I think the argument here is that we're using two different definitions. When I was growing up, melting pot meant that everyone assimulated and became indistuinguishable from the mainstream culture. Ie, no Spanish language or slang, no additional holidays, no special neighborhoods, etc. As in students who spoke something other than English in schools were punished (with beatings, not making this up).
Of course that sort of thing would never happen. But around the late 70s or so the phrase started meaning something different, just an attempt to mix in instead of being insular, or starting to melt.
Well sure, if you stop further immigration for several centuries. Otherwise by the time the population has become homogenous another group will have come along.
When people in the past talked about melting pot they would sometimes give an analogy of melting together crayons in a pot, then it all ends up one color. Or one culture in other words. But others said it was a good thing to have lots of crayons of different colors rather than mushing it together. What's in America is in between those two, we still have different cultures and they stay distinct even if there's a lot of blur. The full melting-pot version of the Italian restaurant is called Little Caesar's, but there are still plenty of authentic Italian restaurants (some of which are managed by Chinese owners).
The melting pot didn't work; the other cultures (if you can all American a real culture) did not integrate 100% and we did not end up with homogeneity. It's not even clear if homogeneity would even be a good thing.
The culture that raped and killed the indigenous natives. The culture that believed women were inferior to men and could not vote. The culture that believed in killing homosexuals also. The culture that believed slavery was ok and defended it with religion. And so forth, there's a lot of negatives in American culture also.
The problem is that you're stereotyping the actions of a few to the beliefs of all. If your belief is true and all muslims are like that, then I will counter and say that all Americans are bigoted and violent and culturally unsuited to democracy.
Remember, most of the US was Mexico until we stole it. Many Mexican-Americans today in the south west would consider gringos to be the immigrants who did not assimilate or integrate. And Mexico would have been much better off if they had been suspicious of the Texan immigrants.
They used to be a separate city where non-Chinese would not enter. People used to complain that Chinese, Italians, whoever were not properly integrating. By which they meant abandoning their own culture and embracing the mayonaisse of American "culture". It's only over time that those other cultures became mixed in better, but the US embraced (badly) parts of their culture instead. We even bitched about the Irish and you can't get any whiter than that.
The melting pot concept is stupid, it just doesn't work to expect immigrants to abandon the old and become clones. There was too much effort spent in the past on forced conformity in many places in US and elsewhere; forcing children to go to English speaking schools and punishing them when their native language was used so that it becomes forgotten over time (most native American languages are functionally dead, children who can't communicate with their grandparents, etc).
Have good code reviews too. However sometimes on my team I feel like I'm the only one that really does this. Others do code reviews but they mostly just say "looks good, check in in" rather than actually inspecting the code in any depth or providing constructive feedback. I'll see some code with incredibly obvious bugs and wonder how it managed to slide past the code reviewer... It seems the code review is treated as just another check box to get done fast rather than something that's important to do.
And a set of rules if it did exist would not apply to everyone. The way to do things when writing web code is not the same way to write a Java application, versus a C++ application, versus code for an embedded system, etc. Some of the good techniques in some domains are really awful ideas in other domains.
Best thing I think, which will never happen, is to keep the work load light so that the team has actual time to spend making the code better in the first place as well as time to go back and rewrite older code. But too often everyone's on a death march to meet deadlines, you can only add features and fix bugs and any redesign or rewriting isn't assumed to help the bottom line. A lot of bad code I see is not because the programmer is bad but because they're being forced to add the code quickly and move on to the next task quickly.
Unless your sister is stellar and could create her own position to which she could be promoted, most companies don't want more managers just for the sake of having them
However this does not seem to apply to men. You can have an average guy, not the best, not pulling his full weight, and he gets promoted. I see companies with redundant managers whose teams have been dissolved but they don't fire the manager because they know they'll need one in the future (it's bizarre but I've seen it at more than one company). How come men can be average and get promoted but women have to be stellar in order to be promoted?
Companies do not tend to promote only the best and brightest. Just look around.
American shrinks down its teams so much in the name of productivity that there's no wiggle room for someone to take off too much time. There's no redundancy built in. If you take off a week then when you come back you now are a week behind and have to work extra hard.
So any evidence is rejected by you, even statistics? The obvious thing to do is just look around at who gets promoted and their qualifications. There are lots of male managers which is to be expected given the ratio of men to women. However those managers cover the whole range, from geniuses to barely functional idiots with the majority being boringly average. However for women managers they're almost all above average. Hardly anyone promotes the slightly below average woman to manager even though you see slightly below average male managers in every direction. Just look at the bell curve at any random company and see how well the average does between men and women.
