You say he's "sent a message" to a female team member that the dress code is there to marshall her sexuality - when actually, he's just trying to keep her from sending a message that says "fuck me" to everything within 50 miles that has a penis (and maybe a lot of things that don't).
Why can't she be saying, "I don't mind if you take a look as long as you are discreet." Most reasonable people don't assume that everything in the world that is attractive to them for whatever reason was specifically designed to elicit and overt response. Its called impulse control -- catch it (at the next appropriate juncture).
The problem stems from the definition of "harassing". It's literally anything that the perceiver finds offensive.
Not really. It is merely anything the policy creator believes will run afoul of existing law and precedent. I am pretty sure I could live the rest of a very fulfilling life without intentionally or inadvertently offending a co-worker in a way that would get me or my employer sued.
Moreover, a sincere apology goes a long way. Naturally, that is tricky when the offense was intentional. But if you generally conduct yourself in a decent manner, people will forgive the occasional slip-up.
Of course, there are unreasonable and/or malevolent people who will abuse any system. There is no defense against this behavior other than, again, establishing a reputation for being a decent person.
If I hire an employee, male or female I expect her or him to get the work done, instead of bitching about not liking what other employees are saying and making frivolous accusation of sexual harassing because of fleeting remarks.
Is making frivolous remarks that open you up to a lawsuit part of getting the work done?
Gun rights advocates have run into the car analogy lots of times. It's even worse than the standard Slashdot tactic of using car analogies with computers. If guns were licensed like cars, almost everyone would be able to get a license; and you would be able to own and fire a gun on private property without a license. And there would be almost no limits on selling guns.
Exactly the kind of strawman argument I was talking about. Regulating guns as we regulate cars is not the same as applying the exact same regulations to guns as are applied to cars.
Futher, had there been a "delusional John Wayne wannabe", the shooter would have needed to focus his fire on that brave individual, giving others more time to react and escape.
That assumes that the shooter would have noticed incoming fire amid the chaos of a panicked crowd in a dark, noisy, tear gas filled theatre. It also assumes that he would have adopted some kind of rational response. It also assumes that hundreds of panicked people would have also assessed the situation and reacted efficiently.
Most likely, he would not have noticed someone returning fire. He would have been distracted by the chaos. The return fire would likely have missed anyway. Had he noticed, he would have simply directed his fire into a different, but just as populated area of the theatre. Moreover, in addition to a likely equal number of bystanders being at risk around the second shooter, bystanders near the original shooter would have been in the second line of fire.
See now why the NRA worries about the liberal left trying to disarm the populace?
And that's not even counting the Brady Campaign and all the other branches of the gun control nutjobs, who have always been calling for more gun control since I was a kid...
Gun control is to gun ownership what speed limits and drivers licences are to car ownership. Gun control is a risk management proposition that can easily be managed to the benefit of all interested parties.
The NRA has nothing but strawmen, slippery slopes and other bad-faith argumentation.
Turned out that he was gay (nobody had ANY clue) and found the workplace to be sexually hostile.
Under the circumstances that you described (and many other "guys just being guys" situations), I am pretty sure that anyone, of any gender or sexual orientation, could have won a lawsuit.
It isn't about who might be offended. It is about following well understood and easily complied with standards that protect everyone.
All-male groups tend to be marked by putdowns and other practices that remind everybody that there is NOT enough respect to go around,because this awareness motivates each man to try harder to earn respect. This, incidentally, has probably been a major source of friction as women have moved into the workplace, and organizations have had to shift toward policies that everyone is entitled to respect. The men hadn’t originally built them to respect everybody.
I have worked in teams that were all male or mostly male for 15 years and have never encountered this kind of dysfunctional group dynamic. There has always been plenty of respect to go around, and motivation was derived from self-respect.
You can train skills, you can't train them to be happy and functional in an existing group.
But you can face serious consequences if you allow the culture of your existing group to become hostile to women or racial/religious/ethnic minorities.
Just think of professionalism as a "skill", and follow your own advice.
This man's coworkers probably just think they're having good clean fun and that they're "keeping it real" in the face of what they feel to be phony soul-tarnishing political correctness.
Well to hell with their "realness" and their "feelings". Their attitude is pathetic.
However, it's hard to really walk in another's shoes sometimes.
Which is why the far easier route of adhering to a accepted standard of maturity and professionalism is the way to go. Don't harass people. Don't have your "fun" at the expense of someone else's ability to their job without unwanted and needless distraction.
