You said it yourself, you're 44 lb overweight, yet you can't seem to follow your simple formula. Ever wonder why?
It's because hunger is one of the strongest human stimuli. When we get hungry, we get irritable, cranky, and basically feel like crap until we provide the body with food. When we eat, the relief is immediate. That's why it's obvious that we need to eat less, yet we can't seem to do it.
On the exercise side, most modern exercise is incredibly boring. Jog on a treadmill. Ride a stationary bike. Row on a machine. Move heavy objects around, only to put them back in the same place they started from. It's little wonder people can't get psyched up to go to the gym.
So the fight is more about finding ways to control hunger and active activities that aren't boring. "Eat less, exercise more" trivializes that to the point of being a useless statement.
Some things that I found worked for me:
Drink water. It'll make you feel full, it'll help your body function, and it'll make you feel better. Just don't end up like the Wee for a Wii lady.
Don't eat quickly. Let your body tell you when it's satisfied.
Don't eat often at restaurants. Their portions are far too big, and if the food is in front of you, your brain is wired to eat it (never know if there will be food available tomorrow. Better eat up!)
Try not to eat overly processed foods. Your body is asking for more and more food because it didn't get the nutrients it needed to function.
Don't eat lowfat foods. They're loaded with sugar, which is empty calories. Eating fats makes you feel full.
Eat more fish. It's good for you, fills you up, and you won't be hungry again in an hour.
Go outside and play with your kids/dog/salamander. Whose mind can stand jogging on a treadmill for an hour? Whose knees can stand that?
Do a sport that you enjoy.
I spent 3 years of my life traveling for work, working late, and eating out every night. I gained over 30 lbs. I lost it in about 6 months following the advice above.
Actually, I reject all email from envelope sender if the recipient is invalid (I use a catch-all address for some domains before I realized that this would be a problem because of people like yourself).
So really the only backscatter that I get is from people like you who want to make your spam problem my spam problem. I've taken to simply replying to all of the confirmation emails, dutifully filling out all the captchas so that you get your own damn spam.
How about this: at least check the SPF record for the domain before sending out your obnoxious backscatter. If the SPF record doesn't match, could you please just/dev/null the message instead of turning around and spamming me?
It's been pretty much defeated now because so many spammers have their machines try to hammer the message through until it does go through.
I disagree completely.
Sure, I agree that spammers hammer away until the message gets accepted, but I've found that by the time they finally get their message through, they are on so many RBLs, razor/pyzor/dcc, etc., that Spamassassin makes quick work of them. Before greylisting, I used to get about 10-20 image spams in my inbox daily. Now, I get, maybe 1 per week.
My greylisting is homegrown and the algorithm is this: If your IP class C hasn't successfully gotten a message past the greylist before (to get you whitelisted), your IP/envelope sender/envelope rcpt combination gets put on the greylist and you see a tempfail. Retrying your IP/ES/ER combo is going to keep getting tempfails for the next X seconds, after which I'll let you through and put your class C on the whitelist. (The value of X is 10 seconds unless your IP has no reverse DNS or your IP appears in your reverse DNS, or your IP appears on any of the RBLs checked by 'rblcheck'. If any of those conditions are true, your value of X is 60 minutes.)
My observations:
Most spammers do not retry the IP/ES/ER combo. Sure, they'll hammer away from the same IP, but you'll see hundreds of messages fly by in the logs, all of which are dictionary attacking me so they get rejected (ER is always different).
After 60 minutes, spamassassin tends to make quick work of the spams.
I haven't even implemented blacklisting yet because I haven't hit the spam pain point. But I could definitely envision a system that reads the results of sa-learn and if your IP has only ever sent me spam over a certain time period, I just blacklist you and you're never getting through.
Nobody has ever contacted me to say, "How come I got a bounce message from you?"
