Criticizing a religion is not the same thing as dehumanizing its followers.
Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so, because people are, in fact, people.
This is the important point everyone seems to be missing. If you look at the example tweets they all have some aspect of making the [Religious Group] out to be less than human: rats, virus, maggots, etc.
People can still freely express their distaste for any and all religion on twitter so long as they don’t dehumanize the people who follow that religion.
This kind of attitude with respect to rules and regulations drives me nuts. Guess what? Every time you have a human applying a rule you’re going to get results that aren’t entirely consistent. Have you ever managed a team and given the exact same task with the exact same instructions to two people? Did you get the exact same work product in return? I very much doubt it.
Rules & regulations should be written, evaluated, and revised the same way code is. Code doesn’t always run as we intended but we (usually) don’t crucify the developer. We learn from the misunderstanding, fix it, and then re-evaluate when the next inevitable misunderstanding comes up. We get feedback and we iterate. That’s exactly what Twitter is doing. Their first policy didn’t work out as planned and this is their next iteration based on the feedback they received on policy v1.0.0
And will Twitter update this policy yet again once they’ve had time to work out some of the kinks? You can bet on it.
Neither the title nor the article use the word "median" - they appear to be using the concept of "Fair Market Rents" (FMR), which is a 40th percentile[1] of non-sub-standard units.
The article calls out that even the _average_ wage earner can't afford an FMR unit in many states:
> For a two-bedroom rental, the Housing Wage is $22.96—a figure that’s higher than average renters’ wages everywhere, and at least $5.00 higher than the average wage for renters in 16 states. For a one-bedroom rental, the Housing Wage is $18.65.
There are multiple points where averaging is employed.
FMR is a close to median value. From the linked definition:
"The FMR is the 40th percentile of gross rents for typical, non-substandard rental units occupied by recent movers in a local housing market"
Additionally, FMR is itself statewide average, covering both high and low cost of living areas. Low cost of living counties have units available for far below FMR values.
Low end housing in low cost of living areas can be found for under $377/mo - their estimate of affordable minimum wage rent.
The article mentioned the 30th percentile, which is an unrealistic percentage of income to expect minimum wage earners to spend for housing by themselves without a roommate or family situation.
Is that what the article is saying? Their reference to 'median' is saying that's what other people are reporting and they want to look at something else.
They don't seem to qualify it - they simply say 'there is not one U.S. state, metropolitan area, or county in which a minimum wage worker who clocks 40 hours a week can afford a two-bedroom apartment'. They don't use the term 'median' anywhere apart from talking about other articles. The report they link to talks about 'fair market rate' - not sure who decides what's fair and what isn't.
> In 2019, the affordability crisis has plunged to new depths. Last year, the average worker making the federal wage minimum of $7.25 per hour had to work 122 hours a week, every single week, to afford an average two-bedroom apartment.
The point being made earlier in the thread is the comparison is between the middle and the tail, not the tail earners and the tail quality 2-bed room apartment.
Yes, it's what they're saying. They quote $377/mo as the maximum affordable rent for a minimum wage earner.
There are many counties across America where a low-end two bedroom can be found for substantially less than that $377. These claims only make sense if they refer to median prices.
The claim 'there is not one U.S. state, metropolitan area, or county in which a minimum wage worker who clocks 40 hours a week can afford a two-bedroom apartment' is simply incorrect.
People making the minimum wage can hardly get by anywhere in the US and have almost no social mobility because they can't buy homes and rent leaves little or no room for savings, particularly if they have families. Moreover the disparity between top and lowest quartiles is growing. Whatever the flaws of the article, it's a problem. It's a shame the article has those flaws (https://reports.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/OOR_2019.p... is the original source for a lot of the article's and is worth reading instead) and everyone is focused on bikeshedding the analysis instead of getting the greater point.
The article starts out talking about median rents, but the data they use is based on something called Fair Market Rent. There’s a link in there explain it.
They aren't saying that --they state the minimum wage worker would have to work 122 hours to afford that. Which is three jobs.
I have first hand experience with this crisis. I live in a reasonably priced area and make (with my spouse) about three times the minimum wage and I can barely afford to live anywhere. Basically one large unexpected cost could sink us into homelessness.
Whether or not they can afford a bottom quartile home is a different question than whether it's reasonable to expect them to afford a median home (and I don't think we have any evidence regarding that question here). They certainly aren't expected to be able to afford a top quartile home, for example, so I agree that the headline is a bit fishy.
The whole situation is being drastically oversimplified, though. Whether or not we expect minimum wage to support a family depends on whether there are other alternatives, like higher (and adequate) wage jobs that individuals can reasonably obtain when they do have to support a family. Is that happening? My sense is no -- we have a big step function where you're either mostly screwed (working several jobs, driving Uber, etc. barely making it if at all), or you're making 6 figures after getting a 4 year degree in some technical or professional field.
