Diverse it gets



  • I am just filling out some paperwork for a new client in the US and it has a section on supplier ownership diversity which has the following choices:

    • XXS - Owner Unknown (or publicly traded), Small
    • XXL - Owner Unknown (or publicly traded), Large
    • BFL - Black, Female, Large
    • BML - Black, Male, Large
    • BFS - Black, Female, Small
    • BMS - Black, Male, Small
    • CFL - Caucasian, Female, Large
    • CFS - Caucasian, Female, Small
    • CML - Caucasian, Male, Large
    • CMS - Caucasian, Male, Small
    • HFL - Hispanic, Female, Large
    • HFS - Hispanic, Female, Small
    • HML - Hispanic, Male, Large
    • HMS - Hispanic, Male, Small
    • NFL - Native American, Female, Large
    • NFS - Native American, Female, Small
    • NML - Native American, Male, Large
    • NMS - Native American, Male, Small
    • PFL - Asian Pacific, Female, Large
    • PFS - Asian Pacific, Female, Small
    • PMS - Asian Pacific, Male, Small
    • PML - Asian Pacific, Male, Large
    • IML - Asian Indian Male Large
    • IFL - Asian Indian Female Large
    • IMS - Asian Indian Male Small
    • IFS - Asian Indian Female Small
    • ASN – Assoc. or Non Profit Agency
    • EDU – Educational Institution
    • GOV – Government Entity




    Note

    • These choices are listed in the same order that appears on the form
    • Large and small refer to company size (above/below 500 employees) and not the size of the owner
    • Ownership is equal or more than 51% (Ethnicity and Gender )


  • @OzPeter said:

    Large and small refer to company size and not the size of the owner
    How disappointing.



  •  Is the new client a porn hub?



  • I like how this is relevant at all.

    (edit: not having a go at the topic... I just mean, TRWTF is that ethnicity and gender are even remotely relevant to business, apparently)



  • @dhromed said:

    Is the new client a porn hub?

    I would guess federal agency. They ask prospective vendors all kinds of crazy racial questions about the vendor's ownership and employees.

    One time my company decided to go after a federal contract, however we were turned down because we didn't have enough employees living in "poor" sections of town (the technical term is HUB, or "historically underutilized for business"). Some of us were actually asked to move into HUB zones, though I refused. I looked at a city map and found that if I moved across the street either way (I live on a corner) I would enter a HUB zone. The funny thing is across one street is the city's commercial downtown district, and across the other street is a park.



  • @mott555 said:

    One time my company decided to go after a federal contract, however we were turned down because we didn't have enough employees living in "poor" sections of town. Some of us were actually asked to move into HUB zones
     

    QUE?



  • Gotta love how to avoid racism we apparently need to compile giant databases of everyones race. Kinda horrible really....


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @KillaCoda said:

    Gotta love how to avoid racism we apparently need to compile giant databases of everyones race. Kinda horrible really....
    Not really. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with the brain-dead thinking that the only way to 'fix' discrimination, is .... more discrimination (but they don't really call it that so they can pretend it isn't.) That's an example from UK politics - coming up with perhaps more relevant examples is left as an exercise for the student.



  • The point of the question is to ensure that companies that are ethnically diverse get a piece of the government pie. In other words, to make sure that the work is not concentrated in white-owned businesses. It's a laudable goal; but to get this to work at all you have to ask about the makeup of the ownership of the company.



  • @mott555 said:

    @dhromed said:

    Is the new client a porn hub?

    I would guess federal agency. They ask prospective vendors all kinds of crazy racial questions about the vendor's ownership and employees.

    One time my company decided to go after a federal contract, however we were turned down because we didn't have enough employees living in "poor" sections of town (the technical term is HUB, or "historically underutilized for business"). Some of us were actually asked to move into HUB zones, though I refused. I looked at a city map and found that if I moved across the street either way (I live on a corner) I would enter a HUB zone. The funny thing is across one street is the city's commercial downtown district, and across the other street is a park.



    This actually makes sense. It's to the government's benefit to give employed middle-class professionals an incentive to move into low-income neighborhoods and jump-start the process of gentrification.

