Actually, it's easier to come out as LGBT* than it is to come out afterwards as not being a faithful worshiper of the progressive movement...and it's very much a secular religion in its behaviors sometimes. I've have open religious fundamentalists be more okay with you questioning the dogmas they subscribe to... (On the other hand, sometimes the irony of things like people who decry Eurocenticism depending on Eurocentric definitions or very...ignorant assumptions about non-Western lands, is something I can appreciate. I just wish that pointing out the irony was safer.)
Will Mike Pence's position on TPP make any difference on who you'll vote for?
Depends--are we supposed to assume that we're not just picking whose impeachment we'd rather get to watch? If so, then it definitely matter what the possible VP's positions are on issues are because the VP will get the job once the show is over...
What the hell are all of these accountants still doing?
For one thing, they're keeping up with laws regarding taxation, and shepherding the flow of money in an organization.
Accountancy is not just about counting.
Plus, they do things like make sure you've got a live human who can go Where The Money Vanished To Is The New Idiot Manager On Another Spending Spree? and somebody who can answer the question of WTF Happened To Payroll Did The Bank Screw It Up Again Yep The Bank Did. (Turns out, trusting a computer program to keep your accounts and issue checks? Not precisely the best idea.)
Sooo...what's to restrain the destructive effects of greed on regulation? What's to prevent regulatory capture, rentseeking, and other forms of corruption? You want to keep the regulatory burden light and the creation and enforcement processes transparent. Being in the government doesn't magically make somebody not greedy.
Actually, some of us spent enough time around smaller kids that we didn't forget as adults how speedy kids are--which is why I'm planning to have leashes for mine bought between when they're born and when they learn to walk. My mom did it with me, and when people complained that it was inhumane she pointed out "You try walking all day with your arm above your head, trying to keep up."
The thing is, people usually forget how speedy kids actually were, just like how they forget how miserable it was do to that and how their arms hurt at the end of the day, or how high school wasn't that awesome.
The assertion appears to be, basically, that we're spending a lot on enforcing it, but not on doing a formal study where we follow a bunch of cars around and see what the MPG actually is in real-world conditions--which actually feeds into your own complaint about the most recent adjustment, since that sort of study would provide empirical data on what the correct adjustments ought to be. You might find out that things like that the adjustments ought to be different depending on the manufacturer, because those companies' cars are more aiming for fuel efficiency under all conditions.
That smaller, lighter vehicles use less fuel to move than larger, heavier cars isn't really news unless you need a headline "Laws of Physics are Still Working"--remember, it always has taken more energy to move a heavier mass, something would be distinctly strange if simply making the mass move itself somehow changed that. The question is, exactly how accurate is the EPA's numbers?
All it'd take is getting some people to just keep accurate logs of how much gas they use and travel distances over a period of time. It's not a hard study to do, just not a very sexy one.
Looking at the answers and knowing how sales often works? Yes, yes it ought to be mandatory to label things for DRM and proprietary software issues, especially when it's not something people would expect to have such issues. The label also needs to be very hard to miss--and the penalties should be at least having to (at their own cost) provide the tool(s) needed to remove the DRM and/or work with the proprietary software.
I think tomhath's point is that this study is attempting to predict the future and thus it is simply a projection based off of current knowledge & potentially highly flawed by assuming that the current economy will somehow remain in its current state forever...which it's never done before. Anything that would let them be sure of this would be rather more important a discovery than, well, this.
The assumption wasn't that each generation would do better, it was that each generation would be larger--it's very much a Ponzi scheme, and it was set up originally with its payout age being past the average person's life expectancy. At this point? Aside from the fact that life expediencies are better, on the whole all the first world countries have been seeing birthrates below replacement rate for a significant period of time now, and this is actually a pretty reliable demographic trend around the world as the birthrate tends to drop with improvements in access to education for women. (This doesn't actually necessarily link to 'women are choosing not to have babies'--said education does not necessarily include the information for family planning, unless you're using that as a euphemism for 'planning not to have one.' Fixing that would make it easier to distinguish 'chose not to' from 'wanted to but missed the boat.')
As for the rest? Seriously, I wouldn't trust politicians with money laying around. What happened to that 'trust fund' is precisely what I'd expect them to do with any money they saw lying around not being spent on programs that will buy them votes. Campaign finance reform won't actually stop politicians from coming up with clever schemes to spend other people's money to help them stay in power.
