No, they don't. They're pretending they do, but it's really just an excuse to block wins by People They Don't Like.
While Vox did urge people to vote for his recommendations, he did it like this:
"What follows is the list of Hugo recommendations known as Rabid Puppies. They are my recommendations for the 2015 nominations, and I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are."
The only difference between this and "business as usual" is the suggestion to nominate his favorites en bloc. Generally, it's just "here's my list of people I think should be nominated." No real practical difference, there.
On the other hand, when the anti-Puppies decided to fight back, they did it by voting "No Award," which is very much a worse thing to do.
While some of the folks behind the Sad Puppies movement are definitely right-wing, or Libertarian, or something similar, their nominations are all over the map, because they didn't run their nominations through a political filter before putting them up.
On the other hand, the left-wing types who have been running the Hugos process for a long time have been... less honest about it. They whine about the Puppies "promoting" books for the award, while people like John Scalzi have been doing it for years. For that matter, touting books for the Hugo has been a part of the process as far back as I can remember (and I've been in and around fandom most of my life).
Maybe it shows that the people who have BEEN gaming the awards for the last couple of decades are finally being outnumbered by people who actually vote for good writing, instead of politically-acceptable dross. Up until a year or so ago, there was a huge amount of campaigning for Hugo awards. Now, the same people who used to get nominated regularly by doing so are whining because someone else is also campaigning - and getting nominated instead of one of their friends.
The people running the Hugos whine about ""Republicans" - but go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies. There's actual political diversity there, not the progressive sameness of a typical Hugo ballot.
Why bitch about simple statements of facts? The study finds that 90% of added sugars come from so-called heavily or ultra processed foods, which is enormous and something sgnificant to know.
...except that it becomes a circular definition.
When you say that adding sugar MAKES it a "heavily processed" food, then the fact that 90% of added sugar comes from that food is a given.
You cited one source for definitions for "heavily" and "ultra" processed food - but when you read other sources, you get different definitions. That's the problem - you don't get to pick one you sort of agree with and pretend that it covers everything else.
Yeah, when you see a doom-and-gloom article like this one, and one of the phrases is "heavily processed" or the new catchphrase "ultra-processed," you can safely ignore it.
"Heavily processed" is such a wide definition that it's effectively meaningless. Anything that contains extra sugar (in any amount), white flour (or any other refined grains), anything that has "artificial" coloring (even if the color comes from natural sources), refined oils (like soybean oil, which was a "health food" twenty years ago), or even low-fat foods (whether or not they're naturally low in fats).
When you get right down to it, these sorts of articles are trying to get you worked up about processed foods - in other words, ANYTHING that comes in a package. "So buy our Cool New Healthy Food, at only three times the price!"
Of course, the people who are worked up about processed foods are just the spiritual descendants of the people who used to tell you to switch to processed food because the older, natural foods were supposed to be bad for you. I remember when the health nuts told us to switch from butter to margarine because butter was bad - and now we know that margarine is immensely worse for cardiovascular health.
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave
More and more employers are offering paternity leave as well. Once that becomes the norm, this point is moot.
Let us know when it actually does become the norm. Until then, it's not moot at all.
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
How would this even work? If you're coming in early to offset an early departure or using your vacation time and it doesn't interfere with your work duties, what's the big deal? If you're charging work time while off on personal business, then you should be subject to disciplinary action, same as if you routinely skipped out early to hit the bar. Most employers are happy to accommodate family responsibilities as long as work obligations are fulfilled.
The problem is that, from a LOT of prior experiences in this sort of thing, this doesn't happen. Some workplaces might enforce "make it up" rules - but the same person who picks up the kids after work tends to be the same one who drops them off in the first place. I've never been at a workplace where this truly happened. The phrase you're looking for is "we knew she had to deal with her kids when we hired her." So they paid the woman less. Ta-daah!
At best, you might see some make-up work from time to time to make up the hours - but the guys who had to stick around during normal work hours ended up working overtime to make up the slack.
The part you glossed over - "as long as work obligations are fulfilled" - just doesn't happen as much as you're pretending. So the employer knows that, when Female Worker 1 takes time off to grab Little Bobby from the elementary school, he can stick Male Worker 1 with the extra hours to compensate. So, since Male Worker 1 works more hours, they get more consideration when it comes to pay scales....and you can try to "take disciplinary action" versus those female workers - and end up on the pointy end of a class-action suit for not being considerate of work-life balance for women. Let us know how that works.
"Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar)."
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave Taking time off to pick up kids after school (Men often do these sorts of things, but be realistic - women take more time off to handle their families)
They also include "years of experience," but they don't allow for "years of experience with gaps due to taking time off for family."
The study compares a lot of different things, and boils it down to "amount paid in base salary." But they leave out the most important part: "hours actually worked." While this doesn't directly affect base pay, it affects small pay differences because the employer knows that the male employee will end up working more - and more consistent - hours. Thus the less-than six-percent difference.
...and it's apparently a standard in all of the nuclear reactors in the country, only one of which had one single event. Which didn't do any actual damage.
Yeah, I'm going to go with "this isn't that big of a problem in reality" for $1000, Alex.
Back when you were in grade school, they were saying that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, the streets of New York would be a meter or so under water sometime around the year 2100.
So how close is New York to being underwater? We are now two decades closer to the 2100s.
Sorry, but a couple of decades ago, the leading AGW scientists were telling us that parts of NYC would be under water by 2009, not 2100 a rate of several meters per century.
James Hansen, in 1988/89, said (while looking at an NYC road) that it would be underwater in 20 years. Which means 2009. The oceans are an inch or so deeper than they were then - and the rate is actually slowing down, not accelerating.
A lot of those guys said the oceans would rise multiple meters by 2100. Now, the most-probable predictions say as much as 1 THIRD of a meter. About a foot. Which is what the article says is the low end - but going from past AGW predictions, the "low estimate" is probably somewhere above the actual measured number, just like temperatures.
Like the ones back in the 1990s that claimed it was ALREADY happening. Every time we had a big storm, it was global warming!
And no, it wasn't the fringe warmists who said that, either. It was a major theme by everyone who supported the theory. James Hansen (one of the leading lights in the field) was telling people that there would be massively increased storms of all sorts in twenty years - in 1989. Which would make that 2009 prediction false in a very dramatic way. He also said that sea levels would be meters higher by now, instead of centimeters.
Even as recent as 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme said that all of the dire predictions were "imminent," and we'd have 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010. So far, according to the most generous counting, it's about 100. If you count the island off south Louisiana that got munched by a hurricane. If you go by actual refugee counts, it's negative (population increases in just about all of the potential "climate refugee" countries, to the order of a few hundred thousand).
Up until the last couple of years, all of the "increased tropical storm frequency and intensity" predictions were for shorter terms - a few years to a decade. Now that we know that never happened, they had to move the predictions out past a human lifetime so they can stop being wrong quite so often.
All of those surveys they keep touting do NOT compare same (or even similar) jobs and experience. They usually compare anything BUT the same job, with the same hours. Sure, the headlines claim that, but when you look at the surveys, it's just not true.
When they do get around to comparing similar jobs, women get the same pay (or even slightly more), right up until they start having children. Then, they either leave the job market completely (not as common nowadays) or work fewer hours. I have never worked at any place where the women generally worked more hours than the men. I've worked a lot at places where the men worked many, many more hours than the women.
Here's the kicker: if women really were paid 20% less for the same work, who would hire men? Any company that hired only women at that rate would have a huge price differential over their competitors.
"If they have money and want to keep it, they can't really be Democrats or leftists, so I'm going to redefine people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as Republicans because, um, whatever."
If you think "all companies that do this are run by Republicans," you really need to think "the few Republican-run companies that do this are joining the long list of Democrat-run ones."
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
There are also a lot of H-1B recipients at colleges and universities, which are by no means right-wing enclaves.
We keep hearing about these interesting 3D-printed firearms, and the limitation is always along the lines of "everything works except the barrel, which blows up after X number of shots." The Shuty in the article uses a Glock barrel and other parts to get around this.
It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to design a firearm kit - a series of parts that you could combine with a standard item or two (a steel tube that you could buy anywhere and convert to a barrel with minimal work, plus a breech). Include a simple rifling jig in the plans, and you have a real firearm, instead of an "almost" gun. It might take a custom cartridge (if you can't find a suitable steel tube off the shelf). Or leave it smoothbore and make a shotgun.
Heck, you could make a modern Gyrojet if you could get the ammo, and the only steel you'd need would be the firing pin...
