I must have missed the part where having the shiniest, most redundant piece of popular technology was an inherent part of the learning process. Silly me.
I mean, they could take that money and send the kids on so many field trips. Or they could buy new textbooks. Or some really great equipment for the science classrooms. Or build a decent computer lab for a far less privileged school. Or pay the teachers more. Or hire a new teacher, perhaps in one of the less-fundamental but important subjects, like art or music. Really, the list goes on.
Actually, there's an easier way to cut the budget, one that involves little pain to the needy nor endangers the fragile economy. It's called "cut defense spending". We could cut it enough to save a hell of a lot more money than scrimping here and there on the services side of government, and still be spending more on our military than the next five biggest (in military spending) countries combined.
Or we could just let the "temporary" bush tax cuts actually expire.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2699_132/ai_106473713/
Unfriendly environments aren't about the special scholarships or whatever. It's about people treating you like shit. About subtle snubs and outright sexism, about sexual harassment and always being seen as lesser.
And something more detailed than a news article:
http://www.grginc.com/WECE_FINAL_REPORT.pdf
"Several sensed that their professors “did not like women” and recounted incidents of their
tolerating sexist jokes or comments from male students in the classroom or lab.
As women progressed through their college careers, and especially after they took internships in
industry, they became more aware of how their gender affected the way others treated them as
engineers. Some juniors and seniors described being harassed by co-workers or peers –
experiences that made them more aware of gender bias. (Analyses of the focus group discussions
indicated that women who participated in Women in Engineering initiatives were no more likely
to report incidences of bias than those who did not participate in WIE initiatives.)"
Well, the answer is not to throw hands up in the air and say, "too bad, can't do anything about it" just because *one* factor is beyond their reach. In the example of the university, they can move to correct their part of the problem, e.g. notoriously woman-unfriendly environments and attitudes in certain departments, so they're no longer just part of the problem. Imagine some young woman, who survived high school and has a passion for mathematics, though she's kept quiet about it, is interested in studying engineering. If the department is extremely hostile to women and will try to also enforce gender role conformity, as viciously but more subtly than high school, the fact that high school is a big reason there aren't more women like her does not negate the fact that our theoretical university is doing something wrong and should takes to correct it.
"the fault of men" is a really simplistic way of putting it. What we're talking about her is something structural, which is a lot harder to detect and counteract than one person (or several people)'s bad behavior. There's no one single answer to these kind of problems, they usually involve many different factors.
But if we wanted to trace back to the root of the problem, we'd have to go back to middle school, when girls start getting the message loud and clear that girls aren't supposed to be good at math, interested in science, and subsequently start doing far more poorly in those fields than they had been (by a dramatic margin). Middle school and high school are brutal when it comes to enforcing gender conformity. (Just a little anecdote: in my high school, I knew plenty of girls who were far more knowledgeable when it came to computers than most of the guys who offered to 'help' them. But they'd never indicate it, quietly waiting for the idiots to go away so they could fix the problem themselves, rather than risk the social stigma). And you just can't erase years of social conditioning.
These kind of attitudes contribute to the problem when you get to the university level on both sides- both in the traditionally male departments, who view themselves as being 'men's departments' because, say, "women just aren't good or interested in math or science", and with the women themselves, who have had any interested or aptitude in those fields beaten out of them at an early age. It takes a very strong mind and stubborn person (on both sides of the equation) to buck those trends, if only because they're so subtle that we just see them as being part of the way the world is.
Maybe they'd rather do something else because the process has been made unpleasant.
I used to contribute to wikipedia articles, but eventually I got tired of the edit wars and the assholes and gave up. It wasn't worth fighting for.
Not saying that's the cause here, or that my experience was a sign of something sexist or anything like that, but just pointing out that being able to participate and having an environment that encourages participation are two different things.
I mean, I work for organization that is technically open to everyone, but it;s unintentionally guaranteed that very little of the local latino population will be represented in our membership. We don't go out to the hispanic neighborhoods, we don't have anyone in the entire regional organization that speaks spanish, none of our fliers or forms are in spanish, etc etc.
We don't and wouldn't stop anyone from joining, but is it any wonder in that case that our participation from that segment of the population is very low, compared to the absolute population numbers?
Except that doesn't prove anything but that there are structural biases in those directions. In medicine, I've heard that women are often pushed into "womanly" fields, namely, being OB-GYNs and told things like, "no, surgery is for real doctors, women are better off going into gynecology" by senior physicians (a friend of mine actually had that experience.) Similarly, when it comes to engineering, I've heard plenty of nightmare stories from the few women of my acquaintance who gave it a try (though I will say that in the case of a few of them, it was back in the 80s), but decided that the shit that rained down on them as a result wasn't worth it. No one wants to work in a field where they're going to be constantly subject to harassment, bullying, misogynistic comments, and sexist treatment.
