ryan_lane

Exactly in the same boat here. At an old job I once had one of the most useless people in the office, in a 1-1 meeting, tell me that the black people in the office were only being hired for DEI/nepotism (he didn't say "black people"). He felt comfortable saying this to me because I look like him, which means that other folks in the office obviously share his mentality.

"Just asking questions" sounds innocent until you see that the questions being asked have insinuations behind them. He was asking questions that implied that women and non-white people are less intelligent.

Phrasing outright racism/sexism in the form of a question seems to make it OK with other folks who tend to share the same mindset, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) effective in the workplace.

The devil doesn't need an advocate; especially not in a workplace.

This isn't a good example, because this isn't "walking on eggshells", this is an example of a misguided policy that has unintended consequences, and in your own example, when they understood the unintended consequences, they removed this.

Sure, this person was probably bad at their job, and that's problematic, but this isn't an example of someone being fired because they said something non-problematic.

This is why folks can't take yall seriously when discussing code of conduct. This person has a history of being shitty, and they used the CoC to enforce a (temporary!) ban, citing the rules he violated. If the CoC didn't exist, you'd be screaming "he didn't do anything wrong", but obviously, according to the well posted rules, he did, and they enforced those rules for the good of the community.

The reality of the situation is that yall don't want to be excluded from communities for being racist, misogynistic, or creepy.

There's also (relatively) strong renter protections, including effectively frozen rent.

Yes, it's possible to increase rent, but only if the surrounding areas prices have increased, and even then the renter has to agree or it otherwise goes to court and the court tends to not side with landlords.

> and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate

Yes and no. Most housing in Tokyo is apartment complexes and/or condos, which do not depreciate very much (and in fact in the past few years have appreciated by ~30%). Standalone houses depreciate, but the land appreciates. That leads to new construction for those properties, which often then turn into apartment complexes.

Basically, it's a matter of mostly becoming more dense over time, while also restricting price increases of rents.

I'm saying it's not competitive because they're not competing to provide a better service, they're competing to provide the same service at a lower cost, but the quality of the service is effectively always worse than the original government provided service. That isn't capitalism.

Capitalism would be to provide multiple options to the users of the service, and have the providers compete against each other in a proper market.

I used to work for the government (Naval Oceanographic Office), and I worked with the contracting agencies on areas that had been privatized and it was a nightmare. Every few years you'd have multiple companies bid to run the service, but for the most part the same contractor would win the bid because they wrote the software in such a way that only they could run. It had relatively no documentation, had piss poor processes wrapping it, and the subject matter experts worked for the contracting agency. When the contract did change, everything would grind to a halt. For sure, that was more expensive than the original government provided service, but once something is privatized, it can never go back.

I agree we need to have more nuance here. You for some reason think I'm suggesting that "things such as requisitions of commodity items" shouldn't be private, which is not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that existing government provided services, like the post office, for example, are run cheaper and more effectively by the government, and turning services like these private is for the sake of corruption.

This is why I say it's propaganda.

The same underlying service is being done. It hasn't been cut. It's been shifted from a government service, to a private industry. The government pays roughly the same amount they were previously paying (or in a lot of cases slightly more, with the promise of paying less in the future), the private company provides the service as cheaply as they can, and takes a cut of the cost for profit, benefiting a small number of people, while providing a worse service level for tax payers.

This isn't a capitalism vs socialism thing. My issue with it is that privatization is blatant corruption sold as "capitalism". There's no capitalism here, because there's no competition, outside of the bidding on the contract. Competing on who can provide the cheapest service doesn't improve the service; in fact, it reduces the service quality to maximize profit. Reducing service quality to maximize profit would be fine, from a capitalism point of view, if others were offering the same service to the customer.

Lowest and fourth got a tax increase. Middle class got a minor tax cut, the middle-upper class got a decent cut, and the upper class got a large cut.

It's also worth noting that the cut in question also had temporary provisions that expired, causing a tax increase for nearly all brackets except the upper class.

There has also been a massive cut in social services, which primarily affect the lowest/fourth brackets, which means they're paying more taxes for fewer services.

It's hard to interpret that "tax cut" in a way that doesn't scream "we're increasing taxes on most, and cutting services, to give the wealthy a tax cut".

> Why did you leap from talking about incels to talking about friends? It's not friends that are the problem, it's partners

Because most of the people saying this kind of stuff tend to be incels, who famously don't have partners.

But my point about friends also applies to partners. Some stuff you need to work out in therapy. Your partner isn't your therapist, and treating them that way gives them the ick, especially early in a relationship.

