In every single case (22 times) where the federal minimum wage was raised by law, economic growth and standards of living went up faster than inflation. Every single time.
Do you have a good reference for this? I would dearly love to be able to post this exact sentence, with a link, every time anyone posts anything about raising minimum wage putting workers out of jobs...
RTS are exactly the same as checkers, chess, go, etc... except you have more pieces, more board positions, and more than one piece can be moved per turn.
...but more importantly, limited information. In checkers, chess, go, &c all players have perfect information. In Starcraft, you have the "fog of war", which adds a different dimension to the gameplay (i.e., the importance of scouting and the possibility of deception).
My wife works for Apple, and at the end of last year they had a deal to allow Apple employees to buy an Apple Watch for nearly half the retail price. She didn't really want one, so she bought one for me.
TLDR: Definitely useful, but I doubt I would pay full price to replace it.
The biggest feature for me, actually, is the notifications. Basically, with just a phone, you have the choice between cranking up the volume on notifications and having them be super-loud when you're in a quiet environment, or turning them down and miss missing them if you're in a loud environment. The watch has a dynamo that actually taps your wrist when you get a notification; so you're likely to notice it no matter how loud the environment is, but in a quiet environment the sound isn't too disruptive. (When I mention this to people they say, "But I wouldn't want to get notified all the time" -- no of course you don't, that's why you limit the notifications to only things you actually care about.) The notification aspect is handy when you're driving as well -- it gives you a little tap before you're supposed to turn to "wake you up".
The watch faces are pretty cool, with lots of pretty well thought-out features. It's nice being able, for example, to see what the temperature is like outside by just glancing at your wrist; and with the 2.2 update there's a watch face that cycles through photos from a designated photo album, so every time I look at the time I see photos of something that makes me happy.
The heart-rate monitor is pretty useful, but it seems like it's only mainly accurate for aerobic sports -- when I'm weightlifting it will often report obviously incorrect numbers (like, 40 BPM after I've just done a set of lifts and am breathing heavy).
The timer is quite handy, particularly with the "Hey Siri" feature -- "Hey Siri, set a timer for 5 mintues". The "Hey Siri" functionality is quite useful in a number of other situations as well: "Hey Siri, remind me when I get home to put the garbage out."
The Dick Tracy-style phone is a bit gimmicky, IMHO -- it's actually quite uncomfortable to try to talk to someone with your wrist held in front of you. It's almost always worth the 3 seconds of effort to just pull the phone out of my pocket / bag instead.
The awkwardness of holding up your wrist for long periods is the reason I don't use many of the other apps as well -- stocks, weather, browsing maps -- most things are much better just done by taking out your phone.
All in all, I'm glad I have it; and if it was like $150 I'd definitely recommend people buy it. But at the current price, it's a bit steep for what it provides.
Doesn't your company allow you to have packages received at work, rather than have you work from home all day and hope the carrier actually finds your house and doesn't get lost? (Or worse, doesn't bother to knock and just shoves the "pick it up from the post office" slip through your door? Or puts it in your garbage can and you don't notice before trash day?) If they don't your company stinks. The month before Christmas in my office the place is practically a post office. I haven't bought alcohol over the internet yet, but I probably will here in a little bit, and if I do I'll have it delivered to my office, just like everything else.
But it is what I'm talking about. I'm saying there are be circumstances under which "asking someone out" actually is harassment (morally, not legally), and why "there should not normally be a problem" is a reasonable answer from a lawyer: because actions never exist in a vacuum. Most of the time guys only ask a girl out if they've been given social cues to indicate that the answer may be "yes"; some of the time guys are a bit clueless and ask even though they've not been given any cues, or if they've been given "no" cues; but there are circumstances in which a guy asking is just one instance of a pattern of obnoxious behavior.
Another example, same person, was there was a fellow who brought work in some times, and managed to "accidentally" touch her butt a number of times.
