I'm a man and like to multi-task (in fact I'm good at it), your stereotype is as useless as all stereotypes because for each 'rule' their are numerous 'exceptions'. I really wonder at how we can be so blind with these kinds of gender-based stereotypes that we don't even to realize how full of crap they are...
My fiancee sucks at dealing with stress, and I handle money, coupons, and anything time sensitive as she can't juggle anything very well... So based on my own observation I'd be disinclined to believe your theory on 'the female brain' and it's aptitudes. In fact I wish people would stop generalizing such things. Both men and women can be good or bad at all those things and gender doesn't have much if anything to do with it.
how can you not do well on the ASVAB...? I took it in high school like everyone else and afterwards every branch of service wanted me... and not just that they wanted to send me to officers training right off the bat... Solely on my ASVAB... It was rather nuts... and looking back on it I probably should have taken the USAF or Navy up on their offers (the army didn't make as compelling a case as the other two). I would probably have been several years ahead on where I am in my career if I had... and have 60k less college debt...
While a game rather than a TV show or movie... Phantasy Star III had the same concept of a large biodome equipped ship that had lost it's bridge and the cultures within the biodomes developed in their own unique ways having lost the concept of being within a ship. It also followed 3 generations of characters (with options determining which path the following generation would tread). Based on PSIII I think the idea has potential...
Their is a common concept usually referenced by talking about the 'masks we must wear', their is alot of poetry if nothing else written on the subject. However I have heard of some research into the psychology behind it as well. The biggest thing I can remember hearing about as a issue of it however is cognitive dissonance. Most of our early masks are created during our younger years (middle and high school in the US, but the roots go back further) and our need to be 'popular' or 'fit in'. Peer pressure fits into it as well. Someone who may not want to do X can do X when he's 'wearing the mask that does X'.
I suggest you read some work done by Phil Zimbardo (you can look him up on Wikipedia if need be), his area of study is "the line between good and evil" as he's put it before (In fact I think that was the title of one of his books). His research says that actually doing something while emulating a media image and having been given authority does in fact tend to have you do things you otherwise wouldn't. It doesn't seem to effect 'virtual' worlds, but when you do it in the real world things can get extreme.
Self-help concepts also have you refer to yourself differently and otherwise alter our outward image to affect our inner image... Keeping the two separate is often hard.
You must have had some crap sales people if they couldn't make a comeback to that... Not only have I sold plans to people who have said something like that when I worked at such stores during college, I've swung it into a higher end item & a plan on it...
It's really easy to not even lie about that when you see what comes back in as returns... "Oh model X comes back several times a week for one reason or another, you may really want to get item Z instead", I never lied to customers when selling plans. I didn't get as many as the liars did, but I got enough to keep me in a job... Even enough to make some extra cash at one point when they shared part of the profits with employees who sold plans (before I left they ended up taking all the money and giving salespeople nothing). This sadly was never much, a $100 service plan may net you $4... Most things net you a quarter or 2... The biggest payoff from them I ever got was on a $350 laptop plan (the plan was $350, the laptop was nearly $3k) and I kept a whole $15...
I really have to comment on the block you'll mostly see below (I made small changes):
"In reality, you searched for some app to get a specific task done, found a dozen results, sifted through the crud, the crippleware, the ones you can't even tell do what you need, the ones that looked sketchy, the ones for which you had to pay. You downloaded it -- if you're like most users the downloaded executable is still sitting on your home folder with your documents -- and ran it. You really don't know what it is, what it's going to do, or where it came from, but you ran it anyway. You selected a bunch of options (from experience, most users have no idea what the options are and just click "next" hoping for sane defaults) and then wound up with the application...somewhere. Maybe it's in the Start menu under the developer's name, but maybe it's grouped with something else, or labelled by the name of the program, maybe it didn't even create a link to use it. Who knows? And you got a few little freebies, didn't you? Like horseshit little systray icons hogging resources, quicklaunch icons, extraneous desktop shortcuts, unnecessary folders created in the root, perhaps some stupid thing that's going to nag you for updates and registrations every single day, and maybe some silently-installed malware, depending on what you just installed."
