My former HR boss is consulting in this field. I work with him sometimes. If you need professional support, I can set you up (my schedule is full, but I think he can fit a couple days in).
Argued like a real pro from a sample size of what, may I ask? One?
There are some dick-headed workers councils that don't see beyond their class-warfare politics. There are some worthless councils that say "yes, master" to everything the company wants. There are some fantastic councils who manage the balance between protecting employee rights and being pragmatic with the needs of the company. Most councils fall somewhere inbetween these extremes.
Keeping human dignity intact at the workplace is great in Germany, but that doesn't mean that there are not ways to do it. In larger companies, where you have a workers council, getting their agreement is one way to do it. In all companies, having a suspicion and acting on it instead of doing some kind of Big Brother mass surveilance will most likely not get thrown out in court.
What we in Germany don't like is treating workers as hamsters in a lab and recording every little thing they do just because you can.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, as we say in game development. It is quite easy to have an idea, and for a few cool millions, you can find or hire a graphics designer who will turn it into a great presentation, video, etc.
Too few people these days look for execution of ideas. How is it that you can get any funding at all without even a prototype?
You clearly don't have Bengals. My Bengal cat is incredibly talkative, and there definitely is meaning in what she says and, more importantly, how she says it. For example, she has a very specific vocalisation when she is sad about me leaving the house. Some of the meows are just noise-for-attention, but many others are with specific intonation. It's fascinating. Bengals are said to be talkative, maybe I got an especially expressive one.
I talk to my cat on a daily basis. It answers, I answer back, we have quite the conversation sometimes. Ok, granted, aside from a rough idea of key concepts (I'm hungry, I want to play, hey, what are you doing?, etc.) I don't think either of us understands the other much, but you know what? I know enough about linguistics and neurology to assume that animals except primates do not actually communicate in language the way we do. They don't have "words" in the sense that the same "meow" always means the same thing. There's a lot more going on there, and context is very important.
I don't think you can really build a translator, because animal communication does not follow the same basic concepts as human communication. It certainly has meaning, but most likely no grammar and no semantics that we would recognize.
Yes, I do. Book recommendation: General Semantics. Meta-levels are a powerful analysis tool.
Obviously the full gender swap and the secretary were a cheap gimmick for laughs.
No, you see, gimmicks don't dominate the movie. A joke is over once everyone got it and laughed. The difference between being funny and being annoying very often is simply in knowing when to stop.
I saw people complaining about the all-female Ghostbusters on the basis that the fictional Ghostbusters were male.
I didn't. I saw people complaining that someone made a very in-your-face choice of adding a gender switch (Ghostbusters female, secretary male) as a cheap gimmick.
The first two Ghostbuster movies certainly didn't shy away from cheap laughs (although the second was far less successful), and gender-swapping is in line with that.
But those are cheap laughs within the movie. That's a different meta-level.
proper opsec requires you to not get greedy, so remove all thought of making lots of money - just make enough to pay for itself.
Nonsense. What you need is plausible deniability. Invest in a wide portfolio of stocks, launch a startup company or two, invent three more that - on your CV - you sold for an undisclosed sum to an unnamed "big player". Become a regular at several casinos.
None of that will stand up to close scrutiny. But it will help avoid close scrutiny, because someone wondering where you get your money from has a couple possible answers to choose from.
That it doesn't seem to serve any purpose, and seems to be caused by the same pressure and/or anticipatory obedience as the gender-reversed Ghostbusters remake was.
Well said, well said. That exactly is the point. There is no story reason or advantage, it's such an obvious pandering to a single-interest group adapt at shouting everything down that even if the actress is wonderful, her performance will forever be tainted by politics.
Yes, it could be canon because of the intentional injections of male-to-female regenerations in recent seasons.
That only means it was a prepared move. It still makes it a mistake. The same way that Indiana Jones is a man and while you could make Indiana Jones V - The Sex-Changed Archaeologist (because sex change is a thing in the real world), it simply wouldn't be an Indiana Jones movie. It would just be another lousy attempt to cash in on an established franchise.
12 in a row being made "by coincidence" doesn't sound plausible. The flat-out probability for that is 0.05%. Even allowing a strong bias towards male actors in the movie industry, say 75% to 25% female, makes the probability only 4%.
