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[Kagus]

Besides, if an authority figure uses incompetence as an excuse, honestly or not, is that not reason enough to replace them? In a position of trust, an incompetent person can be as dangerous as a malicious one.

Authority figures don't themselves use it as an excuse, but I hear it brought up all the time when discussing the actions of politicians.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, run for office.

[sluissa]

(Though they say never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.)

I've always thought that this saying is extremely convenient for those truly guilty of malice who want to hide behind plausible deniability.

Better a false negative than a false positive; I'd rather see a guilty man run free than an innocent man behind bars.

At this point in my life, I don't 100% agree.

For people in positions of authority, this sentiment should be reversed.  The higher the authority, the more people are put at greater risk as the price for offering that benefit of the doubt.  Otherwise, positions of power are easily abusable, and all the more attractive to those who would want to abuse them.  Letting anything an authority figure does go if it can possibly be explained as incompetence makes us all easy victims to malice.

"Innocent until proven otherwise" is an important pillar of any justice system. Important things should be investigated to find if incompetence or malice truly was the cause (and if it was incompetence, how to idiotproof the system), but until then, nobody can be held responsible.

Besides, if an authority figure uses incompetence as an excuse, honestly or not, is that not reason enough to replace them? In a position of trust, an incompetent person can be as dangerous as a malicious one.

Except that's not how things work. It is easier to fire someone from a position of authority than it is to send them to jail. You don't need beyond reasonable doubt evidence to take away a person's authority like you do to take away their freedom completely.

Contracts and labor laws vary, but in the case of a politician there's an extremely easy way to take them out of authority built into the process. (Or rather should be easy. Politicians have learned to game the system).

Spoiler: "Trucking rant, plz ignore" (click to show/hide)

As for the truck driver thing, the "shortages" mostly self induced. Trucking is known as a shit business. Aside from the shit practices already mentioned, there's also a lot of other shady stuff that happens. Federal subsidies provide bonuses for hiring and training new drivers, so a lot of companies will hire a driver, train them for "free", with a contact stipulation they have to work there for x amount of time or pay back the training costs with cash. Work them just before the x amount of time and fire them. So they get cheap labor from a new driver, often at a reduced rate due to being a "trainee", they get a subsidy from the government for training them, and then they get the "cost" of the training from the driver since they didn't fulfill the contract.  Pushes to do flat out illegal things like drive visibly unsafe trucks or in unsafe conditions, which goes on the driver's record, often costing their license, if they get caught. Combined with the fact that minimum wage laws are difficult to get enforced against trucking companies and if a company gets caught doing something illegal they'll often simply shut down and open right back up under a new name and license number.

So you literally have a system that's doing everything they can to force massive turnover in the labor force and then saying "We have shortage, we need more drivers." WELL OF COURSE YOU DO! Granted the Electronic Log Devices has caused a bit of an issue. Both with "not enough drivers" to cover the legal hours(which is really nothing new, just slightly worse and easier to spot now.) and also from a lack of trucks with HAVE the devices installed. There was some grumbling from the old timers who are used to running beyond their legal hours by fudging their books that they'd give the job up if they couldn't make as much money as they're used to, but I imagine that effect is minimal beyond a possibly significant loss of experience in the pool.

Let's not forget there's significant cost involved in simply getting into the industry. I tried getting into it, and dodging around the $5000+ training cost. Literally more than I paid do go to 4 year college for a 6 week program teaching me how to dodge cones and fill out a log book. I got my license, cost me $325. But guess what, nobody will hire me without that "formal training" attached. Not because the companies don't want to(although a few were obviously simply wanting to get the training money out of the scammed system) but because their insurance won't cover me.

I'm not bitter at all.

[IcyTea31]

Except that's not how things work. It is easier to fire someone from a position of authority than it is to send them to jail. You don't need beyond reasonable doubt evidence to take away a person's authority like you do to take away their freedom completely.

Then fire/impeach them for incompetence, not for malice. 'Incompetent' doesn't mean 'innocent'. But it doesn't mean 'criminal' either. If and when something suspicious happens in politics, we investigate it, and only then make our judgment and do what needs to be done to resolve the issue. Politicians are dirty as all hell, but we need to find the real dirt on them rather than the imagined, just as with anyone else.

[syvarris]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html

Apparently China's making great strides in physical surveillance and facial recognition, in order to create a national panopticon dubbed, perfectly, "Skynet".  Especially considering the name, it seems to be half progaganda, but it's still a remarkable system regardless.

Googling around, seems to be relatively old news, but I find it fascinating all the same.  I'm very curiousi to see just how dystopic it'll get in the future, or if it even will.  Maybe complete surveillance of everything everywhere in a nation won't be abused? 

