I agree with you and didn't suggest otherwise. Neither did the linked article.

Yes I understand, but my point is that people are more than willing to try to overcome that barrier when they want to, but on this specific issue, people are throwing up their hands at the thinnest barrier imaginable because they choose not to understand.

This person used one single jargony phrase in the title that isn't even particularly hard to understand. I don't think that critique applies here. People are responding to it negatively because they don't want to understand it, not because they can't.

What's your point?

Most of your critique is fair enough, but I think you should reconsider this one:

> If you want the average white guy/woman to read your article, don't title it "Decentering whiteness..." That's just the jargon of your own cultural/professional circle.

I agree with you that the average white person would be more likely to read things if black writers went out of their way to speak a certain way, but I don't think that's a valid critique of the author; It's a critique of the readers.

It's true that academics, many of whom are black, have developed some jargon to discuss these kinds of issues, but it's not like it's hard to figure out what "decentering whiteness" means. People on this sub read and discuss all sorts of articles laden with economics jargon all the time--some of which is much more niche--and no one ever has that critique for those articles. It seems people are willing to learn plenty of economics jargon to participate in a discussion about economics, but are unwilling to do the same for issues of race.

Is it really productive to ask people to avoid the terminology of a 100+ year academic tradition of studying "whiteness" because the terminology isn't already familiar to a white audience?

edit: a few clarifying words

Because those issues have left deep wounds in our society and we have historically ignored them. Just now we're allowing people from those groups into the discussion for the first time, and that is causing a lot of friction. Just look at the comment section of this article; the top comment in this comment section is someone willfully misrepresenting what the author of the article said, with a heavy implication that the author is stupid.

It's true that a lot of the programming can be clumsy or awkward. Sometimes, they get a little stuck talking about diversity and ignoring issues of class in a capitalist society, like in this article in which NPR talks about how we need more women Venture Capitalists. But overall, people talk about it a lot because we have a lot of talking about it left to do.

Not what the linked article is about at all.

This linked write up is very short, and you either did not read it or are willfully misrepresenting what it said. I am going to paste a section of it (like a third of the article; it really isn't very long) so people can judge your tl;dr for themselves.

>What follows is a composite of multiple conversations over the years. A White hiker asks me,

>“Why don’t more Black people hike?”

>I struggle to determine how to approach this question, where to even begin. Some would find the question intrusive. I don’t. I know that the intent is genuine curiosity. But I’m saddened by the ignorance of it. The answers are complex, but they are easily discoverable.

>I respond by flipping the question.

>Well, hmm. Why do you hike?

>The hiker may answer: “Because I love nature! I love being outside, I love physical exertion. Because I’ve been going since I was a kid. Some friends invited me as an adult. I went on a school, group or church outing. I was an Eagle Scout.”

>These responses highlight a focus on individualism and a deep and likely unrecognized sense of belonging in those spaces. A belonging felt so deeply that some might experience it as an entitlement, as a sense of ownership. Additionally, it is a hallmark of both white cultural conditioning and our nation’s value system to over-emphasize individuality and individual choice, even in the face of ready evidence of how our environments, our families, our communities and our shared history impact our realities.

>In this conversation, some hikers would even stop at, “I love being outside” – had they never thought more deeply to examine exactly how they had developed that love? They had received opportunities over the course of their lives to have varied experiences outside, never being questioned for their interest, rather receiving affirmation that what they had just done was strong, brave, cool.

>At this point in our discussion, a humble and open conversation partner sees the direction I am headed in, and I can share some of the ways that People of Color have been historically excluded from access to outdoor sports and even simply to nature spaces. I do my best to explain some of the history and the national ideologies centuries in the making that shape policies and outcomes. I draw on the scholarship of Carolyn Finney in her seminal book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans in the Outdoors.

You can agree or disagree with it in whole or in part until you're blue in the face, but don't just make up a bullshit tl;dr.

Yeah I hear ya. I'd like to think that there's an option other than this and no digitization in the year of our lord 2023.

In my line of work, I run across these kinds of niche government and/or NGO SasSes all the time. The total market for their software isn't that big and their clients are very change averse, so what ends up happening is a few companies carve up the space and never have any competition enter. This makes for small but extremely profitable companies that just sorta stick around forever, even as their service deteriorates. It's a really unfortunate pattern, and I wish governments invested more in co-owned open source solutions instead of letting these grifts continue.

Wow, thanks for your clarification. I'll update my top level comments so they're more accurate. If you're willing, you should drop VTDigger a line and ask them to clarify because that article really gives a very strong impression that it's been entirely down with only the briefest window of being back up.

But also, if I may, that's still really bad service. Most of my contracts specify uptime of at least 99.9%. Usually, the highest level of service is called "5 9's," and it's 99.999%. If any of my clients' things went down for more than a few hours, I'd rightfully be chewed out.

I should've specified that I meant for SaaS, not necessarily for an org's own IT, which is a whole 'nother can of worms. That UVM outage was really something, though.

All I know about this is from the article, but it says:

>The system went down on Dec. 26, came up briefly in the middle of last week, then crashed again, she said.

