Posts by Rich 11 4578 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
I like the way some random person on the internet thinks they've got a simple but near-total solution for an entire highly technical organisation of hundreds of thousands of people, especially when the description of the solution is peppered with words like 'only', 'easily' and 'just'. Are you 17? Have you met the real world yet?
a pure socialist like Bernie
Sanders is a social democrat. I know it's got the difficult word 'social' in it, which confuses far too many Americans, but I'd like to think that more of you would occasionally consider reaching for a dictionary rather than joyously gulping down the bullshit spewed by the people who want to manipulate you into making them richer and keeping them richer.
I have to wonder whether the successful revolution in 1776 had any positive benefits for reform of the British government, ultimately giving more power to Parliament?
You're correct in that his contribution to both the causes and the conduct of the war did damage George III's political influence, given that he'd been raised in his mothers' Hanoverian court and brought up to believe that power should be invested primarily in kings. However in terms of power being retrenched in Parliament it's arguable that his son's antics (especially his constant demands for money) damaged the monarchy more. The succession of a madman by a buffoon helped pave the way but it took another generation before meaningful reform took place, and a further 80 years before the monarch was sidelined and left with even less power than the newly-neutered House of Lords.
The job ad calls for someone with strong technical knowledge, excellent negotiation skills, experience managing IT operations in a complex multi-vendor environment, and “significant track record of owning end-to-end in-house technology service delivery”.
The ability to wield multiple electric cattle-prods simultaneously would also be an advantage. Anyone want to bet this poor sod lasts more than twelve months without going off sick with stress and depression or quitting in disgust?
Interestingly enough there was (and still is) an electricity substation just over the road from the hospital car park. It's a squat brick building surrounded by one of those spiky steel fences with an outer hurricane fence around it and the pylons. I did wonder if that would be where an escape exit might emerge, although after all this time I can't remember whether or not the bomb shelter was on that side of the hospital complex.
I did some volunteer work in my distant youth, more with the intent of putting something distinctive on my CV than on improving the lot of humanity. I once spent three weeks working nights driving an electric buggy around the warren of tunnels underneath a major hospital, towing carts full of all sorts of medical waste, disassembled beds, broken furniture going for repair, boxes of supplies and tons of laundry, etc, from one drop-off point to another. You could go the entire night and only ever meet three people.
Naturally I soon got bored and spent some time exploring the place. In one of the less-travelled tunnels I found myself up against a 10' square blast door, the entrance to the nuclear bunker where the local great and good had no doubt schemed and plotted to gain places in a refuge from which they could later emerge and rebuild civilisation in their image. Given the number of RAF bases in the environs, I did wonder if they'd stopped to think how likely it would be that their refuge would become their tomb, buried under ten floors of collapsed hospital.
First, the biologists are commenting on the psychologist's interpretation of biology, not on psychology.
Second, it is reasonable to accept that biologists probably wouldn't know as much about psychology as a psychologist.
So why then give much credence to a psychologist's view on an aspect of biology? You compound this by saying much of our biology is the same, which is the exact point the biologists are laughing at. Mammals and crustacea do indeed both use serotonin, BUT FOR DIFFERENT THINGS!
This is why Peterson is so laughable. He makes things sound not ludicrous on its face (to borrow your phrase) but all he is doing is falsely claiming a scientific basis for his own pre-existing prejudices and he's enjoying the fame and adulation it earns him from those of a similar mindset. Sadly he also sucks in others because he can sound so convincing.
But, ya know, it's all about post-modernists.
Post-modernism can be as readily dismissed as can be Jungian psychology. There hasn't been any advance in post-modernism for 30 years. No new Derrida carrying the flag, nothing like that. I don't expect that Peterson holds much of a positive opinion about Jungian ideas, given its lack of a scientific basis. Both are dead in the water.
So why does Peterson attack post-modernism? Because it's an easy target and it carries associations. He uses it as an inroad to undermine his perception of socialism, due to his pre-existing ideas on the subject (no wonder he's so popular with the alt-right). Just as in the way you've inserted Marxists alongside post-modernism; you might have failed to notice that one school significantly pre-dates the other and that neither is dependant upon the other. This is why I originally said that a person's consumption of Peterson's verbiage can give an insight into the way that person's mind works. I'd like to think that, what with him being a psychologist, Peterson would appreciate that.
BTW, while I will happily state that my politics lean mostly leftwards I don't describe myself as a socialist, nor do I think anyone else with a reasonable understanding of the term could describe me as one either. I just say that so that no-one need bother with any replies beginning "Well your pre-existing ideas..." Because obviously I'd prefer replies which examine my id, ego and anima, or which deconstruct fundamental human perceptions of the universe, or which critique me on the basis of Marxist dialectic.
Showing disdain against some one who promotes reasonable judgement pretty much proves a great many of his points.
This assumes that his judgment is reasonable. If it is not reasonable, disdain is a rational response.
So, where do you stand on this psychologist's attempt to justify hierarchies in human society by reference to the effect serotonin has on lobsters (creatures without a brain) and the effect serotonin has on humans (creatures with a brain and a vast array of concomitant societal influences)? I'll give you a clue: biologists have laughed.
Also, lobsters piss through their face.
The algorithms are, apparently, equal across gender and race. Only employees working in a specific group that contains more than 30 people with at least five people per demographic group are considered by the system.
I can see at least two ways in which that restriction could overlook discrimination, inadvertently or otherwise.
and the result was surprisingly palatable
Tha dussn't know tha's born, lad.
When I was about eight or nine, in the early seventies, me and a mate used to spend our time at the end of our road, about a mile out of town. This was where the river and roads met the train line, so we'd piss about climbing on the bridge and watching the trains go by (which weren't many, except in holiday season for the east coast resorts). We got to know the signalman who worked one side of the river and the gatekeeper who worked the two crossings on the other side.
Some summer evenings one or both of them would give us money to cycle back into town and fetch them fish and chips. In return we got half a bag of chips and a mug of tea to wash it down. It may just have been an urban legend amongst signalmen, but it was said that the signal hut which contained an iron stove and a huge blackened kettle had never been free of tea since the LNER was incorporated a hundred or more years earlier. Every shift, someone would just scoop out the previous set of tea bags, throw in a handful of their own, top it up with water and put some more coal in the stove.
Proper tea, that was.
I can't believe* I got downvoted for not carrying a phone.
It's not my fault I don't have friends who want to speak to me every second of every day, or that I don't absolutely need to speak with them at a whim, or that I don't feel a compulsion to install a Facebook app let alone use it. Unless I'm going out of town for a few days my phone is a fucking expensive alarm clock, that's all.
*Well, alright, maybe I can.
Yes, it can certainly be a subset. I'd like to think that our supposedly intelligent, principled and motivated elected representatives wouldn't all fall into that category, but since everyone is capable of making mistakes I suppose that given enough areas of non-expertise then disastrous results will inevitably occur almost as a matter of individual convenience.
(Please note my restraint on not giving the obvious example. I need the brownie points with the missus.)
Yeah, yeah, we all know that but you try telling the bloody politicians that. It's difficult to tell whether they truly are ignorant and unwilling to learn, or are being blindly loyal to party and ideology, or are using this as an excuse for a broader slurp of data because some spook has convinced them that that would be a jolly good thing and we'll all thank them for their excellent foresight when some undefinable future threat is comprehensively averted.
What do you think should alert us to the presence of heavy metal doom hurtling towards us as we cross the street?
The reanimated corpse of Lemmy. Nothing less will do.
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