I'm dealing with a manager who exhibits a high degree of narcissistic personality traits. In filling a recent vacancy for a software developer he interviewed two candidates. One a highly friendly and right noise-making guy and one a very professional, modest and highly competent person with a lot of direct experience in exactly the technology we use. It was no surprise to anyone when he appointed the one that threatened his sense of superiority least, i.e. the less capable one.
A month after appointing this person, he's shown little work ethic - bugging me with useless chatter repeatedly and not engaging with the simple orientation tasks he's been give and when after a month to work on this task he presents his work, he crumbles at the simplest baby questions. He's been hired to work on your standard PHP / MySQL combo. When asked to write a basic query to select a row from a single table, he couldn't do it. He didn't even understand the principle of a foreign key after it was explained to him multiple times. I later asked him to update the contents of a row and he couldn't even come close to that. And I find it even more dumbfounding that he tries to bullshit his way out of this.
The manager's reaction? He finds it hillarious. He's little focused on the actual success of the team and mainly focused on his relationships with people. I'm currently training this new developer in the basics of SQL and database design (we reached JOINs last week) but I might decide to kill him in the hopes of getting a replacement that can code.
While these sorts of blimps would be great against a foe armed with small arms and other handheld/light weaponry (e.g. those we're fighting in Iraq/Afghanistan), they'd be just about useless against any enemy with even moderate technical capability.
I hate to break this to you, but the USA isn't in the business of fighting technically equivalent rivals anymore. Even aside from the fact that the ability to deal damage has long since outstripped the ability to defend against it on both sides, the USA can't afford to fight another war. If the Chinese want to hurt the US, they call in their loans.
You know it's funny reading all these comments about the Chinese shooting it down. Because the first assumption that I made when I saw the summary was that the US government was intending to use it to keep the US people under observation.
After all, which is the biggest threat to the US government? A foreign power or the US people?
So people deserve scorn for mocking the Chinese government? Because I don't see anything other than mockery taking place here. So please explain how it is "infantile and irresponsible" and "causing disruption in people's lives" to make jokes about the Chinese government? You suggest that it is hindering people who "actually have something important to say." Talk in the Internet is cheap so the onus is on you to explain how a music video about "grass-mud horse" displaces dialogue which (in your opinion) is more important? I'd further contend that when you diminish the public respect for censorship, you encourage people to more freely speak out on serious issues. Do you think that is incorrect and if so why?
If you're not in a position of authority, why did you lock the door? Who told you you had the right to have a quiet uninterrupted evening without having offensive crap shoved in your face? I didn't... and I have the right to say any damned thing I want, any place I want. This is my freedom we're talking about, right?
I can't respond to that as it has nothing to do with my point.
If I kicked your door in and ran into your living room and screamed motherfucker in your face, that's illegal, and thus dangerous. Does that make it subversive and brave? Or just anti-social and stupid?
If you kick in my door? Definitely stupid. I'm not in a position of authority over you so there's no power to subvert. If everyone does it at the government offices, then that's subversive because they claim authority over you and there is power to subvert. Though I'm not part of the culture and am working off the article (yes, I read it), it looks like Grass -Mud-Horse is subversive. Which I'm well in favour of, btw. Individuality FTW.
We know doodling works for us. But people don't because they want to give the appearance of attention. The people who actually set doing work above the appearance of doing work have already found a way to not be in the meeting in the first place.
Are you telling me we have the technology to turn Helium into Iron? Wow! I have got to pay more attention to where technology is at, these days. That's great!
I think you got the not being able to predict part right. Let me say how Academia works outside of the hard sciences: You get everyone saying one thing for a while and then you say something contradictory in order to be seen as radical and on the cutting edge, and then you get grant money and papers. The new paradigm takes hold, people use lots of buzzwords and then after while the sequence repeats. Often in contradiction to the previous cycle which is politely and complicitly ignored.
Inside the hard sciences it's less so because they demand results, but Economics is so far from a hard science that it's not honestly science at all. It's riddled with supposition and selective data. The aim of academic economists is two-fold. Firstly, to generate publicity for themselves in their community (and out of it for the ambitious), and secondly to provide justifying arguments for the actions of people in power.
The purpose of the legal entity known as a corporation is to make a company an indivisible entity and shield it's officers and shareholders from responsibility for the actions of the officers and shareholders.
That certainly is the purpose. And a child can say that his friends told him to do something wrong. In either case the purpose is to pretend the responsibility lies elsewhere. That doesn't mean it does.
Law, especially the law around very big businesses, is not always the same as what is right and wrong. We shouldn't allow the passing of a law to change our principles. Laws can be changed.