And the thing is? Those things do not have to be as direct as described. There are a lot of less actionable and more insideous ways to 'punish' someone for trespassing gender roles than that.
Thinking of white supremacists, I think you're vastly understating their potential targets. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, liberals, foreigners, civil-rights activists. Much like Al-Queda, it's easier to list who they don't hate than who they do.
We've been living with terrorism for a long time, but something about this specific form of terrorism short circuits people's brains and they can't seem to handle it with the same amount of perspective (what a funny thing to write) as they do and have done with other forms of terrorism.
No one got this hysterical over Oklahoma City or the olympic games or the Unabomber or even the attack on the WTC in the early '90s. They dealt with hijackings, bombings, and etc on a scale in the 80s that today would have the entire country on lock down.
We've lost the ability to keep it in perspective when it comes to these specific type of terrorism. (With the others, we seem to remain fairly calm.)
How about abortion clinics or churches or the houses of certain people? Not all terrorism is that of al-queda or the ilk. We've had our own home-grown types here.
I don't know why it sparks so much fear. Look it how people responded to that shooting on the military base- for a while, it was kind of terrorism, but most people seemed to put it in the slots of their head marked "workplace rampage/going postal" and just shook their heads sadly and moved on without going into fits.
You've never heard of 'freedom of movement' have you?
You might as well say that the ability to take a bus or a train or a car or to even damn well walk down the street is not a "right" because they're all choices. I mean, hell, you could stay home all day! Who's forcing you? Couldn't you get a job as a telecommuter? er
I'm exaggerating there, but you get the point. Freedom of movement is one of the fundamental liberties upon which democracy is based, tied closely to freedom of speech and freedom of association. Yes, forcing people to either comply with outrageous civil liberty violations OR to not fly at all is a de facto restriction of movement.
'Female family members'? Seriously? Why didn't you just say 'luddites' or 'technologically illiterate family members' or something else not quite as painfully sexist?
And when was "the very beginning"? When it first started? When it was some new cool thing on a few campuses? Or 2006ish, when it actually started pinging the public consciousness?
Original flavor facebook didn't really seem to have any huge privacy red flags. At least not at the time.
Except for where it's only rape if there are four male witnesses or something like that, and if not? it's considered adultery- in which case the woman is punished. Usually killed.
So sure, poor men. So sadly suffering from so much gender-based injustice in this world.
Facebook once had an extremely limited audience- college students. And only students of those universities that Facebook had expanded to.
That did not stop it from taking off like crazy.
I actually kind of miss those days. I'd be more than happy to leave facebook to my parents, their friends, my young cousins, and every random person I knew in middle and high school.
It was a public barbecue, so we needed the permit. If we'd just served our own members, it would have been all good, but the point of the event was to get people interested in Girl Scouts (AKA Girl Guides), so it was public.
I imagine the laws in that respect are quite similar. There was nothing that the daily mail would have been shouting out at particularly- the permits were not expensive, and the rules were not terribly onerous.... though it would have been very complicated for me, given the situation. An organization that regularly does something say, at a fair, would not have a problem. Here's what I would have needed, were I to do something that was not precooked/prepackaged- say, hamburgers and potato salad. I would have needed a prep area separated from the public (say a table in a booth), my bucket o' sterilizer, a place to wash the utensils, my trusty handwashing station, a meat thermometer, and a way to keep the potato salad covered and at 40 degrees F. (so, a cooler with ice and a thermometer). If I did any prep before hand and not on-site(say, forming the hamburger patties, slicing tomatoes, etc) it would need to be in a kitchen that could conform to those standards (and NOT a home), and I would need to have a way to keep it cool while transporting it.
None of this would have been in and of itself impossible- just a little bit too much work for a one-off quicky event done on the cheap.
The number of food booths at fairs, farmer's markets, and various other festivals suggest that quite a few small businesses, non-profits and schools don't find any of this too hard. It just requires a bit of planning and maybe the purchase of some basic equipment you should probably (common-sense) have anyway.
The fine may have been not the best decision, but shutting them down I can see.
Getting a permit retroactively doesn't do you any good, even if possible because the things required by the permit tend to be pretty specific. For example, just at my little barbecue (and granted, local laws will vary but these are pretty common) I was required to have:
a) a dedicated hand-washing station, conforming to department-provided specifications
b) a bucket filled with a water/bleach mixture, and test strips to confirm that it was at the right levels
c)Separate containers of ice for pretty much everything
d) a thermometer to prove that everything was at he right temperatures
e)all the receipts proving I had bought everything and not prepared it myself.
