What everyone has missing in objecting to James Hanley is the trivial difference between warning about rape, and warning about 'black men':
Trigger warnings are for events, not things. They are used to warn about depictions of situations, not for random nouns.
And we certainly should have trigger warnings about people being surrounded and beaten. And that would probably not include the race of the people doing the beating, as that's not actually that important to 99% of the people who would be triggered. Much more important would probably be the location of the beating, or the age of victim, or the reason for the beating, or all sorts of crap. Unless we want trigger warnings that are entire paragraphs and actually describe the entire thing, 'Warning: Depiction of group assault' would probably be the reasonable choice.
No one gets a trigger warning because of a thing. Things do not cause PTSD. Experiences do.
Things can, of course, trigger PTSD, but those sorts of triggers are completely random and unknowable. 'Trigger warning: Narrator wears a hat that will remind you of your abuser'. That doesn't work in any possible sense.
OTOH, showing a depiction of abuse could easily be triggering for the vast majority of sufferers.
And, of course, the next objection is that PTSD can be caused by quite a few things, and there's no way to catch them all. Duh. There's probably some guy out there that was in his attic, fell though his ceiling, and was trapped there suffering and in pain for a day before anyone found him, and now depictions of attics trigger him. But no one's ever going to warn about attics, or even about people stepping through a floor.
But it's easy enough to catch the events that cause 99% of PTSD.
Yeah, if this is going to change, it would either require a law, or some sort of industry-wide agreement. (And an agreement might, ironically, fall afoul of price-fixing laws.)
It’s not the company’s fault that you’re butthurt about how you fell for their advertising scheme.
You realize how crazy that statement is, right?
It actually is the company's fault that you fell for their advertising scheme. Considering, you know, they're the ones who did it.
'It's not Fred's fault you're upset because he deliberately ran over you with his car'.
Yes. Yes, it is Fred's fault. Or, rather, it's Fred's fault you were ran over, and being upset is a perfectly expected reaction to that.
You want to assert that their advertising scheme is legal, fine. That means they're not legally 'at fault' that someone fell for their advertising scheme. They didn't commit a tort, and can't be sued for it.
But it still is, in English, the company's 'fault'. The company caused their advertising scheme to happen. It is something that happened due to the company's actions. It is the fault of the company.
@vikram-bath I always try to recognize it happening and then go out of my way to agree with the salesperson that I probably can’t afford it.
The most fun I have ever had interacting with a cashier is via agreeing with them:
Best Buy used to be the only moderately close electronic store. In case you don't know, they like to pressure people into buying completely overpriced extended warranties. (On top of their idiotically overpriced stuff.) I hated it, and they'd always lie to try to sell their warranties.
But then a Fry's opened up nearby, and I started going there, and I thought I'd even look back.
So one day a few years ago I needed something, I think it was a nice-ish set of headphones, or something like that. Something that normally would be thirty dollars, and Best Buy would be selling for $45. and I happened to be right at the mall with the Best Buy.
And I just couldn't resist. I'd actually talked about doing it before, but never hard. But I couldn't resist. I knew what was going to happen, and if it didn't, I'd take my lumps, but the headphones, and just pay the extra money.
But it happened. They tried to sell me an extended warranty. They even used the same script as last time, how their mother had bought one of them and they had to get it replaced. (Last time it had been their grandmother.)
I gasped in horror, looked at them, and said 'You mean you're selling stuff that breaks? And you know it?' really loudly.
Then I walked out, just leaving the headphones at the cashier.
@michael-cain I didn’t read all of the relevant California statutes, but did notice that they have a separate set of rules for gasoline and oil prices. It’s amazing how much cruft has accumulated in state statutes over the decades, and the historical reasons for why certain things ended up in now-unexpected places.
You just know that if gas stations were allowed to 'be wrong' on their sign, they would. It's a perfectly reasonable business model...by the time people pull up to a pump, even assuming they do check the price and notice it's wrong, they've already made a commitment to go to that gas station instead of another. So just put up a sign 'accidentally' advertising prices 20 cents cheaper than the actual price, and, boom, customers.
Almost every 'Businesses cannot do this' law exists solely because a business did do that. ;)
It's the same with ringing up the wrong price...you'd be amazed, back when bar code scanners came out, how many businesses 'accidentally' ran up a higher price. And if you caught it, they'd be happy to not only correct it, but give you a discount! Because for customer who caught it, there were 20 people who didn't.
The government eventually said: Uh, no. You can't just correct the price when people catch it. We see what's happening here. It's now just completely illegal, even 'accidentally', and if we catch you doing that 'accidentally', we'll fine your ass. You better put in procedures so that doesn't happen, because we're now erring on the side of 'you did that on purpose' and you better have a damn good explanation of how that mistake happened.
(This was back when governments actually did things like that. Now, the government would politely ask the grocery industry to maybe not do that so much. Ha, I kid. The government wouldn't do that.)
That said, it obviously might make some sense to go through the laws and optimize and consolidate them a bit.
@vikram-bath …which would probably dissuade anyone who is familiar with the grocery industry from shopping there absent any other information. Typical grocery store margins are 2-3%. A 10% markup is actually really high.
Then again, the above quote doesn’t say whether the cost they refer to just includes the purchase price or if it includes the total costs the store incurs.
