most people do more for the company than they get back as a reward for their work.
That's kind of the point of hiring someone. If you get $25,000 benefit from a person and pay them $30,000, you'd be better off to fire them. If you get $25,000 in benefit, you need to pay them less than $25,000 to justify the hire. Conversely, the employee could probably earn say $15,000 working alone, so if they can get $20,000 for doing $25,000 in work, it's worth it to them to get hired.
So you've got the benefit to the company (x) and the amount of money the employee could make elsewhere (y), and as long as x is greater than y, you can figure out a salary in between.
Of course a lot more factors into it. Like risk (you are probably safer with a salaried job than going indie) and also the difficulty of figuring out an employee's contribution to firm revenue (easy for front end and sales, harder for back end like sys admins).
But the general idea is simple: you are supposed to earn more money for the company than you get paid, otherwise they would be stupid to keep you in their roster.
Oh please. Writing "I'm not going to call you a fat moron because that would be a personal attack" is a personal attack. Actually omitting an anti-Mormon comment would be one thing, writing "[anti-mormon attack ommitted here]" is the same as my "fat moron" example - just less explicit. That's exactly the kind of passive-agressive attack (like the Faux News barb above) that may help you feel some sense of moral superiority, but doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're not making assumptions and personal attacks in the very same post where you claim they never happen.
It's probably not worth mentioning I don't watch Fox News, is it?
I guess you did find out that I don't have all that much respect for pushy religions.
Right... so is Mormonism one such religion or not? You seem hell-bent on saying it is, despite the fact that you've really got no rational reason to say so. You claim that anyone who asks you if you're interested in their church is directly calling your own beliefs false despite my observation that it is clearly an indirect and unintentional side effect that only occurs in a minority of cases. No response from you on that point. Your characterization of my mission as "aggressive" was based entirely on word-play, but when the direct approach fails you, you seem happy to lapse back into passive-agression, innuendo, and implication.
I'll be honest - I'd prefer an outright personal attack to all this back-pedaling and shadow boxing. Say what you mean the first time and have the courage to stick by it. Worry about social niceties second. It's always easy to apologize honestly for something that was said honestly, I think, and it's a waste of too much time and effort to attempt to insult someone without getting your hands dirty.
So I guess what you learned is that at least one Mormon out there is a cantankerous, insulting, pushy fellow. I can't say I feel great about that. But the one thing I can say is that I'll never try to insult you without insulting you. I'll either not insult you, or I will do so honestly and openly and based on your comments. Not your religion, race, gender, etc. And when the attack is a result of a misunderstanding, as in this case, I will retract my comment, as I've done.
I'm certainly no paragon of Christlike behavior, and I hope I'm better next year than this year - but at least I don't slam someone else's religion and then deny what I've done.
1. How annoyed at a personal attack can you get if you (mistakenly or not) provided reason for that personal attack? Read your original post again. Note how you criticized me for making a conjecture, as if the act of conjecturing was somehow inherently wrong or irrational. Contrast with your restatement subsequent to that where you said, essentially, oops - I didn't mean you were wrong for making a conjecture, but that you didn't make a good conjecture. See the problem here? I'd wager if someone had come out of the blue and tried to nail you for daring to state a hypothesis you would probably have gotten annoyed to. I'm not saying I reacted the right way, but I think you need to realize that you actually did sound like an anti-social nerd.
2. Let's contrast what happened here. You said something that sounded like an anti-social nerd would say it. Kind of a "linux is the perfect OS, stupid people who need a GUI are just too dumb to get it" type of thing. I called you on it based on what you said. Retaliating with a personal attack would have been no big deal. If you were like "Yeah, well I think you're an idiot for x and y" we wouldn't be here having this conversation. But when you reached for a retaliatory strike you bypassed anything and everything I had typed so far and went for my religion. You don't see a problem with that?
I don't care if you want to call it "a rhetorical device". I don't care ifyou say "there was no thought behind it". When you wanted to attack me you chose my religion. I'd say that speaks volumes all by itself. You don't get to call someone who is Jewish a filthy kike and then say "no, really, it was just a rhetorical device. No thought behind it at all." You don't get to deride someone who is a Wiccan for being a backwards pagan and then say "not that I meant that in religious bigotry kind of way".
The fact is that, even though I was wrong to do so, I went after you based on what you said and you want after me based on my religion. Those are not the same thing, and I'm not impressed with your attempt to pull a Mel Gibson ("it was the beer talking") in the aftermath.
If someone comes to my door to explain to me what they believe, I immediately assume that they have an opinion about what I believe.
Well that's just your paranoia. There's no other word for it. Do you assume that every time you see a commercial for a Honda Accord that Honda thinks you prefer a Camry? It makes no rational sense to infer from the fact that someon is tellingy you x that they think you believe not x. From my own experience a lot of people have no opinion on on it, or are actively curious to learn more about it. If you want to assume people have an opinion about what you believe, I can't stop you, but I certainly don't think it's a rational viewpoint. When a Jehovah's Witness knocks on my door I don't assume they are there to disagree with me. For all they know I am a Jehovah's Witness. Or I might just not care about religion. Or I might have questions about their religion. Or I might have my own different religious convictions. That's just one of several possibilities, and in my experience it's the minority.
"you honestly don't think spending 2 years of your life knocking on thousands of doors is aptly described as aggressive"
You're conflating two issues. The first is whether or not knocking on thousands of doors is aggressive. The second is whether or not dedicating 2 years of my life to something (anything) is agressive. You could say that dedicating 2 years of my lis aggressive based on your definition including things like "bold" and "energetic", but you could easily say the same about giving 2 years of my life to Peace Corps or walking out of my day job to go help clean up after Hurricane Katrina. Both of those activities would be "bold" and "energetic", right? So is Peace Core agressive? Are people who volunteer to help up after natural disasters agreesive?
I think a better word for all of the above (2 year mission, Peace Corps, volunteering after natural disaster) is dedicated. I was very dedicated. But was I actually agressive in my interactions with the people in Hungary? Never. Not a single time. Is knocking on doors inherently aggressive? Absolutely not.
So the simple answer is that I do not think serving a 2-year mission was in any meaningful way aggressive, and only semantics could make it seem that way (by equating "agreesive" with "bold and energetic" and then conflating the dedication of my time with what I was actually doing with that time).
Again, if this is bigotry, I fail that test
Your backpedalling a lot here. I never said that it was bigoted to oppose or disagree with proselyting. I still don't think you're as capable of understanding the alternative as you think you are, but it's immaterial. The reason I called you a religious bigot was the fact that you had to self-censor an anti-Mormon comment that had nothing whatsoever to do with the simple fact that you disagree with proselyting. You keep tryign to reduce this to your problem with proselyting, but my position that you had some religious bigotry predates any knowledge I have since learned about your stance on proselyting.
