Citation for what exactly? I didn't say anything that isn't widely known and easily findable with a simple google search. My examples can also be verified with simple searching. Of course my statements regarding herbs and contraindications are easy enough to find in the PDR. If you have trouble distinguishing noise from signal then try walking into a GNC and picking up a bottle then taking it to the counter.
GNC regularly distributes a large compendium of what, if any, studies have been conducted on the herbs in the supplements they carry or their (suspected) active ingredients. They only have basics, summary of conclusions, basic type of study (sample size, single or double blind, etc). If you want more detail you need to get more detailed with the question. GNC should be able to provide you with enough information to find the full text of any individual study yourself.
Of course your results at GNC are going to vary with the competence of the person at the counter. If you get an incompetent they will probably let you grab the book and search yourself.
I think a lot of the myths are supported with broad negative conclusions drawn from properly narrow studies. For instance a study on Ginko Biloba came out recently which showed that it wasn't effective at restoring memory function to the elderly who had already lost function. Previous studies showed that Ginko enhanced memory function in adults (without control for memory loss). These are completely different things but people immediately jumped on the Ginko is debunked now train.
Note: I'm not actually saying that Ginko is effective. I don't use any drugs (herbal or prescription) outside those in a carefully controlled diet unless I have an immediate medical need with risks that override the crapshoot that comes with haphazardly tossing chemicals into the delicate and poorly understood chemical balance that is my body.
I wouldn't go as far with herb bashing as you (you seem to be implying willow bark is the only herb with a better than minor effect). Half the herbs on the shelf in GNC have peer reviewed double blind studies backing them which is really all the prescription drugs show. The effects or many are significant enough they need to be considered right alongside prescription meds for contraindications.
None of that is to say that there is any sort of manufacturing oversight, claims testing (particularly in the diet and erectile dysfunction areas) or that a natural random soup of chemicals is somehow automatically safer than an intelligently purpose crafted solution. But there ARE many effective herbal remedies and some that seem to be more effective than prescription solutions (marijuana is far more effective than comparable prescription medications in not one but numerous areas). Another example is fish oil, like marijuana there are many physicians recommending fish oil over FDA approved supplements.
A lot of people have a bogus idea about herbal testing. They think because no testing is required that none is performed. Or they believe some odd myth that none of these substances have been shown effective in testing. Or that a single molecule is always responsible for the effects. There is less money to be made herbal remedies and less control of claims. As a result there are fewer studies into their effects. Just the same there have been many studies (though far less than of prescription meds) and they OFTEN show benefits vs placebo not rarely.
quite possible, they could have been drowning their sick children in massive doses of beer to ease their suffering.
In the Nubians defense, 'most people consuming large doses of beer these days' aren't consuming anti-biotic beer so they don't have the opportunity to drink it for the same health benefits. Besides that, anti-biotics can be ordered in pure forms now.
Sometimes sick people got better after drinking beer.
How is this any different than any historical herbal remedy? They didn't need to have any more knowledge of anti-biotics than natives eating mushrooms need know the shrooms contain psilocybin.
Bacteria infected their grain, this resulted in anti-biotic beer which became a local herbal remedy or healing potion. No actual discovery of bacteria or idea WHY the remedy heals. Interesting but hardly 'astonishing'.
Been there, done that. I've grown better than you can find in any shop in Amsterdam.
"Marijuana is a hallucinogen, and if you eat 4 grammes of good hash you will be having them."
You can eat 4 grams of 99.9% pure THC budder and you still won't experience hallucinations. The active components in marijuana are psychoactive in the same sense that prozac is not hallucinogenic. Either you are lying and assume I'm as ignorant as the buddies you usually tell these lies to (most likely) or what you took wasn't hash (or at least not only hash). You are probably basing this nonsense on the latest police propaganda in the UK where they spread the hallucinogen myth.
Hash isn't even particularly well suited to being eaten in the first place. Hash only contains about 20% THC, there are high grade buds that are as potent or more potent than hash.
"There is definitely a functional difference - or at least a difference in how you function - between, say, smoking some shit weed, and eatying 4 grammes of ice hash."
Actually there is a difference in the cannabinoid profile of the marijuana that is most popular and that of commercial varieties. Usually the popular variety is high in THC and low in CBD. This does result in different effects. The THC has the same effect but increased CBD causes the couch lock effect, other cannabinoids cause 'cotton mouth', 'munchies', etc. But there are high grade strains that have both a high THC and CBD profile.
None of these from the 'shit weed' to the extremely high quality homegrown are in any way dangerous (at least not to someone without a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or a heart condition, certainly a smaller danger zone than asprin).
