Which is not a fair comparison because gas stations must meet 100% of the refueling demands of gasoline cars and charging stations only need to meet a tiny percentage because most charging takes place at home or at work.
I think that would still fit pretty well with "those providing 'real' value are so productive that they support all that dead weight and yet still continue to grow".
It's like something you would read out of Catch-22.
News organizations can still publish articles about someone who invoked the RTBF, but nobody will read it because it's impossible to find.
In the bureaucratically definitive sense it's technically not censorship, it's just using a characteristic of the internet to make it censorship. At least, that's the writing on the wall.
tl;dr: Observed fact, GitHub disappeared a repo (this I personally know for a fact) and all its forks, the only reason we can surmise is that it described itself as "X for retards". I believe it's this one https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter now described as "WebM for bakas." (Japanglish for idiots or fools).
I'd be more willing to extend some slack to GitHub if they hadn't precipitously turned off their service for these repos, that's worse than this example of their "tolerance", but who knows what it'll be next?
Who knows how this will play out in the long term; their trashing of their meritocracy rug suggests this is not a one off (ADDED: and erics32 reminded me of C+=). Why should I or anyone else concerned about long term stability invest in their particular value adds when they show such capriciousness?
The great point, in relation to this topic of their latest investment, is that companies that depend almost entirely on their "communities" can screw those up and destroy their value.
Yes it is highly offensive to many English speaking individuals in the US. It has historically been used as a highly derogatory term for disabled individuals.
It'll be another word, perhaps in a more ambigious context, next time. Which brings up another point: I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation.
> I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation.
Then don't say/write bigotted things. Honestly, it's like asking people not to write spelling or grammar mistakes in documentation. It's not that hard.
Do you not know that words can have more than one meaning? From the context you can tell the meaning. When airbus use "retard" they're using it to mean "to slow down".
It's not "these 6 letters in this combination is banned", it's "stop insulting people based on mental illnesses".
That requires people to understand context and nuance.
We live in a world where a guy wants to ban Mel Brooks' The Producers because he doesn't realize it's a satire of Hitler, not an homage. Lots of people don't or won't appreciate context.
The context of the original repo was very clearly that of an insulting word.
re: The Producers, with any topic you'll get one or two extremists of any varity. You should judge it not by "did someone want to stop this", but instead by "did someone(s) in power to stop it, want to stop it". One crank protesting outside a cinema is very different from the CEO of a movie studio deciding not to make the film.
The whole argument hangs on that point. I don't know where your optimism comes from. Seeing a lot of human behaviour on the net in this area, I have pretty much zero confidence that the right decision would always be made.
"Mental retardation" has been a medical term since relatively recently. The "retardation" means nothing more than "being held back". But people did pick it up as a derogatory term, and so it was replaced with "intellectual disability". A classic euphemism treadmill.
In the context of medication, "retard" is still in use: it describes medication that is released steadily and continuously into the bloodstream.
This reaction to the word will over time also come to the replacement word that people will need to come up with to refer to the condition.
"idiot" and "imbecile" used to be the terms used by medical professionals to refer to mentally retarded people in the 50s and 60s. Then those terms became insults, so they started using the term "mentally retarded". Now that retard has become an insult, another word will have to be found, (handicapped? slow?) and then it will become an insult, and they'll have to find another word...
The next phase has already begun - "You were one of the special children, weren't you" is a pretty common start to an ass-chewing in the military. They'll have to move on pretty soon.
"The great point, in relation to this topic of their latest investment, is that companies that depend almost entirely on their "communities" can screw those up and destroy their value."
I think it's pretty much inevitable once the money rolls in that companies like Github and others will start censoring content and generally doing things that upset the community to appease their investors. I can't think of a single company that doesn't do this, and in many cases it has led to a downturn of the company if not outright demise.
Not this particular Github repo maybe, but once they start taking down stuff, they will eventually hit something that will make people quite upset. Though from what other social networks generally experience, that won't be enough to drive a lot of users away, usually just the core ones which is enough to start the momentum away from the platform.
Github has chosen the left/PC side, certainly, as evidenced by the rug death. But I suspect this will help them rather than hurt, as the majority of developers are probably left/PC, as is leadership of major tech companies. They are aligning with the power structure.
Do you think Bitbucket would stand up to a PC Twitter campaign? I think not; only the explicitly ideological want to fight such battles.
This was on the front page recently. 741 comments and only 480 upvotes, so it wouldn't suprise me if it set off the flamewar filter and got pushed off.
In modern economics the assumption is that marginal cost decreases for a while due to economies of scale, but then increases. It's a bit confusing, but consider this, at first you will devote the best resources to their best appropriate task. If you buy a factory, you'll buy the most cost effective factory and you'll hire the most cost effective people. As you expand, you'll have to maybe get another factory that may not be as well suited (if it were, you would have gone with it in the first place) and hire the second best person, and so on. This is called diseconomies of scale. Similarly, running organizations above a certain size creates plenty of inefficiencies that also contribute to increased marginal cost.
Both economies of scale and diseconomies of scale play a role. Think about it in the extremes. Would a company be able to produce 2x, 10x, 100x the product they currently produce now at the same per unit cost, or less? If not, then there must be some point at which the marginal cost is upward sloping.
I believe this is the reason that large companies don't necessarily lead innovation. For instance, a company like Facebook could have easily created a Snapchat, but it could not. It wasn't even successful imitating the product after several attempts (popularity, not functionality).
Define "regressive" because when I google it I get "(of a tax) taking a proportionally greater amount from those on lower incomes". Are you talking about the wealthy having greater ability to find tax loopholes or do define "regressive" as everyone paying the same proportion of their income?
8% is going to hurt at different levels depending how much you have to spare - compare the pain caused by losing $8 of the $100 you have for the week to the $800 of $8000 for the week. One of those people is going to have to make real sacrifices, and it won't be the guy with $7200 left over.