It's as though you were to write [anti-semitic comment left out] and then later write "I happen to believe Jesus was the Christ, does that make me an anti-semite?" No! Merely having a doctrinal difference with the Jews wouldn't make you an anti-semite. Having to prevent yourself from making an anti-semitic comment, on the other hand, would.
Why are you asserting I don't understand religious viewpoints?
Because of your stance on proselyting. It's something that only makes sense to criticize wholsesale if you can't picture the position from the other point of view. If you look at it form the point of view of an evangelical - Mormon or otherwise - then they know something that you don't and it would be duplicitious for them to attempt to "love thy neighbor" and yet remain silent on the knowledge they believe they have.
Now you may find methods of proselyting annoying, but if you have any capacity to understand the perspective of an evangelical you should have no trouble understanding that proselyting is the only course of action open to them that doesn't contradict what they believe in.
So when you say things like this: The act of proselytizing is a direct questioning of the beliefs of others I conclude that you completely fail to appreciate it from the point of view of someone religious. From their poitn of view it's not about questioning the beliefs of others. I served a 2-year mission. I can tell you that most people don't have beliefs to be questioned: they just don't care about religion at all. So only in a minority of cases are you questioning the beliefs of others, and in any case that's not the direct result of proseltying even in that minority of cases. Proselyting is simply explaining your own beliefs. If your beliefs happen to conflict with those of the person you are talking to, then questioning their belief is implied, but certainly not "direct".
And what's with the characterization as "agressive" anyway? Unless you've had some bad experiences with Mormons, we don't tend to be aggressive. I knocked on thousands of doors. I was careful to try and do it in a culturally sensitive way (I was in Hungary, they have a habit of going to sleep really early out in the villages, so we wouldn't knock after 8pm or so) and my door approach was simple and direct. If someone said they weren't interested (99.9% of the time) - I thanked them for their time and walked away. This is no more agressive than a knife or encyclopedia sales guy. Do you hate them to? And a lot less agressive than junk mail. We never revisited neighborhoods, and we tried to avoid double-knocking after the Jehovah's Witnesses because we knew that annoyed people.
But from my point of view bothering some family for a couple of seconds every few years (at the most) isn't a big deal when we know for a fact that there are people out there who actually *want* to hear our message. When we proselyte we're not trying to get uninterested people to listen to us, we're trying to find interested people. And in my 2 years I found dozens by knocking on doors or approaching strangers on the street who turned out to be extremely interested in what I had to say. Not all of them ended up becoming Mormons, but they all were glad I'd spoken up and we had great conversations with them. Priests, priests in training, single mothers, fathers, college students, grandparents: there's no telling who is going to want to talk to you, and the only way to find out is to ask. That's all proselyting is about (from a Mormon perspective).
Remember, the thing that got us here was you bucketing me as antisocial, I don't think I need to pass a relevance test.
I'm not instituting a general relevancy test. The question was whether or not your self-censored anti-Mormon comment was an example of religious bigotry. In that specific instance, I'd say relevance matters. Not as a general rule.
I should specify that I didn't mean to imply there's anything special about theism that makes it superior to atheism in this regard. I mean that I happen to be a theist and I can appreciate theist, atheist, secular (which I distinguish from atheism in that it simply ignores God as opposed to outright claiming he doesn't exist), spiritualist (Buddhism, Wicca, and other non-materialist world views that lack a traditional God-figure) viewpoints. Just as an example: I have a very high degree of respect for French atheist existentialists like Sartre and especially Simone de Beuavoir.
So I don't meant that because you're an atheist or a secularist or whatever you are somehow in an inferior position, I just mean that your lack of capacity to reciprocate an understanding for different world views is, in my view, a tragic impoverishment.
I think it means that your fundamental world view is flawed, because for me, the idea that something that is unknown to us today made itself known to a very select(and characteristically charismatic) few in the past defies all credibility.
So this has nothing to do with proselyting at all. You just think religion in general is too far-out to be true. Which, I think, gets us back in the direction of bias and bigotry.
As a religious person it's easy for me to understand a secular view point, an atheist viewpoint, a spiritualist viewpoint, and many different theistic viewpoints. Agree with? Of course not. But understand? Yes.
So at the very best I consider your world view seriously impoverished.
But in any case, my central comment stands. There's really no comment you could have ommitted that, un-ommitted, would have been both relevant and non-bigoted.
If you are really saying "gee, I just disagree with the Mormon practice of proselyting" then I have absolutely no problem with that. That's a practice. You disagree with it. I agree - no bigotry there.
However, I'm really not sure how a statement that was restricted to "I disagree with proselyting" would have any relevance to this discussion, and so I'm extremely skeptical that that is really the comment you ommitted. I suspec that "I disagree with proselyting" is nothing more than the rationale behind actual bigotry that would have resulted in some comment about the fanciful claims of my religion, how I must be an idiot to believe such tripe, and how that at least explains my penchant for wild conjecture. Am I somewhere near the mark?
Such a comment would, of course, have nothing to do with proselyting and be an example of religious bigotry. Was that really the kind of comment you were going to make? I suppose I'll never know.
I'm asserting that inferring negative characteristics about someone based on their religion is not the same as inferring negative characteristics about a person based on specific statements they have made. Do you disagree with this?
Is proclaiming membership in a religion a statement? Of course it is. But in order to draw negative inferences about the person based on that statement you have to condemn not only them, but their entire religion. I guess if you feel comfortable writing off entire religions in order to make personal attacks, that's your perogative. I also happen to find it a great example of religious bigotry.
If I proclaim "I'm a Muslim" does that justify calling me a terrorist because I have "made a statement"? If I state "I'm a Catholic" does that justify calling me stupid? The sad thing is, you might agree with that last one.
1. I didn't read it "as narrowly as I could". I read it as written. The fact that you admitted you should have written it differently indicates your own assent with my previous reading. The most important change was the inclusuion of the word "bad". This changes it from a general criticism that I used conjecture at all (which is silly) to a specific beef with a conjecture I made (which is quite defensible).
2. There's a large difference between criticizing a person based on a statement they have made v. based on their religion. Even if I had been the one in error in responding to your post, I would nonetheless have been erroneously responding to a particular belief I attributed to you. This is fundamentally different from attacking someone based on religious prejudice. If you were to call me "one of those Mormons who think food storage gets you closer to heaven than kindness" I would disagree with the paticular statement, not call you an anti-Mormon or a religious bigot. Do you see the difference? While my response was certainly not as polite as it could have been, it was qualitatively different than religious bigotry.
