Eh, publicly shaming doesn't work without considerable and undeniable proof. It will just backfire into internet rage and dossing ala dongle gate. If there is real harassment best just make it hurt through state harassment arbitration. When they get tired of paying through the nose for all the stupid insensitive things naive and oblivious coworkers are bandying about, maybe they'll get serious.
Start writing things down and then contact a local equal opportunity office and start the process. It will not be cheap for them. If people keep doing this they'll change their ways.
Going public on Twitter or Hacker News though hasn't done much other than bring out nasty and unproductive fights between Social Justice Warriors and Men's Rights fanatics. They make everyone look bad and we all walk away feeling like maybe we've lost faith in humanity when in reality a serious problem just stems from mostly unintentional, but hurtful ignorance.
This is exactly what I don't understand. If I was being harassed to the point that I was considering quitting my job, I would simply gather all the evidence I could (she mentions emails, I would also carry a voice recorder) and hire an attorney. I wouldn't tweet about it, I wouldn't write a blog post about it or give a talk about it. None of those things are going to fix the problem. File the lawsuit and let the facts speak for themselves.
That's not how it works, at least not in California. That is if you use the equal employment opportunity system. You go through arbitration first. The two sides have to meet and negotiate an outcome, someone is there to help the process. Likely it will be settled there with money exchanged unless there was never any enough evidence for it to go to arbitration. Once there is arbitration, both sides have to compromise. If this fails, then you can file a law suit. The arbitration will be part of that I imagine, but I've never seen how the process works after arbitration. I think usually fixing it in arbitration is the norm.
You don't still have to work at that place to file the grievance. So this individual can still do that. I think if you've gone public with your accusation you are less likely to have success at arbitration because I would think at least.
The amount of money I've seen exchanged is usually a few months salary. You have to come in with a big number though, because you will be pressured to bring it down.
Eh, if someone is being a problem and is creating negativity, as manager you should be able to pick up on it. It shouldn't be that hard, that's most of your job as a manager is to be able to read the people that work for you and evaluate them. You don't need proof of passive aggressive behavior to fire anyone. Just fire them and wish them the best on their next venture.
Right, but your trivializing the problem. Only a clown "inserts negativity", because inserting <ambiguity> equally if nor moreso effective at undermining your authority as a manager.
Firing someone for <creating> "an ambiguous situation" might in fact be the simple, correct action.
But if you fired someone evertime you were just <in> an ambiguous situation? Not so much. Good luck with that, because your boss might probably fire you next=D.
Its also why you'll find a "good leader" is never surrounded by this crap. If you think about the "broken windows" theory of policing, where low-level crime creates an atmoshere conducive to "real crime", there is probably a decent analogy. Good leaders are adept at working through <uncertainty>, but distinguish this from <ambiguity> for this reason. IMHO.
Buy a huge percentage of existing bitcoins and then sell each bitcoin for cheaper than you bought it for and cheaper than your previous sale. Given the entire currency is worth in the billions, nobody would do this, and there's nothing to gain from doing it.
Deleting an account from Quora, including deleting all your contributions, is not easy. It requires sending an email and waiting for them to run some script which can take a long time. So unless Quora changed this, which I doubt, that page needs to be updated.
I work at Quora. A few things:
1) I agree the statement on this page is not accurate, emailing is certainly not as easy as other products.
2) We are committed to people who use, or have used, Quora. Our turnaround time for deleting accounts has improved greatly in the past year and should be within about 48 hours (excluding weekends, I mean, seriously.)
3) We've considered a one-click solution and may one day provide that. For now, we use the email solution because it avoids accidental deletion (I understand the skepticism here, but believe it or not, many people who have sent explicit delete requests in by email have later asked to have their account restored – we can't restore a deleted account, because, you know, deleted.) Offering a one click deletion from a settings page opens up a lot of confusion for people who assume that delete is some sort of soft "goodbye" with the chance to return later. Our soft delete is called "deactivation" which should de-index your content from Google, hide your name and halt all email and notifications from Quora to you. This is effective for a lot of people, but if you want your content straight up deleted, please email privacy@quora.com, and we will take care of it.