That's a great example of tar.gz,.rpm, &.deb installs in Linux... Even Apt installs at times when it requires options to be selected on install... I think your two used to the hassles in Linux to notice they are far more alike than you think. I use both & both annoy me. I want both systems changed to something better as they both suck.
Divx was first out of those three items, Appliances was second, and last was the move from commission to hourly for all employees.... You also left out hourly rate caps (which in the end lead them to fire everyone who made over the caps, though that only happened ~3 years ago). A TV or PC salesman who had once been commission making 30k/year was now downgraded to hourly @ $7.50/hour and capped at $11.50 an hour. Most of the store I once worked for ended up over the cap when they did the switch. I myself went over the cap for my department by $2.25/hour when they changed things... This lead to them firing everyone who was making over the cap after I left. Btw a cheap plastic pen was a '5 years working at CC' gift. Classy...
Having worked in a CC store for a few years several years ago I can easily explain the 'can I help you?' bit...
See CC didn't want a security department like Best Buy uses and instead wanted to use the associates as the only means of doing in shop lifting... So it was mandated that we be extremely 'helpful' regardless of the customers desires. I'd ask exactly once when someone would come into my section of the store, or again if they seemed like they actually might need help. I got into a lot of trouble for that with management seeming to really think that customers wanted associates to stalk them asking 'Can I help you (yet)?' every 2 or 3 minutes... Attempts to explain that I'd leave a store that did that to me, so I won't do it to a customer went nowhere...
By the way, I could answer most of the questions people had on 90% of the store when I worked there. I usually even had a handle on inventory, at least in my section, so I'd know when we'd get shipments, current inventory levels, expected amounts of items when they would come in, etc. So I could actually help most customers.
Alot of depression is also mental and not physical (or at least not directly physical). My minor was in psychology of all things and the track for psychiatrists to understand the psychological issues involved in mental health provide less classes than I took. They specialize in medical causes of mental health issues and usually ignore alternatives, which isn't always so good as the mind doesn't have to biologically suffer from 'x' to have something that seems to be 'x'. Depression is a great example as it's often normal to be depressed and frankly some peoples lives do suck... It's not wonder they suffer from long term depression. Does your life sucking mean you medically have an issue that causes depression? No. Usually the body will respond in certain ways to emotional or mental stimuli, but this isn't always true and shows more how we tend to treat symptoms than conditions.
Well I've seen some interesting evidence by a professor who works on what he tends to refer to as 'the difference between good & evil'... If you'd like to see a talk on that very topic (whether we would or would not follow such orders) take a look: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/272
Most people just buy 'a computer' they don't understand'a computer' may not run games when they feel like playing them. I know this quite well as my fiancee did this very thing... Ended up getting a cheap box that couldn't play her sons (he's 8 btw) disney games on it's POS Intel GPU. Complained to no end about it being such a sucky PC... I pointed out a very low end gaming PC instead (with a dedicated Nvidia GPU), which she bought and it ran all those games her son had. In the end though she then replaced her desktop all together with a laptop using a dedicated ATI GPU instead because it took up less space.
As far as she's concerned however a PC is a PC, the _only_ factor between them is price as she doesn't understand one bit about what gives a PC performance and couldn't care less about it until her generic box can't do whatever it is she now wants to do. & Most people are like her.
It's more like a person only buying a car based on sticker price... Then later they complain it sucks up gas like a sieve and has crap acceleration. What do they do? Sell the car and buy a new one using the same metrics as last time, but from a different company... Unless they get lucky and they can convince someone they know who knows about cars to help them shop for a new one that meets both requirements (old and new ones)...
Yes I know this is a late reply, hadn't noticed your comment until now...
As an example in Columbus Ohio (when I lived there 9 years ago) they had salary caps on where you could live... Government assisted housing was available for ~$400/month and your credit didn't really matter... But you had to make under 15k/year single or 32k/year for a couple. The only option above this (& I did a years worth of apartment looking so I know exactly how it was) were bigger apartments going for $1200-1600/month and they required good credit (& you signed a lease contract rather than a pure rental contract). You also had other limits in there and restrictions, but that is the simplified version... I made 23k/year at the time (during college) & had to look at the more expensive places as I wasn't even allowed to look at other apartments as I made to much...
