Given that I've never flown on a plane that allows you to have your bag pulled out from under the seat in front of you and sitting on the floor between seats during takeoff and landing, I took the other commenter to mean that he sticks his legs under the seat in front of him, and that his bag - also being under the seat in front of him - was therefore "between [his] legs."
If the bag doesn't fit in the overhead or under the seat in front of you, the airline will require you to gate check it. What you describe is not allowed on any airline I've heard of.
So you're one of those people who takes up space in the overhead bin that you don't need, leaving other people to have to gate-check their carryons since they won't fit under the seats? Guess what? To many of your fellow flyers who are perfectly content to place our smaller bags under the seat in front of us as travelers are supposed to, you are the annoying family taking up more than your fair share of overhead space.
It's worth adding to what you've said that the consumption of sugared drinks is an average. That means that it's counting people like me in the study - I'm below the average sugared-beverage consumption amounts (I don't drink soda, period, having completely cut it out of my diet ten years ago and never looking back), which means I'm bringing the average down. I know I'm not the only one either, as my husband also falls below the average (no soda for him, no soda in the apartment - and if we ever have kids we don't intend to change that either), and I know plenty of other people who don't drink soda. The average person who drinks soda almost certainly drinks more than the 178/103 calories' worth per day. So I would posit that the effects would be even more pronounced, at least among the soda drinkers.
That said, of course, it's also true that I/others like me wouldn't lose weight as a result of overall reduced soda consumption - but I'm already below the average weight anyway, and come to think of it, so are most of the non-soda drinkers I know (at least as far as I can tell - although some who probably are heavier also get some of that increased mass from lean muscle). Not necessarily a causative relationship, but at least I don't have to worry that I'm dragging the average upward.
All this misleading and conclusory claim (on what basis do you deem any particular number "high," by the way?) demonstrates is your own lack of attention to this issue.
I consider about half to be high. It's definitely not a super majority but I suppose that could be reached if the income constraints were altered. I don't consider $20,000/year a very comfortable living, not to mention $10,000 but that depends on the area.
Half... of what, exactly? Are you saying that the breakdown of poor to not-poor women should be some percentage other than what it is? As in, you believe that poor women should not be the ones getting abortions? Why would you believe that? Or do you mean simply that the number of women getting abortions itself is "too high" (and it isn't half of women btw; the Guttmacher link estimates that by age 45, about one-third of all women will have had an abortion)? Again, "too high" based on what? And what does the cost of living have to do with your assessment? If anything, that would seem to explain why "such" a "high" percentage of poor women have abortions: because while an abortion may be cost-prohibitive, it's nothing compared to the price of pregnancy, childbirth and raising a kid.
And save your moralizing about diverse perspectives (omg some women want to give birth and others don't? WHAAAT?!) for your weekly anti-choice circlejerk. That "women," just like regular people(!), are not some kind of emotional monolith surprises no actual grown-ups.
What are you going on about? I don't have any dogs in this race.
That's self-evidently disingenuous. The words you are typing are not the words of people who mind their own business and don't give a lick what other people do with their own bodies.
Besides your selective quotes and emotional language you also curiously use counties instead of states so you can get a sensational figure, with emphasis added no less.
Cute. If sarcasm is "emotional language" in your world, you must find the internet a scary place indeed. You're the one who started in with below-the-belt accusations, implicitly accusing "women" of doublespeak because you've heard the term "clump of cells" used in reference to abortion (that phrase is is pretty much a strawman caricature used by anti-choicers, btw -- seriously, google the phrase and tell me how many actual pro-choicers you're able to dig up who actually use it) and yet you're aware of the fact that many women (and men, but why target men when targeting women is so much more fun, right?) feel the pain of loss after a miscarriage. If you genuinely don't understand how ignorant and manipulative your sentiment was, then I apologize for wrongly misjudging you as someone with an ounce of basic understanding regarding emotional context.
As to counties versus states, I was just citing one of the numbers from the link you supplied. I guess you like some of the numbers and not others? I don't deny that counties aren't the only relevant number, although your reference to Texas is hilarious for at least two reasons, both of which tend to underscore my point: Texas is a huge land mass. To say it has "at least" one abortion clinic in the entire state is about as meaningful as saying that England and France have at least one abortion clinic between them. And, unless you live under a rock, you're surely aware that Texas is one of the least friendly states for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy. In fact, if a recent law passed in Texas is upheld, there will be fewer than ten abortion clinics remaining in the entire state; as it is currently, many women already have to drive more than a hundred miles to the nearest provider.
This issue overwhelmingly involves young women and poverty.
Ultimately they remain not difficult to get otherwise the poorest wouldn't get them in such high numbers.
All this misleading and conclusory claim (on what basis do you deem any particular number "high," by the way?) demonstrates is your own lack of attention to this issue. How easy it may or may not be to get an abortion depends not just on how much money you have, but also on which state you live in. Your own link even points out how stark this issue is: 89% of counties in the U.S. don't have a single abortion provider. 89 percent!
