I'm a contractor who specialized in short- to medium- term contracts, and despite having had many different clients, I've gotten flexi-hours at all my jobs in the last... um... four? jeez, I've lost count... lots of years.
In my case, "flexi hours" means I have a regular schedule, but it's not 9-5, and if I won't be in on my regular schedule I give some warning. My big thing is never, ever having to regularly be on a client site before 10am. I have a couple of reasons for wanting this -- I hate rush hour commutes, for one -- but I am very able to give my clients a big reason for them to want me to have flexi hours:
"I can come in at 8am" (or whatever) "if you really want. But you should understand I have very, very strong circadian rhythms. That side of my brain doesn't really wake up until 10am. I will come in at 8am, clutch spasmodically at my coffee cup, rock back and forth, and read email until my brain thaws two hours later -- while you pay by the hour -- if you want. I'll then leave a 5pm or so, which is unfortunate, as my best time of the day for coding is the late afternoon."
Funny, but they all are completely enthusiastic about my working 10am-6+pm.
I'm always surprized that other people don't have as strong a sense of time-of-day (independent of light) as I do. Surely I'm not the only person whose productivity varies on a strict schedule. I would think that any company would be eager to make sure the hours of employee time they get always fall in each employees most productive periods.
The one thing geeks share in common more deeply than a love of
technology is the feeling of being ostracized. The hellmouth series has given us all a place to share our pain. And more
importantly, to wallow in self-pity. Everybody who has self-pity has a perverse desire to wallow in it for some reason. I don't
know why, even though I'm just as big an offender as anyone. But regardless of the reason why I'm sure it has generated a lot of
banner views for/. You can bet this isn't the last time we'll see the hellmouth posts here.
What an amazingly condescending and ignorent thing to say.
The Hellmouth series struck a nerve. The reason it struck a nerve -- the reason people are still talking about this -- is because no one had ever talked about it before.
The collective voices of geekdom all sighed as one "You mean, I wasn't the only one?" and all thought sheepishly in unison "You mean, it wasn't really my fault after all?"
Most victims feel guilty. The reasons why are complicated past going into here, but just take it as a given because it's so. It's not rational, but that's how h. sapiens are.
In any case where people are victimized but there is no censure of the victimization -- no official opposition to people (or to those particular people) being victimized -- there is a sort of quiet community message sent to the victim "You brought this on yourself. You deserve this. All you had to do was X for this not to have happened." where X might be "not wear sexy clothing which provokes rapists" or "not park your car where it could get stolen" or "not act interested in things your peers aren't".
These two phenomena have a particularly toxic interaction. The victim's innate tendency to blame themselves is reinforced by the silence of the community which condones the violence.
When you see those "laughing all the way to the bank" posts which fill you with such disgust, keep in mind that is the empty show of bravado of someone who harbors the suspicion that maybe it's OK for people who are wierd to be beaten in public, that maybe it was his fault.
As wildly incongruous as it sounds, the direct answer to "laughing all the way to the bank" is "You know, what was done to you was wrong. It should never have happened and it should have been treated as the serious crime it was."
Abuse of any kind leaves the victim with some pretty dreadful questions, which until they are answered basically prevent any going forward: Is this going to happen again? If it was OK with the authorities for people to beat me up in that context even though the authorities said it wasn't, how will I know in any future context if I will be in danger? How can I protect myself? How can I protect my family? If there is a way I can protect myself, does that mean I let it happen and it was my fault after all? If it was OK for me to be treated that way, is it OK for me to treat others that way? etc.
All that "wallowing in self-pity" as you call it was a bunch of people with no vocabulary for it trying to discuss what happened to them in an attempt to answer those questions for themselves. The first thing must be to establish what happened and why. That's exactly what the discussion has been focusing on so far. The problem space has to be explored.
Of course oppression -- in this case abuse -- is recursive. And the way the "cycle of abuse" is broken is by people becoming cognizent of the abuse and the way it warps their subsequent perceptions and behavior, and that task can take literally decades of hard psychological work and then requires lifetime vigilence. That "wallowing in self-pity" is exactly the first stage of beginning to admit "something bad happened to me, which hurt me enough to screw how I think". Don't complain about it -- it's where the solution comes from.
Whenever you have the slightest input, choose what is nearest your heart and as ambitious as you can imagine.
Go to a college or job where there are lots of people like you. Geek? Go to MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. Hippie? Go to Evergreen, Oberlin, Hampshire, etc. Under NO circumstances go to a state school (unless *possibly* the UC system), which is where all the bullies will be going.
Once you're out of HS, you have lots of liberty to do what you will. You have to get over any internalized abuse you have. You've absorbed messages about who you are and what you're not entitled to and what is valued which may be against your best interests. Get over that crap quickly and make choices which indulge your passions, and you will find yourself surrounded by worthy people and with a life which gets better.
You miss the point. From the point of view of plenty of the folks to the South, Bush wasn't sufficiently "comforting", as you put it, to get them excited. He was adequately "comforting", but nothing to write home about.
And you're not getting it in a fundamental way -- the same way most conservatives haven't gotten it all along, and which why this strong showing for Gore surprized them -- and this is the important part of my point: When I say the democrats were "frightened", I'm not using it in the intellectual, abstracted way you use it:
People here are frightened of Wiccans
That's just factually incorrect. The people where you are dislike Wiccans. May indeed loathe them. But they are confident in the dominence of their own religion, and see no reason to believe that Wiccans could manage to pass punitive laws which directly effect them since they know they greatly out number them. They don't largely fear Wiccans, not the way Bush frightens a lot of liberals.
I quite literally mean "frighten", not "cause disgust and contempt".
That's something the right absolutely doesn't want to hear: that some of their positions and candidates inspire a kind of fear which drives its own opposition without any counter-organization what so ever.
