471–480 of 578 posts
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I wonder if western culture has similiar quirks that we don't even realise.
“How are you?” “Good” Tons of people have this exchange out of politeness. The person asking “How are you?” doesn’t really want to know details. The person answering is expected to be brief and positive. It’s only among friends that the same question is expected to get an honest and detailed answer.
This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involv…
"We were only following orders" suddenly feels even more scary when they come from a computer and not a human.
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Maybe next time just try out things at first? i.e. rent, move the family into the rented home after 2-3 months without selling the original house for some time.
Sure, but the GP wasn't asking for life advice.
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He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all." Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being…
> a bit of paperwork I suspect this is the difference. If this company is incapable of not firing someone, I imagine their appeals process could be equally miserable. Sure, maybe the manager and director want to repay him, but actually releasing funds to pay someone who "wasn't employed" is going involve a lengthy battle with some HR/Accounting computer system that just wants its invariants not to vary. Depending on…
“Made available? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the appeals department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the forms, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did. They were made available in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
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If you cancel the insurance effective from next month, you have coverage until the cancellation date.
Exactly. If you resign before your insurance coverage monthly renewal is effective, you don't get your insurance renewed. All of this is what "effective" means.
As I understand it, it goes like this:
1) Employee gets promotion, effective in the future (at #3)
2) Employee resigns, to be effective after promotion (at #4)
3) Promotion is to be effective at this date
4) Resignation is to be effective at this date
I understand the surprise.
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This has been a real problem with facial recognition. Faces used to train engines are typically Caucasian, so the ability to distinguish other ethnicities is quite sub-par. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-u...
Isn't there a problem with shadow contrast which makes features more difficult to pick out on darker skinned faces? I vaguely recall an East Asian developer giving that reason for why he developed on Western data-sets.
I read it and still don't really understand why there was no one administrating the system. Who could have stopped the system (with the appropriate emails to cover their ass). I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled. The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence. >I also do not understand why a…
No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]
The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!
Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.
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One of my favorite parts: -- Before the Law A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper…
That was a very interesting piece of text I've never heard of, although I know Kafka. Thank you!
I had a similar experience but in reverse. About six months ago I left my long-time enterprise-y employer for a startup in another city. So we sold our house, packed up the family, bought a new house and moved in. After 3 months it became obvious I had made a terrible mistake, so we sold the new house, packed up the family again, and bought another new house in the same city we had just left 3 months ago so I could r…