Employer: you're all fired.
Here's the thing: when you do that kind of thing, you self-identify as a troublemaker. I love this:
We were shocked. The proposal was written professionally like examples I have learned about in school, and our arguments were thought out and well-reasoned. We weren’t even given a chance to discuss it. The worst part is that just before the meeting ended, one of the managers told us that the worker who was allowed to disobey the dress code was a former soldier who lost her leg and was therefore given permission to wear whatever kind of shoes she could walk in. You can’t even tell, and if we had known about this we would have factored it into our argument.It doesn't matter how professionally written your proposal was. It doesn't matter how well you thought out your arguments. You work for a business and it's not a democracy.
The advice columnist thinks firing them all was extreme, but I do not, and for the very same reasons elucidated here:
Y'all were pretty out of line. You were interns there — basically guests for the summer. Their rules are their rules. This is like being a houseguest and presenting your host with a signed petition (!) to change their rules about cleaning up after yourself. You just don’t have the standing to do that.The thing is, when I read just the paragraph blockquoted by Vox Day, I was pretty certain there was a medical reason for the exception to the rule; the one person in the office who was allowed to wear sneakers or flats had some valid pre-approved reason to be wearing shoes that don't fit the dress code. Having an artificial limb is certainly a good reason to grant an exception. (One commentor adds, "Other possibilities are Related To Boss and The Only One Who Can Make the Farglinugalator Work. Also up there is Consistently Leads in Sales." I like that, though I'm changing the spelling: "Farglinugulator".)
But you get a bunch of special snowflakes whining "It's not fair!" and--having been told all their lives that they're so smart and special--they're suprised when their attempts at redress get slapped down, hard.
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Got lost in the comments, there. On to other things.
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There's plenty of helium left. They found a huge field of helium in Tanzania, which is good to hear. We don't have as much of it as we used to; all those party balloons--
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What's the rationale behind this prediction? They're saying food prices will rise by about 400% in the coming decade, but it just gives a bunch of inchoate causes like "global climate disruption". In fact the entire impetus behind this comes from a simulation/game done with 65 officials and experts from around the world, "intended to improve understanding of how governments, institutions, and private sector interests might interact to address a crisis in the global food system,..."
And the conclusion was that we're all going to starve?
"All moralistic pontificating aside, a return to small-scale, organic farming and switching to vegetarian diets, or at least a reduction in consumption of meat, could avert or abate the coming crisis," the article concludes--and if there is any prescription which would make global famine worse, it would be that kind of switch. (Not to mention a concomitant rise in diabetes and obesity and diseases caused by nutritional deficits.)
What could "avert or abate the coming crisis" is doubling down on GMO crops and increasing industrial farming. The United States--even using an ever-increasing percentage of its corn crop for making fuel!--is still the breadbasket of the world, and that is so because we have big business involved in farming. We're not where we are because we're doing "small-scale, organic farming".
What a load of horseshit.
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Is one of the options to leave the car the hell alone and continue to drive it? If I had a VW diesel and liked it, I'd want to keep driving it as-is without fixing the software or anything, and would gladly waive receiving any of the settlement for my trouble. But $5 says that's not an option.
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NASA building big, dumb, expensive boosters. Sure, SLS will eventually be able to boost 105 tons to orbit. In the process one launch will cost ten times as much as a single Falcon 9 Heavy launch will, which will boost 54 tons the same distance. Two launches, twenty percent of a single SLS, same paylod on-orbit. You do the math.
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Because government cannot do anything efficiently. The fact that our government is fudging economic numbers and providing false statistics is not surprising, nor is the possibility that Social Security is already spending more than it's taking in.
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Two hundred watt laser--that's a beam you can see without anything else in the air. Of course, if you look at that with unprotected eyes, it'll be the last thing you see. Two hundred watts is a lot of light, so much that the beam is visible in clear air just because of the photons scattering off the air molecules themselves.
Understand: when you look at a light bulb and you see that it's rated for, say, 60 watts, that's not how much light it puts out; that's how much power it consumes. A 100 watt incandescent light bulb produces about one watt of actual light; the rest is heat. A flourescent bulb need consume only about 40 watts of electricity to produce a watt of light. An LED fixture may consume 10 or 20 watts to generate a watt of light.
But what you're seeing in that video is two hundred watts of light, and that is a lot of light. It's a dangerous amount of light, in fact.
It's an impressive build, but it's certainly nothing I'd want to fool with.
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Yesterday was errand day; today is chore day. I need to cut the grass, the kitchen and bathroom need cleaning, and I have a bunch of other little things to do. I'm hoping to go pick up a refill for my pills, too.
Better get after it. It's a shame, though, since it's such a nice, quiet day. Well, that's how it goes, I guess.