I agree entirely. Luckily at most workplaces people are pretty good about not talking about ridiculous shit like that, but when they do take off the mask you can hear some wacky-ass shit from engineers.
It really makes me wonder how I got into this profession, since I'm not religious and don't believe in stuff without evidence. I guess I just wanted a better-paying and more stable job than you can get as a scientist.
Some of the engineers I know are conservatives, but few are religious. Logic and religion don't mix well. So I'm confused about this idea that engineers are more likely to be religious than the public at large. That just doesn't make sense to me.
It makes sense to me. Many engineers I've met seem to be both conservative and religious. Why? I have no idea. My guess is they're not very scientifically-minded and want a good income and stable career (hallmarks of conservatism), so they avoided going into sciences where the pay is lousy and careers not that stable.
It also seems to me that software engineers are definitely the least conservative and religious of engineers I've met.
(I think Bernie is too conservative on things like gun control).
I'm a liberal engineer too, and I disagree about this. A strongly pro-gun-control position is a good way for a Democratic candidate to lose the general election, like what happened with Gore in 2000. Bernie's more moderate position is much more realistic in America at this time. Unless you live in the 'hood, your statistical likelihood of being killed by gun violence is ridiculously low, even if it is higher than western Europe or Australia, but our country has severe economic problems which Bernie's policies would improve greatly (much more so than Hillary's, since she just wants to let Wall Street run amok and cause another 2008 disaster).
Bernie's right: you're just not going to get any kind of strict gun control passed in this country anytime soon. Republicans are already dominating elections at the local and state levels plus they control both houses in Congress. Pushing forward with unpopular (with the centrists and swing voters) policies is a recipe for failure.
A hallmark of being a good engineer is being extremely pragmatic.
Yeah, me too. I even wish there were some other line of work I could get into, because 1) there's no women here and 2) most of my coworkers really are religious conservatives. How religion correlates with engineering, I have no idea. What attracted me to engineering was 1) working alone much of the time (open-plan work environments have completely ruined this), and 2) building cool things, making things work which implies a scientific mindset that things happen for a reason based in physics, not mysticism.
If I had known back in college what I know now, I would have gone into medicine instead.
> Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious.
That makes sense, since engineers deal with things as they are, not as they pretend they are.
That doesn't make any sense at all. Being religious is, by definition, believing in something with zero evidence whatsoever, so it's just believing in fantasies. How is that "dealing with things as they are"?
Look, you're wrong and you're full of shit. I even gave you a reference to the Wikipedia article which points out that Egypt IS in the middle east. If you think you know better than a scholarly article on the subject, then I don't give a shit what you think, you probably think the moon landings were a hoax too.
Well, given the the holiday is a winter solstice holiday, which people have celebrated probably since the dawn of agriculture, and it was originally a week long and involved temporarily suspending normal social rules, I'd say that was absolutely the primary reason for the holiday, as well as honoring the great Saturn.
That is why I said: "middle east is not a defined term".
Sure it is, in English at least. English is defined by popular usage, so how people use it IS the definition. What I gave you was my perception (as an American) of how the term is used in this country.
Simple: there is no "near east" any more. No one really uses that term, so it's archaic. We use the term "middle east" now. Decades ago, we used to use the term "near east" to describe the Ottoman Empire's possessions in Asia. There might be some academics who still use the term for something, but that's jargon and not popular usage.
So calling those areas "middle east" makes no sense
It doesn't matter what "makes sense" to you. The only thing that matters is how a term is used in English, if you're communicating with an English speaker. However it's used popularly IS the correct usage. If English speakers worldwide all decided tomorrow to start calling that region "Vulcan", then *that* would be the correct term for the region. Even better, if all English speakers suddenly decided to call that region "Europe", and to call what's now Europe "the Middle East", then *those* would be the correct terms.
So calling those areas "middle east" makes no sense, not even from the point of view of the USA (world map, not political).
Language isn't defined by geographers, it's defined by popular usage. Every language is borne out of the culture of its speakers, and reflects upon their culture and their worldview to a huge extent. This term has obviously come about because of the American worldview and its involvement in geopolitics. The term may not be what geographers would prefer, but there's a lot more to the world than strict geography, and the various people who have to deal with the people and cultures in that region are worried about a lot of things other than some lines on a map, or which piece of land technically sits on which continent or which tectonic plate.
There is no lack of opportunity in STEM, especially computer programming. The barrier to entry is ridiculously low: all you need is a computer, which these days you can get for next to nothing if you get something used and old. You don't need teachers or mentors, you can learn everything on your own. A kid who really has an interest and wants to get into it can, as long as their parents support them.
