Aceticon

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Aceticon , to aww in He’s so unruly

A rolled-up catnip joint...

Aceticon , to xkcd in xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

And in my experience (or at least how I as a foreigner was taught the English RP pronounciation), often also the spaces between words.

Aceticon , to xkcd in xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I'm amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.

English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of "in"-vs-"on" or even in certain forms of past tense.

However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn't know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.

All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it's a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the "knowledge of foreign languages" also has some impact.

Aceticon , to Work Reform in Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

It all makes "business" sense for those who see employees as "commodities", i.e. all kinda equivalent and hence easilly replaceable with nothing lost when they're switched.

It's basically the MBA thinking of employees as just another "raw material" or "supplier".

The reality, more so in complex domains, is that employees have an adaptation and learning period when they arrive (unlike engineered devices, companies aren't standardized machines using standardized parts, so you a new "part" won't just seamlessly fit and start delivering full performance) and often never written institutional knowledge that goes with them when they leave.

However as those things are not easilly quantified and measurable, MBA types - being unable to add it to their spreadsheets - will simply ignore them rather than trying to balance such costs against salary costs: giving a decent salary increase (a guaranteed cost) will always look like a worse option in an accounting spreadsheet if its only counter is a sub-100% possibility that they might lose that employee (and, remember, since they don't count adaption and loss of institutional knowledge costs, that's listed there as costing nothing) and replace it with somebody else who might even be possible to get with a less "decent" salary (so, more than the current employees but less that a fair salary for the current employee).

Such approach works well if all companies are doing it and the probability that people will leave if they don't get a decent salary is low enough (which it probably is, since the majority of human beings favour stability over change).

Aceticon , to Work Reform in Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

Well, it does match my own experience and observations (in Software Development in a couple of countries in Europe) going back to the 90s.

The shift to "no loyalty to employees and hence for employees being loyal is a net negative" was around the point when companies started refering to employees as "human resources" and IMHO, resulted from the increased use of MBAs in Management, which in Tech happenned aound the early to mid-90s (though it dependend on country and the actual Industry making heavy use of IT).

Mind you, at least in IT and even all the way back then, it was already a good idea to move places at least once in one's career because people who worked all their life in one place don't really know any other way of working than the one of their place, which is limiting for one's professional growth (though plenty of people did manage to just keep ticking up on salary purelly on age-seniority even well after they stopped improving as professionals) because no one company has "the right processes" for everything.

Personally I actually think it's healthy to move companies at least a few times in one's career, but my point here is more about one's career and income growth stalling (and pretty early on, too) if you don't move companies.

That said, I'm talking about expert and in high demand career tracks: I don't really know if in the kind of jobs were the bean counters basically see employees as commodities there is any significant benefit from job-hopping, unless it's job-hopping into a different kind of job.

Aceticon , to aww in It's just not fair!

Well, it's fucked up for them that the bipedes made up of delicious meat have guns...

Aceticon , to Work Reform in What kind of institutional gaslighting is this?

If you buy a monitor from Amazon, do you expect that they will thrown in another one for free?

What about if you hire a plumber to come fixe a leaky pipe, do you expect them to install a new set of water taps for free while they're at it?

Do you go to McDonalds and expect a posh table waiter, and a complimentary bottle of Beaujoulais wine along with lightly seasoned oregano and olive oil garlick bread, for the price of a Big Mac?

So why expect that workers will do more work than what they are being paid for?!

If it's only a business relationship, as those very same managers treat it when it's time for layoffs or when giving below inflation raises because the job market isn't tight and they can easilly find replacements, then it's only fair that workers too treaty it as only a business relationship and only provide the level of service they're being paid for.

If they want the haute cuisine Michellin Starred service they're gonna have to pay more than McDonald prices.

The whole calling it "quiet quiting" is just a reflection of the moneyed class wanting to, as the Brits would call it, eat the cake and still have it afterwards.

Aceticon , to Texas in Riot cops line up next to a sign at University of Texas at Austin.

Because the American Power Elites believe Might Makes Right and the riot police are their most willful and most violent goons.

Aceticon , to aww in Cat after my own heart

Smart cat: to get yourself a one month meat supply it’s safer to poison the big animal than it is to try and fight it.

Aceticon , to xkcd in xkcd #2891: Log Cabin

Chaos ensues…

Aceticon , (edited ) to xkcd in xkcd #2882: Net Rotations

The mass of the Earth is 5.972 × 10^24^, so you would need 5.972 × 10^20^ humans of 100 Kg each all turning in the same direction to make the Earth rotate 1% the other way (so about 597,200,000 trillion humans).

PS: I might be slightly wrong here as rotations have to do with angular momentum which is a bit more complicated than the linear kind because rotational inertia doesn’t depende on mass alone, but the law of conservation of angular momentum does apply.

Aceticon , to xkcd in xkcd #2882: Net Rotations

Ultimatelly it depends on the distribution of the Human population all over the World.

It’s fine to not to offset your rotations at the end of the day if there are people on the other side of the World in average rotating about the same as you do and who thus offset you rotations with their own.

Also if some people around you tend to accumulate clockwise rotations and others counter-clockwise ones, it’s all fine as you’re offsetting each other and ditto if your personal accumulation of rotation for each day has an equal chance to being clockwise as it has of being counter-clockwise since you’re offsetting yourself over time (granted, if not in the equator you’ve made days a little longer or a little shorter in between, but all in all it’s fine).

Aceticon , to xkcd in xkcd #2867: DateTime

Well in a very strict sense one can’t really say “never” (unless you can see into the Future), but it’s probably safe to go along with “It’s highly unlikelly and if it does happen I’ll fix it or will be long dead so won’t care”.

Aceticon , to aww in Sometimes a little murder is ok.

When you’re high enough in the food chain you don’t need to look adorable to try and deter predators from eating you…

Aceticon , to Work Reform in Women in Iceland including the prime minister go on strike for equal pay and an end to violence

Well… sorta.

The average wage of women starts falling behind that of men at around the age of 30-something, which does match the point when people have kids nowadays, especially women with higher education. Funnilly enough, in average women earn more than men up to that point because more women get degrees than men.

So yeah, it’s related to childbearing.

However…

It apparently depends on how long a woman stays away from work during the parental leave period: the longer that happens the bigger the negative impact on a woman’s career and hence her on lifetime earnings.

Part of the reason why mothers stay much longer at home on parental leave than fathers are indeed personal choice, but part is cultural (i.e. societal expectation that the mother takes care of the children), part is legal (different legal lengths of parental leave for men and women) and part economic (insufficient provision of affordable kindergarten places, at times making returning to work more costly than staying at home, which associated with the other parts means women are the ones that more often end up staying at home for years after childbirth due to this).

Whilst the first 2 aren’t really something governments can do much about, the other 2 are.

A handful of countries have gone ahead and done things to change this, for example with free kindergarten places guaranteed for every child and parental leave which is just one big gender-independent block of months that can be divided between parents in any way they see fit.

So are these female politicians in Iceland pushing for the real world solutions that can start fixing the roots of the problem or are they just endlessly posturing about the symptoms for image management and political gain amongst the majority gender?!

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