Not all countries ban private ownership of beaches, and honestly this looks like the fairest way to obtain a beach for the public in countries where beaches are privately owned--just gather up the money and buy it, instead of change the laws. (Plus, it actually imposes a direct cost on any politician who wants to win over voters/distract people from internal corruption by giving them a new park: The land cannot be just claimed by fiat, and preferably the protections against sending out thugs to intimidate the owners into 'donating' the land or the like should apply to everybody without exceptions for even the government.)
Quite a few places actually have some stretches of private beach kept a lot better than public beaches--generally ownership inspires a certain amount of interest in taking care of a place, while I've seen public lands get used as the public dump when it's supposed to be a park. (The stacking of old household appliances in the water did sometimes manage to be visually attractive but I'm rather certain this was pure accident.)
I don't think I care of they get their notice as "Edge writing home about how lonely Edge is now that you don't use Edge anymore (sob emoji)" but I do care if it's "W10 sending notice to MS that you switched to Pale Moon 10 days ago."
However, the first is only if it was done as an opt-in, or an explicit condition of making the browser free.
You're right, I should magically know exactly where a person is going to appear out of nowhere with enough time to apply the brakes because I'm paying attention and also brakes are magical!
Paying attention and applying your brakes only works when you can see somebody about to enter the road from far enough away to, well, do so. However, there are such amazing things as 'bushes,' 'parked cars,' and geography that inspires road signs like 'Hill Blocks View' that can render this a bit of a problem--which is why when I've been playing Go and walking along the side of the road I've been very, very careful to keep enough away from the edge of the road as to be not hit. (As for trespassing--honestly? The road is the only way to get between a couple parts of a greenway/park, and the city has not seen fit to install sidewalks. If you can't live with people walking along where the sidewalk would probably be if the city ever gets around to it, you probably shouldn't be living on that road...especially since it's a very good place to live if you want to be able to walk to the grocery store and the like.)
As I recall, there's reports of sexual transmission of Zika so they would have the worry of infecting a female partner--especially if they're having unprotected sex because they're attempting to make a baby.
But if you've paid attention to the news, Zika is only one of Rio's problems: Rio just plain doesn't have the money for this. The state of Rio (not quite the same as the city) ran out of money, they've not been able to pay hospital workers, ditto firefighters, ditto police, there's already been a few fun games of Find the Corpse (Some Assembly Needed) on the site of the Olympics itself...and, well, the general problems that could be summed up as 'being Rio' due to just how long-term they've been a problem--and thus they should have been known to the Olympic committee back when picking the city for the 2016 Olympics... Even before Zika, there were Questions about if Rio was really up to this.
There's a lot of reasons to not go to this year's Olympics, really.
The problem is that what we'd get instead is a dishonest theocracy, which will probably be also corrupt and come with not insignificant amounts of totalitarianism and a lot less tolerance for other ideas. There's a reason the short definition of 'scientism' is 'confusing religion for science.' It's also why I actually favor Poppler and the view that science should never be 'settled'--ongoing debate is essential and important, and it must be free debate, with recognition that occasionally ideas thrown out that were intentionally trying to be absurd have turned out to be actually probably right.
If the suggestion is meant in the same spirit I have heard suggested for Plato's idea of philosopher-kings--that it should be approached as a pure thought-experiment, and is not being seriously suggested as a thing to put into practice--then I'm all for discussing it. It is something whose implications need to be considered before implementing or rejecting it, and the discussion itself is probably worth having even if there's a good chunk of evidence that completely rational decision making actually makes for poor decisions...meaning that the rational choice supported by evidence is to involve emotions...
Okay, let me go with the short words answer on the pill end: You want a magic fix. Any pill that can do what you are demanding it do would as close as you can get to a literal gross violation of essential human rights in a bottle, with probably horrific side effects and likely being forced on people by the legal system so good damn luck managing even a decent pretense of informed consent. And that's just the part covering the 'magical addiction cure in a bottle' aspect; it might end up being exactly what MK ULTRA was looking for. (Hint: There is every reason to believe now that brainwash-inna-bottle is as real as the Philosopher's Stone.)