Yeah, 10% is way too high if they mean 'We add 10% profit to what it costs us to sell it'.
OTOH, it's way too low if they mean 'We purchased this good for this amount from the people who make it, and we are charging 10% more'. They can't get it to the store and put it on the shelves and pay for air conditioning and employees and whatnot with just 10% extra, much less make a profit on it!
I'm pretty certain by '10% above cost', what they actually mean is '10% above 90% of what we want to charge for it'. I.e. their actual cost has no relationship to the price at all. They just pick a price, reduce it by 10%, and post it.
I actually had the weird idea once that this something to do with price matching. But I couldn't figure out how...I don't think they price match, and surely Walmart (The other grocery store in town.) would quickly figure out that their advertised prices all said 'Plus 10% at register'.
Uh, why? It's actually pretty easy to find if you Google, it's the first hit. But I have no idea where this is going.
This is not some sort of basic misunderstanding on my part, some fundamental misunderstand of how grocery stores work. There is not some secret club that I have failed to join. It is not some co-op that offers discounts to members.
They *really are* posting prices that are 90% of the actual price, and then saying 'Plus an additional 10% at register'.
I'm getting a little annoyed at explaining this. This is an actual true fact that is actually true.
I don’t know that anybody has really suggested how to deal with glaciers sweeping down from the north.
This is the plot of Thor 3, actually. It's Ragnarok, and the Frost Giants send the glaciers south.
We defeat them by doing nothing. After a thousand years, after our cities have crumbled into dust from age, we build the new ones slightly farther south.
Uh, no. This is not a co-op, this is not a savings club. This is not some confusion where getting the lower prices is possible.
This is a perfectly normal grocery store that is listing all prices at 90% of what they should be, and then putting 'Plus 10% at register' below every single one of them
@mike-schilling I suspect honest mistakes get a pass in California.
From what I understand, the exact opposite is true. The entire point of those laws is to make it flat out illegal for prices to ring up higher, via barcode, than the actual posted prices. For any reason.
Most of the time, before such laws, that actually *was* an honest mistake. But it's an honest mistake that we simply don't allow businesses to make anymore, as it was much too easy for everyone to claim 'honest mistake' on the 5% of people who caught the error, refund their money, and keep ripping off the 95% of people who didn't notice the price fly by on the scanner.
The theory that, for everyone person that catches such a thing, a large amount of people already got ripped off. Just letting them go 'oops' is not a reasonable remedy. They need to have systems in place to stop such a thing from happening at all.
I worked in a gas station once, and we have to follow a specific rule to obey the law: When raising prices, prices on the sign go up first, and get raised at the pump only after everyone's cleared out. But when lowering prices, prices go down on the pumps first, and then the sign get changes. Why? Because it's illegal to show lower prices on the sign than what you are charging, even for one second.
Although I'm confused by the California one. I suspect that law is only supposed to apply to marked prices in the store. Not advertising flyers and whatnot.
If someone comes in with an ad that says one thing, but the shelf says something else, that's not awesome, but that's just deceptive advertising. A higher price ringing up at the register and the customer not realizing they overpaid is a more direct form of fraud, verging close to outright theft.
There's a local grocery store here that adds 10% on top of all their prices. Not as tax. They list prices that are 10% lower,and add 10% at the register...and *then* add tax. Although they do actually put notices that of that everywhere.
I consider this somewhat deceptive, to say the least.
They're pretending that the prices they list are cost, and the 10% is, I dunno, profit. This is obviously insane, every product in the store cannot possibly have the same profit margin. (And 10% is either much too low or much too high, depending on what they mean by 'cost'. More than 90% of the cost of food is getting it to the grocery store.)
I still shop there, though. Better there than the alternative...Walmart. (And, frankly, the store's method of hiding their true cost is somewhat better than Walmart's hiding of their true cost.)
Ah. Yeah, that's a consideration I forget about. I watch TV different than most people. I *watch a show*. From start to end. If I have watched a certain episode of a TV show, I almost certainly am going to watch the next episode.
There are a few out there that can't quite hold my interest, like Bones, I and I keep getting back episodes waiting while I choose to watch Robot Chicken or some other rerun of a show I've already see.
And some shows I've actually dropped (Breaking Bad, if you can believe it, halfway through the first season.) So not every single show.
But most of the time, I will go from the start to the end. If I start, I will finish.
I guess presenting an open question, like they did on Burn Notice, and always having more answers promised next week, is good to keeping normal people interested, though. Or to cause binge watching. So I can see why they do it even though it's a little annoying.
But I stand by my statement it often seemed forced the way the arc was distributed on Burn Notice. While admitted that such a distribution was probably a good idea, viewerwise. ;)
Burn Notice had a bit of a weird problem in that the seasonal arcs were sometimes completely unconnected to what was going on in the episode, so those five minutes, usually at the very end of the show, often seemed rather forced.
Especially when sometimes it was some guy 'I'll talk to some people, get back to you about that' at the end of one episode, and at the end of the next episode he does, indeed, get back to them. Ooo, slowly doling out information, how exciting...I mean, how boring.
I often found myself thinking 'Perhaps we should spend 20 minutes on arc stuff on this every four episodes instead of five minutes every episode'.
