Having been brought up in a French system and then going to a US college, I must say I strongly prefer the French system.
I guess Americans would take offense to this view, but I find wearing religious clothing in a public institution such as a school incredibly obnoxious and pushy -- it's akin to your professor suddenly starting to push his/her political views onto you in an unrelated lecture, or something.
It's not that it's bad to wear religious clothing or have political opinions -- it's just that a school should be a place of learning, not propaganda.
It's not that it's bad to wear religious clothing or have political opinions -- it's just that a school should be a place of learning, not propaganda.
As an American, I think of nothing when people wear hijab or whatever, and trust me, I am an atheist who think religion is irrational and that humanity would be better off without it.
Maybe the French would be better off thinking nothing of it when someone wears religious clothing, just as we are starting to think nothing of it when people are gay or transgender or whatever.
I think the difference is that the French perceive obvious religious clothing similarly to someone wearing a T-shirt saying "I vote republican/democrat" in huge letters -- though I don't know, maybe that'd be considered fine too in the US (US schools, that is)?
I see it as clearly unnecessary/voluntary (so it's quite different from being gay like in your example), so it's an attempt to advertise, which leaves a bad taste in a place like a school.
I am extremely sympathetic to this view as an American, but I think it is worthwhile to think of this from a native Frenchman's perspective. There has been a mass influx of "foreign" Muslim/Islamic peoples there over the past twenty-odd years that do not share western secular values for the most part, and are happy to impose their own views on the native population. If you were a native Frenchman, or a person in a similar situation in Europe, how would you feel about women wearing the hajib? I don't think it is that black and white.
There has been a massive influx of people into the States who don't necessary share American values as well. The Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Irish, Mexicans, etc. Virtually any group you can think of.
I know the feeling, in my eyes excessive display of religious affiliation in clothing tends to come over as a certain kind of smugness: "according to my values, i am infinitely superior to you godless crowd". Hardly the most respectful message to send, a bit like the difference between a vegan and a preaching vegan.
Still, if you'd want to put up legal barriers to displays of religion, you'd certainly need to find better reasons than "it makes people seem very arrogant" ;)
Schools, being places of science, might mandate non-religious clothing in the same way monasteries and temples should be free to set clothing regulation inside their premises.
> "I find wearing religious clothing in a public institution such as a school incredibly obnoxious and pushy -- it's akin to your professor suddenly starting to push his/her political views onto you in an unrelated lecture"
But prohibiting the wearing of religious clothing IS pushing political views.
It's funny seeing all these people vehemently defend their $15/mo. In the bay area, where this launched, that's like what, two beers at a bar?
I don't get the money argument at all. Negotiate yourself a $15/month raise, if you feel that bad about it. And yes, no shit, in some places in the world (like back home for me) this won't make sense -- so what?
The one thing I'd want to have is some kind of ceiling on the gas price. I checked this morning and the prices seemed quite good, but what guarantee do I have that they won't randomly jack up the price when I'm not looking?
was thinking this too. i have a 2005 mazda3 with 165k miles on it that i bought for $18k at the time. still on stock clutch, stock engine, gets 27-30mpg on cheap gas. great ROI.
with some new shocks and wheel bearings it'll probably make it another 70k or more.
Before my volvo v70 went, it was just a shade under 250000 miles, and got 53mpg (UK gallons) not bad for a 2002 diesel car. Almost entirely original parts, only major thing that broke was the aircon and you can get by without that in the UK. Stupidly comfy to drive and a bargain at £2000, shame it lasted only 2 years.
i bought the car to go places, not because i wanted to own a car. fuel is what makes everything go places. is it that shocking that the propellant itself (a consumable, as opposed to a rapidly depreciating asset) would be the main expense?
> "It's hard to challenge yourself and others to go beneath the surface, but the rewards are great."
The author of the post seems entirely reasonable and I'd love to have a discussion with him about this type of stuff.
