I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the unrelated political messaging aside.
You are posting an unpopular position, and are going to get flamed for it by people who won't articulate why they think you're wrong.
For what it's worth, I think you're right about the common-carrier argument. If that's not the argument you're making, disregard my support.
A lot of these folks, in their reasonable zeal to prevent somebody on the internet having their feelings hurt or being made to feel scared, are ignoring the global costs to their chosen fuck-you-got-mine strategies of selective communications. A minority would be even happy to let, say, a misogynist with a cure for cancer be panned or banned irrespective of their other positive qualities. They can be hard to reason with.
What exactly does this mean? Are there new centralized control mechanisms in the works for Tor? This seems like a really bad idea TBH. I don't want my privacy tools to come with some strangely ambiguous "political" feeling sentiment. Focus is the key to success and this doesn't seem like it.
It's not just the US. Just today the UK press made the lead scientist of the Rosetta mission cry by attacking his SHIRT instead of celebrating his achievements.
His shirt is the kind of thing that keeps women away from science, so the fact that he publicly acknowledged his error will make other scientists more consciously think about inclusivity, helping science in the long run.
But at the same time, this guy is bound to get other people interested in science that may not have been before. He's a freaking inked up metal fan.[1] I don't think every person needs to make "more women in STEM" their life's mission. It is something that needs to be done. But what about a mission of "more [other people] in STEM" for a few of them.
How many people need to make it their life's mission before there is at least one person who could have explained to this guy to wear a hoodie over his shirt? Why does it take a world wide live stream audience before it is possible to find someone in the building to make that conversation happen?
Maybe it took a world wide live stream audience to find enough loud people to complain about it. Not every one has an issue with his shirt. So it is not without reason to think that nobody he works with took offense to his shirt because they know him for more than his clothes.
His shirt was a handmade gift from his friend's wife, who's a tattoo artist.
I would personally be surprised to find out that tattoo artists are the kind of thing that keeps women away from science. I mean, it's probably a rare interaction. Blaming their parents seems more productive.
it is that he found it an appropriate shirt to wear.
as an extreme comparison, if it was a woman dominated field and they commonly wore shirts depicting scantily clad men with bulging pants, I think it would impact my desire to enter that field.
I don't know that the parents can be blamed so readily. Here in Los Angeles at least, I've been very dissaspointed with what my classmates consider appropriate.
As far as gender oppression goes... that shirt ranks pretty low. Lets solve, pay disparity and workplace harrassment before we deciding whether to worry about shirts.
Feminism is not about being precious, it's about equality (which shirts have very little to do with).
The entire fiasco is not about science, it is LITERALLY the thing that I would want to avoid if I had planned going into this field, and I assume that women also do not want long drawn out discussions about what they are wearing INSTEAD of their impressive scientific achievements.
Consider that it may be more degrading and objectifying to treat all women as weak, fragile beings who must constantly be sheltered from things like shirts with retro tattoo art on them.
While the rest of us are busy trying to help provide opportunities for more women to get into STEM careers, there's a whole cadre of privileged, middle class noise generators doing a great deal of harm (or at the very least, not helping) with these sexist stereotypes.
They're only scenes degrading and objectifying women as sexual objects if women feel degraded and objectified as sexual objects about the scenes. As a woman made the shirt and gave it to him then it seems to be the case that at least 1 woman does not feel degraded and objectified as a sexual object about it which makes your blanket assertion disingenuous and patently false.
It's appalling that in the science/tech community there is so little understanding for these issues. In a perfectly equal world, yes, such a shirt would be just completely inappropriate instead of demeaning.
But science does have a sexual abuse problem. Some established male scientists do choose their female collaborators according to taste. Sexual violence does have a tendency of being initiated by men against women.
All this "it's not a big deal" talk is a symptom of not understanding this issue, lacking information and empathy. And this lack of empathy does have an impact.