Not everybody can learn as well from just reading textbooks, even the good ones.
Regardless, the skill and/or patience to learn from reading books is invaluable. If you want to learn things, learning how to use textbooks is a great place to start.
IMO, text is a much more efficient means of storing and communicating information than video, in general. Printing it on paper also makes information more accessible in terms of price and technological requirements.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing Comic-Con as anything but a win for everyone involved. Fans love it for the interactivity, writers, artists and actors love it for the chance to get fans excited about their work, and I'm sure it makes plenty of money for the ownership. I suspect very few people in those groups want the event to go back to focusing solely on comic books.
I suspect that MTV, the cast of Jersey Shore and their millions of "fans" (i.e. people that get a sick thrill out of watching trashy idiots humiliate themselves) wouldn't want MTV to go back to showing music videos. However, the fact that MTV has abandoned its original premise in order to chase cheaper content and easier ratings is not a "win" for music videos. It is a "win" for an alternative form of entertainment and its fans, perhaps. It is certainly a win for MTV, which likely get better ratings for content that clears a much lower bar, and which can be churned out ad nauseam.
However, reality tv is not music tv, regardless of the venue. MTVs ratings don't change this fact. Nor are television and film the same as comic books. You are into the meta "its all just stories" angle and don't care about the distinction? Fine. But that doesn't change the fact that there are distinctions that matter to others.
Its not like there is no venue for TV and film to showcase their projects and talent. Let Comic-Con be about comics.
So its TV-Con now, with a highlight being yet more discussion of a short lived, long dead show that still manages to be at least as interesting as anything that has been made since.
"We don't share this information publicly but we can tell you that, since 2010, the advertising business has grown 142%"
If their was dollar value worth bragging about, even with vague allusions, you could be sure that they'd be doing it. The fact that they would instead resort such an obvious attempt to impress you without providing any basis for arriving at an impressive conclusion yourself, suggests that they are blowing smoke.
Which is actually more aggravating. They will continue to try to squeeze money out of this rock, to the detriment of their core customer base, just because some piddly revenue that isn't even worth mentioning is nonetheless being pursued by some bean counter.
Deliver packages, for Amazon. Sell delivery trucks, to Amazon. Perform maintenance on trucks, for Amazon. Build warehouses, for Amazon. Design and build better delivery systems, for Amazon . ..
These services will be sub-contracted out. As it is, many next-day deliveries to my area are handled by company that sends out random (usually shabby) passenger cars filled with boxes. I don't know anything about the drivers, but this is certainly not a job that requires skill or commands a living wage. There will be no shiny new fleets to build and sell. There will be no homes bought or families supported by delivery personell.
There will likely be no warehouses built (again, a transient cast of cut-throat subcontractors will handle this angle).
Amazon will take the entire retail ecosystem and replace it with unskilled, barely paid manual labor controlled by software.
If your state has a sales tax, it almost certainly requires you to calculate and pay any tax not collected and remitted by sellers that you do business with (for relevant purchases). In most cases this is called a "use tax", and it appears on personal income tax filing forms.
Buying from out of state might be more convenient than under reporting income or taking improper deductions, but it is just a illegal. Chances are that if your state is interested in nailing you, they can analyze your banking and credit card records and compare your spending habits to your use tax declarations.
However, if none of that bothers you, you don't need Amazon's help. There are plenty of ways to pay less tax than you owe.
You seem to think that once a business gets to the top of their space and starts acting stupid no one knocks them off. You seem oblivious that Sears used to be the retail giant with stores everywhere that couldn't be topped.
As long as Amazon is doing it better then I am all for them expanding.
Is your ISP doing it better than anyone else could? Your mobile carrier? Your bank?
Slashdot Mirror
You say he's "sent a message" to a female team member that the dress code is there to marshall her sexuality - when actually, he's just trying to keep her from sending a message that says "fuck me" to everything within 50 miles that has a penis (and maybe a lot of things that don't).
Why can't she be saying, "I don't mind if you take a look as long as you are discreet." Most reasonable people don't assume that everything in the world that is attractive to them for whatever reason was specifically designed to elicit and overt response. Its called impulse control -- catch it (at the next appropriate juncture).
If you want to interact with other human beings, start by respecting them.
"Respect" is such a subjective term. Using the word "the" might be deemed to be disrespectful by one person who happens to take offense to it.
