Linky Friday #162: Behind Every Fortune…
Business:
Image by JeepersMedia 
[B2] I’ve previously mentioned articles I’ve read suggesting that Silicon Valley won out as tech hub due to looser non-compete enforcement. Timothy Lee explains further.
[B3] I don’t think this is how population distribution works. (Or, for that matter, anti-discrimination law?)
[B4] Cracking a profit! Cracked just got sold for a mint.
[B5] Walmart coming to a town can be a glorious event. When it leaves, though, it hurts.
Copyright:
Image by ~Sincere Stock~
[Co2] Book piracy was a thing in the 16th century, and it was only squelched through accommodation.
[Co3] Here’s an in-depth breakdown at how piracy affected a particularly video game.
[Co4] This doesn’t quite make the point the author wants it to – we’re not yet at the point where copyright extends for centuries or that you can’t use real historical figures – but it’s still fair to point out how lapsed copyright is a public good.
Crime:
Image by biloud43
[Cr2] Back home, there is a term for this: Alcohol Abuse.
[Cr3] Marine Major Mark Thompson (no relation!) believes – credibly – that his military trial for rape was badly flawed. He’s fighting it hard. There’s only one problem…
[Cr4] Oops.
[Cr5] Would it be a plus or a minus if cops could shut down your self-driving car?
[Cr6] Leonid Bershidsky looks at Swedish and German approaches to prostitution. I’m somewhat partial to the Swedish model. That the German model created trafficking problems (and other degeneracy) doesn’t compel me to reconsider.
Labor:
Image by Julian Partridge
[L2] A new study shows that being a smoker is a cause, rather than merely an effect, of shafty treatment from potential employers. I was pretty meticulous about not showing any signs of being a smoker on any job interview.
[L3] Join the resistance, comrade! Boycott! Sabotage! A movement of Peter Gibbonses. Meanwhile, companies that do foster employee loyalty may be fostering unethical behavior.
[L4] In Canada, three-quarters of employers were breaking labor law in a recent sweep.
[L5] Barbara McClay hates tipping. PEG dissents.
Resources:
Image by TijsB
[R2] The UK is moving closer to mini-nuclear.
[R3] Bren Smith says that seas will save us! Well, more specifically, ocean farming.
[R4] Japan may become a “paradise for renewables” with some of its new energy rules.
[R5] Attention Michael Cain! As coastal cities become endangered, Oregon’s attempts to hold the US government accountable for climate change are moving forward, as a judge declined to dismiss a lawsuit.
[R6] Meanwhile, global warming may be putting coastal cities at risk earlier than anticipated, in addition to changing the tilt of the planet?
Technology:
Image by A Health Blog
[T2] I don’t think the problem is that we’re too reliant on GPS, but rather that they are not sufficiently accurate that we cannot be completely reliant on them.
[T3] Everybody’s raiding Kansas! Also while we don’t know where the unmatched socks end up, lost phones end up in Atlanta.
[T4] Wow! Infertile mice have been made fertile with 3D-printed ovaries.
[T5] Why do we make AI entities female?
B2: Noncompete clauses for low wage service workers is simply about the exercise of power.
B3: Many people believe that non-discrimination laws shouldn’t apply when the discrimination is for a good cause to them like making women feel safer. They are wrong.
Co1: Strikes Bock might fall under the fair use exception but I’m not sure if a Court would apply the fair use exception to a beer with a puny name.
Co4: Copyright shows a big flaw in originalism to my mind. When the Constitution was written, nobody envisioned vast media business empires and global pop cultural icons. Than vast media empires appeared and the began petitioning Congress to take copyright beyond what is reasonable because it suits them.