I can understand why your coworker didn't want to report it to HR. But seriously, that guy was in the wrong. Your coworker managed to deal with the situation (by calling in another guy to help), but she shouldn't have had to deal with it at all. Don't you agree?
He told her the truth, that he was sexually attracted. I think his is much better than if he had thought of a fake reason for her to leave his courses, e.g. to give her bad grades so that she chooses another department to specialize later on.
You still haven't given me indication that you've tried to look at things from a woman's perspective. As I asked -- wouldn't you be pissed if you went to work for a company, and after being there 6 months the manager asked you to move to a different department (or to find another job) because they were sexually attracted to you (when you had done nothing but be polite)?
In the past they said that the university isn't the place for women. We now got to the point to say that this is wrong. You say that the university isn't the place for men who occasionally fall in love with one of the students of their sexual preference? Isn't that similar thinking to above? Yes, I do agree that we should close university's doors for people who get emotional with every woman and can't hold it back, but there really should be a reasonable compromise.
So yes, we he have two exclusive options here:
1. Allow men who cannot maintain professional conduct with female students to work as professors, and make the women work around the problem by moving around to different advisors until they find one that can. This is good for men who have that problem, and bad for all women.
2. Insist that only men who can maintain professional conduct with female students work as professors, and make men who have difficulty doing so find another job. This is bad for men who have that problem, but good for all women.
On the whole I think #1 is both more fair and more desirable than #2.
Do note that it's "maintain professional conduct", not "never experience emotional or physical attraction".
But we can already see how the story would play out if the genders were inverted.
Things that have only happened in your mind are not data points.:-)
Your model of the universe looks very different than mine; in my model, "advisor forces PhD student to move because of their incompetence" doesn't generally involve sexual harassment lawsuits (which is what you seem to imply), regardless of the gender of the advisor or student, unless some sort of harassment actually took place.
So that's what counts has "harassment" in the pro radical feminist society now-a-days. The argument is tired but it doesn't make it less true: If the supervisor was an attractive guy or if she was interested in him, those exact same words would be perfectly acceptable.
Um, no it wouldn't? If you're forced to throw away your research and start over again because your advisor isn't able to do his job, it sucks no matter what they look like. Even if there were mutual romantic attraction, it's never acceptable for a manager to have a romantic relationship with an employee (or an advisor with a student, for similar reasons). This has nothing to do with the gender of either party.
In a world where many young women believe if a man asks you out and you don't like him, it is sexual harassment, it gets a little hazy as to what sexual harassment is. Sometimes trying to pick up a simple friendship might be harassment.
Have you ever been given unwanted romantic / sexual attention? Or seen it happening? Isn't it uncomfortable? And shouldn't people be able to work without it?
I'm a heterosexual man, and I've got a male coworker who is bisexual, who once when (in a group of coworkers) discussing a particularly smart outfit I was wearing, said "You're making me hot just looking at you." He genuinely meant it as a compliment, but given that we had never had more than a professional relationship, it was inappropriate.
Now he hasn't really made any further comments, so it hasn't been much of an issue (although I am much more circumspect about how I interact with him now). But suppose he said something like that once a month. Or that he kept asking me over to his place or to go see movies 1-1. That would make me pretty uncomfortable -- and I shouldn't have to put up with that at work.
That's not to say you can never ask anyone out at work. It's to say that you should be aware that the other person is unusually constrained. It's not like a party where they can just mingle somewhere else: they're stuck working with you unless one of you finds a new job. You should always be reasonably sure that the question itself will not be unwelcome, even in a merely social situation; at work, the level of "how sure should I be" is higher -- not because of the risk of being fired, but because of how much more constrained the other person is in how they can respond if they're not interested.
Doesn't that make sense? This seems like basic human consideration to me.
Both men and women have internalized misogyny, but it surfaces in different ways. For example, if a man believes I'm a woman, he may offer to carry heavy things for me. If a woman assumes I'm a man, she may ask me to carry heavy things for her, even when she is clearly physically stronger than I.