Thank you, but just FYI, Quora sucks and you should find a new place to work.
It's a shitty crowd sourced product that gives nothing back to the crowd. The deletion policy sucks. The inability to delete your own content (without deleting your account) sucks. The way Quora forces people to login to see content sucks. Forcing people to use real names sucks. The user interface, which at this point looks pretty dated, sucks. The product sucks. You can't get answers to questions which sucks. People with lots of followers get all the upvotes, which sucks. Emphasising the social login buttons at every turn and hiding the email login sucks. The community (never as impressive as people made it out to be because one time many years ago the former CEO of AOL answered something) sucks. The admonishment to be ready to dedicate your life (haha!) to Quora on the jobs page sucks big fucking time. By the way how's that working out for you? Worth it? Probably not. Getting a ton of VC money because Quora's founder had some friends at Facebook and then building a piece of shit? Also pretty sucky.
Can you tell I don't like Quora? My only interaction with Quora has been through its product. I haven't had a Quora account in over a year and I still foam at the mouth at the thought of this site. There's a reason I wanted to delete my account. It's a sinister and manipulative product that connives value (user contributions) out of people and returns walls for the favor. I had quite a bit of content on Quora. I think I got overcharged like $40 by some scammy website in the last year and I am already over that, but I never got scammed for money from Quora but I still cringe at the site in a way that's entirely unique and singular. Quora sucks.
You sound very passionate about Quora, actually, but a lot of what you've stated here isn't true, or is no longer true, I'm happy to respond to each thing, but your position sounds pretty ideological, that is, I don't think there's anything I can say that will make you stop foaming at the mouth over Quora, which is too bad.
I said a lot, not everything, you've chosen three, I'm happy to respond:
A full name is required to add content to Quora, if you just want to browse, you aren't stopped from doing that with a different/fake name, just ask https://www.quora.com/John-Smith-3000?share=1
We ask people to log in to see content, but it's not required, you can add ?share=1 to the end of any Quora URL to see the content. We also don't require login to view posts. More about that here: https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better
Questions aren't "yours" answers and posts are though. Questions are a collaborative resource, so not unlike an entire Wikipedia page, you can't delete it as an individual, though if there are no answers to the question, you can delete it within a particular window of activity. If you go anonymous on the question your name won't be associated with it, same thing if you delete your account. More on question ownership here: https://www.quora.com/Quora-Policies-and-Guidelines/What-is-...
I respect that you clearly feel that Quora should work differently than it does, and that's fine, we've continued to make changes and improvements, some which people like, some which people don't, but the goal is to create a great resource for people, if you think it's not a great resource and it's useless to you, we'll keep trying to improve, though that may never align with what your expectations are.
I requested removal from Quora last week. 27 hours later someone from user operations emailed me confirming it was done. Perhaps they did improve the process recently.
It irked me that when I deactivated my account, it wasn't immediately obvious that it hadn't been deleted. I only found that out when I saw the page was still live on Google.
I then contacted their customer service to find out why it hadn't been deleted. Their customer service team was responsive and helpful, and it was deleted within 24 hours.
We’ve deleted your account information from our end.
However, if you are already in a search engine like Google’s search index, they won’t know to drop you from it until they try to re-crawl your page, and unfortunately we don’t have any control over when that will happen. The best thing to do in the meantime is to directly request removal from Google itself here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals. Once you have submitted your request(s), you will need to wait for Google to reindex the pages — this often takes a few days.
Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.
Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.
I'm not sure how they (or anyone really) prove that they actually removed all information, other than running something like 'select name from users' and sending you the results so that you can see that your name isn't there.
If they send you all info that they have about you, that doesn't prove that account has been removed, it only proves that they have all your data.
Decades in jail? For what? I do not like the NSA's overcollection, but decades in jail ought to be reserved for violent types and people who you can easily demonstrate have ruined people's lives (through ponzi schemes and fraud).