Cr6: Isn’t the problem with the Swedish model that the Swedish government really isn’t studying whether it works or not but simply declaring it to be a success?Report
Regarding Sweden I think it depends on what you consider “success” to be. My opinion is that the policy is sold as progressive and feminist but in reality is based on a lot of really patronizing and backward assumptions about female sexuality.Report
That to. My main point was that Sweden isn’t really studying what the actual effects and outcome of their policy is though.Report
I’m not entirely up-to-date on the efficacy of the Swedish model, so open to being wrong. What I like about it, though, is that it targets those with something to lose. It’s similar to going after employers that hire unauthorized immigrants instead of the unauthorized immigrants themselves. For the latter, it’s far more often going to fall into the “chance worth taking” category because they’re more likely to be desperate. A lot of prostitutes aren’t desperate, but there are enough of them coming at things with comparatively little to lose to staff the street corners.Report
I see your point but I still think it rests on big assumptions about who the Johns are. My suspicion is that the ones who really have a lot to lose aren’t seeking the services of desperate street walkers and the Johns who do have their own issues with addiction and poverty. Under the Swedish model high class hookers who could leave the game any time are treated as victims with no agency. Meanwhile across town some junkie gets arrested and harshly punished for giving another addict 10 bucks for a blow job under the bridge.
I think treating this as a criminal issue is the wrong approach to begin with so any policy that relies on it doesn’t have my support.Report
The problem, as I understand it, is that, just because the law targets one group and not another, it doesn’t mean it protects the non-targeted group.
If johns can’t pick up sex workers without fear of arrest, then all kinds of measures that would make the worker safer become impossible.
If merely being a john can get you arrested, you won’t go to a brothel with decent security, you won’t call an advertised escort agency, you won’t wait around while a sex worker spends a few minutes talking with you to get a sense of whether to trust you, you certainly won’t be willing to let a pimp or fellow sex worker check your ID and write down the fact that on (date) at (time), you left with (colleague) in a vehicle with (license number).
So the law targets the johns, but the johns are the ones in a position to pass on almost all the risk to the sex workers the law is theoretically protecting.Report
Technically, “should” can’t be right or wrong. But normative questions aside, there’s quite a bit of precedent for legal segregation by sex under similar circumstances. Women’s dormitories, women’s bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, women’s gyms. The last one in particular has much less justification than a women’s car service, since a woman is unlikely to be alone with a man in a gym, but driver and rider are frequently alone in the car.
Honestly, I don’t see any real problem here, even aside from my usual skepticism of government interference in private business. Uber and its other competitors offer alternative opportunities for both riders and drivers, so men aren’t being deprived of any meaningful opportunity here. As much as I’d like to see feminists get hoisted by their own petard, they’re right here, albeit mostly in the stopped-clock sense.Report
Co4: I also disagree with the idea that above mentioned works are fan fiction. You can not have fan fiction without copyright and the idea of certain concepts of ownership between a particular work of fiction and author. Homer might have been see as writing the Iliad and the Odyssey but people in antiquity did not see the link between Homer and his epic poems in the same way we moderns see Charles Dickens linked with Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol. The King Arthur tales were part of the common and owned by everybody so you can’t really have King Arthur fan fiction. There is no fan fiction without copyright.Report
The point of the article is that the works would today be considered fan faction. You’re right that without copyright there is no fan fiction… only because we’d call those works “fiction.”
In my view, where Originalism and copyright law break down is retroactive copyrights. Corporations and such lobbying for and receiving ever-increasing copyright terms is perfectly consistent with the Constitution insofar as the argument can be made that it inspires new works. There is an argument to be made that it can, but the argument for retroactive copyright is much, much, much weaker. The rationale for those laws is clearly something other than what is outlined in the Constitution. Even though that something other may be defensible (we want artists and their employers/benefactors to be compensated for their work), that’s “Living Constitution” stuff in my view.Report
My argument is not that you can’t have fan fiction without copy right but you can not have fan fiction without the idea that certain characters and situations were created by a certain author and are in a sense owned by the author even if somebody else or nobody holds the copyright.Report
The question is whether we’re talking about “fan fiction” as a category, or “fan fiction” as pieces of art. The latter exists with and without copyright law (arguably more without). However, without copyright (or the ideas underpinning copyright) they exist simply as works of fiction rather than any special category, since the category of “fan fiction” is entirely dependent on notions of copyright.
In other words, if we define “fan fiction” as “Works of fiction unauthorized by pertinent copyright holders”… certainly without copyright there is no fan fiction. That doesn’t mean that there is no work.
