Race is clearly cultural in todays society because we can make it so. Very unlikely to be genetically culturally if that is what you are saying (but of course, who knows).
What I'm saying is that it the AI to me illustrates how much of a self-own drawing these cultural battle lines is.
If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.
But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
We can't expect people whose lives are, in great part, defined by the societal oppression they face, to be at the forefront of trying to erase the distinctions the bigots hold over them – not least because it'd be ineffective, serving only to hide the abuse. The categorisation schemes used by bigots (e.g. racists) do have predictive power: for the behaviour of bigots, and the resulting effects on the social context of people's lives.
People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.
Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)
Being proud of your identity and culture is not a problem at all!
The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.
You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.
And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.
That's a false dichotomy. The "intrinsically" connotation is not there (you're reading that in), but civil rights activists often discuss the relationships between culture and skin colour. Any book (or Wikipedia article) on the subject should provide this information, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory.
I do agree that the AI bots were farcical, but they don't highlight what you're saying. You're talking about nth-degree pushback-to-pushback as though it's the actual facts-on-the-ground, which it's not. (The "culture war" is composed solely of the assumption that there is culture war, and people's responses to that: unlike the real issues, like systematic oppression, it'll go away as soon as we stop talking about it.)
To be fair, how the term is normally used depends entirely on the group within which the term is being used. For many, racism is strictly “prejudice + power”, which logically concludes in the [in my opinion rather warped] idea that some groups are incapable of racism, which is at odds with the definition you’re citing
You're right, but in practice I don't really consider it as being too fundamentally different because it's the logical conclusion from strong enough predictive power.
There is nothing "logical" about the progression from my appearance and ancestry is something I'm entitled to be proud of; also there might actually be such a thing as Black American culture to racial epithets and Jim Crow laws. Or indeed using "predictive power" to assess people's intellectual ability or criminal propensity from their melanin content.
I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?
I work for a FAANG and a month, well planned, vacation is totally OK. If I want to take a week of I more or less need no notice, but for a month it would be expected I plan ahead what the people I work with should do.
I have 5 weeks vacation and unlimited sick days every year.
My experience of working for a couple of FAANGs does not mirror this - while I was never laid off during a vacation, I think every vacation over 3 weeks I ever took, I returned to discover that my team had either suffered a major reorg, or the entire project was cancelled, and I had to find another team to work on.
Yep, I've taken several three-week vacations and it's never been a problem. The main thing is just giving plenty of advance notice (and reminding people as it gets close) so my manager can schedule around it, and making sure projects are in a good state with arrangements made for anything that needs covering while I'm out.
This is kind of natural for a new service, one of the advantages the big players have is a giant test corpus. For less mainstream languages and terms it will be more noticeable.
> They might get punished in the next election or they may not.
If what they do is sufficiently contrary to the will of the people (or at least, those with weapons and the will to use them), they'll get punished sooner than that. Laws and constitutions are a useful abstraction but ultimately an imperfect one.
CA lets your kids inherit the tax treatment and allows corporations the same benefit. Once you do those things, it’s off in a whole other realm than normal homestead exemptions.
The rapid run-up of home values in the US has led other states to follow, but they generally have higher caps on increases and limit the treatment to your primary residence.
Both should probably be pegged to the inflation rate nationally each year, which would probably bring them up a few ticks, but otherwise seems reasonable to me. For owner occupied of course, -not- landlords.
> Both should probably be pegged to the inflation rate
Yes I agree...but not the CPI, it should be tied specifically to housing prices. You could even have the state hire appraises to figure out the value of each specific property and peg the rate of increase to that for each property owner.
I know this comment is tongue in cheek, but I still disagree. When you purchase a house, you look at principal, taxes, PMI, and insurance before making a decision. If you're responsible, I guess.
If your little city blows up, and your property value in the market is now 3x what it was, why should you be punished and even forced out if you can't afford the new taxes? New buyers do the same math, and decide they can afford it.. Yes they're paying more, but voluntarily on a likely overpriced asset.
I'm not saying the original owners should just pay less and that's fair, screw the new buyers. I just think the increase should be capped realistically.
The fair way to handle this would be to reduce the tax rate across the board in response to housing inflation. Somehow. Governments around the world are more than happy to see housing prices rise, as are existing property owners, so I am not exactly holding my breath for this to happen.
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