Yeah, I think humanity did this once already.. Standard format was called "Paper" or something.:) But yes, you're essentially correct, we need to be careful.. I suspect that's the new social pressure that the younger generations are going to grow up with. Having to be a bit more sensible, and think a little more critically than their parents had to.
Or, if you're an organisation that has those skills already in house (if they don't, then they shouldn't be hosting any critical databases, or doing any development), It'll take maybe a day a year of an engineer, and maybe a day a year of dev time to keep it ticking over, if it's working to standards (and dev and ops don't even need to be from the same department!). So, if you're going AWS, with two server config, it'll come to $35k per year cost (why 4 servers? I'd love to see a capacity plan workout for what's needed throughput wise). Cost saved to the medical profession, millions, and millions, and millions. I call bullshit on it needing to be encrypted. It's information on a specific condition, not patient identifiable information. There is no requirement for it to be encrypted. What the most likely scale out case is going to be is: Static protocols served from main host(s). Cached at border proxy in each of the organisations where it is used, resulting in extremely small amounts of bandwidth usage at main host. The odd fringe protocol would be served from main host(s) on an irregular basis. Yes, there's still going to be a fairly sizable bandwidth usage due to the irregulars, but nothing that can't be handled by very small servers. As a case in point, I used to work for a small company that handled a particular sport as its focus. When each of the large series started up, internationally there was huge demand. As in millions of pages per day. These were served from an array of 20 single core low range boxes (at 1999 spec of low range). It's not rocket science, it just takes a little careful thinking about how you're going to do it (which sounds as though it's already done). So, having historically worked at this scale, and done it reliably and safely, knowing the clinical requirements for how open protocols need to be handled, I really do take issue with your reasoning.
A truly awesome tech would have grabbed a few FTE techs to lend a hand, passed the glory to them (with an aside to themselves as an also ran). That would've got you great karma with the FTEs, a knowing nod from management, and a great chance to network.
So, that works on the principle that only men do it. Or only men can be called out for it. I work in a heavily female environment, and that happens to me, from women. What do I call that? Womannagging? I know loads of people who reiterate to ensure they understand, as mental mnemonic (vocalisation helps the concentration and aids memory) and to ensure that a frame of reference is defenitely identical (you've no idea how many projects I've had to step into and shout at people because they all have different frames of reference so end up doing incompatible things). It also makes the assumption that men do it because they consider women inferior. That's a hell of a lot of assumptions to make as an axiom for use. It basically fails Occam's Razor on every front conceivable. Failing in its logical construct, there must be another, non-logical use for its employment. Verbal attack of a person due to their gender. Hello, I'm sure I've heard that phrase before.. Yes, it's called "hate speech" (much as though I wish hate speech was something exceptional and worthy of the trepidation that its words convey, SJW brigade have had it applied to perceived offense, where none was actually intended). So, use of the word "Mansplaining" rather than use the neutral word "condescending", which conveniently still happens to be in the dictionary, many people decide to use the misandrist "Mansplaining", which, technically, is them engaging in hate speech.
And yeah, there is plenty of "Womansplaining". I see it all the time.
What I tend to do is: 1) See if there's any possible way that following this behavioural pattern aids their cognition of a subject. If so, call it a win for minor inconvenience. 2) See if it's probably that it's ensuring a frame of reference (if it it, it's a win for a minor inconvenience). 3) See if it's someone just rambling and brain dumping because they thought it may be useful to me (if it is, at the first opportunity, politely halt them, and let them know that I know the subject, and can they cover bullet point headings to see if there's an area they know that I don't). If I learn something new, great. If not, then minor inconvenience, as long as it's not every conversation. 4) Is it just someone rambling because they can ramble (with no malice). If so, then let them know that this behaviour is interfering with my work, and I'd like them to stop please. Hold at that level a few times, and eventually warn that you'll have to get management involved as arbitrators if I can't sort it out off my own back. 5) If it's deliberately done to belittle and condescend, follow the above, but more rapidly and alerting management that there may be malice involved.
Most of the time, it completely avoids the perception of condescension. I like that world being a little brighter. It lets me get on with people that others have issue with. I assume the best of people, and attempt to understand them (that's what being human is about). It completely avoids any necessity for a word like "mansplaining" which casually ignores any underlying patterns or reasons for them and makes the assumption someone is automatically malicious, which is my very last port of call, when all else has failed. When you get down to tacks, the only reason (gender)splaining could exist is from malice. I tend not to like that.
Considering that Antifa are neo-maoists, and Mao was just as covered in blood as ever the Nazis were (as was Stalin, another left winger frequently left out of the discussions), then the equivalence stands. Turning round and saying it's a false equivalence doesn't make it so, just because one side has a hip new fangled cool sounding name. If I formed a group called the "Pink Unicorn Fluffy Love Team", then proceeded to harass and intimidate everyone that disagreed with my cool and hip political agenda, it still wouldn't make the group cool. Even though I'd managed to brand myself that way in public. It's like the group "Hope not Hate". I once wandered into their 'area' of the net in the mistaken idea that they were promoting hope. Nope. Discussions were on how to attack, intimidate, dox, incite and skew media (with delvings into how to destroy people's lives and paint them with political mud). The Antifa and allied groups are bad. Having the "out" group being called bad, and the "in" group being called "rebels with a cause" is excuses, because they're "your kind of bad, which must be ok, because it makes me feel good". I dislike them both, and happily debunk their ideological poison where I can (and feel safe to).
