Demonstrating my point pretty well, thank you. You're so off kilter by this idea that you're conflating two very different scenarios - the criminal justice system is rather different than national defense in a number of ways, but your emotionality about the subject is preventing you from making a reasoned argument, and you're flailing around trying to make something - anything - stick.
Which is exactly the opposite of what any person should want from a criminal justice system. We shouldn't want people desperate to extract revenge, but rather people who want to minimize the overall harm done to society.
If I am ever charged with a crime, I want people who aren't going to let some flowery description of what people THINK I might have done causing them to undervalue evidence that is exculpatory. Wouldn't you want the same? Let's say you were accused of raping and murdering a child - would you really want the public's demand for revenge, the jury's disgust with the crime, the prosecutor's inflammatory rhetoric to sway the jury, or would you rather the evidence be evaluated instead, emotions put to the side?
Further, were I actually convicted of a crime, I would want people to decide on what to do with me to be people who are able to resist the urge to merely punish me, but rather seek to rehabilitate me or, if they believe it isn't possible, to be able to recognize that removing me from society so that I can't hurt others while still preserving the ability to release me if I am later found to have been innocent is a vastly better solution than simply killing me, and shrugging it off if I am later found innocent. I can't imagine that you would want people who want to hurt you just because they're enraged at what you did deciding on your punishment, but maybe I'm wrong.
And finally, more harm than good is done by our system as it stands now. This is proven by the fact that other nations with more civilized criminal justice systems have lower crime rates, lower recidivism rates, and overall better outcomes when it comes to people who have interacted with their criminal justice system than we do. If revenge is the best way to handle this, then why do countries like Norway have better outcomes, when everything about their system repudiates the idea of punishment and instead focuses on rehabilitation and the greater public good? If you aren't aware of the evidence I suggest you educate yourself; if you are aware of the evidence then again, you're action on emotion, not reason, and that is not a good thing when talking about a criminal justice system.
Sneer all you like at the idea of doctors and therapists being involved, but the facts - and they are facts - are that approaching criminal justice with the idea of rehabilitation and repair works far, far better than approaching it with the idea of extracting revenge.
Have you actually spent even a second thinking about what you're arguing?
Simple math: Let's take your number - 100k per year per death row inmate. Let's DOUBLE it, to make it even more expensive. 200k per inmate per year. MY GOD, HOW EXPENSIVE!
There are 3,000 people (actually a bit less) on death row in the US, but let's DOUBLE that number, just to make your argument even more powerful. 6,000 people on death row at $200,000 per year in expenses - gosh, that's going to break the bank!
Except it won't. It comes out to 1.2 billion dollars a year to house people on death row. Let's DOUBLE that to 2.4 billion dollars a year just on housing these people.
There are 300 million americans (roughly) but not all of them pay taxes. Mittens got in trouble during the election for saying that 47% don't ever pay taxes, but let's be even more ridiculous - I'm going to say that only 10% of Americans pay income tax. That's 30 million tax payers.
So, 2.4 billion dollars, split by 30 million people... that comes out to.... $80 dollars per year per individual tax payer. Remember, I doubled your estimate of expenses. I doubled the number of people on death row. I doubled the resulting multiplication, and then I took a ridiculously small tax base figure to get to that WHOPPING $80 per year.
What you're saying to me is that $80 per year in your pocket (and it would actually be far, far less) is worth it to you to vastly increase the odds that innocent people will be executed. You're saying to me that you having $80 a year (or about 22 cents a day) is more important than trying to keep the state from murdering innocents or at least reduce the chances of that happening. You're telling me that 22 cents a day (actually a lot less) is more important to you than sparing the families of those wrongly convicted and executed from the anguish of the state run amok.
There's a monster here, but I'm pretty sure it's you.
Just remember that in many cases where someone has been wrongfully convicted, the jurors felt the same as you did about the certainty of the person's guilt based on the evidence they were shown.
Every time someone says they're absolutely certain of the guilt of a person in a given case, especially to the point where they would be willing to execute (not that you were) the person if convicted, they would do well to remember that fact.
They're very emotional about this kind of thing, and as a result they are the absolute worst kind of people to have any kind of say into how people who commit (or, at least, are convicted of committing) crimes are treated.
I don't think they're necessarily bloodthirsty, just incapable of resisting emotionality or using reason when it comes to this stuff. Many - perhaps even most - people are like that. Which is why there's a whole criminal justice system to begin with, as a way to at least try to reduce the impact of people who are not capable of regulating their baser impulses.