I'm not suggesting you change you opinions as to what you think is moral and good. I'm just relating an observation of political reality. If conservatives keep waving political guns at large portions of the population, liberals won't actually have to organize to get out the vote. It's really that simple.
The political spectrum has widened much in the past 50 years -- but not in the past 250. By the McCarthy era, the political spectrum had shrunk to a tiny slice of what it had been.
And, frankly, I'll believe the right supports the Bill of Rights the day I hear a Republican candidate for president publically affirm the citizenship of atheists and suggest that the Pledge of Allegiance be amended to its original form.
My precinct (in Cambridge, MA) had close to 100% voter turn out. I went in at 7:45pm (polls closed at 8:00pm) and almost every name was checked off.
Knowing that my neighborhood is strongly leftish ("People's Republic of Cambridge"), I have a different idea of of what was happening.
(I don't know how to make this tastefully non-partisan, so I won't. Sorry.) From what I've seen here, heard talking to real live Republicans, what I understand to be the case is this:
The Republicans were largely voting for whom they thought would make a better president. They were trying to vote out of optimism. But as conservative presidents go, it's really hard to get enthused about Dubya. He's the only Republican choice, but he's kinda disappointing as Republicans go.
The Democrats, on the other hand (of which I and most of my neighbors are some), were voting for whom they thought would make the less bad president. They were voting not out of a sense of optimism, but of pure, unbridled terror. They weren't asking of their candidate that he demonstrate great talent, character, or policy; they were just looking for someone who seemed to have at least vague concept of civil liberties, and at least a decent sense of shame about abusing them.
For all the conservatives have been whining about "liberal media bias", I think that the media have been astonishingly quiet about what liberals were really thinking and feeling. Bush terrifies them. The media played along with the Republicans in pretending that everything was playing out on the rarified intellectualized plain of abstracted issues. While it was "issues" oriented, it wasn't the abstraction of issues which was the crux.
While Republicans were talking about abstract ideas like "character" and "policy", Democrats were looking down the barrel of a gun. Make no mistake about it, when a presidential candidate presumes to pass judgement on what is or is not a religion and protected by the first amendment (see the case of the Wiccan soldiers), if you don't belong (or think you belong) to a privileged religion, you are looking down the barrel of a gun; you are standing on a slippery slope, the bottom of which rests in concentration camps.
Make no mistake: when a presidential candidate side steps the question "do you think that atheists aren't citizens?", if you are an atheist, or even sufficiently leftist, you are looking down the barrel of a gun. When a presidential candidate opposes abortion, if you are a woman, you are looking down the barrel of a gun.
I live in a state with a Republican govenor, which just defeated in referendum health care reform and just approved a massive income tax cut. I expect lots of people here would have be happy to have voted for someone of Bush's fiscal orientation -- if only he wasn't pointing a gun at them.
(Note to Libertarians: You guys could have all New England in your pockets, but you're basically coming across as extremist Republicans. Maybe you are. I didn't think that's what libertarianism was about. Until you learn to put civil liberties first and fiscal policy second, you will never get anywhere in N.E.)
Republicans worry that Gore will hurt their livelihoods. Democrats are terrified that Bush with destroy their lives. And that is the reason Democratic voters turned out, and the story no media will report.
Also, you have to engage in complicated segregation-era registration procedures here - my friend lives in a state where filing a
tax return is easier than voting. (I will leave it to others to figure out why).
Ugh! Where are you? Here in Massachusetts, registering to vote is trivial. You can do it by mail, or walk into any town office and fill out what amounts to a 3x5 card with your name and address -- and if you're homeless or otherwise don't have a street address, there's a place on the card to draw a map of where you usually can be found. No kidding (was when I registered ~6 years ago). And you don't need to produce any ID or proof of residence in many towns/cities (e.g. Boston, Arlington, Cambridge.)
Maybe that explains why MA politics are so socialist -- we actually get out the vote....?
Hopefully, if you're a Massachusetts registered voter, you already know that there is an initiative -- QUESTION 2 -- to AMEND THE STATE CONSTITUTION TO DEPRIVE FELONS OF THE VOTE.
Vote NO ON 2 to prevent this! Even if you're not voting in the presidential election, PLEASE go vote on this issue!
I notice you're at an.edu. You're looking at the corporate coding world without actually having been in it.
<flame class=adhominem>
Uh, Mr. Moron, I'm a contractor in the business for 10 years. That edu is a past client who as a thank you gives me free isp services. You may now get back down off your hind legs.
The real question is this.....while we bicker about whether there is such a thing as a virtual
community, can anyone even explain to me whether there is a REAL, non-abstracted techie community?
I am at firest inclinded say "it depends on your definition of 'community'", but really, the answer is "no" for all conceivable definitions.
Community is a localized phenomenon (this does not rule out virtual community, if you consider cyberspace a locality, as most geeks do). A bunch of people with something in common is merely a demographic, or a subculture at most. A community is a bunch of people which, at the very, absolute least interact (regularly, frequently, importantly). So for a non-virtual geek community to happen, you need (for starters) a physical population density of geeks which is quite high.
That limits your choices to a very few places in the US (dunno about outside the US). I live in one of those places (Cambridge, MA).
But even if you have that population density, community is a way of interacting which most geeks are neither into nor very good at. For instance, geeks are much better at being loyal to a cause than to a group of people. For instance, geeks prefer not to have to initiate socializing. For instance, geeks don't like to have to deal with the piddling details of people's lives. For instance, geeks don't respect ritual or other social technologies. (All for most geeks; there are of course exceptions.)
But if you meant merely a self-aware subculture of techies, self-declaring as such and looking out for one another, well, geeks are really terrible about looking out for anyone (including themselves, but especially others).
Maybe this is a shockingly naive thing to say, but perhaps you could contribute to its reformation?
Yeah, shockingly naive.
BTDT. Volunteer teacher, both in schools and independently.
I've been following school reform, and studying previous reform movements for 18 years, and I have come to the conclusion: the schools can't be reformed. They can only be dismantled.
