An experience I recommend to any member of a relatively privileged group: Spend some time in a setting where you're the odd one out. If you've been middle class or wealthier all your life, get to know people who have never known significant wealth. If you're white, go to an event run by and for non-white people (e.g. a pro-Mexican-American political rally or black Baptist church service), or work for a business where you're the only white person. If you're a guy, try to spend some time among feminists. If you're Christian, spend time with Muslims or some other minority religion. If you're straight, hang out with some gay people.
If you do this properly, you will find yourself sometimes bewildered, missing a lot of cultural references, sometimes not able to speak or understand the language, definitely left out of most of the goings-on, and viewed suspiciously at best. And you will struggle to navigate through that and try to communicate with those who you're dealing with. And then you will realize that this is exactly what all those people who are culturally different from you go through every single day they deal with you, but because of you're power and privilege you have the option of not making that effort, whereas the powerless don't have that choice.
1. Rick Santorum is a public figure. A high school kid (which is usually what "cyberbullying" refers to) is generally not. If he wanted to avoid criticism, he could have simply retired quite comfortably to his home in Pennsylvania. 2. The website and Spreading Santorum campaign were created in response to things Rick Santorum has said in his official capacity as a United States Senator on the floor of the US Senate. If you're a public official, statements like that are clearly fair game for criticism and/or satire. 3. Bullying is typically done by somewhat powerful people to a powerless or marginalized person. Rick Santorum is neither powerless nor marginalized. 4. Rick Santorum's stated position regarding homosexuality is that he would use the power of the government to try to force homosexual people to either not be gay or not exist. That a prominant gay man responded by trying to prevent him from taking power seems like self-preservation as much as anything else.
Sorry, the claim along the lines of "poor widdle Ricky getting bullied by mean Dan Savage" is simply ludicrous.
In addition, any code that's given away to do good can also do evil. Consider, for instance, nmap. It's great if you're trying to see how open you are to attack, or if you're trying to take down a power grid so Neo and Morpheus don't get killed, but it's also really handy if you're trying to determine the best vector for taking over a host.
Well, as a musician with a pal who was in the music business for a while (I'm not his kind of act, so I didn't work with him), he described it like this: "The big distributors screw the labels in a very uncomfortable place. The labels, in turn, screw the band managers, who screw the musicians. Every time you move up in the business, you basically get to shift your position so that you are more the screwer and less the screwee." He also mentioned that because of the cash involved, if he'd wanted to screw his bands he could very easily have taken most of their share of the door and told the band members (when they woke up) that they'd spent it on alcohol, hookers, and blow.
You can also read this article by Courtney Love explainin precisely how record contracts screw musicians very very badly.
You're right that population pressure is a problem, but it's not the entire story. For instance, the average German uses only about 60% as much energy as the average American, and have a comperable standard of living.
Well, here's something I think they could do if they found something:
"Senator Blowhard, we acquired a very interesting audio recording made in the hotel room next to the one you were staying in on April 14, 2006, with a certain Miss Dupre saying something about how much she liked a 'Mr Hotdog'. Now, it would be a real shame if a public servant such as yourself were so demeaned by this happening to find its way into the hands of a reporter for a major TV network. By the way, how were you thinking of voting in the upcoming law enforcement funding bill? Just curious."
And if you're thinking "But this is the serious crime of blackmail!", then ask yourself who's responsible for investigating such crimes.
I expect them to have some idea of what to do in the case of a reactor meltdown in theory, but given that nuclear meltdowns don't happen that often they won't know whether their plans actually work until they have to use them. And while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Of course there was going to be confusion - you're looking at a scenario that nobody had actually handled before. There were smart people with some good guesses about what to do next, but there was no way to test things out ahead of time, because causing a nuclear meltdown for testing purposes is too expensive to even really consider it.
I'm reasonably certain that if people either at the NRC or in Secretary Chu's group proposed an idea, they most likely had good reasons for thinking it was going to work. There were also good reasons to think that some of those good ideas would be wrong.