So is the speech that's being used to fire men as 'sexist'. Hate speech specifically encodes "gender" as an attribute for mention as an attack. Mansplaining and the tirade was clearly in that category (attacking someone as a male), and therefore qualifies as "hate speech". This is something that the SJWs have pushed to have on the law books, and pushed to have enforced to the nth degree. Now that the same, even handed, punishment is meted out against an SJW, you're trying to find reasons why it's ok to duck that legislation because she's an SJW.
On the personal front, I'm more inclined to agree with the spirit of your post. Hate speech should be "something extraordinary". Something designed to threaten your life or wellbeing because of who or what your are; genuine persecution. However, as it's been used more and more as a tool to oppress by a certain political faction, the legalities and policies now apply at a trivial level (i.e. read a particular way, it caused perceived, if not actual, offence). I'm' all for letting off steam, allowing a little bit of offence to be made (though apologies to be followed if it was out of order) and people to sort silly crap out themselves. I want "hate speech" to mean something like what it sounds like. However, for now, we're in the world we're in, and it'll take time to unpick. I'm not sure if it's going to get worse before it gets better, but the backlash against it will be so much worse if it continues in the direction it has been for years.
I work in the oncology section of a hospital. To cheer someone dying of cancer is quite simply inhumane. Even a person you consider odious. Feeling threatened by it? Not really. Just very, very disappointed.
It's borne out by fringe evidence. In any group there are statistical outliers. That's the way statistics works. And yes, the troll army can be sizable (when you're in the target group of millions, or tens of millions, then a couple of thousand is a very small fraction; a statistical outlier). There is a huge current of pro-female out there in the gaming community (probably several orders of magnitude greater than the anti, though as they're quiet and 'in the background', they're not counted). Of course there are men who feel discriminated against just for being men. When people are openly advertising that there are jobs for women only, and that women can't be sexist, and that it's ok for a woman to be as sexist as she wants, because patriarchy, and that same theme spreads right through all the media, then sure men are going to feel oppressed. Because it's getting enshrined in policies that they are. On the games getting dumbed down so that girlz can play, hell, on some of them, I enjoy them not being so hardcore because I'm getting older an reactions are slowing. Any good young gamer gal can blow me away. That's some (probably young and insecure) guys being dicks. The larger (quiet, background) part of the community detest them just as much as the women they're trying to get a rise out of. It would be nice if there was a way to punish dickishness by people getting dick votes, and you set your dick threshold to a level that blocks out people who are more dickish than others (while allowing perhaps a bit of ribald dickishness in good fun!). Hoo boy. Women as second class citizens. That's a whole can of worms right there for the European world. Women were (over)protected as humanity didn't have a massive expansion rate prior to modern medicine. Every woman was a huge asset (she produced children) to communities on the edge of dying out. No children, and people could expect to die young and badly. The vast majority of men would protect the woman in their life with their life. The women, on the other hand, got on with the job of building communities. In essence, the women decide what shape the future was, and the men went out and built it. The ability to mate was never assured, as women often died in childbirth, leading to an early dearth of women available to procreate with. That, of course, plays silly buggers with the biological imperatives. Men, of course, did silly things to secure a mate. With modern medicine, the population has exploded. Women don't die in childbirth so much, and so aren't such a precious commodity anymore, so the species/culture isn't dependent on them being protected so much. Once that's the case, feminism was inevitable (And needed, certainly in 1st and 2nd wave; 3rd still hasn't got a clue what it's all about yet, apart from that men are bad and Patriarchy). There's always been a symbiotic balance between men and women, a bargain struck that a man meets certain standards, and the woman allows him to procreate. The standards that men need to adhere to have just been altering with what the survival of the species has demanded. Crap times meant a crap deal for women (and a crap deal for men too). Better times have meant a better deal all round.
Thanks for that. Wish I had mod points for informative. It's one thing to assume there are internal directives and processes, but another to discover the training and backing available to cover the policies (well done ANet for the training to policy!). 100% with you that no matter what they did, they don't deserve the harassment afterwards (hopefully the cops will pick up on some of the offenders and explain the error of their ways; it's actually a criminal offence in the UK to harass someone online, so the cops can get involved). This modern day lynch mobbing has to stop, just finding the right way to do it is a thorny problem. Much as though my views and hers may not coincide, I wish both of them a speedy end to the idiots, and a fast recovery to normal life.
I'd naturally assume a pleasant, if stressed, person away from the keyboard. However, when the world is running on policies that routinely get men fired for even a whiff of sexism, it's only fair and equal that women are held to the same standard. This seems fair and even to me. Even if I wish both sides would stand down, and say "We're human, we're going to screw up now and then, people may get offended, but if it's not habitual, we're covering your ass on this and getting PR to sort the mess out". Offending people isn't a mortal sin. We're not perfect beings. When overtaxed we can explode and say something we later regret (anger really messes with the brain). That's part of the ugly side of humanity. However, whatever laws we put in place need to work all ways. If we're saying "Thou shalt not disparage a gender", then that applies to all genders, for all genders. If we say "Thou shalt never disparage a race", then that applies to all races, for all races. The penalty being equal to all. Turning round and saying "This is the law. However, this group are above the law, so they can do what they want, and it's perfectly ok" is a recipe for disaster. If you apply policies evenly across all sides (and most companies have a policy saying that all policies should be applied evenly), then when people in groups that have yelled to get punishments in policies for behaviour themselves engage in that behaviour, then they should reap the rewards they've sown.