It would be analogous to “illegal immigrants” if we had completely open borders. There would be no illegal immigrants – they’d all be legal! – but we wouldn’t be excluding the people we presently call illegal immigrants (or undocumented immigrants or whatever). It’s simply a categorical change.Report
There may not be a legal categorization of “fan fiction” without copyright law, but there’s still a mostly-clear understanding of what is and isn’t fanfiction. For example, Jane Austen’s works are no longer under copyright, but the sequels to her books written by various authors are still fan fiction. A sequel or spin-off from Dickens’ works by a non-Dickens author is fan fiction.
In short, the definition of fan fiction would be “fiction which utilizes characters and/or settings invented by someone other than the person who is writing the story.” (Invented, mind – using historical characters isn’t fanfiction unless you’re using a specific portrayal of those characters that was created by a specific author.)
The area where the distinction blurs isn’t in the existence or non-existence of copyright; it’s in the line between literature and mythology.Report
Interesting. I wouldn’t really describe the Austen novels as fan-fiction. The only way I might is if they were produced non-professionally… which is to say neither sold nor distributed for promotion. Which, in the age of ebooks, is increasingly rare.Report
I think what Katherine met was that Pride and Prejudice with Zombies are fan fiction even though Austen works are no longer copyright protected.Report
So do you think the supreme court got Eldred v. Ashcroft wrong?Report
In my view, copyright periods should be a lot shorter (last the lifetime of the original creator of the work, and then end) and, even more importantly, should be non-transferable.
For example – New Line Cinemas, which bought the rights to make the Lord of the Rings movies, has done things like force a business to stop calling itself “The Hobbit”. Now, they didn’t invent that word, Tolkien did. The only copyrights or trademarks they should have jurisdiction over are things that can be proven to pertain solely to the movies and not to the books.
Similarly, if a company wants to buy the rights to a character or a work from the original author/artist, they can do so. But they shouldn’t have the right to enforce copyright against anyone else using the work – that right remains with the original author or artist. (So, say, Disney could buy the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas. But they shouldn’t be able to prevent anyone else from making and marketing Star Wars-based works – only Lucas should have the rights to do that.
That retains the incentive for people to create things, but doesn’t make copyright a way for people other than the original creator to make a ton of money by claiming control over something they didn’t create.Report
I agree about copyright terms. I keep landing on 28/28 as about right.
I’m not sure about the non-transferrable thing, at least as it pertains to copyright. I think that would do more to inhibit an artist’s ability to monetize if corporations couldn’t gain exclusive rights over something.
Trademarks are trickier, since the rationale involves protecting consumers as well as rights-holders. Namely, to prevent consumers from making false associations (though I don’t think anyone would look at a bar called The Hobbit Hole and think “I’ll bet this is a Disney outfit!”). Trademarks is something I struggle with greatly, particularly when it intersects with the public domain (though that’s something of a tangent).Report
With regards to non-transferability of copyright, the conditions of the sale of copyright would be up to each individual author. Someone could choose to sign a contract with a corporation saying “I will not sell the rights to this to anyone else; you will have exclusive rights, and I commit to bringing a suit against anyone who infringes on the copyright provided that you’re willing to fund the suit.” That would create an arrangement similar to the ones that exist today, and the author would make similar amounts of money from it. But it wouldn’t be the default; an author could also sell the rights to make derivative works to several smaller companies or individuals if they preferred.
What does 28/28 mean?Report
You might want them to extend a bit (a decade or two) past the death of the creator, just to disincentivize the murder of a creator so as to make hay with their creation. But they shouldn’t go into effective perpetuity like they do now.Report
[Cr5] is my biggest fear about self-driving vehicles along with the inevitability that they’ll be one more means of tracking people’s movements and private activities. My view is that the police should not be given the power to stop vehicles. Allowing it is based on the assumption that the police are always in the right and would never engage in misconduct or abuse the power.Report
It think the danger depends a lot on both the operating paradigm (are cars fully autonomous, or capable of being placed under manual control) and what kinds of accountability we want from the police with regard to stopping a car.