The load on my mailserver has plummeted because only like 1% of emails actually hit spamassassin. The rest are disposed of in a maximum of two indexed SQL queries. I don't think spamassassin can so much as read your preferences in under two SQL queries.;)My point is greylisting has been a huge win for me.
I find the same situation with my backup MX. The spammer's thinking is that a backup MX isn't going to have the same level of spam/virus protection as the primary, so better to try for the secondary.
I dropped my secondary MX. My mailserver is rarely down for more than a few hours, so why bother with secondary MX?
I don't trivialize The Mohel's practice of medicine--Mohels are extremely skilled in what they do (watch the difference between an experienced Mohel and an experienced surgeon in a hospital doing the same procedure to see what I mean)--but if you don't know what a Mohel is, you should look it up. Then decide for yourself if you want to take this physician's advice on nutrition.
Again, I'm sure he's a top notch surgeon, but nutrition is a bit outside of his area of medicine.
You can get Acidophilus in pill form at any health foods store. In fact, you can probably get it in any grocery store.
The pills have way more bacteria in them, are stable at room temperature (read: more convenient than yogurt), and are a lot cheaper than yogurt, if you're only eating yogurt for the bacteria.
Credit Card companies absolutely cannot open credit accounts for you without you first applying. I'm not going to spend time looking up the law for you, but you should be able to google it fairly quickly.
The other possibility is your identity has been stolen. Might want to look into that, as it is much more likely the cause of your experience, rather than banks openly flouting federal law.
The hospital where my wife's OB belongs allowed (IIRC) up to 5 guests to be present during delivery. Both our reactions upon hearing that were, "Who the hell would want 5 guests in the delivery room?"
So there is a clear reason why real-estate agents would hurry to sell someone else's house for a little less (because the commission is about the same). It's not a conspiracy, it's a simple force of the market. If I got into being a real-estate agent without ever contacting another real-estate agent, these kinds of tactics would be clear to me if I ever actually thought about how to maximize my profits.
Except it doesn't really work that way. Ask any Realtor. The real money as a Realtor is not made in any one transaction--it's in word of mouth advertising. Ever wonder why your Realtor sends you flowers every year? It's so you remember his name when one of your contacts is looking for an agent.
If you got into selling real estate, without ever contacting another real estate agent, you'd realize that if you get your seller more than he was expecting for his property, he's going to tell everyone he knows what a genius you are and how much money you made him. That's worth tens of thousands of dollars to the agent. That $150 gained or lost doesn't even factor into the equation in his mind.
The Realtors that I work with are constantly reminding me to tell my investor contacts how great they are. They give me discounts. They send me crap in the mail. They do all kinds of things to keep me happy. But they have never once pressured me to sell for less than fair market. There's a string disincentive for them to do that. Does he want me, at investor meetings, to say, "Oh, yeah, Don. He's a real crackpot. He tried to get me to sell for $10k under market. I had to force him to leave it up for another week and, duh gee whiz, wouldn't you know it, I got my price. What a moron."? Or does he want me to say, "Oh, yeah, Don. I've done several transactions with him. They've all gone smoothly, and on the last deal, he netted me an extra $3k. I'm goin' to Hawaii!"?
Do the math.
Please let me know what kind of crazy conclusions he is drawing from those numbers, or what the sloppiness you see in that method is.
Oh, gee, I dunno. Maybe assuming that all drug rings operate on the same payscale as J. T.'s? I buddy of mine in college did a lot of drug runs, and I can assure you that he made well in excess of $3.30 or $7.00 per hour. This was a number of years ago at this point. His dealers made well in excess of those figures as well.
Also, if you see any "blatantly wrong answers", let me know. I have the entire book with me, searchable.
30 seconds of googling proved my suspicions to be correct.
He had to rewrite the chapter on the KKK, since it was historically inaccurate.
The supposed link between legalized abortion and a drop in crime was quickly discredited by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. I was never quite comfortable with his methods on this one, so this doesn't surprise me at all.
