Morning Ed: Society {2017.04.18.T}
Being too persistent in recommending a TV show can really backfire, according to science.
Well okay, but you can stack them. You don’t have to put them side by side.
This seems like sound advice.
Alex Abad-Santos digs in deeper to the comments by Marvel VP David Gabriel involving diversity in comics. Speaking of Marvel, they did take action here, pulling the issue and firing the artist.
This profile of Mike Judge is really, really good.
Scott Rosenberg contemplates the disappointment of Google Book Search.
I really like Demon Train Girl, Bored Dinner Girl, and Escape of Shame Lady.
I used to like ugly uniforms for the novelty, but then the Oregon Ducks made it a regular feature and it got old.
Now you know: Ever-married adults saying they've had sex with someone other than their spouse while married, 1991-2016 pic.twitter.com/wVFtpO0xQx
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) April 8, 2017
That Rothman dude in the Judge piece sounds almost like HE walked out of a Mike Judge film…
Idiocracy is one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve ever seen. (I teach college). My brother, who used to work as an actuary at the headquarters of an international insurance company says that Office Space is one of the most uncomfortable movies he’s ever seen….Judge knows something.Report
A former colleague of mine and I referred to the company we worked for as Initech. Office Space is actually kind of gentle compared to the reality of white collar corporate America.Report
Wow. I always figured I wouldn’t fit in in Corporate America but if it’s *worse* than Office Space, DANG.Report
Love Office Space (well, the first 60% anyway), but that’s a decidedly 90’s satire of corporate america. It is different now. We need an updated Office Space.Report
The inane culture satirized in Office Space still holds pretty true though even that’s gotten worse. Office Space predates Enron so doesn’t include the massive CYA bureaucracy, trainings, and and enforced cultural norms/focus on ‘optics’ that have followed. Also even though Wall Street has done well since 2008 the world is still precarious for a lot of people whereas Office Space came out during boom times. Now you’d need to throw a lot more paranoia and buck passing into the mix (among plenty of other things).Report
Oh man, yes. All the mandated training sessions: how not to sexually harass, what to do if someone shows up truly intent on burning the place down, how to avoid needle-sticks. (That last one may be unique to campus/hospital settings, though – we all had to do the no-needle-stick training, and by “all” I mean “not just the biologists but the historians and English profs and art profs too”)
And yeah, there would be that person wandering around, muttering worriedly about how they were gonna lose their job and THEN what would they do?Report
filly,
Surprised they didn’t have you do the training on how not to get strangled by your badge (or bit, or spat at).
We have a psych hospital in our portfolio.
(We mostly did a ton of fire training).Report
As of yet, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges. But yeah, the badge-on-a-lanyard could represent a threat to the employee (Breakaway lanyards, I suppose)
(We’re supposed to carry our IDs with us, but I’ve never been asked to show mine anywhere other than to check out a book at the library).
We have to do CRASE training (active shooter awareness) annually; that’s bad enough.
What I found more useful though was the (optional) workshop on how to de-escalate when you’re working with an angry, angry person.Report
Rather randomly, my workplace insists on breakaway lanyards — if you use one at all — because otherwise they’re a hazard. White collar office, although we have fab shops.
We need breakway ties…Report
… and tearaway pants. If nothing else it could make the office pretty fab too.Report
Admittedly lanyards are choke hazards. I’m actually not sure what the tensile strength of a tie is, but they make some of those lanyards tough. (And also, generally, thinner than ties).
Of course if you’re working in the fab shops you’re not supposed to wear ties anyways, but you ARE supposed to carry your badge with you so that’s probably a good enough reason.
And if they’re already handing out breakway lanyards to the fab guys, they might as well source all their lanyards to the same place and give them to everyone. Can’t hurt.Report
For two summers in university I had jobs doing computer programming.
Everyone who was doing summer work on campus took the same safety course – the groundskeepers who used various rapidly whirling blade machines, the folks doing lab work with radioactive materials and incredibly poisonous chemicals and live pathogen samples, agriculture and vet med students working with large animals, and us computer desk sitters.
It was kind of interesting, but I can’t say I learnt a lot of direct use for that summer’s work.Report
One of the great advantages to working in a small, real person law firm or even all but the biggest of law firms is that there are rarely enough people to justify what goes on in the rest of regular white collar corporate America. I never had to deal with HR or annual performance reviews in my life.Report
That part of in house actually isn’t so bad. Everywhere I’ve been has had a tacit acceptance that Legal is different. You go through the same motions as everyone else but it isn’t what you’re judged on.
