better due dilligence = money and time invested. you forget that. commenting on/. doesn't look like working. I'm quite familiar with the work that's done, and what's involved in doing it.
you're forgetting that I do this for a living, and it works. so telling me that what I'm doing isn't working, just isn't right. and you forget that one employee can kill the whole business for every other employee too. as a good employer, it's my job to ensure that employee A doesn't lose his job because of employee D.
like I said, it's not about productivity. read harder. it's about liability. I can run a business on as little as 5% productivity. there's money to be made any at level. but there's also too much to lose at every level. that's why the liability matters more than the productivity. you can't fire a telecommuter on a whim. you can fire an office employee on a whim.
good work is often done staring at problem, not commiting broken code. designing structures takes time away from code. so does discussing ideas with coworkers, researching methods, and reading documentation.
or would you have me fire the telecommuter because they went two days without commiting any new code?
not to mention, staring at someone working at a desk for a few days is much easier than reviewing three days of repository logs.
also, if I determine that they aren't working properly, I can fire them on the spot. and I don't need to answer to anyone. if they are at home, then I need to actually prove it. that's a waste of my time.
no. I wait until a client tells me that a project isn't working out so well, or until an given employee mis-estimates too much for my liking, or until I suspect anything at all. Then I sit behind their monitors to make sure they are actually programming, until I figure out what went wrong. either they don't know how to ask for help, or they have a fundamental misunderstanding of our systems or of the client's project, or they aren't working. And that's something that I can determine within three days of staring at them.
if any programmers could self-manage themselves well enough to estimate how long a task will take, and how many problems will come up along the way, that'd be swell. but it's software, and beyound their lack of skill in management, technical shit happens. any given task, no matter how easy, can come up against a nightmare wall to be resolved. my margins take all that into account as flux. it's not a problem. but it means that any telecommuter can hide their lack of effort in a few dozen delays.
my profit margins aren't what that one employee can affect. I can just not pay them, it's not a problem. the problem is that they can derail a project. that project can be $50'000.00, and the client can simply cancel the project mid-way. so I'm out the lion's share of the revenue -- which is my profit, because I get paid last. on top of that, many clients have multiple projects on the go. I can not only lose the project, I can lose the entire client. That can easily be $200'000 per year for 5 years.
That kind of loss is easy for me to deal with -- I scale down until I find a replacement client. But that means firing employees. That degrades other projects and other clients, and basically has me double the risk to save the money. Alternatively, I can pay my employees out of my pocket, and double my financial risk to spare my business risk.
Either way, I'm screwed in the short term. But more importantly, in etiher case, I've allowed an employee to screw me, as well as my clients, and my employees. I'm responsible and accountable to too many people to allow one person to risk everyone's mortgage payments.
yes there's a better way. you ask the employee how long it'll take. and then you hold them to it. if it takes them longer, they don't get paid. it's their estimate to make appropriately. only that doesn't work because employees haven't the foggiest notion of self-management.
but if you can see them in their box, you can easily prove that they are working. again, it doesn't matter in general, it matters only once you suspect a problem. I can go years without checking up on an employee. but if the day comes when I suspect that they are taking advantage of my risk and my business, then I can start watching. and no, employees don't know how to suddenly pass the checks.
all this means is that I can easily prove my suspicions. and that's all I need. It's all I need to sleep at night. it's all I need to protect my investment. it's all I need to protect my clients. otherwise, I'm placing my entire life in the hands of my employees.
remember, they can get fired and get another job. I can't. this is my one and only source of income, and everything from my sandwich to my house is riding on it.
I am the boss, and those meetings you speak of are what make the company run well. my employee's productivity isn't my concern. the company's reliability and consistency are. when the guy in the office knits, I can fire him on the spot, and I don't need to answer to anyone. But when I suspect an employee of knitting at home, I can't just fire him, I need to prove it. that's a waste of my time.
