The wrench problem is easily solved: don't buy older American-made cars. The new ones (I'm pretty sure) are all-metric these days, though there was a time in the 90s when some parts used metric bolts and other parts used US-unit bolts. But 90s American cars were all crap anyway and are almost all in the junkyard now or better yet melted down, so that shouldn't be an issue these days.
With more and more of our appliances being made by companies like LG and Samsung rather than Maytag, the reasons to keep a US-unit wrench set around are disappearing.
Then don't. No one's forcing you to measure things in fractions of an inch, unless maybe you work in a woodworking shop (or maybe a military contractor; they seem to still use those units in engineering for some dumb reason).
Except that Esperanto is heavily biased towards indo-european language speakers, in particular ones who speak a Latin-derived language, and is really an antificially-constructed language derived from Latin, so it's really not that great either, as it has many inefficiencies found in the indo-european languages it's made from. Lojban would be a better choice for a universal language for all humans, if you wanted to force everyone to adopt a standard non-natural language.
The only problem is that water doesn't freeze and boil at the same point everywhere: it's dependent on pressure. So to calibrate your thermometer well, you need to have expensive equipment to measure and set your pressure to 1.000 atm, because barometric pressure varies significantly with the weather. Is it that much harder to mess around with liquid nitrogen once you've gone to that trouble?
One story I heard about the conversion attempt in the 70s was that many gas stations changed from selling gasoline in gallons to liters, but in doing so, they jacked up the prices a lot, thinking people wouldn't noticed. However, they did, and that left many people with a bad taste in their mouth for metricification.
Make sure that when you quit, give the stupid cellphone policy as the reason, and don't give any notice. Bonus points if they're coming up on a big deadline and you're critical to the project.
I used to work at Intel, starting in 2000. For the first year or two, they still had a policy of having the security guards check peoples' bags on the way out of the building, to make sure they weren't taking home any sensitive documents.
It was an extremely stupid policy, because at this same time, every single employee was issued a laptop computer, which they normally brought home with them, and obviously contained lots of work data. Whoever made that policy was still stuck in the 1970s. After a couple years, they finally dropped the stupid policy.
The world has changed. 15 years ago, in most parts of the US, it was expected in most well-paid jobs that you'd have a car to get to work. Sure, 150 years ago this was an unreasonable expectation, but it's expected now, and as a result, employers have parking lots for their employers to park in. No employer is going to last very long if 95% of their employees need to commute (by car) to work due to the geography and local culture of the area, yet they provide no place for them to park.
Similarly, these days it's normal for people to carry around a cellphone with them wherever they go. Many (if not most) people in many industries now do not even have a landline phone. I haven't had one in about 10 years, and I was a bit of a latecomer to the cellular party myself. It's been normal for people to carry cellphones now for at least 15 years; for someone in high school, that's all they know. Asking employees to not carry a cellphone, in 2013, is utterly ridiculous, and a lot like asking them to wear 1800s-style dress to work.
And where are employees supposed to store their phone anyway? In their car maybe, if they drive to work, but there are a fair number of people who ride bicycles in the warmer months, or walk if they're close, or most especially carpool or vanpool, not to mention take public transit (more so in some areas than others). I don't see many employers going to the expense of providing secured lockers; that's wishful thinking at best. Forwarding to a work phone may or may not work; lots of work phones are behind extensions and don't have their own number.
Don't be so sure. There's tons of places where you're not allowed to bring in various personal items (backpacks, food, etc.), and they have security that even checks to make sure you're not bringing that stuff in. However, if you have it, they're not going to give you a place to store it while you're inside the building; it's either throw it in the trash or don't go in.
You really expect employers to have enough consideration to give employees a place to check and store (securely) their personal belongings like smartphones? I think that's asking too much, at least in America.
I don't see anything wrong with making sexist generalizations; the fact is men and women are different, so while not all members of one sex will follow a particular generalization, some generalizations really apply far more to one sex than the other. For instance, how many football-obsessed fans like these will be women versus men? While there might be a small number of stupid female football fans, they're a rarity, but there's no shortage of stupid male football fans (or other sports fans for that matter).
Women in the workplace are different from men; my wife complains a lot about other women, because many of them have the tendency to be "Jezebels" and catty backstabbers. Obviously not all women are like this, but this is behavior you don't see much on the male side. It's a dynamic mostly confined to women. Men have their own crappy behaviors in the workplace too, so they're no saints either, but their bad behavior is usually different from the womens'.