The criminal justice system we have is pretty shit-tacular in that it does not work (compared to other nations' systems) when it comes to reducing crime, reducing recidivism, protecting society, rehabilitating prisoners or being cost effective. But at least it's better than vigilante mobs formed by the very people who are here screaming for blood and relishing the suffering of those they want to see executed.
People certainly thought those guys deserved the "ultimate" penalty for what they did.
Further, appeals to emotion such as yours above are exactly why we shouldn't have a death penalty. I don't care what someone did, at the very worst we should lock them away, not kill them.
Why don't we ever hear about the lack of rich people who get to sleep under bridges? Why doesn't anyone try to spread polio around 1st world countries so we don't miss out on polio? Like you, I am completely fucking confused by really obvious things!
And gosh, golly gee willikers, I dunno why people by and large aren't trying to get people into low(ish) wage, low prestige jobs that provide zero upward mobility for a traditionally marginalized and disempowered group, vs. getting said traditionally marginalized group into high wage, high(ish) prestige jobs that are one of the key ways people of this generation can attain social mobility and financial security.
It sure is puzzling! Gosh, I hope the fine minds of Slashdot's user base can figure it out!
This article isn't for actual software engineers, but "idea guys" who think making games is easy and don't actually understand what goes into real game design.
I know a ton of people like that - they have an idea for some awesome next level stuff, but it's only a very vague idea with a few neat things in there, without any of the actual work that is needed to turn it into a game design, let alone a spec, let alone a game. Seriously, everyone I know who is a gamer and not an engineer is constantly babbling about how games should do X or Y or Z or whatever, but when you ask them questions about how any of it would actually work, they wave their hands and say it isn't important because the IDEA that they took a whole 30 seconds coming up with and articulating is somehow the hard part.
The idea is the easy part - I can toss out hundreds of ideas for games that would be amazing. Turning that amazing idea into anything resembling a useful thing is another kettle of fish entirely.
I do development and I work a standing desk (and for a couple of years did a walking desk when I worked at home). I'm actually vastly more comfortable not just at work now but in the rest of my life since switching:
- issues I had with sciatica went away - I am in better shape/have more endurance & energy - I sleep better - I used to feel like shit if I went on a 10 hour coding binge (sluggish and exhausted) but now I just feel pretty much normal
It's only uncomfortable at first, but once you figure out good shoes to wear, good anti-fatigue mats to use and good posture it's much MUCH more comfortable (at least in my experience) and makes your non-work life better as well.
At my office we have 5 people in our engineering team (some IT, some developers) who use standing desks and a few more who are considering making the switch. The oldest stander is me (42) so it's not just something 20-somethings can do.
I completely understand your points, but let me offer a few things:
Shit like this happens to people every single day. Often vastly worse; I volunteered with an organization that sought clemency for people who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned (and in the US that means being subjected to some truly horrific shit). Yet, by and large, despite being completely fucked over by the system and having had years - sometimes decades - of their lives taken away, despite being tortured by beatings, rapes, solitary confinement, these people didn't lose their shit and go on a killing spree. They kept their shit together. My point here is that people get fucked over and there are ways of dealing with it, and sometimes things get handled and sometimes they don't, and you need to move along and get past it.
But, as you say, that takes perspective. Which gets me to my next point: The kid himself may not have perspective, but his parents sure as hell should. Or some other adult. Someone should have sat him down and explained that he was right, the people in power were assholes, and that while he probably is plenty pissed about how it all went down, in the grand scheme of things it's just a run in with assholes, and he's better than that. It is the job of parents not just to teach kids how to not be assholes, but how to deal with the fact that assholes exist and they will try to fuck up your life.
I definitely agree that dealing with bullying needs to be handled better not just because it's the right thing, but because it's an immediate safety issue and letting it keep going perpetuates a culture that accepts it. The problem is that school administrators are short sighted in this country (actually, pretty much everyone involved in public education in this country is extremely short sighted), and they want to maintain control with a minimum amount of hassle.
When I switched from working in an office to working from home for a couple of years, I went to a standing desk and then to a treadmill/walking desk.
Took me about 3 days to get used to standing all the time - as in, able to do it without feeling too much pain in my feet at the end of the day.
The walking desk took about a week to get used to, at first I could only read emails etc. while walking, but after I got used to things I was able to do 4MPH indefinitely while doing basic stuff, and about 2.5MPH while doing stuff that required a bit more precision with a mouse etc. Put it at a 5% incline and it's not a bad workout. My best day was 20 miles.