Bullshit about obligations to shareholders. The shareholders invest their money of their own free will. If they think they've made a bad bargain then they shouldn't have invested or should sell their shares. And it stops there. If someone gives me £500, I'm not obliged to go out and kill their rich grandparent for them. Why not? Because it's against the law and they didn't give me the money on the expectation that I would go out and indulge in unethical behaviour on their part and if they did then more fool them.
Companies don't exist as indivisible entities. Somewhere there are people saying "lets violate people's privacy" and they should be personally held accountable because they are personally responsible.
I'm often confused about the alternative meanings words acquire in the US. Libertarian => Against Copyright? Appears to be the assumption of both TFS and your post. Is that so?
Heterosexuality is the social norm, no matter what any group of people *wants* to be the case. A larger number of people will be offended by someone being openly homosexual than will be offended by someone being openly heterosexual.
Woah! Back up there. Who said they *wanted* homosexuality to be the norm? That's a strawman. And who mentioned "the norm" anyway apart from you. I asked why it should be offensive to straight person A when person B tells them that they're gay? You are implying that something being a minority is cause for it to be offensive. That doesn't logically follow - you just made that implication up. If someone tells you online that they're from England in a predominantly US website (here), do you then state that US people will naturally be offended because an English person isn't the norm? Of course not, but that's the reasoning you just used to explain why straight people will be offended by someone being "openly homosexual." You take prejudice as a given and then say statistically more people will be offended by homosexuality than by heterosexuality. But prejudice is not a given. It arises for discernable and affectable reasons, it is not a law of nature.
And you only have to look at the moderation and the post counts on different sides of this debate to see that those arguing against there being anything culpable about putting her orientation into her profile are in the vast majority. It seems that those arguing that she is at fault somehow are a small faction of people generally. And indeed, the story appears to consist of a group of bullies who followed her from game to game trying to get the other players to complain about her.
Being gay is far, far less of an issue today than it was even twenty years ago. That fact alone shows that prejudice is not a given, but something that can and has been reduced enormously. There's no reason why it can't be reduced very much more until it becomes something of little consequence. But that will probably only happen by people being cool and open about their orientation. And it's not helped by companies like Microsoft supporting old prejudices.
Stating your sexual orientation *is* "sexual content", just not pornographic or explicit content. She pointed herself out as a member of a group of people that's unpopular in some parts of the country. She *shouldn't* have been targeted, but neither should she have been terribly surprised when she was.
I actually disagree that stating your sexual orientation is sexual content. If I say I'm straight, is that sexual content? Do you immediately start picturing me having sex? If I state that I have a boyfriend and I'm a girl, thus allowing you to infer that I am probably straight, is that sexual content? If I tell you that I like licking out another girl's yummy pussy, then that is sexual content. But someone saying "I'm a lesbian" which is what was apparently said here, is not. A lesbian is a lesbian whether or not they are having sex or even if they are having sex with a man, they remain a lesbian. I think that if someone is so over eager to extrapolate that a statement of orientation is sexual content to them, then the issue is on their side, not the person who gave their orientation as a simple fact. By the same reasoning, my stating I'm a C++ programmer would be "C++ content" but it plainly isn't. It's stating a category I fall into, not a description of how to increment an integer. You may wish to argue semantics but I think the common and correct interpretation lies with me and in any case, the meaning is very clear: stating your orientation is in not sexual. It's not for straight people and it isn't for gay people.
As regards she should have known that she would be targeted, maybe she did, maybe she didn't. It seems that it was a certain faction that kept following her into games and trying to get other people to complain about her which actually sounds like a small group of bullies more than anything. It's impossible to know without more details of the story but the point is that even if she knew she was likely to be targeted by some people, it seems it didn't stop her playing (nor should it). What stopped her playing is that Microsoft decided to come in on the side of those bullies and ban her. For stating a simple fact about herself that contained no sexual content, just mentioned something about herself. It's less "sexual content" to say I have a boyfriend (which implies probability of sex) than it is to say I'm straight or a lesbian which in no way requires sexual activity. And I'm pretty sure no-one on there got in trouble for saying they had a boyfriend. However this is spun, there's no way to make a case for banning her for including "I'm a lesbian" in her profile that isn't highly hypocritical.
Heh! Yes - still admirable. More so, actually because the moral relativity of "If you think that you're right and other people are wrong, then you're mean and nasty" is flawed and dangerous, imo, so that's a second point of correspondence between our views.