>But science does have a sexual abuse problem. Some established male scientists do choose their female collaborators according to taste. Sexual violence does have a tendency of being initiated by men against women.
I dont think you are wrong about this, but painting individual men with the same broad stroke that is frequently is being applied to women to dehumanize them and discount their achievements isnt the right answer to right the wrongs you are listing.
There are plenty of women's issues that are waiting to be championed that are not what amounts to bikeshedding.
'No, his shirt wont keep women away from science.
The entire fiasco is not about science, it is LITERALLY the thing that I would want to avoid if I had planned going into this field, and I assume that women also do not want long drawn out discussions about what they are wearing INSTEAD of their impressive scientific achievements.'
His shirt is the kind of thing that keeps women away from science?
This all started with s.o. being offended by it while watching the original interview, but how can you come to such a conclusion based on that?
Did the female student's lecture attendance/signup rate plummet since that interview?
Is there any kind of imperial evidence that this person's shirt is making female students turn away from science?
I honestly don't understand how it's even possible to get to that conclusion. If there's s.o. interested in a specific field and (s)he witnesses a major scientific breakthrough, then the last thing on your mind would be '...but how could the person be wearing that?'.
If you're offended by it, then ask why this happened in the first place, because maybe there's an actual good explanation behind it.
For me it's in the same category as people saying they don't want anything to do with computers because Turing was gay - how does one thing have anything to do with the other?
> but how can you come to such a conclusion based on that?
I don't think anyone can prove it right now, only find it plausible or probable. Of course that's a long way from proof, but the opposite is also true - can you demonstrate that this shirt, in the context of a wider trend of what people can and do wear, does not affect the number of women in science?
> Did the female student's lecture attendance/signup rate plummet since that interview?
This is disingenuous, I'm sure you know that no criticism of the shirt is because this specific, individual incident would be perceived to be of overwhelming importance for any given statistic, and I think your attempt to portray things this way is a strawman or a horrible misunderstanding. As above, it is the example of wearing this shirt in the context of wider trends in what people do (and wear) that people are criticising. You can still disagree with them, but at least disagree on a point you didn't just make up.
I wouldn't want to work in a workplace which wears its objectification on its sleeve like that. Your argument seems to be that I'm weak because of all the opportunities available to me I would prefer to work someplace else.
Thus, while I think that lern_too_spel is incomplete, in that some men may also stay out of science for these reasons, I strongly object to your name calling. I am not "weak" for my decisions on the sort of work environments I will participate in.
Nor do I think that others, women or men, who make the same decision are weak. Yet, oddly, you want to call me and them names for making what I think are principled decisions. That sounds like a back-handed taunt by you to those who stay out of a given workplace for these reasons.
There's of course no clear cut line. Would a shirt using Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" instead be a problem? Playboy's famous "Lenna" picture for image processing? The full original Lenna centerfolds hanging on the wall? A background screensaver showing people having sex? Or on a related subject, a cross hanging on the wall, along with quotes from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", and prayers to start off each workplace meeting? Mounted trophy heads from all of the hunts from various staff outings? A mariachi band walking through the offices every 10 minutes? Unairconditioned offices next to a pig farm and under the approach path to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport?
Each case is personal, and one's personal decision to avoid a certain workplace or even career must not be considered a weakness.
If you think this is not a big deal, you should become familiar with the Petrie multiplier. Women shouldn't need thicker skin than men to work in science, but that won't get fixed as long as we keep ignoring the problem, limiting the speed of scientific advancement by limiting the population of scientists. http://iangent.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-wh...
man, 'vei just read what the Petrie multiplier is. It clearly explains why, given equal sexism by men and women, women's experience is worst. Thus to equalize experience, according to the Petrie multiplier, men should decrease their sexism way below women's. Forcing men to decrease their sexism way below women's is an attack on men by definition, and the Petrie multiplier provides mathematical foundation for it.
you probably didn't read what Petrie multiplier is - it clearly explains why heavily disbalanced industry like hi-tech consisting of practically non-sexist/non-racist Jesus-es would feel like sexist and racist environment by the corresponding minorities. Onus is on you to show that people in the industry are actually sexist and racist - according to Petrie multiplier, minorities feeling bad isn't enough to conclude that the majority consists of sexist and racist people.
