For a moment there one might have been thinking he meant atrocious actions with high death tolls against a civilian population, in which case the OP is definitely failing to understand it with his "for something no other country has ever faced", and the "spare yourself embarrassment by not making such witless pronouncements" is spot on.
Not silly. It's supposed to be this way. And don't skip out on the angst.
A starting businessman should be apprehensive of sending out invoices and questioning himself.
Yes, it does feel like "begging", but it makes sure you don't lose out because of hubris. Over time (if you're doing everything well) you will have more money and business acumen, and it will become easier, since you won't be needing the money on the short term. It will also allow you to better negotiate higher prices.
And when you've mastered it, you can hire a (part-time) secretary, who sends out the invoices. That's your reward. You faced your fear, learned how to handle it, and now you can let it go, because with someone else doing the billing, you can always fall back to it being a secretarial error.
There are whole industries based on making it seem you have enough cash and confidence so you feel you have a stronger position to negotiate, skipping out on what I feel is a basic business skill.
Or you can do it the hard way, without leased luxury and practicing the voodoo feelgood technique of the day. Building a business on hard work and gathering confidence in your own skills through your customers, without blaming your parents or the world or your mirror.
Dont' be an actor playing an entrepeneur; be an entrepeneur.
It is not supposed to be so hard that you have to get drunk before doing it.
I agree that you should face your fears. But if you have fear to the point of paralysis, I think telling people just to man up is bad advice. It's like the dieting advice one gets from people who have never been fat: plausible on the surface, but ultimately it comes out of ignorance.
I also agree that one shouldn't blame one's parents or the world. But that's different than understanding how one's relationship with one's parents has shaped you.
A starting businessman should NOT be apprehensive about sending out invoices. There is no shame in asking for someone to pay for what they have purchased.
REMEMBER: you're doing them a favor by not forcing them to pay up front. A 30-day same as cash policy is worth {cost of capital}/12
If you think reminding the customer about their bill is "begging", "only a business necessity", or whatever, you are wrong.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you bought something and thought the store was begging by asking for payment. Safeway is not greedy, begging or anything of the sort when they ask me to pay for a loaf of bread. And you are not being greedy by asking for payment for your work.
>>There is no shame in asking for someone to pay for what they have purchased.
True, but what have they purchased ?
>>Safeway is not greedy, begging or anything of the sort when they ask me to pay for a loaf of bread.
No, but that's a loaf of bread, a physical thing with uniform properties and an established price. When you send out an invoice for your freelance work, there is the amount of hours and there's significant markup for it being freelance hours. It adds up, and before you know it you're sending out a bill for what is, at that moment in time, for you a huge amount of money.
It's not a bad thing to reflect on that. "Am I really worth this ?", "Did I actually earn this?", "Am I offending my customer by being out of the ballpark ?", and most importantly, "Can I justify this, not just to the customer, but to myself ?"
Over time you will appreciate how you fretted over that "huge bill", and maybe even adjusted it a little to feel comfortable about the value you feel you have provided.
It's not comparable to retail, where everything more or less has an agreed upfront price.
Your argument is completely rational. Isn't the point, though, that these feelings are irrational? I don't think telling yourself to stop being irrational is the best way to address the problem. Once you have debugged the cause of the irrational belief/behaviour then it might be easy to tell yourself you can now take the desired, rational step, no?
Normally centos users would "grow into" payed support from RH. Now Oracle claims to give them that support without cost.
Unbreakable Linux was never an attempt to have their own distribution, it was to undercut RH, and now they're found a new way to do that through Centos.
It may cost Oracle money, but it costs RH more money, because, after all, they actually build a distribution.
Ideally, kill/buy RH, phase out Unbreakable, and cram in proprietary Solaris. But for now just destabilizing the RH ecosystem has to do.
Thanks for the brtfs, but no thanks. I'll only touch your stuff with a GPL pole and with a non-oracle maintainer.
If you want support for Centos, please consider redhat *
I'm sure there are some good people at Oracle, and maybe this is a genuine project by some of them, but the hierarchy Oracle is under is just too fickle (as what happened with OpenSolaris).
*Not redhat affiliated. Not even running redhat or fedora anywhere. But on enough mailinglists to see that RH isn't a respected open-source company for nothing.
And once again, by your proposed model to fund science. How are we even going to know there's a comet hurling towards earth ?
Gazing out there for neat stuff in the cosmos isn't even a problem in the first place, so it's completely useless by your metric.
>>move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive"
Those are screenwriting scenarios
>>answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
The answers to those questions have allowed governments to, in as far as is realistically possible, have scenarios and structures in place, for actual world-wide calamity events.
