It always amazes me when US Americans talk in terms of human races like it's the most normal thing in the world. And no, “Cummings“ is not a “Caucasian name“ (whatever that is supposed to mean), it's an English name. I don't want sound too harsh, it's just that as a Central European with all our recent history, things like this really rub me the wrong way.
There are a number of these things, though. I personally get a little irritated with the way many people here use terms like "Hispanic" to contrast with "white people". To me, "Hispanic" is a wide spectrum of ethnicities but really more of a linguistic, cultural and national/political specifier, with lots of overlap with "white". People who are trying to be correct about this will pull out complicated phrases like "non-hispanic whites" which may be correct but are also clumsy, reflecting the absurdity of the way we categorize this country's social boundaries in the first place. "White" itself has had a fluid definition in the US over time, previously having excluded southern or eastern Europe, Jews, or even the Irish.
I know that in my own recent ancestry I have at least 4 European ethnicities, some of which would have been ridiculed by other Americans in the past. But this nuance washes away and I am a "white guy" which lumps me together with cultures I don't particularly identify with. There is no sense in denying, for example, that I am less discriminated against by appearance than other groups. But I do not think either that there is one homogeneous "white people" living in the United States.
Therefore I find it pretty odd that in the USA the idea of a uniform European "ethnicity" - largely defined by skin color! - is still very common and even officially practiced. I remember how I had to fill a form when entering the USA which asked for my "ethnicity". I was flabbergasted and just ticked "unknown" or something like that because I didn't want to identify myself as "Caucasian".
Every form I can remember seeing in the US that asks whether you are Hispanic says that it includes people of any race.
So how do you like this election season?
Yes, that is the "correct" thing that goes on the form, written by people who have bothered to look into this question. It isn't how people talk in casual speech.
I personally do not. Nor do those forms you are talking about. But it something I hear a lot out in the world.
I question the wisdom of telling native speakers that their language uses a word wrong/that doesn’t mean what “they assume it means”. Stuff in AE (and other language) means exactly what AE speakers (and speakers of other languages) assume it means.
Cau·ca·sian /kôˈkāZHən/ NORTH AMERICAN white-skinned; of European origin.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portable_radio_SCR536.png
Because that's exactly how some people teach the definition to mean.[0] I've always been told that to the people in Persia, the people that came across the Caucasus were much more pale skinned. Teachings also say those same people helped populate Europe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people
Yes, but it has been completely abandoned by the scientific and political mainstream for decades now. Using the word "Caucasian" will definitely give you some strange looks ;-)
> You're not wrong though, we should use White European instead since that's what it means today.
I agree, because it would make it clear what it is really about: lumping people together by their skin color. This is one of those examples where PC speech only helps to hide a problem instead of solving it.
Namely: Why would it be called "white EUROPEAN" when basically none of the people it is applied to are European in any reasonable sense of the word? They may have great-great-great-grandparents who were European, but that does not make them European.
Americans do this all the time - they call themselves "german", "irish", or "italian", even when they are not born there, do not speak the language, have never even visited the country, and have zero exposure to the culture of that country.
In America, a nation of immigrants, people are often proud of where their family came from. This can trickle down a few generations. There is an increasing number of people that identify as "American" instead of where their family originally immigrated from, particularly in Appalachia and the South, so this could eventually change.
I understand the frustration from a European point of view, but I just wanted to provide some context to the phenomenon.
Even when that’s true—-and it often isn’t--they usually mean that they’re part of a specific American subculture.
Italian-Americans, for example, traditionally celebrate Christmas Eve with a “Feast of the Seven Fishes.” This dinner isn’t traditional in Italy, but it’s also not common in other American cultures either. An Irish-American family might have a turkey instead but they’re more likely to “observe” St. Patrick’s Day by eating soda bread and corned beef.
It's a weird mindset, and it's definitely tied in to the toxic streak of white supremacy that runs through all of American culture.
This guy would disagree:
http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm
Along the same lines,
In general, just because someone is providing a service to you (e.g. driving you, providing customer support, etc) doesn't mean they should be unnecessarily exposed to offensive language.
You do see their first/given name for identification on pickup.
They are as dumb and undesirable as incomplete regex email filters in web forms.
Every single one ever written will have this problem. And ironically, absolutely nobody reading a fart joke will ever be offended. But the millions of people who are denied service and not twitter famous enough to reach a dot-com employee are very much offended.
...Also, the single reason to add those auto-censorship features is to please advertisers, not to protect users/drivers from fart jokes.
Expect Advertisement on lyft very, very soon.
The flower Fuchsia is named after someone called Fuchs, and therefore the correct pronunciation is "fook-seeah", not "foo-shah".
BTW, isn't it insulting to those people to suggest that their names are insulting?
I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.
There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
The baby wouldn't experience the father's name as a swear word unless the conversation was for example about the dicks new girlfriend and his wife's assessment of the matter.
Dick vs DIIIIIIICK
That's what you think the world should be like, not the way it is. If your name is Adolfhitler Smith, a perfectly legal name in the US, then you will have trouble getting hired.