In other words, "use expensive materials in a complex sandwich, plan on replacing the top layer on a regular basis, and hope it works for long enough to generate enough electricity to pay for itself."
They have NOT "solved the problem of slickness." They mentioned it in passing, and tested some textured surfaces that are better than nothing, but pretty much all of the solar road "solutions" are just handwaving - and expensive handwaving at that. Look at the initial "we could melt the snow off the road" claims (which turned out to be one of those "Laws of Thermodynamics" things that would never work).
Here's the kicker: as good as asphalt and concrete are at being road surfaces, they still break, a little. They're fault-tolerant. Take a good look at any road more than a few days old. It will have a lot of little cracks, divots, and other wear points that the glass roadway will not be able to handle. Glass cracks, you have to replace it. A seam opens up between panels, you need to seal it before water gets in. A foundation problem pops up (AKA a pothole)? Shut the road down for hours, pull the panel, rebuild the foundation, and replace the panel.
The "extra strength" is just a matter of thicker materials and deeper foundations. We build lots of similar structures all over the world without any problem.
This is much, much, MUCH cheaper than engineering solar panels + glass to take the weight and impact of motor vehicles. Tempered glass, while nice and strong in many situations, isn't that good for roadways. Especially when you consider how slick glass is, even when textured.
The "solar bike path" they built in the Netherlands a couple of years ago cost about a hundred times what a similar "normal" solar installation would have. Even if adding stronger uprights cost twice as much, it's a better deal than driving on the solar cells themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
...but 100 parts per billion is pretty much business as usual in the big Californian cities.
And 50 ppb is what the best-ranked ones produce.
Before you complain about the chemical being ethane, note that ethane + air + sunlight = ozone.
No, they don't. They're pretending they do, but it's really just an excuse to block wins by People They Don't Like.
While Vox did urge people to vote for his recommendations, he did it like this:
"What follows is the list of Hugo recommendations known as Rabid Puppies. They are my recommendations for the 2015 nominations, and I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are."
The only difference between this and "business as usual" is the suggestion to nominate his favorites en bloc. Generally, it's just "here's my list of people I think should be nominated." No real practical difference, there.
On the other hand, when the anti-Puppies decided to fight back, they did it by voting "No Award," which is very much a worse thing to do.
...that's wrong.
While some of the folks behind the Sad Puppies movement are definitely right-wing, or Libertarian, or something similar, their nominations are all over the map, because they didn't run their nominations through a political filter before putting them up.
On the other hand, the left-wing types who have been running the Hugos process for a long time have been... less honest about it. They whine about the Puppies "promoting" books for the award, while people like John Scalzi have been doing it for years. For that matter, touting books for the Hugo has been a part of the process as far back as I can remember (and I've been in and around fandom most of my life).
They've been doing that for a few years now, it's just that they've been giving it to left-wing talentless self-publishers.
So, apparently, the only thing that outrages you is that they're coming from the wrong flavor of politics?
The anti-Puppy people couldn't manage to come up with anything better.
That should worry you more.
(Although it does remind me of a lot of late-70s sci-fi I read in various major publications...)
Maybe it shows that the people who have BEEN gaming the awards for the last couple of decades are finally being outnumbered by people who actually vote for good writing, instead of politically-acceptable dross. Up until a year or so ago, there was a huge amount of campaigning for Hugo awards. Now, the same people who used to get nominated regularly by doing so are whining because someone else is also campaigning - and getting nominated instead of one of their friends.
The people running the Hugos whine about ""Republicans" - but go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies. There's actual political diversity there, not the progressive sameness of a typical Hugo ballot.
"Sorry, officer, but I was just legally flying a kite over my own property, and the drone just smashed right into it."
You could possibly have a decent defense by referring to sailing versus powered ships...
Why bitch about simple statements of facts? The study finds that 90% of added sugars come from so-called heavily or ultra processed foods, which is enormous and something sgnificant to know.
...except that it becomes a circular definition.
When you say that adding sugar MAKES it a "heavily processed" food, then the fact that 90% of added sugar comes from that food is a given.
You cited one source for definitions for "heavily" and "ultra" processed food - but when you read other sources, you get different definitions. That's the problem - you don't get to pick one you sort of agree with and pretend that it covers everything else.
Yeah, when you see a doom-and-gloom article like this one, and one of the phrases is "heavily processed" or the new catchphrase "ultra-processed," you can safely ignore it.
