The Ruby community has a DHH problem
tekin.co.uk
tekin.co.uk
I’m Asian, I don’t get why the West is so concerned. If half of my country are expats immigrating, hell yeah. I don’t see the problem as long as everyone is contributing for the overall community and welfare of the country.
From DHH’s linked blog?
I can't see how it was calculated but if you check government numbers, legal migrants are less than a 1% and illegal are not even close to that.
If you are worried about how much they cost, I'm sure they are less than the war in Russia, or many of the electoral campaigns for sure.
Are you sure this info is unbiased and well curated?
White British plus white Irish make up 82% of the population of the UK. It is slightly complicated because the Irish are a native population in Northern Ireland and and immigrant one in Great Britain and there were slightly different ethnicity options in the census in Scotland to in England etc.
I don't think so. If anything, i don't think "native Brits" as he called, not wanting to do any of the low-end jobs.
I get why people are frustrated, but it feels like anger's just being used for political gains. There is no easy answers to the current economic problems.
This is exactly the same Brexit maneuver, done by the exact same people trying to rise a political party that has no true solution rather than blame people.
After the EU nothing has improved in the UK. There was no money for the NHS anyway. It is just a political trick IMO
I have a more cynical cynical variation on that take. its being used to distract attention from the need for real economic (or any other) change. Politicians want business as usual (i.e. the Blair/Cameron "centrist" consensus).
I do not think the EU is relevant to this. They have the same problems.
Whatsoever it is, for sure it will not solve any of the root causes of UK's problems. The lack of structured internal investment with good planning and execution is what has been causing the UK to fall behind Germany.
For me, it seems that the British ate being steered away from important decision processes like "should we really invest in another war?" And "should we increase the number of doctors and care workers that has being stagnated for the past 15 years?" Or even "should UK invest more in telecom communication?"
As many other countries, UK has turned into technology hostage. Luckily, the incredible background created by geniuses of that past still holds up but the lag is already showing.
Nothing would sabe Britain if certain president charged taxes for cloud services, AI or processors and GPUs.
I don’t want to sound like Elon musk (he’s corrupt like the rest), but white people aren’t really reproducing at a rate to keep them going. There’s other ways for a race to die out. You think a majority asian Britain is going to be favorable to whites?
> i don't think "native Brits" as he called, not wanting to do any of the low-end jobs.
Because they’re awful jobs. The elites running the country opted to import cheap, exploitable labor instead of improving the working conditions of their countrymen.
And this is ultimately the problem with immigration. It’s done by an elite that hates their people. The elites profit while the common people suffer.
> It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies
Aristotle said this thousands of years ago. The behavior we’re seeing isn’t new, and the response of “we want people that look like us in power” isn’t anything new either. Race is an extension of family, and a ruler who views the people as an extension of their family will rule much better than one who views the people as cattle.
The ultimate problem is the rich hate the natives and have too much money. They push immigration because it cheapens their bottom line and ensures the people will remain divided. They refuse to use their wealth to better their nation.
> There is no easy answers to the current economic problems
There is an extremely easy answer. The levels of corruption are so astronomical that simply installing rulers who aren’t corrupt would turn things around overnight. Unfortunately, the elites have done a good job conditioning the people to view good elites as “far right racists” simply because they’ll prioritize family over foreigners. And until we can unwind that conditioning, things are going to continue getting worse at a time when we have technological miracles.
I do agree that the immigration system is broken. But I do not agree that immigrants are the problem. Simply retroactively applying rules to the folks who are literally accepting to be exploited is not only unfair as immoral, unless you do not consider them people.
I would need to check the gov docs again for the maths, but if this triggers high skilled workers to leave (and only them, not even counting other side effects) it would cause a 2B-4B blast in the economics.
And this do not even consider possible causes of returning the money from pension partially or fully.
Yes it will be. Most British Asians are culturally British and become more so with each generation.
Secondly, there are multiple different Asian cultures in the UK, so the most substantial common ground different groups of Asians have is our Britishness. The dominant culture is very much British because each minority culture is individually small.
Also, there is a long, long way to go for the 9% of the population who are Asian to become a majority.
> There’s other ways for a race to die out
Races (in that sense) always die out. I cannot see many Angles or Jutes around in England.
