We had a similar "doing the math" situation after our second child was born. In our case, though, we realized that after day care and extended day services, my wife would be working at her full time teaching job to take home $3K a year. Add in gas, clothing, and other work expenses and she could easily have been working for an effective negative salary. So she decided to quit her job and stay at home with our child.
When my wife and I were first thinking of starting a family, we looked at the financial aspect over and over. We just couldn't see how we could afford a child even though we both wanted one. Eventually, we realized that if we waited for the financial situation to be perfect, we'd never have kids. After two boys, I can now say that you make things work. I wouldn't want to tell someone "You can't be allowed to have kids unless you are earning a $XX,000 per year and fit this list of prerequisites."
Agreed. Suppose you have two employees: one who takes three weeks off per year and calls in sick when he's ill but produces a lot of work and a second who is in every day of the year (even when hacking up a lung) but who does virtually nothing. Too many managers would see Employee B's "perfect attendance" as a sign that he is an exemplary employee. After all, tracking how productive an employee is can be hard (Is it projects completed? Lines of code written? E-mails sent? Meetings attended?) but seeing how many days out of the year the employee was at his desk is dead simple.
FMLA guarantees that you can take time off but it comes out of your company-provided paid time off. If you exhaust the time off, you can continue to take unpaid time off under FMLA. Of course, if you were the sole income for your family and had only a week of PTO left, how much time could you realistically take off? Some companies might work with you to make sure you can take off as much time as you need, but other companies might say "go ahead and take the time off unpaid... we'll see how long you really take before you're begging to start working again to pay your bills." Still other companies would pressure you not to take FMLA or would try to penalize you for doing so. (e.g. Firing you after you come back for "unrelated reasons.")
When my first son was born, I took two weeks off to help my wife out and help take care of my son. I burned through PTO to do this and I felt 2 weeks was the most I could do. When my second son was born, I took a week off. My company is pretty good about time off for family reasons, but there are some real horror stories out there - including ones that stay within the law but still manage to effectively deny workers any family time.
I can't figure out why so many people in the US think that is somehow a bad thing.
The reason many think generous (or even just minimal) maternity/paternity leave is a bad thing is that some folks are solely focused on businesses. The employees working for the businesses are viewed as cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to churn out more profits. Any time off means that the cogs aren't functioning during that time which could mean the overall machine might not churn out quite as much profits. This is, in their view, a bad thing so any time off for the cogs is viewed negatively.
This doesn't just extend to maternity/paternity leave, you see this attitude in companies where taking ANY time off is viewed as bad or where you can take time off but you'd better bring your laptop and phone with you so you can answer e-mails while on vacation. This also gets perverted into the "death march" at some software companies where the cogs... I mean employees are worked 80 hour days to get a product out. The management figures that if the cogs get burnt out from overuse, they can just ditch them and replace them with new ones. They might even be able to replace them for ones that will work for less money and complain less about being overworked.
Keep spinning, cogs. You've got a profit to generate!
RIAA: "We shot the dirty pirate who was pirating 'Uptown Funk." People: "Um, that person just tweeted 'Heading Uptown and saw a chipmunk.'" RIAA: "Close enough. You can never be too careful."
Obviously, you don't understand the job of a "counter-terrorism expert." His job is to stir up as much fear of terrorism as possible to secure more anti-terrorism funding for his group.
Wait, you wanted actual anti-terrorism planning with actual weighing of costs vs. benefits? *bursts into laughter*
This isn't a case of "perfect is the enemy of the better." This is a case of "something is the enemy of nothing" - which means that, in the minds of politicians, doing something is better than doing nothing even if that something is worse than useless. Even if doing the something in question makes matters worse (say, by allowing the RIAA to form a private army to kill "copyright thieves"), it is better than doing nothing as far as the politician is concerned because he can claim "I did something" when re-election comes around.
In related news, this kind of thinking is what led to the TSA "security." Doing "something" about security (everyone has to remove their shoes) trumps taking the time to actually consider risks and benefits.
"This person has been violating our copyrights which we view as a major cyber-attack. We've seized him and imprisoned him along with the other pirates in our private rehabilitation centers until they have been re-educated."