"I do not want them to grow up thinking profanity, nudity, violence or whatever is normal behaviour."
Of course that would be awful. I mean really, just because profanity, nudity, and violence ARE normal behavior is no reason for children to grow up thinking as much.
Everyone is forgetting the oil industry backing as well. You see people always think of oil in cars. What they forget is all the oil that goes into the production of plastics.
Plastics can be made from plant oils, unfortunately they aren't very strong. Ford demonstrated the solution in the body of an old automobile prototype. If you reinforce the plant plastics with the strong fibers from the hemp plant you have a dirt cheap and very strong versatile plastic... patent free.
That's the problem with the hemp plant it is extremely versatile and yes there is money to be made with it, but there are no patents. Why make lots of money on a product when any farmer can compete with a patch of dirt when you can outlaw the cheap and freely available competition and flood the market with patented solutions? Its the same reason the drug industry hates marijuana and continues to release minor modifications of their drugs with new names and fresh new patents.
But no more so than any other comparably harmless herbal supplement on the shelf. Almost everything on the shelf is more dangerous and pretty much every regulated over the counter medicine is FAR more dangerous.
"There should also be prescription strength, because some of the really hard stuff is dangerous."
Obviously you have no actual knowledge of marijuana. There is no functional difference between different strengths. Stronger marijuana has the exact same effects as the weaker variety, the only difference is the dose.
That isn't true. The employees may not see the risks directly and suffer the worry that comes with them but if the company fails to find work to do that company goes under the employees go hungry (in fact they are usually the last paid).
The best you could say is that the company is larger therefore offers a buffer against short term risk but this doesn't require an exploitative employer/employee model. A successful individual or a group of individuals in a partnership without underlings offers the same kind of risk buffer without a cat licking off the cream.
Put an annoying ass buzzer by the meter, which is across the room from the pc. To turn off the buzzer you have to type in a code. OR have him record the meter reading periodically in a log.
For your oddball scenerio there are a thousand where this doesn't apply. Why should the other thousand suffer for your fringe case?
P.S. I work in IT security. I'd take my chances with your sysadmin. He bought his bag of tricks from me and calls me when he can't figure out how to make it work.
"If your employer is paying you for 8 hours of work time, you should be working for 8 hours."
That's ridiculous. Studies have consistently shown that requiring people to work continuously during their 'work time' results in LESS output of lower quality.
If the bare minimum isn't enough they should raise the minimum. The 'bare minimum' can also be phrased as 'everything we are asking of you'.
Then they can implement a policy against slashdot at work. Until they do, no, its none of their business. They are paying for my work output of a predetermined type during certain hours. They are not paying for me.
What percentage of your staff have been there longer than 2yrs?
Fifteen minutes really isn't very long but having worked in a call center that sounds like the slowest time and not the average or certainly not the busiest time.
I worked for Sony in the US. They had pretty much the same sort of monitoring/tracking you describe. They had meetings like you mention for quality assurance but that isn't really for customer benefit it is to make sure you are doing things the way they want them. It's also an excuse to record all the incoming calls legally and delete any that don't support their case come lawsuit time.
During the slow times you might have as much as 30 minutes between calls at times. But most of the time you had less than 5mins and a good portion of each day it was one call after another.
Sony was always hiring too and they were very proud of their turnover, one of the best in the industry. They averaged 90 days.
By definition an employer is exploiting employees. Employers (or the people who own them) gather profit by paying employees less than value of their output and keeping the difference in order to enable someone else to enjoy a value greater than the value of their own output.
The only ones who aren't either exploiting or being exploited are the self employed. Here in the US we actually punish these individuals with self employment tax.
How many actual sole props do you know of? In my experience even though there may be a sole owner that owner is usually taking advantage of some sort of artificial entity that provides him/her with liability protection and at that point we aren't talking about the owner but the entity and citizens are more important than paper entities. The right to privacy and human needs also trumps property rights since property is not required to live a happy life while privacy and other human needs are.
"So, in order to protect the rights of the employed citizens, we must trample on the rights of the employing citizens."
The reverse would also be true, in order to protect the rights of employing citizens we must trample on the rights of employed citizens. There are a lot more employed than employing which makes it an obvious choice.
The primary reason for employing is to pay others less than the value of their output, sell that output for its true value, and garner the difference which we call a profit. This is done so that the employing can meet their own needs including their need for privacy. It is legal to exploit the employed in this fashion so that is not at issue. But guaranteeing the rights to the employed does not prevent the employing from performing this exploitation and garnering a profit and thus fulfilling their needs.
