There is a lot in this piece, but one of the things mentioned was public spaces.
While it likely doesn't play a huge role, it can't be ignored that the last ten or so years in the US, public spaces have generally deteriorated due to the lack of enforcement of quality-of-life laws, and general absence of social norms. If your government decides to allow tent cities (everything that comes with that) in your local park, people of means will take their kids to SkyZone. When public transportation becomes unsafe, people of means will opt to rideshare. It points to a failure in leadership of many large US cities. Hopefully that changes.
My issue is the metrics constantly parroted to show inequality wouldn't (shouldn't) stand muster to an Econ 101 student.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For me, what is more common is the likelihood of doing something in the wrong environment (e.g. lab, dev, stage, prod). To help make things a bit more clear, our images now override the PS1 with a `(environment)` at the beginning, which is a different color, lab=green, dev=purple, prod=red. If it saves me once, it was worth it.
I alias cd to always show the first few files in a directory, but a better chance of noticing if I'm in the wrong place, and I always make internal IoT controls show the hostname in the top nav bar.
If I have made a mistake once, or imagined a mistake that could be possible, I pretty much always start thinking of technical countermeasures.
I have iTerm set up to change the background colour of a shell based on whether it's local, docker, staging or production, and on top of that prompt colours change depending on how privileged the user is. Without all this, I'm sure I'd be making terrible mistakes on a regular basis.
I'm always running in tmux panes so often iterm and those settings seem to conflict. It would be great to go a step further and include a background color change--will have to give it another shot. Thanks for the tip.
I’ve tried using iTerm2’s automatic profile switching feature to adjust the theme depending on the connection, but I’ve never been able to get it to work reliably.
Double deep environment protection. True prod servers can't be deployed to except from special terminal which only appears visible to the ProdGlasses(TM). If you are wearing ProdGlass(TM) you receive mild brain wave stimulation which is collected for "product control purposes"(TM) future product development(patent pending).
And the no-go zones were just fox news right-wing propaganda. Well, my Swedish friend drove me through one (daytime) two years ago.
Pretty significant cultural changes, like now in their hometown, there are separate swimming days for the sexes at the public pool. When I started going to Sweden 30 years ago, all the beaches were top-ional.
Things like, I think he called them the "bearded babies", which was a group of thousands of refugees who were obviously up to 30 years old, claiming they were 17, so they didn't need to provide any information and received preferential treatment.
It was enough to lead my die-hard liberal punk rock guitarist friend to start voting SD in last few elections. They were the only ones who would talk about the problems.
Middle-upper management also excels at this method of escaping blame/consequences. Move in, talk big and change a bunch of stuff, then on to the next before the tickets start coming in.
20 year listener here. I now listen until they force identity politics in to the subject at hand, then change the channel. In my experience it's much less than 10m, but could be my market too.
I play this game with my XM radio. On First Wave, I listen until they play The Police, then I switch to Lithium and listen until they play Foo Fighters. I cycle back and forth constantly.
Nothing directly, in fact I want to like them so much. But I was there since the 90s and the stations just over-played them to the point that I began to dislike them.
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