That is only true if you're using an extremely idiosyncratic definition of gender. As far as 95% of English speakers are concerned, gender is defined by the body you possess.
Does that mean hundreds of years of English-speakers referring to sailing ship as "she" were all part of a conspiracy to hide that ships have jiggly bits? :p
Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
The only real states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Everything else is just woke lunacy.
I am confident in this fact because I learned it in elementary school decades ago and it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model. Every English speaker knows that “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” are made up.
I assume you will be one of the advocates for my nobel prize
edit: I'm sorry you specifically mentioned gametes, we can talk about diploids and haploids if you wish and how our bodies are such complicated machines that any sort of error that can occur in our growth is guaranteed to at scale
XXY/etc are all variations within a sex. The above poster is correct to point out that sex is defined entirely by the gamete size that one's body is organized around producing in anisogamous species like humans, and is binary.
Intersex is a misleading term, the better term is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development. There are male DSDs and female DSDs. Even in the case of ovotestes, you'll have one gamete produced, and the other tissue will be nonfunctional.
And yet, the original person I was responding to spoke about gender.
If you are going to step into this argument, please do not move the goalposts
edit: I've triggered the HN censor bot, so editing to apologize to EnergyAmy, they are correct on their point. I am still going to throw back at brigandish that they moved the goalposts
I'm responding specifically to your comment in regards to "but if you want to talk about biology then" followed by a list of biological variations that don't dispute the sex binary. The goalposts are exactly where you've left them.
Not only have you undermined your claim to a Nobel award by showing a spurious understanding of biology, you wrote, quite sarcastically "it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model". Well then, we will all await your discovery of that 3rd gamete, or some theory so innovative that it tips this well studied, well understood, uncontested (by any valid competitor) model to the wayside and humanity can revel in this new information, the better model of reality that you promise.
While you're at it, you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
I request that in any reply, you refrain from spamming me with Wikipedia links to articles you don't understand and probably haven't read.
As far as nigh on 100% of Bugis speakers are concerned there has always been five genders and they'll tell you the words in their language they have for them.
You and the other person are probably talking past each other. For most people, "gender" is merely the polite way of saying "sex", and that's probably what the other commenter was referring to.
Gender in the sense of "the social roles and norms on top of biological sex" is indeed a construct, though heavily informed by the biology that they're based on. Biological sex is very much real and not a construct.
Technically correct, but to be specific sex is binary, not merely bimodal. Sex is entirely defined by gametes, and is binary in anisogamous species such as humans. Isogamous species don't have sexes, they have mating types (and often many thousands of them).
There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative:
That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.
Reproductive sex is determined by gametes .. sure.
Not all humans are born with the attribute of reproductive sex via gametes.
Hence "biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers" (in humans, it gets odder elsewhere in animal life on earth) it's just not all reproductive sex, nor is all just strictly M or strictly F despite it mostly being one or the other.
> To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable.
Not in Australia, via a decision that ascended through all levels of the national court system, nor is sex, as you've chosen to define it ("entirely defined by gametes") binary.
Biology is truly messy. It's understandable not everbody truly grasps this.
Colin Wright is pretty much a prop up cardboard "scientist" for the Manhattan Institute (a political conservative think tank).
I tend to run with people with actual field credentials doing real biology and medicine; Michael Alpers, Fiona Stanley, Fiona Wood, et al were my influences.
If Colin Wright scratches your itch for bad biology then by all means run with the one hit wonder who reinforces a preconception untroubled by empiricism.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AI
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms
Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
I'm starting the process of photographing everything I own for a potential insurance claim in my high wildfire danger area. I've dreamed of something like this that could name, describe, and estimate the replacement cost of each item, saving me hundreds of tedious hours. Including books. So please think big like Jeff Bezos and don't stop with books.
If visions of wealth don't motivate you, think of how much the insurance companies will hate it.
>Also, I thought that Yudkowsky's HPMOR fanfic had more interesting ideas than the whole Rowling series, which I like a lot.
Then you do not understand writing. If Yudkowski really had more interesting ideas, then he would have been able to do HPMOR as original fiction.
Rowling is actually really good, inventing very charming things, very fun sentences, and there's nothing even close in HPMOR (I have read it myself, and enjoyed it to some degree), but you really underestimate how good Rowling is.
Yes, pedantically, and as mentioned in the Notes in the Text in most editions, the Lord of the Rings is a single book sometimes published in three volumes.
> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.
Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.
There's a way to combine those, and some countries have it done well (I believe this includes Germany) - you have a rail network that is good enough that you have small stops on feeder lines in rural areas; if you want to be rural you can be a mile from a train that gets you to a moderate-sized city where you can get the fast train.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.
Processing food doesn't necessarily make food less healthy, but it does it so often that it should not be considered neutral.
* it frequently removes the fiber and structure, making it faster to eat, and easier to over consume.
* it frequently adds sugar, salt, etc., not just making it easier to over consume, but with a payload that itself does extra damage.
* simply changing the form of food, without changing the contents, itself can have serious nutritional consequences [0].
For my own choices ultra processing is guilty until proven innocent. Believing that implies a radical change to how most people eat.
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