Let me frame it this way. If every non-sales FTE in my company spends 1 business hour on this it will have cost the company $10M based on a conservative estimate for average salary. I’ve spent a lot more time on it personally, and each of my meetings have 10-12 engineers on it. So I feel good about my back of the envelope estimate. If I’m off by an order of magnitude it’s still a shitload.
Metric or standard?
Do you not grasp that software has user facing elements which use the term master, whitelist and blacklist? Like every application with a configurable security policy has to make customer-facing changes here. Mastering data in a enterprise app is a pervasive phrase and is often in the marketed name of suites of applications. I’m not worried about a silly class name or table column.
I don’t even know, but surely you’re not suggesting that every custodian, every receptionist, every groundskeeper, every inventory worker, and every food service worker in your organization has spent an hour on this?
Your back-of-the-envelope estimate seems really unlikely to me, and the continued failure to point to any industry article talking about the cost speaks pretty loudly. (I looked for such an article before challenging you–as near as I can tell, nobody is talking about the cost).
There is an enormous difference between suggesting that “college student organizers are expected to go entirely uncriticized in left spaces” and showing that in this space, some people defend some specific students.
You’re wrong that this thread provides any evidence for that assertion.
Heh! I left the Lib Dems for much the same reason. That and the fact that the leadership is entirely useless.
I still get the emails though. Apparently disaffected conservatives are joining the party in herds. With luck, this will moderate some of their illiberal tendencies, creating a virtuous circle that will attract more conservatives (liberal ones, I hope). Next stop 10 Downing Street! 
I think you’re falling into a trap with this logic. Its not only the right wing outrage factories that have made words like woke toxic for progressives. It’s also because liberals who would have normally been proud to be called woke have been embarrassed to be associated with the more unhinged parties on their left flank.
Woke doesn’t become a toxic word to lefties when Tucker Carlson sneers it at them. It becomes toxic when you have self-proclaimed woke warriors doing shit like vandalizing statues of Abe Lincoln and cancelling would-be allies for out-of-context faux pas. It’s that shit that corrupts the word, not derision from well documented liars and demagogues.
I am not wrong about the fact that the university seemingly did not take the time to review or edit the published content on their own internet platform. Certainly whatever PARC staff or faculty is in place did not provide oversight or challenge them. In that respect at the very least, their ideological stance was unchallenged.
We don’t have any of those as FTEs. Every single one is a subcontractor…as is the case for almost every major company with lots of offices. Seriously, who keeps a janitor on staff instead of hiring a service? I’m about done with being called a liar here.
Companies are responding to public pressure to conform here. Why the fuck would they put out any reports that would make it look like they were doing it unwillingly? I mean, think about the motives here. Making the change, and then bitching to investors or the public at large about how much it cost would be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Seriously…what are you after here?
Lol, that’s true of every party right now. Bunch of numpties.
Pro-EU Conservatives?
You’re definitely changing the claim, but if you’re abandoning the claim that this thread demonstrates that principle, cool. Now let’s move on to the idea that a university, in not “editing” (or, as others would call it, “censoring”) the statements made by a student group, is refraining from challenging them.
Well, yes. It’s not the job of the university administration to critique the claims made by student groups, is it? Challenge those ideas in class, certainly, and prevent claims from showing up on the university website if they’d expose the university to civil liability, sure. But it would be outrageous for the university to say, “Student group, you can have a website on our servers. But we’re gonna take it down if you say something we disagree with.”
Good lord, deep breaths. I’m not calling you a liar. I think you’re probably mistaken, and I think the fact that nobody else in the industry is talking about it indicates that you’re mistaken. Your inability to provide any citations indicates that you’re mistaken. But your mistakes don’t make you a liar.
Nevertheless, I think you’re about done, and I’m pretty satisfied with the conclusions I’m drawing from your responses to repeated requests for cites, so I’ll stop making those requests.
I’m not asking for company press releases. But you may have noticed that the occasional article gets written about the tech industry and about its financial status. If this were such an enormous deal that it were costing individual companies upwards of $20 million, I’m confident such an article would have been written by an independent blogger/journalist.
You are missing that I was talking about what to do in new systems, in practical terms I remember how a Cisco router from a company I worked for had its capabilities deprecated and the logo turned from Cisco to Technicolor in an update that was remotely made. Thing is that I don’t think that they did go and changed all the past code, what usually does happen is that to do the changes you talk about the old code is not used, changes are implemented in a new release that usually has then changes that are not just about the issue here, I don’t see the programmers complaining about changing features or even graphics in their new environments.
That’s right.
