Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

In a world where Tech Bros fall over each other to out bigot each other, it is refreshing to see the Python Foundation telling the National Science Foundation telling the NSF to put their $1,500,000.00 where the moon don't shine, because the grant demands that the organization cease all anti-discrimination activities.

I looked at recent data on executive compensation at the Foundation, and no one there got more than $200,000/year in 2023, yet more evidence that Dan Ariely,'s research on compensation, which shows that excessive pay reduces performance, is true.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

"These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

By way of perspective, that $1.5 million is about ⅓ of their annual operating budget.

The Python Foundation is a  501(c)(3) not-for profit, and donations are tax deductible, and they manage thousands of volunteers working on development of the eponymous cross-platform FOSS programming language.

I have no opinion as to its merits as a programming language, but it is very widely used. (I'm not a programmer)

Skeet of the Day

You’re allowed to argue that black people and women are genetically inferior. But you’re NOT allowed to argue they are NOT inferior because that’s divisive. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

[image or embed]

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 10, 2025 at 2:26 PM

The Naval Academy has to suppress anti-racist books, but must keep racist books.

How is this not f%$#ing racist? 

This expands a similar purge recently at the Naval Academy library, in Maryland. Last month, civilian Navy officials, following orders originating from Mr. Hegseth, pulled from shelves books including one that critiqued “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 text that argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people. But the academy kept “The Bell Curve” itself on its shelves.

Funny, Innit?

Following the end of World War II, doctor's in the then Soviet Union became overwhelmingly women.

This was rapidly followed by a loss of pay and socioeconomic status for doctors.

We are Now seeing the same thing with college now that women make up the bulk of college students in the United States.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

………

While many of these reasons address why college is less appealing to boys, almost none of them address what has actually CHANGED in recent decades to cause the drop.

Many people cite the lure of trade schools and blue collar jobs as more appealing to men, but when you consider that blue collar jobs have gone down from 31.2% of total employment in 1970 to 13.6% today- why would men suddenly be more attracted to blue collar work compared to an era when these jobs were more plentiful?

As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—

As an aside here, listening to or reading Freakonomics is a recipe for being stupider. (Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)

As I showed over 15 years ago, there's folks go out of their way to twist facts so as to come up with a counterintuitive result.

This is, as Mount Everest is, and Alma Cogan isn't.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

The example of veteranarians is then given where make attendence dropped from 89% to 22.4% between 1969 and 2009.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement- college is stupid and unnecessary. A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college.

Gee, imagine that.

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Today's Must Read

Paul Campos relates how he successfully prosecuted his discrimination against the University of Colorado Law School, getting a significant settlement from both the school, and its Dean, Critical Race Theory specialist  Lolita Buckner Inniss, (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.") hung themselves out to dry by admitting in various permanent media that they were discriminating, and that they did not care.

I’ve settled my lawsuit against my employer, the University of Colorado, and Lolita Buckner Inniss, the current dean of the law school, where I’ve been on the faculty for the past 34 years.

In the settlement agreement, the university denies having done anything wrong, but, as always, actions speak louder than words.   In addition to paying all of my legal fees from two years of litigation, the university paid me a substantial sum to not take the case to trial, removed Dean Inniss as my supervisor for whatever time may be left in her tenure as Dean, and made various other concessions regarding the conditions of my employment going forward. 

………

Part I of the story describes the sheer absurdity of a law school dean who claims to be an expert on discrimination in America responding to a report of such discrimination from a faculty member by insisting something like that couldn’t be happening at the institution she had arrived at eleven months earlier.  It lays out the astonishing professional incompetence Lolita Buckner Inniss displayed when she retaliated against me in such a blatant way that my own lawyer was literally incredulous when I told him about it, because he was certain no lawyer could ever be so careless as to send the self-damning email that the Dean sent me.  That documented retaliation made both this lawsuit and its costly resolution possible.

Part II is about how bureaucratic mechanisms, such as peer review committees, can be co-opted to shield from public view discrimination based on petty personal grudges, and clearly illegal sex discrimination.