I wound up losing some weight - 10 lbs. - which wasn't strictly necessary but wasn't a bad thing. My productivity took a hit at the beginning but got back to normal after the first couple of weeks. My energy level went up dramatically after the first month and my general sense of well-being was much improved. Even better, issues I was having with sciatica went away and I would sleep much better.
At my current job I am at a standing desk all day and while it's not nearly as active as my walking desk, it's still working for me.
Some research suggests that it isn't that much better for you (or at all better for you) than a sitting desk, but my personal experience defies that; I'd recommend trying it for a month - commit to it - and see how it works for you.
Is anyone else creeped out by how hopeful some of the posters here seem to be about the possibility of the kid "going Columbine"?
I get it that many slashdotters feel they were abused by bullies when they were kids, but the fact is pretty much every kid ever has been picked on (and has bullied another kid) at some time in their childhood. Yeah, it sucks, and yeah, the authorities here should absolutely be taken out of positions where they can commit future injustices like this, but in no way, shape or form should revenge fantasies like "going Columbine" be casually thrown about as if yeah, that's something reasonable.
Yeah, it sucks that some of you were horribly treated when you were young, but get the fuck over it already. If you still get overwraught to the point where you fantasize about killing people at shit that happened 10 years ago on a playground, you have problems and you need to address them.
No, thinking otherwise is being informed. You really should educate yourself on the issue, if you're remotely intellectually honest.
Go down to any poverty law center and ask for some information on bias in police interactions, on bias in charging, bail and sentencing.
You're being literally prejudiced in your beliefs, I'm saying you should get some facts and make an assessment there. If you think being armed with facts is "gullible and stupid" then you're not capable of having a reasoned discussion.
Women make 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs despite being about 50% of the workforce.
Women make up 20% of the Senate, despite being about 50% of the population. Women make up 18.9% of the House of Representatives despite being about 50% of the population.
And don't get me started on race! Black men are vastly more likely to have an interaction with police, be arrested, held on higher bail, convicted more frequently and given longer sentences than white men when all other factors (socioeconomic and past criminal record) are accounted for. Estimates are that blacks make up a little over 13% of the US population but just over 40% of the prison population, and have sentences averaging more than 20% longer. Crimes that were predominantly seen as a "black" thing - like possession of crack cocaine - were given disproportionately higher sentences than possession of regular cocaine. Even for drugs that are in common use across races, black users of marijuana are vastly more likely to do jail time than white users of marijuana.
And that's just scratching the surface and going after easily obtainable numbers that took me 30 seconds to Google. There's inequality all over the place, and I'm really glad you agree with me that the US's claims of equality are horseshit. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards fixing it.
Also, you're more than welcome to start up a United Caucasian College Fund with all the exact same rights and protections the United Negro College Fund has as long as you follow all the exact same rules and regulations required by law. You'll probably have a lot of people rolling their eyes and calling you a doofus for doing it, but hey, knock yourself out.
Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.
There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.
*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.
Most people leveling do it alone or maybe in a small group. No need to think about 90% of the abilities a class has while doing that because the leveling content needs to be tuned to people who are novices. Most people don't want - despite playing an MMO - to be forced to play with other people in a group at all times in order to level, so you can't touch this leveling content.
Most people leveling don't even set foot in a dungeon in WoW. A dungeon being fundamentally different than world questing, and yet still not requiring a player to be very good with their class or understand their class.
A tiny percentage of players set foot in a raid EVER, let alone while leveling - even with new things like a very content-tourist mode like the Looking for Raid feature that was added. Raid mechanics are fundamentally different than dungeons or world questing, so really, require you to play your class in a very different way than you would have experienced while leveling; abilities that seem pointless while leveling suddenly make sense to use, and patterns that made sense while leveling suddenly become counter to survival.
What IS true is that, if you want to raid you need to learn how to play your class. But, I don't think 20-100 hours of doing things that bear no real relation to how you will end up playing your class is the way to do it. Personally, I think the idea of having proving grounds (which they kind of do now) wherein the player is hand held by NPCs and given tons of feedback on how to play their specific class, what abilities to use and why, in game, would be the way to go.
"Hey, new paladin person in a tank role - I'm going to make that big guy over there very, very angry in a moment, and he can kill me but he won't hurt you as much, so I want you to press that flashing button on your screen - it's called a taunt - when he starts chasing me; it'll make him go after you, not me!" If you fail? "It's okay, fortunately we have people around who can make everything better when I get beaten to a pulp... Let's try this again..."