You misunderstood what the Petrie multiplier is. It assumes equal non-zero racism/sexism/minorityism. It doesn't matter whether it is a majority. I posit to you that there is no reason why it shouldn't be zero.
>You misunderstood what the Petrie multiplier is. It assumes equal non-zero racism/sexism/minorityism.
misunderstanding is all yours. Equal sexism results in worse experience by the members of minority. Equal experience would necessarily require lower sexism displayed by the members of the majority - read the Petrie multiplier post again if you don't understand that statement. Thus push for equal experience in a male dominated environment is an equivalent of push for the males in that environment to display lower sexism than the women in the same environment. In other words it is an "attack on men".
>I posit to you that there is no reason why it shouldn't be zero.
And there is no reason why people shouldn't violate red light. In theory. They do it in practice.
Is it hysteria to suggest that what men in a male dominated field think is appropriate might have statistical significance in the representation of women?
Moaning about a scientist's sexist shirt is probably a case of misplaced priorites, but it's not like anyone is denying the existence of the landing or the spaceship, whereas here you have public figures who cheerfully deny the reality of biological evolution or climate change in order to chase votes.
It's not like anyone is going to gut the European Space Agency budget over Dr. Wossname's shirt, though.
I really don't care. It's not relevant to the original article about the misrepresentation of science in politics, yet your derail has become the largest thing in the thread and sucked all the oxygen out of the original discussion.
Oh, That Shirt. I thought that was just some feminists divorced from reality who got busy complaining. Meanwhile, during the livecast, when the go/no-go decisions took place the night before the comet landing, you could see one woman engineer and two or three men engineers on duty in the control room, and they all interacted with each other as if they were peers.
I'm blessed to be ignorant about sexism in Silicon Valley, but in Darmstadt it looks that as a woman you are just fine.
> you could see one woman engineer and two or three men engineers on duty in the control room, and they all interacted with each other as if they were peers.
This is a remarkably short sighted attitude. I mean, maybe there is totally no problem with the shirt, but it's just a false argument to say 'I saw some women in science so there is no problem'.
No, it shows that civilization has arrived in Darmstadt. It's an ideal to aspire to, and the folks in the ESO control room have managed to get there. (I believe that in my old university department we have arrived in the same place.)
Everywhere should be like that, and I doubt you get there by banning shirts with surfer babes on. Jesus was up to something when he said "But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person." This was in the context of observing the divine commandments. It's the problem I have with overly specific codes of conduct. If you are an asshole you can and will work around the specific stipulations, and you are and remain an asshole.
This is the first I've heard of this, but it hardly seems like the UK press made him do it. The lady asked a question about his achievement and he responded talking about his shirt.
Perhaps he genuinely felt bad about what he (probably unthinkingly) chose to wear, the possible message it sends, and wanted to address it?
Like /u/exstudent says, it was a reaction to a Verge article and a huge shi(r)tstorm that followed after that, on Twitter and elsewhere. SJWs made the guy completely break down.
This is stupid. His shirt looks like old pinball artwork. It's obviously a vintage throwback that's harmless to anyone who isn't currently obsessed with gender politics.
These feminists are so divorced from reality they are desperate and seeing everything through the prism of their bunk thought-experiments that they have to make literally everything about their imaginary oppression.
Can we have one good news story without trying to make it relevant to your gender-studies major?
I really doubt people would be freaking out on twitter if some animated firemen looking guys were printed on his shirt, especially if was an established art-form like anime. I guess what offends one offends all and should be banned because it promotes oppressions, a lot to read into from the anime printed on a shirt.
Diverse, as long as you dress EXACTLY how you're "supposed" to.
