Masking the true price (cost) of something is what causes the market to be inefficient, resulting in excess or insufficient supply.
If anything, rents indicate true cost compared to mortgage costs which can accurately signal for more (or less) construction needed. In the US, ownership costs are masked by subsidizing interest rates, loan repayment periods, down payment amounts, and mortgage interest tax deductions. Also, property tax limits subsidize existing owners.
There is a bit of a conflict in the mechanics of democracy with zoning laws and taxes, with existing owners having an incentive to limit supply, especially in booming markets. It’s a very tough problem to solve, but making clear the costs of all the subsidies would help.
Homeowners don’t really care about the cost of subsidies since they benefit the most from it.
The real problem is that zoning is decided at the local level; local turnout is not very high, so it doesn’t take that many concerned homeowners to overthrow someone who is too pro-growth. And usually local municipalities are balkanized subsets of the region, who want all the upside of regional growth but none of the downside. In the most extreme example, the Bay Area, this leads to lots of permits for job expansion in small localities but not for housing, since residents need a lot more in the way of services.
It would be much more healthy to have zoning laid out at the state or regional level, but regional level governments don’t even really exist in the American context, and only a few cities in America have continued annexing suburban areas into the 21st century.
Power is completely fucked at the local level in a lot of places. In LA councilmen have basically unilateral power on what gets built in their district, and of the people who vote something crazy like 70% are homeowners (which only make up 30% of the population of LA iirc). So NIMBYism in LA ends up with grossly disproportionate representation that isn't going to ever change until the city charter does, probably long after the city is completely fucked from being unable to build housing supply or transit needed to sustain economic development. It's hard not to be a cynic when these people have just so much entrenched power.
>The real problem is that zoning is decided at the local level; local turnout is not very high, so it doesn’t take that many concerned homeowners to overthrow someone who is too pro-growth.
Hence removing the subsidies or at least making explicit the cost of subsidies, so people are incentivized to go out and vote for increases in supply. Another option is to hand over ownership to government and make everyone do land leases to make them participate in the market and therefore vote the “right” way. Not a perfect solution of course.
The problem is that, in general, wealthy and older people are more likely to turnout and vote, and more likely to participate in lower level elections, and this class of people is well-correlated with owning homes. So homeowners have quite a lot of power even compared to renters, and they are more than happy to flex it. They don't really care that there are subsidies, because they're the primary beneficiaries.
>It would be much more healthy to have zoning laid out at the state or regional level, but regional level governments don’t even really exist in the American context, and only a few cities in America have continued annexing suburban areas into the 21st century.
Not just zoning, soooooo much shit would be better done at the regional level because it would allow the urban areas to do what they think is best for them without pissing off the rural areas (or needing their approval) and vise versa.
The true cost of something depends on the market, and the market is created and shaped by law. If the law changes to disallow foreign direct investment in residential housing and the prices drop then this IS the new true price.
The equilibrium market price will displace owner-residents because the return on a property that is bought and rented is always greater than one which is bought and lived in (ie not rented).
There was very little urban home ownership until twentieth century incentives and regulation directly changed that. Efforts made by people like FDR, William Beveridge and influenced by Keynes who would all be called vociferously denounced as socialist today.
So unless we want to return to that historic lack of home ownership, those are the kinds of policies needed. This because the eventual outcome of an uncontrolled hosing market is as problematic as an uncontrolled market is to climate.
> There is a bit of a conflict in the mechanics of democracy with zoning laws and taxes
There’s really not. All extant democracies recognize private property, with certain limits for the public interest. Zoning is an extreme imposition on private property rights, of a sort that ordinarily would only be consciences in light of equally compelling public interests. Unfortunately, we had a few bad Supreme Court decisions at the height of white panic about desegregation that normalized such impositions. You’d hesitate greatly before taxing someone half the value of their property, but local governments think nothing of eliminating half the value (or more) of private property through zoning or historical preservation ordinances.
The extremely high prevalence of HOAs in the US indicate to me the population not only wants zoning, they want to go further than what normal zoning does. The conflict I’m talking about though is two fold: the voter voting in their own interest which is opposite to those of society as a whole, and the voter voting for gain in the short term while sacrificing the long term.
All democracies allow personal property but this does not extend to land. In fact, all democracies have always put controls on land ownership and treatment of tenants. Even the US itself taxed land before income.
The only places with no protections were medieval societies and their resultant immense inequality.