The parts I struggle with have more to do with the human interactions. There are good business people and I actually find them a pleasure to work with. They take legal advice seriously, their risks are calculated, and you can really learn from them as much as they do from you. Unfortunately these people are few and far between. Most of your interactions are with big egos, bullshit artists, lousy salesmen, mindless box checkers, and people whose primary objective is to fly under the radar. You spend more time navigating personalities and trying to interpret nonsensical, vaguely positive corporate speak than doing actual legal work.
Granted this is just part of being a lawyer. I had plenty of stupid experiences when I was hanging out with Sean the weed dealer instead of Bob from Business Development.Report
InMD,
At least you haven’t been hired as someone’s “pet lawyer” (aka “This person is too important to be distracted by legal bullshit. Fix it for him”).
At least you didn’t take a JOKE legal document and accidentally conclude that you sent the Cease and Desist…Report
The “don’t give advice” article is pretty good (But it ends on a weak note. C. T. May shouldn’t hinge his/her argument on what one’s face looks like and what one’s voice does when you give advice.)
I do think it’s important to distinguish between types of advice, too. One might distinguish between solicited and unsolicited advice. One might also distinguish between advice where the advice-recipient has reason to believe the advice giver knows whereof he/she speaks and where the advice-recipient doesn’t.
(Pro-tip to would-be advice-givers: If you know someone who just graduated from college with a history major, don’t say, “have you thought about applying to a museum?” as if the recent graduate has never heard of museums before–and especially don’t do it if you don’t know of any museums that are actually hiring.)Report
TV: I fail to understand why people give any credence to “oh you MUST see it”. No I don’t. I might, but maybe not. Don’t be the herd. The herd gets slaughtered.
Oregon Ducks. I still laugh at that team name. Not as funny as the Gamecocks, but still.Report
It depends. If the person dispensing the OMG has a track record of liking the same sort of TV that you do then it’s probably worth a look. Otherwise it’s just random noise. In all probability, Netflix knows your tastes better than any actual person.
The herd may very well get slaughtered, but they also get their favorite shows renewed. That’s not a very good argument for taking someone else’s viewing advice but it’s a rational motivation to dispense it.Report
Big difference between:
“You should watch this because it’s good.”
And
“You should watch this because while I was enjoying it I thought of you in particular.”Report
Seattle March For Science
If you listen to the audio clip, you get to hear this gem at the end:
Ah yup!Report
We obliterated two Japanese cities in atomic fireballs.
Wait, I am doing this right?Report
Yep, doing it just fine!
PS I find it amusing that a Marine Biologist resorts to examples of Aerospace achievements to drive a point about American Scientific Leadership.Report
Typical lack of respect for the businessmen who made it possible to obliterate cities in normal fireballs.Report
True, we did obliterate Tokyo with perfectly normal fireballs.Report
Dresden had concrete fires. Self-perpetuating concrete fires.Report
Meh, a firestorm is a firestorm.Report
Everything burns if you get it hot enough. How hot it gets ceases to really matter except as an academic question after about 100 C.Report
Oscar,
Well, that depends on whether you care about how long the fire is going to last.Report
Fire will last until one leg of the triangle is knocked out. Entropy will make sure that things that only burn at very high temps will stop burning pretty early on.Report
Exactly. I was a kid when Chernobyl melted. I discussed it with my dad who is an engineer. He had me look up the temperature at which graphite burns in his CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and I was shocked.Report
Chernobyl was bad, but man, there was some fascinating physics and chemistry happening in the heart of the clusterfish.Report
Oscar,
Chernobyl? at least they let people evac from Chernobyl.Report
Hell, look at some pictures of Atlanta the day after Sherman got done with it.
That took hours, Tokyo minutes, Hiroshima/Nagasaki seconds, but other than the time frame (yes, I realize that the time frame affects how many have a chance to escape).