Such a person would have shunned society long before he or she ended up being your coworker. Or moved to a non-English speaking country.
Cartoonish edge-cases notwithstanding, it is perfectly easy to get along in the workplace without offending people.
The problem stems from the definition of "harassing". It's literally anything that the perceiver finds offensive.
Not really. It is merely anything the policy creator believes will run afoul of existing law and precedent. I am pretty sure I could live the rest of a very fulfilling life without intentionally or inadvertently offending a co-worker in a way that would get me or my employer sued.
Moreover, a sincere apology goes a long way. Naturally, that is tricky when the offense was intentional. But if you generally conduct yourself in a decent manner, people will forgive the occasional slip-up.
Of course, there are unreasonable and/or malevolent people who will abuse any system. There is no defense against this behavior other than, again, establishing a reputation for being a decent person.
If I hire an employee, male or female I expect her or him to get the work done, instead of bitching about not liking what other employees are saying and making frivolous accusation of sexual harassing because of fleeting remarks.
Is making frivolous remarks that open you up to a lawsuit part of getting the work done?
Gun rights advocates have run into the car analogy lots of times. It's even worse than the standard Slashdot tactic of using car analogies with computers. If guns were licensed like cars, almost everyone would be able to get a license; and you would be able to own and fire a gun on private property without a license. And there would be almost no limits on selling guns.
Exactly the kind of strawman argument I was talking about. Regulating guns as we regulate cars is not the same as applying the exact same regulations to guns as are applied to cars.
Futher, had there been a "delusional John Wayne wannabe", the shooter would have needed to focus his fire on that brave individual, giving others more time to react and escape.
That assumes that the shooter would have noticed incoming fire amid the chaos of a panicked crowd in a dark, noisy, tear gas filled theatre. It also assumes that he would have adopted some kind of rational response. It also assumes that hundreds of panicked people would have also assessed the situation and reacted efficiently.
Most likely, he would not have noticed someone returning fire. He would have been distracted by the chaos. The return fire would likely have missed anyway. Had he noticed, he would have simply directed his fire into a different, but just as populated area of the theatre. Moreover, in addition to a likely equal number of bystanders being at risk around the second shooter, bystanders near the original shooter would have been in the second line of fire.
See now why the NRA worries about the liberal left trying to disarm the populace?
And that's not even counting the Brady Campaign and all the other branches of the gun control nutjobs, who have always been calling for more gun control since I was a kid...
Gun control is to gun ownership what speed limits and drivers licences are to car ownership. Gun control is a risk management proposition that can easily be managed to the benefit of all interested parties.
The NRA has nothing but strawmen, slippery slopes and other bad-faith argumentation.
the golf clap is a nasty one
Which is why nobody should still be on 10.4.
I'm betting submitter is talking about "That's what she said" jokes a la The Office.
That's what he, loser of a sexual harassment judgement, said.
The Office is funny because the characters are clearly caricatures of badly behaving people.
Turned out that he was gay (nobody had ANY clue) and found the workplace to be sexually hostile.
Under the circumstances that you described (and many other "guys just being guys" situations), I am pretty sure that anyone, of any gender or sexual orientation, could have won a lawsuit.
It isn't about who might be offended. It is about following well understood and easily complied with standards that protect everyone.
Make sure you have identified the problem correctly.
It may not be sexual harassment per-se.
In Is There Anything Good About Men?,
Roy F. Baumeister writes
I have worked in teams that were all male or mostly male for 15 years and have never encountered this kind of dysfunctional group dynamic. There has always been plenty of respect to go around, and motivation was derived from self-respect.
You can train skills, you can't train them to be happy and functional in an existing group.
But you can face serious consequences if you allow the culture of your existing group to become hostile to women or racial/religious/ethnic minorities.
Just think of professionalism as a "skill", and follow your own advice.
This man's coworkers probably just think they're having good clean fun and that they're "keeping it real" in the face of what they feel to be phony soul-tarnishing political correctness.
Well to hell with their "realness" and their "feelings". Their attitude is pathetic.
However, it's hard to really walk in another's shoes sometimes.
Which is why the far easier route of adhering to a accepted standard of maturity and professionalism is the way to go. Don't harass people. Don't have your "fun" at the expense of someone else's ability to their job without unwanted and needless distraction.
It's hard not to lose one here or there when you play with them nearly daily.