A friend made him this shirt. He was wearing it as a tribute since the day was important to him. He got nailed to the wall.
Remember when scientists and engineers could dress how they wanted and be independent thinkers? It's sad to see that coming to an end. This is not a win for science or free thought.
Wearing a t-shirt with scantily clad women (or men) on it is not acceptable in any workplace. Just like watching porn is not appropriate in the workplace.
There is no end in sight for independent thought in science, but the end of thoughtless marginalisation of women is most definitely overdue.
edit: honestly - downvotes for this? Think about what that means.
It's hard to say that he was disrespecting his colleagues considering that not one of them told him not to wear it. Even if they were scared to do so you would expect someone of higher or equal status to him to say something if it was really seen as a problem. IMO this is a culture clash between American and British culture. In the US it would be unthinkable for someone to wear a shirt like that just because it would be seen as unprofessional, even by a misogynist (which I don't think the Dr. is). In the UK they don't take things like that as serious and are also more tolerant of sex images. It's quite likely that no one thought anything of his shirt until people (Americans) started complaining about it on Twitter.
Do you think they didn't tell him not to wear it because they didn't deem it offensive or perhaps even because they are scientists and engineers that determined that it is merely an article of clothing and it would be prudent to wear any shirt in lieu of going on camera not wearing a shirt at all? (I hope you appreciate the humor in my response as I upvoted yours because I agree with your thoughts on the matter).
Get the repressed individuals out of the office and it's totally fine, some people are comfortable in their own skin, some people aren't.
My partner would like to wear lower cut tops than she's allowed to at work, so I don't see how some arbitrary dress code reduces marginalization of women.
In some places how you dress is very important to clients, some people are able to see through the clothes one wears to the value they provide. There is no universal dress code that ends marginalization of women, because gasp different women have different opinions on what they'd like to wear.
That's completely irrelevant. The problem is that he wore a shirt that sexualises women in a televised major scientific event. Millions of people saw the video, and the image he projected was that he's more interested in sex than in making women feel welcome and valued in science. Which is incidentally the same image you're portraying.
"the image he projected was that he's more interested in sex than in making women feel welcome and valued in science. "
Was the shirt professionally appropriate? No.
Was he "projecting that he was more interested in sex than women in science"? No.
Overstating the case is probably the worst sin in political discussions. It might feel all good to do it, but all it does is make it easy for you to be dismissed entirely.
It was a questionably appropriate shirt but when they interviewed him, he gave a strange answer about how this comet was “The sexiest mission there’s ever been. She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.”
Meh, it was still a weird interview, especially combined with his shirt. I watched it live with my fiance and we were both confused and actually said out loud, "We'll be hearing about him later on."
I don't think he's sexist, I'm sure he's a well-respected and well-liked scientist, and I don't think it's fair to judge someone's worth based on a short interview when they're not used to being in the spotlight.
At the same time, I would expect more professionalism from the whole staff at ESA. Are there any offices where wearing this [http://i.imgur.com/oJ9bVDt.jpg] shirt would be okay? People are making a big deal about the fact that a woman made the shirt for him, but they seem to be omitting that he provided the fabric and asked her to make it..
A large part of the rationale for missions like Rosetta is the inspiration it provides to the next generation of scientists. Hearing crude jokes about how 'easy' the mission was from a guy wearing a nudie shirt doesn't exactly invoke inspiration. It's a shame all of the other incredibly smart, professional, and inspirational people involved with the project are overshadowed by this.
Fortunately, science is largely unencumbered by the fashion choices of the people who participate in it. Furthermore, as outlandish as this shirt may be I find it to be quite refreshing that a tatted up metal fan wearing a shirt like this can still be well-respected in his field for his accomplishments and rise above a moment of questionable judgement and a fashion faux pas.
My problem with PHP is that it's a signal of developer laziness. There are a lot of very interesting things going on with languages nowadays. If you develop in PHP because "it pays the bills" you ARE NOT the type of developer I ever want to work with.
