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She's got someone doing good PR for her. I've been a subscriber for years and never seen her on HN except for the last few months.

I'm probably an order of magnitude less intelligent than her, but her arguments seem extremely reasonable to me. She seem to me to be a bridge from the PBS, pop-science mentality to more serious considerations.

Also, she's a fox. :-)


There's this concept in economics that regulations last about as long as human memory-- that we create a law to stabilize a problem we saw, then the memory of why we did that is lost, and someone comes in and says "this has always been fine, lets deregulate it."

In the case of crypto, we experienced 500 years of economics lessons in a decade.


I think the same thing plagues medicine. Vaccines have been so successful in the developed world that we have forgotten the horror of diseases like smallpox and polio. I this success helped the rise of the anti-vax movement.


I had a very similar experience while EXTREMELY high. The realization came as follows:

"I" am a story I'm telling myself about about a conversation between different drives in my head, and I am free to dis-invite those drives from the conversation, or create new ones.


This happens to also be the premise of the videogame Disco Elysium.

The framing of such drives, and the voices given to each, appears to have been a causal element in many players' own personal growth and development, particularly around addiction, but certainly not exclusively.


Yep. I was once advised by HR to "try not to offend anyone." I asked the HR woman, "How do I know what offends any particular person?"

She looked genuinely stumped.


HR is always going to say "don't make waves". They don't care about the source of the waves, and never have. If you worked in Saudi Arabia, they would say eating pork and uncovering female faces was unprofessional. If you worked in the Vatican in 1850, they'd say eating flesh on Fridays was unprofessional. So if you work for an American corporation today, don't be surprised when HR expects you to drink the unwritten Kool-Aid about what is or is not sacred.


This is yet another hurdle for folks with any kind of social handicap or phobia. If you were already awkward or shy around people, now you have to be even more conscious about what you do, say, and your body language.


I've absolutely had my introversion be interpreted as low key racism before. It was not a fun experience.


Yes, trying not to offend people is fundamentally important to working together.

"How do I know what offends a particular person?" Basic cultural competency will dictate that there are words or stereotypes that are considered offensive to certain people. Outside of that, yes, you will probably make mistakes and aggrieve people from time to time. Again, making an occasional social blunder is a basic part of human relationships. When that happens, listen to why the person is offended. Often they will have real, good reasons that center on them feeling disrespected, and having that disrespect hurt their career or life. Then, apologize sincerely. Then, don't continue making the same mistake, that would be extremely disrespectful. If you wholesale disagree and think the offended person is being trivial or absurd, just don't bring it up or find a new place to work.


You know, from all the companies I've worked at, I've never seen a man working in HR.


I have seen a man working in HR.


If this is going to work you need to tell us what prompted this conversation so we can see how plausible it is to pretend you didn't know it was offensive.


I have had the exact same conversation with HR. Someone takes offense at something and they use it as leverage to suppress any further potential offenses, despite the fact that trying to avoid offending others is completely futile. Because once you accept that kind of policy, you become a target of abuse from others willing to claim offense at just about anything.


Dumb idea... what if you play the game yourself? They can't proof you are just pretending to be offended.


It's the first mover's advantage. When someone reports you everyone becomes suspicious and if you try to use the same tactics you get scoffed at and ignored.


So what did you say though??


I can't even remember. Certainly, nothing intended to cause offense. And that's where things go off the rails. Intent matters. This is how comedians can get away with saying things that a normal person cannot, because a "performance" puts things in a different context. And this gets to my point: it is easy to take offense at most anything people say, if you twist it out of context and put your own spin on it.

As mentioned in another comment, the "first mover advantage" matters when it comes to these matters. The person that initially frames the issue will be given more credence in most cases, because we as a culture have pretty much taken a shit upon the whole notion of "innocent until proven guilty".


> The person that initially frames the issue will be given more credence in most cases, because we as a culture have pretty much taken a shit upon the whole notion of "innocent until proven guilty".

That's a legal precept, not a cultural one.

We've culturally never adhered to it as a nation, nor really pretended to.

