Why Otel compared to prometheus+syslog+(favorite way to do request tagging, eg: MDC in slf4j)+grep?
Syslog is kinda a pain, but it's an hour of work and log aggregation is set up. Is the difference the pain of doing simple things with elastic compute and kubernetes?
Typically this is a subset of OTel that's being compared. Almost everything (aside from Datadog's proprietary stuff) is just smaller than OTel is, which is why it's often chosen for many different needs.
In my experience, it's often folks who have experience setting up metrics or log collection with something smaller (e.g., StatsD) and sometimes for purposes with less scope, who have the most frustration with OTel. All the concepts are different, carry different names, have different configs, have different quirks, etc. There's often an expectation that things will largely the same as before and that they can carry over the cursed knowledge they had from the other toolset.
I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief?
According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place.
I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Your comment about white people that didn't have anyone to do with slavery doesn't seem entirely correct. I'm one of those people (great grandparents were German or Scottish immigrants). But my mom's house is in a neighborhood where black people were explicitly prohibited from buying houses (it was on the deed at the time). And, loans from the government were red lined. Isn't that government collusion that benefitted only me and harmed black people? It didn't help Latinos or Japanese immigrants in the twenties. I'm not sure if that counts as having nothing to do with slavery. That impact seems directly correlated to slavery, although the dragnet could have impacted recent African immigrants in the 1920s.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
Say you inherit your mom’s house which is worth more as a result of historical redlining, and your wife inherit’s her mom’s house and it’s worth less. So there is some persistent economic disparity as a result of past actions. But both houses probably are worth more than my wife’s grandmother’s house, which is a modular house in rural Oregon. And my dad’s family house is a tin roof building in a third world village that didn’t have electricity last time I was there in the late 1980s.
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
Economic value of a house is just a single factor between the two. Redlining has a host of other issues that are often unspoken about or ignored. That rural house in Oregon most likely is in a better environment. Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted. Because of lack regulation or companies just paying low cost fines and making criminal acts just part of business their model. This increase the cost of insurance and medical expenses for those that live in redline districts.
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
> Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted.
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
Thank you for corroborating my claim with evidence. I said:
> They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution.
The study found:
> Across all included cities, redlined D-graded neighborhoods had 12.2 ± 27.2 wells km−2, nearly twice the density in neighborhoods graded A (6.8 ± 8.9 wells km−2).
So, just like I said, "more often", but that's still only less than twice as often as the most desirable neighborhoods. This is hardly a noticeable difference to residents.
> Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted.
Significance:
Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts. "The presence of wells in historically redlined neighborhoods remains relevant, as many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-production, can contribute to ongoing pollution."
* Meant to say,"Redline districts are often near oil refiners and highly polluted."
> Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Yes, 2x is clearly "disproportionate", but it's a far cry from being obviously significant. If you assume that pollution is not significant in best neighborhoods, then it's not greatly significant in worst, because twice something insignificant is still hardly significant. Replace oil wells with something else that's clearly harmful: murders. Imagine the worst neighborhoods had twice as many murders as the best ones. This would actually be improvement over the status quo: worst neighborhoods are far more dangerous than just 2x!
> Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts.
It does no such thing. It says that wells can contribute to ongoing pollution. That does not mean that it does, and it does not even quantify the contribution of wells to pollution, nor does it even show that the worst districts are significantly more polluted in the first place.
The point of this study is to corroborate the narrative of redlined district being significantly more polluted than the "best" districts, and that this is why residents of these districts and their descendants have worse outcomes today. It shows something that's not very interesting on its own (just twice the number of oil wells). However, it's clearly successful in building narrative, given that it convinced you that it provides evidence for it.
There's a clear reason for these ideas being popular but it's something you have to work out yourself because everyone who writes about it is too deeply politically motivated to address it objectively.
As to teaching history, the question is how you do it. Growing up in Virginia, I learned about slavery as a cautionary tale: we treated people in the past differently, and that was bad, and we strive to treat everyone the same now. That’s good history.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
You can see the difference between one immediate family and another in the DNA. DNA differences range from distinctions between individuals to distinctions between species. How do you decide where it makes sense to draw a middle line and say "ethnic group"?
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white,
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do.
If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
You know it's the same everywhere? It's hopeless to wish for all of humanity to change their common intuitions and independently reproduced heuristics.
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
There's a white Korean member of the National Assembly[0], whose existence I find fascinating. I have no doubt that he would also get spoken to in English on the streets, if the speaker does not know who he is. And even more funnily, supposedly his Korean has a thick Jeolla accent!
Also, born and grew up in Korea to missionaries, only to be deported to the US by the Japanese when they took over Korea. Then moved back later in life.
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position.
Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
> I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position
The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.
> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country
Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?
As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.
We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.
Even if that number would hold up - Why?
It’s still more dignified for all involved.
Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.
Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German.
Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.
It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
>> Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
The party is internally divided but a strong portion of it openly endorses facist “heroes” - for example calling the SS “all good people”. They try to hide it and purge their extremist members but it’s not working. Höcke and Gauland are very obviously racists as are many other less prominent members of the party.
>"Germany for the Germans".
>referring to Germans of Turkish origin as "fatherless vermin" and "camel drivers", who should go back to their "mud huts" and "multiple wives".
Yea those are definitely not racist or facist statements /s
Edit: even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
>> I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
Maybe what you think you know is wrong?
>> even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
Maybe because they don't consider AFD as far right enough?
It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.
It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.
So, Germany previously had Prussia, Bavaria and the rest. They were separate kingdoms, but all ethnically German.
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
Thank you. I wouldn't exactly call France a tiny state. Are there any others that I should specifically be looking at? The Europeans pride themselves as being quote unquote civilized people, did they not have uniform ethnicities within their borders before the founding of their states? If not, then what did define those borders?
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.
Killing is not the only way to ethnically homogenize a population. Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.
> Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
Thank you. Again, though, the histories of the European states don't mention efforts at suppression of ethnic identities, deportation, nor encouragement of emigration - at least not up until the 1930s.
If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.
Notably, it was exceptionally common for Religion to overlap almost exactly with Ethnicity (for various reasons), so the fighting between different Sects was often a common proxy for fights between different Ethnic groups too.
Also, since different Ethnic groups tended to ‘own’ different countries, each time there was an invasion, one would either make ground, or get repelled ‘back where you came from’, which also tended to align ethnic groups by borders. Those efforts didn’t generally merit note. If ‘your side’ lost, even if you’d lived there for a couple of generations, of course you’d lose your land and need to flee ‘home’.
Paris is one somewhat notable exception though.
Language is also an interesting proxy for this. Spanish vs French vs German vs English, etc.
still, there was always the ‘European’ Spaniards, vs the Moorish Spaniards, eh? Splits within splits.
France is not, and has never been, ethnically homogeneous (I'm French).
It was always a mix of different peoples - Celtic, then Romans when they invaded, then various Germanic peoples (including the Franks that gave the country it's name)... even the standardization of the French language is fairly modern. We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.
In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north.
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now.
People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.
Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white.
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
> Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900.
Why? Are we talking population or space?
