A million times this. I'm a Wikipedia junky (obligatory xkcd) that searches things out of raw curiosity with no applicable reason whatsoever. I've also done my share of looking at gore photos, crime scene photographs, things of that nature. I'm totally non-violent and would never hurt a fly, but if the police were to start looking at my search history and profiling me based on that alone, they'd probably want to keep a closer eye on me anyway "just in case".
Just because a particular subject interests me, that doesn't mean I'm going to emulate it. Morbid fascination does not equal intent, whether now or in the future.
It amazes me how many supposedly educated people would support things like this. This is basically just another step down the road to thought police and telescreens. Doubleplusungood.
You tell me, as a reasonable person, what sort of expectations you would have applying for a job as a booth babe (or whatever PC term they call it on paper).
If being ogled by creepy dudes is not one of them, then your expectations are not realistic. That's just common sense.
I have a hard time believing that many of the women in this line of work were coming into it not knowing full well what it was going to be like. It's not like these women just woke up hot one day and decided to capitalize on it. They've likely been involved in selling their bodies (not literally, but I wouldn't be surprised if some really had) since they were younger. They probably modeled a little bit, did pageants, shit like that. Point is, the "I had no idea the job was going to be like this" idea is completely unbelievable to me. This isn't the 40's, these girls didn't just step off the bus from Omaha and get taken advantage of.
Like I said, nobody forced them to sell themselves in this way, and there is no shortage of willing and eager women waiting right behind them to take their spot if they want to give it up. If they do decide to leave, I'll be the first to cheer them on, because I'm sure it must get old being stared at all day (as someone with extremely low self-esteem, it would be torturous for me), but at the same time, I would at least have the critical thinking skills to not apply for that job in the first place.
I think it's more that humanity is inherently lazy.
How many men out there would gladly be a 'booth boy' if given the chance? Head on down to your local Walmart, McDonald's, pretty much any retail establishment, and ask any guy working there if he would trade in his shitty job to stand around in a speedo looking hot for the ladies all day. Go ahead and ask. I guarantee you, 99% of guys would gladly agree, not because they've been trained to seek objectification, but because it sure as fuck beats real work.
You want to pay me to stand there in a skimpy outfit and feign interest in people? Where do I sign up?
No, but at the same time, they knew exactly what was expected of them when they applied for that job. They knew exactly what was going to be involved. They sought out that job, probably because they felt they were too good to flip burgers or ring people out at Target, or those jobs wouldn't afford them the wage that they desire.
If you want to talk about the way the industry objectifies women, then fine, I'll agree that there is objectification there. If you want to ban booth babes to try and change this, be my guest...personally, using sex in advertising has never, ever worked on me (and honestly, I've always felt that it was fucking stupid). But let's not pretend that the women doing this job are oppressed in some way. They know exactly why they're standing there in that skimpy-ass outfit in their Fuck Me Pumps, and if that bothers them, then they probably shouldn't have applied in the first place. It's really no different than a vegetarian working at McDonald's bitching about handling meat.
Speaking as someone that's dealt with depression since I was a pre-teen along with the extreme lack of self-esteem, it's incredibly demoralizing and makes it difficult to advance. Every time a promotion came up, I would tell myself I was going to go for it and try and psych myself up but in the end my own fear of failure and disappointment kept me from even trying a lot of the time, and when I did actually manage to get promoted, due to the way I internalize everything, I was never able to let the "shit roll down hill"...it always stopped at me and compounded my neuroses and lack of self confidence.
Coupled with the stigma that still comes along with mental health issues, particularly in the work environment (you can miss a day if you wake up puking your guts up and nobody bats an eye...try and miss a day because you feel like you're a worthless piece of shit that ruins everything he touches, see how that goes over), it's really quite debilitating. This is why it makes me so fucking angry when people make glib comments about the subject, because it really is a handicap. It would be ridiculous to tell someone that lost an arm "just think positive and everything will be okay", but for some reason, when the subject of depression comes up, there are still a large number of people out there that think you can just turn it off.
God, I fucking wish I could just turn it off. I wish it was as simple as telling myself I'm awesome every morning while I'm staring at myself in the mirror, or reading a few self-help books.
So how do they know whether or not the files in question are copyrighted? Is the MPAA now going to be the judge of what constitutes infringing material in private files uploaded to a 3rd party? Gee, no conflict of interest there or anything...
I listen to entire albums from start to finish, too, and I haven't burned a music CD in at least a year (and that wasn't even for me, but for a friend to listen to in his car)...I'm still 1/4 of the way through the 50 CD spindle I bought back in like 2007. It's been even longer for DVD-R's.