I don't think you realize the big holes in the safety nets out there... I could own a 2 story good condition house where I live now for ~1000-1100/month... If I could afford that... I had to have a roommate in Columbus just to pay that bill... & when my roommate forfeited the lease I got a credit black eye for it (& lost the apartment)... I in fact had to move back in with my parents @ 21 years of age or I would very much have been homeless....
"BTW, those people in the street would be paying rent somewhere, losing your house does not make you homeless, it makes you move to a home you can afford. There is no reason why that rent cannot be paying the principle on the loans they took out for the houses they wanted to purchase."
That's actually not quite true... reneging on a significant loan like that can very well kill your credit rating & make it impossible to do anything requiring credit (including renting property).
I know if I had an extra $3k right now I'd pay off some debt and give myself more spending money each month... Like most people I need to pay off tons of debt before I can think of saving money...
Working in education I can tell you the 'special education' students can't even get 1:1 instruction... there are to many to do that with... even 10:1 is hard to get in publicly funded education. Also those students count against a school for things like the 'No Child Left Behind's' AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), and yet funding for SE students isn't any higher than a regular student from state or federal funds. Every SE student cuts into the budget for all other non-SE students in a school.
That's without poor performing (or usually discipline problem) kids figuring in at all. Parents often don't want to raise their own kids and instead expect the school to raise their kids for them with minimal if any involvement... In public school there are way to many of these. They are usually nearly uneducatable, because they don't care and neither do the parents... but not caring isn't cause for expulsion... and someone has to have these kids... they must be in a school unless they become a 'dropout' by federal and state law, and most laws of the sort don't let you even dropout until 16 without parent consent. There are no other recourses for the school and you'll never convince parents they have to take responsibility for their kids until you put them in jail for lack of involvement with them.
The fact that so many parents think they don't need to deal with their own kids is the #1 reason pubic education sucks in the US.
I want to work where you work... My employer is a tyrant who makes quite the fuss whenever a problem occurs that I'm a replaceable 'cog' in the machine. All that while their are very few Network Admins in my area who have 5 years of experience or more in this field.... So realistically they would 'replace' me with someone who has a minimal education in my field... That matters not to them... In fact probably the opposite as they should be paying me more for all I do for them...
My bosses are the enemy & maybe that's why I would love a union...
On the other hand unions can be very helpful for smart people who know their job...
I would love a union currently where I work... no one has a clue what I do, so anything related to technology in any way (tv's, phones and phone services, dvd players, cameras, graphic design, etc, etc) become 'mine'... On top of that I'm a single IT person for over 500 users and have to do everything from writing technology plans, getting and evaluating bids from vendors for projects, and dealing with state and federal paperwork for our reporting... to maintaining the network, helpdesk work, and fixing the crap that was done before I was hired... All while I am not considered a 'management level' employee, I have no budget, and crap for authority to actually get anything done... Oh... and don't even get me started on my crappy $35k/year salary for all the effort I put in...
But every single time I can't instantly give an answer ("How long will it take for these damn phones to get fixed?", "Why doesn't this damn DVD player work?", or "Why isn't the damn internet working again yet?" when our provider wasn't even sure yet why or system wasn't connecting to theirs one day), They decide I am incompetent... I'm also an introvert, while they are all extroverts... Which doesn't help, and then they add paperwork on top of everything else to 'make sure your being productive', which eats into my actual time to _be_ productive as I have to dictate where I am every second of the day...
I would love a Union that could actually bitch slap the administration and possibly fix this crap... My job has ballooned since i first took it 3 years ago and it never ends... my job description still looks the same, every new thing is added under the clause 'And any other tasks that you are directed to do'... The fun part is I can't find another job in my field within 100 miles... and a 2 hour commute by car every day is out of the question... As is moving to a larger city, since I can't afford to rent a apartment there on what I'm paid here and still pay my bills...
I'll tell you the other case where vendor support is useful, besides where IT isn't very skilled.... Understaffed IT departments. I for instance am the sole IT person for a 600 user network... & trust me if I had my way we'd have more IT people... But I don't... & I don't have the time to fix the vendors crap, I probably also didn't choose to use vendor X's crap, and most of the time I can still get work done while explaining to their clueless helpdesk that X needs fixed because of Y...