One question: why would transferring items to a new place be a problem? Don't you have moving trucks and moving services in London? Now obviously, boxes and boxes of books and CDs and DVDs will add to your moving bill, but it's not (or shouldn't be) like you have to hand-carry everything from apartment (flat) to apartment when you move. Even if you don't want to hire movers and do it yourself to save money, sofas and beds aren't things you can carry by hand, so you'll need some kind of truck for that.
In both high school and college, I had some teachers/professors who did a lot of writing throughout the class. These people did NOT use blackboards for this; they used overhead projectors. With these, they sat down in front of the projector, and wrote on it, as it has a horizontal surface.
Maybe it's not generational at all, but rather people who have had to relocate many times in their life. The more stuff you have to carry around, the harder (and more expensive) it is to move. Many bookcases full of books is a lot more hassle to move than a hard drive full of ebooks.
Yep, and since they're in China where there's a one-child policy (which is probably why they only have the one son in the first place), after this son gets assassinated (best to make it look like an accident), then the parents can apply to the government for a waiver to have an additional child.
Yes, exactly. As long as you're decent to everyone else (until they give you a good reason not to be), I have no problem with treating a wicked person poorly. They've brought it on themselves, and they don't deserve to be treated well. Even back in ancient times, tribes of humans have treated bad people poorly in some way, in order to protect the rest of the tribe. If their crime wasn't great enough to kill them outright, they could just "shun" them, and cast them out. There's nothing wrong with that; if you can't act properly within a group, the group is under no obligation to keep you around and help you.
It's hard to say, but there's a few caveats here: 1) Microsoft is not a person. It's a corporation. Despite what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not people. I don't really have a problem with someone doing something mean to MS, because they've earned it, and they've done much worse things over and over and over again throughout their history. If Google gets in trouble for this, it isn't fair, because MS never got in serious trouble for their antics. You can't let one entity get away with murder and then punish others for the same thing that affects the one that profited unfairly. 2) Google isn't really doing anything "wicked" here. They're just denying them a bit of information. It's not like they're assassinating MS executives or hacking into their systems and wreaking havoc. And again, I think they have that right, due to MS's prior actions which have been very similar.
It's still "free speech", even if it's untrue. However, if it's untrue and someone gets mad, they can sue you for civil damages for that speech. You won't go to prison, however; that's why it's free speech: there's no criminal penalties. Remember, in the legal world, there's a huge difference between civil and criminal law. You can get sued (and lose, and have to pay a lot of money in damages) for all kinds of things which are perfectly legal and there's no laws against them. You can only go to prison for things that actually have criminal laws on the books saying you can't do them.
Or, you could harass him in a similar manner: go to his family members and friends (and msot importantly, his employer) and tell them all what a giant asshole he is and how he's doing all these things to you.
Right, but on the other hand, you're not allowed to register the domain "walmart.com" (in a parallel universe where Walmart has, for some strange reason, not already registered this domain) and then post criticisms of it. With "walmart-sucks-and-i-hate-them.com", you're not posing as Walmart themselves, it's clear that you're a separate party that just doesn't like them.
There's a gray area in between: what if the accusations are untrue, but you can't prove it?
Note, IANAL, so I don't know if a civil suit for libel would work out well if the accusations are all hearsay (e.g., "I heard that she has sex with her dog!"), but if the allegations are vague enough and difficult or impossible to disprove ("she told me that she's a pedophile", leading to a he-said-she-said argument with her claiming she never said any such thing), she may be in a difficult spot.
Any lawyers here with expertise in libel? Asking software and IT geeks seems like the worst place to find advice for this, this is definitely a question for a lawyer.
The problem is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are very, very few examples (I honestly can't think of any, except maybe Japan and Germany post-WWII, and even there there was a lot of graft and profiteering going on) where interventionism was really a good thing. We citizens think lofty thought about how we should intercede and help out the underdog and make things fair, but it never actually works out that way. Sociopaths get in there and turn things to their advantage so they can profit, like with Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., and soldiers on the ground are seen as an enemy and violent conflict ensues with each side hating the other and committing atrocities, as always happens in a war. It's bad enough when your own people commit horrible acts to you, but to a tribal species like our, it's always seen as much, much worse when an outside group comes in and commits horrible acts. Notice how much bad press there is when a US Marine rapes an Okinawan girl; do other Okinawans or Japanese never commit child rape (or any rape)? Of course they do, it happens everywhere. But it doesn't make international news and create massive protests when it's one local raping another; they just send the police to deal with the problem and throw the rapist in jail (or worse in some locales). But when it's an outside force that's carrying guns, it's different. We've already had lots of problems with US soldiers committing atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq; that never earns the respect and admiration of a people.
