When I moved to Canada, at age 16-17 I initially failed a lot of job applications at places like Staples, Future Shop, Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc. For some reason, many of them had a type of "Corporate Personality Test" on their application, and asked the same "Have you ever considered stealing from your employer?" to which I would cheerfully answer "Yes". Apparently this was an automatic deal-breaker; there was no f…
I would think that you have been using the word "considered" rather lightly. To me, it means careful thought and deliberation, not just "the thought crossed my mind at some point".
In this context, I think “considered,” here, is best understood as:
“Have I deliberated over whether or not to do this?”
Not:
“Have I thought, in the abstract, about how I might do this, or what it might be like?”
https://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html Other poster posted the same link but is getting downvoted so might get overlooked.
By way of context, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia would not be settled until 1967. (but note also that these "race" questions were all over US forms well into the 1980s. By my time, however, it appears that "mongrel" answers were being routinely coded as "Decline To State") Lagniappe: anyone curious about actual Caucasian phenotypes can find them on Youtube, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQa…
Virginia still required you to answer a race question to get a marriage license until 2019[1]. "Decline to Answer" wasn't an option, though in some counties "Octoroon" (meaning 7/8 white, 1/8 black), "Mulato" and "Aryan" were options[2].
When I moved to Canada, at age 16-17 I initially failed a lot of job applications at places like Staples, Future Shop, Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc. For some reason, many of them had a type of "Corporate Personality Test" on their application, and asked the same "Have you ever considered stealing from your employer?" to which I would cheerfully answer "Yes". Apparently this was an automatic deal-breaker; there was no f…
In a similar vein... while driving down the road, have you ever "considered" just pulling into the opposing lane? I'd never ever do that, but I've considered others driving into my lane, which leads me to consider myself doing that to their lane. Lots of other similar "I'd never do that" situations I've definitely considered. I admire your honesty though. 99% of people would lie.
"Uh-uh-uh - Turning the car into oncoming traffic ... is counter productive!" has been a Jim Carrey tag-line for decades: https://youtu.be/4YnslaUd4VY
Yes and No. I have "Considered" stealing from my employer several times. When I was 15 I was a refugee and worked in a Radio-Shack-like store in Croatia. We built PCs in back and sold them in the front. The front and back were separated by a curtain, and highest value items (ram sticks) happened to be stashed on the shelf on the side of the entrance. I realized it would take literally 5 seconds for a customer to reac…
Yup. "Considered" is certainly ambiguous enough to be a failure in the context of a job application. When I was working at IBM, a my manager introduced me in passing to one of his peers who was getting a huge promotion, about three levels up. Why such an unusual promotion? He'd noticed a way that 4 people could conspire to exfiltrate $25 million on a Friday and be in some non-extradition country before it was noticed…
> but this is an absolute fail on the job application, unless the goal is to filter out intelligent people who have naturally curious minds.
Not sure why you think this is a crazy goal for a retail job. If you can't figure out that you should say "no" to the stealing question, no matter what the truth is, then you're probably not a good fit to work retail.
In fact, I'd bet that most of the "yes" answers to this question are people who are curious but have poor social understanding. I imagine that someone who really would steal is also dishonest enough to lie on the question.
He wasn't investigated by the FBI. The FBI was investigating a hypothetical Japanese spy; since he wasn't a Japanese spy, any follow-up that led to him was merely incidental. If the FBI investigates a spy seen driving a silver Honda Civic with license plate ABC-1234, and looks into an unrelated civilian who drives a silver Honda Civic with license plate ADC-1234 in case their witness misremembered the license place,…
I don't buy it. The FBI found his code sheet that he made, and tracked him down, and asked people about him. This is an investigation, and it's about him. The fact that they thought he was a Japanese spy simply means that they made the wrong assumption about the person they were investigating .
The investigation was about the document, not the person. If, after they had met with the guy, they started interviewing family, friends, and digging into his life - THAT would constitute an affirmative answer to the question.
Sadly, the moral of the story seems to be that the 1943 FBI had loads of zealous (performative?) plods on staff, but ~zero law enforcement professionals. In '43, the US had plenty of highly competent professional cryptographers, who were quite experienced with current Japanese, German, Italian, British, etc. codes. Before an entire local FBI office spent even a day on this case (let alone 6 weeks), maybe they should…
I don't understand your point here. He lost the cypher itself, not an encrypted message. So the code breakers would have said: yep, that's a cypher alright, it can be used for anything by anyone.
Being at war, you want to make sure it's not an enemy using the code.
He wasn't investigated by the FBI. The FBI was investigating a hypothetical Japanese spy; since he wasn't a Japanese spy, any follow-up that led to him was merely incidental. If the FBI investigates a spy seen driving a silver Honda Civic with license plate ABC-1234, and looks into an unrelated civilian who drives a silver Honda Civic with license plate ADC-1234 in case their witness misremembered the license place,…
I don't buy it. The FBI found his code sheet that he made, and tracked him down, and asked people about him. This is an investigation, and it's about him. The fact that they thought he was a Japanese spy simply means that they made the wrong assumption about the person they were investigating .
Ah, the "are you a terrorist" section of the U.S. visa application is hilarious. I was honestly laughing out loud at some of the questions, imagining a sincere terrorist having their plan foiled by their strict moral code which requires them to lay out in detail their plan to topple the government :)
The UK visa application has the same questions pretty much identical. Also made me laugh!
Hm. I had multiple UK visas (but only visited once lol) and I don't remember that. Granted, all of those visas were applied for with assistance from the job I had at the time. The entry form was also much more boring.
When I moved to Canada, at age 16-17 I initially failed a lot of job applications at places like Staples, Future Shop, Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc. For some reason, many of them had a type of "Corporate Personality Test" on their application, and asked the same "Have you ever considered stealing from your employer?" to which I would cheerfully answer "Yes". Apparently this was an automatic deal-breaker; there was no f…
> My mind never stops and there's virtually nothing in the world I have not "considered" One piece of advice my mom gave me which I always follow is: don't tell them (a company/job/boss) anything that could be used against you. There's no need to be truthful here, this isn't a consultation with your doctor. So lie, tell them you're healthy, you never had any problems with anyone ever, never admit to anything. Truth i…
For those of you who are like I used to be and are just honest in an unfiltered way that sometimes caused you trouble: don’t think of it as lying, think of it as keeping secrets. You can also view it as maintaining a personal boundary, which is not something people of my generation were brought up with. We all keep secrets to some extent: shameful memories we do not readily recount; job confidentiality; things we only share with our doctor or therapist. Just be like that more, it’s okay to be a bit of a mystery to others, and you can do this while still divulging a ton of stuff about yourself. Lying just feels stupid and wrong. Pretend you are a spy in this life, and you can consciously choose what face to present to anyone.
"Lady, this case has cost the government thousands of dollars. It has been the top priority in our office for the last six weeks. We traced the glasses to your son from the prescription by examining the files of nearly every optometrist in San Diego." It apparently didn't occur to them that if I were a real Japanese spy, I might have brought the glasses with me from headquarters. First of all, absolutely hilarious -…
What makes you think that type of thing is old school? This kind of brute forcing is still very much in use [1], but usually we are better at having computers do a lot of the filtering these days. [1] - https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/white-sedan-police-found...
Just the other day Italian police announced they found some old mafia boss who was hiding for 30 years because they got a tip he was sick, so they scoured the national health records for clinics treating someone around the right age with the same conditions.