That is kind of irrelevant. Getting yourself involved in discussions about religion ends well only if everyone agrees with each other already. I can kind of understand tabs vs spaces religious wars, since that impacts day-to-day work life. But getting drawn into discussions about 7h century events is not necessary, so why do it?
Harassment is not a victimless crime, where is the victim?
I'm not saying that whatever the OP said was legally harassment. I don't care about legalities because OP was not sued, not even a disciplinary action was taken. My point is that just because there is no victim doesn't mean that everything is fine. I made up the racism example to illustrate that even when there is no identifiable victim, such talk can still be problematic.
A co-worker has complained to our manager, when I pointed a similar fact out during a conversation.
Discussing religion in the work setting is dubious. Why would you want to do that anyway?
The manager then reprimanded me pointing out the company's policy against "harassment"
Whether the slap on the wrist was justified can only be judged if we had audio recording of the conversation.
even though no one on our team is a Muslim.
I'm not sure this makes the situation much better. If all white co-workers were discussing dem-lazy-ni**ers, management might still find it problematic.
I don't trust my own government any more or less than a foreign one at this point. As a result, I've simply tuned it all out.
If you consider US and Russian governments equally bad, I don't think you have ever been tuned in. To illustrate, when people here (in Eastern Europe) are "concerned" with political climate in the US, they fear that it will turn into something like Russia.
With this reasoning, is there any crime that can't be justified, if it was committed by large enough group? Hell, even actions of Breivik can be justified this way. If only he didn't read the wrong literature and had more diverse circle of friends, he wouldn't have killed all those people.
Even worse for Lee, he didn't live in the world where it was an alien idea that blacks should be as free as whites. He lived at the crossroads and he made a choice.
Finally, for Lee himself the statue means nothing, because he is dead. Those statues are for those still living. For example, I grew up in a state with plenty of statues of Lenin and monuments for the Red Army. After regaining independence, those things were removed. Not because we wanted to forget the terror of soviet regime, but not to live in a country which prides itself for having soviet terror.
Isn't Canonical a business? With money? That they could use to hire people?
Just because Canonical doesn't pay doesn't mean that those people who show up won't get paid. If a company is selling PCs with Ubuntu, or are using it inhouse, might care enough about future Ubuntu desktop experience and lend their staff for couple of days to serve their business interests.
Inequalities tend to hit women more than men. How many well paid and/or prestigious fields you know, which are dominated by women? How many such fields dominated by men? Personally, when I say that nursing and teaching is dominated by women, I see it as a symptom that something has gone wrong. Solution usually is to increase pay and/or prestige of the profession, not by somehow forcing people in. Sure, it is possible that biological predispositions would play a role, like in firefighting, but somehow the conversation tend to look like reenactment of Yes, minister. Vast majority of gender imbalance cases can't be explained away with biology, yet for some reason computer science and engineering folks love to speculate on biological aspects. All the biologists I have talks to about these things don't buy the “inherit predisposition” argument either.
Why should people care? Because if “the system” is such that women get less prestigious and less paying jobs, it puts them at disadvantage. They become more dependent on husbands, thus are more likely to stay in abusive relationships, higher risk of poverty etc. If for some reason the day would come where women would disproportionally get prestigious and well paying jobs, then that would be an indicator that something has gone wrong, but we are not in that position, and I write this knowing full well, that it is very unlikely that either of us live in the country, or even a continent.
social penalty is your claim, demonstrate it does exists rather than simply being a choice, and there are certainly enough counter example of people wanting to do such job
People can choose to defy social expectations and bare the consequences. Just because some do, doesn't mean that there is no pressure. Ask your male colleagues what they think their friends would think if they chose to be stay-at-home dads and let their wives become the sole breadwinner. Ask the same to your female colleagues. Ask how it would impact their self worth.
I'm pretty sure criticizing former imperial powers for acting imperial again is somewhat appropriate to this conversation.
I just don't see how this project is imperial. It totally can be imperialistic and this project should be scrutinized, but unless you show coercion or massive corruption, calling it imperialistic is not appropriate.