Just like womannagging does? It's bollocks, completely and utterly. It's a general mode employed by both men and women, yet singled out to make fun of a man, all the while saying that women are sacrosanct, and anything remotely disparaging a woman is grounds for dismissal. I work in a very heavily female environment (hospital) and I've seen women use it frequently. I tend to assume that the rephrasing is simply a memory aid, as vocalising helps concentration and memory, and I've seen many a tech talking through what they're doing as they do it, so they don't lose train of thought. I find it sad though, as Arena loses two good devs. However, the 'sexist' argument is now starting to be applied starkly, and the whole ideology of "women can't be sexist because " is stopping being used (as it simply has no proof, and generally isn't the case, as most moderates are now quite happily agreeing). And what seems to have gotten men fired in the last few years has now been applied to a woman, and there's a general stink about it. What is rotten about it is the abuse afterwards. That, I find petulant, unwarranted, and just plain antisocial (and if identified, I hope they get the book thrown at them). Basically, if the Dev had just blown a fuse and said "Really, you think I don't know this, as I do it all day?", and kept the gender disparaging out of it, it's fairly likely that she'd have been cautioned, and maybe told a little leave would be in order, as she was stressed (and I can entirely believe being a game Dev is extremely stressful, day in, day out). However, she had to throw misandry into it. If a male game Dev blew a fuse and told a female customer that she was just nagging because it was the time of the month, or something, he'd rightfully be fired (hell, I think the internet would explode!). So, that leaves people with two options. Allow misogynist and misandrist lexicon to be used as a way to blow off steam (and have an offended person placated by whatever means necessary on the PR front, maybe disciplining the Dev for exploding at a customer). Or, you can say neither male, nor female can use any gender keyed disparagement, with penalty of firing. As men have had to deal with for years. That's equality. Personally, I'm all in favour of letting people blow off steam, and maybe offend someone (and apologise later, or face medium penalties for painting company in a general bad light same as any old rant at customers).
Definitely "appeal to definition" logical fallacy. Sex trafficking is importing people to act as sex workers under false pretences/illegally. It's basically modern slavery. Though on that front, if that political wing concentrated funds on trying to cure modern slavery, instead of trying to tell everyone how bad ancient slavery was, then it may be further along the process of solving than it is now.
If only I had points to mod you funny. You say that it wasnâ(TM)t a slippery slope argument straight before stating a slippery slope fallacy. The point to stand up is when you see something happening that is unethical. So many people are standing up for so many things that are in no way unethical (or in many cases factually wrong) that nobody has any idea whatâ(TM)s going on.. When something worth standing against actually happens, nobody will notice in the noise.
If google decides no more military contracts, as long as shareholders are fine with loss of earnings, fine.. But thereâ(TM)s a lot that the military does thatâ(TM)s highly ethical. Refusing that because you donâ(TM)t like military is a bit sad really. The money will instead go to some other company thatâ(TM)s not so ethical, so when the time to stand up to something enethical comes, youâ(TM)re ineffective, as the less principled are already in the game, highly funded via all those ethical contracts and fully tooled up. Something Iâ(TM)ve always believed is that itâ(TM)s much easier to change or direct a system when youâ(TM)re on the inside.
If you have a shred of aptitude, eventually you will pass. However, the time taken to do that if you have no aptitude may be far longer than it would be worth. You'd then fail at whatever was dependent on your aptitude for the subject and have a rubbish time afterwards. Retakes are there for a check to determine whether you "just had a bad day", or had a perfect storm of questions that you were weakest on. There's always the possibility that you could retake for the length of your lifetime and still not pass. A well balanced test is a strong indicator of knowledge. Not the only indicator, but a strong one. Generally, Uni admissions are utilising a "strong indicator" of grade ability in subject matter, along with other indicators (enthusiasm, curiosity, external interests etc.) to build up a picture of how you're likely to be able to grasp the relevant curriculum.
The Western world used to plan for generational time periods. Companies were set up with the intent of providing a regular profit over time, slowly increasing, but overall being reliable producers. Back in the 70s, some people started to decide that they could start selling bits of these to make a fast buck, so you could buy a company, split it up into components, and sell bits of it for more than you paid for it. Voila, instant profit, and it'd only take a year. Then investors started to want these immediate gains more and more. So more of the regular reliable producers were split up. That put the regular producers up against the profit margins of the breakers, and many were written off as being "not profitable", making it tough to get loans to continue operating, meaning they had to sell up (which went to the breakers to get bits sold off at profit to financiers). Investors getting used to the fast money only started to look at the immediate future. Can they make money in the next year? If yes, then all's shiny! Very very few people in the West are now asking the question "Where do we see ourselves in 50 years?". If you're not asking yourself that question, you can easily find yourself on a path that looks rosy for the next few years, but with a huge drop that you just don't see coming. Or by the time you do, there's sod all you can do about it; the inertia of all the short termist vision catches up with you. Instant gratification isn't a long term strategy.
Calling cops is definitely supposed to put people at risk. That's the point of it. At the very least, the cops will intervene in a situation to calm it down (putting themselves at risk), or when you tell them there's live fire, kidnapping and their opponents are armed and dangerous with firearms, then that's what they go in with context. Damn straight that's putting people at risk.
The alternative is that the police are supposed to treat every call of live fire as if they were approaching a jaywalker. Which would get cops killed. But that's ok, right? The person most likely to be calm and orderly is the person who has actually got the hostages, and considers themselves in charge.. And that's the likely situation, not the hostage magically escaping just as the cops get there.
If you want to stop a problem, you try and identify the root cause, and you stamp on it hard. The root cause was an irresponsible, sociopathic asshole who thinks it's fun to create dangerous situations because he finds it funny to mess with people's lives with no impact to him. Given the multiple counts, and the expense of mobilisation of all the resources that have been incurred as a cost to the public purse, I think a million is probably a fair recompense plus a small punitive fine in there too.
The sentence, well, it's one life lost, and several devastated (including the cop, who will have to live with that for the rest of their life, and the family that lost a member etc.).
