This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?
Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.
Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.
Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.
Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.
It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.
But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.
I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.
But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.
Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.
It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.
For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."
The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...
If insurability becomes a crisis, I'd expect it to reduce housing availability and raise prices for competing (insurable) properties.
Of course it wouldn't happen in isolation, so there are other massive forces to consider.
Maybe wide swathes of formerly-occupied (but now uninsurable) land would sell cheaply enough that middle-income people could build inexpensive semi-disposable vacation cottages, like the old days.
GP's assertion of population collapse in five years is a bit extreme for me!
>> GP's assertion of population collapse in five years is a bit extreme for me!
Check the population pyramid for the US. the baby boomers are moving into the top part (I call the grinder) where they will die out over the next 20 years. At the bottom, we have 20 years of slowly decreasing births, so the bottom AND top are shrinking. Combine that with current policies stopping immigration and I don't know how the US population can be doing anything but decreasing. College admissions people are talking about the cliff (an exaggeration for sure) in enrolment this year and for years to come. People are also getting married closer to 30, and having much less than 2 children per couple.
Property taxes are use taxes. You're paying for the right to occupy an inherently limited resource, and for necessary services and infrastructure. It's not a wealth tax because it doesn't matter how much equity you have; it's the same whether you fully paid in cash or have an interest-only mortgage. It's also not a capital gains tax because the purchase price doesn't matter.
The total ownership of all public companies is also a limited resource.
Whether I have 0% equity or 100% equity in my home I still own it. The only question is how much I owe to the bank. "Oh I bought that with leverage" shouldn't change things for home ownership and it should change things for a wealth tax on stock ownership.
Then it’s an asset/property tax, not a wealth tax, because debt doesn't change the asset (even if it is secured by the asset), but it does change wealth.
A corporation does not provide services to shareholders.
A municipality is charging residents for services. Obligations are progressive (by necessity), and indexed to assessed property value (as a practicality), rather than equity or income.
Municipal operations get more expensive with inflation, and with resident demands (ballot initiatives, etc). They are never zero, and must be tied to something in the real world.
These payments are collected as a tax, because that is the only lever available to municipalities.
I see your point, but I think it's a category error.
You are taxed on realized property capital gains, beyond a certain amount ($500K?) for principal residence (anywhere you've lived two of more of the last five years). And for a non-principal residence there is no threshold.
Me owning a bigger house than my neighbor does not mean that I use more services than them. My water bill is my municipality charging me for services. My real estate tax is a charge for the general good of my community. I see no reason why this can't simply be a tax for the national good.
The municipality charges all residents for all services provided. Citizens vote on which services are provided to them, and which they will have to pay for.
The payment obligations are progressive by necessity, and indexed to assessed property value as a practicality.
The municipality does not care how much equity you have in your house, or how much wealth you have in other assets, or how much income you have.
Your property tax obligation is the same, whether you have unrealized gains or not. It is therefore obviously not a tax on unrealized gains.
There was a time when EV certificates were considered more trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication for EV certs.
Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like something was lost in the transition.
This was the only objection I had gotten about using letsencrypt 6 years ago but that guy is gone and now we either have letsencrypt or AWS certificates
I think I've seen one or two, and only because I noticed them as a weird callout in a $LARGE_FINANCE_INSTITUTION infosec bingo sheet. Of course I had to check that they really were running with OV certs.
Some of the outfits in that space will be heavily hit by the shortening certificate max-lifetimes, and I do hope that the insurance companies at some point also stop demanding a cert rotation before 90 days to expiry. It's a weird feeling to redline a corporate insurance policy when their standard requirements are 15 years out of date.
Before LE, we did lots of OV (which you generally could get a couple of for free from somewhere). We had to dig up stuff like a heating bill, because evidently that is proof of organizational control to some people.
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.
Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.
Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.
Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.
It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
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