Part III is about the consequences for someone inside a major research university when he tries to bring the gross financial mismanagement of his own school within that university to the attention of central university administrators, whose own negligence has allowed that mismanagement to go on for many years. 

………

Employment discrimination law in this country is extremely defendant-friendly.  It’s usually very hard for plaintiffs to prove that bad treatment from their employers was a product of illegal motives, and it’s also difficult in these cases to prove that the employer is liable for enough damages to make these cases worth pursuing.  And of course people don’t want to sue their employers because they want to keep their jobs.

Because of academic tenure, I’m in an unusually privileged position in regard to the last factor, but like most employees who sue their employers for discrimination, I was still going to have trouble proving that I was being treated badly for illegal as opposed to legal reasons, and to prove just what damages I’d incurred as a result.

This is where Dean Inniss inadvertently came to my legal rescue. She engaged in a series of egregious retaliatory acts after my lawyer sent the university a letter putting it on notice that we were considering filing a lawsuit.  First, she kicked me off an important committee that I had worked to get assigned to precisely because remaining on it was critical to my professional advancement.  In an email she told me she was kicking me off the committee because I was complaining about being discriminated against.  After I complained to her about this retaliation, she removed me from teaching a class because I was purportedly making racist and sexist statements in that class.  My lawyer then let the university know that the law school had complete recordings of the class in question, which we had reviewed in detail, and which no one at the law school had ever even looked at.  This pretty much put an end to that rationale, and revealed it for what it was: a libelous pretext for continuing to punish me for having reported the dean’s discrimination in the first place.

It really is a complete mind-f%$# just how incompetent, and how petty this all is, particularly given that the Dean is (allegedly) an expert in discrimination related law.

This exceeds my wildest expectations, and given my existing views on the academy, that is a pretty high bar to clear.

See also parts II and parts III of his adventures with academe.

Once Again, It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

Once again, we have nameless "algorithms" blamed for discriminating against minorities.

We have seen this time and time again.

Intelligent (and I am using that term advisedly) systems provide a means for bigots to get their racism on without fear of repercussions, so they do.

We see this with Facebook employment ads, Gypsy cab apps, and Airbnb.  The unspoken part of their allure is helping their customers discriminate:

Workday stands accused of building algorithms that have resulted in bias against Black applicants in their 40s, according to a lawsuit.

Launched earlier this week in the Northern District Court of California, the case alleges that the HR and payroll SaaS firm "unlawfully offers an algorithm-based applicant screening system that determines whether an employer should accept or reject an application for employment based on the individual's race, age, and/or disability."

The Register has asked Workday to comment.

………

"The selection tools marketed by Workday to its customers allows these customers to manipulate and configure them in a discriminatory manner to recruit, hire, and onboard employees. Workday's products process and interpret an applicant's qualifications and recommend whether the applicant should be accepted or rejected," the documents add.

………

"We engage in a risk-based review process throughout our product lifecycle to help mitigate any unintended consequences, as well as extensive legal reviews to help ensure compliance with regulations," a spokesperson said.

When they say, "We engage in a risk-based review process throughout our product lifecycle to help mitigate any unintended consequences," they mean  "We engage in a risk-based review process throughout our product lifecycle to help mitigate any unintended consequences FOR US."

There is Some Hope

In response to the Supreme Court decision requiring Maine to fund religious schools, the state formerly known as that other part of Massachusetts is now requiring that all schools that receive state funding to not discriminate against LGBTQ students.

As such, the religious schools in question will still not get funding, because they love their bigotry more than they love their money:

What a week so far for conservatives. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Maine law that prohibited religious private schools from receiving taxpayer dollars. On Thursday, it invalidated a New York State gun safety law limiting the public carry of firearms. And on Friday, it overturned Roe v. Wade. The outcome in these cases was not surprising. The court has ruled in favor of religious litigants in an overwhelming number of cases; the gun case’s outcome was clear from the oral argument before the justices in November; and the court’s draft abortion decision was leaked in May.