"Heavily processed" is such a wide definition that it's effectively meaningless. Anything that contains extra sugar (in any amount), white flour (or any other refined grains), anything that has "artificial" coloring (even if the color comes from natural sources), refined oils (like soybean oil, which was a "health food" twenty years ago), or even low-fat foods (whether or not they're naturally low in fats).
When you get right down to it, these sorts of articles are trying to get you worked up about processed foods - in other words, ANYTHING that comes in a package. "So buy our Cool New Healthy Food, at only three times the price!"
Of course, the people who are worked up about processed foods are just the spiritual descendants of the people who used to tell you to switch to processed food because the older, natural foods were supposed to be bad for you. I remember when the health nuts told us to switch from butter to margarine because butter was bad - and now we know that margarine is immensely worse for cardiovascular health.
No, I'm saying, from decades of experience, that "women do take more time off for family."
When you talk to hiring managers, they will tell you the same thing.
How many of your "20 and 30 something programmers" have children they care for?
Sounds like your workplace is discriminating against people with families.
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave
More and more employers are offering paternity leave as well. Once that becomes the norm, this point is moot.
Let us know when it actually does become the norm. Until then, it's not moot at all.
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
How would this even work? If you're coming in early to offset an early departure or using your vacation time and it doesn't interfere with your work duties, what's the big deal? If you're charging work time while off on personal business, then you should be subject to disciplinary action, same as if you routinely skipped out early to hit the bar. Most employers are happy to accommodate family responsibilities as long as work obligations are fulfilled.
The problem is that, from a LOT of prior experiences in this sort of thing, this doesn't happen. Some workplaces might enforce "make it up" rules - but the same person who picks up the kids after work tends to be the same one who drops them off in the first place. I've never been at a workplace where this truly happened. The phrase you're looking for is "we knew she had to deal with her kids when we hired her." So they paid the woman less. Ta-daah!
At best, you might see some make-up work from time to time to make up the hours - but the guys who had to stick around during normal work hours ended up working overtime to make up the slack.
The part you glossed over - "as long as work obligations are fulfilled" - just doesn't happen as much as you're pretending. So the employer knows that, when Female Worker 1 takes time off to grab Little Bobby from the elementary school, he can stick Male Worker 1 with the extra hours to compensate. So, since Male Worker 1 works more hours, they get more consideration when it comes to pay scales. ...and you can try to "take disciplinary action" versus those female workers - and end up on the pointy end of a class-action suit for not being considerate of work-life balance for women. Let us know how that works.
"Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar)."
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
(Men often do these sorts of things, but be realistic - women take more time off to handle their families)
They also include "years of experience," but they don't allow for "years of experience with gaps due to taking time off for family."
The study compares a lot of different things, and boils it down to "amount paid in base salary." But they leave out the most important part: "hours actually worked." While this doesn't directly affect base pay, it affects small pay differences because the employer knows that the male employee will end up working more - and more consistent - hours. Thus the less-than six-percent difference.
...the local law enforcement guy who accidentally turned on the passcode after they found the phone found the Post-It note with the new code.
Just saying.
If the drill samples turn out to be a green or black sludge that seems to move by itself, toss it back down the hole and pour in a bunch of concrete.
Everyone should know that by now.
...and it's apparently a standard in all of the nuclear reactors in the country, only one of which had one single event. Which didn't do any actual damage.
Yeah, I'm going to go with "this isn't that big of a problem in reality" for $1000, Alex.
Back when you were in grade school, they were saying that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, the streets of New York would be a meter or so under water sometime around the year 2100.
So how close is New York to being underwater? We are now two decades closer to the 2100s.
Sorry, but a couple of decades ago, the leading AGW scientists were telling us that parts of NYC would be under water by 2009, not 2100 a rate of several meters per century.
James Hansen, in 1988/89, said (while looking at an NYC road) that it would be underwater in 20 years. Which means 2009. The oceans are an inch or so deeper than they were then - and the rate is actually slowing down, not accelerating.
A lot of those guys said the oceans would rise multiple meters by 2100. Now, the most-probable predictions say as much as 1 THIRD of a meter. About a foot. Which is what the article says is the low end - but going from past AGW predictions, the "low estimate" is probably somewhere above the actual measured number, just like temperatures.
You're sort of forgetting all of the others.