Are you British? Cause if you aren't, 'Cheers' isn't a closing.
1/2 British.
[personal attack in kind just for having 'Mormon' in your user name omitted]
That, by the way, is the reason I still go by this ridiculous user name. I used it innocently back in 1999 (in my first foray onto msg boards) and was so overwhelmed by the number of anti-Mormon comments I got within minutes of my first post (that had nothing to do with religion or even politics) that I made up my mind that I would use the name from that time forward. And so I have. I certainly don't enjoy the insults that inevitable follow, but I'm not going to back down to religious bigotry either.
So thanks for withholding the comment, even though I'd say it's rather pathetic that you had one to omit.
I'm quite aware of the tendency for high end products to have better margins. What I should have said is that your statement about better margins in the high end video game market is bad conjecture.
In which case I would have reacted quite differently. If you'll notice from my original post, I'm not actually endorsing the theory that luxury necessarily = higher margin. I'm explaining what I think the execs at Sony and MS are chasing after, not that I think they are making the right call. I agree that Nintendo's strategy is not only better now, but has better promise for the future.
I also believe, however, that MS and Sony are still holding out for the traditional higher margins in the luxury category, and in any case they run more of a risk of disappointed expectations at this point (if they were to reduce cost and focus on more casual aspects of gaming) because they have already invested so much marketing hype in the power of their technology. They've created their own prison of expectations.
Obviously it's not working out so far, and I would agree that it looks grim for the future as well.
Your statement about better margins in the high end market is conjecture.
Yay for obnoxious Slashdot know-it-alls. You'd be one of the resident representatives of the anti-social branch of nerdom, right?
My example (Dell vs. Alienware) is actually factually true. The general rule that luxuries have a higher profit margin is also pretty well-established. The idea that high-end consoles will have higher margin in the future and that that is why Sony and MS are chasing that martket segment is obviously conjecture (since it's about the future) but you know what? That's what we do when we talk about the future. We use available facts to make conjectures.
Thanks for providing me a stupid comment to vent at anyway. Cheers!
I think we'll see a change in at least one of these juggernauts next round.
I'm not as sure. Nintendo's strategy is working so far, but I don't think either MS or Sony is likely to try and compete in the "fun" gaming category. (Read: budget category.) As a general rule margins are higher in the high-end regions (see: Dell v. Alienware) and I think the real problem is that MS and Sony have failed to really capture the excitement of gamers out there. I mean the hard, hard-core gamers (the ones who call themselves hardcore gamers) are so trained to wet themselves at every new pixel count number it's Pavlovian. The gamers just below that - more hardcore than the suburban moms and dads - just weren't excited enough by the new systems to spend $500 to $600.
I expect less emphasis on hardware and benchmarks and a lower price, but I think the next gen will be a lot less about avoiding the mistakes of this gen and much more about viewing video gaming as an experience and not a commodity. Xbox Live still needs a lot of work, Sony's offering is pathetic, most games are shipping with only so-so multiplayer functionality, the launch libraries for both systems were relatively anemic: *these* are the problems that must be addressed.
We're only talking about high prices and blaming it on hardware because they dropped the ball on all these other areas. Assuming MS and Sony are in any position to make serious stabs at the next gen, I think we'll see them continue to diverge from Nintendo and casual gaming and seek to have all the other stuff - from depth of launch line-up to media player functionality - in a more finished state.
This is, of course, assuming Nintendo doesn't launch their own next gen system in two or three years (before Sony or MS can are ready) and leap ahead in both processing power AND gaming innovation. Which is possible.
Yet another person with a reasonable point of view that has little to do with the article. Look at the title "Are students liable for school insecurity?"
All discussion about whether the policy is a good one or not are moot. Totally, completely, and 100% irrelevant to answering that question. It's about where responsibility lies. Not whether the rule is smart or not. Maybe the submitter is just dumb and meant to ask a question about whether the rule is harsh or not. But if we're actually responding to the article, than all this argument about whether schools have a right to make any rule they want or what rules the students should follow is pointless.
The premise of the story is quite simply this: since the security measures were easy to circumvent, the student is not responsible for circumvention. That is stupid. It's like saying that if you have one of those honor-system snack trays at work you are not liable for taking snacks without paying because they made it to easy to circumvent. Which is bullshit.
The students are utterly and completely liable for circumventing the security measures. That's the answer to the question. With regards to the second question: should those policies by there or not? I think probably not. They're an expensive waste of time. But they do provide anti-social geeks with an opportunity to be anti-social and rebellious while feeling clever about it. For that reason alone I wish they'd get rid of such stupid policies. Maybe actually learning in school is too pedestrian an idea for the uber-geeks among us, but I happened to actually get something out of high school. What - am I the only one that found a value to AP Literature or US History? Or actually thought calculus was a thing worth learning? I sure hope not.
Bah, that's crap. Kids who are smart enough to figure that stuff out need to be nurtured, not beat down. They displayed initiative, imagination, and creative problem solving, and they didn't cause any actual harm, just broke an arbitrary rule.
This is a separate issue. Look, you've got one of three alternatives.
1. It's a stupid rule because violating it doesn't necessarily result in harm. (See above.) 2. It's a good rule, but the punishments are too harsh. 3. It's a good rule, and the punishments are fine.
What's not an option is any thing that includes "and the student is not responsible for breaking the rule because the school didn't prevent him." Any law with a punishment affixed is by definition not 100% preventative. If it was, you wouldn't need punishments. So the one thing that should not be up for debate is whether or not the student is responsible for the act of violating the policy. Whether that responsibility is good/bad/neutral etc. is debatable, but where that responsibility lies is not. That however, was the tone of the article, and that attempt to shift responsibility is what I and (I believe) GP are reacting against.
I agree. What is this idea that unless someone prevents you from doing something, they are responsible for you doing it? That's like saying "sorry for raping your daughter, but it's your fault for not putting up an electric fence with guard dogs around your house."
Yeah, I know, that's a really over-the-top example, but this blatant attempt to push off responsibility for your own actions infuriates me. It's true that the school should certainly work to solve some of their gaping security holes. But when I was in school I was usually one of the kids that worked for the labs and I know that the guys running campus security were frequently over-worked and underpaid. So give them a break. Their job is supposed to be keeping computers up and running for students to use to pursue their education, not preventing said students from circumventing security measures.
More than anything else though, it's this infantile idea that you can hold someone else responsible for your actions because they didn't stop you. Grow up. If you graduated college with that mindset then that's just a disappointing commentary on your own moral development more than anything else.
The colleges are responsible for not patching the security holes, but the students are responsible for exploiting them.
Does anyone know of any industries where trade shows are growing?