And that was for something where we bought everything prepared (i.e. hot dogs). I was uberly paranoid about anything that might even look like it involved prep work (for example, serving watermelon, which would require us to cut it) because the rules and requirements would have gotten exponentially more complicated had we moved away from simply serving prepackaged and/or precooked foods.
As far as I understand it, there weren't any threats- they just shut them down, which is what happens when you're selling/giving food to the public without following all the health and safety laws.
I know, I just had to get a temporary vendors food license for a (free) Girl Scout event that was technically open to the public.
In my opinion, they were hiding behind her- at least to a certain extent. There's no way a 6 year old would be able - let alone have the notion- to set up a booth at a commercial venue, an art fair, waaaay away from her home.
Health departments overlook kids selling lemonade on their street corners. Setting up a booth at a commercial event (one filled with other vendors) is an entirely different kettle of fish, and I think (as best as I can guess on limited information) that the health department was quite justified. Even if it were completely, completely innocent, allowing it to go on would set a bad precedent for vendors to just use their children as excuses for not following the law. "Oh, it's not MY booth, it's my child's, I swear!"
The issue with the lemonade stand, as I recall, was not tax issues but rather the lack of a temporary vendor's license from the health department. Which is quite reasonable if you have a booth at a farmer's market type-thing and serving a business-level number of customers. That's not a kid on a corner selling lemonade. That's an honest-to-god vendor, unless you think she was able to haul down all the stuff needed for a booth at those kind of things herself?
That sticker thing is really, really damn annoying. On my older computers, they were damn durable.
But now I'm stuck using the damn recovery disks (which have the added bonus of automatically splitting my hard drive into *five* stupid partitions) because the sticker they're putting at the bottom of the laptops are some uberly flimsy paper, and it all completely was worn away after a month or so. I say worn away just for a lack of a better word- the sticker is still there, but it looks like the bottom half of a carbon copy that's been beat to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
I must have missed the part where having the shiniest, most redundant piece of popular technology was an inherent part of the learning process. Silly me. I mean, they could take that money and send the kids on so many field trips. Or they could buy new textbooks. Or some really great equipment for the science classrooms. Or build a decent computer lab for a far less privileged school. Or pay the teachers more. Or hire a new teacher, perhaps in one of the less-fundamental but important subjects, like art or music. Really, the list goes on.
Cheap? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Actually, there's an easier way to cut the budget, one that involves little pain to the needy nor endangers the fragile economy. It's called "cut defense spending". We could cut it enough to save a hell of a lot more money than scrimping here and there on the services side of government, and still be spending more on our military than the next five biggest (in military spending) countries combined. Or we could just let the "temporary" bush tax cuts actually expire.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2699_132/ai_106473713/ Unfriendly environments aren't about the special scholarships or whatever. It's about people treating you like shit. About subtle snubs and outright sexism, about sexual harassment and always being seen as lesser. And something more detailed than a news article: http://www.grginc.com/WECE_FINAL_REPORT.pdf "Several sensed that their professors “did not like women” and recounted incidents of their tolerating sexist jokes or comments from male students in the classroom or lab. As women progressed through their college careers, and especially after they took internships in industry, they became more aware of how their gender affected the way others treated them as engineers. Some juniors and seniors described being harassed by co-workers or peers – experiences that made them more aware of gender bias. (Analyses of the focus group discussions indicated that women who participated in Women in Engineering initiatives were no more likely to report incidences of bias than those who did not participate in WIE initiatives.)"
Well, the answer is not to throw hands up in the air and say, "too bad, can't do anything about it" just because *one* factor is beyond their reach. In the example of the university, they can move to correct their part of the problem, e.g. notoriously woman-unfriendly environments and attitudes in certain departments, so they're no longer just part of the problem. Imagine some young woman, who survived high school and has a passion for mathematics, though she's kept quiet about it, is interested in studying engineering. If the department is extremely hostile to women and will try to also enforce gender role conformity, as viciously but more subtly than high school, the fact that high school is a big reason there aren't more women like her does not negate the fact that our theoretical university is doing something wrong and should takes to correct it.