& the kicker, as long as I've complained enough to vendor X, I'm not held accountable for their shit.
Schools these days can barely teach reading and writing skills... I've seen 12 year olds who can't write their own name. Let alone science (For scientific method) or advanced math (statistics, which I had in HS). I think we need to do alot more than just trying to teach those subjects during elementary school....
Well I'm just going to point out it could take years to get in front of a judge for a proper case... On the other hand, Disney getting a claim so the play couldn't be put on until the case is settled has a high chance of going through very quickly...
Of course this may look nothing like the Danish legal system, but I'm not sure that either of us know what that looks like...
As an 'online service' you've already agreed to them cutting you off if you don't follow the rules. In fact I know some online games that have done this going back at least 5 years. EA just has a bigger share of the market then most of those.
The problem with forums tends to be that a few bad apples can ruin things for everyone & often their are no consequences that they care about keeping them from doing these bad things. The job of a moderator is to cut down on abusive people or at least contain them. This however would give a good incentive to people to stay on good behavior, which there is far to little of.
I have no idea what EA moderators are like as I don't visit their forums, however you have to be quite the jackass to get perma-banned on most forums with repeated instances of abuse of the rules. Their are even people who try to sign-up a new account after getting perma-banned and do the same thing all over again... Apparently some people just get their rocks off harassing others where they feel their are zero consequences...
This would, however, change that from being a zero sum game and may actually fix crappy ass behavior. I'm all for fewer dicks online.
Having been a forum moderator before & having played some games online within the last month even... I have to say I'm all for tying the two together. Being banned from the forums means nothing to alot of people. Being banned from games they like would actually mean _something_.
Being a moderator is often like being a teacher these days, you can tell someone that they can't go out to play for awhile (temp ban) or even get them kicked out of school for something bad enough (banned), but the other person often _wants_ that. Taking away something they enjoy may actual start to curb behavior... to hell with complaints from people who can't follow common sense rules...
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I'm a man and like to multi-task (in fact I'm good at it), your stereotype is as useless as all stereotypes because for each 'rule' their are numerous 'exceptions'. I really wonder at how we can be so blind with these kinds of gender-based stereotypes that we don't even to realize how full of crap they are...
My fiancee sucks at dealing with stress, and I handle money, coupons, and anything time sensitive as she can't juggle anything very well... So based on my own observation I'd be disinclined to believe your theory on 'the female brain' and it's aptitudes. In fact I wish people would stop generalizing such things. Both men and women can be good or bad at all those things and gender doesn't have much if anything to do with it.
how can you not do well on the ASVAB...? I took it in high school like everyone else and afterwards every branch of service wanted me... and not just that they wanted to send me to officers training right off the bat... Solely on my ASVAB... It was rather nuts... and looking back on it I probably should have taken the USAF or Navy up on their offers (the army didn't make as compelling a case as the other two). I would probably have been several years ahead on where I am in my career if I had... and have 60k less college debt...
While a game rather than a TV show or movie... Phantasy Star III had the same concept of a large biodome equipped ship that had lost it's bridge and the cultures within the biodomes developed in their own unique ways having lost the concept of being within a ship. It also followed 3 generations of characters (with options determining which path the following generation would tread). Based on PSIII I think the idea has potential...
Their is a common concept usually referenced by talking about the 'masks we must wear', their is alot of poetry if nothing else written on the subject. However I have heard of some research into the psychology behind it as well. The biggest thing I can remember hearing about as a issue of it however is cognitive dissonance. Most of our early masks are created during our younger years (middle and high school in the US, but the roots go back further) and our need to be 'popular' or 'fit in'. Peer pressure fits into it as well. Someone who may not want to do X can do X when he's 'wearing the mask that does X'.
I suggest you read some work done by Phil Zimbardo (you can look him up on Wikipedia if need be), his area of study is "the line between good and evil" as he's put it before (In fact I think that was the title of one of his books). His research says that actually doing something while emulating a media image and having been given authority does in fact tend to have you do things you otherwise wouldn't. It doesn't seem to effect 'virtual' worlds, but when you do it in the real world things can get extreme.