> Because they’re awful jobs. The elites running the country opted to import cheap, exploitable labor instead of improving the working conditions of their countrymen.
That much is true.
> Race is an extension of family
That is BS. I can define who is family. How do you define race? Shared culture? I have dealt with that idea already. Genetics? It does not map well to usual categories of race. You can only make sense of this by selecting a few inherited attributes (primarily skin colour) and classifying people by a literally skin deep difference.
Natives have rights to their homeland.
We're talking about a small part of the country that's disproportionately expensive that has tried to attract those with money and the side effect of this is natives have chosen to sell up. There might be too much immigration, there might be too much external competition driving house prices up, but I think it's weird to talk about native rights. None of us is truly native here.
If I was a customer I would be canceling my service because I really don’t want my emails to be associated with any type of controversial topic. Why doesn’t he post it under his own domain, rather than a company one?
I’ve used Basecamp in the past, and actually considered signing up for hey.com. Good thing I didn’t waste my money on it. Would be such a pain to have to switch my email address.
No one measures how far megariches are getting from common folks and just point the guns where they can see because they are led through mediatic misformation campaigns.
It does not need to be a convoluted plan, but it is an opportunity where those same ones are using to sell their guns (oops I mean AI).
You all be killing each other very soon because you are believing in such campaigns for creating "the enemy".
There is no "enemy" who is worried if they'll be able to feed their kids tomorrow. You are being manipulated.
Once more. You are being manipulated. Wake up.
He is making software available for free. Feel FREE not to use it.
It's okay to care about the health of the community. To worry about the voices promoted.
Now if the problem shows up during a professional interaction in work on open source software, causing damage to somebody, I see the point in raising complaints, but that would be a very explicit problem. And even in that case, just fork Rails, they did that with Elm because of poor management, they didn't ask to remove the author of Elm from Elm, they just forked.
They literally just read his blog.
What is very, very troubling is his idea that London of all places should be an ethnically white city. London has been multi-ethnic since the 70s or 80s, if not earlier. It is very much a world city.
The other thing is that he is Danish and seems to be projecting his feelings about Denmark onto Britain. He does not really understand how British people feel. The organiser of the march he praises is such as toxic figure for his blatant bigotry that the Reform Party (the most right wing party that has seats in Parliament) turned down a $100m donation from Elon Musk rather than allow him to join the party. e ethnic makeup does not bother any white Londoners I know (I grew up in London, so I do know a lot of people there). In fact, the only person I can recall complaining about it in real life was also foreign European.
The march was not actually that big. There have been many larger protests in London. From protests against the Iraq war (about five times the turnout), against the ban on huntings with dogs (nearly three times as many) and both pro and anti Brexit. It was by far the largest the far right has been able to organise, but they only managed that by labelling it a march for free speech (I do think there is a genuine problem with free speech in the UK, and I wish we had the sort of protections the US does).
Leaving aside the Bronze Age structures around the London area and river,
The archaeologist Leslie Wallace notes, "Because no LPRIA [Late pre-Roman Iron Age] settlements or significant domestic refuse have been found in London, despite extensive archaeological excavation, arguments for a purely Roman foundation of London are now common and uncontroversial."
Londinium was established as a civilian town by the Romans about four years after the invasion of AD 43. London, like Rome, was founded on the point of the river where it was narrow enough to bridge and the strategic location of the city provided easy access to much of Europe.
above quotes sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London
It's not actually ethnicity he's talking about, it's skin color. Ethnicity is cultural.
Why exactly aren't people of any skin color who live in the UK, speak English, and believe in the full package of "Western values" (equality, freedom of speech, religion, rule of law etc) and "English behaviors" (queueing, tea, whatever) considered English? How many generations is enough to become "native"?
He thinks calling his views "far-right" and "racist" and "nazi"-adjacent is going too far because the Social Democrat Prime Minister of his country said the same thing (I actually don't know because the linked interview with Mette Fredriksen was in Danish). But that's how this stuff always begins. It's extremely worrisome.
There is also a difference between being "multi-ethnic" and being minority "native".
DHH says people are not "native Brits". The literal meaning of that is ethnicity, not skin colour. Of course DHH might be using this as code for white, but it is not the literal meaning, and (as another comment points out) the statistic he quotes is for the total of the ethnic groups that are considered white British - it excludes white people who are not ethnically British.