On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
Space and wages of course. In Germany you are a bank slave for your entire live if you want to buy a house. Meanwhile rich people from all over the world buy up prime real estate.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
I use ethnostate more as a statement of fact than as derogatory. Often though I do it to needle lefty euros who like to tell Americans how much more racist we we are than them.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
> The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
Yes, I've lived in Brazil for almost a year, and lived in Japan for two years, and was more or less fluent in both the languages of those countries. I've traveled to almost every country in Europe and South America.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
Ah, I see your point now. I agree there isn't a way to do this easily. And I see what you are saying about the impact of separating into groups to achieve the goal of reparations.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
But as you note, you used race to discriminate, and someone who otherwise would have been qualified who wasn’t black (apparently), lost not due to some skill gap or the like, but apparently purely due to the color of their skin. At least that is how I read it.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
Those situations you are describing are discrimination. At least by the meaning of ‘a choice based off criteria’. The vast majority of them are legally just fine, but as you note produce a specific, rather predictable outcome yes?
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same
with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
> for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population
But there are also personal preferences, and some groups have different average preferences than other groups. Look at rich countries, women often prefer non-STEM jobs if they have the choice, while poor countries can have more equality because women will pursue traditionally male jobs lacking other good options.
> Because how do you propose doing reparations without causing the exact problem I’m describing?
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
Humans are tribal.
As much as I wish it weren’t the case often, I don’t think just pretending we’re all one big family will work.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
The answer is to stop paying lip service to the idea that an ethnicity is like a big family - an idea almost nobody in the US believes, so this will not be that hard - and start saying what we all know to be true: that we're all individuals whose behavior and loyalties are determined by our character and values, not the circumstances of our birth, our skin tones, or which side of a pointless conflict our ancestors fled here to escape.
In most cases, it’s not so much that they’re a family, but rather a group of folks with somewhat aligned interests that can fight together for those interests.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
Ethnic groups don't actually have collective interests. Individuals have specific examples of universal interests. Sometimes individuals are lead to believe that they have collective interests, but that's usually because they're being made to do something against all of their individual interests. Let me offer a few examples.
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
Irish New Yorkers in 1933 didn't want Irish rights, Irish houses and Irish jobs, they wanted rights, houses and jobs. That's what I mean by individual examples of universal interests. Nobody went around saying, "I'll only work for an Irishman," or "I'll only live in a building built by an Irish mason."
LA has always had a lot of gang warfare, which divides itself along ethnic lines because that's the underbelly of human nature. Gang warfare is a great example of everybody doing things that are very bad for themselves and others because of a perceived division with little basis in fact. If there's enough gang warfare I guess you could see racially segregated unions, like in the deep south, but that is again against worker's interests just like how segregated churches oppose God.
It is very difficult to find even a selfish motive for segregation unless you are an actual slaveowner or apartheid government official.
Irish New Yorkers were being heavily discriminated against, to the point that worrying about rights, houses, and jobs was a particularly serious and somewhat unique problem for Irish folks (individuals!) there at that time. It’s not like someone fresh off the boat is going to be able to pass as anything else.
There were also prevalent crime issues and ethnic gangs at the time. And many people (Irish in particular) DID go around saying those things you assert no one ever said.
For people who ‘looked Irish’ it was absolutely in their interest to align with these groups to some extent, or they’d be discriminated against and not have useful power to fight against it, and not have a group of people aligned with them that would provide housing, jobs, etc. to them.
In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason the Irish stopped being discriminated against so heavily is because of the political machines and gangs that punished groups for discriminating against them this way.
I can see that we have different interpretations of what acts were central to the progress of civil rights, and which were ancillary or even effects.
I don't think, for example, the "mafia" was a major contributor to equal rights for Italian immigrants. One obvious piece of evidence is that today, the mafia has been weakened thanks to the efforts of the police, but Italians haven't become persecuted as a result.
Membership in the Italian Mafia has turned out to be bad on net for the good of the people the families claim to represent. I think some people can get rich doing it but it is not a beneficial or admirable lifestyle.
If you want another example, where were all the Jewish gangs? I'm not aware of a single one. Some famous gangsters were Jewish (at least if you count the movies, I don't know about real life), and I don't think the cause of equal rights has suffered as a result. You have to read this with a smile even though the topic is very serious because the ideas involved would be at home on Saturday Night Live.
One final example is what could be the most hated organizations in America: the white nationalist gangs that only exist in prison. They are all in jail, and equal rights for people of European descent hasn't suffered at all. I'm surprised I ever participated in a conversation where I had a reason to write this, but white nationalists have no positive goals, not even for anybody.
The advancement of the universal recognition of equal rights for all is a much better explanation because unlike the rise of gangs, it hasn't been reversed.
As to your second point, not all Nash equilibria are beneficial. Gang formation is a lot like a Keynesian beauty contest in that appealing to the basest parts of our nature is the safest bet, and I think we can agree that this has nothing to do with anything good.
People do not need to "band together to survive" in that sense. Those gangs were mainly shaking down businesses in their own neighborhoods anyway, and everybody is a lot better off now that they're history.
So now you’re trying to say we should just go back to 1930’s New York (and prisons!) and tell them they should just stop forming those ethnic gangs because clearly they don’t actually need to do that, and they’d be better off without them?
Hey, you’re welcome to if you want. Time travel may be hard, but I’m sure someone would let you into your local Folsom equivalent if you asked.
That is a rather weird shifting of the goal posts, and completely ignores that there is such a thing as collective interests if a collective is being specifically targeted, or has special interests correct?
Yes, collectives don't have special interests. Individuals have specific instances of universal interests, like security or freedom. "Black people" doesn't have a separate existence from a black person. By guarding the principle of equality before the law, you are not getting involved in anybody's business but yours.
It isn't right to view something like equality before the law as a matter of somebody else's self-interest, or to justify a ruthless pursuit of self-interest by recasting it as service of an imagined collective interest.
I honestly don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Does it have a practical point?
If a bunch of, say Catholics, get together to make a community group and lobby for something they want - how is that not that groups ‘special interests’ in every practical way?
In 100% of cases, that group will either be lobbying for a universal value in a less effective way than if they were defined by the cause, or advocating for the interests of a few of the members of the larger group against the interests or views of other members.
Anyone who doesn't find that self-evident, I challenge to think of a single political opinion that is universal to members of any religious sect or ethnicity that is not universal to all human beings.
Those are all the same right, the right to practice your religion without being expelled from normal society. Nobody has different rights from anybody else, we just exercise them in different ways.
Literally these are different rights for different groups of people. Based on the dictionary and legal definitions of ‘right’. I’m again not sure what you think you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem to agree with reality.
We don't label people with a mark at birth delineating the prayer and rest times they have a right to. Anybody has the right to convert to any religion and observe it. You have as much a right to pray towards Mecca as you do to observe the Sabbath or attend Mass when it is held.
Of course you think that. You(r family) would monetarily benefit from it. Not to mention you’d get to double dip and enjoy the perks of the neighborhood as well as get your free money. Completely bonkers that you were able to type that without seeing the blatant hypocrisy.
> America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
"DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity)"
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
> What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
Interviewing for orchestras behind a screen, so the judges can't see the age/gender/race. That's a good way to go about equality.