It's the stereotype. Men men are expected to work, women are expected to be domestic. The ideas from the 50s with Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. Mom stays home, dad goes to work except on the weekend when he goes golfing. The times are changing for sure but the biases remain. Especially in some countries it's like going back in a time machine, Japan for instance seriously expects women to stop working once they become mothers and men don't dare ask for a day off in the middle of the week for something a woman can handle. In the US the concept of both mom and dad working full time is becoming a lot more common, and it's probably much more accepted by younger generations whereas older people have the lingering bias. Europe's definitely better here as you're practically forced to take vacation and hardly anyone is in the office after 5pm (American is a country of workaholics and companies rely on small teams and overworking them).
So when a man spends some day with the kids he is praised for bending towards more balance, as long as the work gets done and besides it's just one day and no one worries about it. If his wife gets pregnant it's no big deal because they assume he will still spend at least 350 days of the year in the office. The man is not expected to choose work versus home because he's working by default. The woman who's expected to spend time is automatically considered different for being at work (though this is changing over time). No one expects her to be in the office 250 days of the year or come in on the weekends voluntarily and without prompting. An internal bias may assume she's already spending lots of time at home as a mother, so any additional day taken off is treated suspiciously. If she gets pregnant this confirms the doubts that she wasn't 100% devoted to work.
Again, I'm not saying we're mired in overt sexism, and America is definitely improving in this regard. But from attitudes I've seen from the 70s to the present I still see that bias even if it's dwindled quite a lot (or at least in California it has).
Naw, if you check out middle and upper management men, they almost all have kids. A few exceptions here and there but overwhelmingly the people who get ahead in business are family men. If it's not a hindrance for a man then it shouldn't be a hindrance for a woman.
I've never seen family people get discriminated against more than single people. However I *have* seen discrimination the other way. The person without a family gets assigned to work over the weekend ("it wouldn't be fair to Jack, he's got kids").
I've got Roku and there's no BBC on it. When I first got it there was BBC but it never did anything, like it was out of date or broken, then later it disappeared. It does have Sky News though but it's not quite the same.
But then you don't get any in depth analysis. Of course once you start doing analysis it becomes so much harder to avoid the bias. But the raws news feed doesn't give you perspective, you just get a jumble of facts without a way to tie the facts together.
For instance if the news feed says that a government report came out showing that the Oil Interoperability Index for July was 32.9, then what does that really mean for you? Is it up, is it down, is up better than down, how does it affect my daily life, what's the history behind this index, and so forth?
You can sort of be aware of bias, and I think it's possible to have news without bias if one conscientiously avoids it. It's sort of like saying that you can't teach mathematics without bias because everyone has some innate bias. There might not be any objective truth in news, but there are the basic facts. If they cut out all the extra crap then they could focus on just the basic facts and have time to allow showing more basic facts rather than picking and choosing a small subset of facts (which increases bias).
The part I hate in America (probably true in many other parts) is the artifical way a lot of states try to avoid bias by giving time to opposing views. If 5 minutes were given reporting Obama's state of the union address (straight up facts, this is what he actually said) then they feel compelled to give 5 minutes to the opposition party's rebuttal (again, it is a basic fact that those were the words that were spoken). The result is a lot of gibberish. It leads false credence to the idea that all views are equally important. This technique can lead to the ludicrous if taken to an extreme ("here with the rebuttal to NASA from the Flat Earth Society is our guest...").
A good news channels should build a wall between news reporting and editorializing; be trained to spot innate bias; understand science, statistics, polling; don't pander to an audience; have a role of ombudsman or such on staff; and so forth.
Of course, not all bias is bad. Some of the more enlightening radio shows I've listened to in the past were ones that would take people with opposing views and have them try to reach an understanding or common ground rather than just shouting back and forth.
Well, it's 3 minutes of news cycle, then 22 minutes of talking heads going on about nothing important, then 5 minutes of commercials, repeated for a 24 hour period. Depending upon the channel this can change slightly to that the 22 minutes are news anchors giving partisan editorials lightly disguised as heavy hitting news, or entertainment news (Kardashians), or a "for a rebuttal let's go to the other political party for their reaction" segment, and whatnot.
Al Jazeera has fallen to the same problem as the other news networks: they get paid based upon the number of eyeballs that watch them. The other networks decided to sensationalize the "news" to bring in eyeballs rather than go under.
There's still the BBC. I get a lot of my news from them on the web or radio. I wish they had a streaming service that will go to a TV though.
But if no quality reduction it is also a benefit to the user. Why stick to a patent encumbered standard when there's an alternative, just because someone is making money (which will happen with either standard)?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the argument here is that we're using two different definitions. When I was growing up, melting pot meant that everyone assimulated and became indistuinguishable from the mainstream culture. Ie, no Spanish language or slang, no additional holidays, no special neighborhoods, etc. As in students who spoke something other than English in schools were punished (with beatings, not making this up).
