Universal TechTronics seems to specialize in 'high-tech' products of questionable value, marketing the Cool Surge portable air cooler, 'a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents, or freon are needed' that uses the same energy as a 60-watt light bulb. It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer.
I'll grant you that it's not high-tech and that it's crappy and deceptive to bill it as such, but unless you're willing to work inside your refrigerator, it's a good low-tech way to transfer some of that cold to your workspace. I bought something similar from ThinkGeek a couple years ago (it wasn't billed as cutting-edge technology there, of course), and it did help cut the heat a bit during the stretch when we lived in a basement apartment without air conditioning (my office routinely got to 85 degrees F, summer AND winter). It wasn't the arctic blast I would have liked, but it was colder than a regular fan of the same size.
"Megan's law"s punish people after the official debt to society has been paid.
This has been my argument for years, but everyone I talk to seems to think it's worth the risk to our rights to reduce the risk to our children. I have a little girl and lose sleep at night over her safety, but I just don't think Megan's Law is the right way to go about it.
Honestly, I have no issue with putting profiles of these offenders online, but it has to happen at the point of conviction, not several years afterwards. If you want to start telling convicted sex offenders during sentencing that they will be listed online, so be it. But you can't post the dude who was convicted 30 years ago -- it's not part of his sentence.
And don't get me started on the one-size-fits-all designation of "sex offender" (insert size joke here (insert insertion joke here)). Chester Molester in the panel van by the school is NOT doing the same thing as 19-year-old John and his girlfriend, 17-year-old Mary. Oh, wait, I got myself started there... (insert self-starting joke here)
Yep -- in fact, I'm the owner/operator of a kindergartener (actually now a first-grader-to-be), and they all talk that way. I still prefer my indigenous peoples thing -- it gets the message across and still manages to take a little below-the-belt jab at political correctness.:)
DEFINITELY. A chair is a pretty personal thing -- I have done a lot of searching for each chair I've ever owned (as a result of my first chair being a terrible hand-me-down that torqued up my back pretty badly).
I had an Aeron at my last office job (self-employed now) and it was okay, but I'm a slumper -- I tend to lie down in a chair (to the point where because of the size of my monitor, my coworkers didn't know I was in my office when they walked past my door). So while every external indication to my wife would be that an Aeron would be a perfect gift (the agreed-upon gold standard in geeky ergonomica), I actually tend toward big-and-tall executive chairs that will a) support my head, and b) allow me to sit cross-legged (Indian style, or North-American-Indigenous-Peoples Style) in it. They also have to have metal arms so I can kind of parallel-bar myself into the chair -- plastic arms don't cut it over the long haul. I'm somewhat portly, but basically six feet tall with common geometry. So it would never occur to anyone that I'd prefer a big and tall chair.
I would back up the notion that mesh is good -- currently my chair is a leather executive chair, and I find it to be too hot. Shaped luxuriously with nice strong arms, but it reflects all my body heat back at me. You should never have to hydrate in anticipation of a long coding session. My next one, if I can find it and afford it, will be mesh and big and tall. I found the Aeron, when properly fitted, to be too shallow for the decidedly ergonomically defiant way I sit. Actually, it's not the depth of the seat as much as the grade of the drop off in front -- it's great for sitting like a human with your feet on the floor, but I couldn't get my heels dug in sufficiently on the seat to keep my legs crossed in front me.
Basically, the parent poster is right -- unless you think he'll really hate the process, give him a chair shopping trip for Father's Day. He'll get the chair he wants, and you may well end up spending less (sometimes our butts don't exactly have caviar tastes, you know?).
We had one that my dad left in the trunk of the car for about a week in the summer so the keys partially melted. It was hard to type (you really had to pound on a couple of the keys to get them to register) but it still worked like a charm. Now I worry about my Dell laptop on humid days.
I hear you, but my buddy who recommended them to me in the first place is one of them. He paid manually, but got dinged for several hundred bucks. His credit card covered it in the short-term and it was ultimately refunded, but it DID happen.