A real explanation of what's going on: 1. Assume a population of 200 people, 100 heterosexual men, 100 heterosexual women. In each gender, assume that 50 are people somebody might want to have something to do with, and 50 are complete losers at best. 2. Social norms dictate that men initiate contact. That's not entirely true anymore, but it's still mostly true. 3. The good guys, therefor, go through the 50 women they might want to have something to do with, pick a few, and contact them. They possibly strike out on some, but probably manage to snag somebody. 4. The bad guys, on the other hand, may start with the strategy of the good guys, but are going to strike out on every single one because the women are (correctly) avoiding them. So as they get increasingly desperate, they basically spam all of the good women trying to get anyone. As they get really really desperate, they spam all the women. 5. Effects: The good women have about 53 contacts, 3 from people they might want. The bad women have 50 contacts, all from people they don't want. The bad men are still frustrated and spam any new woman that shows up, who promptly leave because all they got was 50 contacts from people they don't want.
Well, it's a non-story in the sense of turning it into a discussion of gender in IT, when we should be doing is celebrating the fact that Robyn really knows her stuff (at least, based on a few interactions I had with her at a FUDCon a while back) and got a good and well-deserved promotion.
If you're a paleoclimatologist, which is more likely to advance your career? A report that says current climate variations fit the historical pattern and there's nothing anyone needs to do differently, or one that says that significant government regulation and societal reorganization is needed?
Both will do just fine. The first report will get you a cushy job or generous grants from the American Petroleum Institute, the second report will make it more likely that you get a tenure-track university position.
There are at least 5 reasons I can think of for that phenomenon: 1. Some are shills for by the majorly carbon-emitting industries. There's no reasoning with this group, because they aren't here to reason or discuss, they're here to do their job of sowing doubt about whether global warming is real. Similarly, there may be commenters who aren't paid PR people, but work for these companies (e.g. a friend of mine who does geology on oil rigs for a living), for whom the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" truly applies.
2. Some believe that placing a high value on science involves being skeptical of anything not definitively proven. With anthropogenic global warming, because there's only 1 planet Earth (that I'm aware of) there's no way to definitely prove things one way or the other. This is true even if the vast majority of the research supports the theory that AGW is causing significant changes to the climate of the Earth.
3. Some are politically libertarian and tend to strongly oppose government action not concerned with enforcing contracts, protecting property rights, or preventing violent attack and/or sexual assault on a citizen. If AGW is true, and private enterprise can't or won't act to stop it, then stopping it requires significant government intervention in the markets, which dismantles the idea that libertarianism can solve all human problems. It's not dramatically different from a reaction you might get to a devout born-again Christian discovering definitive proof that Jesus never existed.
4. Some are unwilling to make the dramatic changes to everyday life that would be needed to reduce CO2 emissions in the short term. It would mean changes like having to move your home so you can commute to work without driving 30 miles, or having to put your washing machine on timers so the load runs at 3 AM rather than right now, or keeping your home at 55 F in the winter rather than the 70 F you find comfortable. Nobody wants to do that if they can think of a short-term alternative. This also manifests itself in an absolute faith that scientists and engineers will somehow come up with a solution that will solve the problem completely without requiring any kind of conservation effort.
5. Environmentalists have been guilty of overstating their case in the past, so some are reluctant to believe anything they say.
AT&T couldn't just randomly listen in on your phone calls
Well, yes and no.
Back in the really Bad Old Days when operators manually made things work, operators could and sometimes did listen in on a call if it seemed likely to be really interesting. Apparantly, celebrities would sometimes joke about that, along the lines of "Ok, you can hang up, Atlanta. You too, Chicago." or try techniques like announcing some well-known person was dead to see if they got a reaction from somebody other than the recipient of the call.
Actually, even in the United States the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that it's ok to request that all kids say "under God" in public schools, that practically everybody use coins and bills with "In God we Trust" on them, and that many sessions of Congress open with a prayer.
Of course, when Congress starts its session, I tend to go with the prayer, "Dear $DEITY, please do your best to convince Congress not to f**k things up too much more than they already have."
To play devil's advocate: If you're talking about a position that doesn't involve much dealing with people, the human side of things may be a matter of discrimination rather than just being nice. For instance, if somebody starts speaking in African-American Vernacular English or Spanglish as they get less guarded (because they're excited or comfortable with the interviewer), some people will hold that against them, even if they're being perfectly polite and respectful.
context for the uninitiated - let's just say that it was a group of Canadian nerds with too much spare time on their hands, who decided to make something epic.
