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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • You’re making a good point, but I think it’s also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone’s humanity. It feels a little bit to me like the whole “I just pretend everyone is white”-approach.

    I think there’s too much nuance to make a hard rule on it. I’ve worked with someone who’s go-to way to describe people was always ethnicity/perceived nationality-based to a weird extent, never with anything negative, but it was still jarring. Like he would say “the Bosnian guy who works with Steve” instead of "the guy who works with Steve ".

    I would also find it strange if someone treated someone’s race like it was a bad word. Like, I think it would be fairly natural to say “what’s the name of the black guy who works in the shop?”, and much less natural to say “whats the name of the person in the shop who often wears black pants, and said they were a fan of that new TV show, and they said they were from Oklahoma, and …”










  • It almost seems like a different use case. It seems like the plus codes are effectively like mailing addresses for places that dont have addresses (lots of countries). They still lack the ability to do clear, analog communication (e.g., over radio or just a person’s memory in a search and rescue situation).

    I will say, I’ve noticed the plus codes, but never looked into them. It’s really good that they are open source and can be generated offline. Hopefully they have some adoption in other apps/devices.



  • Oh dang. I haven’t actually used the app in a while. It seems like the monetization of core features is a new thing?

    It’s such a simple and good idea at its core, so it seems really stupid to muck it up. I guess I will just have to go back to using decimal lat/longs. At least mapping applications seem to be able to interpret those better now. For the longest time, even Google maps would just give you no results if you typed in what was obviously lat/long if you didn’t have the ° symbol and minutes/seconds.


  • The idea of “whiteness” being good is a super new concept in the grand scheme of things. People like to say things like “Irish and Italians werent considered white”, which is not accurate because they’ve always been considered white.

    “White” just wasn’t enough to be part of the “in group” and people nowadays dont have any other terminology to describe what the in group was other than just white. If you go back to the early 1800’s, the in group was Protestant anglo-americans. That doesnt mean people from other European countries werent white, it just means they werent part of the in group.

    “White” being the defining factor of the racist top hierarchy is super new, like 1966 new. The leader of the American Nazi party realized that they could gain more power by folding in white people from outside of their traditional in group (germanic or nordic), so inspired by the black power movement, he coined the term “white power”.

    Even now, just being white isnt enough to be part of the top category to racists. Maybe an Italian is considered part of the in group, but not middle easterners (who are legally white in the USA).

    Since “white” as an identity of people is relatively new (and only really makes sense in a racist framework), a lot of European/Middle Eastern Americans tend not to identify as “white” but instead by whatever jumble of identities their grandparents might have had. If your grandparents tell you they had a Cherokee grandparent, how are you supposed to know any different.


  • Not that I think you are wrong, but DNA tests dont necessarily paint the whole picture the way they companies selling them would like you to believe.

    They’ve gotten better over time, but unless you have a bunch of samples you know for a fact are 100% Blackfoot (which already inherently doesnt make sense because the Blackfoot are a confederacy of different peoples), you have to just do your best to reconstruct what you consider to be “Blackfoot DNA”. People groups are also never static the way racists think they are.

    In your case, for all you know, you could have had a few different Blackfoot ancestors who had offspring with French traders in the 1700s, or an English frontiersman in the 1800s. The offspring could have just been born and raised in the tribe and considered 100% part of the tribe, even if it turns out their DNA was 25% “Blackfoot”.