I do have it linked in some places - it's hard to do product reviews if you refuse to give your name/address to the companies you are going to do reviews for. So, theoretically, one of those reps could "out" my pseudonym. Other than that, though, I'm not going to intentionally link my real name and pseudonym. (Which is why I refer to it as "my pseudonym" instead of actually typing out my actual pseudonym.)
In the case of my stalker, she's less of a "dox this person" than she is a "track down this person's employer and report to the employer that the person is a pedophile (or some other type of criminal) because God told her." Most likely my employer would shrug her off, but there's no need to take the chance that they might say "we don't believe her, but don't want to get involved with this so you're fired."
I am a Google Voice user and that functionality is there. I can mark a caller as spam and have them get a "This number is no longer in service" message in the future. Other Google Voice users marking callers as spam means that I'll often be notified that a spammer called me but my phone won't ring.
I have something like this with Google Voice. I can mark an incoming call as spam and block them from ever calling me again. Just like with spam e-mail filters, other people can do this too which can result in a phone call not even ringing my cell phone. And when a spammer tries calling me, they get a "This number is no longer in service" message.
Apart from the real name policy, that was my biggest complaint about Google+. I can post to Twitter, Facebook (if I used it), and other social networks using one program. Why not Google+ also? Posting to Google+ meant going to their site and opening a new post. It's adding extra work to the process. Anytime you add extra work to things you want users to do, you'll lose users. Google needed to make it as easy as possible to post to Google+ which meant third party service integration, but that conflicted with the "We want them going to Google+" mentality and so Google+ lost users.
I actually liked Google+ in theory. The idea that you could assign a post to be viewable only by a certain subset of users was perfect. What kept me off was the real-name policy and the lack of third party tools. Slashdot is one of the few places I use my real name online. (This is because I set up my Slashdot account a long time ago and I didn't care who knew my real name then.) I didn't want to link my pseudonym postings with my real name for various reasons - not least of which was because I've been the victim of an online stalker whose potential for damage was limited by her not knowing my real name. However, even when Google relented and allowed pseudonyms, it was in the form of "First_Name Last_Name (Pseudonym)". That doesn't help at all! Why couldn't they let me use my pseudonym and hide my real name. Even better, why not let me assign different visible names to different groups. "Pseudonym" to the public at large, "Real Name (Pseudonym)" to close friends, "Real Name" to family, etc.
As for the third party tools, I would use one application to post to Twitter. Were I on Facebook, I could have used that tool to post to Facebook too. But to post to Google+, I would have needed to go to Google's website. The easier you make it for people to post to your social network, the more posts you will get. The harder you make it, the less posts you will get.
I'm half wondering if they'll be offered a plea bargain. All charges dropped in exchange for helping to run a covert department designed to further scam ISIS to drain as much of their money as possible.
I'm not looking at a private person's decision about his own information. I'm looking at the French court's decision that application of French law needs to be applied across the entire Internet. If this is allowed, then every nation can apply its laws on everyone else, regardless of where they are. I live in the US where - for all its flaws - freedom of speech is pretty broad. There are many nations with much more strict rules about what you can and can't say. I wouldn't want those countries deciding what I can and can't say online.
And, as another poster pointed out, aide workers/doctors/nurses could be vaccinated when they go into an infection zone to treat patients without risking infection themselves. Even if the immunity only lasted a few months, I think any doctor would take the occasional jab over risking Ebola because they were so hot and tired when taking the suit off that they made a small mistake and got exposed to the disease.
You're going for funny, but too many people would say that 100% seriously. As the parent of a child with autism, I resent the implication those people make that a child is better off dead from measles than "damaged" with autism. Sadly, too many people have skewed risk-benefit calculations because they hear horror stories about vaccines and haven't seen first-hand the horrors of the diseases vaccines prevent. I guarantee that an Ebola vaccine would be greeted by long lines to get the vaccine and not questions about whether 1 case in 10,000 will have some minor side effect just like nobody said "Let's hold off on that polio vaccine until it is 100% safe" back when polio was raging.
