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There's a 500 pound gorilla in the room:

Young men have collectively checked out of a society that has nothing but contempt for them. When the supermajority in academia have nothing good to say about you, opine about how "toxic" your existence is, and openly deride your struggles... who would want to spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to be "lectured" by those people?

When men are suffering from record levels of depression, dying from suicide and drug overdoses at rates never seen, still being openly discriminated against and laughed at, supporting the system that not only allows, but encourages that behavior is ridiculous.


Oh please, let's lose the persecution complex. If there is any discrimination against men happening in academia it's in the clown show departments that no one cares about anyway.

As for "struggles", study history. The minor struggles that modern men in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced. I was never drafted and sent to assault the beach at Normandy.


I mean, the Chronicle of Higher Education put out an explainer a year or two titled "The Male Enrollment Crisis." Not "Is there a male enrollment crisis?" because this is a fact that is not in dispute. Males are walking away from college in droves, they are 40% of new enrollments and dropping.

https://connect.chronicle.com/rs/931-EKA-218/images/MaleEnro...

In case your main way of assessing information is its tribal affiliation (it shouldn't be for gods sake): this publication was written by a woman, it devotes substantial time to black male enrollment where the problem is extra bad, and the CHE leans center-left according to Media Bias/Fact Check.

But hey if you weren't at Normandy you don't have problems right? Good lord, what a non sequitur


There is an enrollment crisis. It is not because colleges are denying entry by men. It is because men are not even attempting to go to college. Men don’t seem to be able to deal with a society in which they are not coddled as much as in they were in the past.

When I was in graduate school in the late 90s I took a flight home for the summer break. I was reading a math research paper during the flight. An elderly lady that sat next to me and asked if was reading a mathematics paper. I said yes. She said that she wanted to study math in college but in those days she wasn’t allowed to. She ended up in accounting. She was still upset over that injustice.

That men can’t handle the present circumstance is pathetic. That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic. Stop playing the victim. Stop being a snowflake. Stop being pathetic.


> That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic.

All men want is a level playing field. Colleges have been discriminating against white and Asian men for decades. SCOTUS finally slapped them down, and colleges immediately started scheming to find ways to be covertly racist through proxies for race. Many colleges stopped using SAT scores, making admissions more subjective, and easier to influence with racial bias. Workplaces are doing the same thing, with DEI hiring goals that in effect mean "no white or Asian men".

Have you considered that your experience as a boomer is not representative of conditions for millennials and zoomers today?


I’m not a boomer. Born in the 70s. I’m a white a male who teaches in higher education. White men have a more or less equal opportunity in terms of going to college. Until recently college admissions were on the decline and most colleges were way less choosy than in the past. Men are not oppressed. They just aren’t coddled as much as in the past. Men don’t seem to be able to deal with living in a society in which they aren’t privileged. It’s pathetic.

All men want is a level playing field, a few steps higher than the level playing field women play on. (Which they had up until not very long ago, and still have to a large extent).

Viewing things through a "battle of the genders" lens like that is toxic. The men getting screwed over today are completely different individuals than the men who benefited from unfair policies or norms in previous generations. You aren't getting revenge by retaliating against young men, just hurting innocent bystanders.

This comment is absolutely dripping with bigotry and absolutely not reflective of the attitude that exists in the higher education industry itself, where many people are highly concerned that male enrollment has plummeted. If you want to be a bigot, be it somewhere else please.

The vast majority of Americans want _everyone_ to be represented in higher education, we don't need to split people up by identity and then tell them to take turns.


I audibly chuckled at this comment. RIP Terry.

>chattel status

Maybe in developing and third world countries. Young Western women (which includes the author) in CURRENTYEAR are the most privileged human beings to ever walk the face of this earth.


After what happened to Nix, I've only gained more respect and preference for projects that have BDFL.

What happened to Nix?

Nixcon NA 2023 accepted, then later rescinded, sponsorship from Anduril, which is a defense company. There was a lot of community pushback on that, and it seems like the organizers messed up and the venue wouldn't allow it anyway. Either way they were a sponsor for 2024. Ever since there has been a lot of infighting in the community. Here's a recent LWN article and HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153

Also relevant reading: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

How certain, ideologically and politically driven parts of community conduct themselves against anyone they suspect of wrongthink: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/delroths-muting-in-the-moderat...


The first website, I skimmed the rabbit hole of links a bit, and it reads like far left/far right infighting. Personally, I don't feel sad with someone getting banned who thinks LGBT people don't have a right to exist. But hyperpartisan groups are more likely to scour people's social media/blogs/etc to find any reason imaginable to ban them.

> it reads like far left/far right infighting

It's far-left versus anyone right of Mao. There are no far-right people of note here.

>Personally, I don't feel sad with someone getting banned who thinks LGBT people don't have a right to exist.

