People working in this industry are often required to display unfelt enthusiasm for things that really aren't terribly exciting. One can be forgiven for being through with this nonsense by the age of 30.
I would never consider working as a software developer but for my sincere interest in the value that my software provides and my enjoyment of the craft. Otherwise I think it would be comparable to accounting, the quintessential boring yet rewarding career.
Do what you truly wish to do. To be concerned about being too old at the age of 30 is just silly.
Often stories of this sort are used to advocate a more permissive immigration policy, particularly toward those from Mexico and South America who have entered the US illegally seeking economic opportunity.
Rational arguments seldom make their way into this discussion, if it can be called that.
On the one side we have the empathetic liberals, who in many cases ultimately wish to see the complete abolition of national borders and global inequality. Joining them are corporations, which want abundant labor in order to reduce the costs of employment.
On the other, we have low-skilled citizens, who don't wish to see their quality of life reduced by admitting large numbers of people willing to work for very little. Along with them are those concerned about the political and cultural consequences of admitting a massive, homogeneous, and very different group of people into their homeland. There are probably some racists among the group, though probably far fewer than the other side often claim.
Whichever side you find yourself on, I think the following must be admitted:
1) The ordinary citizen currently in the United States will likely experience a decline in quality of life as a result of a permissive immigration policy.
2) Massive economic migration to rich countries from poor ones is not a solution to the problem of global economic inequality or poverty.
3) Historical instances of immigration, colonialism, and invasion do not justify or necessitate permissive immigration policies in the present day.
Rational arguments seldom make their way into this discussion, if it can be called that.
On the one side we have the empathetic liberals...
It's a common misconception among conservatives that progressive policies are driven solely by emotion, out of compassion and empathy. In fact, progressive policies are pragmatic, driven by sound economics based on long experience. Policies like the minimum wage aren't in place solely to give poor working families more money; they are in place to prevent just the sort of economically destructive race to the bottom that you use as a rationale for limiting immigration. With a strongly enforced minimum wage, workers compete to deliver better service, not to get lower wages. This prevents the decline that you speculate accompanies permissive immigration. Progressive taxation policies are similarly pragmatic and economically sound---despite the knee-jerk emotional reaction conservatives have to taxation, no substantial correlation has ever been found between tax rates and economic growth.
>1) The ordinary citizen currently in the United States will likely experience a decline in quality of life as a result of a permissive immigration policy.
On what basis must this be "admitted"? You provide no rationale for it in the preceding paragraphs and then dump this line as if it should be obvious.
Ordinary people in the US benefit economically because of their citizenship. Many of these people possess few skills and would live in abject poverty doing the same work in other countries. Admitting large numbers of low-skilled workers increases the supply of laborers, with the result that competition for employment increases, and wages decline. Even with a minimum wage, the number of employment opportunities is reduced. Thus, ordinary citizens stand to experience a decline in their quality of life.
That's very simplistic analysis. The impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers, even low-skilled ones, is definitely not a settled question [1].
It's simplistic because of the format. Its intention is to explain the general line of reasoning to the person who asked for it, not provide an exhaustive analysis.
The article you've cited addresses immigration in general, not low-skill immigration by itself. This could support argument in favor of a selective immigration policy, not massive immigration of low-skill workers from developing countries.
The number of such people is probably many orders of magnitude fewer than the number of ordinary people who benefit from economic migration to the potential detriment of citizens already living in the country. Existing immigration policies reflect this fact.
I find it interesting that immigrants are blamed for this. Lets take the hypothetical situation of a baby boom. 5 years down the line our hypothetical city needs twice as many schools yet doesn't have them. Now do we blame the parents who had the babies or government that didn't build the schools. Or lets take another hypothetical example a certain part of the country gets a new factory and there's lots of internal migration of people coming to work in the new factory. Now this hypothetical location suddenly doesn't have enough hospital beds to cope. Do we blame the people that moved for the government that took all their income taxes yet failed to build a new hospital.
TL:DR Governments take taxes from immigrants but don't spend the money improving services then complain that immigrants are overloading services. Blame the government not the immigrants.
Yes. Extraordinary people are significantly less common than ordinary ones. Therefore, admitting large numbers of people indiscriminately will result in admitting significantly larger numbers of ordinary people. Perhaps I was wrong to say "many" orders of magnitude, but other than that I stand by the remark.
Well, let's not bring the Nazis into it. If you're deporting people to Syria or Somalia or some other dangerous place (which they sometimes have no memory of), it's quite bad enough.
Legal terms (like "country of origin") are abstractions that often hide what that consequences of a decision actually are.
If we applied that to driving laws, people would revolt. As long as people have a reasonable expectation to not be directly impacted, they usually don't care.
This article does not actually posit or examine the titular question. It merely states the statistic we all now know and then goes on a tangent about diversity in the tech industry.
For those of you lucky enough to have skipped the article, here's a summary:
A few academics have noted that religious participation is declining in America, interest in spectator sports is increasing, and the two have a few broad similarities. Therefore, football is the new American religion.
I don't care much about sports or religion, but frankly this article is laughable. They even troubled to throw in the perfunctory "correlation does not equal causation" admonition, as if it makes their line of reasoning any less spurious. Pure junk.
