Messaging queues are a core part of a lot of high scale distributed systems (source - Twitter) You want enough queue space to handle the expected volume and then some. Assuming you have that, you don't need to instantly scale instances out to match the amount of messages, you just need to catch up before the queue space runs out.
Taking your statement as a legitimate point, I think the issue isn't that having a vagina means you should be treated differently (side point: not all women have vaginas; don't down vote me). In tech we like to think that everything is a meritocracy but we see countless examples where company culture has made it difficult to exist as a woman. Think of the numerous complaints from women working at Uber circa 2016-2017. Or the thousands of high profile #MeToo allegations. Men being in the dominant and default in tech means it's easier to get away with crap like that. Ensuring that women are adequately represented means that type of stuff is harder to get away with. If more equal representation makes workplaces less toxic, then it's worth it for that alone.
For example? Truly, I'm curious as to what the dysfunctional policies you're referring to? Absolutely agree the homelessness and housing are ridiculous. That said, California is something like the 5th largest economy in the world, produces a huge chunk of USAs food, has some of the greatest universities in the world and is home to some of the largest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity (not sure how I feel about that one). Not to say there aren't huge issues but it's not exactly a hellscape here.
One can assume, but I don't know if you watched the Twitter/Facebook congressional hearings last week but it doesn't seem like a high level of technical competency is required to work in government. Text attribution probably seems like magic to most folks without a stats background.
A dictionary approach is something I'd normally associate with offline attacks since online requires you go through the active system which should hopefully have some sort of rate-limits to prevent that. Offline attacks can be more brute-force and don't necessarily require pre-existing knowledge.
It obviously depends on your threat model. If you don't have any accounts with too sensitive information and you can stash the paper somewhere reasonably safe, then sure. My big issues with this are:
1) People suck at making their own passwords and this encourages bad passwords and password reuse.
2) The article admits that paper alone isn't good enough, but suggests that having "four password storage methods" is the optimal solution. That seems... unwieldy. Storing the most important (banking info, email) passwords in your head is a recipe for password reuse or getting locked out of your account.