531–540 of 578 posts
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As a Finn I typically answer what I really feel at that moment. It creates funny situations, but in general I think if you ask me a question I should give a truthful answer. Why would you ask if you don't want to know...
It's a quirk in English. "How are you?", "How's it going?", etc. are often greetings, not serious questions.
—“How do you do?”
tipping of hats ensues
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If you ship a product because it only works for white people and that's good enough, that is definitely racism. Just as it would be sexism if you shipped a voice recognition product that only worked for men. Laziness and racism aren't mutually exclusive. Historically in America, white people haven't considered black people as fully human. You can read the various declarations of secession or the 3/5ths compromise for…
I think it's important to start talking about, and acknowledging, that nearly every second of the average person's life is thinking about something that is within their own universe of their life's experiences. So plausibly, this really was an innocent and understandable mistake. Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. I understand what they did is te…
> Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white.
This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism.
People in that condition have a choice: they can either overcome their upbringing or they can continue to support white supremacy. If they do the latter, well, then they've made a choice. You can accept that if you want. I don't.
I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one. In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk. I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area. When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not bee…
> perhaps it's best to have people on-site manually approve any destructive steps. Or, almost certainly cheaper, manually deal with the 1 in 10,000 case like yours. In this case, a simple notes field in the request system would perhaps have sufficed. Perhaps there is/was, and it wasn't filled out because it wasn't recognized as being some manner of exceptional request. Perhaps if there was manual approval, removal of…
If my research notebooks actually ended up in the trash, the loss of productivity would have certainly not been cheaper compared to implementing a simple checkmark requiring the approval of the manager of the person whose desk was cleaned out.
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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.
Maybe we disagree on the sequence? 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 In my understanding, the employee's resignation is to be effective after the promotion it to be effective, so that the they would res…
I had interpreted that as being resignation effective before the promotion. But I was probably wrong.
> I missed 3 weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine. Why has this company not made their loyal worker whole? He stayed there when they needed him even when their system was trying to lock him out. They need to fix this. If they don't, they are not a company anyone should work for. Perhaps the worker did not want to risk making a big stink, but a manager should have taken the initiative. Humans were involv…
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Every time I watch it I'm laughing my ass off. It's definitely not serious, or even satirical. Most sci-fi has the problem of trying to model a situation with limited social scope. The fact that they never turn out true is because society has social safeguards to prevent it from happening that the writers don't model. 1984 is also a comedy.
We call it a comedy when it _intends_ to make people laugh. Just because _you_ laugh about it, doesn't mean that it also intends this. I know you could now say that they actually intend it. But I doubt that. (X)
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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…
> He was fired. 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 a…
It does seem like there are two ways of looking at it.
As I read the article, the employee's manager needed to renew his contract, which he failed to do. And this is a literal quote by OP from the article:
"When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me."
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This is a completely different scenario to the one described above. You yourself are potentially breaking the law (if the boom gate is damaged, assisting in potential theft of services rendered, etc) to prevent your car being stuck in the parking lot (which very likely has a clause in the conditions of entry, so may not be illegal). The two key points are that you are committing the crime yourself, not asking somebod…
We don't have a suing culture so much here so I don't think that is relevant. Also, I feel that medical personnel should minimize suffering to the best of their ability, they don't take an oath swearing to fully emulate an emotionless robot.
Not sure how suing is related to the comment you replied to. If a chemist hands out drugs to people without prescriptions and they get caught, they will lose their licence, be barred for life, lose their store, get a massive fine, and in some cases serve jail time. Nothing to do with suing.
[0] Relative to medical emergencies.
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…
I recommend reading the RISKS Digest. It has been a forum for this stuff for many years. * http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/