The rule of law is government's fundamental contribution to civilization. It may not be sufficient, but it's definitely necessary. In context, it's sacred.
Most government employees, particularly members of the military, directors of agencies (Alexander is both), cabinet secretaries, judges, members of Congress and the President, take an oath of office. The first or second thing in the oath is usually an affirmation to protect and defend the Constitution. In the President's oath, it's one of only two things: do your best at being President, and protect and defend the Constitution.
I swore that oath when I joined the Navy. I was only in for six years, I've been out more than thirty years, but I still consider myself bound to that oath. I've long been disenchanted by my government, but I still hope for the Constitution's health and longevity. It may be "just a goddam piece of paper," but it symbolizes our commitment to each other.
I'm tired of watching the NSA and the rest of the government treat the Constitution as just a piece of scrap paper.
Yes, decades in jail are appropriate for fundamental crimes of such depth and sweep.
There's a lot of personal anecdote in your reply but little justification for why decades of jail are appropriate responses. It just seems like you think if you feel it intuitively that everyone else should just accept it. Sorry, I don't agree, and you're not very convincing.
"The rule of law is government's fundamental contribution to civilization."
"Most government employees, particularly members of the military, directors of agencies (Alexander is both), cabinet secretaries, judges, members of Congress and the President, take an oath of office."
Yes, most of my post was anecdotal. Those two points above are my case. I'm sorry it's not good enough.
It's not good enough because taking an oath and breaking it does not automatically equate to the horrors of imprisoning people for long, live changing lengths which is a pretty fucking horrible thing to do to individuals and their families. Especially not if they had good intentions. And not only that I don't agree with the first claim regarding "rules of law" and "civilization". It sounds like some historian's quote from the 19th century completely unaware of a century's worth work in the social sciences.
when is ignorance of the law ever an excuse for citizens?
yes officer I didn't know the speed limit.. does that work for you? or yes sir I didn't know you would object to fondling your ass! No harm no foul right?
At no point did I ever make any kind of argument about ignorance of the law. Do you see that in my post? Perhaps point it out, because you're reading something that isn't there.
Prove it. I mean, how are you going to prove this? Exactly. Which is why "good intentions" doesn't mean anything to anyone with sense in their head, especially not a legal court.
Counterfeiting laws in the US seem to be unreasonably harsh, the reasoning is, that it is such an insidious crime due to the fact it can undermine the fundamental trust in our economy and government. The NSA scandal has done at least one of those things.
> but decades in jail ought to be reserved for violent types and people who you can easily demonstrate have ruined people's lives (through ponzi schemes and fraud).
As a liberal who supports social justice, the social contract, and health care reform and the like, it feels really weird to find myself cheering Freedomworks and tea party types on when we agree on something.
From the outside, the way American politics divides people is strange. The psychology of republicans vs democrats, tpartiers vs big staters seems more like the supporters of a sports team.
When you support a sports team, if your player blatantly breaks the rules, you curse when he gets penalized. However badly they perform, you say they are unlucky and will win next season. When you watch a match with other fans, you feel like you are part of a clan, you feel a sense of belonging. Some people support terrible teams because they like that feeling, and they enjoy getting angry at the other team and its supporters. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they have riots, or at least a punch up.
I'm not saying America is unique, and the... sad cynicism you see in other countries is it's own evil. It's just a bit scary watching the fate of the world be decided like a bar room sports argument.
I guess this comment is a dumb generalization, but that debt ceiling thing really freaked me out.
> From the outside, the way American politics divides people is strange. The psychology of republicans vs democrats, tpartiers vs big staters seems more like the supporters of a sports team.
That's exactly what it's like, and the worst thing (in my opinion) is how it has spread to every facet of American life, so that arguments over factual information are seen the same way. The country as a whole is far more concerned with winning or losing than with the actual significance of the "field" on which their "team" is "playing."