Look at PAX - the Penny Arcade Expo. No, I'm not stupid. I read the phrase "industry trade show", but my point is that as traditional reasons to hold those types of trade shows decline, new reasons may emerge. PAX may not be a trade show, but I think it covers a lot of the type of ground that trade shows (at least, gaming and hard-ware related trade shows) may have covered.
PAX gets bigger every year because the convention has inherent worth, and the trade-show aspect of it is an add on. IF you have a convention that draws people in crowds, then you have a motivation for vendors to show up.
Summary: the vendors aren't enough to draw the crowd anymore, but if you can get a crowd there for another reason, the vendors are going to want in too.
I don't have data about the specific women that don't go to CS - since we can't identify them. How can you tell if a woman "would have" gone to CS, had things been otherwise?
That's my point.
We do know, however, that CS is one of the most lucrative fields, pretty much near the top. So I think it is a reasonable assumption that by having less women in CS, their average salaries are (somewhat) lower.
I don't think this necessarily follows. I'd say CS is also one of the (if not the) most work-intensive majors in college. Which means I'd say only fairly bright and hard working people compete it successfully. So if the girls who didn't do CS (but had the aptitude) go work in some other major, I feel they could easily pick an equally lucrative major or even a less-lucrative major where they can outperform the average.
In short, I see no evidence whatsoever that women who don't chose CS lose money. What's more, even if they do lose money, salary is not the only form of compensation. Consider game programmers. So many people want to do that job that the industry can require 70 - 80 hour work weeks and still have more applications than they know what to do with. Meaning: money isn't everything.
So again your original example is misleading. Menial vs. cushy desk job is clearly meant to indicate that one job is preferable to the other. But why should we assume that women who don't do CS aren't *more happy* in their chosen profession? They did *chose* it after all.
Well, CS jobs pay well, whereas women often take jobs in less-paying fields. So there is an issue of 'less women in CS - lower salaries on average for women'. Which is much exaggerated in my example, but the basic idea is there.
If there was any evidence at all that girls who turn down CS pick something that pays less, I'd be with you. But the article didn't make any such point, and I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case. So without any actual reason to make that assumption, I considered it off base.
If you wanted to take this tact, I think you'd be better served to start with some facts or at least letting people know you're making that assumption. Because from where I am standing this is a story about whether or not we need to have more women in CS for the sake of CS - not a comparison of what women make in CS versus what the make somewhere else.
It isn't meant to be a 1-to-1 analogy. It is obviously a more extreme situation. My goal was to clarify the underlying issue.
I'm not complaining that it's not a "1-1 analogy". Such an analogy would be pointless. Analogies are useful to get rid of extraneous information and/or highlight central issues. To simplify and clarify. You can't do that with a 1-1 analogy.
Your analogy (and I'm not trying to be mean) is bad because it actually brought up issues that don't exist in the real story. The comparison of menial labor to cushy desk jobs has no relation whatsoever to the question of what the male:female ratio is in computer science classes.
Human beings do care about demographics. If you live in a country with red-haired and brown-haired people, and all the red-haired people do menial labor, whereas all the brown-haired people have cushy desk jobs with salaries 100x higher, you have a problem. Even if there is no discrimination, you still have a problem.
This is a rather poor analogy. First of all, no one is saying that men get all the cushy jobs, and women get all the menials ones. At least, not in this discussion. It's not about men making oodles of money in CS courses, women getting paid beans because they did basket weaving. We're only talking about CS, and therefore can't make any kind of comparison about menial vs. cushy labor. It's just about interest, not about job equality.
Secondly, hair color is superficial. I don't think it's correlated to aptitude or interest. Women and men are much different from each other (all things equal) than a population of red heads to a population of brown-haired people.
People aren't rational creatures, they will perceive such a situation as discriminatory
Right, but such a situation has little to do with the topic at hand.
Helping red-haired people get into desk-job school is probably the fairest overall.
This is such a dangerous policy. I think a society that seeks artificial equality of outcome is inherently unfair to everyone because it makes aptitude, interest, and effort irrelevant. You place vast power in the government to over-rule personal choices. So that's one problem. Any government with the power to "nudge" demographics around as it sees fit is a bad idea. And secondly you've fundamentally corrupted the incentives to work harder because you know that if you are red head you may get that cushy job even though you aren't as good as the brown-haired guy, and if you are the brown-haired guy you will loose out to a red head who's not as good. So the incentives for each to perform well are severely curtailed. And finally, as I said originally, I just have an ethical problem with rewarding people for what they are and not what they do.
So your problem is largely imaginary and you completely fail to account for the hideously high cost of the solution to this imaginary problem.
Could you please explain how my comments denigrate anything? I'm saying that when someone compares something to the NAZIs (think the soup nazi) they are exaggerating precisely because the Holocaust was so much worse than just being told "no soup for you". So if anything, I'm *agreeing* that people denigrate the Holocaust when they try to bring NAZIs or Hitler into debates all the time.
I'm also simply saying, however, that it is not *necessarily* true that anytime someone brings up a Hitler reference or a NAZI reference that it is unfounded. In some cases they may not be referring to the evil of the NAZIs or of Hitler, but some other aspect. In which case there's a greater chance that they may be stating something accurate.
In other cases, maybe they really are talking about something of similar magnitude. Maybe they're comparing Pol Pot or Stalin to Hitler.
All I'm saying is that when you automatically rule out any argument that includes a Hitler/NAZI reference, you have gone to far. There's no reason to bring your dead relatives into this discussion. I'm sorry that they are not with you. I had two great uncles and a grand father in WW2. My grand father went ashore on Omaha Beach in the first waves at D-Day. He can't talk about it. One great uncle was a paratrooper in Europe, the other was a marine in the Pacific front.
But what does any of this - the fact that I was lucky enough to have my relative survive while your family met with double-tragedy - have to do with the logical validity of using Godwin's law to dismiss arguments?
Godwin's law is a joke. It's an *observation*. It's descriptive. I'm frustrated with people who use it as some kind of normative tool. Ah-hah! You mentioned Hitler! Therefore clearly *all* of your arguments are invalid!
While it is true that the vast majority of the time when someone resorts to a Hitler/NAZI comparison they are probably exaggerating, it doesn't follow that you can then automatically assume any Hiter/NAZI comparison is invalid.
To then further expand upon this law to also start invalidating any argument that uses potentially volatile language at all is simply unacceptable.
I'm going to put this in the file with all those people that think "ad hominem" is Latin for "insult" and therefore invalidate any argument that hurts their feelings.
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most people do more for the company than they get back as a reward for their work.
That's kind of the point of hiring someone. If you get $25,000 benefit from a person and pay them $30,000, you'd be better off to fire them. If you get $25,000 in benefit, you need to pay them less than $25,000 to justify the hire. Conversely, the employee could probably earn say $15,000 working alone, so if they can get $20,000 for doing $25,000 in work, it's worth it to them to get hired.