Of course that sort of thing would never happen. But around the late 70s or so the phrase started meaning something different, just an attempt to mix in instead of being insular, or starting to melt.
Well sure, if you stop further immigration for several centuries. Otherwise by the time the population has become homogenous another group will have come along.
When people in the past talked about melting pot they would sometimes give an analogy of melting together crayons in a pot, then it all ends up one color. Or one culture in other words. But others said it was a good thing to have lots of crayons of different colors rather than mushing it together. What's in America is in between those two, we still have different cultures and they stay distinct even if there's a lot of blur. The full melting-pot version of the Italian restaurant is called Little Caesar's, but there are still plenty of authentic Italian restaurants (some of which are managed by Chinese owners).
The melting pot didn't work; the other cultures (if you can all American a real culture) did not integrate 100% and we did not end up with homogeneity. It's not even clear if homogeneity would even be a good thing.
The culture that raped and killed the indigenous natives.
The culture that believed women were inferior to men and could not vote.
The culture that believed in killing homosexuals also.
The culture that believed slavery was ok and defended it with religion.
And so forth, there's a lot of negatives in American culture also.
The problem is that you're stereotyping the actions of a few to the beliefs of all. If your belief is true and all muslims are like that, then I will counter and say that all Americans are bigoted and violent and culturally unsuited to democracy.
Remember, most of the US was Mexico until we stole it. Many Mexican-Americans today in the south west would consider gringos to be the immigrants who did not assimilate or integrate. And Mexico would have been much better off if they had been suspicious of the Texan immigrants.
They used to be a separate city where non-Chinese would not enter. People used to complain that Chinese, Italians, whoever were not properly integrating. By which they meant abandoning their own culture and embracing the mayonaisse of American "culture". It's only over time that those other cultures became mixed in better, but the US embraced (badly) parts of their culture instead. We even bitched about the Irish and you can't get any whiter than that.
The melting pot concept is stupid, it just doesn't work to expect immigrants to abandon the old and become clones. There was too much effort spent in the past on forced conformity in many places in US and elsewhere; forcing children to go to English speaking schools and punishing them when their native language was used so that it becomes forgotten over time (most native American languages are functionally dead, children who can't communicate with their grandparents, etc).
Why, were its pants falling down?
Have good code reviews too. However sometimes on my team I feel like I'm the only one that really does this. Others do code reviews but they mostly just say "looks good, check in in" rather than actually inspecting the code in any depth or providing constructive feedback. I'll see some code with incredibly obvious bugs and wonder how it managed to slide past the code reviewer... It seems the code review is treated as just another check box to get done fast rather than something that's important to do.
And a set of rules if it did exist would not apply to everyone. The way to do things when writing web code is not the same way to write a Java application, versus a C++ application, versus code for an embedded system, etc. Some of the good techniques in some domains are really awful ideas in other domains.
Don't mess with code from Texas.
Best thing I think, which will never happen, is to keep the work load light so that the team has actual time to spend making the code better in the first place as well as time to go back and rewrite older code. But too often everyone's on a death march to meet deadlines, you can only add features and fix bugs and any redesign or rewriting isn't assumed to help the bottom line. A lot of bad code I see is not because the programmer is bad but because they're being forced to add the code quickly and move on to the next task quickly.
Unless your sister is stellar and could create her own position to which she could be promoted, most companies don't want more managers just for the sake of having them
However this does not seem to apply to men. You can have an average guy, not the best, not pulling his full weight, and he gets promoted. I see companies with redundant managers whose teams have been dissolved but they don't fire the manager because they know they'll need one in the future (it's bizarre but I've seen it at more than one company). How come men can be average and get promoted but women have to be stellar in order to be promoted?
Companies do not tend to promote only the best and brightest. Just look around.
American shrinks down its teams so much in the name of productivity that there's no wiggle room for someone to take off too much time. There's no redundancy built in. If you take off a week then when you come back you now are a week behind and have to work extra hard.
So any evidence is rejected by you, even statistics? The obvious thing to do is just look around at who gets promoted and their qualifications. There are lots of male managers which is to be expected given the ratio of men to women. However those managers cover the whole range, from geniuses to barely functional idiots with the majority being boringly average. However for women managers they're almost all above average. Hardly anyone promotes the slightly below average woman to manager even though you see slightly below average male managers in every direction. Just look at the bell curve at any random company and see how well the average does between men and women.