Sometimes TV gets a little forced-arc-y. I mean, I like seasonal arcs, but sometimes they seem to think that every episode must somehow touch on the arc, and no episodes till the last (And maybe the first) episode can do too much arc stuff. It's not butter, the arc doesn't have to be spread evenly over the season.
@kim Because however adverse a forced personnel transfer is, it’s not in any way sexual.
Yes and no.
Tod is correct in that, if there was sexual harassment before that, and the transfer was in some way related to that, either as retaliation for claiming harassment, or turning down harassment, or even just to remove their 'access' to each other, that transfer would, indeed, be part of the sexual harassment suit. It is not sexual harassment itself, but if it's a result of that, it's part of the damages.
Of course, as I have pointed out, you sorta need the original claim of sexual harassment to exist for that to compound it, and Lewinsky hasn't made any such claim. So the entire thing rather falls apart there.
Although, as Burt pointed out, even without her asserting any sort of sexual harassment, that could still be gender discrimination. Although I ask: Do we actually have any evidence it was an adverse transfer? Do we know how long interns usually last at the White House? Once you get into gender discrimination by itself, you have to have some evidence of what the norm was.
The idea that the administration would cause any sort of harm to Lewinsky, exactly as she was being called to testify and they needed her to lie under oath, seems rather dubious in my mind. This is the same administration that seemed to go to extreme length to try to track down a private sector job for her when she left the Pentagon. (Although admittedly I have no idea of how much they'd help a random ex-intern that *wasn't* about to testify.)
I mean, stupider things have happened, I'm not trying to say it couldn't happen, and maybe they thought getting her away from the POTUS so 'he didn't keep doing it' was more important (Which would indeed be gender discrimination and compound any hypothetical sexual harassment.), but I'm not willing to just assume that without someone producing something to that effect.
@scott-the-mediocre I remember some people suggesting that the statute of limitations be tolled during Bill’s presidency for specifically that reason.
I wouldn't think that would be needed, would it? As long as the suit is filed within the time limit, it shouldn't matter if it can't proceed forward. That's how it works for crimes. Maybe it's different for civil suits, though.
In fact, if I understand how this all works correctly, the president could actually be indicted for a crime as president, stopping the statue of limitation countdown, and just not actually be arrested until after he left office.
Although you run into the problem of the president hilariously pardoning himself.
We actually have the absurd constitutional situation where, if the president literally committed murder in full view of everyone, he couldn't actually end up in prison for that crime unless he was an idiot. Impeachment only allows removal from office, and barring from future officeholding. Now, after removal for office, the constitution says he could then be charged...but only if he was too dumb not to pardon himself before removal from office.
Agreed that litigation against the POTUS (unrelated to acts asPOTUS) creates all sorts of interesting separation of powers problems.
I actually think it would be an interesting question what would have happened if Bill had simply refused to show up in court. I think, much like the POTUS can't be charged with a crime, the POTUS couldn't actually be held in contempt of court either. (Or maybe he can be held in contempt, but such an order cannot be enforced.)
He could, of course, be held in contempt of Congress if he failed to testify at his impeachment or conviction. Although that would be a weird-ass constitutional crisis, sending the Capitol Police to haul in the POTUS.
I'm not pushing for anything. I was just completely confused as to what the hell people were talking about. I remembered Lewinsky commenting about Hillary's insult of her, but I had no idea what it was, I assumed Hillary had made a public comment about her book. But then people started talking about how Hillary had acted in the past, and I thought I had missed something.
Now that you've clarified it as 'She remained silent in public, and said a mean thing once on the phone to a friend', I'm incredibly annoyed.
Uh, guys? Are you seriously wondering why she didn't leap to the defense of someone that helped cause major problems in her marriage? Hillary had her own things to deal with during that, and perhaps should be given a pass in this specific instance based on how it affected her personally.
There is literally an entire establishment of people that should be condemned before her. Literally every other Democrat had more of an obligation to say something.
How about we start with the actual people who attacked Lewinsky, and condemning them? Then we can move on to the Democratic leaders who weren't married to someone who had sex with Lewinsky and has a semi-valid reason to loathe her?
Seriously, this is amazing as something that people are complaining about. No, Hillary Clinton did not have to defend Lewinsky from unfair attacks in the 90s. Other people needed to be doing that.
Now, there might be a point there if people were attacking Lewinsky now (Which a few are.) and they were Democrats and it was four years later and Hillary was president and the presumptive leader of the party. Then, she might have to put aside her disdain and say something. But, right now, Hillary is officially nobody, and doesn't need to run around commenting on how some random liberal blogs are unfairly attacking Lewinsky.
And if elected Democrats start to do that, Obama should probably step in and say something, considering, you know, he's still in charge.
@scott-the-mediocre I would be very surprised if *any* president, up to (or down to) and including Saint Jimmy*, would not lie under oath...
I actually think that Clinton's lawyers had it right...you should not be able to proceed in a lawsuit against a sitting president. At least, not unless you can show some ongoing damage.
The sitting president being involved with the court system is just asking for fail, especially if Congress can then impeach him for things that happen in that system. The constitution *tries* to stop that, but, through what I suspect was an oversight, failed to consider the civil courts.
Erm, two seconds of googling "narcissistic loony toon" produced the quite obvious fact that Hillary said that in private, and it just now came out.
