This is actually the second time it has happened to the same person. For the same reason presumably.
459 karma · joined January 19, 2016
August 14, 2021
Years ago I was an office manager at a battery supply warehouse (car batteries not AA’s). We had an employee that had started working for us for about 6 months when it became vary apparent that he had a drug problem. Because his brother also worked there we knew that he had suffered a major car accident, was in crippling debt from the medical bills, and developed a pain pill habit as a result. He was only 19 at the time.
The issues that involved the work place were things like being consistently late, taking 2-3 hour lunch breaks and coming back high. So high, that he could not perform basic job tasks like counting a pallet of battery cores. My biggest concern was that he was licensed to use our fork lifts and so I had our warehouse manager do his best to keep him off the forklifts.
At this point I recommended to my boss that we fire him for the repeated offenses, as well as recommend that he seek drug consoling. I felt bad for him. He had a problem. He needed help. But he did not need to be working at that job for his and others safety. My boss and my boss’ boss, on the other hand, decided it was best to send to him to a “random” drug test, so that when the fired him they could do so with indisputable cause. This did not work, he disappeared for many hours, despite the drug testing facility being just down the street, and the results came back clean. I know that people have many ways of faking drug tests. I suggested again that he be fired for the offenses and not the drug test. Again my bosses disagreed and sent him to two more “random” tests each week after that.
The employee in question got wise to this. He knew what they were trying to do. So he went to a therapist and got a declaration of temporary disability. My company then had to pay him his full wages for 6 months with out him needed to come to work.
And I sat back and laughed at my bosses, as the unemployment claim would have be nominal by comparison.
edit: not sure why this would be down-voted. It is just a real story, relevant to the thread. I was only suggested that waiting for test results when possible danger lurks was not the right course of action. i forgot to add the employee did come back after his psychological disability ran out. And of course they sent him to take a drug test again. He failed that one and was fired.
Book: [0]Memory and the Computational Brain, C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King
You can read the main thesis here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/978144431049...
Review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262093114_Man_as_Ma...
Also please take all my comments with a grain of salt. I am not expert, I'm just trying to restate what I've read and understood.
Long-term potentiality is not the point of disagreement. The disagreement is that individual memories are not recalled, as they are not stored, per se. The idea is that neurons acclimate to inputs, so that when we "recall" them we are not retrieving a "memory" from a storage location but instead are being activated in a way that allows us to preform a learned action.
I imagine those marble/cardboard diagrams of logic gates, where the cardboard flap will be left in a particular position after a marble has passed. In this way you can add numbers by dropping marbles into the appropriate input slots. Yet in this way, one could not derive prior calculations, as it does not store this information anywhere.
[0]Memory and the Computational Brain, C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King
You can read the main thesis here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/978144431049...
The claim as I understand it is that there is no “memory” at all. What we experience as memories are simply input parameters that signal our brain to begin a particular function. In the way a neural net does not “remember” the training data but carries out what it “learned” anyway. I have problems explaining this idea as I think it is full of holes and would require some fundamental changes in how we think about feedback structures (I mean this neurologically as well as mathematical/computational).
Either way if most people don’t doubt memory storage in neurons then they are very quite about it. I’ve rarely ever read an argument for memory storage mechanisms in the brain. A good reason for this is simply the question: Where is it then? Neurons individually can’t really provide this sort of expansive data storage. And what they seem to be able to account for is too little and too widely spaced apart. Interestingly this spacing also provides a counter argument against the complex processing that would be required if there wasn’t a memory mechanism.
Personally I think the dismissal of memory comes with a lot of hubris attached, as well as a total lack of understanding information theory. Information theory itself seems to be popularly bemoaned by neuroscientist as well. But it’s hard to see the alternative and is a bit paradoxical since the only way I can seem to understand the “no memory” claim is by using a computer neural net metaphor.