Oh but clearly it's women who don't want politicians having the right to trump medical decisions they make in consultation with their physicians who are the ones with an "agenda." Seriously, what is this tripe? Find me a single pro-choice activist (an actual person who is an actual activist, not a fake personality you create a blog for) who doesn't also advocate for better sex ed, better access to contraceptives and reproductive health care, and better resources for low-income parents. The things you're implicitly tut-tutting about aren't things the left has been standing in the way of. I mean, you do realize, I hope, that Guttmacher is a pro-choice organization (I mean, it's even named after a former president of Planned Parenthood)? It isn't presenting these facts because it views them as an indictment of pro-choice politics. Pro-choicers have never made this an either-or debate as you're implying.
And save your moralizing about diverse perspectives (omg some women want to give birth and others don't? WHAAAT?!) for your weekly anti-choice circlejerk. That "women," just like regular people(!), are not some kind of emotional monolith surprises no actual grown-ups.
I don't understand why the question is framed as one of employment. If the patent is valuable, the submitter should be hiring security specialists, not trying to become one from scratch. If the patent isn't valuable, then it has zero relevance to the job search unless the only reason it lacks value is because the submitter is crap at business. And if that's the case, why isn't the submitter trying to sell the patent for quick buck and use that to fund this interest in security credentials? I'm just having trouble reconciling the whole "I'm pursuing business interests with a security-related patent I own" with "I want to be someone else's hired gun for security work." Perhaps the problem is that the submitter is being disingenuous about the level of involvement in business discussions related to this patent - regardless, the first thing I would work on is creating a narrative that will make an ounce of sense to employers, because this one doesn't.
Also, I'm around the same age as submitter and haven't talked about my GPA in forever. Why are we talking about GPAs at all?? No one cares about your GPA 12 years ago. Seriously, no one. Far more worrying is the implication that a 12-year-old GPA is the most relevant thing you can talk to a potential employer about.
it's risky to hire people because letting go of the lemons often comes with legal hurdles.
In the US, the legal hurdles aren't so much in the letting people go as in the making sure you don't violate the law while they're employed. I've seen so many employers blithely ignore technical (or sometimes more egregious) requirements for things like vacation rules, IC vs employee status, wage and hour rules, etc. that it's pretty obvious many are playing the odds that workers won't make a fuss.
The real risk of firing someone isn't that you'll fire them illegally; it's that now you've just taken away the primary reason they weren't calling you on the shit you've been pulling all along hoping you wouldn't get caught. This is why so many employers have taken to asking people to sign "severance agreements" that give them a pittance in exchange for a full release from everything the law will let them get a release for. Most people who've just been let go are either insufficiently savvy, too busy, or just plain too desperate for that last paycheck to be able to turn it down, even if the claims they might have against their ex-employer for labor code violations would amount to more money.
33-year-old woman here (i.e., also between generations). If I had to hazard a guess based on your comment, I would say that the problem is your attitude. Women my age have zero problem dating an actually mature, positive, thoughtful, emotionally stable guy within around 5-7 years (+/-) of their age. My single girlfriends regularly bemoan the lack of guys who manage to be stable and mature without being sexist assholes. It would seem that they're exceedingly rare.
I imagine you could counter that, no, it's their attitude that is the problem. I don't know. Pointing fingers is always easiest, I suppose. Certainly beats risking rejection and growth by dating an actual human being instead of holding out for perfection.
"Easily"? You must drive a highly fuel-efficient car or else leave in the middle of the night when there's no traffic. Depending on your starting point, just getting through LA traffic can eat up close to a quarter-tank.
Granted, yes, it could very well take that same almost-quarter-tank to get from your home to the train station, but regardless, "easily" strikes me as a stretch. My husband and I just recently made the drive from SF to LA and back and spent probably closer to 100, 120 bucks in gas AND got to deal with the fun of a mysterious "check engine" light that turned on about 40 miles outside of LA and cost us 300 bucks for the dealer to tell us it was a spark plug, grrrr. This isn't a particular old, finicky, or out-of-shape car, either: 2008 VW sedan, we've been good about maintenance, etc.
In fact, in my experience, the average corporate employer's respect for each of the three options has a near-perfect inverse relationship with the cost of each option.
Of course, I proofread this five times and only after I hit "Submit" did I realize that the relationship I'm alluding to is direct, not inverse. Derp. Or as Gene Wilder (as the only Willy Wonka in existence, and I will abide no dispute on this point) more eloquently put it: "Strike that. Reverse it."
It is NOT reasonable to expect that society will simply provide you with the specific job you want, a job you find engaging or interesting, or a job that's fun or enjoyable. Despite huge advances in machines and technology, there still are plenty of jobs that require hard work, often physical labor, or tedious activities. Someone has to do them. Society may "owe" you a job -- but it doesn't owe you a job that will enable you to play video games all day long, or a job as an actor or a musician or whatever.
The "video games" remark is unfairly dismissive, and denigrating artistic aspirations is hardly the exclusive province of those of us just old enough to look down on 20-somethings. My Boomer parents were doing that decades ago, as I'm sure their parents did as well.