Honestly, I'm starting to see the same thing with Python/Ruby/JS devs. Stick with one language that you're comfortable with and never push yourself.
PHP is an order of magnitude worse in that respect than the other scripting languages.
His technical background is clearly insufficient in that he doesn't understand the BASIC technical problems in his argument. Yet, he feels he's qualified to authoritatively call for radical government access to our data in a mainstream media publication.
He's changed his position to "need more information to decide". Well DUH! how about getting that information before scaring up a call to backdoor all of our data?
You can definitely feel this as a patient. If I could give my vitals to an app and have it diagnose and prescribe remedies, I would do it in a heart beat and never visit a doctor again (of course you would need robot surgeons too :).
I've never seen a doctor research anything either (although I'm sure they do behind the scenes). They seem to be pulling from whatever information cache they have in their head which I often suspect is horribly outdated.
I'd take a crowd sourced db of health info over a doctor's personal knowledge any day of the week.
> I've never seen a doctor research anything either
That's a little surprising to me. One of the coolest things about practicing medicine today is that I can pull out my phone in front of a patient and find guidelines that I'm not familiar with, medication side-effects, and other point-of-care resources that really do enhance my clinical ability in real-time.
Granted, I work in a hospital setting. Maybe it's different in the clinics.
BTW, though I feel I'm underpaid for what I do (which many outsiders would find ridiculous), I'm overall pretty happy with being a physician.
> I'd take a crowd sourced db of health info over a doctor's personal knowledge any day of the week.
So would I. But what you'd learn in the first week of hanging out with a doctor in a typical clinical setting is that most patients are frankly too uneducated to be able to use that kind of tool. When I did residency, I suspect most of the patients I saw didn't have internet. Many were illiterate and a disturbing number simply didn't care about their own well-being.
I'd love to build up a practice with patients like you, but people like you tend to be pretty healthy.
> When I did residency, I suspect most of the patients I saw didn't have internet. Many were illiterate and a disturbing number simply didn't care about their own well-being.
> I'd love to build up a practice with patients like you, but people like you tend to be pretty healthy.
There's also the factor that teaching hospitals tend to get a lot of poor and uneducated patients. Private clinics have a different clientèle, and there are definitely plenty of individuals out there who are not in perfect medical condition, yet are educated/informed enough for doctors to interact with on a higher level than they currently do.
> So would I. But what you'd learn in the first week of hanging out with a doctor in a typical clinical setting is that most patients are frankly too uneducated to be able to use that kind of tool.
Yep. There's apps to do your taxes. But the average person isn't able to understand double entry accounting without doing a year of study on it.
I've never seen a doctor research anything either (although I'm sure they do behind the scenes).
Yup, they do it behind the scenes. They worry that too many patients would complain and feel insecure about a doctor having to do research in front of them, since the majority of patients want to feel that their doctor is the expert on all matters of their health. If a patient feels the care he/she wasn't up to par, and there are any complications, there is generally a very high risk of a lawsuit. So to prevent that, most doctors will do research outside of the view of the patient.
To be fair, they aren't sitting at their desks pulling up Wikipedia. Their research often consists of consulting with a specialist (or multiple specialists), consulting with colleagues, and searching through the volumes of medical periodicals and databases.
Most do this not just to be thorough and careful, but also because they know they need to practice defensive medicine and, well, cover their butts in case anything goes wrong.
I wonder if in the future, doctors will become more like bearucracts. You go to the internet, find out what you have.
Then you fill out the appropriate form, go to a doctor who stamps the decision with a red mark of approval, granting you access to medication / surgery.
This is exactly how I interact with the medical monopoly. I don't think I have been to the doctor for the last 10 years without knowing my diagnosis and treatment in advance. My job has then been to guide the doctor to the correct diagnosis in a way that keeps their ego intact.
