> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
But if someone has the ability to broadcast their preferred pronouns and we built that in, and it costs nothing, then what's the problem?
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
I cannot see the harm in using a different pronoun or opening up the ability for that - it feels like a fake or imaginary problem that we are creating such that we have something to complain about to make ourselves feel better. If we want to feel better, we should just smoke or something.
How are you going to know the appropriate pronoun on your first email to "jsmith@company.com" or "ppatel@company.com"? Are you going to send an email to ask their pronouns before you send the actual email?
No, I'll probably just use gender neutral pronouns.
But if they reply back and their email footer has "he/him", I'm probably just gonna use he/him and not think twice about it, because I'm a well-adjusted adult.
My argument is that the H1Bs meet the bar to be hired at their respective companies. Neither pool is inherently better but availability matters.
There are only so many American engineers that meet said bar, they are all either employed or choosing not to be employed.
The ones that don't meet the bar are either employed by smaller employers with lower bars that don't use H1B anyway or yes, maybe unemployed or transitioning to a new industry because they couldn't hack it.
The mythical group I am saying doesn't exist is engineers that are somehow perfectly capable of meeting FAANG bar but are somehow being displaced by H1B. That group doesn't exist.
3D printing is probably the easiest entry point in today's world. You can assemble already designed components into a structure and learn about how they work, tweak them for customization, design your own parts to produce, and "graduate" into designing custom printers and printer parts. The Voron and Annex communities have a ton of folks in this space designing everything from cosmetic accessories to novel mechanical components that bring meaningful improvements to functionality (Monolith, for example).
From there you can explore automation like pick n place machines, engraving, CNC plasma/routers, CNC subtractive machines (lathes/mills/etc). Or you can come back towards programming with PCB design and custom firmware.
If none of that sounds interesting, you can pick up an old project car from an MG to a Jeep XJ and everything in between.
The world is huge and getting your hands dirty is a really nice balance to time on the keyboard. The only downside is there's no ctrl+z or ^[u but sometimes that's where you learn the most.
I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
Among the countries that host US bases, how many had to accept it under the threat of force, invasion, or occupation? I would guess Japan and Germany (initially). Look at the map here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_bases_2.png . Brute force was not a facto in the vast majority of them.
> Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public.
If you were paying any attention at all, you'd see pretty much every 2A community, advocate and lobbying group was outraged by that statement and made statements against it.
Having said that, it is actually illegal to carry a firearm to go commit crimes like destroying government property, assaulting federal officers and obstructing them in carrying out their constitutional duties.
There is video of him kicking light the tail light of a federal law enforcement vehicle, which is definitely a crime. And that’s just what we have video of.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...
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