The BMI is only valid even for a subset of Northern Europeans. For people that are taller it's invalid. It's also invalid for other ethnic groups.

Peformance is a far more useful metric. It also separates out the anorexics from those that are genuinely fit.

Those BMI numbers also originally arose from a time of global economic catastrophe. Their value should be doubted simply for that.

No. It's about having better impulse control.

Poor people are also much more likely to have 5 children each with a different person. Maintaining a healthy weight requires some degree of effort and discipline. People that never adequately prepared for their future are simply demonstrating the same faults in their eating habits as they have done in other things.

Being poor doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing better. People like that are just less likely to stay poor (been there, done that).

They already did apparently. They just wanted to charge more than one person for the same "performance".

Yes. Quite. One of the neighbors is the equivalent of the "Two Bobs" from a well known megacorp. His job is to flush employees when things are slow and then try and hire people back on when the business cycle moves the other way.

I've always wondered how you manage to not burn all of your bridges doing crap like that.

In my own organization, the most important aspect of a new hire is "teachability". This is why we like new graduates over "senior" people. Tech is a rapidly moving area. Even if your degree from n+1 years ago was a finely tuned vocational program, chances are that it quickly became irrelevant because the industry simply moved on.

So depending on an IT degree to be a vocational training program is remarkably stupid.

Although some of the "academic nonsense" from a CS degree can be quite useful and applied to whatever the flavor of the month happens to be. Being able to do that is what separates the real talent from the pretenders.

...lies, damned lies, and...

You're assuming that the numbers account for percentage of graduates employed in the field. While it may be true that those that "make it" are well enough off, many may not "make it". BA is a pretty lightweight degree. There simply may not be enough jobs to go around for all the guys getting degrees.

It's not unusual for someone to end up in BA after washing out of something harder like engineering. The employment rate may reflect that.

Actually, I know a recently minted MBA who's first job out of school was total and utter crap. He managed to "move up" eventually but that was after getting a subsequent job where he had a good mentor and the opportunity for advancement.

A philosophy degree by itself won't entitle you to even become a lawyer at all. The various local guilds simply won't let it happen.

No. They are NOT every bit as smart as us. It's amazing to see how many of them (the most egregious idiots) even manage to remain employed.

Also, quite often this doesn't even boil down to ignorance. They know better they just choose to ignore procedures, or how they've been trained, or industry best practices.

There's more to being your own boss than "just being smart". A lot of people are simply more specialized than that. That's a benefit from living in society. You don't have to do everything yourself.

This isn't the stone age.

Although you can minimize the politics somewhat by working for a smaller company where they don't have the luxury of putting up with any dead weight. Silicon Valley is probably great in that regard.

Based on the behavior of the average ISP, all of the arrogance and and disrespect that those of us can muster here is WELL JUSTIFIED.

This right here would be my big complaint about the "better alternatives" to init. For anything but the most trivial desktop use case, they fuck up the boot sequence. Sometimes it's just glitchy behavior where things get started up out of order but they do start. Other times the box will just get stuck during startup because of some bogus error.

Manual tinkering is far more risky. The better-than-init options make it far to easy to render your system completely unbootable.

In other words, the absolute worst case of the priority system is the base case of the "more sophisticated" alternatives.

This is not a problem of "having too much knowledge". This is a problem of what you do with it. The direct approach to addressing this problem is to simple not punish people for ancient misdeeds. However, that just seems "too hard". Instead, we would rather try to subject the entire world to a sort of enforced amnesia instead.

No. It would be far simpler to simply alter our approach to how we deal with a person's "permanent record".

Besides, this idea of yours that we "forget old crimes" isn't even accurate anyways. So your entire premise is bogus to begin with. Old crimes can and WILL in fact come back to haunt you. If you thought otherwise then clearly you've never been in a position to see how the system (as it is now) actually works.

The Sherman Anti-Trust act wasn't just created on a whim. If you actively avoid treating corporations with the same skepticism that is popular for governments, then they WILL devolve into monopolies.

You drone on about "history". Meanwhile, many of us LIVED through those years and yes indeed most of us non-kludge clone users would have viewed the branding of our chosen alternative as an INSULT.

Commie users certainly would have viewed their machine being called a "PC" as an insult. PCs were a brand associated with IBM and later Microsoft. It represented the ultimate in crapulence unworthy success.

I don't think DOS users in those days would have been happy to have their machines lumped in with Apples or Ataris either.

The generic non-brand terms were "home computer" and "microcomputer".

Some of us actually lived this shit and aren't just regurgitating bad wikipedia articles.