Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
It really does show the failings of multiple layers of FPP. Tea Party are influential enough for their candidates to win a heap of primaries (or more moderate candidates have to sway to the bat-crazy right to do so). Then because they've got republican beside their name, they beat a bunch of democrats. Enough of them do that in the caucus, and they rule the caucus so control leaders and priorities. Enough republicans are elected, they rule the house. Rule the house, shut down the government. Economy starts to falter, and we're all a bit screwed.
There's an additional layer to it. The Republican hold on Congress is largely possible because of Republican-controlled state legislatures - which can gerrymander the Congressional seats to a nicety. There's no apolitical body controlling district borders; it's controlled by whoever is currently in power in the state.
-
Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Bart Janssen,
While most folks focus on the political insanity or cheerfully joke about a day off work (unpaid) this has consequences worldwide for science.
Right now I'm on a research expedition in the northeastern Pacific (well, research in the odd moments we're not getting the crap kicked out of us by that typhoon remnant lurking around up here), with some NOAA scientists. Not only do their .gov email addresses not work anymore, when we get back and offload from the ship - assuming the shutdown is still in place - they won't be able to return their equipment to their home facility, because there are guards stopping them going in there. I've also heard about other important work being done by contractors because it's legal to pay them to do it but not legal for the people who'd normally do it - direct government employees - to do so while the shutdown is happening. This is a highly ludicrous process all around.
-
Speaker: The act of not eating doesn't…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
But the idea of being slimmer at the end of the weekend? It didn't even cross my mind. On the other hand, helping starving children wasn't a big concern of mine either.
As a kid, I never really got into the 40 Hour Famine because I didn't see how me not eating for forty hours was an incentive for people to give money to hungry children - if it was that important, shouldn't they just be doing it anyway? How did whether I ate or not change that? Also, I found the process of asking for sponsorship terribly awkward - once I'd tapped my parents, there wasn't really anyone else I felt comfortable asking for money. It's really not a very efficient way of fundraising, all things considered.
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to BenWilson,
Was this the one?
- Valley Wag: “Culture Fit” Is a Shitty Excuse for Marginalizing Women in TechYep! Thank you for doing the Googling I was too lazy to do. :P
Is it in any way required to ever give a reason to someone when they aren’t hired? It can be polite and helpful to do so, but mostly the excuse is “we found someone better”. How are you going to know if that’s true, unless you know someone in that workplace?
It's not required, but for the highly skilled and specialised jobs we're talking about it's fairly rude not to - there may not be that many people qualified for the job and the person you're turning down might know who most (or all) of them are.
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to BenWilson,
Corporate hiring is very often much more about getting the “right kind of person” than getting a person with the exact skills, because it is acknowledged that they join a culture and are likely to be mobile within it.
This minds me of a blog post I read not so long ago - wish I could remember where - talking about how the new way to avoid hiring women/POC in Silicon Valley is "culture fit", e.g., "we're really impressed by your skills but you're not a good culture fit for the company". Like many of those insidious ideas, there's some truth to it, but it's also code for "you're not like us".
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
El oh el. As it happens, after faking the test results, not only did I get the job but I did it really well, making the website I looked after one of TVNZ’s most popular. And if being duplicitous got me the job, well, I’m sure also it helped me survive in the crazy-arse world of morning television.
If nothing else, the ability to get shit done that does not come naturally to your "personality type" - assuming personalities can be so broadly generalised - is a fairly basic requirement for being successful in *any* job. The fundamental question isn't "are you the perfect candidate?", it's "do you understand what needs to be done and can you get it done?"
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to BenWilson,
What about people who draw energy from something else altogether, or just seem to have an unlimited supply, or no supply? Or they draw it only from specific people, whom they are always around? And what is this energy anyway?
The "spoons" kind of energy, is my understanding - after a hard day, do you recharge by hanging out with friends or by having alone time? Is social interaction something that you reach a limit on relatively quickly? Like you say, it's more a gradient than a binary, but I find it a broadly useful idea about how people work.
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Ben Austin,
In which case it is a pretty good way of dealing with that particular problem, plus it gives the rest of us a good laugh.
Dunno, the Communist Party question is still insulting - membership is not illegal in the US and never has been, and your average Russian spy probably isn't a member of the Communist Party these days. Plus they gender-link some of the terrorism-related questions, which is frankly weird.
Getting more on-topic, psychometric testing for hiring purposes (rather than redundancy or management decisions) is actually not legal in the US. That doesn't mean it isn't used, of course, it just means that companies that do open themselves up to lawsuits. OTOH, in the current employment climate they can pretty much ask applicants to dance the macarena naked and not get a quibble, so the odds of being sued for it are low.
-
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Ben Austin,
I thought it was in part (the moral panic argument sounds right too) to later provide an excuse to withdraw permission, residency or citizenship to entrants/applicants who had lied on the form. I’m thinking here about the various European migrants to the US after the war who later turn out to have been war criminals.
When I’ve gone through immigration forms in the UK, they always make it quite clear on this kind of question that lying could later result in such an outcome.
Bingo. They can't toss you out of the country for crimes committed in another jurisdiction (especially when they may or may not have been illegal in that jurisdiction) but they CAN throw you out for having lied on the application. Well, they can also toss you out for the vague "displaying poor character" (also known as "the reason I won't be trying marijuana even if I visit Colorado") but I believe that usually requires being charged with something in the US.
-
It was extremely good marmite on toast. I was allowed to eat a slice—even though I hadn’t done anything.
I'm glad to see toast is still considered the appropriate post-birthing snack in New Zealand. I had the privilege of watching my brother be born in 1992, and I am told that all I would talk about the next day was the nurse having let me make toast with apricot jam for my mother once it was all over. (Apparently the whole "baby brother" bit had failed to make much of an impression.)