Tag: women

esr calls BS on tor.com

Specifically, with regards to their woefully misplaced glee concerning an asserted discovery of “women warriors”:

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit.

What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking migrants were female, which is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The leap from that to “half the warriors were female” is unjustified and quite large.

There’s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.

It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons – knives, swords, and polearms in particular. I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.

I also know a good deal about Viking archeology – and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my review of William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat.) We’ve both read saga literature. We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.

And I’m calling bullshit. Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost no such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women. Tellingly, they are almost always archers.

Here we go again. Who do these science fiction SJW idiots think they’re trying to fool? That retarded Hugo-winning blog post about how women have always fought notwithstanding, all these women – and it is mostly women – have proven with their insane inventions and historical misrepresentations is that they have never, ever, stepped into a ring with a man.

As I have previously mentioned, I have fought women. I have fought female black belts. And it’s like fighting very flexible 12 year old boys, only the women usually quit faster. I’ve never fought a full two-minute round with a woman where I didn’t ease off; most times they will simply quit after the second time you knock them down. They are slow, small, and weak. They are much slower and weaker than you probably imagine if you have never kicked one in the face or punched one in the stomach.

I found the occasional look of betrayal some women would show to be particularly amusing. Yes, I did just hit you in the face. Yes, I’m sure it did hurt. No, I won’t stop because you’ve got tears welling up in your eyes. What on Earth do you think you are here for? That sort of dojo bunny never stuck around for long. The sort that did ended up marrying both of our senseis.

More importantly, there is the evidence of historical logic. Any society that made use of women warriors wouldn’t have survived for long. From Families and Demographics in the Viking Age:
 
“A typical woman probably bore 7 infants during her lifetime,
29 months apart on average. During pregnancy, women were expected to continue
working. After the child’s birth, the mother typically returned to work with
little delay. Evidence suggests that mothers nursed their children until the age
of 2 years, which may have dictated the interval between the births of a
couple’s children. A typical couple probably had 2 or
3 living children at any one time. Few parents lived to see their
children marry. And fewer lived to see their first grandchild.

So, a female warrior would have had to be not just as good as her male counterparts, but exceptional, and kill AT LEAST seven enemy warriors before being killed herself for the opportunity cost of her warrior womanhood to be considered break even from the tribe’s perspective. Then again, it’s not impossible for at least one bygone society to have been this stupid and shortsighted. After all, our society observably is.

The idea that the Vikings were sexually egalitarian is hysterical if you have ever read the account of a Viking funeral written by Ibn Fadlan in 921, when he was serving as the secretary of an embassy from the Baghdad Caliphate to the Bulgars. By my count, sixteen men have sex with the slave girl who “volunteers” to be slain with her master before she is stabbed and strangled on the ship that is subsequently burned. Wikipedia has a partial description, which appears in full in the revised edition of THE HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS by Gwyn Jones.

And even the mythical warrior woman Brynhildr followed the practice in the human sacrifice she offered for Sigurd.
    Bond-women five
    shall follow him,
    And eight of my thralls,
    well-born are they,
    Children with me,
    and mine they were
    As gifts that Buthli
    his daughter gave.

Immigration and feminism

Full credit to JudgyBitch, as she highlights the logical connection between the feminist push for more educated white middle-class women in the workforce and feminist support for mass immigration that I had not previously noticed:

Let me state up front that I don’t believe feminism engaged in any kind of mass conspiracy to essentially enslave black women – but the effect has been exactly that.  It’s a nice coincidence that feminists seem deeply unwilling to address. There are two things working in concert:  women in the paid labor force and single motherhood.

In order for (mostly) white women to enter the paid labor force with their fancy college degrees in reading and feeling, they need an exploitable class of individuals to provide domestic services at wages that won’t eat up their own wages.  Maids, nannies, child care workers, housekeepers – these are some of the shittiest, most underpaid jobs a woman can get.  And those are jobs that are disproportionately performed by women of color.  In order to incentive women of color to accept these shitty jobs with crappy wages and no benefits, they need to have no plausible alternatives.