It's been a while since I read the book, so I don't remember which other chapters I found to be slipshod in order to google for them as well. At any rate, we've already got 4 chapters that suffer from substandard research and/or analysis. Why should I take seriously anything else in the book?
Have you ever watched a movie that tried to depict something with computers and was so completely wrong that you wound up screaming your fool head off at the TV? That's how I felt when I read that truly awful book.
The good professor takes perfectly valid data and draws wild and crazy conclusions from them, when simple explanations will do. Are there really crack dealers out there risking their lives for pennies? Perhaps there are... but given his sloppy methods in the rest of the book, I find myself taking the entire shebang with a bushel of salt.
Good example: That whole bit about Realtors. As an economist by training, and a real estate investor by trade, I can tell you that his conclusion that there is some conspiracy among Realtors (I work with several of them) to pressure clients to sell for less, while selling their own properties for full market value, is a truckload of crap. I would say that Realtors do get more for their properties on average than their clients, but so do investors. The reason for this is that people in the industry don't shoot ourselves in the foot and do things that prevent us from getting full market. A Realtor or investor:
knows that trying to do a quick sale will normally net you a lower selling price
won't get in a situation of being a motivated seller (must sell by 2/1/07, or lose the new house, new job, kids, wife, whatever)
won't try to sell in the dead of winter when nobody's buying
won't refuse to properly stage a home to make it more appealing to buyers
is more willing to rent their home out if they can't get their asking price
is more willing to carryback a note on the property to help get the asking price
and many, many more mistakes
Don't get me wrong, it's good to see him asking the funny questions, but I don't like reading answers that are so blatantly wrong.
If you can't trust your kids, perhaps it is time to take another look at how you've raised them.
It's going to be difficult to explain this to a programmer, but children aren't your little robots. I know that we are used to telling a computer what to do, it does it, and everybody's happy. Or if there's a bug, we fix it, and then everybody's happy.
Each kid is an actual person with individual free will. We like them to do what we tell them to do, but it is a natural part of growing up to rebel against your parents. A wise parent accepts this, while at the same time making sure the kid doesn't screw up too badly. And while I personally don't see a need for a tool like this, I don't speak for every parent of every child. Each child is different, and this might be the very thing to keep somebody else's child out of harm's way.
However, that doesn't mean that people who have never been a parent can't have a well-grounded personal-experience-based opinion.
I'll never convince you of it now, so I won't even bother trying, but if and when you become a parent, you will realize just how completely and fully and utterly wrong you are.
Just file it away in the back of your head for when the time comes. You'll get a chuckle out of it.
I'm guessing that you grew up in a really messed-up family.
One of the things you'll learn, if or when you have kids, is that one of your responsibilities as a parent is to prepare your children to function on their own. They grow up very quickly, and it's important to gradually and continually challenge your children more and more independence and responsibility (the two go hand in hand, unless you want some really horrid results!).
So I do have sympathy for children with helicopter parents, who hover over them, watching their every move. Inside each of those children is an adult who is trying to develop, but can't because he has lousy parents. With each of those children, it's a crapshoot what will happen when he or she leaves home (or if the child leaves home. I always chuckle at "helicopter parents" who complain about their "boomerang children" coming back to live at home).
For those who are looking for a good compromise, now obviously like anything else, it's going to depend on your kid, but what's worked for me is, "Remember, anything you place on the public Internet can be read by anyone--including and especially me. You don't want me to read it, don't make it public."
Windoze? You want others to respect you, yet you don't even respect the work that you do? Could it be that others are picking up on this, and you think it's because you are a woman?
to fellow (male) students who pointedly excluded me from study groups
Same thing happened to me, and I'm male. I'm just sayin'.
Regarding your suspect career advice, remember that a lot has changed in the last 30 years. I can't imagine a parent, in 2007, advising his or her daughter to be a bank teller. I have certainly not offered this advice to my daughter.