For a crash course in the issue, and why the biggest names in school reform all abandoned the cause, I strongly recommend to you the writings of John Taylor Gatto and John Holt (especially the heartbreaking introduction to his "Teach Your Own").
Seems if people like you and me gave more back into our society (without worrying
about who is "worthy" of our time), we'd have a lot less to bitch about.
Seems if people like you and me worried a little bit more about whether or not our contributions were used for good or evil (instead of giving to stroke our own egos) there'd be far less evil in the world.
Having thus been rewarded for doing nothing, the programmer tries it again the next month
is absurd, factually incorrect, and, when you think about it, contrary to what is known by every open source contributor! I recommend Kohn's book highly to anyone planning going into management, in part because what he has to say about why people do difficult intellectual work dovetails perfectly with what people have observed in the open source movement -- only he was writing back in like 1994.
In fact a lot of what Greenspun talks about as "obviously" true has no actual support in research. He talks about how overtime is such a wonderful thing, and how it makes companies so wealthy. I have in other places noted the mathematics of wages and resources which are so advantageous -- to the company. After all, if you donate 20 hrs beyond a 40hr work week without further compensation, your manager gets a project done for half the money (and possibly in half the time, if there is no exhaustion penulty). Very efficient that.
What of merit there is in Greenspun's article was long ago written by Orson Scott Card in his famous essay "How Software Companies Die" -- the one which originated the metaphor that managing programmers was more like keeping bees than planting crops.
Frankly, Greenspun comes off as manipulative and exploitative and pretty skanky. And superstitious: it sounds like his explanations of his company's success are post hoc, and reflect more what he'd like to believe that his actual practice.
First of all, the reason people are tearing Dubya apart is that Dubya posted to/. and/.rs tear ALL posters to shreds. What are you, new here? People are ripping apart Dubya and not Gore, because Dubya is here and Gore isn't (yet?).
Duh.
Secondly, Bush's responses were actually embarassingly bad. This has nothing to do with "pandering" and everything to do with basic courtesy. Note how during the debates the candidates thanked the moderators and hosting institutions for having them. Bush didn't even do that much here. Further, his actual answers didn't even acknowlege the questions. That's just rude. He comes off not as compassionate but as contempt filled.
In fact, his answers were bad enough as to be embarrassing. Who would want to defend someone who has just done the rhetorical equivalent of pissing himself in public?
What you evidently see as "integrity" I see a "smarminess" and "forked-tonguedness". I am a big fan of "integrity", but I don't see any reason to suspect it of Bush.
Many people have been saying (both in response to this and the last interview responses) comments to the extent of "Don't
these people know what slashdot is?!?!?" and complaining that the candidates are answering the questions the way they
believe is right, rather than echoing the slashdot party line.
Incorrect. A lot of people are, quite reasonably, complaining that the candidates (well, honestly, Bush) does not seem to be aware that we -- and people like us: computer professionals, students, single young adults, etc. -- exist and have our own positions.
It would be one thing if Bush had writen, for instance "I do think the War on Drugs has had some successes, but has been crippled by lack of funding, etc." that would have been completely different than what he did write, which ignored the question ("Do you think the War on Drugs has been a success?") and went into rah-rah-isms. Even though they express the same position.
I would disagree with him, all the same, but at least I would feel there was a modicum of attention and respect, and I could respect him back for it.
I see nothing in your comment which acknowledges the fact that our elected officials are supposed to represent people -- all of the people. If Bush doesn't even know what our point of view is, how can he possibly represent us?
He makes utterly clear that not only doesn't he know what we think or care about, he doesn't care. He can't be bothered to find out, or even leave the possibility open that people might disagree with him. He was, in short, completely disrespectful.
Sometimes, people don't bear any malice; they really are just plain dumb.
Huh? Who the fuk cares whether it's malice or stupidity, if you get screwed just the same? If you are deprived of your rights, who cares if it's because the people who did it to you were ignorent, stupid, malicious or just crazy? You're still out your civil liberties just the same.
Anybody who believes having a bigot in the white house won't effect them, deserves what they get -- it's just I don't deserve to get it, too!
Ok, this has gotten surreal, the combination of this thread here and the simultaneous story The Man Who Wouldn't Be King
Geeks should volunteer their time more than the norm.[...]I hadn't really thought seriously about voluteering before reading this, but it appears that public schools are desperate
enough to submit to the demands of greedy profiteers. Its got to stop, and it appears the only way to stop it is to offer
alternatives.
Dude, do what you think is right, but I am not going to volunteer or donate anything so a school where:
the school principal charged that the 17-year-old
Griffiths "disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of
supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials or other school personnel engaged in the
performance of their duties." [for refusing the homecoming crown]
Put another way: I was suspended once, for getting beat up. Why on earth would I do anything for the institution that not only turned a blind eye on assault and battery, but reprised against a victim?
Face it: as geeks many of us have very schizophrenic attitudes about schools. On one hand, we say things like "we should contribute to our schools to advance learning and education and people picking themselves up by their bootstraps". On the other, our personal experience of school was, well, the Hellmouth.
Until the Hellmouth series here, it was possible -- or even highly plausible -- for geeks to look at their own experience as anomalous. They disregarded their first-person empirical evidence of what schools are like, so that they could continue to support the abstract ideal of schools. They could say "Yeah, I got beaten up every day at school, but schools are still a wonderful thing."
But now we know our experience isn't anomalous. Teachers are biggotted against the smart and the odd. Funding is poured into athletics and not academics. Violence against certain classes of students is condoned. And this happens all over, not just in isolated cases.
It's just about impossible for us to kid ourselves now. I can't be the only one who loathes the idea of supporting the institution which abused me.
How could I possibly be willing to give -- without restraints -- to an institution which is so vile, which treated me so vilely?