I'm glad you got good tech support from them -- personally, I would often wait more than 72 hours for a response from them. My typical support requests were pretty basic and could have been dealt with and gone pretty quickly. So I don't think triage was the issue -- after several months of intermittent problems it became clear that when I had problems, so went the entire customer base. They were dealing with pretty deep infrastructure issues and telling each customer as they were able that it was isolated to a small group of people and would be fixed soon.
I'm not here to bitch about Dreamhost (though I did bring it up, I suppose). I got myself and all my low-level clients away from them and am a happier man for it, though it cost me a lot of hours and irritation. (I had several minimal-use clients hosted there, and it was surprisingly hard to convince them that for five extra bucks they could get their e-mail and have a website ALL the time.) All I meant to point out was that one of the core features offered by Dreamhost was e-mail, and their eagerness to push its users toward Google mail is totally (and depressingly) in keeping with their surfer-boy demeanor.
The point was that people who were NOT being autobilled (but, like everyone, had to provide a credit card number to open a hosting account) were still automatically debited. Also, there were apparently instances of people who had canceled their account months before being debited. In other words, DH was keeping information they should have destroyed. Moreover, they were keeping it ALL in one place, so no matter what your billing preference (or status as a customer or not), your card was dinged when it came time.
I was an idiot -- I hadn't unchecked the autobill option and was pretty satisfied. Now I don't do anything automatically anymore. But others hosted at Dreamhost hadn't signed up for autobilling and got screwed anyway.
Not to mention their billing fiasco last year -- due to a dumb human error, they auto-billed most of their customer base (even people who weren't signed up for auto-renewal) for a year or more of service in advance.
They got me for $400 and took more than a month to return the funds. They dinged others for thousands. All the while telling everyone everything was fine. So if Dreamhost says its mail service is NOT adequate, it must be REALLY bad.
Personally I never had a problem with mail at Dreamhost -- uptime stunk (and the billing issue was the last straw), but mail worked pretty much how it should.
Yeah -- I figured as much. Glad to hear it from someone else, though!
I just had my 650 die, which is why I now have the 755p (Sprint here, too). Gotta say, outside of a bit of processing power and the better broadband, the 650 was just as powerful as the 755p. Unlike other upgrades about which I was willing to fudge facts to my wife to get a new toy, I was completely happy with my 650 until it went around the bend.
I do like the grippy exterior and the no-antenna design on the 755p, though. Worth a look if you're ready for an upgrade...
Hey -- I'm a web designer (and therefore not as up on security issues as others) but occasionally need to SSH in for something or other. I use pssh on my Treo 755p, too, but get all the warnings about how insecure pssh may be. Have you found it to be secure enough and, if not, what do you do to augment it? All I typically ever have to do is a bit of quick content editing in vim or something before I can get back to my office, but if there's something I could be doing to further keep the connection to myself, I'd love to hear it.
I say, just sit tight and take your checks. Read. Do crosswords. Whatever. And as others have said, it couldn't hurt to let the other employees know (if they ask for help with something) that you're cut off. It would be a welcome warning about the company where they will continue to work after you're gone.
You're not the one who changed the rules -- they are. I don't advocate anything spiteful (taking office supplies, undermining morale, whatever), but if they're not going to accept all of the expertise that you're offering, I say just wait for your checks and then go.
When I was about 20 (around 1991), I worked for a family friend who was doing custom DB app development. He was working on a warehouse tracking system at the time, and I helped him compile information about the competition for an article he was writing for Unix World magazine. When I told my parents about the article for Unix World, my father went all glassy until I explained the spelling and definitions involved.
I was impressed by his poker face, honestly. I think he thought he'd been exposing his boy to the decidedly wrong people.
Hi -- again, another deeply informative response. Thanks! You've given me a lot to digest and read (and there's a weekend coming, so I'll have some time).
Thanks again -- I appreciate your patience and willingness to explain things.
Great way to put it. I'm a graphic designer first and programmer only when necessary, so I was coming at it from a slightly different angle. But in the publishing industry, we sell our clients finished books. I design and typeset these books, and in the end they own a garage full of books. I still own my application files (all the digital images, InDesign or Quark files, and fonts). If they want the app files (in other words, if they want to reprint somewhere else without going through us), we sell them those files.
