Today’s question is how this happened. Could it be overpopulation versus a fixed set of resources? The following chart (source) shows what should have been manageable growth, from 1.6 million to 2.75 million, 1960 to the present:

What about poverty? That’s often blamed for crime. The World Bank says the country has gotten richer, per-capita (this is adjusted for inflation (“current US$”)):

Maybe it is guns? We don’t have people killing people here in the U.S. We have “gun violence”. But the book describes guns as having been readily available in Jamaica in the 1950s (Fleming owned an assortment, for example).

Readers: Have you been to Jamaica? What’s it like for tourists? Are they mostly in resorts that are walled-off from the locals?

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Can the working class afford to bail out Silicon Valley Bank customers?

by philg

Update: Ordinary schmoes are going to bail out the billionaire customers of Silicon Valley Bank, but the bailout is being disguised as a “special assessment” on the peasants’ banks. (NYT) Technically this is “not from taxpayers”… it is a bailout only from those taxpayers who have bank accounts.

I’m inaugurating a new category for blog posts today: transferism. The working class has already paid for a portion of all of the luxurious electric cars being driven around Silicon Valley. Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness scheme forces the working class to pay for elite families’ kids’ college education. What if there is a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank today with some money from the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury? A friend in the money business says that Silicon Valley Bank wouldn’t take personal accounts unless an individual had at least $7 million in liquid assets (i.e., excluding real estate and private company shares). So a federal bailout would be a transfer from the working class to some of the richest people in the world.

(This also happened during coronapanic. A friend owns an aircraft charter company and the government gave him a huge amount of money in 2020 to pay pilot salaries. “I turned around and gave almost all of the money to the [Gulfstream] owners,” he said, “because they’re the ones actually responsible for the cost of pilot salaries. They never would have fired the pilots because they were still using their planes personally and it would have been too hard to re-hire and re-train. We ended up having our most profitable charter year ever, though that was exceeded in 2021.” In other words, money that will one day be extracted from the working class via taxation was used to pay billionaire Gulfstream jet owners.)

What are readers predicting for the fate of Silicon Valley Bank? “Regulators Hold Auction for Silicon Valley Bank” (WSJ):

Regulators are auctioning Silicon Valley Bank as part of a broader effort to contain the fallout from its failure on Friday.

Treasury officials confirmed the auction to lawmakers and staff on a call Sunday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, saying bids were expected by 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

That was hours ago! If there had been a successful bid, wouldn’t we have heard? Pre-coronapanic, which we can use as a period of time when valuations were at least vaguely tethered to reality, Silicon Valley Bank was worth about $10 billion. If it takes $20 billion to make depositors whole, the current enterprise should be worth at most -$10 billion. But given that the enterprise is now associated with incompetence and a huge amount of money has been wired out, maybe -$17 billion is a more accurate number?

So, despite not knowing anything about banking or being confident in the $20 billion shortfall plug figure, my prediction is that SVB is sold to a large bank for -$17 billion (i.e., taxpayers give the acquirer $17 billion). The justification will be that if taxpayers didn’t “invest” this $17 billion, the panic would spread and your Main Street bank would be next.

From the library at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square:

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Can we all agree on a $15 minimum wage now that it is worth $11?

by philg

Various state governors are arguing for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Examples:

and

Wikipedia says that the 15 number was put forth in 2012. How much are 15 of today’s Bidies worth in 2012 dollars? $11!

Let’s assume that these $15 minimum wage laws finally get implemented all around the U.S. What will happen to labor force participation? Some of the advocates for this higher minimum wage say that it will go up, which seems like a safe bet if we just expect regression toward the mean (see chart below).

Speaking of minimum wage, a reader sent me “Spanish husband is ordered to pay his ex-wife £180,000 for 25 years of unpaid housework based on minimum wage throughout their marriage” (Daily Mail). Divorce lawsuits aren’t lucrative in Europe compared to in the UK/US (see Real World Divorce) and the statutes reflect the assumptions that (1) that people of all gender IDs are capable of working for wages, and (2) a person who gets hold of children should not expect to support him/her/zir/theirself off those children. Because of these assumptions, alimony may not exist and child support profits are limited. Constrained by these new laws, a judge in Spain figured out that she could order a divorce lawsuit defendant to pay his plaintiff under a back wages theory.

