But sometimes I don't have control, e.g. another person is inputting the data and dutifully duplicates my name. That's how I ended up with the 2 phone calls/3 person situation, which happened about a month ago.
Hell, my driver's license is missing the apostrophe because the system doesn't accept it.
When somebody is trying to find me in a computer there's a whole litany of things they have to try, including assuming "First O'Lastame" got bashed into "First O. Lastname".
I think about this every time I read an article extolling the wonders of technology.
Generally, countries' systems only handle characters in names that are common in that country. Virtually no banking or ID system in Europe or the USA will handle Chinese names, for example. Even if they did at the technical level, it wouldn't actually help at a holistic level, because people who interact with these systems (bank tellers, policemen, etc) can't be expected to recognize any writing system in the world.
So, the reality is that you have to adapt to the country you're trying to live or do business in and the name systems that they can actually use. This can even mean you have to adopt a name that people can actually pronounce, as many Chinese people do when interacting with people outside East Asia
For example, Chinese is particularly sensitive to tone accent, which extremely few people outside that area can even distinguish, leading to hopeless mispronunciation. Consider that Ma2 and Ma4 are completely different words for a Chinese speaker, while a French speaker who hasn't studied this wouldn't even be able to tell that you are intentionally pronouncing things differently and not just your intonation.
And for a reverse example, if you want to move or do business in Japan, you should adopt a well-known Japanese pronunciation of your name, as otherwise Japanese speakers, who have an extremely limited syllable inventory compared to most other languages in the world, will just not be able to follow your name.
There are people who find jobs that require very little work, and its probably easier to find these jobs in offices. It works very well with technical work that management do not understand, and where output is difficult measure. its possible that people on HN might know of some jobs that fit this…
There are extreme cases, such as people dying and no one realising that their work is not being done, and that is rare, but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.
In developed countries kids who are not going to school are probably still getting an education. it is a legal requirement in the UK (for example) that parents ensure kids get a "suitable and efficient education".
I learned whole word reading, as did my children, and i think my siblings too but, we all learned to read at home.
I think phonics may work better in a class room where you want to minimise the difference between slow and fast learners page, and kids do not get much individual attention. My kids learned to read from playing one to one games with flashcards and reading to/with a parent so whole word worked for us.
Its apparent very early on that it is about the US, and everything in the US is all about race.
Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.
The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.
The problem is that until 1971, which is within the lifetime of many people currently alive, especially in government (remember, the only US President born after 1946 is Barak Obama), race was a legal category in the US that seriously restricted lives.
Desegregation has been slow, and you can't really desegregate inherited wealth.
Race is in the mix, but is oddly mutable. Back when I was a kid being of Polish ancestry was a kind of joke. Some of my Irish friends have memories of being excluded from social events. At some point we both became "white" and previous divisions faded. There is no comparable we used to be Dalit and then people stopped caring about that experience in India.
The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
That at least is my coarse observation as an outsider and I stressed qualifiers as there are no absolutes here, just fuzzy clouds of human attributes with some overlaps and no hard borders.
The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
> The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.
Blame the likes of Murdoch and his predecessors, they've mastered the art of using rags and tabloids to eliminate nuance in the US public sphere.
Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.
Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.
The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.
I love Isabel Wilkerson's book. It was that (through the comparison with caste) that gave me a clearer idea of the difference between what race is in American culture.
> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
I'm pretty surprised to hear that. Nearly every program I've seen in my adult life that explicitly uses race as an important factor in who gets hired or promoted or funded has come from the left. The left is also the group that is in favor of gender self-identification. Maybe these aren't always the exact same people, but the overlap politically is strong.
That's not to say that conservatives don't hold or express racist or bigoted beliefs, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an overt effort to only hire white people or exclude brown people.
> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
I am not convinced. Even Americans who accept gender self-identity AND claim to be anti-racist usually have a problem with regarding race as a superficial characteristic, and rarely seem to accept people self-identifying as a different race to their "real" one.
> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.
My point is that BOTH sides in the US regard race as an immutable fundamental characteristic.
In the UK different ethnic minorities do very differently economically (some better than the majority[1]) but this does not follow visible differences.
Indians do a lot better economically than Bangladeshis, black Africans better than black Caribbeans, etc. People from some Eastern European countries do a lot worse than visible minorities. Of the white minorities the Irish were traditionally close to the bottom of the heap historically, but for the last few decades have done well, especially educationally, probably boosted by the quality of Catholic schools (religious schools can receive state funding here and many are therefore free to attend).