I don't think I'm even going to bother putting an optical drive in my next PC build. Seems like there's no point anymore.
Or maybe, just maybe, Comcast is like the cableco in my area and oversubscribing like mad while pocketing all the profits and not spending dick on upgrading squat?
You just described my ISP as well. I live in an area that's predominately apartments and condos, mostly young professionals, and our local node is so oversaturated that we can barely pull down 10% of our supposed 28 Mbps during peak times to the point where even standard definition Netflix or Youtube streaming is unwatchable from all the stopping and rebuffering required. The last service tech I had out told me to my face that this node has way too many individual users on it, but Charter won't replace or augment it until it's costing them more money having the shitty, out-dated node deployed then the replacement cost...but that sure as shit doesn't stop them from signing up new people every month and constantly trying to talk their customers into upgrading our bandwidth. I even had a rep try to sell me an upgrade package after I called to complain about our speed being in the toilet...how ridiculous is that? Like I'm going to upgrade to a higher tier when they can't even reliably provide the lower one...
Word has it that Verizon FiOS is going to be coming in here soon, and rumors have been going around that AT&T U-Verse was going to be coming in for years, but so far it's just Charter and their suckfest or 7 Mbit DSL, which I've heard is really no better due to the fact that the lines in these buildings are all ancient and noisy as fuck.
Seeing as how none of the clergymen I've seen in my neck of the woods are driving a car that cost less than $50,000, I'd say this is the more likely explanation.
I know, I know...they need that Cadillac to better spread God's Message.
That's the actual number of accounts assuming they're all individual users that actively use the service. I know a lot of people with multiple accounts, one for work and G-rated purposes, the other for personal shit. I also know a fair number of people who have Facebook accounts but log in maybe once a year, or have abandoned it entirely, because they didn't want to jump through all those hoops to actually delete their account.
I'd be curious to know what the real number of active user accounts is, but I doubt we'll ever find out. Not officially.
While the first and last things on your list are certainly deplorable, I have a hard time being against eugenics unless it is forced. Voluntarily choosing not to pass on genes that cause sickness and disability would have a benefit to the genome as a whole down the road.
Oh, come on. You've gotta be truly ignorant of history to not know who Amelia Earhart was.
I'll give you a pass, AC, if you grew up in the fucking bush and have never set foot inside a school. As most of those people don't make it here to Slashdot, however, I think that it can be assumed that you have and are just an idiot.
No, but the implication was definitely there. Otherwise, he would have said "She didn't survive long, and after she died, she was eaten by giant sized coconut crabs."
The FDA is never going to whitelist anything potent for over-the-counter recreational use.
Oh, I'm sure Big Pharma is pumping a lot of money into lobbying to make sure that they never do, either.
Imagine the anarchy if the millions of people in this country on anti-depressants, anti-nausea medications, cancer patents, etc,...started growing their own medicine in their backyard? How would they make their enormous profits pimping their patented drugs? Can't have that, now...
This country's drug laws are based entirely on FUD, with a little financial self-preservation at the hands of people like William Randolph Hearst, and now the Pharmaceutical Industry, thrown in for good measure.
Humanity was getting high since the dawn of time. At some point people are going to have to confront the fact that humanity enjoys altering their consciousness for recreational purposes.
All one has to do is look at the US drug schedules to realize that they have no realistic basis.
I mean, THC is ranked as having a higher abuse potential and danger than cocaine. Psilocybin is ranked higher than amphetamines. Peyote is ranked higher than opiates.
Not if the chemical isn't marketed as being meant for human consumption, obviously...
The synthetic weed that they're selling at headshops and shit nowadays is sold as incense, some of them are sold as bath salts. They say right on the side "not safe for human consumption", but then again, so do cans of spray paint and duster and there are thousands of people out there huffing that shit.
Just more stupidity all because the government refuses to legalize a plant that grows wild all over the damn world.
I had the same problem for the short time I was in a commissioned sales position. I simply could not sell people products and service packages that I knew they did not need, a fact that put me squarely on the shit list of the higher-ups in the department. I underwent a lot of "sales training" and "workshops" at their command, the main gist of them being "whatever the customer tells you they need, you tell them they need more and don't stop until they're so pissed off that there is a danger of losing the sale entirely."
As a customer, the "hard sell" always just turns me off, and I've seen first hand how much it turns off the bulk of the general public, so I really wonder where the hell people are seeing the success that warrants this mindset being pushed in the first place. Is it really worth one customer being upsold if we're alienating five other customers in the process? I guess it is to some people, but not to me...
I made the mistake of voting my conscience in both elections, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils like everyone else.