You might think that - President Teddy Roosevelt certainly did (he thought Upton Sinclair was basically a nutcase), but the public outcry was enough that he sent some inspectors in for an incognito visit. Well, somebody tipped off the meatpackers, they spent 2 days cleaning things up, and still the inspectors came back to the president and told him that Sinclair's characterization was accurate.
There was also, I think, some talk of the meatpackers suing Sinclair for defamation, until it became abundantly clear that he hadn't lied in the least.
Apparently, the parent poster got the white-washed version of what plantation slavery actually entailed. The real version of slavery does not really compare favorably with the lives of Foxconn workers:
* Slaves were routinely beaten and whipped. They were also occasionally killed, but this was rare because that would cost the master money to replace them.
* Slaves who attempted to leave the plantation would be hunted down and either returned by force (where they'd be beaten / whipped / killed as a warning), or sometimes killed when trying to run away if they were caught. Foxconn employees would just be replaced.
* Slave families were regularly broken up, both for financial reasons and to prevent family bonds from convincing the slaves to work together to overthrow the master. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the most common form of slave family was a matriarch with children and absentee father(s), which might have modern-day social implications.
* Plantation slaves mostly ate those things which were edible but were cheap and not anything the master would want. Soul food originated among slave women applying their skill and ingenuity to what food they were given.
* The master's tyrrany most definitely didn't end at sundown in the case of female slaves, because they were frequently raped by their masters.
* The average life expectancy of a plantation slave was 22 years. The only future most slaves had was 6 feet under.
Slashdot Mirror
An experience I recommend to any member of a relatively privileged group: Spend some time in a setting where you're the odd one out. If you've been middle class or wealthier all your life, get to know people who have never known significant wealth. If you're white, go to an event run by and for non-white people (e.g. a pro-Mexican-American political rally or black Baptist church service), or work for a business where you're the only white person. If you're a guy, try to spend some time among feminists. If you're Christian, spend time with Muslims or some other minority religion. If you're straight, hang out with some gay people.
If you do this properly, you will find yourself sometimes bewildered, missing a lot of cultural references, sometimes not able to speak or understand the language, definitely left out of most of the goings-on, and viewed suspiciously at best. And you will struggle to navigate through that and try to communicate with those who you're dealing with. And then you will realize that this is exactly what all those people who are culturally different from you go through every single day they deal with you, but because of you're power and privilege you have the option of not making that effort, whereas the powerless don't have that choice.
I don't know - why don't we ask Dick Cheney, George W Bush, and Colon (sic) Powell about it?
No, it isn't.
1. Rick Santorum is a public figure. A high school kid (which is usually what "cyberbullying" refers to) is generally not. If he wanted to avoid criticism, he could have simply retired quite comfortably to his home in Pennsylvania.
2. The website and Spreading Santorum campaign were created in response to things Rick Santorum has said in his official capacity as a United States Senator on the floor of the US Senate. If you're a public official, statements like that are clearly fair game for criticism and/or satire.
3. Bullying is typically done by somewhat powerful people to a powerless or marginalized person. Rick Santorum is neither powerless nor marginalized.
4. Rick Santorum's stated position regarding homosexuality is that he would use the power of the government to try to force homosexual people to either not be gay or not exist. That a prominant gay man responded by trying to prevent him from taking power seems like self-preservation as much as anything else.
Sorry, the claim along the lines of "poor widdle Ricky getting bullied by mean Dan Savage" is simply ludicrous.
In addition, any code that's given away to do good can also do evil. Consider, for instance, nmap. It's great if you're trying to see how open you are to attack, or if you're trying to take down a power grid so Neo and Morpheus don't get killed, but it's also really handy if you're trying to determine the best vector for taking over a host.
If they don't act quickly, it's conceivable that Steamboat Willie might be legally distributed to people within the United States. The horror!
The importance of a score is determined by the number of O's in "Gooooooooooooooooooooal!"
