I don’t know about the UK, but my experience in the US was exclusively women in elementary school, 80-90% women in middle school, 60-70% women in high school. I was actually surprised when I first had a male teacher in middle school, I guess I had thought that male teachers was like an old timey / TV / college thing.

Why do you need so much info on Mike? Can’t you just evaluate his statements/work on its own merit? The whole point of open source, federated platforms is that you don’t have to trust him. If he decides to enshittify it, you can just go with a fork or another instance. A nomadic identity isn’t a centralized alternative to the fediverse, it’s just a way of bringing some of the features of a centralized identity to a decentralized one (at least, that’s the way I interpreted the article).

Quotas are not the only way to combat discrimination, nor are they a good one. Name-blind hiring would resolve name discrimination without making additional presumptions about the applicant pool. A quota presumes that the applicant pool has a particular racial mix, and that a person’s qualifications and willingness to apply are independent of race. And even if those happen to be true, it can’t take into account the possibility that the random distribution of applicants just happens to sway one way or another in a particular instance.

The bill itself says, more or less, “any foreign adversary controlled app is banned. Also, TikTok is a foreign adversary controlled app”. So it doesn’t apply exclusively to TikTok, but it does explicitly include them.

I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:

• It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can’t. The bill literally defines “foreign adversary controlled application” as “TikTok, or …” (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn’t what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.

• It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is “controlled by a foreign adversary” entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn’t need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.

• According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.

• There is a specific exemption for any app that’s for posting reviews (g.2.B). I’m guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.