... hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded -- or totally necessary -- Oxford comma, ...

... Seriously? Are we really going to do this?

Possible revision: "Cortana now admits to reading all of your emails."

Other than someone says 'we need more women in STEM', why do we ACTUALLY NEED more women in STEM?

Off the top of my head, I'd say it's because it's better for the industry and the field of study.

• Because a demographically diverse group is going to bring a greater range of ideas and perspectives to the table.
• Because encouraging the presence and visibility of women within the field helps ensure that those who choose to be there are accepted as a relatively normal occurrence and therefore given credence for their ideas and work, rather than judged based upon the novelty of heir gender.
• Because if an entire intellectual pursuit builds itself up around self-selection of an unrelated trait like gender, it's symptomatic of other self-selected biases which are similarly counter-productive and not in any way relevant to the pursuit itself.

It's fundamentally better for the industry and profession as a whole. For a field that tends to pride itself upon its egalitarian ethos and the importance of logic, the idea that an irrelevant criteria (in this discussion, gender) is so wildly over-represented is wildly hypocritical.

We need more women garbage men too, but you aren't fucking whining about that are you? More women in STEM is not going to get you laid or fix your social issues that prevent you from getting a date.

You accurately noted that there is a wildly disproportionate representation of men amongst garbage collectors and yet that doesn't bother me in the least. That's not because it's unglamorous or because I think it's beneath my notice, but rather because I don't think that physical act of garbage collection will be improved through fresh insight, voices, or perspectives.

I will admit that I would like for there to be at least a few women in garbage collection, just as an indicator that, "No, seriously, 50% of the population can actually choose to do whatever work they damn well please, just like the other 50%," but that does not improve garbage collection itself, just society as a whole. Since it isn't improving the actual practice of garbage collection, let's set that aside as "SJW bullshit", shall we? I can accept that.

I absolutely do think that the logistics of how to handle garbage collection on a city- or region-wide level is a field that can benefit from fresh insight and voices. I know nothing about the sanitation services management industry, but I strongly suspect that it's run by old white men. Rather than gender being the issue, in this case, I'd be more concerned about class, race, and representative makeup of the public being served.

That's why your counterpoint is in no way related to the topic of hand.

To be fair, the Drupal date module isn't just "the simplest helper module."

Off the top of my head, those 14k lines of code also include:

• a system-wide API for other modules to reuse - the most important part
• a few administrative UI variants
• hooks into several common extensions including
  • Context
  • Views
  • Feeds
  • Migrate
  • Tokens
  • ... and I'm probably forgetting several others
• tests for each
• Markups and styles for front-end
• hooks to override any of the above
• administrative options to override most of the above without a single line of code

It's not quite the same thing as a WP plugin that lets you add Date fields to posts.

I disagree.

We are actually big clothed apes.

Speak for yourself.

The reason this works particularly well in baseball, basketball and hockey is the schedule. You have 162 games a year in MLB, for example. In the NBA and NHL, it's 82 games. That's a relatively substantial sample - each game only accounts for roughly 0.6 or 1.2% of the season record.

The NFL, on the other hand, has a 16 game season. A team having a particularly good or bad game carries 10 times the weight it does in baseball (just going off the percentage of the season's games). Also, unlike baseball, football's playoffs are single-elimination.

The reason analytics aren't as directly relevant to football is exactly the reason that I enjoy it immensely.

---

Legend for our friends abroad:
MLB = Major League Baseball
NHL = National Hockey League
NBA = National Basketball Association
NFL = National Football** League

** - yes, we're talking about American football, rather than the game known internationally as the game in which you kick a ball with your foot.

... the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated.

Can we keep our units/ratios consistent?

... the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about one-in-250,000, NASA stated.

When you're regurgitating statistics that are generally considered good news - such as the decreased chance of global catastrophe - doesn't it seem reasonable to make those statistics intelligible?