"Hey, priest type person in a healer role - I'm about to fight several small creatures that individually don't do much to me but hurt me slowly over time. Cast that spell that's flashing on me once every 10 seconds or so in order to throw a spell on me that will heal me up slowly over time."
"Hey, shooty damage type person, I'm going to beat up 4 things, but I want you to focus on hurting ONLY the one that is my primary target." "Hey, so these guys aren't stupid, they're going to try to hurt you - see that purple stuff on the floor over there? If it appears under you during the fight, MOVE AWAY FROM IT!"
Etc. and so on. Have people go through that, have it be so that a veteran player who is familiar with game mechanics could complete all the tasks in under an hour, but where a newbie player who knows nothing might wind up taking 10 hours or so to do the quests well enough, and you're good.
The problem WoW has - and most MMO's have - is that the designers assumed that other players would give solid feedback to people on their teams in dungeons and so on. Unfortunately, most people are assholes and not willing to take any time with newbies to straighten them out. Since the playerbase by and large won't help other people learn, there needs to be an in game process for it.
tl;dr: There needs to be a way to teach people how to play their class, but the current way of doing it (leveling) doesn't teach them anything that is actually relevant.
I agree with your idea that we're looking at the wrong populations, and actually would suggest that "e-sport" people aren't "gamers" but rather "people who play obsessively".
Look at the population of people who play a single game obsessively, then look at the population of people who play said game at the competitive level, and I'm sure any demographic gaps would disappear almost completely.
I don't know, but it seems important enough to some people to make the distinction, and it's reasonably easy to accommodate them if they ask, so why not just roll with it?
If you honestly think the people who want to rob tourists need to see you using glass in order to know you're a tourist, you've probably never been more than 100 miles from where you were born, let alone a foreign country. Trust me, tourists are obvious, and you can ALWAYS figure out their economic status very easily without judging their headgear.
Only an absolute fucking idiot would steal a device that will destroy itself (except for functions related to calling the police to report itself stolen and help them locate it), and only an absolute fucking idiot would do that with a device that is expensive enough for the theft of it to be a major crime, and only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. The only people who harm tourists aren't doing it for petty shit like robbing them of a (soon to be useless) item like glass.
Much more likely is someone will spot you in glass and think "Oh, look, an asshole."
What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.
Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:
As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.
I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.
Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.
If the shoe and underpants bombers had been intending to actually succeed, they would have gone to a lavatory to set their bombs off, they would not have done what they did in plain sight of other passengers. It's not really reasonable to think that the intent of either of those incidents was to actually take a plane down, since if it was, they would have been instructed to go to a toilet to do it.
The idea behind those "attacks" was to get us to enact even more incredibly stupid security tactics, and they succeeded perfectly.
Totally, because as history has shown time and time again, only people who were really great in a particular subject as kids go on to bring anything great into the world, and there has never, ever, not even once, been someone who was initially thought to be very bad at a subject who later became a true giant in the field.
I just assume people willing to stick around in an abusive environment must have low self-esteem and/or be REALLY bad at what they do, to the point where they feel they couldn't get involved elsewhere.
Even if we take your reasoning as valid, it's still pretty icky; you're advocating for it being a good thing to have projects stuffed with people willing to accept a ration of shit as some kind of ideological purity test.
Think about how absolutely fucked up that is for a second.
Your problem is you imagine somehow that hurling abuse at people is effective at getting them to be better at their job.
There's a difference between a thin skin and not wanting to work in an environment where people feel like being an asshole and abusing people for making mistakes is a virtue.
Honestly, every time a story like this pops up here, I have to think most of the folks here have Stockholme Syndrome and miss being bullied when they were kids, given how willingly they support abuse in the workplace.
For what it's worth, when I make a mistake at work, I'm already beating myself up much more effectively than my co-workers could, so them being assholes wouldn't add anything. Much better would be working together to identify and fix the problem and then to put a plan in place to help avoid similar issues from happening in the future.
But hey, if it works for you - if you honestly feel like taking abuse is some kind of virtue in the workplace, or something that is completely unavoidable - then far be it from me or anyone else to suggest there might be a better way.
Slashdot Mirror
Demonstrating my point pretty well, thank you. You're so off kilter by this idea that you're conflating two very different scenarios - the criminal justice system is rather different than national defense in a number of ways, but your emotionality about the subject is preventing you from making a reasoned argument, and you're flailing around trying to make something - anything - stick.