What is surprising is how little the 6-to-3 decision in the Maine case, Carson v. Makin, will matter practically. And the reason offers a glimpse of hope for those who worry about a future dominated by the court’s conservative supermajority — including the many Americans troubled by the court’s decision in the gun case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Let’s start with the Carson case. Anticipating this week’s decision, Maine lawmakers enacted a crucial amendment to the state’s anti-discrimination law last year in order to counteract the expected ruling. The revised law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and it applies to every private school that chooses to accept public funds, without regard to religious affiliation.

The impact was significant: The two religious schools at issue in the Carson case, Bangor Christian Schools and Temple Academy, said that they would decline state funds if, as Maine’s new law requires, accepting such funds would require them to change how they operate or alter their “admissions standards” to admit L.G.B.T.Q. students.

Nice move, but you've only bought a few years.  

The Supreme Court has already made it clear that it wants to force public funding of discrimination in Fulton v. Philadelphia.

Maine should use the time that they have to replace their program with public schools in rural areas.

A Feature, Not a Bug

A study has shown that Facebook's advertising algorithms are a bigotry machine.

While a part of this is the inherent bias of the programmers, and a blithe attitude about the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular, but a bigger part is because pandering to people basest inclinations is profitable.

You wave a wand, and call it tech, and suddenly not renting to black people (Air BnB), not giving rides to black people, and Facebook's ads as shown below, but (because it's all "science" and computers) it's all good:

How exactly Facebook decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience.

………

The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, [what they do after the customer fills out their ad preferences] the process of ad delivery, rather than on ad targeting. Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing:

Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive. [emphasis mine]

Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.

For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.

………

In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.”

Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.

So, not only does Facebook allow advertisers to discriminate, bigotry is baked in their whole "Social Graph".

This is not surprise.

Even if Facebook weren't evil, and they are very evil, this is a part and parcel of the whole techno-utopian delusion that permeates the whole misbegotten industry.

New Jersey Does the Right Thing

I know that this sounds like a typo, but the Garden State has passed a law banning cashless shops and restaurants.

This has increasingly become an issue as shops have gone cashless in order to refuse service to the unbanked and homeless:

On Monday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill banning cashless retail stores and restaurants in the Garden State. Murphy's signature makes New Jersey the second state in the US to ban cashless stores, after Massachusetts banned them in 1978.

More recently, New Jersey's move follows that of Philadelphia, which banned cashless stores earlier this month. Philadelphia's legislation was a reaction to a growing number of stores that only accept credit cards or require customers to pay with an app, like Amazon's new Amazon Go stores.

Ars contacted Amazon for comment on the new law, but the company did not respond.

Much like Philadelphia's new law, New Jersey's law makes an exception for parking garages and car rental companies, where a credit card is required upfront for incidentals. There is also an exception carved out for some airport stores, according to NJ.com.

Proponents of cashless stores say that they prevent theft, speed up customer convenience, and are generally more modern. Opponents say that cashless stores unfairly disadvantage people who don't or can't have credit cards and who don't want the fees associated with prepaid debit cards.

According to NJ.com, State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty said in a statement that "Many people don't have access to consumer credit, and any effort by retail establishments to ban the use of cash is discriminatory towards those people."

It's a good start.

Many of the so-called "innovations" coming out of tech seem to have as an unspoken selling point the ability to discriminate.

We've seen this in AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, etc.

I'd like to see this on the ballot in California.

It Really Is All about the Spoils, Isn't It?

You know, maybe if more time was spent reigning in the excesses of capitalism, and less effort spent on dividing the spoils of the system, we would have a more functional society:

California Democrat Maxine Waters, the first woman and first African-American to chair the House Financial Services Committee, is planning to use her new power to push for more women and minorities in the top ranks of corporate America.

Some firms are panicking at the prospect of new public scrutiny, according to lobbyists, who say that while companies won’t openly fight Democrats' moves to promote diversity, many are uneasy about the prospect of government getting directly involved in their hiring decisions.

………

One financial industry source who previously worked for a Democratic member said: “Very, very few have been ahead of the game” when it comes to improving diversity.

"Now companies are focused like a laser on identifying top African-American talent with Congressional Black Caucus relationships to help them understand and mitigate the striking lack of diversity within their corporations,” the person said.