Like the ones back in the 1990s that claimed it was ALREADY happening. Every time we had a big storm, it was global warming!
And no, it wasn't the fringe warmists who said that, either. It was a major theme by everyone who supported the theory. James Hansen (one of the leading lights in the field) was telling people that there would be massively increased storms of all sorts in twenty years - in 1989. Which would make that 2009 prediction false in a very dramatic way. He also said that sea levels would be meters higher by now, instead of centimeters.
Even as recent as 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme said that all of the dire predictions were "imminent," and we'd have 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010. So far, according to the most generous counting, it's about 100. If you count the island off south Louisiana that got munched by a hurricane. If you go by actual refugee counts, it's negative (population increases in just about all of the potential "climate refugee" countries, to the order of a few hundred thousand).
Up until the last couple of years, all of the "increased tropical storm frequency and intensity" predictions were for shorter terms - a few years to a decade. Now that we know that never happened, they had to move the predictions out past a human lifetime so they can stop being wrong quite so often.
All of those surveys they keep touting do NOT compare same (or even similar) jobs and experience. They usually compare anything BUT the same job, with the same hours. Sure, the headlines claim that, but when you look at the surveys, it's just not true.
When they do get around to comparing similar jobs, women get the same pay (or even slightly more), right up until they start having children. Then, they either leave the job market completely (not as common nowadays) or work fewer hours. I have never worked at any place where the women generally worked more hours than the men. I've worked a lot at places where the men worked many, many more hours than the women.
Here's the kicker: if women really were paid 20% less for the same work, who would hire men? Any company that hired only women at that rate would have a huge price differential over their competitors.
Mindless factory jobs that nobody wants?
Bureaucratic make-work that accounts for a lot of the rest?
What sort of work SHOULD humans do?
"If they have money and want to keep it, they can't really be Democrats or leftists, so I'm going to redefine people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as Republicans because, um, whatever."
If you think "all companies that do this are run by Republicans," you really need to think "the few Republican-run companies that do this are joining the long list of Democrat-run ones."
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
There are also a lot of H-1B recipients at colleges and universities, which are by no means right-wing enclaves.
We keep hearing about these interesting 3D-printed firearms, and the limitation is always along the lines of "everything works except the barrel, which blows up after X number of shots." The Shuty in the article uses a Glock barrel and other parts to get around this.
It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to design a firearm kit - a series of parts that you could combine with a standard item or two (a steel tube that you could buy anywhere and convert to a barrel with minimal work, plus a breech). Include a simple rifling jig in the plans, and you have a real firearm, instead of an "almost" gun. It might take a custom cartridge (if you can't find a suitable steel tube off the shelf). Or leave it smoothbore and make a shotgun.
Heck, you could make a modern Gyrojet if you could get the ammo, and the only steel you'd need would be the firing pin...
In other words, "use expensive materials in a complex sandwich, plan on replacing the top layer on a regular basis, and hope it works for long enough to generate enough electricity to pay for itself."
They have NOT "solved the problem of slickness." They mentioned it in passing, and tested some textured surfaces that are better than nothing, but pretty much all of the solar road "solutions" are just handwaving - and expensive handwaving at that. Look at the initial "we could melt the snow off the road" claims (which turned out to be one of those "Laws of Thermodynamics" things that would never work).
Here's the kicker: as good as asphalt and concrete are at being road surfaces, they still break, a little. They're fault-tolerant. Take a good look at any road more than a few days old. It will have a lot of little cracks, divots, and other wear points that the glass roadway will not be able to handle. Glass cracks, you have to replace it. A seam opens up between panels, you need to seal it before water gets in. A foundation problem pops up (AKA a pothole)? Shut the road down for hours, pull the panel, rebuild the foundation, and replace the panel.
Nope. Sorry, it's still a supremely silly idea.
The "extra strength" is just a matter of thicker materials and deeper foundations. We build lots of similar structures all over the world without any problem.
This is much, much, MUCH cheaper than engineering solar panels + glass to take the weight and impact of motor vehicles. Tempered glass, while nice and strong in many situations, isn't that good for roadways. Especially when you consider how slick glass is, even when textured.
The "solar bike path" they built in the Netherlands a couple of years ago cost about a hundred times what a similar "normal" solar installation would have. Even if adding stronger uprights cost twice as much, it's a better deal than driving on the solar cells themselves.