Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
give me a job or im dead how about that hill
I think too much safety is annoying and stupid. To me safety is often about mindset. I think companies like to force a bunch of stupid safety rules on people so they can try to get out of being sued for doing really dumb shit like hiring drug addicts or people with zero experience to do dangerous jobs. I think it’s really insulting that as an adult, you have to be uncomfortable all day and deal with stupid stuff to work at a job you are being massively underpaid for anyways.
Safety is important sometimes. You should definitely be careful around machines and wear safety glasses sometimes, but for some reason the people who do most of the work at companies often end up being abused by shitty companies who want to lobby the government for tax breaks, but never on behalf of their workers.
It’s quite sad how people spend decades wearing uncomfortable clothing working long hours, and have to subject themselves to humiliation by wearing stupid and ugly clothes simply to get a bit of sympathy from our extremely materially obsessed society and our toxic capitalist system.
For any non-trivial software project, spending time on code quality and a good architecture is worth the effort. Every hour I spend on that saves me two hours when I have to fix bugs or implement new features.
Years ago I had to review code from a different team and it was an absolute mess. They (and our boss) defended it with “That way they can get it done faster. We can clean up after the initial release”. Guess what, that initial release took over three years instead of the planned six months.
In my team we manage 2 software components. 1 of them (A) has 2 devs, the other (B) approximately 5.
Every time a feature needs to be added, B complains that it’s going to take forever, while A is done in a fraction of the time.
The difference? B is a clusterfuck of a codebase that they have no time to refactor because they run low on time to implement the features.
I work in A, but I’m not going to steal the credit, when I entered the company, A already had a much cleaner codebase. It’s not that me and my partner are 10x better than the ones working in B, they just have uglier code to deal with.
I can’t comprehend why management doesn’t see the reason A needs half the devs to do the job faster.
I can’t comprehend why management doesn’t see the reason
Management cannot see beyond the next quarter, it’s a genetic precondition of the species.
I 100% agree with you but I have a hard time convincing my team of that. And so we have a mess of a codebase… It’s not directly important to business, so it is secondary. And obviously nobody notices when fixing bugs take way longer or implementing new features introduces more new bugs than necessary, as it always has been like that. 🤷♂️
The joys of agile programming…
Sounds like you had a bad experience with the failed attempt at establishing agile development methods - sorry to hear that.
I just want to encourage you to give it another go with other developers that are more experienced with the methodology - in my company we’re working successfully that way for over a decade.
[edited because the initial comment was unkind]
When agile works, it actually works pretty well.
99% of the agile projects i’ve been in were waterfall in disguise (fragile for short).What they did was far beyond “agile”. They didn’t care for naming conventions, documentation, not committing commented-out code, using existing solutions (both in-house and third-party) instead of reinventing the wheel…
In that first review I had literally hundreds of comments that each on their own would be a reason to reject the pull request.
This is a non technical hill but it is applicable to my technical career. The hill is that REMOTE WORK WORKS. I am so frustrated that so many businesses are going back to hybrid or full RTO.
RTO mandates are employees reduction schemes, nothing more.
RTO is about control and management/owners thinking that everyone else is lazy and would not do anything if not constantly pushed. I believe that is because they are the kind of people who would need that kind of supervision.
The financial side is that making people go to work maintains value. The money you spend on lunch, travel, dry cleaning, maintenance of cars, and the increased value of property near places of business add to the ownership class’s wealth. All that money you spend traveling to/from and while you are at work goes to them. If you save that money by working from home, the wealth stays with you.
Hear hear. My job’s about to force RTO starting January. Precious few other engineering jobs offer WFH to non-SW engineers.
A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.
- use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
- Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
- use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.
But will you be diligent enough to make a new password for every single website using this method?
I understand, somewhat, this being discouraged at work but I agree that doing it for personal passwords with the notebook at home is fine. I’ve met people opposed to ever writing down passwords and I think it’s just a rote reaction based on work training.
If you have a notebook at home with all your passwords then somebody needs to break into your house to get them, which is pretty good security.
Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.