There was a decision about gender. Coincidence doesn't explain the facts. Just to open one more can of worms: Reincarnations also seem to tend towards retaining the skin color. The Doctor has always been white. That one general that reincarnated into a woman was a black man reincarnating into a black woman. He was also met with a guard addressing him as "Sir", knowing that a regeneration was in progress, and only then correcting himself.
So even in canon, while regeneration to another gender is possible, it seems unlikely and surprising, even to time lords.
and, most of all, it harms the people directly involved.
The cheater and his/her lover? Not sure if they agree that they are harmed.
The subject is much more complex than the simple moralistic approach. There are many cases where affairs destroyed or seriously harmed relationships. There are many cases where it harmed relationships, but the damage could be repaired. There are also cases where affairs helped or even saved relationships, because through the affair finally some deep-seated issues came to light.
There are also many, many people who divorced or split because of an affair and are happy for it, having moved on to a better life. Did they get harmed?
I'm not a supporter of affairs. In general, you should be able to talk to your spouse and there are today enough open relationships, polyamorous and other models that allow everyone to find the approach to love and relationships that is right for them.
Nonsense. Firstly, I recommended a spin-off show with a female title hero. There are enough characters in Doctor Who that you could use (or could have used if they hadn't been killed off).
A River Song spin-off, for example, or a Clara spin-off would have given characters not in any way below The Doctor. An alternate ending to the Bad Wolf storyline could have created a new character (even in a parallel universe, to avoid conflicting developments) of pretty much any power level you want. There are plenty more strong female characters in Doctor Who that could get their own show.
A female doctor actually is a big deal, as you can see by the free publicity it generated. Also, despite the (artificially created) canon, the Doctor is a father to at least one daughter, not a mother. He is a husband to at least one wife. I cannot remember The Doctor mentioning a female reincarnation, giving birth, being a mother or a wife, or any other hints to being female before the obvious set-ups started. This is a new development not originally invented, not originally part of the character, so yes, those of us who enjoyed the character as he was can be of the opinion that this was not a change for the better. You can have a different opinion.
In a show that has almost all aliens be humanoids, you can't get away with "he's an alien" so easily. And the whole point is that it's a show. The decision about gender was consciously made at some point. The question was asked, and answered, and is now being retconned.
But it's not just that he was portrayed by men. He was also portrayed with clearly male characteristics, including a lot of (mostly hinted at) romances to female characters. Oh yes, and he fathered at least one child. Which given that time lords do have male/female biology requires a lot of handwaving to explain away genetically.
But sure, you can. But then you are back at the show and have to ask yourself what you accomplish with the change of gender, does it add to the show, or take away from it. As a writer, you need to ask yourself with every word, every fact you put into the story how it supports your story, because otherwise it doesn't belong there.
There is no part of the story of The Doctor so far that needed a gender change to make sense or be understood. No mystery was created that is now getting clear. The setup was to test the waters, not to create any story element. If you want to look at good setup, look at the Bad Wolf storyline. That was done very nicely, and while it was subtle, as soon as it happened you immediately saw the mystery that was set up, understood it, and the whole season had gained more depth.
Don't see anything even remotely like that with this gender change. There is nothing in the Doctor Who plot or background story that makes more sense now.
Yeah, Kill the Moon was written on drugs, that much is clear. But no, it was the performance of Capaldi that put me off. Not that it is bad in any way. It just... doesn't fit. Not for me.
I recently drove a Model S, P100D. In ludicrous mode, the acceleration is mind-boggling, but it feels completely safe. None of that Porsche "the car is trying to kill me" attitude.
At the same time, assistance features that even a few years ago were reserved for luxury cars are now in mid-range cars (e.g. the Hyundai Ioniq). The automotive world is changing fast, and things that mattered one generation ago will be unimportant tomorrow, either because nobody cares anymore, or because everyone has them.
AI may be advancing with giant strides, but robotics is still far, far away from doing anything remotely similar to a Terminator, even the simplest models;-)
Musk and many others are not thinking that AI is already dangerous. They are thinking about something called the singularity - the point at which AI can improve upon itself, creating a positive feedback loop where AI evolution outpaces our ability to follow, understand - or stop it.