How do I know that if I donate computers to my local HS's computer lab, that they won't say "Great, we got computers for free this year, so we can take the new computer budget for the lab and spend it on the football team"??
How do I know that I am not enabling the school's continuing abuse of it's students? Do I want to work on a computer net which lets teachers know where teens surfed?
How do I know my serving as a volunteer would not be taken as a sign of endorsement of repressive school administrators or board members?
Frankly, at the absolute minimum, a school would have to convince me that it was addressing these issues, and that it was committed to improving them, before I would help it.
I want, bluntly, a quid pro quo. I want to know that if I give to them, they are going to work to improve the lot of the geeks and outcasts who are getting stepped on, and the civil rights of all students.
I'd far and away rather directly support the students, than the institutions: supporting non-school organizations which help students. There's no way I'd want to cart blanche give over any of my time and money to school administrators.
Sweet Athene, you went to all that effort to make a protest, and now you want them to expunge the record? Are you NUTS?
By all that's holy, I'd demand a copy and get it FRAMED. I'd write a manefesto railing against the poverty of culture in highschool, staple copies of the record to the top, and include it in my college applications.
Do you understand how good this could make you look to college admissions officers?? (At the good schools -- Podunk State would be scared, but MIT would love it.)
I wish I'd thought of this when applying to college!
Not quite precise (see 29CFR541.
In practice, it depends on which (tax/employment) flavor of contracting you do. If you do 1099 contracting, no, you probably won't get overtime by default, but you can certainly negotiate your own rates. I do w-2 contracting, which means my agency's income is contingent on my hourly rate, so damned if they're not going to specify time-n-a-half, and double-time -- it's their income which doubles too:) -- and it makes them competitive in attracting talent.
Clearly, some people below don't get it. Here's some further elucidation:
A death march is a programmer experience where management demands of the programmer(s) more than can be done with the resources (t, $, etc.) available, and the only way a deathmarch can be imposed on a programmer is if you can blackmail him.
Blackmail: One can tell (or merely strongly imply to) a salary slave that if he doesn't do the job to management standards -- regardless of how many hours it takes -- he'll be sacked. In this way, management gets lots of extra time and effort out of the employee for free. After all, your job is hostage.
If you tell a contractor (or other hourly billing employee) to get something done, you pay for all the extra time it takes.
This has an amazing radicalizing effect on employers. All of a sudden, they don't have a tremendous incentive (wage-free labor!) to pull much of the kinds of shit which turn a project into a deathmarch.
Put another way: If Joe Management tells Salary Sam that a 80hr project has to be done in a week, Salary Sam will DONATE 40hrs to the project, and Joe Management gets a 80hr project done in one week only paying for the same 40hrs. What a deal! Fast turn around and wage-free labor! Why wouldn't you run your shop this way? If you present every job as an emergency, you could save a mint!
However, if Joe Management tells Contractor Connie to do an 80hr project, Contractor Connie is going to bill every one of those 80hrs, whether they are all in one week (in which case, Joe Management will actually have to pay 110hrs (40 at regular time, 20 at time and a half, 20 at double time)) or over two weeks or over a month. Joe Management is very, very respectful about Contractor Connie's time. She's "expensive", even though her billing rate may be exactly on par with the ostensible hourly rate of the salary slaves, because she won't work for free.
This strongly encourages employers not to pull the bs which causes deathmarches. Paying time-and-a-half has an amazingly salutary effect on manager's time-management and resource-management skills.
(All this reminds me of one project I was on when the client said to me after the zillionth spec change "I'm sorry to waste your time." To which I responded cheerfully, "Oh, it's not my time any more. You bought it. After all, you're buying my time by the hour." The sudden stricken look on his face was priceless. Needless to say, that project shaped up in a hurry.)
You are conflating two things -- church attendence and religiosity -- which you can't conflate in the US. Church attendence (and general participation in organized religions) is plumeting; churches are closing left and right. Meanwhile, people are reporting adherance to spiritual belief systems in higher and higher numbers. Spirituality is skyrocketing; sales of spiritual self-help books and participation in spiritual self-development services (e.g. yoga classes, theological seminars) are skyrocketting. There is a big trend in books right now to present the spiritual or religious aspects of everything, from children to the stock market (I am not making this one up).
This all, of course, has the organized religions quite vexed.
I'll happily pay for most "perks" out of my own pocket, thankuveddymuch, if I am pulling a decent wage. What I want is my desired work schedule. I am flatly uninterested in working "full time" (as defined in the US). I don't want to work 40/50 (40hrs/week X 50wks/yr). I want ideally to work 35/40.
For all that companies like to think of themselves as being competitive at hiring, I have yet to find one un-rigid enough to think that minimal distance outside the box.
If you look around at things and come to the conclusion that
something is broke, that something has got to be the electorate itself.
This reminds me of the old quote "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory there is no difference, and in practice, there is."
If we both grant there is a problem (which you seem to do), then saying it is the electorate gets us precisely nowhere, because we can't fix the electorate. Or at least, it is a grody brute-force problem. We can however tinker with the system.
On an important level, what you're saying is that the problem resides in real people not behaving like the idealized people the system was designed to accomodate.
I agree with you 100% that organizing and getting out the vote is effective, and I have written extensively about that here in the past. However, it seems obvious to me that any system which requires organizing and "getting out the vote" has some pretty fundamental flaws. Quite simply, it is biased and easily manipulable in unjust ways: any time someone (or some natural circumstance) tips the balance against some demographic's ability to participate, they get screwed.
The classic case of deliberately doing that is the Poll Tax, instituted in the South to keep poor Blacks from voting (since banned as an impediment to democracy). But one need not deliberately manipulate people's legal recourse to polls to mess with the electorate. Just about any issue winds up aligning along class, age, and/or employment status. If any of those factors bear on one's ability to organize politically, it will tip the balance.
