It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as
It's my experience that other people most certianly do judge me (and probably you) by looks, including dress. There was one period early in my career where I decided to dress as casually as I could get away with. I also grew my hair down into a ponytail. Slowly while this was going on, somehow at work my perception changed from a bright young go-getter to a useless slacker.
When things got the worst for me career-wise, I decided to physically clean up. After all, its trivial to do. Certianly much easier than actually changing my attitude, right? So I started dressing up. One day at work I just started showing up in dress slacks and shoes, tie and jacket. breifcase instead of backpack. I cut the ponytail off.
It wasn't as obvious during the slow transformation, but the sudden change back was dramatic. Overnight I was right back to being a praised go-getter. Not only that, but I noticed that salespeople in stores would talk to me again, as would panhandlers. When I was ponytail guy, car salemen in patrticular would just act like I didn't exist. Even if I was there to buy something.
If you haven't tried it yourself, you'd be absolutely amazed how much other people's perception of you is based on looks. The thing is, dress and hairstyle are pretty much entirely in your control. You may have a style of each you prefer, but from a strict economic perspective, if you don't do both to maximize your preception at work, you aren't hurting anyone but yourself. So that's what the value of ties is.
The whole experience also left me with a new appreciation for folks with ethnic, weight, or general attractivness issues. While I was being studiously ignored by car salesmen until I left, there was a black guy on the lot getting the same treatment. I could go home and cut off my pony-tail. What could he do?
This betrays a very basic misunderstaning about how Google got where it is, and how it stays there.
Yes, pagerank is a great idea, and it was perhaps an improvement over what was being done before. But that wasn't why people abandoned the likes of Lycos and Yahoo(!) for Google back in the late 90's. Back then all the other search engines had gone to practices that were quite frankly user-abusive. Adds were placed all over the place, including an indeterminate amount of the top hits on your search. The search screens themselves also existed mostly to pump ads at you, and were really clunky, with a large amount of confusing options right there on the main search page.
Google, by contrast, had a main search page with no options whatsoever. Just a text box and a couple of buttons. "Breath of fresh air" doesn't even begin to describe how wonderful to use this was compared to what we were used to. On top of that, the search results were clearly delineated from the ads, so you could trust the results. The "don't be evil" motto was obviously infused into the whole effort. Every competitor was just a giagantic pain to use by comparison. "Page rank" or whatever wifty algorithim used for all this was something that nobody but extreme techies (and marketers) really ever gave a crap about.
So if you've got something that you think competes with Google, you'd better be talking about how nice and clean the interface is by comparison, how much easier it is to find real results without having to wade around ads, and how trustworthy the provider is wrt not allowing marketing weasels to buy their way into my search results. If you aren't talking about any of that, frankly nobody gives a crap.
Only at the very low end. At that point, there's already all the incentive in the world (since the alternative to automation now is either accepting endemic labor shortages, raising the wage to over the welfare level, or breaking the law to hire illegal immigrants). Believe me, if they could make an efficient grape-picking machine to harvest crops in California, they would.
Are you kidding? They have an industrial-sized Roomba.
Yes, but that means they need full-time employees to run around and empty the Roombas, and clean out all the tiny parts in the industrial Roombas that get clogged with hair and whatnot.
Yup. Although, of all the sad stories of an unarmed black person shot by police (or by armed vigilantes) that I've heard over the last 3 years or so, this is the one where the overreaction seemed the most understandable. For all the cops knew, this was part of an organized attack, and the car itself may have been rigged to blow upon trigger from the driver. This is the kind of stuff they are trained for.
That just shows you how ludicrously, immorally low we have our minimum wage set to right now. However, I will admit that it is also pretty darn messed up that we have set up a system where only those here illegally (an thus unable to collect welfare) would take an actual minimum wage job, and then we yell and scream at the inevitable flood of illegal aliens who come here for all those jobs we reserved just for them. Like they are somehow more immoral for wanting a better life for their families, than are the rich folks who set up this system for them to have that role.
