1,167 karma · joined April 11, 2018
For context, this is a bill establishing religious and conscientious rights for students in state law, including things like an explicit right to refuse to participate in acts of collective worship at school, or in displays of patriotism. Its effect, unless I have missed something very important in my skim, is to protect students with minority religious beliefs (including atheism) from being bulldozed by the Christian majority. That's admirable! And it's necessary, given how many stories there are from conservative states in the US of students being unconstitutionally discriminated against by schools for their beliefs - for instance, for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
The bit that this article seems to be alluding to is this:
> Sec. 3320.03. No school district board of education, governing authority of a community school established under Chapter 3314. of the Revised Code, governing body of a STEM school established under Chapter 3326. of the Revised Code, or board of trustees of a college-preparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student's work.
It's pretty clear that what this is saying is that teachers must assess work in a secular manner; that if, for instance, if in poetry class a religious student writes a poem about how their god helps them through life, the teacher can't penalise them because they don't approve of the student's religious beliefs but must instead mark the poem on its poetic merit.
But Local12 decides to spin this as forbidding secular marking, instead, claiming that a student denying evolution for religious reasons can't be penalised for their scientifically wrong answer. Yet this is nonsense! The teacher is in fact required to mark the answers in a secular way - based on "substance" and "legitimate pedagogical concerns". The bill that they're saying forbids penalising this hypothetical evolution-denying students in fact requires penalising them.
But instead, through dishonest journalism, we have a good, liberal, secular bill being reframed as Republican-imposed state theocracy. It's bullshit, and it creates terrible incentives. Why should Republican lawmakers in conservative states try to stop conservative schools oppressing minorities over differences of belief if their attempts to do so are just going to get spun by lying journalists as impositions of Christian theocracy like this? They'd've gained more, politically, by doing nothing to help.
No, that's not how it works for most workplace pensions in the UK now that we have a statutory system for them. There are statutorily-specified percentages of the employee's paycheck that get paid into a workplace pension account by the employer - one percentage as a deduction from the employee's paycheck, the other out of employer's pocket on top of the employee's paycheck. Then the employer's duty is done; the money is now in an account controlled by the employee, they're free to move the money to a different provider if they want to, and if they don't and the provider they're using fails, that's not the employer's problem any more.
As I understand it, the agreement the employer and employee had in this case worked in essentially the same way. However, retroactive statutory changes to the rules governing the scheme type had the effect that:
1. The employer retroactively became a guarantor for the liabilities of the scheme 2. The scheme became obligated to have a greater amount of capital on hand to ensure solvency, which the employer was then liable for
1. It sets up a challenge that incentivizes people to try to contribute; they "think it would be awesome to get their code past Linus"
2. It serves a form of initiation ritual (a hazing) to give people a sense of belonging to the group
(I'm not sure I personally buy point 2, because as far as I know Linus is nice to newbies.)
Beyond that, I can list plenty more:
3. It builds trust in your sincerity. If you openly bitch about everything that pisses you off, then when you say that something is decent work, people know you mean it.
4. As a direct consequence of point 3, it makes the environment much more welcoming for people with scrupulosity complexes, who might otherwise worry that they're just being a nuisance who everyone would rather not have around (but is too polite to shoo away)
5. It drives away hyper-PC social-justicey types who would otherwise impose CoCs and disrupt everything with conflict and hatred.
6. It sets a tone in which people feel free to speak freely, which sets people at ease who would otherwise be anxious about accidentally giving offence (perhaps because they have poor English skills, perhaps because they're neuroatypical in some way that affects their social skills).
Are there downsides too? Sure. But this is just the age-old set of tradeoffs between having a politically correct space and a politically incorrect space; different people will feel alienated (or be rejected by the group) in each of them. For me, anti-PC spaces are home; they're where I feel comfortable and safe and able to contribute, while PC / intersectional feminist / social justice spaces feel oppressive. I guess silveroriole feels the same way.
No, he promised to pay a certain amount into an established scheme. Then he did so. He's upheld his side of every agreement he's been party to.
> Then, he put his money in a pension scheme that actually wasn't charging enough.
Enough for what?
> Now, years later, once some sane accounting rules are put in place, it turns out that there isn't enough money to live up to the promises that were made.
What promises? Why do you think they can't be met?
> It sucks that a decision like this would make a business go bankrupt
There is no business involved here any more. It's just an individual person who once employed people.
> but that's what happens when you make financial commitments that you can't afford to pay
He didn't make any such commitments. They were conjured out of the air by a legal change that rewrote the terms of his pension contributions retroactively.
It's not even remotely shady for a service to inherently involve knowing where you are. That's something that is true of every brick and mortar store, and indeed every cab driver. Yet the government doesn't demand that those businesses provide real-time feeds of information about the movements of their customers, and if the government were to do so and they were to object on privacy grounds, we wouldn't take it to mean that their entire business model is inherently immoral and all shops should cease to exist.
Citation needed. No indication of that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au... and a quick Google turns up no suggestion that it's true.
1. Kaepernick wasn't fired. He simply wasn't signed by anyone team after his contract with the 49ers ended.
2. It's a matter of factual controversy whether his treatment by the NFL was affected by his advocacy at all. As far as I know, no manager has explicitly admitted to making different choices about how to deal with him based on his kneeling.
3. It was never suggested by anybody that Kaepernick's kneeling might be a breach of his contract.
4. Kaepernick was not denied his pay for matches he'd already played in as a consequence of his kneeling.
Assuming I am correct on the facts, there is, at the very least, a significant difference in degree between that case and this one. Do you claim that anything I say above is wrong?
