frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

And I'll just add the Lovecraft Investigations to the list. Absolutely brilliant series.

Agreed with this. Even if one leaves the high performers out of the equation, if someone is consistently shirking work, and others are having to pick up the slack in order to make sure deadlines are met or that quality standards are reached, then that's a recipe for resentment if pay is the same. I don't think everybody on the team has to put in exactly the same level of work, and in a good working environment people tend to be pretty understanding of variances in output (both quality and quantity) as long as everybody is trying their best. Unless you've got someone that does significantly less than everyone else. To deal with that, you either need to have really good management, or pay rates need to reflect the actual work done.

That doesn't mean that the parents' concerns about how so much isolation would impact their childrens' mental, emotional, social and academic development weren't valid, though. In fact, it's pretty obvious at this point that many children were adversely affected, many in ways that will impact them for the rest of their lives. It is definitely not a given that the people that joined Moms for Liberty because they were worried about their children being so isolated during critical stages of development are also Covid deniers and bigots.

That was not known at the time, though. What was known was that children were at a much lower risk of dying (and of getting seriously ill), and there were plenty of parents who had very valid concerns about the impact on their children. What we're going to see over the next 20-30 years is an awful lot of children growing up with severely stunted social and emotional development, which was a much more foreseeable outcome of Covid restrictions in schools than long Covid.

I'm not saying having restrictions was right or wrong. There was probably an ideal balance in there somewhere, but given the situation, it would have been a damned miracle if anyone had figured out what it was. What I'm saying is that the parents with entirely valid concerns about how the restrictions affected their childrens' development were not necessarily Covid deniers, and are certainly not necessarily bigots.

I dunno, there were plenty of parents over here in the UK who took Covid seriously, but still opposed the degree of restrictions in schools because of the impact it had on their kids. It basically came from a place of being aware that children were much less at risk from Covid than older people, so they accepted the need for measures that protected the vulnerable while still disagreeing with the need to keep children so isolated.

(Interestingly, the ongoing government inquiry here about the government's response to Covid has concluded that if any women had been involved in the decision-making on Covid restrictions, the restrictions on children would not have been as extreme as they were - not because women are inherently Covid-deniers, but because they would have considered the long-term impact on children, which the entirely male decison-making team simply didn't think of.)

So my assumption is that many mothers in the US felt the same way - and these people aren't Covid-denying, anti-vax, racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots. They just wanted their kids to be able to go to school normally. While undoubtedly the loudest voices in Moms for Liberty were Covid-deniers, I would expect that the majority of those who joined the group were just normal mums worried about their kids during the pandemic.

I wonder if a big part of it was that there wasn't as large an overlap between being unhappy with coronavirus restrictions in schools and being opposed to children learning about diversity as the Moms for Liberty group thought. All the mothers who were only thinking about how the restrictions were impacting their kids social, emotional, and academic development (and those concerns did have some validity) have now got what they wanted: their kids are back at school and growing up normally. They don't feel the need to go on a crusade against minorities because that was never what they were worried about.

Obviously I can't speak for other countries, but in the UK non-compete clauses have been found to be enforceable when they are very specific and narrow in scope, such that the person isn't prevented from earning a living within their profession - too long a duration or too broad a geographic area will make it unenforceable, because it's unreasonable to expect someone to move to a different country in order to earn a living. But a limited duration in a narrow geographic area can be upheld as enforceable. There is also specific case law that establishes that a non-compete clause that is unreasonable at the point of signing is unenforceable, even if the circumstances change (such as the employee being promoted and having a more senior role) that would otherwise make a non-compete enforceable - this stems from the fact that non-competes for inexperienced, junior employees are less enforceable than non-competes for highly experienced, senior employees.

The government recently ran a consultation on the matter, due to the fact that more regulation is needed for when non-competes are and are not enforceable. The conclusion reached by the consultation was that non-compete clauses would be limited by law to a maximum of 3 months.

