Some days I think I'm smart, then I read stuff like this. I wish there was an EILI5 Plugin for chrome that I could use to tag any paragraph and someone would come along and break it down for me. I'd do it for your comment!
I guess it depends on whether you're willing to read a textbook's worth of Wikipedia articles. (There is no shortcut. Actual 5-year-olds also require a few years until they can understand advanced mathematics.)
You might be confusing "smart" with "knowledgeable". There's no way to be smart about concepts you haven't yet learned.
And the ELI5 idea is cool - just need to find a business model :)
Ah! you've hit the nail on the head why the pro gun people are so adamant about not giving an inch to any sort of increased regulations. Most on the pro gun regulation left do not seem to be able to even fathom why closing the gun show loophole is a non-starter or how there can be push-back against banning guns for people on the terrorist watch list. It's because either are effectively turning the burner on very very low.
Exactly. And people advocating stricter gun laws can't afford NOT be open about this. "We don't want to take your guns, we want to change attitudes so your grandchildren won't wan't to own guns, and most importantly won't feel the need to own guns".
That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed.
I think those who want to keep responsible gun ownership also need to realize they have a lot to win from stricter regulation. With the current culture of short-sighted and reactive legislation, the next ban will be rammed through congress after the next terrible shootout - and that's not the law gun advocates want. I think they are mistaken if they believe they can just use the NRA as a roadblock to keep people buying AR's at gun shows forever. I don't think the political climate a generation from now allows that.
>That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed.
The "gun show loophole" is a misnomer. It's not a loophole. It's simply the case in most states in the US for private sales you're allowed to sell your gun to another person without checking with the federal government first, something that's not true of dealers.
It was an explicit compromise that was added in order to pass the original national background check legislation. A loophole is generally something unintended which this was not.
> A deliberate or accidental provision in tax law that allows an individual or corporation to be exempt from some provision. Most loopholes are deliberate and are created to ensure that the law is not draconian, to please a lobbyist, or for some other reason.
Well, okay. In that case the word doesn't actually mean much beyond "this is the way the law is". What makes the "gun show loophole" rhetoric dishonest is it has nothing to do with gun shows.
Gun shows are a convenient way to find a bunch of private sellers to easily exploit the deliberately created hole in the law.
Sure, you can call it the "private sale loophole" if you want. Go for it. The agonizing over the semantic merits of the "gun show" part of the term is the same tactic as turning any gun argument into a debate over "clip vs. magazine" or "there's no such thing as an assault rifle" stuff - intentional missing of the point to derail a necessary conversation. Might even call that "dishonest rhetoric".
It's not an attempt to derail "a necessary conversation". There's no conversation, since neither side is going to budge. And it's not a semantic argument, either - you're using misleading rhetoric to misrepresent the law as it exists.
>Exactly. And people advocating stricter gun laws can't afford NOT be open about this.
People advocating stricter gun laws have been open about their intentions - it's obvious that such people just want to live in a safer society. Gun advocates just assume they're liars and really just want to come for their guns.
I think this supports the statement you are responding too. The million factors impart a diversity of perspective regardless of whether there is diversity of racial heritage. Does focusing on diversity of racial heritage optimize diversity of perspective?
I think you give up way more with anonymous hiring than you would ever get in return. How do you gauge verbal and non-verbal communication skills? Do they mesh well with the team. Once you drop the in-person interaction you lose more than just the ability to discriminate.
I don't have any issue with this process beyond the use of 'majority'...Maybe I'm just skeptical, but I don't see how the majority of any interview could be non-interactive... Now maybe you think it can be anonymous and interactive but that's rarely true in the way you would want it to be. If it's chat we might over-focus on whether their writing is English as a second language, same for voice. Anything less than that is non-interactive, anything more than that is not anonymous in any way.
I fail to see what any of that has to do with knowing who the person is. You might be right, though. As I mentioned, those benefiting from these things will obviously protest it.