For instance, retirees have more leisure time to follow political issues, so are more likely to vote in a coordinated fashion than, say, busy single moms who work two jobs -- who don't have the time to get more than sound bites out of the news. It may not seem like a big deal, but small trends like that add up big time at the polls.
Our system is punative against people who cannot or will not organize, who do not have the time or information access.
The reason that the only thing which ever gets done with citizen rights which pertain to the digital realm is them get eroded by corporate interests, is that to everyone except corporate interests, there is always something "more important". Consumer privacy and the legal availability of strong encryption (for example) are bottom-of-the-barrel issues. They aren't "noble" and "important" like hunger or the environment -- they're merely about our civil liberties.
If Slashdot for heaven's sake, cannot stand up and say "We as voters find these issues important and demand to know what you have done in regards to them!" WHO WILL?
Your so-called "perspective" is what has kept marginalizing discussion of the incredible erosion of our civil liberties which we are witness to. Your so-called "perspective" is what has allowed politicians and corporations to perpetrate a shell game with the rights of citizens. Your so-called "perspective" has been what has allowed politicians to distract the public from what their records are in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a contractor who specialized in short- to medium- term contracts, and despite having had many different clients, I've gotten flexi-hours at all my jobs in the last... um... four? jeez, I've lost count... lots of years.
In my case, "flexi hours" means I have a regular schedule, but it's not 9-5, and if I won't be in on my regular schedule I give some warning. My big thing is never, ever having to regularly be on a client site before 10am. I have a couple of reasons for wanting this -- I hate rush hour commutes, for one -- but I am very able to give my clients a big reason for them to want me to have flexi hours:
Funny, but they all are completely enthusiastic about my working 10am-6+pm.
I'm always surprized that other people don't have as strong a sense of time-of-day (independent of light) as I do. Surely I'm not the only person whose productivity varies on a strict schedule. I would think that any company would be eager to make sure the hours of employee time they get always fall in each employees most productive periods.
What an amazingly condescending and ignorent thing to say.
The Hellmouth series struck a nerve. The reason it struck a nerve -- the reason people are still talking about this -- is because no one had ever talked about it before.
The collective voices of geekdom all sighed as one "You mean, I wasn't the only one?" and all thought sheepishly in unison "You mean, it wasn't really my fault after all?"
Most victims feel guilty. The reasons why are complicated past going into here, but just take it as a given because it's so. It's not rational, but that's how h. sapiens are.
In any case where people are victimized but there is no censure of the victimization -- no official opposition to people (or to those particular people) being victimized -- there is a sort of quiet community message sent to the victim "You brought this on yourself. You deserve this. All you had to do was X for this not to have happened." where X might be "not wear sexy clothing which provokes rapists" or "not park your car where it could get stolen" or "not act interested in things your peers aren't".
These two phenomena have a particularly toxic interaction. The victim's innate tendency to blame themselves is reinforced by the silence of the community which condones the violence.
When you see those "laughing all the way to the bank" posts which fill you with such disgust, keep in mind that is the empty show of bravado of someone who harbors the suspicion that maybe it's OK for people who are wierd to be beaten in public, that maybe it was his fault.
As wildly incongruous as it sounds, the direct answer to "laughing all the way to the bank" is "You know, what was done to you was wrong. It should never have happened and it should have been treated as the serious crime it was."
Abuse of any kind leaves the victim with some pretty dreadful questions, which until they are answered basically prevent any going forward: Is this going to happen again? If it was OK with the authorities for people to beat me up in that context even though the authorities said it wasn't, how will I know in any future context if I will be in danger? How can I protect myself? How can I protect my family? If there is a way I can protect myself, does that mean I let it happen and it was my fault after all? If it was OK for me to be treated that way, is it OK for me to treat others that way? etc.
All that "wallowing in self-pity" as you call it was a bunch of people with no vocabulary for it trying to discuss what happened to them in an attempt to answer those questions for themselves. The first thing must be to establish what happened and why. That's exactly what the discussion has been focusing on so far. The problem space has to be explored.
Of course oppression -- in this case abuse -- is recursive. And the way the "cycle of abuse" is broken is by people becoming cognizent of the abuse and the way it warps their subsequent perceptions and behavior, and that task can take literally decades of hard psychological work and then requires lifetime vigilence. That "wallowing in self-pity" is exactly the first stage of beginning to admit "something bad happened to me, which hurt me enough to screw how I think". Don't complain about it -- it's where the solution comes from.
Yes, it gets better.
How much better it gets depends on you choices.
Whenever you have the slightest input, choose what is nearest your heart and as ambitious as you can imagine.
Go to a college or job where there are lots of people like you. Geek? Go to MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. Hippie? Go to Evergreen, Oberlin, Hampshire, etc. Under NO circumstances go to a state school (unless *possibly* the UC system), which is where all the bullies will be going.
Once you're out of HS, you have lots of liberty to do what you will. You have to get over any internalized abuse you have. You've absorbed messages about who you are and what you're not entitled to and what is valued which may be against your best interests. Get over that crap quickly and make choices which indulge your passions, and you will find yourself surrounded by worthy people and with a life which gets better.
You miss the point. From the point of view of plenty of the folks to the South, Bush wasn't sufficiently "comforting", as you put it, to get them excited. He was adequately "comforting", but nothing to write home about.
And you're not getting it in a fundamental way -- the same way most conservatives haven't gotten it all along, and which why this strong showing for Gore surprized them -- and this is the important part of my point: When I say the democrats were "frightened", I'm not using it in the intellectual, abstracted way you use it:
That's just factually incorrect. The people where you are dislike Wiccans. May indeed loathe them. But they are confident in the dominence of their own religion, and see no reason to believe that Wiccans could manage to pass punitive laws which directly effect them since they know they greatly out number them. They don't largely fear Wiccans, not the way Bush frightens a lot of liberals.
I quite literally mean "frighten", not "cause disgust and contempt".
That's something the right absolutely doesn't want to hear: that some of their positions and candidates inspire a kind of fear which drives its own opposition without any counter-organization what so ever.