They're all in search of the next big thing. Smartphones, right now, have hit a plateau. You can tweak some feature sets here and there such as adding some additional CPU power/memory/battery life, but overall pretty much any smartphone is the same as any other smartphone. If a phone manufacturer comes out with a "more power" smartphone, all it will take is their rivals packing more power into THEIR next product to dethrone the "more power" phone. So phone manufacturers are resorting to gimmicks to get an edge on the competition. Unfortunately for the manufacturers, none of these gimmicks has caught on. And, if it did, it wouldn't be long before other manufacturers copied the gimmick, all-but-completely negating the advantage for the original manufacturer had.
The UK averages less cop shootings in a decade than the US does in a year
As much as I think that there's a gun problem that leads to shootings, I've got to ask the obvious question: How many officers are there in the UK versus the US? If there are 10 times as many officers in the US than in the UK, simple math would indicate that it would take 10 years for the UK to amass as many cop shootings as the US. If there are 100 times less police in the UK than in the US, then the UK's per-cop shooting rate would actually be higher than in the US.
And that's the big hole in "Right To Be Forgotten." You can't apply one country's (or a group of countries') laws against the entire Internet. Russia can't demand that US hosted pro-gay rights materials be taken down because they violate Russia's anti-gay laws and France can't demand that Google's United States website delist pages because French courts decided that those pages should be forgotten. For better or worse, you can't just demand that the entire Internet forget about you.
And the French court's decision essentially would mean that we would all need to abide by Russia's anti-gay propaganda laws while online despite not living in Russia. Other countries have tried applying their laws to the Internet as a whole and they always fail. You can apply your laws within your borders, but you can't declare that EVERYONE needs to follow your rules no matter where they live.
What Google is essentially saying is "When a user in the US goes to Google.com, he shouldn't get filtered results because a French court said 'Don't include these listings.'" I completely agree with Google here. If you go to Google.fr and the court said "listings for X should be filtered", then Google has no choice but to filter those rulings. (Either that, or get out of France.) The courts of one country, however, shouldn't be allowed to decide what can and can't be shown in other countries, though. If that were the case, then Slashdot would need to take down any comment that mentioned Tiananmen Square because China disapproved and any website talking about gay rights would be nixed because Russia doesn't like that. As the Google statement said, you'd quickly limit what anyone could say online because some country somewhere has probably declared such speech illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing to know the numbers. It's another thing to see those numbers in action.
We had a similar "doing the math" situation after our second child was born. In our case, though, we realized that after day care and extended day services, my wife would be working at her full time teaching job to take home $3K a year. Add in gas, clothing, and other work expenses and she could easily have been working for an effective negative salary. So she decided to quit her job and stay at home with our child.
When my wife and I were first thinking of starting a family, we looked at the financial aspect over and over. We just couldn't see how we could afford a child even though we both wanted one. Eventually, we realized that if we waited for the financial situation to be perfect, we'd never have kids. After two boys, I can now say that you make things work. I wouldn't want to tell someone "You can't be allowed to have kids unless you are earning a $XX,000 per year and fit this list of prerequisites."
Agreed. Suppose you have two employees: one who takes three weeks off per year and calls in sick when he's ill but produces a lot of work and a second who is in every day of the year (even when hacking up a lung) but who does virtually nothing. Too many managers would see Employee B's "perfect attendance" as a sign that he is an exemplary employee. After all, tracking how productive an employee is can be hard (Is it projects completed? Lines of code written? E-mails sent? Meetings attended?) but seeing how many days out of the year the employee was at his desk is dead simple.
FMLA guarantees that you can take time off but it comes out of your company-provided paid time off. If you exhaust the time off, you can continue to take unpaid time off under FMLA. Of course, if you were the sole income for your family and had only a week of PTO left, how much time could you realistically take off? Some companies might work with you to make sure you can take off as much time as you need, but other companies might say "go ahead and take the time off unpaid... we'll see how long you really take before you're begging to start working again to pay your bills." Still other companies would pressure you not to take FMLA or would try to penalize you for doing so. (e.g. Firing you after you come back for "unrelated reasons.")
When my first son was born, I took two weeks off to help my wife out and help take care of my son. I burned through PTO to do this and I felt 2 weeks was the most I could do. When my second son was born, I took a week off. My company is pretty good about time off for family reasons, but there are some real horror stories out there - including ones that stay within the law but still manage to effectively deny workers any family time.
