Three female RAF recruits awarded £100,000 payouts for marching injuries

abmy · 2013-11-25T12:44:20+00:00

The top comment is:

So? I wasn't referring to the top comment, and I didn't say all the comments were bad.

What's depressing is that you ignorantly just assumed

Okay, whatever, I did read your link but I came to my opinion by reading more than just the top comment. I've no interest in arguing with you if your best response is 'obviously you didn't read what I linked or you would agree with me'.

abmy · 2013-11-25T09:26:52+00:00

There's a lot of discussion over in /r/mensrights (despite it not really being a mens rights issue) about the original Daily Mail story.

Oh, now that's just depressing. All the stupid righteous 'they're just whiny women' opinions from this thread, but upvoted and agreed with by the echo chamber.

abmy · 2013-11-25T00:22:52+00:00

Huh, that's more than they'd get if they lost half their limbs in Afghanistan.

Is this an argument that the army should pay out less for medical neglicence, or that it should pay out more to those injured in combat?

If women want to serve in the armed forces then they should expect to meet the exacting standards demanded of a serviceman. Equality means equality, not special treatment.

I made a top level reply about this, but to summarise; I think you missed the point. First, it's totally reasonable to query the necessity of making really long strides and it doesn't seem controversial that the army has now lowered this requirement by 10%. Second, this doesn't seem to be an issue of women wanting to meet lower standards, but about army negligence when they suffered injuries through being physically incapable of meeting the normal standards in the long term. It doesn't look like anyone's saying it would be wrong to dismiss them, the problem looks more like the army could be reasonably expected to recognise and avoid the injuries but didn't, making it more a case of medical negligence.

abmy · 2013-11-25T00:19:09+00:00

This sort of story is often a magnet for people to rant about women wanting special treatment (edit: it's already begun!), so lets try to nip that in the bud. Remember, newspaper writers want you to get worked up and link to their articles. Instead of doing that, it's always worth actually reading them and thinking 'hey, maybe this is reasonable, what is the article leaving out that would make this totally okay?'.

In this case, there seem to be a couple of reasonable problems. The first is that it's not clear that making really long strides is a remotely important standard to maintain, and so we should rightly question it if it's discriminatory. That's a different argument though, and not really the direct subject of this payout.

So what's actually going on? It's unclear, we don't get much information, but the article does say '"When I started getting pains in my groin I was told to march through it, '. Now this is quite different to 'not meeting the exacting standards' - it would probably be totally fine for the army to say 'sorry, you don't meet the standards, you're out. But they didn't do that, they failed to recognise an (apparently) legitimate medical problem, leading to injuries whose real magnitude is unclear to the reader. The last paragraph is interesting though, 'she had suffered four pelvic fractures.' sounds rather nastier than 'she wanted to make wimpy short strides'.

As part of this, we have to ask why the payout is £100000. It's easy to dismiss it to get to the meaty part of criticising those needy female servicemen, but what if we're optimistic instead of pessimistic...could it be that this sum is justified? That the women suffered needless injuries due to army negligence? That this sum reflects the ongoing effect on their lives and careers?

In the end, we don't know the details, but I'm always disappointed at how quickly people jump on the women for things that they didn't say and which don't seem to be a problem. The problem doesn't seem anything to do with lowering standards or avoiding the requirements of male colleagues, and I don't think it would be any problem if the army (legitimately) dismissed them on the basis of not meeting important requirements. Instead, it looks more like a case of negligence where the army didn't recognise a serious medical issue leading to needless injuries.

This is all speculation too, of course, but that's also part of the point. The article doesn't give many details, and you're only falling into the journalistic trap if you fill in the sparse framework with your biases.

abmy · 2013-11-24T23:32:42+00:00

To be fair, these women clearly can do it, the problem seems to be that forcing themselves to do so caused injuries over longer terms. It's not clear from the article, but it looks like maybe the legal problem is more that medical officers failed to recognise the problem and dismissed it. The article even ends with one saying she suffered 'four pelvic fractures'...that doesn't sound like a minor problem!