If cars are fully autonomous, then arguably the police will lose much of the (very lax) probable cause they have today to effect a stop. Without that probable cause, I’d argue that stopping an AV would require something akin to a warrant, and that we should have a system where stopping a car requires the existence of a warrant, and the warrant number/image is tied to the action, so should it come up during discovery, there is a clear chain of documentation outlining the probable cause for the stop.
So no more effecting a stop just to get a phone number, or to deliver a sermon, or for a spot of anal humiliation.Report
The paradigm I’m envisioning is fully autonomous. I like your proposal but I have the feeling that will never fly with policy-makers and law enforcement. I figure once the technology gets good car ownership will go into a decline until it becomes the realm of a few hobbyists and the super rich. The courts will have to determine what expectation of privacy an individual has while traveling in an automated vehicle owned by some third party company. I predict the answer will be ‘none.’Report
Except this isn’t about privacy per se, it’s about freedom of movement. It’s part of why stop & frisk caught so much heat, but with a fully autonomous vehicle, the probable cause is even thinner. An officer couldn’t claim the driver was erratic, or speeding, or any such thing, so it becomes a question of why are you stopping the vehicle and interfering with the lawful movement of a citizen? So they’ll need a much higher degree of probable cause, like blood on the trunk, or obvious signs of a struggle, etc.
Basically, getting pulled over for driving while black, etc. will be a lot harder to hand wave away as something else.Report
This is a really great point that I hadn’t thought of, Oscar, and I’m really glad you made it.Report
I think you’re missing where I’m going with this. Traffic stops are treated more like Terry stops under the 4th amendment meaning that the standard is the lower ‘reasonable suspicion.’ That’s the same standard theoretically being used/abused under stop and frisk. Practically speaking it is a very low burden and I don’t think the police will have trouble meeting it without moving violations or erratic driving. Instead of California stops they’ll start seeing passengers who ‘appeared to be in distress’ or ‘movements that based on their knowledge and experience are consistent with packaging drugs.’
The reason I bring up reasonable expectation of privacy is because the 4th amendment only applies to searches where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. If there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in an autonomous vehicle owned by a third party then probable cause isn’t required to search (assuming consent by the vehicle agency).
Now maybe hypothetical autonomous car agencies battle this, but maybe seeking to be good corporate citizens they don’t care and it’s better PR to be on the side of the cops than the terrorists, drug dealers, etc. Under current law this would theoretically mean that a Terry stop gets the police a short cut to full search of the vehicle without the normal chain of probable cause that needs to be followed from pulled over for failing to signal to full scale search of the vehicle. If the law were to develop this way fishing expeditons would become easier. Think stop and frisk for every vehicle on the road.Report
B1 – It also strikes me as something that happened to Google (and still does, every so often). I also thought the ad superimposing thing still happened in baseball (i.e. the ads behind home plate), where there’s a wide difference in audience (and ad rates, and thus who buys them) between games picked up nationally and those just broadcast on local OTA affiliates or regional cable networks.
B4 – if anything, I found the Cracked purchase price to be quite modest, based on my perception of their staffing level and quantity of content output. I wonder how much, if any, debt goes along with the deal.
Cr1 – hacking into the commissary is essentially the first big mission of Fallout 3. (though you can clean out the store without it, it’s much easier with it). On this specific issue, it seems like the only issue should be credit card fraud, as they don’t have a ‘loyalty program’ like most other stores do. (though the last time I went to one, they did scan my ID, so they may now be hooked up to the DEERS system too. which seems dee ewe em dumb)
Cr3- when this guy’s story first came out (front page of paper WaPo), when the initial gloss was ‘hey, this guy was railroaded’, the details of the story led me to believe that no, the guy was doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing, and he should have just kept his mouth shut and he would have been able to leave the Corps with a full pension.
R2 –
They’re sorta getting cause and effect reversed here. Big nuke plants are built away from people because they’re big and they’re nukes. You reduced transmission losses from these remote generating stations by stepping up the voltage (but keeping the same power output). If you’re plant isn’t big, and is ‘safer’ than a ordinary nuke plant, you have more flexibility on where to put it.