I'm not suggesting you change you opinions as to what you think is moral and good. I'm just relating an observation of political reality. If conservatives keep waving political guns at large portions of the population, liberals won't actually have to organize to get out the vote. It's really that simple.
The political spectrum has widened much in the past 50 years -- but not in the past 250. By the McCarthy era, the political spectrum had shrunk to a tiny slice of what it had been.
And, frankly, I'll believe the right supports the Bill of Rights the day I hear a Republican candidate for president publically affirm the citizenship of atheists and suggest that the Pledge of Allegiance be amended to its original form.
My precinct (in Cambridge, MA) had close to 100% voter turn out. I went in at 7:45pm (polls closed at 8:00pm) and almost every name was checked off.
Knowing that my neighborhood is strongly leftish ("People's Republic of Cambridge"), I have a different idea of of what was happening.
(I don't know how to make this tastefully non-partisan, so I won't. Sorry.) From what I've seen here, heard talking to real live Republicans, what I understand to be the case is this:
The Republicans were largely voting for whom they thought would make a better president. They were trying to vote out of optimism. But as conservative presidents go, it's really hard to get enthused about Dubya. He's the only Republican choice, but he's kinda disappointing as Republicans go.
The Democrats, on the other hand (of which I and most of my neighbors are some), were voting for whom they thought would make the less bad president. They were voting not out of a sense of optimism, but of pure, unbridled terror. They weren't asking of their candidate that he demonstrate great talent, character, or policy; they were just looking for someone who seemed to have at least vague concept of civil liberties, and at least a decent sense of shame about abusing them.
For all the conservatives have been whining about "liberal media bias", I think that the media have been astonishingly quiet about what liberals were really thinking and feeling. Bush terrifies them. The media played along with the Republicans in pretending that everything was playing out on the rarified intellectualized plain of abstracted issues. While it was "issues" oriented, it wasn't the abstraction of issues which was the crux.
While Republicans were talking about abstract ideas like "character" and "policy", Democrats were looking down the barrel of a gun. Make no mistake about it, when a presidential candidate presumes to pass judgement on what is or is not a religion and protected by the first amendment (see the case of the Wiccan soldiers), if you don't belong (or think you belong) to a privileged religion, you are looking down the barrel of a gun; you are standing on a slippery slope, the bottom of which rests in concentration camps.
Make no mistake: when a presidential candidate side steps the question "do you think that atheists aren't citizens?", if you are an atheist, or even sufficiently leftist, you are looking down the barrel of a gun. When a presidential candidate opposes abortion, if you are a woman, you are looking down the barrel of a gun.
I live in a state with a Republican govenor, which just defeated in referendum health care reform and just approved a massive income tax cut. I expect lots of people here would have be happy to have voted for someone of Bush's fiscal orientation -- if only he wasn't pointing a gun at them.
(Note to Libertarians: You guys could have all New England in your pockets, but you're basically coming across as extremist Republicans. Maybe you are. I didn't think that's what libertarianism was about. Until you learn to put civil liberties first and fiscal policy second, you will never get anywhere in N.E.)
Republicans worry that Gore will hurt their livelihoods. Democrats are terrified that Bush with destroy their lives. And that is the reason Democratic voters turned out, and the story no media will report.
Whoohoo! It looks like my precinct (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ward 11 Precinct 2) had close to 100% voter turnout.
Ugh! Where are you? Here in Massachusetts, registering to vote is trivial. You can do it by mail, or walk into any town office and fill out what amounts to a 3x5 card with your name and address -- and if you're homeless or otherwise don't have a street address, there's a place on the card to draw a map of where you usually can be found. No kidding (was when I registered ~6 years ago). And you don't need to produce any ID or proof of residence in many towns/cities (e.g. Boston, Arlington, Cambridge.)
Maybe that explains why MA politics are so socialist -- we actually get out the vote....?
Hopefully, if you're a Massachusetts registered voter, you already know that there is an initiative -- QUESTION 2 -- to AMEND THE STATE CONSTITUTION TO DEPRIVE FELONS OF THE VOTE.
Vote NO ON 2 to prevent this! Even if you're not voting in the presidential election, PLEASE go vote on this issue!
<flame class=adhominem>
Uh, Mr. Moron, I'm a contractor in the business for 10 years. That edu is a past client who as a thank you gives me free isp services. You may now get back down off your hind legs.
I notice you're are an idiot. </flame>
I am at firest inclinded say "it depends on your definition of 'community'", but really, the answer is "no" for all conceivable definitions.
Community is a localized phenomenon (this does not rule out virtual community, if you consider cyberspace a locality, as most geeks do). A bunch of people with something in common is merely a demographic, or a subculture at most. A community is a bunch of people which, at the very, absolute least interact (regularly, frequently, importantly). So for a non-virtual geek community to happen, you need (for starters) a physical population density of geeks which is quite high. That limits your choices to a very few places in the US (dunno about outside the US). I live in one of those places (Cambridge, MA).
But even if you have that population density, community is a way of interacting which most geeks are neither into nor very good at. For instance, geeks are much better at being loyal to a cause than to a group of people. For instance, geeks prefer not to have to initiate socializing. For instance, geeks don't like to have to deal with the piddling details of people's lives. For instance, geeks don't respect ritual or other social technologies. (All for most geeks; there are of course exceptions.)
But if you meant merely a self-aware subculture of techies, self-declaring as such and looking out for one another, well, geeks are really terrible about looking out for anyone (including themselves, but especially others).
So, well, no.
Email me if interested in pursuing conversation.
Yeah, shockingly naive.
BTDT. Volunteer teacher, both in schools and independently.
I've been following school reform, and studying previous reform movements for 18 years, and I have come to the conclusion: the schools can't be reformed. They can only be dismantled.
