Bringing a water cannon is the reasonable response, and if it kills the event, they've lost nothing - they weren't getting anything from the event in the first place.

I think you may have explained US politics in one sentence.

If I'm not winning, then it's better destroyed.

Personally, I'm a bit old-school in my tastes, but if my tastes aren't dominating the Hugos, that's probably because I'm no longer as mainstream as I was 30 years ago. it seems rather childish to burn the toy room down because the toys I like aren't "cool" any more.

They've been pushing individual works, sure. I have too when I really liked a work. In fact, I think SP2 was pretty much the same idea. All seems pretty much accepted in the general discourse.

But publicly organizing a complete slate, and then pushing the slate on the basis of what it represents rather than the body of works in the slate? That's changed the very nature of the awards, just like the introduction of parties changes politics forever.

> Sad Puppies is doing nothing wrong, nothing illegal.

Done nothing illegal - agreed. Done nothing wrong? I disagree. They've introduced full-on party politics of the ugliest kind to the awards. Do you really not see competing slates next Hugo? (Especially if a SP wins an award?) Are you really looking forward to Hugos turning into American politics writ tiny?

I don't think the awards will be better off in the long-term for their intervention. Also, if enough feelings get hurt and people go out of control, I can imagine that this could end up doing for the reputation of SF/Fantasy what GamerGate did for the reputation of gaming.

So if you want to argue that it's okay when John Scalzi does it a little bit, but it's not okay when others do it more...

Actually, that's *exactly* what I'm suggesting. My neighborhood has a yearly water-gun fight. The day that someone decides to bring a full-power fire-hose, despite not being explicitly disallowed, will be the end of the tradition.

Did they break the rules ("only water-only weapons allowed")? No.

Had people upped-the-ante before ("Well, he introduced Super-Soakers, and I don't see him getting yelled at.")? Yes

But nonetheless, would he end up destroying the whole water-fight tradition? Yes.

Life is full of ways to game a system that will (1) win you a temporary victory and (2) destroy the over-all values of the system. It's why people who game a system are so despised. In the end, it's not rules, but ethics and morals that are what allow most human interaction to exist. Insisting that "we just need better rules" is a clear indication that the society is already pretty much mortally wounded.

Sad Puppies has gamed the system to its destruction. If the response turns out to be counter-slates, then they'll have (perhaps unintentionally) permanently destroyed what they sought to control.

And is the answer more rules? Not really. If enough people would rather destroy the system than "lose", then the award is already dead.

The backlash comes from a number of avenues, but a strong reason for this anger is that by the introduction of "slates", the Sad Puppy movement may have irretrievably damaged the Hugos. It is akin to introducing party politics into elections that were previously sets of independents. Once introduced, you can never go back, because that just lets another slate win.

What are the odds that everyone abandons parties and goes back to independents, when parties so evidently work?

Likewise, voting on what you feel is the best book becomes an exercise in futility as it will be swamped by one slate or another. (A best book slate, is of course, ridiculous, that's what the award was supposed to be in the first place.) Instead, as with parties, you end up with voting on what a slate represents.

And that is anathema to the whole point of the award.

Now, I'm fairly certain that the Sad Puppies slate has people who never agreed to be on it, or didn't quite understand what this was all about, so I'm not about punishing those on the slate. But the "Sad Puppies" movement has poisoned this years Hugos, and may well have killed them forever.

Note: any award with a small number of voters is vulnerable to this kind of take-over. The award really can only meaningfully exist only as a consensus in the community not to game them into oblivion exists.

Indeed, the difference between "can basically relax on the way to work" and "allowed to use driver-less car without a license" may indeed be 20 years.

I go home to utter and complete power over two children. I have *far* more power over them than any employer has *ever* had over me.

Obviously I, like every other parent, should be subject to 24 hour a day monitoring.

If they are operating outside of the scrutiny of the public eye, it is *guaranteed* that they are doing something nefarious. That is how power works. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand human nature.

Which is, of course, why every citizen must be constantly monitored. If we're outside the scrutiny of others, it is *guaranteed* that we are doing something nefarious.

Look, rooftop solar is a good thing. I'm not arguing with your facts, I'm arguing with your approach. The topic is irrelevant.

However, if it helps, let me put this out there. I'm cognizant of the fact that while my electrical bill is by use, the fairly obvious reality is that a connection to the utility and the maintenance of the utility has a very high fixed cost, which doesn't go away even if my net use is zero.

A cost-based scheme might be to bill every house $100/month for connection to the grid, and then substantially drop the price we pay (and are paid) for solar, but that hits the poor too heavily. Also, I think we can make a case that we *want* more solar than is optimal in an strictly economic sense.

