- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Foundation says it won’t compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would’ve really helped
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Paying companies to be racist, what a world.
White women are the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. So who’s being racist by being against DEI exactly?
The DEI people are against are policies that mandate discriminatory practices, making someone’s race/gender a qualification. It’s wild that people here actually support discrimination in hiring.
You have it backwards. DEI ensures it’s not just the same good ol boy hired as usual (which is what the current good ol boy employer wants)
This is where everyone here is being disingenuous, or are just completely ignoring opponents of DEI. When have opponents of DEI called for overlooking meritorious minorities? When have they called for discrimination? Because they must have explicitly done so if DEI combats this.
I know what the stated goals of DEI are, and it sounds good, but I also know how it’s often implemented: quantitative goals and affirmative action. These are discriminatory practices.
People routinely admit that white women are the biggest beneficiaries of DEI, calculated from things such as their access to STEM jobs (eg. IBM setting a goal of 50% female engineers), then they go right back to saying that hiring based on gender is actually not DEI. Pure gaslighting.
All true. The problem is, remove DEI and you hand the reigns directly to the baked-in systemic advantage of white men(tall, attractive with hair specifically). It’s like the ocean. DEI is a small seawall trying to make the slightest difference. It’s not perfect and takes work but the alternative is a flood of self-affirming bias where you end up with products and services created by them but supposedly for everyone.
Say you don’t understand dei, without saying you don’t understand dei
DEI was a solution to a problem. When you remove the solution, what remains is the problem.
DEI was a solution to a problem.
It was strategy for industry and government with an international focus. JP Morgan hires Japanese businessmen to acquire equity in Japanese firms and Samsung hires American bankers to negotiate loans with Wall Street. Nigerian oil executives shake hands with African American State Department staffers to negotiate trans-Atlantic trade deals. Korean native speakers in Seoul make sure American military bases don’t create political headaches for Korean politicians. Middle Eastern dictators in Egypt and Israel and Saudi Arabia met with counterparts who knew their customs and spoke their language.
The goal remained consolidation of wealth into the hands of a handful of (primarily white, American based) oligarchs. But the scope of global commerce required regional HQs and middle-men who had to navigate a kaleidoscope of local organizations and logistics partners.
Trumpism is pulling all that back and trying to return to the old Colonial model of capitalism. Your hierarchy is primarily predicated on your physical identity - White. Christian. Fuckable. Man. - in that descending order. Now we put Donald Trump and Tony Blair into the chairmanship of the Gaza Peace Plan, because we don’t trust any Arabs or Israelis to get the job done. We fuck with India, China, and Mexico on a daily basis, because their heads of state don’t meet our definition of Real Person.
When you remove the solution, what remains is the problem.
The objectives of the current government have shifted substantially from the Nixon to Obama neoliberal era. We are a white nationalist government first and foremost. It isn’t that we still have the same problem. It’s that we have a totally different set of goals.
Anti-DEI (racism) is doomed to fail, because it only works in an imaginary world without interracial/international marriage/families. The racists have cornered themselves in because distinct races is something they make up. The real world is not made up of distinct races.
the french model of completely banning even the collection of that information, outside of strictly for facilitating medical care, seems like the best way forward imo.
if you have that information, the race supremacists will use it to their own ends if they ever come into power…as we are seeing right now with ICE
I’ve seen forms were providing info is optional. At this point, I don’t see why anyone would answer. We can’t even trust governments to use or protect the info for our own good.
it only works in an imaginary world without interracial/international marriage/families
You can go back to the 18th century and see it in practice. Also in apartheid systems like the South African junta and the Hinduvista/Tibetan caste systems. The method works so long as the families at the top of the food chain can exert sufficient control downstream, typically via a mix of funding/staffing large occupying armies and pitting native peoples against one another to the benefit of the foreign ruler.
If you get into the history of the French and Indian War, for instance, you had the English and French colonialists backing various American native tribes in what was effectively a coast-wide war. Similarly, Cortez and Pizarro defeated the Aztec and Inca empires respectively in large part by turning insurgent factions within the empire against the chief monarchs and supporting their insurrection with superior European firepower. The end state of the fail of the local empires was foreign governors playing “Kingmaker” among the native peoples. Then they carved out larger and larger settlements for their own migrant populations, while stoking fear of the natives to encourage loyalty to the foreign crowns.
The real world is not made up of distinct races.
