It's a fckn disgrace that you and globular-toast haven't been banned already. Cancel culture you think? No it's just basic GC to not let a few dozens relics from the 1950s poison the environment with misogynistic bullshit for everyone else. You are toxic.
I don't understand why people go to such great lengths to give current injustices the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum, even constructing ridiculously rare and hypothetical scenarios like that.
The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.
I don't know man... I dont think its that rare for someone to climb out of poverty. Maybe I just see it this way because I did it myself (born in a 3rd world country, single mom, step father with bad addiction issues, barely graduated HS)
Now that Im a father myself, Im of course trying to give my child the best opportunities, but also trying to raise him to be grateful and disciplined.
So I'm not talking about the billionaires. Im talking about regular people who can now grant their children not private jets, but just a good private school.
What would be fair in this scenario? How can we make things equal/just in this case?
Also I dont think its rare or hypothetical at all, that rich kids never learn to work hard and squander their good fortune.
-- EDIT, i completely agree its absurd and completely wrong that 1% of people have 50% of the wealth, that should not be that way.
I also have a working class background, but in Sweden. The last thing I would like to do is to pull up the ladder that enabled me and so many others a better chance to a secure and comfortable life. The inheritance tax was actually recently abolished here, but not due to some popular uproar but because right-wing parties got into power.
I have certainly missed how for example Scandinavian countries fits with this:
> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies.
Care to explain? Or are you just being childishly contrarian which your last sentence seem to suggest?
I'm sorry but this all strikes me as rather delusional.
The reason why functional languages doesn't take off is because programming languages are tools, not an end in themselves. Carpenters that are obsessed with perfecting their power tools would rightly be out of a job in a very short amount of time. Furthermore most of these "perfections" aren't even virtuous - in the sense of searching for improvement - but just self-indulgence and aesthetics.
Functional languages are dense, hard to read, have a high cognitive load, and are thus unproductive beyond the proverbial garage startup. They are also designed and used mostly by mentioned power tool decorators rather than practitioners, with the inevitable end result.
Totally understand the sentiment. I was very dismissive at first, as a self thought dev. Its really hard for me to learn something unless its helps directly to solve a concrete business problem I’m facing, so I know where you’re coming from.
I think my epiphany was when I was trying to learn me some clojure on a couple of weeks sabbatical from work.
As a mostly js/frontend/react dev at the time I was deep into React ecosystem for building SPAs. I knew and largely disliked the amount of code a redux based app would require in order to be “complete” with all the data fetching and state management (this was before hooks and contexts). And then I sew re-frame, that implements a lot of the features in that whole ecosystem, in like 100ish lines of code.
Thats BS I told myself. Things are missing! It cannot be just this code in front of me. But no, it was all there, just elegant and clear. All of the “meat” of the logic distilled to its essence, without any of the boilerplate.
It was just that I had to learn all the “higher level” stuff around FP, but it turns out those things are shared and repeated in lots of places, so once you index it in your brain, you can read the business logic itself, without all the additional “fat” of the code. Simply beautiful.
> As a mostly js/frontend/react dev at the time I was deep into React ecosystem for building SPAs.
Not to be too dismissive but I think that's the problem. Modern SPAs with React et al are very bloated and imo a massive wrong turn compared with the simple boring tech that was before it, with very little gain to show for it as well.
"Domain work is messy and demands a lot of complicated new knowledge that doesn’t seem to add to a computer scientist’s capabilities. Instead, the technical talent goes to work on elaborate frameworks, trying to solve domain problems with technology. Learning about and modeling the domain is left to others. Complexity in the heart of software has to be tackled head-on. To do otherwise is to risk irrelevance." - Eric Evans
Would be curious to know if he has changed his view since then.
Also I think that the source code of his projects in Python pretty much validates the point of writing simple code. He has made great user-facing APIs (flask) but as soon you dive into the code base itself it's imo a rather dense and hairy mess of abstractions.
> If slavery had been critical to the U.S. economy, you would've expected a massive economic collapse right after the civil war. But there wasn't even a blip.
Do you believe that the newly emancipated slaves retreated to their own self-subsistence farms directly after the civil war or what?
I think you're actually making OP's point: free laborers were capable of doing the same work that unfree laborers had been forced to do.
This isn't my field, but I have read a few papers about the question of how profitable slavery was. Most of the debate seems to be over how profitable it was to the plantation owners, and whether they personally would have made larger profits by investing their money elsewhere (e.g., by hiring wage laborers to work their plantations, or by investing in manufacturing).
The question of slavery's impact on the development of the economy as a whole is completely different from that. Given how backwards the South remained, while the half of the country that abolished slavery surged ahead economically, it's difficult to see how one could argue that slavery caused the US' economic development.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America. It's well worth reading, to see a contemporary Frenchman's impressions of the stark difference in economic development between the Southern slave and Northern free societies: https://www.tota.world/article/1860/
The point I was trying to make that "free" and "unfree" isn't as binary as some people like to think. The former slaves weren't free from the economic coercion their destitution entailed. Just because you aren't someones literal property anymore doesn't necessarily make you free or in any position to demand a livable wage. The planters were well aware of the disposablity of the wage labourer and even used that it their pro-slavery propaganda that went something like "We actually need to take care of our property, unlike you, who just replace them".
All this huff and puff just for someone using a gender neutral term? I can't understand why people get upset by something so unimportant. Or to get upset for not using it for that matter.
And what do you think is the “gender neutral” term that Spanish speakers use when they refer to group of people of Latin American origin? It surely is not “latinxs”.