To be fair, I think the reference was really to You're no Jack Kennedy, from the 1988 presidential campaign.
Well, as a musician with a pal who was in the music business for a while (I'm not his kind of act, so I didn't work with him), he described it like this:
"The big distributors screw the labels in a very uncomfortable place. The labels, in turn, screw the band managers, who screw the musicians. Every time you move up in the business, you basically get to shift your position so that you are more the screwer and less the screwee." He also mentioned that because of the cash involved, if he'd wanted to screw his bands he could very easily have taken most of their share of the door and told the band members (when they woke up) that they'd spent it on alcohol, hookers, and blow.
You can also read this article by Courtney Love explainin precisely how record contracts screw musicians very very badly.
You're right that population pressure is a problem, but it's not the entire story. For instance, the average German uses only about 60% as much energy as the average American, and have a comperable standard of living.
That amount of power is sufficient for approximately 1.81 time-travelling DeLoreans.
Well, here's something I think they could do if they found something:
"Senator Blowhard, we acquired a very interesting audio recording made in the hotel room next to the one you were staying in on April 14, 2006, with a certain Miss Dupre saying something about how much she liked a 'Mr Hotdog'. Now, it would be a real shame if a public servant such as yourself were so demeaned by this happening to find its way into the hands of a reporter for a major TV network. By the way, how were you thinking of voting in the upcoming law enforcement funding bill? Just curious."
And if you're thinking "But this is the serious crime of blackmail!", then ask yourself who's responsible for investigating such crimes.
Well, it would be the sound of the world's tiniest violin playing a sad song, but due to copyright restrictions I can't actually post a link to it.
I don't.
I expect them to have some idea of what to do in the case of a reactor meltdown in theory, but given that nuclear meltdowns don't happen that often they won't know whether their plans actually work until they have to use them. And while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Of course there was going to be confusion - you're looking at a scenario that nobody had actually handled before. There were smart people with some good guesses about what to do next, but there was no way to test things out ahead of time, because causing a nuclear meltdown for testing purposes is too expensive to even really consider it.
I'm reasonably certain that if people either at the NRC or in Secretary Chu's group proposed an idea, they most likely had good reasons for thinking it was going to work. There were also good reasons to think that some of those good ideas would be wrong.
A real explanation of what's going on:
1. Assume a population of 200 people, 100 heterosexual men, 100 heterosexual women. In each gender, assume that 50 are people somebody might want to have something to do with, and 50 are complete losers at best.
2. Social norms dictate that men initiate contact. That's not entirely true anymore, but it's still mostly true.
3. The good guys, therefor, go through the 50 women they might want to have something to do with, pick a few, and contact them. They possibly strike out on some, but probably manage to snag somebody.
4. The bad guys, on the other hand, may start with the strategy of the good guys, but are going to strike out on every single one because the women are (correctly) avoiding them. So as they get increasingly desperate, they basically spam all of the good women trying to get anyone. As they get really really desperate, they spam all the women.
5. Effects: The good women have about 53 contacts, 3 from people they might want. The bad women have 50 contacts, all from people they don't want. The bad men are still frustrated and spam any new woman that shows up, who promptly leave because all they got was 50 contacts from people they don't want.
"I know kung fu."
Well, it's a non-story in the sense of turning it into a discussion of gender in IT, when we should be doing is celebrating the fact that Robyn really knows her stuff (at least, based on a few interactions I had with her at a FUDCon a while back) and got a good and well-deserved promotion.
If you're a paleoclimatologist, which is more likely to advance your career? A report that says current climate variations fit the historical pattern and there's nothing anyone needs to do differently, or one that says that significant government regulation and societal reorganization is needed?
Both will do just fine. The first report will get you a cushy job or generous grants from the American Petroleum Institute, the second report will make it more likely that you get a tenure-track university position.
There are at least 5 reasons I can think of for that phenomenon:
1. Some are shills for by the majorly carbon-emitting industries. There's no reasoning with this group, because they aren't here to reason or discuss, they're here to do their job of sowing doubt about whether global warming is real. Similarly, there may be commenters who aren't paid PR people, but work for these companies (e.g. a friend of mine who does geology on oil rigs for a living), for whom the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" truly applies.
