In nations where women have good access to education and birth control and where basic infrastructure is sound, the birth rate is lower than the replacement rate.
The best way to curb population growth is to improve the lives of women and to improve overall public infrastructure.
Laws like Chinas one child law lead to abhorrent acts and an unstable situation with a radically skewed demographic that will most certainly end in tragedy. Much, much better to improve education and access to birth control and improve public health and the issue will resolve itself without trampling freedoms.
Quests individually weren't difficult - just spread all to hell and gone over the world with no rational organization, so you spent a lot of time running hither and yon rather than doing anything useful.
Dungeons weren't difficult - just inconvenient as hell to get people to do with you and took forever and a day to get people to the dungeon.
Raids weren't (usually) difficult - the mechanics were pretty simple assuming you had an appropriate class composition and the people playing understood that they can't just willy-nilly spam debuffs on the target without overwriting things.
Raid strategies weren't as widely known because there weren't as many tools for publicizing them and so on.
Contrast that with today:
- Quests are much more intelligently laid out, and questing is more about telling stories than it is about "challenge". Getting to the level cap via questing is trivial, but that's good because the level cap keeps going up.
- Dungeons have 2 modes, one which is normal and one which is a more challenging (mechanically and numerically) heroic mode. Some of the Cataclysm dungeons had mechanics that made them extremely tricky for PUGs to handle, and even now some of the heroics are tricky due to other mechanics.
- Raids have multiple modes. LFR mode is trivial to do (except when the people in your PUG intentionally or unintentionally screw things up), Normal mode can be a bit of a challenge but nothing that a decent guild can't handle. Heroic is challenging as hell.
Raid strategies are trivial to find and learn because we have great out of game tools for them - videos of how to tank a fight, the different phases, etc.
They gave us something for everyone, difficulty wise, now. But anyone who thinks WoW was more difficult (as opposed to inconvenient) in the past is definitely not right.
In reality, the gunman would probably just open up on the herd of people waiting to go through the screening process.
Now, would you like to know how to actually prevent these kinds of attacks?
Massively increase funding for mental health services across the country. Not only would that help prevent some crazy motherfuckers from going on a rampage, but it would do some good for other people who need it.
Call me crazy, but I personally think doing something to prevent the problem in the first place is *probably* a better and more useful idea than turning this country into even more of a police state by setting up groping and irradiation stations all over the country so that the poorly trained schlubs manning said stations can be super-duper successful at not stopping a goddamn thing.
Second time I'm violating my rule about not bothering with ACs.
At this particular school, the school administration contacts the employer to see if the day can be given as a form of donation to the school so as to not eat up the employees vacation time. By and large, I am lead to believe, it's successful - at least in my sister's case her employer was overjoyed to be able to do this and then turn around and announce that they were offering 1 paid day a month off so that their employees could help at schools. She's said that a couple of her co-workers with kids at different schools have also taken advantage of it.
What's also funny is that the population of this particular school is actually mostly poorer - the kinds of kids who can "boost the numbers" and their associated parents usually just go to private schools rather than charter ones. This school does this specifically because one of the biggest problems that poorer students have is a lack of parental involvement in and investment in education.
Most of the kids there are african american and North Carolina poor (I won't get more specific about the location because I don't feel like identifying the school on a forum like slashdot where people tend to get personally vindictive).
And, it really sucks that you aren't willing to spend a vacation day helping out at your kids school. Personally, even if the days weren't being given as a benefit by the employers, I would still count 8 days a year spent on helping my children improve their school and their education to be a hell of a lot better than some vacation time. Parenting means sacrifices for your kids to help them get ahead in life - I feel bad for your kids that you don't seem to be interested in doing that.
It really isn't so much that only white, christian, able body, hetero males are fair game, but rather that by and large, white, christian, able body, hetero males don't really run into constant problems because of their membership in those classes. Exceptions exist, but by and large, if you want to face a minimum of persecution in the US, being a white, christian, able body, hetero male is the way to go. (And I will pre-emptively say that any mens rights activist stuff will be ignored).
Generally speaking, people in the majority class are treated by other members of that majority class as individuals. By this I mean that if two white dudes are talking to each other about something (call them Bill and Bob) they will tend to see the other person as simply representing their own individual behaviors and opinions, as opposed to the opinions and behaviors of all white dudes. This is because they are in the same classes, and see them selves as individuals, and thus don't pay attention to those 2 factors too much. But, when they are interacting with people from other classes, often people will assume that person represents ALL members of that class.
This kind of thing happens also among minority classes - I don't, for example, think of another woman as representing all women since I see myself as an individual and can see her as an individual based on that class. But when I deal with guys, I will say that often times I have to catch myself from thinking that all guys are basically the same - it's unfair for me to do it, so I try like hell to overcome the impulse, and am usually successful.
There's an XKCD about it - one is two dudes at a chalkboard and one makes a math error and is told "you're bad at math" while the other panel is a man and a woman at a chalkboard and the woman makes a math error and is told "women are bad at math." It's not quite that simple, but that's a fair explanation.
