I saw/mostly/ women, mostly young and mostly hip looking types.
Seems unlikely as Google's own stats say that women are a minority in their company. Also if you look at the photos in TFA you can see that there are more men than women protesting.
Descriptions like that are so far divorced from reality that they undermine your argument.
Google is unlikely to retaliate because it needs skilled workers, and has trouble recruiting them already. Blacklisting people is like salting the earth, you not only destroy your most important resource but ensure that it's extremely difficult to recover.
And I doubt that Google employees care about your definition. Google uses ad money to build interesting stuff that many people would love to work on. AI, self driving cars, wireless internet balloons, smartphones, computational photography, operating systems...
Almost everyone working in any kind of tech/R&D environment will ultimately be getting paid by commercial interests like advertising or sales.
Everything you said is true, and none of it actually matters. The fact that people in a society associate certain colors, items, objects, or even words, with a certain sex does not mean that gender is socially constructed.
No, that's exactly what people are referring to when they talk about gender as a social construct. The association of certain colours, certain toys, certain jobs, certain behaviours with a particular gender.
That trans boy wanted to wrestle other boys, but the governing body would not allow it. The problem is not with being transgender, it's that the sport's governing body in Texas can't handle that case.
All they needed to do was switch from using gender assigned at birth to using the current gender of the athlete, with a simple and well established testosterone level check for trans women to keep things fair.
It's not hard or expensive or unfair to anyone. And yet they didn't do it. Should ask them why.
Association with certain colours is an example of what gender in the modern sense means. Many people seem to think that attraction to certain colours is innate, biological.
And there are many, many other examples. A century ago women were just proving that they could do traditionally male only jobs due to the war, when previously it was commonly held the their biology made it impossible.
Freedom to do what you like is one type of freedom. But the guy bleeding to death in the gutter is free to do what he likes, so there is another type of freedom - the opportunity to be free.
An example of the latter would be education. Without education you have fewer opportunities to exercise your freedom to act how you like, because the range of actions you are able to take is more limited. So education enhances you freedom.
They were looking at things like net neutrality and private companies obtaining censorship orders to protect their copyrights. Governments upholding local laws didn't factor very highly (why would it, when most reasonable definitions of freedom include the rule of law as a protection for that right) although things like blocking VPN services are a big issue for privacy reasons.
Or buy a properly designed phone that can run at full speed through the battery's entire lifespan.
The amount of current that the battery can deliver depends on various factors, such as the size of the cathodes. If you select the right battery it will be able to power the phone even when near the end of its life. That usually requires making the phone 0.2mm thicker, so it's a design choice.
Actually using chromosomes to determine sex was abandoned long ago in sport. Turned out to be unreliable, people would XX chromosomes could have male levels of testosterone and male levels of strength/speed.
These days the IOC and many other sporting bodies use testosterone levels as their bar, but it's less a determination of sex as it is putting athletes into competitive categories, kinda like how boxers have weight divisions.
I'd like to think that it is only a small number of people who really care about this particular issue, and that for the majority of his supporters it's just about being contrarian and doing things that will piss off "liberals" etc.
Here's a concrete, undeniable example of how gender is a social construct.
Today pink is considered a feminine colour. Girl's toys are pink, boy's toys are not. However, around a century ago that was not the case. Blue was considered a soft feminine colour and pink was for boys. Baby clothes for boys were pink, blue for girls.
That change is purely social. The time frame is too short for evolution or biological changes to account for it.
It is helpful to have words to describe these things, hence the use of sex for biology and gender for the social aspects. It was an academic thing at first, not some nefarious scheme.
Birth certificates, ID cards, passports etc. Imagine all the problems you would have if your birth certificate contained an error in the gender field; imagine having to dress up as the opposite gender just to cross borders for example. That's why it's important for transgender people to have the government recognize their gender.
Once the government recognizes their gender it helps them to get other organizations to as well. Stops them getting arrested for using the right bathroom. Grants them the protection of laws against gender based discrimination.
Fake news. The origin seems to be this leaflet that happens to have a list of 31 ways a person might describe themselves. However, this is not an official list, it's not law. The law only covers discrimination based on gender, including being transgender.