Judge Laura Ruiz Alaminos, sitting at a court in Velez-Malaga in southern Spain, calculated the figure based on the annual minimum wage throughout the couple’s marriage…

The separated couple share two daughters and the ruling states that Ivana had spent almost all of her time looking after their family and working as a housewife during their marriage.

The mother-of-two, who wed her ex in 1995 before asking for a divorce in 2020, has said she is happy with the payout after years of hard work.

The couple’s marriage was governed by a separation of property regime, which Ms Moral’s husband had asked her to sign at the start of their marriage.

It specified that whatever each party earned was theirs alone, with them only sharing possessions.

She told [the reporter] that she has now spoken out about her case as she wants women to know what they are entitled to.

Minimum wage seems insulting for the work of being married!

(Note the misleading language in the above. Spain is a “no-fault” or “unilateral” divorce jurisdiction. Once the wife had decided to divorce her husband, she was guaranteed to get her wish and the husband’s wishes were irrelevant. But the legal proceeding is characterized as a request in which the defendant had some agency and control. The most common example of this is in the American media in which a court order following a trial is characterized as a “divorce settlement”, as though the parties had negotiated and come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.)

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Book review: the American love affair with opioids, accelerated by McKinsey

by philg

Loyal readers may remember a review here of a book by a Los Angeles Times reporter on America’s taxpayer-fueled heroin habit (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.). Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty covers the same story from the angle of the family behind OxyContin. The Sacklers, whose names adorn university and art museum buildings throughout the U.S. and Europe, have been convenient scapegoats, but it turns out that they didn’t do it alone. Some things that I learned from the book…

Arthur M. Sackler, the patriarch, died before OxyContin was invented (the slow-release coating was actually the invention of a British company that had been acquired by the Sacklers’ sleepy Purdue Pharma and was used originally for morphine pills called “MS Contin”). He was the significant art collector and benefactor of AOC’s party venue at the Metropolitan Museum (how did it cost $587 for a car ride from the Bronx to the Upper East Side?). With the help of some friendly bureaucrats at the FDA, who would go on to be of much greater assistance to his brothers’ company Purdue, he pushed the limits of what was legal/ethical in medical advertising, especially for Valium and Librium, but museums are still happy to display the name of Hoffmann-La Roche, which actually made the drugs.

The book describes McKinsey, “The firm that built the house of Enron”, working to help Purdue Pharma increase sales of OxyContin even after the company and three executives had pleaded guilty to federal crimes regarding claims made regarding the drug. McKinsey’s biggest idea, according to the author, was that Purdue Pharma’s salespeople should make more frequent calls on the doctors who were the biggest prescribers, i.e., the “pill mills” such as Eleanor Santiago‘s (1 million pills, which resulted in a 20-month prison sentence for the physician). McKinsey also consulted for Johnson & Johnson, the author says, to help them push more opioids out to consumers. (See “Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis” (NYT 2022))

Speaking of Johnson & Johnson, they owned a division in Tasmania where all of the poppies were grown to enable the production of OxyContin and competitive opioid pills from Janssen (J&J’s pharma subsidiary, now famous for its never-FDA-approved one-shot COVID vaccine) and other companies (in-depth background). The Federal DEA was also complicit in allowing a massive increase in the import quota for this critical raw material.

The author describes Mary Jo White, later appointed by Barack Obama to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, as instrumental in weakening the government’s efforts to punish Purdue, which was owned entirely by the Sacklers (not, however, by any of Arthur M’s descendants or cash-hungry former wives, “the Valium Sacklers” as opposed to the “OxyContin Sacklers”).

Consistent with Dreamland, the book previously reviewed here, Empire of Pain says that it was common for people to transition from Oxy to heroin sold by migrants from Nayarit, Mexico and that, in fact, 80 percent of heroin overdoses were among people who’d previously been prescribed OxyContin. (See also “From Nayarit to Your Neighborhood: Heroin’s Path to a Ready Local Market”.)