     



  • "Caucasian" is an interesting term. Does that mean "can trace ancestry back through several generations of US citizens', or "just recently immigrated from somewhere in europe" or "A white resident of South Africa" or ??? How about "Asian Pacific" -- that covers a huge geographic area with many diverse cultures and ancestry. Does that mean "can trace ancestry back many generations to someone who lived in that area" or "just moved to the US from that area"? How about if "most of my ancestors were from that area, but some of my most recent ancestors are from european ancestry"?

    I understand the purpose of this questionaire -- to ensure that government money does not go exclusively to priviliged white people only; to ensure that everyone can get equal access without regarding some abstract notion of their "ethnicity" (whatever that might mean).

    In today's world, where it's hard to label yourself because your ancestors are from many different parts of the world, it amazes me that someone can come up with a questionaire that attempts to group people into such broad categories. A better questionaire would be "I think that I belong to a group of people that was discriminated against in the past for some unjustified reason" (yes or no) and leave it at that.



  • @DrPepper said:

    A better questionaire would be "I think that I belong to a group of people that was discriminated against in the past for some unjustified reason" (yes or no) and leave it at that.
     

    Then you get a mob of men raving about "MRA" or some such lunacy.



  • @dhromed said:

     Is the new client a porn hub?

    Actually its a major international manufacturer of a variety of household goods.



  • @DrPepper said:

    A better questionaire would be "I think that I belong to a group of people that was discriminated against in the past for some unjustified reason" (yes or no) and leave it at that.

    You've totally hit the nail on the head.



    Essentially, race is just a matter of perception, applied to a massive range of variety within the human phenome. Other than some mostly irrelevant loose correlations between axes within that variety (which could be call races), there is no real basis for any races.



    The only thing, then, that matters in the question of race, is what race people think that they are (and I guess, to some extent, what race other people think they are, though its not polite to say so).



    I look forward to the day when questionaires have the following categories and choices of answer:
    Nationality: Human

    Race: Human

    Gender: Human

    Place Of Birth: Humanland



    Then we can start discriminating against the idiots instead.


  • Considered Harmful

    @eViLegion said:

    Then we can start discriminating against the idiots instead.

    Like the people who think humanland is a place?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @DrPepper said:

    I understand the purpose of this questionaire -- to ensure that government money does not go exclusively to priviliged white people only; to ensure that everyone can get equal access without regarding some abstract notion of their "ethnicity" (whatever that might mean).
    It's awkward. The government desires to not be making things worse by allocating money in stupid ways that reinforce bad old stereotypes, a largely laudable goal, but in order to do that they have to collect statistics on what is actually happening to their money. (The things to compare are the broad-brush statistics for the population — possibly with divisions against income quartiles — against the aggregate statistics for applicants, and that in turn against the aggregate statistics for actual awards. This allows determining if the incentives and award process are largely fair.) Yet the very process of statistics gathering is rather objectionable in itself. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

    I hope the form states that the information is only used for aggregate statistical purposes; I see that on a number of forms round here…



  • @OzPeter said:

  • BFL - Black, Female, Large
  • BML - Black, Male, Large
  • BFS - Black, Female, Small
  • BMS - Black, Male, Small
  • CFL - Caucasian, Female, Large
  • CFS - Caucasian, Female, Small
  • CML - Caucasian, Male, Large
  • CMS - Caucasian, Male, Small
  •  

    More WTFs:

    1. "Black" - I thought that in contemporary United States that "Black" was considered pejorative and the PC term was "African-American"?
    2. "Caucasian" - I have paler skin than pretty much anyone else I know other than albinos. But as far as I know my ancestry is Anglo-Celt, I doubt I have any connection to the Caucasus region. If the form uses "Black", why can't it use "White" (even though we're actually pale pink)?
    3. How would you answer if the company is privately-owned by two people in equal shares, and they fall into different categories? A small company formed by two business partners, or by a married couple, doesn't seem particularly outlandish and I thought even the United States was getting less allergic to the idea that people of different ancestries could marry each other?

    I remember reading about the confusion someone from Spain who moved to the US had with these sort of forms, particularly when having to choose between Hispanic and European.