Now, the reason it becomes a problem for minority classes to be made fun of and is seen as less of a problem for majority classes to be made fun of it because people in the majority classes, by and large, tend to not see another white, christian, able-bodied, hetero dude and say "Oh, man, I had a bad experience with a white, christian, able-bodied dude - they're all trouble!" and discriminate. But they *are* somewhat more prone, in general, to do that kind of discrimination based on class/category differences. And, because they are in the majority (either power or population wise), they can get away with it.
Personally, i do think that there is a minimum level of piss taking that a person has to be able to deal with in any kind of team. People do make jokes, people tease, people are not always perfectly professional machines. A well adjusted person, should be able to, in the absence of other complicating factors, take a joke of the same level as "big boobs" and blow it off as immature. It's just a lot fucking harder to blow it off when you hear those kinds of things constantly and they have actually caused you personal problems as a result.
At one place I worked as a project manager, one of the other project managers loved to describe certain people on our administrative staff as "ghetto" and "ghetto fabulous." The people she referred to in this fashion were all african american - I literally NEVER heard her use either of those terms to describe white people as ghetto/ghetto fabulous even when they absolutely would have fit those terms. This PM would make comments about how ridiculous their nails and hair were even when they were perfectly in line with our policy, would comment that they sure wear a lot of purple(?!) and bright colors, and so on.
It got worse when, despite these admin people being perfectly good at their jobs and just as capable as anyone else in these roles, and just as professional (if not moreso because, due to casual discrimination they had to be to be seen as equally good), the PM would refuse to use them for client meetings because "they don't feel professional." That she
I will make an exception to the rule I have of not responding to ACs because you do raise a good point:
No, your daughter absolutely should not be subject to objectification like this and I sincerely hope that she never has to be.
What I am getting at, however, is that there's a kind of threshold that people need to be able to stomach and are kind of expected to stomach in any workplace or on any team.
There is a basic level of hazing where things are, generally, innocuous enough to be brushed off as "stupid and immature and something to let slide as long as it doesn't go past that point" that a well adjusted person can deal with. In my opinion - and everyone will have a different threshold - this falls well under that threshold. I routinely see guys making jokes of a similar level of indecency and immaturity at each other and often far, far more directed at an individual. In this particular case, it's just a generally stupid background noise statement about boobs.
The thing is, I would have no problem with an article that discusses what are called "micro-aggressions" (of which this was just one) and the cumulative effect of a lot of these micro-aggressions on the overall culture. The problem here is that this was one example, that, on its own, is just goofy to single out and get angry over.
I know that these kinds of things don't happen in a vacuum - I know that "bigboobs" is not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of absolutely repugnant misogyny and sexist behaviors that go on. BUT, I also know that the people who are largely responsible for perpetuating that kind of environment are either incredibly hateful assholes or people who really, honestly, don't see how this kind of thing adds up and can lead to a horrifying environment.
For the ones who are hateful assholes, it's extremely unlikely that bothering to point it out will make them change. But for the ones who are just ignorant, it *can* be part of a compelling argument that gets them to change. Where the problem comes in here is that in and of itself, the "bigboobs" thing is not a compelling argument that sexism exists, and it absolutely should be put in a larger context if it gets mentioned.
So, I think that bringing things like this - in aggregate, rather than as individual items - can be a good thing, but complaining about one specific instance that is this generally innocuous outside of any context that it comes off as one of those "first world problems" like "sometimes I only get 4 bars on my iPhone when I'm on the subway" to people who really don't understand the larger problem and how this kind of thing can lead to badness.
$75 a month will get you monthly membership in most maker spaces actually.
Ever you are in a position where dropping $500 on a whim is feasible, in many cases you would get more bang for your buck and do a lot more benefit from supporting your local maker community, and helping people who have good ideas but not enough money themselves to buy tools to make those ideas happen. Everyone wins, and you can spend your money on other impulse stuff:D
So save your pennies and instead head off to a maker space or other shared tool environment and get out of the benefit at a cost lower than $500 bucks.
Hell, even if you can afford it, spend money at a maker space. I can fairly easily afford to buy some expensive kit on only a bit more than a whim, but by and large I don't because I don't feel that personally owning it would be worth the hassle, and I would much rather support a community space with my money because it means a LOT more people benefit from your spending, which means there's a lot more chances for interesting innovations to pop up.
The thing is, this is so far down on the list of "awful sexist shit that goes on in tech circles" that it really doesn't matter. Stupid and immature variable names referring to (presumably female in this case) anatomy are at best a symptom of the larger problem of sexism, but not a problem themselves.
I am a woman, I worked in tech (and now work in research doing tech) and I experienced quite a bit of sexism at a level that most any man, we're hey to hear it said about a woman he cared for, would have lost his fucking mind. THAT is a problem.
But an outcry about stupid variable names just gives people who want to deny sexism pervades tech a convenient way to point at something incredibly stupid and say "they're just over sensitive, they got mad about a dumb variable name" and actually seem persuasive because it is such a trivial and stupid thing to get mad about, relatively.
There is enough real sexism that runs throughout tech circles that bringing up stupid things like this does nothing but give deniers more ammunition to point to when dismissing any charges of sexism as stupid.