The digital files, though, are a separate entity from the expression within them. In this case, I'd think it would be the difference between the collected data (John Smith, 123 Main Street, etc.) and the table structure, queries, and so on.
Finally, when we sell my files, I take all indication of our involvement out of the book. Part of the agreement is that we no longer hold any responsibility for the files themselves. If the client wants to gum up the works and produce a crappy reprint, that's their business. But we want no connection to it if we are no longer in direct control of it.
That last bit might be enough to scare your client in this case -- if you tell them that you can't be responsible for the integrity of the data or the reliability of the server anymore if they're going to start writing their own queries, they may decide to stick to the way you've been doing things all along.
Of course, they may also walk away. And while I don't know how integral to your business life they are (and therefore wouldn't presume to tell you to just dump the bozos, as that kind of response comes far too often in the hallowed halls of Slashdot as it is), but I've often been happy to see people walk away during this kind of conflict. You learn a lot about people during negotiations like this, and I've been relieved to find out what a client is made of BEFORE begging them to stick with me/us. It just ends up in a nasty breakup later anyway, typically on a tighter timeframe with higher losses.
One of my long-held understandings about overseas missionary work (not specific to LDS, per se) is that it unduly holds recipients of charity to certain standards -- put VERY simply, I've read of a lot of things about people who want immunizations or food or schools having to come to church (and perhaps convert, but not always) to get them.
I certainly understand that the people doing the missionary work have the best interests (as they see them) of the recipients in mind, but if this stuff is true, I find it objectionable (and this is kind of the source of some of my bristling when we start talking about this stuff). Better that the locals do what they have to do to get the food/treatment/shelter/whatever, but it still makes me itchy. In a perfect world (okay, I know, I know), they should just get what they need and then decide whether the people what brung it have some good ideas about other stuff, too.
Just my opinion, and it's clearly based on a pretty spotty set of facts. But if you have any insight into how that really gets dealt with on the ground, I'd love to hear it. It's all well and good for the missionaries to get something out of it, but are the recipients of the mission services getting what they need with no questions asked, so to speak?
Again, thanks for your patience with this curious agnostic!
Thanks for the insight from within the church. Really, I didn't mean to take a shot at the Mormon church (LDS, right?) in particular. I do personally have some reservations about how organized religions treat their flocks in general and with the concept of recruitment via missionary work, which is more what I was getting at.
And when you put the baptism question that way, it makes more sense. Baptism kind of "presents" you to God and the church, right? So it would follow logically that you need to pin down who you are before that. (I could be wrong -- we UUs don't really have a dedication for babies/children and a Coming of Age later on in your teens, but as I think of it now, I've never been clear on the exact purpose of Baptism.)
And on behalf of all of us, thank you for sending the 10,000 people to the Katrina zone. You did more than a) the government, and b) many other American denominations. I don't know what all the UUA did, but I know we didn't send that kind of manpower. I bet we discussed the hell out of it, though.:)
I'll readily admit (even more readily after this) that I don't know as much about LDS as I could. I think there's a lot of publicly-perceived mystery surrounding your denomination more than most, which may set up more unfair public opinions about you guys. I know some of the reticence to be more visible is historical (you guys had a rough go of it when you came through the midwest here in the 1800s, as I understand it), and some is probably simply combat fatigue due to some of the more controversial offshoots who make all the news.
Thanks for the corrections, though. Maybe I need to do a bit of reading other than Slashdot!
Some of the tenets are quite exclusionary -- if you're planning a transgender operation, for example, you may not be baptized.
Perhaps "dark and unpleasant" was a careless choice of words -- maybe "restrictive and archaic" would be better. I was referring more to the strongly discouraged practices such as surrogate parenting, voluntary sterilization, and so on. I guess it's not significantly different from other churches, but I didn't dig too deeply through the rest of the document.
I guess religions are, in part, inherently exclusionary (as is anything with members). So maybe I need to just let them do their thing. It's just that they and other religions keep so much from their members that the members may not realize what the elders are being instructed to do. I guess some call it faith, but I call it uneducated decision making.
Which is probably why I'm a Unitarian. And even we have our questionable practices (if anything ever gets out of committee).