Root cause is the caller and the person who commissioned the call. Freedom needs responsibility if everyone is to be free.
Uhh.. You're comparing someone in a charged situation with adrenaline running high to someone who manipulates a situation into being like that coldly and with malice aforethought?
The root cause of this is the ones that called the SWATting. Anything that arises from that is on their shoulders. When people get it through their thick skulls that playing with people's live for shits and giggles has massive repercussions, then perhaps the calls to SWAT will be valid calls, and the reactions that they have will be in an environment they're supposed to be in.
Best analogy I can think of for your stance is a state leader ordering the army in to invade another country, then lay the blame on the soldiers for going there, and "maybe the leader had something to do with it" if people got shot.
Bruce, I suspect you know population statistics as well as I do. By saying you have a close to 100:1 ratio in anything doesn't actually tell you a single thing. A clearer signal would be to say "What's the employment rate in candidate cohorts?". If you find, say, that there's an 8% unemployment rate in the caucasian set, and 8% in non-caucasian, or an 8% in male, 8% in female, then the system is stacked (probably) fairly; it'd be giving you a reasonable signal that a woman has just as much chance of getting a role in the sector as a man, which is what equality is all about (an equal shot for everyone). Now if you find say, that there's an 8% unemployment rate in men compared to a 2% rate in women, that tells you that (probably) something nefarious is going on, and one of the prime factors in you getting a job is to be a woman. And that's just silly. It'll breed resentment (you're not creating a job that'll magically help women with no side effects. What you're actually doing is actively discriminating against men, just because "numbers". You are blatantly refusing a man a job because he's a man.
I know you're very firmly embedded in the tech community, so the answers to the unemployment rates and attrition rates from the field would be generally more available to you; it'd be interesting to see if you could ferret them out. What I'm hearing though various studies is that there's no structural barrier to women entering the field at all, so the discrimination against the more populous cohorts present in the field is just tokenism. A good study, with proper controls and meta analysis against various studies could convince me to change my mind, but I'd like to see it treated properly, rather than just an exercise in tokenism.
You obviously didn't read about the ethics behind all this, that Rafael didn't want to be associated with an organisation that blatantly discriminated against a large set of the population (Outreachy), especially when the Code of Conduct explicitly said "You can't discriminate". So logically, the community should spin, and automatically disband itself, as it's actively discriminating when it's core CoC says it isn't allowed. He just wanted to get on with the code, and treat people as people. Now the overzealous Social Justice crowd have got entrenched, he just has better things to do with his time than play petty politics. So he's taking his skills elsewhere. Sounds fair enough to me.
Bruce, affirmative action is not the correct way to go about things at this point. About 6 years ago, there was a systemic imbalance that did actively discriminate. People rebelled against that as being inhumane (which it was). Now the system does actually provide equal access. Not only that, but there are many successful outreach programs that invest in the poor (and it is the generically poor that we need to be granted funded options; that's why I was so angry here in the UK when state funded University places went away to be replaced by more loans, and personal responsibility for paying the tuition fees). When you engage at that level, you are helping fix the historical issues that led to the past imbalances. What doesn't help is actively discriminating against the majority; that's when you're using the same thinking that was found to be abhorrent, and applying it to a majority. That is crass, and unhelpful. When you look at the movement of demographics in society, it's very easy to see the huge changes in the last couple of generations in the West. And it's pretty balanced these days (it'll take maybe another few decades for some of the older entrenched mindsets to vanish by die off, but they don't have much in the way of power and control in everyday life). Looking back through history, I've found most trends to be reminiscent of damped transient oscillations around a mean; society, as far as women's right and minority rights is largely center, to being slightly biased towards minorities. Yet there is still an increasing vocal contingent that is after actively discriminating against a set (and using dehumanising methodologies to do so, which to me is intolerably obnoxious). This is the overshoot on the oscillation. And the stronger that contingent make themselves over the coming decades, the stronger the backlash will be when it occurs. What society has now, which it didn't 60 years ago, is a general acceptance. The world has become smaller, and more unified. What isn't needed so much now is the band aid of affirmative action (that was justified in years gone by, but after the couple of generations now of having equal access to the same education and chances of anyone else, is much less relevant, towards being self-defeating these days). On the racial side, Asians and Indians were discriminated against just as much as anyone else. And now they're a very large contingent of the tech community. On the gender imbalance, you look at the most 'inclusive' countries in the world, and female engagement with tech is still very low. The more thorough the studies are into the gender imbalances, the more it seems to be a "choice", rather than some murky nefarious discriminatory group that keeps being alluded to. I've yet to see a decently controlled study that has found anything _but_ that. It's much the same with teaching, nursing, (increasingly medical doctors, which have a huge female bias these days) biological sciences and so on, except the other way round. Yet nobody complains about that. Or that the majority of trash collectors are men. Hell, I taught all my nieces to code, and got them science kits. One went into music, one into the nursing profession, one into conflict studies and one into biotechnology (now with a PhD). All four of them find general tech on the computing side to be not that interesting. They have other tech that does interest them, and that never seems to be rolled into the treatment of "technology" as addressed in these circles.
The rules that I consider fair are just "Don't discriminate". Give people the resources to achieve what their talent and drive will allow them, and give them the choice of what direction to go. When it comes to selection, let each person prove themselves.
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I remember Cheeseplant's House well! :) That brought back many a happy memory!
Yeah, I think humanity did this once already.. Standard format was called "Paper" or something. :)
But yes, you're essentially correct, we need to be careful.. I suspect that's the new social pressure that the younger generations are going to grow up with. Having to be a bit more sensible, and think a little more critically than their parents had to.