Self-help concepts also have you refer to yourself differently and otherwise alter our outward image to affect our inner image... Keeping the two separate is often hard.
You must have had some crap sales people if they couldn't make a comeback to that... Not only have I sold plans to people who have said something like that when I worked at such stores during college, I've swung it into a higher end item & a plan on it...
It's really easy to not even lie about that when you see what comes back in as returns... "Oh model X comes back several times a week for one reason or another, you may really want to get item Z instead", I never lied to customers when selling plans. I didn't get as many as the liars did, but I got enough to keep me in a job... Even enough to make some extra cash at one point when they shared part of the profits with employees who sold plans (before I left they ended up taking all the money and giving salespeople nothing). This sadly was never much, a $100 service plan may net you $4... Most things net you a quarter or 2... The biggest payoff from them I ever got was on a $350 laptop plan (the plan was $350, the laptop was nearly $3k) and I kept a whole $15...
I really have to comment on the block you'll mostly see below (I made small changes):
"In reality, you searched for some app to get a specific task done, found a dozen results, sifted through the crud, the crippleware, the ones you can't even tell do what you need, the ones that looked sketchy, the ones for which you had to pay. You downloaded it -- if you're like most users the downloaded executable is still sitting on your home folder with your documents -- and ran it. You really don't know what it is, what it's going to do, or where it came from, but you ran it anyway. You selected a bunch of options (from experience, most users have no idea what the options are and just click "next" hoping for sane defaults) and then wound up with the application...somewhere. Maybe it's in the Start menu under the developer's name, but maybe it's grouped with something else, or labelled by the name of the program, maybe it didn't even create a link to use it. Who knows? And you got a few little freebies, didn't you? Like horseshit little systray icons hogging resources, quicklaunch icons, extraneous desktop shortcuts, unnecessary folders created in the root, perhaps some stupid thing that's going to nag you for updates and registrations every single day, and maybe some silently-installed malware, depending on what you just installed."
That's a great example of tar.gz, .rpm, & .deb installs in Linux... Even Apt installs at times when it requires options to be selected on install... I think your two used to the hassles in Linux to notice they are far more alike than you think. I use both & both annoy me. I want both systems changed to something better as they both suck.
You reversed the order of things a good bit...
Divx was first out of those three items, Appliances was second, and last was the move from commission to hourly for all employees.... You also left out hourly rate caps (which in the end lead them to fire everyone who made over the caps, though that only happened ~3 years ago). A TV or PC salesman who had once been commission making 30k/year was now downgraded to hourly @ $7.50/hour and capped at $11.50 an hour. Most of the store I once worked for ended up over the cap when they did the switch. I myself went over the cap for my department by $2.25/hour when they changed things... This lead to them firing everyone who was making over the cap after I left. Btw a cheap plastic pen was a '5 years working at CC' gift. Classy...
Having worked in a CC store for a few years several years ago I can easily explain the 'can I help you?' bit...
See CC didn't want a security department like Best Buy uses and instead wanted to use the associates as the only means of doing in shop lifting... So it was mandated that we be extremely 'helpful' regardless of the customers desires. I'd ask exactly once when someone would come into my section of the store, or again if they seemed like they actually might need help. I got into a lot of trouble for that with management seeming to really think that customers wanted associates to stalk them asking 'Can I help you (yet)?' every 2 or 3 minutes... Attempts to explain that I'd leave a store that did that to me, so I won't do it to a customer went nowhere...
By the way, I could answer most of the questions people had on 90% of the store when I worked there. I usually even had a handle on inventory, at least in my section, so I'd know when we'd get shipments, current inventory levels, expected amounts of items when they would come in, etc. So I could actually help most customers.
Alot of depression is also mental and not physical (or at least not directly physical). My minor was in psychology of all things and the track for psychiatrists to understand the psychological issues involved in mental health provide less classes than I took. They specialize in medical causes of mental health issues and usually ignore alternatives, which isn't always so good as the mind doesn't have to biologically suffer from 'x' to have something that seems to be 'x'. Depression is a great example as it's often normal to be depressed and frankly some peoples lives do suck... It's not wonder they suffer from long term depression. Does your life sucking mean you medically have an issue that causes depression? No. Usually the body will respond in certain ways to emotional or mental stimuli, but this isn't always true and shows more how we tend to treat symptoms than conditions.