While that doesn't require the big 4 year commitment, that still requires education or an in to working with a skilled tradesperson, and their wages aren't great starting out.
If you read the report, they define the rent prices for housing wages as 40th percentile of standard quality homes. Not bottom of the barrel but definitely lower than median across all homes. I think it’s a fair measure.
they also exaggerate by omission the number of people earning these wages, their ages, and the income of other family members.
the housing cost problem is wholly created by government and instead of working to fix it too many cities keep doubling down on making it harder to create new housing, affordable or not. combine the housing cost with the high costs of government services, licensing fees, and other regulatory fees, and the lower class is further in the hole.
one issue is there is no reason for politicians to fix this issue, it is too hot button to have a true remedy and worse is a fantastic source of income for patrons and relatives through various special interest groups which exist to absorb funding from programs supposedly working to solve the issue. instead end up raising legal challenges in exchange for pay outs either in direct settlement or advisement roles all of which end up pushing costs of solutions too high to implement.
Seattle only recently upzoned many areas of the city to permit building denser housing however they may end up sabotaging it through rent controls which have been shown to be another method of limiting new housing
> Minimum wage earners can often afford two bedroom homes priced at the lower end.
[citation needed]
Looking around the bay they appear to simply become homeless, especially if there's any interruption in work, and if they're lucky they're able to move away before this happens.
YIMBY pro-developer stances like Weiner's SB-50 aren’t going to help working class families and individuals either. I am very pro-development but we need high allocations of affordable and social housing to make the development work for the existing community.
No, it’s not. It’s the foundation of market economies, which are not the only way to distribute goods and services. There are many alternatives to this.
Look at singapore for an alternative that isn’t associated with anti-socialized scare tactics. Soviets had a lot of issues but lack of housing wasn’t one of them. Same for cuba, although the sanctions have crippled the economy to make quality housing difficult. I can’t speak for venezuela housing as i have not researched it, and it seems weird to clump a country with a mostly private economy in with self-proclaimed communist countries.
"House prices in Singapore are considered “seriously unaffordable”, with a median multiple of 4.6, which means that the median house price is 4.6 times the city-state’s median household income, according to an annual survey."
Because without community, what value do job markets have? Life is more than working until you die. Only the rich have the luxury of something more the way cities are headed. This is worth fighting for. If you don’t start with values, you have nothing.
Anyway it’s somewhat of a moot point because you can preserve communities and still build—just not with market-driven rents and landlord-owned cities. And not everyone can have what they want and live where they want. It’s worth it.
California's problems are the result of years of zoning codes not allowing needed building. (prop 13 doesn't help either) This is simple supply and demand, when you don't allow supply to change (building more suburbs on the outskirts does not count - distance becomes a factor)
(Note, between the time I wrote the earlier comment and this I discovered new information on California's homeless situation - shelters near me the homeless are either mentally ill or victims of domestic violence - the first are forever a problem and the latter will be out in a couple weeks)
Every market has a working class. You can’t just pretend supply and demand will provide labor with perfect elasticity. Part of why development is so difficult is the labor pool in the bay area is massively outstripped by demand for labor driving up costs and slowing down development.
The unix filesystem api doesn't provide a way to interact with sectors. The primitives are files and the methods available are writing more data, or truncating.
There is no function provided for shifting the byte offset of data in a file.
You can write an entirely new file, of course, but the question has an implicit goal of doing this efficiently.
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I remember when I started noticing that the occasional time a newspaper wrote about something I knew something about, they usually got some vital details wrong, that really undermined my trust in that newspaper. I've got a better newspaper now, but that first one is generally regarded as a pretty decent one. But when they always get the details about stuff I know wrong, how well can I trust the articles about things I don't know?
Of course it's also possible I only remember the times they get it wrong, and I don't notice the many times they get it right when writing about something I know something about, leading me to underestimate the paper's accuracy.
I'm sure somebody somewhere is willing to make up a name for that effect too.
Perhaps Gell-Mann moved from a paper that was bad at writing about physics but good at writing about Palestine, to a paper that was good at writing about physics but bad at writing about Palestine. This kind of transition seems like it might help maintain a filter bubble.
This is certainly a risk, but unfortunately we can extend the argument to suggest that you can't ever trust any source. Say Gell-Mann wants to find a paper he can trust on Palestine. He's good at physics, and checks reporters covering both topics.
A reporter might be good or bad at covering each topic, which leaves us four cases to consider. If they're bad at physics, they could be a specialist in Palestine, but they could also be generally incompetent; Gell-Mann has no way to tell. If they're good at physics, they could just be talented reporters, but they could also be physics specialists who don't know Palestine any better than Gell-Mann does. And once again, he has no way to tell.
