RMS Lifestyle
stallman.org
stallman.org
> Religion offers no moral short-cut. It is up to us to figure out what is right and what is wrong.
Hard at work on this one, I hope.
> As a matter of principle, I refuse to own a tie.
> ... 6 more paragraphs about ties ...
Clearly an important principle.
For RMS, it will likely be related to the counterculture, anti-business or anti-capitalism stance. For a long time, a suit _and tie_ was the uniform of going to work, until well into the eighties or later in many places. (The British didn't even stop wearing bowler hats to the office until the sixties!)
In the late nineties, wearing casual clothes to work in the office was seen as one of the perks of freedom the growing programmer culture had (this is back in the days when Google was 'don't be evil' and everyone was excited about tech.) I'm starting to feel old because while I was still in school at the time, I remember people dressing what today would be quite formally in the office, and it being a really big deal that tech companies had different standards. It was the kind of thing people on Slashdot (remember that?) celebrated about tech.
So - the symbolism of a tie, or being anti-tie, seems very in line with his old-school counterculture hacker ethos.
Wigs were abandoned by British barristers and judges in civil cases only 2007.
Last year, was the first time I went to a job interview not wearing a tie (but still shirt and jacket).
I remember the cubes in Office Space (1999) characterising IniTech as depressing (people dropping by without even needing to knock on the door) and soulless, but maybe today's open plan workers think they look like privacy incarnate?
Given his well-documented harassment of women over the decades, it's sadly ironic that he spends 6+ paragraphs on ties, and much less on more important moral introspection.
And I hate ties and formal attire as well, I refuse to wear it and I wouldn't work for a company that requires it.
https://www.smartrecruiters.com/expeditors/743999981793070
I spoke to them in the past, that last bullet point definitely means suit and tie. I immediately noped out when they told me that. When I lived in Seattle and commuted on the bus to downtown, you could tell the few on the bus who worked there simply by how they were dressed.
I always wear chinos and a T-shirt :P I don't even own any shirts that fit. And I wouldn't do my job any better with one (in fact probably a lot worse because I'd be resentful and very uncomfortable).
Is this still a thing? I've went to dozens of job interviews these last few years, including for Google and for banks and other serious institutions, and I never wore a tie at any of them, nor was it ever suggested that I should (not even by people who had a financial incentive to get me the job) nor did the interviewer ever wear one.
* A tie is a long, big(ish), pointy thing that hangs and flaps around in front of you.
* A wedding ring is something you stick a long, pointy appendage through.
Now I wonder if parent commenter just pulled this out of his ass or if this was always intentional...
* https://www.smartpakequine.com/learn-products/how-to-tie-a-s...
Lagniappe: Is it just coincidence that the proper sentences are « Je vais au Canada. » and « Je vais en France. » ? Do francophones habitually go onto grammatically masculine countries and into grammatically feminine ones?
No you have not got it yet. The long pointy thing in a wedding ring is the finger.
FWIW he has a Mastodon account (https://mastodon.xyz/@rms), mentioned on his site under "social media[0]."
[0] https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/stallman-com...
Amusing on a few levels.
(There's a sartorial theory that the front-of-the-house in restaurants wears clothes approximating what the clientele was wearing a generation ago. When we get to the point where the front of the house is in hoodies and jeans, what do we guess the diners will be wearing?)
https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of...