<< White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
The word "justice" being the keyword (now, for some people) for DEI indicates it is precisely about punishment. At least to those who frame it in terms of "justice". I see that word and I know it is a buzzword for angry people. In the 90s when I was first persuaded as to the necessities of policies that instantiate reverse racial discrimination (i.e. affirmative action) talk was more about equality and unity, and increasing efficiency of the system. Blacks were (still are) not utilized to their full potential, so aa offered a common good inthe form of a more productive, better functioning society. I don't encounter those arguments as much niw as arguments about "justice" or the impossible to define "equity" (not the same as the phrase "equality of outcome" which was a very concrete and useful construct for thinking about racism). Historical context is everything.
What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
affirmative action as implemented requires percentage targets (based on statistical models of the overall population) based on race/gender/etc.
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
>You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing. We are all harmed when we are amongst racist assholes refusing to coexist with others based on skin color.
> This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing
Did you sleepwalk through literally every American history class you had growing up?
It boggles the mind that you can write "discrimination against people doesn't help the people who aren't discriminated against."
That is the point of discrimination: to benefit those who aren't discriminated against. That's why it was created, that's why it persists, and that's why people who benefit from the discrimination oppose its cessation. Look elsewhere in this discussion: the people who historically benefit from that oppression are saying its abatement is oppression directed back at themselves.
The beneficiaries of discrimination are usually split among class lines. So you have economically poor white folks who are indeed harmed by racial discrimination—though not nearly as harmed as the discriminated groups them selves—and rich white folks who are the only ones making money off of it.
The harm is often second factor such as the abundance of cheap (or free) labor yields less bargaining power and you end up working for less than you otherwise would have (but also the psychological harm of living in an unfair society). But next to the harm caused to those who are indeed discriminated against, the harm is rather minute.
My issue is the metrics constantly parroted to show inequality wouldn't (shouldn't) stand muster to an Econ 101 student.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How about the English? I'm a second-generation 'white' American citizen. My grandfather was a Canadian citizen from London, Ontario who migrated to the USA in the mid 1920s as a boy. The English, largely due to the influence of Wilberforce, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which outlawed slavery in the British Empire and predated the American Civil War.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
MLK's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering.
MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.
MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian.
The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal.
So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world.
Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor.
Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
MLK believed in equal worth. But he did not believe that the mechanism to achieve this in public was systems-level colorblindness.
I also think that Christians specifically should be comfortable with the concept of generational sin and personal sacrifice for social justice rather than a vigorous defense that one's achievement's are solely their own and must be hoarded at all costs.
> I also think that Christians specifically should be comfortable with the concept of generational sin and personal sacrifice for social justice rather than a vigorous defense that one's achievement's are solely their own and must be hoarded at all costs.
This is a false choice. They are not the only two options.
I agree with the sibling's point: MLK's ideals transcend ideology. He understood that all men of all colors were equal before God; a belief which he instilled in his movement. He did not play the motte-and-bailey game of "some are more equal than others", that was so popular last decade.
Calling MLK's values "colorblindness" in the way of "racial liberation" is the kind of double-speak the GP criticizes. Language that distances everyone from the capital-T Truth that MLK knew and died for, in favor of small truths that pretend to unite but actually divide.
Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place".
Yes? You're presenting this as some kind of gotcha but isn't that what the ultimate goal is?
I mean there's multiple ways to go about it; one that a lot of people object to is e.g. giving people jobs they're not qualified for. But another that I myself benefited from was a government that paid for everyone's education from elementary to university level, allowing me to go from a blue collar lower class to a comfortable middle class income level.
Good for you for being able to use the system to you advantage. Parent has a point though. DEI goals kept moving and changing along with the language in ridiculous direction. Question of the expected future state is very much relevant here. Note that we may disagree on what is acceptable future state.
I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
>That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it?
yes, thats why I chose it.
I think the point slipped past, we started with you saying MAGA is innocent.
I pointed out that words have context. I gave an example of innocent words, which can be used by bad people, to sound just.
MAGA, is in this category.
Its not considered innocent, and most people will assume that you are being false or misleading when you say "i dont know why this is bad".
Its kinda like showing a Man U flag in an Arsenal town - its impolite. One is expected to have the awareness of how their team is behaving and perceived.
I mean, its your team, of course you should know everything about it, from its good PR to its bad PR.
the issue is that the other side applied a context to it that is not the same context people who created it mean. So you’re taking your own interpretation applying it to somebody else’s saying and turning it into a negative thing even though that’s not what they mean by it. And then you are lambasting them for your own negative connotation applied to what they think is a positive thing.
You're implying Black Americans should be thankful to return to an era where they were slightly wealthier, but had fewer rights, fewer protections and enormous, normalization, socially acceptable discrimination.
No, I’m simply stating that the phrase make America great again is not racist in and of itself. I don’t think it’s debatable that American education and test scores have decreased significantly compared to other countries. When applied in that context to make America great again at educating then there’s no racial context. People are reading what they want to see into the message or more specifically what they want to denigrate
The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point!
But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today.
Who might see more impact from more opportunity though:
* the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression
* the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business
They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace.
Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
If you meet a Chinese person can you tell if they are from a minority group that was enslaved in Vietnam as recently as the 70s, or an upper class Han family?
What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.
And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.
All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.
It is not the job of DEI in the United States to address worldwide historical systemic discrimination of inequality. Globally, DEI would be concerned with this, but not specifically in the USA.
The purpose of it within the USA is to address historical systemic discrimination within the USA, which certainly go beyond merely African slaves and their descendants but do not extend to discriminatory patterns in SE Asia.
That simplifies the objectives of DEI, but it makes for scenarios that are profoundly unjust. One of my college class mates grew up in rural Vietnam, and didn't have electricity until middle school. That classmate is categorized as "Negatively Diverse" according to the company's DEI policy. Even more undesirable than whites. I, on the other hand, had a dad that went to an ivy league university and accrued an eight figure estate before his passing. My sister and I had college and private school paid for. Yet we're categorized as "diverse" taking priority over the vast majority of candidates, most of them vastly less privileged than us.
The logical conclusion is the approach taken for native Americans, providing each tribe payments at certain ages, special programs, and scholarships.
The outcomes haven’t been great, but not due to lack of opportunity. It’s as much money and DEI programs can fix. Fixing lives requires solutions that don’t scale.
Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
> Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies.
What factors were controlled for that led you to the conclusion that is racism? E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia. What about non-marijuana criminal records? A person is more likely to be charged with marijuana possession if they have other crimes on their record. What about age? The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44. People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Race-related factoids in ACLU reports should be viewed with skepticism. It’s made-for-litigation advocacy, not science. People of different races differ on many other dimensions and it’s easy to cherry pick results for advocacy reasons.
For example, I was interested in this notion of a “bamboo ceiling”—the idea that Asians are underrepresented in management or as corporate directors. Turns out that effect disappears when you account for age (the median Asian is 36), language proficiency (most Asian Americans are foreign born, and only 57% of those are proficient in english).
> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.
Why do you think that is?
> The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
> People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
You said:
>I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
And I'm telling you, directly and upfront, why it matters. You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor. You have chosen to try and shift away from the argument when I brought up why it matters. The persistent effects of past bad acts is why it matters where you were born and of what skin color.
>> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.
> Why do you think that is?
The incarceration rate for Appalachian whites is four times higher than the incarceration rate for Massachusetts whites. Why do you think that is?
> >The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
> Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
Asian Americans have a life expectancy at birth of 84.5. Whites are at 77.5, and black Americans are at 72.8. So the Asian-white gap is bigger than the white-black gap. Why do you think that is?
> Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
The black/white incarceration disparity (2.3x) is smaller than the white/asian incarceration disparity (2.6x). Why do you think that is?
> You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor.
No, I asked why it matters why you were born where you were born. 62% of black people have a household income of $40,000 or below versus 40% of white people. As to that 62% and 40% who are in similar circumstances, why should it matter what historical facts led them to those circumstances?
Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation.
We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome?
As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track.
Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past.
I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
> Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary.
Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test.
For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star.
I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test.
So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
> That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place
Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends.
> Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means
I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English.
"Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience.
Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident.
It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out.
You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting.
I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms.
There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole.
(Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.)
But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
> It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society.
You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective).
If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
Let's say you have a company in Warsaw full of lovely people who want what's best for the company. They have an opening for an infrastructure engineer and need somebody with particular skills, but are willing to interview candidates who don't have those skills but show aptitude , interest and a willingness to learn. They throw the doors open wide and interview everybody who applies. They only get white males applying for the job.
If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.
The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.
Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.
Well the first thing to do would to acknowledge that the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.
The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.
The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.
> The second thing to do would be to ask why only white males are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that.
But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?
This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.
> ... the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
This is the actual test to get into firefighter training in California.[1]
This is just to get into training. Graduating is tougher.
Eight test events in 10 minutes 20 seconds. All events must be passed. No breaks.
Candidates wear 50 pounds of weight through the whole test. Plus an additional 25 pounds for the stair climb. The events are all firefighting-related.
Here's a woman firefighter passing this test.[2] With two minutes to spare.
> This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
\1 Is this a real problem in actual fire deployments or simply a made up bit of Fox News DEI outrage?
\2 Here in the Western Australian rural bush fire service 100lb women and people in wheelchairs are valuable members that operate GIS terminals, coordinate aircraft, work as administrators and bookkeepers, etc.
It is a thing that happens and it also includes small women (and sometimes men) who aren't able to carry the weight they should be able to.
It is verifiable fact that the LAFD has lowered the strength requirements considerable in order to allow for smaller people. And with the current fires, there is a plenty of footage of small people not being able to do the heavy physical stuff.
And certainly women (and small men) can do many other useful things, but they people that operate GIS terminals would not be "firefighters" in the categorical sense even if they are valuable parts of the fire fighting team.
Group level differences are of little to no value when evaluating a specific candidate.
It is widely understood and accepted that males and females differ in their physiology in ways that have dramatic impacts on their capabilities. However, the two groups form overlapping bell curves, and if you're seeking someone for a task you'd be a lot better off focusing on the attributes of the individual, which may be at either end of their group bell curve or anywhere in between.
Put differently, my wife, when she was a serious triathlete, would never have been able to beat the best males at any distance. But she could beat most of the males in a half ironman. So if you were interviewing her and some male to do something like a half ironman, you'd better make sure you ask a lot more than "what sex are they?". You'd better find out if the male is in the top X%, because if not, you should be hiring her instead.
All of that is true despite the group differences being real and significant.
Hiring is never about groups ... unless you're a racist/sexist/*ist ...
I mean, all of this is obvious. Group-level differences will still lead to the composition of individuals in a given profession differing from the composition of the general population, even if no hiring managers discriminate.
That's not necessarily true, for many kinds of complex sociological, economic and demographic reasons. The nature of the working population is different than the general population. The skills required from the working population vary across time and space, and may very well consist of a set in which different groups vary only slightly. Etc. etc.
Frankly this just reads like a cover story for "I don't want to have to care about this".
Well yeah, it’s an extremely complex system. If we’re just going to leave it at that, then you have no basis for insisting that working populations are proportional to the general population. But you seem to want to have it both ways.
Send applications that are identical save for identifying characteristics (e.g. names, ethnic extracurriculars) and observe of there are disparities in call back rates. Or anonymize applications and observe if the rates change.
Equality of outcome is absolutely not a measure that ensures nondiscrimination. An extreme example, but imagine if we instituted a policy mandating equal outcomes in murder convictions with respect to gender. Would that make the justice system fairer?
Hip hop artists from the 90s I thought for a while. Nowadays not sure anymore. Folk artists from any decade are usually my more trusted societal engineers, going all the way back to maybe even before Jesus.
Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group.
In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics.
My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media".
To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it.
[0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
> But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity.
There's no evidence that this is true. Even if you take the extreme position (against which there is plenty of data) that different ethnic groups are more or less identically "genetically" capable at a group level, both in terms of the average member as well as the outliers, the fact that different groups have different cultural values and practices mean that those differences play out in considerable differences in results. And those differences get even more exaggerated at the outlying levels.
For example, the US population is roughly 14% black and 6% Asian, but among NFL players, it's 58% black and a 0.1% Asian. Even if you assume no group-level differences in inborn ability and potential, the fact that football is a much bigger part of black American culture than it is Asian American culture would mean that after generations of such cultural differences, you will end up with such a skewed distribution.
In real life, of course, there are group-level differences at the genetic level, which compound into culture and over time result in wildly different outcomes for members of those groups. Over nine-tenths of the world's top sprinters are of West African descent; same for the marathon and people of East African descent. You might easily imagine that a group of people composed of those who naturally run fast will develop cultural customs that involve running, which further develops the talent pool in that group.
Apply that over generations, and it results in such a big difference between groups that a naive observer concludes that external causes (i.e. racism) is the most reasonable explanation, coming from the faulty assumption that group-level differences do not exist outside of such external causes.
In fact, I would go a step further a claim that it's virtually impossible to take a subgroup of a broader population that precisely reflects the composition of the latter, along any lines.
I think that the most likely explanation is that both environment and genetics are factors. In order to view inequality of outcome as proof of inequality of opportunity, you have to believe that group differences are due entirely to environmental conditions. That's a rather extreme position to take.
Of course genetics play a role - some people can get by on long term sleep of 4-5 hours a night, while most people need more. Some people have fantastic health from genetics (and then work hard to maintain it), while others are born with a slew of minor ailments that make them less productive. Not to speak of inteligence or natural talents, height etc.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life."
-Jean-Luc Picard
Additionally, the Declaration of Independence states our fundamental philosophy as a nation that all men are created equal. We all start from the same line, but where life takes us and what we make of it is completely up to life and us the individual.
It is commonly understood that 'men' in that context and in the context of the time is a reference to 'mankind' or 'the race of men' which means the human race, not males specifically.
If I was to say, yes. This is an opinion from someone that isn't even from the US, mind you, but given what I know about the constitution I do think it was the case.
To this day, we generally don't allow people to vote in an election if they aren't a citizen yet I reckon we don't consider non-citizens lesser human beings. The idea of allowing only those with property to vote (because they have stake in the country) or to only allow men (they will be fighting the wars) are outdated, but they aren't nonsensical.