The place where things really aren't equal and it really matters is in peoples' upbringing. Parents and society encourage little girls to believe they're Disney princesses and that math and tech work isn't for them. Girls are also trained to be much more social than little boys, and this also makes them avoid STEM careers which are not usually seen as highly social.
There's not much you can do about this, because it's a product of wider society, and also parenting. The only way you can change this is to ban parenting, and only have kids raised in government institutions like in Brave New World. And finally, trying to do things at, say, the high school level to address the inequity is way, way, way too late.
If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates?
That has absolutely nothing to do with why women don't go into STEM. That's a problem with socioeconomic trends that are hard to change, and also with ongoing racism in the law enforcement profession. This last one isn't going to change any time soon when police departments selectively weed out applicants who are too smart, and only want to hire dumb thugs.
Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them?
You can blame that on the H1-B program, and of course the greed of employers. Cut the supply and the employers will be forced to shape up.
Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country?
The same socioeconomic trends that mean black people still are, on average, poorer than white people. The people in Congress look a lot like the people who run corporations; they're from mostly the same socioeconomic groups. There's a high correlation with racial and gender demographics there.
No, that's "Good Friday" you're thinking of. Black Friday got its name in Philadelphia in the 50s because it was right before some sports game and there was a lot of petty crime and shoplifting that day, creating a big headache for the police.
Who gives a crap about these retail events "losing their meaning"... the underlying holiday has so utterly lost its meaning...
The holiday lost its meaning long ago. It's retained some of it: gift giving has *always* been a major part of the holiday. However other parts have faded away, such as wearing conical hats, wearing loungewear, and slaves eating before their masters (or even being served by their masters) and being able to criticize their masters without fear of punishment. All these things have been gone for over a millennia.
That reminds me of a bicycle shop in my college town which had huge posters advertising that they were going out of business every fall, when the new freshmen were starting classes.
I agree completely. That Motley Fool article was obviously written by a fool, because it touts "smart TV" features as something desirable, when in fact it's a big negative. Basically the whole puff piece was pushing people to buy smart TVs over superior TVs from companies like Vizio and Seiki, where you can still get dumb TVs and save a bundle while not getting stuck with shitty, privacy invading BS that spies on you and sends your conversations to some corporate HQ.
The main Gnome developers are all Red Hat employees, and that's their actual job at RH. It's been that way for probably well over 10 years. So since they're employees, all their actions can be considered to be approved by RH upper management.
There is no such bug. There's these things called "brakes": if your car did accelerate unintentionally, you could press those instead. Or pop the transmission into neutral.
With the millions upon millions of cars being sold with throttle-by-wire over the last 10-20 years, if there really was a problem like this, we would have heard about it by now. Instead all we had was the Toyota incident (mine's not a Toyota), and most of those incidents were proven to be just fraudsters trying to cash in on it.
That's not the comment I made at all. It's more like "I was living happily in a situation of my choosing, then some assholes moved in next door and ruined it and the legal system was entirely useless in solving the problem. But somehow, some asshole on Slashdot thinks I'm to blame for somehow not being in control of the corrupt jerks in my local government."
I don't see how someone moving in *after* you were already there is "making a choice". (Note I'm not contesting the case where some dumbass moves next to a noisy facility and then complains about it.)
That's funny, some people I know say that Wikipedia is all BS and that you can't trust anything on there because anyone can edit it, but meanwhile you can trust Breitbart.com and YouTube videos from people who make "documentaries" "exposing" the FEMA concentration camps.
I can't believe no one has complained about microUSB connectors yet (or maybe I missed it). I'd eliminate the microUSB connector and go back to the much more robust miniUSB connector on phones and other such devices.
While they're at it, they need to increase the thickness of phones and use the space for much bigger batteries. And build an Otterbox-type case in as well, so it's an integral part of the device instead of an add-on. And make the thing easy to disassemble, service and repair too.
Also, make Apple not do about half of what they've done, design-wise, in the last 5 years, to both hardware and software. Thin gray letters on white? Buttons that look like text? Colors from the background creeping into every UI surface? A phone that's so thin, there's a bump for the camera lens to fit, and so thin that its battery doesn't survive one day of moderate use? Fuck all that.
I completely disagree with all of this stuff. If you don't like these things, then stop buying Apple products. I think Apple should do more of this stuff. If they continue being profitable, it'll show what idiotic sheep their customers are.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree entirely. Luckily at most workplaces people are pretty good about not talking about ridiculous shit like that, but when they do take off the mask you can hear some wacky-ass shit from engineers.
It really makes me wonder how I got into this profession, since I'm not religious and don't believe in stuff without evidence. I guess I just wanted a better-paying and more stable job than you can get as a scientist.