2. Some believe that placing a high value on science involves being skeptical of anything not definitively proven. With anthropogenic global warming, because there's only 1 planet Earth (that I'm aware of) there's no way to definitely prove things one way or the other. This is true even if the vast majority of the research supports the theory that AGW is causing significant changes to the climate of the Earth.
3. Some are politically libertarian and tend to strongly oppose government action not concerned with enforcing contracts, protecting property rights, or preventing violent attack and/or sexual assault on a citizen. If AGW is true, and private enterprise can't or won't act to stop it, then stopping it requires significant government intervention in the markets, which dismantles the idea that libertarianism can solve all human problems. It's not dramatically different from a reaction you might get to a devout born-again Christian discovering definitive proof that Jesus never existed.
4. Some are unwilling to make the dramatic changes to everyday life that would be needed to reduce CO2 emissions in the short term. It would mean changes like having to move your home so you can commute to work without driving 30 miles, or having to put your washing machine on timers so the load runs at 3 AM rather than right now, or keeping your home at 55 F in the winter rather than the 70 F you find comfortable. Nobody wants to do that if they can think of a short-term alternative. This also manifests itself in an absolute faith that scientists and engineers will somehow come up with a solution that will solve the problem completely without requiring any kind of conservation effort.
5. Environmentalists have been guilty of overstating their case in the past, so some are reluctant to believe anything they say.
AT&T couldn't just randomly listen in on your phone calls
Well, yes and no.
Back in the really Bad Old Days when operators manually made things work, operators could and sometimes did listen in on a call if it seemed likely to be really interesting. Apparantly, celebrities would sometimes joke about that, along the lines of "Ok, you can hang up, Atlanta. You too, Chicago." or try techniques like announcing some well-known person was dead to see if they got a reaction from somebody other than the recipient of the call.
Actually, even in the United States the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that it's ok to request that all kids say "under God" in public schools, that practically everybody use coins and bills with "In God we Trust" on them, and that many sessions of Congress open with a prayer.
Of course, when Congress starts its session, I tend to go with the prayer, "Dear $DEITY, please do your best to convince Congress not to f**k things up too much more than they already have."
To play devil's advocate:
If you're talking about a position that doesn't involve much dealing with people, the human side of things may be a matter of discrimination rather than just being nice. For instance, if somebody starts speaking in African-American Vernacular English or Spanglish as they get less guarded (because they're excited or comfortable with the interviewer), some people will hold that against them, even if they're being perfectly polite and respectful.
context for the uninitiated - let's just say that it was a group of Canadian nerds with too much spare time on their hands, who decided to make something epic.
You might think that - President Teddy Roosevelt certainly did (he thought Upton Sinclair was basically a nutcase), but the public outcry was enough that he sent some inspectors in for an incognito visit. Well, somebody tipped off the meatpackers, they spent 2 days cleaning things up, and still the inspectors came back to the president and told him that Sinclair's characterization was accurate.
There was also, I think, some talk of the meatpackers suing Sinclair for defamation, until it became abundantly clear that he hadn't lied in the least.
Apparently, the parent poster got the white-washed version of what plantation slavery actually entailed. The real version of slavery does not really compare favorably with the lives of Foxconn workers:
* Slaves were routinely beaten and whipped. They were also occasionally killed, but this was rare because that would cost the master money to replace them.
* Slaves who attempted to leave the plantation would be hunted down and either returned by force (where they'd be beaten / whipped / killed as a warning), or sometimes killed when trying to run away if they were caught. Foxconn employees would just be replaced.
* Slave families were regularly broken up, both for financial reasons and to prevent family bonds from convincing the slaves to work together to overthrow the master. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the most common form of slave family was a matriarch with children and absentee father(s), which might have modern-day social implications.
* Plantation slaves mostly ate those things which were edible but were cheap and not anything the master would want. Soul food originated among slave women applying their skill and ingenuity to what food they were given.
* The master's tyrrany most definitely didn't end at sundown in the case of female slaves, because they were frequently raped by their masters.
* The average life expectancy of a plantation slave was 22 years. The only future most slaves had was 6 feet under.