Oh where are the mod points when you need them. :)
Or, if you're an organisation that has those skills already in house (if they don't, then they shouldn't be hosting any critical databases, or doing any development),
It'll take maybe a day a year of an engineer, and maybe a day a year of dev time to keep it ticking over, if it's working to standards (and dev and ops don't even need to be from the same department!).
So, if you're going AWS, with two server config, it'll come to $35k per year cost (why 4 servers? I'd love to see a capacity plan workout for what's needed throughput wise).
Cost saved to the medical profession, millions, and millions, and millions.
I call bullshit on it needing to be encrypted. It's information on a specific condition, not patient identifiable information. There is no requirement for it to be encrypted.
What the most likely scale out case is going to be is: Static protocols served from main host(s). Cached at border proxy in each of the organisations where it is used, resulting in extremely small amounts of bandwidth usage at main host. The odd fringe protocol would be served from main host(s) on an irregular basis. Yes, there's still going to be a fairly sizable bandwidth usage due to the irregulars, but nothing that can't be handled by very small servers.
As a case in point, I used to work for a small company that handled a particular sport as its focus. When each of the large series started up, internationally there was huge demand. As in millions of pages per day.
These were served from an array of 20 single core low range boxes (at 1999 spec of low range). It's not rocket science, it just takes a little careful thinking about how you're going to do it (which sounds as though it's already done).
So, having historically worked at this scale, and done it reliably and safely, knowing the clinical requirements for how open protocols need to be handled, I really do take issue with your reasoning.
A truly awesome tech would have grabbed a few FTE techs to lend a hand, passed the glory to them (with an aside to themselves as an also ran).
That would've got you great karma with the FTEs, a knowing nod from management, and a great chance to network.
So wish I could mod you up.. Even non-radical second wave feminism was definitely due (and I'd say inevitable).
So, that works on the principle that only men do it. Or only men can be called out for it.
I work in a heavily female environment, and that happens to me, from women. What do I call that? Womannagging?
I know loads of people who reiterate to ensure they understand, as mental mnemonic (vocalisation helps the concentration and aids memory) and to ensure that a frame of reference is defenitely identical (you've no idea how many projects I've had to step into and shout at people because they all have different frames of reference so end up doing incompatible things).
It also makes the assumption that men do it because they consider women inferior.
That's a hell of a lot of assumptions to make as an axiom for use. It basically fails Occam's Razor on every front conceivable.
Failing in its logical construct, there must be another, non-logical use for its employment. Verbal attack of a person due to their gender. Hello, I'm sure I've heard that phrase before.. Yes, it's called "hate speech" (much as though I wish hate speech was something exceptional and worthy of the trepidation that its words convey, SJW brigade have had it applied to perceived offense, where none was actually intended).
So, use of the word "Mansplaining" rather than use the neutral word "condescending", which conveniently still happens to be in the dictionary, many people decide to use the misandrist "Mansplaining", which, technically, is them engaging in hate speech.
And yeah, there is plenty of "Womansplaining". I see it all the time.
What I tend to do is:
1) See if there's any possible way that following this behavioural pattern aids their cognition of a subject. If so, call it a win for minor inconvenience.
2) See if it's probably that it's ensuring a frame of reference (if it it, it's a win for a minor inconvenience).
3) See if it's someone just rambling and brain dumping because they thought it may be useful to me (if it is, at the first opportunity, politely halt them, and let them know that I know the subject, and can they cover bullet point headings to see if there's an area they know that I don't). If I learn something new, great. If not, then minor inconvenience, as long as it's not every conversation.
4) Is it just someone rambling because they can ramble (with no malice). If so, then let them know that this behaviour is interfering with my work, and I'd like them to stop please. Hold at that level a few times, and eventually warn that you'll have to get management involved as arbitrators if I can't sort it out off my own back.
5) If it's deliberately done to belittle and condescend, follow the above, but more rapidly and alerting management that there may be malice involved.
Most of the time, it completely avoids the perception of condescension. I like that world being a little brighter. It lets me get on with people that others have issue with. I assume the best of people, and attempt to understand them (that's what being human is about). It completely avoids any necessity for a word like "mansplaining" which casually ignores any underlying patterns or reasons for them and makes the assumption someone is automatically malicious, which is my very last port of call, when all else has failed.
When you get down to tacks, the only reason (gender)splaining could exist is from malice. I tend not to like that.
Considering that Antifa are neo-maoists, and Mao was just as covered in blood as ever the Nazis were (as was Stalin, another left winger frequently left out of the discussions), then the equivalence stands.
Turning round and saying it's a false equivalence doesn't make it so, just because one side has a hip new fangled cool sounding name.
If I formed a group called the "Pink Unicorn Fluffy Love Team", then proceeded to harass and intimidate everyone that disagreed with my cool and hip political agenda, it still wouldn't make the group cool. Even though I'd managed to brand myself that way in public.
It's like the group "Hope not Hate". I once wandered into their 'area' of the net in the mistaken idea that they were promoting hope. Nope. Discussions were on how to attack, intimidate, dox, incite and skew media (with delvings into how to destroy people's lives and paint them with political mud).
The Antifa and allied groups are bad. Having the "out" group being called bad, and the "in" group being called "rebels with a cause" is excuses, because they're "your kind of bad, which must be ok, because it makes me feel good".
I dislike them both, and happily debunk their ideological poison where I can (and feel safe to).
So is the speech that's being used to fire men as 'sexist'. Hate speech specifically encodes "gender" as an attribute for mention as an attack. Mansplaining and the tirade was clearly in that category (attacking someone as a male), and therefore qualifies as "hate speech".