So you're OK with banning Muslims? Personally, I don't feel sad with someone getting banned who thinks Israeli people don't have a right to exist. See what I did there? This is fallacious thinking.

>But hyperpartisan groups are more likely to scour people's social media/blogs/etc to find any reason imaginable to ban them.

Indeed. This is inexcusable behavior. It's seeking out things to feign "outrage" over in order to make political moves such as ousting any members that are not ideologically aligned.


> There are no far-right people of note here

I would think srid is notable due to his site making an impression here? But I can see where you're coming from. I've observed attempted community takeovers from a safe distance, and it's depressing. Not going to attempt a coherent opinion on Nix, as I am not involved in the project.

> See what I did there?

No, I really don't. Your counter-example just seems like a false equivalence to me.


>I would think srid is notable

Srid is not far-right...

>No, I really don't. Your counter-example just seems like a false equivalence to me.

It's the same as:

"Personally, I don't feel sad with someone getting banned who grooms children."

Then one declares a wide array of behaviors, words, actions, inactions, opinions, orthogonal statements, etc. as "child grooming", "anti-LGBTQ", etc. and then use that as prima facie to oust the opposition.


muslims to not believe that LGBT people don't have a right to exist. those who express such a sentiment have not understood the koran that teaches that all people should be treated with love and compassion.

Just over a month ago there was a flashpoint in community tensions, as some expressed their concerns over the project's governance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370

As a quick summary, they were concerned about sponsorship from military tech, about community moderation not doing enough to keep trolls out, and annoyed by Eelco Dolstra.

In response to this, some discussions about project governance were had. It seems like it was quite a disorganised mess. https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/report-on-nixos-govern...


Only if the BDFL isn't okay with his software being used to kill innocent civilians.

What is it that you think open source means? Vibes?

Glad that's not what happened with Nix.

>You can see one of their most recent contributors is Eelco Dolstra.

That is incorrect. They're merging Dolstra commits from the nix/NixOS projects. Dolstra has not commited directly to Lix.

One of the main Lix developers is delroth, a leftist activist that was banned from the NixOS Discourse for CoC violations.


Adjusted for inflation, housing was significantly cheaper in 1990 than it is today.


Not the point. OP was jealous of the "nearly free money," i.e the low interest rate, not the amount borrowed.


I'm actually not jealous, I'm happy for my friends that were able to buy. I just think it was a silly, shortsighted policy move. The 2% rate that people are locked into is only part of the problem of course. There's just not much inventory in NYC or in many other cities.


>Also why do we base districts based on racial breakdown anyway?

This always felt like "treating the symptom, not the cause" approach to the problem. Voting district lines should always coincide with county lines. There should be some rules about the allowable shapes (no string of counties running East to West for 200 miles for example) of these districts. That would give representation that reflects the population. Taxes, governance, etc. are county driven in many (most) states, why not add electoral boundaries that match?


> This always felt like "treating the symptom, not the cause" approach to the problem.

Given the historical treatment of racial groups in the US, I'd say a little column A and a little column B. Racial minorities have not always been free to choose where they lived - redlining was only phased out in the late 60s and 70s.


Nominally ended then. The shockwaves of it are still felt today [1] because it's a compounding effect - these neighborhoods are still seen as less desirable meaning housing prices are still depressed & rely on richer people extracting wealth out of the area through gentrification to raise home prices.

Also it's not clear mortgage practices have changed all that much:

> FairPlay AI’s “State of Mortgage Fairness Report” in 2020 found that equality in mortgage lending is little better today than it was 30 years ago. In 1990, it found, Black mortgage applicants obtained loan approvals at 78.4 percent of the rate of white applicants; by 2021 that figure had risen, but only to 84.4 percent.

> A National Fair Housing Alliance report from 2020 revealed that Black and Hispanic/Latino renters were more likely to be shown and offered fewer properties than white renters.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/what-is-redlining/#ongo...


>Racial minorities have not always been free to choose where they lived - redlining was only phased out in the late 60s and 70s.

Which means county lines make even more sense: racial minorities may have been redlined out of specific neighborhoods in a city, but they still reside in the same county.


Was it only for specific neighborhoods?


Yes.

"Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining


What about counties that had "significant numbers of minorities"?

I'm just saying, is it really as simple as "Use county borders" and you're done?


>What about counties that had "significant numbers of minorities"?

What about them? They would get proportional representation as well in the counties they reside in.

>I'm just saying, is it really as simple as "Use county borders" and you're done?

Not entirely that simple, but it removes an entire class of problems.


Many electoral districts are smaller than counties, or even cities/townships.


Yes, but they don't have to be with the aforementioned system. Maybe some districts encompass a single county only, and the number of votes it gets is proportional to its population.


For many US offices, such as state and federal legislators (except federal senators), the districts need to have approximately equal populations - each voter needs approximately the same fractional influence in the legislature. Counties don't have equal populations.