     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Paddles said:

    @OzPeter said:

  • BFL - Black, Female, Large
  • BML - Black, Male, Large
  • BFS - Black, Female, Small
  • BMS - Black, Male, Small
  • CFL - Caucasian, Female, Large
  • CFS - Caucasian, Female, Small
  • CML - Caucasian, Male, Large
  • CMS - Caucasian, Male, Small
  •  

    More WTFs:

    1. "Black" - I thought that in contemporary United States that "Black" was considered pejorative and the PC term was "African-American"?
    2. "Caucasian" - I have paler skin than pretty much anyone else I know other than albinos. But as far as I know my ancestry is Anglo-Celt, I doubt I have any connection to the Caucasus region. If the form uses "Black", why can't it use "White" (even though we're actually pale pink)?
    3. How would you answer if the company is privately-owned by two people in equal shares, and they fall into different categories? A small company formed by two business partners, or by a married couple, doesn't seem particularly outlandish and I thought even the United States was getting less allergic to the idea that people of different ancestries could marry each other?

    I remember reading about the confusion someone from Spain who moved to the US had with these sort of forms, particularly when having to choose between Hispanic and European.


    1. Only among some people.  In particular, African-descended people who don't trace lineage theoretically via slavery (that is to say, recent African immigrants, or Caribbean ones, for example) don't want to be called African-American, because they see *that* as a pejorative term!

    2. Who knows, but it's the term.  Nobody cares whether it's accurate.  This leads to humor like white immigrants from South Africa being "African-American."

    3.  Declare the minority person to own 51% of the company, basically by making sure that person owns at least one more share than 50%.

     

     

  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @DrPepper said:

    "Caucasian" is an interesting term.
    It's a catch-all for a certain sub-group of the population.



    For example, in which group of the OP's would you put a:

    1. White Englishman (CM*)
    2. White American (CM*)
    3. White Australian (CM*)





      Now wonder why they have geographic groupings in some of the rest of the choices.


  • @FrostCat said:

    In particular, African-descended people who don't trace lineage theoretically via slavery (that is to say, recent African immigrants, or Caribbean ones, for example) don't want to be called African-American, because they see *that* as a pejorative term!
     

    So, are Republicans going to perjoratively call Obama "African-American"?



  •  @eViLegion said:

    @DrPepper said:
    A better questionaire would be "I think that I belong to a group of people that was discriminated against in the past for some unjustified reason" (yes or no) and leave it at that.

    You've totally hit the nail on the head.



    Essentially, race is just a matter of perception, applied to a massive range of variety within the human phenome. Other than some mostly irrelevant loose correlations between axes within that variety (which could be call races), there is no real basis for any races.



    The only thing, then, that matters in the question of race, is what race people think that they are (and I guess, to some extent, what race other people think they are, though its not polite to say so).



    I look forward to the day when questionaires have the following categories and choices of answer:
    Nationality: Human

    Race: Human

    Gender: Human

    Place Of Birth: Humanland



    Then we can start discriminating against the idiots instead.

     

    Any time you have resources, you have ownership. Anytime you have ownership, you have the corporate. Anytime you have the corporate, you have nationality.
    Any time you have distinction between people, you have race. Anytime you have race, you have preferential treatment.

    Sure, the native americans didn't think they owned anything, however they felt just fine plopping their tents where-ever. You might say they pretty much owned everything, because when rival tribes fought, they fought over resources. A fight over resources demands the concept of ownership. Then pilgrims came and pretty much acted the same way, plopping down their houses where-ever.

    Heck, there's a bird in my attic that just plopped it's nest there. It didn't ask me if I owned this house, so now it owns that section of the attic until I assert my ownership and throw its nest out. But I'm the benevolent type, so I allow it to live there.

    Believing there will ever be some form of utopia where nobody owns anything is a dillusion, one you share with your friends the rioters and looters.



  • So the NFL is owned by a large female native american?



  •  I know that, to get a contract with the State of Pennsylvania (at least from a programming/project management standpoint), it is greatly beneficial for your company to be minority-owned.  It's not uncommon for local consulting companies to name the wife of the owner as the true owner so that the company is "minority-owned".  Yeah, the wife then is required to show up and do "work" at the company, but that is reported on by the company IIRC.  (Been out of consulting for about 7 years; got tired of the politics and instability.)



  • @xaade said:

    Any time you have resources, you have ownership. Anytime you have ownership, you have the corporate. Anytime you have the corporate, you have nationality.
    Any time you have distinction between people, you have race. Anytime you have race, you have preferential treatment.