“What would be point of that?”, yes, that’s exactly the issue. It would seem weird, forced and foreign, just like “latinxs” does to people it is purported to refer to.
It seems to be a bit strange to complain about how widespread the use is of a newly coined term.
I assume that much of this "outrage" is some kind of a "culture war" thing. Instead of focusing on important stuff people get all distracted with "old man angry at minor change" and bike shed things like this ad infinitum.
> yes, that’s exactly the issue
What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need. In some languages gender neutral terms can be legitimately used as a shortcut for using both after each other or similar.
> What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need
But that’s the point: it’s not needed in Spanish either. Spanish speakers are totally fine without new inventions like “latinx”. They see those strange American people, who usually don’t even speak Spanish, try to impose their own new norms on what the Latinos should be called, and they don’t like this kind of cultural imperialism.
The whole problem stems to a large degree from lack of understanding the English speakers have for gendered languages. English is, with few exceptions, not gendered. The exceptions are rare enough that people who care can try to lobby for using gender neutral terms, like they are used for almost everything else. This is often against established language patterns, but since English is, in general, not gendered, it doesn’t seem all that out of place.
That’s not how gendered languages works. In gendered languages, everything had a gender. In Spanish, chair is female, and desk is male. When you use an adjective, you need to use it in an appropriate gendered form to match the gender of the noun. Spanish speakers are completely used to it, and don’t see this as anything special or in need of rectification: that’s just how their language works. External efforts to make some specific words gender neutral are just strange and foreign to them.
You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
In German for example every job ad title need to be suffixed with (m/w). It would be handy if it was gender neutral. I don't understand how the grammatical gender of a random noun e.g. wine, that happens to be masculine in German, is comparable to something that's referring to actual persons.
In Swedish for example there are the pronouns "han" (he) and "hon" (she), and now there's a gender neutral "hen". The latter being very handy when you don't know the gender of the person that's being talked about. But of course this addition has made culture warring people (a.k.a right-wing folks) very upset in Sweden too.
> You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
No, because when you refer to actual people, you still need to use a gendered noun. The issue is which gendered nouns to use, and different language have different rules about it.
In German, for example, one just like in Spanish needs to match the gender of the adjective to the gender of the noun. However, unlike in Spanish, German doesn't really have gender distinction in plural, and you generally use the same form to refer to group of people regardless of whether it comprises of only males, only females, or whether it's mixed.
Spanish, however, has gendered plural, and it also has a rule that whenever one refers to a group of people, one uses female gender noun only if the group comprises of only females. Whenever the group is fully male or mixed, one uses masculine form of the noun. So, a group of Latino men is "latinos", a group of Latino women is "latinas", but the mixed group of Latino men and women is actually "latinos" again. To add to that, the masculine plural version of the word "latinoamericano" is "latinoamericani", but the feminine version is "latinoamericanas", and not "latinaamericanas" (this is a compound word, and not an adjective-noun pair, hence the "latino" doesn't get declensed to "latina")
In short, any time you refer to group of Latin Americans in Spanish that doesn't happen to be all female, you'll always be saying "latino", and never "latina". Hence, the word "latinx" is solving a nonexistent problem, same as the word "Americanxs" would in English.
Why did you skip the Swedish example? That's the most similar to this. It's just a shortcut.
This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar. We would have a major linguistical crises on our hands if that was so.
Because I don't know anything about Swedish language :)
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter.
Which is silly, because "Latinos" is already gender neutral in its actual use, both in Spanish and in English. It declenses in Spanish using masculine form, but as the above example of chair and desk, grammatical gender of a noun doesn't have to say anything about gender of whatever it refers to. It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
> They are under no obligation to keep following the the original language's grammar.
Sure, there is no obligation. They could also decide to just call all groups of people from Latin America "Latinas", or just do away with that stem altogether, and just use "Hispanic" instead. Of course, in the former case, the Spanish speakers would be very confused that Americans keep insisting on only referring to females, and in the latter, the Brazilians might get confused why they are now called Hispanic. But, they'd be wrong to have any concerns about this, because languages are completely arbitrary, and Americans are under no obligation to have their language make any sense or be consistent with anything else.
The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female:
It doesn't even say that; it only means that the groups is not known to be all-female, as the masculine grammatical gender is used for indeterminate as well as mixed human gender.
> The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
Or, since Latinx is an adjective (not a noun), use “Latin” which American English, at least, already did before adopting the Spanish Latino/Latina. If we're dropping it for a non-Spanish gender-neutral English adjective with the same meaning, why not revert to the one we were using before that was only dropped to respect the language of the described population?
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
Anyway, I think it's important to remember that this is English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males. They may even disagree with the original preference of Spanish to go with Latinos over Latinas for a mixed composition.
> And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
No, because when you know nothing about composition of the group, you use the gender neutral form (masculine) instead of feminine one.
> English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males.
When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar.
Don’t you see how that makes it worse? The English word-Latin—is already gender neutral! Americans adopted “Latino” as gesture to the large number of Spanish speakers living in America. It’s not just a borrowed word Americans happen to use, it’s a word used to refer to a large Spanish-speaking minority group living in the country.
But "Latin" is ambiguous and normally not used to describe people of Latin-American decent, at least not in Europe, and the emphasis in America seem to be towards Spanish speaking countries rather than the Latin/Romance languages as a whole.
This isn’t about using a gender neutral pronoun with respect to a specific person. It’s about English-speaking people trying to change the label used for an entire group of mostly immigrant people by slicing and dicing a Spanish word and adding an English ending to it.
