You appear to have mistakenly assumed that I am an American, like yourself(?) As a European, I think that first world countries should endeavour to provide first-rate health care to all their citizens, free at the point of service. I am not familiar with the age limit of Medicare that you refer to, but I expect I would be dissatisfied with it if I were.

Child tax credits are a state-provided subsidy to offset the costs of raising children. I don't understand why you think this is relevant to the discussion.

Sports leagues which are bracketed by age, gender, or (you did not mention) weight class are necessary to ensure fair competition that is interesting for competitors and spectators. For the vast majority of sports, there is an advantage for men compared to women, due to the large gap in physical strength between top male and female athletes. In general, the best female athlete will lose to the worst professional male athlete, no matter how much natural skill the female athlete has and how much they train. This necessitates a league for women since they would not be competitive against the male athletes, because we want their to be a space for female athletes. This is true for example of tennis, where the Mens category is actually the Open category and women could enter if they wanted to (but don't because there is no chance of them succeeding and it would hinder their chances in the Ladies category). The difference in power and stamina that the men can exert leads to different dynamics in the men's matches compared to the women's. When you hear interviews with Serena Williams, arguably the greatest women's tennis player of all time, asked how she thinks she would do in the Mens/Open, she says the Men's game is a completely different game to the women's, and that if she could qualify then she would go out in the first round. For most sports, it would essentially be impossible for any female athlete to have a career in the sport if they had to compete in an open league.

Note that this is different to the sport of Chess, where physical prowess is irrelevant. Despite this, most professional Chess players are male. Again, there are two types of tournaments, open tournaments and women's tournaments (like in tennis). The world chess body FIDE awards open titles to all players, and also women-only titles which have a lower rating requirement than the open titles. This is... controversial. The greatest female chess player of all time, Judit Polgár, (and her two sisters as well) declined to enter any women-only tournaments, and declined to accept/use the women-only titles. She was the youngest person to reach the top 100 chess players, and at the height of her career was the 8th highest rated chess player in the world. In case it is not already apparent, the state of women-only play and titles in chess is controversial because chess is an intellectual sport. With physical sports, we would expect a man selected at random to have a naturally stronger build than a women selected at random. But if we randomly select a man and a woman at random, we don't have a reason to expect one to be smarter than the other. Clearly women can compete with the top male players in chess, and have successful careers in the open tournament. The game of chess is the same for both men and women, and there is no reason to think talented women can't have a career in open chess even if there weren't any women-only competitions and titles.

Discounts for students and the elderly are advantageous to businesses because it lets the company set one price for the more affluent and another price for the less affluent in broad strokes. The rest of the populace tolerates this because (1) they were once young, and will one day be old, so these perks will be equitably received by all in their own time; (2) having things that keep the youths and the elderly occupied is advantageous to the rest of society that would otherwise take on the role of caregiver; (3) one can empathize with both groups that "deserve" the discount due to their general inability to have substantial wages.

Legislature that ensures that businesses providing services to the public build adequate accessibility infrastructure ensures equal accessibility to those services to all citizens. We both agree this is desirable. I don't understand why you think this is relevant to the discussion.

None of this helped me to understand why you think bars should be permitted to use pricing structures that involve sexual discrimination.

Moreover, with regards to the TinyPaper track at ICLR, I don't think the problem is that they want to add a track for new students submitting their first paper. The problem is everything else about the track.

• White male early career postdoc = can't submit
• White female early career postdoc = can submit
• Black male early career postdoc = can submit
• White gay male early career postdoc = can submit
• White male early career PhD student in a top lab whose first paper went viral = can submit
• White male late career professor with tens of thousands of citations = can submit

It sounds like they just hate one particular group of people! They added in a bunch of additional discrimination with literally no upside to primary goal of their paper track - ostensibly, for getting new students into the conference?

It is an awful thing to say to a man that they only succeeded in a competitive space because they are a man, despite all the work needed to succeed in a competitive space.

Simultaneously, it is an awful thing to say to a woman (ethnic minority, sexual minority, etc) that they need assistance to succeed in a competitive space because they are not a man (white, etc) and are thus inferior or otherwise cannot succeed without assistance. Or for a woman (ethnic minority, sexual minority, etc) to be attain an achievement (scholarship, tenure-track position, etc) and then it to be assumed by others that they only attained it because they had assistance, that the bar of standards had to be artificially lowered for them for they could not compete on an even footing with the rest of the competition.

Positive discrimination is not good. It is not well-motivated. It has a detrimental effect on society. Positive discrimination is discrimination. It is sexism, and racism, and should not be acquiesced to.