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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • Nah, they look similar because they’re both people very emotionally and tribalistically (as there’s quite an element of feeling part of a group in it) wedded to an ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas they took in as “undeniable truths” and do not in any way challenge with rationality and skepticism.

    Both have the same way of thinking and relating to politics but tankies have adopted one ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas and modern day “conservatives” (I use quotes because they really don’t do conservation of much) adopted a different ideological bundle of pre-baked ideas.

    Mind you, they’re just extreme cases of people whose relationship with politics runs along the very same behavioural lines as sports club fans. For example, here in Lemmy you often spot Democrat Party fans, which you can spot by their “the figures of the party can do no wrong” posture and similar, in contrast with, say, people who might have voted for the party for tactical or strategical reasons but don’t just take every word of their propaganda as undeniable truth.

    I live in a country with a lot more political parties than the US and am even a member of a small party here, and you see that kind of mindset in al parties party and from my own experience I would even say that mindless unquestioning fans are majority of party members.





  • If you can’t even follow the Mathematics of error margins when using one easy to measure characteristic as a stand-in for another harder to measure characteristic which is positively correlated with the former but not by a factor of 1 and whose correlation factor actually changes by the very action you’re justifying, and, even more more sadly, have to resort to calling it “pseudo-explanation”, there is no point in engaging with you using logic because that’s not the level you’re operating at.

    Enjoy your quasi-religious relation to your ideological beliefs.


  • Some people genuinely have huge assumptions about the intellectual capability of women and/or their suitability for certain occupations: for example, the “women are very emotional” used as excuse for not giving them certain responsibilities such as management positions, is far too common, especially in countries were the main brand of sexism is the so-called “Benevolent Sexism” (called that not because it’s actually good but because it’s disguised as being for the protection of women) such as Britain.

    Similarly there are prejudices about people with sexual orientations other than heterosexuality in the workplace, usually of the “they’ll make other people uncomfortable” kind.

    Sadly, still today, far too many people genuinely think along such lines and some aren’t even aware that they’re doing it because their whole lives they’ve lived around people who do it so for them “it’s how everybody thinks” and the “normal” way of thinking.


  • I’m afraid that fighting oppression and restoring the past oppressed to a level playing field involves finding if actual individuals did indeed suffer from oppression and compensating them for it in some way, a far more difficult task than taking the Fascist’s shortcut of presuming that everybody from a specific race, gender or sexual orientation are equally worthy or unworthy.

    What my experience in The Netherlands taught me is that preserving the idea that you can presume things about people (including that they’re “victims” or “discriminated against”) - a.k.a. Prejudice - is a dead-end strategy for fighting discrimination because:

    • It’s anchored on the very same architecture of presuming things about people based on race, gender or sexual orientation - in other words, Prejudice - as Fascist ideologies are.
    • Because it is literally Mathematically impossible for such a process to be improved to a point where there is full fairness of treatment for all: that process uses a person’s race/gender/sexual-orientation as an indirect metric to determine something else altogether - if a person has actually suffered due to discrimination - so it has an error rate in the form of people who do belong to a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation but never suffered from discrimination. When such people are helped without deserving it, an injustice is committed, and the more the error rate, the more injustice is being done by helping people who do not deserve that help. The Mathematical impossibility happens because the more that process succeeds at its stated objective of reducing discrimination, the more people of a supposedly discriminated against race, gender or sexual orientation never suffered from discrimination (or in other words, the more the error rate of assuming that race, gender or sexual orientation implies being a victim of discrimination) hence the more injustice that process is committing - the closer the process gets to success the more injustice it is committing, only it’s against people from different races, genders or sexual-orientations.

    You can’t Prejudice your way into stopping Prejudiced treatment, not Ideologically and not even Mathematically.


  • I suggest you read the system described by the poster from feddit.nl just below, which just removes the kind of professionally irrelevant information (including gender, race and so on) from being in the candidate selection process.

    Such systems are meant to removed descrimination (even subconscious one) rather than discriminating in the opposite direction. “Discriminating but the other way around” just preserves a mindset that people should be seen and treated differently depending on gender or sexual orientation and, as I’ve observed first hand, that kind of system yields environments which are even more sexist.

    Having lived in both Britain (which apes a lot of things from the US) and The Netherlands, I can tell you that the latter country is way much more naturally equalitarian (gender-wise and even more so when it comes to sexual orientation) than the former.

    (Not perfect, mind you, but way better than average)

    The knee-jerk “this must be sexism” reaction to criticism of the “let’s keep treating people differently depending on the genetics they were born with” of the “anti”-descrimination systems in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in my view partly explains why in the decade and a half since I’ve left The Netherlands I’ve seen no improvement towards the much more natural gender and sexual-orientation equality of The Netherlands in either Britain or the US, quite the contrary.

