Just small point all my excitable friends: the gym is not being restricted to Muslims, it is being restricted to women. The women that asked for it were Muslim, so they probably had some cultural and maybe even religious reasons, but who is not to say they, like a lot of other women, felt uncomfortable with a bored DurianJoe on the Eliptical ogling them?

It is indeed an intolerant world where someone's request for a service was judged on their motivations, not the request's reasonableness. What if it had been Weight Watchers Club members that had made the request-- would they be sternly lectured on the need for them to not impose their body-image issues on the rest of the campus, and threaten the campus with loss of tax-exemptions because it made an effort to accommodate their modesty? Would BroadSheet commentary fill up with furious denunciations of the obese and all their evil works?

And if modesty is the issue, then it will always be a matter of drawing lines. Co-ed showers? Toilets? C'mon, don't impose your religious beliefs on the rest of us.

And finally, it is a little-used gym, and for limited times. Can anybody produce a single person who has been discommoded over this?

Having no little experience in development, here and in the third world, I have a hard time suppressing my cruel cynical laughter. Right, what a woman hoping to start up a goat-sitting service in some African hell-hole needs is training on how to write a business plan and create a marketing strategy. And mentorship from a business school professor who hasn't actually done any business in decades if ever.

Every real entrepreneur I ever met laughs hard and bitterly at business plans. They are a bureaucratic check-off item to secure a bank and especially government loan, a piece of meaningless drudgery, and any businessperson that ever refers to them thereafter in the running of their affairs won't be a business person for long. Similarly with marketing training-- a limited amount of money can be made selling sizzle, but if you ain't got the beef, at the end of the day, the business will fizzle.

But is sure is nice to see Goldman Sachs willing to share their entrepreneurial brilliance; as we all know, they make all their money with innovation, risk-taking, and flexibility. And have a deep understanding of goat-sitting derivatives, no doubt. What it really is, is patronizing: what these women really need is training, see, they need to understand all those fundamental business basics that are second nature to investment bankers. Because they are stupid and ignorant, unlike American investment bankers (sub-prime derivatives anyone?)

It really isn't all that hard to understand. What makes poor people poor? They don't have any money. What do they need to stop being poor? Money. What entrepreneurs need is capital, purely that, in any society. And they need capital appropriate to their circumstances-- microcredit can go a very long way in virtually cash (and capital)-less societies, because in those economies, what appears to be micro to us is only because we are looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. For a family living mostly on subsistence activities who might see $200 in cash over a year, a $20 or $40 cash loan is not microcredit at all.

And like all business loans, guess what? There is risk; some will fail, some will be marginal, and some will work out very well. The only real mitigation against the risk is to make the wide enough without diluting the size of the loans.

Little has pissed me off in recent years as the the attempt of the microcredit culties to import the model to rich societies. See, it works because it's women doing it, in a circle no less, so if we make them attend hours of meetings at which a bunch of people who have never run a business (other than a microcredit cult-type business anyway) lecture them on a lot of moonshine, and ultimately loan them after they go through plenty of patronizing hoops what amounts to at best less than a quarter of a welfare cheque, somehow this will springboard them out of poverty. Riiiight.

Anyway, it is once again the same old tired cliche "Give a woman a fish, you've fed her for a day; teach her to fish, you've fed her for life." Uh, howabout you give her a fishing rod? And a boat, and an icebox, and perhaps trade-rules that don't viciously discriminate against her, and perhaps limits on drag-line fishing fleets that are vacuuming up all the fish and destroying the spawning beds in the first place? Naw, that would be, like, actually expensive, let's give her a marketing plan and our shareholders some warm fuzzies instead.

The patronizing attitude is nauseating. Gah.

In a successful relationship, obviously men should have to supply a "pickle jar" too.

Howabout this: even though we can actually dress ourselves and did it for years before meeting you, once in a while, standing in front of the washing machine and waving our hands helplessly as to what should go with what and at what temperature, should seriously improve Saturday night sex and make you love us all the more, right? Or at least asking which tie goes better with this suit? will keep you feeling valued?

Truth is, you young'uns out there, yes, this sort of stratagem helps in the early stages, be it pickle jars or colour coordination. But take it from a long-married person, while ego-building your spouse actually is important in the first few years, it is no foundation at all in the long run. After a decade or so, no matter what, the only lies you will be able to tell your spouse will be those that s/he knows are lies but has made it clear that they want to hear.