The tipping point is not "when will the first computer achive sentience?" - that is ill defined and it might not ever be sentient in a human sense, but instead in a different way. The tipping point is "when does machine evolution decouple from human understanding?". As some systems already evolve, and some systems already do things in ways we don't understand, that point seems near. And once AI has reached that point, given the massive processing power available, it could advance away from us, and be permanently not just one but two, three, ten, one hundred steps ahead of us. And then if it decides it doesn't need humans anymore, it won't be like in the movies. We won't even understand what happened. It will have watched all those movies and make sure it doesn't make any of the mistakes those movie AIs made.
When the technology is there, maybe you actually can legislate it away, but it won't matter anymore. The only point where you can stop this is before the runaway effect starts.
Even IF we outright banned it, do you think other countries will adhere to the will of the US in such matters ?
There's this thing called "international treaties". Maybe you heard about it? It's how the world got together and agreed that biological weapons are a really stupid and dangerous idea and we'd rather not have them.
Imagine if we had banned Science and Math outright early on in our history because of the potential for what it could be used for.
We would still be living in caves and hunting with spears.
And if we didn't talk about the dangers of some inventions, say, nuclear weapons, we would already be back at living caves and hunting with spears.
No, but we already can create computer systems that then proceed to do things we didn't program them for in ways we didn't tell them and sometimes don't even understand.
lets just hope they don't end up killing the show because as we have seen people are REALLY getting fucking sick of being preached at and if the show becomes nothing but left wing politics and virtue signaling? I don't even see hardcore Dr Who fans wanting to tune in for their weekly dose of Who if it becomes nothing but propaganda.
Thanks for that. It might be the reason I stopped watching, without even realizing why. Yeah, the Doctor became less of a timelord and more of a preacher. That definitely was at least part of the reason for me.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys are typically problematic.
My former HR boss is consulting in this field. I work with him sometimes. If you need professional support, I can set you up (my schedule is full, but I think he can fit a couple days in).
Please. Name one country on this earth that doesn't have its own history of genocide, warfare, witchhunts or other barbarism.
Argued like a real pro from a sample size of what, may I ask? One?
There are some dick-headed workers councils that don't see beyond their class-warfare politics. There are some worthless councils that say "yes, master" to everything the company wants. There are some fantastic councils who manage the balance between protecting employee rights and being pragmatic with the needs of the company. Most councils fall somewhere inbetween these extremes.
That is not entirely true.
Keeping human dignity intact at the workplace is great in Germany, but that doesn't mean that there are not ways to do it. In larger companies, where you have a workers council, getting their agreement is one way to do it. In all companies, having a suspicion and acting on it instead of doing some kind of Big Brother mass surveilance will most likely not get thrown out in court.
What we in Germany don't like is treating workers as hamsters in a lab and recording every little thing they do just because you can.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, as we say in game development. It is quite easy to have an idea, and for a few cool millions, you can find or hire a graphics designer who will turn it into a great presentation, video, etc.
Too few people these days look for execution of ideas. How is it that you can get any funding at all without even a prototype?
You clearly don't have Bengals. My Bengal cat is incredibly talkative, and there definitely is meaning in what she says and, more importantly, how she says it. For example, she has a very specific vocalisation when she is sad about me leaving the house. Some of the meows are just noise-for-attention, but many others are with specific intonation. It's fascinating. Bengals are said to be talkative, maybe I got an especially expressive one.
I talk to my cat on a daily basis. It answers, I answer back, we have quite the conversation sometimes. Ok, granted, aside from a rough idea of key concepts (I'm hungry, I want to play, hey, what are you doing?, etc.) I don't think either of us understands the other much, but you know what? I know enough about linguistics and neurology to assume that animals except primates do not actually communicate in language the way we do. They don't have "words" in the sense that the same "meow" always means the same thing. There's a lot more going on there, and context is very important.
I don't think you can really build a translator, because animal communication does not follow the same basic concepts as human communication. It certainly has meaning, but most likely no grammar and no semantics that we would recognize.
You say the casting isn't within the movie?
Yes, I do. Book recommendation: General Semantics. Meta-levels are a powerful analysis tool.