Which is exactly the opposite of what any person should want from a criminal justice system. We shouldn't want people desperate to extract revenge, but rather people who want to minimize the overall harm done to society.
If I am ever charged with a crime, I want people who aren't going to let some flowery description of what people THINK I might have done causing them to undervalue evidence that is exculpatory. Wouldn't you want the same? Let's say you were accused of raping and murdering a child - would you really want the public's demand for revenge, the jury's disgust with the crime, the prosecutor's inflammatory rhetoric to sway the jury, or would you rather the evidence be evaluated instead, emotions put to the side?
Further, were I actually convicted of a crime, I would want people to decide on what to do with me to be people who are able to resist the urge to merely punish me, but rather seek to rehabilitate me or, if they believe it isn't possible, to be able to recognize that removing me from society so that I can't hurt others while still preserving the ability to release me if I am later found to have been innocent is a vastly better solution than simply killing me, and shrugging it off if I am later found innocent. I can't imagine that you would want people who want to hurt you just because they're enraged at what you did deciding on your punishment, but maybe I'm wrong.
And finally, more harm than good is done by our system as it stands now. This is proven by the fact that other nations with more civilized criminal justice systems have lower crime rates, lower recidivism rates, and overall better outcomes when it comes to people who have interacted with their criminal justice system than we do. If revenge is the best way to handle this, then why do countries like Norway have better outcomes, when everything about their system repudiates the idea of punishment and instead focuses on rehabilitation and the greater public good? If you aren't aware of the evidence I suggest you educate yourself; if you are aware of the evidence then again, you're action on emotion, not reason, and that is not a good thing when talking about a criminal justice system.
Sneer all you like at the idea of doctors and therapists being involved, but the facts - and they are facts - are that approaching criminal justice with the idea of rehabilitation and repair works far, far better than approaching it with the idea of extracting revenge.
Have you actually spent even a second thinking about what you're arguing?
Simple math: Let's take your number - 100k per year per death row inmate. Let's DOUBLE it, to make it even more expensive. 200k per inmate per year. MY GOD, HOW EXPENSIVE!
There are 3,000 people (actually a bit less) on death row in the US, but let's DOUBLE that number, just to make your argument even more powerful. 6,000 people on death row at $200,000 per year in expenses - gosh, that's going to break the bank!
Except it won't. It comes out to 1.2 billion dollars a year to house people on death row. Let's DOUBLE that to 2.4 billion dollars a year just on housing these people.
There are 300 million americans (roughly) but not all of them pay taxes. Mittens got in trouble during the election for saying that 47% don't ever pay taxes, but let's be even more ridiculous - I'm going to say that only 10% of Americans pay income tax. That's 30 million tax payers.
So, 2.4 billion dollars, split by 30 million people... that comes out to.... $80 dollars per year per individual tax payer. Remember, I doubled your estimate of expenses. I doubled the number of people on death row. I doubled the resulting multiplication, and then I took a ridiculously small tax base figure to get to that WHOPPING $80 per year.
What you're saying to me is that $80 per year in your pocket (and it would actually be far, far less) is worth it to you to vastly increase the odds that innocent people will be executed. You're saying to me that you having $80 a year (or about 22 cents a day) is more important than trying to keep the state from murdering innocents or at least reduce the chances of that happening. You're telling me that 22 cents a day (actually a lot less) is more important to you than sparing the families of those wrongly convicted and executed from the anguish of the state run amok.
There's a monster here, but I'm pretty sure it's you.
Just remember that in many cases where someone has been wrongfully convicted, the jurors felt the same as you did about the certainty of the person's guilt based on the evidence they were shown.
Every time someone says they're absolutely certain of the guilt of a person in a given case, especially to the point where they would be willing to execute (not that you were) the person if convicted, they would do well to remember that fact.
They're very emotional about this kind of thing, and as a result they are the absolute worst kind of people to have any kind of say into how people who commit (or, at least, are convicted of committing) crimes are treated.
I don't think they're necessarily bloodthirsty, just incapable of resisting emotionality or using reason when it comes to this stuff. Many - perhaps even most - people are like that. Which is why there's a whole criminal justice system to begin with, as a way to at least try to reduce the impact of people who are not capable of regulating their baser impulses.