In other words, there are arguments pro and con, and dismissing either pro or con means that society is denied the facts that it needs to make choices.

The dismissal of any recognition that rooftop solar, like almost *every single choice on the planet* has tradeoffs raised hackles. That any attempt to discuss such trade-offs was characterized as deceitful made them rise even further.

So, I apologize for the ad hominem nature of my post. But I stick with my basic claim: assuming bad faith on the part of your opponents harms society in general, and that unfairness towards any, individual or in the aggregate, is also harmful.

History is simply too full of examples of what can happen when people feel the rightness of their cause obviates their need for fairness.

Consider: Do you really care about being unfair to the huge corporate energy conglomerate? And do you think that they would be fair to you in return?

Actually, I want to be especially fair to those I oppose, and their behavior is irrelevant.

Otherwise it's just a bunch of Hatfield's vs. McCoy's, and why should anyone prefer my Hatfield to the opposing McCoy?

Sadly. you've made it clear in your post that
      (1) there can be no true information against your base premise
      (2) that anyone disseminating untrue information is an agent of the enemy
      (3) there is no obligation to treat enemy or enemy agents ethically
which puts you in the company of a lot of less-than-august characters.

Since I've indicated disagreement, does that mean I'm in the pay of the energy companies?

There's nothing stopping (and in fact, it seems almost a certainty) that Man-made Global Warming is real *and* is being used as a scare tactic by some people.

When billions are presented with the same crisis, you can expect there to be a multitude of different responses, including those who seek to capitalize upon it by denying its existence, and those seeking to capitalize upon it by promoting its existence.

In the last Ebola crisis, I'm certain there were people recruiting for their Church as a cure ("it's real, and every single person will die if you don't join our Church"), and those pretending it didn't exist so that quarantine wouldn't hurt their business. However, all of it was irrelevant to the fact that the disease was real and could potentially have been globally devastating. Luckily for us, there weren't large Western concerns that had a financial interest in the crisis being ignored.

My father, a physics professor, refuses to buy MS Office, and he's constantly cursing the journals, government organizations, and university institutions that demand .DOC (or .DOCX) format. Also, if you are switching papers back and forth (and you're not using TeX) with others, you're likely stuck in MS formats. My experience in the faculty was less dramatic, but about the same. MS Office was the default.

It can be avoided, but unless you're religiously avoiding MS Office (like my Dad), it's not likely worth the pain. There's a reason that MS is the Borg. To be clear, I'm happy to have people strike out into the wilds and not surrender to the MS Office hegemony. But if the OP's daughter is like most people, the computer is not a statement, it's just about the easiest way of getting things done.

It's hard to escape Death, Taxes or MS Office. And they're all about equally fun.

But the point stands: the criminals are not going to say, "Aw, shucks, we're out of business now that drugs are legal! Looks like we have to go work at Walmart now!"

Actually, the thing is that for a majority of criminals, crime is just another job choice. They weigh (often very badly) what they perceive as the benefits and the costs, just as you do when you are choosing which field to go into. If they perceive that crime has become less lucrative or that the costs have risen, then most criminals will look at other avenues, just as you would when deciding what job you're going after.

Now criminals perception are often not very accurate, and their workplace skills are often rather meager, but the fundamental calculus they perform is exactly the same. It's why as job opportunities rise, crime goes down. Criminals leave their current job for better ones.

Like it or now, Word and Excel documents are the common format for most large organizations.

This means you need Windows or a Macintosh. (I find as soon as you are doing detailed tech documentation, the various Open Office suites start having trouble with diagrams, complicated formatting, etc.)

Also like it or not, Linux (at best) or *nix at a minimum are also required for most open source science software. Pretty much everything is pre-built for Linux, the Mac is supported by most, but not quite all mainstream science packages.

This means you need Linux or at worst, a Macintosh.

So, my recommendations: Window PC running Linux in a VM or a Macintosh.

Personally, I'd look at an Ultralight (many decent manufacturers + VMWare w/ a pre-built Linux VM) or a MacBook Air. Either will require MS Office.

It's actually insanely good. $80K/yr would be WELL above average for just out of school.

I'll admit that's a really good income (out of school) for a general CS job, but for a job that's 80 hours/week? That's like oil-rig platform hours (except the oil rig sends you home every so often), in which case oil-rig platform pay would be expected.

You are absolutely right about where you live making a *huge* difference in what's reasonable. I imagine there are parts of the country in which $80K/year would allow you to purchase a house some day.

Well, $80K right out of school for a grueling job (and presumably top students) isn't insanely bad, although a choice I'd personally have avoided.

I was thinking $80K for 10+ years experience, which is insanely bad. (Although with those hours, perhaps after 10 years, there's only a a burned out husk left :-))