I am a woman, I used to work in tech (and now do tech for research academics), and I have experienced a pretty large amount of sexist behavior in my career, from the merely annoying ("you must be the secretary" "no, I'm the team lead") to the work affecting and frustrating ("let me condescendingly explain this incredibly simple thing to you and completely tune out anything you're saying because girls are dumb") to the incredibly fucking horrifying ("you should be raped for doing this that way" "stupid cunt" - yes, both said by people I was collaborating with, and the repercussions to them weren't nearly as severe as they should have been for such a transgression).
A variable named big boobs is so not even on my fucking radar and is so fucking stupid to even mention that I'm actually kind of pissed so anyone even mentioned it. It's dumb and childish to put it in in the first place, but who cares?
Please forgive the self-reply - I hit submit too soon.
The best athletes in the world perform because they want to WIN. They want to beat EVERYONE. This drives them to be ruthless in their training and to not quit when they are tired.
Someone who is under threat of death may work hard to avoid it, they may even do a fair job, but it defies all my experience with human beings to think that they will do anywhere near as well as someone who is pushed to excel by positive reinforcement and the idea that success will be rewarded rather than failure punished.
Think about it: if you live in a country where they will literally kill you if you refuse to juice up, what is your life worth anyway because they will certainly torture and or kill you if you don't win, and they will treat you poorly even if you do. I simply cannot imagine a human being under that kind of pressure being even remotely able to function for any length of time or being of any value to their masters for the investment involved. It makes no sense.
So set some rules about the treatment of competitors, formalize it into a treaty and allow inspections by an impartial body. Any country not abiding by the treaty is forbidden from competing in the games.
Even without that, however, one of the biggest factors in competition is motivation. Torturing your athletes and threatening them is not a particularly useful way to get them to perform better because they won't be competing to win, but simply not to be hurt too badly.
Fights to the death were actually fairly rare in gladiatorial games because gladiators were so expensive to train that it would be wasteful.
That said, we already have things that are essentially bloodsport, but we pretend as if they aren't. What is boxing and MMA other than gladiatorial combat? Granted the purpose isn't to have people die, but it's certainly a risk, and long-term injury and debilitating brain damage is almost certain.
We also already have people doing incredibly unsafe things to their bodies in the form of training or drugs now, it's just that often times they pretend they aren't doing it. I would much rather have it be legal and in the open (and more closely supervised by medical pros) than illegal and hidden in the dark where we can't have any idea of what is going on. Making it legal would mean that people doing this would be more able to get adequate medical attention, would mean that more research could be done in the open about the long term effects, and would make it easier to inform the general public about what kinds of things people are doing (sacrifices they make) to excel.
There is no way we will ever stop people from using performance enhancements. I recognize that and think that, in a world where people will use those enhancements it's much better to have it in he open and supervised than the dark and unsupervised.
By that line of reasoning then, we should definitely not allow people to do anhing that might let them be permanently hurt when they are too young and dumb to know the difference.
No junk food, only the minimum and maximum daily amount of certain low-impact exercise, proper sleep, etc. after all, they don't know any better what they need so we should babysit them.
Orrrr.... We, as a society, can do a better job of educating people about the risks of things they do so that even young and dumb people who imagine they are 18 and bulletproof can make reasonably informed decisions.
I think I would much rather make damn sure that people know exactly how stupid something they want to do is (like warnings and education about smoking) but should be allowed to go right ahead and do those things anyway if that's their choice, as long as it doesn't directly put other people at risk without their consent.
I do feel bad for young people manipulated into harming themselves so others may profit, but I think the solution is better and more well balanced education about the choices to be made rather than limiting the choices.
The point of sport for you might be exercise for fun and health benefits, but clearly it isn't the point for many, many professional athletes, because their behavior in the pursuit of sport is so unhealthy.
I, personally, wouldn't wreck my body I order to be the best at something that is essentially, in my opinion, meaningless, and to collect ana huge amount of cash and fame in the process, but some people see that as a fair trade and for them that is the point.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Now, I do feel bad for people who have wrecked their bodies in the name of sport, but by and large, it's their choice to do so. I work with an ex-football player who, at the ripe old age of 50, has severe arthiritis in knees, hips, elbows and shoulders, has had multiple back surgeries, and who, when it's cold and damp out basically needs Vicodin in order to function through the pain, but he has said he wouldn't have given up playing even if he knew just how bad he would feel now, and that it was worth it. I feel bad for him, but I'm not going to try and protect people from themselves as long as they're capable of making a relatively informed decision.
The thing with parents is that there needs to be parental involvement during the school day, not just at home.
My sister has my nephews enrolled in a school in her area where one of the requirements is that the parent or parents of each child must attend training sessions (at least one nighht a month) and also spend one school day per month in the classroom providing assistance to the teacher per child they have enrolled.
The training covers a number of things, but one biggie is classroom management, and another biggie is dispute resolution between teachers and parents. This winds up vastly reducing issues caused by helicopter parents because they have to work with the teachers, not against them, and their children WILL be removed from the school if the parents cause a problem.
Just the fact of having a second adult in the room - who knows a parent of all the other kids in the room - will cut down hugely on discipline problems. And because the parents get some level of training in ways to assist the teachers, it means that if there is an issue a child has that would normally require a derail of the lesson, it can be handled without throwing things off too much.