It is being worked on in many european cities. Berlin for instance has a public housing buyback plan in place and many European cities are looking at or have already placed rules in place making foreign ownership or running of massive rental companies more expensive or difficult. Generally commodification of essential needs such as housing and food does need some regulation in order to prevent victimization of the poorest citizens.
I am completely against a 'landed class' collecting malthusian rents. But, if these companies are adding value that shouldn't be overlooked. Not all people want to maintain a property, and not all people want to "rent for decades" in the same place.
I rented in a larger city last year. Had I bought instead of renting I would have had transaction costs that would be 3x the amount I paid in rent. Not only that, if something broke in the apartment I had someone I could call to take care of it. I didn't even have to think through the logistics of getting contractors to my apt and getting bids on jobs.
I think a lot of landlords are slumlords without even realizing it then. Landlords whine and scream and sound the alarm that shit will hit the fan when cities try to limit rent increases to a generous 5% to keep pace with actual wage growth. Yet to the landlord, did their costs even increase at all the year they jacked the rent? In CA, their taxes remained the same as when they bought the place. Hiring laborers to upkeep the property has always been about hiring from the very bottom of the handiman market, a market that also has not seen wage growth.
So if all the landlords costs do not rise all that much, why do they feel justified to raise rents sometimes well over 10% a year? The only reason is to fatten the wallet by milking the tenants, and we've hit a point where in some cases the working class has to commute 4 hours a day in desperate effort to find a job that pays the exorbitant rent.
I rent for the exact same reason, and can agree. The second reason is that there is minimal opportunity for capital appreciation where I am, and I do not feel like locking up a significant deposit in such an illiquid asset. I get much better returns on my money elsewhere.
The real estate agent wants between 2% and 3% of the actual value of the building from both the seller and the buyer.
Taxes (unless it is a "first house" designed and actually used as your "primary residence" AND provided that you are not going to resell it within 5 years, in which case will be around 2% of nominal value) will be around 9% of nominal value (usually much lower than market value).
Then there is the notary fees.
So, example, you buy an apartment paying it 200,000 Euro, something that would be rented between 600 and 800 Euro/month (if you are lucky):
Estate agent (buying) 6,000 (0.03x200,000)
Taxes (buying) 10,800 (0.09x120,000)
Notary 2,000
Estate agent (re-selling) 6,000 (0.03x200,000)
That is 24,800 Euro to which you add the equivalent of 1 year land tax probably some 800 Euro, and some repairs/refurbishing making it more than 26,000 Euro (and without considering what the 226,000 Euro could have produced if invested).
Compare this with 12x800=9600
Maybe it is not exactly 3x, but it is at least 2.5x.
If you prefer, unless there is a huge increase in house value in the (short) period of ownership, the breaking even point is past more than three years.
>Ah like France with its corrupt lawyer cartel then.
I am not following you, in the example I posted there is no "lawyer" (corrupt or belonging to a cartel or not) involved (as normally there are no lawyers involved in "normal" real estate transactions).
So the cost to buy/sell a $1mm apartment could be in the range of $110,000 after broker fees and all taxes are accounted for. An apartment at that price would rent for maybe $4k for month, though that will rise at a faster price over 30 years than a fixed mortgage + common charges. Unless the value rises at a pace much faster than the rate of inflation, you're going to lose money if you don't hold on to the place for a few years. See this fun calculator to find the inflection point:
> A company buying thousands of homes and then milking workers through rent for decades seems unethical.
Providing homes for rent is a service provided to people that they can pay for if they want to make use of it. An economic transaction involves an exchange for money. It is not milking someone. Is a grocery store milking you for food you buy?
A house has value. The people who built it had to feed themselves and their families. Land has value. It is not free. I have to pay expensive annual property taxes to maintain ownership. The services a bank provides are not free. Living expenses are a real thing and even if you can't afford it then someone else is going to have to pay for your housing.
The difference is that housing is a market where you can't increase supply much, because of location. This makes it an accelerator of inequality, unfairness and hereditary wealth. Also, regulatory capture.
And if you derive any rental income from the land value whatsoever, you are milking money from something valuable you did not create and did not make valuable. It's a purely parasitic form of value extraction from something that isn't free.
This is why the value of land improvements (e.g. having a nice house) should be untaxed, separated from the value of the land while the rental value of the land should be taxed at 100%.
And, until we do do that, we shouldn't pretend that rent isn't largely (i.e. ~60%) parasitic value extraction.