Even if what you say is more accurate, that's still functionally down since the 26th. It doesn't do the users any good if you're back up intermittently and go right back down again.

There's no one single thing that leads to a 3 week outage. That's so beyond the pale and only happens if you have a persistent culture of negligence and mismanagement.

It's been down since December 26th. They clearly don't have backups, or a disaster recovery plan, or anything. I bet they don't even have an in house software engineering team.

It's been down since December 26th (edit: apparently not true; see /u/mcmdreamer's comment below). I do software consulting for a living and I don't think I've ever even heard of an outage lasting that long.

All these small enterprise shops that provide "records management solutions" to government entities are always a grift. They hire some Eastern European developers to throw together a janky front end on a DB, and then the company itself is mostly just a sales team.

edit: just went through their linkedin. I was right that it's mostly sales, but they also have an in house software team. I guess they're just incompetent.

Yes. I believe there is only one renter in the entire legislature, and about 1/3 of legislators are landlords. We in this sub squabble about people from the other side of an imaginary line while the rich eat our lunch, as usual.

It's depressing how quick we are to blame people on the other side of an imaginary line for our problems, even when those people are virtually indistinguishable from us. It really puts into perspective how easy it must be to do if the line is a militarized border and the people on the other side speak a different language.

It is not happening at any real scale. Even the pandemic's migration that vt digger called an "explosion" (in my opinion, irresponsibly so) was only a .7% population increase. That is absolutely tiny. Before that, we were seeing a net migration out of the state.

That's not to say it won't happen, but Vermonters talk a lot about the influx of "out-of-staters" moving here anytime housing comes up. Everyone has a story about the house their buddy wanted to buy but some out of stater bought it in all cash sight unseen. Those are investors, not people moving here. It is exceedingly rare for regular families to buy houses in cash sight-unseen.

Investors are buying more than 20% of all SFH on the market. This is an international phenomenon, affecting people from huge cities like London and Vancouver to the towns our delightful little backwater. As wealth inequality reaches increasingly insane levels, large investment firms are looking for more places to deploy their ever-increasing capital, and they are moving more and more of their money into buying property, making housing increasingly unaffordable for regular people.

This is a rent trap. Younger generations are being forced to become lifelong renters, creating a generation of lucrative investments for the largest landlords and screwing over everyone else. When we talk about the influx of out-of-staters, it suits them. It diverts the attention from the real problem. Don't let the rich get away with it while we squabble amongst ourselves fighting over scraps.

Build public housing. Ban airbnb.

That's pretty awesome. I consider giving up my phone every now and then, but I am too weak. Props to you for actually doing it.

>But on a supposedly secure banking app?! What the actual fuck?!!!

Yeah, it's a pretty normal practice, unfortunately. There's trackers on all sorts of shit you'd think is private. I even found one on a major pharmacy brand's COVID test appointment scheduling and results page a while back that was leaking patient data and made national news. It's just depressingly normalized.

Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the content of either. It's purely a deal to create a more complete user profile to sell to data brokers for advertising data. Businesses view it as an "additional revenue stream" when they build an app. If you google "how to monetize app engagement," you'll find a million articles like this one https://www.forbes.com/sites/peggyannesalz/2019/01/14/3-ways-to-make-money-from-app-engagement/?sh=d50442dadc7b

>App companies that have the inside track on data around user activity in and with their apps are sitting on a goldmine. This is because they are the sole owners of valuable first-party data, data that is owned, unique, accurate and—above all—current. Easy to understand why first-party data that is becoming what Maribel Adams, Head of Digital at MediaMax, over in her blog at Street Fight calls “the core ingredient to driving customer acquisition and retention.”

This is a completely normal practice. I don't even mean to call out Ally Bank in particular. This is just how the web works. I recently wrote a whole blog post titled Any App That Could Just Be A Website Only Exists To Track You on just this phenomenon, and it's part of a series I'm writing on the "attention economy." The first part talks about TikTok, too.

I guess I should've said that I know what they're trying to accomplish, but I don't understand why they think this will accomplish it.

I've seen several government bans of TikTok, but I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish. I see TikTok trackers all over the web. Are they banning just the TikTok app? Are they also banning any app that loads TikTok trackers? Are they going to blacklist every website that loads a TikTok tracker?

For example, Ally bank had a TikTok tracker on its website's account page and presumably its app for months if not years, though it seems to be gone now. Would the Ally Bank app have been banned too? How are users to know if their app has a TikTok tracker? Is the state going to provide a whitelist of apps and websites that they've audited where there is no TikTok tracker?

Maybe this is a bad way to build the web.

Another great example of what I'm talking about. The entire point of the thread is to disregard budget, and here we are still saying we can't afford it. We are so trained to respond with "how will you pay for it" to anything that we can't not do it, even when not doing it is the whole point of the discussion. The dreaming is so small that we can't even tell there's anything beyond it.

It's such a good example of what I'm talking about in my top level comment. Look at that wonderful vision and imagination! Whoever drew that would be so disappointed seeing the state of Randolph today, and people who live here now would laugh at the idea of being able to take a trolley from Randolph Center to Randolph or a subway to Braintree. What a delightful postcard. Thanks for sharing.