It also means that the teachers can't slack off either - they have a parent there to see what's going on, so it's hard to phone it in which means bad teachers get bounced out fairly quickly.
It also means that the parents are much more involved at home, which makes for a be improvement in learning.
Finally, the school itself will have an administrator contact the employers of working parents and arrange for the parents to get the workday off each month to handle things, and in several cases have also gotten the employers to sponsor school events etc.
Basically, this school does everything they can to make educating the children in the community a true community exercise. It does require a bit of extra administrative burden, but it also reduces the administrative burden with reduced discipline issues and increased learning and retention, requiring material to be re-taught less frequently.
It's a charter school, though, but I really do think that this kind of thing could be done efficiently and effectively at any school, especially public ones where parental involvement is spotty. Personally, I think if you want to have your child educated in a public school, you should have to do volunteer work like this with the school rather than just dumping your kid off there.
Google might only do it for people who opt in, but I could easily see Facebook going the other way, given how they behave, or other groups finding ways to use it.
Right now, with google image search/search by image you can do some interesting things - the tech will only get better, and I can quite easily imagine that by the time this kind of thing really takes off it will only be easier to have software on these things that is home grown and doesn't give a whit about privacy options people picked.
I've long been one who feels that privacy, as we usually mean it, is dead, and has been replaced to some extent by anonymity. I live in Chicago and am probably on hundreds of video cameras every day - some for the police, some private - but nobody really cares enough to dig through that footage and figure ut what I'm up to. But eventually, when cameras are even more ubiquitous and are even more tied into networks, and we have even better tools for searching, I can really easily imagine a scenario where it's possible for anyone to put together an idea of where one has been and what one has done without much effort.
The nightmare scenario with these would be enabled in part because when you are in physical proximity to a person you could watch them, get the system to give you whatever information there is available about them (and information it thinks might be theirs, with an estimate of the match) and basically make stalking trivial and safe for the stalker. Or you could have a system to search through the sea of imagery out there looking for someone who doesn't want to be found by you (say a domestic abuse survivor being sought by her abuser...)
I think there will be solutions to problems, but it would require a cultural shift to valuing privacy more and to putting more protectins in place for citizens rather than the current system we seem to have where companies are basically allowed to own the digital you in exchange for your using their services. It will be interesting times for sure.
Just call Sprint and ask for customer retention and tell them you want a free airrave.
I have Sprint, get zero reception in my home, and told them to fix it. They next-day sent me an airrave and activated it for free, with no charge for the service, and even gave me a $50 credit for my inconvenience.
"We do not want you to film our business, employees, or customers. Since you say you cannot stop, you have to leave now or we will have the police escort you out."
There was absolutely no need to physically touch him to do this. I cannot imagine Mann would refuse to leave if they had made those objections known.
I don't care what the prior history is unless it includes Mann literally making threats of physical violence against them if they didn't serve him his Royale avec frommage.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
Change the basis of our economy. It's been outdated for decades.
40 years ago my mother made a living wage at her job. Today someone doing the same job, and doing it dozens of times more productively thanks to technology, barely scrapes by.
A radical change needs to happen or yes, there will be absolute chaos.
It still seems to have sold pretty well, but I personally saw nothing compelling about just the minor enhancement of a retina display. Then again, my eyes aren't fabulous, and while I can tell the difference I just don't care but some people do. I also use my 2 in a case that ads weight and thickness since I need to have a somewhat rugged tablet as I use it while walking around on site visits.
But, i agree wi your overall idea, and I do think that they will have to come up with truly compelling stuff for their next generation of products rather than just another minor improvement like the 3 was over the 2 and like the 4gs was over the 4 if they want to stay on top.
I was trying to think of what it would take for me to get a new iPad since I'm happy with my 2, and all I could think of was more power/speed/battery life AND at the minimum a full color, fully responsive e-ink display that is just as good at touch as the current display and just as fast to respond, but doesn't need backlight. Or maybe a completely flexible/roll-up pad that had a layer that could make bumps etc. But failing either of those developments I can't really think of anything that would be must have.
Can you be a bit more specific about the stupid moves they started doing after Jobs? They were already suing everyone when Jobs was there, so that doesn't count.
More than that, Jobs wasn't a designer, wasn't a serious programmer, wasn't a serious engineer, wasn't any of the things that went into making products that were as successful as Apple's have been. The guy was deeply involved at every level, yes, but to say the company was 100% Jobs is just stupid and it completely dismisses the accomplishments of some extremely talented people.
What indication do you have that Cook is the way you say? The "environmental" move is only going to hurt them with institutional buyers who have vendor requirements, but the vast majority of Apple's revenue comes from individuals, and given that when Apple was routinely being accused of engaging in basically slavery in order to make products in China they still sold record numbers of everything, it's pretty clear to me that individual consumers aren't going to stop just because Apple might not bother with certain certifications.
I'm open to real examples, but just your saying "they suck now" isn't sufficient support to make that argument.
To me, the beginning of the end (or of the end of this phase of Apple) would be if they went back to the old ways of less than attractive design, way too many different models with confusing and dumb options.
Slashdot Mirror
In nations where women have good access to education and birth control and where basic infrastructure is sound, the birth rate is lower than the replacement rate.