You're being too reductive. There is no simple one sentence answer and the path to modern western liberal values spans 400-ish years.
It wasn't really that long ago that all/most societies believed that slavery was normal.
Just the IDEA that "all men are created equal" is intensely liberal. And that it was put into a document without qualifiers is miraculous. We can't judge the past only from a modern lens. YOU didn't do anything to help the world move towards liberal values. YOU are just the benefactor of thousands of years of conflict/learning/etc.
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
>> Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
This only ever happens when protesting those with fairly little power, very lower middle management, and those in actual power don't care.
It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else.
Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently.
Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
You seem to be talking about protests. Protests will rarely succeed because protesting is something of an already-lost-the-battle tactic. If the protesters had any effective options they'd be doing that instead of protesting. Protesting is for people who don't have the numbers/power to force change, don't have a persuasive argument to get what they want through formal channels and can't think of a better strategy than basically shouting complaints into the wind. Sometimes they can achieve success regardless, but generally protests don't work. There might be protests because people like outdoor activity, but they are a sideshow or charitably an opportunity to meet people. Effective non-violent tactics don't involve on protesters.
For something interesting consider the topical Roe v. Wade decision, both in its establishment and removal. That involved some significant questions of rights and was settled without violence. Protesting, on either side of the issue, was largely ineffective compared to small groups of organised people working to align the legal system over long periods of time.
It won’t happen overnight. It’s not like violence beings best results that fast. What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? Or the Islamic state? Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
> What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ?
He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure).
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.
The parent's comment is fascinating isn't it? One of Bin Laden's stated goals was to get US engaged and bled out through protracted and costly war, which he actually managed to achieve..
I mean this is not ancient history and lot of it at this point is public record.
So the strategy was to lure the bear on your turf and become a punching bag. After getting beat up pretty bad you celebrate that the bear left your turf. Now you hope someone else will engage the tired bear. Who would want to be the next punching bag?
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
How had it been going up until that point? Very poorly too. The idea that peaceful protests by Palestinians would've changed that would be so awfully naive that I've never even encountered that argument.
Well now a good chunk of Palestians are dead and Palestina finds itself in an even worse situation(politically,economically,socially). Surely there is a better way than poking the bear to see what happens.
It's too easy to forget that even our beloved weekends were only achieved after bloodshed.
The people in power successfully managed to sell us the belief that we can achieve change by sitting on our asses and yelling really loud. If we spend 5 minutes thinking about the current power structures, it's clear that no amount of peaceful protesting will ever achieve any meaningful change.
The only real power we have is to withhold our labor on strikes, and somehow even those need permission (!) to run.
Although the women’s suffrage movement in the United States did have some violence in the extremes, proposal, advocacy, and ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the US Cobstitution (which granted women the right to vote in the US) was not driven by violence in anything but the most remote margins.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
Mind you, feminists had a woman, often several, in every household.
My guess is that if race was determined at birth by chance (instead of genetics) we would have the same racial distribution on a societal level but race issues would move faster.
>FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade.
I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.
I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
It depends on how this percentage was raised. If they actually increased the black and brown talent pool by 50%, that would be an unequivocal success. What I suspect actually happens is that recruiters are incentivized to improve DEI metrics, so they simply hand out more interviews to underrepresented candidates. The end result is that higher tier companies simply poach these candidates from lower tier companies.
So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
In DEI parlance, black and brown refers to African-Americans and Latinos, although, curiously they also do accept African H1B visa holders in this group, despite them typically having high education, wealth from home, etc.
When I have read writings on DEI, they usually talk about "African-Americans," a term historically used to refer to the descendants of slavery. Which writings by DEI professionals and experts have you read that say African H1B visa holders should be included in DEI initiatives?
> Which writings by DEI professionals and experts have you read ...
None. I'm a third party HN commentator that dropped in to address the incorrect assertion that the sentence in question contained a "they" with no referent.
I have six decades of reading, writing, and speaking Commonwealth English and four or so with American English and felt the user who asked could use the grammar assist.
But they are included. Because the companies talk about demographics and include "black" as one of those. A group which mixes African-Americans and African immigrants together
Which population? FB hires from
everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
You are explicitly considering a man's race for something that is irrelevant to that consideration, in this case to answer whether to hire/admit them.
You must consider a man's race if this concerns something relevant to that consideration such as their medical history. This is not one of them; there are actually very few instances where asking a man's race is necessary.
The person above was just saying that having a closer balance of hires to the greater population was a good thing. They didn't talk about how companies got there. We shouldn't just assume they got there by using race while deciding whether to hire or not. Maybe they did something else, or maybe they found some existing racism in hiring decisions and removed it.
The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis. The only way to force that composition to mirror social composition is to do so explicitly and strictly on racial basis.
A lot of factors go into proper hiring and terminations, most significantly the merits of the individual concerned. Such factors will lead to an employee racial composition that might not mirror that of social composition.
Certain hiring practices like favoring women for flight attendants and black men for basketball teams should be terminated with extreme prejudice, but to force employee racial composition and specifically that one way or any other is racism.
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis
That's ludicrous. If I hire only from Harvard, but then I start hiring from state schools as well, the employee racial composition is highly likely to change.
But is the goal to hire from certain schools or to hire certain races?
The axiom presented is that the employee composition must mirror the surrounding social composition, ergo you are hiring for racial reasons because you must set quotas and then hire based upon satisfying (and not exceeding) those quotas.
As an example, if the social composition is composed of 40% Earthlings, 30% Martians, 20% Venusians, and 10% Mercurians and your workforce consists of 10 men: You cannot ever hire more than 4 Earthlings or 3 Martians or 2 Venusians or 1 Mercurian and must refuse or terminate any excess. If you cannot hire even 1 Mercurian at all you arguably can't hire anyone.
But the idea of quotas is something you pulled out of nowhere. It was not part of the conversation until you showed up.
It's a strawman.
Also the post up above was talking about statistics with error bars a thousand people wide. The idea of having a demographic match with 10 employees is... also a strawman.
I agree life is seldom as simple as the examples, the small numbers are just for sake of brevity.
In any case, none of that takes away from the crux of this conversation that programmes like mirroring surrounding demographics and others are discriminatory and have no place in free and civilized societies today.
It's a good idea to measure the imbalance, and sometimes it's a good idea to try to do something to work against it. It requires a lot of care, but it's not inherently wrong. When there are a bunch of bad actors, everyone else trying to be completely neutral leaves things quite unbalanced.
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
> why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
> a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
> do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people.
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. It would be like trying to get more white-looking people in positions, when what you really want is to integrate the Irish or the Italians into more prominent positions in your culture. We don't even think about that anymore because our definition of white has expanded to include those people. But for a while they were on the outside trying to get in while the newly freed slaves weren't even at the door yet.
But being white is really random: how is it my problem that the weather is shit in Normandy and all my ancestors are pale ? I arrive in the US, people would tell me I'm privileged somehow, when all I do is work hard and do my best to contribute to companies. And the same goes to more sunny weather-born people.
If we talked less about skin color, and a bit more about the actual nature of people (I can accept positive discrimination towards former slave families, they deserve compensation), maybe we'd accept those DEI policies more ?