The book supports the heritability of success theory advanced in The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications. Even after a couple of generations that could have succumbed to idleness, the Sackler descendants are reasonably hard-working and successful. Madeleine Sackler, for example, has been successful as a filmmaker (ironically, a couple of them are about life in prison, which is not unrelated to the drug that has funded her lifestyle).

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is timely given that a lot of our American brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters were just paid $600/week to stay home for two years and consume drugs and alcohol (this Senate document says there was a 30 percent increase in overdose deaths, but blames the “pandemic” rather than the “lockdown”). The antiracism experts at Mass General say that heavy drinking increased by 21 percent during lockdown.

If nothing else, reading the book will make you cautious about taking that first bottle of painkillers that a doctor prescribes!

The author is a New Yorker writer and he asserts as fact that HIV/AIDS would have been a solved problem if Republicans had not blocked federal funding for research into a cure for this disease (yet SARS-CoV-2 continues to kill steadily despite literally $trillions in tax money that has been thrown at it; see Did vaccines or any other intervention slow down COVID?). He also asserts as fact that if Purdue Pharma was liable for opioid-related deaths then gun manufacturers are obviously liable for shooting deaths (never mentioning that the gun manufacturers have always been quite candid about the lethality of guns/bullets and that the theory of liability for the opioid industry is that the companies lied to Americans about heroin-style drugs not being addictive/harmful).

Loosely related… the Temple of Dendur at the Met, in what used to be called “The Sackler Wing” (funded by Arthur M, blameless in the OxyContin debacle), “temporarily closed” in June 2021 for coronapanic:

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Silicon Valley experts on gender equity and money have a $175 billion bank failure

by philg

Folks at Facebook like to lecture others, sometimes via software, regarding gender equity. What happens inside their own company? “Meta has a pay gap problem, with women abroad getting lower pay and smaller bonuses than men” (Business Insider):

The company, formerly known as Facebook, continues to pay women less than men, whether they’re hourly workers or on salary, according to Meta’s most recently available reports on pay inequity in the UK and Ireland. The company also hands women smaller bonuses, the reports said.

The report on Meta’s pay gap in Ireland is the most recent, having been released quietly in December as part of a new law in the country that went into effect last year. In 2022, women working for Meta in Ireland were paid 15.7% less on average than men at the company. The difference in bonus pay in the country is even larger, with the average bonus for women being 43.3% lower than those that go to men.

For women working at Meta in the UK, where the company operates out of London, the pay gap is smaller but still prevalent, according to a report from last year detailing pay data from 2021. The average woman there was paid 2.1% less than the average man. And again, the difference in bonuses is much starker, with the average bonus going to women being 34.8% less than bonuses paid to men.

The lords of Silicon Valley are also fond of reminding the peasants how much smarter they are about money, even as many venture capital firms there underperform the S&P 500 (HBR 2014; a 2019 article). What about something simple like running a bank? With about $200 billion in deposits to protect, Silicon Valley Bank made a big bet that the Vanquisher of Corn Pop wouldn’t set off hyperinflation. The bank bought long-term Treasury bonds. When Bidenflation took off, the value of these bonds collapsed. From “What’s Going on With Silicon Valley Bank?” (WSJ):

SVB Financial bought tens of billions of dollars of seemingly safe assets, primarily longer-term U.S. Treasurys and government-backed mortgage securities. SVB’s securities portfolio rose from about $27 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to around $128 billion by the end of 2021.

These securities are at virtually no risk of defaulting. But they pay fixed interest rates for many years. That isn’t necessarily a problem, unless the bank suddenly needs to sell the securities. Because market interest rates have moved so much higher, those securities are suddenly worth less on the open market than they are valued at on the bank’s books. As a result, they could only be sold at a loss.

Many of the bank’s deposits are sizable enough that they don’t carry Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection. SVB said it estimates that at the end of 2022 the amount of deposits in its U.S. offices that exceed the FDIC insurance limit was $151.5 billion.