Science is not, despite the belief of your parents' generation that many of your generation share, going to make the world a perfect shiny utopia for you. It can make things better, but science is not magic, it will not fix all of the world's problems for you, and magic might well have hard limits in what it can do, too.
I do agree there, but I'm trying to get across the very simple point that society will let them say it should be an excuse and is known to accept similar excuses. You not being part of this problem does not make the problem go away.
The disadvantage of medicalization is that it encourages people like you to believe the problem is as simple as 'medications that attack the addiction process itself.' About the closest we've got is one case of a ministroke which left somebody with no interest in smoking afterwards--and we're not sure how that worked and more importantly deliberately damaging somebody's brain with that level of precision is impossible...and probably going to remain so, forever. It'd be like burning a hole through a period on page 325 of a closed paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings with a laser...without putting a hole through anything else, from a football field away. Even if such magic surgery were to somehow become possible, there will still be unavoidable associated losses of function because that neuron is doing more than just addiction behavior, and to top it off it might be absurdly specific in what sort of addiction it magically cures too, and even more importantly psychosurgery of that sort has been pretty much entirely rejected.
As for using a medication? That's taking the shotgun approach--have you actually looked at the lists of side effects that medications aiming at the brain can have? There is a reason synapses don't just spray neurotransmitters everywhere and there are enzymes that clean up enzymes, and it's not just to reset that particular synapse.
There is one thing that actually is pretty certain to work, though, and that? Is deciding that you just want to stop. You can quit a psychological addiction with nothing more than that one, simple thought--therapy and everything else exist just to make changing your habits easier, but they're going to do absolutely nothing whatsoever about any addiction unless you yourself want to quit. (Physical addictions you will need a medically-supervised detox, and psychological addictions are less likely to have that moment of "I wanna quit" that is absolutely, indisputably necessary.)
The brain is utterly fascinating but it's nowhere near simple enough for cures-in-a-pill to ever work--but there's a lot of evidence that you can change your brain's very structure by doing something as little as changing how you think or practicing a skill.
Given the situation and environment they're in, where a communication's snafu could start a war with relative ease, being the communications officer is no small role. It probably requires significant language skills, a great deal of intelligence, and a huge amount of knowledge about various cultures so you can at least manage an educated guess about how to not be horribly, horribly offensive.
Helmsman being a low-level job is also pretty funny; the helmsman in smaller crews often stacks with the job of navigator, and even when it isn't a helmsman needs to have some navigational skill. So, why is this important? Even a slight error in heading at the start will result in being increasingly farther off course. The time in which you have to notice and make course corrections before this gets to be a bignum also decreases as speed increases: the faster you go, the faster you can get really, really lost.
Now consider just how screwed over you would be if your helmsman made a small error in what your heading ought to be when setting your course before you left Earth for a quick run to Proxima Centauri in your spaceship, going with your FTL drive fast enough to make the trip of slightly over 4LY in a day...and you don't notice until you're at least a few hours into the trip...
As I recall, it was the EU that deciding to insist on it being a binding referendum, and it might well be a case that a good number of the people on the 'stay' and on the 'leave' side would have been perfectly fine with the 'stay on renegotiated terms' option if they'd been offered it, and at least some certainly were basically voting 'screw the political class thinking they can order everybody about.'
It's time we started treating addiction, to anything, as a medical problem. Our first attempt to treat addiction as a crime was the Nineteenth Amendment. When that didn't work, instead of trying a new approach to addiction we have been doubling down on the same failed solution.
The problem with that is that a lot of people will basically go "I'm sick: therefore I am not responsible for my actions!"--this gets particularly obnoxious if the person uses this for an excuse for everything they do, and treatment is not only possible but quite easily obtained...and society is pretty much totally okay with this right now. For treating it as a medical problem to begin to end well would require changing how society views medical problems to get rid of that whole meme in its explicit and implicit forms. (And even then, making it a medical problem stops being quite as obviously a 'good' solution if you've spent much time reading about the history of political abuse of psychology and the issues surrounding the medicalization of deviance, including the human rights issues.)
About the only thing that's likely to end well at this point is to flat-out make it indisputably safe for an addict to come in for treatment--there is a well-documented chilling effect on seeking treatment in places where it's not known to be safe to go in. The rest? Bring it up after society no longer is so okay with people using medical issues be an excuse for bad behavior.
