The visualization was confusing for me at first. It's important to realize that if <1% of a group is in the 1% there is a fair chance that they are not the ones bringing in the wealth. Instead they have married into wealth. The darkness of the squares is much more informative then the size of the squares.
In some ways I feel the graphic is misleading since I'm not horribly interested in what groups happen into the 1%, and much more interested in what groups create the 1%.
I used to think this and it's not true. The takeaway is to when you interact with people think about what your interaction is doing to the other person, on many levels.
Feeling bad is A) crappy and B) not productive.
Whatever you do when you read an article like this is you shouldn't feel bad about being male, and you shouldn't feel bad about the fact that you are a privileged class. You should recognize the ways that privilege can cause the people around you to be uncomfortable and then avoid doing those things. There isn't a list of actions you can take, other then treat everybody in a way that makes them feel welcome. Nobody wants to be leered at in a technical setting, nobody wants to be groped in a classroom (true story), and everybody wants to be treated like they are your peer.
You're thinking about the word privilege in the wrong way. When you use the term in a social justice setting you need to stop thinking about all the possible meanings and focus on a very few specific ones. (Think of the word in the same way you think of class when you are talking about programming, it has a specific meaning, trying to make privilege mean more then it does makes you look like you are trying to argue semantics).
When we talk about privilege in a social justice setting you want to think about the privilege of being the default. Ignore every other privilege and think about that one in particular. You point out all the downsides of that privilege in your post, which are all true and valid, which is why calling whiteness and maleness a privilege breaks our brains a bit. It's not unadulterated good, there are a lot of bad things that come about due to the default of maleness and masculinity.
Lets look at the idea that you put forward about Weakness, how in women it's ok, and in males it's not ok.
In males it's not ok because it violates the default maleness that is expected (a negative aspect of the default maleness), and in females it is ok because it goes along with the !default of femaleness.
When you start thinking of privilege not as things that you get for being male, but about expectations of the world, what we view the default as, and what we view the other as, the idea that male privilege could be bad for males and females makes more sense. In a lot of ways the word privilege is a crappy way to put it, because it makes us think about things that are privileges in our lives, not the privilege of being the default.
In some ways the solution falls out of just knowing that it is a problem. If you think about it during your interactions with other people, then you can avoid the harmful things that could be said.
The reality of male privilege is that it's so pervasive in our community (in many communities) that even a little bit of acknowledgment that it might exist, and the males in that communities trying to lessen the harm that it creates can make a huge difference in making it less an issue.
I wonder how much of this acknowledgement can be done effectively as a group vs. as individuals. It seems like individuals can change their behavior very well this way, which eventually trickles to the community, but I've come to be a bit disheartened on the group side.
In a thread not long ago, I made a comment calling out an article (of an article about Steve Jobs, not gender) for expressing a (to me) particularly exasperating form of the "pedestal" side of female-discouragement. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229502) If I recall correctly, the score of my comment fluctuated a bit before hitting 10, then going back down to 2. I didn't find any of the responses particularly thoughtful, but clearly it is a contentious issue.
A number of recent call-outs by women about conferences seem to indicate that accusations of sexism without 100% proof of sexist don't fly in our community, much as anything without 100% proof tends to fall flat. However, one of the most frustrating parts of sexism (and related problems) is that they are subtle and often subconscious. This discourages me.
I think community acknowledgment is basically useless honestly. I think it comes down to individuals needing to understand privilege and how it affects them and the groups they are a part of. Then the individual has to take it upon themselves to make a change that matter to the people around them, and the people they want to have around them.
If individuals don't take responsibility for their actions groups can never change.
You appreciate not having to right click? Right click is on your mouse, where as in order to use the ribbon you have to go up to the top. This seems like pulling the most useful feature out from under your finger to duplicate it somewhere further away. How does this make sense?
Because generally you don't merely right click. You right click and then have to navigate a small menu of options to find the one you want. The big button on the ribbon is a huge target and is generally easier for users to hit and click.
And for some reason, I personally find right-clicking with a track-pad much more difficult than right clicking with a mouse, although I haven't taken a lot of time to analyze why as I generally use a desktop machine with mouse.
At least at Amazon you are free to change projects after a year.
Any large tech company is probably so in need of coders that the idea of having to let one go because they were unhappy with what they were currently doing is repugnant.
Is this some sort of joke? This is usually a company wide policy at any large software company. Amazon is full of in-competent middle managers. Amazon as a company has no respect for software engineers and their quality of life. They are not in the same league as Google! No comparison. No self-respecting engineer lasts at Amazon for more than a few years. It is not a company where engineers go and build careers like Google, and heck even Microsoft. They have great top level leadership, and know how to suck blood and life out of their developers. That's about it.
I worked there my friend, and know a ton of people who did and still do. Ask any one of them. One of the missions of a VP/SVP back in the day was to make Amazon a place where engineers go and build careers, and not quit in 2/3 years. Go check out reviews of Amazon on Glassdoor. They celebrate frugality. Engineers don't even get free pop. It is not an engineer's paradise like Google. Can you even a run a show like this in the valley, and expect top engineers to work for you? Free food is almost the norm now here in the valley.
In some ways I feel the graphic is misleading since I'm not horribly interested in what groups happen into the 1%, and much more interested in what groups create the 1%.