I don't care how fast the business is running, as long as it's profitable, I can go from there. I can about the liabilities of the employees beneath me. that's it. and when I become liable for their errors, it becomes a problem. and there's an easy solution to that problem.
you missed the important part, because you didn't read. 50% efficiency is profitable. 92% efficiency with the chance that you lose a client because of a bad employee means that at any time, I can lose the entire business. that's just not worth the risk.
but like I've always said. start your own company, and see what works for you.
It's always been about employer risk. Certainly, many telecommuters do good work and do work well. That's not the point. For every ten good ones, there's at least one bad one. That bad one is really bad. And the problem is that it takes a long time, and a lot of effort and money to discover and deal with that one bad one. It's just not worth the risk.
I, as an employer, far prefer the costs associated with the office setup to have ten office employees who are each at 50%, than to have ten telecommuters, save the office expenses, have 9 at 100% and 1 at 20%. That one guys can take down my entire business. I've worked far too hard and risked far too much to let that happen.
And the article is correct. It takes longer to train a telecommuter -- who may not stick around longer enough to matter.
Telecommuting is for already-proven and trusted employees, who want a break and a better life. It's something to be earned.
my legal expectation of privacy matters way more. for example, running a business, there are tonnes of confidential information and NDAs and such. if you send something through gmail, you are in breech of just about every NDA you've ever signed. that means that any confidential information that you've sent to me (that you also sent via gmail to anybody) is mine to sell publicly, and is no longer confidential because you put it into the public domain.
it's not my "privacy" that matters, it's my "confidence".
how I'm being tracked is irelevant. there are things that are not legally done with my information. and if they are done, I'm not at fault for them having been done -- because the information was taken without my permission. that's different than when you intentionally put something onto facebook.
it's not about control. it's about liability. that's very different.
it's about what I can be held accountable for, to whom, and what I'm allowed to legally do with the information that you may have given to me.
that doesn't make me legally responsible for it. so my "expectation of privacy" remains legally intact, and I'm not in breech of any NDAs. my actualy privacy matters much less than my legal expectation of privacy.
my e-mail is my own. I don't use google, nor facebook and that's why. in fact, the only place I give anything to is right here like this. oh, and my browser agent string is also generic -- not that I'm proxied or anything.
so my privacy, and my expectation of privacy, remains in tact, just as it did before the internet, when I was 8. though I can't say how many others have chosen to publish my information against my wishes, but I'm not legally responsible for that.
if you think of all of the reasons that I use wheels today, I doubt that most existing back then. People didn't tend to travel, there either wasn't anywhere to go in your daily life, or it wasn't more than a few football fields. and without an engine, or chains, or another six inventions, wheels wouldn't help. so you still need to hook it up to an animal, and just riding the animal is easier. until you need to haul something. certainly now adays, there are loads to haul, but back then, you didn't farm that much at a time, and blacksmiths didn't make a thousand horseshoes at a time.
so still you're six inventions away from make it worthwhile. you needed distances to cover and loads to haul. it's not that there weren't any, it's that they weren't everyday for every person, and dancing to make it rain was more important than getting the water from the local well.
I would never allow you to manipulate the laptop that I give to my employees like that. It's a work laptop. You want to play games, you can get your laptop, and travel with two. It's not a huge deal. Certainly I'm not going to bust you for reading an ebook or surfing the web a little. But you're forgetting why I gave you the laptop in the first place.
By doing so, it's my responsibility to keep it running well. if it fails, you don't need to do your work. But every time you install something, go to some random web page, or just use up more ram that I planned for you to use, you risk making the laptop a little more unstable. Then if it breaks, it's your fault but my problem because you aren't getting your work done.
I do put tracking software onto my employees machines. It's nothing scary, just timetracker, logs a spreadsheet of active window titles. They can see it, they can look at it, and yeah they can manipulate without my knowing. It's supposed to replace their hand-writing a log of their activities. It's a way for me to know how much time is spend doing what, so I can improve their work. It's not about beating them down. They're welcome to remove the six hours of solitaire from the logs.