My two minor peeves aside, while there's something to your point, and I appreciate your recognition elsewhere in your comment that there are larger forces at work here too, one key larger force that it seems you haven't accounted for is the resume effect: namely, if I, as a white-collar professional (or aspiring white-collar professional, or aspiring whatever-with-60k-in-student-loan-debt, etc.), find myself unexpectedly laid off and have difficulty finding work in my field, my options pretty much fall into one of three broad possibilities: (1) go back to school, (2) do something creatively/personally rewarding and/or interesting (volunteer work, something creative but still tied to my field, etc.), or (3) take whatever job I can find to put money on the table.
I wholeheartedly agree that option (3) is worthy of consideration and respect, but most employers looking at resumes don't. Period. In fact, in my experience, the average corporate employer's respect for each of the three options has a near-perfect inverse relationship with the cost of each option. This is pure classism, and it is horrific, and it is unquestionably adding to the country's (and the world's) massive economic inequality and countless other problems. A person (with the means to be able to do so) who avoids option (3) isn't necessarily doing it out of laziness or unrealistic expectations. It's highly possible, even probable in many cases, that he or she is doing it because of insight (which may well be subconscious) into the way things are in the modern business world. I'm reluctant to apportion much blame to relatively disempowered individuals for responding in a wholly rational manner to the skewed incentives that the more-powerful create for them.
I don't seen that in the Mils I've run into. Perhaps for the generations just prior to them, I see the hard work still, etc...but the youngest ones just in the workforce the past 3-5 years, nope, they expect a high paying job and don't understand you have to work and COMPETE for the money and job.
And what are the "generations just prior"? How prior? Prior to whom, precisely? Someone who's been in the workforce for only 3-5 years is maybe, what, mid-twenties, tops? So this is someone who was born in the early 90s. I hope you realize that the the youngest cutoff most social scientists use to describe "Millenials" is 1984, and most go with an earlier year like 1982 or 1980. So while you're bemoaning the common problem of young people new to the corporate world/professional workforce who haven't yet acclimated and attributing this to a particular generation, you're completely ignoring the fact that the "generation" in question is defined as including people about ten years older than the folks you're griping about.
Do you have the same gripes about your 31-year-old coworkers? If not, then guess what, you're yet another person anecdotally demonstrating that this is not a generational trend, but rather the same, age-old problem of young people seeming annoyingly young to those of us who are a little bit (or a lot) older than them.
Many/most people raised in the 80s and 90s are considered Millenials. Only a very small handful of those still in high school fall into the Millenial category. People here seem to be thinking "Millenial" means teens and brand-new employees. Depending on which of the proposed birth year cut-offs you favor, "Millenials" can include people as old as 35 this year.
... to see Mr. Gates fall into the "Fair Tax" nonsense. I suppose this is why business and economics are such distinct fields. If only more business people understood that.
Actually, the point of the rule is so that companies who want to assert exclusive rights to a trademark can't continue doing that if they allow the public to casually associate the mark with every competitor's comparable product and then later try to assert a de facto monopoly over the product itself by virtue of its association with their mark (basically performing an end-run around patent statutes). Don't worry, though; I'm sure there are plenty of other things you can find to blame lawyers for.
Eh. It kinda works. If your goal is to invade Amazon accounts using the method laid out in the strip, it's that much easier to do because by allowing you to use anything for a password, they're more likely to have people using simple repeat passwords that, even if not common for everyone, are common for the user. If those sites had more stringent requirements, you couldn't use your childhood dog's name as a password like you've been doing for various account passwords since high school.
But yeah -- this xkcd was probably the more applicable strip.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just have a slightly different emphasis/vantage point. Basically, you're probably technically correct in marginal cases that there is a handful of behaviors and choices that likely mitigate risk as a matter of pure statistics. I simply think that's not really a useful thing to add to conversation, largely because based on my experience, most people aren't intellectually savvy enough to insulate the technical observation from common human reactionary responses. And thus, as a matter of common parlance, I think it's generally best to avoid talking about such specific observations about risk and responsibility in those terms at all -- in other words, I suppose, the risk in acknowledging the underlying truth there in public conversation is that people will fail to limit that truth to its proper application and will instead expand its reach. And, to me, it's a pretty high risk -- so my risk calculation here compels me to avoid taking the action in question. I rarely see it adding value to a conversation but frequently see it fueling the flames of actual sexism.
As for apportionment of responsibility, I strongly agree that it's very important for social justice - but justice itself is largely irrelevant to eliminating social problems,
I completely disagree. To the contrary, I'd suggest that cultural acceptance of victim-blaming type mentalities rather tends to reinforce in the minds of wrongdoers that their active wrongdoing involves less culpability than it truly does. Consider the treatment of women in countries like the United States where formal legal equality is for the most part the norm, and where we at least pay lip service to the notion that women who go to certain places or dress a certain way aren't "asking" to be raped. Where we don't pretend that wearing the "wrong" clothing constitutes assumption of the risk, women's freedoms and movements are relatively less restricted by cultural convention. Conversely, in countries that adhere to religious norms holding women responsible for their rapists' behavior, unsurprisingly, we see that women are mistreated in countless other contexts as well, and that they "choose" greater restrictions to their own freedoms essentially out of a self-preservation instinct.