>> "I've never seen a doctor research anything either"
I have. It's terrifying. I recently went to the GP, told them my condition (which had been diagnosed by a different GP) and their first response was to look it up on Wikipedia. Seriously. I understand that a GP isn't going to know every condition you come in with but Wikipedia as the reference material?
It shouldn't be terrifying at all. GPs are not specialists. And even specialists don't know everything. I used to work as a neuro tech and I remember a patient came in announcing that he had some particular syndrome (I can't recall the name). I stayed quiet about it, never having heard it, but needed to get a neurologist in for the test anyway. In comes the specialist, one whose skill I greatly respected, and the patient proudly announces the syndrome. The neurologist had no qualms about directly asking what that was. The thing is, if your syndrome only has five people in the country that are affected by it, it's not reasonable to expect every doctor (even specialist) to know what it is off the top of their head. There are hundreds of thousands of maladies that can affect the human body. Many of them go by multiple names.
To top this all off, a GP is a General Practitioner. Their main role is to filter out the sniffles and the rashes, and keep an eye out for the more serious stuff, which gets passed on to an appropriate specialist. In the GP's case, going to Wikipedia gives a good, quick baseline on what the disease is. A GP shouldn't be prescribing drugs from WP, but if you say you've got McGrady's Syndrome, the GP looks it up quickly on WP (which is a very quick, concise resource), and finds out it's a liver problem of a certain type, the GP now has a base to work with. Liver problems mean X, Y, or Z in general, start looking at those avenues of inquiry.
The other thing is that while it should not be a canonical reference, when it comes to scientific topics, WP is very well written, concise, and quick to access. If you've ever used medical software, you'd know the high variety of quality there is - some is just plain awful when it comes to looking things up. And textbooks by their very nature go out of date.
Obviously caveat emptor, YMMV etc. would apply to such a forum, and the other issue is that a patient posting there doesn't have access to all the diagnosis tools that doctors do.
Every doctor is different. If you show a desire to engage with a doctor, and get the right one, you can have one that does research. When I started on cholesterol-managing medication, my physician emailed me three recent journal articles on the effectiveness of different options and the dosing considerations. It all depends on who you have, and how they run their practice.
I agree that there are good doctors, but I'd rather not have it be such a crap shoot. The consistency and depth of knowledge provided by an expert system of some sort seems like the way to go.
I'd imagine the proportion of "good" doctors might be about the same as good programmers, or good teachers, though probably exceeds the supply of "good" politicians.
Point is medical care is only as good as the quality of the "team" consisting of the doctor and the patient. It's a partnership, an expression of the doctor-patient relationship. Not every two people will form a natural team, after all, many marriages fail.
It's kind of a cliche, but still true, find a doctor you can work with, someone you can trust and relate to. More likely than not, that's the the definition of a "good" doctor.
And you know, everyone who's not xenophobic, enjoys living in a diverse community and philosophically believes people should be able to live wherever they want.
Pretty much every country has limits on immigration. It is hardly unique to the US. There are different cultures and traditions in the world. It takes for people to adjust to a new country and the country to adjust to them.
Actually white Americans don't seem to mind immigration from fellow white-majority countries, especially if it's from the developed ones. But that's an understandable phenomenon.
They don't now only because there isn't a lot of it, so it's not a political issue. How many recent German or French immigrants are there in the US? Not enough for anyone to notice. Back when there was large-scale immigration from Europe though, a lot of people minded, and formed parties specifically to agitate against the Irish/Poles/etc.
You see that now in Europe. UKIP isn't complaining only about muslim immigrants (though they complain about them loudest), but also about continental-European immigrants, especially eastern Europeans. I suspect something similar would happen in the U.S. if there were a large influx of European immigrants.
The internet is a good example of a culture than can exist if you do away with artificial barriers between groups of people. Modern immigration policy is not inherently correct and it wasn't devised during an age of hyper connectivity.
If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access. Open borders made sense in the age of unsettled land, and they make sense when the marginal cost of delivering everything (i.e., only information) is nearly zero.