So for all of the effort that you plan to put in, imaging and whatnot, why wouldn't you just get a $600 machine of your own, and not worry about anything.
ok, so those who are good with numbers prefer chrome. those who are good in math prefer star wars over women. therefore, prefering star wars over women is better just like prefering chrome over IE is better. wait.
smart people make fewer mistakes, but those mistakes tend to be longer.
we're not talking about friends. we're talking about making it illegal for someone to do something because someone else has a problem with it. think of the healthy skinny person who wants to start their own modeling agency. you're going to say it's illegal for that person to model their own clothing? just because other people stop eating when they watch those ads?
my sister was and is no longer anorexic.
it's got nothing to do with being able to contribute to the world. everyone can. and I'd hope that you'd help your friend, that's what friends are for. but that's not what strangers are for.
and in this case, you're asking me to help your friend, with my freedom, with my time, or with my money. her problem is not my problem. it may be your problem if you call yourself her friend, but it's not my problem.
and the fact that you'd demand that my government force me to help your friend with your friend's problem, makes you the goddamn computer. it makes you uncompassionate about me. I've got my own problems, and you don't see me demanding your forced assistance.
now things are different with sick people. and by sick, I assume you mean ill. because that's an interspecies attack. I just as vulnerable to cancer as the next person (within a degree of significance). but that's not true with regard to athletic injury. would you demand that I help someone who breaks their arm playing football, by choice? there's a line there. I'm not certain where it is, but I know where it's not. and I'm not going to take the gun out of someone else's mouth. if they want to kill themself, I'm neither for nor against it. and after I weigh everything that they could still contribute, against the cost that it'll take, it's their life not mine.
and that's the point. it's their life to end, and it's their life to deal with. and that's why they have friends to help them, if they want friends. and if they want to live on the edge of death, because they like the taste of the gun, then I'm not going to take that gun away from them -- until they point it at me.
you should never stop helping your friend. and you should never be forced to help mine.
part of being a parent is to raise your children however you see fit. yes that includes keeping them away from things if you believe that they shouldn't see it. a big part of growing up, on the other hand, is to suddenly realize that what you learned wasn't all real, and you now, quite suddenly, need to unlearn things. santa clause comes to mind. so do three incorrect definitions of acids and bases. also primary colours, the shape of an atom, and a good 30% of what you learn in high school. and if you grow up enough, religion too.
in the middle ages, when food was tough to come by, yes the obese were considered superhuman. so yes. nowadays, obese have health problems (because we live longer than they used to). but if you want to know the best thing I ever heard from a mother, it's this: "my son was ill last week, he had a cold. but because he's a little chubby, I didn't worry than if he missed a meal or two that I'd need to forcefeed him so he wouldn't starve". buffer weight is superhuman, yes.
I fight to break free of a lot of things. That includes other people's ideals.
Hey, I'm currently fighting all of my family and friends by choosing to purchase a house that I can afford with a cheque, instead of taking a mortgage for twenty years because I believe life is better without financial debt. It's forced me to move farther than my friends would have liked, and it'll put me into a category of people without problems -- while my friends will struggle to make bank payments, ultimately pay a lot of interest, some will get divorced over it, and some will kill themselves over it. most will spend less time with their families too.
you fight for what you believe will be a better life. if you fight for what others believe will be a better life, they'll have that better life, you won't.
You understand that if those marketers waited for me to buy their stuff, they'd go bankrupt immediately. I don't make purchases due to marketing. You won't find clothing, vacations, cars, foods, et cetera on my annual expenses that were marketed to me. You'll find movies that I enjoyed, you won't find more than the occasional movie that I didn't enjoy (so you're correct to the tune of $30 per year), concerts and the like. You'll find houses and household expenses.
Certainly, for some marketing, I'm very important. I buy one cleaner over another equivalent cleaner based on marketing, sure. But I don't choose a bad cleaner over a good one due to marketing.