Victim blaming -- and the attendant conflation of the distinct concepts of foreseeability and causation -- normalizes the wrongdoers and puts the cultural onus on those at risk to engage in ultimately impotent behaviors to protect themselves. Why impotent? You yourself noted that some amount of wrongdoing is inevitable. But now, on top of the unfortunate fact of wrongdoing, we've also created a culture in which innocent people are expected (and thereby de facto required) to restrict their own lifestyles and behavior, because we have decided to hold people responsible for avoiding their own inevitable victimization -- rather than do our part, collectively, to minimize its occurrence, we've opted for the psychological narcotic of shifting blame from perpetrators to victims, in order to ease our own uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability.
There is little blame to be had by the woman assaulted while walking down the sidewalk in a well-to-do neighborhood, on the other hand if she makes a habit of strolling through dark alleys in a bad part of town without means of defense... As horrible as it feels to say so, there is a certain element of reaping what you sow. That is not to say that the assailant shouldn't still be punished just as hard as if they had assaulted her in a full church or something, but *she* bears an additional level of responsibility for the event as well, and loses much of her claim to sympathy from society as a result.
Even leaving untouched the host of unpalatable classist implications in your comment, exactly what has the second woman "sown"? And why on earth would you deem her undeserving of sympathy? Have you never done something unsafe in your life? And don't play the "I'd accept it if something unspeakable happened to me" card, because it's the rhetorical equivalent of a null hypothesis put forth as an affirmative factual statement in the absence of usable data.
If you've done something unsafe, unless you're an extremely irrational person (and if you are, there's no point in trying to have a discussion with you anyway), you did that unsafe thing because you performed a risk calculation in your head and concluded that the risk of [bad thing] occurring was sufficiently low as not to override the value to you of doing [unsafe thing]. Thus, you're in essence suggesting that, instead of encouraging us all to behave as rational actors, our culture ought instead to inculcate a fear of shame to override our rational impulses when the risk of certain kinds of victimization are thrown into the calculus. Why would you prefer to live in a society in which people make decisions based primarily on fear instead of logic?
LOL. You know what? Okay, let's try it your way. Let's see if your comment was actually about pointing out a factual inaccuracy because of your deep abiding loyalty to the Truth, having nothing whatsoever to do with any attempts to derail the conversation from my real point.
Okay. Ya got me. Mea culpa, I am ashamed, I apologize to my mother and all of my teachers who taught me better than this. You have caught me in a hyperbole, good sir, and we all deserve better than that. Thank you for your service to this community.
Yes, you are indeed correct that I cannot say with absolute certainty that literally no single person on the face of this planet refers to mere advice-giving as "victim-blaming." I made a sweeping statement, and I hang my head in shame at its presumptuous over-inclusive nature, to which you have expertly drawn attention. I shall rub ashes into my forehead if it will help to ameliorate the severe wrong I have done to you all with my false, fraudulent, misleading characterization.
Now that we've dealt with your thorough rhetorical lashing of my feeble overstatement, would you care to address any of the actual content of my comment? Or was that all you had to contribute?
My point is that while assigning blame or relative liability is a wonderful thing for a justice system, it's absolutely irrelevant if your goal is to avoid having bad things happen in the first place.
If the point of a discussion is to apportion responsibility among various parties, though, it isn't irrelevant. The phrase "victim blaming" isn't exactly confusing. Most people would read that as a rather obvious objection to what they perceive as your blaming of persons when you seem to be saying that you actually aren't. Seems to me if you sincerely don't care about assigning blame you could really easily just say "I'm not concerned with who's at fault. Throw everyone in prison for all I care. Hackers and providers and victims alike. Just get rid of the whole lot of them and the problem will go away."
I mean, for that matter, let's just destroy the communications infrastructure that makes the internet possible. That'll stop the bad forms of hacking -- since you seem to think blame is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is solving a problem, and by definition no solution is susceptible to an objection that it unfairly places responsibility and/or undue restrictions on people who shouldn't have to bear them.
Because look guys, we're just being solutions-oriented. Why do you keep making us out to be bad guys? Do you hate solutions? Do you LIKE people being able to steal your identity? Then hey, by all means, keep the internet. But don't complain when people use it to steal your stuff.
Animals, human or otherwise, will do their thing.
So why bother arguing with anyone about anything? Someone will always disagree with you. For that matter, why bother doing anything at all, or trying to effect any change of any kind?
Slashdot Mirror
Given that I've never flown on a plane that allows you to have your bag pulled out from under the seat in front of you and sitting on the floor between seats during takeoff and landing, I took the other commenter to mean that he sticks his legs under the seat in front of him, and that his bag - also being under the seat in front of him - was therefore "between [his] legs."
