Slashdot Mirror
Sex Offender Gets New Hearing After Hearing Officer Rants Against Arial Font
ericgoldman writes "People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn't depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he 'can't trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!' and 'I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.' This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with."
What is more disturbing is the thought that there have been and always will be people like this in power and most of them are not stupid enough to post this shit publicly... they just quietly sit there and do a really half assed job and determine the course of peoples lives.
These are the types of people the gun nuts should go shoot, not random kids.
Suppose I interview an engineer and it goes badly. We have an up-or-down vote after his series of interviews and decide not to hire him. At that point, I could see telling jokes like "...and I'd never hire someone who was black, anyway." We'd all laugh and move on to the next person. In fact, though, if the candidate was good then it would never come up again. It absolutely would *not* prevent us from hiring someone and wouldn't even remotely be a weighted factor.