This is something that the SJWs have pushed to have on the law books, and pushed to have enforced to the nth degree.
Now that the same, even handed, punishment is meted out against an SJW, you're trying to find reasons why it's ok to duck that legislation because she's an SJW.
On the personal front, I'm more inclined to agree with the spirit of your post. Hate speech should be "something extraordinary". Something designed to threaten your life or wellbeing because of who or what your are; genuine persecution.
However, as it's been used more and more as a tool to oppress by a certain political faction, the legalities and policies now apply at a trivial level (i.e. read a particular way, it caused perceived, if not actual, offence).
I'm' all for letting off steam, allowing a little bit of offence to be made (though apologies to be followed if it was out of order) and people to sort silly crap out themselves. I want "hate speech" to mean something like what it sounds like.
However, for now, we're in the world we're in, and it'll take time to unpick. I'm not sure if it's going to get worse before it gets better, but the backlash against it will be so much worse if it continues in the direction it has been for years.
I work in the oncology section of a hospital. To cheer someone dying of cancer is quite simply inhumane. Even a person you consider odious. Feeling threatened by it? Not really. Just very, very disappointed.
It's borne out by fringe evidence. In any group there are statistical outliers. That's the way statistics works. And yes, the troll army can be sizable (when you're in the target group of millions, or tens of millions, then a couple of thousand is a very small fraction; a statistical outlier).
There is a huge current of pro-female out there in the gaming community (probably several orders of magnitude greater than the anti, though as they're quiet and 'in the background', they're not counted).
Of course there are men who feel discriminated against just for being men. When people are openly advertising that there are jobs for women only, and that women can't be sexist, and that it's ok for a woman to be as sexist as she wants, because patriarchy, and that same theme spreads right through all the media, then sure men are going to feel oppressed. Because it's getting enshrined in policies that they are.
On the games getting dumbed down so that girlz can play, hell, on some of them, I enjoy them not being so hardcore because I'm getting older an reactions are slowing. Any good young gamer gal can blow me away. That's some (probably young and insecure) guys being dicks. The larger (quiet, background) part of the community detest them just as much as the women they're trying to get a rise out of. It would be nice if there was a way to punish dickishness by people getting dick votes, and you set your dick threshold to a level that blocks out people who are more dickish than others (while allowing perhaps a bit of ribald dickishness in good fun!).
Hoo boy. Women as second class citizens. That's a whole can of worms right there for the European world. Women were (over)protected as humanity didn't have a massive expansion rate prior to modern medicine. Every woman was a huge asset (she produced children) to communities on the edge of dying out. No children, and people could expect to die young and badly. The vast majority of men would protect the woman in their life with their life. The women, on the other hand, got on with the job of building communities. In essence, the women decide what shape the future was, and the men went out and built it.
The ability to mate was never assured, as women often died in childbirth, leading to an early dearth of women available to procreate with. That, of course, plays silly buggers with the biological imperatives. Men, of course, did silly things to secure a mate.
With modern medicine, the population has exploded. Women don't die in childbirth so much, and so aren't such a precious commodity anymore, so the species/culture isn't dependent on them being protected so much. Once that's the case, feminism was inevitable (And needed, certainly in 1st and 2nd wave; 3rd still hasn't got a clue what it's all about yet, apart from that men are bad and Patriarchy).
There's always been a symbiotic balance between men and women, a bargain struck that a man meets certain standards, and the woman allows him to procreate. The standards that men need to adhere to have just been altering with what the survival of the species has demanded. Crap times meant a crap deal for women (and a crap deal for men too). Better times have meant a better deal all round.
Thanks for that. Wish I had mod points for informative.
It's one thing to assume there are internal directives and processes, but another to discover the training and backing available to cover the policies (well done ANet for the training to policy!).
100% with you that no matter what they did, they don't deserve the harassment afterwards (hopefully the cops will pick up on some of the offenders and explain the error of their ways; it's actually a criminal offence in the UK to harass someone online, so the cops can get involved). This modern day lynch mobbing has to stop, just finding the right way to do it is a thorny problem.
Much as though my views and hers may not coincide, I wish both of them a speedy end to the idiots, and a fast recovery to normal life.
I'd naturally assume a pleasant, if stressed, person away from the keyboard. However, when the world is running on policies that routinely get men fired for even a whiff of sexism, it's only fair and equal that women are held to the same standard.
This seems fair and even to me. Even if I wish both sides would stand down, and say "We're human, we're going to screw up now and then, people may get offended, but if it's not habitual, we're covering your ass on this and getting PR to sort the mess out".
Offending people isn't a mortal sin. We're not perfect beings. When overtaxed we can explode and say something we later regret (anger really messes with the brain). That's part of the ugly side of humanity.
However, whatever laws we put in place need to work all ways. If we're saying "Thou shalt not disparage a gender", then that applies to all genders, for all genders. If we say "Thou shalt never disparage a race", then that applies to all races, for all races. The penalty being equal to all.
Turning round and saying "This is the law. However, this group are above the law, so they can do what they want, and it's perfectly ok" is a recipe for disaster.
If you apply policies evenly across all sides (and most companies have a policy saying that all policies should be applied evenly), then when people in groups that have yelled to get punishments in policies for behaviour themselves engage in that behaviour, then they should reap the rewards they've sown.
Just like womannagging does? It's bollocks, completely and utterly. It's a general mode employed by both men and women, yet singled out to make fun of a man, all the while saying that women are sacrosanct, and anything remotely disparaging a woman is grounds for dismissal. I work in a very heavily female environment (hospital) and I've seen women use it frequently. I tend to assume that the rephrasing is simply a memory aid, as vocalising helps concentration and memory, and I've seen many a tech talking through what they're doing as they do it, so they don't lose train of thought.