For forms you only need to put male, female and other or better still just have a write-in box or don't ask at all.
Around 1.5-2%* of humans are born with some amount of intersex characteristics. That makes it about as common as red hair.
Often they don't even know until much later in life, e.g. women who can't conceive because they have internal testes instead of ovaries, or never find out.
All humans start off female, and around half become male in the womb. Sometimes the change doesn't affect all parts of their bodies. This is uncontroversial medical science, there are numerous examples you can see for yourself in medical textbooks.
So is it really that hard to imagine that a person's brain may not match other parts of their body too? Why can it only be the reproductive system or other random parts, but not the brain? Why can't they have a mostly male body but female reproductive organs?
How would that even work? Would you remove all concept of gender from our languages?
Wouldn't removing all notions of gender diminish the human experience? That's what this is about really, not gender based discrimination, it's about gender itself.
I think it might be easier just to make a very slight accommodation for the small number of people who request it, than to change human nature and our language that radically.
I disabled Javascript for my bank's web site. Whatever scripts they run make entering my details very, very slow. Probably some kind of key-logging prevention.
I use YesScript, Javascript is enabled unless I disable it for a site. uBlock Origin blocks third party scripts by default. I find that's a good compromise between breakage and blocking.
so thank you to all the fucking 'cord cutters' that raised the rates for everybody else.
Is that the sound of your PVR's hard disk crashing or the world's tiniest violin?
It's your own fault, not the cord cutters. They are giving you less stuff for the same money, and you are accepting that. There is no down side for them, some people pay more and people like you pay the same for less.
That's why prices aren't going down. If more people ditched cable TV they would be forced to offer a more attractive, competitive product.
You can make exactly the same argument as to why capitalism will never work.
Firstly, for capitalism to work - someone, anyone - needs to be some sort of enforcer - completely incompatible with the whole notion in the first place. Secondly, human nature (as it stands) is still very much tied to amassing resources, and so ultimately greed will remain a thing until we are all programmed not to do so. Now, who is going to be our equal and yet do that fairly and without bias?
Bots and fake accounts are like spam was a couple of decades ago. A seemingly very hard problem, and somehow people fall for the investment scams and pen1s enlargement pills even though it seems impossible that anyone could be that daft.
It's a harder problem to solve than spam, not least because we have state level actors putting resources into it. But Twitter could do a hell of a lot more. These accounts often have really poor op-sec, e.g. posting photos with metadata showing Moscow time instead of where they claim to be. Twitter should have a decent sized team working to find and remove such accounts. Amateurs do it for fun, report the accounts and then Twitter demonstrates its incompetence by being unable to comprehend the evidence.
According to TFA this will be a pre-screening done well before you reach the border, from your own computer. The idea is to speed up border crossing by doing as much of the checking prior to arrival as possible, and then only a quick mostly automated re-check is needed on the ground.
The risk will be similar to online banking or any other web site that handles sensitive information.
If you are paranoid you can opt out and use the standard border checks. A lot of people will probably be forced to due to technical problems with their computers, low quality webcams, lighting etc. I guess it depends if the reduction in border agents results in longer or shorter queues for people not using the system. I'd guess longer, there are never enough border staff.
You seem to be confusing the EU for the US. It's the US border where they will steal all your stuff, copy all your personal data off your devices, check your social media accounts etc.
EU borders have nude scanners and of course non-EU citizens will be checked. But they don't generally ask about things like political views, don't review your social media accounts etc. Things like criminal record checks are done at the visa stage, or for people who don't need a visa on the landing card, and only consider things that they were convicted of (rather than things that are illegal in the EU).
It's not all good though, if they decide to detain you then they can really turn the screws. There are lots of things I would like to see improved. But it's nothing like you describe, and not nearly as bad as the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw /mostly/ women, mostly young and mostly hip looking types.
Seems unlikely as Google's own stats say that women are a minority in their company. Also if you look at the photos in TFA you can see that there are more men than women protesting.
monstrous leviathan of cruelty
Descriptions like that are so far divorced from reality that they undermine your argument.