Sometimes not even trying can drop you straight into the F territory, because you get stuck on something like the Code That Won't Compile or groveling through utterly dry documentation for the one bit of information you actually need (which should be there...somewhere...) and you can't get it done. Switching can even help you actually get it all done--most people do have a hard limit on how long they can pay sustained attention to one thing, and this is on the whole considered a Good Thing since it means you do notice things going on around you or that you need to eat.
It may also, if you multitask in this sense, be that what triggers a switch is getting stuck or bored with Task A, which usually will result with a decrease in efficiency at that task; by switching to Task B or Task C, you manage to maintain interest and sometimes that can also actually help you get around the block.
On the other hand, if you're trying to do Tasks A-D all at the exact same time, yeah, you're going to do a lousy job at all of them.
I'd like them to retain personhood, otherwise my current employer is likely to stop paying me and I will have no recourse because...well, you have to be a person to make an valid, enforceable contract. If my employer stops being a person, the contract that says they must pay me is as much of a joke as what they pay me is.
Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them
Completely irrelevant when you have a very large pool of people to choose from.
I'm sure you are very much aware of that. Suggesting otherwise would be insulting your intelligence a great deal.
What are you trying to do here?
Offhand, that 'very large' and 'sufficiently large' are not and never will be the same thing. It can also be an issue of looking in the right pool: I don't care how big the auto parts store is, you're not going to find a tomato for sale.
To add to the problem is that even if you can find people who are definitely capable, that does not mean that they will want to pick up the training. The difference between 'very large' and 'sufficiently large' is something I learned from watching fields related to some of the ones I'm trained in, and in which I could probably be cross-trained in a matter of months if not weeks...but the thing is? I'm not already because I don't want to be, and the job offer would have to pay me a lot (as in 'my take-home annual salary is in six digits' region) for me to even consider changing my mind.
If what another commenter and reports I've heard are true, Spanish employment laws have stuck them with no real option but to expect others to do the training--if you want employers to do the training? Then you should have it possible to fire people for failure to be trained, and if you require the employer prove this the requirements should be reasonable. (For example, "Employer paid for seat in training program, employee set a new record for flunking out by non-attendance.")
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Actually, it's easier to come out as LGBT* than it is to come out afterwards as not being a faithful worshiper of the progressive movement...and it's very much a secular religion in its behaviors sometimes. I've have open religious fundamentalists be more okay with you questioning the dogmas they subscribe to... (On the other hand, sometimes the irony of things like people who decry Eurocenticism depending on Eurocentric definitions or very...ignorant assumptions about non-Western lands, is something I can appreciate. I just wish that pointing out the irony was safer.)
Will Mike Pence's position on TPP make any difference on who you'll vote for?
Depends--are we supposed to assume that we're not just picking whose impeachment we'd rather get to watch? If so, then it definitely matter what the possible VP's positions are on issues are because the VP will get the job once the show is over...
What the hell are all of these accountants still doing?
For one thing, they're keeping up with laws regarding taxation, and shepherding the flow of money in an organization.
Accountancy is not just about counting.
Plus, they do things like make sure you've got a live human who can go Where The Money Vanished To Is The New Idiot Manager On Another Spending Spree? and somebody who can answer the question of WTF Happened To Payroll Did The Bank Screw It Up Again Yep The Bank Did. (Turns out, trusting a computer program to keep your accounts and issue checks? Not precisely the best idea.)
Sooo...what's to restrain the destructive effects of greed on regulation? What's to prevent regulatory capture, rentseeking, and other forms of corruption? You want to keep the regulatory burden light and the creation and enforcement processes transparent. Being in the government doesn't magically make somebody not greedy.
Actually, some of us spent enough time around smaller kids that we didn't forget as adults how speedy kids are--which is why I'm planning to have leashes for mine bought between when they're born and when they learn to walk. My mom did it with me, and when people complained that it was inhumane she pointed out "You try walking all day with your arm above your head, trying to keep up."
The thing is, people usually forget how speedy kids actually were, just like how they forget how miserable it was do to that and how their arms hurt at the end of the day, or how high school wasn't that awesome.
The assertion appears to be, basically, that we're spending a lot on enforcing it, but not on doing a formal study where we follow a bunch of cars around and see what the MPG actually is in real-world conditions--which actually feeds into your own complaint about the most recent adjustment, since that sort of study would provide empirical data on what the correct adjustments ought to be. You might find out that things like that the adjustments ought to be different depending on the manufacturer, because those companies' cars are more aiming for fuel efficiency under all conditions.