So you've got the benefit to the company (x) and the amount of money the employee could make elsewhere (y), and as long as x is greater than y, you can figure out a salary in between.
Of course a lot more factors into it. Like risk (you are probably safer with a salaried job than going indie) and also the difficulty of figuring out an employee's contribution to firm revenue (easy for front end and sales, harder for back end like sys admins).
But the general idea is simple: you are supposed to earn more money for the company than you get paid, otherwise they would be stupid to keep you in their roster.
What aftermath? Is this going to make Faux News?
We're still talking, aren't we? That aftermath.
And I never attacked you.
Oh please. Writing "I'm not going to call you a fat moron because that would be a personal attack" is a personal attack. Actually omitting an anti-Mormon comment would be one thing, writing "[anti-mormon attack ommitted here]" is the same as my "fat moron" example - just less explicit. That's exactly the kind of passive-agressive attack (like the Faux News barb above) that may help you feel some sense of moral superiority, but doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're not making assumptions and personal attacks in the very same post where you claim they never happen.
It's probably not worth mentioning I don't watch Fox News, is it?
I guess you did find out that I don't have all that much respect for pushy religions.
Right... so is Mormonism one such religion or not? You seem hell-bent on saying it is, despite the fact that you've really got no rational reason to say so. You claim that anyone who asks you if you're interested in their church is directly calling your own beliefs false despite my observation that it is clearly an indirect and unintentional side effect that only occurs in a minority of cases. No response from you on that point. Your characterization of my mission as "aggressive" was based entirely on word-play, but when the direct approach fails you, you seem happy to lapse back into passive-agression, innuendo, and implication.
I'll be honest - I'd prefer an outright personal attack to all this back-pedaling and shadow boxing. Say what you mean the first time and have the courage to stick by it. Worry about social niceties second. It's always easy to apologize honestly for something that was said honestly, I think, and it's a waste of too much time and effort to attempt to insult someone without getting your hands dirty.
So I guess what you learned is that at least one Mormon out there is a cantankerous, insulting, pushy fellow. I can't say I feel great about that. But the one thing I can say is that I'll never try to insult you without insulting you. I'll either not insult you, or I will do so honestly and openly and based on your comments. Not your religion, race, gender, etc. And when the attack is a result of a misunderstanding, as in this case, I will retract my comment, as I've done.
I'm certainly no paragon of Christlike behavior, and I hope I'm better next year than this year - but at least I don't slam someone else's religion and then deny what I've done.
1. How annoyed at a personal attack can you get if you (mistakenly or not) provided reason for that personal attack? Read your original post again. Note how you criticized me for making a conjecture, as if the act of conjecturing was somehow inherently wrong or irrational. Contrast with your restatement subsequent to that where you said, essentially, oops - I didn't mean you were wrong for making a conjecture, but that you didn't make a good conjecture. See the problem here? I'd wager if someone had come out of the blue and tried to nail you for daring to state a hypothesis you would probably have gotten annoyed to. I'm not saying I reacted the right way, but I think you need to realize that you actually did sound like an anti-social nerd.
2. Let's contrast what happened here. You said something that sounded like an anti-social nerd would say it. Kind of a "linux is the perfect OS, stupid people who need a GUI are just too dumb to get it" type of thing. I called you on it based on what you said. Retaliating with a personal attack would have been no big deal. If you were like "Yeah, well I think you're an idiot for x and y" we wouldn't be here having this conversation. But when you reached for a retaliatory strike you bypassed anything and everything I had typed so far and went for my religion. You don't see a problem with that?
I don't care if you want to call it "a rhetorical device". I don't care ifyou say "there was no thought behind it". When you wanted to attack me you chose my religion. I'd say that speaks volumes all by itself. You don't get to call someone who is Jewish a filthy kike and then say "no, really, it was just a rhetorical device. No thought behind it at all." You don't get to deride someone who is a Wiccan for being a backwards pagan and then say "not that I meant that in religious bigotry kind of way".
The fact is that, even though I was wrong to do so, I went after you based on what you said and you want after me based on my religion. Those are not the same thing, and I'm not impressed with your attempt to pull a Mel Gibson ("it was the beer talking") in the aftermath.
If someone comes to my door to explain to me what they believe, I immediately assume that they have an opinion about what I believe.
Well that's just your paranoia. There's no other word for it. Do you assume that every time you see a commercial for a Honda Accord that Honda thinks you prefer a Camry? It makes no rational sense to infer from the fact that someon is tellingy you x that they think you believe not x. From my own experience a lot of people have no opinion on on it, or are actively curious to learn more about it. If you want to assume people have an opinion about what you believe, I can't stop you, but I certainly don't think it's a rational viewpoint. When a Jehovah's Witness knocks on my door I don't assume they are there to disagree with me. For all they know I am a Jehovah's Witness. Or I might just not care about religion. Or I might have questions about their religion. Or I might have my own different religious convictions. That's just one of several possibilities, and in my experience it's the minority.
"you honestly don't think spending 2 years of your life knocking on thousands of doors is aptly described as aggressive"
You're conflating two issues. The first is whether or not knocking on thousands of doors is aggressive. The second is whether or not dedicating 2 years of my life to something (anything) is agressive. You could say that dedicating 2 years of my lis aggressive based on your definition including things like "bold" and "energetic", but you could easily say the same about giving 2 years of my life to Peace Corps or walking out of my day job to go help clean up after Hurricane Katrina. Both of those activities would be "bold" and "energetic", right? So is Peace Core agressive? Are people who volunteer to help up after natural disasters agreesive?
I think a better word for all of the above (2 year mission, Peace Corps, volunteering after natural disaster) is dedicated. I was very dedicated. But was I actually agressive in my interactions with the people in Hungary? Never. Not a single time. Is knocking on doors inherently aggressive? Absolutely not.
So the simple answer is that I do not think serving a 2-year mission was in any meaningful way aggressive, and only semantics could make it seem that way (by equating "agreesive" with "bold and energetic" and then conflating the dedication of my time with what I was actually doing with that time).
Again, if this is bigotry, I fail that test
Your backpedalling a lot here. I never said that it was bigoted to oppose or disagree with proselyting. I still don't think you're as capable of understanding the alternative as you think you are, but it's immaterial. The reason I called you a religious bigot was the fact that you had to self-censor an anti-Mormon comment that had nothing whatsoever to do with the simple fact that you disagree with proselyting. You keep tryign to reduce this to your problem with proselyting, but my position that you had some religious bigotry predates any knowledge I have since learned about your stance on proselyting.