Not sure I agree. Many religions have confidential texts -- some are spiritual, some are operational.
By that logic, a lot of organizations are cults, including corporations and governments. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to keep some policies public and some private -- the content of the policies is another matter, though (public OR private).
IMO the stuff in this one is pretty dark and unpleasant. And keeping this particular stuff confidential doesn't allow a potential or current member to make an informed decision about their church. But in this case I think it's as much an issue of the policies as it is that they are (or were) confidential.
I understand your point, but respectfully disagree. It's like saying that imprisoning criminals starts with the really bad guys, moves to the middle guys, and eventually we're all in prison to a certain extent.
While some may feel this way, I think the slippery slope argument gets a little too much play sometimes. I am happy to employ it when I think it's pertinent, but here we're talking about giving kids a choice between juvie and school.
Two things (among others) are in play here: the value of choice and the value of diversion.
Part of what makes kids screw up is the perception that they have no control and no choice over what happens in their lives. This seems to exemplify the very definition of choice over what happens to them.
Diversion is crucial, too. My wife's uncle has spent years working in the Vermont prison system in the diversion program. Rather than put kids in jail right off the bat, they get to choose to do something else. It nearly wipes out recidivism among the confused kids (there will always be some who are determined to screw up, and they will), and it keeps the prison/juvie population down to a) manageable levels and b) the most relevant population (kids who really do need the ass-kicking).
I don't see this as a risk of feature creep as much as I see it as an alternative to taking a bunch of minor screwups and turning them into criminals.
Why? This isn't a requirement. It's an option equivalent to juvenile detention. As I see it, it gives a kid a choice between juvie and doing what they're supposed to be doing.
TFA clearly states that this is being used for kids with very serious truancy problems. It's not for some kid who's late a couple times. And if the kid prefers to wear the transmitter and go to school, great. And if not, he is detained under more traditional circumstances. At no time is the school system sneaking up on kids and tagging their ears -- this is a choice given to the kid and his family.
In theory, I agree with others around here that if it gets to this level, the parents relinquished control at some point. But be that as it may, until the kids are 16 they're not only the parents' responsibility, but the community's as well. You may take issue with the laws surrounding that issue, but that's not the point. The point is to make the child comply with existing attendance laws, and this seems to me to be a better way than locking them up with other kids who have screwed up their lives in whatever widely varying ways.
You know, I don't know if you're joking or not, but I see no reason why this SHOULDN'T be the case. In the past, the government has provided soldiers with cigarettes, alcohol, and other "creature comforts" for morale purposes.
I'm not suggesting they be given anything illegal or particularly depraved (by "conventional" standards, whatever that means), but how hard is it to provide a collection of confirmed virus-free pics and video?
The only problems I see are that a) soldiers who prefer the company of their own gender would be worried about being tracked despite "don't ask, don't tell," and b) the difference (generally speaking, of course) between how men and women get their ya-yas may cause female soldiers to feel that the porn objectifies women and sets up inequality between soldiers.
Still, it seems worth exploring (and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the government HAS investigated the possibilities). Fact is, the soldiers are going to seek it out. If it's not clean, it puts the network at risk.
I don't recognize the language, but I'm guessing you live somewhere where there are only a couple of languages commonly spoken. Here (Chicago), the people who put pizza menus, roofing company fliers, lawn care fliers, and other ads on our door may speak any one of (conservatively) five or six languages. I made a "post no bills" sign in five languages (English, Spanish, Polish, French, and Russian), but my wife won't let me hang it. She thinks it will make us look unwelcoming. Indeed, to these people who barf their ads all over our front steps, it would. So we now have a separate can inside the door just to throw the advertising crap into.
And that's not even the stuff that gets sent -- that's just the stuff that people walk up and put on our doorknob or car windows.
... they should have pulled GTA3 out of respect to the families of people who were chased down like dogs on the street and chopped to bits with a chain saw.
Personally, the game is too unpleasant for me. I have GTA3 and play it occasionally, but found it to be a little too gratuitous for even my leathery brain. And I can certainly see how people would object to the drunk driving aspect of it (if nothing else, it doesn't seem like it would be crucial to the plot, and therefore seems to be added for shock value rather than gameplay).