Mind you, given how central sports is to American lifestyles[1], it's not like nobody could have seen this coming. But that doesn't reduce how dangerous it is.
[1] Walk into any American high school. Chances are, the walls are lined with football trophies, and the faculty's letterhead is plastered with logos for the resident teams. The social hierarchy of the students revolves around the star players. Outcasts are called "losers."
Your experiences with high schools are different than the ones I've encountered. The social hierarchies aren't oriented around the sports team, but rather the standard hierarchy with the wealthy at the top and the poor at the bottom.
Granted, there's some variation, and being athletically talented or aesthetically pleasing can move you up the hierarchy, but being poor and having both of those traits will only raise you as high as the ugliest, clumsiest, wealthy student.
In four years of high school, I could only ever name one basketball player and that was only because he was my debate partner is speech class. I never knew who the quarterback on the football team was, despite hearing of some impressive victories. I was far more aware of the less popular sports (e.g. track, tennis, gymnastics), precisely because the team members in those sports came from higher income families and thus had more popular athletes.
I'm not disagreeing with your point regarding wealth, but football is the most popular men's high school sport (by participation) in the country so your experiences aren't likely the norm. Also track, tennis and gymnastics are mostly individual sports so they're less likely to be the ones driving the same level of school-wide support and pride (logos on the masthead, trophies in the hall, etc).
Also HN readers might be unlikely to have had the average American high school experience.
While I agree with you, I think looking at this through the lens of only "hey look some irrational muggles" belies the fact that hackers do the EXACT SAME THING.
Web vs native? Vi vs emacs? Tabs vs spaces? PHP vs... everybody else? TDD vs anti-TDD? Git vs Mercurial?
I mean sure there are statistics and facts to back these views but there are also statistics and facts behind which sports team is the best or whether the debt ceiling is bad. There's no meaningful difference.
I guess my point is, the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter. Neither do the other things you list.
TDD vs Anti-TDD for a self driving car. That matters. The engineer that decides that based on an online argument is going to jail when someone dies.
Is mental illness real or should people just pull themselves together? Well we can banter about that, but if you are a psychologist deciding whether to release a patient from protective custody, you better follow evidence based best practice or you are in big trouble when they jump onto a freeway.
That last example is kinda important - when we talk about politics, it feels like it is just banter. Like we don't have to have nuanced, well formed opinions because who cares what we think anyway. We only have one tiny little vote right?
But democracy is driven by the average. And if the average views politics as the same as an internet flamewar (which is what you said right?) then democracy says that politics becomes an internet flamewar. And... well, what I'm saying is, oh look, it kinda has.
You know, poor Americans die about 20 years younger than average ones. I'm not saying that is your fault, and I'm not saying the solution is mandatory health insurance or glorious revolution. I'm just saying it's kinda fucked up. And I'm saying the real issues don't seem to get debated. Not really. Because... the public want a flamewar.
See, America needs to do something about it's debt levels. Probably. And the answer to that is probably years of slow deficit reductions, best done when the economy is growing (accepting it will take a chunk out of that growth). And America probably needs to do something about it's poor, because things are becoming less equal, and if you go for a walk around Mexico City late at night looking swag, you will find out that isn't a situation you want to have. But the solution to that is hard an slow and boring and probably involves scaling back this free trade thing a bit.
But the conversation about debt is either continue borrowing like crazy or massively scale back, both of which mean doom, so neither of which happen. The answer to the poor problem is too nuanced to be discussed, except in terms of rage against the rich or people on SSI depending on your team of choice.
I dunno, that was sort of my point. I think it tailed off toward the end...
> the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter
I have some news for you. The sports industry is something like $400bn. If the Lakers have a bad night or whatever, it matters.
