Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate".

In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof.

While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment.

To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as: "A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say) vs "A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it".

In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up). Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful).

I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people.

Not sure about your 12-18 hours, it looks like you want to use the energy during the night, while it is the trough and does not require energy.

Not sure why you are saying that renewable you need "much more battery": the overlap of generation means that you already have a "baseline" of generation even with renewables (sure, I know about dunkelflaute, but they are as frequent as unexpected shutdown of nuclear site), and therefore in both case, the game is mainly to "move the peaks around" which requires about the same capacity.

Not sure why you are saying the renewable led to a much more complex grid either. Sure, with a naive simplified grid, nuclear works well. But in practice, the modern grid is complex, and adding more nuclear does not really reduce the complexity.

Also, nuclear or not, having EV or heat-pump will be needed for decarbonisation, and therefore the demand becomes even more complex. With EV and heat-pump, local solar+battery is also a smarter choice. So it means that some storage will need to be built on the consumer site directly, even with nuclear.

I'm not saying that in some situation at the end of the computation, nuclear is not the best option, but it is not at all as simple as having a clear winner. Also, the reality is that you need to work with the uncertainties, so it is not like one solution has a score of 75 and the other has a score of 70, so the first is the obvious choice, it is more like one solution has a score of 75 +- 15 and the other 70 +- 5 (or even asymmetric errors), so you cannot directly conclude the first solution is the best. I think the conversation would be way more healthy if we could just avoid over-simplify into a pro-nuclear vs. pro-renewable partisan battle.

(also not sure about "you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid", why is this not true for renewable too? Just compute the average production of the site, and put storage that will charge when the site produces more than the average and discharge when the site produces less, and you get the same situation as the nuclear site (they may still have period of no generation, the same way nuclear sites have unexpected shutdown). Especially that with a renewable site, the cost is lower so the site owner can invest more in storage and manage it themselves: storage is part of the black box, the grid does not need to know, stay the same and no complexity is added)

If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit of energy.

You are right about storage as a way to help with demand following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this case, you have the choice between building an expensive nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable generation.

I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it looks like before we look into the practical details.

According to you, a drawing equating a black person to a monkey is only problematic if some people do really believe that black persons are literally monkeys? And people who enjoy these drawing are lacking basic biology concepts and would be flabbergasted if they were told that, no, black people is not a different species as distant from white people than macaques or gorillas?

The problem is the message that it carries and how it unities, spreads and empowers racist communities.

"Don't feed the trolls" is a cute saying on the internet, usually said with confidence by people who think they are smart but in fact don't really know about what they are talking about. And the goal is usually to deter a troll from a forum, so they can go to the next one and do the same trolling (so, it does not stop any trolling, it just displaces it). And it is not even clear if it is working.

It is also quite a coward way to response to that. Imagine "oh, these people are beating a foreigner to death. I know what to do: just ignore them, they are doing that for the attention, if we ignore them, maybe they will stop". Trolls act for attention, but these trolls are getting plenty of attention, from racist communities that loves them (and often even manage to groom them). So, who care about "feeding the troll" or "the streisand effect", this has no impact of the damage they are doing.

> Nobody is complaining about trolls being told they are assholes.

In the comment I've answered, you were literally saying that the trolls were unfairly blamed in the same non-logical way one would blame Hindus for their usage of their symbol.

For example, the law says that people who have close family living in US and being US citizen are allowed to apply to become US citizen themselves. To do so, they need to come to the US to apply and be present to answer the questions when their file is progressing. But this process is slow and can take years before they even start reviewing the case due to delays. So, for these people, 1) in few year, the administration will say "oh, yes, we concluded that you perfectly have the right to be here", 2) the administration requires them to stay close, so, to live in the city they are applying. And right now, they are now illegals.

In other terms, the only way for them to not be illegal is to be illegal for a while. And once they have been illegal for a while, they may became legal, which is a way for the administration to say "well, turns out that you had the right to be here all along".

On top of that, some people who tried their best to follow all the process still become illegals just because the administration was too slow or did not inform them of the correct procedure (or inform them of the incorrect procedure). It is simply unfair of you they say "these illegals are bad people not following the rules" when in fact they really want to follow the rules but somehow the rules break and someone says "oh, too bad, you did absolutely nothing wrong, but now people can point the finger at you and treat you as if you are a bad person".