That smaller, lighter vehicles use less fuel to move than larger, heavier cars isn't really news unless you need a headline "Laws of Physics are Still Working"--remember, it always has taken more energy to move a heavier mass, something would be distinctly strange if simply making the mass move itself somehow changed that. The question is, exactly how accurate is the EPA's numbers?
All it'd take is getting some people to just keep accurate logs of how much gas they use and travel distances over a period of time. It's not a hard study to do, just not a very sexy one.
Looking at the answers and knowing how sales often works? Yes, yes it ought to be mandatory to label things for DRM and proprietary software issues, especially when it's not something people would expect to have such issues. The label also needs to be very hard to miss--and the penalties should be at least having to (at their own cost) provide the tool(s) needed to remove the DRM and/or work with the proprietary software.
I think tomhath's point is that this study is attempting to predict the future and thus it is simply a projection based off of current knowledge & potentially highly flawed by assuming that the current economy will somehow remain in its current state forever...which it's never done before. Anything that would let them be sure of this would be rather more important a discovery than, well, this.
The assumption wasn't that each generation would do better, it was that each generation would be larger--it's very much a Ponzi scheme, and it was set up originally with its payout age being past the average person's life expectancy. At this point? Aside from the fact that life expediencies are better, on the whole all the first world countries have been seeing birthrates below replacement rate for a significant period of time now, and this is actually a pretty reliable demographic trend around the world as the birthrate tends to drop with improvements in access to education for women. (This doesn't actually necessarily link to 'women are choosing not to have babies'--said education does not necessarily include the information for family planning, unless you're using that as a euphemism for 'planning not to have one.' Fixing that would make it easier to distinguish 'chose not to' from 'wanted to but missed the boat.')
As for the rest? Seriously, I wouldn't trust politicians with money laying around. What happened to that 'trust fund' is precisely what I'd expect them to do with any money they saw lying around not being spent on programs that will buy them votes. Campaign finance reform won't actually stop politicians from coming up with clever schemes to spend other people's money to help them stay in power.
Not all countries ban private ownership of beaches, and honestly this looks like the fairest way to obtain a beach for the public in countries where beaches are privately owned--just gather up the money and buy it, instead of change the laws. (Plus, it actually imposes a direct cost on any politician who wants to win over voters/distract people from internal corruption by giving them a new park: The land cannot be just claimed by fiat, and preferably the protections against sending out thugs to intimidate the owners into 'donating' the land or the like should apply to everybody without exceptions for even the government.)
Quite a few places actually have some stretches of private beach kept a lot better than public beaches--generally ownership inspires a certain amount of interest in taking care of a place, while I've seen public lands get used as the public dump when it's supposed to be a park. (The stacking of old household appliances in the water did sometimes manage to be visually attractive but I'm rather certain this was pure accident.)
I don't think I care of they get their notice as "Edge writing home about how lonely Edge is now that you don't use Edge anymore (sob emoji)" but I do care if it's "W10 sending notice to MS that you switched to Pale Moon 10 days ago."
However, the first is only if it was done as an opt-in, or an explicit condition of making the browser free.
There's GPS spoofers already--for more than just Pokemon Go--and the exploit has been noticed and patched out.
Then pay attention and apply your brakes.
You're right, I should magically know exactly where a person is going to appear out of nowhere with enough time to apply the brakes because I'm paying attention and also brakes are magical!
Paying attention and applying your brakes only works when you can see somebody about to enter the road from far enough away to, well, do so. However, there are such amazing things as 'bushes,' 'parked cars,' and geography that inspires road signs like 'Hill Blocks View' that can render this a bit of a problem--which is why when I've been playing Go and walking along the side of the road I've been very, very careful to keep enough away from the edge of the road as to be not hit. (As for trespassing--honestly? The road is the only way to get between a couple parts of a greenway/park, and the city has not seen fit to install sidewalks. If you can't live with people walking along where the sidewalk would probably be if the city ever gets around to it, you probably shouldn't be living on that road...especially since it's a very good place to live if you want to be able to walk to the grocery store and the like.)
As I recall, there's reports of sexual transmission of Zika so they would have the worry of infecting a female partner--especially if they're having unprotected sex because they're attempting to make a baby.