Every job I’ve worked at has had mountains of “The last guy didn’t…” that you walk into and it’s always a huge pain in the ass. They didn’t throw out useless things, they didn’t bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I’ve spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn’t bother to spend the time.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
I’m so hot for you right now.
Starting a new job soon, and I’m paying for some holes in documentation as I prep my offboarding documentation for my current team. Definitely making it a priority to do better going forward! Being lazy in the moment is nice but the “stitch in time” adage is definitely true
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
In many jobs, someone with the power to fire you makes the priorities, allocates your time and does not think long-term.
Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.
Can you give an example?
Im not him, but theres a tiny shadow underneath the cursor on most windows, probably most everything else. Buttons are slightly 3D looking to appear like they pop out.
What of, more specifically?
An image of the 3 concepts together as you deavribe.
Windows 7 is a great example.
Dynamic typing sucks.
Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.
This is one of those things like a trick picture where you can’t see it until you do, and then you can’t unsee it.
I started with C/C++ so typing was static, and I never thought about it too much. Then when I started with Python I loved the dynamic typing, until it started to cause problems and typing hints weren’t a thing back then. Now it’s one of my largest annoyances with Python.
A similar one is None type, seems like a great idea, until it’s not, Rust solution is much, much better. Similar for error handling, although I feel less strongly about this one.
I usually take these holiday weeks off to learn a new language or framework, and started to take a peek into Python, I had it on the back burner way too long. Got to the dynamic variable types and my heart sunk… I couldn’t continue.
Maybe I should take a third attempt at Rust.
Honestly modern python is not that bad because of the typing hints and checks you can run on them nowadays. Also it’s worth noting that python has very strong types, so it’s not illy willy magical types, and while it is possible to use it like that it’s normally not encouraged (unlike other languages).
That being said, if you haven’t learnt Rust I strongly encourage you to read the book and go through the rustling exercises. Honestly while still a new and relatively nieche language, it fixes so many of the issues that exist in other languages that I think it will slowly take over everything. Sure. It’s slower to write, but you avoid so much hassle on maintenance afterwards.
Coming from a background where all the datatypes are fixed and static (C, PLCs) it took me so very long to get used to python’s willy nilly variables where everything just kinda goes, until it doesn’t. Then it breaks, but would’ve been fine if we just damn knew what these variables where
Now my brain just goes “it’s all just strings”
Now my brain just goes “it’s all just strings”
Dynamic typing does kinda smell like primitive obsession, now that you’ve brought it to my attention lol
Do you mean type coercion?
From my perspective, dynamic typing IS type corrosion!
Type coercion = Allow types to be converted to other types automatically to perform some operations like comparison.
Type corrosion = some non-standard condescending term to say that dynamic typing has no proper rigid types?
It was a typo, but I also wanted to add that type coercion is not dynamic typing, the coercion can be done statically during compile time, so it could not be the 2nd one, even if it wasn’t a typo
It was obviously a typo
No it’s not, they’re completely different concepts. In C/C++ lingo Dynamic typing is having every variable be a
void *whereas type coercion is implementing conversion functions for your types to allow casting between types, e.g. having a temperature class that can be casted to a double (or from it).This is a function with dynamic typing and no type coercion in C/C++:
int foo(void* param) { Temperature* t = (Temperature*) param; return t->intValue() + 10; }This is the same function with type coercion and no dynamic typing in C/C++:
int foo(Temperature& t) { return t + 10; }I’m making a Star Wars joke based on a typo. I know what type coercion is. The joke is that dynamic typing is corroded and disgusting to me. The Star Wars reference being Anakin saying from his perspective the Jedi were evil.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS. You are so valid for this. Static typing is so so so so so useful.
Its not possible to have objects that are statically typed.
What are you talking about? What do you think C/C++/Rust/Java do?
Wut
if you’re using modern fabrication techniques, a couple 10uf mlcc capacitors in small packages are just as good as traditional decade capacitors (10uf,1uf,0.1uf) for decoupling in pretty much every situation, and you need to worry about less varieties on your bill of materials
Usually it was a tradeoff with the voltage, but just checked and MLCC caps have quite high V limit! Long time I haven’t done any analog design but got a chuckle seeing that micro is still typed as lowercase “u” :)
mlccs can also be run right up to their voltage limits without needing a huge derating
for high frequency response the main determining factor is actually the package size!