R4 – the Japanese regulatory change doesn’t seem to me that different than the various changes that have occurred in the US over the last 20-30 years, some of which have worked very well, some of it not so much. (which the article basically says, about 2/3 of the way in)
R5 – The entire case is BS makes me believe even fewer lawyers need to employed in the United states. These kids are making the argument that democracy doesn’t actually matter.
T5 – even after all these years, Moon gets no respect.Report
R5: I haven’t taken the time (yet) to go find the actual filings, but I would have thought the first line of defense is Massachusetts v. EPA and its follow-ons. The Supreme Court held that CO2 and other greenhouse gases were pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The administration followed that by negotiating a drastic increase in the mileage requirements for cars and trucks (54.5 mpg fleet average for vehicles sold in 2025). Then Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA reiterated that CO2 was a pollutant and power plants must be regulated, and the administration produced the Clean Power Plan. I’m on record here and elsewhere in believing that the CPP will stand when the plan proper reaches the Supreme Court, but that the SCOTUS acted properly with a stay on implementation dates while the plan works its way through the courts.
When I get to the actual paperwork, if the argument is that the government isn’t building the sea walls and dikes and water management systems and all the other things that would be needed to “protect” people from the consequences of the 2-4 °C temp increases already baked in, well then… never mind. That would be a different matter entirely.Report
B3: I don’t get the part about population distribution.Report
That women are safer in the aggregate does not mean you are providing meaningful safety by hiring only women.Report
@will-truman — That becomes an empirical question, right? Certainly no one can promise 100% safety to anyone, but if the frequencies differ enough…
Which is to say, I was once sexually assaulted by a woman. That said, I’ve never experienced the kind of violent menace from women that I do from men. There is a real difference.
Look, the “sexual pursuit” model of gender relations is pretty major, and I think a lot of more “cerebral” men (which includes most of you here) don’t really get how it works for women out in the world.
Blah. I’ve had both women and men tell me I look nice, in ways that felt authentic and humanizing. (And thanks random women and men!) Likewise I’ve had both women and men say shitty, transphobic shit to me. Which, whatever. But there is a difference! Like OMG! It’s when we add the gender stuff, the sexual pursuit, the fragile masculinity, on and on. The degree that men (#notallmen, #notevenmostmen, #justthesocalledbadapples #butitonlytakesone) will thrive on physical menace, get-in-close terror. Blah.
Blah blah blah.
So sure, it’s possible that the population of women who choose to work for this company might have some weird and alarmingly high number of abusers. But really, probably not. It will probably be manifestly safer.
It will certainly be safer for the driver. Have you ever met a female cabbie? I have. I have met precisely one female cabbie. Just one.
It was a forty minute cab ride. I asked her what driving a cab as a woman was like. She told me.
I’m not surprised I’ve only met one.
She was tough as nails though. A kindred spirit. Really fun to talk to.
#####
Anyway, this will certainly be legally challenged. In fact, I’m sure the pro-rape MRA types (but I repeat myself) are already lining up to fuck with this company. Fine. Let it go to the courts.Report
In Canada, there are generally provisions for things like women-only services, where they are put in place to right an imbalance. The Alberta Human Rights act specifically uses the example of a women-only exercise program, to address a structural exclusion of women from such programs.
The community bike org I volunteer with has a women, trans, and gender non-binary day, at one of the two workshops, a couple times a month. Some angry MRA (literally, he was discussing it on Reddit’s MensRights subsite) was sufficiently outraged at being turned away as to file a human rights complaint about a year ago. I don’t know if he’s actually been told to go pound sand yet, but I have no doubt he will be.Report
@dragonfrog — I guess CA law is different, as some MRA shiteaters got a women’s tech conference shut down. So yeah. These guys see the world entirely through abstraction, and not according to concrete reality. In other words, they are rules-bound and stupid as fuck. That said, I think as a general rule, “no discrimination according to race, religion, gender, sex, or sexuality,” is the best starting point. However, there are cases with a significant ongoing disparity, and having programs that mitigate that seems wise.
Like, the need in Japan for women’s-only train cars is obvious. Women got tired of frequent sexual assault, where men sexually assault each other far less frequently.