Yes! So with the model I mentioned, there would be fractional influence as well! So LA County would likely be its own district, and it would have more voting power than several Central Valley counties combined.


For the US House of Representatives, I think the current setup (approximately equal representation) is in the Constitution. It would be hard to change.


we could move to proportional voting per county.


There's actually been quite a bit of scholarship on how to draw district lines. We could certainly do better than the status quo, but it's a hard problem.


Are there other notable examples of businesses that have axed entire business units from exec to IC? Any success stories?


I mean he did it to Twitter. Apparently, still working…


World’s biggest nonprofit, in his own words.


This is a fantastic proof of concept project that answers a question I've been asking: what if there was another language that was designed to fit between Go and Rust? Ideas?


That thread just makes me believe srid even more. Salient point here:

"Evidently, Srid's concerns and values, as well as the recommendations and compromises he proposed in response to the charges, were casually dismissed, while other members' concerns and values, as well as their calls for his punishment and sanction, were disproportionately elevated.

And that's unfortunate."


I'm not sure what there is to believe. Srid started relitigating his impending suspension over the moderation teams head when it became clear that his values do not align with the moderators (or, if I can say that, most decent people that don't see left-wing conspiracies everywhere, casually go on about gender ideology destroying the west and perpetuate covid denial - so also likely the modified CoC of Nix). That is the worst way to go about challenging authority you don't like if you don't want bridges to burn.


>Srid started relitigating his impending suspension over the moderation teams head

I haven't been closely monitoring the various NixOS spaces, but this seems nebulous.

>it became clear that his values do not align with the moderators

Nor should there be a requirement that they do. If you want an inclusive environment, you're going to have members with different values.

>(or, if I can say that, most decent people that don't see left-wing conspiracies everywhere, casually go on about gender ideology destroying the west and perpetuate covid denial - so also likely the modified CoC of Nix)

(or, if I can say that, most decent people that don't see right-wing conspiracies everywhere, casually go on about Christo-fascism destroying the west and perpetuate biological denial - so also likely the modified CoC of Nix)

See what I did there? You don't get to define your political ideals as the ones "decent people" align with. All sides believe they're moral.


It's in the thread I linked, the very post you quoted. He started a poll to ask if he should be banned over him posting the "unwoke" page of his digital garden, when the stipulation he already preliminarily agreed to was to not bring it up in Nix spaces. An organization that allows for persistent relitigating and rules-lawyering can't have effective moderation (they're not countries after all), do I don't know what you think the alternative is.

And now the same people that want (impossibly) apolitical spaces want this guy to also be able to post this very political rant that you've probably heard before somewhere in some form, that everyone else is endlessly tired of.

https://srid.ca/unwoke - in case you are missing more context.


>It's in the thread I linked, the very post you quoted. He started a poll to ask if he should be banned over him posting the "unwoke" page

Except he didn't post it, he had it in his profile. This is a key distinction.

>And now the same people that want (impossibly) apolitical spaces

It's not impossible, it's something we had before the rise of Newchurch [0], and it's something mission driven communities are moving towards.

>want this guy to also be able to post this very political rant that you've probably heard before somewhere in some form, that everyone else is endlessly tired of.

I agree in general people are endlessly tired of "politics" that are orthogonal to the mission at hand. No one is asking for what you just claimed.

>https://srid.ca/unwoke - in case you are missing more context.

Nothing there is alarming, it's pretty benign and aligns with the direction of many leaders in the industry [1].

[0] https://www.devever.net/~hl/newchurch

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/04/22/sundar-pichai-google-staff-no...


> ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”

I suspect Google would cite the same policy this manifesto cites as evidence of it's support as a reason to remove/sanction people posting this manifesto to company resources.

That Google is an obvious hypocrite over Israel's behaviour doesn't seem to me indicative that they've totally flipped on every other issue, or that things this manifesto considers political would be considered political inside Google.


>I suspect Google would cite the same policy this manifesto cites as evidence of it's support as a reason to remove/sanction people posting this manifesto to company resources.

Possibly yes, which is fine as long as it's consistently applied. The key distinction in this case is srid didn't post a manifesto, he had a link to his personal blog in his profile.

>That Google is an obvious hypocrite over Israel's behaviour doesn't seem to me indicative that they've totally flipped on every other issue

Not sure what this means considering the context. They're most definitely hypocritical because just four years ago they let "politics" get in the way of mission during the BLM political unrest. They most definitely have flipped on allowing orthogonal political discussions at work, which is the only issue under consideration here.

>or that things this manifesto considers political would be considered political inside Google.

Identity politics, leftist performative activism, alt-right screeds, etc. are most definitely now considered "political" inside Google considering Sundar's blog post linked above. It's a refreshing welcomed change to be honest.


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