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
The real issue is that voters don't actually pick their candidates anymore; its the other way around. Every 10 years when the census is done, all the states have to redraw their congressional districts. What happens in most states is that whoever controls the state legislature gets to do the drawing. They get maps and their state's entire voter registration database out, and make a modern computer-aided science of drawing things so that as many districts as possible are packed full of their party's registered voters. Any districts that have to go to the other party are drawn to look like malaria germs so that they scoop up every voter possible from the other party. Ideally those opposition districts will have more voters in them too. The idea is to give voters from the other party as little voice in government as possible.
In other words, nearly every voting district in the country is designed to be a "Democratic" district or a "Republican" district. The only true election happens on primary day, and nobody from the other side of the political spectrum gets a vote. So you end up with a Congress packed full of extremists. Extremist congressmen don't give a damn which party won or lost the last election, because their own seat is safe either way. All they have to worry about is that someone more extreme than them will challenge them in the next primary.
In some countries, like the UK, with strict, old-fashioned prurient laws about the nudey, pictures of boobs and front-bottoms (male and female) could land you in jail with a conviction as a sexual pervert.
Interesting. So I take it then that The Sun is published from prison?
Respond with your best reasons, rationally, unemotionally. Don't let yourself get caught in the flame war, instead go on with your life. Why do we need to suppress speech again?
This isn't about supressing speech. Joe C. Crackpot is quite free to publish his own journal or website showing how 1=2 (complete with a division by zero in his proof). However, in your typical scientific journal such "speech", and all the ensuing counter-speech, provide absolutely no benefit to the folks who presumably came to read up on the latest advances in DNA sequencing (or whatever). If it is providing no benefit to the readers, no point in having it.
I have to wonder how much of the crush was due to the Randians, the Baggers, and Koch Whores trying to overwhelm the site
As of two days ago, about a third of the USA (population: 300 million people) had no healthcare. When the whistle blows and they are all at once allowed to get coverage, only a moron wouldn't expect the largest server slashdotting in history. Even if they wanted to, malicous parties would have trouble generating a DDOS that would be more than noise compared to that.
Hear, hear! Health care should be completely decoupled from employment. That would be pro-business, and I'm always amazed it hasn't been promoted as such. It works for Canada and many other countries.
As an employee of a company that competes directly against Canadian and French firms, I can vouch this is a huge deal. Its nice that our quality is higher than theirs, but the fact of the matter is that we have no choice. Our labor costs are just not competitive with theirs, because their government is picking up all their employee healthcare costs. It is just not a level playing field. So we have no choice but to position ourselves as the "Rolls Royce" of the industry.
With employer-paid healthcare, US companies are essentially competing with an arm tied behind their backs.
Not to mention that one of the first acts of Obamacare was to outlaw denials for "pre-existing conditions". I remember once during an early 90's tech boom looking at changing jobs from my large defense contractor employer, and suggesting to my co-worker that he consider it too. He was a good bright productive guy, and deserved better. He couldn't. He had sadly developed diabetes after he started working there. Not the company's fault, but due to the "prexisting condition" thing, if he ever left that company, he could never get insurance. He was essentially a life-long indentured servant to that company, no matter how badly they treated him.
Multiply that by every such person in the USA, and tell you tell me how much that stifled our economy. Heck, screw the economy, it stifled freedom. We are all more free today thanks to Obamacare.
Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
I actually saw a report looking into that once. I turns out that a lot of younger voters don't remember the Cold War at all. All they know about Socalisim is that those raving idiots in Congress seem to reflexively hate it. So in their minds, clearly it can't be all bad...
In fact, 2.7 million more people voted for Democratic candidates for the House than voted for Republicans. So no, Republican candidates were not better. Even if you zoom down to states, you see this. For example, in Pensylvania, Democratic candidates got about 80K more votes, which got them only five of the state's 18 Representatives.
The reason the Republicans in the House are acting like elections don't matter, is because for them elections don't matter.
Joke's on you. When the Republicans finally cave and pass the cleaned budget the Senate sent them, food stamps for those retirees will be cut significantly (about $39b). Even when they lose, they win. Merry F'ing Christmas, suckers.