Agreed! It's not common knowledge, and it really should be (that said, I'm hardly an expert myself - just a layperson who reads a lot). If it was up to me, a person's legal rights (consumer rights, employment rights, etc) would be taught at school, so people would already have a basic idea of what's legal and what's not when they reach adulthood and enter the workplace. Even accounting for the law changing over time, if people know they have rights, it gives them a place to start, even if it's 20 years later that their employer tries to screw them over.

I would love to see companies penalised for creating unenforceable contract terms, too. If they had to pay damages every time they got caught doing it, they'd stop doing it pretty quickly!

I mean... those non-compete clauses are legally unenforceable in the UK. They're in contracts all the time, people ignore them all the time and get new jobs elsewhere, and on the rare occasions the previous employer actually tries to sue, the courts chuck it out because banning someone from working in their entire profession, globally, is almost always treated as an automatically unfair contract term that cannot be enforced. The cases where non-competes are upheld are for very specific instances (very high-level employees handling sensitive client data or very new innovations, patents, etc, or alternatively going to work for the direct competitor right across the street), and wouldn't apply to someone who had simply been a team lead for a couple of months. And since Blizzard wanted to treat him as a UK employee for salary purposes, he'd count as a UK employee for legal purposes too.

most cats wouldn’t properly move a plot along without the prompting of their robot friend either

Many cats wouldn't move a plot along even with prompting from a robot friend.

It's a slippery slope, man. As soon as you interfere with the free market by making companies stop screwing over their customers, nobody has any freedums anymore.

It also is far easier to get screwed. I’ve had busses not arrive, train delays and the bus leaves and there’s no refunds, good luck calling one of their centers to try and get any help at all. It’s awful

This is definitely fixable with good consumer protections. In the UK, one of the few things that works well with public transport is being entitled to refunds when delays or cancellations happen, and if a delay happens that causes you to miss a connection, the travel company is responsible for rectifying that. For instance, last summer I was on a train that ended up being delayed by about 3 hours, which meant we arrived at a station after the last connecting train had left - so the train company called ahead and arranged taxis that got everyone to their final destination. The train tickets were also fully refunded, because any delay over an hour entitles you to that (smaller refunds for smaller delays - I get full or partial refunds on about a third of train journeys I take.) They definitely were not doing all of that out of the goodness of their hearts, but because the law says they have to.

I don't think it would ever be possible to 100% ban flying, because islands exist and so do the Atlantic and Pacific oceans - and ships are too slow to fit with modern lifestyles and the demands of employers. There's always going to be people who need to travel between distant islands and the mainland (eg Hawaii and the US) or between continents (eg Europe, North America, Australia).

However, I think there are some great options for reducing flying down to the minimum necessary. Public transport should be good enough to serve people's needs within their own country, and between their country and their nearest neighbours. Speaking for my own country (UK), the non-flying options to France and Spain are actually pretty good - they take a bit longer than a plane, but not so much longer that they're unrealistic for people to do. The problem is the lack of decent public transport options within the country.

Yeah, it's been an ongoing saga. I've tried going to the teachers, but their hands are tied because of his neurodiversity - this is where the "be kind to him" instruction came from last week. And it's like, I did that for months and all I have to show for it is exhaustion, anxiety, and depression. So, nope. Not doing that. He can just stay away from me.

A very wise person once said "the only way to win is to deny the battle". This advice is working well for me this week. The guy at university that I have developed a strong aversion to keeps trying to talk to me, and I have been ignoring him. If you're reading this and feeling inclined to call this mean, this situation has arisen because he repeatedly refused to respect my boundaries (and I genuinely cannot express them more explicitly than the literal words "do not touch my laptop"), repeatedly started arguments because he can't accept his opinions are not facts, and repeatedly obstructed our group project to the point that I ended up doing every single task that was assigned to him, because he either didn't do it, only did half of it, or did it so badly that it was unusable by the rest of the team. He is quite capable of talking non-stop for 8 hours without even pausing for breath, including talking through lectures, talking over other people, and talking while others are trying to concentrate on their work. He does not think the word "no" should ever apply to him. He has broken my belongings, lied about it, and when confronted about it, neither apologised nor offered to pay for them.

