Have a look at this…
Consumerist – Applying For A Job? Great, Give Us Your Google And Facebook Passwords – Facebook
This redneck town thinks it is ok to invade a person’s privacy if they want a job. By this same logic, it would be ok to tap the person’s phone, open their mail, peek through their windows…
While I can understand the need to perform background checks, this is completely inappropriate.
As almost everyone probably knows, President Obama appeared on The Tonight Show last week. Many people seem to have thought this was a bad idea right from the start, but I do not see anything wrong with it. Then we (in Canada) have seen our leaders (yeah, well, sort of) appear on shows such as Royal Canadian Air Farce before, and nothing too seriously bad came out of it.
President Obama made a bit of a faux pas when he compared his bowling to being in the Special Olympics. The crowd seemed to be amused, and not terribly offended. I thought it was a funny if not-well-thought-through quip, and was not particularly offended by it – then I am not handicapped/special/differently-abled.
Or am I?
This is not a very PC thing to say, I know. The fact is, I am and have been differently-abled for most of my life. I have always been a good deal smarter than most of the people around me. This is not bragging or conceit, it is just a fact. I grew up reading encyclopaedias, doing math, physics, and astronomy, and reading philosophy – all just because I wanted to and because I found it fun. So, that made me differently-abled than most of those around me. It also meant that I had a great deal of trouble fitting in socially. I was teased, I was bullied. I was beaten up. I was avoided. I was a geek, a dork, a dweeb, a nerd. And those are the names my friends called me.
My troubles may not have been the same as someone normally covered by the term differently-abled, but there are definite problems associated.
It has become very politically incorrect to make fun of someone who is mentally challenged, or has a physical disability, or is short, or is female, or is overweight, or comes from a different ethnic background. The funny (or not so funny) thing is that it still seems to be perfectly acceptable to make fun of people who are smart, who love to learn, who love science and philosophy, and who have a hard time interacting with “normals” simply because we do not think the same way.
How many shows have been on the air (from that show with Steve Urkel to Revenge of the Nerds to Big Bang Theory) that are based almost entirely upon ridiculing this segment of the population? If Steve Urkel had been mentally challenged, would the premise of this show have been deemed acceptable? Of course not. If he had been in a wheel chair? No. Then why is it acceptable to make fun of him because he is smart but socially challenged.
This may seem petty, but take it from some one who has lived through it. It is serious. And not just for the individual. It colours the way our society sees and values people. It drives one of the problems facing our society, which is the low value we place on scientists, researchers, and educators. It influences smart young people to hide from who they are for fear of ridicule and not fitting in. It causes young people who might have an interest or talent in scientific and technical fields to be pushed away from these fields at an early age.
It no longer really offends me. Almost nothing offends me anymore, as I have developed a pretty thick skin, and I am too much an egomaniac to really care what anyone else thinks (just kidding!). But think about it the next time you watch TV, or a movie, or read something – notice how deeply engrained this is, and think about what it means in our society.
The economy is in trouble – or at least it seems to be. This is hardly a shocking statement for anyone who has not been under a rock for the last year. I sit and I wonder (as I am sure many people do) just how we ended up where we are. I am not an economist or politician or any of the people who are presumed to have an understanding of the dynamics of national and global economies. I am just a poor dumb physicist/mathematician/software developer/business person, making a few observations.
1) Is the state of our economy driven largely by media? I have noticed during my lifetime that at all times, there are certain people in the press, on TV, publishing books, etc. with “end of the world” stories about the coming economic crises. It seems to me that at certain points, mass media starts giving these doomsayers much more attention than they deserve, and further that a year or so after that happens, our economy tanks. I wonder at times if it is not at least partially a self-fulfilling prophecy – if the mass media tells us for long enough that things are bad, then our resultant behaviours cause things to get bad.
It is kind of like a (not serious) theory I have about airplanes. What if heavier-than-air flight is really impossible? Maybe airplanes really only work because the people on board believe that they work? At any given time, there will be some people who do not believe, but as long as enough believe, the everything is great. But what happens when suddenly a critical number of people on the plane start thinking “Hey, this can’t work”? Poof, the plane crashes.
Maybe the economy is something like that.
2) Big banks, Wall Street, rich people, major corporations. Everybody’s favourite targets. Have they done a lot to contribute to the current problems? Of course. Are they and they alone to blame? Hardly. Our economy got where it is because pretty much everyone involved drove it here. The real estate industry predicated on constantly rising home prices. The mortgage bankers finding new and creative ways to allow people to afford the ridiculously expensive houses they really could not afford. Consumers expecting that they should be able to afford these houses. Consumers digging themselves huge debt loads buying things they could not afford. You. Me. Everybody. We are in this mess because we all created it. Maybe to greater or lesser extents, but we all played along (except maybe for the segment of the population who never had the opportunity to play, because they have been in an economic crisis the whole time.)
People are talking a lot about this psychology of entitlement, mostly referring to executives at banks and on Wall Street. I think the problem goes much deeper than that. Our whole society has a feeling of entitlement. We work hard, so we deserve that bigger house, that newer car, that big vacation – who cares if the numbers don’t work out, we deserve it, dammit. It is the whole “American Dream” (or in my case, “Canadian Dream”) concept. It is just that, however. Just because you have worked hard and you deserve it, does not mean it will happen.