You may not understand why moving players around a field matters, but it seems to me that this is roughly the same sort of ignorance that would be behind the view that pushing pixels around a screen "doesn't matter". The fact that X is a hundred billion dollar industry is primate facie evidence that it is important. You may not want it to matter but this is a different thing than determining whether or not it actually does.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that there is a certain sentiment of "silly other people, stop being bad!" that easily occurs in these conversations. The TDD debate sounds important for cars but .001% of engineers are working on the self-driving cars. Most software is mundane and these debates are 99.9% academic and are even had in the abstract without affecting any tangible software at all! In many ways, the hacker arguments are far more tribal and less practical than anything going on in sports or politics.
This is not particular to American society, you can see the same in France (where the left and right divide originated), the UK or any other country or indeed religion - people are tribal, and don't really care about details enough - the sense of belonging to a group and the rewards that brings trumps judging issues individually on their merits.
Oddly enough, I get a lot of flack from my friends for being an openly fair weather fan.
With politics, I support policies, not politicians. I understand the draw for rooting for the guy who 'thinks like you', or, if you find somebody who 'gets it', but the flip side of that is that it's hard to reconcile where they're wrong. A lot of people will actually conform their own beliefs to match the beliefs of a politician they like.
Polls of the NSA surveillance highlighted some of this; many Democrats who hated the PATRIOT Act under Bush didn't mind its abuses under Obama, and similarly, many Republicans who were okay with the law under Bush hated its uses by the Obama administration. Same law, same nonsense, and admittedly, Obama made at least a token effort to instate the FISA court, if only to give it the appearance of fairness.
With sports though, I'm exactly the same. I'm a Ravens fan, but if we don't make the playoffs, I'll pick another team that's convenient and start rooting for them. If we have a years' long streak of bad luck, like the Bills, or the Browns, I'll jump ship and root for a better team.
Yes, that makes me a 'traitor' to many 'real fans', but the counter is that I don't get anything out of being a fan other than some manufactured emotions. If it were Green Bay, and I owned shares, that'd be a little bit different, I suppose, but until and unless I get some kind of perk for a winning season (beyond the one I want most, which is to see my team make the playoffs), I just don't see the logic in being wed to them arbitrarily.
I've always found the US high school obsession with sports teams very fascinating. Growing up in Norway, I can say that I don't even know if my school had any sports teams. It is possible - some do - but to the extent they do it's usually something pretty much only those on the teams care about.
Well it's not really about party identification, at least for me. I think poverty and health services are basic rights a rich country can afford. It has nothing to do with who is for it or against it. It's the principle of it, and Freedom works and tea party types are very much on the complete opposite of it. The disagreement on these points are considerable. I am not likely to be convinced that not helping others out is not a matter of social justice and a requirement for participating in our society. Those on the other side seem about as likely to change as I am. I happen to agree with Freedomworks and the Tea party on NSA/and other social-liberty stuff like the war on drugs and not fighting in foreign countries, but that's pretty much the end of it.
You may believe that you have taken a principled stand on these issues, but unless your psychology is different from everyone else it's probable that your elevation of these specific issues, and the solutions you advocate, owes more to your social environment and the opinions which are considered acceptable within that milieu.
...more to my social environment than rational thought? Not sure what your point is or if you're just trying to blow up and discredit a view point with some pop-psychology/anthropology 101 that could apply to everything equally and thus be a completely meaningless statement.
You need to understand that the division in American politics is intentional. It's the entire intent of making a dual-party system: to make government less efficient. An efficient government structure with a centralized power base could quickly and easily transform into a tyranny, in theory a decentralized multi-branch dual-/multi- party government would require more time.
If you are saying the division is by original design, that is kind of awesome. Did one of the founders say anything about it in a speech? That would actually be pretty cool.
I guess what I object to is the black and whiteness of the discussion. About 20% of the US electorate are swing voters. That's a lot of people who would never vote republicrat, regardless of policy. They will vote Democrat after 2 terms of drone strikes, or Republican after the tea party nearly caused an econopocalypse. That is really sad.
It also means that only the swing voters count. And the only swing voters worth trying to persuade are the ones with simple priorities, i.e. the nutty ones. It's not very healthy.
It's at least a strong tradition, if not by design. But I believe it's actually by design. I wish I had time while at work to find a link for you, but I'll give it a shot when I get home in a few hours.
