It's already important, for various reasons. E.g. I love older electronics books where they explain things in a very thorough manner (maybe because they had more time?). But of course reading older books is full of traps, in some subjects you need to be more careful than when analyzing the output of an LLM.
My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.
It may not be a golden unicorn, but I find it is quite a lot better than providing support for the Windows laptops they used to buy from random department stores on rock-bottom sales... Nothing quite like a $200 PC laptop stocked with OEM bloatware
I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues.
I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues.
One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not.
At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.
> You could, for reasons I never entirely understood, make so much more money doing the same job in the US than anywhere else. [...] e.g. Europe.
It really, really depends. First, not every SE works at top companies, and even there the salary can vary much. Second, in Europe you can often choose your contract type - if you choose a permanent role, you surely earn less, but at the same time enjoy the level of social security your counterparts at FAANG can dream of. If you choose to be a contractor, the median will still be lower than in the US, but not that lower.
> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons
This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?
In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
> Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed.
There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect.
Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's?
My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.
> Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
It's an analogy: If the relationship isn't self-evident, then I chose a poor analogy.
> They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. ...
Would it be unfair to summarize this position as — ultimately — "yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's a problem for you and your family, not for me and mine"? (Perhaps we even leave out families, so that in life it's sauve qui peut, every man for himself?) The societal group-selection disadvantages of that position are obvious, I'd think — most military organizations recognize that sauve qui peut is a hallmark of defeat by others who have better unit cohesion, which comes in part by putting your shipmate's welfare on at least an equal footing with your own.
The short YouTube video I linked to is worth the time. TL;DR (paraphrasing Barry Switzer): Some people like to think that they hit a triple in life but conveniently forget that they were born and raised on second base, while some other people's antecedents were forced to bat with balsa wood yardsticks and to run with 50-pound weight vests — that is, if they were allowed to step up to the plate at all.
Have you been paying attention to who the US elected and the people who elected him? They definitely deny systemic racism and are here for ICE targeting non-white people.
Otherwise similarly situation people in the present are already being grouped together into categories and treated differently...undoing that is the work that needs doing.
If people were being treated differently in the present in large numbers, progressive efforts would be focused on enforcing anti-discrimination law rather than on remedial measures such as affirmative action.
Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist).
By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate.
It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)
The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.)
Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.
> It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.
100% disagree, I love being able to enjoy and learn about different cuisines, it's an opportunity to connect with people I wouldn't have otherwise. In my metro area there's Ethiopian, Oaxacan, Ukrainian, Yemeni, etc. If it weren't for the variety, eating out would have no appeal to me.
> And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.
Oh I'd love a heated argument over that! And I'm sure plenty of Americans, including a lot of protestants, would disagree with your conclusion, too.
On a more meaningful note, wouldn't it be wonderful to have an amalgamate with the best of these worlds - including sharing, socializing, addressing elders properly etc. and not littering.
I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.
And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.
So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.
I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen....
I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.
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