The best way to curb population growth is to improve the lives of women and to improve overall public infrastructure.
Laws like Chinas one child law lead to abhorrent acts and an unstable situation with a radically skewed demographic that will most certainly end in tragedy. Much, much better to improve education and access to birth control and improve public health and the issue will resolve itself without trampling freedoms.
It wasn't difficult, just inconvenient.
Quests individually weren't difficult - just spread all to hell and gone over the world with no rational organization, so you spent a lot of time running hither and yon rather than doing anything useful.
Dungeons weren't difficult - just inconvenient as hell to get people to do with you and took forever and a day to get people to the dungeon.
Raids weren't (usually) difficult - the mechanics were pretty simple assuming you had an appropriate class composition and the people playing understood that they can't just willy-nilly spam debuffs on the target without overwriting things.
Raid strategies weren't as widely known because there weren't as many tools for publicizing them and so on.
Contrast that with today:
- Quests are much more intelligently laid out, and questing is more about telling stories than it is about "challenge". Getting to the level cap via questing is trivial, but that's good because the level cap keeps going up.
- Dungeons have 2 modes, one which is normal and one which is a more challenging (mechanically and numerically) heroic mode. Some of the Cataclysm dungeons had mechanics that made them extremely tricky for PUGs to handle, and even now some of the heroics are tricky due to other mechanics.
- Raids have multiple modes. LFR mode is trivial to do (except when the people in your PUG intentionally or unintentionally screw things up), Normal mode can be a bit of a challenge but nothing that a decent guild can't handle. Heroic is challenging as hell.
Raid strategies are trivial to find and learn because we have great out of game tools for them - videos of how to tank a fight, the different phases, etc.
They gave us something for everyone, difficulty wise, now. But anyone who thinks WoW was more difficult (as opposed to inconvenient) in the past is definitely not right.
Maybe in fantasy land that scenario would happen.
In reality, the gunman would probably just open up on the herd of people waiting to go through the screening process.
Now, would you like to know how to actually prevent these kinds of attacks?
Massively increase funding for mental health services across the country. Not only would that help prevent some crazy motherfuckers from going on a rampage, but it would do some good for other people who need it.
Call me crazy, but I personally think doing something to prevent the problem in the first place is *probably* a better and more useful idea than turning this country into even more of a police state by setting up groping and irradiation stations all over the country so that the poorly trained schlubs manning said stations can be super-duper successful at not stopping a goddamn thing.
Second time I'm violating my rule about not bothering with ACs.
At this particular school, the school administration contacts the employer to see if the day can be given as a form of donation to the school so as to not eat up the employees vacation time. By and large, I am lead to believe, it's successful - at least in my sister's case her employer was overjoyed to be able to do this and then turn around and announce that they were offering 1 paid day a month off so that their employees could help at schools. She's said that a couple of her co-workers with kids at different schools have also taken advantage of it.
What's also funny is that the population of this particular school is actually mostly poorer - the kinds of kids who can "boost the numbers" and their associated parents usually just go to private schools rather than charter ones. This school does this specifically because one of the biggest problems that poorer students have is a lack of parental involvement in and investment in education.
Most of the kids there are african american and North Carolina poor (I won't get more specific about the location because I don't feel like identifying the school on a forum like slashdot where people tend to get personally vindictive).
And, it really sucks that you aren't willing to spend a vacation day helping out at your kids school. Personally, even if the days weren't being given as a benefit by the employers, I would still count 8 days a year spent on helping my children improve their school and their education to be a hell of a lot better than some vacation time. Parenting means sacrifices for your kids to help them get ahead in life - I feel bad for your kids that you don't seem to be interested in doing that.
It really isn't so much that only white, christian, able body, hetero males are fair game, but rather that by and large, white, christian, able body, hetero males don't really run into constant problems because of their membership in those classes. Exceptions exist, but by and large, if you want to face a minimum of persecution in the US, being a white, christian, able body, hetero male is the way to go. (And I will pre-emptively say that any mens rights activist stuff will be ignored).
Generally speaking, people in the majority class are treated by other members of that majority class as individuals. By this I mean that if two white dudes are talking to each other about something (call them Bill and Bob) they will tend to see the other person as simply representing their own individual behaviors and opinions, as opposed to the opinions and behaviors of all white dudes. This is because they are in the same classes, and see them selves as individuals, and thus don't pay attention to those 2 factors too much. But, when they are interacting with people from other classes, often people will assume that person represents ALL members of that class.
This kind of thing happens also among minority classes - I don't, for example, think of another woman as representing all women since I see myself as an individual and can see her as an individual based on that class. But when I deal with guys, I will say that often times I have to catch myself from thinking that all guys are basically the same - it's unfair for me to do it, so I try like hell to overcome the impulse, and am usually successful.
There's an XKCD about it - one is two dudes at a chalkboard and one makes a math error and is told "you're bad at math" while the other panel is a man and a woman at a chalkboard and the woman makes a math error and is told "women are bad at math." It's not quite that simple, but that's a fair explanation.