I'm sure Gene Roddenberry thought a lot about this himself, and that's why he invented his fictional Prime Directive. Getting intimately involved with other groups of people, using force to make them follow your viewpoint, almost never works out well.
You even mention wife-beating. That rarely goes well too; ask any cop what he thinks about intervening in a domestic dispute, and he'll tell you he'd probably rather go up against heavily-armed gang members. Domestic disputes are a cop's worst nightmare, because there's rarely a clear-cut victim. You'd think a woman being beaten by some asshole husband is obviously the victim, yet you try to come to her aid and frequently she'll physically attack you, which is exactly what happens to cops who try to intercede in these situations. Or, at best, she'll refuse to press charges, because she "loves him", "he'll change", etc. When you intercede in another country's internal conflicts, the same dynamic happens most of the time: the "victims" will see you outsiders as a greater enemy than the other group they were fighting against. If some other nation tried invading the US, supposedly to free us Blue States from the tyranny of the Red States, do you think the Blue States would greet them as liberators? No, the country would quickly unite and fight the common enemy. If we ever get invaded by extraterrestrials (some which aren't too terribly powerful, so we actually have a chance of defeating them), we'd see humanity as a whole unite very quickly.
I do agree about welcoming refugees from oppressed regions. It can be argued, however, that that acts as a safety valve, preventing change from coming as quickly. Also, there's practical considerations; no developed nation can handle an influx of 100 million impoverished and unskilled foreigners, and too many outsiders coming in too fast creates big internal problems. Personally, I do think we should bring in more female (no male) refugees from Afghanistan though, since they're so poorly treated there and some of them really do want a better life, but just get acid thrown in their faces or shot for their efforts.
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The wrench problem is easily solved: don't buy older American-made cars. The new ones (I'm pretty sure) are all-metric these days, though there was a time in the 90s when some parts used metric bolts and other parts used US-unit bolts. But 90s American cars were all crap anyway and are almost all in the junkyard now or better yet melted down, so that shouldn't be an issue these days.
With more and more of our appliances being made by companies like LG and Samsung rather than Maytag, the reasons to keep a US-unit wrench set around are disappearing.
Then don't. No one's forcing you to measure things in fractions of an inch, unless maybe you work in a woodworking shop (or maybe a military contractor; they seem to still use those units in engineering for some dumb reason).
Except that Esperanto is heavily biased towards indo-european language speakers, in particular ones who speak a Latin-derived language, and is really an antificially-constructed language derived from Latin, so it's really not that great either, as it has many inefficiencies found in the indo-european languages it's made from. Lojban would be a better choice for a universal language for all humans, if you wanted to force everyone to adopt a standard non-natural language.
The only problem is that water doesn't freeze and boil at the same point everywhere: it's dependent on pressure. So to calibrate your thermometer well, you need to have expensive equipment to measure and set your pressure to 1.000 atm, because barometric pressure varies significantly with the weather. Is it that much harder to mess around with liquid nitrogen once you've gone to that trouble?
One story I heard about the conversion attempt in the 70s was that many gas stations changed from selling gasoline in gallons to liters, but in doing so, they jacked up the prices a lot, thinking people wouldn't noticed. However, they did, and that left many people with a bad taste in their mouth for metricification.
Make sure that when you quit, give the stupid cellphone policy as the reason, and don't give any notice. Bonus points if they're coming up on a big deadline and you're critical to the project.
Fuck 'em.
I used to work at Intel, starting in 2000. For the first year or two, they still had a policy of having the security guards check peoples' bags on the way out of the building, to make sure they weren't taking home any sensitive documents.
It was an extremely stupid policy, because at this same time, every single employee was issued a laptop computer, which they normally brought home with them, and obviously contained lots of work data. Whoever made that policy was still stuck in the 1970s. After a couple years, they finally dropped the stupid policy.
Come here to NYC and say that again.
The world has changed. 15 years ago, in most parts of the US, it was expected in most well-paid jobs that you'd have a car to get to work. Sure, 150 years ago this was an unreasonable expectation, but it's expected now, and as a result, employers have parking lots for their employers to park in. No employer is going to last very long if 95% of their employees need to commute (by car) to work due to the geography and local culture of the area, yet they provide no place for them to park.
