Skip to main content

What Makes Someone a New Yorker?




Article: What Makes Someone a New Yorker? - The New York Times

The rise of inequality has little to do with the people that come to New York, those immigrating from outside the country or those migrating from inside the US. Like most, they come for a better life, for work, and for family. Without a doubt, they are part of what makes New York thrive, make it safer, and provide its diversity. On the other hand, there are sweetheart deals to developers to make luxury high-rises, a dearth of affordable housing development, short-term rental industries reducing housing supply, opaque legal vehicles allowing foreigners to park their money here, and a financial industry that pays highly and earns outsize profits. Cities are magnets for inequality, and there is little being done to rein it in, to make life equitable for those not part of the upper strata. Adams is little better than Trump and his nativists. Trump blames immigrants and uses that to manipulate his base, avoiding the actual cause of their problems.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.