Guaranteeing the property rights of the employing DOES infringe upon the needs of the employed.
You know that studies show that attempts to maximize productivity by keeping employees busy all the time actually reduce both the quantity and quality of their overall output.
The goals are based on business needs not on milking every ounce of possible performance out of each employee.
Of course some metric of performance is needed to know how much staff you need. If there isn't a hard requirement like the number of simultaneous calls to be handled that sets this number for you then you set goals and find the median performance of the staff. Employees far above it get rewards (actual rewards like raises, bonuses, and promotions, not put into a monthy drawing for a TGI Fridays gift card), employees far below it get disciplined and ultimately fired. This will drive employees to want to exceed goals.
Most employees aren't going to push the bar and there is nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean they shouldn't get breaks and especially doesn't mean you should punish those who can beat the goals by requiring more output from them than everyone else.
"100 other employees performance will decrease 2x."
Yeah the hundred that don't meet their sales quotas consistently and therefore get fired.
In the same token for every oddball job where you have no reasonable way to metric performance there are a thousand more where you do. It doesn't make sense to restrict the privacy of the other 999 job functions for the sake of the employer with someone filling the other job role.
Besides that, what is the average turnover at your call center where they expect you to be working every second of the day?
They might be able to get away with fewer reps by trying to exploit them to the max but I doubt any of them stick around long enough to get very good at what they do.
That would depend on what they are supposed to be doing? Just because you can't listen to an employees phone calls and record them scratching their ass doesn't mean you can't track their sales/resolutions/or whatever it is you have them on the phone for.
"But not being able to check if the person is doing the work they get payed to do, is just stupid."
It is not necessary to violate privacy to check if employees are working. Their work output does that.
This reminds me of ridiculous policies like retail making employees straighten shelves during their downtime and factories making employees push a broom.
Just because employees are being paid doesn't make it a crime to have and relax during downtime.
I use an ssh tunnel to a proxy running on my home connection and a portable firewall application to block any company network traffic other than what I have to open to actually perform my work.
As long as I do my job its none of the company's damn business what else I might be doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation for what exactly? I didn't say anything that isn't widely known and easily findable with a simple google search. My examples can also be verified with simple searching. Of course my statements regarding herbs and contraindications are easy enough to find in the PDR. If you have trouble distinguishing noise from signal then try walking into a GNC and picking up a bottle then taking it to the counter.
GNC regularly distributes a large compendium of what, if any, studies have been conducted on the herbs in the supplements they carry or their (suspected) active ingredients. They only have basics, summary of conclusions, basic type of study (sample size, single or double blind, etc). If you want more detail you need to get more detailed with the question. GNC should be able to provide you with enough information to find the full text of any individual study yourself.
Of course your results at GNC are going to vary with the competence of the person at the counter. If you get an incompetent they will probably let you grab the book and search yourself.
I think a lot of the myths are supported with broad negative conclusions drawn from properly narrow studies. For instance a study on Ginko Biloba came out recently which showed that it wasn't effective at restoring memory function to the elderly who had already lost function. Previous studies showed that Ginko enhanced memory function in adults (without control for memory loss). These are completely different things but people immediately jumped on the Ginko is debunked now train.
Note: I'm not actually saying that Ginko is effective. I don't use any drugs (herbal or prescription) outside those in a carefully controlled diet unless I have an immediate medical need with risks that override the crapshoot that comes with haphazardly tossing chemicals into the delicate and poorly understood chemical balance that is my body.
I wouldn't go as far with herb bashing as you (you seem to be implying willow bark is the only herb with a better than minor effect). Half the herbs on the shelf in GNC have peer reviewed double blind studies backing them which is really all the prescription drugs show. The effects or many are significant enough they need to be considered right alongside prescription meds for contraindications.
None of that is to say that there is any sort of manufacturing oversight, claims testing (particularly in the diet and erectile dysfunction areas) or that a natural random soup of chemicals is somehow automatically safer than an intelligently purpose crafted solution. But there ARE many effective herbal remedies and some that seem to be more effective than prescription solutions (marijuana is far more effective than comparable prescription medications in not one but numerous areas). Another example is fish oil, like marijuana there are many physicians recommending fish oil over FDA approved supplements.
A lot of people have a bogus idea about herbal testing. They think because no testing is required that none is performed. Or they believe some odd myth that none of these substances have been shown effective in testing. Or that a single molecule is always responsible for the effects. There is less money to be made herbal remedies and less control of claims. As a result there are fewer studies into their effects. Just the same there have been many studies (though far less than of prescription meds) and they OFTEN show benefits vs placebo not rarely.
quite possible, they could have been drowning their sick children in massive doses of beer to ease their suffering.