So while at some point the political folks can make a decision about whether to pay back-pay or not, there's no guarantee
More specifically, it would require the Republican (and Tea party) run House of Representatives to vote them the funds. They haven't even been able to pass a freaking Farm Bill, so good luck with that. I hear Wal-Mart is hiring...
The USDA absolutely is unessential and should be abolished at once. The nation got along fine without a department of agriculture before it was created in 1862 by the Great Despot
Yes, but you could split the votes out evenly by state, and the Democrats would still be in control of Congress today. For example, the Democrats got about 12% more votes for their congressional candidates in Michigan in 2012. Michigan has 9 Republican reps and only 5 Dems. In Pennsylviana the Democrats got about 80K more votes than Republicans. Pennsylvania has 13 Republicans and only 5 Democrats.
The House is supposed to be the Representative body of our legislature, but that is no longer the case. The Republicans have managed to rig the system so they can lose elections badly, and still be the majority. They can lose barely, and be in a huge majority. This is not democracy in any way, so we should not be surprised when they proceed to act like elections don't matter. They don't.
Well, you're mostly right. However, if you care about rewarding approximiate behavior (like we are supposed to do with children), know that the deficit since the end of WWII tends to grow much less (even shrink in real dollars on occasion) under Democrats. So if you really honestly care about this, the absolute last thing you should ever do is vote for a Republican.
Republicans like to use relatively meaningless absolute dollars when they talk about the debt, because meaningless numbers are much easier to find abberrations to demagoge about (eg: The current aministration will always look bad if you don't adjust for inflation). But if you switch to real dollars, the trend is clear.
A good attempt at a defence of the indefensible. However, the claim would have to be that flying the helicopter is worse for the human body than meerly riding in it as a passenger. That is the claim Sheikh Saleh Al-LoIQ was making about cars.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the orangutan myth comes from people mixing up being bewildered and lazy all the time with wisdom.
That's where Congress comes from too.
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as
It's my experience that other people most certianly do judge me (and probably you) by looks, including dress. There was one period early in my career where I decided to dress as casually as I could get away with. I also grew my hair down into a ponytail. Slowly while this was going on, somehow at work my perception changed from a bright young go-getter to a useless slacker.
When things got the worst for me career-wise, I decided to physically clean up. After all, its trivial to do. Certianly much easier than actually changing my attitude, right? So I started dressing up. One day at work I just started showing up in dress slacks and shoes, tie and jacket. breifcase instead of backpack. I cut the ponytail off.
It wasn't as obvious during the slow transformation, but the sudden change back was dramatic. Overnight I was right back to being a praised go-getter. Not only that, but I noticed that salespeople in stores would talk to me again, as would panhandlers. When I was ponytail guy, car salemen in patrticular would just act like I didn't exist. Even if I was there to buy something.
If you haven't tried it yourself, you'd be absolutely amazed how much other people's perception of you is based on looks. The thing is, dress and hairstyle are pretty much entirely in your control. You may have a style of each you prefer, but from a strict economic perspective, if you don't do both to maximize your preception at work, you aren't hurting anyone but yourself. So that's what the value of ties is.
The whole experience also left me with a new appreciation for folks with ethnic, weight, or general attractivness issues. While I was being studiously ignored by car salesmen until I left, there was a black guy on the lot getting the same treatment. I could go home and cut off my pony-tail. What could he do?
This betrays a very basic misunderstaning about how Google got where it is, and how it stays there.
Yes, pagerank is a great idea, and it was perhaps an improvement over what was being done before. But that wasn't why people abandoned the likes of Lycos and Yahoo(!) for Google back in the late 90's. Back then all the other search engines had gone to practices that were quite frankly user-abusive. Adds were placed all over the place, including an indeterminate amount of the top hits on your search. The search screens themselves also existed mostly to pump ads at you, and were really clunky, with a large amount of confusing options right there on the main search page.
Google, by contrast, had a main search page with no options whatsoever. Just a text box and a couple of buttons. "Breath of fresh air" doesn't even begin to describe how wonderful to use this was compared to what we were used to. On top of that, the search results were clearly delineated from the ads, so you could trust the results. The "don't be evil" motto was obviously infused into the whole effort. Every competitor was just a giagantic pain to use by comparison. "Page rank" or whatever wifty algorithim used for all this was something that nobody but extreme techies (and marketers) really ever gave a crap about.