I still call pf ‘puffs’
If you don’t understand that development, security, and operations are all one job you will constantly make crap and probably point at some other team to make excuses about it, but it will be actually be your fault.
Programs have to run. They have to be able to change to meet needs. Implementing working security measures is one of those needs.
The amount of times I’ve had to slap devs hands that wanted to just disable security or remind security that just shutting it down is denial of service is crazy. If it can’t deploy or is constantly down or uses stupid amount of resources it’s also worthless no matter what it looked like for split second you ran on on the dev machine.
The next patch isn’t going to fucking fix it if no one that writes patches knows about the damn issue. Work arounds are hidden technical debt and you have to assume that they will fucking break on some update later. If you are not updating because it breaks your unreported workarounds you will get ignored by the devs at some point, and they are right in doing so.
If you depend on something communicate with the team that works on it. We can send a fucking petabyte of info around the world and to the moon and back before some people write a fucking Ticket, email, or even a IM. Look dumb and asking the stupid question rather than being an actual idiot and leaving something broken for the next decade. We’re all dumb, it’s why we built computers, get over it and just talk to people. If you really struggle with, don’t just communicate, try to over communicate, say an obvious thing now and again just to keep the dialogue open and test that you really on the same page.
That’s my rant/hill borne from ulcers supporting crappy IT orgs and having to overcome my own shortcomings to actually say something in channels where things can actually change and not just griping in private about it.
We’re all dumb, it’s why we built computers,
I love that.
I don’t know if the basic idea that it’s okay to look dumb will ever catch on, though. There’s a lot of self interest and direct ego motive going against it.
There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.
I wish FPGAs and other more purpose built and purpose suited options were available in my IT equipment. They can do amazing shit, better and more efficiently. Just wasn’t ever available to use for me at least.
One problem is that programming an FPGA is a rare skill. A lot of even good programmers simply don’t get their heads around how they tick.
Coming from a digital hardware background, an FPGA was amazingly straightforward, so I’m one of the rare breeds who does both FPGAs and microprocessors.
That’s awesome! I bet that gives you some really good insights to the two platforms.
Is that controversial? I’ve always assumed people avoid FPGAs just because they’re unfamiliar with them.
I think it’s because FPGAs are an intermediate to just making your own ASIC.
If you’re at a scale where making a new ASIC is your go-to, congratulations on your job at Google or Apple. I don’t even know if FaceMeta would do that. Designing and founding a new chip is a whole thing.
Agreed. If you’re not moving hundreds of thousands if units, there probably is no return in investment. Those things have expensive up front costs.
Tell that to the people who think they will soon replace this expensive and complicated FPGA stuff with something running on a cheap MPU programmed by an intern. For thirty years now…
Yikes.
Welcome to my world.
the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.
I don’t let it wrote code per se but I’ve found it useful for writing regex for me to paste into notepad++ find/replace commands.
Holy shit, that’s a thing you can do? Like a sed type function works in Notepad++?
I bet someone smart could, but i just have Gemini or Claude open on the side where I tell it what I want to do with a regex in NP++ (or Geany now in Linux). Then I paste it into the regex box of the Find/Replace and test it then run it.
IT restrictions should be much more conservatively applied (at least in comparison to what’s happening in my neck of the woods). Hear me out.
Of course, if you restrict something in IT, you have a theoretical increase in security. You’re reducing the attack surface in some way, shape or form. Usually at the cost of productivity. But also at the cost of the the employees’ good will towards the IT department and IT security. Which is an important aspect, since you will never be able to eliminate your attack surface, and employees with good will can be your eyes and ears on the ground.
At my company I’ve watched restrictions getting tighter and tighter. And yes, it’s reduced the attack surface in theory, but holy shit has it ruined my colleagues’ attitude towards IT security. “They’re constantly finding things to make our job harder.” “Honestly, I’m so sick of this shit, let’s not bother reporting this, it’s not my job anyway.” “It will be fine, IT security is taking care of it anyway.” “What can go wrong when are computers are so nailed shut?” It didn’t used to be this way.