Some of the engineers I know are conservatives, but few are religious. Logic and religion don't mix well. So I'm confused about this idea that engineers are more likely to be religious than the public at large. That just doesn't make sense to me.
It makes sense to me. Many engineers I've met seem to be both conservative and religious. Why? I have no idea. My guess is they're not very scientifically-minded and want a good income and stable career (hallmarks of conservatism), so they avoided going into sciences where the pay is lousy and careers not that stable.
It also seems to me that software engineers are definitely the least conservative and religious of engineers I've met.
(I think Bernie is too conservative on things like gun control).
I'm a liberal engineer too, and I disagree about this. A strongly pro-gun-control position is a good way for a Democratic candidate to lose the general election, like what happened with Gore in 2000. Bernie's more moderate position is much more realistic in America at this time. Unless you live in the 'hood, your statistical likelihood of being killed by gun violence is ridiculously low, even if it is higher than western Europe or Australia, but our country has severe economic problems which Bernie's policies would improve greatly (much more so than Hillary's, since she just wants to let Wall Street run amok and cause another 2008 disaster).
Bernie's right: you're just not going to get any kind of strict gun control passed in this country anytime soon. Republicans are already dominating elections at the local and state levels plus they control both houses in Congress. Pushing forward with unpopular (with the centrists and swing voters) policies is a recipe for failure.
A hallmark of being a good engineer is being extremely pragmatic.
Yeah, me too. I even wish there were some other line of work I could get into, because 1) there's no women here and 2) most of my coworkers really are religious conservatives. How religion correlates with engineering, I have no idea. What attracted me to engineering was 1) working alone much of the time (open-plan work environments have completely ruined this), and 2) building cool things, making things work which implies a scientific mindset that things happen for a reason based in physics, not mysticism.
If I had known back in college what I know now, I would have gone into medicine instead.
> Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious.
That makes sense, since engineers deal with things as they are, not as they pretend they are.
That doesn't make any sense at all. Being religious is, by definition, believing in something with zero evidence whatsoever, so it's just believing in fantasies. How is that "dealing with things as they are"?
Look, you're wrong and you're full of shit. I even gave you a reference to the Wikipedia article which points out that Egypt IS in the middle east. If you think you know better than a scholarly article on the subject, then I don't give a shit what you think, you probably think the moon landings were a hoax too.
Well, given the the holiday is a winter solstice holiday, which people have celebrated probably since the dawn of agriculture, and it was originally a week long and involved temporarily suspending normal social rules, I'd say that was absolutely the primary reason for the holiday, as well as honoring the great Saturn.
That is why I said: "middle east is not a defined term".
Sure it is, in English at least. English is defined by popular usage, so how people use it IS the definition. What I gave you was my perception (as an American) of how the term is used in this country.
You can also see what Wikipedia has to say about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you look at the map, you'll see that it pretty much matches up exactly with what I said before. Egypt in, Afghanistan out.
Point is: we define it geographically, and the americans more or less by political reasoning
However Americans have collectively come to use the term "middle east" to mean that group of countries, it IS correct, by definition.
if the regions/countries you mention are "middle east", what is then "near east"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Simple: there is no "near east" any more. No one really uses that term, so it's archaic. We use the term "middle east" now. Decades ago, we used to use the term "near east" to describe the Ottoman Empire's possessions in Asia. There might be some academics who still use the term for something, but that's jargon and not popular usage.
So calling those areas "middle east" makes no sense
It doesn't matter what "makes sense" to you. The only thing that matters is how a term is used in English, if you're communicating with an English speaker. However it's used popularly IS the correct usage. If English speakers worldwide all decided tomorrow to start calling that region "Vulcan", then *that* would be the correct term for the region. Even better, if all English speakers suddenly decided to call that region "Europe", and to call what's now Europe "the Middle East", then *those* would be the correct terms.
So calling those areas "middle east" makes no sense, not even from the point of view of the USA (world map, not political).
Language isn't defined by geographers, it's defined by popular usage. Every language is borne out of the culture of its speakers, and reflects upon their culture and their worldview to a huge extent. This term has obviously come about because of the American worldview and its involvement in geopolitics. The term may not be what geographers would prefer, but there's a lot more to the world than strict geography, and the various people who have to deal with the people and cultures in that region are worried about a lot of things other than some lines on a map, or which piece of land technically sits on which continent or which tectonic plate.
I think we need to add debauchery to go with the food and drink.
There is no lack of opportunity in STEM, especially computer programming. The barrier to entry is ridiculously low: all you need is a computer, which these days you can get for next to nothing if you get something used and old. You don't need teachers or mentors, you can learn everything on your own. A kid who really has an interest and wants to get into it can, as long as their parents support them.
