I have been highly active in online technical communities since the usenet days in the 1980s and I have never once found myself in a situation where my opinions on sex or gender were solicited, interrogated, or judged.
This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content.
This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk.
The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.
Doesn't help with how often it is wrong, but if you preface every question with "terse answer please" at least you don't get the superfluous text tsunami and it sticks to the point.
Very similar to my experience. I never managed to either ask or answer a question on there. Everything I did was "bad" for reasons that were never explained to me in a constructive way that made me feel empowered to get a better outcome.
I used it as a reference when someone had a similar question to mine, but over time the bad taste in my mouth caused me to avoid it in google search results.
I fell into using an early — and I would say, far superior — form of ChatGPT, which consisted of carefully and clearly laying out my question, point-by-point, in a blank text file, and then usually having an insight as to what my particular stumbling block actually was and thereby being able to move forward.
> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld
Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.
Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.
Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.
Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.
What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.
Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.
I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.
These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
My instinct would have been that this applies to Python! I'm only working from an anecdotal dataset of 1, a friend who works in insurance and is becoming necessarily more and more familiar with Python for data processing.
This really sounds like people were letting their personal flags fly (in avatars or sigs or whatever) and you could not stand to see that because they were not like you. All you have to do is ignore it and look at the content.
This reminds me of someone I worked with, who asked me "why does [Colleague 2] have to shove his gay lifestyle in everyone's face?" after that Colleague 2 put a framed holiday photo with his husband on his desk.
The person who asked this had a photo with his wife on his desk. He was unable to understand (A) how that is "shoving" his sexual orientation in other people's faces to the exact same degree as Colleague 2's photo was; and (B) that the photo was for Colleague 2's own comfort and solace, and for positive engagement with anyone who wanted to engage in same, and that nobody else was required to dwell on it or give it a second glance.
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