All I see from the FCCs handling of the broadcast band is that they use it against the community by using their power to cement the monopoly of 100,000 watt globalist megastations with their hollywood drivel that I would not call music.
Are the local college station that is run and programmed by students part of this "monopoly" you are worried about? How about the community station that covers about a 20 mile radius near here? The other community station that covers a 50 mile radius and carries all the appropriate activist radio programs? Are these all part of the "globalist" monopoly?
The broadcast licensing rules protect THOSE stations just as much as the one you never want to listen to. You might want to stop and think a moment about why the stations you don't want to listen to still exist. If nobody listened, they'd go out of business. There must be enough people with interests that aren't the same as yours to keep them afloat.
The power limit with open access wouild create a 5 mile range thing
First, MY community is bigger than 5 miles across. Second, a free-for-all would create a system that was unlistenable. Imagine if you lived on the edge of your "5 mile" community and the next community over decided THEY wanted to broadcast, too. Now you can't listen to your own community because it is interfered with by the "next door neighbors". Is that a productive use of the radio spectrum?
They don't even stop illegal radio equipment from being imported- then sold everywhere from big box stores to truck stops.
Do you want to give them the budget and manpower to do this job well? They do fine and confiscate equipment -- here is one place they list field actions. This includes all kinds of unlicensed and illegal activity. Some of the notices include actions against retailers selling uncertificated radios.
It's a hard job to catch every radio illegally imported to the US and sold in a small truck stop somewhere. I've brought back radios that are illegal to sell in the US, but because they are ham radios I can use them here. They look just like FRS. Do you want to spend the money training every customs agent to detect the difference? And do you want MORE customs agents searching MORE incoming citizens to stop this? I didn't think so.
They cannot even clean up problem frequencies where *everyone* knows who the offenders are.
Do you REALLY want the US legal system to be based on "everyone knows"?
Can't be having people saying just anything over unused radio frequencies.
There are no unused radio frequencies.
What you think are "unused frequencies" are actually used by a station far enough away that YOU can't hear them, but would be interfered with if there was a station using them where you are.
The fight against the free market continues.
The use of the public airwaves is not a "free market", it is a licensed market. Almost as soon as radio was invented, reasonable people realized it needed to be controlled so it would stay usable. Imagine YOUR delight when your favorite FM station playing your favorite radical hippy music was covered up by a paging system because there were no laws regulating who was licensed to do what. "You can get anything you want, at Alice's BRRRFFZZZZZZQQQQQQQQ..." Now imagine if your favorite FM station that you invested money in installing an external antenna so you could get the news and music you wanted from a distance was suddenly covered up by a pirate station two blocks away that played nothing but Devo songs interspersed with profane rants about the FCC.
Your tip for good service, especially if accompanied by communication about what you really liked, is a service to both the waitperson as well as every customer they meet after that.
You just proved my point. MY TIP cannot be the cause of good service TO ME because it has not happened yet. You clearly say that my good tip will help those who come AFTER ME.
I don't give a damn about the level of service people who come after me get. Period. I said nothing about the service they get. I said, flat out, that MY TIP cannot be the cause of GOOD SERVICE to me.
EVERY other response that tries to correct me is talking about PREDICTED tips or a HISTORY of tips. MY tip depends on the service you provide, not what the last guy tipped you or even on what you predict I will tip.
For a tech website, there are a lot of people who are ignorant of the concept of "causality", aren't there?
"If you do a good job, there will be a bonus at the end."
Using that statement to induce good performance is based ENTIRELY on "regular customer" status. I.e., if you've worked for this employer for one month and never seen what his bonus looks like, you'll not have as much incentive as someone who has been there ten years and knows the bonus history has been really good. Tipping, for transient customers, cannot be the cause of good service because there is no history to predict what the tip will be. It could be zip, it could be great.
I could tell you with 70% accuracy if a table would be good tippers before they even sat down. After taking their order, that would jump up to 95%.
So you base your service not on what their tip IS, but what you predict it will be. That's different.
If you think the servers are all just going through the paces until after you've tipped them once, you're quite mistaken.
I said nothing of the sort. I said that good service cannot be caused by the tip. Period. Good service is something that is caused by a desire to get a good tip, maybe, and maybe because of pride in their work, or maybe any number of reasons. But what I tip cannot be the cause, because that number is unknown even to me prior to it being left on the table.
Any server worth their salt will know how you're going to tip
And any server who guesses wrong is going to pay for it. Base your service on prejudice and your tip will suffer accordingly. If you base your level of service on what you predict the tip will be, you may find yourself with a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know that any server that ASSUMES I will stiff him on the tip and decides to provide poor service WILL be getting a miniscule tip. Never 0, because 0 can be cultural (some cultures don't tip), or it can be forgetfulness. But $1 on a $20 tab is a sign that I think your service sucks. Or even 47 cents on a $19.53 tab. Have I run across such poor service that I would do that? Yes, I have, but rarely. And it has to be really bad -- not just slow or "a bad day" kinds of things. Guessing I'm going to stiff them and ignoring me is one of those "really bad" cases.