For a crash course in the issue, and why the biggest names in school reform all abandoned the cause, I strongly recommend to you the writings of John Taylor Gatto and John Holt (especially the heartbreaking introduction to his "Teach Your Own").
Seems if people like you and me worried a little bit more about whether or not our contributions were used for good or evil (instead of giving to stroke our own egos) there'd be far less evil in the world.
The more I read of Greenspun, the more I am convinced he's completely clueless.
WRT reinforcement: His little folk wisdom is thoroughly trashed by the many actual studies cited in Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn. Study after study demonstrates that "positive reinforcement" is devastating to creative or intellectual workplaces. Greenspun's comment:
is absurd, factually incorrect, and, when you think about it, contrary to what is known by every open source contributor! I recommend Kohn's book highly to anyone planning going into management, in part because what he has to say about why people do difficult intellectual work dovetails perfectly with what people have observed in the open source movement -- only he was writing back in like 1994.In fact a lot of what Greenspun talks about as "obviously" true has no actual support in research. He talks about how overtime is such a wonderful thing, and how it makes companies so wealthy. I have in other places noted the mathematics of wages and resources which are so advantageous -- to the company. After all, if you donate 20 hrs beyond a 40hr work week without further compensation, your manager gets a project done for half the money (and possibly in half the time, if there is no exhaustion penulty). Very efficient that.
What of merit there is in Greenspun's article was long ago written by Orson Scott Card in his famous essay "How Software Companies Die" -- the one which originated the metaphor that managing programmers was more like keeping bees than planting crops.
Frankly, Greenspun comes off as manipulative and exploitative and pretty skanky. And superstitious: it sounds like his explanations of his company's success are post hoc, and reflect more what he'd like to believe that his actual practice.
First of all, the reason people are tearing Dubya apart is that Dubya posted to
Duh.
Secondly, Bush's responses were actually embarassingly bad. This has nothing to do with "pandering" and everything to do with basic courtesy. Note how during the debates the candidates thanked the moderators and hosting institutions for having them. Bush didn't even do that much here. Further, his actual answers didn't even acknowlege the questions. That's just rude. He comes off not as compassionate but as contempt filled.
In fact, his answers were bad enough as to be embarrassing. Who would want to defend someone who has just done the rhetorical equivalent of pissing himself in public?
What you evidently see as "integrity" I see a "smarminess" and "forked-tonguedness". I am a big fan of "integrity", but I don't see any reason to suspect it of Bush.
Incorrect. A lot of people are, quite reasonably, complaining that the candidates (well, honestly, Bush) does not seem to be aware that we -- and people like us: computer professionals, students, single young adults, etc. -- exist and have our own positions.
It would be one thing if Bush had writen, for instance "I do think the War on Drugs has had some successes, but has been crippled by lack of funding, etc." that would have been completely different than what he did write, which ignored the question ("Do you think the War on Drugs has been a success?") and went into rah-rah-isms. Even though they express the same position.
I would disagree with him, all the same, but at least I would feel there was a modicum of attention and respect, and I could respect him back for it.
I see nothing in your comment which acknowledges the fact that our elected officials are supposed to represent people -- all of the people. If Bush doesn't even know what our point of view is, how can he possibly represent us?
He makes utterly clear that not only doesn't he know what we think or care about, he doesn't care. He can't be bothered to find out, or even leave the possibility open that people might disagree with him. He was, in short, completely disrespectful.
Huh? Who the fuk cares whether it's malice or stupidity, if you get screwed just the same? If you are deprived of your rights, who cares if it's because the people who did it to you were ignorent, stupid, malicious or just crazy? You're still out your civil liberties just the same.
Anybody who believes having a bigot in the white house won't effect them, deserves what they get -- it's just I don't deserve to get it, too!
Ok, this has gotten surreal, the combination of this thread here and the simultaneous story The Man Who Wouldn't Be King
Dude, do what you think is right, but I am not going to volunteer or donate anything so a school where:
Put another way: I was suspended once, for getting beat up. Why on earth would I do anything for the institution that not only turned a blind eye on assault and battery, but reprised against a victim?
Face it: as geeks many of us have very schizophrenic attitudes about schools. On one hand, we say things like "we should contribute to our schools to advance learning and education and people picking themselves up by their bootstraps". On the other, our personal experience of school was, well, the Hellmouth.
Until the Hellmouth series here, it was possible -- or even highly plausible -- for geeks to look at their own experience as anomalous. They disregarded their first-person empirical evidence of what schools are like, so that they could continue to support the abstract ideal of schools. They could say "Yeah, I got beaten up every day at school, but schools are still a wonderful thing."
But now we know our experience isn't anomalous. Teachers are biggotted against the smart and the odd. Funding is poured into athletics and not academics. Violence against certain classes of students is condoned. And this happens all over, not just in isolated cases.
It's just about impossible for us to kid ourselves now. I can't be the only one who loathes the idea of supporting the institution which abused me.
How could I possibly be willing to give -- without restraints -- to an institution which is so vile, which treated me so vilely?
How do I know that if I donate computers to my local HS's computer lab, that they won't say "Great, we got computers for free this year, so we can take the new computer budget for the lab and spend it on the football team"??
How do I know that I am not enabling the school's continuing abuse of it's students? Do I want to work on a computer net which lets teachers know where teens surfed?
How do I know my serving as a volunteer would not be taken as a sign of endorsement of repressive school administrators or board members?
Frankly, at the absolute minimum, a school would have to convince me that it was addressing these issues, and that it was committed to improving them, before I would help it.
I want, bluntly, a quid pro quo. I want to know that if I give to them, they are going to work to improve the lot of the geeks and outcasts who are getting stepped on, and the civil rights of all students.
I'd far and away rather directly support the students, than the institutions: supporting non-school organizations which help students. There's no way I'd want to cart blanche give over any of my time and money to school administrators.
Sweet Athene, you went to all that effort to make a protest, and now you want them to expunge the record? Are you NUTS?
