What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one - basically it's a posh person finding out what the "real world" looks like.
Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.
I saw this same attitude on a Haskell shop - "we write UIs in Haskell to prevent hiring script kiddies". Turns out Haskell coders with 20y of experience on completely non-visual workloads are terrible at UI/UX, to the point of dismissing the work of building the UI as "a lesser concern".
"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.
(For those who didn't read all the way, the author suggests replacing overly rigid parliamentarian rules with Agile methodology)
Corporate ideation and decision making processes in general, and certainly this includes Agile, prioritize producing the best outcome with the least energy and don't place any intrinsic value on making sure that people are represented, so they are probably not the best fit for democratic governence.
For a discussion of why fluidity and informality in process can be problematic, the seminal essay is The Tyranny of Structurelessness (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm).
It sounds like the structure that the city council committee is using here doesn't work. But the author is wrong to expect a truly inclusive democratic process to feel good. It goes against our nature as social beings, will be unpleasant, and require a ton of additional effort to get a similar quality result compared to a more natural process.
It's a couple petabytes, Michael. What could it cost, $10?
Seriously though, Fastly's donation of their CDN service is generous and eases the burden on the PSF, but if push came to shove they could definitely afford the bandwidth. In 2018 they had a net income of half a million.
(1) A COVID-19 infection can have long-term effects even in young people.
(2) We all have seen the images of hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, not having enough breathers, etc. For some reason this doesn't happen with the typical annual influenza ...
If you reduce everything to statistics about mortality rates, you are missing very important parts of the picture.
It seems like bad advice because it is, frankly, just bad advice. Nearly all of his arguments fall down, even within his own post.
He says that VPN providers don't provide more security. They do, and he mentions this himself when it comes to the public wifi argument.
He says that VPN providers don't provide more encryption. They do. Another layer of transport encryption is another layer of transport encryption.[1]
He says that VPN providers don't provide more privacy. They do. Turns out a lot of networks do things like log DNS, which a decent VPN client can tunnel.[2]
He says there are two use cases for VPNs: There are a lot more.
He says that tunneling all of your traffic is a worse case for obfuscating your identity to a third party service. It's not, or at least I can't imagine how it would be.
He says that instead of a VPN, you can use a VPS with a VPN: That's just a VPN. It does all of the same things, including being outsourced to a third-party provider, except you lose a ton of the functionality of a real VPN service like geographical redundancy and spread.
He asks why VPN services exist, if for any other purpose than stealing traffic or data, but fails to understand any way in which a VPN service could be useful.
The entire piece is just the opinions of someone who is failing to see that other people have significantly different use-cases and threat models than he does.
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[1] Especially if you think of "local -> internet" as easier to intercept than "somewhere internet -> otherwhere internet". Which it usually is. One involves something dumb simple like ARP poisoning. Another involves compromising a telco or the VPN provider itself, which is a teensy bit harder. All of this is even sillier if you consider the hostile-network scenario as well.
[2] Yes, you are offloading 'trust' that the VPN provider doesn't also log your DNS. There's more chance that they don't when they say they don't, than your corporate network doesn't when they say they do.
If the automated system fails and you have 2fa, then it gets escalated to the two most senior members of the security team.
In some cases we haven't had sufficient information on the account to ever verify that account's owner, and they never got their account back. Some users refuse to give us enough information to allow us to later positively identify them - so yes, those people will be out of luck if they lose their credentials.
It's a nautical reference. When someone dies at sea, you can't bury them, and you can't burn them, so you commend their souls to the deepness of the water. Spacefaring borrows a lot of traditions from seafaring; the deepest ocean is the one above us.
Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.