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Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

arstechnica.com

81–90 of 297 posts

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to disappoint

No reason for disappointment, but you likely won't be invited back.

Um, this is highly region dependent. If it were a hot day, I would be comfortable interviewing with a CEO in nice shorts and a clean t-shirt, and fully expect that they'd dress similarly.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is like my great grandpa scolding us at the dinner table for laughing and talking It's more like a non-familial, formal dinner setting. Think about a job interview where the CEO and interviewer take you and another interviewee to dinner in a fancy restaurant. You turn up in jeans and sneakers with your buddy and you laugh and crack jokes together, the other interviewee turns up in smart clothes and talks soberly. I…

I would say that job interview in the fancy restaurant is the first "unprofessional" step in this chain. The place to conduct serious interviews is called the office.

For higher tier jobs, the setting can be wherever looks good. I've met and been hired by CTOs at a local coffee shop and an Indian buffet. Nothing about a meeting room in an office is more conducive to an interview than a shaded patio with a nice chai.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#83
post #7

I get why furries are called that — they’re into human-animal caricatures with fur. What do you call someone who likes dragons? Scalies?

Fun fact: there are also "therians", which are people who truly believe they are part/all animal.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#85

Also, sometimes we (developers) like to use wacky data for testing purposes. For example, I like to put Batman as a dummy user, and my QA likes to upload cat pictures when testing uploads/images. We do it so it's obvious it's test data, and also we're lazy to think of more "real" data. Just say some users expect real(ish) data for testing. I had a client who was totally not happy when he saw Batman and Superman in th…

For example, I like to put Batman as a dummy user I can't remember the details, but I've heard a story multiple times about a fake-sounding name being used in testing -- I think US military payroll? -- and causing problems when a real person had that name. Can anyone here remember this? In any case, "batman" is just about plausible enough that it could be real. I tend to use names like "Mr. Testy Testalicious" which…

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, famously had issues with IT systems:

  Tim: There’re so many places we could start, but in the process of doing homework for this, I found mentioned, and I wanted to do a fact check on this, of you having plane tickets automatically cancelled, and other issues related to your last name. Is that accurate? Did those things actually happen?

  Caterina Fake: This has happened to me many times, in fact. And I discovered that it was actually the systems at KLM and Northwest that would throw my ticket out, my last name being “Fake.” And I have missed flights and have spent way too many hours with customer service trying to fix this problem. Here’s another thing too, is that I was unable for the first two years of Facebook to make an account there also. And probably  all of my relatives.
https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#86
post #26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers are held to different standards of professional conduct than defendants. This also makes it much harder to read.

I see what you are saying about there being different standards. I would follow up with, if the shoe was on the other foot, do you believe that a lawyer with tattoos and or purple hair should be allowed to practice? We may never agree? But I think that we should be more tolerant of individuality than prejudice.

> I would follow up with, if the shoe was on the other foot, do you believe that a lawyer with tattoos and or purple hair should be allowed to practice?

Yes, they should be allowed to practice, because a lawyer’s tattoos and purple hair do not have anything to do with court documents and readability of those. Exceptions obviously apply, as not all tattoos are created equal, and having a visible gang-affiliation tattoo or a tattoo saying “cop killer” (which actually happened, but to a defendant) might be problematic as a lawyer.

Here is an analogy that might help: my employer might not care if someone communicates in offtopic employee chats using gifs and emojis, but I can easily see an employee getting fired for doing the same thing either to an external customer or in cross-org sev 0 incident threads.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#87
post #67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the idea that one should be excluded from doing a type of work because of something arbitrary like hair color or skin markings.

If you were facing the death penalty would you pick a lawyer with purple hair and face tattoos to defend you?

I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I wouldn't select based such traits.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#88

- "The whole story would be far more humorous were it not from a case in which Perrone represented a woman who claims that she nearly died after being incarcerated and not given proper medical care. Perrone must now refile his complaint in that case—without the cartoon dragon." That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world. It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any c…

The world has gone from substance to optics. You see it in every industry or field.

And somehow along the way every institution seems to have forgotten the meaning of the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety".

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#89
post #58
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the way the bar associations are currently constructed as state-sanctioned monopolies. Since they're technically the ones who determine who is "allowed to practice", that's a hard question to answer. I'd be comfortable establishing a stronger dress code for courtrooms - wear business casual or some such - but dyed hair and tattoos aren't easily fixable mistakes if you get called to court, so they have…

I don't like the idea that one should be excluded from doing a type of work because of something arbitrary like hair color or skin markings.

Except those are choices they made knowing full well the consequences. Here's what people miss: the fact that it's a social norm is reason to care, not reason to ignore it.

If you were a brilliant lawyer strongly committed to your craft, you would not get tattoos or dye your hair purple. The reason is simple: too many people would see it and think less of you. As such, it makes you less able to effectively defend your clients. When your job involves appealing to society on behalf of someone, you do not make a middle finger to that same society an immutable part of your appearance unless you are very thoughtless, also not a characteristic I want in a attorney.

There's also the fact that law, more than most disciplines, is premised on adherence to old, old forms of tradition and ritual. In britain they still wear powdered wigs, for goodness' sake. The law still uses Latin terms though it's decades to centuries since educated men learned it in school. Our legal tradition in America is old, with Common Law in some ways tracing back to William the Conqueror. The other major legal tradition on which I've read, Justinian's Codex and its evolution into the Napoleonic Code, dates back to the 500s AD. Discarding old customs, even if you think them outmoded, trampling social niceties because you find them outmoded, is a really bad sign for a capable attorney.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#90

Also, sometimes we (developers) like to use wacky data for testing purposes. For example, I like to put Batman as a dummy user, and my QA likes to upload cat pictures when testing uploads/images. We do it so it's obvious it's test data, and also we're lazy to think of more "real" data. Just say some users expect real(ish) data for testing. I had a client who was totally not happy when he saw Batman and Superman in th…

For example, I like to put Batman as a dummy user I can't remember the details, but I've heard a story multiple times about a fake-sounding name being used in testing -- I think US military payroll? -- and causing problems when a real person had that name. Can anyone here remember this? In any case, "batman" is just about plausible enough that it could be real. I tend to use names like "Mr. Testy Testalicious" which…

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