Now, the reason it becomes a problem for minority classes to be made fun of and is seen as less of a problem for majority classes to be made fun of it because people in the majority classes, by and large, tend to not see another white, christian, able-bodied, hetero dude and say "Oh, man, I had a bad experience with a white, christian, able-bodied dude - they're all trouble!" and discriminate. But they *are* somewhat more prone, in general, to do that kind of discrimination based on class/category differences. And, because they are in the majority (either power or population wise), they can get away with it.
Personally, i do think that there is a minimum level of piss taking that a person has to be able to deal with in any kind of team. People do make jokes, people tease, people are not always perfectly professional machines. A well adjusted person, should be able to, in the absence of other complicating factors, take a joke of the same level as "big boobs" and blow it off as immature. It's just a lot fucking harder to blow it off when you hear those kinds of things constantly and they have actually caused you personal problems as a result.
At one place I worked as a project manager, one of the other project managers loved to describe certain people on our administrative staff as "ghetto" and "ghetto fabulous." The people she referred to in this fashion were all african american - I literally NEVER heard her use either of those terms to describe white people as ghetto/ghetto fabulous even when they absolutely would have fit those terms. This PM would make comments about how ridiculous their nails and hair were even when they were perfectly in line with our policy, would comment that they sure wear a lot of purple(?!) and bright colors, and so on.
It got worse when, despite these admin people being perfectly good at their jobs and just as capable as anyone else in these roles, and just as professional (if not moreso because, due to casual discrimination they had to be to be seen as equally good), the PM would refuse to use them for client meetings because "they don't feel professional." That she
I will make an exception to the rule I have of not responding to ACs because you do raise a good point:
No, your daughter absolutely should not be subject to objectification like this and I sincerely hope that she never has to be.
What I am getting at, however, is that there's a kind of threshold that people need to be able to stomach and are kind of expected to stomach in any workplace or on any team.
There is a basic level of hazing where things are, generally, innocuous enough to be brushed off as "stupid and immature and something to let slide as long as it doesn't go past that point" that a well adjusted person can deal with. In my opinion - and everyone will have a different threshold - this falls well under that threshold. I routinely see guys making jokes of a similar level of indecency and immaturity at each other and often far, far more directed at an individual. In this particular case, it's just a generally stupid background noise statement about boobs.
The thing is, I would have no problem with an article that discusses what are called "micro-aggressions" (of which this was just one) and the cumulative effect of a lot of these micro-aggressions on the overall culture. The problem here is that this was one example, that, on its own, is just goofy to single out and get angry over.
I know that these kinds of things don't happen in a vacuum - I know that "bigboobs" is not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of absolutely repugnant misogyny and sexist behaviors that go on. BUT, I also know that the people who are largely responsible for perpetuating that kind of environment are either incredibly hateful assholes or people who really, honestly, don't see how this kind of thing adds up and can lead to a horrifying environment.
For the ones who are hateful assholes, it's extremely unlikely that bothering to point it out will make them change. But for the ones who are just ignorant, it *can* be part of a compelling argument that gets them to change. Where the problem comes in here is that in and of itself, the "bigboobs" thing is not a compelling argument that sexism exists, and it absolutely should be put in a larger context if it gets mentioned.
So, I think that bringing things like this - in aggregate, rather than as individual items - can be a good thing, but complaining about one specific instance that is this generally innocuous outside of any context that it comes off as one of those "first world problems" like "sometimes I only get 4 bars on my iPhone when I'm on the subway" to people who really don't understand the larger problem and how this kind of thing can lead to badness.
$75 a month will get you monthly membership in most maker spaces actually.
Ever you are in a position where dropping $500 on a whim is feasible, in many cases you would get more bang for your buck and do a lot more benefit from supporting your local maker community, and helping people who have good ideas but not enough money themselves to buy tools to make those ideas happen. Everyone wins, and you can spend your money on other impulse stuff :D
So save your pennies and instead head off to a maker space or other shared tool environment and get out of the benefit at a cost lower than $500 bucks.
Hell, even if you can afford it, spend money at a maker space. I can fairly easily afford to buy some expensive kit on only a bit more than a whim, but by and large I don't because I don't feel that personally owning it would be worth the hassle, and I would much rather support a community space with my money because it means a LOT more people benefit from your spending, which means there's a lot more chances for interesting innovations to pop up.
The thing is, this is so far down on the list of "awful sexist shit that goes on in tech circles" that it really doesn't matter. Stupid and immature variable names referring to (presumably female in this case) anatomy are at best a symptom of the larger problem of sexism, but not a problem themselves.
I am a woman, I worked in tech (and now work in research doing tech) and I experienced quite a bit of sexism at a level that most any man, we're hey to hear it said about a woman he cared for, would have lost his fucking mind. THAT is a problem.
But an outcry about stupid variable names just gives people who want to deny sexism pervades tech a convenient way to point at something incredibly stupid and say "they're just over sensitive, they got mad about a dumb variable name" and actually seem persuasive because it is such a trivial and stupid thing to get mad about, relatively.
There is enough real sexism that runs throughout tech circles that bringing up stupid things like this does nothing but give deniers more ammunition to point to when dismissing any charges of sexism as stupid.
