loanedempathy

There's nothing stopping anybody from forking the code and maintaining it--you can just do things.

But, I would ask...was the excommunication of Eich worth it, all things considered? Have we learned anything?

(I assume by gender you mean sex or cisgender.)

The problems facing the two sexes are different and the expectations of them are different, at least in many societies. The expectations of a young man have been around self-sacrifice, self-control, and self-reliance, and looking towards female role models for cues on that would lose a lot of nuance particular to the male condition.

Women do not have the same physical capabilities of men in either size or strength, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of restraint. Women have, by and large, a different way of processing emotions than men, and and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how to handle things like intense anger. Women are rewarded for consensus and co-support in a way that men are not, so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how and when to step out of line and take your licks. Women do not have the same utility in things like warfare or manual labor, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of patriotic duty or chivalry.

It's fine and well to have role models for other purposes, mind you--plenty of great examples of other qualities--but you can't look towards women for how to be a good man with the same efficacy you can look at men. The opposite argument is of course laughed at out of hand: nobody would seriously suggest that a young woman look towards men to learn how to be a proper woman.

Simple question:

Does Russia owning more of Ukraine further the interests of the United States, European states, and/or NATO?

In a normal timeline, the way this was going to get hammered out was behind closed doors where very serious people from the State Department presented a spreadsheet of options for Ukraine's renewal of the Democracy Plus DLC and the ukies, through gritted teeth, chose a mortgage they could live with. This should not be a surprise.

(Absent, say, Europe committing more men or material.)

The US, absent anything else, needs to choose between direct military intervention, continuing sending over material (which is unpalatable long term), or cutting Ukraine loose. Again, none of that should be a surprise--if it _is_, you should get your head examined.

The problem today is that these conversations were had out in public, and in so doing we got to see the top two rungs of the US executive branch act excessively cruel on the one hand and like somebody completely ignorant of the stakes on the other--the "it'll make great TV" being perhaps the icing on the cake. Even worse, it'll probably work, because Zelensky seems to care more about his country than his ego.

Even to the extent that I agree with some of the realpolitick, I cannot abide by the odious behavior adjacent it. Kissinger was evil, but not impishly cruel.

(I also would caution people not to buy into the "Russia owns Trump" narrative when the more depressing--but probably accurate--explanation is simply that he wants the "Look at me, I ended a war I didn't even fight in!" merit badge.)

Ah hell, that predicate applies to every congressperson anybody here has voted for.

Let's not pretend like we as a nation suddenly give a shit about integrity, capability, or neutrality.

Thank you for putting it this way.

I watched people scam VCs with drone tech, and Theranos, and other things.

Can people please do any amount of critical thinking around this sort of stuff? It steals funding from serious efforts and pollutes the pool.

What is special in this approach compared to literal decades in the field?

What is special about these young dudes compared to better-funded ventures that haven't pulled it off yet and who have been working on it longer?

What is the difference between "yeah we can do design work look at all this stuff (that's the easy 60-80% of the problem space)" versus "we can actually solve the remaining work that's got everybody so screwed up"?

This feels like a scam y'all, knowingly or not.

I highly doubt that the poster did anything other than try and conduct business with the tribe.

Thievery is thievery--if it's okay on a small scale now, it must've been fine on a large scale then. At which point, we're just scoring who was more effective at it. Sucks to suck.

This sort of thing should be a good example to point to when people say "Why are there spending cuts coming to public broadcasts and media?".

What evidence, exactly?

To be glib: you're not competing with KUKA, you're competing with the parking lot at Home Depot.

The market here isn't competing with toolmakers, it's competing with temp agencies.

Using humanoid robots means you get to reuse human tools and workflows, and use teleoperation (and training) until your AI catches up.

To misquote Death of Stalin, they had they choice between his conviction and his revenge. They picked poorly.

You'll note that I used the word despot, and not authoritarian. This was not an accident.

The old joke used to go: "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!"

We have since updated it to billion in order to keep pace with the times.

Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.

Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.

The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere here. Good luck to you over the next four years.

I know this for a fact

If you can't see how the implementation of a Holocaust in the US might be impacted by the distribution and population density of Latinos I can't help you.

Some of the estimates I've seen for 1930s Germany were that Jews were less than 1% of the population; by contrast, Latinos are far beyond that--something like 40% in Texas and California.

A big part of the Holocaust was the targeted persecution and removal and ultimate execution of Jews, right? This was greatly aided by the fact that there were so few of them, and the Nazis were able to pin a bunch of ills of the time upon them. It's a lot easier to other a group when there are only a few representatives around.