It's as though you were to write [anti-semitic comment left out] and then later write "I happen to believe Jesus was the Christ, does that make me an anti-semite?" No! Merely having a doctrinal difference with the Jews wouldn't make you an anti-semite. Having to prevent yourself from making an anti-semitic comment, on the other hand, would.
Why are you asserting I don't understand religious viewpoints?
Because of your stance on proselyting. It's something that only makes sense to criticize wholsesale if you can't picture the position from the other point of view. If you look at it form the point of view of an evangelical - Mormon or otherwise - then they know something that you don't and it would be duplicitious for them to attempt to "love thy neighbor" and yet remain silent on the knowledge they believe they have.
Now you may find methods of proselyting annoying, but if you have any capacity to understand the perspective of an evangelical you should have no trouble understanding that proselyting is the only course of action open to them that doesn't contradict what they believe in.
So when you say things like this: The act of proselytizing is a direct questioning of the beliefs of others I conclude that you completely fail to appreciate it from the point of view of someone religious. From their poitn of view it's not about questioning the beliefs of others. I served a 2-year mission. I can tell you that most people don't have beliefs to be questioned: they just don't care about religion at all. So only in a minority of cases are you questioning the beliefs of others, and in any case that's not the direct result of proseltying even in that minority of cases. Proselyting is simply explaining your own beliefs. If your beliefs happen to conflict with those of the person you are talking to, then questioning their belief is implied, but certainly not "direct".
And what's with the characterization as "agressive" anyway? Unless you've had some bad experiences with Mormons, we don't tend to be aggressive. I knocked on thousands of doors. I was careful to try and do it in a culturally sensitive way (I was in Hungary, they have a habit of going to sleep really early out in the villages, so we wouldn't knock after 8pm or so) and my door approach was simple and direct. If someone said they weren't interested (99.9% of the time) - I thanked them for their time and walked away. This is no more agressive than a knife or encyclopedia sales guy. Do you hate them to? And a lot less agressive than junk mail. We never revisited neighborhoods, and we tried to avoid double-knocking after the Jehovah's Witnesses because we knew that annoyed people.
But from my point of view bothering some family for a couple of seconds every few years (at the most) isn't a big deal when we know for a fact that there are people out there who actually *want* to hear our message. When we proselyte we're not trying to get uninterested people to listen to us, we're trying to find interested people. And in my 2 years I found dozens by knocking on doors or approaching strangers on the street who turned out to be extremely interested in what I had to say. Not all of them ended up becoming Mormons, but they all were glad I'd spoken up and we had great conversations with them. Priests, priests in training, single mothers, fathers, college students, grandparents: there's no telling who is going to want to talk to you, and the only way to find out is to ask. That's all proselyting is about (from a Mormon perspective).
Remember, the thing that got us here was you bucketing me as antisocial, I don't think I need to pass a relevance test.
I'm not instituting a general relevancy test. The question was whether or not your self-censored anti-Mormon comment was an example of religious bigotry. In that specific instance, I'd say relevance matters. Not as a general rule.
As a religious person...
I should specify that I didn't mean to imply there's anything special about theism that makes it superior to atheism in this regard. I mean that I happen to be a theist and I can appreciate theist, atheist, secular (which I distinguish from atheism in that it simply ignores God as opposed to outright claiming he doesn't exist), spiritualist (Buddhism, Wicca, and other non-materialist world views that lack a traditional God-figure) viewpoints. Just as an example: I have a very high degree of respect for French atheist existentialists like Sartre and especially Simone de Beuavoir.
So I don't meant that because you're an atheist or a secularist or whatever you are somehow in an inferior position, I just mean that your lack of capacity to reciprocate an understanding for different world views is, in my view, a tragic impoverishment.
I think it means that your fundamental world view is flawed, because for me, the idea that something that is unknown to us today made itself known to a very select(and characteristically charismatic) few in the past defies all credibility.
So this has nothing to do with proselyting at all. You just think religion in general is too far-out to be true. Which, I think, gets us back in the direction of bias and bigotry.
As a religious person it's easy for me to understand a secular view point, an atheist viewpoint, a spiritualist viewpoint, and many different theistic viewpoints. Agree with? Of course not. But understand? Yes.
So at the very best I consider your world view seriously impoverished.
But in any case, my central comment stands. There's really no comment you could have ommitted that, un-ommitted, would have been both relevant and non-bigoted.
If you are really saying "gee, I just disagree with the Mormon practice of proselyting" then I have absolutely no problem with that. That's a practice. You disagree with it. I agree - no bigotry there.
However, I'm really not sure how a statement that was restricted to "I disagree with proselyting" would have any relevance to this discussion, and so I'm extremely skeptical that that is really the comment you ommitted. I suspec that "I disagree with proselyting" is nothing more than the rationale behind actual bigotry that would have resulted in some comment about the fanciful claims of my religion, how I must be an idiot to believe such tripe, and how that at least explains my penchant for wild conjecture. Am I somewhere near the mark?
Such a comment would, of course, have nothing to do with proselyting and be an example of religious bigotry. Was that really the kind of comment you were going to make? I suppose I'll never know.
I'm asserting that inferring negative characteristics about someone based on their religion is not the same as inferring negative characteristics about a person based on specific statements they have made. Do you disagree with this?
Is proclaiming membership in a religion a statement? Of course it is. But in order to draw negative inferences about the person based on that statement you have to condemn not only them, but their entire religion. I guess if you feel comfortable writing off entire religions in order to make personal attacks, that's your perogative. I also happen to find it a great example of religious bigotry.
If I proclaim "I'm a Muslim" does that justify calling me a terrorist because I have "made a statement"? If I state "I'm a Catholic" does that justify calling me stupid? The sad thing is, you might agree with that last one.
1. I didn't read it "as narrowly as I could". I read it as written. The fact that you admitted you should have written it differently indicates your own assent with my previous reading. The most important change was the inclusuion of the word "bad". This changes it from a general criticism that I used conjecture at all (which is silly) to a specific beef with a conjecture I made (which is quite defensible).
2. There's a large difference between criticizing a person based on a statement they have made v. based on their religion. Even if I had been the one in error in responding to your post, I would nonetheless have been erroneously responding to a particular belief I attributed to you. This is fundamentally different from attacking someone based on religious prejudice. If you were to call me "one of those Mormons who think food storage gets you closer to heaven than kindness" I would disagree with the paticular statement, not call you an anti-Mormon or a religious bigot. Do you see the difference? While my response was certainly not as polite as it could have been, it was qualitatively different than religious bigotry.
Are you British? Cause if you aren't, 'Cheers' isn't a closing.
1/2 British.
