Awkwardness doesn't come across as creepy to you, but it may to other people. The vast majority of men aren't harassers or abusers, but a lot of women revel in the power to label them "creepy".

If I were young I would stick to dating apps exclusively, since everyone on the app has already signaled a receptiveness to advances.

Vast majority of men are not accused of being creepy. I also dont know what "women in power" have to do with dating or hook ups, are you trying to hit on a boss or something?

And I mean, yes, obviously if you are looking for hookup, you should go to where hookup looking people go. That is not something specific to modern society.

I said nothing about "women in power".

HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.

> 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued

Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.

I believe this is the legal team. There are a lot of self imposed restrictions HR puts on companies, like the can't have a drink during lunch, but I don't understand how ignoring such rules leads to getting sued.

For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.

> A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed

Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.

The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.

And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.

People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.

> The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem

???

Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.

I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.

So when exactly has that non-mixed-sex workplace existed? It hasn't, the mixed nature was just buried under ungodly amounts of hierarchy full of gender defaults. With harassment just taken as a given. Partially held in check by, well, good guys who I guess have always existed, and the ones from the dark ages must have been very good given the lack of external checks, but those 20 or whatever percent who weren't must have made life quite miserable for those at the wrong side of the default imbalance. Yes, progress has happened but we should still have more of it, not less. And HR plays a role in this progress, even if at times it appears a little annoying or excessive.

The non-mixed-sex workplace was definitely a thing in the early 20th century that required explicit effort to change.

There was literally a legislative marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service from 1924 till 1973.

The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.

We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.

Drinking at lunch is a great example. The company can get sued for that.

Not specifically for that, but if something does go wrong afterwards it makes the company much more likely to be liable for not preventing it.

Yes, that's what I meant. Employers are the deep pocket defendants that might get roped into a lawsuit resulting from bad behavior on the part of their employees.

Having a drink or two is not the same thing as getting drunk.

Everybody I know south of the border also calls it Canadarm as well. I'm not sure why they titled the article like that.

I thought it got renamed "Arm of America" /s

A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.

I'm kind of disappointed nobody writes this kind of stuff in Whitespace.

I seems to be easier to have written the same in whitespace given its richer featureset. In fact given BF skips past whitespace, both could be in a single file.

They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.

Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.

They care about what boosts investor confidence.

So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.

It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".

It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors.

Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.

The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.

30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.

I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.

It's not meant to be idealistic at all. There very much should be a whole lot more that goes into the decision to raise prices or introduce ads or whatever that might upset your customers.

Certainly there are people who shouldn't gamble, but that doesn't mean gambling should be illegal. For a lot of people it's harmless fun.

I think it’s worth reflecting on the baseline paradigm of our political system. Which is: we are perfectly fine taxing one group of people (the working non-retired) at very substantial levels so that a different group of people (the retired) can not work for 20 years at the end of their lives. Given that our backdrop is such an incredible impingement of the liberty of some for the benefit of others, I think it’s completely reasonable to likewise impinge on the freedom of people who can gamble responsibly to save people who are prone to gambling addiction from destroying their lives.

I disagree with the framing of your comment. For one thing, you get an old age pension for the extra taxes you pay when you work.

What do I get for restrictions on my liberties in this case?

Then restrict it to just programs that help the poor. Still an enormous share of the federal budget and, thus, a huge impingement on the liberty of people who are not poor.

> What do I get for restrictions on my liberties in this case?

A neighbor who is less likely to beat his wife because he gambled all the rent money on baseball

If you don’t see yourself as part of a system, a neighborhood, a community… I don’t think there’s an answer here that will resonate with you.

Oh, I do. But I see myself as part of a voluntary system.

A functioning society

Gambling is legal where I live and society functions just fine.

The industry can't survive on people who see it as harmless fun, that's the problem.

So is Russian roulette 83% of the time.

This is all just smoke. Hegseth is not going to be impeached.

Massie is upset because the Jews have been using their orbital mind lasers on the illuminati again.

Let's say Hegseth was impeached this very day.

Is this something that actually carries any weight, meaning, or consequences?

eg: The current sitting POTUS has been twice impeached .. has that slowed his roll in any way?

Flares. They fired flares at a Danish helicopter.

It's possible the conflict will get bigger, but I doubt it. I think what's happening right now is all about internal Russian politics. The Russians will lose in Ukraine without a big influx of new troops, something that's very unpopular. By provoking his neighbors in a few highly publicized incidents, Putin can play into existing Russian paranoia about invasion from the west, which will allow him to conscript another half million men.

But new troops don't help him if the need for troops gets correspondingly larger. My suspicion is after Putin gets his troops most of the talk about a wider war will die down, and all those new resources will be dedicated to Ukraine.