And of course my comment is despicable. I think so too. But that's the point. I don't want to live my life having to worry about those people who add needless complexity. Their problems are not my problems. I don't want to be involved in solving them.
And what of the skinny person who isn't anorexic, but is very skinny -- genetics can do that -- and wants to start a modeling agency of their own? You're going to tell them that it's illegal for them to model clothing?
And of course it's common on slashdot. I love the softer sciences, and they are very relevant. They are excellent things to fight - because unlike hard sciences, you can fight them without equipment. The're a House episode floating around with a line to the effect of: if you don't require those who suffer to fight their own fight, you deny those that do the respect that they deserve.
We all have our shit. There are skills that I find incredibly difficult to master, or even to learn in the first place. I fight really hard, for example, to teach anyone anything. It turns out that I can't serialize knowledge at all. That's no the way I think of things. Occasionally, I'm in a position where I really need to teach someone something. I fight hard to do it. And I win. I don't turn and say that the world should allow me to never need to teach anyone anything, that I should have my own private teacher to help me whenever I do.
it's not difficult to not be affected by what you see. you'd think that eating would be at the top of the list of things that are easily achievable -- being evolutionary and all. let's keep evolution alive, and let people who don't eat die.
because they tried to take a home entertainment device where people sit together and relax doing nothing, and they incorporated business activities where people needed to ignore each other and dedicate their focus to something requiring their interaction.
that's what a desk is for. and it's better for that reason. that's why monitor's are better than televisions. so until humans choose to work from their couch, you can't give them a keyboard for it.
tell me, what's the correct ergonomic seating position for a keyboard and couch?
I'm just guessing, but I think "resisting arrest" is english, whereas being "arrested" is jargon. Being "arrested" is being detained by police on charges. Where as "resisting arrest" is simply resisting being stopped by police. Just a thought.
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better due dilligence = money and time invested. you forget that. commenting on /. doesn't look like working. I'm quite familiar with the work that's done, and what's involved in doing it.
you're forgetting that I do this for a living, and it works. so telling me that what I'm doing isn't working, just isn't right. and you forget that one employee can kill the whole business for every other employee too. as a good employer, it's my job to ensure that employee A doesn't lose his job because of employee D.
like I said, it's not about productivity. read harder. it's about liability. I can run a business on as little as 5% productivity. there's money to be made any at level. but there's also too much to lose at every level. that's why the liability matters more than the productivity. you can't fire a telecommuter on a whim. you can fire an office employee on a whim.
and like most people you didn't read enough. You can't just fire someone for not being productive enough.
good work is often done staring at problem, not commiting broken code. designing structures takes time away from code. so does discussing ideas with coworkers, researching methods, and reading documentation.
or would you have me fire the telecommuter because they went two days without commiting any new code?
not to mention, staring at someone working at a desk for a few days is much easier than reviewing three days of repository logs.
also, if I determine that they aren't working properly, I can fire them on the spot. and I don't need to answer to anyone. if they are at home, then I need to actually prove it. that's a waste of my time.
no. I wait until a client tells me that a project isn't working out so well, or until an given employee mis-estimates too much for my liking, or until I suspect anything at all. Then I sit behind their monitors to make sure they are actually programming, until I figure out what went wrong. either they don't know how to ask for help, or they have a fundamental misunderstanding of our systems or of the client's project, or they aren't working. And that's something that I can determine within three days of staring at them.
and that's my job.
wow, take individual sentences out of paragraphs of context, and it sounds as though you didn't read anything at all.
like I said, any given task in software programming can hit unpredictable walls.
like I said, it's not about their lack of effort, it's about my being able to easily prove it.
read harder. and stop quoting partial points.
if any programmers could self-manage themselves well enough to estimate how long a task will take, and how many problems will come up along the way, that'd be swell. but it's software, and beyound their lack of skill in management, technical shit happens. any given task, no matter how easy, can come up against a nightmare wall to be resolved. my margins take all that into account as flux. it's not a problem. but it means that any telecommuter can hide their lack of effort in a few dozen delays.
my profit margins aren't what that one employee can affect. I can just not pay them, it's not a problem. the problem is that they can derail a project. that project can be $50'000.00, and the client can simply cancel the project mid-way. so I'm out the lion's share of the revenue -- which is my profit, because I get paid last. on top of that, many clients have multiple projects on the go. I can not only lose the project, I can lose the entire client. That can easily be $200'000 per year for 5 years.