If the bag doesn't fit in the overhead or under the seat in front of you, the airline will require you to gate check it. What you describe is not allowed on any airline I've heard of.
So you're one of those people who takes up space in the overhead bin that you don't need, leaving other people to have to gate-check their carryons since they won't fit under the seats? Guess what? To many of your fellow flyers who are perfectly content to place our smaller bags under the seat in front of us as travelers are supposed to, you are the annoying family taking up more than your fair share of overhead space.
It's worth adding to what you've said that the consumption of sugared drinks is an average. That means that it's counting people like me in the study - I'm below the average sugared-beverage consumption amounts (I don't drink soda, period, having completely cut it out of my diet ten years ago and never looking back), which means I'm bringing the average down. I know I'm not the only one either, as my husband also falls below the average (no soda for him, no soda in the apartment - and if we ever have kids we don't intend to change that either), and I know plenty of other people who don't drink soda. The average person who drinks soda almost certainly drinks more than the 178/103 calories' worth per day. So I would posit that the effects would be even more pronounced, at least among the soda drinkers.
That said, of course, it's also true that I/others like me wouldn't lose weight as a result of overall reduced soda consumption - but I'm already below the average weight anyway, and come to think of it, so are most of the non-soda drinkers I know (at least as far as I can tell - although some who probably are heavier also get some of that increased mass from lean muscle). Not necessarily a causative relationship, but at least I don't have to worry that I'm dragging the average upward.
If CareFirst didn't want to get hacked, it shouldn't have been wearing a miniskirt!
All this misleading and conclusory claim (on what basis do you deem any particular number "high," by the way?) demonstrates is your own lack of attention to this issue.
I consider about half to be high. It's definitely not a super majority but I suppose that could be reached if the income constraints were altered. I don't consider $20,000/year a very comfortable living, not to mention $10,000 but that depends on the area.
Half ... of what, exactly? Are you saying that the breakdown of poor to not-poor women should be some percentage other than what it is? As in, you believe that poor women should not be the ones getting abortions? Why would you believe that? Or do you mean simply that the number of women getting abortions itself is "too high" (and it isn't half of women btw; the Guttmacher link estimates that by age 45, about one-third of all women will have had an abortion)? Again, "too high" based on what? And what does the cost of living have to do with your assessment? If anything, that would seem to explain why "such" a "high" percentage of poor women have abortions: because while an abortion may be cost-prohibitive, it's nothing compared to the price of pregnancy, childbirth and raising a kid.
And save your moralizing about diverse perspectives (omg some women want to give birth and others don't? WHAAAT?!) for your weekly anti-choice circlejerk. That "women," just like regular people(!), are not some kind of emotional monolith surprises no actual grown-ups.
What are you going on about? I don't have any dogs in this race.
That's self-evidently disingenuous. The words you are typing are not the words of people who mind their own business and don't give a lick what other people do with their own bodies.
Besides your selective quotes and emotional language you also curiously use counties instead of states so you can get a sensational figure, with emphasis added no less.
Cute. If sarcasm is "emotional language" in your world, you must find the internet a scary place indeed. You're the one who started in with below-the-belt accusations, implicitly accusing "women" of doublespeak because you've heard the term "clump of cells" used in reference to abortion (that phrase is is pretty much a strawman caricature used by anti-choicers, btw -- seriously, google the phrase and tell me how many actual pro-choicers you're able to dig up who actually use it) and yet you're aware of the fact that many women (and men, but why target men when targeting women is so much more fun, right?) feel the pain of loss after a miscarriage. If you genuinely don't understand how ignorant and manipulative your sentiment was, then I apologize for wrongly misjudging you as someone with an ounce of basic understanding regarding emotional context.
As to counties versus states, I was just citing one of the numbers from the link you supplied. I guess you like some of the numbers and not others? I don't deny that counties aren't the only relevant number, although your reference to Texas is hilarious for at least two reasons, both of which tend to underscore my point: Texas is a huge land mass. To say it has "at least" one abortion clinic in the entire state is about as meaningful as saying that England and France have at least one abortion clinic between them. And, unless you live under a rock, you're surely aware that Texas is one of the least friendly states for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy. In fact, if a recent law passed in Texas is upheld, there will be fewer than ten abortion clinics remaining in the entire state; as it is currently, many women already have to drive more than a hundred miles to the nearest provider.
This issue overwhelmingly involves young women and poverty.
Ultimately they remain not difficult to get otherwise the poorest wouldn't get them in such high numbers.
All this misleading and conclusory claim (on what basis do you deem any particular number "high," by the way?) demonstrates is your own lack of attention to this issue. How easy it may or may not be to get an abortion depends not just on how much money you have, but also on which state you live in. Your own link even points out how stark this issue is: 89% of counties in the U.S. don't have a single abortion provider. 89 percent!