"the fault of men" is a really simplistic way of putting it. What we're talking about her is something structural, which is a lot harder to detect and counteract than one person (or several people)'s bad behavior. There's no one single answer to these kind of problems, they usually involve many different factors. But if we wanted to trace back to the root of the problem, we'd have to go back to middle school, when girls start getting the message loud and clear that girls aren't supposed to be good at math, interested in science, and subsequently start doing far more poorly in those fields than they had been (by a dramatic margin). Middle school and high school are brutal when it comes to enforcing gender conformity. (Just a little anecdote: in my high school, I knew plenty of girls who were far more knowledgeable when it came to computers than most of the guys who offered to 'help' them. But they'd never indicate it, quietly waiting for the idiots to go away so they could fix the problem themselves, rather than risk the social stigma). And you just can't erase years of social conditioning. These kind of attitudes contribute to the problem when you get to the university level on both sides- both in the traditionally male departments, who view themselves as being 'men's departments' because, say, "women just aren't good or interested in math or science", and with the women themselves, who have had any interested or aptitude in those fields beaten out of them at an early age. It takes a very strong mind and stubborn person (on both sides of the equation) to buck those trends, if only because they're so subtle that we just see them as being part of the way the world is.
I don't support quotas at all. It's just that when the ratios get that skewed, it's evidence that there is a problem, or a set of problems.
Maybe they'd rather do something else because the process has been made unpleasant. I used to contribute to wikipedia articles, but eventually I got tired of the edit wars and the assholes and gave up. It wasn't worth fighting for. Not saying that's the cause here, or that my experience was a sign of something sexist or anything like that, but just pointing out that being able to participate and having an environment that encourages participation are two different things. I mean, I work for organization that is technically open to everyone, but it;s unintentionally guaranteed that very little of the local latino population will be represented in our membership. We don't go out to the hispanic neighborhoods, we don't have anyone in the entire regional organization that speaks spanish, none of our fliers or forms are in spanish, etc etc. We don't and wouldn't stop anyone from joining, but is it any wonder in that case that our participation from that segment of the population is very low, compared to the absolute population numbers?
Except that doesn't prove anything but that there are structural biases in those directions. In medicine, I've heard that women are often pushed into "womanly" fields, namely, being OB-GYNs and told things like, "no, surgery is for real doctors, women are better off going into gynecology" by senior physicians (a friend of mine actually had that experience.) Similarly, when it comes to engineering, I've heard plenty of nightmare stories from the few women of my acquaintance who gave it a try (though I will say that in the case of a few of them, it was back in the 80s), but decided that the shit that rained down on them as a result wasn't worth it. No one wants to work in a field where they're going to be constantly subject to harassment, bullying, misogynistic comments, and sexist treatment. And the thing is? Those things do not have to be as direct as described. There are a lot of less actionable and more insideous ways to 'punish' someone for trespassing gender roles than that.
Thinking of white supremacists, I think you're vastly understating their potential targets. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, liberals, foreigners, civil-rights activists. Much like Al-Queda, it's easier to list who they don't hate than who they do. We've been living with terrorism for a long time, but something about this specific form of terrorism short circuits people's brains and they can't seem to handle it with the same amount of perspective (what a funny thing to write) as they do and have done with other forms of terrorism. No one got this hysterical over Oklahoma City or the olympic games or the Unabomber or even the attack on the WTC in the early '90s. They dealt with hijackings, bombings, and etc on a scale in the 80s that today would have the entire country on lock down. We've lost the ability to keep it in perspective when it comes to these specific type of terrorism. (With the others, we seem to remain fairly calm.)
How about abortion clinics or churches or the houses of certain people? Not all terrorism is that of al-queda or the ilk. We've had our own home-grown types here. I don't know why it sparks so much fear. Look it how people responded to that shooting on the military base- for a while, it was kind of terrorism, but most people seemed to put it in the slots of their head marked "workplace rampage/going postal" and just shook their heads sadly and moved on without going into fits.
You've never heard of 'freedom of movement' have you? You might as well say that the ability to take a bus or a train or a car or to even damn well walk down the street is not a "right" because they're all choices. I mean, hell, you could stay home all day! Who's forcing you? Couldn't you get a job as a telecommuter? er I'm exaggerating there, but you get the point. Freedom of movement is one of the fundamental liberties upon which democracy is based, tied closely to freedom of speech and freedom of association. Yes, forcing people to either comply with outrageous civil liberty violations OR to not fly at all is a de facto restriction of movement.
Firefly didn't *have* any aliens, so none of those seem to apply, except 'everyone looking human'...because they were.
ALright then. Complaint rescinded- but to be fair, you did say it in a very generalized way.
'Female family members'? Seriously? Why didn't you just say 'luddites' or 'technologically illiterate family members' or something else not quite as painfully sexist?
You win at life.