The 'mis' in misogyny and misandry means 'hate'. (See also, 'misanthrope'.) I fail to see how "expecting an average man to be stronger than the average woman" counts as hating women. Shooting up a bunch of random women because nobody will have sex with you is misogyny.
The biggest thing I hate about SJWs is that they only look at the world from their own (female, and mostly speaking with female victims of sexual harrassment, not with men) perspective. What should he have done if he had such feelings? Quit his job? Ignore his feelings, every week, because men have to be strong? Here, that's a stereotype.
Looking at it from both sides made sense, but it doesn't sound yet like you've looked at it from both sides. Isn't it reasonable for women to be able to expect to come to university and study -- to be able to choose a professor to work with on a professional basis -- without having to either a) worry continually that they may fall in love with you, or b) have to switch advisors 2-3 times until you find one that can treat you professionally?
I mean really -- wouldn't you be pissed if you went to work for a company, and after being there 6 months the manager asked you to move to a different department (or to find another job) because they were sexually attracted to you (when you had done nothing but be polite)?
If you are a manager in a company, whether you are male of female, having employees who are both male and female is part of your job. If you are a woman who can't handle having male subordinates without forming an emotional attachment, or a man who can't handle having female subordinates without forming an emotional attachment, then being a manger is not for you.
Same thing with being a professor: mentoring both male and female grad students is a part of your job, just like teaching classes or doing research. If you can mentor students but can't do research, then a normal tenure-track professorship at a Research I institution isn't for you. If you can do research but can't mentor half of the students who come to you, it's not for you either.
Actually, according to that article, the reason WhatsApp was shut down was because they didn't even bother to respond, not because they refused:
Because WhatsApp did not respond to a court order of July 23, 2015, on August 7, 2015, the company was again notified, with there being a fixed penalty in case of non-compliance. As yet the company did not attend the court order, the prosecution requested the blocking of services for a period of 48 hours, based on the law [], which was granted by Judge Sandra Regina Nostre Marques
It sounds like what my old DI's used to say: "Yes sir? No sir? F*** you sir? Say something!"
Similarly, people who spend a lot of time sitting may well do so because they have limited ability to exercise due to other health problems.
Yeah, the first thing I thought was, "Well, maybe the more unhappy your life is, the more of these kinds of behaviors you're likely to engage in."
If you find that A and B are correlated, you have to ask if A caused B, or B caused A, or if there's a third thing C, which is causing both B and A. Either being chronically unhappy, or being ill, are things which could both 1) make it more likely for people to have these behaviors, and 2) make them more likely to die.
But this basically shows why Lessig will never be able to win, and even if he did win, would never be able to accomplish anything. Politics is about working the system, having one-to-one conversations to influence people. Obviously he doesn't have buy-in at the DNC level. If the party he wants to run with are changing the rules at the very beginning of his campaign to thwart his plans, what would the party who opposes him do all the way through his tenure?
Go do LWN's search page, uncheck all the boxes except for "security vulnerabilities", and then search for "KVM". Or Qemu, or Linux or Xen.
You'll find that all hypervisors have privilege escalation bugs discovered. However, this is the first one discovered in the Xen PV interface in a long time.
...an unrelated bug causes the vulnerable FDC code to remain active and exploitable by attackers.
Which is why the PV mode in Xen is such a killer security feature -- the more stuff you have just lying around, even if unused in theory, the higher the probability that there will be a bug somewhere that can be exploited.
What if someone who privately knows about the vulnerability gets the idea to exploit various installations of competitors (or even common users!) during the embargo period? Do you trust large enterprises not to misuse their knowledge to their own advantage?
Of course that's a risk. But again, is it worse to have a handful of people who are trying to be secretive know about the vulnerability while vendors update and carefully test their software, or for for the entire world to know about the vulnerability while vendors scramble to get something out the door as soon as possible?