But man, if there was ever an example of the slippery slope argument, this would be it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll grant you that it's not high-tech and that it's crappy and deceptive to bill it as such, but unless you're willing to work inside your refrigerator, it's a good low-tech way to transfer some of that cold to your workspace. I bought something similar from ThinkGeek a couple years ago (it wasn't billed as cutting-edge technology there, of course), and it did help cut the heat a bit during the stretch when we lived in a basement apartment without air conditioning (my office routinely got to 85 degrees F, summer AND winter). It wasn't the arctic blast I would have liked, but it was colder than a regular fan of the same size.
This has been my argument for years, but everyone I talk to seems to think it's worth the risk to our rights to reduce the risk to our children. I have a little girl and lose sleep at night over her safety, but I just don't think Megan's Law is the right way to go about it.
Honestly, I have no issue with putting profiles of these offenders online, but it has to happen at the point of conviction, not several years afterwards. If you want to start telling convicted sex offenders during sentencing that they will be listed online, so be it. But you can't post the dude who was convicted 30 years ago -- it's not part of his sentence.
And don't get me started on the one-size-fits-all designation of "sex offender" (insert size joke here (insert insertion joke here)). Chester Molester in the panel van by the school is NOT doing the same thing as 19-year-old John and his girlfriend, 17-year-old Mary. Oh, wait, I got myself started there
Yep -- in fact, I'm the owner/operator of a kindergartener (actually now a first-grader-to-be), and they all talk that way. I still prefer my indigenous peoples thing -- it gets the message across and still manages to take a little below-the-belt jab at political correctness. :)
DEFINITELY. A chair is a pretty personal thing -- I have done a lot of searching for each chair I've ever owned (as a result of my first chair being a terrible hand-me-down that torqued up my back pretty badly).
I had an Aeron at my last office job (self-employed now) and it was okay, but I'm a slumper -- I tend to lie down in a chair (to the point where because of the size of my monitor, my coworkers didn't know I was in my office when they walked past my door). So while every external indication to my wife would be that an Aeron would be a perfect gift (the agreed-upon gold standard in geeky ergonomica), I actually tend toward big-and-tall executive chairs that will a) support my head, and b) allow me to sit cross-legged (Indian style, or North-American-Indigenous-Peoples Style) in it. They also have to have metal arms so I can kind of parallel-bar myself into the chair -- plastic arms don't cut it over the long haul. I'm somewhat portly, but basically six feet tall with common geometry. So it would never occur to anyone that I'd prefer a big and tall chair.
I would back up the notion that mesh is good -- currently my chair is a leather executive chair, and I find it to be too hot. Shaped luxuriously with nice strong arms, but it reflects all my body heat back at me. You should never have to hydrate in anticipation of a long coding session. My next one, if I can find it and afford it, will be mesh and big and tall. I found the Aeron, when properly fitted, to be too shallow for the decidedly ergonomically defiant way I sit. Actually, it's not the depth of the seat as much as the grade of the drop off in front -- it's great for sitting like a human with your feet on the floor, but I couldn't get my heels dug in sufficiently on the seat to keep my legs crossed in front me.
Basically, the parent poster is right -- unless you think he'll really hate the process, give him a chair shopping trip for Father's Day. He'll get the chair he wants, and you may well end up spending less (sometimes our butts don't exactly have caviar tastes, you know?).
Oh, if only I had mod points right now.
+1 Groan
We had one that my dad left in the trunk of the car for about a week in the summer so the keys partially melted. It was hard to type (you really had to pound on a couple of the keys to get them to register) but it still worked like a charm. Now I worry about my Dell laptop on humid days.
I hear you, but my buddy who recommended them to me in the first place is one of them. He paid manually, but got dinged for several hundred bucks. His credit card covered it in the short-term and it was ultimately refunded, but it DID happen.
I'm glad you got good tech support from them -- personally, I would often wait more than 72 hours for a response from them. My typical support requests were pretty basic and could have been dealt with and gone pretty quickly. So I don't think triage was the issue -- after several months of intermittent problems it became clear that when I had problems, so went the entire customer base. They were dealing with pretty deep infrastructure issues and telling each customer as they were able that it was isolated to a small group of people and would be fixed soon.