That kind of loss is easy for me to deal with -- I scale down until I find a replacement client. But that means firing employees. That degrades other projects and other clients, and basically has me double the risk to save the money. Alternatively, I can pay my employees out of my pocket, and double my financial risk to spare my business risk.
Either way, I'm screwed in the short term. But more importantly, in etiher case, I've allowed an employee to screw me, as well as my clients, and my employees. I'm responsible and accountable to too many people to allow one person to risk everyone's mortgage payments.
yes there's a better way. you ask the employee how long it'll take. and then you hold them to it. if it takes them longer, they don't get paid. it's their estimate to make appropriately. only that doesn't work because employees haven't the foggiest notion of self-management.
but if you can see them in their box, you can easily prove that they are working. again, it doesn't matter in general, it matters only once you suspect a problem. I can go years without checking up on an employee. but if the day comes when I suspect that they are taking advantage of my risk and my business, then I can start watching. and no, employees don't know how to suddenly pass the checks.
all this means is that I can easily prove my suspicions. and that's all I need. It's all I need to sleep at night. it's all I need to protect my investment. it's all I need to protect my clients. otherwise, I'm placing my entire life in the hands of my employees.
remember, they can get fired and get another job. I can't. this is my one and only source of income, and everything from my sandwich to my house is riding on it.
I am the boss, and those meetings you speak of are what make the company run well. my employee's productivity isn't my concern. the company's reliability and consistency are. when the guy in the office knits, I can fire him on the spot, and I don't need to answer to anyone. But when I suspect an employee of knitting at home, I can't just fire him, I need to prove it. that's a waste of my time.
I don't care how fast the business is running, as long as it's profitable, I can go from there. I can about the liabilities of the employees beneath me. that's it. and when I become liable for their errors, it becomes a problem. and there's an easy solution to that problem.
you missed the important part, because you didn't read. 50% efficiency is profitable. 92% efficiency with the chance that you lose a client because of a bad employee means that at any time, I can lose the entire business. that's just not worth the risk.
but like I've always said. start your own company, and see what works for you.
It's always been about employer risk. Certainly, many telecommuters do good work and do work well. That's not the point. For every ten good ones, there's at least one bad one. That bad one is really bad. And the problem is that it takes a long time, and a lot of effort and money to discover and deal with that one bad one. It's just not worth the risk.
I, as an employer, far prefer the costs associated with the office setup to have ten office employees who are each at 50%, than to have ten telecommuters, save the office expenses, have 9 at 100% and 1 at 20%. That one guys can take down my entire business. I've worked far too hard and risked far too much to let that happen.
And the article is correct. It takes longer to train a telecommuter -- who may not stick around longer enough to matter.
Telecommuting is for already-proven and trusted employees, who want a break and a better life. It's something to be earned.
my legal expectation of privacy matters way more. for example, running a business, there are tonnes of confidential information and NDAs and such. if you send something through gmail, you are in breech of just about every NDA you've ever signed. that means that any confidential information that you've sent to me (that you also sent via gmail to anybody) is mine to sell publicly, and is no longer confidential because you put it into the public domain.
it's not my "privacy" that matters, it's my "confidence".
how I'm being tracked is irelevant. there are things that are not legally done with my information. and if they are done, I'm not at fault for them having been done -- because the information was taken without my permission. that's different than when you intentionally put something onto facebook.
it's not about control. it's about liability. that's very different.
it's about what I can be held accountable for, to whom, and what I'm allowed to legally do with the information that you may have given to me.