Ok, here are some of the many things I got to deal with in school:
In early primary school, my teacher told me I was learning-disabled because I couldn't write legibly. Even had me tested for disability, and I cheated on the test because I didn't really feel like being tossed into special ed. Now we know that boys' development of fine motor coordination lags behind that of girls. I wonder what would have become of my life had I not cheated on that test?
My fifth grade teacher was ruthless to all the boys in her class. She would make at least one cry on a daily basis (myself included). All of the girls, of course, were her little angels.
My seventh grade composition teacher routinely gave better grades to stories written about ponies, etc., than, say, sports.
My eleventh grade American Literature teacher constantly derided authors that she considered to be "dead white males". She routinely made derogatory comments toward men, in general.
My school's entire history curriculum could be renamed from "history" to "awful things white males did and continue to do, and why the world would be better ruled by women".
My state's boys' gymnastics program was eliminated because of Title IX. My college's baseball program was eliminated for the same reason.
I could go on, but I really don't feel like it. Know why? Because, like you, I am too thick-headed to let the behavior of jerks define my life.
My point is this. People are cruel--sometimes even the well-intentioned (like the one who wanted to put me in special ed... never mind just how silly that idea sounds given what eventually was my academic performance in high school). It happens to white males too, so don't take it so personally.
If you are a female who really wants to make it on Wall Street or serious NYC-based finance, you had goddamn well better be OK with going to strip clubs to socialize with your peers after work.
This may have been true in the past, but I can tell you that this is not universally true.
My little brother works in NYC-based finance, and I can assure you that he does not frequent strip clubs. In fact, when I planned his bachelor party, he insisted on no sexual entertainment of any kind. If he won't go buck wild for his bachelor party, he's not going to strip joints after work.
NYC strip clubs suck ass, anyhow. Why anybody would want to go is a mystery to me.
As a side note, the only times I've gone to strip joints with women were at the woman's request.
"isn't that cute, she thinks she knows what's wrong with the network!"
Have you considered that that might not be because you're female? It's conceivable that it's happening because you're new. That happens everywhere. It happens to me every time I have a new client.
But they learn. Did you happen to be right about what was wrong with the network? Right again the next time? And then the next time? Soon my clients learn that when I say, "I suspect blah," the issue is open for debate. However, when I say, "What's happening is blah," they know that to raise doubts is to waste everybody's time.
Now I don't work where you work, and I don't see what you see, so for all I know, you could have gotten yourself into a highly chauvinistic environment. All I wanted to do is to alert you that merely being male is not enough to command respect in this field (and in life, for that matter). True respect is earned. The IT profession attracts large numbers of smart and talented people, so it can be particularly difficult to prove yourself at times in this field. As a man, I'm telling you that I must earn every last bit of respect that I am afforded.
salary (laying off a capable person for someone less capable but cheaper, quite illegal)
I'm not sure where you live, but just so you know, in the US, this is perfectly legal. My understanding is that there are certain countries in Europe where this is not possible, but in the US, it is perfectly legal.
"Highly compensated persons" is not a protected class. Now, age is a protected class, so if you were to, say, fire everyone who reaches age 50, then you're gonna get sued (if your company has more than 20 employees). But if you were to, say, fire everyone who makes over $100K, irrespective of age, that would be legal.
We make value judgments about each person we interview--does it hurt to give a little plus to someone who's nationality, race or gender is underrepresented in your group?
Of course it doesn't hurt. Assuming that you are choosing between two qualified candidates, of course. So for the moment, let's assume that you are choosing between qualified candidates.
Can you tell me what the benefit is in giving a little plus to someone who is underrepresented?
I'm not trolling here, but I just feel compelled to ask folks who value diversity why they do. I have been around the block a few times, and I have worked on teams that were all white males. I have worked on teams where I was the only white male. And I've worked on everything in between. My personal experience is that a team's diversity level is not a positive factor, and neither is it a negative factor. In fact, I've found the team's diversity makeup to be completely irrelevant to the productivity and success of the team.