Google is unlikely to retaliate because it needs skilled workers, and has trouble recruiting them already. Blacklisting people is like salting the earth, you not only destroy your most important resource but ensure that it's extremely difficult to recover.
And I doubt that Google employees care about your definition. Google uses ad money to build interesting stuff that many people would love to work on. AI, self driving cars, wireless internet balloons, smartphones, computational photography, operating systems...
Almost everyone working in any kind of tech/R&D environment will ultimately be getting paid by commercial interests like advertising or sales.
Hmm, took longer than usual for the snowflakes to be trolled by reason today.
Slashdot has become really anti-science lately, mostly because of a small number of people with mod points.
Everything you said is true, and none of it actually matters. The fact that people in a society associate certain colors, items, objects, or even words, with a certain sex does not mean that gender is socially constructed.
No, that's exactly what people are referring to when they talk about gender as a social construct. The association of certain colours, certain toys, certain jobs, certain behaviours with a particular gender.
That trans boy wanted to wrestle other boys, but the governing body would not allow it. The problem is not with being transgender, it's that the sport's governing body in Texas can't handle that case.
All they needed to do was switch from using gender assigned at birth to using the current gender of the athlete, with a simple and well established testosterone level check for trans women to keep things fair.
It's not hard or expensive or unfair to anyone. And yet they didn't do it. Should ask them why.
Association with certain colours is an example of what gender in the modern sense means. Many people seem to think that attraction to certain colours is innate, biological.
And there are many, many other examples. A century ago women were just proving that they could do traditionally male only jobs due to the war, when previously it was commonly held the their biology made it impossible.
Freedom to do what you like is one type of freedom. But the guy bleeding to death in the gutter is free to do what he likes, so there is another type of freedom - the opportunity to be free.
An example of the latter would be education. Without education you have fewer opportunities to exercise your freedom to act how you like, because the range of actions you are able to take is more limited. So education enhances you freedom.
They were looking at things like net neutrality and private companies obtaining censorship orders to protect their copyrights. Governments upholding local laws didn't factor very highly (why would it, when most reasonable definitions of freedom include the rule of law as a protection for that right) although things like blocking VPN services are a big issue for privacy reasons.
Or buy a properly designed phone that can run at full speed through the battery's entire lifespan.
The amount of current that the battery can deliver depends on various factors, such as the size of the cathodes. If you select the right battery it will be able to power the phone even when near the end of its life. That usually requires making the phone 0.2mm thicker, so it's a design choice.
If you have a dick, use the mens restroom, if a vagina, women restroom.
Do you really want busty, curvey women in the men's bathroom, and dudes with beards and muscles in the women's?
Because that's what would happen if we used your scheme.
I don't really get the obsession with genitalia anyway. When I use the restroom I try to avoid seeing other people's reproductive organs.
Actually using chromosomes to determine sex was abandoned long ago in sport. Turned out to be unreliable, people would XX chromosomes could have male levels of testosterone and male levels of strength/speed.
These days the IOC and many other sporting bodies use testosterone levels as their bar, but it's less a determination of sex as it is putting athletes into competitive categories, kinda like how boxers have weight divisions.
I'd like to think that it is only a small number of people who really care about this particular issue, and that for the majority of his supporters it's just about being contrarian and doing things that will piss off "liberals" etc.
I'd like to think that.
Here's a concrete, undeniable example of how gender is a social construct.
Today pink is considered a feminine colour. Girl's toys are pink, boy's toys are not. However, around a century ago that was not the case. Blue was considered a soft feminine colour and pink was for boys. Baby clothes for boys were pink, blue for girls.
That change is purely social. The time frame is too short for evolution or biological changes to account for it.
It is helpful to have words to describe these things, hence the use of sex for biology and gender for the social aspects. It was an academic thing at first, not some nefarious scheme.
Birth certificates, ID cards, passports etc. Imagine all the problems you would have if your birth certificate contained an error in the gender field; imagine having to dress up as the opposite gender just to cross borders for example. That's why it's important for transgender people to have the government recognize their gender.
Once the government recognizes their gender it helps them to get other organizations to as well. Stops them getting arrested for using the right bathroom. Grants them the protection of laws against gender based discrimination.