    I’m sorry but compared with what I’ve seen working in other countries the system you defend is deeply flawed and preserves the very same ideological architecture of judging people on their gender, sexual-orientation or race rather than actual personal knowledge and track record, as the one that underpins Fascists ideologies. (Which is maybe why the Neoliberals just love it)


  • Having lived and worked in both The Netherlands and Britain, I’ve seen actual American-style quotas systems in Britain that explicitly priviledged a specific gender (rather than what you describe, which is a system meant to remove any and all discrimination, even if subconscious), and the result was pretty bad, both because the worst professionals around there were from that gender and clearly only got the job due to quotas and at the same time competent professionals that happen to have that gender were not taken as seriously and were kinda second class professionals even though they did not at all deserve it.

    In fact, that specific place, which is the only one I ever worked in with an American style quota system, was the most sexist place I ever worked in, in my entire career (which spans over 2 decades) - people would not say sexist things (lest HR punish them), all the while they would definitelly have different competence expectations and even levels of how seriously they took people as professionals depending on people’s gender. Meanwhile the people that got in via quotas tended to be the kind that would play the system rather than do the job, which often made the whole environment even more sexist.

    Interestingly, IT in The Netherlands was way less sexist in a natural way than almost all places I worked in Britain, with almost always more well balanced gender-wise teams and were - at least that I noticed - nobody assuming anything in professional terms based on people’s gender or sexual orientation.

    Frankly one of the things I really missed after I move to Britain from The Netherlands was exactly the general Dutch viewpoint that “that’s about as relevant as eye color” when it came to judging people as professionals based on their gender or sexual orientation.

    Maybe the point of the previous poster was about that American-style quotas systems.


  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldPar for the course
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    5 days ago

    There’s two different ways to read the previous poster’s point:

    • That any kind of quotas system (no mater whose “born with certain genetic traits” group it favours) is generally bad and causes more problem than it solves. From what I’ve observed in my one and only time working in a place with such quotas, that’s what I saw, with both very incompetent people from the favored group who clearly only got the job due to quotas and at the same time with competent members of that group having trouble being taken seriously because they were assumed to be incompetent and having only got the position due to having the genetics that made them be a member of said favored group (they were de facto seen as second class), so in general I would agree that priviledging in hiring anybody due to the genetics they were born with is wrong (not to be confused with systems that try and make sure nobody is discriminated against due to the genetics they were born with, systems I totally agree with: basically I disagree with people being given different treatment when it comes to selection for a professinal occupation due their genetics).
    • That women and non-straight men are a problem in that profession. If that’s the take, I not only totally disagree with it but find it apalling and unnacceptable. Again, experience tells me that in IT women and non-straight men are neither less nor more competent than straight men: from what I’ve observed gender and sexual orientation are, as expected, entirelly irrelevant when it comes to professional competent in that domain. One needs to have no clue whatsoever about that domain and be an abnormal simpleton to think gender or sexual orientation is what makes somebody a good or bad professional in any of the various areas of the Industry.


  • Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you’re lucky and it’s not a limit of that architecture.

    If that won’t work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

    I’ve worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

    In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you’ll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture’s maximum memory.

    Granted, if a single service whose load can’t be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you’re stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.


  • I was was going to make a post around the same lines, but in thought it through and in all fairness even in countries with Proportional Vote (the only true Democracies, IMHO) such as The Netherlands, there are still people who won’t vote because “all politicians are liars”, because they feel their vote won’t make a difference or simply because they can’t be arsed to go vote.

    There are fewer of those than in semi/fake-Democratic countries and those who do vote actually vote in a positive way (to do something) rather than negative one (to block something), but there still are people who think “all politicians are liars” there.

    However I do agree the previous poster’s metaphor doesn’t at all work outside fake Democracies with Mathematically rigged systems such as FPTP like the US.





  • Not living in the US, I’m not up to date with US salaries.

    That said, even for administrative personnel paid $25/h, $25 will pay 1h of somebody’s work which is way beyond what is needed to close a retail customer account in any modern administrative system were such thing is a common operation which should take less than a minute to do, because people who design the kind of company administrative computer systems (such as yours truly, at least during part of my career) will make the most common business operations be the fastest to do in that system.


  • It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn’t changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

    Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it’s customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

    Those $25 bucks for “account closure” pays at worst for a few minutes of somebody’s seeking the account from user information on a computer, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says “Close accout” and then “Ok” on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.


  • As somebody who works in designing software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because main business operations such as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

    The stuff that uses “lots” (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

    You’ve been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.


  • In my personal experience, “the really old colleague” is often a real throw of the dice between stubborn-as-fuck-never-matured-know-it-all and very-interesting-seen-it-all-genuinelly-mature-colleague - so basically opposite ends of the scale. Often there’s also the corner-guy-just-counting-their-days-till-retirement, which doesn’t say much about that person since they’re not really into establishing relationships with people whom they will soon never see again and just keep a low profile.

    If you’re early career, having one of the seen-it-all kind of older colleagues is probably one of the best things it can happen to you, especially if you’re a bright kid.