If you're a "liberal" in the sense of the classical tradition[1] you should have no problem whatsoever cheering on the tea-party types at times. In fact, it would be highly unusual if you didn't. Well, at least to the extent that the Tea Party had, at one time, a sort of vaguely libertarian bent to it, since classical liberal thought overlaps with libertarian thought in many regards.
But most people who call themselves "liberal" in this day and age aren't, and the term has all but lost any actual meaning. These days, the people calling themselves "liberal" probably ought to use "statist" or "authoritarian" to refer to themselves. shrug
OTOH, the Tea Party these days has become a weird sort of mishmash of populism, anti-incumbent thinking, paleo-convervatism, libertarian thought, and (God|Satan|Allah|Dionysus|Zoroaster|Zeus|Thor|FSM|$DEITY) knows what. I'm not sure the Tea Party "movement" can be said to represent anything in particular anymore.
This is why I am a registered independent. I have a very hard time believing that any rational person can agree with the party line 100%. Now obviously there are disagreements between members within the same party, but the minority is almost always drowned out. So, in effect, if you disagree with your party on any of these big issues you may as well switch teams if you want to do anything about it.
Don't feel too bad, you have more in common with any individual in the US than you might assume based on media coverage. We're all in this together, and we have largely the same concerns. Our differences are not irrelevant, but you shouldn't feel dirty or weird just because you find yourself agreeing with other average Americans about topics of mutual concern.
A big counter point to the Facebook is a fad is Pepsi. Pepsi was considered a fad in the 60's when it was already 40 years old. It's still around. It buys coolness with a massive marketing budget. Pepsi is water + corn syrup + some flavor. And it's been around for many, many decades. Pepsi, and Cola, show that being old does not mean you can't still be cool.
>Pepsi was considered a fad in the 60's when it was already 40 years old. It's still around.
Tons of things have been considered fads through the decades, some rightly (hula-hoops) and some not (rock music). The question, when making an analogy, is how they relate to Facebook.
Unless you connect Pepsi and Facebook with something more besides (both have been considered a fad), we cannot draw any conclusions from Pepsi with regards to Facebook's situation except this:
Sometimes, people can consider something as a fad when it isn't.
If you want to make this analogy work, you have to show why Facebook will be more like Pepsi and less like the hula-hoop or piano neck-ties.
Maybe it'll be that the concept of social networks is here to stay forevermore, but Facebook is just a brand. Social networks are becoming a dime a dozen, so using Facebook is a brand choice.
There's a social cost to be seen doing the things that everyone else is doing (the equivalent, say, of wearing a mainstream band t-shirt), so having a presence on Facebook is just meeting the bar. To be "cool" you need to find the social networks nobody else knows about, and hang out with your friends there. Bonus points for alluding, on Facebook, to conversations you had on the not-Facebook social network.
It may be amusing to find in 10 years that using Facebook becomes a new fad again and is seen as "retro". Certainly a possibility if Facebook does not innovate itself to non-recognizability.
It's a different market with different customer mind sets. More importantly, "cool" is relative. Coke is family oriented, aka not cool. This allows pepsi to be "cool" by associating its brand with "hot" celebrities and trends. On the other hand, Facebook has nothing older to compare to. It's "cool" relative to myspace I suppose.
This is so awesome. I have been excited about RethinkDB and a real mongodb alternative and was just hesitating based on RethinkDb's ability to last. But now I know you will last. Just awesome. I'm going to start using Rethinkdb on my next project.
Start writing things down and then contact a local equal opportunity office and start the process. It will not be cheap for them. If people keep doing this they'll change their ways.
Going public on Twitter or Hacker News though hasn't done much other than bring out nasty and unproductive fights between Social Justice Warriors and Men's Rights fanatics. They make everyone look bad and we all walk away feeling like maybe we've lost faith in humanity when in reality a serious problem just stems from mostly unintentional, but hurtful ignorance.