Oh but clearly it's women who don't want politicians having the right to trump medical decisions they make in consultation with their physicians who are the ones with an "agenda." Seriously, what is this tripe? Find me a single pro-choice activist (an actual person who is an actual activist, not a fake personality you create a blog for) who doesn't also advocate for better sex ed, better access to contraceptives and reproductive health care, and better resources for low-income parents. The things you're implicitly tut-tutting about aren't things the left has been standing in the way of. I mean, you do realize, I hope, that Guttmacher is a pro-choice organization (I mean, it's even named after a former president of Planned Parenthood)? It isn't presenting these facts because it views them as an indictment of pro-choice politics. Pro-choicers have never made this an either-or debate as you're implying.
And save your moralizing about diverse perspectives (omg some women want to give birth and others don't? WHAAAT?!) for your weekly anti-choice circlejerk. That "women," just like regular people(!), are not some kind of emotional monolith surprises no actual grown-ups.
I don't understand why the question is framed as one of employment. If the patent is valuable, the submitter should be hiring security specialists, not trying to become one from scratch. If the patent isn't valuable, then it has zero relevance to the job search unless the only reason it lacks value is because the submitter is crap at business. And if that's the case, why isn't the submitter trying to sell the patent for quick buck and use that to fund this interest in security credentials? I'm just having trouble reconciling the whole "I'm pursuing business interests with a security-related patent I own" with "I want to be someone else's hired gun for security work." Perhaps the problem is that the submitter is being disingenuous about the level of involvement in business discussions related to this patent - regardless, the first thing I would work on is creating a narrative that will make an ounce of sense to employers, because this one doesn't.
Also, I'm around the same age as submitter and haven't talked about my GPA in forever. Why are we talking about GPAs at all?? No one cares about your GPA 12 years ago. Seriously, no one. Far more worrying is the implication that a 12-year-old GPA is the most relevant thing you can talk to a potential employer about.
it's risky to hire people because letting go of the lemons often comes with legal hurdles.
In the US, the legal hurdles aren't so much in the letting people go as in the making sure you don't violate the law while they're employed. I've seen so many employers blithely ignore technical (or sometimes more egregious) requirements for things like vacation rules, IC vs employee status, wage and hour rules, etc. that it's pretty obvious many are playing the odds that workers won't make a fuss.
The real risk of firing someone isn't that you'll fire them illegally; it's that now you've just taken away the primary reason they weren't calling you on the shit you've been pulling all along hoping you wouldn't get caught. This is why so many employers have taken to asking people to sign "severance agreements" that give them a pittance in exchange for a full release from everything the law will let them get a release for. Most people who've just been let go are either insufficiently savvy, too busy, or just plain too desperate for that last paycheck to be able to turn it down, even if the claims they might have against their ex-employer for labor code violations would amount to more money.
/tangent
33-year-old woman here (i.e., also between generations). If I had to hazard a guess based on your comment, I would say that the problem is your attitude. Women my age have zero problem dating an actually mature, positive, thoughtful, emotionally stable guy within around 5-7 years (+/-) of their age. My single girlfriends regularly bemoan the lack of guys who manage to be stable and mature without being sexist assholes. It would seem that they're exceedingly rare.
I imagine you could counter that, no, it's their attitude that is the problem. I don't know. Pointing fingers is always easiest, I suppose. Certainly beats risking rejection and growth by dating an actual human being instead of holding out for perfection.
"Easily"? You must drive a highly fuel-efficient car or else leave in the middle of the night when there's no traffic. Depending on your starting point, just getting through LA traffic can eat up close to a quarter-tank.
Granted, yes, it could very well take that same almost-quarter-tank to get from your home to the train station, but regardless, "easily" strikes me as a stretch. My husband and I just recently made the drive from SF to LA and back and spent probably closer to 100, 120 bucks in gas AND got to deal with the fun of a mysterious "check engine" light that turned on about 40 miles outside of LA and cost us 300 bucks for the dealer to tell us it was a spark plug, grrrr. This isn't a particular old, finicky, or out-of-shape car, either: 2008 VW sedan, we've been good about maintenance, etc.
Do you know the word "irrelevant"? It describes your comment.
In fact, in my experience, the average corporate employer's respect for each of the three options has a near-perfect inverse relationship with the cost of each option.
Of course, I proofread this five times and only after I hit "Submit" did I realize that the relationship I'm alluding to is direct, not inverse. Derp. Or as Gene Wilder (as the only Willy Wonka in existence, and I will abide no dispute on this point) more eloquently put it: "Strike that. Reverse it."
It is NOT reasonable to expect that society will simply provide you with the specific job you want, a job you find engaging or interesting, or a job that's fun or enjoyable. Despite huge advances in machines and technology, there still are plenty of jobs that require hard work, often physical labor, or tedious activities. Someone has to do them. Society may "owe" you a job -- but it doesn't owe you a job that will enable you to play video games all day long, or a job as an actor or a musician or whatever.
The "video games" remark is unfairly dismissive, and denigrating artistic aspirations is hardly the exclusive province of those of us just old enough to look down on 20-somethings. My Boomer parents were doing that decades ago, as I'm sure their parents did as well.