Enter the single mother.  By creating a culture that is welcoming of single motherhood – de-stigmatizing it and treating it as a “lifestyle choice”,and then adding the widespread of incarceration of men of color and black men in particular, that incentive is in place.  Daddy in jail and Mommy a single mother is a perfect recipe for creating an exploitable class of women who can pick up all the white lady’s shit work.

Her alternative does not compute, as we already know that the working class being used here is even less capable of productive professional work than the “reading and feeling” crowd. But it does explain nicely why the feminists, and more importantly, the globalists who have long been pushing feminism in order to weaken national sovereignty, are so relentlessly pro-immigration in this regard.

She focuses on the black population, but it is actually the newly imported Hispanic and Asian populations that are more relied upon in this regard.  And so, once more we see that feminism is a societally destructive institution. It is more lethal than National Socialism and less economically coherent than Communism.

Programmer-prostitutes #icanprogramming

In the end, that’s what the result of GRLZ CAN 2 CODE and pushing more women into pseudo-programming degrees is going to be. Using their sex to sell software to real programmers. Consider the function of the “developer evangelist”:

Developer evangelists are definitely a different
breed. You have to, on the one hand, have the technical chops to be able to
code software, and on the other hand, have the ability to talk about it. I know
a lot of people that are knee deep in their technical savvy, but when it comes
to explaining it to someone who’s never used it before, they fall short. You
need someone that can not only walk the walk, but talk the talk and communicate
it to the community.

Developer evangelists should also
be forward thinking. You need visionaries who can assess the developer
community and see how you should be steering the ship. Otherwise, the developer
program might not necessarily take off. Developer evangelists need to be community
focused. This means elevating the developer community. It means being present
and going out there and working with the developer community.

As
it happens, I was an developer evangelist back in 1990, back when Apple
first popularized the concept. The formal title on my card was
“Transdimensional Evangelist” and my job was to visit the various hardware
manufacturers and computer game developers and convince them that they should be focused
on 3D-acceleration hardware, not MPEG-decompression hardware, for their
next generation of video cards and games. I was initially unsuccessful, but as I had been telling them, the superior technology won out in the end. It may be almost impossible to imagine now, but at the time, the vast majority of the industry was convinced that accelerated 2D video was the future, because 3D was flat-shaded, processor-intensive, and ugly… never mind that one could do so much more with it.

Now, unlike
most “evangelists”, I was actively involved on the strategic development
side; as it happens, I was the individual solely responsible for a chip
designed for the CAD market also having the critical features required
for the game development community; namely, accelerated Gouraud-shading
and texture mapping. I even named the chip: the 3GA. It’s not an accident that Creative Labs didn’t hold the original trademark on “3D Blaster”. However, (and this
is the relevant part), I was under no illusion that being the industry’s
first evangelist for the inevitable move from 2D to 3D made me an engineer, much
less a chip designer.

You may recall that I’ve said one
reason women are unlikely to succeed in programming per se is because
they tend to have an allergy to being held responsible for their own work.
This is mere anecdotal evidence, not conclusive proof, but consider what
sort of “technical chops” are required for this “developer” to “walk
the walk”:

I’ve had issues where my code
didn’t necessarily compile on the first try, and it’s great, because, all
of a sudden, you see them trying to figure it out with you, and it becomes an
engaging activity, as opposed to walking through a bunch of slides.

Isn’t that great? When you can’t do your job on your own but can get someone to help you figure out how to do it? And isn’t that totally unexpected and not at all anticipated by anyone who is sufficiently familiar with the female approach to technological responsibility?

This
is not to say there isn’t a place for women in technology. Nor is there
anything wrong with saleswomen actually knowing what they are talking
about; in fact, this is actually a highly desirable development. But what is
wrong is the pretense that this is not the probable outcome of a computer science degree, or that the
evangelist, (which is a function that combines marketing and strategic
sales), is even performing a production-related job at all.

And this part cracked me up:

Right now, some of the most interesting mobile app developers I know are people who started programming just two years ago. But they’re able to plug stuff together now in such a way to make something that’s cool.

Developers who aren’t Gamma programmers and didn’t study computer science engineering at university are always the most interesting, are they not? And they must be bang-up programmers to have picked it up so quickly!