What I meant was that you are not bending what you see as important principles (free speech) for the sake of personal morality. Both the belief in free speech and the belief in the wrongness of homosexual acts are parts of your morality, but the former is an aspect of extending fairness to others and not showing discrepancy in how you treat someone. I'm applauding the setting of one above the other because I would say that more people than not behave the other way around - withdrawing their protection / rights from those they disagree with, whereas you are willing to show that protection even to those you are criticising. Whilst I disagree with you on the wrongness of homosexuality and will happily debate the matter, I similarly in no way wish to oppress your freedom to state your case. Hence, my original comment and my respect for someone with an uncommon attitude. Most people - on either side of the debates such as this, don't actually adhere to the "disagree but defend the right to say..." notion that I consider an ideal, instead falling back on the "fuzzy definition of tolerance."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm dealing with a manager who exhibits a high degree of narcissistic personality traits. In filling a recent vacancy for a software developer he interviewed two candidates. One a highly friendly and right noise-making guy and one a very professional, modest and highly competent person with a lot of direct experience in exactly the technology we use. It was no surprise to anyone when he appointed the one that threatened his sense of superiority least, i.e. the less capable one.
A month after appointing this person, he's shown little work ethic - bugging me with useless chatter repeatedly and not engaging with the simple orientation tasks he's been give and when after a month to work on this task he presents his work, he crumbles at the simplest baby questions. He's been hired to work on your standard PHP / MySQL combo. When asked to write a basic query to select a row from a single table, he couldn't do it. He didn't even understand the principle of a foreign key after it was explained to him multiple times. I later asked him to update the contents of a row and he couldn't even come close to that. And I find it even more dumbfounding that he tries to bullshit his way out of this.
The manager's reaction? He finds it hillarious. He's little focused on the actual success of the team and mainly focused on his relationships with people. I'm currently training this new developer in the basics of SQL and database design (we reached JOINs last week) but I might decide to kill him in the hopes of getting a replacement that can code.
I hate to break this to you, but the USA isn't in the business of fighting technically equivalent rivals anymore. Even aside from the fact that the ability to deal damage has long since outstripped the ability to defend against it on both sides, the USA can't afford to fight another war. If the Chinese want to hurt the US, they call in their loans.
You know it's funny reading all these comments about the Chinese shooting it down. Because the first assumption that I made when I saw the summary was that the US government was intending to use it to keep the US people under observation.
After all, which is the biggest threat to the US government? A foreign power or the US people?
So people deserve scorn for mocking the Chinese government? Because I don't see anything other than mockery taking place here. So please explain how it is "infantile and irresponsible" and "causing disruption in people's lives" to make jokes about the Chinese government? You suggest that it is hindering people who "actually have something important to say." Talk in the Internet is cheap so the onus is on you to explain how a music video about "grass-mud horse" displaces dialogue which (in your opinion) is more important? I'd further contend that when you diminish the public respect for censorship, you encourage people to more freely speak out on serious issues. Do you think that is incorrect and if so why?
I can't respond to that as it has nothing to do with my point.
If you kick in my door? Definitely stupid. I'm not in a position of authority over you so there's no power to subvert. If everyone does it at the government offices, then that's subversive because they claim authority over you and there is power to subvert. Though I'm not part of the culture and am working off the article (yes, I read it), it looks like Grass -Mud-Horse is subversive. Which I'm well in favour of, btw. Individuality FTW.
We know doodling works for us. But people don't because they want to give the appearance of attention. The people who actually set doing work above the appearance of doing work have already found a way to not be in the meeting in the first place.
I'm trying to picture Woody Allen as an all-powerful creator and sorry... it ain't working. For a start, he cheated on his metaphysics exam.
Are you telling me we have the technology to turn Helium into Iron? Wow! I have got to pay more attention to where technology is at, these days. That's great!
I think you got the not being able to predict part right. Let me say how Academia works outside of the hard sciences: You get everyone saying one thing for a while and then you say something contradictory in order to be seen as radical and on the cutting edge, and then you get grant money and papers. The new paradigm takes hold, people use lots of buzzwords and then after while the sequence repeats. Often in contradiction to the previous cycle which is politely and complicitly ignored.
Inside the hard sciences it's less so because they demand results, but Economics is so far from a hard science that it's not honestly science at all. It's riddled with supposition and selective data. The aim of academic economists is two-fold. Firstly, to generate publicity for themselves in their community (and out of it for the ambitious), and secondly to provide justifying arguments for the actions of people in power.
H.
Cool name, too! National Ignition Facility?
That certainly is the purpose. And a child can say that his friends told him to do something wrong. In either case the purpose is to pretend the responsibility lies elsewhere. That doesn't mean it does.
Law, especially the law around very big businesses, is not always the same as what is right and wrong. We shouldn't allow the passing of a law to change our principles. Laws can be changed.
Bullshit about obligations to shareholders. The shareholders invest their money of their own free will. If they think they've made a bad bargain then they shouldn't have invested or should sell their shares. And it stops there. If someone gives me £500, I'm not obliged to go out and kill their rich grandparent for them. Why not? Because it's against the law and they didn't give me the money on the expectation that I would go out and indulge in unethical behaviour on their part and if they did then more fool them.
Companies don't exist as indivisible entities. Somewhere there are people saying "lets violate people's privacy" and they should be personally held accountable because they are personally responsible.