That's evidence of a woman badmouthing someone who had sex with her husband, to a friend.
This is not evidence of her participating any sort of concentrated public attack to discredit Lewinsky, which is what other people here are asserting.
And I have no idea how 'slut shaming' enters into it at all. Not a single word of that has anything to do with sex. It is, perhaps, using ableist language toward mental illness, but it was the 1990s, so perhaps we could cut her some slack for not seeing the future.
And I don't understand how the Flowers quote is even supposed to be insulting to anyone.
The liability occurs when the person/people who know that a complaint has been or should be filed do not investigate and take corrective action.
Erm, as has been pointed out in this very thread, Lewinsky did not make any sexual harassment claim. At all.
If Bill Clinton, or someone else, had acted as he did in response to such a claim, yes, that obviously would be part of the sexual harassment suit. That would be retaliation. However, nothing Clinton did can be construed to be retaliation to Lewinsky's claims of sexual harassment, because, duh, she made no such claims.
It's like you're actually living in bizarro world or something, where Lewinsky was attempting to sue Clinton for sexual harassment, or filed some sort of EOCC complaint against him. She wasn't. That is not the actual event that happened.
What happened is she was called as a witness in a lawsuit by a different person, a lawsuit she didn't wish to testify in in the first place. And there's very little evidence that Clinton did suborn perjury. It appears they basically conspired together to commit matching perjury, as neither wanted the truth to come out.
Even if Clinton had outright asked her to lie, asking someone to lie under oath does not magically turn into sexual harassment because earlier the asker had sex with that person.
Now, as for 2, you want to assert that moving her elsewhere was sexual harassment, as it was due to the relationship, I'm not entirely sure of that, as we don't know the actual story there. (Maybe she just wanted to be in the Pentagon.) But, yes, I don't dispute it...that *could* be part of some hypothetical case of sexual harassment if Lewinsky had wanted to assert sexual harassment...which, again, she didn't, and doesn't.
But claims 3 and 4 are still nonsense. 3 and 4 were an attempt to derail an unrelated civil trial, and had nothing to do with any hypothetical harassment committed against Lewinsky. You could replace the oral sex with 'Bill Clinton leaves a video of time he sexually harassed other women in the VCR and she watches it' and the story would play out the same....he still needs her not to testify, and he still needs her testimony to not be believed.
Again, possibly criminal. (Although in my mind, we sorta already settled the issue of Clinton committing perjury, and that's really just an aspect of it. He did it, he was punished for it more than most people are, and it's over.) And any slander is possibly a civil tort, and certainly shouldn't be allowed by a president.
Not all unacceptable workplace behaviors are sexual harassment.
There is an actual fucking legal definition of 'sexual harassment', and I assure you it doesn't include 'attempt to suborn perjury'. That's an entirely different crime. (Assuming such a thing happened.)
And, as I pointed out, by the time your point 3 supposedly happened, and when 4 happened, Lewinsky didn't work for the government anymore.
So if Clinton had wandered over to the government's hypothetical HR department and said 'Hey, I'm going to get someone whose testifying in a civil suit against me, who does not work for the government, to see if I can get her to lie. If I can't, I will smear her.', the hypothetical HR department would have responded with 'Uh, why are you asking us about that?'
3. Attempting to coerce same employee from testifying at the hearing of a separate sexual harassment based partially on what might come out about her own indiscretions is absolutely, positively, 100% sexual harassment.
4. Being caught attempting to “smear” that same employee — both in the workplace and in public — in an attempt to discredit their testimony about all the above is what we you might refer to as a “it ain’t never gonna get to trial, because the insurance company is gonna settle out for a whole lotta money to make sure it don’t” case of sexual harassment.
This is so impossibly incorrect I'm not even sure you're living in the same universe as us.
Attempting to coerce people not to testify, and to smear them when they do testify, is wrong, and the first is almost certainly illegal, and the later might be, depending.
But those actions aren't sexual harassment. Random crimes and/or unethical behavior committed to cover up sexual harassment are not magically sexual harassment. The crime of sexual harassment isn't contagious.
Jesus Christ, words have actual meanings. Crimes have actual definitions. An act completely unrelated to sex at the time that the victim was no longer working for the party is pretty much not sexual harassment in any conceivable way.
(Incidentally, I'm not sure we have any evidence that #3 actually happened, Lewinsky was rather unwilling to testify entirely of her own volition, and would hardly need to be coerced. But that's irrelevant to the fact that while any hypothetical coercion might be a crime, that crime is not 'sexual harassment'.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Happy Trails, Trigger!”
What everyone has missing in objecting to James Hanley is the trivial difference between warning about rape, and warning about 'black men':
Trigger warnings are for events, not things. They are used to warn about depictions of situations, not for random nouns.
And we certainly should have trigger warnings about people being surrounded and beaten. And that would probably not include the race of the people doing the beating, as that's not actually that important to 99% of the people who would be triggered. Much more important would probably be the location of the beating, or the age of victim, or the reason for the beating, or all sorts of crap. Unless we want trigger warnings that are entire paragraphs and actually describe the entire thing, 'Warning: Depiction of group assault' would probably be the reasonable choice.
No one gets a trigger warning because of a thing. Things do not cause PTSD. Experiences do.