At least that is the logic. I can say that I personally was sexually assaulted pretty much zero times when I was presenting as male, except for one really-pretty-minor incident in a gay bar one night. But that was in a gay bar. Correspondingly, the one time a women sexually assaulted me, I was presenting female and at a lesbian event. So this shit happens. But harassment and groping in general public spaces — this is a man-on-women thing.
Yeah, it’s different in prison. It’s different in gay spaces. It’s different on the wresting team. But the subway? Nope. Never had a woman do anything like that. Men? Heh. Different story.
Which, truth be told, I’ve never been groped on the subway, just harassed. All the groping has happened in bars and dance clubs and stuff. But still, being on a crowded subway car with some creeper getting close, with clearly no boundaries — that’s some scary shit. I guess in Japan outright groping had become routine.
(It’s in fact a whole genre of out-in-public amateur porn, I guess — at least judging by some stuff I saw on bittorrent. Which I downloaded out of perverse curiosity. You are allowed to mock me for that.)
So can they make the case for cab rides? I think so, not only from the passenger side, but from the driver side even more.
The one company in question is explicitly trans accepting, so I’ll likely sign up and give it a try. Whether than can make it work purely from a business sense — we’ll find out. Regarding the “on no this isn’t fair to MEENNNNNNNN!!!” crowd — fuck those guys. Fucking creeps.Report
Hey, you have to take all that hard-earned, rules-lawyering munchkin skill and apply it to real life eventually.Report
People who disagree with you sure are horrible.Report
Depends on the person, and the subject.
I consider those who are unable to distinguish the idea that rape is BAD to be amoral, and not worth considering as moral agents.
But, I’m not talking about the loveshies and all that, am i?Report
Well, yes, obviously pro-rape people are horrible. My objection was to her assertion that all MRAs are pro-rape.Report
In theory, sure. And if you could screen drivers and riders perfectly, that would be true in practice, as well. But given that screening, especially of passengers but also of drivers, is imperfect, I would still expect it to provide a non-trivial increase in safety. Men commit violent crime at roughly five times the rate women do, and for rape and homicide the factors are twenty and ten, respectively. That’s a pretty big gap to close.Report
B2: One of the few times I agree with the Libertarians! Non-Competes should be banned as a matter of law. California’s non-compete dates from the 1800s and states:
“every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
Cr2: Oh the French is the only thing I can say here.
Cr6: Sex Work is not going away no matter what anyone says. Legalization and regulation along the German lines is the probably the best of a lot of bad solutions.
L1: A minimum wage should be a minimum wage. No exceptions except for the salaried (which should be strict) The exceptions carved into the original minimum wage were for racist reasons. We need to avoid creating two-tiered employment.
L3: I go back and forth on the whole career and calling thing. I grew up expecting a career for a variety of reasons (socio-economics, parents, education, peers, etc.) Since graduating law school in 2011, my career has gone through fits and stats but is basically a lot of freelancing work. I’ve done more than doc review mill stuff but there are some key things that I think are missing from my experience belt and seem very hard to get for a variety of reasons. The pernicious thing about the law school crisis/recession is that employers are demanding experience as if the economy was normal. So an add that asks for an attorney with 4-5 years of experience is phrased like everything was honky dory. My classmates who managed to get typical associate positions have been doing well and making laternal moves. I’ve been floating and rather angsty for it.
On the other hand, I think there is a lot of toxicity built into the whole career thing which covers the sheer amount of hours people are expected to work and often to do so for the sake of working. Managers seem unable to shake themselves of the “time at desk” metric for evaluating employees and the billable hour is a hard drug to shake in professions. One of my girlfriend’s friends works incredibly long hours. Something on the magnitude of at least 70 a week. I can’t believe this person is not suffering some mental and physical issues because of overwork. There are lots of people like this and they seem to look down on people who want more balanced lives.