I find it sad though, as Arena loses two good devs. However, the 'sexist' argument is now starting to be applied starkly, and the whole ideology of "women can't be sexist because " is stopping being used (as it simply has no proof, and generally isn't the case, as most moderates are now quite happily agreeing). And what seems to have gotten men fired in the last few years has now been applied to a woman, and there's a general stink about it.
What is rotten about it is the abuse afterwards. That, I find petulant, unwarranted, and just plain antisocial (and if identified, I hope they get the book thrown at them).
Basically, if the Dev had just blown a fuse and said "Really, you think I don't know this, as I do it all day?", and kept the gender disparaging out of it, it's fairly likely that she'd have been cautioned, and maybe told a little leave would be in order, as she was stressed (and I can entirely believe being a game Dev is extremely stressful, day in, day out).
However, she had to throw misandry into it. If a male game Dev blew a fuse and told a female customer that she was just nagging because it was the time of the month, or something, he'd rightfully be fired (hell, I think the internet would explode!).
So, that leaves people with two options. Allow misogynist and misandrist lexicon to be used as a way to blow off steam (and have an offended person placated by whatever means necessary on the PR front, maybe disciplining the Dev for exploding at a customer).
Or, you can say neither male, nor female can use any gender keyed disparagement, with penalty of firing. As men have had to deal with for years. That's equality.
Personally, I'm all in favour of letting people blow off steam, and maybe offend someone (and apologise later, or face medium penalties for painting company in a general bad light same as any old rant at customers).
Definitely "appeal to definition" logical fallacy.
Sex trafficking is importing people to act as sex workers under false pretences/illegally. It's basically modern slavery.
Though on that front, if that political wing concentrated funds on trying to cure modern slavery, instead of trying to tell everyone how bad ancient slavery was, then it may be further along the process of solving than it is now.
If only I had points to mod you funny. You say that it wasnâ(TM)t a slippery slope argument straight before stating a slippery slope fallacy. The point to stand up is when you see something happening that is unethical.
So many people are standing up for so many things that are in no way unethical (or in many cases factually wrong) that nobody has any idea whatâ(TM)s going on.. When something worth standing against actually happens, nobody will notice in the noise.
If google decides no more military contracts, as long as shareholders are fine with loss of earnings, fine.. But thereâ(TM)s a lot that the military does thatâ(TM)s highly ethical. Refusing that because you donâ(TM)t like military is a bit sad really.
The money will instead go to some other company thatâ(TM)s not so ethical, so when the time to stand up to something enethical comes, youâ(TM)re ineffective, as the less principled are already in the game, highly funded via all those ethical contracts and fully tooled up.
Something Iâ(TM)ve always believed is that itâ(TM)s much easier to change or direct a system when youâ(TM)re on the inside.
If you have a shred of aptitude, eventually you will pass. However, the time taken to do that if you have no aptitude may be far longer than it would be worth. You'd then fail at whatever was dependent on your aptitude for the subject and have a rubbish time afterwards.
Retakes are there for a check to determine whether you "just had a bad day", or had a perfect storm of questions that you were weakest on.
There's always the possibility that you could retake for the length of your lifetime and still not pass.
A well balanced test is a strong indicator of knowledge. Not the only indicator, but a strong one.
Generally, Uni admissions are utilising a "strong indicator" of grade ability in subject matter, along with other indicators (enthusiasm, curiosity, external interests etc.) to build up a picture of how you're likely to be able to grasp the relevant curriculum.
The Western world used to plan for generational time periods. Companies were set up with the intent of providing a regular profit over time, slowly increasing, but overall being reliable producers.
Back in the 70s, some people started to decide that they could start selling bits of these to make a fast buck, so you could buy a company, split it up into components, and sell bits of it for more than you paid for it. Voila, instant profit, and it'd only take a year.
Then investors started to want these immediate gains more and more. So more of the regular reliable producers were split up.
That put the regular producers up against the profit margins of the breakers, and many were written off as being "not profitable", making it tough to get loans to continue operating, meaning they had to sell up (which went to the breakers to get bits sold off at profit to financiers).
Investors getting used to the fast money only started to look at the immediate future. Can they make money in the next year? If yes, then all's shiny!
Very very few people in the West are now asking the question "Where do we see ourselves in 50 years?". If you're not asking yourself that question, you can easily find yourself on a path that looks rosy for the next few years, but with a huge drop that you just don't see coming. Or by the time you do, there's sod all you can do about it; the inertia of all the short termist vision catches up with you.
Instant gratification isn't a long term strategy.
I disagree, please explain your reasoning behind why you consider both to be ethically equivalent.
Looks like people have forgotten what the word "responsibility" means, and are too conditioned to using trite "blame someone else" excuses.
Calling cops is definitely supposed to put people at risk. That's the point of it. At the very least, the cops will intervene in a situation to calm it down (putting themselves at risk), or when you tell them there's live fire, kidnapping and their opponents are armed and dangerous with firearms, then that's what they go in with context. Damn straight that's putting people at risk.
The alternative is that the police are supposed to treat every call of live fire as if they were approaching a jaywalker. Which would get cops killed. But that's ok, right? The person most likely to be calm and orderly is the person who has actually got the hostages, and considers themselves in charge.. And that's the likely situation, not the hostage magically escaping just as the cops get there.
If you want to stop a problem, you try and identify the root cause, and you stamp on it hard. The root cause was an irresponsible, sociopathic asshole who thinks it's fun to create dangerous situations because he finds it funny to mess with people's lives with no impact to him.