We did a lot of horrible things in WW2. The atomic bombs are not worthy of being singled out among them.Report
Don’t blame Sherman for everything that happened to ATL. There was a lot of blame to go round.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/who-burned-atlanta/?_r=0
Besides, war is about doing horrible things.Report
Yes, credit where credit is due, most of the destruction of Atlanta was by the rebels, not Americans.Report
As we’ve seen recently, infrastructure in Atlanta kinda just self destructs.Report
Crackheads setting fires doesn’t help.Report
Not quite. According to the article, “The real cause of the subsequent mass destruction was Sherman’s acquiescence to widespread disobedience among his soldiers.”Report
Phil Leigh is not an historian and he’s a person of peculiar views; he thinks that the cycle of history has moved from “Gone with the Wind” to “Roots” and is due for a correction. Its good though that the NY Times showed some variety in its coverage of view points.
(1) The initial destruction came about because the Confederates set their defensive lines close to the city where they would be shelled, and in the process they burned buildings that would interfere with sight lines. (2) Upon evacuation of the City, Hood gave orders for everything of military value to be destroyed (ammunition, food stores and cotton), which is the burning of Atlanta depicted in Gone with the Wind. (3) The union army occupied the city and destroyed the railroads, including burning depots and train cars and industrial capacity. (4) Unauthorized burning by union troops a few days before departure, most of which occurred while Sherman was away from Atlanta in the field.
I think (1) and (2) were Confederate responsibility and (3) and (4) were Union responsibility, but (2) > (1) + (3) + (4). There is ultimately a significant difference in outcome btw/ setting fires in haste in the process of evacuating the city, and the orderly destruction that the Union conducted over the course of many weeks.Report
Loved the tape. Listen to it around 1:25. That guy’s inflection sums up everything conservatives say about media bias.Report
There was a to-do about March for Science on Twitter. I’ll see if I can find it, Among other things, the guy doing the account was anti-GMO or something.Report
Mike Judges us all, and finds us wanting.
That’s weird. Normally he’s Schilling for us.Report
I’m curious if that chart
A) includes people who are legally married but otherwise decommitted from their spouse.
and B) if so, if people understand that.
I am legally married. But my legal spouse and I are no longer committed to each other in any sort of romantic or physical way. As such, if I were to have sex with someone else, the answer to that question for me would be, “Yes.” But how many people would assume that meant that I was unfaithful to her?Report
And I went straight away to something more like my own situation. I wonder how the answers would break down if the options were something like:
Did you ever have sex with someone other than your spouse, while married?
1) No
2) Yes, while legally separated from my spouse
3) Yes, absent legal separation, with the knowledge and consent of my spouse
4) Yes, absent legal separation, without the knowledge or consent of my spouse
And separately, I wonder what significant options I left out of the above, and how much they might reduce the number of respondents getting down to the final “we were trying to ask about having an affair” answer.Report
It also presumes that sex is the only means by which an affair could be had. Sex — or physical intimacy — tends to offer a bright line when it comes to breaking commitments but it is far from the only way to do so.
I also heard of a survey that women are more likely to be bothered by emotional infidelity than physical while men are more likely to be bothered by physical than emotional. And there is probably lots we can parse from that but I think the clearest insight it offers is that physical infidelity is not the only form.Report
I’m guessing the spike was from guys spreading their seed to repopulate the earth in the aftermath of the Y2K apocalypse.Report
Clinton bump. If it’s good enough for the President…Report
We’re talking tiny variations so the data is likely mostly noise, (and as mentioned, changes in self reporting standards), but still there does seems to be correlations between recessions and having some side action – positive in the case of men, negative for women.Report
Georgia Dem: No issue I don’t live in district
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/329235-georgia-dem-no-issue-i-dont-live-in-district
I thought you had to? Maybe it’s just a good idea. This guy is supposed to be the liberal answer to Trump.Report
You need to live in the state, not the district. As a practical matter, districts move around from time to time, so it’s helpful not to have your district move out from underneath you.
I love how this guy, who has lived in the district for years and is temporarily moving less than 2 miles beyond its border to live with his girlfriend while she finishes medical school, is somehow being portrayed as some sort of carpet bagger.
If people are concerned about the legality of it, there’s no problem at all. If they’re concerned about the principle of the matter, I simply don’t see why. He clearly has deep connections with the district and will reside within walking distance of its border.Report
MLB commissioner wants Cleveland Indians to ‘transition away’ from Chief Wahoo logo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/04/12/mlb-commissioner-wants-cleveland-indians-to-transition-away-from-chief-wahoo-logo/?utm_term=.d4d7ae90bf3e
The PC folks won’t be happier until another tradition is dead.Report