In the Nubians defense, 'most people consuming large doses of beer these days' aren't consuming anti-biotic beer so they don't have the opportunity to drink it for the same health benefits. Besides that, anti-biotics can be ordered in pure forms now.
Sometimes sick people got better after drinking beer.
How is this any different than any historical herbal remedy? They didn't need to have any more knowledge of anti-biotics than natives eating mushrooms need know the shrooms contain psilocybin.
Bacteria infected their grain, this resulted in anti-biotic beer which became a local herbal remedy or healing potion. No actual discovery of bacteria or idea WHY the remedy heals. Interesting but hardly 'astonishing'.
What's a "utilise"? I've never heard anyone utilize that term before.
"Go try it in Amsterdam if you don't believe me."
Been there, done that. I've grown better than you can find in any shop in Amsterdam.
"Marijuana is a hallucinogen, and if you eat 4 grammes of good hash you will be having them."
You can eat 4 grams of 99.9% pure THC budder and you still won't experience hallucinations. The active components in marijuana are psychoactive in the same sense that prozac is not hallucinogenic. Either you are lying and assume I'm as ignorant as the buddies you usually tell these lies to (most likely) or what you took wasn't hash (or at least not only hash). You are probably basing this nonsense on the latest police propaganda in the UK where they spread the hallucinogen myth.
Hash isn't even particularly well suited to being eaten in the first place. Hash only contains about 20% THC, there are high grade buds that are as potent or more potent than hash.
"There is definitely a functional difference - or at least a difference in how you function - between, say, smoking some shit weed, and eatying 4 grammes of ice hash."
Actually there is a difference in the cannabinoid profile of the marijuana that is most popular and that of commercial varieties. Usually the popular variety is high in THC and low in CBD. This does result in different effects. The THC has the same effect but increased CBD causes the couch lock effect, other cannabinoids cause 'cotton mouth', 'munchies', etc. But there are high grade strains that have both a high THC and CBD profile.
None of these from the 'shit weed' to the extremely high quality homegrown are in any way dangerous (at least not to someone without a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or a heart condition, certainly a smaller danger zone than asprin).
"I do not want them to grow up thinking profanity, nudity, violence or whatever is normal behaviour."
Of course that would be awful. I mean really, just because profanity, nudity, and violence ARE normal behavior is no reason for children to grow up thinking as much.
Everyone is forgetting the oil industry backing as well. You see people always think of oil in cars. What they forget is all the oil that goes into the production of plastics.
Plastics can be made from plant oils, unfortunately they aren't very strong. Ford demonstrated the solution in the body of an old automobile prototype. If you reinforce the plant plastics with the strong fibers from the hemp plant you have a dirt cheap and very strong versatile plastic... patent free.
That's the problem with the hemp plant it is extremely versatile and yes there is money to be made with it, but there are no patents. Why make lots of money on a product when any farmer can compete with a patch of dirt when you can outlaw the cheap and freely available competition and flood the market with patented solutions? Its the same reason the drug industry hates marijuana and continues to release minor modifications of their drugs with new names and fresh new patents.
"haha, where I live (in the US), there is no legal obstacle to walking down main street nude"
Unless of course you mind getting arrested. Public nudity is illegal (pretty much?) everywhere in the US.
"It should be legal, regulated, and taxed."
But no more so than any other comparably harmless herbal supplement on the shelf. Almost everything on the shelf is more dangerous and pretty much every regulated over the counter medicine is FAR more dangerous.
"There should also be prescription strength, because some of the really hard stuff is dangerous."
Obviously you have no actual knowledge of marijuana. There is no functional difference between different strengths. Stronger marijuana has the exact same effects as the weaker variety, the only difference is the dose.
That isn't true. The employees may not see the risks directly and suffer the worry that comes with them but if the company fails to find work to do that company goes under the employees go hungry (in fact they are usually the last paid).
The best you could say is that the company is larger therefore offers a buffer against short term risk but this doesn't require an exploitative employer/employee model. A successful individual or a group of individuals in a partnership without underlings offers the same kind of risk buffer without a cat licking off the cream.
Put an annoying ass buzzer by the meter, which is across the room from the pc. To turn off the buzzer you have to type in a code. OR have him record the meter reading periodically in a log.
For your oddball scenerio there are a thousand where this doesn't apply. Why should the other thousand suffer for your fringe case?
P.S. I work in IT security. I'd take my chances with your sysadmin. He bought his bag of tricks from me and calls me when he can't figure out how to make it work.