Given the multiple counts, and the expense of mobilisation of all the resources that have been incurred as a cost to the public purse, I think a million is probably a fair recompense plus a small punitive fine in there too.
The sentence, well, it's one life lost, and several devastated (including the cop, who will have to live with that for the rest of their life, and the family that lost a member etc.).
Root cause is the caller and the person who commissioned the call. Freedom needs responsibility if everyone is to be free.
Uhh.. You're comparing someone in a charged situation with adrenaline running high to someone who manipulates a situation into being like that coldly and with malice aforethought?
The root cause of this is the ones that called the SWATting. Anything that arises from that is on their shoulders. When people get it through their thick skulls that playing with people's live for shits and giggles has massive repercussions, then perhaps the calls to SWAT will be valid calls, and the reactions that they have will be in an environment they're supposed to be in.
Best analogy I can think of for your stance is a state leader ordering the army in to invade another country, then lay the blame on the soldiers for going there, and "maybe the leader had something to do with it" if people got shot.
Bruce, I suspect you know population statistics as well as I do.
By saying you have a close to 100:1 ratio in anything doesn't actually tell you a single thing. A clearer signal would be to say "What's the employment rate in candidate cohorts?".
If you find, say, that there's an 8% unemployment rate in the caucasian set, and 8% in non-caucasian, or an 8% in male, 8% in female, then the system is stacked (probably) fairly; it'd be giving you a reasonable signal that a woman has just as much chance of getting a role in the sector as a man, which is what equality is all about (an equal shot for everyone).
Now if you find say, that there's an 8% unemployment rate in men compared to a 2% rate in women, that tells you that (probably) something nefarious is going on, and one of the prime factors in you getting a job is to be a woman. And that's just silly. It'll breed resentment (you're not creating a job that'll magically help women with no side effects. What you're actually doing is actively discriminating against men, just because "numbers". You are blatantly refusing a man a job because he's a man.
I know you're very firmly embedded in the tech community, so the answers to the unemployment rates and attrition rates from the field would be generally more available to you; it'd be interesting to see if you could ferret them out. What I'm hearing though various studies is that there's no structural barrier to women entering the field at all, so the discrimination against the more populous cohorts present in the field is just tokenism.
A good study, with proper controls and meta analysis against various studies could convince me to change my mind, but I'd like to see it treated properly, rather than just an exercise in tokenism.
You obviously didn't read about the ethics behind all this, that Rafael didn't want to be associated with an organisation that blatantly discriminated against a large set of the population (Outreachy), especially when the Code of Conduct explicitly said "You can't discriminate". So logically, the community should spin, and automatically disband itself, as it's actively discriminating when it's core CoC says it isn't allowed.
He just wanted to get on with the code, and treat people as people. Now the overzealous Social Justice crowd have got entrenched, he just has better things to do with his time than play petty politics. So he's taking his skills elsewhere.
Sounds fair enough to me.
Bruce, affirmative action is not the correct way to go about things at this point.
About 6 years ago, there was a systemic imbalance that did actively discriminate. People rebelled against that as being inhumane (which it was). Now the system does actually provide equal access. Not only that, but there are many successful outreach programs that invest in the poor (and it is the generically poor that we need to be granted funded options; that's why I was so angry here in the UK when state funded University places went away to be replaced by more loans, and personal responsibility for paying the tuition fees).
When you engage at that level, you are helping fix the historical issues that led to the past imbalances.
What doesn't help is actively discriminating against the majority; that's when you're using the same thinking that was found to be abhorrent, and applying it to a majority. That is crass, and unhelpful.
When you look at the movement of demographics in society, it's very easy to see the huge changes in the last couple of generations in the West. And it's pretty balanced these days (it'll take maybe another few decades for some of the older entrenched mindsets to vanish by die off, but they don't have much in the way of power and control in everyday life).
Looking back through history, I've found most trends to be reminiscent of damped transient oscillations around a mean; society, as far as women's right and minority rights is largely center, to being slightly biased towards minorities. Yet there is still an increasing vocal contingent that is after actively discriminating against a set (and using dehumanising methodologies to do so, which to me is intolerably obnoxious). This is the overshoot on the oscillation. And the stronger that contingent make themselves over the coming decades, the stronger the backlash will be when it occurs.
What society has now, which it didn't 60 years ago, is a general acceptance. The world has become smaller, and more unified.
What isn't needed so much now is the band aid of affirmative action (that was justified in years gone by, but after the couple of generations now of having equal access to the same education and chances of anyone else, is much less relevant, towards being self-defeating these days).
On the racial side, Asians and Indians were discriminated against just as much as anyone else. And now they're a very large contingent of the tech community.
On the gender imbalance, you look at the most 'inclusive' countries in the world, and female engagement with tech is still very low. The more thorough the studies are into the gender imbalances, the more it seems to be a "choice", rather than some murky nefarious discriminatory group that keeps being alluded to. I've yet to see a decently controlled study that has found anything _but_ that.
It's much the same with teaching, nursing, (increasingly medical doctors, which have a huge female bias these days) biological sciences and so on, except the other way round. Yet nobody complains about that. Or that the majority of trash collectors are men.
Hell, I taught all my nieces to code, and got them science kits. One went into music, one into the nursing profession, one into conflict studies and one into biotechnology (now with a PhD). All four of them find general tech on the computing side to be not that interesting. They have other tech that does interest them, and that never seems to be rolled into the treatment of "technology" as addressed in these circles.
The rules that I consider fair are just "Don't discriminate". Give people the resources to achieve what their talent and drive will allow them, and give them the choice of what direction to go.
When it comes to selection, let each person prove themselves.