It’s made up of distinct languages and cultures, as well as distinct understood identities and accepted hierarchies. The strategy of Divide and Conquer is an ancient and devastatingly effective one. Our post-WW2 neoliberal turn happened as a necessary rebuttal to Internationalist Communism (which was, itself, fumbled early on via the Soviet-Sino split). But it only needed to persist until the threat of Soviet Era support for anti-colonialist native coalitions faded.
Without a Stalin or Khrushchev or even a Castro or Tito willing to put a thousand guys with guns on a boat and send them to support a Marxist revolt in Columbia or Angola or Vietnam or Afghanistan, there’s no need to pretend we need a Big NATO Tent. No more need for the EU. No more need for economic alliances in the Pacific Rim. Now its every Colonial Empire for themselves. We can go back to merchantilism and juicing our satraps like a bunch of ripe oranges.
No family can sufficient control downstream. That is again imaginary.
And no, the world is not made up of distinct languages and cultures. All continuums. You could find thousands of examples yourself.
No family can sufficient control downstream.
The English Royal Family managed it for centuries. The Spanish and French for nearly as long. The Hapsburg Dynasty dominated European politics for longer still. Get into East Asian dynastic rule or the great empires of Ethiopia and Egypt… FFS, the Caesers reined across the Mediterranean for what? Nearly a millennium?
And no, the world is not made up of distinct languages and cultures. All continuums.
There’s historical continuums that give birth to discrete divisions through geography and social conflict. The Silk Road connects the length of Asia, but the various mountains and deserts and human fortifications form hard divisions between both linguistics and social practices.
Physical and social division over time create a compact social separation between people in the same way it creates distinct speciation at longer distances and time frames.
“FFS” as you say. Put your own family first, instead of theirs, and stay out of others’.
DEI is just the easiest way for the administration to be racist and commit hate based firings without repercussions.
Glad people are refusing to sign an agreement with the fascists as THEY WILL take money back at any moment in time. They are very fragile people trying to compensate for being cucks.
What about the people who make DEI a condition of getting money? Im all for equality etc, but Im 100% against people getting preferential treatment/consideration because of what they look like, have between their legs, or who they love. More often than not, these programs are little more than boxticking to wash the public profile. See Activision for example.
We keep on talking about racism in hiring, but never actually address the main issue in places like the US, which is that historic racism set black families back half a centaury in terms of wealth accumulation. This in turn has limited access to higher education, which limits the ability to compete in the market against an over whelming white population that has had access. The way forward seems to have been clear for a very long time, reparations. Any families that were held back through systemic racism, should be getting money from the banks and companies that discriminated against black families, causing multiple generations of inequality. Levelling up families allows them to send their kids to better schools, grow up in better areas, and compete in the work place at an equal level.
This cherry picking, and surface level tokenism does not work. It has worked for the past 50 years, and a new approach is needed. One that isnt just “You need a random black face in your team.”. Actual real, and lasting change, cant happen that way. The change needs to be at the roots of the issue. And that means money going to families, that gives their kids better access to education and to making friends too. As a lot of their future will also be “Not what you know, who you know.”.
DEI isn’t preferential treatment. It’s a methodology for correcting past, and preventing future preferential treatment.
And yes, I read your entire comment. The last 2 paragraphs are fine, but your first paragraph misses the mark by miles. What you describe in the first paragraph isn’t DEI.
Yes it is. I know the culture war disagrees with anything and everything that pissing all over DEI, but thats exactly what it is. You cant correct past or future mistakes that way. You either hire/recruit based on merit, or you dont. Theres no in between.
https://time.com/7291474/supreme-court-reverse-discrimination
The case was brought by Marlean Ames against the Ohio Department of Youth Services, where she started working in 2004. In 2019, she applied for a promotion, but was turned down and a colleague with less seniority—who was a lesbian woman—received the promotion instead. Ames was later demoted and her previous role was given to another colleague who had less seniority, a gay man.
I’m sure readers saw the title of this article and thought “what!? White straight men are the most represented group in businesses!” Nonetheless, an employment tribunal in the United Kingdom recently held that a strong candidate was deliberately not hired because he was a white, heterosexual male. See Furlong v Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, Case No. 2405577/2018 (U.K.).
It would be a mistake to conclude that discrimination based on sex, race, or sexual orientation only goes one way. I have loads of examples in the US and elsewhere, of “positive discrimination” by bad actors. And even more, where its clear as fuck, it was only something they were doing to wash their shitty reputations.
It looks like in the US supreme court decision the justices clarified the law and kicked it back to the lower courts. The final case hasn’t been ruled on yet. In the past, majority groups were expected to have stronger evidence for discrimination. This decision changes that. I don’t think that’s a great decision for minorities and I’m not sure using the current US Supreme court’s motivations, which don’t seem to be at all concerned with precedent, are a great basis for how we should frame our understanding of racial justice.