We've really not done that great a job of it even in the legal realm, at the level of policing. The courts are a better story.


I figured out how to offend a manager at work: express concerns about Elon Musk. I was reprimanded for being "inconsiderate".

EDIT: No, I do not work somewhere that has Elon Musk in a direct or indirect supervisory position, including the board. The manager (whom I don't even report to in the chain) just didn't care for the lack of unconditional praise for Elon Musk in a slack thread.


I have the feeling "express concerns" here is a much softened description of what actually happened? Could it be that whatever you said would be inconsiderate regardless of the target?


What I said was actually just linking to his "pedophile diver" twitter comment, and a NPR article about his ongoing spat with the SEC. Definitely not the smoothest presentation, but I figured it'd be best to let more neutral sources speak than express an opinion in my own words.

And sure, if a person unconditionally worship someone, that person would probably consider anything that tarnishes the image of that someone as inconsiderate.


do you work at Tesla?


Nope. Just another average tech company.


Hmm... sounds like you got the short end of the stick. Off-topic conversations at work can be tricky, can't they.


Well, the problem is... food safety is a medical nightmare when safety practices aren't observed.

As a personal note, the sickest I have ever been in my life was from food poisoning. The details are horrific, but imagine 3 days of violent diarrhea while at the same time throwing up. I couldn't even hold down water. My arms looked like, its hard to explain... the skin was draped over them. You could see every sinue of the musculature like I was a body builder, except I was a fat 30 year old. I went to the hospital and took 4 liters of saline.

All I did to earn that punishment was eat a few slices of pizza that had been left out too long.

If you please, the saga of the "pink sauce", which is the exemplar of why food safety has to be regulated:

https://youtu.be/fa-qq4lK0NY?t=2790


I vividly remember as a kid wanting a specific pizza that looked good to me, but my parents warned me it looked like it had been sitting under the lamps for too long. I won and got my pizza. Until I didn't, I nearly made it to the bathroom in the middle of the night before the vomiting started.

This short podcast about food safety questions has been fun to listen to, if slightly concerning occasionally. www.riskyornot.co


Food safety laws can be a tough thing to enforce for entry level products like the "pink sauce." There doesn't seem to be standard way to start food-from-home product until this law. Most food ventures normally would have to have a restaurant location that would then pass food safety checks, but this law, normalizes the process of a food-from-home business, taking the food safety checks to the home for approval.


I have never heard of anyone outside the US getting food poisoning.


Oh I'm going to need you to elaborate on that.


This meme is MONTHS old. I think "Internet Today" on YouTube used the phrase... 6 months ago.


My ex was a nurse... she did home visits. A patient had a life threatening injury. She understood the situation, stabilized him and got him to a hospital. The company awarded her a $5 gift card.

I would argue $5 is worth than nothing.


What's dumb about that is, I'm sure it refers to the definition of master as:

adjective main; principal. "the apartment's master bathroom has a free-standing oval bathtub"


So what I didn't know was the origin of the word "master" in relation to housing.

"The phrase "master bedroom" first appeared in the 1926 Sears catalog, according to the real estate blog Trelora. It was a feature of a $4,398 Dutch colonial home, the most expensive in the catalog, referring to a large second floor bedroom with a private bathroom."

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_971e3114fec2c583d17a32ac8c...

1926 was only 60 years after the civil war, an era where the evils of slavery will still felt by those, also a year that the KKK still had marches in DC.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b39318/

The KKK even had political influence:

"In the case of the Democratic Party, the key battleground was the 1924 Convention. The Klan endorsed William Gibbs McAdoo, the frontrunner for the nomination."

http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/Eugenics/Klan.html

So the only question that remains was Sears and Roebuck racist? Some think they were, others point to the fact that they enabled blacks to still purchase from the Sears catalog.

Another option is that Sears was just marketing the house to the consumers that existed at the time. In 1926, what rich KKK sympathizer wouldn't like to sleep in the "Master Bedroom" gloriousness of the 1860's?


That's all very interesting but I don't think it has anything to do with if the phrase "master" is racist.