I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misremembering having more friends when I had places to go and do things in person, I definitely did. And these days I find it increasingly difficult to talk to people who have ever shrinking attention spans. Why is meme speak becoming pervasive in spoken language? Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk. We used to be close. She says she has no time for anything. She's a book publisher and doesn't have time to read the one or two articles I send her every 6 months or so. Even when they are strictly about her field of work. She reads the first paragraph and says she got the "gist", which means we can't talk about it because she has no idea what the other 20 pages said, nor does she care because... well "haven't you seen the top reddit post today. I can't believe (random person) said (random comment) to (random other person)"
To me so many people have just become very boring. I mean what's worth saying/reading that takes 3-5 seconds, really? It's not that I think the internet or online social communication is all bad, or course it's not, but in my experience the bad does outweigh the good. And with suicide and depression rates rising beyond a standard deviation in gen z girls it's hard to feel as if it were worse from them in the past.
And I do believe this is inconsistent if you believe that justice has anything to do with right and wrong actions.
Your argument is:
1. There are right and wrong actions. 2. Justice does not decide or even attempt at determining right and wrong. 3. Therefore doing something right or wrong has no bearing on the outcome of our justice system.
As an individual, what your are saying is important and I agree. We have to call upon ourselves to do the right thing in spite of the consequences. But often times civil disobedience seeks to change the injustice of the current system and if that system never changes or adapts as a result then the outcome will always be the same. This may have happened in the case with Snowden (though we can still correct it) but it has not been the same throughout history. I’m very glad that we did not simply exile all our civil rights leaders with no thought given toward bringing a greater sense of fairness to our judicial systems.
Edit: I do think I understand your overall point though. Actually leaking information should be a very serious decision, and should not be taken lightly.
The conduct being refereed to is part of the issue many people are having here. As the defense argued the conduct is that of an investigative journalist. If such conduct constitutes an offense in the law, then some are worried that there is precedent to charge a wider range of conduct then previously though possible. Weather this is true or not remains to be seen I guess. Either way its a meaningful determination that this judge made.
Scotch vs scotch whiskey is more of a word play joke as well than a direct analogy. But I see your point and your totally right that one sounds less bad to me. I'm only stating that as a matter of taste I do not like this particular apps name.
And since it's apple's store they have the right to not like it either. I just don't think this is a profound "free speech argument" like some do in these comments.
Personally I think it's really odd that someone would need an app to keep their computer from sleeping. This says far more about macs than the arbitrary naming policy.
Sure it’s just a chemical. Everything is just chemicals but I don’t need “meth” for my computer. Same reason our kids don’t need toys advertised as “crack for your baby”.
Agin not offended its just not a good name. Even if let’s say you build an app that’s hooks into some other program and you sell said app for two dollars, you may think it’s hilarious to call it “two dollar hooker”, hell I myself might even chuckle. But only once, then I’ll just get annoyed every time I see “two dollar hooker” in startup, “two dollar hooker has crashed” etc.
I also would not buy your product if it were called alcohol poisoning. I love alcohol. I’m drinking a beer right now (happy New Years everyone). But naming a computer program after it sounds like an odd thing to do. And more to your point would also be a violation of the same rule Apple is using in this case.
This name is pretty rings rather badly in my ears, though I’m not offended by such things. I’d feel similarly if they had named it “fuck sleep”. I’m not offended by the word “fuck” but I don’t really want to buy products that are named that. Do apps need energy drink names to be successful? I’ve noticed a trend in talking about men’s balls in ads, manscaping, underwater fart jokes. It’s seems so much like idiocracy more then something offensive.
On the other hand a rose is still a rose. So I agree they should probably just rename it. I doubt there would be any major loss from doing so.
The amount of time I put into an email inversely correlates to the amount of time someone will spend reading and/or responding to it.
I both do not know any violent criminals personally, and have witnessed a rather staggering amount of acceptance of violence in our culture.