My two minor peeves aside, while there's something to your point, and I appreciate your recognition elsewhere in your comment that there are larger forces at work here too, one key larger force that it seems you haven't accounted for is the resume effect: namely, if I, as a white-collar professional (or aspiring white-collar professional, or aspiring whatever-with-60k-in-student-loan-debt, etc.), find myself unexpectedly laid off and have difficulty finding work in my field, my options pretty much fall into one of three broad possibilities: (1) go back to school, (2) do something creatively/personally rewarding and/or interesting (volunteer work, something creative but still tied to my field, etc.), or (3) take whatever job I can find to put money on the table.
I wholeheartedly agree that option (3) is worthy of consideration and respect, but most employers looking at resumes don't. Period. In fact, in my experience, the average corporate employer's respect for each of the three options has a near-perfect inverse relationship with the cost of each option. This is pure classism, and it is horrific, and it is unquestionably adding to the country's (and the world's) massive economic inequality and countless other problems. A person (with the means to be able to do so) who avoids option (3) isn't necessarily doing it out of laziness or unrealistic expectations. It's highly possible, even probable in many cases, that he or she is doing it because of insight (which may well be subconscious) into the way things are in the modern business world. I'm reluctant to apportion much blame to relatively disempowered individuals for responding in a wholly rational manner to the skewed incentives that the more-powerful create for them.
I don't seen that in the Mils I've run into. Perhaps for the generations just prior to them, I see the hard work still, etc...but the youngest ones just in the workforce the past 3-5 years, nope, they expect a high paying job and don't understand you have to work and COMPETE for the money and job.
And what are the "generations just prior"? How prior? Prior to whom, precisely? Someone who's been in the workforce for only 3-5 years is maybe, what, mid-twenties, tops? So this is someone who was born in the early 90s. I hope you realize that the the youngest cutoff most social scientists use to describe "Millenials" is 1984, and most go with an earlier year like 1982 or 1980. So while you're bemoaning the common problem of young people new to the corporate world/professional workforce who haven't yet acclimated and attributing this to a particular generation, you're completely ignoring the fact that the "generation" in question is defined as including people about ten years older than the folks you're griping about.
Do you have the same gripes about your 31-year-old coworkers? If not, then guess what, you're yet another person anecdotally demonstrating that this is not a generational trend, but rather the same, age-old problem of young people seeming annoyingly young to those of us who are a little bit (or a lot) older than them.
Many/most people raised in the 80s and 90s are considered Millenials. Only a very small handful of those still in high school fall into the Millenial category. People here seem to be thinking "Millenial" means teens and brand-new employees. Depending on which of the proposed birth year cut-offs you favor, "Millenials" can include people as old as 35 this year.
... to see Mr. Gates fall into the "Fair Tax" nonsense. I suppose this is why business and economics are such distinct fields. If only more business people understood that.
Of course it doesn't, that page compared 357grams of broccoli with 34grams of beef.
(relevant part bolded)
34g of beef = 113 calories.
357g of broccoli = 121 calories.
Calories and weight are two different things.
Why would you think the UK is the only country that might make use of this?
Fluke requested the general exclusion order that resulted in the holdup of Sparkfun's multimeters. So yes; Fluke effectively did request this.
Actually, the point of the rule is so that companies who want to assert exclusive rights to a trademark can't continue doing that if they allow the public to casually associate the mark with every competitor's comparable product and then later try to assert a de facto monopoly over the product itself by virtue of its association with their mark (basically performing an end-run around patent statutes). Don't worry, though; I'm sure there are plenty of other things you can find to blame lawyers for.
Eh. It kinda works. If your goal is to invade Amazon accounts using the method laid out in the strip, it's that much easier to do because by allowing you to use anything for a password, they're more likely to have people using simple repeat passwords that, even if not common for everyone, are common for the user. If those sites had more stringent requirements, you couldn't use your childhood dog's name as a password like you've been doing for various account passwords since high school.
But yeah -- this xkcd was probably the more applicable strip.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just have a slightly different emphasis/vantage point. Basically, you're probably technically correct in marginal cases that there is a handful of behaviors and choices that likely mitigate risk as a matter of pure statistics. I simply think that's not really a useful thing to add to conversation, largely because based on my experience, most people aren't intellectually savvy enough to insulate the technical observation from common human reactionary responses. And thus, as a matter of common parlance, I think it's generally best to avoid talking about such specific observations about risk and responsibility in those terms at all -- in other words, I suppose, the risk in acknowledging the underlying truth there in public conversation is that people will fail to limit that truth to its proper application and will instead expand its reach. And, to me, it's a pretty high risk -- so my risk calculation here compels me to avoid taking the action in question. I rarely see it adding value to a conversation but frequently see it fueling the flames of actual sexism.