I assure you I won't be making that mistake again. As much as Obama pisses me off, I'd rather fall on a grenade then end up with Romney because I decided to vote the way we're supposed to, for the candidate we actually want to win (despite the fact that 99% of the rest of the voters sure as shit won't, and will vote for the guy who's commercial they saw last before they left the house)...
Go ahead and tell me I'm part of the problem, I really don't care. I'm not going to have another George W. Bush type president on my conscience, and that's exactly what Romney's going to be. It must have been hard to find someone more out of touch with reality than W., but damnit, the GOP sure as fuck managed to do so anyway. "Corporations are people, my friend." Yeah, sure thing, Mitt...
Surprised so many people around here have DSL. Maybe they're all ex-Charter customers that finally got sick of their shit...
Surprised so many people here apparently rent a modem, too. Like I said, this is primarily IT professionals in this area and that's definitely a demographic I would figure would own their own hardware. I haven't rented a modem from my ISP since '05...
My dad rents a modem/router from Charter (don't think his is 2-Wire, though). He can't even access the firmware outside of the SSID and encryption, it's locked out. I don't think I would ever feel comfortable not being able to fully access my hardware, even if I was renting...
Well, if I was one of those people with the 2Wire*** SSIDs, I would think to be able to find it easier in the drop down...like I said there's a dozen that are virtually identical.
That's admittedly minor, though. There's really no advantage to speak of, but then again, look at how many people actually pay for vanity license plates which also serves no advantage whatsoever (and costs money out of pocket, as opposed to changing the router's SSID). People just like putting their own personal stamp on their things, I guess.
In my last building, there were two networks that were obviously pointed at each other: 'GREEN BAY SUCKS' and 'THE BEARS SUCK'. Surprised nobody mentioned the VIkings...
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A million times this. I'm a Wikipedia junky (obligatory xkcd) that searches things out of raw curiosity with no applicable reason whatsoever. I've also done my share of looking at gore photos, crime scene photographs, things of that nature. I'm totally non-violent and would never hurt a fly, but if the police were to start looking at my search history and profiling me based on that alone, they'd probably want to keep a closer eye on me anyway "just in case".
Just because a particular subject interests me, that doesn't mean I'm going to emulate it. Morbid fascination does not equal intent, whether now or in the future.
It amazes me how many supposedly educated people would support things like this. This is basically just another step down the road to thought police and telescreens. Doubleplusungood.
You tell me, as a reasonable person, what sort of expectations you would have applying for a job as a booth babe (or whatever PC term they call it on paper).
If being ogled by creepy dudes is not one of them, then your expectations are not realistic. That's just common sense.
I have a hard time believing that many of the women in this line of work were coming into it not knowing full well what it was going to be like. It's not like these women just woke up hot one day and decided to capitalize on it. They've likely been involved in selling their bodies (not literally, but I wouldn't be surprised if some really had) since they were younger. They probably modeled a little bit, did pageants, shit like that. Point is, the "I had no idea the job was going to be like this" idea is completely unbelievable to me. This isn't the 40's, these girls didn't just step off the bus from Omaha and get taken advantage of.
Like I said, nobody forced them to sell themselves in this way, and there is no shortage of willing and eager women waiting right behind them to take their spot if they want to give it up. If they do decide to leave, I'll be the first to cheer them on, because I'm sure it must get old being stared at all day (as someone with extremely low self-esteem, it would be torturous for me), but at the same time, I would at least have the critical thinking skills to not apply for that job in the first place.
I think it's more that humanity is inherently lazy.
How many men out there would gladly be a 'booth boy' if given the chance? Head on down to your local Walmart, McDonald's, pretty much any retail establishment, and ask any guy working there if he would trade in his shitty job to stand around in a speedo looking hot for the ladies all day. Go ahead and ask. I guarantee you, 99% of guys would gladly agree, not because they've been trained to seek objectification, but because it sure as fuck beats real work.
You want to pay me to stand there in a skimpy outfit and feign interest in people? Where do I sign up?
No, but at the same time, they knew exactly what was expected of them when they applied for that job. They knew exactly what was going to be involved. They sought out that job, probably because they felt they were too good to flip burgers or ring people out at Target, or those jobs wouldn't afford them the wage that they desire.
If you want to talk about the way the industry objectifies women, then fine, I'll agree that there is objectification there. If you want to ban booth babes to try and change this, be my guest...personally, using sex in advertising has never, ever worked on me (and honestly, I've always felt that it was fucking stupid). But let's not pretend that the women doing this job are oppressed in some way. They know exactly why they're standing there in that skimpy-ass outfit in their Fuck Me Pumps, and if that bothers them, then they probably shouldn't have applied in the first place. It's really no different than a vegetarian working at McDonald's bitching about handling meat.