Women Ruin Everything: Academic edition

This open argument in favor of abanoning the Doctrine of Academic Freedom in favor of a Doctrine of Academic Justice is an excellent example of why women were not allowed into the universities in the first place. This is why they were not permitted to vote. We ignore the great minds of the past at our peril, and we have no right to complain about having to suffer the obvious consequences of entirely predictable actions:

In its oft-cited Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors declares that “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” In principle, this policy seems sound: It would not do for academics to have their research restricted by the political whims of the moment.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. Two years ago, when former summer school instructor Subramanian Swamy published hateful commentary about Muslims in India, the Harvard community organized to ensure that he would not return to teach on campus. I consider that sort of organizing both appropriate and commendable. Perhaps it should even be applied more broadly.

Women are, and have always been, intrinsically fascist at heart. With a small minority of exceptions, they hate freedom and will always trade it for the promise of security, physical and emotional. The Fascists understood this. The medieval philosophers understood this. The Founding Fathers understood this. The West rejected the idea in favor of sexual equality and the myth of progress, and now the university has abandoned its centuries-old tradition of academic freedom.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, not all women are the same. Yes, there are brilliant and sensible women. But the salient point is that the price of female involvement is reliably too high across the board. How much more destruction can Western Civilization be expected to survive before women of sense are willing to admit that the price of female participation in matters of governance is too great? Do we really need to undergo the Great Collapse before the ancient truths can be accepted once more?

“The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”
– Bill Simmons

The comparative danger of eating disorders

It’s fascinating how “eating disorder” as it is conventionally used doesn’t appear to cover the statistically most dangerous health consequence of eating abnormally. And, for some reason, in an overstuffed society we’re supposed to worry about the women who are too skinny:

A “disease” that affects 30 million people and kills one out of every 206,897 of the individuals who contract it is simply not a serious societal problem, especially not when considered in light of how diabetes contributed to 231,404 deaths in 2011. 28.5 million Americans suffer from diabetes, so the risk of death from diabetes is one in 111. That means the risk of dying from diabetes is 1,855 TIMES HIGHER than the risk of dying from an eating disorder.

Stuff that in your piehole, fatty. Better yet, stick your finger down your throat if you want to live… and that’s not even considering amputations, blindness, and other non-fatal complications.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Au contraire, mon ami

I think Captain Capitalism read a bit too much into yesterday’s post in concluding the college credentialists got me:

A well written and charty-goodness post, but he still considers the education/college degree gap a “real” gap. There are two brief points I shall make as I’m trying to knock out a chapter per 4 days of my book:

1.  Women earn the majority of EASY DEGREES.  When it comes to engineering and anything that requires significant math men beat them at a ratio of 4:1. 
When it comes to Masters in Farting Unicorns and Doctorates in Feelings
with Minors in Oprah, yes, women dominate.  But for the stuff that
matters in the world, men by far outcompete women.

2.  Women are NOT going to be ahead in the world for this.  It is NOT a
good thing for women that they are earning the majority of degrees
because they are buying into a bubble.  It’s like having women
purchasing 70% of the housing in early 2007 and citing that as an
example of some kind of performance gap.

The college degree gap is real. The fact that the degrees are worthless is irrelevant. Captain Capitalism appears to have forgotten that I am not a credentialist, and moreover, I was one of the earliest commentators to point out the increasing irrelevance of the college degree. Consider what I wrote on the subject in 2004:

“The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago.
Beginning in the ’60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual
development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds
of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured
faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the
devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of
sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as
absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what’s really
going on in the world.”

I wrote a few more columns on the subject, and in the 2012 WND column entitled “Education is not an investment“, I pointed out five flaws in the various “return-on-investment” calculations used to justify college degrees, such as the failure to take student loan debt into account.

“The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501;
however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010
college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And
since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating
students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8
percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that
seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average
ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan
interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt
is $247,118.”

Ironically, one could build a solid case for a young man being better off financially by lending his $25,000 college fund to college students while going off and working instead of getting a degree, so long as he is able to earn more than $4,680 per year for the next 30 years in addition to collecting his federally guaranteed debt-tribute.