I’m not saying all restrictions are wrong, some definitely do make sense. But many of them have just pissed off my colleagues so much that I worry about their cooperation when shit ends up hitting the fan. “WTF were all these restrictions for that castrated our work then? Fix your shit yourself!”
You pay me to admin 400 servers on a couple million dollars worth of hardware. Let me install a fucking app on my own machine without 4 levels of bullshit.
Until you install solarwinds between 2015 and 2020…
Me and the IT admin in my previous job had this understanding, as I dealt with field hardware, and he dealt with the “normal” IT stuff.
Once a merger caused the corporate requirement of only allowing whitelisted apps to run, my laptop was simply disappeared from the requirement list. It made it easier for the both of us. I could be on the other side of the world in sudden need of running some proprietary BS software that had to be whitelisted, and nobody wanted me to have to wake someone up to whitelist stuff.
When you deal with network hardware that cost more than most PCs, and the server clusters cost more than a house, some leeway should be allowed.
you will never be able to eliminate your attack surface, and employees with good will can be your eyes and ears on the ground.
All the good will in the world won’t make up for ignorance. Most people know basically next to nothing about IT security, and will just randomly click shit to make the annoying box go away and/or get to where they think they want to go. And if that involves installing a random virus they’ll happily do it, and be annoyed that it requires their password.
A major part of that is, I think, that desktop OSes are, “by default, insecure” against local software. Like, you install a program on the system, it immediately has access to all of your data.
That wasn’t an unreasonable model in the era when computers weren’t all persistently connected to a network, but now, all it takes is someone getting one piece of malware on the computer, and it’s trivial to exfiltrate all your data. Yes, there are technologies that let you stick software in a sandbox, on desktop OSes, but it’s hard and requires technology knowledge. It’s not a general solution for everyone.
Mobile OSes are better about this in that they have a concept of limiting access that an app has to only some data, but it’s still got a lot of problems; I think that a lot of software shouldn’t have network access at all, some information shouldn’t be readily available, and there should be defense-in-depth, so that a single failure doesn’t compromise everything. I really don’t think that we’ve “solved” this yet, even on mobile OSes.
This one definitely drives me nuts, but these days I don’t see how else to keep systems safe. It would be nice and probably be pretty effective if you could just prove to your IT team that you’re not a moron to get reduced restrictions though. Most people I imagine would fail or not even make the effort, so you could be reasonably sure the risk was minimized this way.
Okay, I’m pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three “Grundfarben” (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.
There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it’s actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.
Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.
Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn’t work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color…
In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.
Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.
Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it’s almost everywhere.
(Added tldr)
Can you post examples of what correct and incorrect models look like?
Itten
Munsell
The colormodel of munsell, for example, takes into account that some light waves have the same energy, they are experienced in a different brightness. >Helmholz-Kohlrausch effect
The Color model is dependent on what you want to do with it but in Ittens case, it doesn’t even help with pigment mixing nor as a perceptual representation.
I’m sorry I’ve really tried to understand what your position is but I can’t wrap my head around it. I find this really interesting but I don’t understand it, are you willing to help?
Itten is “normal” RYB color wheel, yes?
Can you ELI5 how Munsell is different? The graphic you linked pretty much looks like it showed the same RYB archetype, with some layers and different levels of brightness… Isn’t that just RYB with extra steps?
Here’s some things that might help us meet in the middle:
-I understand radio/light/EM spectrum/frequencies/amplitudes
-i struggle with concepts of hue, contrast, brightness, luminosity, flux
-i am not an artist at all. I have pretty strong aphantasia - I’m not sure if that’s relevant but it seems like it might be in this case so I’ll mention it here
Sure. Colors are a huge topic and I’m not a physicist. There are a lot of colorsystems, and I probably don’t know half of it, but I try to break it down.
There is no real “normal” colormodel. We just sort colors on a chart that fits our needs the best.
The color model you will see most often is, for instance, in Photoshop the HSV model. (Hue, saturation, value). It’s good but has its own flaws with the color brightness.