"If your employer is paying you for 8 hours of work time, you should be working for 8 hours."
That's ridiculous. Studies have consistently shown that requiring people to work continuously during their 'work time' results in LESS output of lower quality.
If the bare minimum isn't enough they should raise the minimum. The 'bare minimum' can also be phrased as 'everything we are asking of you'.
How many pieces of flare do you require?
Then they can implement a policy against slashdot at work. Until they do, no, its none of their business. They are paying for my work output of a predetermined type during certain hours. They are not paying for me.
What percentage of your staff have been there longer than 2yrs?
Fifteen minutes really isn't very long but having worked in a call center that sounds like the slowest time and not the average or certainly not the busiest time.
I worked for Sony in the US. They had pretty much the same sort of monitoring/tracking you describe. They had meetings like you mention for quality assurance but that isn't really for customer benefit it is to make sure you are doing things the way they want them. It's also an excuse to record all the incoming calls legally and delete any that don't support their case come lawsuit time.
During the slow times you might have as much as 30 minutes between calls at times. But most of the time you had less than 5mins and a good portion of each day it was one call after another.
Sony was always hiring too and they were very proud of their turnover, one of the best in the industry. They averaged 90 days.
By definition an employer is exploiting employees. Employers (or the people who own them) gather profit by paying employees less than value of their output and keeping the difference in order to enable someone else to enjoy a value greater than the value of their own output.
The only ones who aren't either exploiting or being exploited are the self employed. Here in the US we actually punish these individuals with self employment tax.
How many actual sole props do you know of? In my experience even though there may be a sole owner that owner is usually taking advantage of some sort of artificial entity that provides him/her with liability protection and at that point we aren't talking about the owner but the entity and citizens are more important than paper entities. The right to privacy and human needs also trumps property rights since property is not required to live a happy life while privacy and other human needs are.
"So, in order to protect the rights of the employed citizens, we must trample on the rights of the employing citizens."
The reverse would also be true, in order to protect the rights of employing citizens we must trample on the rights of employed citizens. There are a lot more employed than employing which makes it an obvious choice.
The primary reason for employing is to pay others less than the value of their output, sell that output for its true value, and garner the difference which we call a profit. This is done so that the employing can meet their own needs including their need for privacy. It is legal to exploit the employed in this fashion so that is not at issue. But guaranteeing the rights to the employed does not prevent the employing from performing this exploitation and garnering a profit and thus fulfilling their needs.
Guaranteeing the property rights of the employing DOES infringe upon the needs of the employed.
Case closed.
You know that studies show that attempts to maximize productivity by keeping employees busy all the time actually reduce both the quantity and quality of their overall output.
The goals are based on business needs not on milking every ounce of possible performance out of each employee.
Of course some metric of performance is needed to know how much staff you need. If there isn't a hard requirement like the number of simultaneous calls to be handled that sets this number for you then you set goals and find the median performance of the staff. Employees far above it get rewards (actual rewards like raises, bonuses, and promotions, not put into a monthy drawing for a TGI Fridays gift card), employees far below it get disciplined and ultimately fired. This will drive employees to want to exceed goals.
Most employees aren't going to push the bar and there is nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean they shouldn't get breaks and especially doesn't mean you should punish those who can beat the goals by requiring more output from them than everyone else.
"100 other employees performance will decrease 2x."
Yeah the hundred that don't meet their sales quotas consistently and therefore get fired.
In the same token for every oddball job where you have no reasonable way to metric performance there are a thousand more where you do. It doesn't make sense to restrict the privacy of the other 999 job functions for the sake of the employer with someone filling the other job role.
Besides that, what is the average turnover at your call center where they expect you to be working every second of the day?
They might be able to get away with fewer reps by trying to exploit them to the max but I doubt any of them stick around long enough to get very good at what they do.
That would depend on what they are supposed to be doing? Just because you can't listen to an employees phone calls and record them scratching their ass doesn't mean you can't track their sales/resolutions/or whatever it is you have them on the phone for.
"But not being able to check if the person is doing the work they get payed to do, is just stupid."
It is not necessary to violate privacy to check if employees are working. Their work output does that.
This reminds me of ridiculous policies like retail making employees straighten shelves during their downtime and factories making employees push a broom.
Just because employees are being paid doesn't make it a crime to have and relax during downtime.
I use an ssh tunnel to a proxy running on my home connection and a portable firewall application to block any company network traffic other than what I have to open to actually perform my work.
As long as I do my job its none of the company's damn business what else I might be doing.