that doesn't make me legally responsible for it. so my "expectation of privacy" remains legally intact, and I'm not in breech of any NDAs. my actualy privacy matters much less than my legal expectation of privacy.
my e-mail is my own. I don't use google, nor facebook and that's why. in fact, the only place I give anything to is right here like this. oh, and my browser agent string is also generic -- not that I'm proxied or anything.
so my privacy, and my expectation of privacy, remains in tact, just as it did before the internet, when I was 8. though I can't say how many others have chosen to publish my information against my wishes, but I'm not legally responsible for that.
if you think of all of the reasons that I use wheels today, I doubt that most existing back then. People didn't tend to travel, there either wasn't anywhere to go in your daily life, or it wasn't more than a few football fields. and without an engine, or chains, or another six inventions, wheels wouldn't help. so you still need to hook it up to an animal, and just riding the animal is easier. until you need to haul something. certainly now adays, there are loads to haul, but back then, you didn't farm that much at a time, and blacksmiths didn't make a thousand horseshoes at a time.
so still you're six inventions away from make it worthwhile. you needed distances to cover and loads to haul. it's not that there weren't any, it's that they weren't everyday for every person, and dancing to make it rain was more important than getting the water from the local well.
I would never allow you to manipulate the laptop that I give to my employees like that. It's a work laptop. You want to play games, you can get your laptop, and travel with two. It's not a huge deal. Certainly I'm not going to bust you for reading an ebook or surfing the web a little. But you're forgetting why I gave you the laptop in the first place.
By doing so, it's my responsibility to keep it running well. if it fails, you don't need to do your work. But every time you install something, go to some random web page, or just use up more ram that I planned for you to use, you risk making the laptop a little more unstable. Then if it breaks, it's your fault but my problem because you aren't getting your work done.
I do put tracking software onto my employees machines. It's nothing scary, just timetracker, logs a spreadsheet of active window titles. They can see it, they can look at it, and yeah they can manipulate without my knowing. It's supposed to replace their hand-writing a log of their activities. It's a way for me to know how much time is spend doing what, so I can improve their work. It's not about beating them down. They're welcome to remove the six hours of solitaire from the logs.
So for all of the effort that you plan to put in, imaging and whatnot, why wouldn't you just get a $600 machine of your own, and not worry about anything.
ok, so those who are good with numbers prefer chrome. those who are good in math prefer star wars over women. therefore, prefering star wars over women is better just like prefering chrome over IE is better. wait.
smart people make fewer mistakes, but those mistakes tend to be longer.
we're not talking about friends. we're talking about making it illegal for someone to do something because someone else has a problem with it. think of the healthy skinny person who wants to start their own modeling agency. you're going to say it's illegal for that person to model their own clothing? just because other people stop eating when they watch those ads?
my sister was and is no longer anorexic.
it's got nothing to do with being able to contribute to the world. everyone can. and I'd hope that you'd help your friend, that's what friends are for. but that's not what strangers are for.
and in this case, you're asking me to help your friend, with my freedom, with my time, or with my money. her problem is not my problem. it may be your problem if you call yourself her friend, but it's not my problem.
and the fact that you'd demand that my government force me to help your friend with your friend's problem, makes you the goddamn computer. it makes you uncompassionate about me. I've got my own problems, and you don't see me demanding your forced assistance.
now things are different with sick people. and by sick, I assume you mean ill. because that's an interspecies attack. I just as vulnerable to cancer as the next person (within a degree of significance). but that's not true with regard to athletic injury. would you demand that I help someone who breaks their arm playing football, by choice? there's a line there. I'm not certain where it is, but I know where it's not. and I'm not going to take the gun out of someone else's mouth. if they want to kill themself, I'm neither for nor against it. and after I weigh everything that they could still contribute, against the cost that it'll take, it's their life not mine.
and that's the point. it's their life to end, and it's their life to deal with. and that's why they have friends to help them, if they want friends. and if they want to live on the edge of death, because they like the taste of the gun, then I'm not going to take that gun away from them -- until they point it at me.