The criminal justice system we have is pretty shit-tacular in that it does not work (compared to other nations' systems) when it comes to reducing crime, reducing recidivism, protecting society, rehabilitating prisoners or being cost effective. But at least it's better than vigilante mobs formed by the very people who are here screaming for blood and relishing the suffering of those they want to see executed.
Mistakes are never made.
People certainly thought those guys deserved the "ultimate" penalty for what they did.
Further, appeals to emotion such as yours above are exactly why we shouldn't have a death penalty. I don't care what someone did, at the very worst we should lock them away, not kill them.
Why don't we ever hear about the lack of rich people who get to sleep under bridges? Why doesn't anyone try to spread polio around 1st world countries so we don't miss out on polio? Like you, I am completely fucking confused by really obvious things!
And gosh, golly gee willikers, I dunno why people by and large aren't trying to get people into low(ish) wage, low prestige jobs that provide zero upward mobility for a traditionally marginalized and disempowered group, vs. getting said traditionally marginalized group into high wage, high(ish) prestige jobs that are one of the key ways people of this generation can attain social mobility and financial security.
It sure is puzzling! Gosh, I hope the fine minds of Slashdot's user base can figure it out!
This article isn't for actual software engineers, but "idea guys" who think making games is easy and don't actually understand what goes into real game design.
I know a ton of people like that - they have an idea for some awesome next level stuff, but it's only a very vague idea with a few neat things in there, without any of the actual work that is needed to turn it into a game design, let alone a spec, let alone a game. Seriously, everyone I know who is a gamer and not an engineer is constantly babbling about how games should do X or Y or Z or whatever, but when you ask them questions about how any of it would actually work, they wave their hands and say it isn't important because the IDEA that they took a whole 30 seconds coming up with and articulating is somehow the hard part.
The idea is the easy part - I can toss out hundreds of ideas for games that would be amazing. Turning that amazing idea into anything resembling a useful thing is another kettle of fish entirely.
Maybe I was unclear - we have an engineering team of about 15 people, 5 of whom work at standing desks. It's not required.
I do development and I work a standing desk (and for a couple of years did a walking desk when I worked at home). I'm actually vastly more comfortable not just at work now but in the rest of my life since switching:
- issues I had with sciatica went away
- I am in better shape/have more endurance & energy
- I sleep better
- I used to feel like shit if I went on a 10 hour coding binge (sluggish and exhausted) but now I just feel pretty much normal
It's only uncomfortable at first, but once you figure out good shoes to wear, good anti-fatigue mats to use and good posture it's much MUCH more comfortable (at least in my experience) and makes your non-work life better as well.
At my office we have 5 people in our engineering team (some IT, some developers) who use standing desks and a few more who are considering making the switch. The oldest stander is me (42) so it's not just something 20-somethings can do.
I completely understand your points, but let me offer a few things:
Shit like this happens to people every single day. Often vastly worse; I volunteered with an organization that sought clemency for people who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned (and in the US that means being subjected to some truly horrific shit). Yet, by and large, despite being completely fucked over by the system and having had years - sometimes decades - of their lives taken away, despite being tortured by beatings, rapes, solitary confinement, these people didn't lose their shit and go on a killing spree. They kept their shit together. My point here is that people get fucked over and there are ways of dealing with it, and sometimes things get handled and sometimes they don't, and you need to move along and get past it.
But, as you say, that takes perspective. Which gets me to my next point: The kid himself may not have perspective, but his parents sure as hell should. Or some other adult. Someone should have sat him down and explained that he was right, the people in power were assholes, and that while he probably is plenty pissed about how it all went down, in the grand scheme of things it's just a run in with assholes, and he's better than that. It is the job of parents not just to teach kids how to not be assholes, but how to deal with the fact that assholes exist and they will try to fuck up your life.
I definitely agree that dealing with bullying needs to be handled better not just because it's the right thing, but because it's an immediate safety issue and letting it keep going perpetuates a culture that accepts it. The problem is that school administrators are short sighted in this country (actually, pretty much everyone involved in public education in this country is extremely short sighted), and they want to maintain control with a minimum amount of hassle.
When I switched from working in an office to working from home for a couple of years, I went to a standing desk and then to a treadmill/walking desk.
Took me about 3 days to get used to standing all the time - as in, able to do it without feeling too much pain in my feet at the end of the day.
The walking desk took about a week to get used to, at first I could only read emails etc. while walking, but after I got used to things I was able to do 4MPH indefinitely while doing basic stuff, and about 2.5MPH while doing stuff that required a bit more precision with a mouse etc. Put it at a 5% incline and it's not a bad workout. My best day was 20 miles.