[Loud Whispers]

It won't be abused for illegal suppression if the purpose is legal suppression

[Egan_BW]

inb4 80% of China starts wearing juggalo face paint.

[sluissa]

I guess they've solved the inherent racism of electronics.

[Reelya]

That took me down the google rabbit hole and ended up back at the Feminist Glaciology thing:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

And no, I'm not claiming that feminism is invalid or that feminist causes aren't valid.

Feminist Glaciology, brought to you by a bunch of men (check the names on the paper: three men ... and a woman who was listed last) who have never been near a glacier.

The point is, people like this co-opt the "feminist" label and apply it to post-modern attacks on mainstream science, when in fact it has absolutely not relation or bearing to anything to do with women's rights. They're just stealing the Feminist label as a tool of attack and a shield from criticism: "you think out theory is bullshit? Why do you hate women so much?!?" And the attack on "gendered" science and knowledge is just a way of setting up a fallacy: it creates a false equivalency between "male" science and "feminist" post-modern anti-science deconstruction.

But the fact that the whole attack was put together by men who don't study glaciers should be the real message. There's also the "sexist airconditioning" debate, where it being a few degrees colder in an office is sexist because women hate the cold so much. I don't know if they realize, but glaciers are really, really cold. So if office airconditioning is a great injustice, I can't see women lining up to join glacier science, regardless of how feminist the framework becomes.

[Trekkin]

(check the names on the paper: three men ... and a woman who was listed last)

Meaning she's the corresponding author, and therefore the principal investigator. It's not sexism, it's an authorship convention.

A really widespread one, too. How do you think authorship order works?

[Il Palazzo]

[Reelya]

(check the names on the paper: three men ... and a woman who was listed last)

Meaning she's the corresponding author, and therefore the principal investigator. It's not sexism, it's an authorship convention.

A really widespread one, too. How do you think authorship order works?

Well if that's the case then they picked a pretty under-qualified person to lead the project.

https://around.uoregon.edu/content/glaciers-melt-more-voices-research-are-needed

When UO historian Mark Carey hired Jaclyn Rushing, an undergraduate student in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, to explore how nongovernmental organizations were addressing melting Himalayan glaciers, he got an unexpected return.

Jaclyn Rushing is the fourth author I was talking about, and Mark Carey is the first name on the paper. If Jaclyn Rushing is meant to be the "principal investigator" as you state, then it seems the whole basis of the attack on glacier science is from one undergraduate student, then they brought in a bunch of male faculty members to fix it up and make it legit. Also, the entire thing is just wall-to-wall buzzwords:

Feminist and postcolonial theories enrich and complement each other by showing how gender and colonialism are co-constituted, as well as how both women and indigenous peoples have been marginalized historically (Schnabel, 2014). Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial science studies, analyzing not only gender dynamics and situated knowledge, but also alternative knowledge and folk glaciologist that are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality, unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western science (Harding, 2009).

Yeah, maybe it was all the work of one undergraduate humanities student. When someone starts to appeal to "alternative knowledge" and lambasts how "colonialism" and "patriarchy" stops regular glacier scientists from listening to "folk glaciologists" all leading to the terrible "domination of Western science", then there aren't any original or useful ideas to be had here.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, maybe it was all the work of one undergraduate humanities student. When someone starts to appeal to "alternative knowledge" and lambasts how "colonialism" and "patriarchy" stops regular glacier scientists from listening to "folk glaciologists" all leading to the terrible "domination of Western science", then there aren't any original or useful ideas to be had here.

Honestly if you're looking for original or useful ideas in a free-to-publish open-access journal with an impact factor of 6.5, you're not going to have a very good time. It looks like the PI on this was actually Carey, and the journal just likes to be a weird little special snowflake and reverse its author listing.

It really does look like Rushing just came in all miffed about sexism in environmental science and wrote a classically terrible undergrad paper, which Carey funded and sent off to this gutter-tier journal without much review -- which would ordinarily be surprising isn't weirder than a lot of his other publications.

Incidentally, if the term "principal investigator" is new to you, and it seems like it is, a lot of the process of science is going to be somewhat opaque to you. It might be worth doing some reading.

[Folly]

Do you run Windows 10? Do you like to keep your operating system up to date? Well you might want to hold off for a while...

Windows 10 October Update is randomly deleting user documents and profiles.

[scourge728]

Good thing I found a way out of updating ever

[Reelya]

For this specific bug in the Windows 10 update you'd be kind of a goose to be really caught out by that.

The update issue only affected those who manually force the update instead of leaving it to the automatic updater. Once the bug reports started coming in, Microsoft pulled the update, but it never got to the point that it was being automatically rolled out. Anyone in the habit of manually updating things should really be doing full backups however, so they really have themselves to blame if they muck the system up.

the moral is to leave the system well alone unless you know what you're doing.