Though I can’t bring myself to joint the “Bullshit jobs” crowd either. I’ve gotten a lot of heat from people over the years for not doing so.Report
Another victory for Unions:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-court-rejects-bid-to-end-teacher-tenure-in-california-marking-huge-win-for-unions-20160414-story.htmlReport
B1: the logical conclusion of the anti-adblocking position is a broad right for site operators to control rendering. This is, to say the least, concerning.Report
Certain folks seem to have a problem with the concept of the browser as “user agent”. Which, when a person’s living depends on their not understanding something, it can get pretty hard for them to understand.Report
But, but, but… site operators already have a way to control rendering. It’s called “make the whole bloody page an image”. Worked for the newspapers for what, four centuries? And TV for most of one? Of course, it puts the computational burden of rendering on the site, instead of being able to steal large quantities of processing power from the end user. And eats up bandwidth like nobody’s business. And does away with any opportunities to allow the layout to fit the user’s display.
They’re just whining. Ignore them and they will eventually give up.Report
Pngs compress nicely for newsprint. (not as nicely as text, but still…)Report
B1: Go Brandon.
B3: Gotta agree on the discrimination, unless laws are passed allowing firms to hire only women.
CR3: This case is a listing of screw ups on all sides.
DR5: As we’ve seen with Apple, this is coming. First thing I’d do is look to jailbreak my car.
L1: Yah, a union shafting their own for the “greater good”. That’s not what a union is ostensibly for. And they should be bound by min wage laws-and so should congress.
L3: I’ve always seen work a purely a business transaction. I do assigned tasks for pay then go home. Work allows me to live my life the way I want. I do my tasks, and stay late because I expect that that will be rewarded, and for the most part, it has been. I’m part of a team and a single contributor and I want to succeed because it builds “boss karma”.
R5: It’s been clearly established that the gov’t owes no one a duty to protect them. However, it’s always easier to get new regulations implemented to achieve what you always wanted to when you get a “friend” to sue you and then just roll over. Makes the rubs in flyover land thing you actually lost the case.
T5: it’s all about the sex bots!Report
R5: i.e. Sue & SettleReport
“Yah, a union shafting their own for the “greater good”. That’s not what a union is ostensibly for. ”
A union is an army. The generals of an army are sad when their soldiers die fighting, but in the most pragmatic view, keeping the soldiers alive is not what the army is for.Report
Indeed.
More important are the promotions and industry contacts. But I’m sure there’s something in the union bylaws. If not, well, I think mngt would have a good argument to the workers saying that “if the union isn’t going to fight for your wages, why are you still in it”?Report
B5,
When walmart leaves, the town dies.
But they were often just Medicare Warehouses in the first place, so who really cares?Report
T2: Recently, friends were over and we said something about giving so-and-so a call. I jumped up and ran to the kitchen and came back with the cordless. “What are we going to do with that?”, I was asked. Someone dug out their smartphone and yelled “call so-and-so”.
But I didn’t write an article saying “are we too reliant on smartphones?”Report
L3: As someone pointed out on Twitter a while back, if you really start enforcing corporate ethics laws you’re going to be putting most of middle management in jail, and that’s basically the only middle-class job left.Report
I wish I had come up with Co1. It is relevant to several of my interests, simultaneously.
The link is two years old, and a perusal of the company’s website reveals that it still offers a Maibock, called “Strikes Bock.” Which gives us a hint of how the dispute was resolved.
I shall make it a point to look them up should I ever find myself in Syracuse. Looks like a high quality brewery and pub.Report
T5: Star Trek has lots of male (or, at least, nongendered-but-male-skewed) computers.Report
Then why’d they say goodbye to her on Torchwood?
(Check the voicework — the Enterprise’s computer’s female.)Report
and was married to the boss.Report
The original series had a female voice for the Enterprise’s computer.
No all of the computers were female voiced though. The computer that was hooked up to the enterprise with the “memory engrams” of some scientist had a male voice.
And there was spock. He was pretty much a computer except during pom far.Report
I think you could make an argument that the ST meme was “good computer = female, bad computer = male”. Not unambiguously, of course – Spock wasn’t all bad (and Number One, whose personality he stole between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” wasn’t all good). And if the Borg had had a queen – which they wouldn’t, of course, it wouldn’t just be a painful and unnecessary retcon, but it’s wrong for them – they’d undoubtedly have made her female (thank God this is just a hypothetical).
Norman, M-5 (IIRC), Chapel’s old flame… If a computer voice presented as male or ambiguous, you know it would be off the rails by the third act.Report