The problem, at least for me, is that it's difficult to tell upfront who's reasonable and who is not. What I mean by reasonable is someone who will put forward an honest effort to have a discussion, as opposed to deliberately trying to insult the other party (like the CEO from the article), or deliberately trying look for unintended missteps and immediately paint the opponent as some kind of racist monster (like some POC).
I used to be quite honest about these things; now with more experience I think I am less so.
This seems really sad, and like a step backwards, but I don't really see how to solve it without somehow being able to guarantee the other party will cooperate. Of course, if it is your wife, I'm sure you trust her a lot and she trusts you as well, which facilitates the discussion. However, realistically the vast majority of these discussions will be between people who not only don't trust each other as much, but they might even see each other as foes/adversaries.
In that scenario, I'm not sure it's a good idea to "challenge yourself [...] to go beneath the surface".
While in general, there are sometimes people who feel put upon and don't feel like answering questions and/or having that difficult discussion of race, a job interview isn't the place to have it.
The power dynamic is too skewed for you get anything like a real answer to your question. If the question was designed to see how the interviewee handles pressure than that's a shit move to do.
Either way it's a terrible question. Also, it's an unfair one because other white applicants aren't getting this question. By definition, there really isn't a way for a white interviewer to be able to judge how well the interviewee responded to "Why isn't it OK to say nr". It can easily end up feeling like a personal judgement or worse a judgement on a person's entire race of which there is no way they could represent every perspective.
The fact that it was in a job interview just shows the that interviewee either didn't understand the context of the question which is strong evidence that they are probably a bad manager or they didn't care, which is even stronger evidence of a bad manager.
"The fact that it was in a job interview just shows the that interviewee either didn't understand the context of the question which is strong evidence that they are probably a bad manager or they didn't care, which is even stronger evidence of a bad manager."
By "they" you mean the CEO, right? Because it scans as though you mean the interviewee.
I agree, and I certainly wasn't trying to promote the idea of striking up such conversations with someone you barely know just for the sake of personal development.
I've had far fewer such discussions with friends and coworkers, though I've had some. Mostly they have turned out OK, but I've been burned a few times too. And I didn't actively seek the conversations; rather, they always occur when something happens in a shared environment and usually later one of us makes a comment about it that leads to a discussion.
I don't think that's what he's trying to say. He's probably referring to the fact that unless you're black/poc/whatever you're not allowed to have an opinion; it's the blacks/pocs/whatevers that are making him shut up, not the other way around.
> For example, you don't have to have been poor to contribute solve poverty.
You DO need a level of understanding and context, though. You don't have to be poor to contribute to solving poverty, but you do need to have experience with poor neighborhoods to know what the pertinent issues are and to get a more wholesome understanding of the predictament of the affected. I wouldn't expect anyone who's never stepped into a neighborhood with Section 8 housing to know the whole story enough to come up with any substantive solutions, and the same applies for racial issues, as well. If you don't know the stories of people who experience them and fail to properly evaluate their worldview, any opinions you have on the matter are based on faulty reasoning and can't truly be taken seriously.
And yet everyone must live in a society subject to policies that are enacted as response to racism or supposed racism.
To suggest that people should be absolutely silent and not contribute to the discourse that leads to policies that affect their lives is morally abhorrent. Ask them to weight their opinions, sure but telling them to shut up is absurd.
Out of curiosity, is there a way for a non-citizen to vote?
I see the logic of requiring you to be a citizen, but it does nevertheless feel a little unfair -- I live here too, and I pay my taxes like everyone else.
Apparently it depends on the state (within the United States). For California, it appears that Citizenship is required. Some states seem to have substantially lower requirements.
There is, actually - the US has a (slightly worse) government data repository, but there's several LIDAR sets of the Bay Area, mostly from coastal surveys.
We need this in SF. SFMTA ticketed my car for no reason before; I tried their "appeal" process, only to get a response that sounded like they didn't even read what I said.
I once received a parking ticket timestamped 2 in the afternoon. Funny thing is, that day I drove across the GG Bridge and went hiking - I had photographic evidence of crossing the bridge in the morning and the toll to prove I returned in the evening. Therefore I and my car were not in the city at 2 pm and could not have parked illegally.