The reason many think generous (or even just minimal) maternity/paternity leave is a bad thing is that some folks are solely focused on businesses. The employees working for the businesses are viewed as cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to churn out more profits. Any time off means that the cogs aren't functioning during that time which could mean the overall machine might not churn out quite as much profits. This is, in their view, a bad thing so any time off for the cogs is viewed negatively.
This doesn't just extend to maternity/paternity leave, you see this attitude in companies where taking ANY time off is viewed as bad or where you can take time off but you'd better bring your laptop and phone with you so you can answer e-mails while on vacation. This also gets perverted into the "death march" at some software companies where the cogs... I mean employees are worked 80 hour days to get a product out. The management figures that if the cogs get burnt out from overuse, they can just ditch them and replace them with new ones. They might even be able to replace them for ones that will work for less money and complain less about being overworked.
Keep spinning, cogs. You've got a profit to generate!
I can see it now:
RIAA: "We shot the dirty pirate who was pirating 'Uptown Funk."
People: "Um, that person just tweeted 'Heading Uptown and saw a chipmunk.'"
RIAA: "Close enough. You can never be too careful."
Obviously, you don't understand the job of a "counter-terrorism expert." His job is to stir up as much fear of terrorism as possible to secure more anti-terrorism funding for his group.
Wait, you wanted actual anti-terrorism planning with actual weighing of costs vs. benefits? *bursts into laughter*
This isn't a case of "perfect is the enemy of the better." This is a case of "something is the enemy of nothing" - which means that, in the minds of politicians, doing something is better than doing nothing even if that something is worse than useless. Even if doing the something in question makes matters worse (say, by allowing the RIAA to form a private army to kill "copyright thieves"), it is better than doing nothing as far as the politician is concerned because he can claim "I did something" when re-election comes around.
In related news, this kind of thinking is what led to the TSA "security." Doing "something" about security (everyone has to remove their shoes) trumps taking the time to actually consider risks and benefits.
"This person has been violating our copyrights which we view as a major cyber-attack. We've seized him and imprisoned him along with the other pirates in our private rehabilitation centers until they have been re-educated."
That article has been nuked.
One down, seven to go.
I do have it linked in some places - it's hard to do product reviews if you refuse to give your name/address to the companies you are going to do reviews for. So, theoretically, one of those reps could "out" my pseudonym. Other than that, though, I'm not going to intentionally link my real name and pseudonym. (Which is why I refer to it as "my pseudonym" instead of actually typing out my actual pseudonym.)
In the case of my stalker, she's less of a "dox this person" than she is a "track down this person's employer and report to the employer that the person is a pedophile (or some other type of criminal) because God told her." Most likely my employer would shrug her off, but there's no need to take the chance that they might say "we don't believe her, but don't want to get involved with this so you're fired."
I am a Google Voice user and that functionality is there. I can mark a caller as spam and have them get a "This number is no longer in service" message in the future. Other Google Voice users marking callers as spam means that I'll often be notified that a spammer called me but my phone won't ring.
I have something like this with Google Voice. I can mark an incoming call as spam and block them from ever calling me again. Just like with spam e-mail filters, other people can do this too which can result in a phone call not even ringing my cell phone. And when a spammer tries calling me, they get a "This number is no longer in service" message.
Apart from the real name policy, that was my biggest complaint about Google+. I can post to Twitter, Facebook (if I used it), and other social networks using one program. Why not Google+ also? Posting to Google+ meant going to their site and opening a new post. It's adding extra work to the process. Anytime you add extra work to things you want users to do, you'll lose users. Google needed to make it as easy as possible to post to Google+ which meant third party service integration, but that conflicted with the "We want them going to Google+" mentality and so Google+ lost users.
I actually liked Google+ in theory. The idea that you could assign a post to be viewable only by a certain subset of users was perfect. What kept me off was the real-name policy and the lack of third party tools. Slashdot is one of the few places I use my real name online. (This is because I set up my Slashdot account a long time ago and I didn't care who knew my real name then.) I didn't want to link my pseudonym postings with my real name for various reasons - not least of which was because I've been the victim of an online stalker whose potential for damage was limited by her not knowing my real name. However, even when Google relented and allowed pseudonyms, it was in the form of "First_Name Last_Name (Pseudonym)". That doesn't help at all! Why couldn't they let me use my pseudonym and hide my real name. Even better, why not let me assign different visible names to different groups. "Pseudonym" to the public at large, "Real Name (Pseudonym)" to close friends, "Real Name" to family, etc.