So if you've got something that you think competes with Google, you'd better be talking about how nice and clean the interface is by comparison, how much easier it is to find real results without having to wade around ads, and how trustworthy the provider is wrt not allowing marketing weasels to buy their way into my search results. If you aren't talking about any of that, frankly nobody gives a crap.
Yup. That's why countries prefer to have extradition treaties.
Only at the very low end. At that point, there's already all the incentive in the world (since the alternative to automation now is either accepting endemic labor shortages, raising the wage to over the welfare level, or breaking the law to hire illegal immigrants). Believe me, if they could make an efficient grape-picking machine to harvest crops in California, they would.
Are you kidding? They have an industrial-sized Roomba.
Yes, but that means they need full-time employees to run around and empty the Roombas, and clean out all the tiny parts in the industrial Roombas that get clogged with hair and whatnot.
Yup. Although, of all the sad stories of an unarmed black person shot by police (or by armed vigilantes) that I've heard over the last 3 years or so, this is the one where the overreaction seemed the most understandable. For all the cops knew, this was part of an organized attack, and the car itself may have been rigged to blow upon trigger from the driver. This is the kind of stuff they are trained for.
making welfare a more attractive option than work for many.
That just shows you how ludicrously, immorally low we have our minimum wage set to right now. However, I will admit that it is also pretty darn messed up that we have set up a system where only those here illegally (an thus unable to collect welfare) would take an actual minimum wage job, and then we yell and scream at the inevitable flood of illegal aliens who come here for all those jobs we reserved just for them. Like they are somehow more immoral for wanting a better life for their families, than are the rich folks who set up this system for them to have that role.
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
That's actually too generous.
The real issue is that voters don't actually pick their candidates anymore; its the other way around. Every 10 years when the census is done, all the states have to redraw their congressional districts. What happens in most states is that whoever controls the state legislature gets to do the drawing. They get maps and their state's entire voter registration database out, and make a modern computer-aided science of drawing things so that as many districts as possible are packed full of their party's registered voters. Any districts that have to go to the other party are drawn to look like malaria germs so that they scoop up every voter possible from the other party. Ideally those opposition districts will have more voters in them too. The idea is to give voters from the other party as little voice in government as possible.
In other words, nearly every voting district in the country is designed to be a "Democratic" district or a "Republican" district. The only true election happens on primary day, and nobody from the other side of the political spectrum gets a vote. So you end up with a Congress packed full of extremists. Extremist congressmen don't give a damn which party won or lost the last election, because their own seat is safe either way. All they have to worry about is that someone more extreme than them will challenge them in the next primary.
TL;DR: elections don't matter
Time for everyone on Capitol Hill to get back to work.
Umm...yeah...Well, about that ...
In some countries, like the UK, with strict, old-fashioned prurient laws about the nudey, pictures of boobs and front-bottoms (male and female) could land you in jail with a conviction as a sexual pervert.
Interesting. So I take it then that The Sun is published from prison?
Respond with your best reasons, rationally, unemotionally. Don't let yourself get caught in the flame war, instead go on with your life. Why do we need to suppress speech again?
This isn't about supressing speech. Joe C. Crackpot is quite free to publish his own journal or website showing how 1=2 (complete with a division by zero in his proof). However, in your typical scientific journal such "speech", and all the ensuing counter-speech, provide absolutely no benefit to the folks who presumably came to read up on the latest advances in DNA sequencing (or whatever). If it is providing no benefit to the readers, no point in having it.
I have to wonder how much of the crush was due to the Randians, the Baggers, and Koch Whores trying to overwhelm the site
As of two days ago, about a third of the USA (population: 300 million people) had no healthcare. When the whistle blows and they are all at once allowed to get coverage, only a moron wouldn't expect the largest server slashdotting in history. Even if they wanted to, malicous parties would have trouble generating a DDOS that would be more than noise compared to that.