Things can, of course, trigger PTSD, but those sorts of triggers are completely random and unknowable. 'Trigger warning: Narrator wears a hat that will remind you of your abuser'. That doesn't work in any possible sense.
OTOH, showing a depiction of abuse could easily be triggering for the vast majority of sufferers.
And, of course, the next objection is that PTSD can be caused by quite a few things, and there's no way to catch them all. Duh. There's probably some guy out there that was in his attic, fell though his ceiling, and was trapped there suffering and in pain for a day before anyone found him, and now depictions of attics trigger him. But no one's ever going to warn about attics, or even about people stepping through a floor.
But it's easy enough to catch the events that cause 99% of PTSD.
On “Let He Who Reveals his True Final Cost Cast the First Stone”
Ah, yes, I can't even count the ways in that I harmed that man.
Because those ways are, in fact, zero, as I didn't harm him at all.
Despite the fact he was actually telling me a lie intending to cause me to pay him money, aka, committing what was morally, if not legally, fraud.
That's right, everyone. Be sure to be polite to people attempting to defraud you, or you'll get sneered at on the internet.
"
Yeah, if this is going to change, it would either require a law, or some sort of industry-wide agreement. (And an agreement might, ironically, fall afoul of price-fixing laws.)
"
It’s not the company’s fault that you’re butthurt about how you fell for their advertising scheme.
You realize how crazy that statement is, right?
It actually is the company's fault that you fell for their advertising scheme. Considering, you know, they're the ones who did it.
'It's not Fred's fault you're upset because he deliberately ran over you with his car'.
Yes. Yes, it is Fred's fault. Or, rather, it's Fred's fault you were ran over, and being upset is a perfectly expected reaction to that.
You want to assert that their advertising scheme is legal, fine. That means they're not legally 'at fault' that someone fell for their advertising scheme. They didn't commit a tort, and can't be sued for it.
But it still is, in English, the company's 'fault'. The company caused their advertising scheme to happen. It is something that happened due to the company's actions. It is the fault of the company.
"
@vikram-bath
I always try to recognize it happening and then go out of my way to agree with the salesperson that I probably can’t afford it.
The most fun I have ever had interacting with a cashier is via agreeing with them:
Best Buy used to be the only moderately close electronic store. In case you don't know, they like to pressure people into buying completely overpriced extended warranties. (On top of their idiotically overpriced stuff.) I hated it, and they'd always lie to try to sell their warranties.
But then a Fry's opened up nearby, and I started going there, and I thought I'd even look back.
So one day a few years ago I needed something, I think it was a nice-ish set of headphones, or something like that. Something that normally would be thirty dollars, and Best Buy would be selling for $45. and I happened to be right at the mall with the Best Buy.
And I just couldn't resist. I'd actually talked about doing it before, but never hard. But I couldn't resist. I knew what was going to happen, and if it didn't, I'd take my lumps, but the headphones, and just pay the extra money.
But it happened. They tried to sell me an extended warranty. They even used the same script as last time, how their mother had bought one of them and they had to get it replaced. (Last time it had been their grandmother.)
I gasped in horror, looked at them, and said 'You mean you're selling stuff that breaks? And you know it?' really loudly.
Then I walked out, just leaving the headphones at the cashier.
So much fun.
"
@michael-cain
I didn’t read all of the relevant California statutes, but did notice that they have a separate set of rules for gasoline and oil prices. It’s amazing how much cruft has accumulated in state statutes over the decades, and the historical reasons for why certain things ended up in now-unexpected places.
You just know that if gas stations were allowed to 'be wrong' on their sign, they would. It's a perfectly reasonable business model...by the time people pull up to a pump, even assuming they do check the price and notice it's wrong, they've already made a commitment to go to that gas station instead of another. So just put up a sign 'accidentally' advertising prices 20 cents cheaper than the actual price, and, boom, customers.
Almost every 'Businesses cannot do this' law exists solely because a business did do that. ;)
It's the same with ringing up the wrong price...you'd be amazed, back when bar code scanners came out, how many businesses 'accidentally' ran up a higher price. And if you caught it, they'd be happy to not only correct it, but give you a discount! Because for customer who caught it, there were 20 people who didn't.
The government eventually said: Uh, no. You can't just correct the price when people catch it. We see what's happening here. It's now just completely illegal, even 'accidentally', and if we catch you doing that 'accidentally', we'll fine your ass. You better put in procedures so that doesn't happen, because we're now erring on the side of 'you did that on purpose' and you better have a damn good explanation of how that mistake happened.
(This was back when governments actually did things like that. Now, the government would politely ask the grocery industry to maybe not do that so much. Ha, I kid. The government wouldn't do that.)
That said, it obviously might make some sense to go through the laws and optimize and consolidate them a bit.
"
@vikram-bath
…which would probably dissuade anyone who is familiar with the grocery industry from shopping there absent any other information. Typical grocery store margins are 2-3%. A 10% markup is actually really high.
Then again, the above quote doesn’t say whether the cost they refer to just includes the purchase price or if it includes the total costs the store incurs.
Yeah, 10% is way too high if they mean 'We add 10% profit to what it costs us to sell it'.
OTOH, it's way too low if they mean 'We purchased this good for this amount from the people who make it, and we are charging 10% more'. They can't get it to the store and put it on the shelves and pay for air conditioning and employees and whatnot with just 10% extra, much less make a profit on it!
