265 karma · joined October 22, 2016
Most places with large crowds disallow firearms, and most mass shootings occur at places with crowds. You're confusing correlation with causation.
We don't have a recent smallpox outbreak to compare to for mortality with modern medical treatment. It's possible smallpox is only 5% deadly these days, we just don't know.
2019 and 2020 had particularly dangerous flu seasons and were still significantly less deadly than COVID.
Smallpox would still be significantly more deadly than COVID individually, but I'd bet people would take lockdowns much more seriously for smallpox than they did for COVID, preventing a pandemic and resulting in fewer deaths overall. Especially because people believe falsehoods like "COVID is comparable to the flu" because it downplays the risk.
You can also have implement different associated functions based on properties of generic arguments, which is quite different in design from just attaching methods to a struct.
Because the reality is, I'm trans and I don't feel safe participating on Hacker News anymore. If I try to ask someone to be respectful towards me, I know I'll be attacked because this is the top comment. And that sucks.
It matters because even if you don't think it's a big deal, it can be death by a thousand papercuts for others. Seeing "he" used as a default pronoun just reminds me that people will assume I'm a man, further entrenching this idea subconsciously that people like me don't belong in tech. When I'm misgendered online, I have an internal conversation of "Do I correct them? Do I want to be perceived as not contributing to the discussion and be punished for that? Will I be seen as a crazy SJW and attacked for it?" That's a mental stress that cisgender men simply don't have to deal with.
Use gender-neutral language by default. It's not hard, and simple mistakes are forgiven. However, if one isn't willing to put the slightest amount of effort to either avoid pronouns or use the singular they, it shows they doesn't actually care about the concerns of people unlike themselves. And that shows a lot about what kind of person they are.
All of these are regular everyday things for me, but I've had people tell me that even asking for basic respect is "disagreeing with their political opinion". The real problem is where the line is drawn, or whether a line can even be drawn.
A transgender lesbian, therefore, is a transgender woman ("male-to-female") who is attracted to women.
If you don't want that to be the case, create a company that supports them. The only ones stopping you are your customers.
"Politics-free" also means "the ethical choice is what the higher-ups define", which would be difficult for me to stomach for its own set of reasons.