So this is why I like to ask people who value diversity why they do. I have not found it to be something worth going out of my way to achieve.
The only reason that I'm responding to you is to let you know that talking about stay at home moms vs. going back to work is a huge pandora's box and a flamefest waiting to happen. Every woman seems to have an opinion on this, and whatever hers is, it must be the only One True Way for every other woman. Huge flamefests ensue.
The bottom line is that some women want to be stay at home moms. Some women want to work. Both situations have their advantages and disadvantages; yet very few people recognize this.
And as a counterexample to your "every woman wants to get knocked up so she don't have to work no more" theory, my wife will readily acknowledge that she is not cut out to be a stay at home mom. She finds her job to be very exciting; and if she had to stay home with the kids, she'd go nuts. In fact, I know quite a few stay at home moms who absolutely hate it, but don't have a choice because they don't make enough to pay for daycare, or their husbands pressure them to stay home with the kids, etc. You should see what happens when daddy gets home in those households: Daddy gets all the kids shoved into his hand, and Mommy walks straight out the door to get out of that house and regain her sanity.
My wife would be one of those people, if she had to stay at home. Fortunately, my wife and I both earn enough that paying for daycare is not a hardship. Otherwise, she would be miserable.
Moral of the story: before you get married, you might want to see what your potential spouse's views are on the subject (and about kids in general). It could save you from a lot of stress down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
You said it yourself, you're 44 lb overweight, yet you can't seem to follow your simple formula. Ever wonder why?
It's because hunger is one of the strongest human stimuli. When we get hungry, we get irritable, cranky, and basically feel like crap until we provide the body with food. When we eat, the relief is immediate. That's why it's obvious that we need to eat less, yet we can't seem to do it.
On the exercise side, most modern exercise is incredibly boring. Jog on a treadmill. Ride a stationary bike. Row on a machine. Move heavy objects around, only to put them back in the same place they started from. It's little wonder people can't get psyched up to go to the gym.
So the fight is more about finding ways to control hunger and active activities that aren't boring. "Eat less, exercise more" trivializes that to the point of being a useless statement.
Some things that I found worked for me:
- Drink water. It'll make you feel full, it'll help your body function, and it'll make you feel better. Just don't end up like the Wee for a Wii lady.
- Don't eat quickly. Let your body tell you when it's satisfied.
- Don't eat often at restaurants. Their portions are far too big, and if the food is in front of you, your brain is wired to eat it (never know if there will be food available tomorrow. Better eat up!)
- Try not to eat overly processed foods. Your body is asking for more and more food because it didn't get the nutrients it needed to function.
- Don't eat lowfat foods. They're loaded with sugar, which is empty calories. Eating fats makes you feel full.
- Eat more fish. It's good for you, fills you up, and you won't be hungry again in an hour.
- Go outside and play with your kids/dog/salamander. Whose mind can stand jogging on a treadmill for an hour? Whose knees can stand that?
- Do a sport that you enjoy.
I spent 3 years of my life traveling for work, working late, and eating out every night. I gained over 30 lbs. I lost it in about 6 months following the advice above.Show some gratitude.
Actually, I reject all email from envelope sender if the recipient is invalid (I use a catch-all address for some domains before I realized that this would be a problem because of people like yourself).
/dev/null the message instead of turning around and spamming me?
So really the only backscatter that I get is from people like you who want to make your spam problem my spam problem. I've taken to simply replying to all of the confirmation emails, dutifully filling out all the captchas so that you get your own damn spam.
How about this: at least check the SPF record for the domain before sending out your obnoxious backscatter. If the SPF record doesn't match, could you please just
Sure, I agree that spammers hammer away until the message gets accepted, but I've found that by the time they finally get their message through, they are on so many RBLs, razor/pyzor/dcc, etc., that Spamassassin makes quick work of them. Before greylisting, I used to get about 10-20 image spams in my inbox daily. Now, I get, maybe 1 per week.