3) Values. Not religious or moral values, but the values we place on things. Who are the highest paid people in our society? Corporate wheelers and dealers. Professional athletes. Movie stars. TV stars. Musicians – at least the popular ones. I know and understand the economics of why these individuals are paid such ridiculously huge amounts of money relative to their contribution to society. I understand that what they get paid is an investment by someone, and they get huge amounts because those paying them expect to get much, much greater amounts in return for their investment. The athlete gets huge sums of money because he/she puts butts in seats at stadiums, and sells merchandise.
The problem is with the people who buy into this crap. The people who pay silly amounts just to see a sports game, or a movie, or a concert. The societal value system that says these people are worth paying to see.
It is also silly that in our society, these people are valued at such a level, when the people who really have the power to solve the worlds problems – researchers in science and engineering and medicine and throughout our universities have to fight tooth and nail to get enough money just to keep the research going. Not to mention the value we place on our educators and the infrastructure around them. Education and fundamental research should be getting the big pay checks, not people playing games, playing make-believe on a movie screen, or pumping out music.
This inversion of value is endemic in our society, and we will not truly break out of the current cycle of economic crises until our values change. Period.
Just my thoughts – but they are, of course, correct. 🙂
I am reading this article Harper takes aim at gun registry. I realize that the gun registry has been unpopular, and seems to have been very poorly implemented. What does not make sense to me is the argument against the idea of registering guns, and licensing owners. The same people arguing against it have no problem with the rules which require us to register our cars, and have licenses to operate them. Why then does it not make sense to do the same for potentially lethal weapons?
I just read a very interesting article by Neil Young on the automobile industry, bailouts, and reducing emissions. While I do not know enough to validate the feasibility of the strategy suggested in the article, I still believe it is an intelligent discussion. There should be no money to bail out the automobile industry without very clear, very specific, very enforceable requirements to retool the industry to produce vehicles which are relevant to the current economic, political, and environmental situations.
(not that I expect any of our leaders to have the guts to follow that path).
It is kind of funny to me that the most popular post I have written (based on the number of hits, anyway) is one on Vista from well over a year ago. It is even more interesting that the hit rate on this post has gone up over time.
Of course, it is fairly easy to draw hits – just use any combination of Microsoft, Vista, sucks, etc. in your tags!
As many nerds know, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, came out last week. As with the previous expansion, both of my sons and I got our copies at midnight the night it came out.
In the past week, all three of us have spent considerable time online together playing WoW, and sharing our experiences and adventures. Something occured to me on the weekend – is this quality family time for the 21st century?
I find it amusing (or would if so many real people were not suffering) to watch lawmakers in the United States continue to play the same old partisan games while their country tumbles towards economic disaster (or through economic disaster, more correctly). It would seem that they are all far too interested in their own personal agendas and philosophical obsessions to act in a way that protects the people who elected them (as opposed to the people who pay for them).
And this not just about the current fiasco over the proposed $700 million bailout. It has been obvious for a long time that a collapse like this was inevitable. All of our leaders, however, have been completely obsessed with political manoeuvring in order to gain or retain power.
(as an aside, I have no better opinion of our government here in Canada – which has acted in such a secretive, cloistered manner that it is really hard to see what, if anything, it has done during its current mandate)
At what point will elected officials in both of our countries realize that they do not work for the lobbyists, corporations, and others who pay them to believe in and vote for what they are told.
They work for us – or should. They are not in office to vote their beliefs. They are not in office to vote the party line. They are not in office to vote their “conscience.” They are there to vote the way their constituents want them to. If they do not do so, they should be thrown the hell out!
(if only there were a viable alternative to the idiots we have now)
Rumor: Tablet Mac to appear this fall…
I agree – competition is good, and anything which livens up the Tablet market is also good.
The depressing thing is, shortly after Apple releases a Tablet, the whole world will be proclaiming how cool and hip Steve Jobs is for inventing the Tablet computer.
I have always been a big fan of email (well, since email became prevalent, anyway). For me, it is a big help to be able to interact with people asynchronously – to be able to send questions or requests and let people deal with them when they have time (and them to me). This as opposed to a phone call or walking over to their office and demanding immediate attention, and interrupting whatever they are doing. I know not everyone shares my views on this. My peers at Whitehill felt pretty much the opposite about email – that it was a medium of last resort, and that face-to-face or phone communication were preferred. As with most things, I think the real answer is in balance and using the right tool for the context.
More and more, however, I am finding that email has become less useful. As a way of distributing specific documents within a team, it is still good. Same for setting up meetings. However, I have noticed a trend over recently (or longer than recently) for people to just ignore email. For the most part, unless a message is marked urgent, or is part of a project-specific interaction, I receive responses to only about 20% of email. I find it hard to believe that this could all be because of poor email etiquette (mine or others). I suspect the bigger problem is email overload – most of us receive far more email than we can possibly respond to. Perhaps email was more productive before it became so widespread. Then there were the years of spam overload, causing many to give up on email as a useful tool. Now (for me, anyway) email spam is no longer a problem. However, many people are still overloaded, even with spam eliminated.
So, is email as a useful business tool dead except for limited communications on projects?
FredSpace 
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