It's a complex debate everywhere anyway, we have the same in France with our own colonial crosses to bear, and like what to do with a Tunisian freshly arrived vs a descendent of a Tunisian family who's been French for 3 generations.
If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though.
I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country.
Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
You're thinking in terms of group guilt and inter generational guilt, which frankly doesn't make sense. There is no rational basis to trace ancestry of people to find who descended from slaves or slave owners. It's non sensical. In a fair hiring environment, no one deserves any special preference. If you want to help economically poor groups, the time to intervene is much earlier in their childhood by providing them better education, communities, infrastructure etc. So tipping the scales by investing more in certain communities is alright, tipping them at the job interview isn't.
When we think about society we love equality, but when we have to choose our heart surgeon we only want merit. Helping some group get by easier through school and hiring only puts a question mark to their real merits. It's also demeaning for them to be admitted with lower standards.
I personally think that it is not helpful to subscribe to 'sins of the father belong to the son' view of the world. Apart from everything else, it rewards near-constant cries of perceived injustices that drown any point you may have had about descendants of slaves.
I said "might" for this reason. I can tolerate the argument while I agree with you ofc. Still, they've been wronged, and the debt is hard to repay.
I feel we misbehaved in Africa, us French, for instance, and owe something, smaller and smaller every decade that passes sure, to these people we exploited.
I am not sure where you are getting the idea that people of Indian origin are asking for or getting any special consideration compared to Turkish or a Portuguese or any other ethnic groups.
They are not, ofc. But the DEI policies group them in the "black and brown" group, to try to up their presence in the mix. But it's silly, me and an Indian raised in the same circumstances will have the same world views and him or me offer no more diversity.
A french guy raised in struggle will have as interesting a perspective as a brown guy raised the same way. They are both interesting and diverse hires regardless of their color.
See my point ? Diversity should be circumstance based and Im afraid sometimes, it's just sun-strength-on-the-skin-based. Maybe Im wrong there too ?
This is an interesting response that points out ambiguity in it all. Depending on what you're reading / what statistic is being derived, often times you see Hispanic / Latino included as white and not brown.
On forms, I would tend to agree.I'm more speaking of in statistics. It appears depending on the narrative they're intertwined. There's also the variances in self reporting.
"A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that one-third of US Latinos identify as "mestizo", "mulatto", or another multiracial identity.[21] Such identities often conflict with standard racial classifications in the United States: among Latino American adults surveyed by Pew Research who identified as multiracial, about 40% reported their race as "white" on standard race question as used on the US Census; 13% reported belonging to more than one race or "mixed race"; while about 20% chose "Latino" as their race." - Wikipedia
It should not make sense, but as long as discrimination is based on skin color, you will see efforts to address it also be based on skin color.
The only thing I advocate for is on economic basis. Nothing else should matter.
If one is "poor" (for a socially acceptable definition of poor), we as a society must help them.
Skin color, historical persecution, country of origin,gender, sexual orientation or any of the thousand things that can be "different" , shouldn't matter.
I agree, but I think the constant division of people across vague color lines make people counter react in unproductive ways. Like (random example) talking about Obama as a black person hides so much nuances about who he truly is (and who his ancestors are) that it gives his opponents the impression that s all he is and his defenders not much else to defend him with.
I just find the american casual racism, both sides of the political spectrum, very ... american :D
In France we sort of pretend to ignore there s skin color. I d never describe someone as black, or no more than I d describe someone as blonde and I would almost never use a French word to describe it. It makes me nervous to reduce someone to this random attribute, when maybe his family came from Mali, or Martinique or the US and that's so much more interesting than the effect of the sun on his skin.
Yes, it is not optimal. Like I said, I don't subscribe how its handled either.
I am not an American, and I'm brown. I don't take issue if someone says I'm brown because I am brown! Maybe I cannot empathize with other races who've been extremely discriminated because of their skin color, but as you said, it is an attribute describing me, among hundred others. I also agree, color of skin by itself is not interesting at all, just like being blonde is not interesting at all - but may play into personal preferences, again, just like any of the hundreds of physical, personality attributes.
I'm in Germany and I'm also puzzled by how Americans view race. To me, black, white, etc. are just phenotypes, no more important than e.g. being blonde (of course, I realise that some people discriminate based on skin colour). The idea that these skin-colour labels constitute separate "identities" is a bit weird to me.
And yes, of course many African-Americans have certain cultural traits, some heritage etc. that sets them apart, but I would describe that as "African-American" and not "black" because I don't think that a Nigerian or a Sri Lankan would share those traits.
When Donald Trump insisted that Kamala Harris wasn't really black that just made no sense to me.
Abysmal? You think that Meta is going to compromise its quality of work to meet a statistic they knew would only be temporary? If they had changed the demographic to 30%+ they would have had to hire subpar people and bypassed people in the top of their field who truly deserved and had the experience to qualify for the job. This whole DEI bs never should have been started.
What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
You only need to go back 3 generations in my family to find someone born a slave. And I am not even middle aged. People don’t understand that hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations, it carries over in really strange and insidious ways.
> If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago,
Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics.
Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
> Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
I feel that's overstating it a bit. But my mother (English) was definitely brought up in a context that had not forgotten about Napoleon - Napoleon was viewed/presented as comparable to Hitler.
I've seen these claims (in much more detailed form that the Guardian link lays out, even the link it offers to one of its own articles to back up the claim).
I'd really like to see some differentiation between:
* a disproportionate number of people of Norman descent remain some of the wealthiest landowners in England
and
* a disproportion number of the wealthiest landowners in England are of Norman descent
Take redlining for instance. That happened a long time ago. Redlining systematically and intentionally deprived non-white families of home ownership, while helping white families to own homes. But wealth begets wealth, so owning a home lets someone borrow money against it to start a business. When these people die, their children will inherit their wealth. As a result, the (grand)children of a family are still denied opportunities that they would've gotten, if not for redlining.
P.S. Yes, a family who was able to get a home loan (redlining didn't affect them) might have squandered this wealth gambling, or maybe they didn't pass it onto their children, so some people unaffected by redlining may still end up in a similar place. Similarly, some families that were affected by redlining have still managed to accumulate wealth in spite of redlining. My claim is that the family that squandered their money still got the chance to squander was was given to them, and the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity.
> the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity
Right, but the median debate isn't about whether there was in fact past injustice done via discrimination on racial lines. The median person agrees. The debate is whether present discrimination on racial lines is required to "correct" that past injustice, and whether that would be a form of present justice. There's very little agreement on that.
I can't help but notice (believe me, I'm trying not to notice!) that this comment is getting some downvotes. I'd love it if a downvoter could let me know why they're downvoting, and how I can improve!
I haven't heard that but in general tactics and threats could get your labelled terrorist? You may feel you have a just cause but it doesn't mean your goal justifies your actions.
by definition, if you want to destroy the established methods for change or circumvent them then yes, that is treason (or; terrorism) especially via threat or force.
Real change that will jot be classified that way has to happen by engaging with the process for change- though I definitely recognise that its a lot slower and more difficult.
So too is it more difficult to save up money instead of robbing a bank, but it doesn't mean you’re morally justified to rob a bank to give to charity vs working and giving a percentage of a paycheck.