A quick search reveals the following English idioms:

master master plan master of ceremonies master key master class master baker master of arts baggage master past master grand master zen master puppet master master of fine arts master of science master sergeant chess master old master master builder master bedroom harbor master master of literature master copy master cylinder master at arms master of library science sailing master master race question master master of arts in library science master hand master file master of divinity master of theology master mason master of architecture master of arts in teaching master of education property master master switch drill master master lease master in business master of the rolls master cast ballet master master in public affairs master mechanic master stroke master vibrator master chief petty officer master of laws riding master harbour master job master rattlesnake master assay master master notes master of science in engineering master and servant wreck master dance master games master kong the master master plans bus master master in business administration master mind master tape senior master sergeant station master the master master slave mint master special master wagon master forage master jack of all trades and master of none master in chancery master keys quarter master three master two master be own master been own master dock master dutch master fencing master master electrician master of the horse writing master bush master corrected master cast gang master is own master master classes master gland master lode master switches master tap master two step exercise test


A quick google search on the origin of the word master comes up with this (and in fact, I don't know why you didn't search this originally).

"Master comes from the Latin adverb magis (“more”). It first appeared in English over a thousand years ago, referring to people who had authority over others, whether as rulers, employers, teachers, or fathers."

I would imagine slaves and slave owners would be in that list as well.

I'm not saying that "master" is always racist, but in certain cases, it seems pretty clear -- as in the Master/Slave J/K flip flop. The example given "master bathroom" surely seems like it could have racist connotations.


This article get Star Trek, barely right.

First of all, they're based on the Horatio Hornblower novels-- they're basically those in space.

Second of all, Star Trek, the core before it lost its way (Enterprise and anything after it) is about aging. Either intentionally or unintentionally.

TOS, and TNG, both have a space alien telling humanity to stay home. In "The Cage" which is literally called The Cage (metaphor for not advancing), the telepathic aliens warn humanity about the dangers of space, while sheltering (parenting) a disfigured human woman. In my theory, this is the adolescent humanity.

In TNG, literally, a race called the Q warns humanity to stay home, we defy him and suffer through our teenage years straining against a well meaning but no longer welcome parental figure.

DS9 and Voyager, to me doubly so since they ran concurrently, are about middle to late age. DS9 a younger middle age where you're still in your prime but you have children now you have to think about and there are hard decisions to be made.

Voyager, because it starts with literally, "The Caretaker" dying (parents) and deals mostly with spirituality and ethics, and in my theory is placed later in life.

*This is my theory and my theory alone. I will take all shit :-)

So what's wrong with the new Star Trek? It's not liberalism, it's not lack of liberalism it's the same thing wrong with Star Wars and a lot of other entertainment out there-- its not GOOD.

The entertainment industry has lost and idea of subtlety or complexity. If TNG offered me loving viewpoints that were beyond their time ad now and then preachy (the trans episode for instance--where Riker falls for an alien who doesn't have a clear sex)... things like Discovery and Brave New Worlds just bludgeon you with bullshit, and then when you don't like the mess they're serving you-- they blame you for that.

I'd point to the Captain America debacle as the exemplar of this-- Brie Larson tells everyone the movie is for little girls (this was a deeply narcissistic, cynical and most of all dishonest viewpoint) and literally said she didn't care what 40 year old men thought about her movie and it "wasn't for them." Then she demonizes the same demographic for not showing up to see the movie she told them not to see.

We're in a weird growing-pains stages of society. I am a card carrying, Bernie Sanders progressive, and I can't tolerate most of this bullshit.


This tracks for me.

I worked for a supplier for AMAT/Intel/Samsung etc. and was basically on-call 24/7. I had to carry two laptops with me at all times (my personal one and a work one).

I didn't care because I was young, and well compensated, but they decided that they'd cut my pay by a third by converting me to a salaried employee. The unpaid overtime (previously paid as a contractor) lost its luster quickly. Once I realized I was subsidizing bad management because I was filling the gaps left by often intentional shortcuts taken-- for free, I bailed. That took... two months I think.


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