I'm not here to bitch about Dreamhost (though I did bring it up, I suppose). I got myself and all my low-level clients away from them and am a happier man for it, though it cost me a lot of hours and irritation. (I had several minimal-use clients hosted there, and it was surprisingly hard to convince them that for five extra bucks they could get their e-mail and have a website ALL the time.) All I meant to point out was that one of the core features offered by Dreamhost was e-mail, and their eagerness to push its users toward Google mail is totally (and depressingly) in keeping with their surfer-boy demeanor.
The point was that people who were NOT being autobilled (but, like everyone, had to provide a credit card number to open a hosting account) were still automatically debited. Also, there were apparently instances of people who had canceled their account months before being debited. In other words, DH was keeping information they should have destroyed. Moreover, they were keeping it ALL in one place, so no matter what your billing preference (or status as a customer or not), your card was dinged when it came time.
I was an idiot -- I hadn't unchecked the autobill option and was pretty satisfied. Now I don't do anything automatically anymore. But others hosted at Dreamhost hadn't signed up for autobilling and got screwed anyway.
Not to mention their billing fiasco last year -- due to a dumb human error, they auto-billed most of their customer base (even people who weren't signed up for auto-renewal) for a year or more of service in advance.
They got me for $400 and took more than a month to return the funds. They dinged others for thousands. All the while telling everyone everything was fine. So if Dreamhost says its mail service is NOT adequate, it must be REALLY bad.
Personally I never had a problem with mail at Dreamhost -- uptime stunk (and the billing issue was the last straw), but mail worked pretty much how it should.
Yeah -- I figured as much. Glad to hear it from someone else, though!
...
I just had my 650 die, which is why I now have the 755p (Sprint here, too). Gotta say, outside of a bit of processing power and the better broadband, the 650 was just as powerful as the 755p. Unlike other upgrades about which I was willing to fudge facts to my wife to get a new toy, I was completely happy with my 650 until it went around the bend.
I do like the grippy exterior and the no-antenna design on the 755p, though. Worth a look if you're ready for an upgrade
Hey -- I'm a web designer (and therefore not as up on security issues as others) but occasionally need to SSH in for something or other. I use pssh on my Treo 755p, too, but get all the warnings about how insecure pssh may be. Have you found it to be secure enough and, if not, what do you do to augment it? All I typically ever have to do is a bit of quick content editing in vim or something before I can get back to my office, but if there's something I could be doing to further keep the connection to myself, I'd love to hear it.
I say, just sit tight and take your checks. Read. Do crosswords. Whatever. And as others have said, it couldn't hurt to let the other employees know (if they ask for help with something) that you're cut off. It would be a welcome warning about the company where they will continue to work after you're gone.
You're not the one who changed the rules -- they are. I don't advocate anything spiteful (taking office supplies, undermining morale, whatever), but if they're not going to accept all of the expertise that you're offering, I say just wait for your checks and then go.
When I was about 20 (around 1991), I worked for a family friend who was doing custom DB app development. He was working on a warehouse tracking system at the time, and I helped him compile information about the competition for an article he was writing for Unix World magazine. When I told my parents about the article for Unix World, my father went all glassy until I explained the spelling and definitions involved.
I was impressed by his poker face, honestly. I think he thought he'd been exposing his boy to the decidedly wrong people.
Hi -- again, another deeply informative response. Thanks! You've given me a lot to digest and read (and there's a weekend coming, so I'll have some time).
Thanks again -- I appreciate your patience and willingness to explain things.
Great way to put it. I'm a graphic designer first and programmer only when necessary, so I was coming at it from a slightly different angle. But in the publishing industry, we sell our clients finished books. I design and typeset these books, and in the end they own a garage full of books. I still own my application files (all the digital images, InDesign or Quark files, and fonts). If they want the app files (in other words, if they want to reprint somewhere else without going through us), we sell them those files.
The digital files, though, are a separate entity from the expression within them. In this case, I'd think it would be the difference between the collected data (John Smith, 123 Main Street, etc.) and the table structure, queries, and so on.