Similarly, these days it's normal for people to carry around a cellphone with them wherever they go. Many (if not most) people in many industries now do not even have a landline phone. I haven't had one in about 10 years, and I was a bit of a latecomer to the cellular party myself. It's been normal for people to carry cellphones now for at least 15 years; for someone in high school, that's all they know. Asking employees to not carry a cellphone, in 2013, is utterly ridiculous, and a lot like asking them to wear 1800s-style dress to work.
And where are employees supposed to store their phone anyway? In their car maybe, if they drive to work, but there are a fair number of people who ride bicycles in the warmer months, or walk if they're close, or most especially carpool or vanpool, not to mention take public transit (more so in some areas than others). I don't see many employers going to the expense of providing secured lockers; that's wishful thinking at best. Forwarding to a work phone may or may not work; lots of work phones are behind extensions and don't have their own number.
Don't be so sure. There's tons of places where you're not allowed to bring in various personal items (backpacks, food, etc.), and they have security that even checks to make sure you're not bringing that stuff in. However, if you have it, they're not going to give you a place to store it while you're inside the building; it's either throw it in the trash or don't go in.
You really expect employers to have enough consideration to give employees a place to check and store (securely) their personal belongings like smartphones? I think that's asking too much, at least in America.
I don't see anything wrong with making sexist generalizations; the fact is men and women are different, so while not all members of one sex will follow a particular generalization, some generalizations really apply far more to one sex than the other. For instance, how many football-obsessed fans like these will be women versus men? While there might be a small number of stupid female football fans, they're a rarity, but there's no shortage of stupid male football fans (or other sports fans for that matter).
Women in the workplace are different from men; my wife complains a lot about other women, because many of them have the tendency to be "Jezebels" and catty backstabbers. Obviously not all women are like this, but this is behavior you don't see much on the male side. It's a dynamic mostly confined to women. Men have their own crappy behaviors in the workplace too, so they're no saints either, but their bad behavior is usually different from the womens'.
One question: why would transferring items to a new place be a problem? Don't you have moving trucks and moving services in London? Now obviously, boxes and boxes of books and CDs and DVDs will add to your moving bill, but it's not (or shouldn't be) like you have to hand-carry everything from apartment (flat) to apartment when you move. Even if you don't want to hire movers and do it yourself to save money, sofas and beds aren't things you can carry by hand, so you'll need some kind of truck for that.
In both high school and college, I had some teachers/professors who did a lot of writing throughout the class. These people did NOT use blackboards for this; they used overhead projectors. With these, they sat down in front of the projector, and wrote on it, as it has a horizontal surface.
Maybe it's not generational at all, but rather people who have had to relocate many times in their life. The more stuff you have to carry around, the harder (and more expensive) it is to move. Many bookcases full of books is a lot more hassle to move than a hard drive full of ebooks.
I think it's degraded to "Be less evil than Apple and Microsoft". Since Apple and Microsoft are both so incredibly evil, that leaves a lot of leeway.
Yep, and since they're in China where there's a one-child policy (which is probably why they only have the one son in the first place), after this son gets assassinated (best to make it look like an accident), then the parents can apply to the government for a waiver to have an additional child.
Yes, exactly. As long as you're decent to everyone else (until they give you a good reason not to be), I have no problem with treating a wicked person poorly. They've brought it on themselves, and they don't deserve to be treated well. Even back in ancient times, tribes of humans have treated bad people poorly in some way, in order to protect the rest of the tribe. If their crime wasn't great enough to kill them outright, they could just "shun" them, and cast them out. There's nothing wrong with that; if you can't act properly within a group, the group is under no obligation to keep you around and help you.
It's hard to say, but there's a few caveats here:
1) Microsoft is not a person. It's a corporation. Despite what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not people. I don't really have a problem with someone doing something mean to MS, because they've earned it, and they've done much worse things over and over and over again throughout their history. If Google gets in trouble for this, it isn't fair, because MS never got in serious trouble for their antics. You can't let one entity get away with murder and then punish others for the same thing that affects the one that profited unfairly.
2) Google isn't really doing anything "wicked" here. They're just denying them a bit of information. It's not like they're assassinating MS executives or hacking into their systems and wreaking havoc. And again, I think they have that right, due to MS's prior actions which have been very similar.