I am a woman, I used to work in tech (and now do tech for research academics), and I have experienced a pretty large amount of sexist behavior in my career, from the merely annoying ("you must be the secretary" "no, I'm the team lead") to the work affecting and frustrating ("let me condescendingly explain this incredibly simple thing to you and completely tune out anything you're saying because girls are dumb") to the incredibly fucking horrifying ("you should be raped for doing this that way" "stupid cunt" - yes, both said by people I was collaborating with, and the repercussions to them weren't nearly as severe as they should have been for such a transgression).
A variable named big boobs is so not even on my fucking radar and is so fucking stupid to even mention that I'm actually kind of pissed so anyone even mentioned it. It's dumb and childish to put it in in the first place, but who cares?
Please forgive the self-reply - I hit submit too soon.
The best athletes in the world perform because they want to WIN. They want to beat EVERYONE. This drives them to be ruthless in their training and to not quit when they are tired.
Someone who is under threat of death may work hard to avoid it, they may even do a fair job, but it defies all my experience with human beings to think that they will do anywhere near as well as someone who is pushed to excel by positive reinforcement and the idea that success will be rewarded rather than failure punished.
Think about it: if you live in a country where they will literally kill you if you refuse to juice up, what is your life worth anyway because they will certainly torture and or kill you if you don't win, and they will treat you poorly even if you do. I simply cannot imagine a human being under that kind of pressure being even remotely able to function for any length of time or being of any value to their masters for the investment involved. It makes no sense.
So set some rules about the treatment of competitors, formalize it into a treaty and allow inspections by an impartial body. Any country not abiding by the treaty is forbidden from competing in the games.
Even without that, however, one of the biggest factors in competition is motivation. Torturing your athletes and threatening them is not a particularly useful way to get them to perform better because they won't be competing to win, but simply not to be hurt too badly.
Fights to the death were actually fairly rare in gladiatorial games because gladiators were so expensive to train that it would be wasteful.
That said, we already have things that are essentially bloodsport, but we pretend as if they aren't. What is boxing and MMA other than gladiatorial combat? Granted the purpose isn't to have people die, but it's certainly a risk, and long-term injury and debilitating brain damage is almost certain.
We also already have people doing incredibly unsafe things to their bodies in the form of training or drugs now, it's just that often times they pretend they aren't doing it. I would much rather have it be legal and in the open (and more closely supervised by medical pros) than illegal and hidden in the dark where we can't have any idea of what is going on. Making it legal would mean that people doing this would be more able to get adequate medical attention, would mean that more research could be done in the open about the long term effects, and would make it easier to inform the general public about what kinds of things people are doing (sacrifices they make) to excel.
There is no way we will ever stop people from using performance enhancements. I recognize that and think that, in a world where people will use those enhancements it's much better to have it in he open and supervised than the dark and unsupervised.
By that line of reasoning then, we should definitely not allow people to do anhing that might let them be permanently hurt when they are too young and dumb to know the difference.
No junk food, only the minimum and maximum daily amount of certain low-impact exercise, proper sleep, etc. after all, they don't know any better what they need so we should babysit them.
Orrrr.... We, as a society, can do a better job of educating people about the risks of things they do so that even young and dumb people who imagine they are 18 and bulletproof can make reasonably informed decisions.
I think I would much rather make damn sure that people know exactly how stupid something they want to do is (like warnings and education about smoking) but should be allowed to go right ahead and do those things anyway if that's their choice, as long as it doesn't directly put other people at risk without their consent.
I do feel bad for young people manipulated into harming themselves so others may profit, but I think the solution is better and more well balanced education about the choices to be made rather than limiting the choices.
The point of sport for you might be exercise for fun and health benefits, but clearly it isn't the point for many, many professional athletes, because their behavior in the pursuit of sport is so unhealthy.
I, personally, wouldn't wreck my body I order to be the best at something that is essentially, in my opinion, meaningless, and to collect ana huge amount of cash and fame in the process, but some people see that as a fair trade and for them that is the point.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Now, I do feel bad for people who have wrecked their bodies in the name of sport, but by and large, it's their choice to do so. I work with an ex-football player who, at the ripe old age of 50, has severe arthiritis in knees, hips, elbows and shoulders, has had multiple back surgeries, and who, when it's cold and damp out basically needs Vicodin in order to function through the pain, but he has said he wouldn't have given up playing even if he knew just how bad he would feel now, and that it was worth it. I feel bad for him, but I'm not going to try and protect people from themselves as long as they're capable of making a relatively informed decision.
The thing with parents is that there needs to be parental involvement during the school day, not just at home.
My sister has my nephews enrolled in a school in her area where one of the requirements is that the parent or parents of each child must attend training sessions (at least one nighht a month) and also spend one school day per month in the classroom providing assistance to the teacher per child they have enrolled.
The training covers a number of things, but one biggie is classroom management, and another biggie is dispute resolution between teachers and parents. This winds up vastly reducing issues caused by helicopter parents because they have to work with the teachers, not against them, and their children WILL be removed from the school if the parents cause a problem.
Just the fact of having a second adult in the room - who knows a parent of all the other kids in the room - will cut down hugely on discipline problems. And because the parents get some level of training in ways to assist the teachers, it means that if there is an issue a child has that would normally require a derail of the lesson, it can be handled without throwing things off too much.
It also means that the teachers can't slack off either - they have a parent there to see what's going on, so it's hard to phone it in which means bad teachers get bounced out fairly quickly.