As for the religion bit, that is just trolling, right? If not, I don't even...
Google has at best “don't ask don't tell” ideological policy, but judging from the stories about their hiring process, it's more of a “I have no idea what I am doing”. Soviet ideological purge was to actively seek those whom to remove. For this guy to get fired it took a public outcry. In any case, comparing Google to Soviet regime is like equating pedants to Nazis — hardly useful and would make you believe that Nazis were just as bad as annoying pedants.
it would likely become a lot more stable if the world suddenly found a serious self-interest in making it so.
This whole thing could go either way. The solar panels could become a recourse curse. Also, world interest could also give perverse incentive to back up dictators. War Collage had a interesting (albeit cynical) podcast on this.
How is this moving wealth to Europe? If Europe is paying for use of land, then this is transfer of wealth from Europe to Tunisia. It is an energy transfer to Europe, but unless Tunisia is using that energy (or the land, where that energy is falling on) for themselves, they are not losing anything (economically).
Do the Tunisians get any of the electricity? Or do we just throw a few beads at them and move in?
Now that is racist. Tunisians don't need payment in goods, rather payment in money and let them decide, if they rather spend it on electricity, built their own solar panels, build an ice skating ring in every town or whatever.
There is *some* inherent sexism, but that does not explain 100% why in some job you have a 80/20 toward one gender or the other
I agree that [workplace] sexisms does not account for all of it. One aspect is social standing. How much does hauling garbage decrease social standing for men and women? How much does it influence chances of getting/retaining a life partner? For men, it is deemed as “at least an honest job”; for women social standing is more influenced by their looks, compared to men.
Army has another interesting aspect. Imagine that your movie industry produced a lot of war movies, and in all of them soldiers/generals were predominantly women and men would play roles of love interest/trophies (the best fighter pilot get the sexy man). How do you think the army composition would look in such society? Nurses have similar issue. TV shows depict nurses as women.
The teachers are the most fascinating profession. In my country, some +50 years ago teachers were mostly men, now it is mostly women. At least here it boils down to the pay. The more you pay for the job, the more likely the men will take it over. Pay less, and more women will do it. My guess is that men are taught that they are the breadwinner, so they should get into professions that pay well.
We could dismiss all that by saying So what? It doesn't matter why women don't care about some professions. If they don't care, we shouldn't change their minds. To this strawman I answer, that this indicates that there is an environment, where those who do want to be in those professions will suffer unnecessary social penalties. Also, it limits the free market of labour. Those women, who would otherwise be great programmers, would become so-so nurses and those men, who would otherwise do splendid job as nurses, would become so-so programmers.
sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent
You mean the killings, deportations, torture or closing borders for escaping? If you were referring to not paying money in exchange of services as Soviet treatment of dissent, you have really messed up understanding of what the Soviet union was.
Nope, virtue signalling just means doing things that indicate that you are virtuous, usually by not doing very much yourself. For example, if your neighbour (let's call him Jhon) is arrested for killing babies, and you go around calling Jhon an immoral tosser, that is virtue signalling. When your friends mom dies and you show up to the funeral and give solace, that is virtue signalling. If fact, the comment you wrote just now is virtue signalling.
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
Not all thieves! If you can implement policy that will discourage half of the thieves, why not do that? For example, in Latvia kill switches were implemented at cell operator level about 15 years ago and it did reduce phone thefts significantly.
Thieves will smash a car window to get a few coins in a car's cupholder.
Coins are real money, phones can (maybe) be sold for real money. Selling things is real work.
being fucked up in the head... swift and blinding violence to kill the enemy
As a side note, if a person is willingly joining an organization which is made to kill [hopefully] other people, then they are either misinformed, or truly fucked up in the head. But seriously, “fucked up in the head” is meaningless. I might as well say that believing in some invisible dude in the sky, that is kind of loving, but sometimes tells to kill others, is fucked up and such people should not be anywhere near military, but Christians are still serving in the US army. You have to show how being transgender would significantly impair ability to serve.