And I'll also tell you, I don't leave the tip until I leave the table. I had one server who took a $14 tab up to the register with my $20 bill and decided not to come back until I asked her explicitly where my change was. She thought her tip was going to be $6 (43%). Wanna guess what it turned out to be? It was one of the only times "zero" was the right answer.
So you freely admit that you trade convenience for privacy? Why would you continue to go to a restaurant that you think is recording your conversations at the table? Is it the only place in town that sells crack along with the burgers?
As I understand it, in many places tips are pooled and shared amongst the entire wait-staff, including bussers. Not tipping in those places hurts everyone, and the fact that Jane is a screw up who gets no tips is hidden by the common tip pool. Of course, when the tip is on the charge slip it can be figured out, but cash tips (the best kind, because they can become tax-free) are almost anonymous.
It's amazing what being nice, and tipping decently will do for you if you become a regular somewhere.
The problem with your argument is that it applies to regular customers and not at all to transients. The TIP comes AFTER the service, and thus cannot be a causal mechanism for GOOD service. The only time a good tip does cause better service is when you are a known regular, the tip amount applies to the LAST few tips and not the tip for this service, and being a known regular is going to get you better service anyway.
I mean, you know how good it makes YOU feel when someone remembers your name?
Not at all good. I went into a hardware store a couple of days ago and one of the employees calls me by name. Huh? I looked at him for a bit trying to identify where he would know me from, because I've only been in that store once before. After an awkward bit of time, he reminded me I was wearing a name tag. I was not pleased by the encounter at all.
The upside of the anonymous rating system is that many people are hesitant to create awkward face-to-face situations, and are less likely to report bad service to a manager. I don't like doing it, but I will seek one out when I get really good service. The difference is that saying "Jake did great" is so much less awkward that "you hired a dork", but the manager still needs to know about his dork server so he can fix it.
And, if I am a transient, I will not be highly motivated to seek out a manager to report a problem because it costs me time and I will never see any positive result from it.
Tests should be about doing things correctly and efficiently using every tool at your disposal.
Patently absurd. You are ignoring the purpose for the tests.
I grant you that asking someone else for the answer shouldn't be allowed.
You've just contradicted yourself. "My roommate who is a chemistry major" certainly fits the definition of "tool at my disposal", doesn't he? He's a good source of answers about chemistry, and is quite willing to answer when I ask ("at my disposal", so to speak.)
But using a calculator, dictionary, etc is a skill that should be encouraged.
OF COURSE, EXCEPT on a test that covers how to do basic math, spelling, etc. And YOU KNOW we are not talking about using such tools for tests that cover other material, we're talking about using things like smart phones to look up answers online. Looking up answers to specific questions online is directly analogous to "asking someone else for the answer."
A toolmaker who doesn't know how to use their tools because they've been denied that learning process is not effective.
This is absurd. The time for learning how to use a calculator to determine the square root of 3 is AFTER you've learned what a square root is and how to do one on your own, and after you've demonstrated that skill on a test intended to evaluate that skill. Letting people show that they know how to press "3" and "sqrt" on a calculator proves nothing about their understanding of what a square root is or why it might be of value. Now, it is pretty hard to fuck up that calculation so you can be reasonably assured your calculator is showing the right answer, but I've had people fuck up a simple division problem on a calculator to come up with a pathetically ridiculous answer -- and they write that answer down as if God told it to them and it couldn't be wrong. The calculator told them. It must be right. Why should I think about the answer and if it makes sense?
You can have all the knowledge in the world and not be successful if you don't know how to efficiently apply it
How to efficiently AND CORRECTLY apply it. You can find 1000 generic, wrong answers to your specific problem online, and if you don't know how to CORRECTLY apply the concepts being tested you are going to use the wrong answer.
I have an anecdote to demonstrate that, too. Two years before I wound up teaching the class with the student who failed at dividing two numbers, I actually took the class. For weakly dissociating solutions there is an approximation you can use so you don't have to do the full quadratic solution. You have to know WHEN that approximation is valid, however, to get the right answer. On a quiz, I recognized that the approximation was not valid and used the full process. The TA used the shortcut. He marked my answer wrong, and then had to admit in class that he had come up with the wrong answer. Was knowing what buttons to press on the calculator to get his result the important thing, or was understanding when and how to apply that approximation the goal of the learning?
all human knowledge is an abstraction of the full truth and thus to be taken with a grain of salt.
Spoken like a true social scientist.
If I write a test with the question "if I apply the same amount of thermal energy to two items with different heat capacities, which one gets warmer?" I'm not looking for someone to look up the equation and run two different cases through it, I'm looking for a basic understanding of what heat capacity is. If you go look that up online, you don't show that you have that understanding, and if you need to look it up you DO NOT. You did not master the material.