Black Lives Matter as an organization has lost any respect from me on October 8, 2023 when they celebrated the October 7th attack killing over a thousand Israelis on their X account [0]
Your claim doesn’t really match your reference, also, I don’t really care (and neither likely does BLM) care about what people like you think. React less to clickbait headlines, think more critically pleaze.
I saw BLM Chicago instagram post myself, the referenced link is simply for proof.
They celebrated an attack on Israel that resulted in deaths and kidnapping of hundreds of innocent music festival goers and kibbutznicks the day after that vicious attack.
The fact that you don’t care what I ( or people like me - whatever that means) think is irrelevant to the discussion
Insofar as Europe has "forgotten" about the Nazis, you might want to check out how Israel legged into this in the early 60s, basically getting Germany to back any of their militaristic objectives in return for full diplomatic engagement with all the symbolic power that implied.
Every government wants to "forget". France maintained a viewpoint that Vichy was a "few bad apples" until the evidence of deporting Jews until their death was undeniable.
>sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
Germany probably shouldn’t forget the genocide of millions of people from a variety of groups, just as the united states should not forget the systematic enslavement and repression of millions of people, who are also americans and their descendants are alive and numerous today. It doesn’t really make sense to me why people should forget that, and it cannot be forgotten by the people still living with the consequences of it today - but I’m not really willing to be baited into this type of discussion on a platform like this, so I’ll just say your fundamental premises in your post sound flawed if not extremely troubling in what you seem to be implying. It sounds completely unreasonable to say for instance, indigenous groups should forget they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
I think you are intentionally misreading this. My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take. Sins of the father and all that.
Doesn’t mean we should forget them. But getting angry at someone now because of something that his great grandfather did to your great grandfather is a great way for these grudges to never die.
> My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take
No one is holding people responsible for actions they didn't take. YOu're just mis-perceiving assistance given to historically oppressed people as a personal slight against yourself.
Helping a black person is not punishing a white person, and you're showing your own ass when you suggest it is.
Taking resources - tax dollars and opportunities usually granted on the basis of merit - from white person and redistributing them to black person on the basis of race absolutely does punish the white person. Talk of "historical oppression" is just a polemic to distract from this racist favoritism.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but "getting more reparations out of Germany" is a constant refrain of Polish politics regardless of what wing, faction, or party is leading it.
The thing about oppression is that it causes both long-lasting and recurring trauma. The people targeted will be hurt for a long time, and they will be the target of follow-up attacks because other bullies know they can get away with it.
In the specific case of Nazi Germany, exterminating the Jews was not an original idea of Hitler. Hitler's only original idea was taking shittons of methamphetamine. Martin Luther had done the legwork of radicalizing Germany into hating Jews; once Germany had become a functionally unified nation-state the Holocaust was a forgone conclusion. This is the core belief of Zionism[0]: that the only way to stop Jews from becoming victims is for those Jews to form their own nation-state that can commit its own atrocities.
BTW, this is the same logic the Japanese had in their head when they started invading and destroying the rest of East Asia, around the same time as Hitler. They wanted to be respected in the way that the Christian Bible would describe as "having the fear of God". The fact that this led to the horrific rape of China and Korea[1] would suggest that these victim narratives are morally self-defeating without some framework of reciprocal[2] tolerance and human rights to distinguish between justified self-defense and unjustified oppression.
But America at least sort of has that, so we can make that distinction. In fact, that's part of what makes American race relations so weirdly straightforward. In the "old world" you have complicated webs of peoples angry at each other for shit that happened anywhere from ten to ten thousand years ago. But in America, there's just one very deep wound that never seems to heal.
When does America "forget" slavery? Well, ideally, we don't 'forget', but we do 'forgive'. Practically, however, we can't. Every time a cop thinks it'd be a good idea to treat a criminal suspect like a demon in DOOM Eternal, and it hits social media, we get a huge reminder of "oh, there's still people in this country who think it's OK to do this to black people".
[1] And yes, they still complain about it, too. It doesn't help that Japan's ruling LDP was run by a war crimes denialist for a decade and change.
[2] As in, "tolerate all except the intolerant." See also: the GNU General Public License.
[3] I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mormonism, is in fact, LDS/Mormonism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, LDS plus Mormonism. Mormonism is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning LDS system made useful by the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, the Old & New Testaments, and the Pearl of Great Price comprising a full testament as defined by Jesus.
Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
It's not like people in prison are actually all guilty of their convicted crime.
You'll see this double-standard a lot for minor offenses as well. How many times has MKHB been caught excessively speeding (including 90? in a school zone) and still have a license.
We forbid cruel and unusual punishment. If we lived by the morality you just articulated, we wouldn’t do so. I think slavery is cruel and unusual, I think that’s clear.
The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks.
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
I must be the only idiot to think that education and money aren’t the issue in the black community. Two-parent households and stability would sort a lot of things out in a generation. Dreams, goals, ambitions, and opportunities follow from stability. Money doesn’t fix emotional vacuums.
This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
It's true that having a two-parent household helps children's outcomes, but it's somewhat inflammatory to ignore the impact that targeted violence has had on black communities, or that simply pretending that didn't happen and that "they should just get their shit together" is a remotely compassionate stance.
Expert beginner problem. If you can count a grain of sand, and measure the distance of one centimeter, then surely you can measure the exact length of a coastline and count the exact number grains of sand! (The length and number of grains goes to infinity as you get more detailed)
It is less magic, just insanely complicated. We therefore very well might not build it one day. Your claim we would solve it one day is not obvious and needs solid evidence. Some cryptographic problems require millions of years of compute to solve, why cant it be the case that AGI requires petayears of compute? A billion fold increase in compute still won't do it, hence, maybe not ever. 4 billion years and a trillion fold increase in compute might not be enough. (Assuming we have that long. Dawkins was most concerned about humanity surviving the next 500 years.)
Human vision works this way. To fix the latency problem (actual event hff happening vs signal transmitted to your brain) human vision is constantly predicting what you should see, your brain tells you that is what you saw (the prediction), and then the brain does reconciliation after the fact. Your brain will scramble for coherency when prediction and reality do not match. This trickery is why it seems like you see events in real time, when there is actually a significant delay between event and perception.
Though, there are error correction mechanisms, systems for validation, and a coherent underlying model of the world that is used by tthee brain.
FWIW, it is likely the most used set of neuron connections, sets of millions in play and their interconnections being the important part. That subset being one of billions of others with thousands of connections between each neuron - keep in mind it is not the set of neurons firing that matters, but the set of connections firing. The set of connections is a vastly large number.
Like, if you have three neurons, your brain can encode 10 data points. Let's call these A, B,C. A firing and terminating is one (so three for each), each edge, eg A to B is another three, each set of two edges, eg A to B to C (three more), and all three edges for one more. Then keep in mind you have billions of neurons and they are each interconnected by the thousands.
True, and this even happens in a brain the size of a flea's.
Which makes one wonder, what is it that makes processing and reconciling millions of visual signals per second "easy", but reasoning through a simple sudoku near impossible?