Then consider the "value" of an empty lot, the archetype of land in itself. Its _price_ is based solely on the the _value_ that those near it produce. A high productivity region increases the value of neighboring empty lots. The lots themselves have produced nothing and whatever price they command is solely a drain on the productive part of the economy.
>Is a grocery store milking you for food you buy?
Value added by building or improving a resource like food or a structure is fundamentally different and obviously needs to be compensated and encouraged. But profit from an unchanged property is entirely a zero-sum gain moving wealth from productive parts of an economy to unproductive.
You could charge exponentially more tax based on the number of units rented. That way even if the cost is passed on, renters are incentivized to rent from small landlords.
Then tax and cap rent increases county wide on every building no matter when it was built or if a tenant moves out. Then again, I'm pretty far left on housing issues. In my ideal world, the rent formula would be:
monthy rent = 0.3(minumum hourly wage * 160 hours) * n bedrooms; with studios being n = 0.5
That way if landlords want to lobby for higher profit margins, the only way to do it would be to also ensure the working class can actually afford to supply those higher profit margins for the landlords.
Depends on the details - the tax could be paid by the occupants a bit like the council tax in the UK. And then discounts applied. Or by the owner if the property is unoccupied.
'Foreigners who have studied or worked in China for a minimum of one year are permitted to buy property. ... Unfortunately, a foreigner can only own one property and it has to be residential. Again, the foreigners are banned from renting the property as you are supposed to use it for dwelling purposes.'
Thanks for bringing it up. I see it being perfectly rational for countries to mirror asset possession rules that are instilled on their citizens abroad.
There is so much draconian regulations of foreign bank account holding all around the world, but none regulating foreign possessions of the said bank. Same for real estate.
I suppose it might work like council housing (used to) work in the UK. The council builds large numbers of homes and houses people in them for lower than market rentals. Of course people are still free to build and buy homes privately if they want.
The problem with this in the UK was that the stock of council housing became immensely valuable and as soon as we had a right wing government they started to sell it off. Selling it off created home owners (who are more likely to vote for that government) and raised "free" money which could be given out in tax cuts, so it was a natural target.
In the UK an alternate system - housing associations (HA) - survived a little bit better. Here the houses are either built with public money and handed to a housing association (a private trust) or built by the HA. The HA then rents them out on similar terms to council houses. Because they aren't publicly owned the government couldn't sell them off. Except that because some HAs built using government loans or assistance the government was able to extend the right of tenants to buy to those homes too.
In the Netherlands we have the good tendency to take these away from politicians: any extra budget MUST be used to lower our national debt, not to lower taxes or 'buy votes' for the current people in charge.
This takes away the incentive to sell off public goods for their own short term profit.
>Real estate, and its scarcity, has been the driver of competition, wealth, value creation, for oh, say, all of human history.
Much like excessively long copyright periods, real estate also allows for excessive economic rent that can destroy value creation. Incentives for individual real estate owners are divergent to those of society, hence we see problems getting mass transit online in many places and lack of sufficient housing in booming job markets.
There needs to be some balance between needs of society and individual. I don't claim to know the fine line of this balance, but that's how long-running successful societies work. Opposite side is dictatorship in some form - most common being some variant of communism regime that I had displeasure to live in for initial part of my life - its not a good system for 99% of the population.
This is generally highly controversial topic, people either align as per their left/right viewpoints, or their current situation and needs (homeowner/investor views it differently compared to somebody young looking wanting to buy accommodation and and being priced out of their favored location).
> Real estate, and its scarcity, has been the driver of competition, wealth, value creation, for oh, say, all of human history. There must be something to that, even if you think it's not ideal for how it works out for some people.
You know when humanity started evolving rapidly? When real estate stopped being the main driver for wealth. And you know how the system where the main source of wealth was real estate was named? Feudalism.
I'd much rather have socialism than feudalism...
I know that there's more options than these two, but we're seeing again a major increase in real estate value that's causing average people to not be able to buy their homes or not even be able to rent something decent. Over time it's starting to look a lot like that regime where a few people "rent" real estate to masses of people... and can (almost) control those masses through it.
Personally I'd make it so big groups of people get affordable rents or even affordable prices for homes, through various laws that incentivize private ownership and constant improving of property. The latter part is not even socialist, it's a Roman principle.
>>You know when humanity started evolving rapidly? When real estate stopped being the main driver for wealth. And you know how the system where the main source of wealth was real estate was named? Feudalism.