Its clearly mostly to do with lack of intergenerational social mobility. Its worth noting that the group doing worst educationally in the UK are white working class boys.
In Sri Lanka which is also my "home" country for a different definition of home the minorities are not "economically lower class" but have faced significant racism and religious discrimination (both sometimes violent) - but have also done the same themselves.
[1] All numbers I know of that compare ethnic groups lump the three biggest native groups into one, "white British".
It's similar in the USA. Black Americans do poorly. Black Nigerian immigrants to great. They're both black so it's evidence race has little to do with whatever the problems of class are but a certain segment of vocal people ignore this evidence.
If true, it’s not necessarily evidence of race being independent of class, it would only be evidence of color being independent of class. If true, it might to some degree be the opposite of what you claim, it might be evidence of race mattering since Americans and Nigerians though they might share some physical traits, are now from different countries for many generations. Is it true? I’d love to see this evidence, can you link to some?
There is a literal mountain of evidence that both color and race in the US correlate negatively with outcomes, perhaps in differing amounts, but if you ignore that, you’re also ignoring some evidence. There a lot of possible confounding reasons why one black group might fare better than another on average in the US, and that means that if you care about being accurate about whether race and class are linked, then it’s extremely difficult to separate them, and nearly impossible to declare they’re not linked. The biggest problem with your claim is that race and class absolutely were linked in the past without question, when blacks were slaves, and we have never had a period in US history where the socioeconomic outcomes of blacks matched whites on average. The situation has improved, but we have plenty of evidence we’re not there yet, and so it’s impossible and almost certainly wrong to claim that either race or color has little to do with class.
> You see this happening because large corps simply are more efficient.
More efficient in terms of doing things at low cost in a system them manipulated to give them a cost advantage. True. Supermarkets are monopsony buyers, tech companies use patent thickets to keep out new entrants. They lobby for regulations that small businesses without separate compliance departments cannot afford to keep up with.
> almost everyone except politicians is critical of big corporation
I think that is the critical point.
Big corporations are good at lobbying. They shape policy. Politicians do not only like big corporations, they allow them a lot of influence, so they can shape policy to advantage themselves against smaller competitors.
Which also includes building bureaucracy moats- that load smaller competitors with unpaid for paperwork and prevent them from operating. Which is never really addressed as source of state inefficiency in liberal literature. At some point, the creature gets hacked by the actual ruler (monopolistic cooperations) and used as a sock puppet.
> Which also includes building bureaucracy moats- that load smaller competitors with unpaid for paperwork and prevent them from operating
Exactly. one of the defining moments for my political views was hearing the CEO of a big pub company explaining that this was why they could keep expanding as smaller competitors gave up because of the administrative burden.
Both governments and big business live complex rules.
I'm not sure which CEO you specifically heard, but this[only] is a great example of what you're talking about. Llloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, making statements to this effect in 2015.
Are there many of those left anymore? Everytime i encounter it and probe it, its basically some thin layer of paint on basically neo-feudalism "whose bread i eat
those song i sing" mercenary mentality. Probe for the "not-a-real-ism" shism and if they do not want to go back to small companies fighting, but prefer big behemoths stagnating- not a true free market spirit- also a indicator, if they integrate well into hierarchies.
Meh, markets are a useful tool for the allocation of resources, but like everything you need to keep an eye on what they're doing and who's benefiting. And like everything you need to keep an eye on the people entrusted with keeping an eye on things as well.
If this is true, why do corporations lobby against regulation? Either they want more regulations to build this "moat", or they don't. If both outcomes result in a win for them, (deregulation vs moat-building by greater regulation) why spend money on lobbying?
1. They say they are opposed to regulations publicly, but indicate they will "compromise" privately.
2. They lobby against some regulations and against others.
Here is an example of a business openly asking for more regulation: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51518773 I actually agree with some of his arguments, but I do not think his motives are exactly pure.
GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.
First off, the AGPL license is nonfree (and also nonsensical, it is a EULA pretending to be a license), but more importantly, dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms. If you think users have basic and fundamental rights to the software that they run on their computer, you would never release software under proprietary licenses.
It’s like Microsoft’s VS Code nonsense where all the important bits are non free, or any company with “open core”. They don’t care about software freedoms; it’s just open source cosplay.
In usernames or in name fields for text generally?
I assume things like bank systems can deal with it because they should match things like IDs?
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