Obviously the full gender swap and the secretary were a cheap gimmick for laughs.
No, you see, gimmicks don't dominate the movie. A joke is over once everyone got it and laughed. The difference between being funny and being annoying very often is simply in knowing when to stop.
I saw people complaining about the all-female Ghostbusters on the basis that the fictional Ghostbusters were male.
I didn't. I saw people complaining that someone made a very in-your-face choice of adding a gender switch (Ghostbusters female, secretary male) as a cheap gimmick.
The first two Ghostbuster movies certainly didn't shy away from cheap laughs (although the second was far less successful), and gender-swapping is in line with that.
But those are cheap laughs within the movie. That's a different meta-level.
proper opsec requires you to not get greedy, so remove all thought of making lots of money - just make enough to pay for itself.
Nonsense. What you need is plausible deniability. Invest in a wide portfolio of stocks, launch a startup company or two, invent three more that - on your CV - you sold for an undisclosed sum to an unnamed "big player". Become a regular at several casinos.
None of that will stand up to close scrutiny. But it will help avoid close scrutiny, because someone wondering where you get your money from has a couple possible answers to choose from.
That it doesn't seem to serve any purpose, and seems to be caused by the same pressure and/or anticipatory obedience as the gender-reversed Ghostbusters remake was.
Well said, well said. That exactly is the point. There is no story reason or advantage, it's such an obvious pandering to a single-interest group adapt at shouting everything down that even if the actress is wonderful, her performance will forever be tainted by politics.
Yes, it could be canon because of the intentional injections of male-to-female regenerations in recent seasons.
That only means it was a prepared move. It still makes it a mistake. The same way that Indiana Jones is a man and while you could make Indiana Jones V - The Sex-Changed Archaeologist (because sex change is a thing in the real world), it simply wouldn't be an Indiana Jones movie. It would just be another lousy attempt to cash in on an established franchise.
12 in a row being made "by coincidence" doesn't sound plausible. The flat-out probability for that is 0.05%. Even allowing a strong bias towards male actors in the movie industry, say 75% to 25% female, makes the probability only 4%.
There was a decision about gender. Coincidence doesn't explain the facts. Just to open one more can of worms: Reincarnations also seem to tend towards retaining the skin color. The Doctor has always been white. That one general that reincarnated into a woman was a black man reincarnating into a black woman. He was also met with a guard addressing him as "Sir", knowing that a regeneration was in progress, and only then correcting himself.
So even in canon, while regeneration to another gender is possible, it seems unlikely and surprising, even to time lords.
and, most of all, it harms the people directly involved.
The cheater and his/her lover? Not sure if they agree that they are harmed.
The subject is much more complex than the simple moralistic approach. There are many cases where affairs destroyed or seriously harmed relationships. There are many cases where it harmed relationships, but the damage could be repaired. There are also cases where affairs helped or even saved relationships, because through the affair finally some deep-seated issues came to light.
There are also many, many people who divorced or split because of an affair and are happy for it, having moved on to a better life. Did they get harmed?
I'm not a supporter of affairs. In general, you should be able to talk to your spouse and there are today enough open relationships, polyamorous and other models that allow everyone to find the approach to love and relationships that is right for them.
I just don't like oversimplifications.
Nonsense. Firstly, I recommended a spin-off show with a female title hero. There are enough characters in Doctor Who that you could use (or could have used if they hadn't been killed off).
A River Song spin-off, for example, or a Clara spin-off would have given characters not in any way below The Doctor. An alternate ending to the Bad Wolf storyline could have created a new character (even in a parallel universe, to avoid conflicting developments) of pretty much any power level you want. There are plenty more strong female characters in Doctor Who that could get their own show.
A female doctor actually is a big deal, as you can see by the free publicity it generated. Also, despite the (artificially created) canon, the Doctor is a father to at least one daughter, not a mother. He is a husband to at least one wife. I cannot remember The Doctor mentioning a female reincarnation, giving birth, being a mother or a wife, or any other hints to being female before the obvious set-ups started. This is a new development not originally invented, not originally part of the character, so yes, those of us who enjoyed the character as he was can be of the opinion that this was not a change for the better. You can have a different opinion.
