Just twigged - they looked at 'tweets'. So we're not looking at racists, we're looking at their interpretation of Racists, who use Twitter, who tweeted about the election result. That's not a great basis for anything. Maybe not all racists use twitter.
We may need a door-to-door sampling using a questionairre. God, that would be good: 'On a scale of 1 to 10, how racist are you?". And then we're into whether racists really see themselves as racist. And do some non-racists see themselves as racist.
Once you can answer the WIIFM question, then you are ready to talk to Bob. Bob will be asked to do work - to change the way he works, to learn a new system. In the short term, this will cause hassle, frustration, delay and extra work. Those are all negative things. Change _itself_ can be perceived as a negative thing.
To be worth it, it needs to either save Bob time, or remove one of his pain points. The board doesn't matter, no one else matters. Only Bob's pain points matter.
So, look at the existing system from Bob's point of view. What does he spend most of his time doing? How can you make that faster and less error prone? If you can do that, then you have the hook to pull in changes that benefit everyone else.
Agreed - I'd have asked Bob what he sees as the problem, and how he'd cure it. Get Bob's buy-in. Could be a case for De Bono's 'Six thinking hats' and get everyone (including Bob) saying what's good about the current system, then everyone (including Bob) saying what's bad. And finally everyone to say how to fix it.
As for offending Bob - offence is only ever taken, not given. If Bob's going to take offence, that's his call. And it'll happen sooner or later if it will happen. Better to face it now.
"I said oh well, not like voting matters anyhow due to electoral college bullshit and went home"
I'm so glad you didn't vote. Uneducated people shouldn't vote.
Tut. Currently BBC carries Obama with more Electoral college votes and less 'popular' vote. I think the OP has a point.
And just because you disagree with him doesn't make him uneducated. (And dammit, answered an AC possible troll... mark you, some folk modded him 'insightful' - should have been 'insulting')
Why is the job of Apple customers to enforce tax law? We have an agency, the IRS whose job it is to enforce tax law. Customers should comfortably buy Apple products and if Apple is guilty they should get their ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion with no interruption in service to anyone but their shareholders who watch a nice chunk of the cash disappear in penalties and fines.
If they haven't broken the law, they law should be changed to make this sort of thing much harder. Again nothing to do with customers.
As long as it's tax avoidance, rather than tax evasion, nothing illegal in this. Everyone (corporations included) want to pay as little tax as possible. It's the governments job to close the loopholes. It's the beancounters and lawyars jobs to find the new ones.
This is my strategy. I tell my employer: "Do you want to pay me overtime or do you want the account to slip its deadline? Your choice." If that's drama, get your head out of your ass. If you're not paid by the hour to code, you're doing it wrong. I keep hoping my employer will answer "yes, we'll pay overtime" but they never do.
What, is that somehow unfair. Well too fucking bad. My time is worth money.
Well said. I had a boss once who used to complain when his boss asked for extra time at no cost, and he didn't pass anything down to us without compensation.
If managers want something for nothing, tell them to go to a charity.
They also like nutrients from the soil.
There are none on mars.
You will need to fling large amount of ready-to-use nutrient rich soil along with those plants.
Now you have plants converting nutrients AND carbon dioxide in more nutrients.
Sure? I live in NZ, and the reason why we can feed 20 million but only have a population of 4.5 million is because our soil is so fertile - after thousands of years of volcano blasts. One small town (Pukekoke) gets two (or possibly three) harvests of onions a year. And the soil there is a browny-red.
Now I'm assuming that volcanic matter needs special stuff to help plants get started, but what's that? "Nutrients" = ???
I'm also assuming we don't want to plant Mars full of onions...
A few years back I was in the Sistine chapel (I'm an art-lover: so shoot me). There's some stuff on the wall that tells bible stories in art. Example (I'm making this up, as I can't remember but do remember the technique) Moses on the mountain, getting the commandments from the man upstairs. Moses coming down the mountain, seeing the wild party, Moses smashing the tablets... each vignette has Moses in in at a different time in the story, but in the same painting. He's dressed identically, surrounded by the same people. He might be on the road, top right, then on the same road, middle centre.
Dawkins not only is an insulting person, he sometimes explicitly instructs his followers to be insulting too. This is a quote from a speech he made at Reason Rally last March:
So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe — for example, if they say they are Catholic — do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?”
Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.
Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."