You're forcing them to bear your trauma. You can expect people really far into a relationship to do this to a point (like nearing engagement, already engaged, or married), but even then it's more fair to share your trauma after you've learned how to bear it yourself, with the help of a professional. Partners should know about your past, especially as it may affect your behavior, but they shouldn't be forced to help you resolve your emotional issues.

Japan now has Kimi Onoda as Minister in Charge of Foreign Nationals and Immigration, and she's an immigrant herself, but her stance on immigrants is pretty hardline.

These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.

> Conservatives want to cut taxes to force liberals to cut spending. Liberals want to increase spending to force the conservatives to increase taxes.

This is straight propaganda. Both parties increase spending. One party cuts taxes for the rich, the other increases taxes on the rich.

Conservatives haven't been "small government" and haven't cut taxes for folks other than the rich in a long, long time. Even calling them "small government" is a misnomer, because that propaganda is about privatization, not reducing costs (private services are less efficient and more costly than the government service they replace!)

Let's stop calling the problem "both-sides". One side is considerably worse for the economy, and you and I know it's the conservatives.

> It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't.

I think the norm now is that you should share your trauma with a therapist, to help heal. I can't imagine telling anyone to share their trauma, regardless of gender.

> and have no winning move.

This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.

Should you be able to also share with your friend? Yeah, but there's also the concept of trauma dumping, where you use your friends as a therapist, and that has its own problems. Sometimes folks aren't in the right mental space to hear your problems, especially depending on the context (like, were you abused as a child? maybe they were too).

This is part of the "persecution of conservatives", where they "can't say a thing anymore". They obviously can, and still do, but feel their voices are being suppressed. The reality is that their opinion isn't popular anymore, and they're used to being listened to unconditionally, and can't stand that people don't agree with them anymore.

The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man. It's toxic masculinity, and it's obvious that's taken on a massive rise in popularity, thanks to folks like Joe Rogan and the like.

Especially considering a considerably amount of their bandwidth is free, via peering agreements.

How many people are needed to maintain instagram, facebook, etc? Wikipedia isn't just a collection of static content. The page contents include static and dynamic content (via a lua scriptable set of templates), semantic data (wikidata), multimedia management (wikimedia commons), editing tools (WYSIWYG editing, with full support of the wiki markup and templating), global caching infrastructure, multiple datacenters for HA/DR, etc.

There's also the need to support the staff and volunteer developers, which includes wikimedia cloud services, git hosting, config management and orchestration, CI, community hosted tool/bot services, etc.

WMF has ~600 employees, and that's quite lean, for a service of their complexity.

Smart hands is more expensive than having dedicated datacenter staff, and the dedicated staff do a considerably better job. It's worth noting that WMF runs _very_ lean in terms of its datacenter staff.

You're also ignoring the need for infrastructure/network engineers, software engineers, fundraising engineers, product managers, community managers, managers, HR, legal, finance/accounting, fundraisers, etc.

> you're implying that people who don't want a CoC will actually behave badly, and I don't think that's accurate at all, at least not for the majority

If you fight against a code of conduct, which has a more listed out version of "don't harass people", then you're already acting badly. It's at minimum a red flag. There's very little that should be controversial in a CoC.

> IMO that is just bad leadership... they could (and should) have taken action against abusive people regardless.

It's hard to justify kicking someone out of a community without being able to point to a rule they've broken, which is the entire point of the CoC.

None of us want to have to make these things, or enforce them. We just want to work on projects together. These things exist because shitty people cause problems, and then when we try to eject them, they act like victims. When we set rules up front, then enforce them, it takes part of the problem out of the equation.

It doesn't fully solve the "playing the victim" part, because folks then start claiming they're being selectively targeted, and start pointing out super minor violations often using out of context quotes, but it's impossible to solve for everything.

So you're saying that we should be able to add training requirements to use a firearm, if well-regulated means "well functioning, well trained, efficient". Similar to how we require folks to show they know how to properly drive a car before we allow them on the road?

To the folks that say they won't contribute if there's a CoC: this just proves they're working. If you can't avoid the behavior called out in a CoC, then we don't want you to contribute. Thank you for self-selecting yourself away from us.

I dealt with abusive contributors at Wikimedia Foundation for years, and it wasn't until a CoC was added that coordinators were actually empowered to ban those abusive volunteers. Can you guess which members of the community were also the most vehemently against the CoCs?

I'm not personally against individuals owning guns, but the part that is somehow vehemently opposed is the "well-regulated" part. There's effectively no regulation, and somehow the 2nd amendment has been warped to leave out the part of regulation, to make folks believe they're entitled to guns without limit.

