If gender female
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
They sent a mistargeted email. Wow.
A fair number of people who meet the known characteristics of your wife have children, thus it seems reasonable to send them a PSA pertaining to kids. It looks like a sensible email and it’s not a judgment or anything. I think the email could have been better qualified. But this whole things just smacks of hypersensitivity to perceived micro aggressions.
That said, I think it's really imprecise to infer whether someone has a child from their age, sex, and marital status. Regardless of how many 30-year-old married women in SE Railways' database show strong signs of having children (e.g., they regularly book child's fares), the consequence of incorrectly believing a woman has a child when they really don't is potentially really bad. How many infertile couples, recovering stillbirth mothers, or childfree advocates who complain eloquently enough to get to the front page of HN do you want to risk upsetting with this tone-deaf campaign email?
If privacy is the concern, there’s plenty to discuss about FB or Google who actually do target people based on personal and private insights. I think that ranting about this email is misplaced at best.
The ratio of useful mail to garbage in my mailbox is approaches 1:100, and email without regularly efforts to prune and filter is even worse.
This should not be okay.
if (condition) { variable = true; }
variable |= condition;
hasChildren |= gender == "female" && married && age >= 30;I don't have a problem with companies sending out emails tailored to customers' demographic profiles. The issue is really the wording, which in this case assumes the customer has children. It could easily be remedied by changing it to "Do you have kids? Make sure they know this."
I was going to say: cases like this illustrate how insensitive such advertising can be. While it sounds like she underwent sterilization since she didn't want children, there is also a possibility that the choice was forced upon her for medical reasons or that she didn't undergo a procedure but was sterile. Of course, that would have happened even if the email was sent to everyone rather than targeted.
More realistic issues pop up when the criteria are prejudiced (age, gender, race, etc.) or criteria that may have an implicit prejudice. Using income is more likely to bias towards a particular gender due to well known income disparities. Using postal/zip code is more likely to bias towards a particular race simply because of the amount of segregation we see in housing. While those biases don't guarantee an outcome, historical and contemporary ills in society means they are a problem.
Shall I complain that the algorithm is not aware of the number in my savings account, and is also not aware of the fact that I have a 3-year old child which cannot possibly be put in a 2-seat Vantage?
I'm going to be blunt here: there are circumstances under which women desire yet cannot bear their own children. It is a heavy burden that they may carry through much of their adult life. It can have a much deeper impact than being unable to afford some creature comfort or being unable to seat a child in a luxury car. Perhaps it can be argued that the number in a savings account can have an equally heavy burden, say for someone who has had everything taken away from them. I'm not the one to make that argument since I place the value of the person above that of dollar.
That being said, I am not particularly fond of direct advertising. Not only is it intrusive, but most forms of direct advertising involve making some sort of decision regarding who to advertise to. Even choosing people within a particular postal/zip code is going to result in bias, even if it is an unintentional consequence of structural problems within our society. Couple that with the intent of direct advertising having a larger impact, you end up with the negative consequences having a larger impact.
Why should I care if I occasionally get a mistargetted email?
If you don't, then don't worry yourself about it.
It is for people like them and about people like them.
The only reason I’m interacting on this post is because I feel a mild sort of outrage about the author’s mild outrage. And I feel like a bit of a sucker because of that.
In that case it's just shrug this company's marketing campaign is shitty.
I guess this hits some sense of identity that needs to be blasted from the rooftops, and we need to know how wrong this all is...
Bingo: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/11/do-you-have-kids-thankfully...
Leaving aside the reason spelled out in the article at hand--an ad assuming children while recovering from surgery to ensure no children ever--I think we should all be less okay with uninvited spam emails.
Or just lie. Several apps think I have been knighted...
Respectfully,
Emperor code_scrapping III
Leader of the Free Code Monkeys
Debugger of print statements
Divider of Sets, Walker of Lists, Mapper of Dictionaries
May his hash always be unique,
and infinite his TTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Colonel#See_also
Fun Fact: KFC's Colonel Sanders wasn't commissioned as a military title. He was a 'Kentucky Colonel', one of these honorary titles.
Haha, yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man.
Also slight nitpick of the title: if(gender == "female" && married && age >= 30) would work just as well. But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases.
Sadly true.
> But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases.
I can see this option more popular nowadays due to the gender discussion, but how did they manage unknown back in the day if they used a boolean for this (I assume something like isMale or isFemale)?
Otherwise, it can be represented as two booleans, one that tells if the gender is specified, and another one for the gender itself. Or it can be a 3 value enum, which is my preferred solution, even if we don't consider non-binary genders.
We should always consider the case when a field has no value. And I hope those who stored gender as a boolean did. Because what if you don't have that information? You can put a default (ex: male), but what if later, in another database, that person is explicitly female and you want to merge. You now have a conflict where you shouldn't.
would likely work too.
The author is apparently part of a "childfree community" that collectively has a huge chip on their shoulder.
I mean I guess it's kind of a joke thing but it fails for me because even though it's one person trying to make sport of a presumably huge company it still seems like he's punching down which adds a degree of difficulty to any joke.
I think it is the latter, which would only mean receiving even more irrelevant emails.
- It looks like JavaScript, so the explicit weak comparison against a boolean is unnecessary
- I believe and& will be a parse error
- I don't think you'll want to assign a value to the age variable in the condition
But it's not real code, so making assumptions about the semantic is pointless.
Being offended here is a personal choice, it's a message about children traveling safely on trains. Yes, you may not fall into that group but that doesn't mean you're a victim unless you want to act like one.
It seems to me the OP is questionning generic assumptions, and I don't get how the meme relates to the situation.
The email is poor because it is worded as if they knew for a fact that the recipient had children whereas clearly they don't.
On the other hand, I'm sure that statistically the hypothesis that married women aged 30+ have children is probably correct by a good margin (although we don't know how they targeted so this is speculative by the author). Of course this is only a statistical likelihood and like always in such case you should proceed with caution if you decide to make an inference (which I don't have a problem with).
For instance they could have targeted who to send the email to but used an informational and neutral wording not to give any impression.
Pretty minor annoyance, though.