No matter how you feel about what someone believes, telling others to go out of their way to specifically "mock", "ridicule", and display "contempt" towards the person and/or the idea is nothing but doing your best to be offensive, and knowingly so.
Sorry, but I think he's right. Do catholics truly believe that the wine and wafer turn to the blood and body of a person supposedly dead for 2,000 odd years? Really? I'm pretty sure that Dawkins is right and they don't - and they need to admit to themselves that they don't.
As for the 'ridiculed with contempt' - yes, that's a bit on the nose. Citation needed. Got the source? (Not a religious site quoting Dawkins...)
Don't have any current mod points, so I'll just comment: quite so. Disagreeing with someone is not insulting; *insulting* someone is insulting. Dawkins does plenty of the latter. Calling theists "ignorant" is indeed insulting...
Nonsense. I am profoundly ignorant in several fields (for example: I can't speak cantonese: I know next to nothing about Marxism: I cannot fly a plane: I cannot play a trombone). You are welcome and fully justified to call me ignorant in those fields. I won't take offense and won't be insulted.
Dawkins - who I admit I respect - has issues with people who are ignorant in necessary-for-life skills and wish to remain so. That's my take of it. Not knowing the bus timetable is silly when you need to know it to get to work in the morning. Not knowing how to perform surgery is dumb when you have a kidney transplant to do in the morning. Believing that some illnesses can be treated better by prayer than by antibiotics is not safe.
"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly knows that Apple has sold more than 100 million iPad tablets at this point, but according to the outspoken executive, that's not the tablet people really want"
In Mandy Rice-Davies's immortal words, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he".
How about people that set up many PCs daily or weekly? Sure, home users aren't overtly affected by it but businesses are. Even automating it (IE: WSUS) still makes it a pain in the ass. "You would have had your new PC yesterday, but it's still updating Windows"
Anyone that installs multiple PCs and doesn't have a slipstream version deserves their punishment.
It's like digging a canal with spoons.
Nice analogy, but I still think one involving a car would work better.
The one who came before Kirk in the original series pilot. Last I saw he was either cavorting with a lady in his imagination or in a bad wheelchair, going "beep beep" (no) over and over.
.. own the bodies of deceased personnel (in as far as OKing the autopsy) if the member dies on a base or a battlefield. Wonder if that's in the Terms and Conditions when you sign up...
Who are you calling a simple mimic? Parrots have been shown to understand concepts. To have the ability to generalize from concrete instances. To create abstractions. Categories. And possibly to plan for the future as well.
Citation needed.
In 'Broca's Brain', Carl Sagan mentioned that the great apes (uh . not us) can learn sign language and communicate with us in that shared language - even to the extent of creating phrases for 'duck' (Water-bird). Now that is understanding concepts, etc.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people
Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.
We've something like that happening in NZ. After the big one in Christchurch (22/Feb/2011) one of the buildings in Christchurch collapsed. The investigations have found that the engineer falsified his degree and he may also be liable. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10835563
Somewhat remiss of people not to check on someone's qualifications. Skeptics of the world unite.
Who DOESNT think the moon was caused by a collision, outside of a few Creationists?
Tut. Look back at the past. I used to be a lot more into astronomy than I am now, and back in the 70s/80s, the thought that the moon was caused by a collision was not laughable, but looked at askance. One thought was that if there was a helluva collision, why wasn't the rest of the planet shattered into fragments (much like the poor chaps in the gap between Mars and Jupiter...). I took the "both formed together, dual planet" thesis as the latest there was 'til I read Bill Bryson (god help me...) in his book "A short history of nearly everything", or some such title.
Every theory is blindingly obvious and unquestionable, 'til someone proves it isn't. T. H. Huxley read Darwin's "Origin of Species" and thought it stupid of him (Huxley) not to have thought of it. Same here..
Slashdot Mirror
Episodes I through III.
IV through VI were masterpieces, but given recent events it had very little to do with George Lucas, whatever George likes to think.
Hmm. Your definition of 'masterpiece' is different from mine.
.. but I'll reserve 'masterpiece' for something far snappier. But that's just me.
I'll grant you IV and V were 'enjoyable watching'
Amazon might as well be Al Queda.
You're not over over-reacting at all, are you?
Agree, if every public service operated as poorly and unprofessionally as the BBC, the world would be a much better place.
Nicely put! Mod up!