I'm pretty certain by '10% above cost', what they actually mean is '10% above 90% of what we want to charge for it'. I.e. their actual cost has no relationship to the price at all. They just pick a price, reduce it by 10%, and post it.
I actually had the weird idea once that this something to do with price matching. But I couldn't figure out how...I don't think they price match, and surely Walmart (The other grocery store in town.) would quickly figure out that their advertised prices all said 'Plus 10% at register'.
"
Uh, why? It's actually pretty easy to find if you Google, it's the first hit. But I have no idea where this is going.
This is not some sort of basic misunderstanding on my part, some fundamental misunderstand of how grocery stores work. There is not some secret club that I have failed to join. It is not some co-op that offers discounts to members.
They *really are* posting prices that are 90% of the actual price, and then saying 'Plus an additional 10% at register'.
I'm getting a little annoyed at explaining this. This is an actual true fact that is actually true.
"
It's called 'Fresh and Frugal'.
On “The Icemen Cometh?”
I don’t know that anybody has really suggested how to deal with glaciers sweeping down from the north.
This is the plot of Thor 3, actually. It's Ragnarok, and the Frost Giants send the glaciers south.
We defeat them by doing nothing. After a thousand years, after our cities have crumbled into dust from age, we build the new ones slightly farther south.
...it's not a very good movie.
On “Let He Who Reveals his True Final Cost Cast the First Stone”
Uh, no. This is not a co-op, this is not a savings club. This is not some confusion where getting the lower prices is possible.
This is a perfectly normal grocery store that is listing all prices at 90% of what they should be, and then putting 'Plus 10% at register' below every single one of them
"
Erm, I mean, more than *10%* of the cost of food is getting it to store. Not 90%. That would be crazy.
"
@mike-schilling
I suspect honest mistakes get a pass in California.
From what I understand, the exact opposite is true. The entire point of those laws is to make it flat out illegal for prices to ring up higher, via barcode, than the actual posted prices. For any reason.
Most of the time, before such laws, that actually *was* an honest mistake. But it's an honest mistake that we simply don't allow businesses to make anymore, as it was much too easy for everyone to claim 'honest mistake' on the 5% of people who caught the error, refund their money, and keep ripping off the 95% of people who didn't notice the price fly by on the scanner.
The theory that, for everyone person that catches such a thing, a large amount of people already got ripped off. Just letting them go 'oops' is not a reasonable remedy. They need to have systems in place to stop such a thing from happening at all.
I worked in a gas station once, and we have to follow a specific rule to obey the law: When raising prices, prices on the sign go up first, and get raised at the pump only after everyone's cleared out. But when lowering prices, prices go down on the pumps first, and then the sign get changes. Why? Because it's illegal to show lower prices on the sign than what you are charging, even for one second.
Although I'm confused by the California one. I suspect that law is only supposed to apply to marked prices in the store. Not advertising flyers and whatnot.
If someone comes in with an ad that says one thing, but the shelf says something else, that's not awesome, but that's just deceptive advertising. A higher price ringing up at the register and the customer not realizing they overpaid is a more direct form of fraud, verging close to outright theft.
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There's a local grocery store here that adds 10% on top of all their prices. Not as tax. They list prices that are 10% lower,and add 10% at the register...and *then* add tax. Although they do actually put notices that of that everywhere.
I consider this somewhat deceptive, to say the least.
They're pretending that the prices they list are cost, and the 10% is, I dunno, profit. This is obviously insane, every product in the store cannot possibly have the same profit margin. (And 10% is either much too low or much too high, depending on what they mean by 'cost'. More than 90% of the cost of food is getting it to the grocery store.)
I still shop there, though. Better there than the alternative...Walmart. (And, frankly, the store's method of hiding their true cost is somewhat better than Walmart's hiding of their true cost.)
On “Why Babylon 5 is the Best — and Worst — Television Science Fiction Show Ever Made”
Ah. Yeah, that's a consideration I forget about. I watch TV different than most people. I *watch a show*. From start to end. If I have watched a certain episode of a TV show, I almost certainly am going to watch the next episode.
There are a few out there that can't quite hold my interest, like Bones, I and I keep getting back episodes waiting while I choose to watch Robot Chicken or some other rerun of a show I've already see.
And some shows I've actually dropped (Breaking Bad, if you can believe it, halfway through the first season.) So not every single show.
But most of the time, I will go from the start to the end. If I start, I will finish.
I guess presenting an open question, like they did on Burn Notice, and always having more answers promised next week, is good to keeping normal people interested, though. Or to cause binge watching. So I can see why they do it even though it's a little annoying.
But I stand by my statement it often seemed forced the way the arc was distributed on Burn Notice. While admitted that such a distribution was probably a good idea, viewerwise. ;)
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Burn Notice had a bit of a weird problem in that the seasonal arcs were sometimes completely unconnected to what was going on in the episode, so those five minutes, usually at the very end of the show, often seemed rather forced.
Especially when sometimes it was some guy 'I'll talk to some people, get back to you about that' at the end of one episode, and at the end of the next episode he does, indeed, get back to them. Ooo, slowly doling out information, how exciting...I mean, how boring.