Real estate stopped being the main source of wealth because other sources of wealth grew, not because the state interfered in the market to hobble real estate as an investment.
Humanity began progressing rapidly because of better enforcement of private property rights, which made investment to create productive capital more profitable.
Deliberately harming the real estate market by making it harder to invest in it will do no such thing, and will only add to the restrictions that have increasingly suppressed housing supply growth, and worsened housing affordability:
It's a bit of an extreme case, but basically if you'd own land and someone else took it over (not by force) and took care of it for a longer period (several years), that someone else could claim ownership and be granted the land.
So if you'd "abandon" your property, someone else could take it over, provided he would take care of it.
The modern equivalent would be, in my opinion, buying houses or apartments and leaving them unoccupied. Outright usucapio would be a bit strong, but I definitely think exponentially higher rates of taxation would make sense.
So you're suggesting that everybody should read the miles long terms for each website they subscribe to, otherwise they do not have a right to keep their username.
And I'm not sure that abusing an unethical system waives you from the morality of your actions.
The only lesson you're giving here is about you. But hey, any publicity is good publicity right? You're enforcing your 'brand' after all. \s
Oh so I guess the fact that there are whole organizations[1] devoted to reading the absurdly enormous TOS means nothing, and studies[2] that suggest a major percentage isn't reading them are false.
I will not believe you if you state that you read the TOS for every site you register on, every program you install.
rclone is fine (in fact I use rclone with restic to synchronise my restic backup repository on BackBlaze B2) but it doesn't encrypt or deduplicate your backups -- it's just a synchronisation tool like rsync.
Ah, I wasn't aware it had an encryption backend. Just looking at the documentation I'm quite worried -- why on earth is there an "obfuscate" mode?
I would suggest using restic. It doesn't have any weird modes, it simply encrypts everything and there isn't any weird need to specify (for instance) that you want things like metadata or filenames encrypted. Also backups are deduplicated using content-defined-chunking -- giving you pretty massive storage savings. If you really need rclone since it supports some specific feature of your backend -- restic supports using rclone as a synchronisation backend (or you can do what I do, which is to batch-upload your local restic backup every day).
It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name.
If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years old.
The problem comes when we give someone a name. If I say: "I bumped into Julie on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me", people might think it sounds odd (if they're not used to it).
It's as if we have an order/hierarchy in which we expect to learn information about people. Like, by the time we know someone's name, we assume we should already have been told their gender, and we confused if hasn't happened yet.
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story.
So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.
I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).
But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.
That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team."
Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.
I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races.
It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.
(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)
Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere.
Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.
This sounds like working backwards. Up this thread, people have suggested that the reason is that gender matters more to society than height (this is why we don't announce people's height). When this argument is defeated by race, it switches again to what "seems reasonable".
What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?
Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as racial distinctions.
I'm not debating whether it was true 1000 years ago. I'm saying that today, it is a linguistic quirk of English. Of course English is a language that was in use in some form 1000 years ago - and we don't use all the same words we did then, because some of them don't have value to us today. (Singular you, for instance, was much rarer back then!)
Sure, but order 10^3 years is the right time scale to think about linguistic features. People lived in villages and farmed. They speculated about other people's sex lives a lot. Argued about legitimate descendants and inheritance. Could not afford to ignore the difference between cows and bulls. And many (though not all) of their languages have gender deeply built in.
None that I'm aware of have anything resembling our modern idea of race built in. For the obvious reason that approximately nobody in said village had been 100 miles, nevermind to another continent. If a language had such a feature, the next generation would probably never have heard it used, and thus would not know what it meant. (I wonder whether any languages have grammatical markers for slavery or caste? That would be the closest thing I could imagine, divisions that many people would have talked about every day for millennia, in some places.)
Forgetting features seems to happen much quicker than acquiring them. Post-1066 English lost a lot of complication which German retained (including grammatical gender of nouns, IIRC). As you say, singular you is much younger than that, but importantly it's about forgetting a distinction we used to make. I'm not an expert on why this happened, but I didn't think it was some great shift in what needed to be communicated, just a mutation/simplification.
What do you mean? You mean that racist societies might be expected to distinguish between races with noun classes? Seems to me this might well have happened in some language at some time, or at least a variation on it: distinguishing between those inside the clan, and those outside.
It looks like the sex distinction is the one most commonly reflected in language, which strikes me as empirical evidence that it's generally the most valuable one.
> Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate.