I guess the lazy nihilists are the only ones that carry on living, eh?
No, no, no... I thought it was Cake OR Death!
So... an insanity plea, then? ;) :p
I'm often confused about the alternative meanings words acquire in the US. Libertarian => Against Copyright? Appears to be the assumption of both TFS and your post. Is that so?
I found a Gnome's pot of gold. Or thought I did. When I opened it up, it was just filled with underpants! WTF? >:/
We were always at war with Eurasia.
Woah! Back up there. Who said they *wanted* homosexuality to be the norm? That's a strawman. And who mentioned "the norm" anyway apart from you. I asked why it should be offensive to straight person A when person B tells them that they're gay? You are implying that something being a minority is cause for it to be offensive. That doesn't logically follow - you just made that implication up. If someone tells you online that they're from England in a predominantly US website (here), do you then state that US people will naturally be offended because an English person isn't the norm? Of course not, but that's the reasoning you just used to explain why straight people will be offended by someone being "openly homosexual." You take prejudice as a given and then say statistically more people will be offended by homosexuality than by heterosexuality. But prejudice is not a given. It arises for discernable and affectable reasons, it is not a law of nature.
And you only have to look at the moderation and the post counts on different sides of this debate to see that those arguing against there being anything culpable about putting her orientation into her profile are in the vast majority. It seems that those arguing that she is at fault somehow are a small faction of people generally. And indeed, the story appears to consist of a group of bullies who followed her from game to game trying to get the other players to complain about her.
Being gay is far, far less of an issue today than it was even twenty years ago. That fact alone shows that prejudice is not a given, but something that can and has been reduced enormously. There's no reason why it can't be reduced very much more until it becomes something of little consequence. But that will probably only happen by people being cool and open about their orientation. And it's not helped by companies like Microsoft supporting old prejudices.
I actually disagree that stating your sexual orientation is sexual content. If I say I'm straight, is that sexual content? Do you immediately start picturing me having sex? If I state that I have a boyfriend and I'm a girl, thus allowing you to infer that I am probably straight, is that sexual content? If I tell you that I like licking out another girl's yummy pussy, then that is sexual content. But someone saying "I'm a lesbian" which is what was apparently said here, is not. A lesbian is a lesbian whether or not they are having sex or even if they are having sex with a man, they remain a lesbian. I think that if someone is so over eager to extrapolate that a statement of orientation is sexual content to them, then the issue is on their side, not the person who gave their orientation as a simple fact. By the same reasoning, my stating I'm a C++ programmer would be "C++ content" but it plainly isn't. It's stating a category I fall into, not a description of how to increment an integer. You may wish to argue semantics but I think the common and correct interpretation lies with me and in any case, the meaning is very clear: stating your orientation is in not sexual. It's not for straight people and it isn't for gay people.
As regards she should have known that she would be targeted, maybe she did, maybe she didn't. It seems that it was a certain faction that kept following her into games and trying to get other people to complain about her which actually sounds like a small group of bullies more than anything. It's impossible to know without more details of the story but the point is that even if she knew she was likely to be targeted by some people, it seems it didn't stop her playing (nor should it). What stopped her playing is that Microsoft decided to come in on the side of those bullies and ban her. For stating a simple fact about herself that contained no sexual content, just mentioned something about herself. It's less "sexual content" to say I have a boyfriend (which implies probability of sex) than it is to say I'm straight or a lesbian which in no way requires sexual activity. And I'm pretty sure no-one on there got in trouble for saying they had a boyfriend. However this is spun, there's no way to make a case for banning her for including "I'm a lesbian" in her profile that isn't highly hypocritical.
BECAUSE! Now eat it - it's good for you!
Because!
Bob. Bit of a funny name for a girl. :D
Heh! Yes - still admirable. More so, actually because the moral relativity of "If you think that you're right and other people are wrong, then you're mean and nasty" is flawed and dangerous, imo, so that's a second point of correspondence between our views.
What I meant was that you are not bending what you see as important principles (free speech) for the sake of personal morality. Both the belief in free speech and the belief in the wrongness of homosexual acts are parts of your morality, but the former is an aspect of extending fairness to others and not showing discrepancy in how you treat someone. I'm applauding the setting of one above the other because I would say that more people than not behave the other way around - withdrawing their protection / rights from those they disagree with, whereas you are willing to show that protection even to those you are criticising. Whilst I disagree with you on the wrongness of homosexuality and will happily debate the matter, I similarly in no way wish to oppress your freedom to state your case. Hence, my original comment and my respect for someone with an uncommon attitude. Most people - on either side of the debates such as this, don't actually adhere to the "disagree but defend the right to say..." notion that I consider an ideal, instead falling back on the "fuzzy definition of tolerance."
There - long winded explanation. Apologies.
H.