New Testingstan

so apparently today is one of those days where i go into the bathroom and sneeze, then turn the light on to discover i have covered the mirror in blood

my first thought being whether i can afford to be sick since i don't get sick days or pto

at least i have SOME insurance so if it's something minor i will only be out half of my next paycheck

Losonti Tokash wrote:so apparently today is one of those days where i go into the bathroom and sneeze, then turn the light on to discover i have covered the mirror in blood

redrum

Thanks for those points, straha. I'm writing up a massive post for Facebook to piss off everyone I know, but I want it to be thorough enough they can't argue against it without coming out as racists.

something btw you migjht notice is the politicians used to talk about iran's nuclear weapons

then they realized that's just not true and we aren't buying it, so they switched to "nuclear program" (no weapon) and "weapons capability" instead


now consider a few facts about capability

1) a lot of ppl have it. if you've mastered the civilian stuff you have the capability to militarize it too. other countries have this and it isn't a big deal

2) you can't use a capability for a surprise attack. it needs to be turned into a weapon first and this still takes time, and will have certain obvious clues. for example the iranians would have to kick out the IAEA inspectors and break their seals on the stockpiles.

i think there's an ehud barak quote about this but i can't find it right now. but anyway if they want to turn the civilian program into military, they have to circumvent the IAEA and we'll all know if that happens well before an actual bomb is built, meaning it is pretty useless for attack

also there's the whole MAD thing. there was recently an ahmadinejad interview where he asked who the hell would pick a fight with america or israel and its 10,000 bombs when they only have one bomb? that's obviously a losing proposition. it isn't logical for iran to attack just from a pure self preservation perspective. tehy aren't stupid, they can see that

3) the nuclear weapons capability could be useful for defense.... if iran is invaded, they can kick out the inspectors (they've already been invaded so what do they have to lose?) and switch to bomb mode 100%. if their army stalls the invasion long enough, they pump out bombs and turn the tables


so what this means is a few things

1) there's a double standard toward iran. the west isn't treating them with the equal dignity and respect that we should be

2) there's no realistic threat from iran's nuclear program


now let me talk about "threat" for a minute. when you hear the word, what do you think? "he's threatening me", you'd think he's preparing an attack right? so he's pointing a gun at you or he has a key to your house and says he wants to take all your shit etc

in other words to me "threat" is someone intending to take something from me by force



but i've observed that when many goverments talk about threats, they mean something different: they mean a limit to their expansion

by their definition, if my neighbor bought new locks for his house, that would be a "threat" to me, because it means my copy of his old keys won't work anymore! so i can no longer use his house at will...

and if he bought a home security system, well, now i can't even break in anymore!!!!!! what if i wanted his stuff? EXISTENTIAL THREAT.



realizing this, you learn to not take the government's shit about threats seriously. it simply doesn't mean the same thing to them as it means to us.

iran's potential nuclear weapons capability is a "threat" to the government not because iran will use it hurt us

but because they can use it to limit our expansion


BTW ditto on israel, it's all the same. it'd be madness to attack them, iran doesn't even want to, but they could potentially put a check on israeli aggressive expansion, thus "threat"




now why do they see it as a threat? are they just lying because they're power hungry? actually no i don't think so. i think it's because a limit on expansion actually is an existential threat to the ruling class. some israelis have actually said this though in racist terms - if israel doesn't keep up jewish expansion and forcing others down, it will lose its identity as a "jewish state". no jewish people may be hurt, but the state's identity will change

and we can get a similar result by following the money. if our economy isn't constantly growing, we call it a crisis. if growth hit a hard limit, our economic system - and the power structures built on top of it - would collapse. thus a limit on its expansion actually is an existential threat to our rulers. again, no people ae hurt, but they lose their identity as powerful



but ask yourself this: is that a legitimate threat? is it worth hurting other people over?

wow did you know the facebook chat can store your exact location if you use its chat?

i was just taking a gander at a fb chat history with a friend and noticed a little pin thing

upon clicking it showed exactly where she was for each individual message, along with the exact time



jesus christ

yeah social networking makes stalking really easy

uh
I would think

The casual look into peoples lives is pretty wierd, but what gets me is that people will use that check in stuff willingly. Why would I want anyone to know where I am?

so they know when to burgle your house, duh

Obviously.

Losonti Tokash wrote:

Holy shit, that first guy looks awfully similar to Nicolas Sarkozy.