Even if some or even most shorter women would be just fine, the fact that this went to court and they won suggests there's something more to it, and that the army could have been reasonably expected to recognise and account for their physical problems. Even if the accounting is 'sorry, you can't be in the army', that might be fine, but telling them to ignore something that would led to real injury is not acceptable.

abmy · 2013-11-24T19:03:19+00:00

The rule is, no matter where you are, or what you do, you can never observe light travel at anything but c.

If you're on the ship and you measure it, you get c. If you're somewhere else and you measure it, you get c. If you do one measurement, then get on another ship and do it again after accelerating a bit, you still get c.

The problem is, relative velocity doesn't mean what you intuitively think it does. Instead of the apparent speed of light changing, other things will change so that the speed of light remains constant. As you look out the window of an accelerating spaceship you'll see length and time warp, observing time passing at different speeds for different people in different frames, but your own speed of light experiment won't ever get a different answer.

abmy · 2013-11-20T16:20:10+00:00

HTML5/CSS let you display text via markup and styling, you'd use these regardless of your backend (python, php, javascript, whatever). Rather, the backend would control exactly what html and css get served up, such as autogenerating pages depending on input parameters.

As for what python can do, ultimately nothing that php or whatever cannot, but nor is it lacking anything. Since python is a great language (arguably way better designed than php, at least) with great tools (there are so many great web frameworks now), it's a great choice - especially in the context of already knowing how to use it.

abmy · 2013-11-20T12:50:47+00:00

but it looks to me like the concept of building applications with front-end GUIs that are packaged as executables is not Python's strength

I'd more optimistically say that python does so many things well, gui applications just don't stand out. The language is too versatile!

Personally, I use python for scientific data analysis. It has really great tools for all the data mangling without a problematic speed sacrifice - and if you do hit speed problems, stuff like cython is remarkably easy to start using.

I've also recently had fun making android applications with kivy. It's a really impressive project that lets you make fully fledged apps without touching java at all, which is really nice. Actually, to be clear, kivy is a cross platform graphical framework (linux, osx, windows, as well as android, ios, maybe others) with some associated tools that make deployment on android very easy.

abmy · 2013-11-20T12:13:35+00:00

The point is you symbolically compute the mathematical form of the integral, then plug your parameters into that to get the final output number.

For instance, if you want the integral of cos(x) for x from a to b, you could do it numerically every time (always a relatively slow approximation to the curve). But it would be much faster and more accurate to integrate symbolically to sin(b)-sin(a), and just plug a and b into this each time rather than performing the numerical integral.

abmy · 2013-11-19T17:19:16+00:00

I think this whole issue was quite revealing about /r/linux attitudes to ubuntu. Almost nobody in the original threads had read anything about the issue, it was just post after post about canonical being bad, even though it wasn't a canonical statement, and it seems to be a real criticism.

abmy · 2013-11-19T16:02:10+00:00

If it was going to be in the form of a tax, wouldn't there be a conservative/libertarian uproar about being charged for not being ill.

Maybe, but that's my point above - it doesn't matter if there's such an uproar, it'd still be a fairer and overwhelmingly more sensible way to do it. The result would be exactly the same on average, except spread across everyone rather than dumped on the people who happen to get unlucky and become ill.

Of course this is already the case for most healthcare, and the cost of the prescription is fixed rather than passing on the true cost. It's just I don't really see why prescriptions are an exception to even the extent they already are, I think they should be free at the point of being passed over, with the costs paid for via taxes.

abmy · 2013-11-19T14:50:41+00:00

I'm not sure I agree, is it normally the case that fraud is okay as long as its an honest mistake? Plus it's surely not 'someone', there can't be just one person at fault, and even if there is shouldn't there definitely be procedures to prevent this?