Even probabilistically, we could argue for either approach. Most people aren't experts in more than one thing, and it's easier for an expert than a random fool to garner attention for a baseless claim, so perhaps we should especially distrust good physics writers on Palestine. But incompetence is broadly correlated, and journalism skills apply to both topics, so perhaps we should view bad physics writing as a sign of weak fundamentals and distrust it everywhere.
(I'm talking about reporters instead of papers, but we can push the argument back a level easily; editors have to hire reporters for fields they don't know.)
Going alone, all I can see to do is to look for people who claim to specialize in a few things, one of which you know well, and trust them on their other specialties. As a society, we can perhaps do better by asking a bunch of experts who's competent in their domain and looking for alignment - provided we can all correctly agree on some experts in advance.
edit: a bit of searching suggests this is basically Berkson's Paradox. If we (boldly) assume that news sources which are bad on all topics don't circulate, then quality in one area lowers the expectation of quality in other areas.
Although there is another interpretation (especially in traditional newspapers): you aren’t just evaluating the the individual journalist, you’re evaluating the editorial staff. They are responsible for finding a physics expert to write about physics and a Palestine expert to write about Palestine.
If they do a poor job of selecting a physics expert, then it seems likely that they will do a poor job of selecting other kinds of experts as well.
Hm, lots of options going - negativity bias (bad stuff is more memorable), conservatism bias (low-frequency events are overestimated), availability heuristic (memorable events like misrepresentations are overstated).
Honestly though, I'm not sure I'd call it a bias in your observation so much as a sensible assessment of sources. A source that's right about 90% of topics is still misleading you quite often. And even worse, a source that's 90% accurate about each topic can leave you almost totally ignorant; there are a lot of stories where the entire message can be destroyed by any one of numerous errors.
(And of course, there's a pithy name for that too. "O-ring theory", after the Challenger shuttle disaster, describes phenomena where everything has to go right, so the failure chance at each step is multiplicative.)
I think that's just confirmation bias working in tandem with the amnesia effect described, but certainly it is a valid point. To me, the hardest part about this problem is that trust tends to be stored (at least in my brain) as a binary yes or no, though possibly with a fuzzy border and some room in the middle. It's tough for me to read something and internally modify my trust of the source by a proportional amount for getting things "right" that I "know" when even what I know is uncertain because I could be wrong.
The end effect is that I tend to double check just about any source, but I still have a handful of sources that I have strong reason to believe their motives are compromised on various topics where I expect their motive to conflict with the motive to tell the truth. It's still not great though because sources rarely move up in this system and frequently move down, which leads in a general inability to find information considered trustworthy. This works fine on things where there is a general consensus because I'll be able to find a varied set of sources saying the same thing, but not so great on hotly debated topics with lots of nuance. Also sometimes my brain is lazy and I don't do any of this processing because I'm an imperfect human.
Generally speaking theft requires an intent to deprive an owner of property. It's a crime to take my bike intending to deprive me of it, but it's not a crime to take my bike while attempting to return it to me.
Property owners do not have any obligation to lock up their items.
There are sometimes very specific laws regarding found property when the owner cannot be located, generally these involve turning the property over to the state first.
Totally fair - I don't mean to excuse the results. That's an interesting insight that perhaps it's possible to identify organizations who have scaled (or whose products have scaled) too quickly based on whether they can cope with outages.
You say "you" as if you're talking to the person you're replying to. Most scripts in the world aren't authored by the person you're replying to. They're powerless to change the ocean of python out in the world.
For example, out of about 50 or so /usr/bin/python scripts I see in a RHEL7's /usr/bin I can't find a single one that runs on python3.
No individual user is going to be fixing this. It's a very silly and shortsighted move on RedHat's part.
Right, someone working in ubuntu distro development has done this work for those packages specifically.
Above, we're discussing some build system where someone hasn't done this work. Most collections of python code in the world (I'm going to hazard a guess significantly upward of 90%) just use /usr/bin/python or /usr/bin/env python.
I'm discussing the problem of collections of python scripts using /usr/bin/python and I included the state of RHEL7 as an example.
The actual subject is CoolGuySteve's build system, which is likely to look like my example of RHEL7 rather than yours of ubuntu. The vast majority of environments look like RHEL7 or CoolGuySteve's build system where #!/usr/bin/python is the norm.
First, This is about RHEL 8 (Beta) not 7, 6, etc. Second `#!/usr/bin/python` is a different animal than `#!/usr/bin/env python`. One is hard coded. The other is `PATH` based so will change depending on current `PATH`.
On RHEL 7 (and earlier) `/usr/bin/python` must be the Python 2 the system shipped with or your break `yum` and other admin tools. When people try to install their own python by doing a `make install` as root, `yum` breaks and it's hard to recover the system.