My greylisting is homegrown and the algorithm is this:
If your IP class C hasn't successfully gotten a message past the greylist before (to get you whitelisted), your IP/envelope sender/envelope rcpt combination gets put on the greylist and you see a tempfail.
Retrying your IP/ES/ER combo is going to keep getting tempfails for the next X seconds, after which I'll let you through and put your class C on the whitelist. (The value of X is 10 seconds unless your IP has no reverse DNS or your IP appears in your reverse DNS, or your IP appears on any of the RBLs checked by 'rblcheck'. If any of those conditions are true, your value of X is 60 minutes.)
My observations:
I find the same situation with my backup MX. The spammer's thinking is that a backup MX isn't going to have the same level of spam/virus protection as the primary, so better to try for the secondary.
I dropped my secondary MX. My mailserver is rarely down for more than a few hours, so why bother with secondary MX?
Again, I'm sure he's a top notch surgeon, but nutrition is a bit outside of his area of medicine.
You can get Acidophilus in pill form at any health foods store. In fact, you can probably get it in any grocery store.
The pills have way more bacteria in them, are stable at room temperature (read: more convenient than yogurt), and are a lot cheaper than yogurt, if you're only eating yogurt for the bacteria.
Interestingly, that distinction doesn't hold in the US either, unless the speaker wants to sound like a pompous ass.
Credit Card companies absolutely cannot open credit accounts for you without you first applying. I'm not going to spend time looking up the law for you, but you should be able to google it fairly quickly.
The other possibility is your identity has been stolen. Might want to look into that, as it is much more likely the cause of your experience, rather than banks openly flouting federal law.
Good luck!
The hospital where my wife's OB belongs allowed (IIRC) up to 5 guests to be present during delivery. Both our reactions upon hearing that were, "Who the hell would want 5 guests in the delivery room?"
:)
I guess the answer is Xaria (630117).
If you got into selling real estate, without ever contacting another real estate agent, you'd realize that if you get your seller more than he was expecting for his property, he's going to tell everyone he knows what a genius you are and how much money you made him. That's worth tens of thousands of dollars to the agent. That $150 gained or lost doesn't even factor into the equation in his mind.
The Realtors that I work with are constantly reminding me to tell my investor contacts how great they are. They give me discounts. They send me crap in the mail. They do all kinds of things to keep me happy. But they have never once pressured me to sell for less than fair market. There's a string disincentive for them to do that. Does he want me, at investor meetings, to say, "Oh, yeah, Don. He's a real crackpot. He tried to get me to sell for $10k under market. I had to force him to leave it up for another week and, duh gee whiz, wouldn't you know it, I got my price. What a moron."? Or does he want me to say, "Oh, yeah, Don. I've done several transactions with him. They've all gone smoothly, and on the last deal, he netted me an extra $3k. I'm goin' to Hawaii!"?
Do the math.
Oh, gee, I dunno. Maybe assuming that all drug rings operate on the same payscale as J. T.'s? I buddy of mine in college did a lot of drug runs, and I can assure you that he made well in excess of $3.30 or $7.00 per hour. This was a number of years ago at this point. His dealers made well in excess of those figures as well.
30 seconds of googling proved my suspicions to be correct.
He had to rewrite the chapter on the KKK, since it was historically inaccurate.
The supposed link between legalized abortion and a drop in crime was quickly discredited by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. I was never quite comfortable with his methods on this one, so this doesn't surprise me at all.
It's been a while since I read the book, so I don't remember which other chapters I found to be slipshod in order to google for them as well. At any rate, we've already got 4 chapters that suffer from substandard research and/or analysis. Why should I take seriously anything else in the book?
Have you ever watched a movie that tried to depict something with computers and was so completely wrong that you wound up screaming your fool head off at the TV? That's how I felt when I read that truly awful book.