People who "remember" instead of "understand" are the hardest to bring forward when science proves the old knowledge wrong and introduces a new one.
CONGRATULATIONS!!! You have committed the logical fallacy known as tu quoque. Had you not cheated your way through school you might have avoided looking like a fool.
Quoting this since I've already posted in this discussion and cannot mod it up.
He's redefined a derogatory term so it applies to everything anyone does, and thus everyone is bad.
No, he's explicitly saying that the US doesn't take such drastic measures to deal with the ones that do. The "US" deals with it better, and it can't "deal with it better" if the implication is that it never happens, now can it? There's nothing in that statement that implies US students don't cheat or even cheat less. We just don't shut off Internet for the entire country every time there is a test.
Maybe they should make the test harder and just expect kids to use any resource available to them because that's how life does work.
Would you want to live in an apartment building designed by a construction engineer who passed his engineering license exams by having his roommate give him the answers to the test, or one who understands the concepts of load bearing this and stress limit that? You know, one who can tell that the answer he gets from Wikipedia about how to design where you sleep at night isn't right?
like, did you even TRY yo search online?
Would you like him to be the programmer on your team who implements an O(N^2) sort in your app because that's the first one he found online, instead of understanding the problem and using an O(N) algorithm, or understanding even more and deciding it is appropriate to use an O(1) "sort" by keeping a sorted, linked-list of the data instead of sorting each time? Do YOU want to have to tell the client that the app you wrote for him is miserably slow in real life applications because he's got too much data and your programmer was a cut-and-paste-from-the-net expert who didn't understand how to make it fast enough from the beginning?
And socialism is not? Forcing people to accept "equal" is not the same as removing all desire to compete. Unfortunately, in socialistic societies the competition winners are usually the rulers.
capitalism by nature is psychopathic,
Bullshit. You might be able to argue it is sociopathic, but you'd fail there, too.
I think that we are committing a similar error in creating a society that limits our usage of the tools that are also our birthright - we are toolmakers.
The Internet is a birthright? Using a smartphone to access information during a test is a birthright?
Tests should not be about your ability to look things up using your smartphone. Tests are about your understanding of the material and being able to use it -- YOU using that understanding, not your roommate being able to use his understanding.
Tests are also not "our society", they are a tiny microcosm of an academic environment. Limiting tool use during a test is not "creating a society" in any way. Outside that test environment, "society" is free to use the tools. It's just before you get credit for demonstrating an understanding of some material you need to actually demonstrate the understanding.
I have a specific anecdote I use when this kind of issue comes up. I taught a chemistry class, and a quiz I was giving asked for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a weak acid solution. The concepts being tested are "weak acid", pKa and solving quadratic equations. The answer the student wrote down was "1.000". (Hint: 1 mole/L H+ is NOT weak.) He misused the calculator and did not understand the material well enough to identify patent nonsense when he got it out. In this class, it was funny as hell. If he's a design engineer for a bridge and he uses nonsense answers in the design people can get killed.
That said, turning off the Internet for everyone is a stupid and bad thing and won't solve the problem.
i mean yes you can waste multiple hours but in the end its the score that maybe matters
There are people who enjoy seeing the competition and the effort and the skills demonstrated. All some people care about is that Portugal tied Spain in World Cup at 3-3, but there was a lot of enjoyable sport that took place to get there. If all you know is the score you might not realize that the actual result was Ronaldo 3, Spain 3.
And if all you know about this morning's match is that Croatia beat Argentina 3-zip, you would have missed the elation of the Croatian team and fans over beating a team that should have whipped them, and Messi's utter humiliation at losing (priceless). Also the very skillful first Croat goal based on the failure of the Argentinian goalie to clear the ball.
But you are free not to watch. Not everyone enjoys this stuff, and that's what makes the world interesting, huh?
1. Allowing a laid-off manager to "continue working" with the expectation that he will care about your company in any way, and when he's "working from home" he will be doing more than just watching TV.
2. Putting a manager in a position of authority without training on how to manager her employees. She was incompetent at using the HR system and could not look up her employee's status. His recruiter could do it, she should have been able to do it, too.
... this would probably have been resolved in no time.
I put a lot of blame on the recruiter. He apparently knew three weeks before the bosses could figure it out, at least from the chronology in the summary. "His recruiter told him" and then "three weeks later".
Maybe the recruiter had gotten his fee already and didn't care what happened to the recruitee, or maybe the bosses ignored him. Either way, the cause was known.
However, the fact that it took 3 weeks to figure this out is interesting, and does suggest to me that humans are not as fully in charge as we might think.
No, it points very clearly to the fact that his new manager is incompetent at managing her employees, because SHE wasn't able to use the system to find out his contract had been terminated but his recruiter had no problem doing that. And his recruiter was apparently unable to communicate with anyone "in charge" at the company, because it took three weeks for the bosses to "figure it out".
