You mistake the author's central claim. The central claim is that certain things cannot be taught or even researched if they appear to hurt the feelings of students.
Sex being binary (and the author carefully distinguishes between sex and gender) based on the size of gametes was simply one example. Other examples are discussed in the article:
- the inability to use the terms male and female
- fear of mentioning historical figures that are white and male to students
- teaching the concepts of sexual conflict, kin selection, heritability
- research about sexual selection and cultural differences
- NIH is denying scientists access to data if their research appears to be "stigmatizing"
Your focus on one example as the central claim that invalidates the author's thesis seems like a giant evasion of the real issue.
Communication and honest debate about facts and details, such as the ones you bring up yourself, is impossible when the people you are attempting to communicate with don't care about the truth -- they only care about how the words you are using make them feel.
Which is the whole point of the article: when feelings take precedence over truth and knowledge, science is at threat.
1) If you're busy maintaining backward compat, you're not busy building innovative new things -- Microsoft. 'nuf said.
2) You have a built-in excuse to not make your new stuff equal in functionality or greater to the old stuff, because hey, customers can just use the old stuff right? I built some software that talks to O365 Sharepoint. Ok, I have two choices of API: the older Sharepoint API or the newer Graph API. They recommend Graph, ok. Build the product and put it into production. Get a new customer requirement for fine-grained auth, and then find out that Graph doesn't handle fine-grained auth -- only the Sharepoint API does that. Oops. Ask Microsoft when that capability is coming to Graph? No timeline, because the Sharepoint API isn't deprecated.
3) Keeping old stuff working may be easier, but building new stuff is harder because the landscape is muddier -- how many times have you looked at Microsoft docs and found multiple ways to do things with no idea if the docs you're looking at actually apply to the approach you're using now?
I think there are ways to have (mostly) the best of both worlds. Linux does it by bring as much stuff in-tree as they can -- they break compat all the time for out-of-tree stuff. Ever try to keep a proprietary VMWare module building without errors? In-tree KVM never breaks because they're super careful with the ABI. Some languages have explicit mechanisms by which they attempt to keep things current, but make it easier on users -- Kotlin is an example of this [1] but its a young language so time will tell whether they can actually thread this needle. My experience so far is yes, I think they can -- I've updated code from Kotlin 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 with relatively little pain.
Wonderful story. Both the janitor and the CEO epitomize Ayn Rand's "ideal man":
> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e., to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you, and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?
> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a company president."
Another gotcha with HSTS + includesubdomains is if you have a naked domain e.g. https://example.com redirecting to a www prefix e.g. https://www.example.com, but the server is configured to send the HSTS header for the naked domain.
It's not always obvious because your gut reaction is "oh my web site is on www.", but that misconfigured naked domain redirect might indeed break "randomservice.example.com".
I find the the amount of traffic and comments articles with this message generate quite amusing, given the article can be boiled down to: don't use tools like Cassandra, Kafka, etc. until you've thought through whether they are the right tool for your use case. That last part is often forgotten -- these tools may not always be the right tool for the job, but SOMETIMES they are, regardless of your scale.
Well, duh.
The corollary is: if you're using one of these tools, and you HAVE thought through your use case and reasons, don't get defensive about it. If challenged by those with lesser knowledge after reading an article like this, calmly and rationally explain your reasoning. And like any technology choice, be prepared for someone else to offer another option you weren't aware of, with better reasons.
Leaving aside the (unconvincing) possibility that Boeing was actively covering up issues (which, if they were, is potentially a criminal issue due to fraud), there is a deeper philosophical point to be made about how people should view industry in the modern world, which includes aviation, but also all other production, ranging from farming and mining, to the manufacturing and use of products, and even to services.
It's easy to point to the various risks and lives at risk, due to the products of industry, such as aviation accidents as well as pollutants and even mundane things like typing on a computer (RSI anyone?).
However, what is often forgotten is all the amazing benefits of this industry -- from being able to fly to anywhere in the world in less than a day at a cost affordable by almost anyone in a developed country to having energy to light and heat our homes and run our medical devices, to the existence of this very forum. It is right and moral for both producers in setting their own safety and emission standards, as well as the state in setting limits on production in the name of "protecting society", to consider these positives as well as the negatives. It is morally right even knowing that not setting these limits higher will result in lives and health lost, because the alternative is, bit-by-bit going back to a pre-industrial society in which humans were lucky to live past 35. The way to achieve setting these limits higher is in fact by becoming richer, such that we can afford the better controls. If the state attempts to too tightly control an industry before it can afford those same controls, it is essentially the same as destroying it, and keeping its benefits from the world forever.
Aviation is an example of this whole process working. It's exactly why aviation has become so incredibly safe, while at the same time becoming ever more economical. Companies like Boeing are to be, overall, praised. When fraud occurs, it needs to be investigated and punished, but that doesn't change the essentially good nature of Boeing.
Sex being binary (and the author carefully distinguishes between sex and gender) based on the size of gametes was simply one example. Other examples are discussed in the article:
Your focus on one example as the central claim that invalidates the author's thesis seems like a giant evasion of the real issue.