Who the fuck QAs this? This is literally the second most important function on the site, after being able to comment. How the fuck did this make it into production?

There is a simple way to prevent unions from gaining a foothold in your company: stop treating your employees like crap. Stop implementing life-sapping schedules that prevent workers from having meaningful relationships, give them solid healthcare that they don't want to trade away, give them a paycheck that allows them to live within a decent distance of their work, and don't treat them like meatbags whose sole purpose is to make you more money. If they still want to unionize after that? Fine, throw 'em to the wolves. But quite frankly, reading through the description of what the bus drivers get, the company had this coming.

That said, fuck the unions as well. No, a bus driver isn't the same thing as a programmer. Stop pandering to your audience and do something useful instead.

You're a dick. Or a troll. Or both. No wonder you're posting as AC. The only rule in life is that there are no rules. You make your own path and the wisdom others seek to enforce on you isn't worth shit against the wisdom you earn for yourself. I've met plenty of people of all ages, male and female, who for one reason or another haven't had access to the same life choices as the rest of us. The best people the OP's daughter will ever meet will be people who don't fit in, who make mistakes, who have regrets, and I choose to post that not as an AC because that's how the world works, not how you're bitter little worldview makes it appear.

The best advice I would give to her is to live her life. Make her mistakes. Don't be like the rest of us and don't be told that's the only path she can take. The worst sin in life is follow in someone else's footsteps. I did and it certainly didn't make me happy.

Tredinnick's a nut who has form for this kind of statement.

Still. At least he's not on the House of Commons Health Committe or anything. What's that? Oh...

So. Er. Be pleasant, polite, engaged and confident? Perhaps that's what attracts a potential partner rather than pseudo-manipulative mind tricks?

Heh, you're assuming they'd attack in space ships as if they'd escaped from some 1950s B-Movie. If they've travelled this far to 'attack' us (Whatever that might mean in this context) their technology would be so far in advance of our own we wouldn't even know we were being threatened. Hell. We might have fought and lost that battle already and you'd never know.

You're quoting a parliamentarian from 19th century France. Which had some very specific issues that the socialists were trying to address, and where a lack of state intervention indeed would mean nothing of that sort happening (see specifically education).

And just to pile on your vaccine statement: I am damn sure in my right to force you to not be the carrier of a disease that can infect me 2 hours after you passed through the room.

That's a (deliberate, I frequently think) misunderstanding of the liberal position. The reason that there's a lot of talk about outcomes is because it is the single clearest and simplest metric we have about success. If a group is represented at 5% in a field where we suppose that equal opportunities should lead to something more like 50%, the conclusion is that the initial assumption of equal opportunities is wrong. Measuring opportunity is incredibly hard, consists of hundreds, if not thousands of factors, is impacted by the cultural biases of the investigator, and some impacts to opportunity are so embedded in the culture that they are quite literally invisible to the investigator. As a result, outcome is frequently used as a proxy for opportunity.

Is it right to make it a 100% proxy? No. But it is a valid starting point to look into opportunities.

Which sometimes is a good thing. See for example the "local" Alabama Chief Justice who just gave the finger to gay people because he doesn't like what he's being told to do. Sometimes, the big stick of the uninvolved far away helps to knock sense in the locals. Sometimes, the locals do know best. But blanket statements like "local government is much more often best" is trivially proven to be wrong.

You make the mistake of listening to articles about scientific research instead of actually reading the research. Additionally, you make the mistake of thinking that one study == Truth. Especially in biology and medecine, with hugely complicated machines and enormous difficulty setting up good controls, a single study is almost meaningless.

Wait for studies to confirm others, wait for things to percolate through the scientific community, then start paying attention to it.

Oh - is that why all the posts about "SJWs are ruining Slashdot and the world" regularly sit at +5?

The main application for piping your phone through your car audio is that phone calls are clearer, and you get access to your audio books, music, or online newspapers that have an audio stream. In other words, making sure that your car system isn't obsolete 3 years after you buy it requires a tethering mechanism. And bluetooth is the simplest one out there.

Heh, if only they stopped at renationalising. The East Coast Mainline was brought back into public hands and returned £1bn to the taxpayer while also maintaining some of the highest customer service ratings in the UK. The obvious thing to do then is to sell it back to the private sector to regain it's status as an utter fucking shambles. At which point we'll bail out the clowns that are in charge, run it ourselves for a while, make it successful, sell it back to the clowns, wait for it to fail, bail out the clowns and run it ourselves for a while. It's like a very expensive wealth transfer Groundhog Day, except not as funny.

Meanwhile, the main privatised commuter line between Brighton and London, a journey of only 40-odd miles, failed to arrive on time ONCE in an ENTIRE YEAR. You can thank Southern Rail for that. Douchebags.

And don't get me started on the omnishambles that was Hinchingbrooke Hospital.

Fact is, there are some things that cannot and should not be privatised because the drive for profit is diametrically opposed to the quality of service they're intended to provide. Only libertarian wingnuts and the halfwits running this country seem to think differently.

Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.

There are a few of them that grew up exactly like that. They show little difference with the rest of the politicians. Why? Because if they got to their position, anyone can, and those who don't become part of the 1% are clearly just lazy moochers.

Being poor in the US is either a temporary embarrassment or proof of being a bad person. It's quite amazing how alive Calvinism is in the US.

Great! That means that Al-Qaeda is not about Islam and instead is just about some base for some people, right? The fact that they constantly talk about Islam, Mohammed, and infidels is just a coincidence.