It's just the musings of a pastor. One shouldn't expect anything approaching a data-based analysis or 'reason', which is utterly at odds with 'faith', from a pastor.
I recommend going to sleep if possible, or persevering with sleep in mind as something to look forward to. After waking, one tends to have a more harmonious frame of mind.
A sense of depression (and I assume you're referring to the emotion, not the medical condition) quite often has nothing to do with easily identified circumstances, the mind just tends toward the things it is dissatisfied with.
If you believe you have the medical condition, treat it like anything else: see a doctor. I know many people who have wasted years of their lives fearing a few moments of awkward discussion with their general practitioner. There's no rational reason to join them.
At the risk of talking out of my depth, to me it seems very nearly a cliche in criticism to hone in on a person's inconsistencies in order to unveil him or her as a hypocrite.
It ought to be well understood that human beings are not perfectly consistent animals. We struggle to maintain an unchanging public image through the course of a continuously and inevitably changing experience. If we had to live up always to our highest ideals in order to advise others on the best course of life, none of us would ever be situated to recommend a framework for living. In Seneca's case, a school of philosophy would today be without many of its best-known works.
Incidentally, I think the fact of our inconsistency is a strong argument in favor of protecting privacy. Most of us have unrealistic and irrational expectations of consistency for others. The only way to maintain a sense of peace under these circumstances is to maintain the freedom to say one thing and do another, at least some of the time. A world without privacy might well be one in which we are all subject to the sort of treatment Seneca has received from this article's writer.
I generally agree - we do want to give people space to privately struggle to reach their professed ideals without risk of public humiliation. But surely that must be balanced with some expectation that a person's actions not be in blatant, large-scale contradiction with those ideals. And if you're at the point where you're preaching asceticism while causing political revolts with your financial excesses, perhaps you've crossed that line.
I think much of the dissonance we experience when evaluating Seneca's life comes from our separation from his time period. Concerning the particular issue you mention, possibly contributing to rebellion in Britannia by calling for debts to be paid, I can't say I think it reflects a blatant divergence from his professed ideals in itself. (Truthfully, I'm not knowledgeable enough about the rebellion to take a strong stance.) It could be that he called in the debts not expecting the outcome, but once the rebellion started, it was important that it be opposed forcefully in order to avoid establishing precedent. It isn't as though Seneca was living as Caligula did.
In any case, my point is primarily about the focus of the article. It's fine to examine contradictions in a notable person's life, but too few acknowledge that we all have them, and this seems especially true among literary critics. In general, I think people take charges of "hypocrisy" too seriously.
Let me rephrase the question such that evasions via Tu quoque are rendered impossible: is there a known case (as in, a person) where Stoicism does work consistently? And if there is no such case (as in, no such person) where Stoicism works consistently - what is its measure of success?
First: What do you mean when you talk about Stoicism working - What do you think is the goal of Stoicism?
Second: This criticism is applicable to just about anything; does capitalism not "work" since just about any implementation has aspects that can be considered flawed?
You cannot generalize about an idea from people's failures to be consistent with their professed belief in it (other than perhaps that it appears to be difficult to act according to it in a consistent manner).
In the case of Seneca, it is also difficult to say whether he attempted to apply Stoicism 100%, how good his attempts were ("objectively"), or whether it is even possible at all.
> First: What do you mean when you talk about Stoicism working - What do you think is the goal of Stoicism?
As the goal of Stoicism is maintaining happiness -- and I'm referring to living in peace and harmony 24x7 -- via virtue, then it is said to "work" if it can achieve the said goal 24x7.
> Second: This criticism is applicable to just about anything; does capitalism not "work" since just about any implementation has aspects that can be considered flawed?
Irrelevant. One is a complex social phenomena; the other is pertaining to human psychology with specific goals. I could as well pick an example from the other end of the spectrum (of simplicity): eating less, for instance, leads to weight loss (or maintaining weight) - and this can be consistently demonstrated ... hence eating less "works".
> You cannot generalize about an idea from people's failures to be consistent with their professed belief in it (other than perhaps that it appears to be difficult to act according to it in a consistent manner).
I wasn't generalizing anything, and an idea/ belief is not necessarily a fact. The idea/ belief of the stoics is that virtue is sufficient for happiness. There is no doubt, in the mind of stoics, that virtue always leads to happiness (no exceptions). And it of course "appears to be difficult" - because virtue, being a higher-level cognitive function based on morality ("thou shalt remain calm" for instance), cannot consistently override the core emotions (wherein lies sorrow and malice), as humans all throughout the centuries have demonstrated time and again.
> In the case of Seneca, it is also difficult to say whether he attempted to apply Stoicism 100%, how good his attempts were ("objectively"), or whether it is even possible at all.
I doubt it is even possible at all (see above paragraph). Hence my "if it doesn't work, what is its measure of success?" question. If success that one is striving towards is ill-defined, one is probably fooling oneself.
Shouldn't the offended stoics (who down-voted my above comment asking a reasonable question) be practicing their own philosophy by remaining stoic (neither up-voting nor down-voting)? tongue-in-cheek.
Trust me, this is not true. Initiating contact is not only acceptable, but quite often preferred. Generally this approach is just protecting your self-esteem.
No, it's a sign of respect. In these days of Tinder, girls are used to guys hitting on them all the time. By not contacting them, you are actually sending a message.