I've been getting some pushback on my decision to start pretending he does not exist, because he's neurodiverse (autism+ADHD+oppositional defiance disorder) and we have to "be kind to him". I've really struggled with this, because I normally have no difficulty getting on with neurodiverse people and I have genuinely tried my best to be understanding with this guy. My default approach to interactions with anyone is to be(e) nice. But that has to be a two-way street. Having had my very reasonable boundaries trampled over multiple times, with all the evidence being that he misses the unspoken social cues, isn't listening when asked politely, and argues about why "no" should mean "yes" when asked grumpily, my conclusion is that my own self-preservation has to take priority now.

By refusing to engage with him, he has no opportunities to ignore my boundaries (except for his continued attempts to keep talking to me) and he has no opportunities to start arguments. He can't do any of his usual shit if I completely blank him when he speaks. This is the most control I've had over my interactions with him in four months, and it's the least stressed and suicidal I've felt in two months. I would also, perhaps, argue that this is the best way I can "be kind to him", because the one thing that will consistently make me lose my temper is when someone keeps pushing me even after I've told them "no". Refusing to give him the opportunity to keep pushing me is a kindness to both of us.

I definitely agree with you on critics. It seems to me that critics, like all humans, have their likes and dislikes, but too often they set themselves up as the beginning and end of the discussion about what is "good" art, when the reality is they're just expressing their opinions as facts. Whereas I feel everyone should make up their own minds about what art is to them, and what they like or don't like.

But I don't really agree with you on art historians. My experience with those who look at the history of an artistic medium is they tend to think everything is interesting and worth looking at, but in most settings where one might have contact with an art historian, they're under pressure to whittle it down into digestible chunks for whoever they're talking to (be it students, visitors at a museum/gallery, etc) - so of course they have to focus on the artworks that had the greatest impact on their surrounding culture and audience. There is, of course, an element of personal taste involved, because no human can be 100% objective, but there are some objective elements: the first piece in a completely new style or medium, which inspired others, is often more influential than the millionth piece in that style or medium.

I'll concede that the very best examples of AI-generated pieces, when given a sufficiently deep prompt by someone who knows what they're doing, may have more depth than the shallowest examples of traditional art. But it certainly doesn't have more depth than the most meaningful human-made artworks. And it's not representative of the typical output of AIs. Human-made art is almost always deeper, because the human has to make conscious choices about every single thing they include. AI doesn't do that, and most of the time, neither does the prompter.

And again, the same goes for commercially-driven art. You'll note in my previous comment I said "a lot of". There are some that stand out and have genuine lasting power... but the vast majority of it does not. It exists to sell a product, and is forgotten in a year or two.

The Impressionists weren't making art solely for aesthetics though. The results are considered beautiful in hindsight, but at the time the first Impressionist paintings were considered amateurish and poor quality - so their aesthetic qualities were not appreciated and they were disruptive. It was only later that the Impressionists' use of colour was truly appreciated.

So my point is that it's not whether art is pretty that gives it staying power. It's about what the artist puts into the work. Art that is pretty just for the sake of prettiness rarely has staying power. Art that has a deeper meaning does, whether or not it's pretty

My feeling is that art that aims to disrupt usually fails to do so because the artist is trying too hard to be disruptive rather than express something meaningful and personal to them. But when an artist is expressing something authentic about their perception of the world, then it's inherently going to be disruptive because it usually isn't bowing to the "everything is fine" status quo.

Art that exists only to be pretty, but lacks any meaning or personal resonance, doesn't last. It's why AI-generated art (and a lot of other commercially-driven art) is so shallow and unmemorable: sure, plenty of it looks nice, but it ultimately says nothing. The art you actually remember has something to say - and by its very nature, that's disruptive.

A truly magnificent little dude. 🐸