In Ittens and Munsells case, you can see a small difference in the colors that are opposite of each other, in both colorwheels. In munsels case, yellow is opposed to indigo. In ittens case yellow is opposed to violet.
itten
Munsell
That’s a small but significant difference. Opposing colors should combine into grey and not into other colors. In ittens case they don’t.
(Upper is correct, lower is Itten)Munsell is closer to a perceptive color space that takes into consideration that colors have different value and chroma levels, and vivid yellow is brighter than a vivid indigo.
Itten only used the flat ring model and lost the value and brightness of colors.
Now I compare those two because they are from the same time period, and Ittens model even came a little later.
Munsells color model even holds today.
Thanks for entertaining my struggle. I get it now.
When I referred to itten as “normal” I was making reference to its prevalence (which seems to be something that peeves you, given it’s inaccuracy), but I think it’s so prevalent because it’s so damn simple. I had to read and re-read your posts and look at your graphics in order to understand what the various layers were signifying, but the flat itten wheel is easy as pie to comprehend to the point that it’s taught to children in preschool. I’ve never really needed any more depth of understanding in my day to day life since then.
Like many models, the simplest are often very inaccurate on a technical level. As a layman the difference between indigo and violet and purple and blue green or whatever are unremarkable in most cases, so the slight yet important difference of which is across from yellow on the wheel doesn’t seem significant, until you showed an example of how they mix.
I can see why it bugs you if you have experience in a field that uses color theory as part of its toolkit. For me I’ve always just needed to know the bare minimum of RGB vs CMYK or whatever.
What would you prefer to see, that there’s just better education about colors once people are old enough to get some more nuance?
Glad I could help.
That is true, and I get that it should be simple for children. But that doesn’t mean that the foundation has to be incorrect.
Just using the simplified version of a correct layout like I showed you should be the way to go in this case.
Of course, most people won’t need to know what’s colorsystems there are. Itten is none of the less still teached by artschools even though it is this incorrect simplified version of a color space. At that advanced stage, there is no need to stick to a simplified version, let alone a one that doesn’t lead to correct results.
Ittens model is just a remnant of its time. And it keeps being shared because of that simplification. But hey, that how history sometimes goes.
I think that’s pretty crazy that itten is taught in art schools of all places, except maybe as an example of how models have different strengths and weaknesses, to spark a deeper acknowledgement of the color space in general (as this conversation did for me).
The good news is that now there’s two of us. Cheers!
Fun fact:
OKLab which was created recently by Björn Ottosson as a hobby project, is a pretty accurate perceptual colorspace. It is open Source and has been adapted by Photoshop for Black and White conversion.
I kinda hope painting apps will also impliment it as a standard model for colopickers.
I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Patient autonomy!
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
Nope. Don’t start putting caveats on aid.
You can’t buy comforts. You will live the life i think you should be accustomed to. It’s infantilising and controlling
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it’s only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I’m being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I’m a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it’s how it rolls. I live in a country where social systemnpayments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government’s business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that’s actually opt-in and they’re reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I’m actually ok with that. It’s a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn’t a moral position
It’s more like - I’ll help with the necessities to keep you alive. Anything extra is on you. We all have our vices but why should I pay for yours
And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?
When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think “I don’t like this thing therefore others should not have it” but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.
**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **
The person donating decides what they wish to donate.
Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don’t get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
- it’s ok to treat all men as criminals who may attack women and women as victims who may be attacked so we need to keep them from fraternizing
From
- it’s not ok to try to reduce their self-destructive behaviors that are keeping them from being able to support themselves
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high.
No. Higher than the other direction but hardly extreme
Statistically speaking the harm from drug adficts and alcohol is is much higher
In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.
As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don’t drive drunk or high and I don’t hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?
I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.
But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.
You’re confusing “way too women experience partner violence sometime in their lives” with “all men are violent criminals and need to be separated”.
While yes, a lot of drug related violence is caused by the drug war, the harm for drugs is easy to see from with a significant portion of the homeless, theft and ciolence as the worst addicts fall out of society, and ruined wasted lives. Harm for alcoholism is much more obvious and easy to see, but I’d also add all the victims of drunk driving to it’s harm
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can’t buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You’re essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that’s not wrong - you’re not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn’t even apply. That’s mostly for free)