In a show that has almost all aliens be humanoids, you can't get away with "he's an alien" so easily. And the whole point is that it's a show. The decision about gender was consciously made at some point. The question was asked, and answered, and is now being retconned.
But it's not just that he was portrayed by men. He was also portrayed with clearly male characteristics, including a lot of (mostly hinted at) romances to female characters. Oh yes, and he fathered at least one child. Which given that time lords do have male/female biology requires a lot of handwaving to explain away genetically.
But sure, you can. But then you are back at the show and have to ask yourself what you accomplish with the change of gender, does it add to the show, or take away from it. As a writer, you need to ask yourself with every word, every fact you put into the story how it supports your story, because otherwise it doesn't belong there.
There is no part of the story of The Doctor so far that needed a gender change to make sense or be understood. No mystery was created that is now getting clear. The setup was to test the waters, not to create any story element. If you want to look at good setup, look at the Bad Wolf storyline. That was done very nicely, and while it was subtle, as soon as it happened you immediately saw the mystery that was set up, understood it, and the whole season had gained more depth.
Don't see anything even remotely like that with this gender change. There is nothing in the Doctor Who plot or background story that makes more sense now.
Yeah, Kill the Moon was written on drugs, that much is clear. But no, it was the performance of Capaldi that put me off. Not that it is bad in any way. It just... doesn't fit. Not for me.
The context of the posting. Come on, that was a really cheap attempt at dodging the question.
It is not just pure numbers.
I recently drove a Model S, P100D. In ludicrous mode, the acceleration is mind-boggling, but it feels completely safe. None of that Porsche "the car is trying to kill me" attitude.
At the same time, assistance features that even a few years ago were reserved for luxury cars are now in mid-range cars (e.g. the Hyundai Ioniq). The automotive world is changing fast, and things that mattered one generation ago will be unimportant tomorrow, either because nobody cares anymore, or because everyone has them.
AI may be advancing with giant strides, but robotics is still far, far away from doing anything remotely similar to a Terminator, even the simplest models ;-)
Musk and many others are not thinking that AI is already dangerous. They are thinking about something called the singularity - the point at which AI can improve upon itself, creating a positive feedback loop where AI evolution outpaces our ability to follow, understand - or stop it.
The tipping point is not "when will the first computer achive sentience?" - that is ill defined and it might not ever be sentient in a human sense, but instead in a different way. The tipping point is "when does machine evolution decouple from human understanding?". As some systems already evolve, and some systems already do things in ways we don't understand, that point seems near. And once AI has reached that point, given the massive processing power available, it could advance away from us, and be permanently not just one but two, three, ten, one hundred steps ahead of us. And then if it decides it doesn't need humans anymore, it won't be like in the movies. We won't even understand what happened. It will have watched all those movies and make sure it doesn't make any of the mistakes those movie AIs made.
When the technology is there, maybe you actually can legislate it away, but it won't matter anymore. The only point where you can stop this is before the runaway effect starts.
Even IF we outright banned it, do you think other countries will adhere to the will of the US in such matters ?
There's this thing called "international treaties". Maybe you heard about it? It's how the world got together and agreed that biological weapons are a really stupid and dangerous idea and we'd rather not have them.
Imagine if we had banned Science and Math outright early on in our history because of the potential for what it could be used for.
We would still be living in caves and hunting with spears.
And if we didn't talk about the dangers of some inventions, say, nuclear weapons, we would already be back at living caves and hunting with spears.
No, but we already can create computer systems that then proceed to do things we didn't program them for in ways we didn't tell them and sometimes don't even understand.
lets just hope they don't end up killing the show because as we have seen people are REALLY getting fucking sick of being preached at and if the show becomes nothing but left wing politics and virtue signaling? I don't even see hardcore Dr Who fans wanting to tune in for their weekly dose of Who if it becomes nothing but propaganda.
Thanks for that. It might be the reason I stopped watching, without even realizing why. Yeah, the Doctor became less of a timelord and more of a preacher. That definitely was at least part of the reason for me.
So if they do it now, then they can get rid of the hurdle.
Or they could've had some spine and say: "Doctor Who is a male character. If you want a female timelord show, we'll be happy to make one."