nikt
The dingo ate my baby!
His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.
If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?
Yeah that’s an absolutely grotesque situation. I’m in Canada though so it’s a bit different.
In practice people also don’t get fired here on a an employer’s whim. Not because it’s not allowed by law but because fired employees can sue for wrongful dismissal, and for most employers it’s not worth the risk, so there’s usually a long HR process for firing someone for poor performance.
Termination with “cause” has special meaning in employment law. It usually means getting fired for theft, fraud, harassment, causing irreparable harm to the company, etc.
One consequence of getting fired with cause is you don’t get severance or most other protections you’re normally entitled to by law. So, the bar for this kind of termination is (rightfully) very high.
Poor performance or even not showing up for work at all generally don’t meet the requirements for “cause”, so I dunno if making it illegal to let people go for anything other than straight up committing illegal or harmful acts makes sense.
Thanks for posting this. I read the guardian every day but somehow missed this article.
Yes, I got a lot out of reddit, and I miss it sometimes. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have enough of the right people yet to generate enough high quality content to compare to reddit.
Y-combinator’s HN has been sort of filling that void for me though.
I gave up trying to make Mastodon work. Two minutes of scrolling and I always end up closing it with an overwhelming feeling of cringe.
Mind you I could never get in to Twitter either. Maybe it’s just the format? It reinforces ego/personal brand over the value of the actual content.
… by publicly announcing that “we must eventually stop pouring gasoline on it!”
That’s exactly the point. There is a cost. The news media and the public discourse has limited bandwidth. There are only so many things we can talk about and fight for at any given time, and to me it seems like this issue may be drowning out more existential issues.
The irony is that the argument over pronouns is intentionally being amplified by right wing media and activists. They’re trolling us into being outraged about this, and we’re falling right into their trap.
It’s classic bikeshedding being used against us, and most of us seem to be entirely unaware.
I’d have no issue with you calling me ma’am or whatever you feel comfortable with, but that’s only because that part of my identity is not something I’ve struggled with for much of my life.
I totally understand and empathize with people for whom perceived gender is not what they identify as, and I’m 100% in support of ensuring that everyone has the right to be referred to by their chosen pronouns.
My point is that I worry that this issue is overshadowing other issues that I think are existentially threatening to our entire way of life.
We’re busying ourselves over respectful word use, while the world crumbles around us.
Do you think anyone will respect anyone’s pronouns when the world’s superpowers are run by fascist governments or our ecosystems and food production have collapsed?