What the article is saying is that RHEL 8 addresses this by having a platform python that the system tools use. So RHEL 8 tools will not use /usr/bin/python
CoolGuySteve complained that things will break because existing scripts assume /usr/bin/python. CoolGuySteve is correct. There is an enormous amount of work involved in changing or removing the function of /usr/bin/python.
Offering advice about how to write new software does nothing to help with the frustration he highlighted: His existing build systems will break. Build systems are especially frustrating as they tend to have hacked-together code that no one really wants to look at.
People will often work around this by installing a python2 as /usr/bin/python. At the end of the day this change results in a less predictable platform. On previous RHEL systems I know what /usr/bin/foo is -- it's predictable given the major version of the distro. But now I won't know what /usr/bin/python is on RHEL8. It will be uniquely different and that's not a good thing.
Which is why something between slap on the wrist and massive fines is in order.
The FDIC and SIPC work through public trust. When a broadly-marketed consumer product sets a precedent for degrading that trust, it causes real harm. Robinhood grabbed users through marketing this affiliation and gained tangible value from it. The last thing we need is the next growth hacking scheme involving falsely marketing trusted affiliations before pulling the product, customer lists in hand.
If I try to sell you a car and tell you that it has a 20-year warranty, which it turns out is a total lie, is that fine just because I got caught before any cars changed hands?
False advertisement shouldn’t be acceptable even in the case where it didn’t go far enough for people to actually obtain the product.
> Had they launched a product, sure. But this was mere talk about a future product which they've decided "to retool" after scrutiny.
It was not mere talk, it was talk about a waitlisted feature used to induce signups to (and because of a “referrals move you up the line” policy, also to induce providing personal information if third parties as referrals to) Robinhoods existing service.
That is, it was false representation used to induce people providing Robinhood things of value, and thus, arguably, commercial fraud.
> That is, it was false representation used to induce people providing Robinhood things of value, and thus, arguably, commercial fraud.
That's assuming they knew the representation was false. If they reasonably expected to be able to get the insurance, claiming that they would get it was a true statement of their intentions.
Ummm but if you want people to trust you with their money and build reputation shouldn't you do your DD and make sure what you say is true? imo RH is either reckless or deceptive, and neither is a good look for a company like them
They hurt their reputation and they look like idiots, sure.
Above, people are suggesting that we need regulatory and/or criminal charges. There isn't any harm to customers and there isn't any evidence of fraud or criminal wrongdoing.
RH harmed themselves by looking stupid in front of the world. That's it. The rest is misguided hysteria.
Exactly. Most people have significantly more than $86k debt in the form of a mortgage. I owe a lot more than $86k on the mortgage for my home.
I have more assets than debt and I could pay off my mortgage but it's simply not the best way for me to spend my capital.
Additionally, I suspect this article is using a median value for "average income" but a mean value for "average debt." This paints a misleading picture.
First, even if you couldn't pay off your mortgage today that doesn't mean you would be in a bad position at all. If you had enough to contribute 50k a year (plus job increases) and had 500k left on a house you would be in great shape. You would be happy to have the debt and the entity issuing you the debt would be happy to be repaid.
Second, while it is useful to think of debts in terms of things like mortgages and auto loans, most of this global debt is government debt. Think locally - your local town may need 50 million dollars to build a new school. They aren't increasing taxes for one year to build the school they instead take on 50 million dollars of debt in the form of bonds. So even if you have no personal debt you still have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt which the government has taken out which can reasonably be repaid overtime.
That's obviously not the angle this article takes though. Obviously there is more than enough assets to cover worldwide debt and one only goes into debt to obtain something of value. The context here is debt on paper excluding assets.
And every debt is someone else's asset. I have a retirement plan that owes me money, that has US bonds, that I pay part of the interest on with my taxes. It is when the credits all pile up on the same group and they don't use it wisely, the world can get into a real conundrum that seems to only be solved by violence.
In other words, $350k home = $300k mortgage + $50k in equity. You still have debt. Its just that the debt was exchanged for something. Its the same equation for credit card debt.
No one takes on debt without receiving something in return.
Well people do take on debt for things that are quickly worth nothing. For example, you buy groceries with a credit card. You eat them; they are gone. But you still have the debt.
Or you buy a car. It quickly loses value, but you still have the debt based on the original purchase.
The formula still holds, but the "equity" part is negative, which leads many people to conclude that bankruptcy is a better option than paying for something they no longer have or is no longer worth what they owe.
> Or you buy a car. It quickly loses value, but you still have the debt based on the original purchase.
Aside from perhaps the first year of owning a financed car, it is worth more than remaining principal on the loan for the majority of the loan's duration.
Dehumanization is a defense mechanism which helps us avoid feeling the pain of realizing that humans sometimes do (subjectively) abhorrent things. It's seductive to define such people outside the bounds of humanity as it allows us to excuse treating them poorly. It is nearly always a mistake to do so, because people are, in fact, people.