Sure, this is not the case for all the illegals. But this is also a huge incentive for illegals to not even bother to try to become legals: why jumps to all the hoops and spend energy if anyway even when you should be granted the nationality, you are still considered as illegal and take the same risks. The system is broken and people don't see the point of following an unfair process.

All of this happens in western countries (maybe not all in US). Immigration processes are just really badly designed. Look it up, it is crazy: from some countries, the only way to be considered as "legal" require you to be "illegal" during to the time of the admin process. Even if you pretend that it just means they are just not accepted, it does not make any sense: in this case, why the process does not say "no, sorry, from this country, no one can be legal". But the process is "you want to be legal, good, come to my country and walk this way. Oh, by the way, now that you are here, you are technically illegal, let me arrest you".

The reason is that the victim of the bad design cannot complain because people say "they are illegal anyway, so their voice does not count". For this reason, some citizen noticed that the system is just stupid, and just ask that for each illegal person, we give them a chance to demonstrate if they are really not fit to be regularized. But right now, the whole system is just a waste of money, and some idiots are trying to defend it just because they are too lazy to consider fairness and justice.

edit: if you want more concrete information on why the immigration system is unfair, badly design and waste your money, you can watch John Oliver on youtube about "legal immigration"

But again, this is a false dichotomy. You are pretending that the only way to stop breaking the law is by accepting an incompetent organisation (ICE) to act as bullies without having to answer for their actions (while I'm not sure if the people involved in the recent killing will be punished or not, plenty of unjustified violence happened without any consequences for the perpetrators). They are incompetent: they keep making stupid mistake, saying things that appear to be obviously wrong as soon as we see the footage, ...

If you really want "applying the law", why are you not contesting ICE for not being able to arrest illegals while not breaking the law themselves in situation where breaking the law is totally useless (and don't tell me it is not useless: cops and local authorities managed to do the same without creating the mess that ICE has created).

I guarantee you, in Europe, illegals are arrested and deported regularly, and yet, the large majority of people don't even notice. There is no masked troops doing raids. And some people push for more care in managing illegal migrants expulsion, they do demonstration, they organise events and sometimes even are present and makes small obstruction during interventions. Yet none of them are being killed.

There is a huge disconnect with reality in US right now, with a part of the population so uneducated with the "usual" migration regulation and so fed with fear that they are painting the situation as if having unhinged ICE acting outside of due process is the only alternative to "open border and lawlessness". What a joke.

Come on, from the start, what the trolls were doing was to parody the initial video game (which is apparently shit) by taking the opposite stance: so, they were, on purpose, making it as much as opposed as the perceived wokeness of the video game. So, they were putting, on purpose, plenty of racist tropes.

The Hindus did not do that: their symbol was used in a totally different context. But the trolls were doing exactly that: the trolling itself consisted in putting plenty of racist things. They knew about it, they knew it was racist, they did it 100% on purpose.

Trolling is, by definition, behaving like an assh*le. I have absolutely no sympathy for those little kids who behave like assh*le and then come crying "boohoo, people say I'm an assh*le". What did you expect? Did you really think you were being smart, or edgy, or that somehow you can spit in people's faces and just say "it was a joke man" and not being accountable?

What I don't understand is that ICE are clearly incompetent: they shoot the wrong guys, they keep claiming they arrested bad guys and it turns out they totally misunderstood and the persons in question are not who they thought they were. Even with Pretti, ICE declared they were there to arrest a known illegal with a "significant criminal history", but turns out the Minnesota officials have said it was not the case.

This is an usual strange situation: some people want to see "less illegal immigrants", and yet, they are ok with paying big money to pay incompetent people do an half-assed job.

That's my point and the reason of my first comment, which answered to a comment saying

> Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?

I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)

> If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be ...

Somehow, I doubt it. You are yourself saying "they think (rightfully or wrongly)". They are not interested in evidence, they don't really care to check if what they think has any evidence supporting it, it is just convenient for them.

If there are evidence of widespread false positive, they will just hold tight to the idea that "they were traitors anyway". It is more convenient for them. (and in fact, there currently is a lot of evidence of a high number of false positive, but they deny it exactly like that)

The proof of that is that there are already plenty of red flags everywhere showing that officials are incompetent. The officials say that there are plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, and yet, the only people they manage to shoot just appear to be non-illegal with no history of extremism. Then, when it happens, they starts fabricating excuses that turn out are total lies. And then ... it happens again. Even if you buy into the idea that there are indeed plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, you have to admit that they are awful at fixing it.

