No. If you look at history everything we consider civilized have been a result of an effort or a struggle by the people that came before us.
Expecting the war against bullshit to end any time soon is naive. Civilization will always be on the defensive because the owners want more for themselves and less for everyone else.
1) Not every person wants the same kind of fit(snug,slim,skinny,relaxed,classic,natural, etc) or drape.
Those are irrelevant details. The basic form of input is "person A gives rating R to item B". This is precisely the formulation behind successful solutions to the netflix problem.
You would need a pretty well-populated training set (assuming SVD or similar ML algorithm), I imagine, and somehow I think that might be difficult with so many unique item Bs. With Netflix you have many people watching the same movie, but I think there are many more dresses around, and women probably won't be rating hundreds/thousands of them (which is easier to do on movies).
The Yahoo Music dataset has these characteristics (more items than users), and a combination of methods (including the SGD-based matrix factorization that people call "SVD" in recommender lore) did pretty well on it (KDD Cup 2011: http://kddcup.yahoo.com/).
What I find a little disappointing is that the top 3 prizes for this Netflix-Prize-style competition total $7,000 in value. Is technical brainpower, even that of students, really worth that little? Maybe startups should band together to hold their own optimization contests if the 'market rates' are so low.
56% is a sane top tax rate if you feel that you make enough money and you feel that you want to contribute to the infrastructure and services that the government provides.
56% is a low top marginal tax rate. The United States had a top marginal income tax rate that was higher than 56% between 1932 and 1980. It was 90% between 1950 and 1963.
To be fair though, the effective net tax rate in the US was not much different than today back then. That 90% tax rate was essentially fictional in that no one paid anything close to it after deductions and loopholes. It was theater so that politicians could claim the wealthy were paying high taxes.
Reducing the marginal tax rates on income in the US was largely revenue neutral due to the incremental elimination of loopholes, credits, and deductions concurrent with those reductions. If we actually reverted to the tax policies of 1950s I do not think you would be impressed with the distribution of taxes paid.
Ironically, the low marginal tax rates we have today reflect the historical truth more closely than the nominally high rates of the past.
My personal opinion is that anything over 50% is too much. If I work hard and earn a lot of money I should at least be allowed to keep half.
That said, to reach the top income bracket and get a tax between 52-59.9% (Depending on where in Sweden you live) you have to earn somewhere around $80k/yr. Not entire sure about the number but it is in that region. I wouldn't consider that very wealthy, especially not if you live in Stockholm, expensive city to live in.
Of course it's not a serious problem that a group of people are being paid less if you're in the group that's being paid more than them.
Maybe it's easier to understand the issue if you replace women with another group of people. Imagine if black people, jewish people or LGBT as a group were paid 90% of their counterparts. Does that make it easier to grasp why this is a serious problem.
Lets make it even easier. Would you still feel that it's not a serious problem if white men as a group were discriminated against, were getting less promotions and were paid less than their colleges.
Coding and programming is not a vacuum that exists outside of society.
Does that make it easier to grasp why this is a serious problem.
What would make it easier to grasp that this is a serious problem is if you had evidence it occurred to any significant degree. You are telling me a huge business opportunity exists and no one is exploiting it.
If you can find good women being paid less for doing the same job or who find themselves not getting hired, send them my way. I'd love to hire them myself.
Until you do (or hire them yourself), I'm lumping you in with all the inefficient market crackpots.
You realize your link shows that after taking into account easy controls (overtime, part time work), 60% of the gap goes away, right?
You also realize that your link looks at age, but not work experience. I.e., a 35 year old woman who vanished from the workforce at age 28 gets paid less than a man who didn't. Not discrimination. It's lesser pay for lesser experience.
Plenty of other great sporting events are held without these kind of ridiculous measures.