Again, it's possible to have an anonymous candidate you can talk to. Voice obfuscation, prohibited questions (to ensure anonymity, etc.) There's nothing inherent in needing to know who the person is. If you disagree I'd love to hear some scenarios.
Sure it's more difficult to do so, which I agree with. However, the only people who will claim that as a reason NOT to do this will be people who are benefiting from how the system is already, or have something else to lose. The dollar amount to implement this is trivial.
If you've ever been to any of those anonymous chat rooms, that's an example. You could then conduct a full interview that way, and have an independent third party source check all of the credentials. Boom. You're done. This whole thing can be implemented with a standard application form (to initially remove identifiers such as name and school) and a Slack channel.
This seems to be an argument more for interacting with your target market than for diversity. Or are you thinking more like: "Team we just got a new client from Mexico, obviously we are going to assign Alberto to work on their stuff."
Think of a professional vehicle driving. Be it race cars, trucks, etc... Sure, maybe in the early days those cars and trucks looked and worked way different from each other but over time the available ones largely overlap, work similarly, and work well in almost all situations. If every time a new car came out you had to spend several days/weeks trying to figure out how to drive it that would be incredibly annoying. Now just think if you needed to purchase a vehicle and stake your business on it. You look at the options and some come without wheels, some without seats, some had designers that said brakes aren't neccessary, oh and there is an upcoming one that is getting a lot of attention the can also fly... some take gas, others run off vegetable oil. Experimentation is good but there are way too many options parading around as serious contenders.
The problem with your analogy is that, in it, we are the consumers, the people who buy the car. I would agree with some of your points if you were speaking from an end-user's point of view.
But as developers, we're the engineers. We build the car. It is explicitly our job to do all the hard work of picking out the appropriate parts and assembling them in a way that provides a seamless experience for the end user. IMHO complaining about "way too many options" is like a Ford engineer complaining that there are too many (let's say) turbochargers available with varying levels of quality, and it's unclear which one should go in the new car she's designing. It's supposed to be hard, these are precisely the hard problems we are getting paid lots of money to solve.
The relation of consumption is transitive. End-users consume our products. We consume libraries and frameworks we use to build this tools. Just like in the analogy buyers would be annoyed by the plethora of choices, many developers are getting annoyed at constantly changing "best library" ecosystem.
> It's supposed to be hard, these are precisely the hard problems we are getting paid lots of money to solve.
And quite a lot of those problems - including this situation - are instances of the so-called accidental complexity. I.e. difficulties we inflict on ourselves, not parts of the problem that's being solved.
Anyway, the problem seems to be more profound in software than elsewhere, and I think it's because of the medium - code is very malleable; it's easier to rewrite a program than to redesign a car that's already being manufactured. So it makes it tempting to consider changing frameworks, instead of picking one that's good enough and sticking with it.
>there are way too many options parading around as serious contenders.
Its early days for some of these concepts on the web (I mean, discounting some stuff that happened years ago at Xerox Parc which got beat out by worse technology). So by what objective measure are there too many options? There are a few very well established options: React, Angular, and Ember. If you need standards and heavyweight support and reliability, use one of those things. I'm sure in a few years, things will have coalesced and standardized a bit further.
The API and internal code is still expected to change. He very recently finished a large breaking refactor, so it is not mature. Having said that it is a nice editor with a lot of promise.
But I think reasons that are directly related to the job are the only things that belong in this list. If your "shields down" moment is caused by some factor that is external to the job it's really outside of your manager's control.
His job as a manager doesn't really include making sure your children don't get sick, or convincing you that California weather isn't that nice, or that you don't really want to have the life goal of starting your own company. I'd saying restricting the list to questions that a manager could have an impact on is more valuable than a more generic list that encapsulates everything.
"I want to live in a different city" is a management challenge that belonga on the list. Managers have some measure of control over where they allow employees to work.
Accounting for it doesn't really add anything. If you have that drive your shields were never really up so trying to prevent the "shields down" moment is simply not possible.