Fake news. The origin seems to be this leaflet that happens to have a list of 31 ways a person might describe themselves. However, this is not an official list, it's not law. The law only covers discrimination based on gender, including being transgender.
For forms you only need to put male, female and other or better still just have a write-in box or don't ask at all.
Around 1.5-2%* of humans are born with some amount of intersex characteristics. That makes it about as common as red hair.
Often they don't even know until much later in life, e.g. women who can't conceive because they have internal testes instead of ovaries, or never find out.
All humans start off female, and around half become male in the womb. Sometimes the change doesn't affect all parts of their bodies. This is uncontroversial medical science, there are numerous examples you can see for yourself in medical textbooks.
So is it really that hard to imagine that a person's brain may not match other parts of their body too? Why can it only be the reproductive system or other random parts, but not the brain? Why can't they have a mostly male body but female reproductive organs?
* There is some debate about this, but even the low estimates are a very significant number of people.
How would that even work? Would you remove all concept of gender from our languages?
Wouldn't removing all notions of gender diminish the human experience? That's what this is about really, not gender based discrimination, it's about gender itself.
I think it might be easier just to make a very slight accommodation for the small number of people who request it, than to change human nature and our language that radically.
If I told you that I do care, what would you say?
I disabled Javascript for my bank's web site. Whatever scripts they run make entering my details very, very slow. Probably some kind of key-logging prevention.
I use YesScript, Javascript is enabled unless I disable it for a site. uBlock Origin blocks third party scripts by default. I find that's a good compromise between breakage and blocking.
so thank you to all the fucking 'cord cutters' that raised the rates for everybody else.
Is that the sound of your PVR's hard disk crashing or the world's tiniest violin?
It's your own fault, not the cord cutters. They are giving you less stuff for the same money, and you are accepting that. There is no down side for them, some people pay more and people like you pay the same for less.
That's why prices aren't going down. If more people ditched cable TV they would be forced to offer a more attractive, competitive product.
You can make exactly the same argument as to why capitalism will never work.
Firstly, for capitalism to work - someone, anyone - needs to be some sort of enforcer - completely incompatible with the whole notion in the first place. Secondly, human nature (as it stands) is still very much tied to amassing resources, and so ultimately greed will remain a thing until we are all programmed not to do so. Now, who is going to be our equal and yet do that fairly and without bias?
Bots and fake accounts are like spam was a couple of decades ago. A seemingly very hard problem, and somehow people fall for the investment scams and pen1s enlargement pills even though it seems impossible that anyone could be that daft.
It's a harder problem to solve than spam, not least because we have state level actors putting resources into it. But Twitter could do a hell of a lot more. These accounts often have really poor op-sec, e.g. posting photos with metadata showing Moscow time instead of where they claim to be. Twitter should have a decent sized team working to find and remove such accounts. Amateurs do it for fun, report the accounts and then Twitter demonstrates its incompetence by being unable to comprehend the evidence.
According to TFA this will be a pre-screening done well before you reach the border, from your own computer. The idea is to speed up border crossing by doing as much of the checking prior to arrival as possible, and then only a quick mostly automated re-check is needed on the ground.
The risk will be similar to online banking or any other web site that handles sensitive information.
If you are paranoid you can opt out and use the standard border checks. A lot of people will probably be forced to due to technical problems with their computers, low quality webcams, lighting etc. I guess it depends if the reduction in border agents results in longer or shorter queues for people not using the system. I'd guess longer, there are never enough border staff.
You seem to be confusing the EU for the US. It's the US border where they will steal all your stuff, copy all your personal data off your devices, check your social media accounts etc.
EU borders have nude scanners and of course non-EU citizens will be checked. But they don't generally ask about things like political views, don't review your social media accounts etc. Things like criminal record checks are done at the visa stage, or for people who don't need a visa on the landing card, and only consider things that they were convicted of (rather than things that are illegal in the EU).
It's not all good though, if they decide to detain you then they can really turn the screws. There are lots of things I would like to see improved. But it's nothing like you describe, and not nearly as bad as the US.