I often found myself thinking 'Perhaps we should spend 20 minutes on arc stuff on this every four episodes instead of five minutes every episode'.
Sometimes TV gets a little forced-arc-y. I mean, I like seasonal arcs, but sometimes they seem to think that every episode must somehow touch on the arc, and no episodes till the last (And maybe the first) episode can do too much arc stuff. It's not butter, the arc doesn't have to be spread evenly over the season.
On “What the Left (and pretty much everyone else) still don’t get about the “Monica Lewinksi Scandal””
@kim
Because however adverse a forced personnel transfer is, it’s not in any way sexual.
Yes and no.
Tod is correct in that, if there was sexual harassment before that, and the transfer was in some way related to that, either as retaliation for claiming harassment, or turning down harassment, or even just to remove their 'access' to each other, that transfer would, indeed, be part of the sexual harassment suit. It is not sexual harassment itself, but if it's a result of that, it's part of the damages.
Of course, as I have pointed out, you sorta need the original claim of sexual harassment to exist for that to compound it, and Lewinsky hasn't made any such claim. So the entire thing rather falls apart there.
Although, as Burt pointed out, even without her asserting any sort of sexual harassment, that could still be gender discrimination. Although I ask: Do we actually have any evidence it was an adverse transfer? Do we know how long interns usually last at the White House? Once you get into gender discrimination by itself, you have to have some evidence of what the norm was.
The idea that the administration would cause any sort of harm to Lewinsky, exactly as she was being called to testify and they needed her to lie under oath, seems rather dubious in my mind. This is the same administration that seemed to go to extreme length to try to track down a private sector job for her when she left the Pentagon. (Although admittedly I have no idea of how much they'd help a random ex-intern that *wasn't* about to testify.)
I mean, stupider things have happened, I'm not trying to say it couldn't happen, and maybe they thought getting her away from the POTUS so 'he didn't keep doing it' was more important (Which would indeed be gender discrimination and compound any hypothetical sexual harassment.), but I'm not willing to just assume that without someone producing something to that effect.
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@scott-the-mediocre
I remember some people suggesting that the statute of limitations be tolled during Bill’s presidency for specifically that reason.
I wouldn't think that would be needed, would it? As long as the suit is filed within the time limit, it shouldn't matter if it can't proceed forward. That's how it works for crimes. Maybe it's different for civil suits, though.
In fact, if I understand how this all works correctly, the president could actually be indicted for a crime as president, stopping the statue of limitation countdown, and just not actually be arrested until after he left office.
Although you run into the problem of the president hilariously pardoning himself.
We actually have the absurd constitutional situation where, if the president literally committed murder in full view of everyone, he couldn't actually end up in prison for that crime unless he was an idiot. Impeachment only allows removal from office, and barring from future officeholding. Now, after removal for office, the constitution says he could then be charged...but only if he was too dumb not to pardon himself before removal from office.
Agreed that litigation against the POTUS (unrelated to acts asPOTUS) creates all sorts of interesting separation of powers problems.
I actually think it would be an interesting question what would have happened if Bill had simply refused to show up in court. I think, much like the POTUS can't be charged with a crime, the POTUS couldn't actually be held in contempt of court either. (Or maybe he can be held in contempt, but such an order cannot be enforced.)
He could, of course, be held in contempt of Congress if he failed to testify at his impeachment or conviction. Although that would be a weird-ass constitutional crisis, sending the Capitol Police to haul in the POTUS.
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I really don’t know what you’re pushing for here
I'm not pushing for anything. I was just completely confused as to what the hell people were talking about. I remembered Lewinsky commenting about Hillary's insult of her, but I had no idea what it was, I assumed Hillary had made a public comment about her book. But then people started talking about how Hillary had acted in the past, and I thought I had missed something.
Now that you've clarified it as 'She remained silent in public, and said a mean thing once on the phone to a friend', I'm incredibly annoyed.
Uh, guys? Are you seriously wondering why she didn't leap to the defense of someone that helped cause major problems in her marriage? Hillary had her own things to deal with during that, and perhaps should be given a pass in this specific instance based on how it affected her personally.
There is literally an entire establishment of people that should be condemned before her. Literally every other Democrat had more of an obligation to say something.
How about we start with the actual people who attacked Lewinsky, and condemning them? Then we can move on to the Democratic leaders who weren't married to someone who had sex with Lewinsky and has a semi-valid reason to loathe her?
Seriously, this is amazing as something that people are complaining about. No, Hillary Clinton did not have to defend Lewinsky from unfair attacks in the 90s. Other people needed to be doing that.
Now, there might be a point there if people were attacking Lewinsky now (Which a few are.) and they were Democrats and it was four years later and Hillary was president and the presumptive leader of the party. Then, she might have to put aside her disdain and say something. But, right now, Hillary is officially nobody, and doesn't need to run around commenting on how some random liberal blogs are unfairly attacking Lewinsky.
And if elected Democrats start to do that, Obama should probably step in and say something, considering, you know, he's still in charge.
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@scott-the-mediocre
I would be very surprised if *any* president, up to (or down to) and including Saint Jimmy*, would not lie under oath...
I actually think that Clinton's lawyers had it right...you should not be able to proceed in a lawsuit against a sitting president. At least, not unless you can show some ongoing damage.
