As futile as online arguments.
As dated as Usenet.
As productive as blogging.
"State of California, the governor has declared a state of emergency..."
Don't read too much into that. He also declared a state of emergency some years back when a highway overpass in the SF Bay area burned down. The declaration allowed the gov't to bypass a lot of the usual procedural checks in getting the replacement built. The present act may be similarly tactical.
"The #1 public health measure the authorities can take is close the schools."
Is closing the schools dramatically more effective than closing work-places or malls?
No-reply rejections are annoying in another context too: job hunting. That's one of the bits I am determined to change once I get high enough to be hiring people; every applicant get a reply, even if it's just a cut-and-paste rejection.
Perhaps the author was inspired by the Song of Songs.
That first part reminds me of the opening of Rawhide, "Rollin' rollin' rollin'."
Graydon@66: "The core problem with the CIA is that they recruit from what used to be called the landed class and as such reflexively side with the landlords."
I don't think that's true any more. These days, the CIA seems to prefer well-educated people from with uncomplicated backgrounds. If the writer is right, the CIA is, if anything, too middle class.
The fun bit about the Elijah-and-the-bears story is how specific it is. How many youths? 42. What kind of bears? Female ones. Where? In Bethel.
Perhaps the Bible in those days had an irate editor who demanded to know the details.
Ken@8, I read the bit about questioning by-line decisions as, "We're utterly fed up with bitching about this issue and don't want to hear any more about it. Got a problem? Work elsewhere."
It makes sense to me that an employer might want to cultivate an atmosphere of serious professionalism, and would as part of it insist on traditional attire.
What doesn't make sense is that the dress code makes a big deal about the distinction between suits, on the one hand, and sport-coat-and-slacks outfits on the other. Both of these fall squarely in the jacket-and-tie category of office monkey suits. Presenting sport coats as a more casual option, permissible on Sundays, is at least a generation out of date.
I strongly advise you to reconsider the blanket prohibition on "penis" and "vagina". These are the formal, even clinical, terms for these body parts. Someone may quite legitimately want to discuss medical procedures, say, and should not have to resort to maiden-aunt terms like "manhood" or "flower" to do so.
I do not poet. But I verb in prose.
Marilee@50: "I was taught to drop what I'm holding, no matter how important..."
That's an important bit, I think. An acquaintance of mine slipped on ice and tried to protect the laptop he was carrying. He ended up breaking his shoulder socket in an interesting way. Six months of first-class medical care later he still couldn't raise that arm above the shoulder, and won't ever fully recover.
R.M. Koske@31: The device used to make people fall was a thin rug on a powerful motorized roller. When activated, it literally pulled the rug out from under the test subject. They ran their tests with a padded floor under the rug.
To catch people unawares, I suspect they just activated the machine while telling folks they were still setting up the cameras and whatnot. "OK, please stand in that spot over here. It will take me a few minutes to set up the cameras, and verify the motion-capture equipment is registering all the reference points. Please raise your right arm. Good. And the left. Good. Now turn around." WHAM!
@27, Daily Planet (a Canadian science show) had a segment about researchers trying to prevent broken hips in the elderly resulting from sudden falls. One idea they tested was teaching them Judo breakfalls. So they brought in a bunch of judokas and subjected them to unprepared falls. It turned out not one of them was able to use his training when he wasn't expecting trouble, even after years of training. Our response to falling is hardwired *deep*.
Fragano@17: I'm not asking you to mourn Helms's death, but rather to refrain from heckling while others do so. Once he's good and buried you're welcome to dance on his grave for all I care. I'd be hard pressed to find a kind word for him myself.
@14, Yes, when discussing the newly dead, people tend to focus on the positive if at all possible. But if you'd prefer to strike off the fetters of civility, you may be interested in the commentary of Christopher Hitchens.
I don't think I'll join you. There's a time for Hitchens's forthright condemmnation and our host's cheap snark; but this isn't it.
In my experience corporate IT stuff is old and quirky for two reasons. First, often it was built inhouse long before similar products was openly available. It's been surpassed in most respects by standard commercial products now, but because it has been carefully adapted to the business processes of the company, it's kept going. Second, like your car or your furniture the hardware and software were bought a while back -- perhaps as much as a decade ago. Of course it isn't as spiffy as the stuff in the showrooms right now, but neither is what you have in your living-room. Is there some reason to expect your office to be any different?
You're blaming libertarians for this? When these people were brought in under INS visas? I think you'll find that libertarians are in no way fans of that odious engorged bureaucracy.
Actual libertarians would favor one of two approaches to labor imports. On the one hand, I could see them wanting to let in anyone who can find work, and who isn't likely to cause trouble. (Not that there aren't problems with that, mind you.) On the other hand, they might notice that picking and choosing foreigners to let in would require a bureaucracy of some kind, and a government one at that. And since keeping government small is a priority, libs would favor having very simple admission rules and probably letting in very few foreign workers. But either way, the system that caused these problems little resembles what the libs are looking for, and I don't see much point in blaming them for it.
As for unions, I doubt a union would have helped these people. As foreigners who are here only temporarily and can be tossed out for essentially any reason, they have little leverage over anyone. Certainly not over the government or their employers, and probably not over anyone charged with looking after them either. More than likely, the union would have turned into yet another fee-taking layer, delivering nothing useful but keeping the goons in bling.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 6 |
| 2008 | 17 |
Total: 23 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Johan Larson:
Show all comments by Johan Larson.