I do not know how many times that frog type experiment has been repeated on other species or branches of animal life but that one study up ended my preconceived notion of how vision could work with a brain, and most insects have a tiny brain, speculatively may be possible only of certain automaton type tasks, though wasps IIRC have very small brains relative to other insects but exhibit social behavior so who knows.
How do you distinguish partisans from actual knowledge? The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same seems to have killed public discourse IMO. It is easy to label everyone as partisans.
To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).
Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.
Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.
called "The Principles of Newspeak" that coins the word.
The slogan "My Body My Choice" has some of this character. It rolls off the tongue and stops thought. There is no nuance: the rights of the mother are inalienable. Opponents will talk about the inalienable rights of the fetus. There is no room for compromise but setting some temporal point in the pregnancy is a compromise like Solomon's that makes sense to the disengaged but gives no satisfaction to people who see it as moral issue. [1]
Note that this phrase turned out to be content-free and perfectly portable when it got picked up by anti-vaccine activists.
"Illegal Alien" is a masterpiece of language engineering that stands on its own for effectiveness. I mean, we all follow laws that we don't agree with or live with the threat of arrest and imprisonment if we don't. It's easy to see somebody breaking the law and not getting caught as a threat to the legitimacy of the system. "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.
(Practically as opposed to morally: Americans would rather work at Burger King rather than get a few more $ per hour to get up early for difficult and dirty work which might have you toiling in the hot or the cold. An American would see a farmhand job at a dairy farm as a dead end job. A Mexican is an experienced ag worker who might want to save up money to buy his own farm. Which one does the dairy farmer want to have handling his cows?)
My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine to the point where he shows microexpressions when reading discussions about access to healthcare in general.
in that teaching small children the alleged difference between two words will make a difference in the very difficult problems that (say) black [2] people have in America trivializes those problems. It trains them to become the kind of people who will trade memes online as opposed to facing those problems. In the meantime I've heard so many right wingers repetitively talk about "Equality of opportunity" vs "Equality of outcomes" which is a real point but reduces a complex and fraught problem to a single axis.
[2] Bloomberg Businessweek has a policy to always say capital B when they talk about "Black" people. Do black people care? Does it really help them? What side of the barricades are they on when they write gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and review $250 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
> "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.
It definitely comes across as language engineering. It's a legitimate category ("I'm an asylum seeker directly on my way to claim asylum from the nearest office") but expanded to include people who are just in the country illegally. It's too obvious to convince many people for very long.
> My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine
In terms of cost, the items you cite are vanishingly small, and to conflate the two, one must have no experience of the medical system beyond twitter.
Is your son on his own? Did he have to pay the cost for a broken limb or a child's disease, or has he seen a family member go through a cancer? Maybe he would have a better sense of what "healthcare" means if he had actually been facing these situations.
Apparently bike-touring was called bikepacking by the old timers in the 70s. Somewhere along the way it turned into touring. Then got misappropriated to mean road vs dirt. Bikepacking is any kind of bike riding where you've got your "backpack" on the bike. All bikepacking is touring. Backpacking is simply carrying everything you need in your backpack, eg: "backpacking across Europe". Bikepacking is similar, but for with a bike. When you're riding a bike and carrying everything you need for a multi-day, it's bikepacking, regardless of terrain. #pedantics
This last summer I left my front door in the PNW and road 800 miles on a mixture of terrains to the tour divide, road 300 miles of that, then road another 1500 miles of pavement to Iowa. I'd call that bikepacking, and by my previous assertion it's also touring too. Not all touring is bikepacking, but all bikepacking is also touring. That trip is a good counter example of why it gets silly to define bikepacking by the terrain type.
My personal take on touring vs bikepacking is that the bikepacking movement was always more parallel to touring, rather than a superset. The bikepackers I've met are usually a lot more focused on minimizing the amount of stuff they carry.
It can be simplified into a "saddle bag" vs "paniers", but IMO this is just a symptom. A form folows function. If You need to carry a full tent, sleeping bag and a change of clothes, touring paniers and heavy frame are probably the only way to go.
If You can cut down on comfort (or are optimizing for speed over long distance), suddenly You're left with a whole lot of options on how to carry whatever's left and You can use much lighter frame to do so.
Touring is from French. Means to go around and about. "Tour" is short for "Tour a velo", which is to travel on a bike. It encompasses short & long trips.
Touring vs bikepacking being distinct I think is an anglicism, an americanization and a commercialization of the terms. The Americanization part I believe is "Bike Tour" being mistaken for in-contrast to "Car Tourist". "Bike tour" has nothing to do with "Car Tourism" or "Bike tourist". It is not short for 'tourist', which is where the americanization comes in. The etymology is French.
Take a look at my counter-example - was that a tour, or a bikepacking? It was 50% pavement. Meanwhile 300 miles was on one of the worlds most famous bikepacking route. These distinctions based on how minimalist of what you carry or where you go make no sense. Given that example, the most consistent answer is clearly "both". It was a bikepacking trip - I was carrying what I would have were I backpacking, while on a bike. Because all bikepacking is touring, it was therefore also a tour. Had I stayed in hotels/hostels and/or with & friends every night (not carrying everything I needed), then it would have been touring and not bikepacking.
We can look to the etymology of the words. 'tour' comes from French. You can do a "tour a pied" (on foot), "tour a velo" (by bike), or "tour a voiture" (by car). Because cycling is the national sport of France, "un tour" is understood to often be by bike, it's just shortened. Bike tour comes from that etymology, it is a superset. A bike tour might include a 'backpack' (bags), or it may not.
Language does evolve. The "current" anglicized understanding is silly though and contradictory. It's also way more commercial than I'd like.
Sorry.. I once spent a solid 7 hours thinking about the difference of touring vs bikepacking while on a bikepacking race. I had some time to really dig into it... I kinda dislike that 'bikepacking' is thought to be something apart from touring (and only in mountains, only on dirt, only with inline bags)- when instead bikepacking is just a subset of bike travel, bike touring.
I suspect that cycle touring is the much older term than bike packing.
In the UK we still have the Cycle Touring Club[1] which was founded in 1878, so it goes way back.
I don't even think there was originally much difference in the type of bags used. Really old school riders here used to use big saddle bags like those made by Carradice before panniers came into fashion.
I think I'm good with either term. All these amazing adventure stories make me long for summer again.
1. Recently renamed by some genius to Cycling UK (not to be confused with British Cycling which covers racing), still not sure why they bothered.
'Touring' is a superset, it just means to go around and about on a bike. It comes from French. It's very old. Touring encompasses many different trip types. All bikepacking is touring. Not all touring is bikepacking.
Memories are very much subject to confirmation bias and sampling bias. Basing knowledge on personal experience is not solid epistemology. Further, the "I was alive and remember all of the media landscape at a time 50 years ago" is an appeal to authority fallacy. I don't personally dispute your recollections at all, and that is your impression and lived experience - but it does not make it facts. Extrapolating from an individuals experience is liable to be very faulty, again, poor epistemology.
Religion too. Those that are told a prophecy is to come, have a lot of incentive to fulfill that prophecy. Human belief systems are strange and interesting because (IMO) of the entanglement of beliefs with identity
Syslog is kinda a pain, but it's an hour of work and log aggregation is set up. Is the difference the pain of doing simple things with elastic compute and kubernetes?