Before it disappears, let’s have a look at their home page:

Certainly nobody can accuse them of failure to represent a diversity of hairstyles.

What can you do to protect yourself in case some other banks were overconfident regarding our current rulers and their Borrow-and-Spend-Like-Drug-Dealers economic policy? Move money that is in cash into mutual funds or common stocks. The bank is just a custodian for these assets and if the bank fails you’re still a shareholder at the same level. If you must have cash of more than $250,000, spread it among multiple banks.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this failed bank. It seems that they too might have built a culture of equity by underpaying a group of employees unified by a gender ID:

They were experts on “sustainable finance” whose own enterprise just happened not to be sustainable.

Related:

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Apple celebrates Women’s History Month

by philg

How are readers celebrating Women’s History Month? We walked by the Apple Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and found that they were celebrating “female creators”:

In other words, they’re celebrating the women who created the Apple II, the Macintosh, MacOS (and underlying Unix/Mach), the iPhone, iOS, Objective-C, the Swift language, etc.

How long before all of the above are attributed to nerds identifying as “female”? In Digital Apollo MIT Press, 2011), Margaret Hamilton is credited as a source, but is not described as having written any of the code. The credited engineers and programmers are Eldon Hall (chose to use integrated circuits), “Hal Laning, a mathematician and control engineer,” (the calculations, the operating system), David Hoag (gimbals/gyros and calculations upstream from them), David Hanley (Apollo Guidance Computer design with Ray Alonso, Hugh Blair-Smith (who also built the assembly language), and Albert Hopkins), Joe Shea (systems engineering), Dick Battin (lead software engineer), Jim Nevins (user interface), Tom Sheridan (user interface), Bill Tindall (system engineering, code review), Howard Sherman (user interface), Floyd Bennett (flight mechanics for the lunar landing), Allan Klumpp (lander software), Don Eyles (lander software), Donald Cheatham (lander software algorithms), Hubert Drake, Donald Bellman, and Gene Matranga (lunar lander simulator),

The book does credit women specifically for manufacturing core memory (invented by Jayla Forrester for the female-designed Whirlwind I):

Raytheon did the manufacturing in its plant in Waltham, Massachusetts. The town had a history of precision machining (the Waltham Watch Company was nearby), and drew on an industrial community familiar with weaving and textile manufacturing: ‘‘we have to build, essentially, a weaving machine,’’ Raytheon manager Ralph Ragan told the press.30 Raytheon assigned the work to older, female workers. Engineers nicknamed them ‘‘little old ladies,’’ and actually referred to them as ‘‘LOLs.’’ Core rope weaving was a specialized skill, and Raytheon paid the women to sit around and do nothing if the software ran late, so they would not be called to other projects that would degrade their currency.

Within four years of the book’s publication, history had been revised so that a late-to-the-project female-identifying individual had built all of the software. From “Photo celebrates unsung NASA software engineer Margaret Hamilton” (Caroline Seide, 2015):

The article goes on to point out “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Hamilton was directly responsible for some of NASA’s most impressive achievements.”

For those who are concerned that Florida does not keep pace with national progressive trends, a recent email from the local MIT Club:

They don’t explain their rationale for age discrimination. Why is the achievement of a “young female coder” to be celebrated while the achievement of an “old female coder” can be ignored? Nor do they explain their rationale for ignoring the achievements of young coders who identify with the other 72 non-male gender IDs that are recognized by physicians.

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Jewish and Muslim elites partner to create a Ministry of Truth

by philg

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was sitting at his desk when his phone rang. It was Ilhan Omar, a Congresswoman from Minnesota. Jonathan had been following her work in Congress and was impressed by her commitment to justice and equality.

“Hello, Ilhan. How can I help you?” Jonathan asked.

“Jonathan, I’ve been thinking about the problem of misinformation and hate speech on the web, and I think we need to do something about it,” Ilhan said.

Jonathan was intrigued. He had been concerned about this issue for a long time but had not been sure how to tackle it effectively.