Since Open Source projects communicate in the open (even if just version control commits), I find it quite likely that all major security-related projects are monitored by black hat hackers. The few weeks waiting period gives them ample time to use the security hole.
That's why the Xen Project doesn't put the fix into version control until after the embargo period is over. Only people on the predisclosure list (or those able to listen in) would be able to learn about the vulnerability without doing their own audit of the code to find the bug themselves (which is very expensive).
There's basically a balance to be struck. All users not on the predisclosure list (and thus who cannot update their systems until the embargo period is over) will continue to be privately vulnerable during the embargo period: anyone who happens to have dug deep enough and found the bug can still exploit it. But as soon as the announcement is made, everyone who hasn't yet updated is publicly vulnerable: Nobody has to search to find the bug, they just have to write an exploit for it. Being privately vulnerable is certainly bad, but being publicly vulnerable is far worse. The goal of the embargo period is to try to reduce the time that users are publicly vulnerable by extending the time they are privately vulnerable. Two weeks has been found to be a reasonable cost/benefit trade-off in our experience.
The XenProject security process gives them time to patch their systems (in this case, 2 weeks). If you don't have your stuff patched by then, they won't wait for you.
Regarding "they", English speakers have been using "they" as an ungendered third person singular for hundreds of years.
Language is defined by its speakers, not by some committee somewhere; each of us gets a vote. In some cases I persistently vote against change if I think it's a bad idea (for example, I will make fun of people who use the word "literally" when speaking figuratively as long as I can get away with it); but in this case, I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and I have purposely chosen to use "they" in this way.
English is perhaps the most gender neutral language currently in use.
I cannot tell you how ignorant that sounds to me. Of the four languages I know to various degrees (English, French, Turkish, Mandarin), two of them are far less gendered than English. In both Turkish and Chinese, there is no "he/she" distinction -- there is a single pronoun which can be used for any person. Additionally, in the base for "person" and for "child" is ungendered, and to specify "man/woman" or "boy/girl" you have to add a gender tag. Chinese: rén = person, nánrén = man, nrén = woman. háizi = child, nánháizi = boy, nháizi = girl. (Turkish was too long ago for me to remember the actual words.) Turkish is the same for brother/sister. (Chinese have cutesy reduplicatives for sibling relationships -- gge, dìdi, mèimei, jijie -- so the "add a gender" thing wouldn't fit.) I never got to actor/actress, waiter/waitress, &c in Turkish, but in Chinese they're all ungendered as well. (And nouns are genderless in both languages too.)
Seriously dude -- if you don't know Chinese or Turkish, that's fine; but then don't make a claim about all languages "currently in use".
Indeed: if you look at m-w or any other dictionary then you may notice that the modern use have two opposite meanings. That belongs to the richness and sophistication of modern language.
No, that's because most dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive: they're trying to help people understand what someone might be saying, not trying to tell you what the right answer is. And in general, I agree with them -- language is defined by its speakers and develops over time.
But the fact is that using "literally" when you actually mean "figuratively" is stupid. It's not only evidence of sloppy thinking, but it actively degrades the language. The fact that it's in M-W reflects the fact that a significant minority of people use it this way; but the fact remains that the majority of speakers oppose this change and think that it's stupid and wrong. By making fun of people who use the word "literally", I am "voting" to keep the old definition and keep the new definition from becoming accepted, and I will do so as long as it is practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a good reference for this? I would dearly love to be able to post this exact sentence, with a link, every time anyone posts anything about raising minimum wage putting workers out of jobs...
The right not to testify against yourself?
...but more importantly, limited information. In checkers, chess, go, &c all players have perfect information. In Starcraft, you have the "fog of war", which adds a different dimension to the gameplay (i.e., the importance of scouting and the possibility of deception).