Plus, the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't help.
Speaking as someone that's dealt with depression since I was a pre-teen along with the extreme lack of self-esteem, it's incredibly demoralizing and makes it difficult to advance. Every time a promotion came up, I would tell myself I was going to go for it and try and psych myself up but in the end my own fear of failure and disappointment kept me from even trying a lot of the time, and when I did actually manage to get promoted, due to the way I internalize everything, I was never able to let the "shit roll down hill"...it always stopped at me and compounded my neuroses and lack of self confidence.
Coupled with the stigma that still comes along with mental health issues, particularly in the work environment (you can miss a day if you wake up puking your guts up and nobody bats an eye...try and miss a day because you feel like you're a worthless piece of shit that ruins everything he touches, see how that goes over), it's really quite debilitating. This is why it makes me so fucking angry when people make glib comments about the subject, because it really is a handicap. It would be ridiculous to tell someone that lost an arm "just think positive and everything will be okay", but for some reason, when the subject of depression comes up, there are still a large number of people out there that think you can just turn it off.
God, I fucking wish I could just turn it off. I wish it was as simple as telling myself I'm awesome every morning while I'm staring at myself in the mirror, or reading a few self-help books.
So how do they know whether or not the files in question are copyrighted? Is the MPAA now going to be the judge of what constitutes infringing material in private files uploaded to a 3rd party? Gee, no conflict of interest there or anything...
I listen to entire albums from start to finish, too, and I haven't burned a music CD in at least a year (and that wasn't even for me, but for a friend to listen to in his car)...I'm still 1/4 of the way through the 50 CD spindle I bought back in like 2007. It's been even longer for DVD-R's.
I don't think I'm even going to bother putting an optical drive in my next PC build. Seems like there's no point anymore.
Or maybe, just maybe, Comcast is like the cableco in my area and oversubscribing like mad while pocketing all the profits and not spending dick on upgrading squat?
You just described my ISP as well. I live in an area that's predominately apartments and condos, mostly young professionals, and our local node is so oversaturated that we can barely pull down 10% of our supposed 28 Mbps during peak times to the point where even standard definition Netflix or Youtube streaming is unwatchable from all the stopping and rebuffering required. The last service tech I had out told me to my face that this node has way too many individual users on it, but Charter won't replace or augment it until it's costing them more money having the shitty, out-dated node deployed then the replacement cost...but that sure as shit doesn't stop them from signing up new people every month and constantly trying to talk their customers into upgrading our bandwidth. I even had a rep try to sell me an upgrade package after I called to complain about our speed being in the toilet...how ridiculous is that? Like I'm going to upgrade to a higher tier when they can't even reliably provide the lower one...
Word has it that Verizon FiOS is going to be coming in here soon, and rumors have been going around that AT&T U-Verse was going to be coming in for years, but so far it's just Charter and their suckfest or 7 Mbit DSL, which I've heard is really no better due to the fact that the lines in these buildings are all ancient and noisy as fuck.
Seeing as how none of the clergymen I've seen in my neck of the woods are driving a car that cost less than $50,000, I'd say this is the more likely explanation.
I know, I know...they need that Cadillac to better spread God's Message.
That's the actual number of accounts assuming they're all individual users that actively use the service. I know a lot of people with multiple accounts, one for work and G-rated purposes, the other for personal shit. I also know a fair number of people who have Facebook accounts but log in maybe once a year, or have abandoned it entirely, because they didn't want to jump through all those hoops to actually delete their account.
I'd be curious to know what the real number of active user accounts is, but I doubt we'll ever find out. Not officially.
While the first and last things on your list are certainly deplorable, I have a hard time being against eugenics unless it is forced. Voluntarily choosing not to pass on genes that cause sickness and disability would have a benefit to the genome as a whole down the road.
Oh, come on. You've gotta be truly ignorant of history to not know who Amelia Earhart was.
I'll give you a pass, AC, if you grew up in the fucking bush and have never set foot inside a school. As most of those people don't make it here to Slashdot, however, I think that it can be assumed that you have and are just an idiot.
No, but the implication was definitely there. Otherwise, he would have said "She didn't survive long, and after she died, she was eaten by giant sized coconut crabs."
Let's not be obtuse, now...
The FDA is never going to whitelist anything potent for over-the-counter recreational use.
Oh, I'm sure Big Pharma is pumping a lot of money into lobbying to make sure that they never do, either.
Imagine the anarchy if the millions of people in this country on anti-depressants, anti-nausea medications, cancer patents, etc, ...started growing their own medicine in their backyard? How would they make their enormous profits pimping their patented drugs? Can't have that, now...