My assertion--if you agree with the numbers earlier, which to me seem to be about the right near order of magnitude--is that we're not going to see that here in the US with Latinos (or Blacks, or most other groups) in the same way, and so fears of a Holocaust against those groups are likely unfounded.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't a dozen other problems that could pop up, or that perhaps it might take a form wholly different than history--but the assertion was "we have lots of parallels to the Holocaust's preconditions" and I think that is (mercifully) one of the few things we don't have to worry about.

I don't think you're reading me in the way that I intended, and I think you're being very uncharitable.

I did not claim that their concerns about replacement were well-founded, merely that they were understandable. Again, go back and read what I actually wrote: we cannot both acknowledge that there is a decline in the proportion of whites in America, that there are policies being pursued that help with this (again, no moral judgement, simply a statement of fact), and also that the people who are scared about losing majority status are completely without basis in their concerns.

If you cannot understand the tiny pier of truth that these people use as a foundation for the massive pile of other nonsense they've stacked (or had stacked) upon it, you will never be able to get them to change.

I'm not asking you to agree with them. I'm not asking you to say that the whole of their beliefs makes any sense at all.

I'm asking you to understand that they aren't pulling this completely out of thin air, and that if you want to have more success than you've had it may be worth it to acknowledge their concerns and try to show how your preferred policies would serve them better and how their current preferred bozos are manipulating them.

You and people like you might assert that they're idiots, misinformed, evil, or whatever else--but their vote counts as much as yours, sometimes moreso, and so you ignore or misunderstand them at your peril.

If you're referring to me, you'll have to do better than namecalling.

If you're referring to Musk or the current administration, calling them names doesn't really seem to have worked for what, at least nine years now?

How is that relevant?

The thing that user is concerned about seems to be trying to decide if we're looking at another Holocaust. It seems reasonable to check to see if the preconditions are similar.

But why do it in the form of a riddle?

It's not a riddle, it's an invitation to set a baseline to discuss from that's not just "the world is scary and we're looking at another Holocaust".

If somebody says the world is scary and they want reassurance, we can't just go "no the world isn't scary it's gonna be fine"--we have to explain _why_ the world isn't scary, and to do that we need shared understanding.

It's not helpful if, for example, they mean Nazi in the general sloppy sense ("thugs and bigots that seek power") and I use Nazis in a very particular sense (a group desirous of annexing Sudetenland and Alsace–Lorraine, seeking to restore German and Austrian economic power, scapegoating particular minorities and progressive values for cultural corruption, a reliance on a patchwork of occult and mystical foundations for rallying, etc.).

So, I didn't ask "riddles": I asked a bunch of questions to see where they were coming from before making an argument one way or the other. I wish more folks did this in the years leading up to the current situation, but here we are.

Blue team is hesitant to use its power in a lot of ways, and due to insisting on consensus most of the time they are handicapped. Red team actually seems to know what power is and how to use it--unfortunately for us, they lack discrimination and strategic planning in its application.

Blue team also required a bunch of thought-killing exercises and public signalling of things that are clearly inefficient and intellectually bankrupt and dishonest--this drove away a lot of smart people that actually wanted to get shit done, and made it easy for red team to point over and say "see, they're lying/delusional/woke?" as covering fire when red team pushed for their own odious agendas.

Blue team also not only failed to address issues but deliberately lied about them: the immigration crisis was pilloried when Trump wanted to build a wall, but once Biden took power a few weeks later suddenly _then_ the immigration crisis was a real policy concern. When people were complaining about the cost of food and goods, that was silly--but now that Trump's in power, suddenly we are told to care again. The attempted manufacturing of consent by the media on the left (and to be clear, red team does the same thing) is now too obvious not to be used against them.

Given all of this:

* Things aren't as bad as they're being made out to be, though they are serious.

* There is an entire industry relying on your fear and anxiety to exist, so practice good information hygiene.

* Maybe look beyond the obvious labels (woke, Nazi, marxist, fascist) to understand what's actually going on--don't be intellectually lazy.

* Revisit the things you think you know and why they're Good or not--and consider what others would think of them (for example, we can't both talk about how it's only a matter of years that "white" will be a minority in the US and that that's a good thing _and also_ claim that reactionary concerns about replacement are wholly unfounded).

Good luck to you.

Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?

Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?

making a class of women inherently lesser.

A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.

True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.

If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?

We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.

If that's the case, it suggests something odious: there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).

And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...

I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.

...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.

(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)

Are your utterances here helping the cause of trans liberation, or hurting it?

I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).

All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"

Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.

Let me give some blunt feedback:

Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.

Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)

The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.

Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.

The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.

Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.

If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.

The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.