[personal attack in kind just for having 'Mormon' in your user name omitted]
That, by the way, is the reason I still go by this ridiculous user name. I used it innocently back in 1999 (in my first foray onto msg boards) and was so overwhelmed by the number of anti-Mormon comments I got within minutes of my first post (that had nothing to do with religion or even politics) that I made up my mind that I would use the name from that time forward. And so I have. I certainly don't enjoy the insults that inevitable follow, but I'm not going to back down to religious bigotry either.
So thanks for withholding the comment, even though I'd say it's rather pathetic that you had one to omit.
I'm quite aware of the tendency for high end products to have better margins. What I should have said is that your statement about better margins in the high end video game market is bad conjecture.
In which case I would have reacted quite differently. If you'll notice from my original post, I'm not actually endorsing the theory that luxury necessarily = higher margin. I'm explaining what I think the execs at Sony and MS are chasing after, not that I think they are making the right call. I agree that Nintendo's strategy is not only better now, but has better promise for the future.
I also believe, however, that MS and Sony are still holding out for the traditional higher margins in the luxury category, and in any case they run more of a risk of disappointed expectations at this point (if they were to reduce cost and focus on more casual aspects of gaming) because they have already invested so much marketing hype in the power of their technology. They've created their own prison of expectations.
Obviously it's not working out so far, and I would agree that it looks grim for the future as well.
Your statement about better margins in the high end market is conjecture.
Yay for obnoxious Slashdot know-it-alls. You'd be one of the resident representatives of the anti-social branch of nerdom, right?
My example (Dell vs. Alienware) is actually factually true. The general rule that luxuries have a higher profit margin is also pretty well-established. The idea that high-end consoles will have higher margin in the future and that that is why Sony and MS are chasing that martket segment is obviously conjecture (since it's about the future) but you know what? That's what we do when we talk about the future. We use available facts to make conjectures.
Thanks for providing me a stupid comment to vent at anyway. Cheers!
I think we'll see a change in at least one of these juggernauts next round.
I'm not as sure. Nintendo's strategy is working so far, but I don't think either MS or Sony is likely to try and compete in the "fun" gaming category. (Read: budget category.) As a general rule margins are higher in the high-end regions (see: Dell v. Alienware) and I think the real problem is that MS and Sony have failed to really capture the excitement of gamers out there. I mean the hard, hard-core gamers (the ones who call themselves hardcore gamers) are so trained to wet themselves at every new pixel count number it's Pavlovian. The gamers just below that - more hardcore than the suburban moms and dads - just weren't excited enough by the new systems to spend $500 to $600.
I expect less emphasis on hardware and benchmarks and a lower price, but I think the next gen will be a lot less about avoiding the mistakes of this gen and much more about viewing video gaming as an experience and not a commodity. Xbox Live still needs a lot of work, Sony's offering is pathetic, most games are shipping with only so-so multiplayer functionality, the launch libraries for both systems were relatively anemic: *these* are the problems that must be addressed.
We're only talking about high prices and blaming it on hardware because they dropped the ball on all these other areas. Assuming MS and Sony are in any position to make serious stabs at the next gen, I think we'll see them continue to diverge from Nintendo and casual gaming and seek to have all the other stuff - from depth of launch line-up to media player functionality - in a more finished state.
This is, of course, assuming Nintendo doesn't launch their own next gen system in two or three years (before Sony or MS can are ready) and leap ahead in both processing power AND gaming innovation. Which is possible.
Yet another person with a reasonable point of view that has little to do with the article. Look at the title "Are students liable for school insecurity?"
All discussion about whether the policy is a good one or not are moot. Totally, completely, and 100% irrelevant to answering that question. It's about where responsibility lies. Not whether the rule is smart or not. Maybe the submitter is just dumb and meant to ask a question about whether the rule is harsh or not. But if we're actually responding to the article, than all this argument about whether schools have a right to make any rule they want or what rules the students should follow is pointless.
The premise of the story is quite simply this: since the security measures were easy to circumvent, the student is not responsible for circumvention. That is stupid. It's like saying that if you have one of those honor-system snack trays at work you are not liable for taking snacks without paying because they made it to easy to circumvent. Which is bullshit.
The students are utterly and completely liable for circumventing the security measures. That's the answer to the question. With regards to the second question: should those policies by there or not? I think probably not. They're an expensive waste of time. But they do provide anti-social geeks with an opportunity to be anti-social and rebellious while feeling clever about it. For that reason alone I wish they'd get rid of such stupid policies. Maybe actually learning in school is too pedestrian an idea for the uber-geeks among us, but I happened to actually get something out of high school. What - am I the only one that found a value to AP Literature or US History? Or actually thought calculus was a thing worth learning? I sure hope not.
Bah, that's crap. Kids who are smart enough to figure that stuff out need to be nurtured, not beat down. They displayed initiative, imagination, and creative problem solving, and they didn't cause any actual harm, just broke an arbitrary rule.
This is a separate issue. Look, you've got one of three alternatives.
1. It's a stupid rule because violating it doesn't necessarily result in harm. (See above.)
2. It's a good rule, but the punishments are too harsh.
3. It's a good rule, and the punishments are fine.
What's not an option is any thing that includes "and the student is not responsible for breaking the rule because the school didn't prevent him." Any law with a punishment affixed is by definition not 100% preventative. If it was, you wouldn't need punishments. So the one thing that should not be up for debate is whether or not the student is responsible for the act of violating the policy. Whether that responsibility is good/bad/neutral etc. is debatable, but where that responsibility lies is not. That however, was the tone of the article, and that attempt to shift responsibility is what I and (I believe) GP are reacting against.
I agree. What is this idea that unless someone prevents you from doing something, they are responsible for you doing it? That's like saying "sorry for raping your daughter, but it's your fault for not putting up an electric fence with guard dogs around your house."
Yeah, I know, that's a really over-the-top example, but this blatant attempt to push off responsibility for your own actions infuriates me. It's true that the school should certainly work to solve some of their gaping security holes. But when I was in school I was usually one of the kids that worked for the labs and I know that the guys running campus security were frequently over-worked and underpaid. So give them a break. Their job is supposed to be keeping computers up and running for students to use to pursue their education, not preventing said students from circumventing security measures.
More than anything else though, it's this infantile idea that you can hold someone else responsible for your actions because they didn't stop you. Grow up. If you graduated college with that mindset then that's just a disappointing commentary on your own moral development more than anything else.
The colleges are responsible for not patching the security holes, but the students are responsible for exploiting them.
I also own both. I don't play much of either. Mostly I played GC games on my Wii.
Although I have to say that Super Paper Mario is a lot of fun. You should try that one out.
Mostly I'm just waiting for Halo 3...