The 2nd amendment specifies "well regulated militias", but somehow this part is always left out by gun enthusiasts. The idea was to ensure states can have militias, and that those militias would be allowed to have guns. Somehow this has been stretched by the gun lobby to "everyone should be able to have a gun with absolutely no restrictions", when that's absolutely not what is stated in the 2nd amendment.

> Developers ship more often when code deploys in seconds (or milliseconds) instead of minutes.

I don't want my code deployed in seconds or milliseconds. I'm happy to wait even an hour for my deployment to happen, as long as I don't have to babysit it.

I want my code deployed safely, rolled out with some kind of sane plan (like staging -> canary -> 5% -> 20% -> 50% -> 100%), ideally waiting long enough at each stage of the plan to ensure the code is likely being executed with enough time for alerts to fire (even with feature flags, I want to make sure there's no weird side effects), and for a rollback to automatically occur if anything went wrong.

I then want to enable the feature I'm deploying via a feature flag, with a plan that looks similar to the deployment. I want the enablement of the feature flag, to the configured target, to be as fast as possible.

I want rollbacks to be fast, in-case things go wrong.

Another good example is UI interactions. Adding short animations to actions makes the UI slower, but can considerably improve the experience, by making it more obvious that the action occurred and what it did.

So, no, fast isn't always better. Fast is better when the experience is directly improved by making it fast, and you should be able to back that up with data.

They mean the same thing I was suggesting. Illegal immigration is a symptom of a problem. Immigration is too difficult, but we so heavily rely on immigrant labour that we allow it to continue.

Most undocumented immigrants are here for work. If we change the immigration system to give them work visas, the problem mostly goes away. Some of them don't want to stay here permanently, and not even for the entire year. They come seasonally. Others would like to stay permanently, and offering them a legal path to citizenship is likely a good idea.

I think it's not possible to end all illegal immigration instantly, but the vast majority is easily within our reach.

It's worth noting that asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants, and the way the current administration handles the situation itself it what's illegal.

It's not disingenuous. Republicans rally their base against "violent illegal immigrants". They don't rally their base on "fixing immigration issues", but on deporting people, which is effectively the same as running on law and order.

If immigration issues are mostly solved, then republicans lose one of their rallying points.

As someone else pointed out, this is exactly why republicans killed a bill that had support across the aisle. Trump was going to run on mass deportations, and it's hard to do that, when a bill was just passed, co-sponsored by your own party.

Let's not continue using propaganda numbers around undocumented immigrants. There's not 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. There's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in total, and that number has _decreased_ since the early 2000s (when it was closer to 12 million).

A decent percentage of these immigrants are seasonal. A very, very small percentage of the total of undocumented immigrants have criminal histories. Focusing efforts on violent criminals is reasonable, but that doesn't meet the propaganda numbers from the current administration. Deporting tens of thousands of people just doesn't rally hate the same way.

Rather than spending time and money building concentration camps, building out secret police (ICE), and deporting people without due process, we could be fixing our immigration system.

Let's make work visas that allow migrant workers to work seasonally. Let's add paths to citizenship to migrant workers. Let's prioritize fast paths to citizenship for students, especially those with masters and PHDs. Let's introduce a point system to encourage immigration of the best and brightest from high demand countries, allowing them prioritized visas, PRs and naturalization. Let's fix the DREAMER situation by providing those folks clear paths to citizenship.

The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken. They use undocumented immigrants as a group to target hate against, which rallies their base.

Except I don't want to use crypto, I don't want to accept crypto for content, I don't want to pay middlemen for using crypto.

Micro payments using crypto is just a way for folks to prop up crypto currencies. It also is a dead concept, because how do we all agree on _which_ crypto to use? If I'm browsing the internet, and each site only accepts a particular shit coin, is that ok? Does everyone just use a single stablecoin? Now everything is locked to a single currency?

The cloudflare approach is honestly ideal, because it charges people profiting from your content, not humans looking to read your content. It also doesn't use crypto.

Yes, pet owners who live in no-shoes households. I live in Japan, basically everyone here does it. I do it as well.

If you have pets and want your floors (and sofas, and beds) to stay clean, you need to wipe/wash their paws. It takes like 30 seconds.

If you're worried about that, have house shoes (or slippers). This is the norm, especially providing slippers for guests, in no-shoes homes.

You wipe (or wash) their paws when they come in.

> Do you not see the problem for both people and for the long-term funding of the Texas Lotto if this kind of thing were continuously possible?

I don't think it's a problem for the lotto to not exist.

As for the underlying problem, if they're worried about this being a long-term issue for the viability of their tax, then they should change the odds to make it non-viable to buy all tickets.

There's nothing against the spirit of a gambling game that is poorly setup, unless it's explicitly made illegal.