It's the stereotype. Men men are expected to work, women are expected to be domestic. The ideas from the 50s with Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. Mom stays home, dad goes to work except on the weekend when he goes golfing. The times are changing for sure but the biases remain. Especially in some countries it's like going back in a time machine, Japan for instance seriously expects women to stop working once they become mothers and men don't dare ask for a day off in the middle of the week for something a woman can handle. In the US the concept of both mom and dad working full time is becoming a lot more common, and it's probably much more accepted by younger generations whereas older people have the lingering bias. Europe's definitely better here as you're practically forced to take vacation and hardly anyone is in the office after 5pm (American is a country of workaholics and companies rely on small teams and overworking them).
So when a man spends some day with the kids he is praised for bending towards more balance, as long as the work gets done and besides it's just one day and no one worries about it. If his wife gets pregnant it's no big deal because they assume he will still spend at least 350 days of the year in the office. The man is not expected to choose work versus home because he's working by default. The woman who's expected to spend time is automatically considered different for being at work (though this is changing over time). No one expects her to be in the office 250 days of the year or come in on the weekends voluntarily and without prompting. An internal bias may assume she's already spending lots of time at home as a mother, so any additional day taken off is treated suspiciously. If she gets pregnant this confirms the doubts that she wasn't 100% devoted to work.
Again, I'm not saying we're mired in overt sexism, and America is definitely improving in this regard. But from attitudes I've seen from the 70s to the present I still see that bias even if it's dwindled quite a lot (or at least in California it has).
Naw, if you check out middle and upper management men, they almost all have kids. A few exceptions here and there but overwhelmingly the people who get ahead in business are family men. If it's not a hindrance for a man then it shouldn't be a hindrance for a woman.
I've never seen family people get discriminated against more than single people. However I *have* seen discrimination the other way. The person without a family gets assigned to work over the weekend ("it wouldn't be fair to Jack, he's got kids").
I've got Roku and there's no BBC on it. When I first got it there was BBC but it never did anything, like it was out of date or broken, then later it disappeared. It does have Sky News though but it's not quite the same.
But then you don't get any in depth analysis. Of course once you start doing analysis it becomes so much harder to avoid the bias. But the raws news feed doesn't give you perspective, you just get a jumble of facts without a way to tie the facts together.
For instance if the news feed says that a government report came out showing that the Oil Interoperability Index for July was 32.9, then what does that really mean for you? Is it up, is it down, is up better than down, how does it affect my daily life, what's the history behind this index, and so forth?
You can sort of be aware of bias, and I think it's possible to have news without bias if one conscientiously avoids it. It's sort of like saying that you can't teach mathematics without bias because everyone has some innate bias. There might not be any objective truth in news, but there are the basic facts. If they cut out all the extra crap then they could focus on just the basic facts and have time to allow showing more basic facts rather than picking and choosing a small subset of facts (which increases bias).
The part I hate in America (probably true in many other parts) is the artifical way a lot of states try to avoid bias by giving time to opposing views. If 5 minutes were given reporting Obama's state of the union address (straight up facts, this is what he actually said) then they feel compelled to give 5 minutes to the opposition party's rebuttal (again, it is a basic fact that those were the words that were spoken). The result is a lot of gibberish. It leads false credence to the idea that all views are equally important. This technique can lead to the ludicrous if taken to an extreme ("here with the rebuttal to NASA from the Flat Earth Society is our guest ...").
A good news channels should build a wall between news reporting and editorializing; be trained to spot innate bias; understand science, statistics, polling; don't pander to an audience; have a role of ombudsman or such on staff; and so forth.
Of course, not all bias is bad. Some of the more enlightening radio shows I've listened to in the past were ones that would take people with opposing views and have them try to reach an understanding or common ground rather than just shouting back and forth.
Well, it's 3 minutes of news cycle, then 22 minutes of talking heads going on about nothing important, then 5 minutes of commercials, repeated for a 24 hour period. Depending upon the channel this can change slightly to that the 22 minutes are news anchors giving partisan editorials lightly disguised as heavy hitting news, or entertainment news (Kardashians), or a "for a rebuttal let's go to the other political party for their reaction" segment, and whatnot.
Al Jazeera has fallen to the same problem as the other news networks: they get paid based upon the number of eyeballs that watch them. The other networks decided to sensationalize the "news" to bring in eyeballs rather than go under.
There's still the BBC. I get a lot of my news from them on the web or radio. I wish they had a streaming service that will go to a TV though.
Zealous gun owners filled with the fervor that they are never wrong?
But they are spending developer time shipping out updates to remind you to upgrade to the latest products.
But if no quality reduction it is also a benefit to the user. Why stick to a patent encumbered standard when there's an alternative, just because someone is making money (which will happen with either standard)?
However if someone has not grown up in a city, such behavior would be absolutely unsettling.