Interesting Links for 05-05-2013

[andrewducker]

• Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Underground Drug Site Silk Road And Radical Libertarian
  (tags: drugs libertarianism bitcoin )
• Why any analysis of the local election results cannot be extrapolated to a general election
  (tags: politics uk voting )
• Is Grant Morrison’s Zenith going to return?
  (tags: GrantMorrison comics )

Comments

[bart_calendar]

The thing is I doubt they were against the lady for being pregnant. My understanding of how call centers work - because calls are automatically routed to your phone - that the company really can't accommodate a lot of pee breaks, because the phone would just ring and ring and ring pissing off customers.

I'm pretty sure anyone who needs to pee outside of break time, probably has to log out of the system and punch out for this reason - at least, that's what people I've known who have worked at call centers say.

I mean, yeah, that's a shitty job condition, but I really doubt it's only an issue at T-Mobile. I think it's probably a problem with the way call centers are organized.

I also wonder how relevant this is in 2013, since the trend now is for call centers to not actually be call centers, but for call center personnel to work from home, where the employer would have no idea at all if the employee is peeing often.

[xenophanean]

“There is no specific legal requirement that requires employers to let their employees use the restroom,” Paula Brantner, the executive director of Workplace Fairness, told ABC

Nice.

[gwendally]

Okay, speaking as an employer here, the thing that makes you "allow" employees to use the restroom is that you won't find people to hire if you don't.

We absolutely must make reasonable accommodations for disabled workers to allow them to get the job done. I have hired both blind and deaf people, and been able to use adaptive technology at no great cost. But this person is not asking for adaptive technology, she is asking to not do this job. To leave the station that costs that employer thousands of dollars in fixed asset cost and just not perform the duties she was being paid to do.

That is precisely when we fire people. Not because she was pregnant, but because she was not able to perform the duties of the position she was being hired to do. An unpaid leave of absence was apparently not acceptable to her.

[kiffkin]

No, she was fired because the job was considered more important than the worker.

Or to put it another way: workers are disposable, jobs aren't. There'll always be someone else to exploit. It's a fundamental tenet of capitalism and dressing it up with fancy terms doesn't change the nature of the system. The US economy would fall apart unless workers are exploited, and the more exploitation, the greater potential for profit.

Okay, speaking as an employer here, the thing that makes you "allow" employees to use the restroom is that you won't find people to hire if you don't.

You should probably look up how many cases there are of employers expecting their workers to wear nappies, or urinate into bottles, or just not take breaks at all. It's been going on for years and doesn't seem to stop those employers from finding people to hire. For a lot of workers, they only choice they have is to take the job or take no job at all.

[gwendally]

Why assume exploitation? You are making a leap here, that she is compelled to work in a job that is a bad fit.

Why any analysis of the local election results cannot be extrapolated to a general election

[cartesiandaemon]

Hm. As is often the case, that's an excellent post with an evocative but misleading title. Obviously you can't just take the results and apply them -- everyone knows people swing away from government and away from major parties in non-general elections, and I hadn't noticed until the post pointed it out how depressingly much people are trying to do that.

But it's very surprising to me if you can't extrapolate general trends like "how much people resent the government" and "how much more people like green/UKIP/etc" and speculate how that might affect a general election assuming people vote like they normally do at general elections.

Re: Why any analysis of the local election results cannot be extrapolated to a general election

[andrewducker]

Yup. And some people try for this, using all sorts of tools to extrapolate.

It's notoriously unreliable, but probably still better than nothing!

Simple Ways to Improve 7 Popular Websites (All of these. Particularly the Tumblr one.)

[cartesiandaemon]

ROFL!

Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Underground Drug Site Silk Road And Rad

[cartesiandaemon]

That's really interesting.

I probably should be more scared of these. I'm scared of the proliferation of gun use in some countries, the idea that you can buy them anonymously or 3d-print them ought to be so much worse. But my brain is currently so scared of government control that it's less than usually scared of libertarians...

I wonder what the drugs are like, if they're more reliably not-poison than drugs you buy the old fashioned way. And if they're less likely to be associated with organised crime and casual crime (which seems to be the major problems with drug use). It makes sense they'd much less support casual robberies by desperate addicts, if it takes 3 days to get your goods delivered by post anyway. And not support organised crime amongst the customers, since they're only served by post. But it may be equally bad for supporting organised crime by the growers, I don't know. But it would be interesting to see if it functions like legalisation-lite...

Re: Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Underground Drug Site Silk Road And

[andrewducker]

Silk Road has feedback (like Amazon/Ebay), and lots of discussion threads, which means you can see previous people's experiences (and some of those people own testing kits for a variety of chemicals). This cuts out a lot of the reliability problems.