The UK case seems to indicate a ruling on the narrow principle of ‘positive action’ which is fundamentally distinct from ‘positive discrimination.’ You seem to be mixing those two ideas up a bit.
The judicial system is inherently conservative. It’s designed to be that way. And just because a judge or group of judges decides something doesn’t make it the right thing to do. This whole ‘reverse discrimination’ push is simply undoing the progress of the civil rights movement, unfortunately.
Im not mixing anything up. Just because you call it a different name, doesnt change what it is. Racism.
What seems to be happening is that a lot of people, yourself included, seem to think that the answer to past discrimination is more discrimination. And in case you all missed it, Trump has been voted in not once, but twice, because a very large group of people felt the deck being stacked against them.
Outside of that, you look to things like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings and other media franchises, were the mantra “Male and pale is stale” was openly said around their production over the past decade. The result is that young men and boys and all but abandoned those things. Because they are sick of being told that being straight, white and male is a bad thing. Its so bad, that Disney is now looking for another franchise to buy because they have no idea how to get genz and younger bums back on seats. And further to that, in social media world in general, the hate and generalisation of straight white males has gotten so bad that around the world young boys are increasingly being taken in by right wingers who dont treat them like rapists and abusers. Its almost like all this over correction has come back to bite everyone on the ass…
Black, white, gay, straight, man, woman, and everyone in between should be judged on just one thing. Their ability to do that job. If your the best person for the job, you should get it. End of. Once you start making excuses, once you start excluding people, you start making enemies. The only way to make sure that black people have the same start in life, if to make sure there is money and access to education that allows them to take control of their own lives, and puts them on a level playfield. Then you dont need to lower standards, or make excuses, or discriminate at all. You just hire the best person for the job, and you go about your day.
Quite a mouthful. Too bad none of it addresses the legal nuances you completely ignored in your previous assessment.
You don’t understand dei. You don’t know what you are talking about.
Wrongggggggggggg
I don’t believe that NSF had any ability to fire people from PSF.
Even if they will take the money back, isn’t that just a interest-free loan? It doesn’t seem like there is any drawback in your hypothetical.
That assumes you have that kind of cash to pay them back when they come knocking…
They’re buying influence. Its pretty clear.
The US government needs to buy influence? And they are doing that by giving grants that organizations apply for?
Do you think this is an isolated instance? They’re probably trying to do this a lot.
And if course they’re trying to influence other orgs to their will. Why else would you do this?
I think you are severely underestimating the level of influence the US government already has. NIST is a US Agency. Much of research in the US is done at the behest of the government. My local university had to comply* with anti-DEI policy to continue receiving federal funds ( it’s primary source of income).
Influencing the foundation of a, quite frankly bad, programming language is not really that impactful, especially considering that the foundation apparently only has 14 employees.
*In case you were wondering the only change they had to make was discontinuing LGBT work anniversaries. So you can probably see why I view this anti-anti-DEI fear mongering with some skepticism. The reality is that racial bias in an organization is very difficult to actually prove, regardless of whether it is pro or anti minority, so anti-DEI constraints simply prohibit explicit biasing.
That still doesn’t answer why do it then.
They’re literally attaching conditions to money. That’s one of the fundamentals of buying influence is attaching strings.
I do not use Python for anything, but I donated. Any project, willing to stand up for its morals and against BS rules, is worth supporting.
Hugs to Python Foundation.
Was going to go into just Rust and GDScript more but you what I am going to go into Python now too. Massive respect to them
How do donations come with strings? I’ve never…
I think that’s just a bribe in that case isn’t it?
No. It’s called earmarking. It’s super common. I can do it at my local university.
Here’s $100 but you have to spend it on materials for research, not executive salaries. It’s called a restricted donation. You may hear that colleges and universities have million dollar endowments but still send out fundraising emails. This is because you might get a $200k donation from an alumni that is only to be used on tuition for student athletes and, yeah, you take that money because that means $200k that you don’t need to spend there… But that you can only spend there.
So you’ve got to keep that money around unless you use it for those things.
All grants come with strings. You can go to grants.gov and click on hundreds of them.
I don’t know where you donate, but Open Collective doesn’t have a field for “enter your demands to accept this donation”
There’s just no way to do that
I’m sure you’re aware that businesses, especially with donations of that size, might engage in emailing contacts prior to donating…
No. Some do, but all the donations I’ve gotten from businesses on OC were just made.