    Sure, the native americans didn't think they owned anything, however they felt just fine plopping their tents where-ever. You might say they pretty much owned everything, because when rival tribes fought, they fought over resources. A fight over resources demands the concept of ownership. Then pilgrims came and pretty much acted the same way, plopping down their houses where-ever.

    Heck, there's a bird in my attic that just plopped it's nest there. It didn't ask me if I owned this house, so now it owns that section of the attic until I assert my ownership and throw its nest out. But I'm the benevolent type, so I allow it to live there.

    Believing there will ever be some form of utopia where nobody owns anything is a dillusion, one you share with your friends the rioters and looters.

    Unlimited (or effectively unlimited) resources would break that model. Who can say what science will bring us in the future?



    Why do you think I am friends with rioters and looters? How does that logically follow? I'm generally in favour of not destroying things and ruining other peoples days out of petulance.



    [b]De[/b]lusion. :o)



  • @eViLegion said:

    Unlimited (or effectively unlimited) resources would break that model. Who can say what science will bring us in the future?

    Problem: only about 10,000 people can live on the shores of Lake Washington. Only 50,000 people can attend a Daft Punk concert. How do unlimited resources fix these problems?

    Some things just have inherent value.



  • @Jayman said:

     I know that, to get a contract with the State of Pennsylvania (at least from a programming/project management standpoint), it is greatly beneficial for your company to be minority-owned.  It's not uncommon for local consulting companies to name the wife of the owner as the true owner so that the company is "minority-owned".  Yeah, the wife then is required to show up and do "work" at the company, but that is reported on by the company IIRC.  (Been out of consulting for about 7 years; got tired of the politics and instability.)

    I've worked for a company that was owned in such a manner. It was pretty openly talked about. They even managed their total employees to stay "Small", subcontracting out positions to SAIC, CACI, and the like.

    I've also seen, at least twice, times when a MWBE was select for a bid, and turned around and hired someone else who had also bid on the project, but didn't have MWBE Status. The first time I knew the guy who ended up getting the contract, so I also know he charged the same as his original bid. The second time, I know the winning bid was about 20% higher.

    Right or wrong, I understand what they are trying to do with MWBE preferences, but it doesn't seem to me that it works out in practice.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @cdosrun said:

    Right or wrong, I understand what they are trying to do with MWBE preferences, but it doesn't seem to me that it works out in practice.

    Like anything else, people figure out the rules and game them.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Problem: only about 10,000 people can live on the shores of Lake Washington.
    Solution: dimension steppers. Or, more seriously, improved transportation that makes other places comparably attractive to the shores of Lake Washington, or improved building tech allowing people to live closer together and still feel private, or maybe something that shrinks you down when you get home so you can live in a shoebox. The 'problem' is your lack of vision.
    @blakeyrat said:
    Only 50,000 people can attend a Daft Punk concert.
    That's not ever going to be a problem.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Problem: only about 10,000 people can live on the shores of Lake Washington. Only 50,000 people can attend a Daft Punk concert. How do unlimited resources fix these problems?

    Some things just have inherent value.

     

    Advanced projection technology (i.e. holograms) could render "attending a concert" (almost) obsolete, just like online shopping and banking has made "going to the store" almost obsolete.

    Next example!

     



  • You're missing out on what truly creates value. Productivity and demand creates value, not resources. We've shown we can cultivate the land given almost any condition to produce food and create food that can grow under any condition. Then why are people in Africa starving? Because it takes effort to deliver the technology and skill to do so. No matter how unlimited the physical resources are, the human resource will always be limited, because if you introduce more humans, you introduce more demand, and the limitation stays relatively fixed.

    Besides that, you have the desire to own. So even if we had the technology to turn dust into gold, somebody would own that technology so they could keep the value of gold high. We already see that a certain company owns enough diamonds to make diamonds worthless. They artificially limit the supply.

    And even if you eliminate greed through some biological tampering (because laws won't), you still have the first problem.

    So no. Some Eutopia built upon the unlikely elimination of resource limitation will never come to light, because we'll always have a limitation on the human resource.



  • @xaade said:

    Eutopia
    Is that the utopia that results from the EU?

     



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    @xaade said:

    Eutopia
    Is that the utopia that results from the EU?

     

    They hope so, but it's not really happening.

     


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