It doesn't take much of a hormone imbalance to really fsck a person up.
Not all transgender people use hormones, most don't. Military can have policy that limits paricipation of those who need homonal medication, blanket ban on transgender people is excessive.
Look, we did just find without these till now..why rock the boat?
US military has had serving transgender people for a while now, why rock the boat and exclude them? There is a good reason not to exclude — talent. If a transgender person is better than the next candidate, why lose this talent?
The military is NOT the place for social experimentation.
Military is THE place for all kinds of experimentation. This is how organizations do get better — by trying things out and seeing how it turns out. Given how the initiative to ban trans people form the military is coming from white house and not from the pentagon, it seem that this isn't to keep the killing machine effective, but to satisfy voters.
There's a BIG difference between being born a certain race...vs choosing if you want to cut your pee-pee off and dress like a girl.
Being transgender does not imply removing body parts. If your point is that other soldiers will be distracted, the same issue holds up for race. If you think lack of genitals will make them less of a fighter, look up janissaries. If you think wearing skirts is an issue, look up ladies from hell (besides, women in US army don't wear skirts in battle).
16.06 has 5 years worth of support. What kind of company is going to re-do their entire infrastructure every 5 years?
If you need 10 years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has that. Add ~5 years of “extended” support, if you really need it. If somehow you have managed to get yourself in a real pickle and need to run it longer than that, you can maintain it yourself (as a company, using contractors, probably ex Red Hat employees) or use hardened (virtualized, in separate network etc.) unmaintained versions.
In any case, I am not aware of any applications that are supported longer than 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
We do not know who started the conversation
That is kind of irrelevant. Getting yourself involved in discussions about religion ends well only if everyone agrees with each other already. I can kind of understand tabs vs spaces religious wars, since that impacts day-to-day work life. But getting drawn into discussions about 7h century events is not necessary, so why do it?
Harassment is not a victimless crime, where is the victim?
I'm not saying that whatever the OP said was legally harassment. I don't care about legalities because OP was not sued, not even a disciplinary action was taken. My point is that just because there is no victim doesn't mean that everything is fine. I made up the racism example to illustrate that even when there is no identifiable victim, such talk can still be problematic.
A co-worker has complained to our manager, when I pointed a similar fact out during a conversation.
Discussing religion in the work setting is dubious. Why would you want to do that anyway?
The manager then reprimanded me pointing out the company's policy against "harassment"
Whether the slap on the wrist was justified can only be judged if we had audio recording of the conversation.
even though no one on our team is a Muslim.
I'm not sure this makes the situation much better. If all white co-workers were discussing dem-lazy-ni**ers, management might still find it problematic.
Well, I live in Eastern Europe, in city called Moscow. And I frankly don't see anything different wrt US vs Russia.
As the folk saying goes, menshe znaesh, krepche spish.
I don't trust my own government any more or less than a foreign one at this point. As a result, I've simply tuned it all out.
If you consider US and Russian governments equally bad, I don't think you have ever been tuned in. To illustrate, when people here (in Eastern Europe) are "concerned" with political climate in the US, they fear that it will turn into something like Russia.
He was a product of his time and so are we.
With this reasoning, is there any crime that can't be justified, if it was committed by large enough group? Hell, even actions of Breivik can be justified this way. If only he didn't read the wrong literature and had more diverse circle of friends, he wouldn't have killed all those people.
Even worse for Lee, he didn't live in the world where it was an alien idea that blacks should be as free as whites. He lived at the crossroads and he made a choice.
Finally, for Lee himself the statue means nothing, because he is dead. Those statues are for those still living. For example, I grew up in a state with plenty of statues of Lenin and monuments for the Red Army. After regaining independence, those things were removed. Not because we wanted to forget the terror of soviet regime, but not to live in a country which prides itself for having soviet terror.
unusable; way too dumbed down, essential (to me) features removed
In the good old days people at least were a bit more specific with their off-topic whining.