you should never stop helping your friend. and you should never be forced to help mine.
part of being a parent is to raise your children however you see fit. yes that includes keeping them away from things if you believe that they shouldn't see it. a big part of growing up, on the other hand, is to suddenly realize that what you learned wasn't all real, and you now, quite suddenly, need to unlearn things. santa clause comes to mind. so do three incorrect definitions of acids and bases. also primary colours, the shape of an atom, and a good 30% of what you learn in high school. and if you grow up enough, religion too.
in the middle ages, when food was tough to come by, yes the obese were considered superhuman. so yes. nowadays, obese have health problems (because we live longer than they used to). but if you want to know the best thing I ever heard from a mother, it's this: "my son was ill last week, he had a cold. but because he's a little chubby, I didn't worry than if he missed a meal or two that I'd need to forcefeed him so he wouldn't starve". buffer weight is superhuman, yes.
I fight to break free of a lot of things. That includes other people's ideals.
Hey, I'm currently fighting all of my family and friends by choosing to purchase a house that I can afford with a cheque, instead of taking a mortgage for twenty years because I believe life is better without financial debt. It's forced me to move farther than my friends would have liked, and it'll put me into a category of people without problems -- while my friends will struggle to make bank payments, ultimately pay a lot of interest, some will get divorced over it, and some will kill themselves over it. most will spend less time with their families too.
you fight for what you believe will be a better life. if you fight for what others believe will be a better life, they'll have that better life, you won't.
You understand that if those marketers waited for me to buy their stuff, they'd go bankrupt immediately. I don't make purchases due to marketing. You won't find clothing, vacations, cars, foods, et cetera on my annual expenses that were marketed to me. You'll find movies that I enjoyed, you won't find more than the occasional movie that I didn't enjoy (so you're correct to the tune of $30 per year), concerts and the like. You'll find houses and household expenses.
Certainly, for some marketing, I'm very important. I buy one cleaner over another equivalent cleaner based on marketing, sure. But I don't choose a bad cleaner over a good one due to marketing.
And of course my comment is despicable. I think so too. But that's the point. I don't want to live my life having to worry about those people who add needless complexity. Their problems are not my problems. I don't want to be involved in solving them.
And what of the skinny person who isn't anorexic, but is very skinny -- genetics can do that -- and wants to start a modeling agency of their own? You're going to tell them that it's illegal for them to model clothing?
And of course it's common on slashdot. I love the softer sciences, and they are very relevant. They are excellent things to fight - because unlike hard sciences, you can fight them without equipment. The're a House episode floating around with a line to the effect of: if you don't require those who suffer to fight their own fight, you deny those that do the respect that they deserve.
We all have our shit. There are skills that I find incredibly difficult to master, or even to learn in the first place. I fight really hard, for example, to teach anyone anything. It turns out that I can't serialize knowledge at all. That's no the way I think of things. Occasionally, I'm in a position where I really need to teach someone something. I fight hard to do it. And I win. I don't turn and say that the world should allow me to never need to teach anyone anything, that I should have my own private teacher to help me whenever I do.
it's not difficult to not be affected by what you see. you'd think that eating would be at the top of the list of things that are easily achievable -- being evolutionary and all. let's keep evolution alive, and let people who don't eat die.
can't be. feet aren't on the ground, that tray isn't stable, and I'm not trailor trash.
because they tried to take a home entertainment device where people sit together and relax doing nothing, and they incorporated business activities where people needed to ignore each other and dedicate their focus to something requiring their interaction.
that's what a desk is for. and it's better for that reason. that's why monitor's are better than televisions. so until humans choose to work from their couch, you can't give them a keyboard for it.
tell me, what's the correct ergonomic seating position for a keyboard and couch?
I'm just guessing, but I think "resisting arrest" is english, whereas being "arrested" is jargon. Being "arrested" is being detained by police on charges. Where as "resisting arrest" is simply resisting being stopped by police. Just a thought.