They look at finance, where the self described "geniuses" nearly blew up the world a decade ago, and their first concern is that the rewards of being a parasite are not being evenly distributed.

To quote Lambert Strether, "One does not improve a tapeworm; one removes it."

Not Surprised

It appears that Uber has systematically structured its pay system to underpay women:

Uber Technologies Inc. is being investigated by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a complaint about gender inequity, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, one of a series of federal probes of the ride-hailing giant, began last August and hasn’t been previously reported. EEOC investigators have been interviewing former and current Uber employees, as well as seeking documents from Uber officials, the people said. They are seeking information related to Uber’s hiring practices, pay disparity and other matters as they relate to gender, one person said.

………

Uber has struggled to overcome a reputation for being permissive of chauvinism that was largely sparked by former software engineer Susan Fowler’s viral blog post in early 2017.

………

Last week, Uber pushed out its human-resources chief, Liane Hornsey, following an internal probe of her department’s handling of racial discrimination claims. And Uber Chief Operating Officer Barney Harford, hired by Mr. Khosrowshahi from their former employer Expedia Group Inc., last week sent employees a letter of contrition after internal complaints that remarks he made were racially insensitive. The New York Times earlier reported on Mr. Harford. 

Uber abides.

You Have Got to be F%$#ing Kidding Me

pic.twitter.com/z8cyxrd693

— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) October 11, 2017

And then he sang, "I saw your boobs."


Notice the Slightly Uncomfortable Audience Reaction?

The story about Harvey Weinstein's long history of harassment and assault of women in Hollywood continues to get more horrifying.

It also gets weirder. Now we have an explanation for a Seth McFarlane joke at the 2013 Oscars, and basically it's him seizing the moral high ground.

You hear heard that right, "Seth McFarlane seizing the moral high ground."

Now THERE is a phrase I never expected to write.

He had been told in confidence by a friend what had been done to them, and given those constraints, he went after Weinstein with a joke:

As allegations against disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein pile up, more and more celebrities are coming forward to either confirm or deny their own preexisting knowledge about the situation.

On Wednesday, Seth MacFarlane explained the origins of a 2013 joke he made at Harvey Weinstein's expense during the announcement of Academy Award nominations.

MacFarlane cracked his joke immediately after he listed the nominees for supporting actress. "Congratulations," he said. "You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein," which got a considerable response from the room.

"In 2011, my friend and colleague Jessica Barth, with whom I worked on the ‘Ted’ films, confided in me regarding her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances," MacFarlane said in a statement on social media Wednesday. "She has since courageously come forward to speak out. It was with this account in mind that, when I hosted the Oscars in 2013, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a hard swing in his direction."

I still find it hard to believe that Seth F%$#ing McFarlane is seizing the moral high ground.

We are living in profoundly strange times.

Google Gives Us a New Definition of Chutzpah

The US Department of Labor is investigating Google for discriminating against women.

In response to a request for payroll data, Google has claimed that it's too expensive to collect the data.

This from a company that nets billions in profits, and which has automated search to a degree that would have been unimaginable only 3 decades ago.

It's like the man who murders his parents, and then asks for mercy because he is an orphan:

Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the US Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women.

Allegations of possible employment violations emerge at court hearing as part of lawsuit to compel company, a federal contractor, to provide compensation data

Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators’ ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women.

Noting Google’s nearly $28bn annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the US, DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company’s defense, saying, “Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water.”

The tense exchanges in a small San Francisco courtroom emerged in the final day of testimony in the most high-profile government trial to date surrounding the intensifying debate about the wage gap and gender discrimination in the tech industry.

The DoL first publicly accused Google of “systemic compensation disparities” during a hearing in April, saying a preliminary inquiry had found that the Mountain View tech firm underpays women across positions.

The current court battle stems from the DoL’s lawsuit filed against Google in January, accusing the company of violating federal laws by refusing to provide salary history and contact information of employees as part of a government audit. As a federal contractor, Google is required to comply with equal opportunity laws and allow investigators to review records.

That whole, "Don't be evil," thing is so last week, I guess.