Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are We Living In the Golden Age of Bailing? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report that makes a case of us living in an era where bailing has become just too common: It's clear we're living in a golden age of bailing. All across America people are deciding on Monday that it would be really fantastic to go grab a drink with X on Thursday. But then when Thursday actually rolls around they realize it would actually be more fantastic to go home, flop on the bed and watch Carpool Karaoke videos. So they send the bailing text or email: "So sorry! I'm gonna have to flake on drinks tonight. Overwhelmed. My grandmother just got bubonic plague..." Bailing is one of the defining acts of the current moment because it stands at the nexus of so many larger trends: the ambiguity of modern social relationships, the fraying of commitments (paywalled), what my friend Hayley Darden calls the ethic of flexibility ushered in by smartphone apps -- not to mention the decline of civilization, the collapse of morality and the ruination of all we hold dear. [...] Technology makes it all so easy. You just pull out your phone and bailing on a rendezvous is as easy as canceling an Uber driver. There are different categories of bailing. There is canceling on friends. This seems to follow a bail curve pattern. People feel free to bail on close friends, because they will understand, and on distant friends, because they don't matter so much, but they are less inclined to bail on medium-tier or fragile friends. Then there is professional bailing. This tends to have a hierarchical structure. A high-status person will frequently bail on a lower-status colleague, but if an intern bails on a senior executive, it is a sign of serious disrespect. What do you folks think?
This is not only an American trait, the only place where I don't see it happening regularly is Japan..
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
It happens in Germany, not so much, so. It happens far less in Spain, France, Italy. Because the dating and "going out" culture is completely different.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Betteridge's law is one of those really stupid ideas that makes no sense. That explains why the users here keep trotting it out. Most readers on this site are pretty stupid. What if the headline read, "was Hitler wrong to exterminate the Jews?" Would you answer no to that? My god the people here are stupid, just like Betteridge.
Actually it's a corollary of good writing practices, in the context of newspaper journalism.
Headlines need to be as short as possible, so if you're waisting letters on a question word it better be because your article explains why the answer is "no" as otehrwise any editor with half the title would have cut it down to the shorter declarative statement, or tossed the article in the trash if all it does is restate the headline in paragraph form.
For example:
"Will Earth Explode Tomorrow?"
"Earth to Explode Tomorrow"