What Captain Capitalism failed to realize is that I don’t see the growing preponderance of women in higher education as evidence that women are going to run the world. To the contrary, I see it as evidence that higher education is in the late stages of collapse. Because women ruin everything. The final stage will be reached when Title IX is successfully applied to the STEM degrees, which is already federal law, and math and the hard sciences are sufficiently dumbed down to permit women to receive what is determined to be an equitable number of those degrees.

By that point, men will have likely created alternative systems to the university credentials that are as unpalatable to women as the universities once were, and successful businesses will be increasingly prone to utilize those systems. Some sort of online achievement-based system like those popular in the IT world would appear to be the likely candidate, especially as the availability of online degrees from prestigious institutions continues to increase. Once 50,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese are graduating with degrees from Harvard, its social cachet will plummet.

Women and military discipline

As bad as this sounds, the reality is even worse:

I once asked a friend who is a retired Army command sergeant major how
they disciplined the women. He replied, “You can’t. If you try, they
charge you with sexual harassment.” I said, “Then how do you get them to
do what you need them to do?” He said, “We don’t. We just let them do
whatever they want.”

I have a friend who was forced out of the service only a few years before his scheduled retirement due to false sexual harassment charges.  The reason his female subordinate made up the charges had nothing to do with his relationship with her, she was just angry that he had disciplined one of her male friends for committing a crime.

Women in the military destroy more than unit cohesion, they destroy all military discipline across the board, from the top to the bottom.  It’s exactly the same as the difference between raising a generation of children in the traditional manner, and raising a generation using only single mothers. We already have a feral black underclass and an increasingly feral white one; in another two decades we will likely have an equally feral military.

This is precisely why I support an all-female U.S. military populated by a draft.  Anything less would be sexist and fail to account for more than 200 years of unmitigated male privilege.

Ruthless compliance

The Marine Corps appears to be going about complying with the Defense Department’s decision earlier this year to repeal the Direct Combat Exclusion Rule in a correct and effective manner.

The Marine Corps will allow enlisted women to participate in basic infantry training beginning this fall as part of ongoing research to determine what additional ground combat jobs may open to female personnel.

New female enlisted Marines will volunteer for spots in the service’s Infantry Training Battalion, mirroring a related effort allowing new female lieutenants to enroll in the Corps’ Infantry Officer Course, according to an official planning document obtained by Marine Corps Times. Titled “Assignment of Women in Combat Units,” the document is dated Aug. 16.

“Female Marines will have the opportunity to go through the same infantry training course as their male counterparts,” the document states. However, as with the research involving female officers, “female enlisted Marines who successfully complete infantry training as part of this research process will not be assigned infantry as a military occupational specialty and will not be assigned to infantry units.”

The correct way to address female claims to equality is always to insist upon completely objective standards.  Women tend to be highly skilled at manipulating subjective standards, which is why so many of them shriek with indignation whenever they discover that their tears, emotional appeals, prostitution, rhetorical sallies, and negotiating tactics will avail them nothing.

Take the oft-cited “women make 77 cents of the male dollar for doing the same job”, for example.  There is a very easy solution to that “problem”. Eliminate salaries and put everyone with the same job on equal hourly wages. Women will still be making less money on average, but their complaints won’t be credible because it is objectively clear why they are earning less: they work fewer hours.  As Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.”

Now, it can be expected that the Marine Corps will eventually come under considerable pressure to reduce the difficulty of its basic infantry training. But with a growing number of Obama Wars to fight, the Corps has very good reason to resist the political pressure to produce inferior Marines, and in the unlikely event a woman proves capable of successfully completing the course, (note that none of the 10 women who have tried have passed the Infantry Officer Course and only one of those ten made it through the course’s very first test), she is likely to be an extraordinary individual who will not be disposed to creating the sort of problems that most women in the military do.

WRE: technology conference edition

It is customary for women to lament the way men are openly hostile to their presence when they insert themselves into hacker fests and technology conferences.  And yet, it is hardly difficult to understand why men tend to be less than enthusiastic about opening themselves up to be patrolled by volunteer speech police and self-appointed equality cops.

A Playhaven developer was fired after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner, and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

    Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…
    — Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The developer on the left, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was apparently fired by PlayHaven for the incident.

