I view them as similar to python's "private" functions, which are really just functions starting with an underscore. The interpreter will let anyone call them like any other function, but the general rule is don't do it, unless you know what you're doing and are willing to deal with the internals changing.
Python typing is like that. If I say a function takes a List[int], but you know I'm just calling a for loop, you can ignore it and hand me a Set[int]. Maybe it breaks some day, but you're allowed to take that risk, if you have a need.
Do either of these things do anything comments couldn't? Not really. But they're ways of indicating intended semantics without formally documenting your stuff, and when most of what you use the language for is scripts, that's actually pretty helpful. People actually use type hints in a way they didn't with comments, and that's caused a major improvement in code readability. Or at least that's been my experience
You can absolutely look at all this and say python's a crazy, terrible language you never want to touch, but if you've got no choice on language for whatever reason, or you're throwing something together and don't feel like writing `private static final synchronized` forty time, type hints are great.
Another way to translate it would be “the cost of British labour was reduced, pushing down the artificially high unemployment rate,” but the best way would probably be both of the above at the same time, and some other more complicated stuff I don’t know or understand. My point isn’t this was actually a really good thing, but it’s not as straightforward as you’re making it out to be.
I’m not sure if this is a legitimate question or an attempt to make some sort of “but also not-the-West is bad!” point; if the latter, this is a comment on an article about caste discrimination in California, which is probably why the its observation focuses on the West, instead of talking about parallels in other cultures.
Does anybody have advice for dealing with oncall (for all the software people out there)? My issues are light as they go, and I’m pretty productive for things with timeframes longer than a week, but managing a ticket queue is just brutal, and basically impossible once I end up with pager-induced sleep deprivation. Long-term I think I just need a job that doesn’t involve a lot of ticket management, but switching isn’t an option at the moment, and I need to find something to reduce the amount of slack other people have to pick up.