That would work if there was an acknowledgement by the right about the changes already made by the progressives regarding the use of the word. Incidentally, as I learned about the history of the word the embarrassing part came from the misuse and abuse by corporations and misguided centrists using it out of context. Followed then by right wingers (that besides demonizing the word) criticized those entities for not really helping the cause and the reason why black people used that word.
Of course that does not prevent right wingers from being hypocrites since they do not think much about dealing with the issues of why black people came with their original use of “woke”.
And it’s the Brexit voters who’ve been abandoning Labour to vote for the Conservatives. There’s some big realignments going on. Will the Tories become the party of the working class?(!)
I think this thread is a healthy dialogue about what should or should not be considered as offensive speech. It’s good that we’re able to have it. I also think that colleges are ideal grounds on which to have those conversations/debates. To the extent that PARC presented their side of the debate, I have no real qualms nor do I believe that they need to be “censored”. My only argument is an appeal to what I still believe to be my own side (liberal progressive) to be more circumspect about the kind of advocacy regarding language they put forward. This does not mean that we have to make sure we get the right-wing stamp of approval. But it does mean that we ought to be careful not to step on our own dicks by listening to those quieter voices appealing to some moderation. Now, is that me advocating for the status quo of the ‘good old days’? No. But I’ve no doubt some will level that accusation.
Perhaps in the UK – I don’t know the situation there, but the first I learned of the pushback against the word “gypsy” was back in the late 90s/early 00s, while working in Budapest. I had friends who worked at the Roma Rights Center there and some who were Roma or half-Roma themselves, and the ones I met there, at least, emphatically did not like the word Gypsy in any context. They don’t speak for all Roma or similarly groups, but knowing this, I personally do not use the word on to refer to the Roma or as a catch-all for various itinerant peoples.
One last comment on this because we are in danger of hijacking.
Ash Sarkar pointed out on Twitter that the traditional labour voters who switched to the Tories in the Red Wall are overwhelmingly affluent and retired. If your (not, you particularly. the general you) perception of a working-class labour voter is of a middle-aged man in a flat cap, you are out of date. The average working-class worker in 2021 has brown skin and is a woman.
Out of curiosity, I did my own back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Assuming that a company that has every employee spending at least an hour on the “master/main password” change is going to be software focused, let’s figure a reasonably high average salary of $100,000, or $50 an hour.
To reach the $20 million threshold, the company would need to have 400,000 employees. There are 23 companies on the planet with that many employees. Looking over the list, I’m not seeing any companies that are going to be entirely software engineers or the like. Most companies with that many employees have a lot of very low-paid employees (construction workers, cashiers, factory workers, package packers, etc.), and those employees aren’t going to be spending much time on the issue of password terminology.
I just don’t think the claim checks out.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find the very triviality of many of these examples to be one of the most infuriating things about them.
Take the GitHub example. I think kevlaw’s assessment of it is entirely correct. It was a consequential change which created a lot of pain-in-the-ass busywork for countless people all over the world. Yet the reasoning behind it was simply absurd. Ditching the word ‘master’ because someone might be triggered by its associations with slavery is the kind of thing a right wing comedian might dream up to poke fun at progressives.
Firstly, I’m going to draw my own personal line in the sand here and state outright that if you visit a version control website and see the word ‘master’ in that specific, technical context, and the first thing you think of is chattel slavery then there’s something wrong with you. You’re the one at fault, not GitHub or anyone else. You’re wrong to be offended, the fact that you are offended reflects badly on you, and the last thing anyone else should do is cater to you, because you’re clearly one or two cards short of a full deck.
Secondly, because the reasoning behind the change was so tenuous, it did nothing meaningful to actually fight racism in the real world. GitHub would’ve accomplished more anti-racist work if, instead of changing ‘master’ to ‘main’, they’d just donated ten dollars to their local chapter of BLM. A small donation like that wouldn’t have done much, but at least it wouldn’t have done nothing, and at least it wouldn’t have pissed off every programmer from here to Timbuktu.
There are so many examples like this. Trivial changes that nobody asked for, devised by busybodies with too much free time, for the benefit of a tiny minority of zealots and fools. It doesn’t matter that these changes don’t affect me personally (although, the GitHub one very much did), I still find them profoundly irritating just on principle.
You’re right that, a lot of the time, these incidents are blown out of proportion by right wing media. But right-wing media typically blows them out of proportion by exaggerating their importance. They rarely exaggerate their silliness. In many case, it’s hardly possible. What is possible, however, is for people who don’t watch FOX or OAN and don’t read the Daily Mail to be exasperated by their sheer triviality and pointlessness. And when people get exasperated they get cynical, which only makes real anti-racist work more difficult to accomplish.