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Comment Consider this (Score 1) 262

If the crime happens in public, and it IS a crime, I paid, I want to see it. Even if I have to wait til court is over, but as public OWNER of the footage I demand to see a return on my investment. Protect the innocent by holding the film 'till after court. If they are guilty release it, if not, it wasn't a crime and it's no ones business. Whatever I do with MY footage then, is MY business. Fuck the guilty.

Police officer finds 9-year old girl, unconscious behind some bushes IN A PUBLIC PARK, completely nude and obviously the victim of a sex assault. The scene is captured on camera.

Using this real life scenario, care to run your "I paid, I want to see it" rant by me again? Are you really that obtuse or unable to think analytically that you fail to see how your idea is utterly idiotic?

Comment Off the tangent, but... (Score 1) 155

He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include: - There is no problem - Girls just don't like computers ...

Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992

OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.

Comment Re:Wouldn't time be better spent... (Score 1) 481

Stating calmly that you do not consent to the search as it is a violation of your rights is "bravado and grandstanding"?

Short answer: no. Long answer: that is not the type of behavior I'm referring to. Feel free to conflate the two if that gives you the last word. The entire topic of discussion is about a school teaching teenagers how to deal with police encounters. This is not about adults discussing common sense behavior. Nice red herring btw.

Why would it have to be?

It doesn't. But that is not the type of behavior under discussion.

Oh wait your entire life advice column is hinged on that contrived notion.

No. It is an answer to this question in bold below:

"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"

What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?

If you want to conflate topics, go for it, but don't get all uptight when people call you for being obtuse on purpose.

Comment Re:Wouldn't time be better spent... (Score 5, Insightful) 481

"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"

What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?

Not get killed? Live for another day where you can fight for legal remedy, and hopefully create a legal precedent that will prevent such violations in the future?

Subservience only reinforces their grandstanding and power playing.

This is all bravado from your part. Until you have actually dealt with situations like that, face to face, you ought to temper it and think a little.

There are moments in life when it is appropriate to disobey a law and deal with the consequences (see Rosa Park or Gandhi, or recently Arnold Abbott).

This is specially true if violations of your rights (or your "violation" of an unjust law) is done in public, to bring awareness to a just cause. This is particularly true when violations are the manifestation of egregious institutions (colonialism, institutionalized racism, to less diabolical but still egregious ones such as laws preventing feeding of homeless.

Here, you, the generic "you", are full aware of it, and you have a made a decision to take the hit for a greater cause. On the other hand, there are times to play possum, in particular if violation of your rights just happen because you are there on the wrong time, being incidental of you just being you, without you planning to take the hit for a greater cause.

You coming from an event and getting arrested because "you" look the profile, or getting handcuffed while picking up your kids because you look suspicious, even when teachers are vouching for you. Etc, etc.

In such cases when you are just living your daily life, play possum, litigate later. This is specially true when you have family that depends on you.

Telling other people to go martyr just because it sounds good and right, that's just unhelpful bravado. This has nothing to do with doing the right thing, but everything to do with making a post where you sound brave and rightful.

Ignorance of the law on the side of the police is not an excuse, just as ignorance of law among a civilian is no excuse.

None of that justifies telling other people to escalate things when in a position of vulnerability. This is not a comic book, and you are not GI Joe.

Learn to pick your battles, and you pick them, learn how to fight and win them.

Comment Re:Wouldn't time be better spent... (Score 1) 481

No, just when they're committed by people with guns in positions of power.

That would exclude people without guns in a position of power. I know where you are coming from, but you better polish the logic you use to structure your arguments if you really want to make clear, precise points.

Comment Yep, this is the way to go. (Score 3, Interesting) 481

Their first concern is to not get shot in the head. Teaching kids that they need to obey lawful orders and recognize unlawful ones is the right approach. If your rights are violated you deal with it later, not when a nervous person holding a gun is telling you what to do.

This. Specially for inexperienced teenagers who, for whatever fucksake reasons (biological maturity, society, etc) might (will) lack the social, communication and cognitive skills for de-escalation and negotiation that adults (should/typically) have.

Consent and litigate later, or know how to not consent without getting killed. OTH, if a 200+lbs person in a position of power wants to strangle a 100lbs handcuffed crying teenager on the back of his patrol car, there is nothing that kid can do.

^^^ And I say this because I witnessed it on a park right in front of my house. I was sitting on a bench in front of my house near a tree when a patrol car stopped there (some investigation going on, whatever.) The car parked, the officer, a gorilla of a man, got out of the driver's seat, went to the back and started chocking the shit out of this kid.

He stopped when his partner nodded to him that there were people (me) watching. They took off, God knows where.

I'm not making this shit up, and this was with my house in one of the supposedly nice, upper middle class neighborhoods in South Florida. Just imagine the type of crap that occurs in less affluent neighborhoods.

Comment Globalization, not automation. (Score 2) 111

... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant

I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.

Accelerated, more sophisticated automation didn't by itself led to a shrinking of the middle class. It is not even the primary factor. Globalization did that. A middle class that was not educationally prepare to move out of what I call "manual/rudimentary" manufacturing, and a national difficulty to operate efficiently, those two played a significant role.

Remember, middle class used to denote blue collar jobs.

But those jobs started to go bye bye quite some time ago. It even preceded 2000's globalization and contemporary automation. The blue-collar middle class built around the auto industry was hurt significantly when it got to compete against Japanese auto makers. Middle class jobs built around the semi conductor industry got severely affected when it could not compete against Taiwanese and Japanese semiconductors.