Gender matters more than race or height (I.e., race doesn’t make one markedly stronger or un/able to birth children or any of the social roles that emerge out of those properties), and as I mentioned elsewhere, multiracial societies weren’t a universal reality (and aren’t today) such that it would leave a mark on grammar.
Because education didn't exist for most of the last few thousand years. Wealth did, but I guess it wasn't worth modifying your speech of every day to encode that today isn't the one day a year you happen to encountered a nobleman.
Race is fundamentally different than gender in many ways. Contrary to your claim, you can’t discern race as easily as gender—there are far more racially ambiguous people than there are gender ambiguous people. Unlike how gender proxies for biological sex, race doesn’t proxy for any interesting biological phenomena around which we might organize our culture—thus race is much less information-dense than gender. The likely reason you find racial qualifies objectionable is that your culture experienced racism in its history (e.g., the US’s historical oppression of African Americans), not because it is a completely useless disambiguator (although it can be if the circumstances are right—such as a group where all members share the same race). We don’t have specific pronouns for specific races because (in addition to the previously cited reasons) interactions with specific groups were rarely universal experiences. That said, we do have pronouns that can indicate membership to our people or the people across the river (originally “race” referred to a people or ethnic group—e.g., “the Celtic race”): “us” and “them”.
In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.
My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.
I would say it’s more that “they” is used for individuals when the subject is specified previously in the sentence or conversation. In your example sentence, “the stranger” clarifies this. If the sentence were simply “They bumped into me on the street.” it is unclear if the subject is singular or plural.
In my second example, I used "Julie" instead of "a stranger". The subject is specified in exactly the same way, but people might find "they" more surprising in that case.
Some people might even take it as a potential clue that Julie could be non-binary, because of how much we expect gender-matched pronouns at that point. (Not saying they should, just that they might.)
Ah yes, my bad, you are correct. I meant to say that it's not simply that the distinction is between "named individual" and "stranger" but is more complex.
It seems like "they" is used 'correctly' for a singular subject when the subject has been previously referred to, but hasn't been given a proper name. But I'm sure a linguist has studied this in further detail.
Considering singular they has been in common use for centuries[0], changing it now would be an uphill struggle. People have used words like "ze" but they haven't caught on.
The article I linked to gives 1794 as an example of using singular they to refer to a specific person. And as it also points out, there's nothing particularly unusual about using they in the context of a specific person as well as being a plural. It is commonly accepted that "you" is now both singular and plural.
I don't think there's a better choice today than 'they' but that 1794 example doesn't show that this was a natural use back then. It was a conscious and intentional deviation from standard usage just as it is today, as was noted by the contemporary 'mansplaining' commenter and the contemporary response to him.
I can't decode what the 1794 usage was. The article describes it as "singular they", used presumably in reference to one of these three authors, but, well, it would help to see the passage in question.
English is not a dead language and so it evolves. Consider 12th century English: Ealdred arceb hine to cynge gehalgode menn guldon him gyld gislas sealdon syððan heora land bohtan.
You get confused because you're not used to it. It gets less confusing the more you see it used. There are some cases where it introduces unnecessary confusion but the same is true for any other pronoun.
There are some proposed non-binary or gender neutral pronouns but none of them seem to be in use much.
For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0]
Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring to a man or a woman (or ship, or country, etc.), and those few contexts where it is relevant should be easy enough to glean from other information.
If you think that could never work, I'd point out that Mandarin managed without gender-specific pronouns until contact with Europeans, and even now they are only distinguishable in written form.[1]
Alternatively, there's Stallman's proposal for ‘person’, ‘per’ and ‘pers’.[2] I'm doubtful of any proposal that involves creating new words (see ‘xe’, Spivak pronouns, etc. ), but everything else Stallman says seems to come to pass so maybe.
The problem with "it" is the word's existing use to refer to non-person objects. One could easily interpret being called "it" as an insult, ie: this thing is not even a human.
I might not even be willing to refer to a dog as "it" in most circumstances.
Honestly though, I'm with you that it's a linguistic gap English needs to fill. Similarly, the second person plural pronoun need to be accepted as "y'all"- and I say that as someone not even from the southern USA.
I still don't understand what's the problem with simply using "you" as second-person plural pronoun, most of the time it's perfectly clear from the context whether it's singular or plural. And if not, there's also "everybody" or "everyone".
In German we have "sie" which is both third-person singular female, third-person plural, and when written "Sie" also a formal second-person singular/plural. It works just fine.