The person who was not in charge of the computer could see what was happening, the person who IS in charge of the computer couldn't figure it out. It wasn't the computer's fault, and it wasn't an issue of machines taking over the planet. The machines did what they were programmed to do, and it was quite correct given the inputs they got from the humans. GIGO.
Also, how long until an algorithm decides who stays and who gos during a downsizing? My guess is that we are already there.
Probably. Managers already use computers to crunch data and run projections and other management tasks. But your question is wrong because it is not the "algorithm" that implements the changes, it is the management using data from the computer. It is the management that makes the final decision, and can keep in mind intangibles like "Bob has a lot of institutional memory about this company and processes, we ought to keep him around...", or even "Bob has a lot of institutional memory about this company and now is a completely legal time to fire his ass before he exposes all the skeletons..."
As said summary is open about that so maybe one should not make too many assumptions.
The summary appears to quote TFA and says that his contract was not renewed. You don't have to renew a contract if it is still valid. Thus, the summary is not open about this, it is pretty clearly saying his contract either expired or "his contract has been terminated."
Neither his still working ex-manager (who was sent to work from home for the remainder of his time with the company, thus not completely terminated at the time), or his new manager renewed his contract. We don't know why, but we do know that his new manager is apparently not competent enough with the system to be able to look up the employment status of her charges. Othewise, she would have seen "contract terminated" and known what the problem was. His "recruiter" could look this up, so we know it was online, and that's the point when the correction should have started.
That so many of commenters here show complete understanding for the failed system ('working as it should' and other nonsense)
The system worked as it should. His contract was either expired or terminated and not renewed. At that point he is no longer an employee. It was not "a machine" that fired him, it is the acts of his managers that resulted in this situation. Two people. One of them had no reason to care -- which is why you don't keep him online and "working from home" in the first place. One of them was incompetent.
What do you expect the system to do? Should it keep allowing access to company resources by a terminated employee? Or should the process be automated so a disgruntled fired person cannot continue to access the company computers when a human makes a mistake and doesn't cancel accounts and cards? We already know his "current" manager is incapable of using the computer to manage her people, so we can assume she would have been equally incompetent at completing the discharge process and turning off access. That's why we automate such things.
I would like to come back to the enthusiasm with which we accept orders from authority these days. Nothing has changed since 1933 I guess.
Oh, for pete's sake. This has nothing to do with "authority" or Hitler. Two managers failed to do their jobs to keep someone they wanted employed in that status. One didn't care and didn't need to, the other might have cared but wasn't able to find her ass with both hands. That's it. It's not machines taking over the world ordering humans to do their every bidding. It's not a malicious dictatorship killing humans because they aren't performing to his standards. It was a MISTAKE, apparently, made by humans.
Does that mean that this guy has to just sit back and accept it? Of course not. He can sue for various employment law violations, I am sure. If they still want him to work for them, the company can "rehire" him, and I might recommend he negotiate a raise in the process. Maybe he wants to assume that the company is screwed up enough that he'd never work there again, or he can assume that it was a mistake made by a couple of under-abled managers and get past it. From the fact that he's hyping this as "fired by a machine", I doubt the latter would happen.
It's a bad thing that happened, of course, but it is NOT "fired by a machine", nor is it related to 1933.
Nobody doesn't understand why this wouldn't work, which is why the idea is several years old and is being actively used for land-based seismic sensors already, and if not being used has been floated as a use for dark fiber for long distances. There is no significant difference between undersea and on-land use of fiber in this context.
My first response to this article is that Science has become subject to the same error of "dups" that/. has.
If one can live a good life not going around robbing, raping or stealing, and still not be considered to go to your heaven, again, I'll pass.
Then you should be happy that God created you with the free will to make that choice, instead of creating you as a toady yes-man servant who is forced to love and obey him whether you want to or not. See, that's how it works. You get to choose.
When you created children, if you did, did you want them to be slaves to you, loving you not by choice but by force? When they bring you a Father's Day present in a week or so, would it mean anything if they were programmed robots forced to bring you gifts or does it mean more if they get to choose? Would a wife you created these children with be more valuable and interesting if she were a slave to your whims not by any choice of her own but by design?
Until you get every manufacturer of the items you want to sell to add them at the beginning.
Walmart has the chops to do that. If you want your product sold in a Walmart, you WILL do things the Walmart way. That includes changing your packaging because a 16 oz package of your product costs too much, so make it 13 oz for 10% lower price... keep them prices rollin' back!
That's not remotely the same thing as being able to walk right out of the store with purchases, which would drastically improve the shopping experience.
Until you get the bill, or rather, a one line charge on your credit card that contains no information about what you bought. The "shopping experience" might be great, but the "reconciling the bill against what you actually walked out the door with" will be hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Just let me know when I can have fun with my old blue box again, and that whistle I keep in the junk drawer.
