It's a real breakdown of empathy. People only see skin color for their interpretation of "like me". There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Agreed. This brings to mind a couple of other anecdotes:
* The Dutch translator who was hired to translate Amanda Gorman's work (AG is the youngest poet laureate in US history and while I'm not particularly informed on poetry, I liked her performance at the Biden inauguration). The deal was reneged because of significant complaints that the translator wasn't black and thus couldn't possibly understand Gorman (a black person) and thus couldn't possibly convey her sentiments. The translator noted that he was deemed fit to translate Shakespeare despite not being neither an Englishman nor alive during the 16th century, so the implication seems to be that race constitutes a greater distinction between humans than nationality and centuries of history.
* The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because, despite being eminently qualified and having the support of the broader community, he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers. In this case, the explicit reasoning of the school board was that the candidate volunteer wouldn't be able to relate to students of color and thus wouldn't be fit to serve them. The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race (irrespective of the experiences or qualifications of said volunteer) rather than someone who was qualified and perhaps had relatable experiences but of a different race.
> There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Perhaps, but skin tone differences have always existed, and this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
> The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because [...] he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers.
That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
> The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race
I bet the (closeted) students (of all races) would have probably preferred to see an openly gay man in a position of authority where he's not mocked for who is is.
> That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
FWIW, I didn't interpret it that way. I think the school board's message was merely that race dominates all other qualifications and since they already had two other white people (who happened to be female) they already had enough people with "white qualifications". Of course, this is by no means a less toxic interpretation than your "homophobia" interpretation.
> this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
This sounds like something that could only be true of a white person. It reminds of me of how I was horrified to learn that one of my gay friends had to deal with someone calling them the F slur once, and my friend said I was only surprised because I don't personally deal with homophobic slurs on a regular basis.
There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone, it's just that more and more non-POC folks are starting to see it bit by bit.
> There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone
No doubt this is true in some strict sense depending on how you define "extraordinary", but in whatever sense this is true I don't think it's very informative. Namely, while (esp in the US) there is a deep history of racism, to say that it has always been this way is pretty much untrue--American views on race (including the importance placed on race) have changed a lot throughout history, and while racism has never utterly disappeared, it's perfectly correct to note that the emphasis placed on race in the 90s and 2000s was much lower than the most recent decade.
Indeed, Google NGram corroborates this. Note the date range is 1990-2019 because ngram doesn't offer 2020 or 2021 data--though I strongly suspect the upward trend continues in 2020. Note also that I used "americans" as a suffix in all cases to disambiguate "white" and "black" which come up in a lot of non-racial contexts.
So I don't really buy into the "we've always been this obsessed about race; whites are just mysteriously unable to perceive it" argument. In general, people are often surprised that the variation within a race far exceeds the variation between races, and specifically that "people of color" do not have the views (on race or otherwise) ascribed to them by the popular media.
People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more. Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
EDIT: There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
> People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Indeed, ngram isn’t conclusive proof that our society (or rather, certain elements there within) are race obsessed. But my claim is only that certain elements of society have become possessed by race, not that they have succeeded in restructuring society according to their segregationist designs.
> Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more.
I don’t think there’s any evidence for that, and there’s significant evidence that the role race plays has gone down considerably (we don’t have expressly racist policies like we did in the 60s and earlier, we don’t tolerate racist memes in the entertainment media, being perceived as a racist is the among the worst social offenses, etc). Note that there is no dichotomy between advocating for further progress and acknowledging the progress that has been made.
> Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
And yet the evidence for subconscious bias is virtually nil. The implicit association test, long hailed to be proof of subconscious bias, turns out to be bunk and little additional evidence exists.
> There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
The idea that our society has always been this race-obsessed and white people are just unable to pick up on it is racist nonsense, and there is no evidence which supports it. Indeed, all evidence corroborates the hypothesis that our race obsession is a phenomenon that developed in the last 10 years. No need to gaslight the white folks. :)
It’s the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, which sparked the largest ever protests seen in this country over the racist tendencies of of this country. One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America. This has been the case for centuries. As long as we can safely say that the United States has an extremely racist past, it’s fair to say that skin tone has played a huge role in society.
How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black?
Surely we can consider those things as instances of skin tone being taken into consideration, no?
> How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black?