I wound up losing some weight - 10 lbs. - which wasn't strictly necessary but wasn't a bad thing. My productivity took a hit at the beginning but got back to normal after the first couple of weeks. My energy level went up dramatically after the first month and my general sense of well-being was much improved. Even better, issues I was having with sciatica went away and I would sleep much better.
At my current job I am at a standing desk all day and while it's not nearly as active as my walking desk, it's still working for me.
Some research suggests that it isn't that much better for you (or at all better for you) than a sitting desk, but my personal experience defies that; I'd recommend trying it for a month - commit to it - and see how it works for you.
Is anyone else creeped out by how hopeful some of the posters here seem to be about the possibility of the kid "going Columbine"?
I get it that many slashdotters feel they were abused by bullies when they were kids, but the fact is pretty much every kid ever has been picked on (and has bullied another kid) at some time in their childhood. Yeah, it sucks, and yeah, the authorities here should absolutely be taken out of positions where they can commit future injustices like this, but in no way, shape or form should revenge fantasies like "going Columbine" be casually thrown about as if yeah, that's something reasonable.
Yeah, it sucks that some of you were horribly treated when you were young, but get the fuck over it already. If you still get overwraught to the point where you fantasize about killing people at shit that happened 10 years ago on a playground, you have problems and you need to address them.
No, thinking otherwise is being informed. You really should educate yourself on the issue, if you're remotely intellectually honest.
Go down to any poverty law center and ask for some information on bias in police interactions, on bias in charging, bail and sentencing.
You're being literally prejudiced in your beliefs, I'm saying you should get some facts and make an assessment there. If you think being armed with facts is "gullible and stupid" then you're not capable of having a reasoned discussion.
Wow, you actually believe that black men are entirely responsible for the way the police treat them.
Maybe you should examine that belief.
You're absolutely right. We're far from equal.
Women make 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs despite being about 50% of the workforce.
Women make up 20% of the Senate, despite being about 50% of the population. Women make up 18.9% of the House of Representatives despite being about 50% of the population.
And don't get me started on race! Black men are vastly more likely to have an interaction with police, be arrested, held on higher bail, convicted more frequently and given longer sentences than white men when all other factors (socioeconomic and past criminal record) are accounted for. Estimates are that blacks make up a little over 13% of the US population but just over 40% of the prison population, and have sentences averaging more than 20% longer. Crimes that were predominantly seen as a "black" thing - like possession of crack cocaine - were given disproportionately higher sentences than possession of regular cocaine. Even for drugs that are in common use across races, black users of marijuana are vastly more likely to do jail time than white users of marijuana.
And that's just scratching the surface and going after easily obtainable numbers that took me 30 seconds to Google. There's inequality all over the place, and I'm really glad you agree with me that the US's claims of equality are horseshit. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards fixing it.
Also, you're more than welcome to start up a United Caucasian College Fund with all the exact same rights and protections the United Negro College Fund has as long as you follow all the exact same rules and regulations required by law. You'll probably have a lot of people rolling their eyes and calling you a doofus for doing it, but hey, knock yourself out.
Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.
There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.
*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.
Not so much, actually.
Most people leveling do it alone or maybe in a small group. No need to think about 90% of the abilities a class has while doing that because the leveling content needs to be tuned to people who are novices. Most people don't want - despite playing an MMO - to be forced to play with other people in a group at all times in order to level, so you can't touch this leveling content.
Most people leveling don't even set foot in a dungeon in WoW. A dungeon being fundamentally different than world questing, and yet still not requiring a player to be very good with their class or understand their class.
A tiny percentage of players set foot in a raid EVER, let alone while leveling - even with new things like a very content-tourist mode like the Looking for Raid feature that was added. Raid mechanics are fundamentally different than dungeons or world questing, so really, require you to play your class in a very different way than you would have experienced while leveling; abilities that seem pointless while leveling suddenly make sense to use, and patterns that made sense while leveling suddenly become counter to survival.
What IS true is that, if you want to raid you need to learn how to play your class. But, I don't think 20-100 hours of doing things that bear no real relation to how you will end up playing your class is the way to do it. Personally, I think the idea of having proving grounds (which they kind of do now) wherein the player is hand held by NPCs and given tons of feedback on how to play their specific class, what abilities to use and why, in game, would be the way to go.