This country's drug laws are based entirely on FUD, with a little financial self-preservation at the hands of people like William Randolph Hearst, and now the Pharmaceutical Industry, thrown in for good measure.
Why not pass a law that just bans any drug that has the potential to be used recreation-ally? Or is that too easy?
Because that always works so well...
Humanity was getting high since the dawn of time. At some point people are going to have to confront the fact that humanity enjoys altering their consciousness for recreational purposes.
If only there existed relatively safe plant that people could smoke instead and not turn into fucking flesh-eating zombies after use...
Oh well, I'm sure Big Pharma will come up with something to combat these cravings at a very reasonable price per dose, because Big Pharma cares...
All one has to do is look at the US drug schedules to realize that they have no realistic basis.
I mean, THC is ranked as having a higher abuse potential and danger than cocaine. Psilocybin is ranked higher than amphetamines. Peyote is ranked higher than opiates.
I'm sure it's just coincidental that all the intoxicating substances that grow wild with little human intervention, that have been used spiritually and medicinally for tens of thousands of years, are rated as being "more dangerous" than the opiates that make up the bulk of the pharmaceuticals in use around the world today. It's not like the companies selling the legal recreational drugs like alcohol and tobacco are putting money into keeping these things scheduled in this unrealistic way or anything. Oh, wait...
Not if the chemical isn't marketed as being meant for human consumption, obviously...
The synthetic weed that they're selling at headshops and shit nowadays is sold as incense, some of them are sold as bath salts. They say right on the side "not safe for human consumption", but then again, so do cans of spray paint and duster and there are thousands of people out there huffing that shit.
Just more stupidity all because the government refuses to legalize a plant that grows wild all over the damn world.
I had the same problem for the short time I was in a commissioned sales position. I simply could not sell people products and service packages that I knew they did not need, a fact that put me squarely on the shit list of the higher-ups in the department. I underwent a lot of "sales training" and "workshops" at their command, the main gist of them being "whatever the customer tells you they need, you tell them they need more and don't stop until they're so pissed off that there is a danger of losing the sale entirely."
As a customer, the "hard sell" always just turns me off, and I've seen first hand how much it turns off the bulk of the general public, so I really wonder where the hell people are seeing the success that warrants this mindset being pushed in the first place. Is it really worth one customer being upsold if we're alienating five other customers in the process? I guess it is to some people, but not to me...
Very true...I'm sure most people here in the U.S. remember the astronaut that went batshit a few years back.
On paper they may have seemed about the same, but in practice Bush was a lot worse than most people imagined he could be.
QFT. Believe me, if I would have known, there is no fucking way I would have voted for Nader in 2000. No fucking way.
It may not have made a difference in the long run, but at least I wouldn't have the regret...
I made the mistake of voting my conscience in both elections, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils like everyone else.
I assure you I won't be making that mistake again. As much as Obama pisses me off, I'd rather fall on a grenade then end up with Romney because I decided to vote the way we're supposed to, for the candidate we actually want to win (despite the fact that 99% of the rest of the voters sure as shit won't, and will vote for the guy who's commercial they saw last before they left the house)...
Go ahead and tell me I'm part of the problem, I really don't care. I'm not going to have another George W. Bush type president on my conscience, and that's exactly what Romney's going to be. It must have been hard to find someone more out of touch with reality than W., but damnit, the GOP sure as fuck managed to do so anyway. "Corporations are people, my friend." Yeah, sure thing, Mitt...
Either that or they're a fan of Whuffie...
Surprised so many people around here have DSL. Maybe they're all ex-Charter customers that finally got sick of their shit...
Surprised so many people here apparently rent a modem, too. Like I said, this is primarily IT professionals in this area and that's definitely a demographic I would figure would own their own hardware. I haven't rented a modem from my ISP since '05...
My dad rents a modem/router from Charter (don't think his is 2-Wire, though). He can't even access the firmware outside of the SSID and encryption, it's locked out. I don't think I would ever feel comfortable not being able to fully access my hardware, even if I was renting...
Well, if I was one of those people with the 2Wire*** SSIDs, I would think to be able to find it easier in the drop down...like I said there's a dozen that are virtually identical.
That's admittedly minor, though. There's really no advantage to speak of, but then again, look at how many people actually pay for vanity license plates which also serves no advantage whatsoever (and costs money out of pocket, as opposed to changing the router's SSID). People just like putting their own personal stamp on their things, I guess.
In my last building, there were two networks that were obviously pointed at each other: 'GREEN BAY SUCKS' and 'THE BEARS SUCK'. Surprised nobody mentioned the VIkings...