Just twigged - they looked at 'tweets'. So we're not looking at racists, we're looking at their interpretation of Racists, who use Twitter, who tweeted about the election result. That's not a great basis for anything. Maybe not all racists use twitter.
We may need a door-to-door sampling using a questionairre. God, that would be good: 'On a scale of 1 to 10, how racist are you?". And then we're into whether racists really see themselves as racist. And do some non-racists see themselves as racist.
I should do a thesis on this...
Once you can answer the WIIFM question, then you are ready to talk to Bob. Bob will be asked to do work - to change the way he works, to learn a new system. In the short term, this will cause hassle, frustration, delay and extra work. Those are all negative things. Change _itself_ can be perceived as a negative thing.
To be worth it, it needs to either save Bob time, or remove one of his pain points. The board doesn't matter, no one else matters. Only Bob's pain points matter.
So, look at the existing system from Bob's point of view. What does he spend most of his time doing? How can you make that faster and less error prone? If you can do that, then you have the hook to pull in changes that benefit everyone else.
Agreed - I'd have asked Bob what he sees as the problem, and how he'd cure it. Get Bob's buy-in. Could be a case for De Bono's 'Six thinking hats' and get everyone (including Bob) saying what's good about the current system, then everyone (including Bob) saying what's bad. And finally everyone to say how to fix it.
As for offending Bob - offence is only ever taken, not given. If Bob's going to take offence, that's his call. And it'll happen sooner or later if it will happen. Better to face it now.
Just wondering....
"I said oh well, not like voting matters anyhow due to electoral college bullshit and went home"
I'm so glad you didn't vote. Uneducated people shouldn't vote.
Tut. Currently BBC carries Obama with more Electoral college votes and less 'popular' vote. I think the OP has a point.
And just because you disagree with him doesn't make him uneducated. (And dammit, answered an AC possible troll... mark you, some folk modded him 'insightful' - should have been 'insulting')
In and out, kind of how I wish sex was...
Once every 4 years?
Why is the job of Apple customers to enforce tax law? We have an agency, the IRS whose job it is to enforce tax law. Customers should comfortably buy Apple products and if Apple is guilty they should get their ass nailed to the wall for tax evasion with no interruption in service to anyone but their shareholders who watch a nice chunk of the cash disappear in penalties and fines.
If they haven't broken the law, they law should be changed to make this sort of thing much harder. Again nothing to do with customers.
My point exactly :)
As long as it's tax avoidance, rather than tax evasion, nothing illegal in this. Everyone (corporations included) want to pay as little tax as possible. It's the governments job to close the loopholes. It's the beancounters and lawyars jobs to find the new ones.
This is my strategy. I tell my employer: "Do you want to pay me overtime or do you want the account to slip its deadline? Your choice." If that's drama, get your head out of your ass. If you're not paid by the hour to code, you're doing it wrong. I keep hoping my employer will answer "yes, we'll pay overtime" but they never do.
What, is that somehow unfair. Well too fucking bad. My time is worth money.
Well said. I had a boss once who used to complain when his boss asked for extra time at no cost, and he didn't pass anything down to us without compensation.
If managers want something for nothing, tell them to go to a charity.
They also like nutrients from the soil. There are none on mars. You will need to fling large amount of ready-to-use nutrient rich soil along with those plants. Now you have plants converting nutrients AND carbon dioxide in more nutrients.
Sure? I live in NZ, and the reason why we can feed 20 million but only have a population of 4.5 million is because our soil is so fertile - after thousands of years of volcano blasts. One small town (Pukekoke) gets two (or possibly three) harvests of onions a year. And the soil there is a browny-red.
Now I'm assuming that volcanic matter needs special stuff to help plants get started, but what's that? "Nutrients" = ???
I'm also assuming we don't want to plant Mars full of onions...
A few years back I was in the Sistine chapel (I'm an art-lover: so shoot me). There's some stuff on the wall that tells bible stories in art. Example (I'm making this up, as I can't remember but do remember the technique) Moses on the mountain, getting the commandments from the man upstairs. Moses coming down the mountain, seeing the wild party, Moses smashing the tablets... each vignette has Moses in in at a different time in the story, but in the same painting. He's dressed identically, surrounded by the same people. He might be on the road, top right, then on the same road, middle centre.
So yeah, done before - in the renaissance.
Dawkins not only is an insulting person, he sometimes explicitly instructs his followers to be insulting too. This is a quote from a speech he made at Reason Rally last March:
So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe — for example, if they say they are Catholic — do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?”
Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.
Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."
No matter how you feel about what someone believes, telling others to go out of their way to specifically "mock", "ridicule", and display "contempt" towards the person and/or the idea is nothing but doing your best to be offensive, and knowingly so.
Sorry, but I think he's right. Do catholics truly believe that the wine and wafer turn to the blood and body of a person supposedly dead for 2,000 odd years? Really? I'm pretty sure that Dawkins is right and they don't - and they need to admit to themselves that they don't.
As for the 'ridiculed with contempt' - yes, that's a bit on the nose. Citation needed. Got the source? (Not a religious site quoting Dawkins...)
Don't have any current mod points, so I'll just comment: quite so. Disagreeing with someone is not insulting; *insulting* someone is insulting. Dawkins does plenty of the latter. Calling theists "ignorant" is indeed insulting ...
Nonsense. I am profoundly ignorant in several fields (for example: I can't speak cantonese: I know next to nothing about Marxism: I cannot fly a plane: I cannot play a trombone). You are welcome and fully justified to call me ignorant in those fields. I won't take offense and won't be insulted.
Dawkins - who I admit I respect - has issues with people who are ignorant in necessary-for-life skills and wish to remain so. That's my take of it. Not knowing the bus timetable is silly when you need to know it to get to work in the morning. Not knowing how to perform surgery is dumb when you have a kidney transplant to do in the morning. Believing that some illnesses can be treated better by prayer than by antibiotics is not safe.
I take it that you're not expecting a visit from the Spanish Inquisition, then?
Looks like it has to be me that says it ... Nobody expects a visit from the Spanish inquisition.
And I'm not even a fan.
"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly knows that Apple has sold more than 100 million iPad tablets at this point, but according to the outspoken executive, that's not the tablet people really want"
In Mandy Rice-Davies's immortal words, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he".
At this point, it would be completely irresponsible to put fertile men and women on a long-term trip. Chances are the woman and her baby would die.
Any chance we could put (say) one man and twenty or so fertile, attractive women on a long-term trip? If so, where do I sign?
How about people that set up many PCs daily or weekly? Sure, home users aren't overtly affected by it but businesses are. Even automating it (IE: WSUS) still makes it a pain in the ass. "You would have had your new PC yesterday, but it's still updating Windows"
Anyone that installs multiple PCs and doesn't have a slipstream version deserves their punishment.
It's like digging a canal with spoons.
Nice analogy, but I still think one involving a car would work better.
The one who came before Kirk in the original series pilot. Last I saw he was either cavorting with a lady in his imagination or in a bad wheelchair, going "beep beep" (no) over and over.
.. own the bodies of deceased personnel (in as far as OKing the autopsy) if the member dies on a base or a battlefield. Wonder if that's in the Terms and Conditions when you sign up...
Who are you calling a simple mimic? Parrots have been shown to understand concepts. To have the ability to generalize from concrete instances. To create abstractions. Categories. And possibly to plan for the future as well.
Citation needed.
In 'Broca's Brain', Carl Sagan mentioned that the great apes (uh . not us) can learn sign language and communicate with us in that shared language - even to the extent of creating phrases for 'duck' (Water-bird). Now that is understanding concepts, etc.
Parrots? I don't buy it. Yet.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people
Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08codes.html
We've something like that happening in NZ. After the big one in Christchurch (22/Feb/2011) one of the buildings in Christchurch collapsed. The investigations have found that the engineer falsified his degree and he may also be liable. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10835563
Somewhat remiss of people not to check on someone's qualifications. Skeptics of the world unite.
... it's usually because they're losing. Or about to. You never quit when you're ahead. Amazon have problems over the horizon?
Who DOESNT think the moon was caused by a collision, outside of a few Creationists?
Tut. Look back at the past. I used to be a lot more into astronomy than I am now, and back in the 70s/80s, the thought that the moon was caused by a collision was not laughable, but looked at askance. One thought was that if there was a helluva collision, why wasn't the rest of the planet shattered into fragments (much like the poor chaps in the gap between Mars and Jupiter...). I took the "both formed together, dual planet" thesis as the latest there was 'til I read Bill Bryson (god help me...) in his book "A short history of nearly everything", or some such title.
..
Every theory is blindingly obvious and unquestionable, 'til someone proves it isn't. T. H. Huxley read Darwin's "Origin of Species" and thought it stupid of him (Huxley) not to have thought of it. Same here