True, which is why it needs to start with people choosing to be called ‘it’. It's yet to happen, but I'll do my bit if/when I'm ever asked for my preferred pronouns.
Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).
Yes, it feels grammatically weird, because e.g. you use "is" for he and she but "are" for they. But there's no option that isn't a compromise in some way. The alternative is coming up with an entirely new pronoun and convincing people to use it, and people have tried that as well. It seems that the singular they is much more widely recognized, though.
FWIW, I think new words are easier in this case. This new usage of “they” is really confusing when you come across it. Typical usage of first person “they” implies a degree of unfamiliarity with the person in question. So using “they” for someone who is known causes you to question your reading comprehension.
To me it's very natural, perhaps because I've been argui-- er, interacting with so many people on the internet, whose true identities and genders are completely obscured behind an arbitrary username.
"I replied to always4getpass, and told them that the generic pronoun seems pretty normal, I hope they agree."
There were probably people saying very similar things around the time when the “thou”/“you” distinction was being replaced with always using “you”. Both changes of the language make some changes, but not very large changes, and you’ll probably get used to it.
The big difference, though, is that most people have no use for this usage of “they” because most people don’t deal with non-binary people on a regular basis, if ever.
Right now, it is a cultural marker. If you run a linguistic use analysis, you see that it is used on the coasts and a few key urban areas in the US and it hasn't made progress toward universality.
Do you have any citations? If you mean the deliberate usage of singular they as a neuter pronoun for subjects who identify as non-binary, then sure. But otherwise, singular they is used by almost everybody some of the time. always4getpass' comment, at least on its face, refers to the latter usage.
Frankly, I think even people offended at being forced to use the former usage will relent. Refusing to accommodate (rightly or wrongly) is confrontational, and being confrontational is exhausting. It's already quite natural to use singular they when using a passive, impersonal voice, and using a passive voice is what people will invariably resort to when they're exhausted.
Except you know Shakespeare using singular they[0]. Then the fact that I’m willing to bet decent money that random individuals in rural areas also use singular they all the time without realising. It is just when a trans person wants singular they exclusively that it becomes an issue.
I'm surprised that this misses the distinction made by signalsmith above: the way Shakespeare uses "they" to refer to someone is unremarkable, but what strikes many present-day speakers as an error (even if they fail to explain why) is the use of it to apply to a particular person, especially a named person.
TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier.
There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself to "they".
And can I add that this comments thread here is peak HN. There's a fascinating article about an interesting part of history I'd never heard of before, and yet all but one of the comments here are nitpicking over word choice. And I'm not helping any either.
It's perfectly standard. You're probably already accustomed to using it for a person whose identity you don't know, unless you walk around saying things like "I hope this person comes back to get his or her umbrella."
Even if you know what gender the person is it's not uncommon to use they
"Well officer, I saw them walk from their car up to the door then they turned and looked around, that's when I saw them pull the ski mask down, draw their gun and enter the bank"
---
Manager: What was the customer doing when you told them to leave?
Clerk: Well I had been trying to help them with their project but they kept stepping into my personal space, then he places his hand on me and that's when I decided they'd crossed a line and needed to leave
---
Most people wouldn't even bat an eye swapping they out for he/she in conversation in person.
It would depend on context, if you ask me. The bank robbery was across the street & half a block down? Completely unremarkable to say "they". The clerk is complaining about sexual harassment, hand on thigh? Avoiding "he" implies a careful choice not to say, either to hide an identity, or because the customer was obviously confusingly gender-ambiguous.
I interpreted “they” in the second one as implying distance from the person in question, like the speaker wants nothing to do with them and is emphasising that they were a stranger. Possibly part of why saying “they” feels uncomfortable to people, but I’d never realised it until reading that example.
In my case if I don't know someone well, or at all, without thought I use gender-neutral terminology they/them/their and with pets and babies, again without thought, I naturally use it.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
While seemingly good news and will definitely have positive side effects to open source projects, I cannot stop myself from questioning if this is just good old Microsoft using one of its edges over Gitlab (money) to come on top.
After all, this is the embrace, extend, and extinguish company.
Anyhow, I'm looking forward to see a similar feature implemented by Gitlab, even without the matching donations.
I'd much rather work on a company that has a pleasant atmosphere but not insane growth than on a shitty environment grinding my ass off.
But ignoring performance completely, that is nuts. Because output and success also bring joy and enhance the atmosphere of teams.