Its quite easy to leave SF via the GGB in the morning, reenter SF via any of a variety of different routes and get a ticket at 2pm, leave SF again, and reenter via the GGB in the evening.
Now, if you had described evidence of the specific location your car was at the time of the ticket, and the appeal was still denied, that might be a different story.
Heh, please, don't defend these POS. They're cheating and they know it.
I got a ticket for the car being "double parked"; I sent a picture of how it was parked (right next to the curb in a legal spot). It was a rainy day, so you could even see that the car must've been in that spot for a while -- it's not like I moved it there to take a picture.
Later, I got a prewritten appeal denied notice -- it wasn't even specific to double parking, and mentioned none of the evidence I sent.
I also have several friends with similar experiences.
So, please, let's fire them, instead of making improbable excuses.
Here in the Netherlands, if a response to your appeal contains evidence that the handling officer hasn't read your appeal properly or does not give an appropriate answer to each of your objections, it is grounds to get the ticket thrown out in court EVEN if it was a legitimate ticket.
An example: If you object to the calibration of the SPECS camera (e.g camera's that track you over a longer piece of road to determine your average speed) and the officer responds saying that the radar equipment was properly calibrated, you can have the ticket thrown out as it was not radar equipment that ticketed you and thus proper care wasn't shown during the handling of your appeal.
Huh. I appealed a parking ticket in SF one time and it was dismissed. I got a street cleaning ticket that said I parked on a Tuesday but the address on the ticket was on the Thursday street cleaning side. Just pointed that out in a letter and everything was dropped.
However, my scenario is pretty straightforward. I'm guessing anything more complex is going to get denied. You can always appear in front of a judge.
Yeah, back when I got the ticket I was really angry (can you tell from my comments on this topic? :P) and considered doing this.
The problem is that regardless of how angry petty bullshit injustices like this make me, it is simply not worth my time to go fight a parking ticket (it was like $100 or something) in person. Same thing for hiring a lawyer -- it's cheaper to just pay. Plus, I imagine they have the final word anyway and I'm quite disillusioned with the fairness of their whole "trial" thing.
I suspect this is the case for many/most people who get these tickets, and probably a large part of the reason that they can get away with it. It's disgusting but true, and besides someone exposing the scam with data like this, I'm not sure what else I could've done.
No you can almost never appear in front of a judge. Random people from around town (who may not even be lawyers) that adjudicate administrative (extrajudicial) trials are not judges.
That makes more sense when you realize that final appeals from these adjudicators' decisions go to the director of the agency.
I don't know how it works in SF, but after my final administrative hearing was denied in Oakland in exactly the way you describe, I filed an appeal in the county court, appeared before a real judge, and won: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381103
I appreciate your skepticism, but I did appear before a superior court judge. Specifically, my court documents say "dismissed by court without
prejudice" with the presiding judge: Ursula Jones Dickson, Alameda Superior Court Judge.
It is not just an issue of her name appearing on the paperwork. My testimony, as well as the parking department's, was made directly to her, and I presented my evidence to her as well.
I would imagine it's partly an emotional thing; it's hard to blame the pilot or think that the pilot was negligent, when clearly any error he makes can be fatal to him as well as the passengers.
Whereas if a doctor makes a mistake, nothing really happens to him. Thus it's easier to imagine he's just being negligent / doesn't care, which generates more anger than an honest mistake.
How costly is it to train a pilot? How costly is it to train an anesthesiologist? How costly is it to hire a pilot? How costly is it to hire an anesthesiologist?
I guess Americans would take offense to this view, but I find wearing religious clothing in a public institution such as a school incredibly obnoxious and pushy -- it's akin to your professor suddenly starting to push his/her political views onto you in an unrelated lecture, or something.
It's not that it's bad to wear religious clothing or have political opinions -- it's just that a school should be a place of learning, not propaganda.