As for apportionment of responsibility, I strongly agree that it's very important for social justice - but justice itself is largely irrelevant to eliminating social problems,
I completely disagree. To the contrary, I'd suggest that cultural acceptance of victim-blaming type mentalities rather tends to reinforce in the minds of wrongdoers that their active wrongdoing involves less culpability than it truly does. Consider the treatment of women in countries like the United States where formal legal equality is for the most part the norm, and where we at least pay lip service to the notion that women who go to certain places or dress a certain way aren't "asking" to be raped. Where we don't pretend that wearing the "wrong" clothing constitutes assumption of the risk, women's freedoms and movements are relatively less restricted by cultural convention. Conversely, in countries that adhere to religious norms holding women responsible for their rapists' behavior, unsurprisingly, we see that women are mistreated in countless other contexts as well, and that they "choose" greater restrictions to their own freedoms essentially out of a self-preservation instinct.
Victim blaming -- and the attendant conflation of the distinct concepts of foreseeability and causation -- normalizes the wrongdoers and puts the cultural onus on those at risk to engage in ultimately impotent behaviors to protect themselves. Why impotent? You yourself noted that some amount of wrongdoing is inevitable. But now, on top of the unfortunate fact of wrongdoing, we've also created a culture in which innocent people are expected (and thereby de facto required) to restrict their own lifestyles and behavior, because we have decided to hold people responsible for avoiding their own inevitable victimization -- rather than do our part, collectively, to minimize its occurrence, we've opted for the psychological narcotic of shifting blame from perpetrators to victims, in order to ease our own uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability.
There is little blame to be had by the woman assaulted while walking down the sidewalk in a well-to-do neighborhood, on the other hand if she makes a habit of strolling through dark alleys in a bad part of town without means of defense... As horrible as it feels to say so, there is a certain element of reaping what you sow. That is not to say that the assailant shouldn't still be punished just as hard as if they had assaulted her in a full church or something, but *she* bears an additional level of responsibility for the event as well, and loses much of her claim to sympathy from society as a result.
Even leaving untouched the host of unpalatable classist implications in your comment, exactly what has the second woman "sown"? And why on earth would you deem her undeserving of sympathy? Have you never done something unsafe in your life? And don't play the "I'd accept it if something unspeakable happened to me" card, because it's the rhetorical equivalent of a null hypothesis put forth as an affirmative factual statement in the absence of usable data.
If you've done something unsafe, unless you're an extremely irrational person (and if you are, there's no point in trying to have a discussion with you anyway), you did that unsafe thing because you performed a risk calculation in your head and concluded that the risk of [bad thing] occurring was sufficiently low as not to override the value to you of doing [unsafe thing]. Thus, you're in essence suggesting that, instead of encouraging us all to behave as rational actors, our culture ought instead to inculcate a fear of shame to override our rational impulses when the risk of certain kinds of victimization are thrown into the calculus. Why would you prefer to live in a society in which people make decisions based primarily on fear instead of logic?
LOL. You know what? Okay, let's try it your way. Let's see if your comment was actually about pointing out a factual inaccuracy because of your deep abiding loyalty to the Truth, having nothing whatsoever to do with any attempts to derail the conversation from my real point.
Okay. Ya got me. Mea culpa, I am ashamed, I apologize to my mother and all of my teachers who taught me better than this. You have caught me in a hyperbole, good sir, and we all deserve better than that. Thank you for your service to this community.
Yes, you are indeed correct that I cannot say with absolute certainty that literally no single person on the face of this planet refers to mere advice-giving as "victim-blaming." I made a sweeping statement, and I hang my head in shame at its presumptuous over-inclusive nature, to which you have expertly drawn attention. I shall rub ashes into my forehead if it will help to ameliorate the severe wrong I have done to you all with my false, fraudulent, misleading characterization.
Now that we've dealt with your thorough rhetorical lashing of my feeble overstatement, would you care to address any of the actual content of my comment? Or was that all you had to contribute?
My point is that while assigning blame or relative liability is a wonderful thing for a justice system, it's absolutely irrelevant if your goal is to avoid having bad things happen in the first place.
If the point of a discussion is to apportion responsibility among various parties, though, it isn't irrelevant. The phrase "victim blaming" isn't exactly confusing. Most people would read that as a rather obvious objection to what they perceive as your blaming of persons when you seem to be saying that you actually aren't. Seems to me if you sincerely don't care about assigning blame you could really easily just say "I'm not concerned with who's at fault. Throw everyone in prison for all I care. Hackers and providers and victims alike. Just get rid of the whole lot of them and the problem will go away."
I mean, for that matter, let's just destroy the communications infrastructure that makes the internet possible. That'll stop the bad forms of hacking -- since you seem to think blame is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is solving a problem, and by definition no solution is susceptible to an objection that it unfairly places responsibility and/or undue restrictions on people who shouldn't have to bear them.
Because look guys, we're just being solutions-oriented. Why do you keep making us out to be bad guys? Do you hate solutions? Do you LIKE people being able to steal your identity? Then hey, by all means, keep the internet. But don't complain when people use it to steal your stuff.
Animals, human or otherwise, will do their thing.
So why bother arguing with anyone about anything? Someone will always disagree with you. For that matter, why bother doing anything at all, or trying to effect any change of any kind?