> That is like saying that replacing the car emoji with a train car is changing it from a ‘car’ to a ‘car.’ A squirt gun is not at all the same thing as a pistol

In the context of human conversation via emojis (which is a very specialized subset of communication), can you give me an example of a scenario where the semantic meaning of a sentence is going to change significantly by the gun emoji being a squirt gun instead of a pistol?

I mean this in good faith, I can't think of a reasonable scenario outside of something like:

Alice: "911, what's your emergency?"

Bob: "Help, I"m being threatened"

Alice: "What are you being threatened with?"

Bob: "" (edit: I pasted https://emojipedia.org/pistol in here, but of course HN didn't render it)

> > Am I "manipulating my son's thoughts and culture" by choosing when I intentionally expose him to profanity?

> Yes, and it’s good because you are your son’s father.

If you were right, I would dispute that me being a child's father gives me exclusive rights to manipulate their thoughts and culture so it's a good thing. They are an independent human being. I could use my power and influence to enstill obedience to a cult (aka, religion), or teach them racism. It might take them decades to deprogram themselves, if they ever do so at all.

But I don't think you're right. Keeping profanity out of my son's brain until he grows out of the "repeat everything he hears especially if it gets a reaction" phase is no different than not giving him a gun before he can grow up to be a responsible gun owner.

And conversely, just because I am failing to keep profanity out of his mouth (obviously - most kids at some point figure out potty language and how fun ti is to repeat) doesn't automatically mean he's going to grow up a profane sailor.

Likewise, I don't know if my 5-year-old will grow up to be a responsible gun owner, a conscientious objector to weapons, or a mass shooter.

But I do know that his fate will not be decided by whether he sees a water pistol or a bullet pistol in the gun emoji on the internet.

> Apple is not anyone’s father, and does not have that right over its customers.

And customers aren't citizens. Apple may have a pretty large market share, but it is in no ways a monopoly. It is trivial to avoid Apple products in your life.

If the concern is that they used their power to influence the rest of the tech industry and the Unicode consortium, I mean the list of things like that is infinite. All modern web standards are shaped by tech companies, large and small. The issue isn't that someone CAN influence a consortium, the issue is that you disagree with the decision.

And I can understand if this was a threat to free expression or culture, but the list of emojis is already curated and influenced by the artists.

I'm still curious of an answer to this BTW:

> how does replacing a gun emoji with a squirt gun help make their case or in any way weaken the 2nd amendment? I don't think it says anything about not infringing on rights to a gun emoji?

Right but we are far from that world and statistics show that we are very far from such a post sexist post racist world and that despite nice words companies are still not hiring that many canidates who are women or members of some minority ethnic groups for high paying engineering jobs.

Again, DEI does not mean "hire less qualified people from group X", it mean "don't bias your hiring of less or equally competent candidates in favor of men". It is not "sexist/racist in the other direction" - though I'm sure some people can make it such - however, let's be clear here, if it _were_ racist/sexist in the other direction, and you want it to be removed, you're saying "both paths are sexist/racist and I just prefer the old sexist/racist path that gave an advantage to people who are straight, cis, white, and/or men". It's really not the most compelling argument to say "I just wish we got to benefit from the biases we used to have".

The problem is lots of people are use to a default world in which being a man, or being white, etc means that if all other things are equal they will be selected. They see anything other than choose the "equally performing" white dude by default as reverse racism.

Couple this with the well documented history of women and minorities being judged more critically for the same work, and you get the "non-racist" world where worse performing candidates are hired because they're "equal" and a better culture fit.

You can see the same thing retroactively: a woman or minority figure who subsequently performs below the level expected is blamed on "DEI", yet no one questions the hiring of a sub-performing non-minority. Weird right? lackluster minority employees only ever get their jobs because of DEI, lackluster non-minorities are just a thing that happens some times.

You're right, it would be great to not consider gender, race, etc - and certainly when I've interviewed people it has never figured into the process, but companies need to have some kind of mechanism to compensate for all the employees that do (you can happily find countless examples on HN of people openly admitting they consider women inferior devs, they dismiss certain races and castes, lgbt candidates, or people with the wrong religion. DEI programs exist so that those bigots can't pollute the entire recruitment process. Those are the bigots who complain most, yet seem completely unaware that they are the entire reason DEI programs are necessary. The moment you say "I don't think group X can do the job as group Y", you've immediately said there needs to be an external mechanism to mitigate the advantage you are giving to group Y.

That's what DEI is: a hamfisted, but sadly necessary, unless you have a better idea, mechanism to stop people from biasing the recruitment process.

Seriously.

If you think DEI is bad, I want you to think about every "bad" coworker you've had and see if there's any bias in what you blame for them being hired. If you look at the news today, everytime anything goes wrong, and there is a minority involved anywhere, even if they were objectively not at fault, the bigot circle jerk does nothing but blame DEI.

Lots of people want to go back to the "good old days", because they were immensely privileged in those days, you could get and stay married easier - because women could not have bank accounts, and were functionally owned by their family or husband. Remember a women could not divorce her husband for beating her, nor for raping her, because by definition spousal rape was impossible. So yeah, I understand why lots of men want to go back in time, life was objectively easier for them. Those men just don't give a shit about it being harder for literally every one else, which is why I don't give a shit about their opinion.

If you think DEI is the reason you can't get a job, maybe the problem is just that you're broadcasting "I'm a bigot" and no one wants to work with someone who is saying "I have no respect for my coworkers unless they're the same race, gender, religion, etc as me and will not treat them as people". Or of course, maybe it's just dunning-kreuger: you're too low skill to understand you're lower skill than the people being selected over you.