My wife works for Apple, and at the end of last year they had a deal to allow Apple employees to buy an Apple Watch for nearly half the retail price. She didn't really want one, so she bought one for me.
TLDR: Definitely useful, but I doubt I would pay full price to replace it.
The biggest feature for me, actually, is the notifications. Basically, with just a phone, you have the choice between cranking up the volume on notifications and having them be super-loud when you're in a quiet environment, or turning them down and miss missing them if you're in a loud environment. The watch has a dynamo that actually taps your wrist when you get a notification; so you're likely to notice it no matter how loud the environment is, but in a quiet environment the sound isn't too disruptive. (When I mention this to people they say, "But I wouldn't want to get notified all the time" -- no of course you don't, that's why you limit the notifications to only things you actually care about.) The notification aspect is handy when you're driving as well -- it gives you a little tap before you're supposed to turn to "wake you up".
The watch faces are pretty cool, with lots of pretty well thought-out features. It's nice being able, for example, to see what the temperature is like outside by just glancing at your wrist; and with the 2.2 update there's a watch face that cycles through photos from a designated photo album, so every time I look at the time I see photos of something that makes me happy.
The heart-rate monitor is pretty useful, but it seems like it's only mainly accurate for aerobic sports -- when I'm weightlifting it will often report obviously incorrect numbers (like, 40 BPM after I've just done a set of lifts and am breathing heavy).
The timer is quite handy, particularly with the "Hey Siri" feature -- "Hey Siri, set a timer for 5 mintues". The "Hey Siri" functionality is quite useful in a number of other situations as well: "Hey Siri, remind me when I get home to put the garbage out."
The Dick Tracy-style phone is a bit gimmicky, IMHO -- it's actually quite uncomfortable to try to talk to someone with your wrist held in front of you. It's almost always worth the 3 seconds of effort to just pull the phone out of my pocket / bag instead.
The awkwardness of holding up your wrist for long periods is the reason I don't use many of the other apps as well -- stocks, weather, browsing maps -- most things are much better just done by taking out your phone.
All in all, I'm glad I have it; and if it was like $150 I'd definitely recommend people buy it. But at the current price, it's a bit steep for what it provides.
Doesn't your company allow you to have packages received at work, rather than have you work from home all day and hope the carrier actually finds your house and doesn't get lost? (Or worse, doesn't bother to knock and just shoves the "pick it up from the post office" slip through your door? Or puts it in your garbage can and you don't notice before trash day?) If they don't your company stinks. The month before Christmas in my office the place is practically a post office. I haven't bought alcohol over the internet yet, but I probably will here in a little bit, and if I do I'll have it delivered to my office, just like everything else.
But it is what I'm talking about. I'm saying there are be circumstances under which "asking someone out" actually is harassment (morally, not legally), and why "there should not normally be a problem" is a reasonable answer from a lawyer: because actions never exist in a vacuum. Most of the time guys only ask a girl out if they've been given social cues to indicate that the answer may be "yes"; some of the time guys are a bit clueless and ask even though they've not been given any cues, or if they've been given "no" cues; but there are circumstances in which a guy asking is just one instance of a pattern of obnoxious behavior.
I can understand why your coworker didn't want to report it to HR. But seriously, that guy was in the wrong. Your coworker managed to deal with the situation (by calling in another guy to help), but she shouldn't have had to deal with it at all. Don't you agree?
You still haven't given me indication that you've tried to look at things from a woman's perspective. As I asked -- wouldn't you be pissed if you went to work for a company, and after being there 6 months the manager asked you to move to a different department (or to find another job) because they were sexually attracted to you (when you had done nothing but be polite)?
So yes, we he have two exclusive options here:
On the whole I think #1 is both more fair and more desirable than #2.
Do note that it's "maintain professional conduct", not "never experience emotional or physical attraction".
Things that have only happened in your mind are not data points. :-)
Your model of the universe looks very different than mine; in my model, "advisor forces PhD student to move because of their incompetence" doesn't generally involve sexual harassment lawsuits (which is what you seem to imply), regardless of the gender of the advisor or student, unless some sort of harassment actually took place.