>>Try reading.
You make some highly unorthodox points. There's nothing wrong with that in itself; in fact, it's welcomed.
But when people respond to those points and indicate they have no merit (like how research scientists are in it for their own enrichment), being rude and dismissive is not going to convince anyone you're right; quite the contrary.
Actually we can change orbit of comets/asteroids if we know few years ahead of time that they will impact with Earth - by bombarding object with few hundreds kilograms of "metal spheres" we cause small change in energy of object, causing it to deviate from its orbit quite a bit in the long run.
>>if the problem cannot be addressed than why even bring it up?
Because an engineer (not a research scientist) somewhere, given the right model, and access to the right information, has a basis on which to start working on a solution.
>>Downvote me, I don't care.
You have a very serious misunderstanding about the scientific process and its interaction with other disciplines it seems.
Or to put it more bluntly.
Cancer is a punishment from God, not a "problem", no investigation warranted, case closed. So let's all get back to devising scientific methods for determining who's a witch, a real problem that can at least be addressed directly and is beneficial to society.
>>Take special note of my words above, particularly "DEEP DOWN"
Especially DEEP DOWN, that's where the problem lies.
It's called "Appeal to nature", and it consists of explaining one concept in term of another (love in reproductive drive), even though their fields of use are on completely different levels.
It's a form of reductio ad absurdum, which, even if ultimately and factually correct, adds nothing to the argument other than to discard important facets of a problem that are important for understanding the problem on one level, but not on the other, like, e.g.
"I am capable of feeling love without sexual connotations, but deep down I understand that the reason my brain loves is because it has found a worthy mate"
I'm sure a brother/father would be fascinated by that sort of reasoning :)
This is just to show that in your reduction of the term "love" to purely reproductional terms, you cast out a lot of complex interaction, because "love" exists on the level of rational human interaction, and is complex behaviour, whereas reproduction is not; in fact, the complexity of love is what makes it worth having a seperate term for "love" and "reproductional drive", and worth arguing about what it entails and its place in society.
To redefine it in simpler but unequivalent (even if related) terms, is to change the subject entirely, and that's why it's a logical fallacy.
>If a male were to sexually harass a female, it would not be sexism because he is not giving males special preference over females
Well, seeing how he's not sexually harassing the males I'd say there's a noted difference in "special preference".
Anyway, I'd argue that sexism is almost inherent to any sexual harassment, as the male put himself in a position of power/dominance based on little more than gender difference and the perceived inequality/role expectations that go along with that.
Not that I agree with the other person but by your logic everyone (who is not bi-sexual) practices sexism because they have a "special preference" to relationships with one gender over another.
If the OP of the article had all those same things done to her (ass grabbing, pillow fight invitations, etc) by gay women, would that still be considered "sexism" or just sexual harassment? People sometimes forget that sexual harassment is not always a "Man on Woman" action. There is a 2x2 matrix of how that can go down.
I can't hammer this home enough: it's institutional, the sexism that's going on here. That is, the pillow-fight invitation is not by itself sexism; the sexism is that we live in a world where a man might consider it acceptable to burst into a conversation without prompting and ask a woman to his room for a private pillowfight party, for the sexual gratification of onlooking men. It's not the act, it's the environment which makes the act possible, and the environment which the act fosters, which constitute the sexism. In practice we can therefore label the act itself as 'sexist' -- but the criticism that the act 'is not literally sexist' or what have you deeply misses the point.
If this had been done by gay women, the problem would still be that those gay women somehow felt entitled to make such a request of women. The problem is that a woman was, purely due to her sex, "lowered beneath" a baseline of human decency, if you wish. There might be a legitimate question of "what if we lowered the baseline?" but there is no legitimate question of "what if the person who lowered her was a woman?"
I see an environment that values females sexually. Yes, there are plenty of instances where males are rude to females, but the reverse is true as well. Have you ever watched the way some females gun down males in a bar, even when they approach kindly? This is not sexism, it is sexuality. We are attracted to women, and in fact often give them special bias due to their sex (do women hold the door open for males? Who pays for dinner more often, males or females? Who buys the other person a drink? Who buys the wedding ring? Which sex is allowed to slap/punch the opposite sex? Who has to resort to saying "yes dear" more? Which sex gets let past the line in a club? Which sex apologizes more?). Just because there are isolated incidences of sexism does not mean that the US as a whole is generally sexist (I assure you, it is not - the male race cannot afford all the lawsuits).
If anything, the sexism is in favor of females, as no one would call it sexist if a female groped a man, invited them to a pillow fight party, etc.