>If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access.
Unfortunately, the US doesn't ensure anything at all for its own citizens, other than their God-given right to accumulate capital in unlimited amounts.
Whom should you select to let into your country? The same people you select as employees, only more so.
We use "skilled migration" as a proxy for what we really want, which is people with good genes. If you have skills and good genes then you'll enrich the country not only in this generation but in all future generations to come.
So an ideal immigration policy would involve some combination of testing for intelligence, physical fitness and (dare I say it) good looks.
There are plenty of untalented natives in any country. I do not think the government is particularly good at spotting talent. We should just let everyone in IMO.
Besides, "talent" can mean many things. Is the Mexican mother who can't speak English and doesn't have a college degree (maybe not even high school), but can make BAD ASS food and is capable of raising a family of 5 talented?
Strawman. Vivek Wadhwa scolded Democrats for not taking a deal proposed by the Republicans whereby 55K diversity visas in exchange for startup visas. [1]
Startup visas have nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with enriching the US economy. Nothing wrong with that. I support the startup visa moment, but not at the expense of other visas. We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
>We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
True, but you should also be doing more to exclude the people who don't have visas, which is the main reason the US immigration system is currently broken.
I lived in the US for a few years, did everything legally, queued up at embassies, paid endless fees, and saw that everywhere I went I was surrounded by people who had entered the country illegally and the US government wasn't doing a fucking thing about it.
Eventually I decided "Fuck it", because if the US government is more interested in letting in a gazillion unskilled, non-English-speaking manual labourers who have already shown a complete disregard for its laws than it is in letting in me, then the US isn't a country that deserves me.
While it would of course lower afasd's blood pressure to relax and let it go, his question needs to be considered. Anyone telling law-abiding would-be American immigrants to wait their turn comes off as either oblivious or downright malicious if they tacitly condone, um, "extralegal" immigration. As an American, frankly, it's embarrassing.
I agree that would be hypocritical. I didn't tell him to wait his turn though, I told him I support open borders.
If he wanted to come into this country illegally, I personally would have no problem with it. Maybe then though, he'd see that those people don't have it easy since they obviously won't be getting high-end engineering jobs like that and will realize they are no threat to anyone whatsoever.
It's also comparable to GPL compliance too. The companies that do open source their code and comply are leaning on the FSF to make sure their competitors are also held to the same standard. If the FSF let them off, then why should anyone spend any effort complying?
It was more the moral outrage that happens when you do the right thing and see other people getting away with doing the wrong thing.
It's like if you went to a supermarket and paid for your groceries and saw that you were the only person paying. Everyone else was just walking in, shoplifting, and walking straight out, and the managers weren't doing anything to stop it. That's not a supermarket I'd choose to keep going to.
Immigration is very important for all countries, but assimilation takes time. (If you believe in the country enough to want to immigrate there, then the existing culture must have some value.)
Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.
Meh, as a visible minority I'd rather the open borders than the opposite. The Nordic countries, Japan, and others with historically xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes have a "stronger" rule of law, and the illusion of fewer social ills, because they don't have to deal with the discomfort of a heterogeneous population.
And now that immigration is increasing in these places the amount of racism being exposed is shocking, even when compared to the USA where racism has been front-and-center for decades. Hell, just look at HN threads whenever Muslim immigration to Sweden/Norway comes up, it's like Stormfront on steroids.
Your argument has been levied against just about every immigrant population that's made its way into the US. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, all of whom were subject to enormous racist and xenophobic backlash, much of it under the guise of some vague notion of cultural integrity.
All of the above populations have integrated into American society and in fact the US would be markedly poorer - economically and culturally - without them now.