It also seems relevant here that basically all coverage I saw of Kaepernick's case - from the nearly-exclusively right-wing commentators I follow - was harshly critical of the minority on the right who were calling for him to be punished. By contrast, I have never seen anyone on the left criticise speech codes or corporate censorship. I do not think it is reasonable to try to draw an equivalence between the right and left on these issues by comparing the positions of a minority on the right, heavily criticised by other right-wingers, with the position of an unchallenged hegemony on the left. There is a real asymmetry here, both in terms of what the majority position of each coalition is and the extent to which they actually punish the speech they disfavour in practice.
I note that the exact phrase "offends a portion or group of the public" has only ever been used in Blizzard's rules as far as I can tell (you can use a date-filtered Google search to confirm; prior to today there are only a handful of results, all Blizzard-related). So at the very least, they didn't lift it verbatim from sports contracts. If there used to be equivalent language in sports contracts a decade ago, I'd like to see it.
When tomp says that China coopted the machinery of censorship laid by SJWs for its own purposes, he's entirely correct.
In the case of Caleb, I assume because he has a religious objection to it - he thinks that a person cannot alter truly the gender given to them by God, and thinks it would be against his faith to use pronouns in a manner that implies otherwise. Though I may be misstating his view, in which case I apologise to him - I have not seen anything he's written where he spells out the basis for his objection, and may be guessing / inferring wrongly.
In the case of Monica, she would in fact do this in all but maybe a situation involving the singular they where she might prefer stylistically to use names (which seems fair enough, since it's clearer).
This is flatly contradicted by both Caleb's post (upon which this whole thread is based) and Monica's.
Caleb resigned because the new rules proposed would not allow him to compromise by simply referring to trans people by name and avoiding all pronouns. His issue is not that he insists on using "he" for a transwoman, but that he refuses to use "she", and would rather stick to names.
Likewise, per the from-memory transcript she posted, Monica - who has no issue referring to a person who has changed gender by their preferred gendered pronoun! - simply stated that she often prefers to avoid the singular genderless "they" when referring to a specific person, and so would prefer to refer to a person who has that as their preferred pronoun by name. That, apparently, was enough to get her fired.
... which is often difficult and inefficient. A large part of the point of the article is that when making changes to an existing system, you often DON'T know until doing some experimentation what the result of your particular new bit of code should be. You know what change you want to happen to the behaviour of the system as a whole, but don't yet understand how the pieces that make up the system slot together. That permits you to dive in and try making changes and see what their effect is, but doesn't permit you to write a unit test right away.
> it is smarter and more effective to write them first.
But... why? You're asserting this without any justification.
> People who say that TDD moves slower are simply admitting that they don't test.
This accusation is pretty tedious. The article was explicitly comparing the test-first-code-second approach against the code-first-test-second approach and giving a reasoned argument (which you've not acknowledged or engaged with) for why the second was usually superior. The author isn't saying they don't test or arguing for not testing.
> I found it rather ironic that the article ends by praising behaviour-driven development
That was sarcasm.
This is at least not quite true of First Amendment law. The concept of "compelled speech" exists in US law, and is considered an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Exactly what falls into that category (and whether the right of domain owners to censor user-provided content as they see fit is protected), I'm not sure, but freedom of speech in the US certainly does at least sometimes include the right not to speak.
That's very different from the case in question, where LinkedIn's motive for cutting off hiQ's access is to inflict damage on hiQ because they are a potential competitor.
This is nonsense. Pretty much anywhere that you're accepting user input on the web you want to have some sort of length limit. Even if you're Hacker News rather than Twitter, you probably don't want to let anybody post a 10GB comment. You just need to pick an appropriate length metric. That's part of the post's point, and it's also apparently your point a few sentences after you rubbish it; why are you insulting the post and then suddenly agreeing with it?
> Use of the word "Python" in the names of freely distributed products like IronPython, wxPython, Python Extensions, etc. -- Allowed when referring to use with or suitability for the Python programming language.
We can quibble about whether a Python 2 fork would technically meet the definition here, but it seems to me that it would meet it at least as much as IronPython does; going after such a fork would contradict the rule implied by the examples in this section, even if it doesn't unambiguously violate the definition. I think they've already granted the public the right to use the word "Python" in a Python 2 fork and couldn't successfully sue over it now even if they wanted to.
What's your basis for suggesting that they've threatened to do so?
* If I provide an outline of a political argument to a opinion columnist for them to write up in detail, I should own copyright on the argument and prevent anyone else from making it
* If I describe a novel combination of techniques to use in a photoshop to create an interesting effect, I own copyright to the process and prevent anyone else from using it
* If I come up with a new hairstyle that goes viral and becomes popular, I should own copyright to the hairstyle and be able to stop anyone else having it.
These are all bad ideas, and so is allowing copyrighting APIs. Being a genuine creative work requiring significant labour is simply not a high enough bar on its own.
Maybe I'm missing something, but your comment seems to boil down to "If Oracle wins, people won't be able to copy APIs, which is awful! If Google wins, people will be able to copy APIs, which is awful!" Surely you have to be on one side or the other?
95%+ of MSM articles I read that reference an external document do not link to it. MSM articles are usually littered with links, but they're internal links to lists of other articles by the same MSM outlet about the topic. Meanwhile, the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration - is basically unimaginable to me; I've never seen it happen as far as I can recall.
I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there:
* If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it.
* If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning.
* If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it)
The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.
a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants specifically because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or
b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit racial segregation and class-based admissions, or
c) something else entirely
I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.