As for the third party tools, I would use one application to post to Twitter. Were I on Facebook, I could have used that tool to post to Facebook too. But to post to Google+, I would have needed to go to Google's website. The easier you make it for people to post to your social network, the more posts you will get. The harder you make it, the less posts you will get.
I'm half wondering if they'll be offered a plea bargain. All charges dropped in exchange for helping to run a covert department designed to further scam ISIS to drain as much of their money as possible.
I'm not looking at a private person's decision about his own information. I'm looking at the French court's decision that application of French law needs to be applied across the entire Internet. If this is allowed, then every nation can apply its laws on everyone else, regardless of where they are. I live in the US where - for all its flaws - freedom of speech is pretty broad. There are many nations with much more strict rules about what you can and can't say. I wouldn't want those countries deciding what I can and can't say online.
And, as another poster pointed out, aide workers/doctors/nurses could be vaccinated when they go into an infection zone to treat patients without risking infection themselves. Even if the immunity only lasted a few months, I think any doctor would take the occasional jab over risking Ebola because they were so hot and tired when taking the suit off that they made a small mistake and got exposed to the disease.
You're going for funny, but too many people would say that 100% seriously. As the parent of a child with autism, I resent the implication those people make that a child is better off dead from measles than "damaged" with autism. Sadly, too many people have skewed risk-benefit calculations because they hear horror stories about vaccines and haven't seen first-hand the horrors of the diseases vaccines prevent. I guarantee that an Ebola vaccine would be greeted by long lines to get the vaccine and not questions about whether 1 case in 10,000 will have some minor side effect just like nobody said "Let's hold off on that polio vaccine until it is 100% safe" back when polio was raging.
They're all in search of the next big thing. Smartphones, right now, have hit a plateau. You can tweak some feature sets here and there such as adding some additional CPU power/memory/battery life, but overall pretty much any smartphone is the same as any other smartphone. If a phone manufacturer comes out with a "more power" smartphone, all it will take is their rivals packing more power into THEIR next product to dethrone the "more power" phone. So phone manufacturers are resorting to gimmicks to get an edge on the competition. Unfortunately for the manufacturers, none of these gimmicks has caught on. And, if it did, it wouldn't be long before other manufacturers copied the gimmick, all-but-completely negating the advantage for the original manufacturer had.
As much as I think that there's a gun problem that leads to shootings, I've got to ask the obvious question: How many officers are there in the UK versus the US? If there are 10 times as many officers in the US than in the UK, simple math would indicate that it would take 10 years for the UK to amass as many cop shootings as the US. If there are 100 times less police in the UK than in the US, then the UK's per-cop shooting rate would actually be higher than in the US.
And that's the big hole in "Right To Be Forgotten." You can't apply one country's (or a group of countries') laws against the entire Internet. Russia can't demand that US hosted pro-gay rights materials be taken down because they violate Russia's anti-gay laws and France can't demand that Google's United States website delist pages because French courts decided that those pages should be forgotten. For better or worse, you can't just demand that the entire Internet forget about you.
And the French court's decision essentially would mean that we would all need to abide by Russia's anti-gay propaganda laws while online despite not living in Russia. Other countries have tried applying their laws to the Internet as a whole and they always fail. You can apply your laws within your borders, but you can't declare that EVERYONE needs to follow your rules no matter where they live.
What Google is essentially saying is "When a user in the US goes to Google.com, he shouldn't get filtered results because a French court said 'Don't include these listings.'" I completely agree with Google here. If you go to Google.fr and the court said "listings for X should be filtered", then Google has no choice but to filter those rulings. (Either that, or get out of France.) The courts of one country, however, shouldn't be allowed to decide what can and can't be shown in other countries, though. If that were the case, then Slashdot would need to take down any comment that mentioned Tiananmen Square because China disapproved and any website talking about gay rights would be nixed because Russia doesn't like that. As the Google statement said, you'd quickly limit what anyone could say online because some country somewhere has probably declared such speech illegal.