There's a small amount of schadenfruede I feel when I look at the struggles going on right now in previously-closed countries as they experience large-scale immigration for the first time. For years they tsk'ed tsk'ed at the US (and Canada) for their social upheaval, as people came to grips with living in a heterogeneous society, and criticized us for the many examples of blatant racism and xenophobia. Now that they're going through the same thing it makes me sad to see people from these very countries spouting the same justifications and views as Jim Crow-era America, as if they've learned literally nothing for themselves while observing us in judgment this whole time.
Was it a love for Native American culture that caused the original European settlers to come to the US? No, it was raw opportunity. Unless you're talking about Native American culture, then ALL culture in the US was constructed by immigrants.
Even Native Americans were immigrants as they crossed the Bering land bridge ;)
Actually, American Indian culture had developed a way of life that preserved a beautiful land in a sustainable manner, while much of the world was embroiled in war, feudalism and disease. True, there were inter-tribe rivalries as well, but the land was relatively peaceful and undeveloped compared to what Europe was experiencing with the Seven Years War, Protestant-Catholic Wars and massive civil wars at the time. I don't think the early Europeans necessarily understood Amerindian culture, but they were definitely the beneficiaries of it. If American Indians had executed a more cogent immigration policy, the transition to a modern economy would probably have been easier for the natives.
Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.
I think there are two separate issues in your comment...
You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.
Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree more. We're RAPIDLY approaching the point where most people are employed to do basically nothing of value. How many people's jobs could be replaced by the mythical "script" written in a day by a good dev?
I'm glad to see us get to this point. People should learn and practice useful skills. So as not to cause a violent revolution, I think we do need some form of basic income though. That would also enable creatives to experiment and produce without economic pressure which I think is great. I also don't care if 99% of people mooch off this model as most people are just wasting time at work as it is anyway.
It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.
They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.
Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.
How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?
And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.
There's also a bit of a principal-agent problem. The people who make decisions about the educational system are state bureaucrats, teachers, and parents, in roughly that order. The one person who's most affected by it - the kid - has basically zero say in anything.
I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.
You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.
Except this argument doesn't seem to apply globally: I have a good friend over here in Europe who's got a PhD in computer science. He works as a researcher in a renouned university. His sister is not a kindergarden, but elementary school teacher.
She makes (slightly) more money than he does. Her work day starts at 8am and most of the time ends at 2pm. She's got around 10 weeks of vacation per year. She cannot legally get fired if she performs badly.
So in this country, my friends knowledge and high level skill levels certainly weren't a value multiplier when compared to his sister.
Granted, he might be able to get a higher paid job with his background, but that brings us back to the grandparent's original point: your education is not a good predictor for your salary.
"You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly."
And then the kids grow up, and you are fucked. Do you think the first ever important thing those kids learn, for society, is when they become 20+ and one day they start learning compsci-simulated-quantum-biomolecular-teleportation-of-artificial-intelligence-nanoparticle-drug-dynamofeedback 101? (Yes, if it's not obvious, I just pulled that out of my...)
She gets less, cause the system doesn't care about if the world in totally destroyed 30 years down the road. (Actually that would be great. Opportunity for "growth" and profit.) It only cares about billions yesterday.
Maybe I'm parsing your comment incorrectly, but do you mean that you used to have clients that allowed you to make your own schedule but you no longer do? Out of curiosity, what caused the change?
I firmly believe we'll see more people move to a consulting model where they work far fewer hours, are more productive and make as much or more money as before.
Sure you're drinking your VOSS but can you afford a home in SF? I would say it's a middle class aspiration to raise a family near your work. You'd be in for an "insane commute" if you had 3 kids and tried to work in the valley.
Engineer's pay pales in comparison to the value they create. That's an issue.
Average office drone X probably shouldn't even have a job so yeah, they shouldn't expect to get paid as much as a developer at Google.
My point is that it is not the execs fault for it being expensive. There is an artificial limit on supply. If supply is kept low, the producers (the landlords) usually benefit at the expense of poorer consumers.
My point is that people CAN afford to live in these places and those people built their fortunes on the back of a labor supply with artificially suppressed wages.