Adria Richards, having successfully gained the attention she was there to seek, tries to justify her actions in the usual self-lionizing language: “Adria Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl,
saying that she took the comments for as long as she could, but when
she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a
stand for her, and all the women who have not considered technology as a
career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible
for her to do so.”

What Richards clearly doesn’t realize is that she is the parasitical ass clown making it more difficult for women to pursue technology as a career path.  What sort of idiot employer would want to hire disruptive, self-seeking, controlling employees actively looking for causes to fight instead good engineers who will simply do their jobs and may happen to tell a mildly offensive joke now and then in the process?  At this point, I have no doubt that the conference organizers are regretting their decision to permit Adria Richards to attend.

After all, who wants to attend the sort of conference where merely being overheard by a fellow attendee comes with a proven risk of losing your job?  I’m not a Python developer, but if I was, I’d certainly wouldn’t bother to clear a spot on my calendar for it.  And as a game developer, I’m certainly going to be looking at PlayHaven with a deeply skeptical eye going forward.

As one female developer – in other words a woman who actually works in the industry, as opposed to patrols it on behalf of her equalitarian ideology – correctly observed: “Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech.”  It does.  It absolutely does. People like Richards are parasites who have no place in technology because they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they construct nothing, they only destroy.  They only seek to destroy.

Even the lowly white knights who desperately desire to be considered good and proper equalitarians understand the problem:  “She damages the reputation of everyone trying to make this industry more
female-friendly. She’s done the opposite of making men and women feel
more comfortable working together; now men will be looking over their
shoulder every time a woman is present in the workplace or a conference
because hey, she might do what Adria did. This is not an environment
anyone wants to work in.”

It is reported that 20 percent of  the 2013 attendees at PyCon were female.  If the men who attended this year have any sense at all, that percentage will be considerably higher next year.  Meanwhile, those of us who don’t give a quantum of a damn about making “industry more female-friendly”, but are focused on creating compelling, entertaining, and useful technologies, see our skepticism vindicated.  Again.

UPDATE:  Apparently SendGrid was unimpressed with their employees decision to evangelize feminist speech control rather than SMTP relay services.  It is a wise move on their part, and should serve as an object lesson to other would-be though police.

“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.“

Mailvox: which is worse, work or rape?

A drive-by commenter throws out a few questions:

women don’t have to stay home and breed simply because it intimidates
you that we’re in the workforce. What about the fact that women may
wish to work and be very capable of doing so. Are you saying women are
less intelligent than men? Is there any reason that a man couldn’t stay
home and provide childcare if that is best suited to a family? 

1) True.  Women don’t have to stay home and breed because it intimidates anyone that they are in the workforce, about two-thirds of them have to stay home and breed in order to prevent society from either collapsing into demographic and economic ruin or being transformed by the imported replacement workers into a third world society.  The birthrate has already fallen well below replacement level without the rate of female employment even drawing completely even with the male employment rate; one wonders how low it would go if all women were required to enter the workforce.

One can look to Londonistan if one requires an example of this process at work: “[F]or the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city…. White Britons now make up 45 per cent of the population, compared with 58 per cent in 2001.  London’s population has been boosted by immigrants. Three million foreign-born people now live in the capital.  

2) The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so.  The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse.  Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized.  Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable.  History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted.  Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.

3) Are women less intelligent than men?  On average, no.  In terms of the highest standard deviations, yes.  However, I think it is readily apparent that both men and women are to blame for constructing an equalitarian society that, in terms of intelligence, doesn’t even rise to the ability of a dog to avoid defecating in its own bed and staying off the railroad tracks.

4) Yes, there are a number of reasons that a man cannot stay home and provide childcare.  The three most important are that a) most men don’t want to provide childcare, b) most women don’t want to work to support a man, and c) doing so significantly increases the probability that his wife will stop being attracted to him and his marriage will fail.  A woman simply OUTEARNING her husband increases the risk of divorce by 50 percent; this implies that it is untenable to expect women to be willing to completely support their families.  But certainly, if there are women who dream of marrying men who will stay home and play video games with the children while they work 60 hours per week to support the family, there is no reason they should be barred from doing so. 

I tend to doubt there are enough of these hard-working snowflakes to be of any statistical, let alone demographic, significance to society.