QED
You say climate change, I say beach front property. No problem here.
The problem is that the boardwalk is in Utah, but the waterline is still in California.
If you have a problem with Khan being video, then why don't you have a problem with subpar teaching in general?
Who, besides you, indicated that I don't have a problem with subpar teaching?
All else being equal, I believe that text is superior to video for providing educational material.
Not everybody can learn as well from just reading textbooks, even the good ones.
Regardless, the skill and/or patience to learn from reading books is invaluable. If you want to learn things, learning how to use textbooks is a great place to start.
IMO, text is a much more efficient means of storing and communicating information than video, in general. Printing it on paper also makes information more accessible in terms of price and technological requirements.
People with a vested interest in the sky falling. . .
"Sky is falling" as in "we could cause our only viable ecosystem to spiral into an uncontrollable and unsurvivable climate upheaval"?
Or "sky is falling" as in "The status quo may be slightly inconvenienced by the need to do something innovative about energy consumption"?
Most of the time they can be used synonymously and no one will care. . .
'nough said.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing Comic-Con as anything but a win for everyone involved. Fans love it for the interactivity, writers, artists and actors love it for the chance to get fans excited about their work, and I'm sure it makes plenty of money for the ownership. I suspect very few people in those groups want the event to go back to focusing solely on comic books.
I suspect that MTV, the cast of Jersey Shore and their millions of "fans" (i.e. people that get a sick thrill out of watching trashy idiots humiliate themselves) wouldn't want MTV to go back to showing music videos. However, the fact that MTV has abandoned its original premise in order to chase cheaper content and easier ratings is not a "win" for music videos. It is a "win" for an alternative form of entertainment and its fans, perhaps. It is certainly a win for MTV, which likely get better ratings for content that clears a much lower bar, and which can be churned out ad nauseam.
However, reality tv is not music tv, regardless of the venue. MTVs ratings don't change this fact. Nor are television and film the same as comic books. You are into the meta "its all just stories" angle and don't care about the distinction? Fine. But that doesn't change the fact that there are distinctions that matter to others.
Its not like there is no venue for TV and film to showcase their projects and talent. Let Comic-Con be about comics.
So its TV-Con now, with a highlight being yet more discussion of a short lived, long dead show that still manages to be at least as interesting as anything that has been made since.
"We don't share this information publicly but we can tell you that, since 2010, the advertising business has grown 142%"
If their was dollar value worth bragging about, even with vague allusions, you could be sure that they'd be doing it. The fact that they would instead resort such an obvious attempt to impress you without providing any basis for arriving at an impressive conclusion yourself, suggests that they are blowing smoke.
Which is actually more aggravating. They will continue to try to squeeze money out of this rock, to the detriment of their core customer base, just because some piddly revenue that isn't even worth mentioning is nonetheless being pursued by some bean counter.
Whats left for 300 million people to do?
Deliver packages, for Amazon. Sell delivery trucks, to Amazon. Perform maintenance on trucks, for Amazon. Build warehouses, for Amazon. Design and build better delivery systems, for Amazon . . .
These services will be sub-contracted out. As it is, many next-day deliveries to my area are handled by company that sends out random (usually shabby) passenger cars filled with boxes. I don't know anything about the drivers, but this is certainly not a job that requires skill or commands a living wage. There will be no shiny new fleets to build and sell. There will be no homes bought or families supported by delivery personell.
There will likely be no warehouses built (again, a transient cast of cut-throat subcontractors will handle this angle).
Amazon will take the entire retail ecosystem and replace it with unskilled, barely paid manual labor controlled by software.
If your state has a sales tax, it almost certainly requires you to calculate and pay any tax not collected and remitted by sellers that you do business with (for relevant purchases). In most cases this is called a "use tax", and it appears on personal income tax filing forms.
Buying from out of state might be more convenient than under reporting income or taking improper deductions, but it is just a illegal. Chances are that if your state is interested in nailing you, they can analyze your banking and credit card records and compare your spending habits to your use tax declarations.
However, if none of that bothers you, you don't need Amazon's help. There are plenty of ways to pay less tax than you owe.
You seem to think that once a business gets to the top of their space and starts acting stupid no one knocks them off. You seem oblivious that Sears used to be the retail giant with stores everywhere that couldn't be topped.
As long as Amazon is doing it better then I am all for them expanding.
Is your ISP doing it better than anyone else could? Your mobile carrier? Your bank?