Well I've seen some interesting evidence by a professor who works on what he tends to refer to as 'the difference between good & evil'... If you'd like to see a talk on that very topic (whether we would or would not follow such orders) take a look: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/272
Most people just buy 'a computer' they don't understand'a computer' may not run games when they feel like playing them. I know this quite well as my fiancee did this very thing... Ended up getting a cheap box that couldn't play her sons (he's 8 btw) disney games on it's POS Intel GPU. Complained to no end about it being such a sucky PC... I pointed out a very low end gaming PC instead (with a dedicated Nvidia GPU), which she bought and it ran all those games her son had. In the end though she then replaced her desktop all together with a laptop using a dedicated ATI GPU instead because it took up less space.
As far as she's concerned however a PC is a PC, the _only_ factor between them is price as she doesn't understand one bit about what gives a PC performance and couldn't care less about it until her generic box can't do whatever it is she now wants to do. & Most people are like her.
It's more like a person only buying a car based on sticker price... Then later they complain it sucks up gas like a sieve and has crap acceleration. What do they do? Sell the car and buy a new one using the same metrics as last time, but from a different company... Unless they get lucky and they can convince someone they know who knows about cars to help them shop for a new one that meets both requirements (old and new ones)...
Yes I know this is a late reply, hadn't noticed your comment until now...
As an example in Columbus Ohio (when I lived there 9 years ago) they had salary caps on where you could live... Government assisted housing was available for ~$400/month and your credit didn't really matter... But you had to make under 15k/year single or 32k/year for a couple. The only option above this (& I did a years worth of apartment looking so I know exactly how it was) were bigger apartments going for $1200-1600/month and they required good credit (& you signed a lease contract rather than a pure rental contract). You also had other limits in there and restrictions, but that is the simplified version... I made 23k/year at the time (during college) & had to look at the more expensive places as I wasn't even allowed to look at other apartments as I made to much...
I don't think you realize the big holes in the safety nets out there... I could own a 2 story good condition house where I live now for ~1000-1100/month... If I could afford that... I had to have a roommate in Columbus just to pay that bill... & when my roommate forfeited the lease I got a credit black eye for it (& lost the apartment)... I in fact had to move back in with my parents @ 21 years of age or I would very much have been homeless....
"BTW, those people in the street would be paying rent somewhere, losing your house does not make you homeless, it makes you move to a home you can afford. There is no reason why that rent cannot be paying the principle on the loans they took out for the houses they wanted to purchase."
That's actually not quite true... reneging on a significant loan like that can very well kill your credit rating & make it impossible to do anything requiring credit (including renting property).
I know if I had an extra $3k right now I'd pay off some debt and give myself more spending money each month... Like most people I need to pay off tons of debt before I can think of saving money...
Working in education I can tell you the 'special education' students can't even get 1:1 instruction... there are to many to do that with... even 10:1 is hard to get in publicly funded education. Also those students count against a school for things like the 'No Child Left Behind's' AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), and yet funding for SE students isn't any higher than a regular student from state or federal funds. Every SE student cuts into the budget for all other non-SE students in a school.
That's without poor performing (or usually discipline problem) kids figuring in at all. Parents often don't want to raise their own kids and instead expect the school to raise their kids for them with minimal if any involvement... In public school there are way to many of these. They are usually nearly uneducatable, because they don't care and neither do the parents... but not caring isn't cause for expulsion... and someone has to have these kids... they must be in a school unless they become a 'dropout' by federal and state law, and most laws of the sort don't let you even dropout until 16 without parent consent. There are no other recourses for the school and you'll never convince parents they have to take responsibility for their kids until you put them in jail for lack of involvement with them.
The fact that so many parents think they don't need to deal with their own kids is the #1 reason pubic education sucks in the US.