Um, no it wouldn't? If you're forced to throw away your research and start over again because your advisor isn't able to do his job, it sucks no matter what they look like. Even if there were mutual romantic attraction, it's never acceptable for a manager to have a romantic relationship with an employee (or an advisor with a student, for similar reasons). This has nothing to do with the gender of either party.
Have you ever been given unwanted romantic / sexual attention? Or seen it happening? Isn't it uncomfortable? And shouldn't people be able to work without it?
I'm a heterosexual man, and I've got a male coworker who is bisexual, who once when (in a group of coworkers) discussing a particularly smart outfit I was wearing, said "You're making me hot just looking at you." He genuinely meant it as a compliment, but given that we had never had more than a professional relationship, it was inappropriate.
Now he hasn't really made any further comments, so it hasn't been much of an issue (although I am much more circumspect about how I interact with him now). But suppose he said something like that once a month. Or that he kept asking me over to his place or to go see movies 1-1. That would make me pretty uncomfortable -- and I shouldn't have to put up with that at work.
That's not to say you can never ask anyone out at work. It's to say that you should be aware that the other person is unusually constrained. It's not like a party where they can just mingle somewhere else: they're stuck working with you unless one of you finds a new job. You should always be reasonably sure that the question itself will not be unwelcome, even in a merely social situation; at work, the level of "how sure should I be" is higher -- not because of the risk of being fired, but because of how much more constrained the other person is in how they can respond if they're not interested.
Doesn't that make sense? This seems like basic human consideration to me.
The 'mis' in misogyny and misandry means 'hate'. (See also, 'misanthrope'.) I fail to see how "expecting an average man to be stronger than the average woman" counts as hating women. Shooting up a bunch of random women because nobody will have sex with you is misogyny.
Looking at it from both sides made sense, but it doesn't sound yet like you've looked at it from both sides. Isn't it reasonable for women to be able to expect to come to university and study -- to be able to choose a professor to work with on a professional basis -- without having to either a) worry continually that they may fall in love with you, or b) have to switch advisors 2-3 times until you find one that can treat you professionally?
I mean really -- wouldn't you be pissed if you went to work for a company, and after being there 6 months the manager asked you to move to a different department (or to find another job) because they were sexually attracted to you (when you had done nothing but be polite)?
If you are a manager in a company, whether you are male of female, having employees who are both male and female is part of your job. If you are a woman who can't handle having male subordinates without forming an emotional attachment, or a man who can't handle having female subordinates without forming an emotional attachment, then being a manger is not for you.
Same thing with being a professor: mentoring both male and female grad students is a part of your job, just like teaching classes or doing research. If you can mentor students but can't do research, then a normal tenure-track professorship at a Research I institution isn't for you. If you can do research but can't mentor half of the students who come to you, it's not for you either.
Actually, according to that article, the reason WhatsApp was shut down was because they didn't even bother to respond, not because they refused:
It sounds like what my old DI's used to say: "Yes sir? No sir? F*** you sir? Say something!"
Yeah, the first thing I thought was, "Well, maybe the more unhappy your life is, the more of these kinds of behaviors you're likely to engage in."
If you find that A and B are correlated, you have to ask if A caused B, or B caused A, or if there's a third thing C, which is causing both B and A. Either being chronically unhappy, or being ill, are things which could both 1) make it more likely for people to have these behaviors, and 2) make them more likely to die.
But this basically shows why Lessig will never be able to win, and even if he did win, would never be able to accomplish anything. Politics is about working the system, having one-to-one conversations to influence people. Obviously he doesn't have buy-in at the DNC level. If the party he wants to run with are changing the rules at the very beginning of his campaign to thwart his plans, what would the party who opposes him do all the way through his tenure?