But if you've paid attention to the news, Zika is only one of Rio's problems: Rio just plain doesn't have the money for this. The state of Rio (not quite the same as the city) ran out of money, they've not been able to pay hospital workers, ditto firefighters, ditto police, there's already been a few fun games of Find the Corpse (Some Assembly Needed) on the site of the Olympics itself...and, well, the general problems that could be summed up as 'being Rio' due to just how long-term they've been a problem--and thus they should have been known to the Olympic committee back when picking the city for the 2016 Olympics... Even before Zika, there were Questions about if Rio was really up to this.
There's a lot of reasons to not go to this year's Olympics, really.
The problem is that what we'd get instead is a dishonest theocracy, which will probably be also corrupt and come with not insignificant amounts of totalitarianism and a lot less tolerance for other ideas. There's a reason the short definition of 'scientism' is 'confusing religion for science.' It's also why I actually favor Poppler and the view that science should never be 'settled'--ongoing debate is essential and important, and it must be free debate, with recognition that occasionally ideas thrown out that were intentionally trying to be absurd have turned out to be actually probably right.
If the suggestion is meant in the same spirit I have heard suggested for Plato's idea of philosopher-kings--that it should be approached as a pure thought-experiment, and is not being seriously suggested as a thing to put into practice--then I'm all for discussing it. It is something whose implications need to be considered before implementing or rejecting it, and the discussion itself is probably worth having even if there's a good chunk of evidence that completely rational decision making actually makes for poor decisions...meaning that the rational choice supported by evidence is to involve emotions...
Okay, let me go with the short words answer on the pill end: You want a magic fix. Any pill that can do what you are demanding it do would as close as you can get to a literal gross violation of essential human rights in a bottle, with probably horrific side effects and likely being forced on people by the legal system so good damn luck managing even a decent pretense of informed consent. And that's just the part covering the 'magical addiction cure in a bottle' aspect; it might end up being exactly what MK ULTRA was looking for. (Hint: There is every reason to believe now that brainwash-inna-bottle is as real as the Philosopher's Stone.)
Science is not, despite the belief of your parents' generation that many of your generation share, going to make the world a perfect shiny utopia for you. It can make things better, but science is not magic, it will not fix all of the world's problems for you, and magic might well have hard limits in what it can do, too.
I do agree there, but I'm trying to get across the very simple point that society will let them say it should be an excuse and is known to accept similar excuses. You not being part of this problem does not make the problem go away.
The disadvantage of medicalization is that it encourages people like you to believe the problem is as simple as 'medications that attack the addiction process itself.' About the closest we've got is one case of a ministroke which left somebody with no interest in smoking afterwards--and we're not sure how that worked and more importantly deliberately damaging somebody's brain with that level of precision is impossible...and probably going to remain so, forever. It'd be like burning a hole through a period on page 325 of a closed paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings with a laser...without putting a hole through anything else, from a football field away. Even if such magic surgery were to somehow become possible, there will still be unavoidable associated losses of function because that neuron is doing more than just addiction behavior, and to top it off it might be absurdly specific in what sort of addiction it magically cures too, and even more importantly psychosurgery of that sort has been pretty much entirely rejected.
As for using a medication? That's taking the shotgun approach--have you actually looked at the lists of side effects that medications aiming at the brain can have? There is a reason synapses don't just spray neurotransmitters everywhere and there are enzymes that clean up enzymes, and it's not just to reset that particular synapse.
There is one thing that actually is pretty certain to work, though, and that? Is deciding that you just want to stop. You can quit a psychological addiction with nothing more than that one, simple thought--therapy and everything else exist just to make changing your habits easier, but they're going to do absolutely nothing whatsoever about any addiction unless you yourself want to quit. (Physical addictions you will need a medically-supervised detox, and psychological addictions are less likely to have that moment of "I wanna quit" that is absolutely, indisputably necessary.)
The brain is utterly fascinating but it's nowhere near simple enough for cures-in-a-pill to ever work--but there's a lot of evidence that you can change your brain's very structure by doing something as little as changing how you think or practicing a skill.
Given the situation and environment they're in, where a communication's snafu could start a war with relative ease, being the communications officer is no small role. It probably requires significant language skills, a great deal of intelligence, and a huge amount of knowledge about various cultures so you can at least manage an educated guess about how to not be horribly, horribly offensive.