All I see from the FCCs handling of the broadcast band is that they use it against the community by using their power to cement the monopoly of 100,000 watt globalist megastations with their hollywood drivel that I would not call music.
Are the local college station that is run and programmed by students part of this "monopoly" you are worried about? How about the community station that covers about a 20 mile radius near here? The other community station that covers a 50 mile radius and carries all the appropriate activist radio programs? Are these all part of the "globalist" monopoly?
The broadcast licensing rules protect THOSE stations just as much as the one you never want to listen to. You might want to stop and think a moment about why the stations you don't want to listen to still exist. If nobody listened, they'd go out of business. There must be enough people with interests that aren't the same as yours to keep them afloat.
The power limit with open access wouild create a 5 mile range thing
First, MY community is bigger than 5 miles across. Second, a free-for-all would create a system that was unlistenable. Imagine if you lived on the edge of your "5 mile" community and the next community over decided THEY wanted to broadcast, too. Now you can't listen to your own community because it is interfered with by the "next door neighbors". Is that a productive use of the radio spectrum?
People who are sick and tired of seeing people persecuted for the color of their skin?
Busting pirate radio operators has nothing to do with the color of someone's skin. What an absurd implication.
They don't even stop illegal radio equipment from being imported- then sold everywhere from big box stores to truck stops.
Do you want to give them the budget and manpower to do this job well? They do fine and confiscate equipment -- here is one place they list field actions. This includes all kinds of unlicensed and illegal activity. Some of the notices include actions against retailers selling uncertificated radios.
It's a hard job to catch every radio illegally imported to the US and sold in a small truck stop somewhere. I've brought back radios that are illegal to sell in the US, but because they are ham radios I can use them here. They look just like FRS. Do you want to spend the money training every customs agent to detect the difference? And do you want MORE customs agents searching MORE incoming citizens to stop this? I didn't think so.
They cannot even clean up problem frequencies where *everyone* knows who the offenders are.
Do you REALLY want the US legal system to be based on "everyone knows"?
Can't be having people saying just anything over unused radio frequencies.
There are no unused radio frequencies.
What you think are "unused frequencies" are actually used by a station far enough away that YOU can't hear them, but would be interfered with if there was a station using them where you are.
The fight against the free market continues.
The use of the public airwaves is not a "free market", it is a licensed market. Almost as soon as radio was invented, reasonable people realized it needed to be controlled so it would stay usable. Imagine YOUR delight when your favorite FM station playing your favorite radical hippy music was covered up by a paging system because there were no laws regulating who was licensed to do what. "You can get anything you want, at Alice's BRRRFFZZZZZZQQQQQQQQ..." Now imagine if your favorite FM station that you invested money in installing an external antenna so you could get the news and music you wanted from a distance was suddenly covered up by a pirate station two blocks away that played nothing but Devo songs interspersed with profane rants about the FCC.
Your tip for good service, especially if accompanied by communication about what you really liked, is a service to both the waitperson as well as every customer they meet after that.
You just proved my point. MY TIP cannot be the cause of good service TO ME because it has not happened yet. You clearly say that my good tip will help those who come AFTER ME.
I don't give a damn about the level of service people who come after me get. Period. I said nothing about the service they get. I said, flat out, that MY TIP cannot be the cause of GOOD SERVICE to me.
EVERY other response that tries to correct me is talking about PREDICTED tips or a HISTORY of tips. MY tip depends on the service you provide, not what the last guy tipped you or even on what you predict I will tip.
For a tech website, there are a lot of people who are ignorant of the concept of "causality", aren't there?
"If you do a good job, there will be a bonus at the end."
Using that statement to induce good performance is based ENTIRELY on "regular customer" status. I.e., if you've worked for this employer for one month and never seen what his bonus looks like, you'll not have as much incentive as someone who has been there ten years and knows the bonus history has been really good. Tipping, for transient customers, cannot be the cause of good service because there is no history to predict what the tip will be. It could be zip, it could be great.
I could tell you with 70% accuracy if a table would be good tippers before they even sat down. After taking their order, that would jump up to 95%.
So you base your service not on what their tip IS, but what you predict it will be. That's different.
If you think the servers are all just going through the paces until after you've tipped them once, you're quite mistaken.
I said nothing of the sort. I said that good service cannot be caused by the tip. Period. Good service is something that is caused by a desire to get a good tip, maybe, and maybe because of pride in their work, or maybe any number of reasons. But what I tip cannot be the cause, because that number is unknown even to me prior to it being left on the table.
Any server worth their salt will know how you're going to tip
And any server who guesses wrong is going to pay for it. Base your service on prejudice and your tip will suffer accordingly. If you base your level of service on what you predict the tip will be, you may find yourself with a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know that any server that ASSUMES I will stiff him on the tip and decides to provide poor service WILL be getting a miniscule tip. Never 0, because 0 can be cultural (some cultures don't tip), or it can be forgetfulness. But $1 on a $20 tab is a sign that I think your service sucks. Or even 47 cents on a $19.53 tab. Have I run across such poor service that I would do that? Yes, I have, but rarely. And it has to be really bad -- not just slow or "a bad day" kinds of things. Guessing I'm going to stiff them and ignoring me is one of those "really bad" cases.