I want to work where you work... My employer is a tyrant who makes quite the fuss whenever a problem occurs that I'm a replaceable 'cog' in the machine. All that while their are very few Network Admins in my area who have 5 years of experience or more in this field.... So realistically they would 'replace' me with someone who has a minimal education in my field... That matters not to them... In fact probably the opposite as they should be paying me more for all I do for them...
My bosses are the enemy & maybe that's why I would love a union...
On the other hand unions can be very helpful for smart people who know their job...
I would love a union currently where I work... no one has a clue what I do, so anything related to technology in any way (tv's, phones and phone services, dvd players, cameras, graphic design, etc, etc) become 'mine'... On top of that I'm a single IT person for over 500 users and have to do everything from writing technology plans, getting and evaluating bids from vendors for projects, and dealing with state and federal paperwork for our reporting... to maintaining the network, helpdesk work, and fixing the crap that was done before I was hired... All while I am not considered a 'management level' employee, I have no budget, and crap for authority to actually get anything done... Oh... and don't even get me started on my crappy $35k/year salary for all the effort I put in...
But every single time I can't instantly give an answer ("How long will it take for these damn phones to get fixed?", "Why doesn't this damn DVD player work?", or "Why isn't the damn internet working again yet?" when our provider wasn't even sure yet why or system wasn't connecting to theirs one day), They decide I am incompetent... I'm also an introvert, while they are all extroverts... Which doesn't help, and then they add paperwork on top of everything else to 'make sure your being productive', which eats into my actual time to _be_ productive as I have to dictate where I am every second of the day...
I would love a Union that could actually bitch slap the administration and possibly fix this crap... My job has ballooned since i first took it 3 years ago and it never ends... my job description still looks the same, every new thing is added under the clause 'And any other tasks that you are directed to do'... The fun part is I can't find another job in my field within 100 miles... and a 2 hour commute by car every day is out of the question... As is moving to a larger city, since I can't afford to rent a apartment there on what I'm paid here and still pay my bills...
I'll tell you the other case where vendor support is useful, besides where IT isn't very skilled.... Understaffed IT departments. I for instance am the sole IT person for a 600 user network... & trust me if I had my way we'd have more IT people... But I don't... & I don't have the time to fix the vendors crap, I probably also didn't choose to use vendor X's crap, and most of the time I can still get work done while explaining to their clueless helpdesk that X needs fixed because of Y...
& the kicker, as long as I've complained enough to vendor X, I'm not held accountable for their shit.
Schools these days can barely teach reading and writing skills... I've seen 12 year olds who can't write their own name. Let alone science (For scientific method) or advanced math (statistics, which I had in HS). I think we need to do alot more than just trying to teach those subjects during elementary school....
Well I'm just going to point out it could take years to get in front of a judge for a proper case... On the other hand, Disney getting a claim so the play couldn't be put on until the case is settled has a high chance of going through very quickly...
Of course this may look nothing like the Danish legal system, but I'm not sure that either of us know what that looks like...
As an 'online service' you've already agreed to them cutting you off if you don't follow the rules. In fact I know some online games that have done this going back at least 5 years. EA just has a bigger share of the market then most of those.
The problem with forums tends to be that a few bad apples can ruin things for everyone & often their are no consequences that they care about keeping them from doing these bad things. The job of a moderator is to cut down on abusive people or at least contain them. This however would give a good incentive to people to stay on good behavior, which there is far to little of.
I have no idea what EA moderators are like as I don't visit their forums, however you have to be quite the jackass to get perma-banned on most forums with repeated instances of abuse of the rules. Their are even people who try to sign-up a new account after getting perma-banned and do the same thing all over again... Apparently some people just get their rocks off harassing others where they feel their are zero consequences...
This would, however, change that from being a zero sum game and may actually fix crappy ass behavior. I'm all for fewer dicks online.
Having been a forum moderator before & having played some games online within the last month even... I have to say I'm all for tying the two together. Being banned from the forums means nothing to alot of people. Being banned from games they like would actually mean _something_.
Being a moderator is often like being a teacher these days, you can tell someone that they can't go out to play for awhile (temp ban) or even get them kicked out of school for something bad enough (banned), but the other person often _wants_ that. Taking away something they enjoy may actual start to curb behavior... to hell with complaints from people who can't follow common sense rules...