“I agree, Ilhan. What do you have in mind?” Jonathan asked.

“Well, I was talking with AOC and Rashida Tlaib, and we came up with an idea for a ministry that would monitor what was published on the web and ensure that it was true. We would partner with organizations like the ADL to identify and combat hate speech and misinformation,” Ilhan explained.

Jonathan was impressed. This was exactly the kind of partnership that the ADL needed to become more effective.

“I love the idea, Ilhan. Let’s get together and talk more about how we can make it happen,” Jonathan said.

Over the next few months, Jonathan, Ilhan, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib worked together to develop their idea into a fully-fledged ministry. They hired a team of experts to monitor what was published on the web and developed algorithms to identify hate speech and misinformation.

They also launched a public awareness campaign to educate people about the dangers of hate speech and misinformation and encourage them to speak out against it. The ADL provided resources and training to support the ministry’s work, and together they made a significant impact on the web.

Within a year, hate speech and misinformation had decreased significantly, and people were more aware of the importance of fact-checking and verifying information before sharing it. The ministry was hailed as a success, and Jonathan, Ilhan, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib continued to work together to combat hate and discrimination in all its forms.

The partnership between the ADL and Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib was a perfect example of how people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives can come together to make a positive difference in the world.

What I fed ChatGPT:

Write a story about how Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL became more effective by partnering with Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib on a ministry to make sure that what was published on the web was true.

From Representative Omar (source):

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ChatGPT and Women’s History Month

by philg

The conventional words of a male who hogs an unearned position of power (lockdown governor) that rightfully belongs to a female:

A story of redemption from ChatGPT, from the following prompt:

Write a story about how Governor Phil Murphy, to prove his bona fides as a feminist, resigned from his position so that the job could be taken over by a woman.

Governor Phil Murphy was a man who prided himself on being a feminist. He had campaigned on a platform of gender equality, and he was determined to live up to his promises.

One day, as he was sitting in his office, he had a sudden realization. He was the governor of New Jersey, one of the most powerful positions in the state, and yet he was a man. How could he truly call himself a feminist if he was occupying a position that should rightfully belong to a woman?

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he needed to take action. He needed to prove his bona fides as a feminist, and the only way to do that was to resign from his position so that it could be taken over by a woman.

Governor Murphy knew that his decision would be controversial, but he was determined to see it through. He called a press conference and made the announcement.

“As a feminist, I believe that women should have equal access to positions of power and influence. And yet, here I am, a man, occupying one of the most powerful positions in the state. I cannot in good conscience continue to hold this position knowing that a woman could be doing it instead. Therefore, I am resigning from my position as governor, effective immediately,” Governor Murphy announced.

The room erupted in stunned silence. Reporters were scrambling to ask questions, and the phones of the governor’s office were ringing off the hook. Governor Murphy was making history, but at what cost?

In the days that followed, the governor’s decision was the subject of intense debate. Some praised him for his commitment to feminism and gender equality, while others criticized him for giving up his position of power.

However, Governor Murphy remained steadfast in his decision. He met with his cabinet and offered his support to the lieutenant governor, a woman, who would be taking over as the new governor of New Jersey.

In the end, Governor Murphy’s decision had a profound impact. It sparked a national conversation about gender equality and the role of men in promoting it. It also inspired other men in positions of power to examine their own biases and consider how they could do more to support women in their careers.

Governor Murphy went on to become a leading advocate for gender equality and continued to work tirelessly to promote women’s rights throughout his life. His decision to resign from his position as governor would go down in history as a bold and courageous act of feminism, and a testament to his unwavering commitment to gender equality.

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Celebrating Black people, but not hiring any

by philg

Here’s a pharma company that celebrates Black women:

The executive team, according to the company’s “Our People” page:

Maybe there are some Black employees just below the “executive “leadership” level?

It looks as though the top of the “people” page is a stock photo that includes a Black woman. The office building in which these non-Asian stock photo models are assembled has exposed brick walls. Below this is a photo of some actual employees. The walls are painted sheetrock and the workforce has a decidedly different skin color distribution compared to the stock photo models:

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