I've read about this suit, too, and I'm pretty sure that most of the plaintiffs were women who *had* applied to work in the Lawn and Hardware department but were rejected on the basis of low scores on a personality test designed to measure "vigor."
The "vigor" test included questions like "Do you have a deep voice?" and "Do you enjoy hunting?"
Part of the reason the plaintiffs won the suit was that higher "vigor" scores were linked to *worse* sales, but the women were rejected because their "vigor" scores were too *low*.
There *are* examples of stupid lawsuits that allege discrimination where none exists, but this isn't one of 'em.
When I was at MIT, several of my female friends used to amuse themselves by dressing up as bimbos, going to the bars frequented by BU guys, and claiming to be elementary education majors from Simmons.
Apparently they'd pretend to be total ditzes and giggle vapidly for hours so that guys would buy them drinks and try to impress them.
I think the goal was to laugh themselves sick as they walked home, but I don't know. I never went along, since I don't drink and I'm a lousy actress.
I've seen those in operation as recently as nine or ten years ago at MIT.
We used laboratory tubing, which seemed able to withstand some pretty serious pressure; you could fill a 2 m section of tubing with enough water that a strong man could carry it but a small woman couldn't.
(No more precise measurements of water volume or mass are available, sorry.)
With that much pressure, though, you had to tie a looseknot in the end of the tubing for the brief trek from the hose to the battlefield. With the knot in place, the aforementioned strong man would be carrying a ten-gallon water balloon wrapped around his body.
Imagine a big guy slipping and falling on top of something like that. He soaked himself to the skin, along with about fifteen other people who happened to be nearby.
Good as a kamikaze weapon, but they seemed to lack control...
Actually, there's a great deal of evidence that CyberSitter (one of the worst) does block content because they disagree with it. Among their filtering categories is "Satanism/Cult", which blocks every Pagan site on the net and a few Christian ones ("Brethren" is one of the banned keywords, which really annoys the web folks at Lutheran churches.) There's evidently somebody at the CyberSitter office who's hired to decide which religions are and are not "satanic cults. I don't think most CyberSitter buyers know that they're paying to have theological decisions made by a web-crawling bot and an anonymous human "reviewer" who may or may not share their views? Who'd buy it if they knew that? Nobody I've met. Maybe education is the solution?
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm...
I've read about this suit, too, and I'm pretty sure that most of the plaintiffs were women who *had* applied to work in the Lawn and Hardware department but were rejected on the basis of low scores on a personality test designed to measure "vigor."
The "vigor" test included questions like "Do you have a deep voice?" and "Do you enjoy hunting?"
Part of the reason the plaintiffs won the suit was that higher "vigor" scores were linked to *worse* sales, but the women were rejected because their "vigor" scores were too *low*.
There *are* examples of stupid lawsuits that allege discrimination where none exists, but this isn't one of 'em.
When I was at MIT, several of my female friends used to amuse themselves by dressing up as bimbos, going to the bars frequented by BU guys, and claiming to be elementary education majors from Simmons.
Apparently they'd pretend to be total ditzes and giggle vapidly for hours so that guys would buy them drinks and try to impress them.
I think the goal was to laugh themselves sick as they walked home, but I don't know. I never went along, since I don't drink and I'm a lousy actress.
I've seen those in operation as recently as nine or ten years ago at MIT.
We used laboratory tubing, which seemed able to withstand some pretty serious pressure; you could fill a 2 m section of tubing with enough water that a strong man could carry it but a small woman couldn't.
(No more precise measurements of water volume or mass are available, sorry.)
With that much pressure, though, you had to tie a looseknot in the end of the tubing for the brief trek from the hose to the battlefield. With the knot in place, the aforementioned strong man would be carrying a ten-gallon water balloon wrapped around his body.
Imagine a big guy slipping and falling on top of something like that. He soaked himself to the skin, along with about fifteen other people who happened to be nearby.
Good as a kamikaze weapon, but they seemed to lack control...
Actually, there's a great deal of evidence that CyberSitter (one of the worst) does block content because they disagree with it. Among their filtering categories is "Satanism/Cult", which blocks every Pagan site on the net and a few Christian ones ("Brethren" is one of the banned keywords, which really annoys the web folks at Lutheran churches.) There's evidently somebody at the CyberSitter office who's hired to decide which religions are and are not "satanic cults. I don't think most CyberSitter buyers know that they're paying to have theological decisions made by a web-crawling bot and an anonymous human "reviewer" who may or may not share their views? Who'd buy it if they knew that? Nobody I've met. Maybe education is the solution?