It is not technically a "widespread false positive", but it is already something that a neutral reasonable person will be incapable to deny that there is a problem. And yet, right now, these people who, according to you will totally "start to speak up", don't hesitate to bury their head in the sand and insist that it is all normal.

It is totally unrealistic to pretend that suddenly, when there is widespread evidence of false positive, they will not continue to find excuse and pretend that these evidences are fake news and lies propagated by traitors.

I'm not saying it is not a problem and the left is not to blame. But I don't see why you explain the situation because of the "all or none" of the left, rather than the "all or none" of everyone in the US: left and right.

I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.

This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.

edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".

(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)

The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.

But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).

In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".

I, like you, don't believe the phenomenon was the result of an organised action (of course). The phenomenon was started as meme, resonnated with the far-right, and both far-right and people who don't see any problem with far-right ideology just amplified it. After all, the government has made a lot of stupid videos, and yet, the popularity explodes mainly when it's aligned with far-right.

But I don't have a problem with considering that the "bunch of trolls who did classic troll things" are considered as far-right. They indeed totally jumped in the opportunity to make racist things for the lols. How does that not make them racist themselves? If you create stuffs that racists find great and very aligned with their ideology, I'm sorry, even if you think you are not intrinsically racist, just be an adult and accept the consequences of your actions: you are part of the racist community, you are one of their "allies".

So, I'm perfectly fine with trolls being considered as racists. Trolling is a pain on society anyway and each time a kid thinks of themselves as "super smart" because they are trolling, the reality is rather that the world would be a better place if this version of them was not part of it. Why should we care about what trolls are feeling, they choose to put themselves at the top of the list of people who don't deserve any consideration for their feelings.

1. What is different in software engineering with respect to any other work that require exploration?

The author mentions "it requires research, it's why it's impossible". But plenty of work requires research and people doing it are also asked to provide an estimate: writing a book, managing a complicated construction project, doing scientific research, ...

In all of this, it is also well known that time estimation is tricky and there are plenty of examples of deadline not met. Yet, it looks like that these people understand 1) that their estimations are guesses, 2) that still giving an estimation is useful for their collaborators.

I've worked in academic research, and famously, you sometimes need to write a document for a grant detailing the timeline of your project for the next two years. We all knew what it was (an estimation that will deviate from reality), but we understood why it was needed and how to do it.

I now work as researcher in the private sector, sometimes very closely with the software developers, sometimes doing the same work as them, so I have a strong experience of what it is asked. And I'm often surprised how often software developers are thinking that they are "special" when they have to deal with something that a lot of other persons have to deal with too, and how often they are all lost by this situation while other persons manage to go around it pragmatically.

2. Why is so many of these articles not reflecting in a balanced way on why people asked time estimates?

When the article comes to explain why developers are asked for estimate, the main reason seems to be "because non developers are idiots, or because of the checking box system, or because of the big bad managers who want to justify their role, or because it is the metric to judge the quality of the work".

But at the same time, if they need something, the same developers asks for time estimate all the time. This is just something needed to organize yourself. If you know that the builders will work in your home for 6 months, you know that you need to prepare yourself differently than if it is 2 days. And how many time a developer asked for something, did not get it in time, and did not conclude that it demonstrates the worker was incompetent? (I'm sure _you_ don't do that, rolling my eyes at the usual answer, but you have to admit that such conclusion is something that people do, including developers)

Why in these articles, there is never reflection on the fact that if you don't give any estimate, your colleagues, the people you are supposed to work with, and not against, don't have the information they need to work properly? The tone is always adversarial: the bad guys want a time estimate. And, yes, of course, we have situations where the admin becomes the goals and these requests are ridiculous. But on the other hand, I also understand that developers are asked to follow more process when at the same time they act like teenage-rebel condescending kids. I'm not sure what is the distribution, but even if it is not 50-50, it tells so much about the level of reflection when the article is unable to conceive that, maybe, maybe, sometimes, the developer is not the victim genius surrounded by idiots.

(in fact, in this article, there is the mention of "Some engineers think that their job is to constantly push back against engineering management, and that helping their manager find technical compromises is betraying some kind of sacred engineering trust". But, come on, this is a terrible flaw, you should be ashamed of being like that. This sentence is followed by a link to an article that, instead of highlighting how this behavior should be considered as a terrible flaw, frames it as "too idealistic")

> For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything

This does not mean "bad at everything else", this is explicitly "not bad at everything else, even slightly better than usual".