The good professor takes perfectly valid data and draws wild and crazy conclusions from them, when simple explanations will do. Are there really crack dealers out there risking their lives for pennies? Perhaps there are... but given his sloppy methods in the rest of the book, I find myself taking the entire shebang with a bushel of salt.
Good example: That whole bit about Realtors. As an economist by training, and a real estate investor by trade, I can tell you that his conclusion that there is some conspiracy among Realtors (I work with several of them) to pressure clients to sell for less, while selling their own properties for full market value, is a truckload of crap. I would say that Realtors do get more for their properties on average than their clients, but so do investors. The reason for this is that people in the industry don't shoot ourselves in the foot and do things that prevent us from getting full market. A Realtor or investor:
- knows that trying to do a quick sale will normally net you a lower selling price
- won't get in a situation of being a motivated seller (must sell by 2/1/07, or lose the new house, new job, kids, wife, whatever)
- won't try to sell in the dead of winter when nobody's buying
- won't refuse to properly stage a home to make it more appealing to buyers
- is more willing to rent their home out if they can't get their asking price
- is more willing to carryback a note on the property to help get the asking price
- and many, many more mistakes
Don't get me wrong, it's good to see him asking the funny questions, but I don't like reading answers that are so blatantly wrong.I work 40 hours per week, and I hope I'm a good parent. I also haven't been fired yet, but I'd rather be fired than be a lousy parent.
Each kid is an actual person with individual free will. We like them to do what we tell them to do, but it is a natural part of growing up to rebel against your parents. A wise parent accepts this, while at the same time making sure the kid doesn't screw up too badly. And while I personally don't see a need for a tool like this, I don't speak for every parent of every child. Each child is different, and this might be the very thing to keep somebody else's child out of harm's way.
Just file it away in the back of your head for when the time comes. You'll get a chuckle out of it.
I'm guessing that you grew up in a really messed-up family.
One of the things you'll learn, if or when you have kids, is that one of your responsibilities as a parent is to prepare your children to function on their own. They grow up very quickly, and it's important to gradually and continually challenge your children more and more independence and responsibility (the two go hand in hand, unless you want some really horrid results!).
So I do have sympathy for children with helicopter parents, who hover over them, watching their every move. Inside each of those children is an adult who is trying to develop, but can't because he has lousy parents. With each of those children, it's a crapshoot what will happen when he or she leaves home (or if the child leaves home. I always chuckle at "helicopter parents" who complain about their "boomerang children" coming back to live at home).
For those who are looking for a good compromise, now obviously like anything else, it's going to depend on your kid, but what's worked for me is, "Remember, anything you place on the public Internet can be read by anyone--including and especially me. You don't want me to read it, don't make it public."
Your Mileage, as always, May Vary.
These days, kids are getting cellphones in 5th grade. That's age 10 or 11 ish.
Scary, I know.
We're not talking about mere POWs here. We're talking about teh pirates! You know, the ones who steal music to fund terrorism?
It TPB buys it, Sealand's toast.
Same thing happened to me, and I'm male. I'm just sayin'.
Regarding your suspect career advice, remember that a lot has changed in the last 30 years. I can't imagine a parent, in 2007, advising his or her daughter to be a bank teller. I have certainly not offered this advice to my daughter.
Ok, here are some of the many things I got to deal with in school:
- In early primary school, my teacher told me I was learning-disabled because I couldn't write legibly. Even had me tested for disability, and I cheated on the test because I didn't really feel like being tossed into special ed. Now we know that boys' development of fine motor coordination lags behind that of girls. I wonder what would have become of my life had I not cheated on that test?
- My fifth grade teacher was ruthless to all the boys in her class. She would make at least one cry on a daily basis (myself included). All of the girls, of course, were her little angels.
- My seventh grade composition teacher routinely gave better grades to stories written about ponies, etc., than, say, sports.
- My eleventh grade American Literature teacher constantly derided authors that she considered to be "dead white males". She routinely made derogatory comments toward men, in general.