It also means that the parents are much more involved at home, which makes for a be improvement in learning.
Finally, the school itself will have an administrator contact the employers of working parents and arrange for the parents to get the workday off each month to handle things, and in several cases have also gotten the employers to sponsor school events etc.
Basically, this school does everything they can to make educating the children in the community a true community exercise. It does require a bit of extra administrative burden, but it also reduces the administrative burden with reduced discipline issues and increased learning and retention, requiring material to be re-taught less frequently.
It's a charter school, though, but I really do think that this kind of thing could be done efficiently and effectively at any school, especially public ones where parental involvement is spotty. Personally, I think if you want to have your child educated in a public school, you should have to do volunteer work like this with the school rather than just dumping your kid off there.
Google might only do it for people who opt in, but I could easily see Facebook going the other way, given how they behave, or other groups finding ways to use it.
Right now, with google image search/search by image you can do some interesting things - the tech will only get better, and I can quite easily imagine that by the time this kind of thing really takes off it will only be easier to have software on these things that is home grown and doesn't give a whit about privacy options people picked.
I've long been one who feels that privacy, as we usually mean it, is dead, and has been replaced to some extent by anonymity. I live in Chicago and am probably on hundreds of video cameras every day - some for the police, some private - but nobody really cares enough to dig through that footage and figure ut what I'm up to. But eventually, when cameras are even more ubiquitous and are even more tied into networks, and we have even better tools for searching, I can really easily imagine a scenario where it's possible for anyone to put together an idea of where one has been and what one has done without much effort.
The nightmare scenario with these would be enabled in part because when you are in physical proximity to a person you could watch them, get the system to give you whatever information there is available about them (and information it thinks might be theirs, with an estimate of the match) and basically make stalking trivial and safe for the stalker. Or you could have a system to search through the sea of imagery out there looking for someone who doesn't want to be found by you (say a domestic abuse survivor being sought by her abuser...)
I think there will be solutions to problems, but it would require a cultural shift to valuing privacy more and to putting more protectins in place for citizens rather than the current system we seem to have where companies are basically allowed to own the digital you in exchange for your using their services. It will be interesting times for sure.
Just call Sprint and ask for customer retention and tell them you want a free airrave.
I have Sprint, get zero reception in my home, and told them to fix it. They next-day sent me an airrave and activated it for free, with no charge for the service, and even gave me a $50 credit for my inconvenience.
So what?
"We do not want you to film our business, employees, or customers. Since you say you cannot stop, you have to leave now or we will have the police escort you out."
There was absolutely no need to physically touch him to do this. I cannot imagine Mann would refuse to leave if they had made those objections known.
I don't care what the prior history is unless it includes Mann literally making threats of physical violence against them if they didn't serve him his Royale avec frommage.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
For someone who was going off about Apple cultists up thread you sure seem incredibly obsessed with bad mouthing them at any chance.
It's just as cult like to reflexively bash as it is to reflectively praise. Give it a rest.
Change the basis of our economy. It's been outdated for decades.
40 years ago my mother made a living wage at her job. Today someone doing the same job, and doing it dozens of times more productively thanks to technology, barely scrapes by.
A radical change needs to happen or yes, there will be absolute chaos.
It still seems to have sold pretty well, but I personally saw nothing compelling about just the minor enhancement of a retina display. Then again, my eyes aren't fabulous, and while I can tell the difference I just don't care but some people do. I also use my 2 in a case that ads weight and thickness since I need to have a somewhat rugged tablet as I use it while walking around on site visits.
But, i agree wi your overall idea, and I do think that they will have to come up with truly compelling stuff for their next generation of products rather than just another minor improvement like the 3 was over the 2 and like the 4gs was over the 4 if they want to stay on top.
I was trying to think of what it would take for me to get a new iPad since I'm happy with my 2, and all I could think of was more power/speed/battery life AND at the minimum a full color, fully responsive e-ink display that is just as good at touch as the current display and just as fast to respond, but doesn't need backlight. Or maybe a completely flexible/roll-up pad that had a layer that could make bumps etc. But failing either of those developments I can't really think of anything that would be must have.
Can you be a bit more specific about the stupid moves they started doing after Jobs? They were already suing everyone when Jobs was there, so that doesn't count.
More than that, Jobs wasn't a designer, wasn't a serious programmer, wasn't a serious engineer, wasn't any of the things that went into making products that were as successful as Apple's have been. The guy was deeply involved at every level, yes, but to say the company was 100% Jobs is just stupid and it completely dismisses the accomplishments of some extremely talented people.
What indication do you have that Cook is the way you say? The "environmental" move is only going to hurt them with institutional buyers who have vendor requirements, but the vast majority of Apple's revenue comes from individuals, and given that when Apple was routinely being accused of engaging in basically slavery in order to make products in China they still sold record numbers of everything, it's pretty clear to me that individual consumers aren't going to stop just because Apple might not bother with certain certifications.
I'm open to real examples, but just your saying "they suck now" isn't sufficient support to make that argument.
To me, the beginning of the end (or of the end of this phase of Apple) would be if they went back to the old ways of less than attractive design, way too many different models with confusing and dumb options.