> Every policy is targeted discrimination for or against certain groups of individuals
Lol are you talking about "discrimination" on the basis of task-relevant skills?
Until 20 years ago, nobody in OS cared who you were IRL, your gender, ethnicity etc. In many cases they didn't even know, plenty people only contributed under pseudonyms. Hard to believe for people who only joined the show after social media had become pretty much mandatory, and the "I don't care who you are IRL"-crowd got drowned out by "who you are IRL is the most important thing, not what you contribute"-crowd.
I think their point is that there was never any reason to even know what people identify as, or your political views, and that there still shouldn't be. That things like "diversity" in online-only circles doesn't really make sense. I don't want to know your sexual preferences or your gender identity, not that I am against anything, just that it's completely irrelevant to writing code and learning about technology etc. and only seems to lead to more drama by including it at all.
As a more personal example, I no longer support the Linux kernel because I no longer consider it fully "open" to contributions, especially when accepting those contributions are no longer based solely on technical merit, but are also actively rejected for political reasons, even for patches that are merely fixes, which benefits everyone, and not just a sanctioned country. Even going so far as removing names from the maintainers list because of some unspoken combination of their country of origin, employer or political affiliation. Not only the lack of advance notice, transparency and empathy, but the abusive attitude Linus continues to display to the world about this and many other issues.
Back then my field had plenty women and asians, I also knew a bunch of middle easterners (mostly iranians, but that's probably by accident). They got into the field because they were interested in it, so they were good at it!
Nowadays many people (including the despised white boys) enter the field because they think it's an easy way to make money, not because they're interested in it. But at least with the white boys, employers are still allowed to filter based on interest and ability. They can't filter out "oppressed identity havers" on the basis of interest or ability, who as a result are just as bad as nepotism hires -- some are good, most aren't.
What we should have focused on for the last 20 years was reducing nepotism, instead we created a new type of nepotism based on identity. In traditional nepotism you need an uncle who is friends with the boss, here you just need the skin color that is friends the boss of your (boss's)^n boss.
> I think we need diversity. Am I wrong?
There are definitely some circumstances where identity and cultural background can be very job-relevant -- for example for understanding your customers.
But that's pretty limited. Does your skin color or genitals have an effect on what kind of networking problems you can solve? The only reason we haven't proven the Riemann hypothesis yet is because we forgot to hire a Manchu-Bantu queer Muslim with ovotesticular syndrome and vitiligo? I don't think so.
Even if you believe that, this perceived need does not justify identity-based discrimination. Discrimination creates resentment.
Actual, legally enforced, culturally glorified discrimination (which corporate america currently has against white and asian men, unless they're nepotism hires) creates more resentment than does the ethereal, unfalsifiable, hypothetical discrimination that you assume to exist based on outcome disparities, even though companies are aggressively punished for any actual such discrimination (against anyone besides white and asian men).
The main unfairness in corporate America is nepotism. If you fight that, you'll automatically fight more white men than members of other identity groups. The main unfairness in America in general is poverty. If you fight poverty you'll automatically help more minorities. The main beneficiaries of DEI are "oppressed identity havers" from high income backgrounds. DEI reinforces/extends nepotism and income inequality instead of fighting it.
> The main unfairness in corporate America is nepotism. If you fight that, you'll automatically fight more white men than members of other identity groups.
adolph reed says something similar to this as well.
one important addition to that conversation is that what dei (in many cases) represents is the implicit acceptance of the system as-it-is except that the only problem remaining is 'equal representation'
so if (going to extremes) you have a corrupt organization, just making the identify of that organization represent the makeup of society doesn't fix that corruption; it just makes it look more legitimate...
As far as economic policy goes Democrats are neoliberals (which can be considered right wing).
They are far left on cultural topics (e.g. favoring retributive discrimination, wanting frivolous late term abortions to be legal) and far left in their attempted "solutions" to issues like homelessness (rewarding what they try to stop), crime (not enforcing the law if it would make client groups look bad, e.g. making theft under $1k a misdemeanor), education (e.g. abolishing measures of competence).