Helmsman being a low-level job is also pretty funny; the helmsman in smaller crews often stacks with the job of navigator, and even when it isn't a helmsman needs to have some navigational skill. So, why is this important? Even a slight error in heading at the start will result in being increasingly farther off course. The time in which you have to notice and make course corrections before this gets to be a bignum also decreases as speed increases: the faster you go, the faster you can get really, really lost.
Now consider just how screwed over you would be if your helmsman made a small error in what your heading ought to be when setting your course before you left Earth for a quick run to Proxima Centauri in your spaceship, going with your FTL drive fast enough to make the trip of slightly over 4LY in a day...and you don't notice until you're at least a few hours into the trip...
As I recall, it was the EU that deciding to insist on it being a binding referendum, and it might well be a case that a good number of the people on the 'stay' and on the 'leave' side would have been perfectly fine with the 'stay on renegotiated terms' option if they'd been offered it, and at least some certainly were basically voting 'screw the political class thinking they can order everybody about.'
It's time we started treating addiction, to anything, as a medical problem. Our first attempt to treat addiction as a crime was the Nineteenth Amendment. When that didn't work, instead of trying a new approach to addiction we have been doubling down on the same failed solution.
The problem with that is that a lot of people will basically go "I'm sick: therefore I am not responsible for my actions!"--this gets particularly obnoxious if the person uses this for an excuse for everything they do, and treatment is not only possible but quite easily obtained...and society is pretty much totally okay with this right now. For treating it as a medical problem to begin to end well would require changing how society views medical problems to get rid of that whole meme in its explicit and implicit forms. (And even then, making it a medical problem stops being quite as obviously a 'good' solution if you've spent much time reading about the history of political abuse of psychology and the issues surrounding the medicalization of deviance, including the human rights issues.)
About the only thing that's likely to end well at this point is to flat-out make it indisputably safe for an addict to come in for treatment--there is a well-documented chilling effect on seeking treatment in places where it's not known to be safe to go in. The rest? Bring it up after society no longer is so okay with people using medical issues be an excuse for bad behavior.
Sometimes not even trying can drop you straight into the F territory, because you get stuck on something like the Code That Won't Compile or groveling through utterly dry documentation for the one bit of information you actually need (which should be there...somewhere...) and you can't get it done. Switching can even help you actually get it all done--most people do have a hard limit on how long they can pay sustained attention to one thing, and this is on the whole considered a Good Thing since it means you do notice things going on around you or that you need to eat.
It may also, if you multitask in this sense, be that what triggers a switch is getting stuck or bored with Task A, which usually will result with a decrease in efficiency at that task; by switching to Task B or Task C, you manage to maintain interest and sometimes that can also actually help you get around the block.
On the other hand, if you're trying to do Tasks A-D all at the exact same time, yeah, you're going to do a lousy job at all of them.
I'd like them to retain personhood, otherwise my current employer is likely to stop paying me and I will have no recourse because...well, you have to be a person to make an valid, enforceable contract. If my employer stops being a person, the contract that says they must pay me is as much of a joke as what they pay me is.
Completely irrelevant when you have a very large pool of people to choose from. I'm sure you are very much aware of that. Suggesting otherwise would be insulting your intelligence a great deal. What are you trying to do here?
Offhand, that 'very large' and 'sufficiently large' are not and never will be the same thing. It can also be an issue of looking in the right pool: I don't care how big the auto parts store is, you're not going to find a tomato for sale.
To add to the problem is that even if you can find people who are definitely capable, that does not mean that they will want to pick up the training. The difference between 'very large' and 'sufficiently large' is something I learned from watching fields related to some of the ones I'm trained in, and in which I could probably be cross-trained in a matter of months if not weeks...but the thing is? I'm not already because I don't want to be, and the job offer would have to pay me a lot (as in 'my take-home annual salary is in six digits' region) for me to even consider changing my mind.
If what another commenter and reports I've heard are true, Spanish employment laws have stuck them with no real option but to expect others to do the training--if you want employers to do the training? Then you should have it possible to fire people for failure to be trained, and if you require the employer prove this the requirements should be reasonable. (For example, "Employer paid for seat in training program, employee set a new record for flunking out by non-attendance.")