If he is, then he is, again, projecting his own views onto a culture he does not really understand. Some people from European countries (e.g. an Albanian illegal immigrant) are far more likely to face hostility than some non-white people (e.g. a professional affluent South Asian with a British accent). Someone recently commented that a racist who they know well would not mind my (brown) family because we "sound posh" so would prefer us to people like Poles.
> How many generations is enough to become "native"?
Define native! Are white Americans native in the US, and are Afrikaners native to South Africa, etc.? It is an ambiguous word.
The problem disappears if you drop the adjective native and just say "British".
> Why exactly aren't people of any skin color who live in the UK, speak English, and believe in the full package of "Western values" (equality, freedom of speech, religion, rule of law etc) and "English behaviors" (queueing, tea, whatever)
I think the problem with that definition is that lots of people how have never even lived in the UK believe in those values and drink tea and even queue. I know plenty. Also, English or British? British is a nationality, English is arguable an ethnicity (as are Scottish and Welsh).
> It's extremely worrisome.
I agree there, and it is very disappointing to see DHH spouting this.
That's why I put "native" in scare quotes.
> I think the problem with that definition is that lots of people how have never even lived in the UK
That's why I wrote "live in the UK" first.
windrush was the 1950, but chinatown had been around since the late 1880s
OP's post, I think, correctly points out that DHH appears to believe that British == White. Wish he'd be clear on this point, as he's often claimed and indeed has been in the past regarding other issues. Dancing around it shows a lack of respect for the audience and/or a sign of weak conviction.
If you believe in something strongly enough to want to have an impact on its discourse, why not be clear about it? Here's an example of a clear statement regarding this particular issue: "I believe that our country ought to aim for demographics where 80% of the people on our streets look like us [whatever that happens to be]". What's so difficult about that? A clear demand/objective easier to vote on/measure/debate....everyone knows that, then why do the proponents of such ideas always dance around being specific?
People have a right to voice unpopular opinions. And programming communities have to stop pretending like they are some self-righteous above-everyone morally-superior folks.
It’s incredibly lazy as well to label someone as racist, whatever-ist by quoting what they say as if a quote can encapsulate a person’s whole life and meaning.
What DHH says is actually the majority opinion of the world. I am an immigrant and do not find his thoughts controversial. I might disagree on some points but it is rather dismissive and tone deaf to ignore a majority opinion and silence it as if the programming enclaves of $100k compensated individuals somehow are superior to or worse, represent the majority population who may not have the same opportunities and thinking patterns.
It’s also tiring to see these write ups to portray to the world how good and liberal you are and to show which party one is aligned with (your tent is getting smaller even though you originally thought it included everyone) - groupthink masquerading as original free thought. I am actually not (no longer) part of your tent as I find it repulsive and lazy.
Programmers should program and not limit programming communities from people they somehow think are morally inferior.
Just realize that you are just as shitty as the person you think you are superior too.
It’s all code at the end of the day.
I certainly would not make posts about how the locals are the real problem and they’re evil for not accommodating me.
It’s also odd the article is trying to paint Tommy Robinson as “far right”. He’s deeply in bed with the Israelis, who last I checked don’t get along with the “far right”. He’s pushing anti Muslim sentiment to garner support for the genocide in Gaza.
Why would you want to be a guest in your own country for the rest of your life?
> I certainly would not make posts about how the locals are the real problem
That's not what the post said.
> they’re evil for not accommodating me.
What does "accommodating" mean? From what I can tell they just want to not be treated like a guest in their own country. Not a crazy request.
Taking citizenship in another country is comparable to being a new convert to a religion. Is it acceptable for people born and raised in the faith to treat new converts differently?
I think it's a bit more profound than that. Club membership doesn't change most people's identity. They aren't defined by it. On the other hand citizenship is one of the first descriptors used about a person formally. Check out how any Wikipedia article about a person from the last couple centuries begins - "<Person name> is/was a <nationality or citizenship> <profession or thing they are notable for>."
"Steven Allan Spielberg is an American filmmaker." [1]
"Sir Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah (born Hussein Abdi Kahin) is a British former long-distance runner."[2]
It also seems reasonable for one person to question another’s leadership position given their expressed views.