The sitting president being involved with the court system is just asking for fail, especially if Congress can then impeach him for things that happen in that system. The constitution *tries* to stop that, but, through what I suspect was an oversight, failed to consider the civil courts.
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Erm, two seconds of googling "narcissistic loony toon" produced the quite obvious fact that Hillary said that in private, and it just now came out.
That's evidence of a woman badmouthing someone who had sex with her husband, to a friend.
This is not evidence of her participating any sort of concentrated public attack to discredit Lewinsky, which is what other people here are asserting.
And I have no idea how 'slut shaming' enters into it at all. Not a single word of that has anything to do with sex. It is, perhaps, using ableist language toward mental illness, but it was the 1990s, so perhaps we could cut her some slack for not seeing the future.
And I don't understand how the Flowers quote is even supposed to be insulting to anyone.
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The liability occurs when the person/people who know that a complaint has been or should be filed do not investigate and take corrective action.
Erm, as has been pointed out in this very thread, Lewinsky did not make any sexual harassment claim. At all.
If Bill Clinton, or someone else, had acted as he did in response to such a claim, yes, that obviously would be part of the sexual harassment suit. That would be retaliation. However, nothing Clinton did can be construed to be retaliation to Lewinsky's claims of sexual harassment, because, duh, she made no such claims.
It's like you're actually living in bizarro world or something, where Lewinsky was attempting to sue Clinton for sexual harassment, or filed some sort of EOCC complaint against him. She wasn't. That is not the actual event that happened.
What happened is she was called as a witness in a lawsuit by a different person, a lawsuit she didn't wish to testify in in the first place. And there's very little evidence that Clinton did suborn perjury. It appears they basically conspired together to commit matching perjury, as neither wanted the truth to come out.
Even if Clinton had outright asked her to lie, asking someone to lie under oath does not magically turn into sexual harassment because earlier the asker had sex with that person.
Now, as for 2, you want to assert that moving her elsewhere was sexual harassment, as it was due to the relationship, I'm not entirely sure of that, as we don't know the actual story there. (Maybe she just wanted to be in the Pentagon.) But, yes, I don't dispute it...that *could* be part of some hypothetical case of sexual harassment if Lewinsky had wanted to assert sexual harassment...which, again, she didn't, and doesn't.
But claims 3 and 4 are still nonsense. 3 and 4 were an attempt to derail an unrelated civil trial, and had nothing to do with any hypothetical harassment committed against Lewinsky. You could replace the oral sex with 'Bill Clinton leaves a video of time he sexually harassed other women in the VCR and she watches it' and the story would play out the same....he still needs her not to testify, and he still needs her testimony to not be believed.
Again, possibly criminal. (Although in my mind, we sorta already settled the issue of Clinton committing perjury, and that's really just an aspect of it. He did it, he was punished for it more than most people are, and it's over.) And any slander is possibly a civil tort, and certainly shouldn't be allowed by a president.
It's just not sexual harassment.
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Okay, as one of the actual reasonable people, zic, can you actually point me *to* some documentation of this 'slut shaming' on the part of Hillary?
Because I don't remember any such a thing happening, and everyone keeps *talking* about it, but I have yet to see a single quote from Hillary, at all.
I asked this in the last article, and didn't get an answer.
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I didn't say it was acceptable.
I said it wasn't SEXUAL HARASSMENT.
Not all unacceptable workplace behaviors are sexual harassment.
There is an actual fucking legal definition of 'sexual harassment', and I assure you it doesn't include 'attempt to suborn perjury'. That's an entirely different crime. (Assuming such a thing happened.)
And, as I pointed out, by the time your point 3 supposedly happened, and when 4 happened, Lewinsky didn't work for the government anymore.
So if Clinton had wandered over to the government's hypothetical HR department and said 'Hey, I'm going to get someone whose testifying in a civil suit against me, who does not work for the government, to see if I can get her to lie. If I can't, I will smear her.', the hypothetical HR department would have responded with 'Uh, why are you asking us about that?'
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3. Attempting to coerce same employee from testifying at the hearing of a separate sexual harassment based partially on what might come out about her own indiscretions is absolutely, positively, 100% sexual harassment.
4. Being caught attempting to “smear” that same employee — both in the workplace and in public — in an attempt to discredit their testimony about all the above is what we you might refer to as a “it ain’t never gonna get to trial, because the insurance company is gonna settle out for a whole lotta money to make sure it don’t” case of sexual harassment.
This is so impossibly incorrect I'm not even sure you're living in the same universe as us.
Attempting to coerce people not to testify, and to smear them when they do testify, is wrong, and the first is almost certainly illegal, and the later might be, depending.
But those actions aren't sexual harassment. Random crimes and/or unethical behavior committed to cover up sexual harassment are not magically sexual harassment. The crime of sexual harassment isn't contagious.
Jesus Christ, words have actual meanings. Crimes have actual definitions. An act completely unrelated to sex at the time that the victim was no longer working for the party is pretty much not sexual harassment in any conceivable way.
(Incidentally, I'm not sure we have any evidence that #3 actually happened, Lewinsky was rather unwilling to testify entirely of her own volition, and would hardly need to be coerced. But that's irrelevant to the fact that while any hypothetical coercion might be a crime, that crime is not 'sexual harassment'.)
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