And I'll also tell you, I don't leave the tip until I leave the table. I had one server who took a $14 tab up to the register with my $20 bill and decided not to come back until I asked her explicitly where my change was. She thought her tip was going to be $6 (43%). Wanna guess what it turned out to be? It was one of the only times "zero" was the right answer.
So you freely admit that you trade convenience for privacy? Why would you continue to go to a restaurant that you think is recording your conversations at the table? Is it the only place in town that sells crack along with the burgers?
Not tipping only hurts the waiter
As I understand it, in many places tips are pooled and shared amongst the entire wait-staff, including bussers. Not tipping in those places hurts everyone, and the fact that Jane is a screw up who gets no tips is hidden by the common tip pool. Of course, when the tip is on the charge slip it can be figured out, but cash tips (the best kind, because they can become tax-free) are almost anonymous.
It's amazing what being nice, and tipping decently will do for you if you become a regular somewhere.
The problem with your argument is that it applies to regular customers and not at all to transients. The TIP comes AFTER the service, and thus cannot be a causal mechanism for GOOD service. The only time a good tip does cause better service is when you are a known regular, the tip amount applies to the LAST few tips and not the tip for this service, and being a known regular is going to get you better service anyway.
I mean, you know how good it makes YOU feel when someone remembers your name?
Not at all good. I went into a hardware store a couple of days ago and one of the employees calls me by name. Huh? I looked at him for a bit trying to identify where he would know me from, because I've only been in that store once before. After an awkward bit of time, he reminded me I was wearing a name tag. I was not pleased by the encounter at all.
The upside of the anonymous rating system is that many people are hesitant to create awkward face-to-face situations, and are less likely to report bad service to a manager. I don't like doing it, but I will seek one out when I get really good service. The difference is that saying "Jake did great" is so much less awkward that "you hired a dork", but the manager still needs to know about his dork server so he can fix it.
And, if I am a transient, I will not be highly motivated to seek out a manager to report a problem because it costs me time and I will never see any positive result from it.
Tests should be about doing things correctly and efficiently using every tool at your disposal.
Patently absurd. You are ignoring the purpose for the tests.
I grant you that asking someone else for the answer shouldn't be allowed.
You've just contradicted yourself. "My roommate who is a chemistry major" certainly fits the definition of "tool at my disposal", doesn't he? He's a good source of answers about chemistry, and is quite willing to answer when I ask ("at my disposal", so to speak.)
But using a calculator, dictionary, etc is a skill that should be encouraged.
OF COURSE, EXCEPT on a test that covers how to do basic math, spelling, etc. And YOU KNOW we are not talking about using such tools for tests that cover other material, we're talking about using things like smart phones to look up answers online. Looking up answers to specific questions online is directly analogous to "asking someone else for the answer."
A toolmaker who doesn't know how to use their tools because they've been denied that learning process is not effective.
This is absurd. The time for learning how to use a calculator to determine the square root of 3 is AFTER you've learned what a square root is and how to do one on your own, and after you've demonstrated that skill on a test intended to evaluate that skill. Letting people show that they know how to press "3" and "sqrt" on a calculator proves nothing about their understanding of what a square root is or why it might be of value. Now, it is pretty hard to fuck up that calculation so you can be reasonably assured your calculator is showing the right answer, but I've had people fuck up a simple division problem on a calculator to come up with a pathetically ridiculous answer -- and they write that answer down as if God told it to them and it couldn't be wrong. The calculator told them. It must be right. Why should I think about the answer and if it makes sense?
You can have all the knowledge in the world and not be successful if you don't know how to efficiently apply it
How to efficiently AND CORRECTLY apply it. You can find 1000 generic, wrong answers to your specific problem online, and if you don't know how to CORRECTLY apply the concepts being tested you are going to use the wrong answer.
I have an anecdote to demonstrate that, too. Two years before I wound up teaching the class with the student who failed at dividing two numbers, I actually took the class. For weakly dissociating solutions there is an approximation you can use so you don't have to do the full quadratic solution. You have to know WHEN that approximation is valid, however, to get the right answer. On a quiz, I recognized that the approximation was not valid and used the full process. The TA used the shortcut. He marked my answer wrong, and then had to admit in class that he had come up with the wrong answer. Was knowing what buttons to press on the calculator to get his result the important thing, or was understanding when and how to apply that approximation the goal of the learning?
all human knowledge is an abstraction of the full truth and thus to be taken with a grain of salt.
Spoken like a true social scientist.