And when was "the very beginning"? When it first started? When it was some new cool thing on a few campuses? Or 2006ish, when it actually started pinging the public consciousness? Original flavor facebook didn't really seem to have any huge privacy red flags. At least not at the time.
Except for where it's only rape if there are four male witnesses or something like that, and if not? it's considered adultery- in which case the woman is punished. Usually killed. So sure, poor men. So sadly suffering from so much gender-based injustice in this world.
Facebook once had an extremely limited audience- college students. And only students of those universities that Facebook had expanded to. That did not stop it from taking off like crazy. I actually kind of miss those days. I'd be more than happy to leave facebook to my parents, their friends, my young cousins, and every random person I knew in middle and high school.
Who is "all"? It was fairly common in antiquity (at least among the educated) to assume the earth was a sphere.
It was a public barbecue, so we needed the permit. If we'd just served our own members, it would have been all good, but the point of the event was to get people interested in Girl Scouts (AKA Girl Guides), so it was public. I imagine the laws in that respect are quite similar. There was nothing that the daily mail would have been shouting out at particularly- the permits were not expensive, and the rules were not terribly onerous.... though it would have been very complicated for me, given the situation. An organization that regularly does something say, at a fair, would not have a problem. Here's what I would have needed, were I to do something that was not precooked/prepackaged- say, hamburgers and potato salad. I would have needed a prep area separated from the public (say a table in a booth), my bucket o' sterilizer, a place to wash the utensils, my trusty handwashing station, a meat thermometer, and a way to keep the potato salad covered and at 40 degrees F. (so, a cooler with ice and a thermometer). If I did any prep before hand and not on-site(say, forming the hamburger patties, slicing tomatoes, etc) it would need to be in a kitchen that could conform to those standards (and NOT a home), and I would need to have a way to keep it cool while transporting it. None of this would have been in and of itself impossible- just a little bit too much work for a one-off quicky event done on the cheap. The number of food booths at fairs, farmer's markets, and various other festivals suggest that quite a few small businesses, non-profits and schools don't find any of this too hard. It just requires a bit of planning and maybe the purchase of some basic equipment you should probably (common-sense) have anyway.
The fine may have been not the best decision, but shutting them down I can see. Getting a permit retroactively doesn't do you any good, even if possible because the things required by the permit tend to be pretty specific. For example, just at my little barbecue (and granted, local laws will vary but these are pretty common) I was required to have: a) a dedicated hand-washing station, conforming to department-provided specifications b) a bucket filled with a water/bleach mixture, and test strips to confirm that it was at the right levels c)Separate containers of ice for pretty much everything d) a thermometer to prove that everything was at he right temperatures e)all the receipts proving I had bought everything and not prepared it myself. And that was for something where we bought everything prepared (i.e. hot dogs). I was uberly paranoid about anything that might even look like it involved prep work (for example, serving watermelon, which would require us to cut it) because the rules and requirements would have gotten exponentially more complicated had we moved away from simply serving prepackaged and/or precooked foods.
As far as I understand it, there weren't any threats- they just shut them down, which is what happens when you're selling/giving food to the public without following all the health and safety laws. I know, I just had to get a temporary vendors food license for a (free) Girl Scout event that was technically open to the public. In my opinion, they were hiding behind her- at least to a certain extent. There's no way a 6 year old would be able - let alone have the notion- to set up a booth at a commercial venue, an art fair, waaaay away from her home. Health departments overlook kids selling lemonade on their street corners. Setting up a booth at a commercial event (one filled with other vendors) is an entirely different kettle of fish, and I think (as best as I can guess on limited information) that the health department was quite justified. Even if it were completely, completely innocent, allowing it to go on would set a bad precedent for vendors to just use their children as excuses for not following the law. "Oh, it's not MY booth, it's my child's, I swear!"
The issue with the lemonade stand, as I recall, was not tax issues but rather the lack of a temporary vendor's license from the health department. Which is quite reasonable if you have a booth at a farmer's market type-thing and serving a business-level number of customers. That's not a kid on a corner selling lemonade. That's an honest-to-god vendor, unless you think she was able to haul down all the stuff needed for a booth at those kind of things herself?
That sticker thing is really, really damn annoying. On my older computers, they were damn durable. But now I'm stuck using the damn recovery disks (which have the added bonus of automatically splitting my hard drive into *five* stupid partitions) because the sticker they're putting at the bottom of the laptops are some uberly flimsy paper, and it all completely was worn away after a month or so. I say worn away just for a lack of a better word- the sticker is still there, but it looks like the bottom half of a carbon copy that's been beat to hell.