That's easy--I never said anything remotely like this. :) I quite explicitly scoped my claim to "within my lifetime". Indeed, everyone knows that race played a big factor in our nation's history. We made a lot of progress away from racial ideologies following the civil rights movement, and while the work isn't complete it doesn't follow that we should double down on different racial ideologies.
> One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America.
I don't think that's remotely an appropriate takeaway. By all appearances, violent crime rates account for the disparity in police killings, which are indeed rare regardless of race (contrary to your "not uncommon" claim). Indeed, last time I dug into the WashPo police shootings database and filtered out all instances in which the deceased was wielding a weapon, the disparity virtually disappeared.
Further, while we're all familiar with the myriad cases of unjust police killings of black Americans, there are plenty of cases of white people heinously murdered by police which were never elevated by the media. Consider [Daniel Shaver][0], [Tony Timpa][1], and [Justine Damond][2] (all killed by police within a year or so of each other). Of course, people always say "they didn't get national attention because they weren't killed for their race" which is of course begging the question since the only evidence that George Floyd or whomever was killed for his race is the presumed lack of notable cases of white people being killed by police.
To the extent that fear of police is "part of what it means to be black in America", it appears to be a largely manufactured or vestigial fear.
The only appropriate conclusions to draw are:
1. the United States has a police brutality problem (irrespective of race)
2. that black citizens are more likely to commit crimes than citizens of other races--presumably for historical reasons--leading to a disparity in police killings of black citizens
3. the media will absolutely sow divisiveness on a nationwide scale for clicks
Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer.
There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Are they? I've had no issues with remittances outside of blockchain. In places where I have heard remittances are difficult, it is usually due to regulation, something this does not solve either.
My Spanish teacher in Peru has to travel one hour by bus to reach the destination for Western Union money transfer. With crypto using local crypto exchange, he receives the money directly into his bank account.
Its difficult because it requires parked money (nostro accounts) in foreign currencies. This imposes a risk and act as "dead capital".
At some point the cost to maintain the corridor is higher than the profit so the corridor is closed. Transaction then are routed trough other corridors which means multiple currencies swaps. More loses and more parties who want their cut. + it can takes days and the system are one-way so you have to ask the recipient if he got it to know.
If this scaling blog post is accurate, a global payment network at 1m transactions/second, decentralised, is massively valuable.
Imagine if the only way to send a message to someone was through fb messenger or WhatsApp, and then someone invented email. The UX might not be great, but the benefits are huge.
Additionally if the eth virtual computer can scale with very low gas costs, there’s a lot of accountancy and banking functions that can replaced with eth code. Potentially some legal functions as well.
You should look at it as a public service of authenticity.
Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars.
Big tech has too much control over these things, and the road to get a response se or to go to court is way too long and expensive for the average joe
Your example makes no sense. How would blizzard banning a wow account (I don't know the game particularly well, but let's just use this since you brought it up) be solved w/ Blockchain?
This is what people mean usually when they make this argument:
Blizzard can ban WoW accounts and take away your hard-earned in-game assets, and that makes people unhappy. Therefore, because capitalism, a competitor to Blizzard's WoW can arise whose killer feature is "we technologically commit to not being able to take away your assets because those assets are distributed through a decentralized blockchain."
Of course, it's pretty far-fetched. The "banned account had lots of assets" problem happens to a tiny minority of people compared to how many enjoy WoW because Wizards and Goblins or whatever, so to compete with WoW on the basis of "we can't take away your assets and they can" is not going to appeal to anyone. You have to also be better than WoW in other aspects that would make people want to migrate.
But the general idea is, "if part of your offering is 'virtual assets' you can use this technology to commit yourself to never being able to take those assets away". Hence ICOs.
How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.
Silkroad, money laundering, tax evasion, exit scams, pump&dumps, crypto pyramids, ransomware – all this improves someone's day / process / life. Why don't you want to see the opportunities?
- Fuels research for applied cryptography (example Zero knowledge cryptography) and privacy technologies.
- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.
- Gives options to people living in censored governments
- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.
Someone from africa or russia can buy tokenized american stocks (like aapl/goog) that they wouldn't have access to easily in their national stock exchanges. I'm really excited to use tokenized stock projects like mirror that are popping up.
It's pretty useful for scammers, extortionists, drug sellers, money launderers and all other kind of people that want to bypass or break laws. But that's about it.
A couple of points, the first is criticising lack of real-world use-cases for nascent technology is like criticising the web in the mid 90's. It's like expecting the cart to lead the horse.
Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.
DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -
You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.
Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.
In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.
All of these commercial blockchains should really just be "traditional" databases. Byzantine fault tolerance is a ridiculous requirement for a project that runs inside a trusted networked, or between trusted peers. These companies are doing blockchain for PR and/or as projects with consultents, not as serious integrated software projects to solve actual supply chain management problems.
In comparing it to the mid 90s web, you miss three things:
Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.
There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.
There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.
Grin is currently not untraceable (it only hides amounts and addresses, but not input-output links, which are mostly visible in the mempool), but could be if the coinswap proposal [1] is implemented and widely deployed.
OP listed Zcash which is the same so it seems fair game. I think it's also important to list it as Aztec can interact with DeFi privately and also be programmed which allows for complex interactions and an economy where money goes in and doesn't come back out often. This increases privacy and also allows people to actually use money instead of just temporarily hiding it.
ODL is a product that uses a DLT (the XRPL) and a digital asset (XRP) to facilitate cross bolder transaction.
Instead of finding a bank or payment provider that hold the foreign currency you want to deliver somewhere and exchange it for you currency, this system converts you local currency to XRP send the XRP to the destination and sells it there for the local currency.
If you send money to the Philippines or Mexico you may have used it without knowing.
This was a terrible layer. Everyone hated it when I was there. People ended up building logic directly into the API gateway because it was so difficult to use.
I am so glad to never have to look at RTAPI again.
He's saying that it might not be getting worse due to a cost-cutting strategy, but rather an attempt to optimize the value for the most possible people.
Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the issues that we've had with privatised rail going away - those issues being incredibly high fees, understaffed and underpaid workers, under maintained infrastructure, and a lack of real investment in areas with little to no infrastructure at all (the north).
Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.
The ScotRail brand was operated by the private company Abellio, who lost the contract due to long term failure to meet its requirements of reliability etc - was in trouble before the impact of the pandemic.
>doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda
Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work.
Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.
Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”.
It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.
> It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working
More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried.
Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.
Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages.
£100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.
The last time I had to travel from London to Bristol and back, I rented a car from Heathrow airport and it cost me a quarter of the price the train would. It takes the same amount of time, but the car is more comfortable and worse for the environment. The system is so broken in the UK.
Problem is that there is massive pent up demand. Cheaper tickets mean more people travelling longer distances to work when there isn't capacity. The last thing we need is even more regular commuting to London from outside greater London.
This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.
Something like 160 pounds at peak time from Nottingham to London. Service is good but it's just inconceivable that private individuals would be paying that, all the travelers are on expenses or are self employed contractors/consultants. When I started working and up till about 2005 the same journey was about 40 pounds - a massive increase!
This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries.
My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
And there’s the rub. Is that network rail’s problem, or the operator’s? Network rails’s rails... operator’s train wheels, leaves in the middle. The leaves are undefined, and are therefore probably nobody’s problem but the passengers’.
Same here, but newer trains no-one was really asking for, and tickets about three x what you were paying (about £290/month and no seats from my stop in, 25 minutes.) The line -- Thameslink -- got so bad the government took over paying the compenstation rebates for distrupted customer journeys while letting the operators continue to trouser all the fares in addition to something a 4 billion pound operating payment regardless of how badly they performed.
This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.
£100 a month not bad. My season ticket used to cost £4400, for a 25 minute ride to London waterloo, and tube to Hammersmith. Still cheaper than £28 for the day!
To be fair they were clean and well-maintained. They also had the benefit of being flushed through with fresh air - a result of the doors not forming a seal around the edges.
It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.
Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!
Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.
Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.
Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.
My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.
A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.
High fares (and they aren't that high) aren't a result of privatization; they're because of a lack of subsidy. In the UK, despite the obvious environmental benefits, subsidizing rail is politically awkward because it's regressive.
If privatisation of essential services is a crime (it’s not, but it should be), privatising the subsidies and directing them to private companies is much worse.
If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.
I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week.
Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24
London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158
I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge.
Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.
> this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department
Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.
Don't expect the people who lined their pockets during privatisation to lose any money. Do expect Tory party donors to do well in whatever actually happens.
So, during the 1948-1995 nationalized period, train ridership was in almost constant decline, and from the 1995 privatization, train ridership started a steady and steep increase.
Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.
Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.
The infrastructure had been renationalized for quite a while. Its the Operators that have still been private, which in general can be made to work. In Britain it didn’t work well.
Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested.
Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies.
"that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.