Look, I understand that you have a stake in this. I get that. I am also male. I understand that you might want to look out for male interests in a sort of economic sense.
Nonetheless, what you are saying is deeply misguided and shows that you don't know what sexism became in the 20th century and looks like today. You are struggling too hard to make some sort of point. In doing this you are failing to come to a common ground and to understand the Other. I know this well; I have been there. I implore you to make one last effort.
Let us start from some common ground: women are granted a great deal of courtesy because they are in some sense 'overvalued'. The question you should ask is, how are they being overvalued, exactly? And the answer I think is, "they are being overvalued as romantic objects." It's a common thread with roots in that Shakespearean sort of ideal, the Quiet, Pure Woman who Knows Her Place and is Walled Away and must be Wooed by her Romeo. It plays forth in all of the behaviours you have insisted upon: that we would pay for dinner, buy them drinks, arrange the wedding, extend them romantic courtesies, forgive them their outbursts, et cetera. It is also the reason that they are discouraged from the club scene and thus can be whisked past the line.
This is our common ground. Now what you must understand is that this position is not merely a position of privilege, but is also deeply dehumanizing. Look at those words again: romantic "object". The same attitude which makes her precious also makes her little more than ornamental. And this is a story played out through most of our history, until several extremely noteworthy women in the Victorian Era decided "hey, screw that--we can be writers and mathematicians and factory workers as well." Of course, this soon after intersected with the Suffragettes, the World Wars and the Sexual Revolution. It was only very recently that women got the right to vote and the right to attend school -- much less the right to wear 'immodest' dress or the right to be a witch. For a long time they simply were not treated as human but rather as subhuman.
Sexism is simply that: it names these social institutions which treat women as a whole as subhuman. There are still many such institutions. Many of them come from this same Romantic Object Past that you are complaining about -- this is presumably why some man drunkenly licked her tattoo; he may well have thought that this might show that he was pursuing her and wooing her, in his drunken state -- in doing so he revealed that he doesn't really think of her as some independent person to be talked to, but rather some skin to be licked. They may also be inverted by the modern pornographic culture, as with the man who burst into a conversation asking for her to come to a pillow-fight essentially did the same, essentially saying "your conversation could not possibly be as important as our idolizing you as a sex object; come on, let's do this."
The bottom line is that the sexism isn't "in favor of" anybody, it's a deeply immature mistake that we've been carrying around from the Dark Ages to the present. It wouldn't be sexist if a female groped a man or invited him to have a pillow-fight because our institutions happen to not be geared to objectify men in this way. They objectify men in other ways though; especially in corporate culture where there is a tendency to emphasize those who neglect their families to work harder, to be cogs in a machine, to follow the orders of management. This may not be sexism -- that is, there is little reason to expect that women who join the corporate circuit are treated much differently -- but it certainly is objectification happening to men today. The pornography industry also objectifies men; in the industry men become little more than muscles, penises, and a bundle of perversions, with their stamina, girth, and virility being the most important qualities.
TL;DR = "rudeness" is not sexism, sexism is again the climate which generates, and is generated by, such rude acts. Key to the climate being "sexist" is that the climate lowers women beneath a baseline of what it is to be human. The examples you've given do not lower men beneath such a baseline, but there are cultural features which do and we should be wary towards those too, even though they tend to not be sexist per se.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the act of inviting a woman to a pillow fight is sexism regardless of the gender of the requester. If so then we can agree that the act is equally <what ever label you use>. We may disagree on what that label is. If you label it sexism, that is your choice. I would call that rude or aggressively forward.
However, if you are thinking that it is only sexism if the requester is a male, then I think we'll have to agree to disagree completely because I am not going to buy into such gender based biases.
I'm not sure you do understand. The point is rather, "yes, it is rude and aggressively forward. Added onto that, the fact that someone felt free to do it, is sexism. And, the global environment that it creates is also sexism."
It is a sexist request in the sense that it was constructed by, and constructs, sexism. It does not directly oppress anyone, that is true -- but that is irrelevant, because that isn't the only mechanism of sexism (and isn't even the dominant mechanism).
As long as we are agreeing that it is <what ever> regardless of who does it, I really don't care what you label it. That was my point. You can believe it is sexism. I will believe it is not. I don't have to believe it is sexism to think the behavior is bad. It is bad regardless. However, I believe labeling it as sexism is overly harsh due to what that label implies. I don't believe that label is deserved.
More specificly, the Lemote Yeelong, which is not only made in China (like most hardware I guess), but also designed there.
It's neat enough if you can find one, with actually a pretty decent keyboard (for a netbook; rms uses a seperate keyboard with his).