Go do LWN's search page, uncheck all the boxes except for "security vulnerabilities", and then search for "KVM". Or Qemu, or Linux or Xen.
You'll find that all hypervisors have privilege escalation bugs discovered. However, this is the first one discovered in the Xen PV interface in a long time.
Which is why the PV mode in Xen is such a killer security feature -- the more stuff you have just lying around, even if unused in theory, the higher the probability that there will be a bug somewhere that can be exploited.
Of course that's a risk. But again, is it worse to have a handful of people who are trying to be secretive know about the vulnerability while vendors update and carefully test their software, or for for the entire world to know about the vulnerability while vendors scramble to get something out the door as soon as possible?
That's why the Xen Project doesn't put the fix into version control until after the embargo period is over. Only people on the predisclosure list (or those able to listen in) would be able to learn about the vulnerability without doing their own audit of the code to find the bug themselves (which is very expensive).
There's basically a balance to be struck. All users not on the predisclosure list (and thus who cannot update their systems until the embargo period is over) will continue to be privately vulnerable during the embargo period: anyone who happens to have dug deep enough and found the bug can still exploit it. But as soon as the announcement is made, everyone who hasn't yet updated is publicly vulnerable: Nobody has to search to find the bug, they just have to write an exploit for it. Being privately vulnerable is certainly bad, but being publicly vulnerable is far worse. The goal of the embargo period is to try to reduce the time that users are publicly vulnerable by extending the time they are privately vulnerable. Two weeks has been found to be a reasonable cost/benefit trade-off in our experience.
The XenProject security process gives them time to patch their systems (in this case, 2 weeks). If you don't have your stuff patched by then, they won't wait for you.
"It" here still isn't (or shouldn't be) referring to a human. Normally it means, "The problem in our relationship isn't you; the problem is me."
Hmm, Slashdot seems to have eaten the characters it wasn't familiar with. That should be nuren and nuhaizi (tone 3).
Regarding "they", English speakers have been using "they" as an ungendered third person singular for hundreds of years.
Language is defined by its speakers, not by some committee somewhere; each of us gets a vote. In some cases I persistently vote against change if I think it's a bad idea (for example, I will make fun of people who use the word "literally" when speaking figuratively as long as I can get away with it); but in this case, I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and I have purposely chosen to use "they" in this way.
I cannot tell you how ignorant that sounds to me. Of the four languages I know to various degrees (English, French, Turkish, Mandarin), two of them are far less gendered than English. In both Turkish and Chinese, there is no "he/she" distinction -- there is a single pronoun which can be used for any person. Additionally, in the base for "person" and for "child" is ungendered, and to specify "man/woman" or "boy/girl" you have to add a gender tag. Chinese: rén = person, nánrén = man, nrén = woman. háizi = child, nánháizi = boy, nháizi = girl. (Turkish was too long ago for me to remember the actual words.) Turkish is the same for brother/sister. (Chinese have cutesy reduplicatives for sibling relationships -- gge, dìdi, mèimei, jijie -- so the "add a gender" thing wouldn't fit.) I never got to actor/actress, waiter/waitress, &c in Turkish, but in Chinese they're all ungendered as well. (And nouns are genderless in both languages too.)
Seriously dude -- if you don't know Chinese or Turkish, that's fine; but then don't make a claim about all languages "currently in use".
No, that's because most dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive: they're trying to help people understand what someone might be saying, not trying to tell you what the right answer is. And in general, I agree with them -- language is defined by its speakers and develops over time.
But the fact is that using "literally" when you actually mean "figuratively" is stupid. It's not only evidence of sloppy thinking, but it actively degrades the language. The fact that it's in M-W reflects the fact that a significant minority of people use it this way; but the fact remains that the majority of speakers oppose this change and think that it's stupid and wrong. By making fun of people who use the word "literally", I am "voting" to keep the old definition and keep the new definition from becoming accepted, and I will do so as long as it is practical.