Some of that is performative, some of it is clientelism. But there are a lot of influential Democrat positions are held by sincere (cultural) leftists.
> favoring retributive discrimination, wanting frivolous late term abortions to be legal, etc.
I don't think these are the positions held by the Democrat party at large. I don't deny they exist within the party, but this isn't what a Biden or Pelosi are pushing for.
The "democrat" party at large does not have a position because the Party is too fractured. From the screeching Banshees with weird hair colours and piercings who frequent all paid-for protests to the out-of-work mill working man, from the race grifters in academia to the well-meaning but ill-informed librarian in some prairie town, from the in-and-in corrupt politico syphoning off funds for her own purposes to the sheriff who just wants his county to be a safe place for all who happen to be there, who represents them in the current DNC? Who will they follow as their next leader, trusting that (most likely) she will have their interests at heart? The Party does not know because the Party has purged itself of believable candidates because they did not fit the narrative - too male, too Jewish, too sensible. By 'centring the marginalised' - their own term - they lost focus of the fact that there will always be people on the margins who in their turn will demand to be at the centre which ends up marginalising the centre which happens to be where the majority of their potential voters reside. This is why I have been calling for the Party to burn itself down to the ground so that a new (capital-D small-p) Democratic party can arise to function as effective opposition to the Republican party. While I may not be an American I do have some skin in the game since I prefer that big neighbour on the other side of the ocean to remain stable without veering off too far in either direction. Without a functioning capital-D Democratic party the risk is for the country to veer off towards whatever faction ends up taking over the Republican party once Trump has run his course in about 3½ years.
I've never encountered a radical centrist in the wild before. Now I can say I have. Fascinating.
But the politics of the Dems are absolutely pro-capital, pro-moderate, pro-"nothing fundamentally changes". Biden, Obama, Harris, and Clinton were all "let's not make any radical shifts here, the markets will sort us out, we just need some easily ignorable guard rails on them" candidates.
I don't think the party, at the national level, contains many leftists. Perhaps Sanders (though I think of him as a soc-dem, not a dem-soc, based on his policy positions), and he's not even a member of the party anymore.
DOGE didn't abolish PEPFAR, they reduced its budget by 25%. Probably because ~50% of that budget was being wasted. There's likely still a big buffer before anyone runs out of meds.
Also there are lots of private donors who would make up the difference (if it's only 20% of Americans, that's more than 65 million people, who can easily come up with 25% shortfall of the $6.5B budget, that's less than $10 per person).
> Probably because ~50% of that budget was being wasted.
Crazy how you just made this up.
> There's likely still a big buffer before anyone runs out of meds.
And this.
> Also there are lots of private donors who would make up the difference (if it's only 20% of Americans, that's more than 65 million people, who can easily come up with 25% shortfall of the $6.5B budget, that's less than $10 per person).
Now you're just being absurd.
You're literally describing the tax system that was funding it before it was axed by the guy who can't stop making mistakes.
Quite a few people would donate for Firefox development, but they can't donate to Mozilla because Mozilla spends the money on other stuff. Until now, as Google's lapdog, Mozilla didn't need donations, so that wasn't a problem (for Mozilla, it did however result in firefox getting 2.62% market share).
To reinforce this, I'm a stingy bastard but I'd give them 5$ a month if I could donate them to the browser development itself since it's the program I use the most.
"Nobody" is an exaggeration since there are a few people like you. Most people want Mozilla to focus on making a good browser.
If Mozilla had used the Google billions on improving Firefox instead of fart sniffing, Firefox would be a better browser now and its market share would be above 2.62%.
The misspending was (implicitly) part of the deal: the Google money would stop if Firefox started to seriously threaten Chrome's dominance.
someone else always does and they always have the same knowledge and skills. except in this case, hellwig had more experience coding in rust than his replacement.