If I write a test with the question "if I apply the same amount of thermal energy to two items with different heat capacities, which one gets warmer?" I'm not looking for someone to look up the equation and run two different cases through it, I'm looking for a basic understanding of what heat capacity is. If you go look that up online, you don't show that you have that understanding, and if you need to look it up you DO NOT. You did not master the material.
People who "remember" instead of "understand" are the hardest to bring forward when science proves the old knowledge wrong and introduces a new one.
You have just prove
CONGRATULATIONS!!! You have committed the logical fallacy known as tu quoque. Had you not cheated your way through school you might have avoided looking like a fool.
Quoting this since I've already posted in this discussion and cannot mod it up.
He's redefined a derogatory term so it applies to everything anyone does, and thus everyone is bad.
You're implying US students don't cheat,
No, he's explicitly saying that the US doesn't take such drastic measures to deal with the ones that do. The "US" deals with it better, and it can't "deal with it better" if the implication is that it never happens, now can it? There's nothing in that statement that implies US students don't cheat or even cheat less. We just don't shut off Internet for the entire country every time there is a test.
Maybe they should make the test harder and just expect kids to use any resource available to them because that's how life does work.
Would you want to live in an apartment building designed by a construction engineer who passed his engineering license exams by having his roommate give him the answers to the test, or one who understands the concepts of load bearing this and stress limit that? You know, one who can tell that the answer he gets from Wikipedia about how to design where you sleep at night isn't right?
like, did you even TRY yo search online?
Would you like him to be the programmer on your team who implements an O(N^2) sort in your app because that's the first one he found online, instead of understanding the problem and using an O(N) algorithm, or understanding even more and deciding it is appropriate to use an O(1) "sort" by keeping a sorted, linked-list of the data instead of sorting each time? Do YOU want to have to tell the client that the app you wrote for him is miserably slow in real life applications because he's got too much data and your programmer was a cut-and-paste-from-the-net expert who didn't understand how to make it fast enough from the beginning?
You forget capitalism is competition.
And socialism is not? Forcing people to accept "equal" is not the same as removing all desire to compete. Unfortunately, in socialistic societies the competition winners are usually the rulers.
capitalism by nature is psychopathic,
Bullshit. You might be able to argue it is sociopathic, but you'd fail there, too.
I can push further with my mind,
Uhh.....
I think that we are committing a similar error in creating a society that limits our usage of the tools that are also our birthright - we are toolmakers.
The Internet is a birthright? Using a smartphone to access information during a test is a birthright?
Tests should not be about your ability to look things up using your smartphone. Tests are about your understanding of the material and being able to use it -- YOU using that understanding, not your roommate being able to use his understanding.
Tests are also not "our society", they are a tiny microcosm of an academic environment. Limiting tool use during a test is not "creating a society" in any way. Outside that test environment, "society" is free to use the tools. It's just before you get credit for demonstrating an understanding of some material you need to actually demonstrate the understanding.
I have a specific anecdote I use when this kind of issue comes up. I taught a chemistry class, and a quiz I was giving asked for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a weak acid solution. The concepts being tested are "weak acid", pKa and solving quadratic equations. The answer the student wrote down was "1.000". (Hint: 1 mole/L H+ is NOT weak.) He misused the calculator and did not understand the material well enough to identify patent nonsense when he got it out. In this class, it was funny as hell. If he's a design engineer for a bridge and he uses nonsense answers in the design people can get killed.
That said, turning off the Internet for everyone is a stupid and bad thing and won't solve the problem.
i mean yes you can waste multiple hours but in the end its the score that maybe matters
There are people who enjoy seeing the competition and the effort and the skills demonstrated. All some people care about is that Portugal tied Spain in World Cup at 3-3, but there was a lot of enjoyable sport that took place to get there. If all you know is the score you might not realize that the actual result was Ronaldo 3, Spain 3.
And if all you know about this morning's match is that Croatia beat Argentina 3-zip, you would have missed the elation of the Croatian team and fans over beating a team that should have whipped them, and Messi's utter humiliation at losing (priceless). Also the very skillful first Croat goal based on the failure of the Argentinian goalie to clear the ball.
But you are free not to watch. Not everyone enjoys this stuff, and that's what makes the world interesting, huh?
Not really ground-breaking AI stuff here at all.
Yep. Two failures of human beings.
1. Allowing a laid-off manager to "continue working" with the expectation that he will care about your company in any way, and when he's "working from home" he will be doing more than just watching TV.
2. Putting a manager in a position of authority without training on how to manager her employees. She was incompetent at using the HR system and could not look up her employee's status. His recruiter could do it, she should have been able to do it, too.
... this would probably have been resolved in no time.
I put a lot of blame on the recruiter. He apparently knew three weeks before the bosses could figure it out, at least from the chronology in the summary. "His recruiter told him" and then "three weeks later".
Maybe the recruiter had gotten his fee already and didn't care what happened to the recruitee, or maybe the bosses ignored him. Either way, the cause was known.
