No worries about the lack of sleep. I’ve been there and then some.

I do think however that you’re misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.

First, it’s a completely noisy signal. It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what I’m interested in, I’m not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and that’s the only data point I have, that’s what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. I’m not arguing that it’s not noisy. I’m just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. I’ve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I can’t say that they had a whole lot in common.

Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I don’t think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, you’d probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.

In terms of social power, that’s absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.

If you’re talking about the “elite” schools - Ivy or otherwise - there’s a little bit more to it.

A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of that’s all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets they’ve already run. It’s like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.

As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you can’t say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.

If you’re talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever they’re calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.

We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn.

So this is what we call a “career limiting move.”

In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I voted Green in 2012 because a) Barack Obama was given a 99% chance of winning my state very close to the election and b) I thought I could “send a message” to the Democratic Party that they should move further left.

I did so with full knowledge that not only was Jill Stein in no position to win a single elector and that in addition she was a horrible candidate who would be literally the worst president in the entire history of the United States (this was before Trump, but I’m still going to go with that for the purposes of this discussion). I did so knowing it was a protest vote while claiming it wasn’t a protest vote but a vote of conscience.

Jill Stein and GPUSA are a bunch of corrupt fucks who only run because they take in republicans money because they regularly scrape off a 3-4% of the otherwise democratic vote, which in some districts and state can swing the entire election.

So o cast my GP vote, the total GP vote was completely in line with historical trends, Obama won my state and the presidency (thankfully), and no signal was sent, except that the republicans could rely on that.

I’m sure the Dems do something similar with the libertarian vote. I’ve even been tempted to donate (now that I have some money to donate) to libertarian candidates in elections where scraping off a point or two could tip things towards the D (which I confess is something I favor, being part of Team Rainbow). I haven’t dug into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that racist son of a Bircher Ron Paul didn’t help hand the election to Clinton. If so, fucking yay. I don’t love Bill, but we sure as fuck didn’t need more Ronald Reaganing.

I think everyone should treat people advocating for a GPUSA or other protest vote as a Republican stalking horse, period. Whether they’re intentionally doing it or naively turning themselves into a broadcast node doesn’t matter - I’m not judging. I’m just saying that they’re effectively campaigning for a fascist, and should be treated as one.

Yes. Yes, I do.

Edit: Bought some. Will update if any other plants or ants start glowing unexpectedly.

I can’t be the only person who read this and went “Jesus fucking Christ, they were doing what?”

It looks like Jesus is targeted by a sniper.

I kind of want to learn some Middle English stock phrases to grill anyone who complains about the changing nature of English being just political correctness. Like, “You want to be a language conservative? Here’s some Chaucer-era language motherfucker.”

That (iirc) Harvard professor specialized in fascism wrote that we cannot count on institutions for protection. We’ve seen that institutions, including the judiciary, can be taken over and corrupted. Trump has stated multiple times that one of his first acts as president will be to basically clear the decks of the federal government and fire all of the non-Trumpist personnel. His lawyer even argued that the president can break any law, up to and including murder, and impeachment is the only process to hold them accountable. I’m not even sure how that’s supposed to work, since then they could arrest or kill everyone in Congress who would support their impeachment.

Basically, we’re fucked.

It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.

The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.

However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.

So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.

Unless Trump tries to run for it in his limo, I think it’s pretty safe to assume the OJ chase in the Blanco Bronco will remain the most famous of all time.

seven year itch

Wow - I had never put those two together before.

Anyway, Memory Alpja states that intensive meditation is also used to alleviate the problems associated with pon farr.

What doesn’t make in-universe sense to me is that the condition comes from a neurochemical cascade. Even in our time, we recognize many of these conditions and have targeted drugs and therapies for them. Surely a society that is medically and technologically more advanced than ours by orders of magnitude would be able to simply treat the condition.

As a plot point it makes sense, and Roddenberry both personally and as a person of his time saw things like brain processes as strange and mysterious. It allowed them to play with the still evolving character of Spock and with Vulcans in general. It allowed them to do that “put a human condition into an alien and turn it up to 11” kind of thing they loved so much. The same would go for Lon Suder, of course.

They just get really hand-wavey around medical questions.

I’m going to have to go with Team Mouse on this one. If your only reaction is to stomp a mouse running past your foot, that’s a bit of a red flag there. The mouse is not presenting a clear and present danger, it is not threatening harm to itself or others, and is actively engaged in de-escalating the situation triggered, through no fault of its own, by its mere presence.

Anon could make Police Captain some day.

Augustus Caesar also was an adopted name. I’m not into deadnaming, but he was born Gaius Octavius.

He died in August.

We definitely need better writers.

The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.

Defederation is the best response imo.

77% of Americans write below 9th grade-levels, and hyphens are taught as an elective.

The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.

In the case of the Foundation, it supports exactly what it purports to support. They’re like the EFF and other civil rights organizations. If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.

The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.

On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.

So if you are saying that libertarian software project : libertarian institutions :: conservative ideas : homophobic legislation, I guess you’re just really endorsing the position of judging the company by the politicians and politics it supports. If you see prop 8 as being as fundamental to the conservative position as internet freedom is to an organization specifically dedicated to preserving internet freedom, all I can say is that I hope more people start to see it that way.