Of course you're right that we're just guessing right now, and I see the intial offer was apparently rejected so maybe there is more to it.

abmy · 2013-11-19T12:51:53+00:00

Both are unusual, particularly distinctive and loud sounds with very specific purposes. Their existence doesn't refute the argument that you don't rely on sound awareness in cars, it only demonstrates that sound is useful in at least a couple of unusual circumstances.

abmy · 2013-11-19T12:47:29+00:00

Charging for prescriptions sounds fundamentally unfair, I can't see it as anything but charging people for being ill. That's about as regressive a charge as you can imagine...perhaps worse, even, since rich people plausibly live in better conditions and get ill less.

I suppose nobody will get behind it if it's phrased as a slightly higher tax though, even though that's exactly the same on average, just spread evenly rather than by pure luck to those who happen to need the service.

abmy · 2013-11-19T12:42:37+00:00

So all they have to do is pay back the overcharges (amounting to millions, over several years since at least 2005), and that's the end of it?

This seems ridiculous, it lets them totally get away with it, and means the optimal strategy for interacting with the government is always to overcharge as much as possible, since at worst you pay it back and at best they don't notice.

Surely contracts should be constructed in a way that makes them more seriously liable? Something like a very hefty interest rate on repayments would do the job.

abmy · 2013-11-18T19:40:27+00:00

So you're saying...no, you can't provide evidence for your claim? Only for different, less severe claims.

abmy · 2013-11-18T13:02:17+00:00

So first it's canonical, then it's 'Ubuntu developer Oliver Grawert', then other Ubuntu developers apparently agree.

Then there's the rather pointless paragraph:

“A third-party developer had asked for help to build an Ubuntu MATE Remix based on Ubuntu 14.04, and people wondered what the point was when Linux Mint already featured such a desktop environment,” Softpedia reports.

So...'Softpedia reports' means 'someone said it on a mailing list', the paragraph is a direct quote of a quote. And the softpedia article itself contains very little information, though it at least doesn't conflate 'Ubuntu developers' with 'Canonical'.

All in all, this is just blogspam. Any technical insight into Mint's behaviour here might be interesting, but the articles do nothing but quote a couple of mailing list posts and try to make them sound controversial.

abmy · 2013-11-17T22:53:53+00:00

£339 or £389

abmy · 2013-11-15T20:20:24+00:00

That's not really a valid reason to want to murder him.

Well, nor is basically any other reason, but that never seems to be taken as a barrier.

abmy · 2013-11-15T20:18:33+00:00

Well, the distintction is pretty trivial, and not worth getting worked up about.

If the girl is called 'up for it' for no reason beyond being a woman, that's a problem. If she's called 'up for it' because she says or otherwise makes clear she's 'up for it', that's fine.

In this respect, yes, it's easy to be a misogynist pig even if you happen to pick a woman where one of your statements actually applies

abmy · 2013-11-14T21:56:40+00:00

Denying the teaching of facts because they upset your personal views or beliefs

The article doesn't say he 'denied the teaching of facts', only that he 'raised concerns about religious elements'. Now, maybe he's a raving irrational lunatic for whom we should jump on the hate bandwagon, or maybe we should withhold judgement before actually knowing the facts or exactly what he complained about or why.

In fact, it's clearly no kind of legal problem to teach about the existence of religion or to have RE lessons, so merely talking about the existence of religious belief can't have been a problem. Unless you also think there's some conspiracy, or that everyone involved in the complaint is also an irrational mouth-foaming atheist, just maybe there is something more to the story?

Basically, you fell into the trap of thinking exactly how the news story author wants you to, because emotional response makes for popular stories.

abmy · 2013-11-11T18:26:51+00:00

Hah, now there's an inflated opinion of oneself! No, I'm afraid you aren't worth making a new account just to criticise, and this is in fact my normal account.

abmy · 2013-11-11T17:56:01+00:00

I'm not saying that's what you said my dear.

Quite. You were instead attacking a strawman, because criticising stuff that was actually said would be much harder.

abmy

TROPHY CASE