I’m reminded here of when the director of communications at Lockheed Martin responded with the following when asked about a possible connection between Columbine and the manufacturing of Triton missiles just down the street (Lockheed being a major employer of many parents in the area):
“I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us.”
We also accept violence in the criminal justice system even to stop non-violent crimes. We also support wars, see it’s approval rating of post 9-11. I’ve had many a person tell me the solution to some Perceived racial problem was to “wipe them out” and only one of them physically assaulted me.
So it seems to me that we are okay with violence but often do not like carrying it out ourselves in personal disputes. Yet this may only be detoured but the treat of violence being carried out on us if we were to. Unless of course we are in the military and have been told/trained to carry out violent activities with impunity. All in all I am not convinced we are a peaceful nonviolent civilization, quite the opposite. Nor am I convinced that seeing accepted violence everyday on your T.V. Screen, be it video game or otherwise, does not affect this pervasive psychological mindset, agin the opposite.
As for the second post. It is indeed a person wearing a shirt that says press on it who is not a journalist. However, the given reason was “so he would not be shot by feds” which to me highlights the spirt of this conversation, that there is growing concern as well as some evidence that the country has sifted toward a more authoritarian bent.
Edit: I forgot to mention that there were no rocks or molotovs being thrown in any of the videos I saw, which there were reportedly hundreds of.
[1] Underworld, Blood Meridian, The Bluest Eye, Milkman, Pale Fire, Borges, etc...
[2] Chekhov, Ursula Le Guin, Proust, Umberto Eco, etc.
Edit: I scrolled down and read the creators summary of how the search works. And now believe my results really nailed his description: rarest but highly rated by readers of the same books. Which also explains all the Calvin and Hobbes, which I think have a universal appeal.
Weak language, such as overuse of adverb qualifiers, is much more akin to the passive-aggressive tone that you’re referring to. Though, it can also just be the product of overly self-conscious writing.
Also, intent is just a small part of context. Therefore, it would rarely if ever supersede the importance of context. For example: Two spies are sitting on a bench speaking in code to one another. Spy 1 gives up an important detail concerning the number of Tridents in a specific location in exchange for some equally important detail related to Spy 2’s national defense structure. Now, it may not have been Spy 1’s intention to divulge his nation’s exact percentage of Tridents stored in a single location, but nonetheless and unbeknownst to Spy 1, Spy 2 already knew the total number of Tridents and therefore could deduce from context. Shovel in a few more cascading deductions and maybe Spy 2 now knows a lot more than Spy 1 ever intended to tell him.
This is true of a lot of things. You can make racists statements out of ignorance without intending to be racist. However, many things that may seem racist on the surface may in greater context be criticism, parody, or just an attempt at candid documentation. All of which are partially informed by intent, but only because intent is a part of context.
Given this and people’s proclivity for hiding their intentions (and even with intentions stated can be either a lie or the truth and we wouldn’t really know so we have to yet still include it in our box of contextual evidence that is still yet to be determined, in terms of authenticity) I would choose to gather as many contextual clues as I could while keeping intent at arms length—still there and I see it, but maybe not the most important factor.
Just for fun the “editor” put this comment at grade 10 and told me to aim lower, grade 9. Too many hard-to-read sentences, adverbs, and difficult words like “therefore”.
I find this sort of ultra deterministic take on things renders articles like these pointless. I mean, what are we supposed to do now, 'choose' to expose ourselves to different information? Isn't too late, in a way before we were ever born kind of way? Wouldn't our "underestimating" be an imperative beyond reproach. Not to mention that free-will is not a factor in our being influenced by information. This is true in both cases, free-will and not.
Personally, I'm a non-compatibilist but believe the jury is still out on determinism. Despite having lots of evidence in support of it, I think there is still a lot of room for conformation bias, simply because the scope of such claims is so large. Overall, it takes a lot of hubris to make the claims stated in this article.
Also as a sort of pseudo-biological question: What would be the purpose be of evolving an illusion of free-will?