It's still "free speech", even if it's untrue. However, if it's untrue and someone gets mad, they can sue you for civil damages for that speech. You won't go to prison, however; that's why it's free speech: there's no criminal penalties. Remember, in the legal world, there's a huge difference between civil and criminal law. You can get sued (and lose, and have to pay a lot of money in damages) for all kinds of things which are perfectly legal and there's no laws against them. You can only go to prison for things that actually have criminal laws on the books saying you can't do them.
Or, you could harass him in a similar manner: go to his family members and friends (and msot importantly, his employer) and tell them all what a giant asshole he is and how he's doing all these things to you.
Right, but on the other hand, you're not allowed to register the domain "walmart.com" (in a parallel universe where Walmart has, for some strange reason, not already registered this domain) and then post criticisms of it. With "walmart-sucks-and-i-hate-them.com", you're not posing as Walmart themselves, it's clear that you're a separate party that just doesn't like them.
There's a gray area in between: what if the accusations are untrue, but you can't prove it?
Note, IANAL, so I don't know if a civil suit for libel would work out well if the accusations are all hearsay (e.g., "I heard that she has sex with her dog!"), but if the allegations are vague enough and difficult or impossible to disprove ("she told me that she's a pedophile", leading to a he-said-she-said argument with her claiming she never said any such thing), she may be in a difficult spot.
Any lawyers here with expertise in libel? Asking software and IT geeks seems like the worst place to find advice for this, this is definitely a question for a lawyer.
The Mafia (the Sicilian one, not the "MAFIAA") also provides a "clean-up" service that might be useful here....
Concrete shoes.
The problem is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are very, very few examples (I honestly can't think of any, except maybe Japan and Germany post-WWII, and even there there was a lot of graft and profiteering going on) where interventionism was really a good thing. We citizens think lofty thought about how we should intercede and help out the underdog and make things fair, but it never actually works out that way. Sociopaths get in there and turn things to their advantage so they can profit, like with Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., and soldiers on the ground are seen as an enemy and violent conflict ensues with each side hating the other and committing atrocities, as always happens in a war. It's bad enough when your own people commit horrible acts to you, but to a tribal species like our, it's always seen as much, much worse when an outside group comes in and commits horrible acts. Notice how much bad press there is when a US Marine rapes an Okinawan girl; do other Okinawans or Japanese never commit child rape (or any rape)? Of course they do, it happens everywhere. But it doesn't make international news and create massive protests when it's one local raping another; they just send the police to deal with the problem and throw the rapist in jail (or worse in some locales). But when it's an outside force that's carrying guns, it's different. We've already had lots of problems with US soldiers committing atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq; that never earns the respect and admiration of a people.
I'm sure Gene Roddenberry thought a lot about this himself, and that's why he invented his fictional Prime Directive. Getting intimately involved with other groups of people, using force to make them follow your viewpoint, almost never works out well.
You even mention wife-beating. That rarely goes well too; ask any cop what he thinks about intervening in a domestic dispute, and he'll tell you he'd probably rather go up against heavily-armed gang members. Domestic disputes are a cop's worst nightmare, because there's rarely a clear-cut victim. You'd think a woman being beaten by some asshole husband is obviously the victim, yet you try to come to her aid and frequently she'll physically attack you, which is exactly what happens to cops who try to intercede in these situations. Or, at best, she'll refuse to press charges, because she "loves him", "he'll change", etc. When you intercede in another country's internal conflicts, the same dynamic happens most of the time: the "victims" will see you outsiders as a greater enemy than the other group they were fighting against. If some other nation tried invading the US, supposedly to free us Blue States from the tyranny of the Red States, do you think the Blue States would greet them as liberators? No, the country would quickly unite and fight the common enemy. If we ever get invaded by extraterrestrials (some which aren't too terribly powerful, so we actually have a chance of defeating them), we'd see humanity as a whole unite very quickly.
I do agree about welcoming refugees from oppressed regions. It can be argued, however, that that acts as a safety valve, preventing change from coming as quickly. Also, there's practical considerations; no developed nation can handle an influx of 100 million impoverished and unskilled foreigners, and too many outsiders coming in too fast creates big internal problems. Personally, I do think we should bring in more female (no male) refugees from Afghanistan though, since they're so poorly treated there and some of them really do want a better life, but just get acid thrown in their faces or shot for their efforts.