By all that's holy, I'd demand a copy and get it FRAMED. I'd write a manefesto railing against the poverty of culture in highschool, staple copies of the record to the top, and include it in my college applications.
Do you understand how good this could make you look to college admissions officers?? (At the good schools -- Podunk State would be scared, but MIT would love it.)
I wish I'd thought of this when applying to college!
Not quite precise (see 29CFR541. In practice, it depends on which (tax/employment) flavor of contracting you do. If you do 1099 contracting, no, you probably won't get overtime by default, but you can certainly negotiate your own rates. I do w-2 contracting, which means my agency's income is contingent on my hourly rate, so damned if they're not going to specify time-n-a-half, and double-time -- it's their income which doubles too
Clearly, some people below don't get it. Here's some further elucidation:
A death march is a programmer experience where management demands of the programmer(s) more than can be done with the resources (t, $, etc.) available, and the only way a deathmarch can be imposed on a programmer is if you can blackmail him.
Blackmail: One can tell (or merely strongly imply to) a salary slave that if he doesn't do the job to management standards -- regardless of how many hours it takes -- he'll be sacked. In this way, management gets lots of extra time and effort out of the employee for free. After all, your job is hostage.
If you tell a contractor (or other hourly billing employee) to get something done, you pay for all the extra time it takes.
This has an amazing radicalizing effect on employers. All of a sudden, they don't have a tremendous incentive (wage-free labor!) to pull much of the kinds of shit which turn a project into a deathmarch.
Put another way: If Joe Management tells Salary Sam that a 80hr project has to be done in a week, Salary Sam will DONATE 40hrs to the project, and Joe Management gets a 80hr project done in one week only paying for the same 40hrs. What a deal! Fast turn around and wage-free labor! Why wouldn't you run your shop this way? If you present every job as an emergency, you could save a mint!
However, if Joe Management tells Contractor Connie to do an 80hr project, Contractor Connie is going to bill every one of those 80hrs, whether they are all in one week (in which case, Joe Management will actually have to pay 110hrs (40 at regular time, 20 at time and a half, 20 at double time)) or over two weeks or over a month. Joe Management is very, very respectful about Contractor Connie's time. She's "expensive", even though her billing rate may be exactly on par with the ostensible hourly rate of the salary slaves, because she won't work for free.
This strongly encourages employers not to pull the bs which causes deathmarches. Paying time-and-a-half has an amazingly salutary effect on manager's time-management and resource-management skills.
(All this reminds me of one project I was on when the client said to me after the zillionth spec change "I'm sorry to waste your time." To which I responded cheerfully, "Oh, it's not my time any more. You bought it. After all, you're buying my time by the hour." The sudden stricken look on his face was priceless. Needless to say, that project shaped up in a hurry.)
You are conflating two things -- church attendence and religiosity -- which you can't conflate in the US. Church attendence (and general participation in organized religions) is plumeting; churches are closing left and right. Meanwhile, people are reporting adherance to spiritual belief systems in higher and higher numbers. Spirituality is skyrocketing; sales of spiritual self-help books and participation in spiritual self-development services (e.g. yoga classes, theological seminars) are skyrocketting. There is a big trend in books right now to present the spiritual or religious aspects of everything, from children to the stock market (I am not making this one up).
This all, of course, has the organized religions quite vexed.
I'll happily pay for most "perks" out of my own pocket, thankuveddymuch, if I am pulling a decent wage. What I want is my desired work schedule. I am flatly uninterested in working "full time" (as defined in the US). I don't want to work 40/50 (40hrs/week X 50wks/yr). I want ideally to work 35/40.
For all that companies like to think of themselves as being competitive at hiring, I have yet to find one un-rigid enough to think that minimal distance outside the box.
This reminds me of the old quote "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory there is no difference, and in practice, there is."
If we both grant there is a problem (which you seem to do), then saying it is the electorate gets us precisely nowhere, because we can't fix the electorate. Or at least, it is a grody brute-force problem. We can however tinker with the system.
On an important level, what you're saying is that the problem resides in real people not behaving like the idealized people the system was designed to accomodate.
I agree with you 100% that organizing and getting out the vote is effective, and I have written extensively about that here in the past. However, it seems obvious to me that any system which requires organizing and "getting out the vote" has some pretty fundamental flaws. Quite simply, it is biased and easily manipulable in unjust ways: any time someone (or some natural circumstance) tips the balance against some demographic's ability to participate, they get screwed.
The classic case of deliberately doing that is the Poll Tax, instituted in the South to keep poor Blacks from voting (since banned as an impediment to democracy). But one need not deliberately manipulate people's legal recourse to polls to mess with the electorate. Just about any issue winds up aligning along class, age, and/or employment status. If any of those factors bear on one's ability to organize politically, it will tip the balance.
For instance, retirees have more leisure time to follow political issues, so are more likely to vote in a coordinated fashion than, say, busy single moms who work two jobs -- who don't have the time to get more than sound bites out of the news. It may not seem like a big deal, but small trends like that add up big time at the polls.
Our system is punative against people who cannot or will not organize, who do not have the time or information access.
Some democracy.
The reason that the only thing which ever gets done with citizen rights which pertain to the digital realm is them get eroded by corporate interests, is that to everyone except corporate interests, there is always something "more important". Consumer privacy and the legal availability of strong encryption (for example) are bottom-of-the-barrel issues. They aren't "noble" and "important" like hunger or the environment -- they're merely about our civil liberties.
If Slashdot for heaven's sake, cannot stand up and say "We as voters find these issues important and demand to know what you have done in regards to them!" WHO WILL?
Your so-called "perspective" is what has kept marginalizing discussion of the incredible erosion of our civil liberties which we are witness to. Your so-called "perspective" is what has allowed politicians and corporations to perpetrate a shell game with the rights of citizens. Your so-called "perspective" has been what has allowed politicians to distract the public from what their records are in this area.