Does anyone know of any industries where trade shows are growing?
Look at PAX - the Penny Arcade Expo. No, I'm not stupid. I read the phrase "industry trade show", but my point is that as traditional reasons to hold those types of trade shows decline, new reasons may emerge. PAX may not be a trade show, but I think it covers a lot of the type of ground that trade shows (at least, gaming and hard-ware related trade shows) may have covered.
PAX gets bigger every year because the convention has inherent worth, and the trade-show aspect of it is an add on. IF you have a convention that draws people in crowds, then you have a motivation for vendors to show up.
Summary: the vendors aren't enough to draw the crowd anymore, but if you can get a crowd there for another reason, the vendors are going to want in too.
I don't have data about the specific women that don't go to CS - since we can't identify them. How can you tell if a woman "would have" gone to CS, had things been otherwise?
That's my point.
We do know, however, that CS is one of the most lucrative fields, pretty much near the top. So I think it is a reasonable assumption that by having less women in CS, their average salaries are (somewhat) lower.
I don't think this necessarily follows. I'd say CS is also one of the (if not the) most work-intensive majors in college. Which means I'd say only fairly bright and hard working people compete it successfully. So if the girls who didn't do CS (but had the aptitude) go work in some other major, I feel they could easily pick an equally lucrative major or even a less-lucrative major where they can outperform the average.
In short, I see no evidence whatsoever that women who don't chose CS lose money. What's more, even if they do lose money, salary is not the only form of compensation. Consider game programmers. So many people want to do that job that the industry can require 70 - 80 hour work weeks and still have more applications than they know what to do with. Meaning: money isn't everything.
So again your original example is misleading. Menial vs. cushy desk job is clearly meant to indicate that one job is preferable to the other. But why should we assume that women who don't do CS aren't *more happy* in their chosen profession? They did *chose* it after all.
Well, CS jobs pay well, whereas women often take jobs in less-paying fields. So there is an issue of 'less women in CS - lower salaries on average for women'. Which is much exaggerated in my example, but the basic idea is there.
If there was any evidence at all that girls who turn down CS pick something that pays less, I'd be with you. But the article didn't make any such point, and I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case. So without any actual reason to make that assumption, I considered it off base.
If you wanted to take this tact, I think you'd be better served to start with some facts or at least letting people know you're making that assumption. Because from where I am standing this is a story about whether or not we need to have more women in CS for the sake of CS - not a comparison of what women make in CS versus what the make somewhere else.
It isn't meant to be a 1-to-1 analogy. It is obviously a more extreme situation. My goal was to clarify the underlying issue.
I'm not complaining that it's not a "1-1 analogy". Such an analogy would be pointless. Analogies are useful to get rid of extraneous information and/or highlight central issues. To simplify and clarify. You can't do that with a 1-1 analogy.
Your analogy (and I'm not trying to be mean) is bad because it actually brought up issues that don't exist in the real story. The comparison of menial labor to cushy desk jobs has no relation whatsoever to the question of what the male:female ratio is in computer science classes.
Human beings do care about demographics. If you live in a country with red-haired and brown-haired people, and all the red-haired people do menial labor, whereas all the brown-haired people have cushy desk jobs with salaries 100x higher, you have a problem. Even if there is no discrimination, you still have a problem.
This is a rather poor analogy. First of all, no one is saying that men get all the cushy jobs, and women get all the menials ones. At least, not in this discussion. It's not about men making oodles of money in CS courses, women getting paid beans because they did basket weaving. We're only talking about CS, and therefore can't make any kind of comparison about menial vs. cushy labor. It's just about interest, not about job equality.
Secondly, hair color is superficial. I don't think it's correlated to aptitude or interest. Women and men are much different from each other (all things equal) than a population of red heads to a population of brown-haired people.
People aren't rational creatures, they will perceive such a situation as discriminatory
Right, but such a situation has little to do with the topic at hand.
Helping red-haired people get into desk-job school is probably the fairest overall.
This is such a dangerous policy. I think a society that seeks artificial equality of outcome is inherently unfair to everyone because it makes aptitude, interest, and effort irrelevant. You place vast power in the government to over-rule personal choices. So that's one problem. Any government with the power to "nudge" demographics around as it sees fit is a bad idea. And secondly you've fundamentally corrupted the incentives to work harder because you know that if you are red head you may get that cushy job even though you aren't as good as the brown-haired guy, and if you are the brown-haired guy you will loose out to a red head who's not as good. So the incentives for each to perform well are severely curtailed. And finally, as I said originally, I just have an ethical problem with rewarding people for what they are and not what they do.
So your problem is largely imaginary and you completely fail to account for the hideously high cost of the solution to this imaginary problem.
Not a good start, if you ask me.
Could you please explain how my comments denigrate anything? I'm saying that when someone compares something to the NAZIs (think the soup nazi) they are exaggerating precisely because the Holocaust was so much worse than just being told "no soup for you". So if anything, I'm *agreeing* that people denigrate the Holocaust when they try to bring NAZIs or Hitler into debates all the time.
I'm also simply saying, however, that it is not *necessarily* true that anytime someone brings up a Hitler reference or a NAZI reference that it is unfounded. In some cases they may not be referring to the evil of the NAZIs or of Hitler, but some other aspect. In which case there's a greater chance that they may be stating something accurate.
In other cases, maybe they really are talking about something of similar magnitude. Maybe they're comparing Pol Pot or Stalin to Hitler.
All I'm saying is that when you automatically rule out any argument that includes a Hitler/NAZI reference, you have gone to far. There's no reason to bring your dead relatives into this discussion. I'm sorry that they are not with you. I had two great uncles and a grand father in WW2. My grand father went ashore on Omaha Beach in the first waves at D-Day. He can't talk about it. One great uncle was a paratrooper in Europe, the other was a marine in the Pacific front.
But what does any of this - the fact that I was lucky enough to have my relative survive while your family met with double-tragedy - have to do with the logical validity of using Godwin's law to dismiss arguments?
Godwin's law is a joke. It's an *observation*. It's descriptive. I'm frustrated with people who use it as some kind of normative tool. Ah-hah! You mentioned Hitler! Therefore clearly *all* of your arguments are invalid!
While it is true that the vast majority of the time when someone resorts to a Hitler/NAZI comparison they are probably exaggerating, it doesn't follow that you can then automatically assume any Hiter/NAZI comparison is invalid.
To then further expand upon this law to also start invalidating any argument that uses potentially volatile language at all is simply unacceptable.
I'm going to put this in the file with all those people that think "ad hominem" is Latin for "insult" and therefore invalidate any argument that hurts their feelings.
I'll be completely honest. I'm jealous of your 4-digit UID and I'm not ashamed to say so.