- My school's entire history curriculum could be renamed from "history" to "awful things white males did and continue to do, and why the world would be better ruled by women".
- My state's boys' gymnastics program was eliminated because of Title IX. My college's baseball program was eliminated for the same reason.
I could go on, but I really don't feel like it. Know why? Because, like you, I am too thick-headed to let the behavior of jerks define my life.My point is this. People are cruel--sometimes even the well-intentioned (like the one who wanted to put me in special ed... never mind just how silly that idea sounds given what eventually was my academic performance in high school). It happens to white males too, so don't take it so personally.
Show me a link to a law that prohibits this practice. Until then, I am going to assume that you are simply mistaken in your belief.
My little brother works in NYC-based finance, and I can assure you that he does not frequent strip clubs. In fact, when I planned his bachelor party, he insisted on no sexual entertainment of any kind. If he won't go buck wild for his bachelor party, he's not going to strip joints after work.
NYC strip clubs suck ass, anyhow. Why anybody would want to go is a mystery to me.
As a side note, the only times I've gone to strip joints with women were at the woman's request.
But they learn. Did you happen to be right about what was wrong with the network? Right again the next time? And then the next time? Soon my clients learn that when I say, "I suspect blah," the issue is open for debate. However, when I say, "What's happening is blah," they know that to raise doubts is to waste everybody's time.
Now I don't work where you work, and I don't see what you see, so for all I know, you could have gotten yourself into a highly chauvinistic environment. All I wanted to do is to alert you that merely being male is not enough to command respect in this field (and in life, for that matter). True respect is earned. The IT profession attracts large numbers of smart and talented people, so it can be particularly difficult to prove yourself at times in this field. As a man, I'm telling you that I must earn every last bit of respect that I am afforded.
"Highly compensated persons" is not a protected class. Now, age is a protected class, so if you were to, say, fire everyone who reaches age 50, then you're gonna get sued (if your company has more than 20 employees). But if you were to, say, fire everyone who makes over $100K, irrespective of age, that would be legal.
Can you tell me what the benefit is in giving a little plus to someone who is underrepresented?
I'm not trolling here, but I just feel compelled to ask folks who value diversity why they do. I have been around the block a few times, and I have worked on teams that were all white males. I have worked on teams where I was the only white male. And I've worked on everything in between. My personal experience is that a team's diversity level is not a positive factor, and neither is it a negative factor. In fact, I've found the team's diversity makeup to be completely irrelevant to the productivity and success of the team.
So this is why I like to ask people who value diversity why they do. I have not found it to be something worth going out of my way to achieve.
The only reason that I'm responding to you is to let you know that talking about stay at home moms vs. going back to work is a huge pandora's box and a flamefest waiting to happen. Every woman seems to have an opinion on this, and whatever hers is, it must be the only One True Way for every other woman. Huge flamefests ensue.
The bottom line is that some women want to be stay at home moms. Some women want to work. Both situations have their advantages and disadvantages; yet very few people recognize this.
And as a counterexample to your "every woman wants to get knocked up so she don't have to work no more" theory, my wife will readily acknowledge that she is not cut out to be a stay at home mom. She finds her job to be very exciting; and if she had to stay home with the kids, she'd go nuts. In fact, I know quite a few stay at home moms who absolutely hate it, but don't have a choice because they don't make enough to pay for daycare, or their husbands pressure them to stay home with the kids, etc. You should see what happens when daddy gets home in those households: Daddy gets all the kids shoved into his hand, and Mommy walks straight out the door to get out of that house and regain her sanity.
My wife would be one of those people, if she had to stay at home. Fortunately, my wife and I both earn enough that paying for daycare is not a hardship. Otherwise, she would be miserable.
Moral of the story: before you get married, you might want to see what your potential spouse's views are on the subject (and about kids in general). It could save you from a lot of stress down the road.