Finally, when we sell my files, I take all indication of our involvement out of the book. Part of the agreement is that we no longer hold any responsibility for the files themselves. If the client wants to gum up the works and produce a crappy reprint, that's their business. But we want no connection to it if we are no longer in direct control of it.
That last bit might be enough to scare your client in this case -- if you tell them that you can't be responsible for the integrity of the data or the reliability of the server anymore if they're going to start writing their own queries, they may decide to stick to the way you've been doing things all along.
Of course, they may also walk away. And while I don't know how integral to your business life they are (and therefore wouldn't presume to tell you to just dump the bozos, as that kind of response comes far too often in the hallowed halls of Slashdot as it is), but I've often been happy to see people walk away during this kind of conflict. You learn a lot about people during negotiations like this, and I've been relieved to find out what a client is made of BEFORE begging them to stick with me/us. It just ends up in a nasty breakup later anyway, typically on a tighter timeframe with higher losses.
Thanks -- there's a lot I don't know, obviously.
One of my long-held understandings about overseas missionary work (not specific to LDS, per se) is that it unduly holds recipients of charity to certain standards -- put VERY simply, I've read of a lot of things about people who want immunizations or food or schools having to come to church (and perhaps convert, but not always) to get them.
I certainly understand that the people doing the missionary work have the best interests (as they see them) of the recipients in mind, but if this stuff is true, I find it objectionable (and this is kind of the source of some of my bristling when we start talking about this stuff). Better that the locals do what they have to do to get the food/treatment/shelter/whatever, but it still makes me itchy. In a perfect world (okay, I know, I know), they should just get what they need and then decide whether the people what brung it have some good ideas about other stuff, too.
Just my opinion, and it's clearly based on a pretty spotty set of facts. But if you have any insight into how that really gets dealt with on the ground, I'd love to hear it. It's all well and good for the missionaries to get something out of it, but are the recipients of the mission services getting what they need with no questions asked, so to speak?
Again, thanks for your patience with this curious agnostic!
Thanks for the insight from within the church. Really, I didn't mean to take a shot at the Mormon church (LDS, right?) in particular. I do personally have some reservations about how organized religions treat their flocks in general and with the concept of recruitment via missionary work, which is more what I was getting at.
:)
And when you put the baptism question that way, it makes more sense. Baptism kind of "presents" you to God and the church, right? So it would follow logically that you need to pin down who you are before that. (I could be wrong -- we UUs don't really have a dedication for babies/children and a Coming of Age later on in your teens, but as I think of it now, I've never been clear on the exact purpose of Baptism.)
And on behalf of all of us, thank you for sending the 10,000 people to the Katrina zone. You did more than a) the government, and b) many other American denominations. I don't know what all the UUA did, but I know we didn't send that kind of manpower. I bet we discussed the hell out of it, though.
I'll readily admit (even more readily after this) that I don't know as much about LDS as I could. I think there's a lot of publicly-perceived mystery surrounding your denomination more than most, which may set up more unfair public opinions about you guys. I know some of the reticence to be more visible is historical (you guys had a rough go of it when you came through the midwest here in the 1800s, as I understand it), and some is probably simply combat fatigue due to some of the more controversial offshoots who make all the news.
Thanks for the corrections, though. Maybe I need to do a bit of reading other than Slashdot!
Some of the tenets are quite exclusionary -- if you're planning a transgender operation, for example, you may not be baptized.
Perhaps "dark and unpleasant" was a careless choice of words -- maybe "restrictive and archaic" would be better. I was referring more to the strongly discouraged practices such as surrogate parenting, voluntary sterilization, and so on. I guess it's not significantly different from other churches, but I didn't dig too deeply through the rest of the document.
I guess religions are, in part, inherently exclusionary (as is anything with members). So maybe I need to just let them do their thing. It's just that they and other religions keep so much from their members that the members may not realize what the elders are being instructed to do. I guess some call it faith, but I call it uneducated decision making.
Which is probably why I'm a Unitarian. And even we have our questionable practices (if anything ever gets out of committee).
Not sure I agree. Many religions have confidential texts -- some are spiritual, some are operational.
By that logic, a lot of organizations are cults, including corporations and governments. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to keep some policies public and some private -- the content of the policies is another matter, though (public OR private).