It's these droopy blue eyes...

adr wrote:wow did you know the facebook chat can store your exact location if you use its chat?

i was just taking a gander at a fb chat history with a friend and noticed a little pin thing

upon clicking it showed exactly where she was for each individual message, along with the exact time



jesus christ

I hope that's opt-in rather than opt-out in the settings, otherwise fucking Facebook.

(Not that it matters too much for me since I rarely use that chat, and only from home anyway, so...)

Aaron wrote:The casual look into peoples lives is pretty wierd, but what gets me is that people will use that check in stuff willingly. Why would I want anyone to know where I am?

For whatever reason, thanks to the whole Facebook/Twitter/etc social media thing, people seem to be of the opinion that it is somehow important to share the littlest details of their lives with the Internet at large.

Because y'know, people give a shit you went to McDonalds for lunch.

I guess you could chalk it up to "kids these days" although as noted in various places, some of this 'share EVERYTHING' mindset can come back to bite you in the ass. Like teachers who get fired for drinking out of a red plastic cup because OH NOES MIGHT BE ALCOHOL THINK OF THE CHILDREN (even though you couldn't see what was in the cup and it wasn't like she was half naked, or appeared drunk, or anything like that; but red plastic cup + party = alcoholic I guess) and so on and so forth.

holy shit what
does that actually happen?
I mean, I know employee protections are a joke without a punchline in the US, but I was under the impression that teachers were pretty heavily unionised, and that's the sort of thing that really ought to kick up a fuckstorm of shitacular proportions

evilsoup wrote:holy shit what
does that actually happen?
I mean, I know employee protections are a joke without a punchline in the US, but I was under the impression that teachers were pretty heavily unionised, and that's the sort of thing that really ought to kick up a fuckstorm of shitacular proportions

It can. In fairness, the specific red cup thing I couldn't find, could be misremembering that. But yeah, social networking can get you fired.

http://www.nea.org/home/38324.htm

This here gives a good explanation. A lot of it is younger teacher who don't have tenure, so they're basically at the mercy of the district. Now the examples in that article can probably be justified for firing. But look up Ashley Payne and what she got fired for. You could see the alcohol she was drinking, granted, but still. And her privacy settings wouldn't let her students see it and she didn't friend her students. The FB profile was private, basically. Here it from Ms Payne herself and there's this article about it. Here's an excerpt:

Barrow has a policy that states employees can be investigated and disciplined for postings on Web sites that contain provocative photographs, sexually explicit messages, use of alcohol, drugs or anything students are prohibited from doing. And the policy allows for termination for such transgressions.

So yeah, even though it's perfectly legal for the teacher to drink alcohol, better not take a picture because if the students can't do it, you can't do it. Also "provocative photographs" which, let's be honest, could easily mean a picture of a female teacher wearing a low cut shirt.

There's also a teacher's aide fired over not giving her FB password to the admins which is, y'know, against FB's policies anyway. Although that's not something that only happens to teachers apparently and in fairness that sort of thing has made some members of Congress rather unhappy so that probably wouldn't last if it hit mainstream attention.

That's fucked up
I would think that maybe two or three of those reasons would be a justification for firing (calling a student a retard, actually badmouthing other staff in public)... but even then, it'd probably be a written warning over here...
But yeah, wow.

The idea that I can't do something a student can't is pretty fucking dumb. I'm a god damn adult, their a child. Sometimes I wish I had a time machine, maybe then I could find somewhere humanity isn't made up of dipshits.

RogueIce wrote:

Barrow has a policy that states employees can be investigated and disciplined for postings on Web sites that contain provocative photographs, sexually explicit messages, use of alcohol, drugs or anything students are prohibited from doing. And the policy allows for termination for such transgressions.

So... when are they going to fire every teacher that has a photograph of them driving a car? How about photographs of them going to the voting booths? Older photos of veteran teachers during their military service?

Murdered this thread...

Rape is funny if it's Elmo doing the raping. That's what my dog barked to me in morse code anyway.

evilsoup wrote:hahahahahahaa

ffmpeg fucking sucks. why the hell is its default settings "take good video in, spit shit video out"??????

...and the settings the FAQ give for "high quality" video don't even work for mp4 and STILL produce shit for mpg

god damn it, i guess i'll just bump this back to the Mac weenies or something, at least their software actually *works*

use handbrake, it has ffmpeg as a backend, but with sane settings, & it's cross-platform