Isn't Canonical a business? With money? That they could use to hire people?
Just because Canonical doesn't pay doesn't mean that those people who show up won't get paid. If a company is selling PCs with Ubuntu, or are using it inhouse, might care enough about future Ubuntu desktop experience and lend their staff for couple of days to serve their business interests.
Read the full memo with figures intact
Care to give us a link?
He gave citations for all of it.
Were those citations any good? Did they actually support the point he was making?
Inequalities tend to hit women more than men. How many well paid and/or prestigious fields you know, which are dominated by women? How many such fields dominated by men? Personally, when I say that nursing and teaching is dominated by women, I see it as a symptom that something has gone wrong. Solution usually is to increase pay and/or prestige of the profession, not by somehow forcing people in. Sure, it is possible that biological predispositions would play a role, like in firefighting, but somehow the conversation tend to look like reenactment of Yes, minister. Vast majority of gender imbalance cases can't be explained away with biology, yet for some reason computer science and engineering folks love to speculate on biological aspects. All the biologists I have talks to about these things don't buy the “inherit predisposition” argument either.
Why should people care? Because if “the system” is such that women get less prestigious and less paying jobs, it puts them at disadvantage. They become more dependent on husbands, thus are more likely to stay in abusive relationships, higher risk of poverty etc. If for some reason the day would come where women would disproportionally get prestigious and well paying jobs, then that would be an indicator that something has gone wrong, but we are not in that position, and I write this knowing full well, that it is very unlikely that either of us live in the country, or even a continent.
social penalty is your claim, demonstrate it does exists rather than simply being a choice, and there are certainly enough counter example of people wanting to do such job
People can choose to defy social expectations and bare the consequences. Just because some do, doesn't mean that there is no pressure. Ask your male colleagues what they think their friends would think if they chose to be stay-at-home dads and let their wives become the sole breadwinner. Ask the same to your female colleagues. Ask how it would impact their self worth.
I'm pretty sure criticizing former imperial powers for acting imperial again is somewhat appropriate to this conversation.
I just don't see how this project is imperial. It totally can be imperialistic and this project should be scrutinized, but unless you show coercion or massive corruption, calling it imperialistic is not appropriate.
As for the religion bit, that is just trolling, right? If not, I don't even...
Google has at best “don't ask don't tell” ideological policy, but judging from the stories about their hiring process, it's more of a “I have no idea what I am doing”. Soviet ideological purge was to actively seek those whom to remove. For this guy to get fired it took a public outcry. In any case, comparing Google to Soviet regime is like equating pedants to Nazis — hardly useful and would make you believe that Nazis were just as bad as annoying pedants.
it would likely become a lot more stable if the world suddenly found a serious self-interest in making it so.
This whole thing could go either way. The solar panels could become a recourse curse. Also, world interest could also give perverse incentive to back up dictators. War Collage had a interesting (albeit cynical) podcast on this.
instead to move the wealth to Europe
How is this moving wealth to Europe? If Europe is paying for use of land, then this is transfer of wealth from Europe to Tunisia. It is an energy transfer to Europe, but unless Tunisia is using that energy (or the land, where that energy is falling on) for themselves, they are not losing anything (economically).
Do the Tunisians get any of the electricity? Or do we just throw a few beads at them and move in?
Now that is racist. Tunisians don't need payment in goods, rather payment in money and let them decide, if they rather spend it on electricity, built their own solar panels, build an ice skating ring in every town or whatever.
There is *some* inherent sexism, but that does not explain 100% why in some job you have a 80/20 toward one gender or the other
I agree that [workplace] sexisms does not account for all of it. One aspect is social standing. How much does hauling garbage decrease social standing for men and women? How much does it influence chances of getting/retaining a life partner? For men, it is deemed as “at least an honest job”; for women social standing is more influenced by their looks, compared to men.
Army has another interesting aspect. Imagine that your movie industry produced a lot of war movies, and in all of them soldiers/generals were predominantly women and men would play roles of love interest/trophies (the best fighter pilot get the sexy man). How do you think the army composition would look in such society? Nurses have similar issue. TV shows depict nurses as women.