Hear, hear! Health care should be completely decoupled from employment. That would be pro-business, and I'm always amazed it hasn't been promoted as such. It works for Canada and many other countries.
As an employee of a company that competes directly against Canadian and French firms, I can vouch this is a huge deal. Its nice that our quality is higher than theirs, but the fact of the matter is that we have no choice. Our labor costs are just not competitive with theirs, because their government is picking up all their employee healthcare costs. It is just not a level playing field. So we have no choice but to position ourselves as the "Rolls Royce" of the industry.
With employer-paid healthcare, US companies are essentially competing with an arm tied behind their backs.
Not to mention that one of the first acts of Obamacare was to outlaw denials for "pre-existing conditions". I remember once during an early 90's tech boom looking at changing jobs from my large defense contractor employer, and suggesting to my co-worker that he consider it too. He was a good bright productive guy, and deserved better. He couldn't. He had sadly developed diabetes after he started working there. Not the company's fault, but due to the "prexisting condition" thing, if he ever left that company, he could never get insurance. He was essentially a life-long indentured servant to that company, no matter how badly they treated him.
Multiply that by every such person in the USA, and tell you tell me how much that stifled our economy. Heck, screw the economy, it stifled freedom. We are all more free today thanks to Obamacare.
Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
I actually saw a report looking into that once. I turns out that a lot of younger voters don't remember the Cold War at all. All they know about Socalisim is that those raving idiots in Congress seem to reflexively hate it. So in their minds, clearly it can't be all bad...
In fact, 2.7 million more people voted for Democratic candidates for the House than voted for Republicans. So no, Republican candidates were not better. Even if you zoom down to states, you see this. For example, in Pensylvania, Democratic candidates got about 80K more votes, which got them only five of the state's 18 Representatives.
The reason the Republicans in the House are acting like elections don't matter, is because for them elections don't matter.
Joke's on you. When the Republicans finally cave and pass the cleaned budget the Senate sent them, food stamps for those retirees will be cut significantly (about $39b). Even when they lose, they win. Merry F'ing Christmas, suckers.
So while at some point the political folks can make a decision about whether to pay back-pay or not, there's no guarantee
More specifically, it would require the Republican (and Tea party) run House of Representatives to vote them the funds. They haven't even been able to pass a freaking Farm Bill, so good luck with that. I hear Wal-Mart is hiring...
The USDA absolutely is unessential and should be abolished at once. The nation got along fine without a department of agriculture before it was created in 1862 by the Great Despot
Ummm...doesn't the USDA do our food inspections?
Yes, but you could split the votes out evenly by state, and the Democrats would still be in control of Congress today. For example, the Democrats got about 12% more votes for their congressional candidates in Michigan in 2012. Michigan has 9 Republican reps and only 5 Dems. In Pennsylviana the Democrats got about 80K more votes than Republicans. Pennsylvania has 13 Republicans and only 5 Democrats.
The House is supposed to be the Representative body of our legislature, but that is no longer the case. The Republicans have managed to rig the system so they can lose elections badly, and still be the majority. They can lose barely, and be in a huge majority. This is not democracy in any way, so we should not be surprised when they proceed to act like elections don't matter. They don't.
Well, you're mostly right. However, if you care about rewarding approximiate behavior (like we are supposed to do with children), know that the deficit since the end of WWII tends to grow much less (even shrink in real dollars on occasion) under Democrats. So if you really honestly care about this, the absolute last thing you should ever do is vote for a Republican.
Republicans like to use relatively meaningless absolute dollars when they talk about the debt, because meaningless numbers are much easier to find abberrations to demagoge about (eg: The current aministration will always look bad if you don't adjust for inflation). But if you switch to real dollars, the trend is clear.
Am I the only one made a little uncomfortable by this?
Headline from next year: Copenhagen Suborbitals' new franchise office in the Gaza Strip is doing amazing business...
A good attempt at a defence of the indefensible. However, the claim would have to be that flying the helicopter is worse for the human body than meerly riding in it as a passenger. That is the claim Sheikh Saleh Al-LoIQ was making about cars.