However, the fact that it took 3 weeks to figure this out is interesting, and does suggest to me that humans are not as fully in charge as we might think.
No, it points very clearly to the fact that his new manager is incompetent at managing her employees, because SHE wasn't able to use the system to find out his contract had been terminated but his recruiter had no problem doing that. And his recruiter was apparently unable to communicate with anyone "in charge" at the company, because it took three weeks for the bosses to "figure it out".
The person who was not in charge of the computer could see what was happening, the person who IS in charge of the computer couldn't figure it out. It wasn't the computer's fault, and it wasn't an issue of machines taking over the planet. The machines did what they were programmed to do, and it was quite correct given the inputs they got from the humans. GIGO.
Also, how long until an algorithm decides who stays and who gos during a downsizing? My guess is that we are already there.
Probably. Managers already use computers to crunch data and run projections and other management tasks. But your question is wrong because it is not the "algorithm" that implements the changes, it is the management using data from the computer. It is the management that makes the final decision, and can keep in mind intangibles like "Bob has a lot of institutional memory about this company and processes, we ought to keep him around...", or even "Bob has a lot of institutional memory about this company and now is a completely legal time to fire his ass before he exposes all the skeletons..."
As said summary is open about that so maybe one should not make too many assumptions.
The summary appears to quote TFA and says that his contract was not renewed. You don't have to renew a contract if it is still valid. Thus, the summary is not open about this, it is pretty clearly saying his contract either expired or "his contract has been terminated."
Neither his still working ex-manager (who was sent to work from home for the remainder of his time with the company, thus not completely terminated at the time), or his new manager renewed his contract. We don't know why, but we do know that his new manager is apparently not competent enough with the system to be able to look up the employment status of her charges. Othewise, she would have seen "contract terminated" and known what the problem was. His "recruiter" could look this up, so we know it was online, and that's the point when the correction should have started.
That so many of commenters here show complete understanding for the failed system ('working as it should' and other nonsense)
The system worked as it should. His contract was either expired or terminated and not renewed. At that point he is no longer an employee. It was not "a machine" that fired him, it is the acts of his managers that resulted in this situation. Two people. One of them had no reason to care -- which is why you don't keep him online and "working from home" in the first place. One of them was incompetent.
What do you expect the system to do? Should it keep allowing access to company resources by a terminated employee? Or should the process be automated so a disgruntled fired person cannot continue to access the company computers when a human makes a mistake and doesn't cancel accounts and cards? We already know his "current" manager is incapable of using the computer to manage her people, so we can assume she would have been equally incompetent at completing the discharge process and turning off access. That's why we automate such things.
I would like to come back to the enthusiasm with which we accept orders from authority these days. Nothing has changed since 1933 I guess.
Oh, for pete's sake. This has nothing to do with "authority" or Hitler. Two managers failed to do their jobs to keep someone they wanted employed in that status. One didn't care and didn't need to, the other might have cared but wasn't able to find her ass with both hands. That's it. It's not machines taking over the world ordering humans to do their every bidding. It's not a malicious dictatorship killing humans because they aren't performing to his standards. It was a MISTAKE, apparently, made by humans.
Does that mean that this guy has to just sit back and accept it? Of course not. He can sue for various employment law violations, I am sure. If they still want him to work for them, the company can "rehire" him, and I might recommend he negotiate a raise in the process. Maybe he wants to assume that the company is screwed up enough that he'd never work there again, or he can assume that it was a mistake made by a couple of under-abled managers and get past it. From the fact that he's hyping this as "fired by a machine", I doubt the latter would happen.
It's a bad thing that happened, of course, but it is NOT "fired by a machine", nor is it related to 1933.
My first response to this article is that Science has become subject to the same error of "dups" that /. has.
If one can live a good life not going around robbing, raping or stealing, and still not be considered to go to your heaven, again, I'll pass.
Then you should be happy that God created you with the free will to make that choice, instead of creating you as a toady yes-man servant who is forced to love and obey him whether you want to or not. See, that's how it works. You get to choose.
When you created children, if you did, did you want them to be slaves to you, loving you not by choice but by force? When they bring you a Father's Day present in a week or so, would it mean anything if they were programmed robots forced to bring you gifts or does it mean more if they get to choose? Would a wife you created these children with be more valuable and interesting if she were a slave to your whims not by any choice of her own but by design?
Have a nice day.
Until you get every manufacturer of the items you want to sell to add them at the beginning.
Walmart has the chops to do that. If you want your product sold in a Walmart, you WILL do things the Walmart way. That includes changing your packaging because a 16 oz package of your product costs too much, so make it 13 oz for 10% lower price ... keep them prices rollin' back!
That's not remotely the same thing as being able to walk right out of the store with purchases, which would drastically improve the shopping experience.
Until you get the bill, or rather, a one line charge on your credit card that contains no information about what you bought. The "shopping experience" might be great, but the "reconciling the bill against what you actually walked out the door with" will be hell.