That's a made up example, but there's evidence[1] that unusual (not necessarily obscene) names will lead to less success in job applications.
If you have a "bad" name, it's your problem well before anyone else's.
If I yell insults at you, you are saying that doesn't mean anything? And if you get insulted, it is your own fault?
No, words have meaning based on a common understanding between the person saying the word and the person hearing the word. If I insult you and you understand it, it is me who did the insulting, it is not 'your problem'
You should try this argument out in court: "No, your honor... I can't be guilty of threatening to kill someone.. sure I said, 'I am going to kill you tomorrow at 5pm', but those were just words! If the person felt threatened, that is on them!"
Yes. It's just sounds that you hear, then your brain recognizes and turns them into words with meaning. How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. This is how you might pick up words from languages you don't know if the sounds are similar, yet you wouldn't claim to be insulted by them.
> "If the person felt threatened, that is on them""
Yes, your feelings are your own, nobody else controls them. That's one of the fundamentals of free speech. There are some very limited situations (like threats) where it's overruled, not because of your feelings but because of the intentions being forecast. Even then, there's a very high bar to prove any criminal intent there.
Considering that it is often very easy to guess how people will “react to the meaning” of the sounds you make, it’s often considered polite to refrain from making them when they would probably offend.
In such a case I would just assume you are stupid or something and keep on my business. If you don't have capacity to ignore that kind of noise you probably need treatment. Threats, however, are a different story.
You shouldn't care much if some random people express their opinion which is you're a moron (unless you meet such people often - then it might be a good idea to actually make sure there is nothing wrong with you or you are not hanging out in a wrong place) - ignoring insults usually causes better consequences than reacting to them. At the same time you usually should be worried if somebody threatens to kill you, ignoring threats can often get you in a real trouble.
The entire discussion here has been about being offended by a word, even though that word is used in a context which is not offensive at all.
Some people are trying to insult and offend, so they set their names as offensive and insulting names... in an attempt to stop that, Lyft messed up and blocked non-offensive names that share the same words as the offensive ones.
That doesn't mean words can't be insulting and offensive, it just means context matters and algorithms have trouble with context.
Yes. You should check out Seneca, and/or Epictetus.
Good luck using the N-word in the US.
The point of the comment above is that the meaning is informed by the listener, you can import all the traumas and neuroses of those around you or you can listen mindfully and limit the impact to whatever is the speaker's intent and capacity to harm you.
Which makes sense. There's likely a lot of drivers who want to go by "Tom" instead of "Thomas" or whatever their full official name is – which is even more important for drivers with very uncommon names who want to go by something more familiar/pronounceable. There's probably a decent safety argument for not requiring drivers to have their full real names be accessible to the user, especially in cases where a driver has an uncommon (i.e. easy to doxx) name.
The privacy of the driver is outweighed by the need for the public to feel they will safely be taken to their destination in an enclosed vehicle totally controlled by another party.
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Transportation/Medallion-Drive...
In any case, rules are different for different jurisdictions and entities. If NYC TLC did have that requirement, then it's possible that real name display is mandatory for Lyft drivers operating in NYC, given that TLC has some oversight over services like Lyft. However, TLC also has some say over livery cabs. It's been awhile since I've been in a livery cab, but I think they do operate under different requirements in terms of what's required for display.
You can definitely argue that they should show their real name, but it is not a good argument that because taxi requires it, lyft should as well.
Albeit, this is rarely used to block payments, because if they stopped payments when customers didn't put their middle name the exact way it's written on their card, nobody would be able to pay online.
The Simpsons figured this out decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EjcWU6sEk
I've never heard of this. Where did you learn this? I'm not saying you're wrong either, as it makes sense. I've just never heard of it.
It's useful for busier locations, where more people would call for a taxi at the same time.
What for?
And how does any other environment where people introduce themselves to each other fix this? I don't think they see it as a problem in practice.
There are many terrible things in the world. People naming themselves Mike Rotch isn't one of them. Certainly not as "terrible" as denying hundreds of thousands of people a service.
Regardless, your point still stands. The product manager should have gone through whatever process was needed to pull down a limited set of production data to test against. Or the engineers could have logged exceptions in prod before making the filter active.
They could just generate the list of questionable names and get support to give them a call about it or institute a rider identity verification programme.
The intentions can be noble, such as a Lyft employee seeing an user named “F* N*” and thinking, hey that shouldn’t be okay.
The actual consequences can be meh.
"I'm so sorry my name is offensive!"
To this day, emails from that account have "Ryan <lastname>" in the header.
This is no the only use, of course, but that doesn't matter. Good luck being a Hindu and displaying a swastika.
Implying devs test their code thoroughly. lol. After working at numerous companies (some with high bars of entry) I've noticed many devs push changes without testing properly. Or, if they test, they rarely consider edge cases or implications of what they're doing and only test the obvious base cases.
He had his own flying car, in 1961!
How very dare you. I'll have you know I come from a long line of Fuckers.
With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.