In the early 90's, way before I got into college I used to work as an electronic welder out in Burbank, CA. Nice gig, but you know what, that type of job went somewhere else. A lot of people back then did not realize the seismic change, and were not equipped to re-adapt.

It used to be the case that Grandpa would work in a good gig, a decent gig, that provided everything he needed, savings, a car and a house. Dad then would work on the same. And then the son. Nothing wrong with that. One generation would pick the trades of the previous one.

That continuity started to break around the late 70's, early 80's, with a full spinal breakage by the late 90's. That generational-job continuity I refer to was possible because there was no industrial competition to speak off. The end of that was inevitable.

The younger generations (some X's and most millennials) are better equipped to make the transition. It's the people within the 35-45 bracket who came out unprepared, those are the ones that are going to be limping for some time, maybe forever.

Automation has very little to do with it because, without globalization, those people displaced by automation would have gone to do something else with little external pressure off international competition.

The country is going to adapt, but a lot of people are going to be limping economically till that happens.

Comment Re:There's not a lot to say, this is scummy (Score 2) 299

When journalists start to attack the company because the guy at the top is happy that he's getting laid that begins to sound like journalists engaging in personal attacks.

It's all about context. There is a suggested story that is painting Uber's corporate culture as one that engages in sexism, all that embedded in alleged questionable practices. As a result, it is worthy of investigation.

If the guy was just getting laid left and right like Tony Stark but the company is relatively free of controversy (in particular controversy that can be construed as illegal) untangled completely from the guy's personal life, then you have a point.

To me, this type of reaction just affirms that there is something systematically and systemically psycho going on there.

At that point I can see some people deciding to return the favor.

Depend on the type of people. Not every biologically grown-up person acts like a 4th grader.

Now when they describe things the company is actually doing that are anti-consumer then I think they are doing their job. If drivers are actually attacking passengers then of course it should be reported and the company should take action to investigate and discipline the drivers if they are guilty.

No argument here, I agree with your paragraph.

Comment Re:There's not a lot to say, this is scummy (Score 1) 299

> That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life.

The journalists sure don't mind digging into theirs...

Journalists are supposed to report things, and in the case of high-profile cases, behavior within the confines and image of the business that could be construed as problematic, questionable and/or sexist.

Uber could simply choose to file a defamation suit if it has what it needs to prove a defamation took place. Companies, like individuals, can choose how to act according to the validity of their arguments or counter-arguments (or they can act like 4th graders.)

Comment Re:There's not a lot to say, this is scummy (Score 1) 299

what if the digging reveals that they were getting money from cab companies & taxi driver unions? or maybe they have close friends/relatives that own/drive taxis?

In that case that is not personal dirt digging, or digging into a person's personal life. The former has very specific parameters that limit the search towards that which is relevant to the issue at hand. The later is a free-for-all McCarthyan fishing expedition that digs up everything, private sexual lives, problems with in-laws, personality flaws, all stuff that has nothing to do with reporting alleged business bad practices.

We have been there before, we know how that worked out. So why people cab be so obtuse and refuse to see the difference?

Comment Re:There's not a lot to say, this is scummy (Score 5, Insightful) 299

So? I am not saying Uber is or is not a bad company. What I am saying is that the press is not beyond question.

That is all great and dandy, but that has nothing to do with trying to find dirt in journalists' personal life. Dig into journalists' public records, things that could show, say, they are not objective, but on payroll by, say, cab unions or Uber's competitors.

Something relevant and noteworthy to the public. Personal life, in particular fishing for personal life "dirt" as they call it? We already went through Mccarthyism and past ad-hominem practices such as the FBI trying to defame MLK.

Ad-hominems are supposed to be an invalid form of counter-argument, or that's ok when it comes to journalists?

Comment Re:Exactly why we test all candidates. (Score 1) 276

Testing during an interview is not fair to the candidate.

Testing during an interview is the norm with good tech employers.

Rarely do the tests reflect the reality of the job and for some insane reason it's seen as cheating to use the Internet to solve the problem when, in the real world, that's exactly how they should be solving it.

OTH, testing to see if a developer actually knows how to write simple programs without the use of the interweebz is perfectly reasonable. Seeing how so many "developers" flunk to write a semi-complex for loop or flunk at explaining why a SQL cartesian join is typically a very bad idea completely legitimizes (in my eyes) the practice of testing.

Comment Re:Exactly why we test all candidates. (Score 1) 276

Meaning, there is an expectation of being aware of problems that can occur - by accident or stupidity (3rd party or yours) - with any non-trivial setup, including troubleshooting network problems that causes Apache to proxy among several PHP boxes (if you distribute horizontally) or why or database connections get truncated/closed prematurely (damned unknown firewall) or why your system is so slow (until you fire up snoop or something like that and you detect a shit-ton of re-transmitted packages because the NIC on your database server is running full duplex while the NIC on your PHP box is running half-duplex).

Shouldn't the switch rectify that by buffering ?

Yes, but when it does, what does the "dev" do? Would he/she even know where/what to look for? Would he/she even had a notion of something going wrong, a notion good enough with which to ask the appropriate questions to appropriate liaisons?

Or would he/she sit helplessly waiting for a "guru" to do some magic (sometimes forever... I've seen it happen)?

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