Lots of companies just tell their staff how much, and they hung on OC and make those donations. They don’t see a point to contacting them.
Right but if you’re trying to score political points and ensure you can bend a open source project to your will, you do.
Not saying they’re right for doing it but it’s not so outside the realm of possibility that we should say “who does that?”
Here’s my $1000 donation, but you must remove one testicle from each member of your team…regardless of their assigned sex at birth. For $2000, we would like two. Thank you!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I don’t know where you donate, but Open Collective doesn’t have a field for “enter your demands to accept this donation”
There’s just no way to do that
You could contact the company directly if you were doing a large donation/wanted to negotiate.
Usually I assume those are phishing and ignore.
I’d do the same
that pic is me when someone offers me to learn javascript
Can I interest you in learning Brainfuck?
ive played with it before
Sent a donation! For as much as I’ve used python probably should have donated sooner but better late than never
The PSF was smart to walk away - those grant terms were vague legal landmines that could mean anything from “no diversity goals” to “fire your existing minority staff.” But watching y’all melt down over meritocracy is peak comedy.
I’ve worked with brilliant devs from every background. The good ones succeed because they can solve problems and write clean code, not because of their melanin levels. The whole “systemic racism in hiring” cope ignores that maybe different groups have different interests and aptitudes. Engineering talent isn’t equally distributed across all demographics just because you wish it was.
The historical guilt trip about wealth gaps doesn’t make hiring less qualified people logical. I’m supposed to tank my codebase quality because someone’s great-grandfather got screwed? Merit-based hiring optimizes for results. Everything else is expensive virtue signaling that makes products worse while executives pat themselves on the back for being “inclusive.”
I’m on the fence about this. I think that it’s true the most hiring decisions aren’t merit-based, nor do they necessarily need to be. Most jobs can be sufficiently done by the average-skilled person, it’s only the most skilled positions were you can argue that one person is just simply the best (and sufficiently that it matters). I think DEI practices would be fine in the former case since it’s just another biasing metric like nepotism.
As for highly skilled positions, most people in those positions grow up saturated in the culture from a young age, typically from parents in that field themselves. I think there is arguments to be made that DEI practices now can produce a larger skilled pool in the next generation.
The questions are 1. How much does it help the next generation? 2. Is it worth the cost of lower standards now?
So let me get this straight - we should hire less qualified people TODAY so that maybe their kids will be inspired to enter tech TOMORROW? And somehow this creates a “larger skilled pool”?
The logic is beautiful: “Let’s lower standards now so future generations can… have lower standards too?” How exactly does seeing unqualified people get promoted inspire excellence? If anything, it teaches kids that competence is optional.
That’s just my steelman. You are correct that it would require a readjustment at some point, i.e DEI practices can’t exist forever.
“Unqualified people get promoted inspire excellence”. I think at the very top, advanced work isn’t done to get promotions but rather the work itself. I imagine that people don’t take years of schooling and work with the goal of becoming a senior dev. There’s something about the work and producing good work that motivated them.
Note that I don’t work in tech but rather mathematics research. So our incentives are different, but I think the main ideas hold.
Yeah, but your code will be culturally one-sided! You need diverse coding practices, like three-space indentation!
My favorite was companies like IBM setting a goal for 50% female engineering representation even though barely 20% of the respective college grads were female. Like, they’re just blatantly picking from a smaller pool, making it statistically inevitable that they’re bypassing more qualified people.
But people here evidently support this sort of gender/race based discrimination. 🤷
Cultural bias for indentation styles, lol. Your math checks out though, statistics say women earn about 20-25% of CS/engineering degrees so if companies set a 50% target then they’re either:
- Hiring less qualified people to hit quotas
- Poaching talent from competitors (zero-sum game)
- Living in fantasy land
NSF - National Socialist Fund.
What’s the nodei type if it’s not a string?
python foundation. python is so slowwwwwwwwww
Then don’t use it?
i just wish it was faster, great language to program in
Tool for the job, if you need something fast, use any of the row level languages like c or rust, if you want something easy, use python , if you want something stupid use PHP.
also depends on what you want to do. for small programs i wouldnt use rust, too complex for that. personally i just use C. thats my favourite language.
It does not matter how much money you do or don’t have, there is no sense pretending there is any sustainable path forward without a conscious commitment to inclusivity.
That’s just it: a sustainable path isn’t in it. They want that to not even be an option. They want to burn it all twice as fast so they can buy bigger yachts.