The teachers are the most fascinating profession. In my country, some +50 years ago teachers were mostly men, now it is mostly women. At least here it boils down to the pay. The more you pay for the job, the more likely the men will take it over. Pay less, and more women will do it. My guess is that men are taught that they are the breadwinner, so they should get into professions that pay well.
We could dismiss all that by saying So what? It doesn't matter why women don't care about some professions. If they don't care, we shouldn't change their minds. To this strawman I answer, that this indicates that there is an environment, where those who do want to be in those professions will suffer unnecessary social penalties. Also, it limits the free market of labour. Those women, who would otherwise be great programmers, would become so-so nurses and those men, who would otherwise do splendid job as nurses, would become so-so programmers.
sure are quite Soviet in their treatment of dissent
You mean the killings, deportations, torture or closing borders for escaping? If you were referring to not paying money in exchange of services as Soviet treatment of dissent, you have really messed up understanding of what the Soviet union was.
There is actual research showing that neuroticism affect women more than men
Even your link shows that the difference is by half of a standard deviation.
Nope, virtue signalling just means doing things that indicate that you are virtuous, usually by not doing very much yourself. For example, if your neighbour (let's call him Jhon) is arrested for killing babies, and you go around calling Jhon an immoral tosser, that is virtue signalling. When your friends mom dies and you show up to the funeral and give solace, that is virtue signalling. If fact, the comment you wrote just now is virtue signalling.
I am against equality of outcome.
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
There's no amount that's too little for them.
Not all thieves! If you can implement policy that will discourage half of the thieves, why not do that? For example, in Latvia kill switches were implemented at cell operator level about 15 years ago and it did reduce phone thefts significantly.
Thieves will smash a car window to get a few coins in a car's cupholder.
Coins are real money, phones can (maybe) be sold for real money. Selling things is real work.
being fucked up in the head ... swift and blinding violence to kill the enemy
As a side note, if a person is willingly joining an organization which is made to kill [hopefully] other people, then they are either misinformed, or truly fucked up in the head. But seriously, “fucked up in the head” is meaningless. I might as well say that believing in some invisible dude in the sky, that is kind of loving, but sometimes tells to kill others, is fucked up and such people should not be anywhere near military, but Christians are still serving in the US army. You have to show how being transgender would significantly impair ability to serve.
It doesn't take much of a hormone imbalance to really fsck a person up.
Not all transgender people use hormones, most don't. Military can have policy that limits paricipation of those who need homonal medication, blanket ban on transgender people is excessive.
Look, we did just find without these till now..why rock the boat?
US military has had serving transgender people for a while now, why rock the boat and exclude them? There is a good reason not to exclude — talent. If a transgender person is better than the next candidate, why lose this talent?
The military is NOT the place for social experimentation.
Military is THE place for all kinds of experimentation. This is how organizations do get better — by trying things out and seeing how it turns out. Given how the initiative to ban trans people form the military is coming from white house and not from the pentagon, it seem that this isn't to keep the killing machine effective, but to satisfy voters.
There's a BIG difference between being born a certain race...vs choosing if you want to cut your pee-pee off and dress like a girl.
Being transgender does not imply removing body parts. If your point is that other soldiers will be distracted, the same issue holds up for race. If you think lack of genitals will make them less of a fighter, look up janissaries. If you think wearing skirts is an issue, look up ladies from hell (besides, women in US army don't wear skirts in battle).
What experimentation? You mean transgender people can't kill other people?
16.06 has 5 years worth of support. What kind of company is going to re-do their entire infrastructure every 5 years?
If you need 10 years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has that. Add ~5 years of “extended” support, if you really need it. If somehow you have managed to get yourself in a real pickle and need to run it longer than that, you can maintain it yourself (as a company, using contractors, probably ex Red Hat employees) or use hardened (virtualized, in separate network etc.) unmaintained versions.
In any case, I am not aware of any applications that are supported longer than 10 years.