IMO the stuff in this one is pretty dark and unpleasant. And keeping this particular stuff confidential doesn't allow a potential or current member to make an informed decision about their church. But in this case I think it's as much an issue of the policies as it is that they are (or were) confidential.
I understand your point, but respectfully disagree. It's like saying that imprisoning criminals starts with the really bad guys, moves to the middle guys, and eventually we're all in prison to a certain extent.
While some may feel this way, I think the slippery slope argument gets a little too much play sometimes. I am happy to employ it when I think it's pertinent, but here we're talking about giving kids a choice between juvie and school.
Two things (among others) are in play here: the value of choice and the value of diversion.
Part of what makes kids screw up is the perception that they have no control and no choice over what happens in their lives. This seems to exemplify the very definition of choice over what happens to them.
Diversion is crucial, too. My wife's uncle has spent years working in the Vermont prison system in the diversion program. Rather than put kids in jail right off the bat, they get to choose to do something else. It nearly wipes out recidivism among the confused kids (there will always be some who are determined to screw up, and they will), and it keeps the prison/juvie population down to a) manageable levels and b) the most relevant population (kids who really do need the ass-kicking).
I don't see this as a risk of feature creep as much as I see it as an alternative to taking a bunch of minor screwups and turning them into criminals.
Why? This isn't a requirement. It's an option equivalent to juvenile detention. As I see it, it gives a kid a choice between juvie and doing what they're supposed to be doing.
TFA clearly states that this is being used for kids with very serious truancy problems. It's not for some kid who's late a couple times. And if the kid prefers to wear the transmitter and go to school, great. And if not, he is detained under more traditional circumstances. At no time is the school system sneaking up on kids and tagging their ears -- this is a choice given to the kid and his family.
In theory, I agree with others around here that if it gets to this level, the parents relinquished control at some point. But be that as it may, until the kids are 16 they're not only the parents' responsibility, but the community's as well. You may take issue with the laws surrounding that issue, but that's not the point. The point is to make the child comply with existing attendance laws, and this seems to me to be a better way than locking them up with other kids who have screwed up their lives in whatever widely varying ways.
You know, I don't know if you're joking or not, but I see no reason why this SHOULDN'T be the case. In the past, the government has provided soldiers with cigarettes, alcohol, and other "creature comforts" for morale purposes.
I'm not suggesting they be given anything illegal or particularly depraved (by "conventional" standards, whatever that means), but how hard is it to provide a collection of confirmed virus-free pics and video?
The only problems I see are that a) soldiers who prefer the company of their own gender would be worried about being tracked despite "don't ask, don't tell," and b) the difference (generally speaking, of course) between how men and women get their ya-yas may cause female soldiers to feel that the porn objectifies women and sets up inequality between soldiers.
Still, it seems worth exploring (and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the government HAS investigated the possibilities). Fact is, the soldiers are going to seek it out. If it's not clean, it puts the network at risk.
Is that the RIAA now has an ally on the bench in Colorado.
I don't recognize the language, but I'm guessing you live somewhere where there are only a couple of languages commonly spoken. Here (Chicago), the people who put pizza menus, roofing company fliers, lawn care fliers, and other ads on our door may speak any one of (conservatively) five or six languages. I made a "post no bills" sign in five languages (English, Spanish, Polish, French, and Russian), but my wife won't let me hang it. She thinks it will make us look unwelcoming. Indeed, to these people who barf their ads all over our front steps, it would. So we now have a separate can inside the door just to throw the advertising crap into.
And that's not even the stuff that gets sent -- that's just the stuff that people walk up and put on our doorknob or car windows.
... they should have pulled GTA3 out of respect to the families of people who were chased down like dogs on the street and chopped to bits with a chain saw.
Personally, the game is too unpleasant for me. I have GTA3 and play it occasionally, but found it to be a little too gratuitous for even my leathery brain. And I can certainly see how people would object to the drunk driving aspect of it (if nothing else, it doesn't seem like it would be crucial to the plot, and therefore seems to be added for shock value rather than gameplay).
But man, if there was ever an example of the slippery slope argument, this would be it.