The place where things really aren't equal and it really matters is in peoples' upbringing. Parents and society encourage little girls to believe they're Disney princesses and that math and tech work isn't for them. Girls are also trained to be much more social than little boys, and this also makes them avoid STEM careers which are not usually seen as highly social.
There's not much you can do about this, because it's a product of wider society, and also parenting. The only way you can change this is to ban parenting, and only have kids raised in government institutions like in Brave New World. And finally, trying to do things at, say, the high school level to address the inequity is way, way, way too late.
If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates?
That has absolutely nothing to do with why women don't go into STEM. That's a problem with socioeconomic trends that are hard to change, and also with ongoing racism in the law enforcement profession. This last one isn't going to change any time soon when police departments selectively weed out applicants who are too smart, and only want to hire dumb thugs.
Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them?
You can blame that on the H1-B program, and of course the greed of employers. Cut the supply and the employers will be forced to shape up.
Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country?
The same socioeconomic trends that mean black people still are, on average, poorer than white people. The people in Congress look a lot like the people who run corporations; they're from mostly the same socioeconomic groups. There's a high correlation with racial and gender demographics there.
No, that's "Good Friday" you're thinking of. Black Friday got its name in Philadelphia in the 50s because it was right before some sports game and there was a lot of petty crime and shoplifting that day, creating a big headache for the police.
Who gives a crap about these retail events "losing their meaning" ... the underlying holiday has so utterly lost its meaning...
The holiday lost its meaning long ago. It's retained some of it: gift giving has *always* been a major part of the holiday. However other parts have faded away, such as wearing conical hats, wearing loungewear, and slaves eating before their masters (or even being served by their masters) and being able to criticize their masters without fear of punishment. All these things have been gone for over a millennia.
But if you do that, you won't be able to co-opt the Roman holiday of Saturnalia.
Personally, I think we should bring back Saturnalia.
That reminds me of a bicycle shop in my college town which had huge posters advertising that they were going out of business every fall, when the new freshmen were starting classes.
I agree completely. That Motley Fool article was obviously written by a fool, because it touts "smart TV" features as something desirable, when in fact it's a big negative. Basically the whole puff piece was pushing people to buy smart TVs over superior TVs from companies like Vizio and Seiki, where you can still get dumb TVs and save a bundle while not getting stuck with shitty, privacy invading BS that spies on you and sends your conversations to some corporate HQ.
The main Gnome developers are all Red Hat employees, and that's their actual job at RH. It's been that way for probably well over 10 years. So since they're employees, all their actions can be considered to be approved by RH upper management.
There is no such bug. There's these things called "brakes": if your car did accelerate unintentionally, you could press those instead. Or pop the transmission into neutral.
With the millions upon millions of cars being sold with throttle-by-wire over the last 10-20 years, if there really was a problem like this, we would have heard about it by now. Instead all we had was the Toyota incident (mine's not a Toyota), and most of those incidents were proven to be just fraudsters trying to cash in on it.
How the fuck is it a "choice" when someone moves in **after** you?
That's not the comment I made at all. It's more like "I was living happily in a situation of my choosing, then some assholes moved in next door and ruined it and the legal system was entirely useless in solving the problem. But somehow, some asshole on Slashdot thinks I'm to blame for somehow not being in control of the corrupt jerks in my local government."
Weird, I haven't had much trouble. Syncing two different phones to my car was easy as pie.
I don't see how someone moving in *after* you were already there is "making a choice". (Note I'm not contesting the case where some dumbass moves next to a noisy facility and then complains about it.)
Well it was even more amazing how she managed to brainwash many of her victims to admit to the crimes after she "solved" the mystery.
That's funny, some people I know say that Wikipedia is all BS and that you can't trust anything on there because anyone can edit it, but meanwhile you can trust Breitbart.com and YouTube videos from people who make "documentaries" "exposing" the FEMA concentration camps.
I can't believe no one has complained about microUSB connectors yet (or maybe I missed it). I'd eliminate the microUSB connector and go back to the much more robust miniUSB connector on phones and other such devices.
While they're at it, they need to increase the thickness of phones and use the space for much bigger batteries. And build an Otterbox-type case in as well, so it's an integral part of the device instead of an add-on. And make the thing easy to disassemble, service and repair too.
Also, make Apple not do about half of what they've done, design-wise, in the last 5 years, to both hardware and software. Thin gray letters on white? Buttons that look like text? Colors from the background creeping into every UI surface? A phone that's so thin, there's a bump for the camera lens to fit, and so thin that its battery doesn't survive one day of moderate use? Fuck all that.
I completely disagree with all of this stuff. If you don't like these things, then stop buying Apple products. I think Apple should do more of this stuff. If they continue being profitable, it'll show what idiotic sheep their customers are.