"Hey, new paladin person in a tank role - I'm going to make that big guy over there very, very angry in a moment, and he can kill me but he won't hurt you as much, so I want you to press that flashing button on your screen - it's called a taunt - when he starts chasing me; it'll make him go after you, not me!" If you fail? "It's okay, fortunately we have people around who can make everything better when I get beaten to a pulp... Let's try this again..."
"Hey, priest type person in a healer role - I'm about to fight several small creatures that individually don't do much to me but hurt me slowly over time. Cast that spell that's flashing on me once every 10 seconds or so in order to throw a spell on me that will heal me up slowly over time."
"Hey, shooty damage type person, I'm going to beat up 4 things, but I want you to focus on hurting ONLY the one that is my primary target." "Hey, so these guys aren't stupid, they're going to try to hurt you - see that purple stuff on the floor over there? If it appears under you during the fight, MOVE AWAY FROM IT!"
Etc. and so on. Have people go through that, have it be so that a veteran player who is familiar with game mechanics could complete all the tasks in under an hour, but where a newbie player who knows nothing might wind up taking 10 hours or so to do the quests well enough, and you're good.
The problem WoW has - and most MMO's have - is that the designers assumed that other players would give solid feedback to people on their teams in dungeons and so on. Unfortunately, most people are assholes and not willing to take any time with newbies to straighten them out. Since the playerbase by and large won't help other people learn, there needs to be an in game process for it.
tl;dr: There needs to be a way to teach people how to play their class, but the current way of doing it (leveling) doesn't teach them anything that is actually relevant.
I agree with your idea that we're looking at the wrong populations, and actually would suggest that "e-sport" people aren't "gamers" but rather "people who play obsessively".
Look at the population of people who play a single game obsessively, then look at the population of people who play said game at the competitive level, and I'm sure any demographic gaps would disappear almost completely.
I don't know, but it seems important enough to some people to make the distinction, and it's reasonably easy to accommodate them if they ask, so why not just roll with it?
If you honestly think the people who want to rob tourists need to see you using glass in order to know you're a tourist, you've probably never been more than 100 miles from where you were born, let alone a foreign country. Trust me, tourists are obvious, and you can ALWAYS figure out their economic status very easily without judging their headgear.
Only an absolute fucking idiot would steal a device that will destroy itself (except for functions related to calling the police to report itself stolen and help them locate it), and only an absolute fucking idiot would do that with a device that is expensive enough for the theft of it to be a major crime, and only an absolute fucking idiot would rob a tourist bringing the wrath of their local authorities down on them HARD. The only people who harm tourists aren't doing it for petty shit like robbing them of a (soon to be useless) item like glass.
Much more likely is someone will spot you in glass and think "Oh, look, an asshole."
What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.
Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:
As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.
I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.
Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.
If the shoe and underpants bombers had been intending to actually succeed, they would have gone to a lavatory to set their bombs off, they would not have done what they did in plain sight of other passengers. It's not really reasonable to think that the intent of either of those incidents was to actually take a plane down, since if it was, they would have been instructed to go to a toilet to do it.
The idea behind those "attacks" was to get us to enact even more incredibly stupid security tactics, and they succeeded perfectly.
Totally, because as history has shown time and time again, only people who were really great in a particular subject as kids go on to bring anything great into the world, and there has never, ever, not even once, been someone who was initially thought to be very bad at a subject who later became a true giant in the field.
I just assume people willing to stick around in an abusive environment must have low self-esteem and/or be REALLY bad at what they do, to the point where they feel they couldn't get involved elsewhere.
Even if we take your reasoning as valid, it's still pretty icky; you're advocating for it being a good thing to have projects stuffed with people willing to accept a ration of shit as some kind of ideological purity test.
Think about how absolutely fucked up that is for a second.
Your problem is you imagine somehow that hurling abuse at people is effective at getting them to be better at their job.
There's a difference between a thin skin and not wanting to work in an environment where people feel like being an asshole and abusing people for making mistakes is a virtue.
Honestly, every time a story like this pops up here, I have to think most of the folks here have Stockholme Syndrome and miss being bullied when they were kids, given how willingly they support abuse in the workplace.
For what it's worth, when I make a mistake at work, I'm already beating myself up much more effectively than my co-workers could, so them being assholes wouldn't add anything. Much better would be working together to identify and fix the problem and then to put a plan in place to help avoid similar issues from happening in the future.
But hey, if it works for you - if you honestly feel like taking abuse is some kind of virtue in the workplace, or something that is completely unavoidable - then far be it from me or anyone else to suggest there might be a better way.